Dragon's Green

by Scarlett Thomas

  When Octavia came back she didn’t sit down.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’ve got buns to make. Are you going through?’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Effie.

  ‘Do you want me to let you through to the Otherworld before the rush starts?’

  12

  Effie suddenly felt afraid of the blue mist and the Otherworld beyond. But that was where she was supposed to go, surely? That was where she was supposed to find Pelham Longfellow, although of course she had no codicil to give him. But perhaps he could help her in some other way.

  ‘All right,’ said Effie slowly. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Come with me,’ said Octavia Bottle.

  Effie gulped, stood up, and then followed Octavia over to the lectern.

  ‘Papers?’ said Octavia. But of course Effie didn’t have any.

  Octavia frowned. ‘Sleeve?’

  Effie rolled up her sleeve the same way she’d seen the blond man doing. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn’t. She felt hot, suddenly, and very embarrassed. Did this mean she wasn’t magical after all? Was she not a Neophyte? Not a true something? Of course Lexy had said that she couldn’t go through this door either, so maybe it was just normal but . . . Hadn’t her grandfather told her to find Pelham Longfellow? And her father had said he would be in the Otherworld. Was this all some big mistake? She shouldn’t have come here, though. That was clear.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Octavia. She felt so ashamed.

  Octavia looked confused.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure you haven’t at least got a document saying you are free to pass between the worlds? Your grandfather didn’t give you anything?’

  ‘Positive,’ said Effie.

  ‘Then why are you even here?’

  Effie shrugged sadly. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t let you cross over without your documents,’ said Octavia. ‘As well as a passport you should really have your M-card and the mark. If I did let you go, it would be a disaster. The Guild would revoke my licence.’

  ‘Where do I get the documents?’

  ‘Now, that I don’t know,’ said Octavia. ‘Liminals – the people who come in here – are a bit of a mystery, to be honest. I don’t know what happens to them in there,’ she gestured towards the door to the Otherworld, ‘but they aren’t half blooming secretive about it. As far as I understand it, you have to have been in once to be allowed back, but how you get in the first time without any documents or anything, I don’t know. I must admit I did wonder how you’d have the mark – but you do hear stories. Your grandfather was so well-connected that nothing would really surprise me. He didn’t always do what the Guild said, that’s for sure. And he had all those boons . . .’

  Effie wiped a tear from her eye. She couldn’t cry here. She had to just . . .

  Octavia patted Effie’s shoulder kindly. ‘Look, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get to the other side,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been there either. Lexy would love to go, but she’s never had the opportunity, poor thing. There’s no shame in not going. Some people say it’s terrifying anyway, and completely different from here. Although it does seem a shame that you’ve got your magic ring and all that M-currency and you can’t even use it. Maybe you can sell it all to someone for krubles or Realworld money? Or you could try to find another way in, although I don’t know how you’d do that.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry for putting you to the trouble of trying to let me though this way,’ said Effie. ‘I’d better get home. I’m late as it is.’

  She felt so sad and, now that the embarrassment had faded, sort of cold and alone. She started putting her cape back on.

  Octavia said goodbye and went back into the kitchen.

  ‘Do you want a tonic before you go?’ said Lexy.

  Effie had tears in her eyes. ‘What will it do?’

  ‘Help you out there. You said you were hungry, and you looked a bit weak when you came in. The buns are sort of magical. It’s complicated, but they don’t give you much actual Realworld energy. And after all that stuff with the ring . . . A tonic will help you get a bit of strength back. Maybe help you stay up and read? After all, you’ve got that book, Dragon’s Green. Maybe that’s got some answers in it.’

  ‘OK,’ Effie said, wiping her eyes. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘The only thing you have to do is give me a tiny amount of Realworld money. It doesn’t matter how much. It can be five pence or two pence. It’s just that we’re not allowed to give away tonics for free. There’s a Guild rule and . . .’

  Effie reached into her schoolbag to try to find her battered old purse. But . . . How odd. Something was vibrating somewhere inside. She wasn’t allowed to have a pager until she was fourteen, and unlike many of the other children she didn’t carry an old phone to use as a calculator, dictionary and torch. What could it be? She put her bag on the table and the vibrating got stronger. It seemed to be coming from the drawstring pouch that Dr Black had given her this morning. Effie reached in and found the clear crystal she’d originally taken from her grandfather’s secret drawer. When she put her hand around it, the vibrating stopped.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Lexy, leaning forward.

  ‘It’s the crystal I got from my grandfather,’ Effie said. ‘It seemed to be vibrating for some reason. It’s stopped now.’

  ‘Could I . . .?’ Lexy reached across the table. ‘Could I see it? If it’s what I think it is, then, well, I’d love to just look at it for a moment. In fact . . . I might even be able to use it to make your tonic stronger if I can just hold it for a few seconds.’ She blinked shyly. ‘But only if you don’t mind.’

  Effie shrugged. ‘OK.’ She held it out. It was a large oval-shaped clear quartz crystal mounted in a silver circle with a dark green stone set in it. There was a hole you could put a chain through so you could wear it around your neck, but no chain. It was very beautiful to look at, and heavy and reassuring to hold, especially now that it had stopped vibrating. It didn’t make Effie feel anything particularly different when she touched it. To her, it didn’t seem like a magical object at all – just a very nice one. And it didn’t seem like something she’d wear herself, more like something she’d admire on someone else.

  Lexy’s eyes grew bigger and bigger.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘Wow.’

  Effie put the crystal on the table between them so that Lexy could pick it up and look at it properly. As soon as she’d put the crystal down, it seemed to do a little hop in Lexy’s direction, and then began vibrating again.

  As Lexy’s hands got closer to the crystal she started giggling uncontrollably. ‘It’s so tingly!’ she said. ‘Ow! It tickles. Stop it. Come here, you . . .’ She started talking to the crystal as if it were a small, recalcitrant animal that she wanted to coax into its hutch so that she might give it its supper. Her words got softer and more jumbled until Effie could have sworn she was hearing some kind of magic spell. Lexy’s small hands came close to the crystal, then moved away, then closed in on it. ‘Got you!’ she said, finally, as she picked it up.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Effie.

  The crystal now sat in the palm of Lexy’s hand. Lexy herself looked as if a very flattering light had just been shone on her, as if the sun had come out above her head and no one else’s. Suddenly, she seemed so much more alive, vibrant and powerful than she had before, although with a strange touch of melancholy too. The crystal wriggled around on her palm as if it were trying to get comfortable, moving this way and that before it finally stilled with – unless Effie was simply imagining this – a happy little sigh.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Lexy. ‘And it does fit me. I wondered.’

  ‘What do you mean? And why do you look so sad?’

  Lexy frowned. ‘It means I really am a true healer. It’s a healing crystal – the only one I’ve ever seen. The only one I’m ever likely to see.’ She handed it back to Effie. ‘Thank you for letting me try it. I
can add a bit more oomph to your tonic now, at least.’

  The crystal clearly didn’t want to go back to Effie. It arrived in her hand feeling cold, heavy, and sort of sulky. It then got heavier and heavier until Effie had to put it down again. Once it was down, it started shuffling back across the table towards Lexy.

  ‘Don’t,’ Lexy said to it. ‘You belong to her.’

  ‘It wants to go to you,’ said Effie.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Lexy. ‘I suppose it does. I’m sorry, I didn’t think that would happen.’ She looked down at it fondly. ‘Shoo,’ she said. ‘You don’t belong to me.’

  The crystal simply threw itself into her lap and crawled into one of her pockets.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to Effie, taking it out and putting it back on the table. But the same thing happened all over again. ‘Look, I’ll get your tonic and then I’ll think of some way to persuade it to go back with you.’

  While Lexy was in the kitchen Effie tried to make sense of what had happened today. It seemed clear to her now that the crystal had brought her here so that it could find Lexy. That was the only explanation. Why else would her new abilities have brought her to a portal to another world that she wasn’t even allowed to access?

  Effie couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that she had inherited these wonderful objects from her grandfather and the only one that worked on her had almost killed her. The pleasure that Maximilian had in the glasses, and that Lexy had in the crystal – Effie herself had felt none of that with the ring. Well, it had felt amazing when she was playing tennis. But then she’d been so very drained afterwards – and, if Maximilian was to be believed, she had almost died. And something about the ring just felt wrong. As if it weren’t really meant for her. But hadn’t her grandfather said he’d found it specially?

  Lexy came back a few minutes later with a silver flask.

  ‘It’s not enchantment-free, I’m afraid,’ she said, with a twinkle in her eyes. ‘It’ll give you a bit of strength and help you read in the dark if you have to. I hope you like it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Effie.

  Lexy took the crystal from her pocket and offered it to Effie. The crystal seemed to duck, cower and try to hide, then it turned and rushed up Lexy’s sleeve.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  ‘You’d better keep it,’ said Effie.

  ‘I can’t. It’s worth thousands and thousands of . . .’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’

  ‘And it’s illegal to give away a boon unless you register it with the Guild.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you borrow it, then? We’re friends now, and friends lend things to one another. Like a long-term loan. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to use it in some way to help me find my grandfather’s books and get them back.’

  Lexy rushed over and threw her arms around Effie.

  ‘I’ll be your healer,’ she said. ‘Just like in the stories. You won’t regret this. Thank you, thank you. I’ll start working now on remedies and tonics to help you get the books back. Something to make Leonard Levar a bit sleepy, perhaps.’ Her eyes were sparkling. ‘Actually, wait here a moment,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to go and get . . .’

  When she got back she was holding a box with two brand-new walkie-talkie radios inside it. Effie had seen these devices plenty of times before but had never touched one. Only well-off children had two-way radios. And you needed to have a best friend to share one with anyway. After the worldquake, radio waves were the only thing you could really count on, and some of the richer and more popular children now had three or four of these devices in their bags – one for each friend. But it was more common to carry only one, which was connected to your best friend, and use your pager (if you had one) for everything else.

  ‘This was my Christmas present last year,’ said Lexy. ‘But I hadn’t found anyone to give the other one to before now. They’ve got a ten-mile range, so we can stay in touch always. And you can give me instructions on what sort of healing tonics you want.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Effie.

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Lexy.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Effie put one of the radios in her bag, thanked Lexy again for her tonic, and left.

  13

  So far, this was the best day of Maximilian’s life. Well, sort of. Well, it would be, were it not for . . . But he wasn’t going to think about that. His horrible secret.

  Anyway, he’d done it. He’d done what he’d always dreamed about. He’d epiphanised.

  Maximilian lived with his mother on the other side of town from Effie and Lexy. It would take about half an hour, if you had a really fast bike (or, in days gone past, a broomstick), to get from Mrs Bottle’s Bun Shop to the university. After that, you’d cycle (or fly) past the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange, where Mrs Beathag Hide was currently feeling cross and rather baffled, past the Old Rectory with its brand-new locks, past the hospital and the cemetery and the botanical gardens. You’d go down a road with big houses and ancient trees and around a corner. And then you’d get to a block of flats with concrete stairs, where a boy was currently pacing up and down the length of his room wondering what to do about everything.

  If you carried on past these flats to the end of the road, you’d get your first view of the sea. And there, around the corner and opposite the bingo hall, in a small bungalow with a pretty front garden, was Maximilian, with his magic freshly awoken, happier than he’d ever been.

  Except for, well . . . that. The thing he wasn’t going to think about.

  He’d spent the first hour after he’d arrived home simply looking at things through the Spectacles of Knowledge. Everything in his room was different. He could see the contents of his drawers and cupboards without even opening them. The spectacles helpfully provided an inventory of every item he owned and, until he asked them to stop, started working quite hard on finding new ways of ordering his socks, underwear, school uniform and so on, shuffling the items around this way and that in hypothetical scenarios that seemed entirely unnecessary to Maximilian.

  As well as looking at items in his room like this, he could, if he wanted, see into the ground beneath the house, and examine all the artefacts that had been buried there over the years. He could check on the battery life of his pager, his scientific calculator and his radio. If he opened a book, the spectacles would tell him all sorts of interesting facts about it, and could provide dictionary definitions or translations of any words Maximilian chose. It was a bit like the way old people said the internet had once been, only more so.

  Also, intriguingly, the spectacles seemed to give a set of statistics on every book in the room; a bit like the stats he’d seen hovering around Effie and Wolf. Like Effie and Wolf (but not like the neighbour Maximilian had peered at through the window just now), each book had two status bars – one green, one gold – that seemed to indicate energy or physical strength, along with something else. But books didn’t have energy or strength, did they? And as for the something else, the gold bar . . . Well, if that was (as Maximilian suspected) some kind of way of tracking magical power, or M-currency, as it was called on the dim web, then that was just bananas. How could a book have a life, and a magical energy of its own? The neighbour had no magical status bar at all, which was no surprise to Maximilian. But for a book to have one? It didn’t seem right, somehow.

  After his tea, Maximilian settled down to read old issues of The Liminal on the dim web, to see what he could find out about Leonard Levar and Griffin Truelove’s library. You usually needed a password and subscription to get into The Liminal’s Bulletin Board System – which cost a thousand krubles a year. But the spectacles had kindly supplied him with a lifetime subscription and unlimited access to the back issues.

  Maximilian was supposed to be searching for news items, but he kept getting distracted by adverts for exclusive and rare boons – for example, an archer’s bow made from silverwood and unicorn gut, complete wit
h fifteen enchanted arrows, all tipped with dodo feathers. It could be shipped from the Otherworld in just three hours for a total cost of 1.5 million krubles, or around a hundred thousand in M-currency.

  Also distracting were all the true-life stories of spells gone wrong, disastrous trips to the Otherworld, creatures from the Otherworld currently said to be on the loose, without papers, in the Realworld (these included obvious deviants like the Loch Ness Monster, the beast of Bodmin Moor, the faeries in the New Forest, Bigfoot, the man in the moon and the Bermuda triangle, plus all the usual yetis, ghosts and so on, as well as less obvious interlopers like the Northern Lights, three royal babies, one prime minister, a scientist and four world-famous athletes). Each issue of The Liminal also carried a recipe for a healing tonic as well as a free spell. And there was also a very diverting problem page.

  But he had promised Effie.

  An initial search for Leonard Levar brought up numerous articles, mainly from the news section of the paper. Although the reporters avoided saying so directly, Leonard Levar was something of an international book thief, involved in almost every major book heist of the last three centuries. He was alleged to own the original Voynich Manuscript – a secret document whose meaning had eluded scholars for centuries – along with a guide to the code it was written in. He allegedly had the minutes to every secret meeting ever held by the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar and the Speculative Society. He had an unpublished play of Shakespeare’s. He had John Dee’s diary, a selection of never-seen letters written by Queen Boudica, the lost journals of King Arthur and several unknown tablets from The Epic of Gilgamesh. The rarer a book was, the more likely Leonard Levar was to have it.

  If he did have any of these books, he had hidden them well. Multiple raids on his antiquarian bookshop had found none of the items he was alleged to have stolen. He had properties in France, Morocco and New Zealand, but searches of these properties had found nothing. Several years before, The Liminal had done a special investigation into Leonard Levar, but it found no evidence of the books he was meant to have stolen ever being sold on to anyone else. But what was the point of being an international book thief if you didn’t make money from your operation? It was as if every high-profile book acquired by Leonard Levar simply disappeared into some kind of black hole.