Muddle and Win (6 page)

The room itself seemed to him to be a huge, cubical cavern with pale walls and a floor the size of an ocean. Except that he knew it couldn’t really be an ocean, not here. For one thing, it was blue. (There isn’t much blue
in
Pandemonium, and what there is doesn’t appear in the oceans, which are mostly cooking fat.) There were rectangular shapes on the walls. He did not realize, then, that some of these shapes were pictures and others were windows, or that there was any difference between the two.

The chaotic profusion of objects bewildered him. The house contained all the furniture and possessions of two working adults and two teenagers, including office papers, newspapers, bills, sports kits, school kits, a cat, a largely forgotten tidying rota and nowhere to put the boots. Stuff was everywhere.

And it was all
huge
. It was far larger than he had imagined it would be. When he looked down again he saw that he was about to make his landing on what appeared to be a mountain covered with dark forest. He waggled his arms and legs a bit to see if he could steer, and found he couldn’t.

He was still clutching his equipment sack. His mind had forgotten all about that in his terror, but his hand hadn’t. Or maybe it had just forgotten to let go. He dropped it now, letting it fall the last few fathoms to the ground, and gathered himself to land as lightly and gracefully as he could in this new world.

THUMP!

Winded, groaning, Muddlespot got to his hands and knees. He untangled himself from the strings of his parachute, took the bag off his back and stuffed as much of the canopy as he could back into it. He limped over to where his kit lay, found various bits that had fallen out of the sack and stuffed them away too. Then he straightened and looked at the forest around him.

It wasn’t a forest of trees. (There
are
trees in Pandemonium. They make them of brass.)

These were a bit like trees, to be sure. They seemed to be about the thickness of slender young saplings. But they had no branches. And after rising several times his height from the ground, they bent over and lay one on top of another, all in one direction as if shaped by some terrific wind.

With a creeping feeling in his stomach, Muddlespot realized that they were human hairs. And very probably, unless the guards had made some enormous mistake, they were part of Sally Jones. He was standing on her head, and her head was – to him – the size of a mountain.

Muddlespot was used to being smaller than everything else. But that was because Corozin had chosen that he should be. Corozin could make anything he
had
power over be any size he liked. If Corozin had chosen that his palace cleaner should be a hundred fathoms tall, then that’s how it would have been. (Muddlespot would have rather liked being the only hundred-fathom-high former wart in existence. It would have made dusting the palace spires
so
much easier.)

But here on Earth, Quantity ruled. Quantity said that things like Muddlespot were Ideas. Ideas had to be small. It didn’t matter how big an Idea they were, said Quantity. They could be Freedom or Liberty or World Peace for all Quantity cared. But they still had to fit inside a head without causing too much discomfort to the head’s owner.

It’s true that some Ideas kicked back against this. They were Really Big Ideas, they said. They knew things about Quantity that made Quantity look like it wore nappies. No way were
they
going to be told how much space they fitted into. The Theories of Relativity bent space, warped time, predicted black holes and singularities and chucked in a cosmological constant just to show what they thought of Quantity. But all it got them was enough room to make their owner’s hair stand on end.

So there was Muddlespot, tiny, smaller than a fleck of skin, abandoned in the vast forest that was the scalp of Sally Jones.

And the light around him grew.

Someone behind him said ‘
Freeze
.’

THE ANGEL TOWERED
over him. It might have been carved from bright marble or shining steel. Or very, very hard light. Muddlespot had to squint at it to see.

It was all straight lines – head, wings, feet. Its dark glasses were rectangles. Its tuxedo was pressed in crisp white lines, its little black bow tie was a cubist’s dream. Even its fiery hair flamed in little zigzags. In its rock-steady hands it gripped a great bassoon, with the mouth pointed right between Muddlespot’s eyes.

Muddlespot’s hands shot up as high as they could – which was just slightly below the level of his ears.

‘Well, well, well,’ said the angel, in tones like bells tuned in C sharp. ‘What have we here?’

‘Er  . . .’ said Muddlespot. He thought of various
possible
answers. None of them seemed likely to improve things. ‘Is there time to defect?’

‘Nice try, creep,’ said the angel, ‘but I don’t think so.’ It spoke into a mouthpiece. ‘Hello, base? I have the intruder. Shall I purify?’

‘Mercy!’ cried Muddlespot, throwing himself forward and grovelling among his scattered kit. ‘I’m too young to die!’

‘You have your orders, Blue Two,’
said a voice from midair.
‘Yay, verily.’

‘Too bad, creep,’ said the angel, hefting the bassoon. ‘Say your prayers. Oh, I forgot – you people don’t, do you? Just say “Goodbye” then.’

Muddlespot’s little claw, clutching frantically, closed on the thing he was looking for. ‘Goodbye!’ he squeaked. And he rolled, and threw it at the angel’s feet.
SPLOTCH!
went the tar bomb in a fountain of black ickiness. The light was smothered at once.

The angel was blinded, covered head to foot in black goo – and
very
angry. It wiped its eyes on its sleeve. The bassoon quested from left to right. Just let that little creep show himself and he’d get blasted so hard he’d still be travelling outwards when all the galaxies collided!

But Muddlespot was gone. All that was left was an
abandoned
No. 19 portable furnace, a few scattered runes and a frantic scurrying somewhere in the undergrowth.

‘Base!’ yelled the angel. ‘I’ve lost him! Request urgent backup!’

‘ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!’ sang angel choirs in close polyphony. Rainbow gates clanged open. Steeds of fire trampled. Saints shook their lances and hurried out to battle. The air rang with alarums. ‘ALERT! ALERT! YAY, VERILY ALERT!’

Fierce-eyed robins established a cordon in the bushes around the Jones household. Shock troops equipped with cymbals, harps, triangles and trumpets moved in behind a creeping barrage laid down by an organ in the old mission hall, while low-hovering afreets and pegasi circled in support.

But Muddlespot was ahead of them. He was already tumbling into space, hanging by an abseil line from the tip of Sally’s ear. Down, down he went, burning his hands in his hurry, kicking out with his little feet so that he could swing inwards on the return, and release, and fall in a heap in the delicate curled canyons of Sally’s auricle. There he lay breathless, listening to the clamour of the hunt and the growing clatter of feet in corridors nearby.

Voices called. Wings rushed. Muddlespot cowered in his place as troops of security angels poured past him, hurrying out from their posts in Sally’s brain to scour the slopes of her shoulders for signs of the intruder.

The sounds faded. He waited. No more came.

After a long while he picked himself up, gathered his considerably reduced kit sack, and began to softly make his way in the direction from which they had come.

Upwards.

Inwards.

Into the mind of Sally Jones.

There was a high archway, carried on slender pillars. Beyond was a six-sided chamber. On each side of it was an arch like the first, opening onto long corridors of diminishing perspectives, or onto flights of broad steps leading either up or down. A gallery ran around the chamber, far above Muddlespot’s head. More arches opened from it, one after another. The archways were not round or pointed but parabola, intersecting at the ceiling with an ordered complexity that could only have been conceived by someone who really
liked
that sort of maths.

Everything was made of glass, or some transparent crystal. He could see through walls and through floors,
to
other chambers and corridors far above his head, or many, many levels below his feet. It was dizzying. It made him feel that the floor was about to give way and send him tumbling through layer after layer of thought. Some of the surfaces were plain; others were patterned with complex translucent designs like mosaics of stars or unicorns rising from waves. These broke up the passage of light, discreetly concealing whatever lay beyond them. In a corridor a level below this one was a row of doors. Muddlespot could just make out the lettering on some of them.
FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE
, one said. And next to that was
DECLENSION OF IRREGULAR FRENCH VERBS
.

The corridor stretched on and on to the left and right. There must have been a thousand doors of it. And beyond it was another, and another, and  . . .

Music seemed to be playing somewhere, but he couldn’t catch what it was or which direction it came from.

‘
Un
usual,’ he murmured to himself.

He had thought that the mind of a schoolgirl would be a rather small place. He had imagined that there would be bright colours and childish pictures, and lots of things like bowling alleys and swings and slides. He had been rather looking forward to the slides.

‘
Unusual, unusual
,’ echoed the crystal passages, as
if
they agreed with him and were also a little proud of it. They spread in all directions, intricate and yet ordered. Everything had symmetry. Every feature had its mirror image. There was no dust. There was no movement. There was no sound of voices. There were a million ideas in Sally’s head, but they didn’t go wandering about. They stayed in their rooms until they were wanted. And when they were wanted, they had to move quickly.

Feeling very small, Muddlespot climbed a flight of broad stairs to reach another chamber. There was a crystal figure in the middle of it. A graceful torso rose from a block of sculpted ice. The head was a man’s, with a full beard. He was crowned with leaves. Blank-eyed, he gazed along his outstretched, smoothly muscled arm. His index finger pointed to one of the chamber’s six arches. Above the arch was written in words of gold,
LOOK FOR THE RIGHT
.

‘The right,’ grumbled Muddlespot nervously. ‘Yeah, yeah, right.’ But he went the way that he was pointed. It led down another long corridor and past a court where a fountain was playing. He crossed the open space quickly. On the far side was a higher, wider arch and above it, again in gold letters, were the words
IT IS BETTER TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE
.

‘I don’t believe it,’ muttered Muddlespot.

And: ‘She
can’t
be for real!’

In their niches, statues brooded silently. Their blank eyes looked down on him.
Oh yes she can
, they seemed to say.
Yes she can
.

There was another flight of stairs, as wide as a basketball court and very long. Muddlespot panted up it, hurrying because he knew there couldn’t be much time before the squadrons of angels he had seen leaving earlier gave up their search and returned to their posts. At the top was another arch. Beyond it was a chamber. This was the place.

The ceiling was set with stars. A pantheon of crystal statues, marked with names such as
TRUTH, WISDOM, FAIRNESS
and
CALM
, stood in a semicircle around the centre of the room. And opposite, curving round the far wall, were two huge arched windows. The windows looked out onto the world in which Sally lived. He saw the room that had spun before his eyes during his desperate flight and jump. He saw a formica tabletop, on which were laid textbooks, calculators, neatly ordered pens and a workbook on which Sally’s own hand was writing, in beautiful, round letters, the words
Essay on the Fall of Roman Civilization in Britain
.

Sally had finished making the dough, had stood guard over the oven while it meekly did what she wanted, and had turned out two dozen flawless small cakes onto the cooling rack. Now she was doing her homework. She had everything she needed. She had pen, paper, essay plan and the cat curled up in her lap. (The cat wasn’t really needed for the homework, but he had got so much into the habit of jumping up into her lap when he saw her sitting down with pen and paper that somehow it would have felt wrong to start without him. Sally thought he was hopelessly selfish, but she had a soft spot for him all the same because at least he was honest about it.)

And here, in the high inner chamber of her mind, set within the semicircle of statues, there was another table, exactly like the one Muddlespot could see through the window. It was set with the same books. The same pencils and calculators were laid out upon it. And seated in a chair, cat in lap and head bowed over her writing, was another Sally.