It’s the girl. She’s here in the darkness with me. I can only dimly make her out.
She doesn’t look like any one of Pearl’s friends. Not one that I can remember, anyway.
Oh no!
While patting my jacket clean of dirt and dust, I’ve just realised that the pockets are no longer full of the magical cake I’d picked up earlier.
Have I dropped it all out there? Out amongst the rats?
If the rats eat the cake – what will life be like then for those poor settlers?
I can only hope that it’s the doll and the soldiers who find the cake. If they eat it: well then, at last, they might be able to protect those poor children.
‘Could you help me please?’
The girl repeats her request, a little more impatiently and forcibly this time.
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I reply distractedly, my mind still not fully on whatever she’s saying.
‘Do you know where my legs are?’ she continues brightly.
‘Where your…legs are?’
Mystified, I look down to where her legs should be.
And she’s right – she doesn’t have any legs.
*
Chapter 22
The legless girl is hovering in the dark air.
She’s smiling.
Like not having any legs doesn’t hurt, or bother her too much.
I know this tale. A girl without legs, asking where she can find them.
It’s an urban myth: a Japanese urban tale.
If I answer incorrectly, she slices me in half.
Pretty unlikely, normally, right?
But in this place?
Very likely!
‘They’re being held at the lost and found office,’ I answer anxiously. ‘At the Meishin Railway.’
She nods, grins, like she’s satisfied.
‘Who told you this?’ she trills happily.
‘Kashima Reiko: she told me.’
I have to hope I’ve read the correct version of this tale.
She politely nods once again.
‘As a reward for your help,’ she continues gaily, ‘I would like to give you a cape! Would you prefer red, or blue?’
Another urban tale.
If I chose blue, she drains all the blood from my body.
If I choose to name some other colour, or refuse to reply, she carries me off to the Netherworld.
And red?
I can’t remember what happens if I choose red!
‘Red,’ I answer, preparing for the worst.
Before I can move, she swings around my back, razor sharp claws sprouting from her fingertips.
She slashes at my back.
Shredding my skin into a bloodied red cape.
*
With a mischievous chortle, the girl vanishes.
I crease up in agony, my torn skin burning with pain.
There’s no mirror to check on the state of my back. I feel with my hands, cringing in horror as I feel the shreds running through my hands.
Yet…yet when I touch the shreds, it doesn’t send more pain shooting along my back, as I’d expect.
They’re shreds of skin, there’s no doubt about that. And they’re covered in blood.
But they’re shreds of leather.
This time, unfortunately, the skin of my back hasn’t emerged completely unscathed.
Through my pain, I can sense the furrows her talons have gouged into my skin, drawing blood.
Once again, however, my jacket has absorbed the very worst of the damage.
There’s a part of my memory trying to tell me, I feel, that the previous girl I’d met – that evilly warped Little Red Riding Hood – also has her roots in Japanese tales.
Is that how it works here?
The place conjures up into reality tales we’ve heard?
That would explain the Alice in Wonderland rabbit, the drink, and the cake. The original Red Riding Hood too.
But what, then, about the theme park? The ponies? The Four Horsemen?
Maybe it’s not just tales; maybe it’s also other things we have unconsciously flowing through our minds.
Which makes this place as dangerous as I could possibly imagine.
And, going by all the weird tales and images flooding through my brain, that’s not in any way reassuring.
*
Chapter 23
Exiting through the back door, I walk out into yet another garden; this one even more pleasant and delightful than the first one I’d found myself in.
All gaily coloured borders. All elegantly cut hedges and bushes.
There’s music too; light and gay.
And not, thankfully, that damn skipping song!
As I walk along the gently meandering path, I begin to pick up what sounds like voices: happily chattering voices.
Amongst it all, too, there’s the clink of what could be china cups.
Not that that means, of course, that it is cups I’m hearing.
Or that I’m really hearing happy chatter.
‘Shall I be mother?’ someone trills.
‘Tea for me, please!’
‘And me!’
‘Me too!’
Despite all these happy cries, I’m still pleasantly surprised that, rounding the corner of some particularly high flowers, I really do come out into a small clearing containing a highly exuberant tea party.
But one madder than the Hatter’s tea party.
*
The table’s large, and spread with a glaringly white tablecloth.
It’s also piled high with towering cake stands, filled with every kind of cake you could think of. The tea service is elegant, the finest porcelain at a guess. The cups are minute, however, while the teapot is gigantically oversized, needing at least three people to lift it.
When I say people, I’m using the term only because it would take three people to lift it. Not because three people are lifting it.
Cartoon characters would be a better description. And I don’t mean funny characters: I mean animals literally lifted from some early twentieth century black and white Silly Symphonies type feature. You know, the type where the very earliest forms of animated mice and cats dance endlessly to jazzy little tunes.
It’s not even like these are three dimensional versions of the characters. Not that they’re exactly flat and two dimensional either.
Just as they appear on film, no matter which way they look or I turn, they look as though they would when projected upon a screen – all hazy black lines, and glowing whites.
Like ghosts, whose features have been picked out with an ink-dipped quill.
There are mice here, but no cat. A rabbit too, a duck, and some form of incredibly cute puppy.
They’re seated around the table, eating the cakes. Daintily sipping their tea from the undersized cups.
The only person I can’t quite make out is the one nearest me, the one who’s seated within a high-backed chair that has its back to me.
But the person sitting there obviously knows I’m here.
‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Dia!’ Pearl declares sternly.
*
Chapter 24
Despite her stern greeting, Pearl peers around the edge of the back of her chair; and grins warmly at me.
She’s out of her chair in a second, rushing towards me, throwing her arms around my waist.
She doesn’t appear in anyway unusual. It’s Pearl as I know her in every way. Almost the Pearl I’d originally chased down here, apart from the fact she’s wearing some other dress.
‘You have to stop going deeper,’ she warns me. ‘You have to avoid the wendy houses!’
‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you, you know?’ I sigh, partially frustrated, partially relieved. ‘Now let’s get ou–’
She pulls back, grabs my hand, starts dragging me towards the table.
‘No no! It’s not that easy. There’s no time to explain – the game’s about to start!’
‘Game? No,
no, Pearl! We haven’t got time for any–’
She slips back into her chair, indicating that I should take the empty one nearest hers.
The cartoon characters generally ignore me, continuing with their hungry eating, their urgent sipping. At least the puppy pulls out the empty seat for me to take at the table.
As soon as I take my seat however, the seat jumps from under me. The other seats also slip from beneath Pearl and the cartoon creatures, moving to the music as it increases in tempo. They whirl around the table as they twirl and spin, as if taking part in an elaborate dance.
Pearl and the others move around the table too, and I join them, a weird version of Musical Chairs.
‘What kind of madhouse have you created here?’ I ask.
‘I’ve created? Don’t you think, perhaps Dia, that the mad part has a little more to do with you?’
I briefly think about this.
Yeah, that would make sense.
Pearl creates all the flowery little ponies, the sweet Little Red Riding Hood.
All it takes is my bitterly warped mind to turn them into the pale horses of Revelation, the terrifying Japanese girl.
‘But what about your friends,’ I point out. ‘They were lost down here long before I became involved. You’re not telling me your sweet little fairy story characters carried them off?’
She shakes her head.
‘No, not the fairy stories; but their fears, their worst fears, which they’d always tried to hide from – that’s what eventually ended up threatening them.’
The jabbing pain in my back, the dull itch across my cheek: all this tells me that Pearl’s telling the truth.
‘So how come you’ve survived down here? How come you still keep coming back?’
‘Because I was lucky – I had Mom here to help me.’
*
‘Mom?’ I laugh uncertainly. ‘Mom can’t be here…’
But then, why can’t she?
If I can conjure up half remembered tales I’ve read in Manga comics, then why can’t Pearl recreate Mom here?
‘She’s here?’
I look around hopefully. I can’t see her anywhere.
Could I conjure her up?
My version of her?
Huh, what would my version of Mom be like?
All mean and cantankerous. And continually telling me off for every little slight, every supposed misdemeanour.
Now Pearl’s version of Mom; now yeah, there you’d have an all sweetness and light, helpful Mom.
Before Pearl can answer, the music directing our strange little dance comes to an abrupt halt.
The chairs slip back into place beneath the table.
Everyone rushes for the nearest chair. In my rush towards a chair, caught up in the game, I almost push a cartoon mouse out of the way.
Thankfully, she doesn’t seem to mind.
She waves sadly; and then she vanishes.
*
Chapter 25
When the little mouse vanishes, Pearl looks worried. So do the other cartoon creatures.
‘Pearl, you said Mom’s here wi–’
I almost fall to the floor as the chair pulls itself out from beneath me once again.
The music has started up once more, faster this time. The chairs take up their peculiar little dance, and, once again, we follow them, trotting after them as they spin and whirl around the table.
Pearl shakes her head once more in answer to my question.
‘Not here: no. Mom can’t help us here.’
I can’t see any source of danger here. Is that what Pearl means? We don’t need Mom here?
‘I’ve come here to help you,’ Pearl continues, displaying all the confidence of an elder rather than younger sister. ‘Me and my friends.’
‘Friends?’
I glance around at the table, at the cartoon mouse, duck, puppy, and rabbit.
‘I don’t suppose you’d recognise them,’ Pearl admits. ‘But these are my friends: Jeanie, Mary, Carol, Debbie, and – well you just saw poor little Ellie leave, didn’t you?’
And as Pearl calls each of her friends’ names out, each cartoon animal smiles and waves a hand in happy greeting.
*
The music stops.
The chairs slip beneath the table. And once again, there’s a sudden, mad scramble for them.
This time, two chairs must have vanished, for both the rabbit and puppy disappear with a last, sad wave.
The other cartoons glance my way worriedly, like they’re anxious that they’re losing their friends because I’m here.
‘You’ve turned your friends into cartoons?’ I cry out to Pearl above the increasingly loud music as it starts up once more.
The music and moves are more frenzied than ever. I’m running faster than I’ve ever run, in my efforts to keep up with the hurriedly whirling chairs.
‘It was the only way to save them!’ Pearl yells back at me.
‘Save them? Like this?’
‘I didn’t have any other choice! They understand that – that’s why we’re here to help you! To make sure you don’t win!’
‘Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line…’
The cartoon creatures are singing that ridiculous song again. They’re gasping for breath as they run around the table.
When she’s not trying to shout out to me, Pearl joins in with the song. The song’s beat fights against the strenuous rhythm of the music that’s playing, that’s directing the feverish actions of the chairs.
‘To make sure I don’t win?’ I cry back at Pearl, the whirling chairs now adding the shrieks of a furious wind to the cacophony. ‘How does that help me?’
‘As I said –’
The music stops, as does the whirl of the chairs.
Only the skipping song remains as everyone heads towards a chair.
‘…and they all went to heaven in a little row boat!’
Two chairs have gone. The last mouse and the duck vanish along with them.
‘You’re getting in too deep…’ Pearl shrieks out as loudly as she can as the music and whirlwind of dancing chairs begins again, louder and more frantically than ever.
One of the two remaining chairs swirls off high into the air.
There’s just the one chair now, tossed around as if in a powerful tornado.
‘You have to let me win!’ Pearl screams out above the noise. ‘I know how to deal–’
The music stops.
I dash towards the chair.
‘Pearl, you can sit on here with me–’
But it’s all too late.
I’m sitting on the chair.
And Pearl has vanished.
*
Chapter 26
The music is calm and pleasant once more.
Of course, I feel neither calm nor pleased.
What have I done?
What’s happened to Pearl?
The chair I’m seated on is no longer facing the table. I’m looking out onto the garden, a neatly cut lawn stretching out before me.
Behind me, where the table lies, I hear the clink of cups once more.
Rising from my chair, I whirl around, hoping that everyone’s back in their seats around the table.
The party is on again.
But this time, different characters are seated there.
The emaciated man and woman who I had earlier seen as fearsome wendigoes.
Little Red Riding Hood.
And four cowled figures whom I can only presume are the Four Horsemen.
*
The cakes displayed upon the high stands begin to move slightly, to crumble as they move.
Insects suddenly emerge from them, engorged on the innards of the cakes. What remains of the cakes falls into nothing but dust.
The characters reach for the insects and, as if actually picking up fallen pieces of cake from the white tablecloth, eagerly bring them up towards their hungrily gaping mouths.
r /> Like the cakes, however, the clothes and flesh of each character begins to crumble away into dust. It all falls away until bared skeletons and grinning, hollow-eyed skulls are revealed.
The insects drop through the bared, empty skeletons, only to be followed by evermore insects as bony hands greedily reach out for more and more to desperately devour.
Despite this lack of any proper nourishment, each skeleton begins to rapidly increase in size, but grotesquely so: for rather than just enlarging, each bone sprouts further bones, until each creature is actually formed from a vast number of combined skeletons, writhing all over each other. Perhaps over twenty times my own height, each enlarged creature wails as if with a hundred voices, with a hundred mouths to feed.
There are no more insects for them to devour, for they have hurriedly swarmed off, either scuttling into the undergrowth or flying off into the air.
The darkly hollowed eyes of the skeletal creatures turn my way.
As one, they stretch out towards me with hundreds of hungrily reaching, boney hands.
*
I urgently step back, nervously brushing aside the nearest reaching hands with a sweep of my arms.
The skeletons howl, outraged by my resistance. Blazes of anger light up within the dark pits of hundreds of hollowed eyes.
Spinning around, I sprint across the lawn, even though I realise I can’t hope to outrun the gigantic skeletons. I’m looking about me everywhere I can, looking for anything that might help me evade them.
Behind me now, I can hear the frustrated shrieks of hungry mouths denied their expected meal. With the grind of bone against bone, the skeletons set off in pursuit.
I swerve off towards the more overgrown areas of the garden, the more natural and therefore wilder parts of grasses, bushes and trees.
Even though I duck through and beneath these bushes, I can easily see the pursuing skeletons: they loom over everything, like War of the Worlds’ Martians, ponderous in their moves, but assured that there is no escape from them.
Just as I can so easily see them, they can obviously easily see me. Every mouth wails out directions, every arm points my way.
I’m hoping that the trees’ spreading branches will at least block the skeletons’ attempts to reach out for me. But, as ever, it’s a false hope.