by Valija Zinck
Seller said nothing. He looked down again at the creeper corms and narrowed his fish-eyes. After a moment, he tapped a code into his phone and an extendable ladder rattled from the top of the well down into its depths.
Tractor Man ran off toward the big steel gate.
* * *
Hurriedly, Seller climbed down toward the giant tubers. He shivered as he reached the bottom of the well; it was freezing down here. He took a step toward the still-growing roots and picked them up. Thump! The Anti-Eye fell between his feet.
“Well, well, what have we here?” he said, grabbing the small tin box. “Hmm, this is really … Serge! Serge! Come quickly. I’ve found something!”
A hint of enthusiasm passed over Seller’s usually expressionless face. He had a passion for anything technology-related. For a moment, he forgot why he was there, and only had eyes for the silvery gadget in his hand. Without thinking, he pressed his finger down on the rusty button on top of the tin box …
“What have you found, Seller?” Tractor Man came back over the lawn and looked down the well. “Seller, where the heck—?” He glanced around in confusion.
Keep your hair on, Serge, I’m still down here, Seller tried to shout, but all that came from his lips was a soft Sssspppt noise. He pressed the button a few times, trying to make himself visible again, but that didn’t work, of course. Stupid piece of scrap metal! he whispered soundlessly, and started to climb back up the ladder.
“Selleeeeeeerrr?! Come on, man, what’s going on here?” Tractor Man looked all around him in panic, then jumped a foot in the air as his invisible, voiceless sidekick touched him on the arm.
The impact with the floor of the well had got the Anti-Eye working properly again—well, almost. The invisibility was working the way the box’s creator had intended. It now made a person invisible for half an hour—and they returned in pieces: first the head, then the feet, with the rest of the body following afterward. But as Seller had pressed the Anti-Eye several times, he would remain invisible for several hours—and voiceless too, as that was the only thing that hadn’t corrected itself.
Penelope and her father stood pressed against a column at the far end of the yard, hardly daring to breathe—they couldn’t hear the sounds of commotion and struggle any longer, and Penelope was worried that the two men had started searching for her father in earnest. A gentle breeze made the trailing ivy rustle over the high stone wall.
“We need to get over that,” Leo whispered. He scanned the wall, checking for protruding stones that might serve as footholds, even though the top of the wall was a trap of barbed wire and broken glass. He was desperate—but Penelope knew it was too dangerous. She turned her attention to the gravel drive leading toward the steel gate. We’ll have to go out that way, she thought. But the gate was locked. Her eyes wandered over the lawn, over the moss, glided over the stone figures, before resting on the angel with the large wings. A blurry image swam through her head, a faded memory of a story. No, not a story—a dream—the dream she’d had that morning! The one where she was crawling through a park with a red-headed man … what was it that the man had asked her?
How do you know that the key is under the angel? Or something like that?
And Penelope had replied: I dreamt it.
* * *
Penelope glanced around the yard. Finding no sign of pursuit, she sprinted to the marble angel and reached instinctively into a narrow gap at the foot of the pedestal. A key on a black band. Bingo.
“Come on, Dad,” she called to him softly.
He was gazing at her wonderingly. “How did you … ?”
“Never mind—come on!”
Together, they ran for the gate. The key slid into the lock, Penelope turned it, the lock clicked, she pushed the gate open. She slipped through, her father following wide-eyed, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was real. She locked the gate, and together they raced down Rose Street, across the village square, past the town hall, past the post office and the shop, where people shot curious glances at the girl and the man tearing through their village. On and on they ran, over the narrow dirt road, up the embankment, and into the forest.
Completely exhausted, Penelope and her father stopped in a clearing full of blueberry bushes and gasped for air. Penelope felt heavier than ever, and her father was very weak, of course. They were lucky to have made it so far.
“We could slow down a bit now. They won’t be able to sense us from this far away, and the trees will hide us too,” said Leo Gardener, gasping for breath.
The Blackslough church clock struck three.
“No, we can’t slow down.” Penelope started running again. “The last train to Senborough leaves at quarter past three. We need to be on it!”
She was in such a hurry that she stumbled and fell. Her father offered her a hand, helping her to her feet—it felt funny and a little bit nice, holding her father’s hand. And then they were off again, weaving through the trees and sprinting over the stubble field, along the dusty roads and past the yards with the chain-link fences. As they reached the station, the train was already there and they jumped into a jam-packed carriage. The doors closed, and they were off.
Penelope and her dad stood very close together, back to back, squeezed between strangers who couldn’t escape their sweaty bodies but shot them plenty of disapproving glances. The train was as full this afternoon as it had been empty this morning; it wasn’t even possible to turn around. They couldn’t even look at each other! Even so, Penelope kept thinking, My dad is right here! and kept trying to glance at him over her shoulder. At least no conductor would be able to squeeze through this jam of people to check their nonexistent tickets!
As they were boarding the bus in Senborough, Penelope held her monthly ticket up like a protective shield and said to her dad, “Let me talk to the driver. I know him a little. Maybe he’ll let you ride for free.” She shot the driver a friendly smile, trying as best she could to cover up her dirty and ragged father as she did so. But the driver was looking over her shoulder, his eyes wide.
“Leo? Is that you?” he whispered, looking like he’d seen a ghost. “But … but … how … ? You’re … I mean, I thought, errm, I thought you’d been dead for years?”
“Hello, Fred, nice to see you,” said Mr. Gardener calmly. “No, I’m not dead. I’m very much alive, and I’d like to travel on your bus, if you’d be so kind.”
The driver opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. Her father continued: “Fred, as soon as I have time I will tell you what happened to me. But for today, I’m asking you if you’ll do me a favor and let me ride this bus, even though I don’t have any money for the fare.”
The driver blinked, then sat up decisively. “Of course you can, Leo.” He printed a ticket for Mr. Gardener. “Of course you can. What a question. As if I wouldn’t give a lift to the best goalie our soccer team ever had.”
Penelope looked up at her dad wonderingly as Mr. Gardener took the ticket, smiling. A group of teenagers rushed into the bus, and Penelope and her father were pushed toward the seats at the back. Jerkily the bus pulled away.
Penelope thought that if she wasn’t already sitting down, she probably would’ve fallen over. She couldn’t quite believe her father was here with her. She looked at him again, afraid he might dissolve into thin air at any second, like a dream in the morning. It simply couldn’t be true, that he was actually sitting next to her on the bus!
“Dead? Why would I be dead?” Mr. Gardener wondered aloud. “Where would Fred get an idea like that?”
Penelope winced. She hadn’t wanted to admit that her mother had been telling everyone—even Penelope!—that he was dead for a long time now. Her father looked so wretched as it was; he didn’t need to hear that on top of everything else.
“It’ll take Seller and Platell less than two days to reach our house,” Leo broke into Penelope’s reflections. “But as soon as Coco is with me, they won’t stand a chance.”
“What’s Coco got to
do with this? Why do you keep going on about Coco?” asked Penelope, a little irritably. She was the one that had rescued him, after all!
“Coco is my battery cat.”
“Your what?”
“My battery cat.” Leo laughed quietly. “Well, that’s what I call her for fun, anyway. You know, I used to dye my hair with the ash paste—but I couldn’t bear how heavy it made me feel. That stuff doesn’t just make us undetectable to our kind, you know—I always found that it made me feel sluggish too. I couldn’t even fly with the ash paste on my hair. I couldn’t stand feeling that way—so unlike the way I usually felt. So before I put the paste on my hair, I always transferred a big chunk of my powers to Coco so that she could give them back to me as and when I needed them—whenever I stroked her, in fact. That’s why I call her my battery cat, although Coco’s never really liked that name.”
The bus stopped in a new housing development, and quite a few of the teenagers got off. Penelope gazed through the window without really seeing them; she was too busy thinking about what her father had just said. How had she never realized that Coco was loaded with her father’s power? It was so obvious, now that she knew. Whenever she stroked the cat, she always felt stronger, clearer, and calmer. And that very morning, at the bus stop, Coco had drawn the heaviness out of her limbs.
“The day I disappeared,” said Leo, “Coco followed me into the forest, but I shooed her away. Perhaps that was stupid of me … perhaps none of it would have happened if I hadn’t done that. All I remember is looking up into the crown of a tree … and then nothing. I don’t remember anything after that. Something must’ve fallen on my head, something heavy—because when I came round, my head hurt so much that I was sick. It was dark around me—the ground I was lying on was hard, and I was freezing. Especially my head, because I was bald—I didn’t have a single hair left.”
Her father fell silent. He seemed to be fighting tears, Penelope thought, and he looked as though he might topple from his seat at any moment. She had to do something, say something …
“Mom will be happy to have you back,” she whispered.
Her father’s face relaxed a little, and a warm glow came into his eyes.
“Lucia, my Lucia,” he said softly. But then he frowned, returning to his story. “I don’t know how long they kept me prisoner before they talked to me. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know what was going on. Seller turned up at some point. He said if I used my powers to make money for him and Serge Platell, eventually he’d let me go. I didn’t really have any choice but to comply. I’d known them both for a while, and I knew that they could hardly do anything themselves, but that they were quite violent. They waited until my hair had grown long enough again that I had the strength to carry out a job for them.”
Penelope swallowed. She thought about how angry she’d been with her father, and she felt ashamed. “But they had powers, too, didn’t they? Why didn’t they just do all this themselves?”
“Everyone who is like us has a different type of power, Penelope—and not everyone is as strong as me. When I was young, getting into people’s heads was my specialty. I thought it was funny to annoy people with it, and I could almost do it in my sleep. It didn’t take much of my power at all,” he said, with quite a bit of pride, but then his voice grew serious again. “They used me to influence business deals to their advantage. It was really clever. They grew rich and it looked entirely legitimate—but whatever money I helped them make, it was never enough. They threatened to harm you and Lucia if I didn’t agree to their demands. So I agreed—but I persuaded them to at least let Lucia know I was alive and send money to the two of you every month, to cover your essentials.”
Yes, and how charmingly they went about that, thought Penelope, sliding around restlessly in her seat. They’d sent her mother a forged letter … and this year they’d put her in the hospital too.
“But they knocked Mom down with their tractor!” she whispered.
“Yes, I know,” said Leo bitterly. “My head visit in April didn’t make them as much money as they wanted. The accident was their way of getting their own back.”
“But if you had the power to get into other people’s heads, why didn’t you have enough power to free yourself?”
“Seller and Platell have known me since I was fourteen, since I took my first training course with Alpha Regius. We were never friends, but when you train together, you get to know each other very well. When I would meet with people like me, it was with them, among others—and we would share everything about our powers. So they knew exactly how long my hair needed to be for me to infiltrate someone else’s head. They measured it regularly, and never let it grow too long between jobs. Besides, to really get into someone’s mind, you have to look them in the eye very carefully. Or you need one of their possessions, something that’s very important to them, something they like. Of course, Seller and Platell never looked me in the eye, and I didn’t have anything that was important to them—maybe that’s because nothing is important to them, except money.”
The bus stopped again, this time in a village Penelope recognized. They weren’t far from home now.
Leo took up the story again. “But a year ago I started to plan my escape.”
“A year ago? What was so different about a year ago? Did they forget to cut your hair?”
“No, of course not. They’re not that stupid. But something changed: A cellar spider fell into my otherwise sterile prison. He was called Simon Tschakerno. I had to take good care that Seller and Platell didn’t stumble across him.” He took the gray-and-yellow cellar spider out of his pocket and gazed at him fondly on the palm of his hand. The creature waggled its front legs at Penelope as if to say hello. “It wasn’t easy getting into the little fellow’s mind, but after a few weeks, I managed it. He let me a little way in, so I politely asked him if he could walk to my house to bring me something you loved. He went off, and came back after a few weeks with your blue shoelace.”
“My blue shoelace? But I haven’t got any blue shoelaces. I never have!” exclaimed Penelope.
“No? That’s strange,” mused her father. “I definitely got through to someone …”
“Oh!” Penelope realized suddenly. “They were my friend Pete’s! That’s why he heard your voice in his head!”
Penelope’s dad smiled. “Simon told me you were wearing sneakers that were too big for you—I suppose I should’ve guessed they weren’t yours. But Seller took the shoelace off me almost immediately. First Simon tried to bring me Lucia’s scarf, the one with the roses on it, but that all went wrong. He managed to bring it most of the way through the swamp forest, but then someone picked it up.”
Penelope bit her lip. “That was me,” she said in a small voice, grimacing apologetically at the cellar spider. “I didn’t know Simon was sitting under it.”
“Well, why should you?” Leo looked at her affectionately, slipping Simon back into his pocket. “The amazing thing is, he only just came back today with Lucia’s scarf and one of your hairs. I could never have guessed that you were virtually under my nose at the time. But how on earth did you manage to find me?”
Penelope took her father’s hand and slowly told him everything as the fields rolled past the bus window. She told him about the gray envelopes full of sand, about her anger, about her plan to dye her hair, plant creeper corms in his yard, and give him a piece of her mind. She told him how she had followed Seller, how she’d used the Anti-Eye to sneak behind the tractor, and how she’d crept along the hedge to the well where Leo was being held. She told him who had given her the wonderful Anti-Eye, too, about Gina. Everything was flying out of her mouth in a torrent now. She told him how Granny Elizabeth had given her the Alpha Regius book, and that she could do hearing-before-hearing, that her tongue clicked, that it always rained on her birthday but the rain wasn’t really wet, and that she could float—or rather, that she had been able to, but now it wasn’t working anymore, which she thought was probably beca
use of the ash paste.
She told him about the road, how it had saved her life, and that G.E. was on a rest cure at the moment and her mom was with her, and that her best friend with the blue shoelaces was called Pete, and that his father had been very rich, but soon wouldn’t be anymore. She talked about the school trips and biology experiments, and homework and herb picking, about dreams and tears, bike rides and films, tooth gaps and bruised knees, about the time when she swallowed a pearl, about dancing, igloos, Christmas, thunderstorms, and how happy she was that he was back, and that he must never go away again …
Penelope couldn’t stop talking. She wanted to speak on and on, and never stop. For more than ten years, she hadn’t been able to say anything to her father, and now she wanted to catch up, to tell him every single thing she’d done in that time, everything she knew, and wanted to know. She wanted to explain, and tell, and share, and the tears began to run down her face, and she started to tremble, and …
Leo Gardener pulled her to him and held her tightly.
“It’s all right, Penny, my little one. I’m here now, and no one will ever separate us again.”
He stroked her dyed-brown hair, and she grew calmer, breathing deeply. Silently, she pressed her head against his chest and listened to his heart beating firmly and evenly. Her nose dripped, and she fumbled for a tissue. The bus took a sharp bend.
“I need some refreshment after all that,” she muttered to herself, opening her backpack. She split the last cheese roll, and passed half to her father. She poured apple tea into the thermos cup and sipped it. The tea was hot and mild and sweet.
