Sally wouldn’t have thought it was possible to surprise her anymore, not after the morning she’d had. But as the horse’s head bent and shook, crackling the twigs that made it up as it did, she couldn’t take her eyes off it. It looked as if it had changed the material it was made out of into something softer and more flexible, just by Rube talking to it. And when it finally focused its glass eyes on them and opened its mouth, it spoke in Uncle Colwyn’s voice.
“Ruby? Girls? Is that you?”
“Yes,” said Rube, and her voice sounded like a kettle whistling, it was so high-pitched and breathy. She almost seemed to breathe the word in instead of out.
“Are you alright? I’m so sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. If I could have been…”
“How are you talking through a horse’s head?” This was Jeanette, who was still frozen to the spot next to Sally.
The horse turned its head so it could look at her properly. “It’s my security system. When I’m away from the house, I can keep an eye on…”
“Where are you?” asked Rube.
“I’m… It’s a little hard to explain. Have you seen the paths around the gardens? The ones with the white walls?”
“We’ve seen them,” said Rube, “We’ve just been to Wallfruit Cove.”
“Ah,” said Uncle Colwyn, as if Rube had cut him off mid-thought, “I suppose I should have guessed. You wouldn’t have known to speak to Falada if you hadn’t seen some of it. Well… have you heard of the Iridescence family?”
“Yes!” Sally was pretty sure all three of them had shouted out at once. To her, it was as if Colwyn had made them jump and say it against their will.
The horse flinched a little at the force of their answer. “I see. Well, they won’t let me leave. I went to their estate to bargain for the release of a hostage, but he managed to escape while I was there, and now they think I only came here as a distraction.”
Rube nodded. “This hostage- his name wasn’t Kai, was it?”
“Yes- Kai Domino. Have you met him? Did he get out safely? I heard he’d been injured…”
“He’s fine. Sally actually…” Rube turned to look at her. Sally felt a bit of pride welling up in her chest. Rube and Jeanette had probably thought she was wasting her time trying to make that moth better, and now look where they were. “He’s in Wallfruit Cove. They said he could stay.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Sally didn’t know how you could tell if a horse was smiling, but she thought she could hear it in his voice.
“Now what about you?” asked Rube, “How do we get you out of where they’re keeping you?”
“You don’t,” said the horse, “I’ll be fine. They’re not stupid people. Sooner or later, they’ll realise it’s not worth the trouble they’ll have with the Opal Hill council, and they’ll let me go.”
“But what if they don’t? What if they try the same thing on you as they did on Kai?”
“Ruby, they won’t. Not on a member of our family. Trust me. I’ll be back in a day or two. Until then, you three just sit tight and stay in the house. You’re safe here.”
“When we were in Wallfruit Cove, they said that the Opal Hill council doesn’t do enough to rein in the Iridescence family. It doesn’t sound as if you can rely on them doing their jobs.”
“They may not do enough, but you mustn’t think that they do nothing. The Iridescence family know that they mustn’t push things too far. In a couple of days…”
A strange, chiming noise rang out from the back of the room. It took a moment or two for Sally to realise that it was the phone ringing.
*
It didn’t occur to Rube until later that she really should have sent Jeanette or Sally to answer the phone. She was the one talking to the horse’s head. She had her hands full. Once a big sister, always a big sister, she guessed.
The phone was a red plastic thing on a little side-table near the French windows at the back. It had one of those circular dials on the front that Rube had never learned how to use. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d found out that Colwyn had had the same one since the Seventies. She picked up the receiver and tried to sound calm. “Hello?”
“Ruby, it’s your dad. Are your sisters there, too?”
Rube’s heart sank. The voice had a jolly tone to it, but she knew how quickly that would evaporate when he didn’t get his way. “Yes. How are you?”
“Could you put your mother on? I want a word with her.”
Here it was. “Um, she’s not here, I’m afraid.”
“Put her on.” The voice was still calm, but he’d let a little bit of coldness seep into it. “Do it.”
“No, she’s really not here. She didn’t come with us.” A second later, she could have kicked herself. She’d basically told him that their mother was home alone.
“Oh, I see.” The coldness had gone, for now. Rube even thought she heard him chuckle. “New bloke, is it?”
“What?”
“Is that why she wanted you off her hands for the summer?”
“Um… I don’t think so…” Rube couldn’t even remember the last time Mum had been out on a date.
“Well, tell your uncle that I’m coming to pick you up.” Rube heard him jangle his keys, like an actor using a prop. “If she can’t be bothered to take care of you, then I’m going to have to step in, aren’t I?”
Rube wondered what her father would have thought if he’d seen what Rube had been doing before he rang. He’d probably have got angry. That was how he usually reacted to things that surprised him. “No, we’re OK here…”
“I’m coming to pick you up. No arguments.” And then he hung up on her.
Rube looked back at her sisters, still standing by the horse’s head. They’d only heard her half of the conversation, but that had probably been enough. They’d got the gist.
“So, that’s that decided,” she told Colwyn, “We’re not staying in the house.”
The first thing Rube did when they got back to the house was to walk up to the wicker horse’s head on the wall and say, “OK. What do I have to do to get you to talk?”
She’d been like that for the last hour- looking ahead and speaking in clipped, decisive sentences. Back at Wallfruit Cove, she’d asked Sleet and Comet, If we went home to think things over, would we be able to find our way back here tomorrow morning? Yes? Then that’s what we’re going to do. Then they’d barely spoken on the walk back. Sally had seemed worried that Rube was mad at her for going off with Kai, but Jeanette was half-convinced that she’d had some kind of mental break.
“What makes you think it’s going to talk?” asked Jeanette- quietly, as if she was worried that the horse was going to overhear her. It didn’t make sense, but not much had today. And it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.
“The name. It’s from that fairy tale- The Goose Girl.” She looked sideways at the horse. “Falada the horse gets his head chopped off and hung over the stables, but it starts talking.” She frowned. “I’m trying to remember if there was some kind of spell that got him to… No, I think the idea was that he could always talk? Or maybe that he got the ability naturally after he died?”
“There might be a button or something,” suggested Jeanette, feeling kind of superfluous.
“I don’t think so,” said Rube absently. She shut her eyes tight, screwing up her face, then opened them again. “OK… Alas, young queen, passing by / If this your mother knew / Her heart would break in two.”
A few seconds went by. Jeanette found herself holding her breath.
Rube looked back at her sisters. “I think there’s another…”
By the time her sisters turned up, Sally had probably been in Wallfruit Cove for a few hours. She’d had three milkshakes (lemon, strawberry and grape). She’d used the toilet once, and found out that they’d had one specially installed for people who visited from Dovecote Gardens and didn’t want to use the “gutter-streams,” whatever those were. And, after listening for long enough, she was pretty sure she understood most of what Sleet and Comet were trying to tell her.
It was actually quite lucky- Sally turned her head at exactly the right moment to see Rube and Jeanette come round the corner near the treeline and freeze, as if they’d hit an invisible wall in the air. It took Sally a moment or two to realise that they must have seen the people in the pool. The grey and green people. And if that shocked them, just wait until they saw them close-up.
Sally raised her hand and waved to Rube and Jeanette, before they could start to worry about not being able to see her. “My sisters,” she explained to Sleet and Comet, “We should go over and say hi.”
“Good idea,” said Kai, glancing around the pool. He’d probably noticed them freeze as well.
As they made their way across the rocky path, Kai perched on Sally’s shoulder, Sleet and Comet hung back a bit. That meant that Sally was the first to get to Rube and Jeanette. It also meant that there was enough room for Jeanette to shove Sally behind her and step in between her and Sleet and Comet, glaring daggers at them. “What do you think you’re playing at?” she roared.
“It wasn’t their fault!” said Kai, “I was the one who called the piper!”
“I don’t think they know what a piper is,” Sally told him. Rube and Jeanette seemed to be trying to keep an eye on both Kai and the other two at the same time, twitching between one and the other like they were getting electric shocks. “He means he was the one who brought me here. But he only did it because he needed our help- he wasn’t trying to cause any trouble.”
Jeanette, still standing across the path as menacingly as she could, glanced back at Rube, who took a deep breath. “Alright, Sally. How about you go right back to the start, and talk us through everything that’s happened this morning.”
Sleet leaned around to look at her properly. “We could sit in the pool if you…”
Rube held up a hand. “I’d… rather not. If that’s OK.” Her voice sounded a bit like a robot’s, but it was firm enough to get Sleet to drop it.
Sally thought through everything that had happened and everything she’d been told. “Well… do you remember I said I rescued a moth last night?” she asked, pointing at Kai.
“Yes,” said Rube dully.
“Well, he hasn’t always been a moth. His name’s Kai, and he says he got lost near Dovecote Gardens when he was younger.” Sally noticed a few of the people back at the pool turn around to stare at them. Sleet seemed to be trying to wave them off- like, nothing to see here. “You know the paths around Dovecote Gardens? The ones with the little white walls?”
“Yes,” said Rube.
“Well, they lead to other places. Like this one. And you can only get there by going to Dovecote Gardens in the first place. I think Sleet and Comet called it a hub?” She looked round, and they nodded. “So Kai, when he was little, wandered off down one of the paths, and someone kidnapped him.” Sally wasn’t sure how to tell the next bit- her first thought had been to say, And turned him into a moth, but that would probably sound a bit silly if she said it out loud. She didn’t want to sound as if she was making fun of something upsetting.
“And turned me into a moth,” said Kai, and Sally relaxed.
Jeanette had relaxed a little by now, and Sleet managed to edge around her (Comet stayed put, looking at bit intimidated.) “They’re called the Iridescence family,” said Sleet, “They’ve done this sort of thing before. The council down in Opal Hill don’t…”
“Could you explain why any of that means you get to take our little sister off without telling us?” snapped Rube.
Sally shook her head. “I told you- it wasn’t them! It was Kai! And he only did it because he was worried about some of those Iridescence people coming to the house while Colwyn wasn’t there!”
“And what if they’d come by while me and Jeanette were there?”
“They wouldn’t have,” said Kai, “They were just after me. And they can’t come here because…”
“Why did you take Sally?” Rube was shouting by now. There were definitely people in the pool turning round to stare.
“Because he thought I might be able to help!” Sally shouted back.
“How?”
Sally thought about it, and glanced round at Kai, who shrugged. “You’re Colwyn’s niece,” he said apologetically, “I kind of thought we’d figure it out from there.”
There was a map- a sort of map, anyway. There was a small metal plaque on the platform at the top of the stairs, and etched into it was the shape of the hills and towns around them. The ones that Rube definitely hadn’t been able to see from the ground. The ones that she definitely hadn’t seen when they’d driven up here yesterday afternoon, either.
“So, you said it looked like Sally was heading this way,” said Jeanette, pointing in the direction of the mountains and then tracing the equivalent route on the map. “So…”
“So what’s the quickest way for us to get to her?” Rube finished. Because that had to be the priority. Find Sally first; worry about how screwed-up everything was later. Maybe when they found her and stopped panicking, they’d finally see that there was a simple explanation for everything, but even if they didn’t, at least they’d all be together again.
The staircase ended at a white, rectangular platform- maybe four or five yards across- with a safety rail around the edges. (Rube didn’t know why the platform had a safety rail when the stairs didn’t have any bannisters. Maybe it was just there so there’d be somewhere to put the map.). Rube wasn’t about to lean over the edge and check, but she was pretty sure there wasn’t anything under the platform, any more than there had been anything under the staircase once it left the ground. The whole structure was just jutting out into thin air.
“We could see if we can hitch a ride on one of those purple things?” Jeanette suggested, “If they could come over to the house and pick up Sally, they must be able to come over here too, right?”
Rube looked back down at the map. The places had little labels carved onto them- Opal Hill, Wallfruit Cove, Reynard Woods. They were such weirdly nice names. Like street names in a really dull, wealthy part of town. “I think we should keep an eye on those purple things,” she told Jeanette, “If it turns out that there’s a place they all go back to, we should probably head there.”
“Ok,” said Jeanette, “Sounds like a plan.”
“I just wish we’d brought a notebook. Or even just a pen.” She traced the wobbly routes between the places on the map. She didn’t need to double-check to see that they corresponded with the little white walls down on the ground. “Because when we do work out where we’re going, we’ll have to find our way there by…”
Rube broke off. She’d spotted something.
There were labels on the map, with their weirdly nice names, and it wasn’t such a surprise that there was one for Uncle Colwyn’s house, slap bang in the centre. But it was a little bigger than most of the others- three words instead of two. It read, “Dovecote Gardens (Falada).”
Practically the first thing that happened when Sally arrived at Wallfruit Cove was that somebody put a lemon milkshake into her hand. That was the sort of thing that made you a friend for life.
The person who had given her the drink was tall and thin, with grey, clammy skin, and Sally couldn’t exactly tell whether they were a boy or a girl. “Welcome to the Cove!” they said, speaking with a slight lisp, “You’ll be one of Colwyn Ballantine’s neices, I assume?”
“Um, yes. My name’s Sally.” That was two people so far who not only knew who Uncle Colwyn was, but also knew that he had nieces. “This is Kai,” she added, pointing to the moth on her shoulder, “He’s the one who brought me here.” Hopefully she wouldn’t have to add, And also the one who knows what’s going on. Hopefully that was implied.
“I’m Sleet of the Meadows,” said the milkshake-giver, “Official greeter.” When Sleet talked, Sally thought she could see more than one tongue in their mouth. That was probably the reason for the lisp. “Now, why don’t we sit down somewhere a bit nicer, hm?”
Sleet had met them where they’d landed, in the middle of a kind of ferny wood, but when they led Sally and Kai to the edge of the treeline, it seemed like all they could see was water. A series of shallow pools, with little stony paths and bridges between them. Tables and chairs in the water, so that in some of them you had to sit submerged up to your waist. One deep, wide pool with a moat circling around it, which seemed a bit over-the-top to Sally. And all around, people sitting and talking, playing games, or just floating aimlessly. About half of the people Sally could see had the same grey, scaly skin as Sleet. The rest were green.
Sleet led them to a table in the shallower part of the water (so that Sally had to take off her shoes, but didn’t have to get her shorts wet), and called another person over. “Comet of the Marshlands,” they explained, “Friend of mine.”
“News from Colwyn?” asked Comet, shifting themself up onto the chair next to Sleet. As they moved, Sally thought she saw little suction cups on the underside of their hands, like you saw on squids and octopuses.
Sleet made the kind of noise that meant ‘yes.’ “This is Sally. She’s one of his nieces.” They smiled. “She says a moth brought her here.”
Sally was just about to explain what she meant when Kai said, a lot louder than you’d expect, “You know, I am at the table. You can ask me directly.”
Sleet’s mouth fell open. Comet clapped a hand over the lower half of their face. Sally looked from one to the other, and realised something: People from Wallfruit Cove weren’t any more used to talking moths than she was.
She began to explain. “He hasn’t always been a moth…”
“It’s OK, Sally,” said Kai, waving a furry leg, “I think they’re getting the idea now.”
“Sweet Colubraria…” muttered Comet, who still hadn’t taken their hand from their face.
Sleet leaned forward. “This is the Iridescence family again, isn’t it?”
“Got it in one,” said Kai.
“I’m so sorry. What you must have been through…” They took a shaky breath. “There’s no excuse…”
“Others have been through worse,” he said gently, “I’m Kai, by the way.”
Sleet moved their hands over their face, pulling themself together. “Well, you’re welcome to stay in the Cove as long as you want, Kai. Sally, how much has Colwyn told you about the paths?”
Sally bit her lip. She felt as if she was in school and she hadn’t done her homework. “He, um, he hasn’t. We only got here last night. Me and my sisters, I mean.”
“Colwyn hasn’t been around since Sally got here,” added Kai, “Otherwise, I’d have thrown myself on his mercy instead.” He gave a little laugh, which made him feel as if he was vibrating on Sally’s shoulder.
“You’re welcome, both of you,” said Comet. They were leaning forward in the same way as Sleet, which made the two of them look like book-ends. “The important thing about these paths, Sally, is that Dovecote Gardens is right in the middle. And only people who start off in Dovecote Gardens can go anywhere else.”
Sally frowned.
“What we mean is,” explained Sleet, “you can come here, because you come from Dovecote Gardens. And we could go there. But we couldn’t get to the place Kai came from, if you follow me.”
“Right…” said Sally.
Sleet pinched their nose. “Oh, I’m not explaining it right…”
Sally did her best to look as if she was willing to learn. She quite liked Sleet and Comet, so far. Not everyone gave her milkshakes in the first two minutes of meeting them.
Halfway up the stairs, Rube stopped in her tracks. “It was one of them! The purple things!”
Jeanette looked at where she was pointing. It was one of those colourful flecks she’d seen earlier, flying around the mountains. “Sally went off on one of them?”
“Yes!”
It was strange to think that, half an hour ago, Jeanette had been worried that if she looked away from this view, she’d never see it again. Now both of her sisters were involved in it, but somehow that didn’t make it seem any more solid. The three of them were probably close enough to share the same hallucination. “Did you see which way it was going?”
“Um…”. Rube squinted into the distance. “Up towards the mountains, I think.”
Jeanette nodded. The mountains behind the house. The mountains that weren’t there until you climbed this staircase. Those mountains. “Do you want to go up to the top? There might be a map, or…”
Jeanette was sure that Rube was going to say no. She was sure that Rube was going to insist on going back down and trying to follow Sally on foot, even if that looked hopeless. She was sure that they were going to have an argument about what would be the bigger waste of time, going upstairs and looking for clues that they had no reason to think would even be there, or walking towards the mountains they couldn’t even see and hoping Sally and the purple thing hadn’t got a thousand-mile head start. But instead, Rube just sighed like a deflated balloon and said, “I… sure.”
Jeanette bumped into Rube halfway back to the house, having got fed up of sitting at the bottom of the staircase and not being allowed to climb it. And it was just as well she’d started back when she had, because Rube was in a state. Her face was bone-white and she was breathing funny, like she had when she’d gone to get her GCSE results last year.
“What’s wrong?” asked Jeanette. Her first thought was that Rube had had a close call with some kind of dangerous animal, or maybe even a person who’d wandered into the area and started threatening her. She didn’t even remember that Rube had gone back to check on Sally until she said her name.
“Sally’s gone off somewhere,” mumbled Rube.
That didn’t seem to fit with Rube’s panicky expression. ‘Gone off somewhere’ sounded a lot less urgent than ‘gone missing.’ “Well… she can’t have gone far, right? We’ve only been away from the house for…”
“No, I saw her go.” Rube fiddled with her fringe. It looked as if she was trying to crush the hair with the sheer power of her knuckles. “She…. I don’t know what happened…”
Jeanette put what she hoped was a calming hand on Rube’s shoulder. “Come on. Tell me.”
Rube looked up at her. “It… It looked like she was flying. I looked out of the window, and she was off in the distance…. I guess she was on a zipwire? I don’t know where it could have…”
Jeanette couldn’t make head nor tail of what Rube was telling her. A zipwire? Flying off into the distance? Sally could be anywhere by now. Anywhere, and in any situation.
So Jeanette said the only thing that made sense to her at the moment. “Let’s go back to the staircase. You need to see what’s up there.”
The thing they were riding reminded Sally of a seahorse. Something about its face. Something about the way it shimmered in the sun.
“We call them pipers,” explained the moth, “They live down in Wallfruit Cove. That’s where we’re heading.”
“Right,” said Sally. The moth had introduced himself as Kai. That was just about all he’d had time to say before he’d tarted whistling his little tune to summon the seahorse thing.
Sally should have been frightened. She was normally scared of heights. She’d never have dared to get on a theme park ride that took you as high as this seahorse-thing was going. But once talking moths and flying purple creatures got involved, falling was probably the least of your worries.
“I wanted to talk to Colwyn about what the Iridescence family are up to, but if he’s not around, the Cove’s probably our best bet,” Kai continues. He was perched on Sally’s knuckles, tickling her a bit when he moved. Every so often, she’d worry that she was about to drop him, before remembering that he had wings.
“Who are the Iridescence family?” asked Sally. Miles underneath them, she could see their shadow move across the fields and towns below. It was the only shadow in sight. The sun must have been right above them.
“They live over there,” said Kai, pointing out a town to the right of them. Sally couldn’t see much of it, but some of the buildings looked as if they were made out of colourful glass, like a church window. “They’re the ones I escaped from.”
“Right,” said Sally.
“Bunch of creeps. No-one in the city’s ever tried to tell them no; that’s the problem. That’s why I thought Colwyn could help.”
“So they kidnapped you?” asked Sally, trying to get the conversation back to where she’d have a clue what he was talking about.
The moth nodded his furry head. “When I was younger than you.” Sally was just wondering how long it took for moths to grow to adulthood when he added, “It’s their fault I’m even in this body.”
“Oh, right- so you weren’t always a moth?”
“Nope. I started off just as human as you are. But one day my parents took me on a trip to Dovecote Gardens, and I wandered off down one of those paths.” He sighed. “Next thing you know…”
Sally felt that lonely, punching feeling again, just like when she’d been reading last night. She wondered how old Kai had been at the time, and how long it had taken him to realise that he really wasn’t ever going to see his home or family again.
Then she thought of something else. “I think my sisters went for a walk along those paths. Should we…?”
Kai waved one of his front legs in a calming gesture. “They’ll be fine, as long as they’re careful.”
By the time she got to the front door, Rube felt s little calmer. They’d deal with the staircase once they got back to it. Right now, her only responsibility was to check on Sally and get her to come outside and enjoy the fresh air with them. By the time they got back to it, the whole staircase thing would probably seem a lot easier to figure out.
As soon as she got through the front door (enjoying that lovely wood smell again), Rube heard Sally’s voice from upstairs. “Is he really going to fly us there?”
That wasn’t alarming in and of itself- Rube remembered Sally playing imaginary games with her Barbies and Sylvanians when she was younger, and this sounded like that all over again. She’d thought Sally had grown out of that over the last couple of years, but you never knew- sometimes kids her age went back to their old habits when they were feeling insecure.
But then, before Rube had a chance to call up to Sally, she heard an unfamiliar voice reply, “Yep. Just climb on up.”
A stranger. And a strange man, at that. Rube felt her heart seize up. “Sally?” she called up the stairs, somehow keeping her voice even, “Is there someone up there with you?”
No reply. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Alert him to your presence, why don’t you? Now he’ll panic and start threatening her.
Or maybe not. Maybe he’d panic and sneak out of the window before Rube called the police. And, come to think of it, wouldn’t he have heard the front door close behind her anyway?
Maybe everything was fine. Maybe Uncle Colwyn had hired a cleaner or a groundskeeper that he’d forgotten to tell them about, and Sally had just run into him and struck up a conversation.
But then why did he go quiet when you shouted up? Why didn’t he just call down and introduce himself?
There was nothing for it- Rube was just going to have to go upstairs and confront him. She looked around the hallway for something she could use as a weapon. There were a couple of big, sturdy umbrellas in the stand by the door. One of those might do. It would be something to swing around in front of her, anyway, and that might be enough.
She picked it up and darted to the staircase, trying to take the stairs two at a time but worrying that that might not actually get her there any quicker, and the whole time there was a strange, loud noise coming from just beyond the door to Sally’s room. A wafting kind of sound, like a giant fan, or the wind hitting a big bedsheet on the washing line.
She opened the door to Sally’s room, and…
Sally wasn’t there, first of all. Not in the actual room part. Rube’s first thought was, They’ve disappeared out of the window, but that wasn’t accurate, now, was it? They’d left through the window, but Rube could still see them in the distance. She could still see Sally, anyway. She was about ten yards from the window when Rube got there, and about thirty feet above the ground.
The thing she was riding…
It’s some kind of zipwire, Rube told herself, because that was the only sane thing it cold be. It was ling and thin, see-through in places and purpleish in others, and it was disappearing into the distance with Sally on top of it.
The sound hadn’t been like a giant fan after all. More like a giant bird’s wings flapping.
Rube leaned out of the window and called to her sister, but it was no good. The noise was too loud. She’d got too far away. A crazy part of Rube wanted to jump out of the window and try to grab onto the thing’s tail (It’s a zipwire, and zipwires don’t have tails, she told herself firmly), but she probably couldn’t have even if she’d tried. Her legs felt like stone, bolted to the ground. She cold barely even feel them.
As she looked helplessly out of the window, all Rube cold think was, What am I going to tell Jeanette?
After breakfast, Sally disappeared upstairs with a few slices of orange to feed to the moth that had appeared in her room last night. She’d spent the whole meal asking Rube and Jeanette what moths ate and how to treat their injuries, and neither of them had had the heart to tell her that moths only had a life expectancy of about a fortnight. Rube waited a minute or two, listening out for a sudden cry of grief upstairs. When she didn’t hear one, she assumed that the moth was OK for now, and went for a walk out front.
Uncle Colwyn still wasn’t here.
Rube climbed down off the veranda and looked out at the gardens at the foot of the hill. Those little white walls really were everywhere, forming twisting paths that seemed to begin and end at random. She wondered who’d designed it that way in the first place, and what their reasoning behind it had been. Maybe there was a pattern she hadn’t seen yet.
There was a noise behind her, and Rube turned round to see Jeanette on the front steps. “Sally’s still upstairs,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, “So, tell me what you’re not telling her.”
Rube’s first instinct was to say something like, What do you mean?, but that would probably just have made Jeanette angry. Rube knew exactly what she meant, and they both knew it.
“Come on,” said Rube, gesturing to the path in front of them, “Let’s go for a walk.”
Jeanette got the hint, and followed Rube a little way down the hill. It was funny- you ended up following the routes picked out by those little white walls whether you meant to or not. After a minute or two, Rube said, “Mum’s been getting phone calls from Dad again.”
“Ah,” said Jeanette, “I thought it would be something like that.”
Just breathing made Rube feel as if she was lifting a huge weight. “I don’t know what he said, but I’m pretty sure she was crying one night last week. I came downstairs to get some paracetamol, and her eyes were all pink.”
Jeanette frowned. “But she knows he’s all talk, right? Remember when he kept threatening to go to court and get custody of all of us? But then when I say I might actually want to move in with him for a bit, suddenly he disappears for six months and never mentions it again.”
“He’s not always just talk,” said Rube, remembering the time he’d got drunk and stood outside their house for two hours, yelling things, until Mum had had to call the police. “Besides, talk can be upsetting enough on its own. You know- sticks and stones.”
“I’m pretty sure that means the exact opposite of…” Jeanette broke off and looked around. “Have we gone over to the opposite side of the hill? I don’t recognise any of this.”
Ruby shrugged. She couldn’t tell one part of the gardens from another yet. They were gorgeous, she would never deny that, but they weren’t her top priority at the moment.
They walked on a little further. “How scared is she?” asked Jeanette.
Rube sighed. “Scared enough to send us away. Not scared enough to come with us.”
“Well, she had work.”
“I know. But if…”
And then they saw the staircase. It came into view as they turned a corner, long and white and stretching up into the clouds.
“What the hell is that?” asked Jeanette, squinting ahead.
“I don’t know,” said Rube. It was about twenty yards ahead of them, blocking off the path, as if it was the next logical step for anyone who had followed it this far. As far as Rube could see, it didn’t lead to anything- it was angled away from the hill, not towards it. They hadn’t seen anything like this from the house. But how could they have missed it? It was taller than anything else around.
Jeanette ran ahead, reached the bottom of the staircase, and circled it. “There’s nothing supporting it!” she called back.
“What do you mean?” asked Rube, running to catch her up.
“You can see right under it! Look!” She led Rube to the side of the staircase. When Jeanette touched it, Rube saw that each step was about twice the height of her hand- and that was all there was. Underneath, it was just a white, diagonal line leading up as far as they could see.
“We shouldn’t try and climb it,” Rube heard herself say, “It’s probably not very stable.”
“‘Not very stable’?! It’s physically impossible!”
“There must be a kind of trick to it… Some kind of balancing trick… If we put our weight on it, it’ll collapse.”
Jeanette rested her elbows on the fourth step, and- without warning, because she was apparently out to scare Rube to death today- hoisted herself off her feet, using it like a chin-up bar.
“Don’t do that!” screamed Rube.
Jeanette let herself down. “It looks pretty solid to me.”
Rube was getting a headache. There had to be a trick here. An optical illusion, maybe. “I’m going back to fetch Sally,” she said, because it seemed like the only sensible thing to do, “She needs to see this.”
*
Sally didn’t know how to tell whether a moth was eating something or not. She just put him on an orange slice and hoped for the best.
She turned back to her bed and pulled the duvet straight so that she could sit on it. She still had all the books she’d been trying to read last night piled up on the beside table- maybe she’d have better luck with them this morning. She definitely didn’t feel like going out yet. At least this room was hers, full of her own things. She could make a familiar little nest in the middle of all this weirdness.
She picked up a Goosebumps book with three grinning pumpkins on the front. Not much chance of that making her homesick. She opened up the first page, and began to read about a bunch of American kids having daft, creepy Halloween adventures that didn’t remind her of anything she didn’t want to think about.
She’d just finished the first chapter when she heard an unfamiliar voice. “You’re one of Colwyn’s nieces, aren’t you?”
Sally sat bolt upright, the book dropping onto the bed, completely forgotten. She drew her knees up to her chest as she looked around for the intruder.
“Over here,” said the voice. It was coming from over by the window.
Sally stared at the moth. He looked like he was propping himself up on his front legs.
That can’t be it. There must have been someone outside. A window cleaner, maybe? Sally’s room was three floors up, but a window cleaner would have a ladder, or maybe one of those hoist things that pulled you up on a platform. She took a step towards the window, meaning to open it and look around… and this time, she actually saw the moth’s mouth move.
“Look, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said apologetically. (It was definitely a “he.” Sally thought he sounded a bit older than Rube.) “I just thought I ought to check where I was, that’s all.”
Sally nodded. “You’re at Dovecote Gardens,” she told him, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say, “And yeah, Colwyn’s my uncle.”
The moth’s head drooped. “Thank. God.”
“Um.” Sally swallowed. “How come you can talk?”
“I had a good education,” said the moth. Sally was pretty sure he was grinning.
*
The longer Rube was gone, the greater the temptation became. Jeanette really, really wanted to find out what was at the top of those stairs. Or at least find out how high you could go before the air got too thin.
The air down here was warm and still around her. The only sound was a few insects buzzing and a couple of birds squabbling in the distance. Jeanette sat on the grass, resting her elbow on one of the lower steps, which felt nice and cool against her arm. Rube was taking her sweet time getting back. Sally must have wanted to talk about something. Hopefully it wasn’t because the moth had died.
Rube hadn’t wanted Jeanette to put her weight on the staircase in case it collapsed and she hurt herself. And Jeanette didn’t want to make Rube worry (any more than her natural baseline level of worry, which was honestly pretty high.) But Rube wasn’t here. And what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her, right?
By way of experiment, Jeanette pulled herself up against the staircase, using one the higher steps as a chin-up bar. She didn’t quite dare to leave the ground- Rube had kind of had a point- but she got onto tiptoe before relaxing back into position. She tried it again, pushing down on the surface of the step beforehand to see if she noticed any shaking or cracking. Nothing.
Feeling a little guilty, Jeanette stepped away from the staircase and looked at the path to see if there was any sign of Rube and Sally yet. She watched it for three whole minutes, counting out the seconds in her head, before turning back to the staircase and putting her foot on the bottom step.
Jeanette had spent the previous day hot, uncomfortable and sticky in the back of a series of cramped vehicles. She’d spent most of the three months before that either in school listening to lectures about smart targets and positive attitudes, or sleeping over at Zainab’s and listening to Monessa sing that song about Yogi Bear having a cheesy knob for the eightieth time in a row. Now that she finally had access to something new and interesting, she intended to make the most of it.
She went slowly, spreading her arms out slightly to keep her balance. If it started to creak or wobble, she could always turn around and go back the way she came. And as long as it didn’t…
The thing was, Jeanette had imagined things like this when she was little. Climbing u an enchanted beanstalk until you reached a giant’s kingdom in the clouds. Shooting up to the sky on the back of a dragon or a Pegasus or a giant bird. Leaving the land behind and climbing up to something better. She’d never thought she’d actually be able to do it, but she’d always hoped.
There were no clouds in the sky. There was nothing ahead of her but pure blue.
At some point, she stopped for a rest. There still wasn’t any creaking or swaying, and the air still seemed breathable (Jeanette assumed that if it wasn’t, she’d find out pretty quickly.) If her legs hadn’t started aching, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to her to stop at all.
At a guess, she’d have said that she’d been climbing for more than five minutes, but less than twenty. She knew better than to swear to that, though. Every story she’d ever heard about places like this said that they could make time work differently whenever they liked.
Supernatural places. Magical places.
Jeanette sat down on the stairs, and looked over the side. She could still see Uncle Colwen’s house. She couldn’t see the streets and roads that were supposed to be around it, though. Instead, there were just walls, and paths, and the places they led to.
A lot of it was green- rolling hills and fields, like a solid background keeping it all together. But to the left was a dark, tangled forest where the trees didn’t seem to have a single leaf between them, and a little way behind it was a wide blue lake surrounded by little cabins. To the right were buildings that looked as if they were made out of diamonds. Behind them were mountains, blending into the sky with blues and whites and purples, and cable cars travelling from peak to peak. And all over the place, things were flying. Jeanette could see colourful flecks trailing across the landscape, too far away for her to make out any details.
She thought, I want to stay here looking at this for the rest of my life.
She couldn’t, obviously. She needed to get back down before Rube got back, and tell her and Sally what she’d seen. But she couldn’t bring herself to move. Because what if she left, and by the time she got back with Rube and Sally it was all gone? And then she spent the rest of her life thinking about it, doing her best to remember every detail, but she never got to see it again?
She could just wait here. When Rube and Sally got to the bottom of the steps and found her gone, they were bound to work out where she was and come up to find her.
No. Bad idea. Even if they did work it out eventually, Rube would have two or three nervous breakdowns before they did. Jeanette didn’t want to do that to her.
She stared at the landscape for a few more minutes, committing it to memory. Then she stood up and made her way back down.
