He frowns briefly in bewilderment, but he’s too intent on running to bother himself too much with this puzzle. Jumping down to the ground as he reaches the last wayward curl of the beanstalk, he unceremoniously grabs the spade off the startled dwarf.
‘Sorry,’ he shouts, ‘but I have to cut this beanstalk down. Before the giant has a chance to use it and follow me!’
*
Using the iron blade of the spade, the soldier hacks frenziedly at the beanstalk’s fibrous stem. Cutting away chunk after weeping chunk.
High above us, the clouds rumble yet again, this time more clearly recognisable as a deep, grumbling complaint.
‘Who’s making all that dreadful racket? Can’t a man get a decent sleep around here anymore?’
From the clouds there now also comes a steadily burgeoning rain of objects; immense cups, roof-sized plates, ornaments the equal of garden statues. And the more the solider hacks at the beanstalk’s thick stem, weakening it with every violent blow, the more the objects fall, the signs of a huge house beginning to disintegrate.
Soon it’s chairs, a table, a sideboard. All massive, all collapsing into a splatter of shards as they fall to the hard earth with a cacophonic, shattering impact.
Within seconds, it’s not only household objects but also part of the building itself that’s crashing to the ground around us. Huge sections of brick wall, of crumbling mortar. Enormous wooden beams, all of which must have been constructed from similarly unimaginably large trees.
Next comes something that, apart from those unbelievably enormous beams, is more gigantic than anything that’s previously fallen; a huge oblong of wooden slats and metal framing, of materials flowing about it like useless wings.
It’s a bed.
A bed that falls out of the sky like some oddly shaped meteorite. It hits the ground with a clang of springs, of buckling metal legs.
There’s also a tremendously loud groan of pain: and the giant slips from between the sheets.
Partially rolling off the far side of his bed, he slumps to the floor, as if dead.
*
‘Is he dead? Could he have survived that fall?’
The dwarf, wide-eyed in wonder, looks towards each of us for an answer.
‘There’s no movement,’ the soldier says, cautiously stepping closer towards the fallen bed, towards the awkwardly crumpled form of the giant. ‘But he could just be unconscious.’
As the dwarf had done earlier, he holds the blade of the spade out before him, his sole weapon against a giant who would have no trouble in casting both it and him aside with a simple swipe of a massive hand.
‘He’s already killed my men. He thought he’d killed me too, but I’d just been knocked unconsci–’
He’s interrupted by yet another horrendously loud crack, this one coming from behind us.
As one, we all whirl around. The already weakened beanstalk is continuing to shred and crumble, more and more of its protruding stalks breaking off and crashing to the ground.
As the stalk continues to disintegrate, so does the giant’s cloud castle, with more and more of it beginning to tumble from the sky. Large cast iron ovens. Whole wardrobes packed with immense clothes. Massive armchairs. They all crash to the ground with the boom and crash of an exploding volcano.
When we look back towards the bed, we can no longer see the giant.
‘Where’s he gone?’
The soldier glances nervously about himself.
‘He hasn’t had time to run off!’ Pearl points out.
‘Why would he run off?’ I add.
‘He’s under the bed,’ Debbie says with fearful certainty, even though the thick shadow beneath the bed is as black and impenetrable as a block of coal. ‘Isn’t that were all nasty things live? Under the bed?’
‘Clever girl,’ the giant snarls from beneath the bed – and a huge, grasping hand reaches out towards Debbie.
*
Chapter 41
The giant’s huge fingers snatch and close – around empty air.
Instead of fruitlessly trying to run away from the grasping hand hurtling towards her, Debbie has thrown herself towards it. Leaping onto the fingers while the palm was still open, she’s clambered up them all as if they were the steps of a living ladder.
Reaching the top of the uppermost finger, she leaps clear.
With a howl of frustration, the giant abruptly rises to his feet. He throws off the bed as if it were nothing more than a heavy cloak.
He looms over us, so mountainous that he blocks out the sun, casting a huge area of dark shade around us. He glowers at us all, but particularly at Debbie. He’s incensed by the way she’s cleverly avoided his grasping hand.
‘You first, I think!’
Growling furiously, he strides out towards us all, but reaches down towards Debbie with his grasping hand once more. Just as she did before, however, Debbie uses her small size to her advantage. She runs towards him, ducking out of the way of his uselessly closing fingers.
She ducks and weaves again and again. The giant howls in fury and frustration, his grasping hand again and again grasping nothing but empty air. It’s like a man hopelessly trying to catch a swiftly darting mouse.
We rush forward, either hoping to pull Debbie clear of the constantly snapping, snatching hand, or at least distract the giant long enough for her to re-join us.
With a lazy, irritable back swing of his hand, the giant swats us all away. He sends us all flying up into the air.
We land with body-jarring impact, despite thankfully falling into the softer parts of the dwarf’s depression, the loose soil exploding around us in an earthy dust cloud. Hurriedly picking ourselves up, swiping aside the muddy earth clogging our mouths, our eyes, we dash towards the depression’s edge.
The giant has turned away from us, his back facing our way.
He’s still awkwardly stumbling after a fleeing Debbie, still uselessly snatching out at her as she cleverly avoids his every grasp.
She’s drawing him towards the area where the rain of falling objects is at its heaviest. Towards where the crumbling beanstalk stretches high in the air above them like a vast, green crack in the sky itself.
The falling furniture, the broken sections of castle, crash around them like a shower of exploding comets. Many fall and crash into the beanstalk’s angled stem, bouncing off and at last crashing to the floor, but not before making the already creaking trunk rock and sway.
Something large and yellow drops from the clouds. It hurtles towards Debbie. She looks up at it, sees it heading her way: and stops where she is.
The giant’s overjoyed to see that she’s finally tired of running from him.
He thankfully and unhurriedly steps towards her. He leans over her. He reaches for her with a massive hand; and the yellow object strikes him hard on the bald crown of his huge head.
The deadly projectile briefly bounces back into the air, striking the giant once more as he falls. It lands on and rolls down the giant’s back even as he begins to slowly topple forward, his legs already crumpling uselessly beneath him.
‘Run Debbie!’ Pearl cries anxiously, realising the toppling giant is going to fall on her.
Debbie has already realised this.
She’s running away from the swiftly falling giant. This time, she doesn’t stop running until she’s well clear of the giant’s rapidly slumping body.
When the giant’s mountainous knees strike the ground, everything around us reverberates as if the whole Earth is suffering an earthquake. The ground shakes and rumbles. The beanstalk quivers, shedding leaves and branches. The crack in its trunk widens ominously with a shriek of tearing flesh.
The rest of the giant’s massive, slumping body continues toppling forward, an arm limply extending as he finally crashes heavily to the ground.
The arm comes crashing down last of all, the open hand flopping lifelessly yet heavily as it lands directly on top of poor little Debbie.
*
Chapter 42
‘No!’
‘Debbie!’
We all wail out in anguish.
We all hurriedly clamber out from the depression, sprinting across the ground towards the giant’s massive, motionless hand.
It’s hard to believe that Debbie could have survived the weight of that huge hand falling on her.
Even as we draw closer to the immense, slightly arching fingers, it seems to gradually dawn on each of us that there’s nowhere near enough room beneath the flattened palm for Debbie to have remained unharmed.
We each frown morosely as we realise the hopelessness of the situation.
We each gasp, too, as we spot a burst of wavering movement around the top of the hand.
It is Debbie, and yet it’s not Debbie.
It’s a translucent, angelically winged Debbie. An angel rising up through the hand, up through the air into the sky.
She’s still doll-like; yet in this softly transparent form, she could be regarded as being almost human.
I blink, as I’m sure everyone else must do, as she rises up before a glaring sun; and suddenly she’s no longer rising up on her wings. Instead, she’s comfortably seated in the rowboat languidly looping its way up towards heaven.
Like Debbie, the monkey and goose are no longer cartoons. They’re cutely soft toys, pulling on the oars, blissful smiles on their faces.
Before any of us can make any comment, the air is rent with a fearful shriek, the ripping of the shredding flesh of a gigantic plant.
The beanstalk, weakened all the more by the earthquake-like jolts of the falling ogre, is at last completely collapsing.
And we’re all standing underneath its extensively spreading branches.
*
There’s nowhere to run.
It’s like being caught in the shadow of a toppling redwood tree.
No; in the shadow of a tree larger than any that could possibly exist in the real world.
‘There! A wendy house!’
Ellie’s urgently pointing across to the large yellow object that had felled the giant. And she’s right: it is a wendy house! Albeit one that’s partially smashed, and lying on one end.
‘In the back, as before!’ Pearl screams as we run towards the little house. ‘It seems to help us rise up through the levels!
With nowhere else to run, we all head towards the wendy house. Even the bemused dwarf joins us in our sprint.
Fortunately, the back door to the house lies open.
We begin to quickly scramble inside, helping each other, unsure as to how long we have before the rapidly shredding beanstalk completely collapses on us. Already, enormous branches and leaves are crashing to the earth all around us. The earth shakes violently once more, the choking dust enveloping and blinding us all.
‘Are you all going? Leaving me on my own again?’ the dwarf asks fearfully.
‘No, no: no one deserves to be left all alone!’ Ellie declares determinedly.
She steps back from the open door, pulls hard on the little man’s arm; and pushes him up and through the doorway.
With a heart-stopping snap, a terrifying rumble and a frightening shaking of everything around us, the main stem of the crumpling beanstalk finally comes crashing to the ground. The house jumps, rocks, the back door clanging shut.
With the sound of a hurricane rushing towards us, the first stems of the falling beanstalk begin lashing our little house. Smashing the wood. Making the house leap and rise up into the air like a hot jumping bean.
As the house shatters and splinters with loud cracks all around us, the front door flies open.
The floor of the house rocks, jolts; and once again we’re unceremoniously thrown out through the front.
We tumble across the ground, screeching in agony as we roll across sharp twigs and stems. We crash in an ungainly, painful heap against the thick trunk of a tree.
I say we.
By that, I mean only me, Pearl, and Jeanie.
There’s no one else with us.
And we’re in such a tightly condensed wood that hardly any light falls around us.
*
Chapter 43
‘Are we home?’ Jeannie asks hopefully.
She glances everywhere about herself in a mix of barely controlled terror and surprise.
It’s a reasonable question.
The tightly packed trees remind me of home. Or rather, of course, of the dark forest surrounding our home.
There’s hardly any room to move between the innumerable trees, their trunks staunch and rigid like so many uncountable pillars. Within the space that should exist between them, a seemingly infinite number of branches lock and intertwine like a thickly black tapestry.
And we’re all human again.
It’s not too much to hope that we’re finally home again, is it?
But then, we hear the whispering.
The countless voices. All talking over each other.
The singing, too.
A singing that, eerily, sounds like the distant voices of long-dead children.
‘Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line…’
*
I notice a flash of bright red amongst the thick carpet of fallen, interlocking twigs.
Reaching out for it, picking it up, I find I’m holding a toy soldier. Lying nearby there’s also a battered garden gnome, one smiling happily as he shoulders his over-sized shovel.
I feel incredibly sorry for them both. Especially the little tin soldier, who had risked his life for me earlier.
I kiss him.
‘Are…are these Ellie’s?’ Jeanie asks tearfully.
She’s spotted something glinting amongst the massed twigs. She holds up a pair of broken spectacles.
Pearl nods in response to Jeanie’s question.
‘I think they are; yes.’
‘Does that mean…mean she was human too when she…when she…?’
She can’t say it, can she?
None of us can, I suspect.
‘When she died.’ That’s what she’s wanting to say, isn’t it?
I can only shrug in answer to Jeanie’s hopefully pleading stare.
‘I think, yes; she was,’ Pearl thankfully answers for me.
She doesn’t sound in any way doubtful.
Which surprises me.
There’s a hushed chuckling, as if the whispering voices are in agreement with my surprise.
‘I think we must be higher up the levels, closer to home,’ Pearl states assuredly, rising to her feet.
Dusting herself down, she tries to peer through the darkness of the surrounding forest.
‘If I’m right,’ she says, ‘we need to find something – like a sundial, or an ancient henge – that will point us towards the double suns.’
‘Double suns? Is there such a thing?’ I grimly chuckle.
‘What’s a henge?’ Jeanie asks.
We’re all ignoring the whispering voices, refusing to recognise them.
We’ve been through so much, travelled through so many odd lands, that I suppose none of us see any point in worrying until we know for sure what we’re facing.
Listen carefully, however, and there are individual voices amongst that strangely drifting yet also remarkably intense whispering. Children who are lost. Children who are scared.
All those children who have been lost in the forest: they’re all still here, somehow.
‘They appear on the final level out of here as two suns,’ Pearl explains in answer to my question. ‘But yes, really, it’s just our own sun, blazing in through the windows either side of the wendy house’s door. As for a henge, Jeanie; have you ever seen pictures of Stonehenge?’
Jeanie nods, manages a weak smile.
‘But they’re not always made of stone. They can be of wood – tree trunks embedded in the ground,’ Pearl continues. ‘Or it can just be a circle of massive stones, rather than ones topped with other stones. The
main thing is, they act like pointers, showing us where the two suns are.’
‘I can’t see how we’re going to find a stone circle amongst all this,’ I point out miserably, observing the enveloping, packed trees.
‘We won’t unless we start searching,’ Pearl replies, beginning to push her way through the entrapping branches.
The branches crackle, spitting flashes of what could be static electricity.
The sparks spread, branch to branch, stem to stem. They light up like massed stars around us in the darkness of the packed wood.
It reminds me of something, but I can’t quite place what that something is.
The voices are suddenly agitated. There are wails, screams.
Warnings.
‘Go back, go back!’
‘No, no; that’s not the right way!’
‘This way, this way!’
‘Come with us!’
‘Come with me!’
Alongside us, Jeanie shivers, cowers against us.
‘This…this is what Ellie said she had heard: voices, telling her to join them in the forest. She didn’t like being alone.’
‘It’s the forest; the forest is stealing children.’
It’s the first time I’ve seen Pearl look truly frightened. She glances up nervously towards the flashing sparks of electricity now swiftly running along the branches.
‘It’s always stolen children,’ Pearl says, her expression of fright now tinged with the gawping, wide-eyed qualities of awe. ‘Dad just made it even easier; when he made the wendy house out of its wood.’
‘Easier? Stealing children?’ I’m still puzzled, even though I recognise that Pearl might be on to something with her theory, no matter how bizarre and unlikely it might seem. ‘Why would a forest steal children?’
‘Because it’s alive. I don’t know how – maybe, you know, all the people that’s died here through starvation? Perhaps it’s soaked up all their fears, all their hunger.’
She carefully touches a branch once more: and yet again, it quivers and sparks. It sends a flash of electricity rushing up back through the rest of the forest.
‘All these tightly packed trees, all connected with intertwining branches, all snapping and crackling against each other – it’s gained intelligence. Like it’s a gigantic brain.’