“Yes.”
“But I don’t know what that means. Please will you tell me what it means?”
I took a deep breath.
“Eh… it’s… I guess it means that you make your own decisions. That you’re able to do what you want.”
“And I can do that now?”
“Yes. You’re free.”
She nodded twice.
“Very well. Then please would you open the door for me?” She nodded towards the exit.
“Why?”
“So I can go looking for my mum.”
“No! I mean, I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Because then she’ll know where I am, I thought, but I had a strange feeling that Chimera already knew. “Because then she’ll lock you up inside the cage again.”
“I know.”
“But… is that what you want?”
“No. But I want to be with my mum.”
I shook my head slowly. “Why??”
“I don’t know. That’s just the way it is. I can’t help following her.”
“But you have to. You have to learn not to!”
“Why? Please open the door. I can’t do it on my own.”
“No! No, that’s just not right. I won’t let you!”
“But you just said…” The Nothing’s voice wobbled. “You just said I could do what I wanted. Being free and all that. Wasn’t that what it meant?”
“Yes. Or rather… You are free to do what you want, but there are still some things you shouldn’t do, even if you feel like doing them. Do you understand?”
“Mmmhh… Like eating something that makes you sick?”
“Right. And although it might be really, really hard – you have to stop following Chimera. You have to find out where you want to go.”
The Nothing sneezed. A couple of down feathers loosened from her plumage and fluttered onto the kitchen table.
“But I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said. “Except where my mum is.”
I stared at the unkempt little chimera and felt a jab of irritation mix with my pity.
“Well, then you do that,” I said at length. “If that really is all you want. But you’ll have to open the door yourself.”
I turned on one of the taps. The pipes hissed and gurgled, but eventually a stream of rusty water shot out of the tap. I washed my filthy hands. Then I stripped off my waterproofs and rinsed the trouser leg Lop-Ear had peed on. The Nothing sat very still all the while, watching everything I did with intense interest.
“You’re so clever,” she said admiringly. “You can clean your own plumage.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t. I hung my waterproofs across the back of a kitchen chair so they could dry. It was cold in here, but not as cold as outside, and besides, putting on wet trousers would only make the cold worse.
“Do you know if there are any peop… eh… anyone else in the house?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “I’ve heard voices.”
“For how long?”
“Since yesterday at least.”
That could be Aunt Isa, I thought. And possibly Oscar as well. And Shanaia.
I dried my hands on a dusty tea towel, and cautiously opened the door at the other end of the kitchen, which proved to open onto a long, dark passage with rows of pegs along one wall and several abandoned, dusty coats. The Nothing followed me as best she could. She wasn’t all that good at flying or walking on her fingerfeet; it turned into a clumsy, flapping gait. She sneezed. And pooed on the floor. And sneezed again. Feathers and dust flew everywhere.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She flapped her wings to keep her balance, caught a wingtip on one of the coats and tripped, straightened up again, and stared at me with lost, golden-brown eyes.
“It’s so hard not to follow someone,” she said. “Please may I follow you instead?”
I guessed it was better than her following Chimera. And although I didn’t really fancy having her small, flapping, sneezing, pooing figure at my heels, it was also impossible to say no.
“OK,” I said. “But just to begin with. Until you learn. But you must begin to decide what you want to do. Do you understand?”
“Yes, yes,” she said eagerly. “I promise.”
I turned around to continue, when a thought came into my mind.
“Hey, eh…” I couldn’t bring myself to call her The Nothing, not out loud. “Little friend.”
“Friend?” she said. “What’s that?”
“A friend is… someone you like.” Seriously! Claiming I actually liked The Nothing was probably going too far. What was I getting myself into here?
“Like?” she said. “You mean… food you think tastes nice?”
“Eh, yes. Maybe. Or… not really… it’s someone you’re happy to see.”
“Happy,” she said. “I know what that is. I just haven’t tried it all that much.”
Pity welled into a painful lump in my throat. I swallowed and quickly returned to the question that I really wanted to ask.
“You said ‘go away’ when you spotted me. Several times. Why did you do that?”
“It wasn’t something I made up,” The Nothing said, looking terrified. “I said it only because the others did.”
“What others?”
“Them. The house. They’re in the house. They want you to go away.” She looked at me with big, shiny eyes. “Can’t you hear them?”
CHAPTER 16
The Sisters
“‘Go away’,” I said to The Nothing. “Are you sure that’s what they said?”
“No,” she began to waver. “Not if you don’t think so.”
But she was sure, or at least she had been before I started questioning her.
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never seen them. I can only hear them… very faintly.” She pointed a wingtip at her head. “In here.”
I got goose pimples all the way down my spine. Now a lot of people might have dismissed it and concluded that The Nothing had lost her marbles in captivity, but I remembered the kestrel dive-bombing in front of me like a fighter plane. And since meeting Cat, I’d learned that not all the voices in your head are your own.
“What do they say?”
“Just ‘go away’.”
“Are they angry?”
“No. Not with you.”
“Then why do they want me to leave?”
“I don’t know.”
I took a deep breath. Closed my eyes. Tried listening with my wildsense, and listen properly. But although I tried for several minutes, I picked up nothing but silence, which in an old house isn’t really silence but a creaking, a whisper, a gurgling in the pipes.
Hang on. Wait.
Someone was here. Right on the other side of the door I was thinking of opening, there was life. But it was a strange form of life. I sensed many different breaths, many different hearts, and yet… oddly unified. Something was waiting, without stirring, and although I was convinced there was more than one life behind that door, they were all completely identical.
“Someone’s in there,” I said, pointing at the door. “Is that what you mean?”
“Oh no,” The Nothing said. “That’s just the sisters.”
“Sisters?”
She nodded. “My sisters. They turned out better than me.”
“And they’re the ones who want me to leave?”
“Oh no,” she said again. “They’re not like that. It’s… the others.”
I closed my eyes. Tried to get past the still, waiting presence which The Nothing called her “sisters”. It was difficult, it was as if they formed a wall around me, but faintly, ever so faintly, I began to sense…
Oscar.
There are times I get the feeling that he and I are connected by an incredibly thin, red thread, finer than a fishing line. Most of the time I can’t see or f
eel it, but now that I concentrated… I was almost certain that it was him. Almost.
I opened the door – first only a crack, then when nothing happened, a little more.
On the other side of the door there was a hall with a large staircase leading all the way up to the top of the house. There wasn’t very much light, only a single big round stained glass window above what I assumed must be the front door. Several of the window panes were cracked or were missing completely, so only the iron frame remained. This hall might once have welcomed guests with some degree of warmth and charm, but those days were long gone. An icy draught blew through the broken window, and the floor was covered with bird droppings. And I mean totally covered. You couldn’t even see what colour it had been originally, nor whether it was a tiled or a wooden floor. There were bird droppings on the walls, bird droppings on the steps and the banister, bird droppings everywhere.
Now all that bird poo had to come from somewhere. I peered up nervously at the staircase in the twilight. Nothing moved, which was probably why it took me so long to spot them, but they were there – on the railings and the banister and the cross beams, all the way up through the dim stairwell, up to the rafters right under the roof. I could see that they were birds, but not what kind. They were resting with their heads tucked under one wing and their grey feathers puffed up so they resembled big dust bunnies.
“Are those your sisters?” I whispered to The Nothing.
“Yes. But you don’t have to whisper. They don’t mind noise.” The Nothing flapped her wings furiously and managed to elevate herself almost two metres. “Heelloo!” she yelled. “Heeeellllooooouuuuuooooouuuuu…”
I jumped, but the sisters didn’t even twitch a feather.
“Are they… hibernating or something?” I asked.
“I don’t know what that means,” said The Nothing.
“I mean, do they sleep during the winter?”
“Oh, I see. No. No, I don’t think so. They’re just waiting.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. But they’re not asleep. Not really.”
I took one cautious step forwards, keeping my eyes fixed on the vast, motionless flock of sisters. Nothing happened, so I took another one. I closed my eyes for a split second in order to get a better sense of where Oscar’s thread was leading me – upstairs, it seemed. And now I thought I could hear muted voices coming from the same direction. Still keeping half an eye on the sisters, I tiptoed up the stairs to the first landing, which ran the width of the room like a sort of gallery. There was a door at each end, but I stopped in front of a set of tall double doors in the centre and pressed my ear against the woodwork. No one was saying anything now, but the voices had come from in there, I was sure of it. I knelt down and tried to peer through the keyhole.
“What are you doing?” said The Nothing right behind me, and nearly gave me my second heart attack of the day.
“Shhhhh,” I hissed.
Fortunately, she didn’t respond with: “What does that mean?” She just pressed her lips together and nodded eagerly.
I couldn’t see much apart from a big patch of faded carpet. A table leg, something which might be a lamp… and a foot.
That foot belonged to Oscar. I would have recognized those hi-tops anywhere.
I tried the handle – it wasn’t locked – and opened the door.
It was an old-fashioned sort of parlour, with furniture upholstered in moss-like green velvet, fringed lampshades, logs burning in the fireplace, and mahogany bookcases with glass doors. The first thing I really looked at, though, was Oscar. And he in turn stared at me and at The Nothing who came flapping inside at my heels.
“Duuuuuuuuuck!” he screamed at the top of his voice and dived behind the armchair he had been lounging in.
Woofer yelped fearfully and tried squashing himself under the sofa. Bumble barked loudly, Aunt Isa brandished an old umbrella rather like a sword, and looked unusually confrontational. Only Shanaia, who was lying on the sofa, showed no reaction at all.
“It’s only me…” I said. But it wasn’t me they were staring at. It was The Nothing.
“It’s not like them,” Aunt Isa said, lowering her brolly. “I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t one of them. Clara, close the door.”
Aunt Isa had a large, bloody wound on her temple and blood in her hair; one shoulder was bloodstained and torn. Hoot-Hoot was perched on one of the bookcases, looking unusually ruffled. And when Oscar slowly emerged from his hiding place behind the armchair, I could see that he too had the same kind of bloody gouges on his forearms.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Shut that door now!” Aunt Isa snapped, and I did as I was told.
“Are they still out there?” Oscar wanted to know.
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“Those… shark birds.”
“What?”
“I think he means my sisters,” The Nothing said helpfully. “The ones that turned out right…”
CHAPTER 17
Chimera’s Voice
“They’re totally creepy,” Oscar said. “They look like birds, but… they have these jaws. You know, like a shark. Full of teeth…” He raised one injured arm. The skin had been ripped off in a circle the size of a tennis ball. “It really hurts. They sink their fangs into you and refuse to let go and… and they keep biting until you kill them. There are hundreds of them. They sit there just waiting for you.”
“But… they didn’t do anything to me when I came up the stairs.”
“Nope, but just wait until you try to escape.”
“It’s a trap,” Shanaia said out of the blue; she was still lying on the sofa, staring into the air, looking as if she’d stopped caring about everything. “The whole thing is a trap, and it’s all my fault…”
Aunt Isa looked as if she felt sorry for her, but she didn’t say “no, of course it isn’t” or words to that effect.
“You couldn’t know,” Oscar said. “You didn’t do it on purpose…”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “She couldn’t know what?”
“She wants to capture you,” Shanaia said. “I knew that all along, but I… all I could think about was Westmark. And somehow I got it into my head that you were the only one who could help me get Westmark back.”
“Not ‘somehow’,” Aunt Isa said. “It was Chimera. Chimera did everything in her power to convince you. And she didn’t let you escape until she was sure that you truly believed it.”
“I should have known it was all too easy,” Shanaia said bitterly. “Chimera never lets her prey get away before she’s done with it…”
I caught myself rubbing Cat’s scratches between my eyebrows. Possibly because right now I felt a bit like prey myself.
“Are you saying… that you didn’t get away? That she deliberately let you go?”
“I thought I’d made my own escape. But she was just using me the way a hunter uses a bird dog to flush out his target,” Shanaia said in a low voice. “Only this dog wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t persuade you to come with me to Westmark. So instead she took Oscar and Woofer and used them as bait. And then… and then…” She gasped for air a couple of times, as if it physically hurt her to say the words, “then I betrayed my friends.”
“Shanaia…”Aunt Isa held up a hand as if to stop the bitter flow of self-recrimination.
“No. It’s the truth. That’s what I did. You would never have… she would never have been able to… if it hadn’t been for me.”
“She’d captured your wildfriend,” Aunt Isa said. “Of course you would come to her.”
“I shouldn’t have done it.”
“If it had been Hoot-Hoot…”Aunt Isa said. “I would have done the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You’re wiser and stronger. You don’t betray people. You don’t tell… tell people where your friends are most vulnerable. How best to trick them.” Her gaze fell on Oscar.
“So i
t was you who…” I didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence. “Did you tell Chimera that Oscar and I…”
Shanaia nodded in anguish. “But…” Her voice almost faded away. “But… she killed Elfrida anyway. As a punishment. Because I’d been a bad dog.”
Elfrida. That had been the name of the ferret. I remembered the stiff little body in the cardboard box back at Aunt Isa’s. Poor Elfrida. Poor Shanaia.
She’d sat up now and pulled her knees right up to her chest. It made her look both smaller and younger. Once upon a time I’d actually wondered if Shanaia might be right and Chimera really was frightened of me for some reason. But of course, that had never been the case. The feeble hope curled up inside me and died. Chimera had never been afraid of me. That wasn’t why she had kept her distance. She’d known all along that by picking the right bait and not interfering, she would have stupid Clara walk straight into her trap like a good little girl.
“I was so hoping that you wouldn’t come,” Shanaia said. “And then you came anyway.”
“Yes.” Then I remembered something. “Were you the one saying ‘go away’?”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a kestrel…” I told them about it, and the voices The Nothing could hear.
“I don’t know,” Shanaia said. “I… was only wishing.”
“Perhaps that was enough,” Aunt Isa said. “You’re part of Westmark. When you wish for something hard enough, all of Westmark can feel it.”
Shanaia lowered her head. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Because it didn’t make any difference.”
So now only one big question remained.
“Why?” I asked. “What does she want with me?”
“Read the book,” Chimera said.
My heart stopped. It truly did. It started again, but it had stopped for one panicky moment. I looked around like a maniac, but I couldn’t see anyone other than us – Oscar, Aunt Isa, Shanaia and me. No bird woman with giant wings.
And yet it had been her voice. I was certain.
“Where are you?” Aunt Isa said. “Chimera, you’re breaking the law. Let us go.”
I didn’t think that Aunt Isa believed for one minute that Chimera cared about the law any more. She just wanted her to speak again, so we could determine which direction her voice was coming from.