‘I’m not going to move, you egg,’ said Becky with a reassuring grin. ‘Just don’t go too far and know how to get back. Keep looking back over your shoulder. Things always look different when you’re going the other way.’
That was true enough, thought Becky. She had done a bit of bush walking. Her father Roger had been a keen tramper and, when he had been with them, he and Donna had often taken Becky into the bush for day trips. Sometimes they had gone with other families as well. Her father was mad about native trees and could identify just about everything he saw. Birds, too. He would have none of that, of course, in Australia. It would be like learning a whole new language. Becky could not imagine how her father could cut himself off from the bush and the birds. Any more than she could imagine how he’d been able to cut himself off from Donna and herself. But he had, and without warning. Things always look different when you’re going the other way. This was a useful lesson from the bush.
Johnny gave a little half wave and hurried off.
‘If you haven’t found it in ninety seconds, come back here,’ Becky called after him. ‘We have to stick together.’
She need not have worried.
Johnny was back within a minute, probably. He looked depressed and to Becky’s inquiring glance, shook his head. ‘No, it’s crazy. The ground starts to rise a few metres in. There’s no sign of the river. It’s just gone and there’s a hill there instead.’
Becky nodded. ‘I didn’t think you’d find it. This thing is just too big and too weird. I reckon our best bet is to return and climb back in that window.’
‘I guess so,’ said Johnny. ‘I just hope the bloody thing’s still open.’
‘Don’t say that!’ said Becky. ‘One problem at a time, shall we?’
She had not even considered the possibility that the window might have been shut again, and was a little annoyed that Johnny was making such bleak suggestions.
This time, Becky led the way. Instead of running at full tilt as they had when escaping from Arcady House, they now walked, trying as far as possible to keep to the route they had followed earlier. This time, though, the woods seemed endless. Becky remembered breaking into the shrubbery after running across the lawn. At some point the trees surrounding them must meet this border of lower shrubs and they should break through on to the lawn and be able to see the brick walls, windows and chimneys of Arcady House rising before them.
Increasingly uneasy, Becky paused to look around. She was sure they had walked at least as far as they had previously run. If anything, they’d walked further.
‘We haven’t gone off at a funny angle, have we?’ she muttered to Johnny.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.
‘It seems to be taking longer than I was expecting,’ said Becky.
Johnny nodded but did not otherwise reply. He had a tight, worried expression on his face.
‘Strange,’ whispered Becky.
She tried to convince herself that the fact that they were walking was making her misjudge the distance; and then she tried to persuade herself that going back always took longer than going from, although deeper inside she knew that it was the other way round.
After another minute of walking she could not persuade herself of anything hopeful at all. The trees ranged in front of her and on each side. They were all of a type: grey trunks and yellowy heart-shaped leaves. She wasn’t sure what they were. Her father would have known, she thought. Perhaps they were linden trees or some sort of spreading poplar. Whatever they were, it was perfectly clear that they were not going to give way to a border of shrubs and a lawn and Arcady House any time soon.
Like the street, like the river, like the noise of traffic, Arcady House had disappeared.
Shortly after this fact had become completely undeniable, they stepped into a small glade. Here the late afternoon sun lingered on butter-green grass that looked soft and inviting. It was such a relief to find it after the serried rows of tree trunks.
This glade, so like an oasis and so beguiling, seemed a good place to stop and consider the strangeness of their situation. Becky sat down, stroking the soft grass as if it were the fur of a friendly cat, a strange, unfamiliar but friendly cat. Although lush, it was perfectly dry. Johnny remained standing for some moments, gazing around with his habitual nervous expression, but then he too succumbed and fell to his knees, not far away from Becky.
‘Have you got a watch?’ Becky asked. ‘What’s the time?’
‘It says half past four,’ said Johnny, and then added in a small voice. ‘But that can’t be right. I mean it was after four when we left your place.’
‘Must have stopped,’ remarked Becky. Somehow, she didn’t think it would have been a simple battery failure, though. If simply by jumping out of a double sash window they could have launched themselves into a different world, then there was no reason to think that time would have remained the same as well. It could be any time, it could be any season, or it could be no time or no season at all. She wondered about the season. They had jumped out of autumn. Was this autumn? She thought so. The leaves were gold. Certainly, the air was fresh and clean, although it was not cold. Up above, surrounded by the circle of treetops, the sky was blue. It really should have been very pleasant. Instead it was ever so slightly terrifying.
‘What are we going to do?’ whispered Johnny.
Becky, who had been lying on her side, now rolled over onto her back and stared at the sky. There were no answers there. It suggested nothing at all. What could they do? They had no idea where they were except that it was not the world they knew, and they had no way now of getting back to that world.
‘Do you have a mobile?’ Johnny asked hopefully.
Becky shook her head.
She wanted a mobile. Most of her classmates had a mobile and Becky felt increasingly excluded by not having one. She knew her mother wasn’t averse to the idea either; it was a safety thing, but there was the issue of money. Since her father left it had to be one step at a time. If her mother hadn’t shelled out to buy the flute, then she might have been persuaded to let her have a mobile phone, but then if her mother had bought her a mobile instead of a flute she wouldn’t have been in this situation and wouldn’t have needed a mobile now. What was that called? A paradox?
‘Me neither,’ said Johnny.
He glanced around the surrounding trees. ‘It probably wouldn’t work here, anyway,’ he remarked gloomily. ‘I haven’t seen a hell of a lot of cellphone towers.’
Becky brightened a little. That was true. There was not much point in feeling frustrated about not having a phone if the bloody thing wouldn’t have worked anyway. And at that thought, another struck her.
‘Even if it did work,’ she said ‘what good would it do? We could tell people we’re lost but they’d still have no idea where we were or how to get here.’
‘So,’ repeated Johnny, ‘what do we do?’
Becky shook her head. ‘I’ve absolutely no idea,’ she said. ‘I’d sort of pinned everything on finding that house. But now that it’s gone the way of everything else I think …’
She paused trying to find the words.
‘What?’ Johnny persisted.
‘I think that really it doesn’t matter what we do. I mean, I don’t think it’s in our power to do much about what’s happening. It’s happening anyway.’
Johnny nodded.
‘I mean,’ continued Becky, ‘at home we can sort of shape our world, can’t we? We can use the phone and use the buses and maps and buy things and make decisions about what we want to do.’
‘Not always,’ said Johnny.
Becky glanced at him, but he did not go on to explain.
‘Sure,’ said Becky. ‘I suppose we have to go to school and stuff, but even there we can decide.’
‘You mean bunk?’
‘If we want to … But here there’s nothing we can shape, perhaps there’s nothing to shape.’
‘That’s not right,’
said Johnny. ‘We could stay here, or we could walk north or south or east or west.’
‘We don’t know which way is north, or south or east or west,’ said Becky flatly.
‘Well, left or right,’ persisted Johnny, ‘or straight ahead or back. We can make that choice.’
‘But that’s my point,’ said Becky. ‘We could make those decisions but it doesn’t matter a fig which one we make. We’ve no idea which decision is best and nothing to judge it by. If we decide to go to school or to bunk school we can see the consequences. We can’t see any consequences here whatever we do. It’s all in the lap of the gods.’
‘Yeah, but which gods?’ Johnny asked.
Becky didn’t reply. Suddenly the word gods had put her in mind of Paddy’s story of the maiden Syrinx. What had she been? A nymph? No, wasn’t it the nymphs who had turned her into a bulrush or something? She had been pursued by the god Pan and the god Pan was a creature, half-man and half-goat and …
She rolled over again and stared at Johnny remembering Dr Faunus and his little trotting walk. ‘Which gods?’ she echoed. ‘I have a sneaky feeling one of them might be Pan.’
‘Pan?’
‘An ancient Greek god, I think.’
‘Ancient Greek? So this is ancient Greece?’
‘I’ve no idea where it is, but I do know that the old guy in the wheelchair, Dr Faunus, had feet that looked like they belonged to a goat.’
‘Tell me about it!’ muttered Johnny. ‘That’s when things really started getting weird.’
‘Well, so did Pan,’ said Becky.
‘But they are just stories! There’s no such thing as Pan.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Becky continued. ‘That piece of music I played for him is by Debussy and it’s about this girl called Syrinx who was changed into a reed by a bunch of nymphs because Pan was chasing her and would have had her if they hadn’t got involved. Pan broke off some reeds, the one Syrinx had been changed into among them, and turned them into a pan pipe.’
Johnny stared at her.
‘You know all woodwind instruments have a reed?’
Johnny shook his head. ‘How does any of that help? I’ve still no idea what to do.’
‘I’ve tried to explain,’ said Becky patiently, ‘that it doesn’t really matter.’
‘But it does matter!’ protested Johnny. ‘You said it’s like being in the lap of the gods, but I reckon it’s more like being lost in the bush. We’re going to need something to eat and drink soon. I haven’t seen many burger bars or fish and chip shops around here. And it could get cold, or it could rain. People who get lost in the bush sometimes die, you know!’
Everything Johnny had said was true enough, but his saying it and his saying it in that panicky way, irritated Becky. She wanted to tell him to get a grip, to control himself, to calm down. The trouble was, she was getting more and more unsettled herself.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said crossly. ‘Why are you always asking me? Haven’t you got any brilliant suggestions?
Johnny started to protest, but Becky carried on. ‘All I know is that whatever else happens we have to stick together. It’s bad enough for us both but it’d be ten times worse on our own.’
Johnny nodded.
‘And the only other thing I can think of,’ said Becky, ‘is that we should take a right and see if that rising ground really is a hill. There might be a chance of a lookout or something if we climb high enough.’
‘You never know,’ said Becky, ‘we might see that burger bar from up there.’
It was a weak joke, but it served to release the tension they were feeling a little.
At that moment, though, a sound disturbed the silence and they looked at each other in astonishment. It was the sound of a whining engine in the distance. It could have been a chainsaw, but it sounded rather more like a motorbike.
‘That doesn’t sound like ancient Greece,’ whispered Johnny.
‘What is it?’ said Becky.
‘It sounds like a motorbike!’
‘But … but there aren’t any roads here.’
‘We don’t know that,’ said Johnny. ‘Anyway, it could have been a trail bike or a farm bike. They travel across country.’
‘I guess so,’ said Becky. ‘Let’s find that higher ground. There might be a chance of finding this road or trail or whatever.’
As they were talking the whine of the machine had continued like some angry blowfly or wasp. The sound rose and fell in pitch and seemed sometimes far away and sometimes quite close as if it were climbing up and down, or travelling some winding route; the sound waves sometimes coming to them directly or sometimes muffled or baffled by hills or trees. At times it seemed that the machine was the only sound in the world, large and somehow threatening. Certainly it had stilled the birds as soon as it arrived.
Despite its rather aggressive sound, Becky felt they must find its source for if it were a motorbike, it would have a rider. And a rider might be able to help them, could perhaps tell them where they were, could offer some chance of escape from this nightmarish situation she and Johnny Cadman had found themselves in.
‘Come on!’ she said, clambering to her feet. ‘Let’s go.’
As they had observed through the trees, the ground did begin to rise to their right. Not long after they left the pleasant little glade, it began to climb steeply. Walking became more difficult as the slippery leaves threatened their footing and from time to time they found it necessary to grab a trunk or a dangling branch to pull themselves up. Here and there rocky outcrops thrust through the earth and had to be negotiated. The vegetation became more varied too. They came across other kinds of trees and there was more undergrowth: ferns in dark hollows, strap-leaved lilies, and herbs of various sorts.
At some time, almost without their noticing it, the sound of the motorbike had faded and then disappeared. The birds returned. Every so often, as they scrambled up the hillside and down and up gullies of underbrush, a bird would jink off in alarm crying, or high above another bird would sing to yet another and there would be a trilling response from further away. They came across little evidence of larger animals though: no growls, no sudden shuffles or the sound of a panicky headlong rush through wildly thrashing undergrowth. Nothing noisy. From time to time, they did follow what appeared to be half-defined tracks, tracks that might have been animal trails although, if they were, they had not been used recently.
Eventually, they came across a much more prominent rocky outcrop, a bluff really, and one much more difficult to negotiate. It took several minutes of navigation before they eventually found a narrow gully beside it, which they could climb up hand over hand by clutching at smaller rocks and the tough little trees that grew on either side. For Becky, trying to hold her flute case in one hand, this was especially awkward.
This exhausting little climb led to a small plateau and from this they could obtain access to the flat top of the outcrop, which nosed out well above the tallest trees below.
While the view was spectacular, it underlined undeniably that the city whose suburbs they had travelled through a few hours ago had completely vanished. In its place were wooded slopes, and beyond the wooded slopes more woodland that gave way to green grassland on the valley floor. For Becky and Johnny now realised they were looking down on a sweeping valley. Directly opposite, faintly blue in the distance was another line of hills with what appeared to be limestone bluffs. Before the trees began again there was the serpentine glitter of what looked to be a slow moving river shining in the late sun.
The river flowed through the distant V of a valley and beyond there was a large shining in the late sun, a shining Becky guessed was a sea.
Becky’s face, which had been pink with perspiration, felt the cool caress of the mountain breeze. She glanced at Johnny Cadman who was still catching his breath. His face was red, too, and smudged with mud, and his hair was tousled and unkempt.
‘Wow,’ he breathed. ‘Look at that.’
‘Not many burger bars,’ said Becky.
‘Or roads,’ added Johnny.
That was true enough. In the whole landscape there was no indication of human habitation. No houses, roads, power poles, bridges. Becky shivered, remembering Johnny’s worries about food. She herself was already dying for a drink. The climb had parched her. Soon, too, she would need food.
But, there had been that sound. They had not imagined it. However, there was no sign of a road anywhere in sight, nor even a track.
With increasing disappointment she scanned the landscape again. And then, almost as Johnny Cadman said ‘Look!’ excitedly and pointed, she saw a thin column of smoke rising from the trees to their right just before the trees gave way to the grassland.
The column of smoke was their only hope. To reach it they would have to climb back down the hill, travel through the woodland and then walk along the grassland verge. It looked simple enough, but Becky knew how difficult maintaining direction would be once they were down among the trees again. To get down the hill they would have to zigzag and zigzagging was fraught with risk. Without knowing it they could find themselves heading off at disastrous right angles from their route.
‘Is there a place where the trees are less thick?’ she asked.
Johnny understood what she meant and scanned the area closely.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ he muttered.
‘Any landmarks?’
Once again, he shook his head.
Becky shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to risk it then,’ she said. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Let’s try to go down the same way as we came up. That way we might get back to that grassy patch.’
It was a good idea, but very hard to execute. They clambered down the steep gully and then retraced their steps around the base of the outcrop before beginning their descent once more. However, before long, all memories of which particular stretch of woodland they were in had faded and Becky realised with a sinking heart that they were travelling more in hope than precision.
The Enchanted Flute Page 6
