Staring at the mess of smashed metal, I realized that Quillan was a territory with technology that was so advanced, they were able to create lifelike self-powered robots. I could only hope they weren’t all going to be chasing me.
I did a quick cleanup of the broken crate and the crushed robot-quig-spider. I didn’t think anybody would be wandering by, but just in case, I wanted to hide any evidence that I had been there. I kicked the debris into a corner between a couple of large crates, making sure I swept up every last remnant of mechanical-gut stuff. After I was satisfied that the mess was hidden, I set out to find my way out of there. It was time to see what other surprises lay in wait for me on Quillan.
The Eidolon
Chronicles, Book I:
The Secret Country
By Jane Johnson
Ben wants a Mongolian fighting fish more than anything. But when he goes to Mr. Dodds’s Pet Emporium with his hard-earned savings, he buys a cat instead. He didn’t have a choice, really. The cat insisted.
Iggy (as the tabby likes to be called) has been kidnapped from his home, a parallel world known as the Secret Country. And as the two soon discover, Iggy is not the only animal to fall victim to the pet store owner’s devious scheme: Mr. Dodds is stealing the Secret Country’s magical creatures and selling them to England’s rich and curious.
“[A] marvelous start to what promises to be a wonderfully offbeat and original series.”—Clive Barker
JANE JOHNSON is the director of Harper Collins UK’s fantasy and science fiction list and the world’s leading expert on J. R. R. Tolkien. Jane was one of only a handful of visitors to the Lord of the Rings film production set, and the only one ever allowed to take photographs on site. Those pictures formed a reference for her work on the New York Times–bestselling visual companions to the movies. While she has written adult novels under the pseudonyms Jude Fisher and Gabriel King, this is her first novel for children. She lives in London with her Norwegian forest cat, and in Morocco.
Visit www.simonsayskids.com for more on The Secret Country, including an author Q&A.
AVAILABLE NOW
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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Chapter One
Mr. Dodds’s Pet Emporium
Ben Arnold was not a remarkable-looking boy. Not unless you looked closely. He had unruly straw-blond hair, thin legs, and quite large feet. But his eyes had a faraway expression; and when you got close enough to notice, you could see that while the left one was a sensible hazel brown, the right shone a wild and vivid green. Ben believed this oddness to be the result of a childhood accident. One day, his mother had told him, while being pushed up the High Street in his stroller he had stuck his head out unexpectedly and banged it hard on a lamppost. He had been rushed to the hospital and when he came out one brown eye had gone green. It was as simple as that. Ben couldn’t actually remember the accident, but he had long since stopped wondering about it. He had other things on his mind, after all.
Which was why, this Saturday morning, he found himself walking briskly along Quinx Lane, his heart thumping with excitement. It had taken him weeks to save up for this. One day on his way home from school, when pressing his nose up against the glass of Mr. Dodds’s Pet Emporium, he had seen something so special he had been obsessed ever since. Amongst all the colorful paraphernalia of the Pet Emporium, looking as wicked and shiny as jewels, switching back and forth in their brightly lit tank, their fins fluttering like the pennants on a medieval knight’s lance, were two Rare Mongolian Fighting Fish, as a neon-orange cardboard sign announced. Did they live up to their name? he wondered; and if so, how did fish fight? He had taken a deep breath and gone into the shop there and then to ask how much they cost. He had nearly fainted on the spot when Mr. Dodds told him, and so had headed home, grim and silent with determination, moneymaking schemes careering round his head.
Every day since, he had checked to make sure the fish were still there. He wanted to own them more than he had wanted anything in his life.
Mongolian Fighting Fish!
He desired them. He coveted them, a word for which he had had till then only the vaguest of Biblical associations. Before he went to sleep each night, he pictured them swimming around in a tank mysterious with soft light and fronds of weed. When he slept, they swam through his dreams.
He’d saved his birthday money (twelve at last!), his pocket money, and whatever he could make from extra errands and odd jobs. He’d cleaned his father’s car (three times, though it was an ancient Morris, and polishing it just seemed to expose the rust patches); he’d mowed next door’s lawn (and a flowerbed, when the mower got out of control, but luckily they hadn’t seemed to notice); he’d peeled potatoes and washed windows; he’d vacuumed and dusted and ironed, and even (and this had been really horrible) changed his youngest sister’s diaper, which made his mother very happy indeed.
Before long, he’d gathered quite a tidy sum, which he carried around with him, to keep his elder sister off it.
“I can tell it’s burning a hole in your pocket!” his mother had teased him gently.
What would happen, he wondered, if it did burn a hole in his pocket? Once it had done that, would it stop at his leg? Or would it keep on burning, right through his leg, into the road, down through the sewers and into the core of the Earth? Goodness knows what might happen if he didn’t buy his fish: Failure to do so might bring about the end of the world!
He turned off the High Street and into Quinx Lane; and there it was, squeezed between Waitrose and Boots the Chemist. The great ornate gold letters above the shopfront announced it grandly: Mr. Dodds’s Pet Emporium. A throwback from a bygone age, his father called it, and Ben sort of knew what he meant without being able to put it into words. It was a shop full of clutter and oddities. It was a shop full of wonders and weirdness. You never knew what you might step on next: in amongst the shiny silver cages, the collars and leashes and squeaky toys, the dog baskets and cat hammocks, the sawdust and sunflower seeds, the hamsters and talking birds, the lizards and Labrador puppies, you had a vague feeling you might just stumble upon a tangle of tarantulas, a nest of scorpions, a sleeping gryphon, or a giant sloth. (He’d never yet done so, but he lived in hope.)
Holding his breath, Ben gazed in through the murky window. They were still there, at the back of the shop: his Mongolian Fighting Fish—swimming around without a care in the world, little realizing that today their lives would change forever. For today they would be leaving Mr. Dodds’s Pet Emporium and traveling—in the finest plastic bag money could buy—all the way to Ben’s bedroom, First Door on the Right on the Upstairs Landing, Gray Havens, 27 Underhill Road, just past the Number 17 bus stop. And that afternoon Awful Uncle Aleister was coming over to drop off an old fish tank for which they no longer had a use. (“Awful” had become an automatic part of his name as far as Ben was concerned, for very many reasons not unrelated to his braying laugh, loud voice, and complete insensitivity; and the fact that he and Aunt Sybil had spawned his loathed cousin, Cynthia.)
Feeling the weight of destiny in his hands, Ben pushed open the heavy brassbound door. At once he was assailed by noise: cheeps and squawks and scratchings; rustlings and snores and barks. It was really quite alarming. Thank goodness, he thought suddenly, that fish were quiet. Surely even Mongolian Fighting Fish couldn’t make much noise? A badly behaved pet would be a terrible trial to his poor mother, as Aunt Sybil had reminded him. Frequently. And she did have a point; for Cynthia’s piranhas had not been the best behaved of creature companions. But that was another story.
Ben’s mother had not been well for some time now. She had complained of tiredness and headaches, and the skin below her eyes was always thin and dark. No one knew what was the matter with her, and she just seemed to get worse and worse. She had, as Ben’s father said, always been “delicate”; but in the last few weeks she had declined suddenly, and now she found it easier to use a wheelchair than to walk. It made Be
n very sad to see how tenderly his father picked her up at night to carry her to their room.
Sometimes Ben would find his father sitting quietly at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. “It’s as if she’s allergic to the whole world,” he had once said helplessly.
But she wasn’t allergic to animals. Ben’s mother loved animals. She had, as people say, a way with them. Stray cats came to her as if from nowhere. Dogs walked up to her in the street and laid their heads in her hands. Birds would settle on the ground in front of her. Ben had even seen a pigeon land upon her shoulder, as if it had something to tell her. She had encouraged him to save for the fish. “Looking after other creatures teaches us responsibility,” she had said. “It’s good to care about someone other than yourself.”
A man pushed in front of Ben, and for a moment he was terribly afraid that he would stride up to the counter and demand that Mr. Dodds’s assistant pack up Ben’s fish; but instead he grabbed a sack of dried dog food, slapped a ten-pound note on the counter, and left without even waiting for his change. Outside the shop, its thick leash tied very thoroughly to the brass rail, a huge black dog glared at the man, its red jaws dripping saliva onto the pavement. Anxiously, Ben stepped over a heap of spilled straw, avoided a collection of oddly shaped and buckled tartan coats, threaded his way between a narrow row of cages, one of which contained a noisy black bird with orange eyes, and—
Stopped.
He tried to step forward a pace, but something—someone?—was holding him back. He stared around, but there was no sign of anyone behind him. Shaking his head, he started off again. But again he was pulled back. He must have snagged his jacket on one of the cages.
He turned around carefully so as not to make the snag any worse. It would not do to return home with a pair of Mongolian Fighting Fish and a ripped coat. He fiddled with the area that seemed to be caught, and found, not a spike of wire or a sharp catch, but something warm and furry and yet hard as iron. Skewing his head around until his neck hurt, he stared down. It was a cat. A small black and brown cat with shiny gold eyes and a remarkably determined arm. It appeared to have reached out of its cage and snagged its sharp little claws in his jacket. He smiled. How sweet! He made an attempt to pry it loose, but the cat clamped its fist together even harder. The fabric of Ben’s jacket became rucked and furrowed. Ben’s smile became a frown.
“Let go!” he said under his breath, picking at its powerful claws.
The cat looked at him, unblinking. Then it said very distinctly, in a voice as harsh and gravelly as that of any private investigator with a bad smoking habit, “There’s no way you’re leaving this shop without me, sonny.”
Ben was shocked. He stared at the cat. Then he stared around the shop. Had anyone else heard this exchange, or was he daydreaming? But the other customers all appeared to be getting on with their business—inspecting piles of hamsters sleeping thoughtlessly on each other’s heads; poking sticks at the parrot to try to make it say something outrageous; buying a dozen live mice to feed to their python…
He turned back to the cat. It was still watching him in its disconcerting way. He began to wonder whether it actually had eyelids or was just saving energy. Perhaps he was going mad. To test the theory he said, “My name is Ben, not Sonny.”
“I know,” said the cat.
Chapter Two
A Sudden Change of Heart
“I came here to buy some fish,” Ben said firmly. “Mongolian Fighting Fish.” The cat still hadn’t blinked. “Over there, see.”
The cat’s eyes flicked boredly across the bank of glass tanks on the far wall of the shop. It still held on to his jacket tightly. “Oh, fish,” it said. “You don’t want fish. Who wants wet pets?”
“I do,” Ben protested hotly. “I’ve been saving up for them for weeks.”
“But what can fish do?” said the cat in a tone of ultimate reason. “They just swim up and down all day.” It thought for a moment. “And sometimes they die and float to the surface. It’s not a lot to boast about. It isn’t as if they have much effect upon the world.”
“These,” said Ben proudly, as if he owned them already, “are Mongolian Fighting Fish. They…fight.”
The cat regarded him askance. He could have sworn it raised an eyebrow, but because cats’ faces have fur all over and not just as eyebrows, it was hard to tell.
“Obviously,” the beast said, this time with a clear edge of contempt, “you know very little about fish. Mongolian Fighting Fish indeed. There’s no such thing. It’s just a marketing strategy. So many pretty fish to choose from: How do you persuade a boy to part with his hard-earned cash? You give your fish an exciting name and let your customer’s imagination run away with itself.”
At last it blinked.
Ben was furious. “That’s not true! I saw a picture of them in Fish: The Ultimate Encyclopedia—”
“And who was the author of that esteemed tome?”
Ben concentrated hard. He pictured the cover of the book, with its gorgeous angelfish and archerfish, its dogfish and catfish and rabbitfish, thornbacks and triggerfish, its groupers and gobies and grunions. And in the middle of them all, swimming in a sea of fins and scales in long black letters as sleek as any shark, the name A. E. Dodds…
His face fell.
“You mean, it’s a trick?”
The little cat nodded. “Worst sort of untruth.” It eyed him solemnly. “Mongolia’s landlocked and mainly desert, anyway. Nowhere for a fish to live.”
“Next you’ll be telling me they don’t fight, either.”
The cat shrugged. “They might argue a bit, I suppose.”
A shadow fell across him.
“I beg your pardon, laddie,” the shadow said. “What don’t fight?”
Ben looked up. Mr. Dodds was standing in front of him. Or possibly, since he was a very tall man, looming over him. He didn’t look as you might expect the owner of a pet emporium to look. He wasn’t old and benign-looking, and he didn’t wear overalls covered with dog hair. He didn’t have little half-moon spectacles, or smell of rabbit food. No, Mr. Dodds wore a sharply cut Italian suit with narrow lapels and very shiny buttons. He had a bowtie made from some sort of weirdly patterned fur, like luminous leopardskin, and his smile was as white as a television advertisement for toothpaste.
Ben quailed slightly. Mr. Dodds had that sort of effect on you.
“Er, the Mongolian Fighting Fish?”
“Nonsense, laddie! They fight like demons. Not in here, of course—too many distractions; but get them home to a nice quiet room and they’ll be at each other’s throat in no time. Lovely family pets.”
Ben was beginning to have serious doubts about his dreams of the last several weeks. Even if Mr. Dodds was truthful, the idea of owning a pair of fish that actually wanted to hurt one another was becoming less attractive by the minute. Bravely, he looked the pet shop owner in the eye. Mr. Dodds had large eyes, eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil and no iris, as if all available light were being sucked into them with not even the slightest hint of a reflection.
“I had heard,” Ben started nervously, “that some creatures don’t always live up to their names. And also,” he went on quickly, “that Mongolia has no ocean, and therefore no…fish….”
Mr. Dodds’ eyes widened slightly. A second later and his smile followed suit, but the expression that had crept onto his face was not amused.
“And who might have given you this remarkable information, laddie?” he inquired gently.
Ben looked down.
“Well, go on then, Ben,” came the gravelly voice of the cat, “tell him who told you.” It grinned at him unhelpfully.
Ben looked up and found Mr. Dodds fixing the cat with a gimlet glare, a glare that suggested he would like to strangle it, or maybe just swallow it down, fur and all, in a single mouthful. Even so, it was hard to tell whether he had been a party to their conversation, or just wasn’t very fond of this particular item of stock.
“
Er,” floundered Ben, “I can’t remember. Maybe I read it in a book.”
“Oh, yes,” said the cat sarcastically. “That would be Mr. Dodds’s Great Big Book of Lies, then, would it?”
The pet shop owner reached out with sudden shocking speed and did something that made the cat wail. Ben whirled round in horror, only to find Mr. Dodds extricating the creature’s claws, with seeming care, from the back of Ben’s jacket.
“Whoopsadaisy,” Mr. Dodds said lightly. “This little fellow seems to have got himself caught up with you.”
So saying, he gave the final claw a spiteful twist and pushed the cat away with an uncompromising finger. It hissed at him, ears laid flat against its skull, and retreated into the cage.
Mr. Dodds straightened up. He seemed taller than ever.
“You’ve got to go with your heart, laddie, follow your heart’s desire. It does no good to hanker after a dream and not pursue it to the ends of the earth.” He leered at Ben, gave him an encouraging wink. “Do the right thing, son: Spend the money you’ve saved all these weeks. Can’t have it burning a hole in your pocket, can we?” He moved toward the fish tanks, reached up to collect the little plastic scoop to remove the Mongolian Fighting Fish, and regarded Ben expectantly.
Ben looked at the black and brown cat. It was crouched at the back of the cage with its paw cradled to its chest. When it looked back at him, its eyes were hot with misery, and at the same time a barely suppressed fury. He sensed a challenge, an invitation. He looked at the fish. They circled sweetly through the miniature bridge with which someone had decorated their tank, entirely unconcerned by the world and its ways. One of them swam up to the surface, the artificial lighting making its scales glow like rubies and sapphires, and banged its head on the air pipe. They were, he decided, very pretty, but possibly not very bright. He looked back at Mr. Dodds—who was standing there like a waiter in a posh restaurant, fish tank lid in one hand, scoop in the other, ready to dish out his order—and made a momentous decision.
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