The One Who Is Two (Book 1 of White Rabbit)

Loofah skirted a low hill, leaping lumps of bracken and fallen branches. Ahead – far, far ahead – the train flitted between oak trunks and then passed behind a thick stand of birch. His panic flared and he leapt after it, redoubling his already superhuman effort. For in the bracken, in the trunks of the trees, in the foliage of the young saplings still struggling to make their mark on the wood, even in the liquid air itself, was the same face, puffy with fury, goading him mercilessly onwards with the laser sharpness of its piggy little eyes.

  At last he reached the birch thicket – ghostly trunks loomed out of the deep shade and flew towards him in machine gun fire succession, while dark animal faces leered from the peeling white bark and dry twigs like birds' feet clawed at his hair and jacket. Then suddenly he was in a patch of brambles where thorned tendrils tore at his jeans then tightened across his thighs like asylum restraining straps, bringing him to a struggling standstill. Panic screamed through his skull and he fought like a maniac, lacerating his hands as he ripped and pulled at the tangle of barbed cables.

  And then he was free, out into open oak-wood – and there was the train, across a shallow valley, a languorous metal eel winding between the trunks. The Under Manager was inside is head now, bellowing remonstrance and threat directly into the squirming jelly of his brain. He sprinted down into the valley, his momentum carrying him faster than his feet as he flew over the soft ground. In the shallow dip at the bottom a broad strip of black mud had been camouflaged by dried leaves, probably deliberately. He sank to his ankles with the mud clinging to his shoes with secret sticky hands, and within three paces he was slowed to a struggling stagger, having to haul each leg forward one at a time while the huge oaks mocked his distress with haughty indifference. After an era of struggle he reached the far side, but as he was about to step out onto the dry land with a last violent tug the mud wrenched off his left shoe. In his mad desperation he ran on with one bare foot, but it was no good, he knew he would be crippled in yards. So, cursing vehemently, he turned back to fight the quagmire for his stolen footwear.

  By the time he won the fight and pulled on the shoe, however, the silver eel was out of sight over the ridge. With legs heavy with incipient despair, he started up the modest incline.

  At the top of the ridge the wood opened out into a long sweeping slope of oak, with occasional black clumps of rhododendron clustered around the mocking trunks like cancerous growths. Panting for breath and with a rapidly sinking heart, Loofah scanned the slope. At first he saw nothing, but then, just as the last vestiges of hope were trickling away, a flash of silver glinted briefly among the distant trees.

  He hurled himself forward in one last desperate attempt, and as he accelerated down the incline like a reckless tobogganist he caught another glint just beyond a large clump of rhododendron, a splurge of rampant malignancy spreading through the wood at the bottom of the slope. Hope rekindled – it seemed closer now, much, much closer.

  The rhododendron thicket loomed towards him, a wall of darkness shielding a sinister heart. He rounded it, like a motorcyclist leaning into the corner, then staggered to a halt – for no more than fifty yards ahead of him, standing in a vast arena of open woodland, was a silver motor car, its engine purring gently in the warm air with the sunlight glinting on its carapace and windscreen. There was no sign of the train.

  Loofah stumbled forward a few steps and then stopped again, staring blankly at the car as it sat meditatively under the trees like an oversized silver beetle. He had missed the train, the fat toad was somewhere behind him, no doubt hard on his heels, and yet again he was about to incur the wrath of the Under Manager – and yet he was too drained to feel anything. He gazed up into the broken canopy: jagged branches and clumps of foliage black against the harsh white of the sun. Birdsong echoed around him and a gentle breeze ruffled the high leaves – despite everything, it was beautiful.

  'Hello!' called a voice. A woman in a white summer dress with pale orange stripes was standing beside the open driver's door of the car, waving to him.

  'You look a bit lost,' she called, 'Can I offer you a lift?'