Lilliput

by Sam Gayton

Horatio padded silently over the tiles towards his dinner, which was behaving very strangely indeed.

  Usually the birds Horatio hunted were sparrows and starlings. Slender, timorous little things, all fury and no flesh. They pecked at breadcrumbs and were startled by the wind. They were very hard to catch.

  This bird, though, was enormous – half as big as Horatio himself. And he didn’t fly away at all. He watched Horatio pawing closer, and then he said, ‘Get away from my guest, you pest!’

  Horatio hesitated. There were three things he liked to do with his dinner – hunt it, play with it and eat it. But so far hunting the strange bird had been disappointing, and a little unnerving. Playing with him would be a challenge. Eating him might become a chore. After all, he was rather big.

  It was then that Horatio spotted that his dinner also came with dessert. A little, tasty-looking shadow moved just below the bird.

  Horatio gave a purr, and then shrank back – it was the creature from yesterday, the thing with the silver sting! He saw it glint in the moonlight and hissed, his paw throbbing with the memory.

  Horatio slunk back. Fighting with his dinner was not something he enjoyed.

  Suddenly his nose twitched. He could smell something else. It was so strong and so delicious that Horatio could see it hanging in the air. A rippling silver thread, with flashes of green and a tinge of pink.

  Horatio turned and followed the smell down to the street. He leaped from the gutter to a windowsill then dropped onto the pavement. The smell wafted from an alleyway, and he hung his head, expecting the stray cats (who were bigger than Horatio) and the sewer rats (who were biggest of all) to be there already. But to his surprise there was only a small girl.

  ‘Here, kitty-kitty,’ she said. In her hand dangled a glistening, silver trout.

  Horatio began to purr. Trout was his favourite. He forgot completely about the strange bird, and the thing with the silver sting up on the roof. He didn’t even notice when, high above him, Señor Chitchat started to speak.

  In the attic Gulliver kneeled by his bed, alone and desperate. Since waking yesterday afternoon and finding Lily gone he had fallen into despair. He did not know where she was, or how to get her back.

  ‘Please, Lily,’ he whispered as he kneeled beside his bed. ‘Please, come back to me.’

  Lemuel Gulliver was a man of science. He believed in reason. He believed in progress. He did not believe in prayers. Or miracles. Or gin.

  And so it was highly unusual for him to be drunk, with his hands clasped together, asking for the impossible to happen.

  And it was even more unusual for Lily to suddenly answer him.

  There was a tap, tap, tap at the window. Gulliver sat up on his elbows, his long hair drizzling down onto his shoulder.

  Then he heard her voice.

  ‘Run, run, as fast as can be,

  Gulliver’s a yahoo and he’ll never catch me!’

  Señor Chitchat’s impression of Lily was a little squawky, but Gulliver was full of gin, and empty of hope. He leaped to his feet.

  ‘Lily?’ he hiccupped. ‘Lily, is that you?’

  And he heard again:

  ‘Run, run, as fast as can be,

  Gulliver’s a yahoo and he’ll never catch me!’

  ‘You are alive!’ he said, crying tears of joy. ‘You have come back! Oh, Lily, I have been so worried …’

  He flung open the window, but there was nothing there. Señor Chitchat had already flown back to the chimney.

  ‘Lily, where are you?’ Gulliver called. ‘Come back, please!’

  He lit a lantern, pulled on his coat and burst out of the attic. Then he clomped down the stairs and onto the street, leaving his Book of Travels lying open on the desk.

  LILY SMILED TO herself as she watched her kidnapper disappear down Tock Lane, calling out her name.

  Well, she thought. Horatio is chasing a fish and Gulliver is chasing a parrot. That just leaves Mr Plinker.

  Lily strained her ears, trying to hear the clock maker down the chimney. He was somewhere in there. She could smell his stink.

  Lily fretted nervously, pacing round the chimney pot, looking down at the street. Of their whole plan this part was the riskiest. The bit she felt most worried about. Because there were only two things that Mr Plinker would leave his workshop for.

  Finn or Lily. Lily or Finn.

  He had already chased after them once before. Finn was almost more valuable to the clock maker than his own fingers. Mr Plinker needed an apprentice to wind up his clocks and make them tick.

  Lily gazed down at the street below as Finn crept up to the front door of the workshop. He was the bait. She tried to remember that Finn was fast and clever. She tried to remember that Mr Ozinda was down there too – it was his job to protect Finn if something went wrong.

  But as she was trying to remember Lily was also trying to forget – she was trying to forget that Mr Plinker had already caught Finn once before.

  She shook her head, annoyed with herself. It was too late to worry now. Finn was already right outside the workshop, singing a rhyme.

  ‘There once was a man from Tock Lane,

  Whose clocks were completely insane.

  He just couldn’t fix

  All their tocks and their ticks

  His apprentice, I think, is to blame.’

  Mr Ozinda had come up with it. He said that it would be so irritating to hear, Mr Plinker would have to give chase.

  Lily couldn’t wait about to see if he was right or not. Now was her chance. She had a Book of Travels to steal and a Swift to set free.

  ‘Keep Finn safe,’ Lily whispered to the Ender.

  She checked that her saddle was tied tight about her waist, and that the reel of thread was still looped around Señor Chitchat’s foot.

  ‘You did brilliantly with Gulliver,’ she told Señor Chitchat. ‘Now, remember – don’t fly away. You’re my rock!’

  ‘Soy tu roca,’ the parrot promised.

  Lily gulped, hoping that meant he understood. Then, like a fisherman with his bait, Señor Chitchat dangled Lily above the chimney. Slowly she lowered down into the pool of blackness.

  As Lily abseiled down the chimney and Finn stood outside the workshop, Mr Plinker was at his counter working. When he heard the voice of his runaway apprentice drift into the room he did not rant and rave and foam at the mouth in rage.

  Instead he began to laugh. Very quietly, so that Finn would not hear.

  Then he said to himself, ‘What perfect timing.’

  And it was.

  Mr Plinker took the clock he had just been fixing from the counter. He slipped the Waste-Not Watch in his pocket and listened to Finn outside. He did not know why his apprentice had come back, only that he was there.

  Soon Finn would once again be Mr Plinker’s apprentice. His prisoner. His slave.

  Silently Mr Plinker slipped his feet into his shoes. His coat rustled onto his arms. He slithered out of the workshop and into the shadow at the top of the stairs. He stood there, utterly still. Observing Finn. Like a crocodile in a swamp observes his prey.

  Slowly, keeping in the dark, Mr Plinker began to creep down the stairs.

  Closer. Closer.

  At last, he was at the front door.

  Finn was out on the street, still singing Mr Ozinda’s irritating limerick. The clock maker put his left hand on the handle. Then he reached above the door with his right and muffled the little bell that jingled whenever a customer came in.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, he began to turn the handle and open the door.

  LILY WENT DEEPER down the chimney, while above her the little square of starry sky shrank to the size of a stamp.

  She rehearsed the plan in her head. First she was heading to the attic to steal the Book of Travels. Then she would go down the stairs to Mr Plinker’s workshop and rescue Swift.

  The inky dark around her started to fade, and she saw a pile of ashes on a ledge below her feet. The attic fireplace! When she had la
st been here it had been a mass of glowing coals – an impassable volcano.

  Now, though, the fire was just a mountain of ashes and the attic was lit by candles.

  Lily lowered herself until she twirled a few inches above the hearth. She untied the thread and dropped, skidding down the cinders to the bottom.

  The attic was just as she remembered; only now it looked smaller. There was her birdcage, swinging empty on its hook. There was the rusty nail, halfway into the doorframe. Gulliver’s mess. His bed.

  His desk.

  That’s where I’ll find it, she thought.

  Carefully Lily sniffed the air. Mr Plinker’s stink wasn’t so strong now. He must have left the workshop. She listened out in the street for him but heard nothing. She hoped that was a good sign. She hoped Finn was all right.

  With the saddle tied round her shoulders Lily jumped down onto the floorboards, looking for a way up to the Book of Travels. It didn’t take long.

  She climbed a stack of old plates onto Gulliver’s bed and dragged an old fork over the space between the desk and the mattress. She stepped across it like a tightrope walker.

  Trodden into the candle wax on the desk were her footprints from two nights ago. Like fossils from another time. The Book of Travels lay to one side. It still smelled faintly of coffee and some of the edges were singed. Lily scrambled up the stack of paper and stood on the first page.

  Now came the hard part: finding the chapter she needed. The bit that told her where Lilliput was.

  Lily walked back and forth wondering where to start. She opened the book to a random page.

  She read, ‘It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.’

  I’m wasting time, she thought. This chapter isn’t telling me anything useful.

  She turned back to page one. Gulliver started by writing about his life: after his studies he had come to London to become a doctor and study medicine. He had got married. His wife’s name was Mary.

  That had all been hundreds of moons ago, back when it had been the year 1699, before Nana’s nana had been born. Now it was 1720. Lily wondered where Mary was now. Gulliver had never mentioned her, not once.

  Maybe she had died whilst he was on his travels, or maybe he had just shut himself away from her, like he had from everyone else.

  Lily turned the page. She had always thought of Gulliver as her kidnapper. But once, long ago, he had been more than that. He had been a doctor. A husband. A father.

  Now he wasn’t anything. Just a lonely, locked-up man who was a long way from home. And, as Lily stood there, she suddenly felt sorry for him. It shocked her. She never thought she could pity Gulliver. Not after what he had done. But she could see now – even though he had kept her in a cage, he was the real prisoner.

  Wandering over the sentences, Lily tugged another page from the book and froze. There was a drawing – squiggled coastlines with tiny labelled names. She was standing on a map.

  Heart beating fast, Lily skipped over countries and coastlines, until she let out a choked gasp. Down by her toes was a tiny blob of an island that Gulliver had neatly labelled Lilliput.

  Soon I’ll be standing on Lilliput for real, she told herself.

  Trembling with excitement she dragged the map to the edge of the desk. It was like an enormous, stiff rug – far too big to carry or drag.

  So, using Stabber, Lily scored lines in the page and then folded them carefully. For the next few minutes, she worked silently, listening for any sound from the street that might signal the return of Gulliver. But there was nothing. Just the curtains rasping in the wind.

  Lily pinned Stabber back onto her jacket and looked down at the paper with satisfaction. It was a map no longer – now it was an arrow-shaped glider. Picking it up, she took a few unsteady steps backwards. Then she broke into a run, right to the edge of the desk and off … into nothingness.

  As Lily floated in the attic, Finn fell in the street. Over him stood Mr Plinker.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said the clock maker.

  Finn could not answer. He could not move. He was in shock. Everything had happened in a blur – Mr Plinker’s hand, shooting from the door; Finn jerking back and tripping; a flash of something jagged closing around his arm, like jaws …

  He stared down in horror at his wrist.

  The Waste-Not Watch was strapped on.

  Tight.

  And it was ticking.

  ‘I fixed it, Finn,’ Mr Plinker said in a wicked whisper. ‘I let all the other clocks wind down. I spent my time putting the Waste-Not Watch back together. I was going to go to the House of Safekeeping and buy another apprentice from Mother Mary Bruise. But then you came here and saved me the effort. And the money.’

  Finn turned round to call for help, but Mr Ozinda was already there.

  ‘You beast, you brute, you greasy-brained newt!’ he said trembling all over. ‘Let Finn go.’

  Mr Plinker narrowed his eyes to slits. ‘And who are you?’ he asked the chocolate maker.

  Mr Ozinda did his best to look terrifying. ‘Let Finn go!’ he repeated. ‘My fists insist!’

  Finn looked over at Mr Plinker. The clock maker didn’t look frightened at all. In fact, he was laughing to himself.

  Mr Ozinda stepped forward, swinging his arms. ‘You’ll regret your chuckles. Here – meet my knuckles!’

  Mr Plinker sidestepped him neatly, and Mr Ozinda’s punch went wide.

  ‘I’ll crunch you like a biscuit!’ the Spaniard huffed. ‘I’ll slice you like a flan! I’ll—’

  There was a dull THWACK as the clock maker punched Mr Ozinda on the jaw. The Spaniard blinked once, wobbled and collapsed onto the floor like a messy blancmange.

  ‘Pathetic,’ Mr Plinker grunted as he rolled the Spaniard into the alleyway, out of sight.

  ‘Mr Ozinda!’ gasped Finn. He scrambled to his feet and went to run, but then the hand on the watch travelled once around the clock face, and a tiny bell went ding-dong.

  All by itself the buckle tightened. Finn cried out, trying to tug the Waste-Not Watch over his hand. It didn’t even budge.

  ‘I hope you now understand how important it is to obey me, Finn,’ the clock maker said behind him. As Finn turned, Mr Plinker held out the copper key that hung on his neck with string. ‘Remember, only I can unwind the Waste-Not Watch. Do what I ask and I promise to stop the pain.’

  Ding-dong! went the watch, tightening again.

  Finn felt sick. Already the pain made his head swim. He couldn’t escape. He couldn’t do anything. Mr Plinker had him trapped once more.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked in a small voice.

  A smile spread over Mr Plinker’s face, the way water ripples from a dropped stone.

  ‘I want the Lilliputian,’ he said.

  LILY GRIPPED THE glider tight as it soared out of the attic door. She swerved right on the landing, then helter-skeltered down the steps.

  Air rushed in her face, and her stomach plunged as she went faster and faster. Then she tugged the glider to the left, whipped through the open doorway and into the workshop.

  Now it was night the room was much scarier. It was silent as a graveyard, messy as a slaughterhouse, gruesome as a torture chamber. Lily floated past the clocks. There was something ghoulish about their frozen faces, staring at her. Lifeless. Still.

  She shivered. Mr Plinker might be gone, but the stink of him was still so strong it made her want to gag. Her eyes darted about nervously, reminding herself that the clock maker was off chasing Finn, not lurking here.

  A sudden sound, halfway between a scream and sigh, made Lily wobble on the glider. It was so full of sadness it made her want to weep.

  ‘Skee … Skee …’

  ‘Swift,’ Lily breathed.

  She bit her lip with worry. His cries came from the counter, where the Astronomical Budgerigar sat. He sounded so weak. Finn hadn’t been here to feed him since yesterday morning.
What if he couldn’t fly? He had been trapped for so long …

  She spun the glider down onto the workbench in a tight corkscrew and skidded to a stop. Quickly she unfolded it back into a page, and taking Stabber she cut the map into tiny jigsaw pieces. An atlas. Stacked together they were the size and thickness of a Lilliputian book.

  Lily tucked the atlas into one of the saddle pockets and hurried forward, past a teetering stack of old clocks. Somewhere at the other end of the counter, Swift cried out for help.

  ‘Skee! Skee! Skee!’

  ‘Hold on!’ she called back, trying to calm him. ‘I’m almost there! Just a little longer …’

  Now she was close enough to see the Astronomical Budgerigar itself. Like everything else in the workshop the clock had wound down. There was no point waiting for it to strike midnight, and send Swift shooting out to call the time.

  If Lily wanted to free him she would have to climb inside the clock and untie him from the perch.

  ‘Skee!’ came Swift’s cry, more urgent than ever. ‘Skee! Skee!’

  Lily looked above the square face of the Astronomical Budgerigar at the small window. It was made of glass, with brass hinges.

  That’s where the perch shoots out, when the clock chimes the hour. That’s the best way in. Here goes …

  Stepping onto a bundle of clock hands, Lily began to climb. There were plenty of footholds, because the wooden casing was so cracked. Soon she had hoisted herself up to the window above the clock face. Brushing the dust from the glass, she peered inside.

  As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, Lily gasped.

  The clock was a dingy ruin, but it was still breathtaking. As big as a cathedral, as complicated as a steam-engine, as busy as a bee’s nest. The window was open, just a sliver. But it was enough. Lily squeezed inside, wrinkling her nose at the smell of oil and smoke.

  Dust lay thick on the floor, and long ropes of grease dangled and dripped from the centre spoke. Mashed up in the cogs were poor, squashed spiders that made her shiver. This was a terrible place to be trapped. It was deadly.

  Away from the window a wide tunnel led down into the heart of the machine.