I? I’m the one
who should be cleaning up and getting the fire lit. I know how this is supposed to go.
She sat up and looked around the room.
Her old clothes had been neatly folded on top of the chest of drawers. The fossil and
the lucky stone and the other things had gone, and it was only after a frantic search
that she found them back in the box in her suitcase.
‘Now, look,’ she said to the room in general. ‘I am a hag, you know. If there are any Nac Mac Feegle here, step out this minute!’
Nothing happened. She hadn’t expected anything to happen. The Nac Mac Feegle
weren’t particularly interested in tidying things up, anyway.
As an experiment she took the candlestick off the bedside table, put it on the chest
of drawers and stood back. More nothing happened.
She turned to look out of the window and, as she did so, there was a faint tint noise.
When she spun round, the candlestick was back on the table.
Well. . . today was going to be a day when she got answers. Tiffany enjoyed the slightly
angry feeling. It stopped her thinking about how much she wanted to go home.
She went to put her dress on and realized that there was something soft yet crackly
in a pocket.
Oh, how could she have forgotten? But it had been a busy day, a very busy day,
and maybe she’d wanted to forget, anyway.
She pulled out Roland’s present and opened the white tissue paper carefully.
It was a necklace.
It was the Horse.
Tiffany stared at it.
Not what a horse looks like, but what a horse be . . . It had been carved in the
turf back before history began, by people who had managed to convey in a few
flowing lines everything a horse was: strength, grace, beauty and speed, straining to
break free of the hill.
And now someone – someone clever and, therefore, probably also someone expensive
– had made it out of silver. It was flat, just like it was on the hillside and, just like the
Horse on the hillside, some parts of it were not joined to the rest of the body. The crafts-
man, though, had joined these carefully together with tiny silver chain, so that when
Tiffany held it up in astonishment it was all there, moving-while-standing-still in the
morning light.
She had to put it on. And . . . there was no mirror, not even a tiny hand one. Oh,
well. . .
‘See me,’ said Tiffany.
And far away, down on the plains, something that had lost the trail awoke. Nothing happened
for a moment, and then the mist on the fields parted as something invisible started to move,
making a noise like a swarm of flies . . .
Tiffany shut her eyes, took a couple of small steps sideways, a few steps forward,
turned round and carefully opened her eyes again. There she stood, in
front of her, as still as a picture. The Horse looked very well on the new dress, silver
against green.
She wondered how much it must have cost Roland. She wondered why.
‘See me not,’ she said. Slowly she took the necklace off, wrapped it up again in its
tissue paper and put it in the box with the other things from home. Then she found one of
the postcards from Twoshirts, and a pencil, and with care and attention, wrote Roland a
short thank-you note. After a flash of guilt she carefully used the other postcard to tell
her parents that she was completely still alive.
Then, thoughtfully, she went downstairs.
It had been dark last night, so she hadn’t noticed the posters stuck up all down the
stairs. They were from circuses, and were covered with clowns and animals and that
old-fashioned poster lettering where no two lines of type are the same.
They said things like:
Thrills Galore! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
Professor Monty Bladder’s
Three-Ring Circus
Cabinet of Curiosities!! In His Actual Mouth!!!
See the Horse With His Head Where His Tail Should Be! See the
Egress!!!!!
CLOWNS! CLOWNS!
CLOWNS!
The Flying Pastrami Brothers will defy Gravity, The
Greatest Force in the Universe
•without a net!*
aS!S5S>S>S!5>5>S>S>S>S>®S>SJS>S53S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>S>aS!
See Clarence The Tap-Dancing l&ule!
Wonder at
isy a
* The Astounding Mind Reading Act *
Wonder at
Topsy and Tipsy
And so it went on, right down to tiny print. They were strange, bright things to find
in a little cottage in the woods.
She found her way into the kitchen. It was cold and quiet, except for the ticking of
a clock on the wall. Both the hands had fallen off the clock face, and lay at the bottom
of the glass cover, so while the clock was still measuring time it wasn’t inclined to tell
anyone about it.
As kitchens went, it was very tidy. In the cupboard drawer beside the sink, forks,
spoons and knives were all in neat sections, which was a bit worrying. Every kitchen
drawer Tiffany had ever seen might have been meant to be neat but over the years had
been crammed with things that didn’t quite fit, like big ladles and bent bottle-openers,
which meant that they always stuck unless you knew the trick of opening them.
Experimentally she took a spoon out of the spoon section, dropped it amongst the
forks and shut the drawer. Then she turned her back.
There was a sliding noise and a tinkle exactly like the tinkle a spoon makes when it’s
put back amongst the other spoons, who have missed it and are anxious to hear its
tales of life amongst the frighteningly pointy people.
This time she put a knife in with the forks, shut the drawer – and leaned on it.
Nothing happened for a while, and then she heard the cutlery rattling. The noise got
louder. The drawer began to shake. The whole sink began to tremble-
‘All right,’ said Tiffany, jumping back. ‘Have it your way!’
The drawer burst open, the knife jumped from section to section like a fish and the
drawer slammed back.
Silence.
‘Who are you?’ said Tiffany. No one replied. But she didn’t like the feeling in the air.
Someone was upset with her now. It had been a silly trick, anyway.
She went out into the garden, quickly. The rushing noise she had heard last night had
been made by a waterfall not far from the cottage. A little water-wheel pumped water
into a big stone cistern, and there was a pipe that led into the house.
The garden was full of ornaments. They were rather sad, cheap ones – bunny
rabbits with mad grins, pottery deer with big eyes, gnomes with pointy
red hats and expressions that suggested they were on bad medication.
Things hung from the apple trees or were tied to posts all around the place. There
were some dreamcatchers and curse-nets, which she sometimes saw hanging up outside
cottages at home. Other things looked like big shambles, spinning and tinkling
gently. Some . . . well, one looked like a bird made out of old brushes, but most looked
like piles of junk. Odd junk, though. It seemed to Tiffany that some of it moved slightly
as she went past.
When she went back into the cottage, Miss Level was sitting at the kitchen table.
So was Miss Level. There were, in fact, two of her.
‘Sorry,’ said the Miss Level on the right. 1 thought it was best to get it over with right
now.’
The two women were exactly alike. ‘Oh, I see,’ said Tiffany. ‘You’re twins.’
‘No,’ said the Miss Level on the left, I’m not. This might be a little difficult -‘
‘- for you to understand,’ said the other Miss Level. ‘Let me see, now. You know -‘
‘- how twins are sometimes said to be able to share thoughts and feelings?’ said the
first Miss Level.
Tiffany nodded.
‘Well,’ said the second Miss Level, ‘I’m a bit more complicated than that, I suppose,
because -‘
‘- I’m one person with two bodies,’ said the first Miss Level, and now they spoke
like players in a tennis match, slamming the words back and forth.
‘I wanted to break this to you -‘
‘- gently, because some people get upset by the -‘
‘- idea and find it creepy or -‘
‘- just plain -‘
‘- weird.’
The two bodies stopped.
‘Sorry about that last sentence,’ said the Miss Level on the left. 1 only do that when I’m
really nervous.’
‘Er, do you mean that you both-‘ Tiffany began, but the Miss Level on the right said
quickly, There is no both. There’s just me, do you understand? I know it’s hard. But I
have a right right hand and a right left hand and a left right hand and a left left hand.
It’s all me. I can go shopping and stay home at the same time, Tiffany. If it helps,