by Guy Jones
‘I told you, it’s fine.’
‘It’s a mess and you know it.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘And yet you still have to.’ Her mother softened. ‘Come on, little one, it’ll only take a moment. Let’s go and see the nurse and then we can go home.’
More poking and prodding, Jess thought. More and more and more and more. She’d had enough of it. She’d had enough. Something had to change.
Jess lay awake, listening for the arthritic creak of the stairs as her mother turned in for the night. A few minutes later the glow from beneath her door was extinguished, but still she waited. Street light streamed through the trees outside her window and threw shadows across her wall.
Only when she was sure the house was truly sleeping did she slip out of bed and into jeans and a T-shirt. She crept downstairs and paused at the front door, scarcely able to believe what she was about to do. I think she needs to be careful, Mummy. Very careful indeed . . . She cringed at the memory of Doctor Stannard’s voice. Then she turned the handle and stepped out into the street. Her stomach unclenched a little and suddenly she was nothing more than a normal girl, in normal clothes, able to do as she pleased. Her heart began to race and she couldn’t stop a grin from spreading across her face. I’m doing it, she thought, I’m really doing it!
The night air was soupy and warm, but she shivered as a slight breeze wrapped itself around her bare arms. In the winter months her mother often took her walking after dark, but in summer, when the sun didn’t fall until after her bedtime, there was no such luck. Jess had argued that the normal rules shouldn’t apply, but her mother had consulted Doctor Stannard, who had gone on for a while about the virtues of a good night’s sleep.
She glanced back at her house, the same as every other on the street. A couple of steps led up to a black front door, above which two first-floor windows peered down at her like a pair of eyes. Her mother’s room was on the left. What if she wakes up? Jess thought with a shudder. She could go back inside, it would be easy, but there was a whole town out there that she only ever saw from behind tinted car windows or the orange lenses of the Hat. And even worse was the way the town saw her – as something strange to be stared at and whispered about.
She blew out a slow breath and started down her road: a thin strip of tarmac sandwiched between redbrick terraces, at the end of which was a corner shop. The place had a bright blue sign that should have been cheery but somehow looked plain miserable.
That’s far enough, she told herself. It was the middle of the night, so that had to be far enough. And yet she kept on going, through the maze of houses and on to the High Street itself. There was a drumbeat playing in her head, getting faster and louder with a growing excitement she could barely keep concealed.
The shops were all sleeping, their shutters like closed eyelids casting a tarnished reflection of the street lamps. She knew that in the day it would be full of people, but the town was a different place at night. Gaudy rubbish clogged the gutters and the air was thick with the scent of fried food and vinegar.
She wasn’t surprised that people stared – a young girl out at night is unusual, after all, and she was small for her age to boot. A middle-aged man and woman, hand in hand, stopped and for a moment she was terrified they’d ask where her parents were. She didn’t break stride, walking as if she had every right to be there, but thought herself very small. As she passed them she felt the couple’s eyes slide off her. She smiled to herself. She was all right. She was all but invisible.
Weston Road traced its way downhill, from the High Street to the better part of town. It was lined on one side by large houses and on the other by railings. Beyond those was a slope spattered with low trees and bushes. At the bottom lay a park where street lamps threw strange shapes across the grey grass. A small lake glinted like a silver-black mirror.
Jess rested her hands on the bars, refreshingly cool in the muggy air. From her vantage point she could see a half-lit playground tucked away in one corner near the playing fields. At this time of night, it was a dead thing. The metal equipment was as bare as sun-bleached animal bones, stranded and forgotten in the desert.
The gate groaned as she pushed it and made her way down the zigzag path. She settled on one of the swings and began to rock herself back and forth, her shoes sending up puffs of dust as they scuffed the ground. It’s better than nothing, she thought, as if sitting there in the lamplight would give her some small part of what she missed out on in the day.
She could imagine them if she tried – those daytime children. They jumped into her mind’s eye as easily as the characters in her stories and she spoke out loud, narrating the scene as if reading from a book. There, on the seesaw, a brother and sister – twins by the look of them. The woman next to them almost certainly their mother, all three sharing the same thick black hair. Two small boys forced the mother to dodge aside as they pelted by making police-siren noises. The woman’s lips pursed and she shook her head slightly.
On the other side, an Indian girl with a megawatt smile was being urged higher and higher on the climbing frame by a younger blonde friend; a father tried in vain to coax a screaming toddler on to the slide; three mothers sat in a line on the bench, each with one eye on their phone and the other on their child. The shouts, cries and laughter merged together into a beautiful and bizarre racket. The playground was alive in a wonderful, disorderly whirl.
And then it wasn’t. It was simply dark and empty. The chain ropes of the swings clicked and creaked in the breeze. She fell silent.
When Jess was small, her mother had arranged for other children to visit and play, but it had always been difficult. It was hard to stay friends with the little girl who couldn’t go outside, who didn’t go to school. She still remembered the day all that had come to a crushing end, when her two so-called friends had told her that they’d made up a song just for her. She’d grinned at them, happy that they’d thought to do that, and waited for them to begin.
Freaky Jess, she can’t go out,
Can’t go out and run about.
Freaky Jess must stay inside,
Freaky Jess, she has to hide.
Over and over they’d sung it until her eyes burnt with acid tears, but that just seemed to spur them on. At last, thankfully, her sobbing attracted her mother’s attention. After that day two things changed: no more children had come round to play, and Jess had never again cried in front of strangers.
They’re the type of kids who come here, she thought. They must have played amongst these metal frames. But never in the dead of night the way Jess had to. The playground they saw was not the same as hers.
There was a noise. She came to a stop, listening hard. Nothing. There was nothing, and yet a new drumbeat started up in the back of her head that sounded like There’s something wrong, there’s something wrong. Jess eased herself off the swing and peered at the narrow, tree-lined path that led to the main road above.
That was her route home. Was there something up there, waiting to jump out at her? There’s something wrong, there’s something wrong, went the drumbeat. Her neck prickled and she shivered as if struck by a blast of freezing air.
It could be anything. A fox or a rabbit. Or a . . . a something. A something hiding and watching. That was enough for her – panic hit like breakers swamping a boat and she cast around for another way out. The playground was ringed by conifer trees, all crammed in side by side. If she could slip through, she’d be able to run across the playing fields and back up to the road that way. She searched and found a slight gap that she could force her way into.
The sickly scent of the firs flooded her nose and mouth, as if the trees were shouting in their own language that there was an intruder in their midst. Dull green limbs scratched and prickled her skin. Even the needles carpeting the ground joined the struggle, shouting their protest with every crunch of her feet. She shielded her face and scooped branches out of the way, almost swimming through to the other side.
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br /> But there was no escape. She found herself in a narrow corridor with the trees at her back and an impenetrable laurel hedge in front. She imagined whatever was out there starting to cross the playground with heavy, wet steps – some dripping creature of the night. There was another sudden gust of icy wind, out of place on a summer’s night.
She had to find a way through. She pushed along the corridor until finally, gratefully, she found a gap in the hedge. All she needed to do was get through to the playing fields on the other side and then run – run back to the road, through the town and into her bed.
She stepped through and into the impossible.
Jess’s mind looped around, trying and failing to make sense of what was in front of her. It stuttered to a halt, unable to cope with something so strange and illogical. Then, slowly, it came back to life and, with it, a dawning sense of wonder. For, on stepping through the gap, the whole world around her had changed.
Firstly, the moon had vanished. It had been there just seconds before, but now it was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the whole sky was different. The familiar dark tablecloth, scattered with stars, had been replaced by a mottled twilit heaven, like the most glorious sunset imaginable. From a light mauve in the distance it thickened into a deep purple above her head. It was streaked with clouds that burnt at their edges despite the absence of a sun in the sky.
Secondly, her arms were puckered with goose bumps. The night air was no longer a smooth summer balm, but rather a sharp-edged, biting chill.
And finally, most remarkably of all, everything in front of her was glistening white. She took a few steps forwards and heard a delicate crunch beneath her trainers. Looking down, she saw she was walking on a lawn, but instead of grass there were blades of frost. Looking back, she could see the footsteps of crushed ice she’d left in her wake.
She was in a garden, she realized. But one completely made of ice. Which is not to say that it was covered in ice, like a normal garden on a frosty morning or after a snowfall. Rather, every tree, leaf, rock, flower and blade of grass was composed completely and entirely of ice.
Jess closed her eyes, ready for the mirage to have vanished when she opened them again. But it was still there. It was real. Her breath turned to steam in the bitter air. She felt as if there was a taut string running through her, vibrating at a pitch somewhere between terror and joy.
Behind her a huge white wall rose up beyond the limits of her vision. In the middle was the thin crack through which she’d come. The ice was solid and strangely smooth to the touch, and looked as if it might go on for miles. Yet, when she stepped back through the gap, it proved to be no more than a few centimetres thick. The other side was the same as it had been: a laurel hedge with fir trees close behind. It was summer and a fat moon still hung in the sky. In fact, everything around her was just . . . normal. Yet when she went back through the gap in the hedge, the world was utterly changed. It was like looking at a car, then walking around to the other side to discover it was actually an elephant. Both states seemed to be completely real – no fakery or tricks of the light.
This can’t be right, Jess thought. This is just . . . But what was it? What could possibly explain the evidence of her own eyes?
She examined the gap itself, and saw that the ice had formed around the branches of the hedge, which jutted out in places. At ground level there was even a crushed drinks can held beneath the surface like an ancient insect trapped in amber. There was no other explanation for it – this gap was where two worlds merged. On one side was everything she was familiar with and on the other some kind of ice garden.
It was perfectly quiet, so much so it was almost unnerving. In the town you could always hear the rumble of far-off traffic or the whine of aircraft in the sky above. But the silence of the ice garden was as pristine as the air itself. No sounds from her own world leaked through. She was utterly alone, she realized. There was no one to disturb her. And no one to tell me what to do.
She hugged herself and rubbed her arms, trying to get some warmth back into them. For a moment she thought of running home for a coat and jumper, but what if she couldn’t find the spot again? Or worse, what if the entrance somehow closed itself up while she was gone? She thrust her hands deep into her pockets and forged ahead along the main path, ignoring the smaller tracks that occasionally sprouted from either side. The ice around her, she saw, was not uniformly clear. The flowers were a thousand different shades, laced with small hints of colour. She reached down and picked a stem, which snapped like an icicle breaking from a window ledge. Looking closely, she saw it was translucent but run through with craggy fissures that shone gently. She realized she was holding her breath, as if she feared that the slightest change would break the spell.
There was a low cliff off to one side and, hoping to get a better view of the place, Jess turned to head in that direction. She skirted along the bottom of the rise until the path began to climb steeply, winding its way towards the summit. She was panting heavily now, clouds of breath swirling around her. At the top was an ice boulder about the height of a tall man. The height of Doctor Stannard, she thought, with a lancing stab of annoyance. There was a hollow on one side that formed a kind of seat. A throne, she told herself as she settled into it and took in the view.
The garden stretched out around her like the parkland of a country house, but glittering white and brilliant silver. A spiderweb of winding pathways crisscrossed the rolling terrain. Here and there enormous trees stood alone, sentry-like, while smaller ones clustered in groves, as if gossiping to one other. A ring of woodland skirted the edge of the garden, cradling and containing it.
Her eyes searched the landscape, hungrily taking in each detail, and she began to name the things she saw as if they were places in one of her stories. Down amongst the flower beds was a colossal tree with a crooked trunk and two branches that hung forward like a pair of arms. The Old Man, she thought. On the other side of the Throne a long slope of silver grass rolled elegantly downwards – the Sweep seemed to fit it well. In the real world everything you saw, everywhere you went, had already been called something by someone else. But the ice garden was undiscovered territory. Things can be whatever I want them to be, she thought.
Far off, at the bottom of the Sweep, an assortment of tall hedges linked up in a strange sort of pattern. Jess stood up and squinted for a better look. All at once the shapes resolved themselves and she realized what she was looking at.
‘A maze,’ she said out loud. A maze!
She laughed, suddenly and without restraint. She threw her arms out and began to spin on the spot, cackling away. Her mind raced with the billions of thoughts and sensations brought to life by this mad, impossible place she’d discovered. This place which was all hers and no one’s but hers.
But then the laughter caught in her throat at the sight of something new, something she hadn’t noticed. She walked to the edge of the slope. The ground there was hard and smooth, without any covering of ice-grass. But there was one patch where the wind had created a shallow snowdrift. And there, in the middle, was a footprint. She gawped: it was the footprint of a person. But that person wasn’t her.
‘There’s someone else here,’ she said weakly, and as if in answer a faint breeze swirled and wrapped itself around her.
The Big Book of Tales wasn’t going to write itself. Just because she’d been off exploring a bizarre new world, it didn’t mean she could neglect her responsibilities. Her great project. Jess picked up her favourite pen along with several sheets of paper and flicked on her desk lamp. The temptation to simply describe the events of the night before was almost overwhelming. If she could turn that pure blast of experience into carefully chosen words and phrases, then perhaps she could start to make sense of it. But that was impossible, surely? How could mere scribbles on a page help her understand something so incredible?
And there was something else stopping her – a creeping dread that bubbled up, bile-soaked and burning, from the bottom of her sto
mach when she remembered that footprint. I wasn’t alone, she thought. There was someone else there, in her own frozen paradise. Someone who might even have been watching her.
Or was there? she asked herself. Was what she’d thought of as a footprint anything of the sort? She remembered the way her own steps had looked, the pattern from the bottom of her trainers clearly stamped into the ice grass. It hadn’t been like that at all – more like the indistinct mark of a bare foot in sand. And who would go without shoes in a place like the ice garden? Still, though, her skin crept and crawled at the memory.
She scanned her room for inspiration. Thick curtains blocked out any trace of the sun. She couldn’t open the windows in case a gust of wind blew them out of place and so a plug-in air-conditioning unit sat in the corner by the door, whirring and burbling away. The light above her bed was encased in a silver shade which smoothed out the glare of the bulb. The walls were covered in pictures she’d printed out. They were mostly the stuff of her imagination: towering gothic castles and deep, dark woods. But here and there were snapshots of a band she liked at the moment, whose toothy smiles and perfect hair made her heart do a little jitter.
Today, though, none of it helped. The ideas refused to come and she was reduced to scrawling practice signatures across the first sheet of paper. It was important for her to have a good signature so that she could sign all those books she was going to sell. She imagined the queues of people, the little conversations, the children explaining how much her stories had meant to them. They’ll have to close the blinds in the bookshop when I come, though. Either that or I go Full Hat. The thought landed with a sickening thud. She hated these moments, when reality took a wrecking ball to her fantasies. She was saved from having to dwell on it by the chime of the doorbell downstairs and, a few moments later, a cheery cry of ‘Bonjour!’
Although Jess took most of her lessons with her mother, there were some subjects for which they brought in outside tutors. Of these her least favourite by far was Mrs Agatha Dobson, who insisted on speaking English with a French accent, despite originally being from somewhere near Swindon.
