Attica (9 page)

‘You’re kidding me,’ laughed
Chloe softly. ‘Ink imps?’

‘Ink imps, talking bats, scoff all you want, lady – just remember I told you they’re there. In this place—’

‘I call it Attica.’

‘Good name, lady. Well, let me warn you that in deepest Attica effigies have come to life. Those who were abused in the other world, where you come from, are naturally very mean and aggressive towards humans. Dolls, Guy Fawkes effigies, shop dummies, tatterdemalions, they’ll attack you if they get the chance. If you don’t want to believe me, I don’t care.’

‘Are you the one who wrote “Katerfelto” in the dust?’

‘Might have been,’ said the bat. ‘Could have been.’

‘What does it mean?’

The bat said, ‘It’s a name.’

‘Whose name?’

‘Katerfelto’s, of course. Ah, you want to know who he is? Katerfelto is the monster who lives on the Jagged Mountain. He’s made of bundles of shadows, tangled together like thick coarse hair. He can be as big and menacing as a thundercloud, or as small as a scuttling spider. If you face him he can do nothing but slink around and make menacing shapes, but if you run from him he’ll chase you down and overcome you with a darkness as thick as the suffocating quicksand of a swamp. If he catches you and enfolds you with his darkness, you will never again see the light.’

Chloe shuddered. ‘He sounds
terrible.’

‘He
is
terrible. Katerfelto is the King of Gloom, the Prince of Terror. If you fail to meet his eye you will choke on your own fright. You will run until you fall gasping on to the boards and there you will shake yourself to death. But since he is made of nothing but darkness and fear, he is therefore hollow. Those who stand in his path and refuse to be intimidated will not be daunted. However, it’s not an easy thing to do, to look terror in the face, so don’t think it is. No matter how empty his form really is, he appears grotesque and formidable, ready to swallow all those who oppose him. Such a cold and evil presence you have never experienced before in your life. Not at all easy to ignore or face up to with courage.’

‘How did he come to be?’

‘He was formed from the basest materials of the human emotions known as
hate
and
arrogance
, mixed with
love
– a love of power, those dregs of feelings from which wars spring. This ugly concoction, drawn from the weapons soaked in such emotions, emerged and became Katerfelto.

‘Now,’ said the bat sounding weary, ‘where is my map?’

Chloe said, ‘A deal is a deal.’

‘Just put the map on the boards.’

She did as she was asked and the bat then gave her instructions on how to get to the place of the golden bureau.

‘… and now go back to sleep.’

Chloe closed her eyes and after a while feigned sleep. A little later she was alarmed to see a pile of clothes, topped by a wide-brimmed hat, sliding towards her. It stopped when it reached the piece of paper. A thin, white, bony arm shot out of the heap of rags and snatched the list, drawing it into the pile. Then the heap slid back again into the deep dark shadows at the edge of the village, under some low rafters. There was a muttering and a mumbling, as if the bat were talking to itself again, then finally a shriek which woke up her brother Alex, who sat bolt upright.

‘What is it?’ cried
Alex. ‘Is that a ghost?’

‘It’s all right,’ replied Chloe, patting his back. ‘It’s only that pile of rags over there. The one with that funny mask on top.’

‘Pile of rags?’ Alex’s eyes were wide and round. ‘What pile of rags?’

The bat fluttered in the rafters.

‘You – lady – you – cheated.’

‘No,’ replied Chloe calmly.

‘Yes, you cheated. This is no map.’

‘Oh yes it is. It’s a map to knowledge. It’s a map to other worlds, the worlds of fiction. It’s a map to great literature.’

‘Great literature?’ scoffed the bat. ‘
Flat Stanley
?’

‘
Flat Stanley
is highly original. It’s for younger readers than me, of course, but I loved it when I was little. I couldn’t have written it – could you?’

‘I couldn’t write a shopping list, but that doesn’t make this a map.’

‘It’s all I have.’

‘You’ll regret this, lady.’

The heap slid away into the darkness and the bat followed shortly afterwards.

‘Lady?’ repeated Alex. ‘What lady?’

‘It meant me,’ said Chloe. She hugged her knees. ‘And I’ve got some good news. I know where there’s a map of Attica.’

Alex yawned and shook
his head. ‘Where?’

‘Over there,’ she replied vaguely, unwilling to tell her younger brother that there might be live and hostile ink imps waiting for them. Alex had an engineer’s brain and engineers were not the most imaginative of people. At least, they were good inventors, but not good at believing in fantastical creatures. ‘I’ll show you in the morning.’

‘Oh, all right, sis.’ He yawned again and lay down. ‘Did – did that bat really talk?’

But Chloe found she was too tired to answer and fell asleep.

The following morning a shaft of golden light struck Chloe in the face and she woke feeling dreadfully thirsty. Alex was already up and eating some of their stores. He offered her the bottle of water. She drank from it gratefully and then joined her brother at breakfast. They munched away, staring into the distance. There were slanted pillars of light all around them today, marching off like pylons into unknown regions. Obviously it was a very bright day in the outside world. Chinks and cracks in the roof also sent down smaller blade-like beams of light. It was as if Attica were a stage and the lighting manager had just arrived and turned on all the switches.

Chloe’s eyes searched the area for signs of the bat and the heap of clothes, but they were both gone. After the encounter last night she was now ready to accept that they were in some strange world, rather than in the rogue attic of an ordinary warehouse or palace. She didn’t know whether Alex would accept what she believed to be true, but she knew that it was best to let him come to his own conclusions in his own good time.

‘Makes you feel a bit
better,’ she said, ‘when it’s sunny.’

‘Yup,’ agreed her brother. ‘It do.’

However, the Jagged Mountain (as the bat had called it) remained very much shrouded in darkness. Jordy was still nowhere to be seen. Chloe was worried about him but she knew him to be a resourceful person – annoying when it came to books, but quite resolute and tough – and she knew he was no wimp. However, she and Alex could not wait around for ever and if Jordy didn’t return before noon, she thought perhaps they ought to follow him.

Jordy did not return, despite anxious prayers from Chloe.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose we’d better go and look for him.’

‘What about Katerfelto?’ asked Alex, looking nervously at the distant mountain. ‘What shall we do about him?’

‘If we run into him, we’ll have to face up to him.’

Alex’s Indian cousins, some being Hindus, had spoken to him about Shiva, the Moon-god of the mountains. There was some thought in Alex’s head that perhaps this great god would protect them.

‘All right,’ he said to his sister. ‘If you can face him, so can I.’

The pair prepared for the journey. Chloe found another bag, a backpack through the straps of which she slipped her arms. It was much easier to carry that way and it held both the torches as well as food and water. Thus by noon they were ready to leave. One more quick glance around the floor to see that they had all the photos which had fallen out of the album, then they were off towards the first of the foothills.

Instead of heading towards a hill of footstools, as Jordy had done, Alex and Chloe decided to try a different route.

CHAPTER 6

Pursued by Mad Mannequins

A strange light was coming from
the valley ahead of them. There was one thick sunbeam bearing down from a skylight in the roof which struck the centre of the Vale of Mirrors. But this was reflected back and forth over a thousand thousand times. It went from dazzling brilliance in the first mirror, to a silvery-dull echo of a gleam in the last. All the shades of light between these two extremes were to be found in the valley.

‘It’s a very bright scene,’ mused Alex. ‘I wonder how much candle-power is in there?’

Chloe said, ‘What candles?’

‘Candle-power is a measure of luminosity,’ replied Alex in a haughty tone, ‘whatever the light source is. Didn’t you know that?’

‘No, and you knew I didn’t, which was why you mentioned it.’

Alex smiled. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, sis. You know me …’

They entered the Vale of Mirrors, walking between two giant antique looking-glasses with ornate gilt frames. Even as they stepped into the gap that separated these two guardians of the valley Chloe realised this was no ordinary clutter of mirrors, which were there in a hundred varieties. Someone had collected these and brought them all to this place.

She said
wondrously, ‘Look how many …’

There were mirrors from dressing-tables with wooden frames; from wardrobes; from retail clothes shops. There were bevelled mirrors with silver chains; spherical mirrors from ballrooms; hand mirrors, bathroom mirrors; fairground mirrors. There were huge mirrors from stately homes; tiny mirrors from musical boxes; long, lean mirrors, short, fat mirrors, mirrors with the quicksilver peeling away. There were mirrors from Turkey, from Samarkand, from Chad, from Fiji, from New England, Venice and Shanghai. There was every mirror, every looking-glass, from all the kingdoms and republics that the world has ever known. They stood, lay, were stacked, were scattered, were shattered, were placed in every position thinkable. There were mirror pools and mirror doors and mirror portholes. You could drown in mirrors, you could float in mirrors, you could lose your soul in their reflective surfaces, you could go stark – staring – mad.

The two giant mirrors which were the pillars of the valley entrance seemed to lock Chloe in a dual embrace. The trouble was, she hesitated and stared into the one on the right, and saw Chloes curving away into infinity. It made her dizzy to see millions of herself on both sides, sweeping off into a netherland of space, growing imperceptibly smaller until she disappeared. She turned away but the one on the left was even worse, for she was upside-down and arcing away on her head into a distant greyish otherworld.

She tore her eyes away, saying to Alex behind her, ‘Don’t look!’

But of course, he did.

Once they had entered the
vale it was even worse. She was everywhere. Alex was everywhere. When they moved, a hundred other Chloes and Alexes moved, all in different directions. Some of these copies were fairground-mirror images and they warped and distorted the originals. They mocked the children with their willowy forms, or their fat, toadish, lumpy shapes.

Once out of the fairground cluster it was even worse, for at least she knew the right from the wrong Chloe in those undulating surfaces. In the clear mirrors she lost count of the times she bumped into herself, walking straight into a reflective surface and striking her face. It was utterly confusing to have so many altered images all moving at the same time, so she began to wonder which was the real Chloe and which were the fakes.

‘This is horrible,’ she said to Alex. ‘We have to get out of here.’

She turned to find Alex staring into a mirror which was not reflecting his form, but that of their living-room, back at the house. In this large mirror Dipa and Ben could be seen walking about, mouthing the names of the children, as if seeking them. When Alex let out a cry of anguish his parents looked out of the mirror at him, clearly not seeing him, but as if they had heard his yell and wondered where it came from.

‘Don’t stare at it,’ ordered Chloe. ‘It’s lying. Don’t let it fool you, Alex. There’s no one behind it.’

Alex tore himself away, just as Chloe confronted a looking-glass in which there was a scene of herself as a little girl picking daisies on a hillside. She remembered the picnic, which had been several years ago. Then coming up behind her was her father – her real father, not Ben – who was laughing and waving from a patch of bright-red poppies. There was her father, in the full flush of life, before he had died of his heart attack. His eyes were smiling, his skin was glowing in the sun and the wind, his hair flicking back and forth. His arms were stretched out to scoop her up, to cuddle her close to him.

‘Daddy?’ she yelled. ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’

Chloe became hysterical with
a mixture of misery and joy. She ran towards the mirror, clawed to get inside its duplicitous surface, to touch its deceptive reflections. She felt if she tried hard enough she could enter the silver pool and join her father. Then she felt Alex pulling her jersey, yanking her back. He was in tears, calling for her to stop.

‘You told me not to look,’ he accused her, shaking her roughly. ‘Don’t you look either.’

And so they did their best, even though aircraft zoomed at them firing cannons and shooting rockets. Even though ships lurched out of fog banks and bore down on them with wicked-looking bows. Knights charged out of misty marshlands, lances pointing at their breasts. Eagles flew, talons hooked and beaks glinting, straight at their faces. Monsters stalked them on every side: monsters bearing shapes of which they had never dreamed, with open slavering jaws and hands with finger-claws as long and spindly as the legs of a crayfish. There were hideous mouths full of needle teeth. Spooks and ghouls came, rising from cruddy graveyard earth. Frightening corpses with the rotten flesh dripping from their bones. The mirrors tried every trick they knew to bend the children’s minds to their will.

‘Don’t worry, Alex,’ said Chloe, gripping her younger brother’s hand and pulling him along with her, ‘we’ll get out safe.’

‘Someone’s watching us,’ he replied, looking round. ‘I know they are. Someone’s here.’

‘No, you’re imagining it – it’s just us – and reflections of us.’

Alex was convinced there was
someone there. Someone hiding at the backs of the mirrors, following them.