The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  ‘But you always say that! I have the frog one, dad, that’s your favourite!’

  She ran to get it out of her bag and show him, but it made no difference. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that soon,’ mom said, stroking her hair. ‘Right now, we have to focus on getting you well.’

  After that there was really nothing for Madigan to do. She was too tired to go and explore, and there was no one to play with in the room. So she counted the little swirls on the patterned carpet for a while, and then she imagined an adventure for herself where Pokoj got attacked by goblins and she had to save everyone, and then she fell asleep.

  When she woke up it was dinner time, and all the phone calls and the emails were done for the evening. She and her parents went down to dinner together. The restaurant in the hotel was called The Old Ballroom, because that was what it had been, once, back when Pokoj was still a house rather than a Heritage Site and Hotel.

  When he saw the sign on the door, Madigan’s father grinned at her. ‘A ballroom? Well, in that case …’ He swung her off the ground and waltzed her inside, and her mom put on a silly voice and said, ‘Announcing Lord Nicholas of Pittsburgh, and his daughter, the lovely Madigan!’ Madigan laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard that she started to cough, and her chest felt like a tunnel of jagged rocks that caught and scraped at the air as she sucked it in. When her dad put her down, she stumbled and almost fell over. The waltzing had made her dizzy, and the room was covered with dark blotches all running together, which hadn’t been there before.

  ‘Dad,’ she mumbled, ‘I think that thing’s happening again,’ and he was beside her at once, kneeling down with one arm around her and a bottle of water in his hand. ‘Oh Mads, Mads, I’m sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Are you out of breath, sweetie?’

  Madigan nodded, so he picked her up again very carefully, and carried her to their table. She lay in his arms and tried to take deep, slow breaths until she could see the room properly. After a while the jaggedness in her chest calmed down enough for her to sit up and look around her. The restaurant was very posh: there were some people playing violins and cellos up on a stage at the back, and waiters in black suits wandering around carrying silver plates with lids on. Whatever was underneath smelled delicious, but Madigan wasn’t sure that she could eat much right now. So she just had the bread and butter that was already on the table, in a basket with a white ribbon on the front. Her parents talked quietly as they ate, and Madigan knew that they were talking about her, and worrying that the thing with the black blotches might happen again.

  But by the time the dessert menus arrived they had cheered up, and she felt much better again too. As their plates were cleared, Madigan’s mom stretched her arms and looked around the table. ‘Now,’ she asked, ‘who wants ice cream?’ She meant Madigan, of course. But Madigan frowned at her.

  ‘I’m not allowed,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Why are you not allowed?’ Her mom said it like it was a game Madigan was playing, but it wasn’t. She frowned harder.

  ‘It’s against the rules. I had a cake at the service station before, you know that!’ The rule was that she was only allowed to eat one dessert a day. Her parents were very strict about it, most of the time. But now her mom was smiling, and pointing to something behind Madigan’s head. She turned with a sort of twisting feeling in her stomach to see another black-suited waiter, carrying a large glass bowl. They had ordered her some without telling her. Her dad was laughing as if it was a wonderful surprise, but Madigan felt her face getting hot, like someone was filling her up with water from a kettle. She shoved the bowl away from her, hard, glaring at them both.

  ‘I don’t want it. It’s against the rules.’

  Her mom was still smiling at her, but her smile had gone wrong somehow. When she smiled like that Madigan always knew that really she was sad, but trying to pretend that she wasn’t.

  ‘Mads, sweetheart,’ she said, ‘the rules don’t matter. You can have as much ice cream as you want.’

  ‘But I don’t want! I don’t want any!’ The buzz of conversation in the restaurant got suddenly quieter, and Madigan realised that she had been shouting. She felt like everyone was staring at her. She was breathing too quickly again, and her mom had an expression on her face like she had broken something that she didn’t know how to fix. Madigan wanted to tell her she was sorry, only she couldn’t now because the hot water inside her was trying to spill out from her eyes, and she had to screw up her face to stop it from escaping.

  And then she felt something brush against her cheek, and she looked up to see a man standing by their table. He was wearing a long cloak, dark blue with silver stars on it, and a top hat to match. His eyes when he looked at Madigan were deep green and brown, like the reflection on a pond in the middle of summer.

  ‘You don’t want any?’ the man repeated gravely. ‘Well this won’t do at all then, will it?’

  He pulled a large cloth from his pocket – it looked like the sky, Madigan thought, all black silk and silver sparkles – and shook it out like a toreador’s cape so that it covered the ice cream on the table.

  ‘Now then …’ The man looked at her, one eyebrow arched in a question.

  ‘Madigan,’ Madigan supplied.

  ‘Madigan; a pleasure to meet you!’ He took off his top hat with a flourish and bowed to her. ‘Allow me to rid you of this inconvenient ice cream.’

  In spite of her shame and the tears still seeping from her eyes, Madigan giggled.

  The man flexed his shoulders and stretched his arms as if he was preparing for a race. His hands darted back and forth in front of Madigan’s face, fingers wiggling over the covered ice cream as he said the magic words. Abruptly one of his hands held a fork from the table, which he handed to Madigan’s father.

  ‘A drum roll, if you please, sir.’

  The man paused, and looked into Madigan’s eyes again. Then he pulled off the cloth. The ice cream was gone. Madigan stared at the empty space on the table, her eyes wide. Then she looked at her parents. Her dad was clapping, her mom laughing in delight. She had her proper smile again, the sadness vanished along with the ice cream. Madigan had never seen anything so incredible in her entire life.

  That was how she first met Mr Stupendo.

  He stayed in the restaurant after that, sometimes at other tables and sometimes at Madigan’s, but never so far away that she lost sight of him. Every now and then he would glance over at her and smile, or raise one eyebrow as he had before. She watched him all the way through her parents eating dessert, and when they were done she pretended that she wanted a hot chocolate, just so she could watch him for a little longer. She sipped it as slowly as she could: by the time she was finished, they were almost the only people left. Mr Stupendo came back over then, and Madigan’s mom shook his hand.

  ‘Thank you so much for your wonderful trick earlier,’ she said. ‘It really cheered Mads up.’

  ‘You’re the best magician in the world!’ Madigan burst out. Mr Stupendo grinned at her.

  Madigan’s parents chatted with Mr Stupendo while the waiters tidied up for the night and put the chairs upside down on the tables. He told them about how he was staying at Pokoj for a few months while he worked in the restaurant and in the pub in Puppendorf, the nearby village. He was mostly doing magic, he said, but also some child-minding for the hotel. Madigan gazed at his cloak and his hat and his beautiful smile, and eventually she gathered up enough courage to ask him if he would do more tricks for her while she stayed at the hotel.

  ‘I accept the commission,’ he told her solemnly. ‘And I will place myself entirely at your disposal.’

  ‘Thanks so much,’ Madigan’s mother said. ‘We’ve got a lot on at the moment, and she gets so bored when she’s on her own.’

  ‘So long as she doesn’t get to be a nuisance,’ her father said.

  Then Madigan’s mother started explaining about the clinic, and about all the phone calls and the emails. ‘We’re not staying here for long, on
ly while we sort the details out.’ Madigan watched her fingers dance and drum on the table as she spoke, like she was saying magic words.

  Next morning, Madigan went to see Mr Stupendo as soon as she woke up. He lived at the very top of Pokoj, in the attic: the lady at the desk had told her where. The hotel had a lift which would take you to the first and second floors, but it didn’t go all the way up there, so Madigan had to climb the last flight of stairs herself. It made her so tired and breathless that she was afraid the blotches might happen again, but by stopping after every few steps and sitting down to have a rest she managed at last to make it to the top.

  When she knocked on the door and Mr Stupendo opened it, he seemed surprised to see her. He didn’t have his top hat on, but he ducked back behind the door and then reappeared wearing it, just so that he could doff it again as he bowed to her. Madigan laughed.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Stupendo,’ she said in her best polite voice. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

  ‘Not at all, Madigan,’ he replied, equally seriously. ‘If you’ll give me just a moment or two, I’ll be with you presently.’

  He didn’t invite her in, but he didn’t close the door. While he gathered his things, Madigan stood in the doorway and looked past him into his room. It was small: just a narrow bed, a wardrobe and a sink with a crack in it squashed together against peeling white walls. His suitcase took up most of the space on the floor. Madigan thought that a magician as good as Mr Stupendo must be able to stay in a nicer room than this. But maybe he had booked into Pokoj at the last minute, and this was the only one left. As he went over to the wardrobe to get his cloak Madigan saw his face reflected in the mirror on the inside of the door. For a moment he looked as tired as she had felt when she climbed the steps, and so sad that she wanted to run to him and hug him. But she didn’t, because she knew that she wasn’t supposed to have seen the sadness, just like she wasn’t supposed to notice when her mom’s smile went wrong. Mr Stupendo’s expression smoothed out into a smile as he turned to face her, and he held out a hand towards the corridor.

  ‘Let’s go and explore,’ he said, shutting the door behind him.

  They couldn’t explore very fast because Madigan was still tired out from the steps, but Mr Stupendo didn’t seem to mind. Every time she needed to stop and rest, he pointed out something interesting that they had just passed. He knew so much about everything! When she paused for breath halfway down the corridor outside his room, he showed her a square patch in the carpet just next to where she stood.

  ‘Touch it,’ he said.

  Madigan did, and felt how the floor underneath was a little lower within the square than to either side of it, and wobbled slightly when she trod on it.

  ‘When Pokoj was a mansion, that used to be a trapdoor,’ Mr Stupendo told her. ‘This whole floor was used to store things like sheets and pillows, and there were doors like this all over it which the servants could use whenever they needed to make the beds in the rooms upstairs. They’re all sealed now, but once upon a time you could use them to get into almost every room on the second floor.’

  ‘Secret passages,’ Madigan breathed in awe.

  ‘Exactly.’

  They carried on chatting as they walked down the stairs, about magic tricks and goblins, and how cool it would be if the trapdoors still opened and they could use them to sneak into people’s rooms and spy on them. Mr Stupendo took Madigan to the hotel museum on the ground floor, which had vases and bowls from the glass factory and a gold hoop which was found in the ground when the builders came to turn it into a hotel. There were paintings from when Pokoj was a mansion, and a wooden cat from the same time which Madigan looked at for ages. It was a beautiful kitty, even though the carpenter hadn’t finished it.

  They made up stories about all the things they saw. Mr Stupendo said that the gold hoop, which was almost as big as Madigan’s head, was a giant’s earring. That made them both laugh. After they left the museum, they went and sat outside on the terrace and chatted some more. Madigan told Mr Stupendo about her school back home, and all the places she’d been since she got sick. And eventually, because he was her friend, she told him about the lump in her chest, which was growing and growing and sometimes made it hard for her to breathe and to run around like other people.

  ‘That’s why mom wanted me to have extra dessert after dinner,’ she admitted, ‘and why she says that I can stay up past my bedtime.’ She looked at Mr Stupendo carefully. She was a little worried now that she had told him about the lump, because a lot of the time people who knew about it went strange on her. They looked at her differently, like they might catch it if they stood too close, or like she was made of glass now, and they couldn’t touch her any more. But Mr Stupendo held her gaze, and his expression didn’t change.

  ‘And what do you think?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think that rules are rules,’ Madigan said firmly.

  ‘Then I think so too. And I am at your service to dispose of unwanted desserts whenever the need arises.’

  It was almost midday now, and Madigan knew that she would need to go back to her parents for lunch soon. So she thanked Mr Stupendo for a lovely morning and told him that she was going back to her room now. When she tried to stand up, though, she realised that she couldn’t. Her legs had gone like legs in a dream: she could feel them under her, but however hard she tried she couldn’t make them move more than an inch. Not being able to stand made Madigan cry a bit, not because it hurt, but because she was scared that she would be stuck like this for ever. But Mr Stupendo sat by her and spoke to her in a soothing voice, telling her that it had been a busy morning and she had walked a long way, and that everything would be fine once she had had a good rest. Then he carried her back into the hotel and up in the lift, right to the door of her room. It felt nice being carried, and the rocking motion of his steps lulled and calmed her so that she soon fell asleep.

  When she woke up, she was in her own bed, with her mother sitting beside her and Mr Stupendo hovering just inside the door. He looked worried, but when he saw that her eyes had opened his face relaxed.

  ‘I think we’d better stick to less strenuous activities in the future,’ he said.

  Madigan tried to raise herself up a little on her pillow so that she could see him properly, but she was still too weak, and she flopped back down onto the bed.

  ‘Will you stay and talk to me?’ she asked him. ‘Mom, please let him!’

  ‘He’s got work to do, Mads,’ her mother said. ‘He’s already given up a lot of time to be with you. Let him go and do his work now.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to do until the restaurant opens,’ Mr Stupendo said. ‘I can stay a little longer. That is, if it’s not …’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Madigan’s mother said. ‘If you’re sure. Thank you.’

  ‘Please. It’s nothing. Madigan, what would you like to talk about?’

  ‘I’d like a story,’ Madigan replied eagerly.

  That afternoon, while Madigan drifted in and out of consciousness and her mother came and went in the background, Mr Stupendo told her the story of how he stole the moon. It was for a magic show, he said, a really big one. Ten thousand people came from all over the world to a huge round circus tent in a park just to see it. There were lots of magicians at the show, who did all sorts of things. One swallowed fire, and another knew how to escape from a locked chest with his hands tied behind him, and another could tell you your name just by looking at you. But Mr Stupendo was the star. He was the last person to perform, and when he walked onto the stage everyone in the audience went quiet. He bowed to them. Then he drew back a curtain at the back of the stage and there was the moon, stuck firmly in the sky like a sequin on black paper.

  ‘No one thought it possible,’ Mr Stupendo told Madigan. ‘The moon is as much a part of the landscape as the earth or the sea. How could one man shift it from its place? But I told them that the moon was a coin dropped from the pocket of God. It might fill our night sky with its l
ight, but it is no more than loose change to the heavens, destined to glitter for a time and then to be gathered up again into that vast celestial pocket. You won’t miss it; it was never yours in the first place.’

  He drew the curtain again as he finished his speech, and passed his hands across it once and twice and three times, drawing his fingers together as though to pluck the moon out of the sky. On the third time, he swept the curtain back once more and the sky was empty.

  Everyone was too astonished even to clap. Mr Stupendo had done it! Normally, magicians could only pretend to make big things disappear. They used trick photography, or the studio audience was really in on it all along and only pretending to be surprised. But no one could guess how Mr Stupendo had stolen the moon, and when they asked him he only raised an eyebrow and smiled in reply.

  As Madigan listened to the story, pictures chased each other through her mind almost too quickly to follow: the audience sitting in shocked silence, the full moon hanging in the sky like an apple on a tree, and Mr Stupendo himself, his cloak and hat sparkling in the lights of the stage.

  ‘You stole it?’ she asked him after he had finished speaking. ‘Right out of the sky?’

  ‘Right out of the sky.’

  ‘And then you got really famous, and everyone said you were the best magician of all?’

  Mr Stupendo looked at her and laughed. The laugh sounded a bit like a cough and a bit like a sigh, and not as if he thought that Madigan had said something funny at all.

  ‘Something like that,’ he replied.

  Madigan must have slept then, because the next time she woke up Mr Stupendo had gone to his shift at the restaurant, and it was dark outside. Her mom was sitting by her bed now, and she stroked Madigan’s hand with hers and sang to her, just like she had used to when she was very little.

  In Madigan’s dream that night, Mr Stupendo towered as tall as the clouds and strode past trees the size of matchsticks. He pulled the night from his pocket, a cloth of black silk and silver stars, and shook it across the air until the stars glittered. And then he reached up into the sky that he had made, took the moon between finger and thumb, and offered it to Madigan like a silver coin.