Malcolm McNeill, Der Wald der träumenden Geschichten |Beginning Woods

Der Wald der träumenden Geschichten

by Malcom McNeill

© 2014 S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt

Part One

The Vanishings

There are many ways of disappearing besides Vanishing.

Some people fall into the sea and are marooned on desert islands.

Others climb into the mountains, where they shiver and make clothes

out of yak fur. There are even those who leave their lives behind and

take to the open road, where they get sore feet and a magnificent

suntan.

People have always disappeared; it’s nothing new. It’s something

people just do.

- Klaus Knechtling

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1

The International Symposium

There was a time, not so long ago, when a mysterious phenomenon swept the world,

baffling scientists and defying explanation.

It had nothing to do with gravity or electricity.

It altered no weather patterns, sea levels or average temperatures.

The migration of beasts across the globe did not change, and plants continued to

grow, bloom and die in their proper seasons.

The biochemical reactions that sustain life went on with unceasing vigour, as they

had for millions of years, propelling organisms down myriad paths of development,

just as the continents drifted apart, moved by the massive forces generated in the

bowels of the earth.

Almost the entirety of creation was ignored by the new phenomenon, which

concerned itself with one thing alone.

Us.

The crisis took place in every country. It was compared to a plague that knew no

boundaries, or a fire that ravaged a forest. But scientists were able to cure the plague,

and the secret of putting out fires had been discovered long ago.

There was no stopping the Vanishings.

When they first began nobody realised what was going on. Crumpled piles of

clothes were discovered at the bottom of gardens or in cupboards under stairs, but

that was no reason to suppose someone had been Whisked Away Into Nothing, that

they had Ceased To Exist, that they had been Cancelled Out. Such things were

unheard of, after all.

Then the Vanishings began to spread—slowly at first, and then with a sharper

appetite. Before long thousands were Vanishing every day, and it became clear

something unusual was going on—especially from a scientific point of view.

Of course, whenever a great problem threatens the world all enemies put down

their swords and work together to find a solution. This was the case with the

Vanishings. Scientists came from far and wide to form an International Symposium

in Paris, and a special fund was set up to provide them with everything they needed to

carry out their research.

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It was decided to house the Symposium in the Trocadéro Palace, an old museum

filled with ancient artefacts, archaeological treasures, paintings, sculptures and

fossils. Artists and inventors had gathered at the Trocadéro in 1878 to mark their

achievements at an International Exposition, so there was a pleasing historical

precedent, but since then the palace had fallen into disrepair, and an immense effort

was required to renovate it.

To begin with, hundreds of workers with barrows poured into the museum, and

carted off the many treasures to L’Hôtel des Invalides, where they were wrapped up

and placed in storage. Then, overnight, a skeleton of scaffolding sprang up against the

walls. Beneath the flapping plastic shroud that cocooned the building a team of

sandblasters went to work on the decades of grime and soot that had blackened the

granite and limestone. An army of engineers and builders burrowed deep beneath its

foundations, installing laboratories, generators, wires and computers, while

gardeners dug their fingers into the barren slopes leading down to the Seine, planting

trees and shrubs, decorating them with fountains and pools of water. Finally,

stonemasons laid a broad terrace of granite flagstones in front of the Palace, and

erected golden statues around it to lend the old building the grandeur it deserved.

The opening ceremony of the International Society for the Prevention and Cure of

the Vanishings was a great day for the human race: A day of hope and purpose. The

palace gleamed like a hero’s smile, proudly bearing its pennants and flags as if they

were medallions of trust and responsibility. Below, the doctors and professors

processed through the gardens, their chins tucked solemnly into their necks, their

whole manner imparting gravity, wisdom, and most of all: Determination. When they

reached the terrace a band struck up and the crowds of people cheered. These men

and women were the champions of humanity, proclaimed the trumpets and the

drums. They were going to pit the might of science against the mysterious

disappearances that threatened to devour the human race.

After speeches, applause, music and cheering the Seekers, as the scientists came

to be known, filed into the Trocadéro, where they immediately went to work on a

buffet lunch provided by the Mayor of Paris. The people remained outside watching

the windows, expecting a triumphant shout to go up at any moment, but the Palace

only settled into the evening gloom, like an old man in a deckchair folding a

newspaper across his face. As darkness fell the crowd began to disperse. Flags, no

longer needed for waving, were dropped onto pavements, banners were stuffed into

bins, and the cafés and bars began to fill up once more.

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How long would it take the Seekers to stop the Vanishings? That was the question

on everyone’s lips. Six weeks? Six months? A year? “We do not know the length of the

road ahead of us,” the Chief Researcher said in his speech. “We do not know if it will

be easy or difficult. We must be patient. We must be cautious with our hopes.”

So the world held its breath and waited for the first findings.

Meanwhile the Vanishings continued unabated. In every country, people Vanished

without warning. Perhaps sensing they were about to be consumed, they always took

themselves off somewhere secret, like dying elephants, and most of the Vanishings

went unwitnessed—until the tell-tale puddle of clothes was found there was no reason

to suppose a Vanishing had happened at all. But now and again people would find

themselves trapped in crowded train compartments, or in business meetings, where it

was not possible to escape the public eye. Some Vanishings even occurred live on

television. Elenia Diakou, the Olympic Champion figure skater, Vanished in front of

six million viewers while singing the Canadian national anthem on the gold winner’s

podium; Paul Herbert, the French financier, unintentionally set the record for the

highest altitude Vanishing when he disappeared from beneath his parachute at

57,000 feet; and Edwin Wong, the virtuoso pianist, Vanished while laying down the

final chords of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in B minor, which the judges deemed so in

keeping with the nature of the piece they awarded him the Queen Elisabeth of

Belgium prize, even though he was not there to receive it.

It goes without saying there was no shortage of theories to account for the

Vanishings—but nobody paid them any attention. Everyone was waiting for the

Seekers to crack it. Only they could come up with the answer.

But the days turned into weeks, the weeks into months, and the Symposium doors

remained closed. In this vacuum of information a new, frightening idea took hold—

that the Vanishings could not be cured, that they would continue until nobody

remained. Only one thing gave cause for hope, a little quirk in the behaviour of the

Vanishings that soon became obvious.

Children did not Vanish.

There was something about children the Vanishings didn’t like, or couldn’t touch.

But nobody could say what this was.

After two long years of evidence gathering and fruitless speculation, the Chief

Researcher was forced to admit the Symposium was no closer to understanding the

Vanishings than before. In the storm that followed this confession a new man took

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over, a scientist nobody had ever heard of called Professor Courtz.

The new Chief Researcher’s inaugural address inspired fresh confidence in the

hearts of those who were afraid. They took comfort in his military-style moustache,

his grey hair slicked back with tonic, and most of all in his astonishing blue eyes that

sparkled like skilfully-cut sapphires. There was something solid and reliable about

him, like a judge’s closing remarks or a balanced equation. By the time he was

halfway through his speech, his audience were hypnotised.

He ended his address with an appeal for privacy to study the Vanishings

undisturbed. All future contact, he announced, would be made through subordinates

at monthly press conferences. Lulled into inattention by the reassuring tones of his

voice, those watching barely registered the significance of these words and raucous

applause followed him as he backed into the Trocadéro, smiling and waving to the

crowds like an old King of Europe.

But that was the last anyone saw of him. Afterwards, he disappeared from view.

At first this odd conduct was tolerated. The new Chief Researcher was a serious

man who did not seek celebrity? Well and good! But his monkish behaviour soon lost

its appeal. The Symposium bulletins, despite their reassurances, satisfied no one, and

an idea gathered force that the Professor himself had Vanished, that he—even he!—

had succumbed, that he had gone too deep, and become one with the fathoms he had

sought to penetrate.

It was around this time that the light must have appeared. Nobody could say when

it first came on, but there it was, high up in the highest window of the Trocadéro,

burning through the night when all others had been extinguished. This signal of hope

was all the troubled citizens of the world needed to regain the faith they had lost, and

when the little children of Paris woke from their nightmares of empty houses, their

parents took them in their arms, carried them to a window, and pointed across the

rooftops.

There he sits, they would say. There he sits, working away.

One day he’s bound to solve the Vanishings.

One day soon!

In A Bad Light

6

Boris tapped the desk lamp that had just popped and died, then unscrewed the bulb

and held it up to examine the curled filament, his worn, engineer’s fingers

unflinching on the hot glass.

The bulb was his last. For weeks he’d been reduced to carrying the lamp around

his tiny apartment—to the kitchen to prepare his meagre dinners, or the bathroom to

examine his hollow-eyed reflection—trailing the long extension cable around the

towers of boxes and stacks of files. The shops in his secluded neighbourhood were

closed at night, and he could never work up the courage to go out during the day.

Besides, he’d grown fond of this last light of his, and come to believe, against the laws

of science, that it would never burn out.

“And now you have,” he murmured—the first words he’d spoken for three days.

He pushed himself to his feet and shuffled out of his flat into the stairwell,

returning a moment later with a stolen bulb nestling in his jacket pocket. But instead

of turning the lamp back on and resuming his work, he placed his chair by the

window and stared out at the lights of Paris and the streets they half revealed.

In the distance, across the rooftops, the many windows of the ISPCV were dark—

all except one, the one, where his old mentor, Professor Courtz, wrestled alone with

the same mystery. He gave Courtz’s light only a disinterested glance, and fell instead

to watching the late-night loners of Montmartre, meandering about below as though

trapped in a labyrinth from which there was no escape; the drunks, the flâneurs and

the entangled; the eaters of opium; the criminals … a variety of ends that his struggle

against the Vanishings would drive him to, no doubt. What hope did he have, after

all? He was no Professor Courtz, surrounded by Seekers and expensive machines. He

was nothing more than a simple Boris, an unknown Russian scientist sitting alone by

the window of a tiny Montmartre flat. He had his pencils, his notebooks, and his

brain, and that was all.

And maybe that would be enough.

Of all the scientists in the world, Boris was the closest to unlocking the secret of the

Vanishings.

But he did not know this.

If someone had told him —if, one day as he sat at his desk, a peculiar little man

had crept out of the cupboard behind him and whispered softly in his ear: “You nearly

have it, my lad, keep going!” he would not have believed him for a moment, even if

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the little man had then disappeared in a flash of blue light. Sometimes he felt he

would never discover the answer, and that he was wasting his time.

Nevertheless, even Courtz and the Seekers were far behind Boris in the quest to

solve the Vanishings. Boris had something they did not, something worth more than

Symposiums and funding and state of the art, hi-tech equipment.

He found the Vanishings beautiful.

Every night, on his own, he studied his files and reports, his photographs and

videotapes, trying to find some kind of common cause, or link between each case.

Over and over in his head he saw the films he had gathered of people fading from the

world. It was right that people Vanished—just as it was right that they died when they

became too old and tired. It was a painful, melancholy rightness, but it seemed to

Boris that when somebody Vanished a natural law was being fulfilled. Yes, the

Vanishings were sad, but were they surprising? Boris did not leap to this conclusion

like everyone else. The Vanishings were certainly strange, but strange in a way that

made him tremble with longing. And this was not a longing to understand the

Vanishings, or to put an end to them, but something else—perhaps even a longing to

Vanish himself.

Thoughts like these would not have been tolerated in the Symposium, where the

cold, careful steps of logic prevailed, and flights of fancy were forbidden. Courtz and

the Seekers wanted to incorporate the Vanishings into scientific theory. Boris felt that

a different approach was necessary, that the Vanishings had nothing to do with

science, that they came from something else, something human, something poetical.

He reacted to the Vanishings not as a scientist trying to analyse a new phenomenon,

but as a complete individual, a living, breathing, feeling soul. The Vanishings, he was

certain, had sprung from the one place where science had no authority: The human

condition itself. They had been started not by a change in scientific law, but by an

alteration in human nature, possibly even a tiny alteration—a single turn of a single

screw in a machine of a million parts. Perhaps this change had been brewing for

centuries in the processes of history, like a potion in a witch’s cauldron. Perhaps it

had struck like a bolt of lightning in recent years.

But it had come.

He lit a cigarette and continued to stare out of the window at the streets below.

As far as he could tell there was only one chink in the Vanishings’ defences, a tiny

window through which he hoped to force entry. Again and again he came back to this

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clue, but he could not see what it meant.

Children did not Vanish.

Children had always been the choicest prize of the wolf, and here was the wolf,

leaving them be. Not because it wanted to; not out of kindness. Whenever he saw a

child passing below, he thought he heard the Vanishings snarling in the air—held at

bay, somehow, by a lollipop. And this puzzled him.

“Perhaps it is children who will stop the Vanishings,” he muttered, scratching at

his beard. “Not men like me.”

Reaching for his notebook, he saw once more the question he’d written before the

light bulb exploded—the question, he thought with a tremor of fear, that had even

caused it to explode. When he’d first heard of the Vanishings, this question had

occurred to him before any other. He’d never written it down, and now he had it

looked more ridiculous than ever, no better than the wild guesses put forward by the

celebrity scientists on television.

Fairy tales.

Stories his father had told him.

He rubbed it out and fell once more to watching the street below. But this time

there were no thoughts, no ideas, no memories—only a deep sadness that captivated

him, that seemed to speak more truly of the Vanishings than words ever could.

He did not stir again until his watch beeped.

It was nearly time for the meeting.

Heaving himself to his feet, he slung on his rumpled black jacket, thrust some

coins, keys, matches, cigarettes, pencils and paper into his pockets, and left the flat,

his heavy tread booming on the stairs.

The question remained faint in the back of his mind.

What if it’s all got something to do with the Woods?

Ten minutes later he slid onto a stool in a tiny café hidden along the Rue Jacquemont.

It was two in the morning and as usual he was the only customer. Ghostly white

sleeves hovered in the gloom behind the bar: With a clink, a candle and a coffee

materialized in front of him.

He lit a cigarette and waited, his limbs heavy with exhaustion. In the mirror above

the bar his reflection watched him from behind dimly-glinting bottles: hulking

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shoulders, a pale face, a red chip of light in his mouth, like some wild-haired prophet

on the side of a mountain.

If I solve the Vanishings, will I be able to sleep and enjoy life, the way other

people sleep and enjoy life?

His reflection watched him ironically, but gave no answer, and his eyes slid away

to another part of the mirror—the reflection of the entrance. Beside it, a tall, narrow

shadow had taken up a position of stillness. He stared at this shape for some time

before he realised what it meant.

Someone was there, watching him.

He swivelled round on his stool. If it was the woman he’d come to meet, she had

entered so quietly neither he nor the barman had heard.

“Mrs Jeffers?” he asked, straining his eyes to make her out.

“Who else would it be, this time of night?”

The shape edged forward a little, enough for him to see thin, wrinkled fingers

arranging the folds of a golf umbrella. Even though they were weighed down with

silver rings, the fingers moved with startling precision.

“Get him to turn off the lights, will you?”

“Lights?” He glanced about. “You mean the candles?”

“The candles are fine. It’s the cigarette machine. The beer fridges. And that absurd

Eiffel tower lamp beside the till.”

“But … why?”

“You know why.”

“I do?”

“Have him light more candles if the dark frightens you.”

He gestured to the barman and related the old woman’s instructions.

“That’s better,” she said approvingly, as candles appeared one by one in bottles

along the bar. “Now we can get down to business.”

He examined her reflection as she arranged her knees and elbows on the stool

beside him. She was about as old as he’d expected from the antiquated handwriting of

her letter. Her silvery hair was twisted high into a serpentine tower, held in position—

magically, it seemed—by a single silver pin, long as a knitting needle, thrust

diagonally downward. Ornate silver earrings hung from her earlobes, which drooped

under their weight. Her face was long and bony, and covered in an elderly fuzz of

white hair, while her close-set, penetrating eyes reminded him of a bird—a heron, or a

crane. It was all typical of the wealthy, cultured, eccentric sort he’d supposed she

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would be, but still, as he studied her, he found himself looking for something he could

not find—whatever it was that was giving him this sensation of unease. From the

moment he’d seen her in the mirror, he’d felt a small balloon of fear inflating in his

throat.

She propped her umbrella against her stool. “I don’t remember the last time I was

up so late,” she said. “I suppose you love night-times in cities. Prowling the streets,

collar up, frowning like a murderer.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” he muttered. He was already finding her bright, wide-awake

voice hard to manage.

“Not me. As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing worse.” She rapped on the bar.

“Monsieur! J’aimerais du whiskey! It’s not past your bedtime though, is it?”

“No,” he said, surprised by the quick way the question darted at him. “Actually—

yes. It’s been past my bedtime for two days.”

“What’s keeping you awake? Monsters under the bed?”

“There are no monsters under the bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve checked.”

“You had to check? I like that, hehheh, that’s good. Merci, dear boy.” The barman

retreated with a hushed de rien, and she sipped her whiskey. “So what is it, if it’s not

monsters?”

Some sugar crystals lay scattered on the bar. Boris began crushing them under his

thumbnail, and imagined telling the old woman what happened when he tried to

sleep. How he’d lie down and close his eyes. How one of the Vanished would appear

in his mind. How he’d think about this person – who they were, where they lived, the

people they’d left behind – and how he’d find something had slipped from his

memory, their age or some other detail. How this would torture him so much he’d

have to get out of bed and go through his files to find the missing information, and

how he would lie back down and attempt to clear his mind. Finally, most dreadful of

all, how a question would then occur to him – always the same question – that

banished all possibility of sleep.

Why had he remembered that person, and not someone else?

Why not the old man who had Vanished six months ago in the cubicles at a

municipal swimming pool in Dresden, leaving behind goggles, trunks, dentures, a hip

replacement, and a thin sliver of metal that had turned out to be a piece of shrapnel

embedded in his body, unknown to anyone, since childhood? What was his name?

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Peter something. Laskau? Lasker? Or what about the mother who’d Vanished in the

dim shadows of the reptile house at Glasgow Zoo? She’d left behind a similar pile of

personal artefacts—they all did—plus two boys, he’d interviewed them himself,

neither had shown regret or even awareness their mother had gone, and had

continued to clash their toy trucks together on the carpet as he stood over them,

notebook in hand—but he had sensed, deep within them, the slow opening of a

terrible chasm they would never be able to close.

What were their names?

For a few days he’d not been able to get them out of his mind. Now all he could

remember was the trucks.

And then he’d be trapped, he’d have to get out of bed once more to look at them

all, one by one. Looking at them all was the most important thing, because the

thought that terrified him more than any other was that one would be forgotten. But

the files were stacked high, and in the end he would be driven out into the streets,

where he would walk and smoke, collar up, trying to escape the Vanished people who

pursued him in a silent crowd, insisting that they too be remembered.

The café door banged—a stack of freshly-printed newspapers hit the floor. Boris

blinked and came out of himself. He saw from the old woman’s face he hadn’t just

imagined telling her—he’d actually spoken his thoughts out loud, or she’d read

everything from start to finish in his eyes.

“I thought you’d be like that,” she said, touching his arm. “And seeing you now,

and listening to you, I understand so much about you. You’re a kind man, and you’ve

taken the Vanishings to heart, that’s all.”

Boris felt his eyes, absurdly, filling with tears. His rough fingertips fumbled them

away; if the old woman saw she pretended not to.

“Perhaps you could just tell me why you wanted to meet,” he got out, a little

irritably. “And especially why you didn’t want to talk to the Symposium.”

She smiled and began turning one of the antique silver rings on her fingers—it

gleamed dully in response to her touch.

“Oh, my little story isn’t something you want regular scientists getting their hands

on. It’s for someone a bit more … from both worlds, if you know what I mean.”

“There’s only one world.”

“Have you checked that too?”

“I don’t need to. I’m sure.”

She clicked her tongue, for the first time sounding annoyed. “Don’t say that. It

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doesn’t come from you, from your heart. Professor Courtz might say it. But not you.”

“How would you know? He’s a recluse.”

“It’s plain what kind of man he is.”

“What kind’s that?”

“All circuit-boards and equations. He’d rather words were numbers and ideas

were formulas. You’re different. There’s something of the cauldron about you.

Something Witch-Made. It’s a mind like yours that’ll solve the Vanishings, not a mind

like his. Don’t you know that?”

“I know Courtz. I worked under him at a research institute in Moscow. He used to

beat me at chess. I’d have to go ice-skating afterwards.”

“Why?”

“To recover a sense of my own elegance, I suppose,” Boris said with disinterest. “I

don’t expect he’s changed much. Perhaps you know people you don’t know quite

well.”

“You’d be surprised, dear boy, what I know, you really would.”

“Do you know how to stop the Vanishings?”

“I know how they started.”

“That’s nothing. Even Pierre knows that. Pierre, les Disparitions – c’a commencé

comment?”

“Par les Anglais,” mumbled the barman from behind a newspaper.

“You see?” said Boris. “It was the English. Everyone has an opinion. What’s so

special about yours?”

“Who’s talking about opinions? This isn’t something I thought up. It’s something I

saw.”

“We have to correctly interpret what we see.”

“Some things can only be interpreted one way.”

Boris frowned and stubbed out his cigarette.

“Very well then,” he said. “You’ve come all the way from London. If you’ve

something to tell me, then tell me. If not, I suggest we both go home to our beds.”

The old woman hesitated, and for the first time he felt a prickle of interest.

Whatever theory she had about the Vanishings, she was unsure of it, and this alone

set her apart from the others he had met. It meant she had considered it critically,

examined it and tried to wriggle out from under it. But she hadn’t been able to, and

such thinkers were to be valued.

It was only a short sentence she whispered in his ear. Having said it, she pushed

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him away and sat waiting for his response.

Keeping his eyes averted, he scratched the side of his face to hide his

disappointment. Why did he bother with these meetings? They always turned out the

same way. Some wild story. Some strange fantasy cooked up by a lonely soul.

“A baby started the Vanishings?” he muttered, unable to conceal his disbelief.

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“That’s it, yes,” she nodded. “I’m not saying he did it on purpose. He can’t have

known what he was doing—I mean, he’s only just learned to walk.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous. I mean … it’s

absurd.”

“There’s that fellow Courtz again. Why do you keep trying to be someone you’re

not?”

Before he could stop himself, Boris glanced up. His reflection, looking more

priest-like than ever among the candles, allowed a thin stream of smoke to trickle

from the corner of its mouth.

What an interesting question! Aren’t you going to answer?

His eyes fell on the heavy crystal ashtray. He briefly considered hurling it into the

mirror, but seeing himself fracture and fall apart was the last thing he needed.

“Courtz or no Courtz,” he said. “It’s absurd.”

“Is it? What have you discovered about the Vanishings that makes you so sure?”

He cocked his head, surprised: This, after all, was a good point, and he was about

to admit so when a car turned on the road outside, sending long shafts of light

through the bar. The old woman flinched and flicked her hand up.

“Dratted stuff,” she muttered. “Just no escape, is there?”

The moment was over in a second, but Boris saw it. He shot a look at Pierre—the

barman was sliding the newspapers onto their bamboo reading poles.

Probably he’d imagined it.

Just a hallucination.

A hallucination?! We have to correctly interpret what we see! Your words! Your

words!

He fumbled for a cigarette and snapped one match after another trying to light it,

but it was too late: Panic was galloping up on him. He gave up on the cigarette and

put his palms flat on the bar to stop himself toppling off his stool. Somewhere a

thousand miles away, the old woman was speaking. Was he feeling all right? He’d

gone all pale, and he was pale enough to begin with! Was he taking his vitamins?

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“I’m fine … I just … I thought I saw … please go on … tell me … ”

Bending his head to gather his breath, he noticed the golf umbrella resting against

her stool and focussed his attention on it, because focussing on something, finding

one thing and staring at it—the life of a Vanished person, the inner workings of a

computer—was the only thing that would stop IT from happening.

The splitting.

The breaking apart into more than one.

And at first it worked. Branded with the logo of a Life Insurance company, it was a

peculiar choice for the eccentric old woman, and didn’t go at all with the refined

clothes and antique jewellery. Still, she was obviously accustomed to it. He’d seen her

folding it in the mirror—she’d done it with a few skilful twists.

She’d been folding it.

But … that meant she’d had it open.

His heart began to pound and a weakness spread through his body.

She’d had it open and it hadn’t been raining.

She’d been walking around on a clear night under an open umbrella.

Why?

You know why.

He felt himself collapsing, disintegrating. He did know. He’d known all along.

He’d just refused to admit it. And now the answer was rising in his mind,

monumental and terrifying, like some obscure sea-beast struggling up through a

thousand fathoms of water to reach the surface of the ocean.

What if it’s all got something to do with the Woods?

His mind split and began to fall apart in pieces. Tensing his shoulders, he held it

together with sheer force of will.

It couldn’t be true.

It was ridiculous. Impossible.

He would prove it.

He caught Pierre’s eye. “Lumière,” he mouthed.

Bizarrely unconcerned, the barman sidled towards the switch that would ignite

the cloud of glass glittering darkly above them. The old woman noticed nothing and

carried on talking, but now he couldn’t understand a single one of the words she was

saying. He stared at her, paralyzed with fear.

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… Beschreibung deß Lebens eines seltzamen Vaganten, genant Melchior Sternfels

von Fuchshaim, wo und welcher gestalt er nemlich in diese Welt kommen …

Why was she speaking German all of a sudden?

For a moment he felt himself floating above his stool, detached from all sensation.

And then Pierre flicked the switch.

The old woman jerked like a bomb had gone off. Her whiskey glass exploded

against the mirror, and a shard embedded itself in Boris’s cheek, making him blink.

Then everything erupted in a chaos of gasps and cries, of clattering stools and

smashing bottles. The old woman was everywhere at once, racing back and forth with

the frenzy of an animal that had gone up in flames. Then, limbs flailing, she rushed at

him.

“Turn it off … you idiot!”

Her hands clutched at his collar; her face, sizzling and shrinking, was inches from

his own. Already the teeth were dropping from her gums; her eyes, white as hard-

boiled eggs, rolled blindly in their sockets.

She had only moments left.

He flung his arms around her.

“PIERRE!” he roared. “La lumière!”

The barman didn’t move. Rigid and staring, he was shaking his head, muttering

with machine-gun rapidity: “Non non non non non non.”

“Pierre! Vite! Vite!”

“Vite? Comment-ça, vite?” the barman suddenly screamed, waving his arms.

“La lumière, pour l’amour de Dieu! Éteins!”

Pierre stared at him uncomprehendingly, then flung himself against the wall and

tore at the switch.

click

Nothing.

clickclickclickclickclick

“PIERRE!”

“Pétart! Ça ne marche plus! Ça ne marche plus!”

Boris vaulted the bar, shoved the barman aside and struck the brass plate a

terrible blow with his fist. It disappeared into the wall with a puff of dust—the light

flickered but did not go out.

Cursing, he spun round.

The old woman was pulling herself along the bar, disintegrating as she went. Her

16

hair had dissolved into a dribbling morass of syrupy goo, and there was a sound like

firecrackers going off as her spine bent into a curve, the vertebrae popping one by

one. The skin on her face drew against her bones, shrink-wrapping her skull with a

sizzling noise: There was a terrible, oily smell like fat smoking in a pan. She was

shrivelling up, the shrieks and screams dwindling to a helpless mewling that was a

thousand times more dreadful. Above her, the chandelier that had hung peacefully

since the nineteenth century was rattling with malevolent energy, every one of its

glass diamonds shivering with crystalline delight as it inflicted its punishment on her

for daring to intrude where she did not belong.

Staring at it in disbelief, Boris squeezed his head between his fists.

It was true.

Everything his father had told him.

She whirled round then, her mouth dropping open. “Ee-duts,” she got out. Then,

instead of closing, her mouth continued opening wider until her face simply peeled

off the back of her head like a sock coming off, and she collapsed into a smouldering

heap, a smashed apart skeleton.

Boris vaulted back over the bar, snatched up a stool and heaved it into the

chandelier—with a crash, the bar was plunged into sudden gloom. Swiftly he was on

his knees beside her, terrified of what his fingers might touch. Her breath was coming

in shallow gasps, but somehow, from the cusp of extinction, she flung out a single

word.

What was it?

Again?

Candle!

There were many scattered about. He relit one and placed it next to her, then

knelt there, touching her shoulders, not knowing what to do. She motioned him away

with a twitch of her fingers, so he sat with his back against the bar, his legs splayed

out, watching that light as it worked its ancient magic, stroking her with the gentlest

of touches, a painter at a work of restoration.

From a corner obscured by smoke and shadows, another Boris watched him with

dark, knowing eyes.

You nearly killed one of the Forest Folk …

It was true, he had. But he knew two things now he hadn’t known before.

Why the old woman had come to him.

And that it all very definitely had something to do with the Woods.

17

2

The ORPANAB Kobold

The baby who had started the Vanishings was no longer a baby. He was two years old

and lived in London with a meat-grinder operator called Forbes and an ex-greetings

card designer called Alice.

He didn’t know he’d started the Vanishings and luckily neither did they—which is

not to say he hadn’t aroused suspicions. Everyone who saw him was suspicious of

him. At the Surbiton Centre for Orphaned and Abandoned Babies, where he’d started

out, they’d suspected him of all kinds of astonishing things.

In those early days the Vanishings had not yet begun. He had set them in motion,

but they were still to make their grand debut. Even so, right from the morning of his

arrival at the ORPANAB Centre, he made himself known as an oddity. Each

ORPANAB (as babies were referred to in that institution) came attached to a

history—a police file, or a social worker’s report—but this one came empty-handed, in

possession of no history at all.

He had been discovered on a shelf in a second-hand bookshop. It was supposed

that someone had put him there, as new-borns were not known to be in the habit of

clambering shelves in bookshops. He had been found, however, completely naked,

without even a basket, dummy or nappy to offer up as evidence of a parent. As for the

note traditionally found with abandoned babies, there had been none.

The mysterious effect of these circumstances was multiplied a thousand-fold by

the physical appearance of the ORPANAB in question. From day one the nurses

thought of the baby as “IT” not “HE”, and couldn’t wait for the maximum three

month stay to expire before it was shipped to the long-term holding facility in the

countryside. It wasn’t just that it was ugly: It was spooky ugly. Instead of the plump,

friendly little arms and legs of conventional new-borns, all squidgy and soft, it had

hard, animal limbs more suited to leaping and burrowing than rolling about in the

arms of grandparents. It had a way of staring too, of staring and staring—and it was

such an adult stare! It seemed to know things beyond its age; the nurses half expected

it to open its mouth and start reciting Shakespeare, or make a comment about recent

political developments. Indeed, when the creature did open its mouth for the first

time (or rather, had its mouth forcibly opened for its health check) its strangest

18

feature was revealed: It could not have been more than a few days old, but already it

had grown an intimidating set of teeth.

These were not the partially-visible buds sometimes found in new-borns. They

were ten shining little pearls, perfectly formed, sharp and hard as barnacles. Within

the first few hours of its arrival, it had bitten off a nurse’s earlobe while being burped,

snapped in half a pencil a clerk had dropped into its cot, and savaged down to the

bone the index finger of a trainee reckless enough to tickle it under the chin.

These abominable attacks made him instantly notorious among the nurses.

None of them had seen anything like it.

None of them, that is, except one, an ancient German called Frau Winkler from

the forests of Bavaria, who had come to London before the war. The very second she

laid eyes on the baby she remembered an illustration from a book of fairy tales she’d

had as a child. The picture depicted a moonlit, magical scene—a farmhouse rooftop

laden with snow, and, perched by the chimneystack, a Kobold, its nose raised to the

delicious odours wafting up from the oven below.

“Er will den Stollen stehlen,” the inscription had read. He wants to steal the

Stollen.

Bending over the cot for the first time, Frau Winkler remembered this picture she

had not thought of for seventy years. So the Kobold had escaped from the book, had

it, and come looking for her at the end of her days? She would keep a close eye on its

activities!

Every afternoon visitors would come to the ORPANAB Centre to view the babies

on offer. Whenever these Parents-To-Be entered the enormous dormitory, the Kobold

would roll onto its front and examine them through the bars of its cot, its jet-black

eyes staring fixedly. The couples would move round the room, coming nearer and

nearer, now and again bending down to make silly noises for the gurgling, drooling,

dribbling, pooing babies. Sooner or later they’d be drawn to the Kobold’s corner,

sensing that something dwelt there, that it was a lair of some kind. By this time the

Kobold would be on red alert, sitting up, its slightly squashed head held perfectly still.

It seemed to Frau Winkler that of all the babies, only the Kobold knew what was at

stake, that these Giants were maybe its Parents, that it was on the brink of finding a

home. But when the Maybe Parents were close enough it would smile and show its

teeth, and they would shudder and turn away and even—this happened quite

regularly—scream.

A few minutes later a nurse would enter and take one of the other babies, passing

19

the Kobold by with a look of admonishment.

What do you expect?

Why would anyone want YOU?

And the Kobold would roll onto its side and face the wall, and not look round

again for some time.

The Balloon & The Mouldy Corner

This wall the Kobold faced whenever he rolled away from the world was not blank

plaster like the other walls in the ORPANAB Centre. It was decorated with a mural,

painted years before when the ORPANAB Centre had been a government asylum. The

artists had been the inmates themselves. Under the supervision of a local entertainer

called Boppo the Colour Clown they had been permitted to express their innermost

feelings upon the wall of their canteen. Though the canteen was now a dormitory, and

Boppo was long in his grave, their masterpiece remained.

If the ORPANABs had taken the mural as a representation of the outside world,

which most had never seen, they would have understood that the Taj Mahal, the Alps,

a High Street and a jungle all stood together in close proximity, and that the world

was populated by braying, bucking donkeys pursued by policemen with red faces and

stomping black boots. Most of the Maybe Parents found it a comical piece of work,

but some sensitive souls couldn’t look at it without thinking the donkeys were too

bewildered and the policemen too menacing. These people, like the Kobold, found

themselves drawn to an almost invisible detail, added by a patient with an old soul,

perhaps, who had stood on a ladder while the others splashed about below, pouring

pent-up longing and sadness into an image of heart-stopping beauty: A Hot Air

Balloon, hanging high and away on the upper edge of the mural and therefore the

world, about to drift free of the sky that contained it, about to pass into some other

unknown region—a region every Hot Air Balloon yearns towards and would no doubt

reach, were it not for gravity and the perils of the encircling Cosmos.

The Kobold spent hours staring up at this balloon and the two indistinct pilots in

the basket. They never turned away like the Maybe Parents, never scowled like the

nurses, or held him upside down by the ankles and rudely wiped his bottom. No, they

looked right back, smiling and waving: They were saying “Hello”, not “Goodbye”.

Before long, the Kobold lost all interest in the Maybe Parents and never once turned

20

to examine them when they entered in the afternoons. Instead, it stared longingly and

hopefully at the Hot Air Balloon and the smiling faces; longingly and hopefully at

first, but then fearfully and anxiously, as the Hot Air Balloon drew nearer and nearer

to the Mouldy Corner.

This sinister patch of ceiling was never reached by the sunlight that streamed in

through the huge sash windows of the old asylum. It remained always in shadow, and

there the damp, vaporous breath of the babies gathered and became mould—dark,

swampy mould. There was something about this Mouldy Corner that was truly

monstrous. Each day it grew, spreading ever closer to the Balloon, and the Kobold

watched its progress with a fixed, terrified expression.

Only Frau Winkler noticed these obsessions. She wondered if the Mould was a

window the Kobold used to escape the ORPANAB after dark. Often, when she was

alone on night duty, she would go up to its cot to see if it was still there. Finding it

sleeping peacefully, she would stare at it mistrustfully. “Who are you?” she would

whisper on those occasions. “Where do you come from?”

Those questions were the only words ever addressed to the Kobold during its stay

at the ORPANAB Centre. No Kootchy-Koos, no words of affection, no bedtime stories.

Instead: “Who are you?” and “Where do you come from?” over and over again,

repeated a thousand times and always in the deepest part of the night, when the soul

is ruptured by sleep, when cracks appear, emitting dreams, but through which in the

other direction outside impressions may also creep, becoming stowaways in the soul.

At that time, at that soft, vulnerable time, who knows how those questions

influenced the Kobold’s developing mind. Perhaps all our lives have been shaped by a

strange old woman hunching over us in the night, and what she whispers …

Lifted, Held, Hooked & Picked

The next words said to the Kobold were: “Time to go!” and “Come on then!” and “Up

with you!” Not Winkler’s words, but those of Mr Stubbings, and not whispered, but

said in a business-like way with impatient clicks of a pen.

Two months and twenty nine days the Kobold had lain in the cot, unnerving a

long parade of Maybe Parents, and now here was Mr Stubbings saying “Let’s have

none of this nonsense!” and “What the devil’s he playing at?” and “Get me an aspirin,

will you, Mrs Winkler.” The necessary forms had been completed and the hour of

21

departure had come, but the Kobold would not comply and had fastened itself to a

bar of the cot by means of biting it.

Tickling, nipping and prodding being ineffective, Mr Stubbings thrust his pen

between the locked teeth, prised them apart, and snatched the Kobold up with a

victorious “GOTCHA!” The hidden consequence of this action was to break the

Kobold’s view of the Hot Air Balloon, and so the triumph of Stubbinbgs was short-

lived, for the Kobold at once began to make a most unusual noise, a loud, threatening

growl like the snarling of a woodland creature. Frau Winkler and the other nurses,

who had never heard the Kobold make a sound, hunched their shoulders in surprise,

and all the babies (there were ninety-one of them) burst into a chorus of screaming.

“Erm ... ” said Mr Stubbings, holding the Kobold at arm’s length, and undergoing

the sensations that people undergo when they are snarled at by small animals with

sharp teeth..

“Do not worry, it does not bite,” said Frau Winkler, knowing full well the Kobold

very definitely did bite, and would at any moment. But she had a nurse’s courage and

took the Kobold from Mr Stubbings’s outstretched arms.

“You frightened it, that is all,” she said. “It had settled in here so nicely, it does not

want to leave.”

She plopped the growling Kobold over her shoulder, turned to walk it about—but

found her way suddenly blocked by a man / mountain, who had appeared out of

nowhere behind her.

“I’m Forbes!” bellowed the man, instantly silencing the howling babies, who had

never once, in all their years of existence, heard such an astonishing thunderclap.

“Give him over! Let’s have him!” the man went on, brandishing a razor-sharp

prosthetic hook under Frau Winkler’s nose.

Frau Winkler screamed. The hook, the uncombed beard, and the making-

demands-and-introducing-yourself-at-the-same-time, could mean only one thing:

Pirates! In her terror she loosened her grip, and the Kobold, sensing freedom, made a

break for it. With a wriggle and a squirm, it launched itself towards the Hot Air

Balloon, arms outstretched.

A falling baby is no laughing matter, especially one doing so headfirst towards a

tiled floor. Mr Stubbings immediately dropped his clipboard, which was a good

start—it showed a gentlemanly sympathy and freed up his hands. But the sight of the

clipboard falling next to the Kobold caused the word “Galileo” to flash into his mind,

so for vital milliseconds he was trapped in a state of flop-mouthed speculation: Which

22

one would hit the ground first? Baby or clipboard? As for Frau Winkler, she was

frozen by a Witch Trial instinct: Now we’ll see! If it really is the Kobold it will land on

all-fours. If not, it will smash its head open and that will be that!

Fortunately the Kobold did not reach the ground to provide the hoped-for proofs.

With an impossibly deft swipe of his hook, the newcomer, the pirate, the one who’d

identified himself as “Forbes”, snagged the Kobold’s nappy in mid-air.

“ARRGGGHH!” screamed Mr Stubbings, thinking in a moment of pure terror that

the baby had been impaled and he would have to complete Form A99-B, one of the

longest. But PHEW! all was well: Forbes flipped the Kobold up and caught it on the

palm of his hand with a chortle and an “Upsy-Daisy!”

“Gute … Gott!” gasped Frau Winkler, her hand on her chest.

“I think he likes you Forbes,” said a quiet voice, and for the first time it became

apparent another person was there, a small, thin woman with wispy hair.

“Alice, I think he does,” said Forbes, giving the Kobold’s ear a nip with his hook.

“What’s his name, Nursie?”

“Kobold!” Frau Winkler blurted out.

“I beg your pardon?” said Mr Stubbings, standing bolt upright.

“Kobold?” said Alice, her light eyes turning sharp and hard. “What sort of name is

that?”

Frau Winkler drew herself up, pushed her nose into the air and assumed an

expression of terrifying dignity. “It is not a name. There was a chimney in a book and

it was sniffing it. It was trying to steal the Stollen!” she finished, unable to believe

that none of these idiots understood.

There was a silence, then a pen clicked.

“Wait for me in my office please, Mrs Winkler,” said Mr Stubbings.

Frau Winkler departed, Forbes and Alice remained, and Mr Stubbings apologised,

apologised, apologised: Stress, pressure, staff shortages – and ORPANABs weren’t

given names until placed with a family.

“And are you such a family?” he asked with an insinuating grin. “Have you come

to view our collection? We have a great many.”

They were not a family, at least not yet, they were just Forbes and Alice. And no,

they didn’t want to look at any other babies: This one would do.

So after the necessary documents were filled in the destiny of the baby who had

started the Vanishings was transferred into the hands of Forbes and Alice Mulgan,

and henceforth disappeared into those dwelling places of North London defined in

23

character, somehow, by the grey rattle and thud of the lorries on the North Circular.

When they got him home Forbes and Alice sat him on the sofa and had a closer look.

“He’s an intense little fella,” Forbes said.

“I wonder what his parents looked like,” Alice said.

“Doesn’t matter—we’re his parents now.”

“Yes, we are,” said Alice, snuggling up a bit. “What’ll we call him?”

“He’s only a little thing. Let’s give him a big name, something with a bit of bite,

like what he’s got.”

“What about Max?”

“Max Mulgan? Sounds good to me.” Forbes placed his hand on Max’s head. “I

name you King Max of Bickerstaffes Road. Let’s show his Majesty his domain.”

The Kingdom Max inherited was a converted store room upstairs at the front of

the house. As Kingdoms go it was small and sparsely populated, with few natural

resources to speak of. Its only inhabitants were a cot, a set of drawers, a shelf and a

magic lantern, which, when lit at night and given a touch to set it turning, cast the

shadows of flying birds against the walls. All these citizens Alice had gathered from

second-hand shops and house sales, and as a consequence were somewhat worn, but

they had a pleasing air of dedicated service about them, and they welcomed their new

Lord with a respectful gravity.

Best of all, by some miracle or coincidence, on the wall opposite the bed Alice had

painted a mural like the one in the ORPANAB Centre, only more focussed in its

theme, representing not the World in its entirety, but a Country Fair. There was a

Helter-skelter, a Bouncy Castle, a Merry-Go-Round, a Coconut Shy, a Petting Zoo, a

Jumble Sale, a Bakery Stand, a Candy Floss Caravan and a Donut Wagon. With a

touch of sinister genius Alice had painted a Wolf standing unnoticed on its hind legs

among the playing children. But Max hardly saw this master-stroke. Something else

caught his attention, something far more important.

In the background, between the Prize Vegetable Competition and the Pet Dog’s

Assault Course, a Hot Air Balloon ride was going up, trailing ropes that drooped

towards the ground. It was bigger than the balloon at the ORPANAB Centre, big

enough so that the people in the wicker basket could be seen. It was very definitely a

man and a woman. Though their faces could not be clearly made out, they were

certainly looking at him and smiling.

He smiled back.

24

They had escaped the Mouldy Corner.

They were getting closer.

25

3

The Dark Man

A few months after Max’s arrival at Bickerstaffes Road the Vanishings began.

By then he had settled in and they caused little upset to his daily routine.

Symposium Press Conferences mean nothing to babies, and neither do speeches,

processions or fine feelings about international cooperation. Even when Bickerstaffes

Road had its first Vanishing and the street was jam-packed full of cars and people,

they were just “NeeNaws!” and “Bolsmen! Bolsmen!” As he got older, there were

educational puppet shows at nursery, cartoons on TV, and guest speakers at morning

assembly, demonstrating what to do if you were out with Mummy or Daddy and

suddenly Mummy or Daddy “took off all their clothes and went away”.

Find a Safe Person.

Dial 000.

But TV had similar programmes for Crossing The Road, Not Talking To Strangers

and Not Playing With Matches. So the Vanishings were part of all that.

People just Vanished.

It was something people just did.

It was much more puzzling when people were always there.

The Dark Man, for instance.

He saw the Dark Man almost every day. When Alice dropped him off at school in

the morning, the Dark Man would be smoking a cigarette outside the gates. When

Forbes took him to their local library, the Dark Man would be sitting at one of the

tables with files, phone books and newspapers stacked around him. When they went

on holiday to a caravan deep in the Welsh mountains, the Dark Man was sitting in the

local pub, a pint of beer and a crusted pie untouched before him. Lying in bed at

night, Max imagined that if he got up and peeked through the curtains, he would see

the Dark Man under a street lamp, staring up at him.

And once he did.

And he was.

Even when the Dark Man wasn’t around, he probably was, really. He had a clever

way of going from plain sight to nowhere in the twinkling of a moment. All he had to

do was step back into the shadows and he was gone—and shadows were always close

26

about him. In his rumpled black suit, with his jet-black hair and beard, he was half

made of them already. Only his pale face, shining like the surface of the moon, and

his eyes, burning with curiosity, weren’t so well camouflaged for darkness. And often

that was all Max could see: The face, the eyes and the curiosity.

He never confronted the Dark Man, or told anyone about him. The Dark Man was

like the Squonk, a creature in one of his favourite library books—W.T. Cox’s

Fearsome Creatures Of The Lumberwoods. Squonks lived in the forests of Northern

Pennsylvania, hiding themselves away on account of their ugly, baggy skin:

Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, but now at St. Anthony Park, Minnesota, had

a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mount Alto. He made a clever capture by

mimicking the squonk and inducing it to hop into a sack, in which he was carrying it home,

when suddenly the burden lightened and the weeping ceased. Wentling unslung the sack and

looked in. There was nothing but tears and bubbles.

Max knew that if he questioned the Dark Man, or told anyone about him, he

would melt away in bubbles and tears. And he didn’t want the Dark Man to go.

Having someone there—that was the most exciting thing.

As it turned out, though, the Dark Man was the one with the questions.

It happened in the supermarket Alice occasionally visited to gather food.

He was tagging along behind her, eating some prawn cocktail crisps. Near the

bottom he stopped to tilt the good bits into his mouth, and when he lowered the

packet Alice and the trolley had disappeared and the Dark Man was there - right

there, ten times close and a hundred times big, smelling of damp clothes, sweat and

cigarettes, his hands trembling and a deep crease between his eyes deepening even as

Max looked up at it, deepening and widening like it was a watery trench into which

ocean-going vessels could sink and disappear forever, like it was that Trench he’d

heard about it in school.

The Mariana Trench.

If you went to the bottom of the Mariana Trench then you’d gone just about as far

underwater as it was possible to go, he’d been told. Maybe that’s why the Dark Man

was all damp and smelly, he thought, wrinkling his nose. He’d been to the bottom of

the Trench, and the deepness had left that mark on his forehead.

The Dark Man didn’t introduce himself or explain what he wanted—he just asked

27

two questions. Before Max had a chance to answer, there was a clatter and a shout,

and a long snake of shopping trolleys was pushed between them.

When it had passed the Dark Man was nowhere to be seen.

From then on every time they went to the supermarket Max expected the Dark

Man to approach him again. Sometimes he would get a packet of prawn cocktail

crisps and tilt the crumbs into his mouth, hoping this would summon his unseen

companion. But the Dark Man never came out of the crisps and only remained in the

shadows, waiting for an answer to his questions.

Who are you?

Where do you come from?

These questions seemed easy and at first Max believed he knew the answers. But

the more he thought about it, the more he began to wonder.

If he’d answered the Dark Man with, “I’m Max Mulgan, I come from Bickerstaffes

Road,” somehow he knew the Dark Man would have replied, “No, you aren’t,” and

“No, you don’t.” So the questions lodged unanswered in his mind, and before long

other questions piled up behind them.

Where did he come from?

Where did the where he came from come from?

Where did the where where the where where he had come from come from?

Nobody except the Dark Man seemed to be asking questions like these. Nobody

talked about them. Nobody mentioned them.

This made him feel different.

And that made him feel alone.

And that bound to the Dark Man more than ever.

The Boggy Clump

But sometimes it was good to be alone.

Near Bickerstaffes Road was a park called Newton Fields, a wide, open place with

a play area, a duck pond, and a wind that blew with unending breaths across the grass

and round the trees, collecting and delivering birds, and snapping the pages of

newspapers. In the middle rose a hill where locals gathered for picnics in Summer,

Bonfire Night in Autumn, sledging in Winter, and Easter Egg rolling in Spring.

Standing on its crest, Max could see all the way across the park to a distant land of

28

stately houses whose wide windows were partly-concealed by a row of poplar trees.

He liked to watch the tall, slender trees swaying with mysterious enjoyment in the

wind, wondering who lived behind those darkly-glinting windows.

His favourite spot was a corner of the park where a stream ran. He could sit there

all afternoon on a hummock of grass, undetected except by roving dogs and the

fetchers of kicked-too-far footballs. The stream was interesting. Minnows darted

about in the shallows above the orange mud. Birds dropped from the trees and

dipped their beaks into the water.

Once he saw a kingfisher.

There was always something different.

At the park’s edge, the stream passed through a metal grille and into a concrete

tunnel, vanishing underground with a swirl of its cloak. He liked to watch the water

gurgle through the bars and disappear into the darkness while he thought about the

Dark Man’s questions.

One day he saw a large branch float down the stream and clunk against the metal

bars. Before long some twigs got caught in the branch, then some leaves got caught in

the twigs. By the time he returned the next day a boggy clump had formed. The bigger

it got, the faster it got bigger, and after a few more days the grille was snarled with

muddy junk—a doll, a pair of shoes tied together at the laces, a broken umbrella, a

telephone. By the next weekend the roar of water that had echoed up from the

concrete tunnel had fallen silent, and the stream had spread into a shallow, still pool.

This pool was terrifying to behold. Dead insects floated on its surface, trapped in a

treacherous film of green algae, and a yellowy froth gathered round the edges. Alice

called it Witch Spittle, a name that gave Max nightmares about what was happening

at the pond when he wasn’t there. Even so, the pond was dreadfully fascinating, and

each day he would run from school to succumb to its evil power. The pond was

generating something deep in the depths of its foulness, it was about to give birth—

and then one day, even as he stood there staring hard at the still surface of the water,

there was a violent bubble and a glug, and a cheap, plastic football bobbed to the

surface, a mutated eyeball to stare back at him.

Screaming, he ran home and told Forbes the pond was watching him.

Forbes grunted and pulled on his wellingtons. When they got to the park he took

one look at the pool, then strode into the water, grabbed the branch—still sticking out

of the clump like a lever—and gave it a heave. Watching from the edge, Max

experienced a deep, satisfying thrill as the boggy clump crumbled apart, and all the

29

built-up water, the algae, the dead insects and the Witch Spittle drained away.

But Forbes still wasn’t done. With skilful swings of his hook, he flung all the old

bits of trash and junk onto the bank, and in a matter of moments he’d cleared the

grille completely. As final proof of his mastery, he hoofed the football towards the

centre of the park, sending his boot spinning after it with a guffaw of laughter. An

hour later the stream was roaring along on its underground journey, just as before,

and there was a line of black bags next to one of the park bins.

For the rest of the day Max stayed close to Forbes, admiring things he’d never

noticed before, like the way he could butter his toast with one stroke of his knife, and

drain a mug of scalding-hot tea in one gulp. Everything was simple with Forbes and

he was afraid of nothing, not even Pond Eyeballs and Witch Spittle.

Forbes knew the answer to everything.

Finally at bedtime he couldn’t stand it any longer—he asked Forbes the Dark Man’s

questions.

Forbes was sitting at the end of the bed, telling a story. He sat there, facing away,

whenever he told his stories, which were always about strange goings-on at the

abattoir like the Annual Offal Sorting Competition, the Sheep Who Lived, or the

phantom hooves that could be heard trotting up and down the Shooting Box. He

faced away because he couldn’t tell stories when he was looking at someone, he said,

but Max didn’t mind. Lying there in the semi-darkness, he would turn his head

towards the Country Fair and imagine himself floating into it, past the Candy Floss

Machine and the Wolf Among the Children, towards the Hot Air Balloon, and he

would feel himself rising, losing touch with Forbes’s voice—and then he would wake

and it would be morning.

But tonight the questions wanted out.

He listened all the way to the end of the story, and when Forbes got to his feet,

closed the curtains and bent down to tuck him in, they escaped—first one: “Who am I,

Forbes?” and then the other: “Where do I come from?”

The moment they were out something changed—maybe even everything, even the

laws of gravity, because Forbes was pulled down, as though he had become too heavy

to stand. He sat slowly and the mattress buckled under his weight. Max rolled into

him, and by the time he’d recovered Forbes was looking at him with an uneasy smile.

“What kinds of questions are those?” he said quietly. “You’re Max Mulgan. You’re

from Bickerstaffes Road. You live here with me and Alice.”

30

Max got himself into an upright position to let Forbes know how deadly-serious

he was.

“I don’t mean all that,” he said. “I mean who am I really?”

Forbes didn’t reply, and tried to straighten the blankets in a half-hearted way.

Finally he gave up and simply sat there, his broad, cheerful face collapsing somehow,

like something underneath the surface of the skin had given way—and Max suddenly

felt sorry for Forbes. He’d never had this feeling before, it was the very first time, and

the newness of it held him mystified. He was about to wonder if maybe it would be a

good idea, possibly and perhaps, to forget about the questions and give Forbes a

cuddle instead.

Forbes said: “Was it the kids at school who told you?”

“Told me what?” Max asked after a moment of astonishment. What did the other

kids have to do with anything?

“We weren’t going to tell you until you were older,” Forbes went on, as if he hadn’t

heard. He looked up suddenly. “Have you been sneaking about in our bedroom?” But

almost at once he sighed and looked away. “It’s OK if you did. You have a right to

know.”

Max kept as still as possible. He hadn’t expected all this strangeness, but he could

see Forbes was about to tell him the answers. All he had to do was say nothing and

wait.

And he was right. After a few hesitant starts, Forbes began to speak.

And then Max learned he was adopted, and he learned what that meant. He heard

about Mr Stubbings and the ORPANAB, about the nurse who’d dropped him, and

how he’d been found in a bookshop—and he knew none of it was a story because

Forbes was looking right at him when said it. It even felt true, like something he’d

always known. It was just the words that were new, the clunky, clumsy words:

Adoption, Orphanage, Birth Parents.

“But now you live with Alice and me,” Forbes said when he’d finished. “You’re

Max Mulgan. We’re your parents and this is your home.”

“What happened to my real parents?” Max asked at once.

“Your birth parents? Nobody really knows.”

“Did they Vanish?”

“Not then, no. The Vanishings hadn’t started then.”

“So where are they?”

“Nobody knows.”

31

“Why haven’t they come back for me?”

“Nobody knows that either.”

“Nobody?”

“Nobody apart from them.”

Max looked past Forbes to the mural of the Country Fair. The man and woman in

the Hot Air Balloon stared back at him gravely.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” he asked, and without knowing he was about to, he

flung his arms around Forbes and began to cry for his poor, dead parents.

“Nobody knows,” Forbes murmured, holding him and rocking him. “Nobody apart

from them.”

After a while Max felt himself being lowered onto the pillow, and then Forbes was

tucking the blankets up under his chin.

“Think of it like this,” Forbes said. “If nobody knows who your parents were, you

get to decide for yourself. You can choose who they were then, and who they are now.

You can choose.”

He bent over to kiss Max on the forehead, which was the signal for bedtime.

“Goodnight Max.”

“Goodnight Forbes.”

The nightlight clicked and its yellow glow sprang up against the wall. Max rolled

dozily onto his side. With a quiet, mechanical whirr the flock of birds swept around

the room.

I get to decide who they are, he thought. And nobody can tell me I’m wrong.

He looked once more at the Hot Air Balloon. The man and woman stared back at

him.

His Birth Parents?

No …

His Forever Parents.

The black silhouettes moved across the wall with agitated, flapping wings—a

never-ending flight that went round and round.

dead they’re

dead they’re

dead they’re

dead they’re

Slowly his eyes closed. He was inside a flock of honking birds, high up in the sky,

and they were flying somewhere with whirring, beating wings.

32

His parents ...

The birds ...

The balloon ...

A wicker basket creaked ...

He heard voices ...

Laughter ...

Someone was singing quietly ...

Sunlight glinted on spectacles ...

Auburn hair shone in the sun ...

A flame roared. The basket swayed and hands drew in on ropes. His Forever

Father played a tin whistle. His Forever Mother sang in a low voice. He was with

them in the Balloon and they were together, and because they were together they

were happy.

Then a hook gave the sky a touch, and in a dark corner of the dream a shadow was

set in motion with a mechanical whirr. On the horizon a black smudge appeared,

there was a beating of wings, an approaching flurry: A flock of birds, of Canada geese!

One cannoned past. Then two. Then hundreds. They thundered round the

Balloon, blotting out the light, a storm of honking and a hammering of wings. But just

as suddenly the Balloon was free. They had passed through and the sky was silent and

bright and blue again.

Only, there was a new sound.

A low, sinister hiss.

The Canada geese had made a hole.

They were losing height!

His Forever Parents leapt into action. Bedding. Books. Luggage. Armchairs. The

writing desk. The tin whistle. All of it went overboard, tumbling towards the waves

where the sharks were already circling.

And for a while it worked. Land appeared. Hopes rose. So did the Balloon.

Then the hole tore wider. They began to sink again, faster than before.

His Forever Parents took stock. Land was still far off. They weren’t going to make

it.

Something else had to go.

They cast around.

There was nothing.

There was something.

33

His Forever Mother hopped over the side and dropped out of sight.

Gone!

That bought a few extra minutes, but not enough, not nearly enough! His Forever

Father gave him a blessing, a hug, and instructions for how to grow up and be good—

then flung himself into the cold, shark-filled waters.

And … that was it … they were gone … and the wind blew, and the shore came, and

the dream broke into many parts that went skittering about and became a thousand

other dreams, many Dream Children with one Mother—the Balloon dream, his

favourite. It returned to him many times, always filling him with a deep, heart-

wrenching love for his Forever Parents, who had sacrificed themselves so the Balloon

could carry him to land. When he woke his eyes would be bright with tears, and he

would lie in his bed filled with the sad happiness of leaving a wonderful dream

behind.

The Ocean

Max wasn’t the only one with dreams.

As a boy Forbes had dreamed of becoming a great scientist, an engineer who

would build rockets, space ships and factories of shining steel, or a famous doctor

who would cure disgusting diseases like the Mumbles or Grout.

But somewhere along the line something went horribly wrong and he ended up

cleaning the meat grinder at Chumley Abattoir.

For twenty years he stood beside the grinder holding a long pole with a hook on

the end. When a piece of meat got caught in the grinder’s teeth he would scrape it out

and drop it into a bucket marked BEEFBURGERS. And while he hooked and

scratched, scraped and fished, he dreamed his dreams and was happy.

As the years went on, though, his dreams began to leave him. One by one they

went, dropping from his pockets and rolling into the grinder, where they were

mashed up with hundreds of sheep heads. In time only one dream remained, and

because it was the last it tugged sadly at his soul. Seeing it go, he lunged after it, lost

his balance—and his right hand was whipped off so fast he hardly noticed it had gone.

Six months later he returned to the abattoir with a prosthetic hook. It was useful

for scratching out the smaller pieces of bone that couldn’t be reached by the long,

clumsy pole; but though he worked twice as fast as anyone else, and the meat grinder

34

was the cleanest in the country, whenever he looked at it he thought about the rockets

and dreams that had been crushed in its mechanical jaws.

To replace his lost dreams he went to the racetrack to bet on the dogs. Now and

again he came home with a bundle of ten pound notes, but mostly he came home

empty-handed, and then Alice would shout at him until she was blue in the face.

Forbes would shout back, getting red in the face, and they would storm off to separate

parts of the house: Forbes to the television set and a can of lager, Alice to the

greenhouse at the bottom of the garden where she kept a bottle of pale cream sherry,

and there they would sit in obstinate silence, wondering when it was all going to end.

But it did not end. It went on and on, and slowly Alice lost her dreams as well.

They crawled into the grime under the fridge.

They were silenced by the bank manager’s frowns.

They seeped out of her so slowly she did not notice they were going, until one day

she woke up, looked in the mirror and did not recognize her own face.

It was then they decided to foster a child.

They wanted someone who was full of dreams. Someone who could bring dreams

back into their lives. They chose Max, and for a while the racetrack and the shed at

the bottom of the garden went unvisited.

But as Max grew up the Mulgans came to realise his dreams were of the wrong

sort. They were dreams about his birth parents. He kept these dreams close about

him; he held them tightly in his fist like a bunch of balloons he would not share.

Before long, they were looking up at a boy who was high in the sky, floating

through the blue, while they remained below, drowning in the ocean.

35

4

Someone Porterholse Porterholse Someone

Max thought no more of the Dark Man’s questions. He’d made up answers out of

Canada Geese, Sharks, and a Hot Air Balloon, and when questions are answered they

disappear and are forgotten. Even the Dark Man faded into the background, as if his

very existence depended on riddles and mysteries.

Then one morning he sat down to breakfast and discovered the questions hadn’t

disappeared at all—they were right there in front of him, between the butter dish and

the marmalade.

It was only a flyer, an ordinary flap of white paper of the kind used to advertise

car-boot sales and window-cleaning services—but it was just as if the Dark Man

himself was sitting at the breakfast table, munching toast and drinking tea and saying

things like, “Hot Air Balloons and Canada Geese? Are you sure?”

“Who put that there?” he asked.

“Put what where?” Alice glanced up from the magazine she was reading. “Oh that.

I did. Someone stuck it through our front door.”

“Why our front door?” Max asked at once, imagining with a thrill the Dark Man

creeping up the garden path in the dead of night.

“Hm?”

“Why did they put it through our front door?”

She looked at him, not understanding. Then smiled. “Not just ours, silly.

Everyone’s. So they’ll know about it and come and see.”

WHO ARE

YOU? WHERE DID YOU COME

FROM?

36

“Know about what?”

“It says on the other side,” Alice said, jerking her head vaguely and going back to

her magazine.

Max drew the paper towards him and flipped it over. The reverse was crammed

with words, and he had to squint his way through the dense text.

“Want to go then?” Alice asked. “It’s only through the park.”

Max didn’t even need to think about it. If everyone had got the leaflet, that meant

his Forever Parents had too.

They were sure to come!

He spent the next week engaged in the construction of a new dream.

He would enter a room lined with bookshelves and decorated with stuffed

animals—weasels, Canada geese, and armadillos. His father would be at a workbench,

gutting a salamander, and behind his glinting spectacles there would be a sad look in

his eyes. His mother would be kneeling before the fire, on the carpet beside her a

book face down and a cat belly up, purring beneath her hand.

She would be the first to see him, and the sharp turn of her head would alert his

father. He would lift the salamander guts onto a tray, and his glasses would clink

down beside them. The cat would flop over and for a moment they would all simply

look at him, not daring to believe—because he might disappear, their long-lost child,

he might fade into nothing: They’d seen such apparitions before. But he wouldn’t

disappear, not this time, and then … then they would say it, they would say a name,

and it would be his name, the name they had given him, not Max, that was only a

pretend name … they would say something else ... his real name … who he really was

…

His Forever Name …

Unable to fathom the mysteries of existence? Lost in a labyrinth of puzzling questions? Feel like you’re being followed by someone you don’t know? Read books! For centuries great minds have stored their wisdom in literature. I, Porterholse, invite you, dear neighbours, to the grand opening of The Book House, 8, Newton Fields Road, this coming Saturday. Every story ever written under one roof!* Read in the comfort of someone else’s home! Teas and coffees, cakes and sandwiches provided!

Fondly yours, Porterholse, esq.

* figuratively speaking

37

And then something else would begin, something so wonderful he could not

imagine a second of it, no matter how hard he tried.

By the time the day of the Grand Opening finally arrived he was beside himself

with excitement. He dragged Alice out of the house, along the road and into the park,

all the way to that distant land he had often glimpsed from the hilltop, which turned

out to be the Newton Fields Road mentioned in the flyer. The park’s resident wind

surged at their backs to hurry them along, and the poplar trees swayed with a wild,

happy abandon, as though they had waited long for his arrival.

Why haven’t you come sooner?

This way …

This way …

The houses were even more imposing close up than from the top of the hill. They

stood apart in grand isolation, encircled by gardens, hedges and fences, and frowned

down on him like Headmasters. Each was different from the others, with names

instead of numbers, but Max had already spotted the long white banner flapping

against a garden wall, and he pulled so hard on Alice she had to trot to keep up with

him. The banner turned out to be a bed-sheet, and the letters were a patchwork

arrangement of cut-up socks, stitched in place to form the words:

Grand Opening Today

Flaking paint crackled under Max’s fingers as he peered through the gate onto an

overgrown garden, a tangled jumble of bushes, shrubs and weeds. A faded path of

mossy flagstones led to a large house of crumbling red brick, a house that looked in

two minds about accepting visitors. The top floor had the stillness of a tomb, the

windows boarded on the inside with shutters, while downstairs many people could be

seen moving about in high-ceilinged rooms. Instead of trying to spot his Forever

Parents, Max found his eyes drawn to the top floor. The shutters were sealed tight.

There wasn’t the tiniest chink of space between them.

“Creepy, isn’t it?”

A man had come up behind, but his voice was wrong and Max didn’t look round.

His eyes dropped from the shutters and began searching eagerly for the signal, the

glint of spectacles or flash of auburn hair, that would tell him his Forever Parents had

arrived.

38

“Could do with a bit of spit and polish.” Alice spoke in the wary voice she always

used with strangers.

“My dad says the same thing,” the man said. “Says it knocks three percent off the

property prices. I guess I don’t mind. Every street needs a house like this.”

“You’re one of the neighbours?”

“Used to be. My parents still live at thirty two. When they told me what was

happening I came down at once.”

“Came down?”

“From Edinburgh.”

“Really? Just for this?”

“I’d have come from Australia. I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”

Max turned—the man was staring just as intently at the house as he had been.

“I was born on this street. I lived here until I was twenty and I walked past this

house every day. In all that time, I never saw anyone go in or out. Not a single soul.

Nobody. My parents haven’t either, and they’ve lived here their whole lives.” He came

forward and turned Max to look back at the house. “See those shutters up there,” he

said, pointing. “They’ve never been open. Forget about going inside, this is the first

time anyone’s been able to see inside.”

“So what?” Alice said. “It was just an empty old house and now someone’s bought

it.”

“Oh, it wasn’t empty. I never said it was empty.”

“It must have been. Who would live in a place like that? It’s falling apart.”

“I didn’t say anybody lived here either.”

“Make up your mind. Was it empty or not?”

“Most of the time, yes. But now and again there were … visitors.”

“Visitors?” Alice’s eyes narrowed into two slits. “What do you mean?”

“Strange sorts. Reclusive types. The last one was this old woman. She started

showing up a few years ago. She used to go into the park at night and sit on the hill.”

“She what?” Alice’s eyes went sharp and hard.

“She’d get a deckchair, carry it up there, and sit looking at the stars. She’d spend

the whole night talking to them.”

Alice folded her arms. “Hold on. If you never saw anyone go in or out, how did you

know they were staying here?”

“You could just tell. My mother said once it was like they came from the same

country. They all had the same feel. Old. Crumbly. From the Olden Days.”

39

“What about this—what was his name again?”

“Porterholse,” Max whispered.

“Never heard of him,” said the man. “Nobody has. Like you say, he probably

bought the place. But still … that name. Is it Porterholse Someone, or Someone

Porterholse? I’ve never heard a name like it. It sounds almost as if it’s—”

“From that country too,” Max said.

“Yes,” said the man, his eyes wide and wondering. “Yes, exactly.”

Alice glanced again at the chaotic garden and the closed shutters.

“I don’t know about this,” she muttered. “It all seems a bit … weird.”

Max knew that look on her face: She was about to go into reverse and cancel the

whole outing. And who knew when he’d be able to get back?

Before she could stop him, he darted through the gate and ran up the path.

The house swallowed him with a gloomy gulp—but he paid no attention to what

the house was up to and only rushed from room to room, staring into every face. He’d

recognise his Forever Parents the moment he saw them, he was sure of it. And they

would recognise him.

But there must have been a delay.

They hadn’t arrived.

None of the guests had auburn hair, and nobody wore glinting spectacles.

Undaunted, he returned to the front hall to begin a second sweep of the premises.

There, he found Alice and a group of guests gathered in conference.

Nobody, it turned out, had come to meet them either.

Where was this Porterholse person?

Nobody knew.

Who was he?

No idea.

Was he hiding upstairs?

Maybe, but good luck finding out! TRESPASSERS WILL MEET A GRISLY END

said a notice hanging across the foot of the stairs. A second was pinned to a closed

door at the top:

PRIVATE – KEEP OUT

After some discussion a timid “Hello?” was sent up. The response came at once—

an exasperated huffing and puffing, followed by a stomping and thudding, as if a

large animal—a bear, or a minotaur—had been disturbed from its slumber.

Huff!

40

Puff!

THUD THUD THUD!

The guests jerked in surprise, then glanced at each other uneasily. An unspoken

decision was reached: No further attempts would be made to communicate with the

upstairs and whoever lived there. Probably it was a Someone Another or Another

Someone, a recluse who was angry with the intrusion and wished to be left alone.

Once they got used to the lack of an Anyone Porterholse or Porterholse Anyone,

the guests relaxed a little. The house, after all, had clearly been prepared for their

arrival. The front door had been left open. The banner and balloons had been put out.

There was even a rotund, cast-iron piggy bank stationed on a low table inside the

front door, its flanks divided by etched lines into butchery regions such as Hocks and

Loin. Around the pig’s neck hung a postcard of an Arctic iceberg gleaming in a bright,

blue light: If you take what you like and pay what you can, the pig will not

object someone had written. Deciding the place was meant to operate on a self-service

basis, the guests spread out and began to explore—turning their attention, at last, to

the books.

Max had never seen so many. Apart from the kitchen, the three large rooms on the

ground floor were entirely given over to shelves, stacked floor to ceiling and wall to

wall, the books pressed together without a wafer of space between them. A single

extra sentence in a single book, Max reckoned, would have brought the whole

structure crashing down. Selecting one at random, he pulled it free from the tight

embrace of its companions, who instantly snapped together, as if another book,

further along the shelf, had appeared out of nowhere to take its place—and it

occurred to him, looking round, that perhaps the books were multiplying in this way,

and were migrating to colonize other parts of the house. Overflowing the shelves, they

had formed pyramids in the corners and towers on the windowsills. The television

cabinet was minus a television and plus a hundred or so hardbacks. The fireplace was

stuffed with a pile of books that disappeared up the chimney and overflowed,

perhaps, onto the roof. A book had even found its way into an aquarium in the

hallway—the goldfish, all alone beside its underwater castle, floated over the sodden

pages, seeking a way to turn them with its gently flapping fins.

Footstools and stepladders had been provided so the upper reaches of the shelves

could be explored, and the whole place was chock-a-block with armchairs, sofas, and

beanbags.

41

The infinity of books was equalled only by the riches found in the kitchen at the

back of the house. Just as promised, the cupboards were crammed with boxes of tea,

jars of coffee, and varieties of biscuit, some of the common sort—fruit shortbreads,

chocolate chips, jammy dodgers, Viennese swirls, digestives, teacakes, macaroons,

bourbons, ginger nuts, custard creams, Abernethies, Rocky Roads, party rings and

Garibaldis—and others only identified later by a local pâtissier who visited at a later

date especially to categorize the selection—discovering such rarities as Cornish

fairings, paprenjaks, oat crisps, Bath Olivers, koulourakia, snickerdoodles, Russian

tea cakes, stroopwafels, and vanillekipferls. The biscuit eternity was in turn matched

by what was stashed away in the cold, white forever of the fridge—the tuna and

cucumber sandwiches, prawn salad baguettes, chicken and mayonnaise baps, bacon

and egg butties, porchetta tramezzinos, roast beef grinders and Philadelphia zeps, all

wrapped in cling film or tin foil, and cakes stacked in patisserie boxes—Black Forest

gateau, ginger and treacle tart, Bakewell tart, carrot cake, strawberry flan, Bundt

cake, crumb cake, Dundee cake, angel cake, madeira cake, Boston cream pie,

punschkrapfen, tarte tatin, tiramisu, Christmas cake, date and walnut loaf,

Battenberg, galettes, fat rascals, lamingtons, cannoli, chocolate fudge cake, pineapple

upside-down cake, croquignoles, and prinzregententorte, with jugs of whipped

cream, double cream, clotted cream, vanilla cream, cherry sauce, chocolate sauce,

maple syrup, caramel syrup, treacle, and brandy butter, all cooked to such exquisite

perfection that tourists, visiting London from Japan or Brazil, would make their way

to the Book House kitchen straight after—and sometimes even before—Buckingham

Palace.

These glorious riches, discovered to gasps of amazement and delight, provided the

guests with final proof of their welcome, and banished the last traces of uneasiness.

Cups of tea and coffee were made, biscuits selected, cakes sliced, books chosen and

armchairs settled into. Before long the only sounds to be heard were the rasps of

turning pages, the clink of cutlery, the occasional delicate, embarrassed nibble, and

the huffing and thudding from upstairs, which repeated itself throughout the

afternoon.

Only Max settled down without a book. He’d come for Parents, not Stories, and

there wasn’t a single Mother or Father to be found. Slipping away from Alice, he

hoisted himself onto the windowsill in the front room and pulled the curtain across to

create a shell of glass and cloth. If his Forever Parents came up the garden path they’d

see him there, unhappy and alone. They’d understand at once how miserable he’d

42

been without them, and they’d never abandon him again.

It began to rain.

The person upstairs huffed and puffed.

The poplar trees swayed with wild excitement.

His forehead dunked sadly against the glass.

Maybe they did die.

Maybe the sharks ate them after all.

The curtain swished back and Alice was there.

“Given up already? You were so excited when you came in.”

Max looked past her into the room. The armchairs and beanbags were all taken up

with people and their books. Others were browsing the shelves, their heads tilted as

they squinted at the vertical spines.

He shrugged and stared out at the rain. “I couldn’t find anything.”

“You haven’t even looked,” she said. “I saw one you might like. It’s called—” she

glanced at the cover “—A Pocket of Ghosts And Goblins. See?”

Turning his back on her—what did he care about Ghosts and Goblins?—he

breathed on the window and drew an outline of a balloon in the mist. He wanted her

to go away so he could carry on dreaming about his Forever Parents.

“Reading’s boring,” he said. That’d make her go.

He watched her reflection in the window, waiting for her to take her book and

leave. But she didn’t move. She didn’t even speak. She was just standing there.

Only then did he see that a very peculiar-looking man was standing right beside

her. He turned with a jolt.

“Is that really what you think?” asked the man, peering at him penetratingly.

“That reading’s boring?”

The man was standing with a cup of tea raised high against his chest, holding the

saucer and the cup very precisely in his delicate hands. He had thin, dark hair and a

long black beard, and tiny muscles all over his pale, sickly face were twitching and

trembling. His ice-blue eyes, though, were alive with a spark that was fierce and kind

at the same time.

Max glanced at Alice. She wasn’t exactly frozen, it was more like she was lost in

thought. The man had done something to her, he realised, so they could talk in

private.

“Personally I think reading is the most important thing there is,” the man

continued conversationally, as if this was all completely normal. “Or one of them, at

43

any rate—we mustn’t get carried away. There are diamonds, but there are flowers

too!”

He spoke with a peculiar accent Max recognised, and he realised after a moment it

was the same as the Dark Man’s—and in fact, this person reminded him strongly of

the Dark Man. He wore a dark coat that reached almost to his knees, a white shirt

tucked into high-fitting trousers, and a black waistcoat with a watch-chain. He looked

like he’d stepped out of a history book, or was dressed to take part in a play. Even his

face said: “I am not from here, you know. I am from somewhere else.” Max was not

surprised to see, between the old man’s eyes, the same deep crease that gave the Dark

Man his bottom-of-the-sea look. Maybe this man too had been marked by the

Mariana Trench.

“These writers, after all,” the man went on, speaking in a quiet, insistent whisper,

“these writers, they sit thinking for such a horrible length of time, hours and hours

every day, for years on end—their entire existence! While you’re watching television

they’re wrestling with the secrets of the universe, excavating their souls to see what’s

there, a labour that almost destroys them! And when they do find something their

work has only begun, because then they have to write it all down, they spend their last

drop of blood capturing it with the utmost precision, sweating over every word so

others will be able to understand their feelings and thoughts, all this for one purpose,

and one purpose only—the transmission of the human condition through time! Now,”

he said, raising his finger, “that’s not for everyone, I’ll admit. Each must live their

own way—the diamonds and flowers again! But even so, even so, let me ask: How

long do YOU sit still and wrestle with the secrets of existence, in the course of a day?

Two hours? One hour?” His eyes narrowed. “Not one minute! Not one minute do you

spend! Yet here it all is, millions of years of thinking, ready and waiting, the greatest

story of them all—the story of human life—with all its contradiction and variety, here

for all to read, here on these very shelves, thanks to those writers who toiled like the

most wretched of slaves under an insane compulsion with next to zero hope of

reward. And how do you repay them? What epitaph do you chisel out on their

tombstones? “Reading’s boring.” Ah well! I think you haven’t thought it through, have

you, and you don’t know what you’re saying. Otherwise—” his eyes narrowed even

further “—you wouldn’t come out with anything so stupid.”

He reached this insulting conclusion staring right at Max, right into his eyes, with

such penetration Max suddenly got the impression the speech was only a distraction,

something to pass the time while he got on with this staring of his. He even felt a

44

prickling in his brain, like the man was rummaging around in there with his long

fingers to see what he could find. Even as he thought this, the man took a step closer

and lowered his voice even more, and Max felt his brain was positively sizzling.

“When you read,” the man whispered, “you discover who you really are. You find

traces of yourself, little pieces you didn’t know were there.”

He held Max’s eyes. Then with a snap of his fingers at Alice he drew the curtain,

leaving Max alone. A moment later the curtain swished back and Alice was there.

“Given up already?” she asked. “You were so excited when you came in.”

Max simply stared at her. The front door banged, and he turned in time to see the

man striding down the garden path, scribbling into a notebook as he went.

“I couldn’t find anything,” he murmured.

“You haven’t even looked. I saw one you might like. It’s called—” she glanced at

the cover “—A Pocket of Ghosts And Goblins. See?”

Wordlessly, he took the book and turned it over in his hands.

A Pocket Of Ghosts and Goblins

Discover the ways and habits of Sprites and Shades, Gremlins, Ghasts, Brouhahas, Frights,

Bloodguddlers, Brownies, Urchens, Hellwaines, Imps, Trollots and Kobolds in these fairy tales gathered

from twenty-three countries around the world.

When you read you discover who you really are.

Alice touched his shoulder to get his attention. “I’m going to see if there’s anything

for me. Will you be OK here for a bit?”

Max said nothing and only nodded.

When she came back twenty minutes later he was deep in the stories. She agreed

to let him stay a bit longer.

Two hours later she was dragging him, sobbing and protesting, across the park—

getting him out of the Book House only by purchasing not just A Pocket of Ghosts &

Goblins, but A Sackful of Monsters, A Chalice of Devils & Demons, A Cauldron of

Witches & Wizards, and A Barrel of Giants too.

His Forever Parents didn’t show up in the Book House that day, or the next.

But he no longer expected them to.

He wasn’t supposed to wait for them.

45

He had to find them.

And so he began to read.

He read on the windowsill with the curtain drawn to hide him from the other

people. In this secret nook he tramped over mountains, through forests, across

deserts and into caves; he crossed oceans to far-flung continents, and explored

steppes that stretched as far as the eye could see; he burrowed deep into the bustling

crowds of foreign towns, and poked his nose into the dungeons of ogres; he explored

the ethereal citadels of wizards and genies, and even crossed the boundaries of time

to visit distant eras, past and future—all in his search for his Forever Parents.

Every last penny of his pocket money went on books. Before long they were filling

his tiny bedroom, and he began to suspect there was something wrong with his

approach. There were so many books in the Book House. It had taken him months

just to get quarter of the way along one shelf.

Deciding he needed help, he wrote Someone Porterholse Porterholse Someone a

letter.

Dear Someone Porterholse Porterholse Someone

I’m looking for my Forever Parents in the books and I can’t find them because there are so

many and I want to know if maybe you saw them once there did you? When you saw them

they might have been in a balloon. If it is true please write to me. My name is Max Mulgan 37

Bickerstaffes Road and tell them to watch out for the geese. I’m on the windowsill most days.

Thank you very much

Max Mulgan

p.s. I hope you get this letter soon.

p.p.s. The iron pig is nearly full.

p.p.p.s. Please tell the angry man upstairs to stop making so much noise.

He left the letter by the pig, hoping the huffing-puffing man wouldn’t get hold of it

and blow it away.

The very next morning, he got his reply.

The Storybook

It was left on the window-ledge—a pale cream envelope with a silky, luxurious feel.