“Stop it. We’re not going to starve to death.”
“We are if we don’t get out of here…”
For a while we sat next to each other, equally despondent.
Then suddenly Oscar slapped his hand against his forehead.
“Doh…” he said. “Now I know why you don’t fancy eating my brain.”
“What? What are you on about?”
“Then again… who says smart brains taste better than stupid ones…”
“Oscar, get a grip!”
He grinned from ear to ear.
“Daylight,” he said. “There’s a gap up there, and a very nice big one at that, or there wouldn’t be this much light down here.”
I looked up. The cave ceiling wasn’t like the ceiling in a house. What I could see was spiky and rugged, and stalactites hung like icicles in large, grey clusters. It was true that there was light from above, but you couldn’t see the hole it was coming from. And the tips of the nearest stalactites were many metres above us.
“Yes, OK, there’s a hole,” I conceded. “But I don’t see how we’re going to get up there.”
“Hello,” he said. “Have you forgotten that I’m the school wall-climbing champion?”
He fell twice. The first time wasn’t too bad, he was only about two metres up, and he pretty much landed on his feet. But the second time…
“Oscar…”
He lay completely still on his back with his mouth open and his arm flailing helplessly.
“… I… can’t…” he groaned.
He couldn’t breathe. I sat down beside him and raised his shoulders and head a little. I took a deep breath and did my best to sing something that sounded like wildsong. Although it hadn’t worked on Aunt Isa and Shanaia and the others, perhaps it would work better on a living boy. Or rather… a boy who didn’t look like a zombie. And Aunt Isa always said that the melody wasn’t important, it was just a way of harnessing your power, the way a magnifying glass gathers light. I hummed some rather false and disjointed notes, and wished with all my heart that Oscar would get better.
I’m not sure if it worked, but he suddenly took a deep, gasping breath and started to cough, splutter and hawk.
“I was… winded…” he gurgled. “… Better now…”
I helped him sit up. He was sweating and dark rims were starting to form under his eyes; for once he didn’t look as if he thought life was one big party.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Do you have a better idea?” he asked.
I looked around. By now most of the cave floor was underwater, and the water was still rising. If we stayed here, we might not even have time to die of hunger. We would probably drown first. And Aunt Isa, Mrs Pommerans, Shanaia, Kahla’s dad and Mr Malkin… They would drown too, wouldn’t they? Even zombies needed oxygen. We could always try sitting them up against the rock wall, but what if the water level rose higher than that? I looked up at the stalactite ceiling and the small wedge of daylight. It was our only way out.
“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t have a better idea.”
Oscar got up.
“Move, peasant,” he said in his best dictator voice – which wasn’t very convincing. “And let the master of the universe show that climbing wall who’s boss.”
I was pretty sure he was bruised all over and I could see that the scratches on his right hand were bleeding. I was also pretty sure that he had no wish at all to climb up the wall and risk falling yet again. This wasn’t something he was doing to show off or to win a competition. He was doing it because it was the only way he could save all of us.
“Oscar?”
“Yes, peasant?”
“I think you’re super-cool. And don’t you dare fall again, do you hear me?”
He grinned across his whole freckled face, clicked his heels and saluted me like a tin soldier.
“Yes, milady,” he said. “Now get out of my way. This time I’ll make it all the way up, just you wait and see!”
A small leap took him to the first ledge and he carried on quickly, without hesitation, up to a gap where he could wedge in most of his body. Then he reached the tricky place where he’d fallen the first time. But he’d learned from experience – his hand into one crack, his foot there, and his knee on a narrow rock shelf, a firm grip on the stalactite, swing himself round, right foot up…
He was nearly at the top. He disappeared behind a protrusion and I stopped being able to watch his every move, I could only hear his laboured breathing and the scraping of feet, hands, clothes, elbows and knees against the cliff wall. I held my breath. If he slipped and tumbled down now…
But he didn’t.
“I’m the master of the universe!” I heard from above – somewhat out of breath and maybe not quite the lion roar he was hoping for. But he was up.
It would be wrong to say that it was plain sailing from there on. Even with the help of an old lawnmower tractor and some ropes Oscar found in the garden shed at Westmark, it was still a challenge to hoist the stiff and uncooperative bodies up through the narrow light shaft. Handling them as if they were plastic dolls was weird. I discovered that it was possible to move their arms and legs, bend a knee, extend an elbow, which made it a little easier to get them up and out. But it also enhanced the sensation that they were dolls. And the water continued to rise, so towards the end I was wading around up to my knees in cold water. But we got them up, all five of them, and finally it was my turn to slip my legs through the improvised harness we’d made and be pulled up through the well.
“The tractor was a really good idea,” I said to Oscar when I was finally back on the grass, in the wind and the sun outside the wall that surrounded Westmark.
“Well, they’re heavy,” Oscar said. “Heavier than us. I’d worked out that we wouldn’t be able to pull them up ourselves.”
Aunt Isa was lying on the grass, staring up at the sky with open eyes. I wanted to close them, but I didn’t because it felt like something you did to a dead person. Mrs Pommerans was lying next to her, with one arm sticking straight up into the air. Mr Malkin…
“Hang on,” I said. “What’s that?”
Because Mr Malkin wasn’t quite as immobile as the others. Something stirred, approximately where his heart was. And suddenly a tiny nose poked out of his waistcoat pocket, and a pair of shiny black beady eyes peered at the sun. It was the baby dormouse. I had completely forgotten it was there.
“Wow, fancy it surviving all of that…” Oscar said. “What a supermouse, eh?”
“It’s actually not a mouse,” I said.
“OK, then a… didn’t he call it a dormouse?”
“Yes. It’ll grow quite a lot bigger than a mouse, and its tail is bushy, almost like a squirrel’s.”
“I still think it’s a supermouse,” Oscar said quietly, holding his hand out to the dormouse. “It’s wearing a mask and everything, can’t you see? I bet it has a secret identity.”
He was right about the mask. Unlike the common dormice Aunt Isa often had hibernating in baskets or shoeboxes on the bookcase, this one seemed to have a black band stretching from its eyes and across its cheeks.
“We have to take it with us,” I said. “Mr Malkin can’t look after it now.”
Oscar looked down at the lifeless bodies. “Is there really nothing you can do to… bring them back to life?”
“If there was, don’t you think I would’ve done it?”
My voice was harsh and angry, and Oscar took a step back.
“Relax,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to hassle you.”
“No, I know.” I was trying really hard to calm down, but everything inside me was whirling around. My head felt like a cement mixer, and my stomach wasn’t much better. My emotions were all jumbled up, there was relief that we’d escaped and brought the others up with us, helplessness because I hadn’t done a better job, fear that Aunt Isa and her friends would die here, all staring eyes and rigid zombie bodies. Gu
ilt. Grief. Loss. I wanted Aunt Isa to wake up and help us. I wanted Cat to come back. I wanted everything to be better than it was.
“It’s my fault,” I whispered. “I called them. They came to help me – and now they’re just lying there.”
“How about Thuja?” Oscar said. “The Raven Mothers? Do you think they’ll know how to wake them up?”
“We have to ask them,” I said. “But… I can’t find my way to Raven Kettle on my own. I can’t even find my way home.” The cement mixer feeling worsened.
Oscar looked at me glumly.
“My mum is going to go ape,” he said.
I don’t know why, but hearing that made me feel a bit better. Perhaps because it reminded me that the ordinary world still existed. Oscar’s mum was out there somewhere. As were my own mum, and my dad.
The problem was just how to find them again.
Then I heard flapping as if a big, clumsy bird was trying to fly past us. I looked up, but I couldn’t see anything. Not until I heard someone sneeze, and I turned around.
“I’b so bery, bery sorry,” The Nothing said and sniffled. Her dust mite allergy was clearly in full flow. “I know I promised to stay at home and look after Bumble, but… I got so lonely, and it’s so hard not to follow someone…” Then she spotted Aunt Isa and the others. “Oh no, oh dear. What happened to them?”
I made no reply. I just grabbed the small, snuffling bird girl and hugged her tight until she started to squirm because I was hurting her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Ninth Life
“Where’s Isa?” my mum demanded to know. “Did she just abandon you?”
“Mum,” I said. “You’re not listening. She didn’t abandon us. She saved me. And now… now I have to save her.”
Mum was standing in the middle of Aunt Isa’s living room wearing her coat and with raindrops in her hair. Dad was still in hospital; the doctors wanted to carry out a few more tests before they discharged him.
“It was me who brought us back,” The Nothing said proudly. “I remembered the whole way. The whole way!”
“Yes,” I said. “We’d have been lost without you.”
Mum took a deep breath.
“Are you telling me that Isa won’t be back for a while?”
“She’ll be back as soon as I work out how to help her,” I said stubbornly. We’d had to leave Aunt Isa and the others at Westmark. It simply wasn’t possible to bring them home on the wildways. Oscar and I had made a kind of stretcher from an old sun lounger and we’d managed to carry Aunt Isa and the others inside the house. We’d dragged beds down to the hall because it was easier than heaving deadweight adults up a lot of stairs. I didn’t know if it helped them. I wasn’t sure that they were aware of the difference. But I felt better when I saw them lying almost normally in their beds, as if they were just ill and not… sleeping zombies. Leaving them, however, felt completely and utterly wrong, and I welled up with rage when Mum talked about Aunt Isa as if she were completely irresponsible, when the truth was that she and the others had given their… lives, pretty much, to save me and Oscar.
I’d tried explaining it to her, but it was as if Mum didn’t want to understand what had happened.
“They’ll wake up again, I guess,” she’d said, as if they were just taking an afternoon nap. And it got the cement mixer in my head and my stomach going again because I wasn’t sure that they ever would wake up – not unless I helped them. Or found someone who could.
“What a mess,” Mum sounded irritated.
“Mum, it’s not as if she did it on purpose!”
“No, I don’t suppose she did. But what about the animals? The horse and the goats and Bumble?”
“I’ll take care of them. Me and The Nothing.”
Mum looked at me as if I’d suddenly turned into some strange creature she’d never seen before.
“Clara Mouse,” she said. “I’m trying to be patient here, I really am. But this is… this is insane. You’re twelve years old—”
“Thirteen!”
“Thirteen years old. You must be out of your mind if you think you can live here on your own until Aunt Isa comes back.”
“If I can’t live here alone, then you’ll have to stay here too. Or Dad. But she’s your sister. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Oscar looked from one of us to the other. I think he was relieved that his own mum wasn’t here as well. He would have enough on his plate once he got home. Not least explaining away the small, living bump in his shirt pocket. To my enormous surprise it was Oscar who’d tempted the dormouse out of its hiding place in Mr Malkin’s pocket. Perhaps it liked the idea of being a supermouse with a secret identity – at any rate, it had darted willingly into Oscar’s shirt pocket and settled down there.
“What about school?” Mum said. “You can’t just stay away. Have you thought about that?”
“I can be off sick,” I said. “Look. I was bitten by a leech. It’s very serious, and I won’t be able to go back until after the summer holidays. But Oscar has promised to ring me and let me know what our homework is, so I don’t fall too far behind.”
“Clara!”
“Mum, don’t you get it?” My voice grew thin and shrill, and I had to take a couple of deep breaths. She would pay closer attention if I didn’t get “hysterical”, as she called it, when I got angry. “I’m sorry that you’re upset,” I said as calmly as I could. “But I’m not coming home with you. If you make me, then I’ll run away. This is more important than school. It’s more important than me. More important than you, as it happens. I might be only thirteen years old, but when you’re a wildwitch it’s the same as being a grown-up. And you know it.”
It was as if something inside her cracked. She looked around as if she couldn’t quite believe that she was standing here arguing with me like this. She pushed her wet fringe aside with impatient fingers, and then she suddenly stuck out an arm and pulled me close.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” she said. “Come home. We’ll work something out.”
I snuggled up to her, but I didn’t give in.
“I don’t want to fight with you either,” I said. “Please, just stay here for a week? You can work from here just as well as from home, can’t you?”
“A week,” she said tentatively. “And then we go home?”
I considered it. The Nothing wasn’t sure that she could find the way to Raven Kettle along the wildways. If I had to travel there without her help, how long would it take me? And what if Thuja and the Raven Mothers couldn’t help Aunt Isa and the others?
“I can’t promise you that,” I said. “I don’t know if one week is enough.”
The Nothing started flapping her wings, happy that we were no longer fighting.
“Tea?” she said. “Would you like me to make some tea?”
“No, thank you,” Mum said. “I need to drive Oscar home and pick up Clara’s dad from the hospital. And I guess I’d better pack some clothes and schoolbooks for the return journey. And my laptop.”
My aching body relaxed with relief.
“I’d like some tea, please,” I said to The Nothing.
Mum touched my scorched eyebrows carefully.
“How about we take you to the hospital?” she said.
“No need,” I said. “Aunt Isa has an ointment that…” I ground to a halt because the words reminded me of the strange, rigid Aunt Isa doll now lying in a bed at Westmark, still with her eyes wide open. “It’s very good for burns,” I mumbled.
“One week,” Mum said. “That’s all I’ve promised!”
“Yes.”
When Mum and Oscar had driven off in the Volvo with its new windscreen, I stood for a while in the living room not knowing quite what to do with myself. It was odd, Aunt Isa not being there. Bumble, too, seemed at a loss, although he was pleased to see me. The Nothing flipped between being proud as a peacock and totally down in the dumps, and I had to praise her over and over again for having been so b
rave and so clever.
Although it was noon, Hoot-Hoot came sweeping through the open bedroom window on silent wings. Perhaps he was restless because he could feel that something was wrong with Aunt Isa.
“Oh, Hoot-Hoot.” I held up my arm and he actually landed on it. He looked at me with glowing orange eyes and made a clicking, almost questioning, sound. “I promise I’ll bring her home,” I said to him, but right there and then I felt so despondent that I hardly dared believe it myself. Aunt Isa. Shanaia. Lovely Mrs Pommerans. Mr Malkin. And Kahla’s dad…
Kahla. Kahla knew nothing. She was probably stuck at home – wherever that was, she never really talked about it, but it was probably somewhere warm – waiting for her dad to come back.
“Nothing?”
“Yes?”
“Did Aunt Isa ever send messages with Hoot-Hoot to Kahla’s dad?”
“Yes. If anything came up or there was too much snow. He knows the way.”
“Good. Do you know where to find a pen and some paper?”
I wrote a brief message to Kahla. I didn’t tell her what had happened to her dad because it wasn’t something you could write on a scrap of paper small enough to tie around Hoot-Hoot’s leg. I just said she had to come. Hoot-Hoot tolerated my fumbling fingers attaching the message with a bit of twine. An elastic band would have been easier, but I was afraid that would be too tight.
“Kahla,” I said to him, while making an effort to visualize her in my mind: dark eyes, cinnamon skin and at least two colourful hats… “Find Kahla.”
He chirped at me. Shook his head once, a lightning quick movement that blurred his feathers before they settled. Then he flapped his wings vigorously a couple of times and swooped out through the window.
“Do you think he understood me?” I said to The Nothing.
“Why wouldn’t he?” she said, and looked genuinely baffled.
I was exhausted. I could barely stay upright. I drank the tea The Nothing had made, then lay down on the sofa and covered myself with a blanket. I had to get some sleep. When Kahla turned up – if she turned up and Hoot-Hoot hadn’t just flown off to catch himself a water vole or two – then together we would find the way to Raven Kettle. I had to believe that.