Seven Sorcerers (19 page)

‘Look, he doesn’t have to stop to sleep or eat like we do, so he can keep on going. He’ll be waiting for you when you’ve found Toby and your memory pearls and managed to escape again.’ Jonas smiled into the night.

‘You don’t think I can do it, do you?’

‘Ninevah Redstone, if I didn’t think you had a chance I wouldn’t let you go. You’re lucky …’

‘I know I said that,’ wailed Nin, ‘but I’m not so sure now. I mean, look at all the things that have been after us! We spend all our time running away.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jonas, ‘but that’s the point. You’re still alive to do the running. Take it from me, after all that, most people wouldn’t be.’

cold wind made Jik look up to see the tombfolk leaving, their airy bodies rippling into the night sky. He had been keeping as still as mud, hoping that they had forgotten him. Now, at last, he was free to move.

Jik knew that going through the Heart would be horribly dangerous. He also knew that going around the edge would take too long for him to find Nin again before she reached the Terrible House. And although he could follow her inside when he finally got there, he also knew that before she made it that far she would need her friends. He could feel it in his mud. Something bad was going to happen and it wasn’t far away.

He tottered into life. The extra layer of mud that covered his body from top to toe made him waddle, but at least it was now rock hard. It was very kind of Skerridge to sort out that little problem, though Jik wouldn’t like to bet it had been meant that way. At any rate, the new top coat had given him a better hope of survival.

Because, however deadly it might be, Jik wasn’t going around the Heart. Jik was going
through
.

If the road hadn’t been enough proof, the ordinariness of the trees would have told them at once that they were back in the Widdern. The grass was just doing grassy things, shadows stayed properly in the shade and the only thing that the clouds looked like were clouds. Or possibly bits of cotton wool, but that was as far as it went.

‘Better tuck that out of sight,’ said Jonas, nodding at the amulet around Nin’s neck.

Here in the Widdern the charm looked out of place, the star shape burning in the air like hot wire. Nin slipped it inside her T-shirt, where it hung, fizzing against her skin.

‘I still don’t know what it’s for,’ she said.

‘You’ll find out sooner or later.’ Jonas shrugged. ‘Sorcerer magic isn’t predictable, you know.’

They left the road and followed a track that led through fields and trees, finally opening out into a green valley. On the other side, the track took them up the hill again to a path with a signpost, pointing to Coulsdon Common. Nin glanced back over the valley, wondering how Jik was getting on and wishing that she could have said goodbye. Just in case.

‘Right,’ said Jonas, ‘civilisation, here we come.’

‘Do you think we’ll see him again?’

‘Jik? Dunno, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to underestimate the mudman.’

The path took them to a pub called The Fox, a main road and a bus stop. On the other side of the road were more woods.

‘Call this civilisation?’ said Nin. ‘One pub and a load more trees.’

Two cars whizzed past. Jonas stuck out his thumb

‘No change for the bus,’ he said. ‘Anyway we’ll need our cash for the train. So, I’m counting on the fact that you are the lucky sort.’

Almost at once a small blue car pulled over.

Wincing in the bright Widdern sun, Skerridge stared after the blue car with mounting irritation. It wasn’t that he would have any trouble keeping up with it, but dodging all the other vehicles on the road wasn’t going to be a picnic.

Everything went well enough until the road the blue car was on joined another, busier road. This busier road was chock-full of cars and buses. Even then it wasn’t too bad until Skerridge realised that the blue car he was following was the wrong one.

Then things got really tricky.

Hilary Jones was having a bad morning. It was her second month in a new job and her boss was a stickler
for punctuality. Unfortunately for Hilary, good timekeeping was not something she did well and today, she was running horribly late.

She was speeding around the corner towards Old Coulsdon when she saw a boy and a girl standing by the road. The boy had his thumb out. Her brain went into overdrive along the lines of: ‘I can go past because it’s not my problem but if I read in the news that horrible things happened to two kids on this road I’ll never forgive myself because I’ll always know they would have been safe with me and I’m late anyway’.

So, not without a sigh, she pulled over and said, ‘Get in.’

They got in. She had a moment of ice-cold fear when she got a proper look at the boy. He had long, unwashed hair tied back with string, a worn black coat over his worn clothes and the whole package didn’t look too clean either. But then she saw the girl and relaxed a little.

‘Where are you heading?’ she asked as she pulled away.

The girl was staring at her openly. It didn’t bother Hilary because she was used to that sort of thing. The boy nudged the girl hard and she blinked, looking away for all of two seconds. He smiled at Hilary, meeting her eyes in the mirror. Suddenly things seemed a lot better, because even if
he
looked a mess, his eyes looked like eyes you could trust.

She took them all the way to Croydon where she dropped them off within a few minutes’ walk of the
station. The girl was still staring. The boy managed to say thank you and goodbye with only a slight blush. Hilary was impressed. Normally boys that age went nova and couldn’t look her in the eye.

As she tried to pull back into the flow of traffic – not that it was doing a lot of flowing – she realised that something odd was going on behind her. Everything had ground to a halt and a couple of men were out of their cars, shouting. Hilary craned her neck to see. She could just make out a huge dent in the roof of one of the cars. In fact, both of them had a bashed-in look.

Suddenly, horns began to go off all over the place. One car up and to the left a mother with two children was having a problem keeping the kids under control. Hilary couldn’t work out if the dented roofs and shouting men were connected to the outbreak of screaming kids. Then, a horrible thing happened.

There was a huge CRUMP overhead. She screamed and ducked instinctively. When she unravelled herself and looked up she saw that the roof of her car was crumpled in like a dented cardboard box. There was a scraping noise and the car shook. Several long scratches appeared out of nowhere on her nicely polished bonnet. Two things struck her at once.

First, there was absolutely nothing there.

Second, she had a really bad feeling that, although there was nothing there, SOMETHING was staring in at her through the windscreen. Staring right into her eyes.

The car bounced. More scratches appeared in the
bonnet and then all was still. Her heart thumping madly, Hilary threw open the door and scrambled out. Arguments were breaking out all over the place.

‘Parts from a passing plane,’ barked a large man with a purple face. ‘You hear it all the time on the TV.’

‘Meteorites,’ said a boy on a bicycle, staring enthusiastically at the sky. ‘Falling so fast that even a small one has enough impact to dent sheet metal. Then they just lie there, looking like ordinary stones …’ He switched his gaze to the ground.

Shivering, Hilary sat down by the road and waited for the mess to sort itself out. The sense that invisible eyes had been watching her still made her skin tingle with fright. She wished very much that her day had begun a little differently, because deep in her heart she knew that she would never feel really safe again.

Skerridge had been nipping between the cars, trying to keep the blue one in sight, but it was a tricky job. As soon as he realised that he had been following the wrong one for the last few miles he decided to go over instead of around.

Jumping, from one roof to the next and occasionally on to a bonnet if it was convenient, he went looking for the right blue car. He could feel roofs and bonnets buckling underneath him due to the weight of all the magic in his bones, but the yelling Quick didn’t cause him any bother so he ignored them and kept going.

A bunch of kids stared out of the windows of a bus. Their names tripped quickly through his head, but since he didn’t need to know who they were he ignored that too. He reached the bus and ran up the back of it on to the roof. Inside, the kids hit mass hysteria and the panic-stricken driver screeched to a halt, yelling into his radio for help.

At the front edge of the roof, Skerridge paused. He looked ahead. Away in front was a car of the right shade of blue. Right Madam and Obstacle were just getting out of it.

Swiftly, Skerridge leaped from the roof of the bus he was on to the roof of the one in front and then on to the roof of the blue car. His targets had just disappeared around a corner. Skerridge hopped down on to the bonnet and was about to hop off it again on to the road when he happened to glance in through the windscreen.