Horten's Incredible Illusions (11 page)
“Okay, I’ll give it some thought.” Stuart pocketed the paper, gave her a grown-up sort of nod, and went back into the house. Then an idea occurred to him.
“Dad, would you like to come to the museum with me tomorrow morning? I can show you how some of the tricks work, and maybe you can help me with one we haven’t solved yet.”
“A solution that needs lexicographic skill and cerebral—I mean, that needs word knowledge and brain power?”
Stuart looked up (and up) at the tall, spindly figure of his father, and shook his head.
“What we need for this one,” he said, grinning, “is
muscle
.”
The Fan of Fantasticness looked like a huge, outspread peacock’s tail, each of its “feathers” made of silver metal enameled with greens and blues. Stuart’s father walked around it admiringly.
“Strictly speaking,” he said, peering over the top of it at Stuart, “there is no such word as
fantasticness
. Although you’ll find both
fantasticalness
and
fantasticality
in
The Oxford English Dictionary
.”
“I thought you were going to try to use shorter words, Dad,” said Stuart. “Both of those are even longer than the one I came up with.”
He unfolded the drawing that April had given him, showing how her sister’s little plastic fan would spring shut if you tried to stretch it wider.
Then he looked at the actual Fan of Fantasticness. Each “feather” was actually a very long, thin triangle joined to the others only at the bottom. It was obviously designed to fold up. And you could see that when it was folded the triangles would all slide behind one another, with the one in the middle ending up at the front. He also noticed that the one on the far right had a ledge along the length of it. Perfect for putting a foot on and pressing down….
Stuart gave it a try and felt a slight springiness.
“Dad,” he said. “Can you come around here? This is where I need a bit of muscle power.”
His father wandered over.
“Put your foot on that ledge, next to mine,” said Stuart, “and when I count to three, really, really press down. As if you’re trying to stretch the fan out even wider.”
“If you’re confident that I won’t contribute to its comminution.”
“You’re using long words again, Dad.”
“Sorry. I won’t damage it, will I?”
“I don’t think so. Now—one, two,
three
!”
There was a rusty screech followed by the
boing!
of a giant spring, and Stuart found himself flying through the air. He had the weird impression that he passed straight
through
the fan before landing with a thud halfway across the room.
“Have you sustained any serious contusions?” his father called anxiously, loping across to where Stuart lay.
“No…. I don’t think so.” Stuart sat up, feeling a bit bruised and dented. One of his shoes had fallen off during the flight.
“That’s certainly an extraordinarily powerful mechanism,” said his father, helping him to his feet. “One would have thought you’d been expelled from a cannon.”
They both looked over at the Fan of Fantasticness. It had snapped shut like a Swiss Army knife. From where they were standing, only the central triangle was visible; all the other segments had folded in behind it.
“From several to single,” remarked his father. “Rather akin to my continuing attempt to move from polysyllabic to monosyllabic speech.”
Stuart limped across the room to pick up his shoe. Odd bits of loose change from his pockets were scattered across the floor as well as the remains of a pack of mints that he’d forgotten about, and he crawled around collecting them.
“My goodness,” said his father, peering into the mechanism of the fan. “There’s actually a considerable gap just behind this central segment. I think you may have passed through it during your flight. It’s actually large enough for an individual to interpolate himself into it—indeed, someone shorter than myself standing here would be totally invisible to the audience.”
Stuart looked up and laughed to see his father’s head poking over the top of the triangle.
“That must be how they did it,” Stuart said. “Great-Uncle Tony’s assistant would hop into the gap just as the whole thing snapped shut. Everyone would think she’d disappeared.”
“And there’s an artifact here as well,” remarked his father, crouching down.
“A what?”
“A man-made object. One might call it a star—apart from the fact that it only has four extrusions.”
Stuart’s hand flew to his pocket. The magic star had been in there; it must have fallen out when he shot through the air.
“And there’s an odd quartet of sulci in the gap where I was standing,” continued his father. “In fact, it looks as if this stellar object might be perfectly congruent with—”
A terrible realization shot through Stuart, and though he didn’t know what the words
sulci
or
stellar
or
congruent
meant, he somehow
knew
that his father was about to fit the four-pointed magic star into a matching set of grooves that he’d just found in the Fan of Fantasticness, and he hurled himself across the room, arms outstretched, yelling, “DON’T DO IT, DAD! DON’T FIT THE STAR IN THERE!” and had just managed to snag his father’s sleeve with one hand when there was a soundless explosion, and he was no longer in the museum but in a white, windowless room standing on a blue and purple rug, looking at a painting of a volcano.
“
More magic
,” he said, his voice a whisper.
He looked around. His father was nowhere to be seen. The room was very large; it looked like something out of a stately home, with a massive fireplace, a grand piano in one corner, and three separate doors, all painted different colors. It was full of sunlight, the white walls so bright that they hurt his eyes.
How can it be full of sunlight when there are no windows?
he wondered, and then he looked up, and heard himself shout in surprise.
There was no ceiling to the room. Above him stretched a clear blue sky. The only visible object was a tall, square tower with a balcony running all around the top of it.
“Hello!” shouted Stuart. “Anyone around? Dad? Are you here somewhere?”
There was no answer.
He walked over to the nearest door and opened it. It led to a concrete cell, bare except for a mattress on the floor and a bucket of dirty water. There was no ceiling on the cell, either. He closed the door again and opened the one next to it. Beyond it lay a long, sunlit corridor with doors opening off both sides. He walked along it and chose a door at random. It opened into a stable, in which an enormous horse was furiously stamping its hooves. It swung its head around and glared at Stuart with fierce reddish eyes, and he quickly closed the door and tried the one opposite. Inside was a room with a trickling stream, instead of a floor, and a set of stepping-stones that split into three paths, each leading to another door. The sun shone overhead, the tall tower casting the only shadow.
Stuart picked his way across the stepping-stones, and chose the left-hand door. It opened straight onto a blank brick wall. He let the door swing shut again, and stood there, thinking hard.
“It’s a
maze
,” he said slowly.
And then he heard someone high above him call his name.
Or rather, half his name.
“Stu—!”
He looked up, startled.
Way above him, on the balcony at the top of the tower, stood his father.
“Hi, Dad!” yelled Stuart, waving. “Are you all right?”
Rather hesitantly, his father waved back. “This is most odd,” he called down, his voice faint with distance. “What is this place, and how did I get here?”
Stuart tried to think of a simple way of explaining the vast and complicated truth, and then decided that he couldn’t. “You’re in a dream,” he yelled. “A very peculiar dream. Can you get down from there?”
“There’s a steep set of stairs with a door at the base, but the door has a bolt that is not on my side. I’m stuck here, I think.”
His father sounded disorientated and a bit wobbly, and Stuart realized that he would have to take charge himself; after all, it was his third magical adventure—he should know something about it by now. “Dad, can you see I’m in a sort of weird maze?”
“Yes.”
“Can you work out which way I should go? You must have a really good view from up there.”
There was a pause while his father peered down, moving his head as if following a path. He walked right around the balcony at the top of the tower, disappearing from view for a few seconds, before he reappeared and called down to Stuart.
“Yes, I think I can see where you should go. You would end up at the foot of this thing.”
“What thing?”
“This thing that I’m on. This tall thing.”
“The tower, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Stuart stared up at him. He couldn’t see his father’s expression from this distance, but it was clear that something was very wrong.
“Why didn’t you say
tower
?” he asked.
“I can’t,” said his father.
“Why can’t you?”
“I just can’t. It seems that in this dream my mouth won’t say words that have more than one…bit to them.”
“Bit?”
“Yes.”
“You mean syllable? You can only say one-syllable words?”
“Yes.
yes.
“
His father’s voice was full of frustration, and it occurred to Stuart that it was probably as hard for him to use only short words as it would be for Stuart to use only enormously long ones.
“Don’t worry,” he yelled reassuringly, “it’s just part of the dream. It shouldn’t be a problem—you just have to say
left
or
right
or whatever. Where do I go now?”
He was still standing on the stepping-stones in the room full of water, with three doors ahead of him.
His father peered over the balcony. “Go through the door!” he shouted, and then paused to think. “The door that is not on the left or the right.”
Stuart walked forward and opened the middle door.
A huge, shiny green leaf barred his way. He pushed it aside and found himself in an enormous greenhouse full of tropical plants, with creepers dangling from wires above him and huge, perfumed flowers blooming on every side. When he looked down, he could see a muddle of narrow brick paths snaking through the vegetation, crisscrossing each other in a complicated network.
“Which way do I go?” he shouted up to his father.
“To a door near a thing.”
“A thing? What sort of thing?”
“A thing from which clear stuff that you can drink comes out of.”
“Water, you mean? So I’ve got to find a tap? Or a hose?”
“No. You can find things like this in parks. A round shape.
Splish, splash.
Coins are thrown in.”
“A
fountain
?”
“Yes.”
Stuart moved cautiously through the vegetation. Butterflies flitted between the flowers; a lizard appeared, paused briefly on a bunch of nearly ripe bananas, and then zipped away again. Somewhere to his left he could hear the tinkle of water. He ducked under a hairy stem, parted a wall of leaves, and found himself beside a stone fountain, with a jet of water shooting upward out of the mouth of a stone dolphin.
