The Hidden World Read online

  ‘It’s easy. Come and save us. It will take us, if you don’t.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Stain … it’s going to take us all.’

  ‘The Stain? What’s that?’

  ‘Come find us, we’re begging you … Come and save us …’

  Jessica opened her eyes. The wallpaper was glowing, as if there was a dim light shining behind it, and the roses, irises and blessed thistles were all in silhouette. She pushed back her comforter and knelt close to the wall. The breeze made her long dark hair fly up.

  ‘This is a dream,’ she said.

  But the voice whispered, ‘There are no dreams, Jessica. Only different places to be.’

  She stood up, balancing herself on her bed. The light from the wallpaper grew brighter and brighter, until it was so intense that she had to shield her eyes with her hand. She took one unsteady step forward, and then another. She reached the wall, and it didn’t feel like a wall at all, more like a stiff damp sheet on a winter washing-line. She pushed it and it gave way, just like a sheet, and then she was battling her way through it, and suddenly it fell away behind her. She was standing barefoot in a tangle of prickly briars and thistles, in an overgrown garden, on a brilliantly sunlit day.

  Above her, the sky was primrose-colored, the same as her wallpaper, and cloudless, although she could see flocks of birds wheeling in the distance. At least they looked like flocks of birds, but when they flew closer she saw that they were nothing but the blue V-shaped patterns from her bedroom carpet.

  She turned. Behind her, she could still dimly distinguish her bed, nightstand and dressing-table, but they were separated from her by a patterned screen of flowers: all the roses and irises and blessed thistles, but plain white, because she was seeing them from the other side, their unprinted side.

  ‘You have to help us,’ whispered the voice, as if it were concerned that she might turn back.

  ‘I will if I can,’ said Jessica. ‘But I can’t see you. I don’t know who you are.’

  ‘Follow the flowers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Follow the flowers, and you can find us.’

  ‘What flowers?’

  Through the tangled garden, with the stilted gait of praying mantises, came seven or eight roses. They approached Jessica and stood around her, with spindly arms and legs and thorny claws. It was their faces that frightened her the most, however. The folds of their petals had taken the shape of vindictive little eyes and tight, disapproving mouths. For all of their beauty as flowers, their expressions were mean and threatening.

  ‘This is a dream,’ she repeated, although she didn’t think she sounded very convincing.

  One of the roses came closer than the rest, and stood with its face ruffled in the breeze. ‘Have you ever suffered pain?’ it asked her. Its voice was extraordinary – thin and fluting, but horribly suggestive too, as if it would really enjoy seeing her hurt.

  ‘I hurt my foot once,’ she said, lifting it up a little so that the rose could see her scars.

  ‘You think that was painful? Has anything really awful ever gnawed at you in the night? Has anything ever come surging up from the bottom of your bed like a Great White shark and seized you in its teeth, right up to your waist? Have you ever felt the skin being torn off your ribs, and your nerves being stripped bare, and your lungs collapsing?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, but you will,’ said the rose. ‘I’m talking about the Stain. I’m talking about the most terrible thing that lives in this world or any other world. I’m talking about something that will make your heart stop just to look at it. Do we frighten you? A few flowers out of your nightmares? You wait till you see the Stain.’

  ‘That’s if she ever does,’ put in one of the meaner-looking roses. ‘It’s a long path and it’s a very difficult path, and it’s terribly easy to lose your way.’

  ‘Who am I supposed to be saving?’ asked Jessica. ‘I can’t save anybody if I don’t even know who they are.’

  ‘You mean you want to go back?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I mean I want to know who’s been calling for help, and why, and where they are.’

  ‘Their names are written.’

  ‘What do you mean? Their names are written where?’

  The rose could scarcely conceal its thorny contempt. ‘Where do you think? Where the gray woman in the green cloak stands and weeps.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘Please!’ whispered a voice. ‘There isn’t much time. Please.’

  ‘Are you coming?’ demanded the rose.

  Jessica glanced back at the gloomy outline of her bedroom. High above her head, a thin swirl of clouds had formed, in the same pattern as her curtains; and the V-shaped birds were flying across it as if they were migrating far away, to somewhere sane.

  This is complete and utter madness, she thought. Talk about people who need locking up in asylums. But the roses started to mantis-walk away from her, with an irritating claw-like rustle, and after only a moment’s hesitation she went after them.

  Through the Woods

  The roses led her down a wide, windy hill. At first she thought that they were walking through dry, knee-high grass, scattered with brown poppies; but when she looked down she realized that it was the pattern from the cover that she had stuck on her geography workbook.

  Not only was the sky growing darker, but the wind was rising, so that Jessica’s sleep-T billowed and leaves came whirling through the air, as well as fragments of all kinds of decorations and patterns. She saw the curlicues from her grandmother’s lacy tablecloth, and the leaves and stars that were embossed around the edge of Grandpa Willy’s leather-topped desk. She saw spots and dots and feathers and flowers, and even the horseshoes, clubs and four-leaf clovers from the Lucky Charms cereal box.

  ‘Hurry!’ demanded the roses. ‘We don’t have all day!’

  They reached the foot of the hill and began to make their way down a narrow, winding gully. The grass from Jessica’s geography book lashed at their ankles. The wind had lifted to a soft, morbid scream, and it was filled with a blizzard of carpet patterns, dress designs and fragments of curtain material. Jessica was lashed on the cheek by a bramble from the wallpaper in Grannie’s sewing-room. She lost her balance, stumbled, and fell down on one knee, but the roses came ripping back and shrieked at her, ‘Up! Up! We haven’t far to go, and it’s much too dangerous!’

  This is a dream, Jessica tried to persuade herself, but now she was quite sure that it wasn’t a dream at all, that she was living every moment of it, and it was real. No matter how hard she tried to wake up, she was still slithering down the gully with the roses and she knew that there was only one way for her to get back to her bedroom, and that was to turn around and run there, on her own.

  As they neared the foot of the gully they began to run into gorse bushes and scrub, which snagged at Jessica’s T-shirt and caught in her hair. The gorse grew thicker and higher, and soon they were entering a gloomy wood filled with hundreds of slender trees with shining dark-brown trunks and curled-up branches – except that they weren’t trees at all, but hat-stands, and what had seemed at first sight to be overshadowing foliage was thousands of hats, both men’s and women’s, trilbies and fedoras and black funeral hats with ostrich feathers.

  ‘Faster,’ insisted the roses.

  It was so shadowy in the woods that Jessica could only just make out their spindly arms and legs, and underneath the heaps of overhanging hats the air was suffocating, like hiding in a closet filled with your grandparents’ old clothes, wishing that your party guests would hurry up and find you.

  They emerged at last on the banks of a wide, iridescent river. The light was failing fast, and Jessica began to realize that the hours behind the wall seemed to pass much more urgently, as if time itself were in a panic.

  The river was fifty or sixty feet wide, and the water wasn’t water but rippling moiré silk of the iciest
blue. On the far side stood a landing-stage constructed of yellow majolica tiles, and behind the landing-stage rose trees so dark that they almost looked black – yet sparkling, all of them, with millions and millions of tiny lights. They reminded her of the trees she had seen in her fairy books, Arthur Rackham trees with twisted trunks and hollows where hobgoblins secreted themselves, and whose upper branches were clouded with fairies.

  Already the day had grown so dusky that it was a moment or two before Jessica realized that somebody was standing on the landing-stage. It was a child, a girl of nine or ten, wearing a simple white nightgown with long sleeves, and a white surgical mask that completely covered her nose and mouth. She stood looking at Jessica across the endlessly rippling river, her hair occasionally lifted by the evening wind. She was juggling five differently colored balls, quite nonchalantly, as if she had been juggling all her life.

  ‘You came,’ she whispered, and even though she was so far away Jessica could hear her quite distinctly, almost as if she were right inside her head.

  ‘Who are you?’ Jessica called out. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I’m Phoebe. I’m supposed to be the naughty one. I’m the one who teased the cat. I’m the one who spooned the strawberry jelly into Uncle Richard’s hat.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘You have to find the Stain. You have to wash it away forever.’

  ‘I don’t know where it is. I don’t even know what it is.’

  ‘It’s growing and it’s spreading and soon it’s going to catch us. Three days and three nights, tickety-tock, that’s all we have left.’

  ‘Where do I look for it? I just don’t know what you want me to do!’

  Behind the girl, the sparkling in the fairy-trees grew more intense, and Jessica saw wisps of smoke. The trees weren’t sparkling with fairies, they were actually on fire. She could smell burning on the wind, and hear the popping of twigs.

  ‘I have to go,’ said the girl. ‘Please look for the Stain. Please, or it’s going to take us all, forever. No more juggling. No more games.’ Suddenly, she tossed all of her juggling-balls into the air and they weren’t juggling-balls at all but brightly colored spots from the laundry-room wallpaper, and they were blown away into the wind and out of sight.

  ‘When will I see you again?’ asked Jessica.

  ‘Meet me tomorrow by the sea.’

  ‘Where’s that? How do I get there?’

  ‘The roses will show you … Now, I have to go. No more time for pepper in the sugar bowl. No more apple-pie beds. No more childhood, not for us.’

  Jessica turned around to talk to the roses, but they had all hurried away into the gathering shadows; and when she looked back across the river Phoebe had disappeared too, and the yellow-tiled landing-stage was empty. Jessica was alone on the riverbank in the strangest of worlds, with dark falling fast and the wind howling even more eerily, as if it wasn’t a wind at all but the sobbing of people in serious pain.

  She left the river behind her and began to climb back uphill, into the stuffy hat-covered forest. It was even gloomier than it had been just a few minutes before, and even more suffocating, and she prayed that she wouldn’t get lost. What would happen if you went into the wall and couldn’t find out how to get back again? Nobody would ever know you were there, and they would never think of sending a search party into your wallpaper to find you, would they? She tried to keep herself calm, but she began to limp faster, almost breaking into a run, anxious to get out of the woods and back to the top of the hill before it grew totally dark.

  At last, panting, she saw the faint violet light of the evening sky through the hat-stands. She slowed down a little, because now she was sure that she was going the right way. As she did so, however, she thought she heard a crackling noise quite close behind her, and off to her left. Probably those horrible roses, following her and trying to frighten her. But then she heard another crackle, and a complicated splintering, and this was far too loud to be a few malevolent flowers.

  She stopped, and listened. She still could hear the river, but only faintly now, and every now and then the soft dropping sound of a fallen hat. More than anything else, she could hear her own blood rushing in her ears, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

  It’s the roses, she thought. It’s the roses, because they’re mean and they’re spiteful and they know that I can’t run very fast because of my limp. She continued to walk toward the treeline, feeling irritated rather than scared, but then she heard a crackle-crackle-crackle and she could sense that something really big was rushing up behind her and she turned, and screamed. A huge jagged shape was running toward her, making a noise like chairs and tables being smashed up with half a dozen axes. She saw four blazing red eyes and two stretched-open mouths, and rows and rows of sharply pointed teeth. The thing let out a deafening roar and it was only because she tripped and fell over sideways that it missed her. All the same, one of its claws caught against the sleeve of her sleep-T and ripped it.

  She found herself on all fours, scrambling across the forest floor, her hands and knees prickled not by pine needles but by thousands of glittering hatpins. With a harsh growl, the thing came running back around the hat-stands, and now Jessica could begin to see what it was: a wolf-like creature, except that it wasn’t made of flesh and blood, but varnished wood, broken into sharp pointed pieces, with splinters instead of fur. It had two faces, one the right way up and the other, immediately below it, upside-down. Four eyes, two muzzles, two mouths crammed with teeth. It was the walnut veneer on her closet, come to life. It had two faces because the door panel had been made from the same section of wood, cut in half and fitted with one half facing up and the matching piece facing down.

  It had always frightened her, especially at night when she was lying in bed, trying to sleep. It seemed to stare at her with all four eyes as if it had only one purpose in life and that was to eat her. But here, in the woods, circling toward her, making that crackling noise with every step, it was so terrifying that she couldn’t stop herself from whimpering.

  She managed to stand up, balancing herself against one of the hat-stands. The wooden wolf lowered its head and growled at her with both of its mouths. It had charged at her wildly before, but now it had obviously realized how weak she was, and how scared, and it walked toward her slowly, one seven-clawed paw in front of the other, as if it were relishing the smell of her fear with each of its four flared nostrils.

  Jessica backed away, reaching out blindly for the hat-stand right behind her. Six or seven hats dropped onto the forest floor – a black silk opera hat, a priest’s biretta, a huge Edwardian confection of black eagle’s feathers; then a sudden tumble of trilbies and a deerstalker. The wooden wolf kept on coming after her, every sinew of its body creaking and squeaking.

  Oh please God don’t let it hurt me, Jessica prayed. If it’s going to kill me, please let it kill me quickly. She knew enough about pain from the time when she was recovering from her parents’ car crash. The kind of pain that the roses had been talking about: the pain that made you feel as if something was eating you alive.

  Now the wooden wolf was only a few paces away. It could have easily sprung at her and knocked her down with one jump, but she could hear it breathing her in, breathing her in. It must have been waiting for this moment for over a year – ever since it had first seen her enter her bedroom and stared at her, mute but hungry, from her closet door.

  She stumbled backward, and the next hat-stand swayed, so that more hats fell down. She took hold of the hat-stand and swung it around so that it toppled over. It fell against another hat-stand, and that in turn knocked another one over. Jessica limped back faster and faster, knocking over every hat-stand she came to. It started a chain reaction all the way through the forest, until hat-stands were clattering down everywhere and thousands of hats were pattering onto the ground like soft applause.

  The wooden wolf managed to jump over the first few tangles of hat-stands, but as Jessica pushed
more and more of them over, they formed a criss-cross barrier that stopped it in its tracks. It roared at her in fury and frustration, and began to circle quickly around to the left, so that it could outflank her, but she ducked down onto her hands and knees and crawled underneath a tunnel of fallen hat-stands until she was only a few metres away from the edge of the forest. She had hatpins sticking in her hands and knees, but she didn’t care. The wooden wolf was still running around the heaps of hats, hungry for her flesh and thirsty for her blood.

  She reached the gorse bushes and began to limp uphill. It was night-time now, and up above the windy hilltop she could see millions and millions of stars, all forming the pattern of Grannie’s best lace curtains. She quickly turned her head to see if the wooden wolf were still coming after her, but between the gorse bushes it was too dark for her to see. She kept limping upward, gasping for breath, and trying not to think of the lines she had learned at school: ‘Like one that on a lonesome road/doth walk in fear and dread/because he knows a fearful fiend doth close behind him tread.’

  She crested the hill, and now – no more than a hundred metres away – she could make out the tangled garden where she had first entered the wall. But as she started on the last stretch, hobbling through the dry grass from her geography book, she heard the clattering of claws up the gully behind her and they were coming very, very fast. She turned to look, even though she didn’t really want to, and just as she did, the wooden wolf appeared, its four eyes burning like the narrow grilles in a hot coke furnace, its lips drawn back to reveal crowds of broken and ragged teeth.

  Then – worse – Jessica heard an answering snarl from not far off to her right, and more sharp crackling noises. At first she couldn’t see what it was, but then she glimpsed the gleam of varnished wood in the darkness. Another wooden wolf was coming after her, and she realized that, no matter how much she hurried, she wasn’t going to be able to reach the garden before at least one of the wolves was upon her.