Joey? That’s the brother of Mary.
So that means the rabbit is Mary.
And the puppy? Well, that’s got to be Debbie.
‘I miss Carol.’ Debbie’s letting the tears flow once more.
Pearl curls a reassuring arm around her weeping friend’s shoulders.
‘I know, I know; I do too. But let’s all try and get back home safely. That’s what Carol would want us all to do, isn’t it?’
Sometimes, it is hard to remember that Pearl is only nine.
*
Around me now, the others are moving oddly, almost as if they have little control over their own movements.
They have to straighten up every now and again, as if they’ve unconsciously slipped, or even fallen slightly.
Stranger still, my own body is now involuntary moving in its own way too. My arm abruptly slides deeper into the surrounding filth. My hips suddenly sag. I have to pull my arm out, to sidle my hips to one side, where the massed rubbish feels firmer – then this area too suddenly drops away from beneath me, sucking along part of my body with it.
‘The waste’s moving! It’s alive!’
Mary jumps up from the floor of rubbish as if it’s burning her.
The waste is hot, admittedly – it’s steaming with the heat it’s giving off. Yet she’s actually leapt clear of a part of the pile that collapses before her, like it’s dropping away into another world.
‘The other piles of waste – they’re vanishing!’
Debbie points off towards the other barges, the ones stretching out so far ahead of us they’re already in deeper water. She’s right, too. The hills of waste are dropping lower, the ones in the forward barges having almost completely disappeared.
‘They’re slipping away – like sand in the top of an hour glass,’ Ellie points out more studiously, her wide-eyes intense as they apparently take in every detail of the rapidly diminishing piles.
‘They’re getting rid of the waste; letting it slip into the sea.’
Pearl glances worriedly at our own increasingly swiftly moving pile. It’s flowing away from us now almost fluidly, causing us all to stumble wildly on our feet.
‘We’re moving with it!’ Jeanie yells in warning, looking back towards the edge of the barge, where we were standing only moments before.
‘It’s the middle of the barge!’ I shriek out in fear as it dawns on me what’s happening. ‘The whole bottom’s opened up, like two huge trapdoors – everything’s slipping into the sea!’
*
Chapter 38
Just as Ellie had so aptly described it, the waste is slipping away like sand in an hourglass.
The middle is dropping away fastest of all. It’s sickeningly dipping away from us at an ever steeper angle.
Out feet slip, slide and sink into the fluid waste, unable to find anything to grip onto. We can’t grab at anything with our hands either, for everything now moves, flows, tumbles. It’s all vanishing into the ever-growing pit.
And we’re going with it all too, slipping down the pit’s inclining sides. The filth and rotting food pours around us, dragging us along, pummelling and showering us in an avalanche of slime.
Mary’s the only one who seems capable of hopping from one large item to another, her long rabbit feet giving her a distinct advantage. Yet instead of saving herself, she constantly offers a hand to the rest of us. She drags one of us higher up the waterfall of rubbish, only to then rush back to help someone else.
‘It’s no good! We keep slipping back!’ Pearl wails.
She’s already been helped twice by Mary. But she’s once again uncontrollably slipping back down the pit’s relentlessly moving sides.
I feel that it’s hopeless too.
The waste is in no real hurry to move, its many broken and discarded objects languidly tumbling and falling over each other. Yet it’s gradually moving faster, gradually drawing us deeper into its embrace more efficiently than any quicksand.
‘Pearl! Look – is that what I think it is?’
Amongst the innumerable unwanted ovens, boilers and large garden toys, I’ve spotted something familiar.
A yellow wendy house.
*
Like us, the wendy house rolls and sways, as if caught on a lightly wallowing sea.
Like us, too, it’s being inexorably sucked towards the very centre of the vanishing pile of waste.
‘What good’s that to us?’ Pearl groans.
‘If we get in, before it vanishes too, it’ll take us to another level!’ I point out, scrambling up through the rippling tide of waste with new vigour and purpose.
All though they haven’t said so, the other girls obviously agree with me. They’re also all making their way as best as they can towards the rocking, bucking wendy house; the same way the sailors of a sunken ship will swim towards a floating spar.
And yes, we swim too: swim what could have been the breaststroke through the tumbling, slimy waste. There’s an extra advantage, too, in that the wendy house is actually drawing towards us on the waves of rolling waste.
The wallowing waste is disgusting beyond belief. It’s not only the mix of the most obnoxious stenches I’d ever come across; it's not even the way its slimy gunge washes over you, swells around your neck and rises up towards your mouth – it’s the mass of insects that, like us, are fleeing the waters swallowing the waste, drawing them all together into a writhing carpet of black bodies and scrabbling legs.
By the time we’re close to the wendy house, its back has frustratingly spun towards us. The door at the front is too far around, too difficult to reach. We won’t reach it before we all finally slither down through the growing hole, where the waste slips beneath the sea’s surface.
‘The back door!’ Pearl gasps, grabbing hold of the wendy house’s rear and using the slender slots between the planks as a means of pulling herself clear of most of the waste.
Her fingers flitter urgently over the wall’s surface, frantically searching for the edges of the door, for anything that could give a hint to where it actually is.
‘Hah!’ she suddenly cries jubilantly.
Prising her fingertips into a gap she’s discovered, her face creases in pain as she strains to make use of that minute gap and pull the door open.
She sighs with relief and joy as the door pops open.
‘Quick, get in, get in!’ she screams, pulling herself half inside the door, turning around and reaching out a hand to pull me aboard.
As soon as I’m half inside, I reach out for Ellie. Pearl next drags inside a gratefully moaning Jeanie.
‘Mary!’
I urge Mary to move quickly, stretching out my hand towards her.
I realise we’re not going to move on to another level until we’re all aboard, until we close the door behind us. But I also realise we’re not going to make it.
We’ve run out of time.
The edge of the waste, where it slips into the water, is only a tumble, a fall, away.
‘There’s no time!’ Mary shouts back, like me realising it’s hopeless. Like me, realising we can’t all get inside before the wendy house slips into the waiting sea.
Even so, she reaches out: and she slams the door shut.
*
Chapter 39
As Mary slams the door to the wendy house shut, the house itself tips violently. It rolls on the sludge of waste as it drops into the sea.
We’re all sent bowling across the short floor, crashing into the front door. The door flies open. We fall clear of the wendy house, tumbling in a chaotic pile onto a ground of solidly-packed earth.
Somewhere within that slight drop, we change, the bodies falling about me no longer black and white, no longer cartoons. Now we’re all unashamedly bright pink or brown, and unmalleably hard.
Our hair is of flowing nylon, either sheer black, or a shiny blonde.
We’re dolls. Pearl’s dolls, the ones I’d seen in her own wendy house.
Only she, of course, remains
as she had been before. She’s thankfully still human.
Behind us, the wendy house rocks unsteadily – then vanishes, as if magically swallowed up by the hard earth.
Everyone looks at each other in surprise, with wide, gleaming eyes of green, blue, amber.
We curiously, fearfully, feel the hardness of our ‘skin’, our shells.
I’m wearing the most ridiculously frilly dress. One like Diana had worn.
‘Mary – where’s Mary?’ Pearl wails, fearfully glancing about herself in the vain hope of catching a glimpse of her missing friend.
‘She…she didn’t have time to get inside.’ I feel that my voice is close to cracking. ‘She shut the door; so that we’d be saved.’
Ellie looks my way with her huge, sad eyes.
‘Did…did she rise up, like an angel? Like Carol?’ she asks, her own voice trembling with the same despondency I’m attempting to control within myself.
‘I didn’t have chance to see,’ I admit with a slight shake of my head. ‘But I’m sure she must have,’ I add as brightly as I can manage.
The exaggeratedly large eyes of the dolls surrounding me seem full of emotion, full of fear and sadness. Maybe, though, there’s also a hint of the hope that Mary and Carol have in some way managed to survive what could be their deaths.
I know Pearl well enough to recognise that she’s finding it hard to hold back her tears. I can sense the way she’s gathering herself together. She knows that the others are relying on her to get them safely out of here.
‘We need to find out where we are,’ she says, glancing about us, taking in our new surroundings.
We’re lying in what appears to be an oddly shaped sandy depression, a deep hollow in what is otherwise rolling, grassy ground. It’s like an overly-large bunker on a golf course.
The sides of the depression are quite high, quite steep: we all have to help each other to clamber out and scramble up onto the grassy area.
‘Oh oh: this isn’t good – this isn’t very good at all,’ Jeanie declares worriedly, looking back on the depression we’ve all just climbed out of.
At first, I can’t understand her anxiety, even as I try and make sense of the odd shape of the depression.
Jeanie points out the tight curve of the depression’s rear, the individual holes towards the front.
‘It’s a footprint,’ Jeanie explains. ‘A giant’s footprint.’
*
The trail of the giant stretches back behind us over the gently rolling landscape.
Each footprint is gigantic in its own right. The giant obviously walks barefoot. His weight must be considerable too, for the depressions within the hard soil are quite deep.
‘Where’s he gone?’
Unlike the rest of us, Debbie isn’t looking back to see where the giant came from. She’s staring ahead, frowning in puzzlement.
‘See?’ she adds, pointing out that the trail of footprints only stretches a little way ahead of us. Ten or twelve more footprints, and that’s all.
‘Perhaps the ground’s harder there.’
‘Maybe he jumped?’
‘There no sign of him landing anywhere,’ Debbie responds with a doubtful shake of her head, shading her eyes as she peers farther off into the distance. ‘He might be a giant; but he’d have to have wings to jump that far.’
‘Then maybe he just vanished; you know, like the wendy house?’ Jeanie says hopefully.
‘Listen – can you hear anything?’ Ellie asks, cupping a hand around an ear.
We all instantly stop speaking, straining our ears to pick up whatever Ellie thinks she might have heard.
There’s a laboured grunting, the odd weary groan. It sounds like it’s coming from somewhere close to the last set of giant footprints.
‘An invisible giant?’ Jeanie whispers in terrified awe.
From the farthest footprint, a spout of dirt shoots up into the air. It lands on the grassy sides with a clump.
There’s a pained groan as another fountain of soil rises from the depression. Soil which once again falls into the surrounding grass.
We waddle over towards the last footprint as quickly as we’re able, our gait awkward and difficult to get used to. It’s like walking as an over-padded toddler. Our legs are stiff, unbending. We’re only jointed at the hip, with no flexibility at the knee.
The piles of dirt rising into the air are coming from the circular hole that would have been formed by the giant’s big toe. The grunting and groaning emanates from there too.
Peering down from the edges of the hole, we find ourselves staring down at an industriously busy and surprisingly small man. He’s too busy digging the hole, throwing the dirt high over his shoulder, to have noticed any of us gathering around him.
‘Excuse me.’
The little man jumps nervously when Pearl calls down to him. The shovelful of earth he’s throwing up into the air falls in a filthy rain all over his bent back.
He whirls around, his face contorted with fear. It’s a large face for his small body, with even larger features. He’s hardly bigger than I am, or the rest of the dolls.
He’s a dwarf, maybe, or a goblin, I’d guess. Something like that anyway. Leastways, he’s dressed like a gnome. His feet are large and bared, his hands similarly over-sized for his body.
‘Who are you?’ the dwarf demands irately, perhaps in an attempt to hide his terror at being unexpectedly surrounded by a group of weirdly glaring dolls. ‘You shouldn’t be here! The giant – the giant will get you! And eat you up!’
Despite his bravado, he’s cowering within his hole, holding his spade before him as if it were some sort of defensive weapon. It’s a full sized spade, one that even Pearl would probably find difficult to handle. The dwarf’s thick arms are obviously incredibly powerful.
‘What giant?’ Debbie asks doubtfully.
‘The giant who made all these giant footprints, course!’ the dwarf blusters edgily.
‘You seem to be the one making them,’ Pearl says dismissively.
‘Is there a giant?’ Jeanie asks.
‘Might be,’ the Dwarf answers with an archly raised eyebrow. ‘You’d better run, hadn’t you?’
‘We don’t think there is a giant.’
I’m sure I’m answering for all of us when I say this. No one attempts to disagree with me.
We all just glare angrily down at the dwarf. We’ve been through enough without this silly little man trying to scare us with tales of non-existent giants.
‘Just because I’m digging this hole doesn’t mean giants don’t exist!’ the dwarf persists.
‘But there aren’t any around here, are there?’ Pearl declares with an assertive scowl.
At last lowering his spade, the dwarf resignedly shakes his head.
‘I suppose not; now you come to mention it.’
‘So why are you trying to scare people then?’ Debbie snaps irritably.
‘Don’t you realise how scary it is for me, living out here on my own?’ the dwarf replies, scrambling out of his hole with difficulty until Pearl offers him a hand.
‘So why do you live on your own?’ Ellie asks.
The dwarf shrugs.
‘Because no one comes out this way: I don’t know why not.’
‘The giant scares them off, maybe?’ I say.
‘But there isn’t a real giant, is there?’ the dwarf says.
‘But if they see the footprints–’
‘It’s not supposed to scare off people who want to be my friend!’ the dwarf retorts, rudely interrupting poor little Jeanie.
Before anyone can point out the major fault lines in the dwarf’s bizarre logic, there’s a thunder-like groan high above us, a lightning-like crack that’s sharp and sudden.
The clouds rolling solidly across the sky aren’t dark, however; they’re as white as can be, as purely unblemished as an artic landscape.
Despite this, a branching streak of lightning breaks out from between the clouds. Ye
t it’s one that’s strangely slow in its movement and – even more improbably – bright green rather than white.
More plant-like than a burst of condensed light, the rapidly elongating green streak stretches down towards us. Smaller sections fork off in every direction.
The main stalk strikes the ground close by us, thickening, curling and burgeoning leaves as it does so. Its lower forks spread and root within the ground.
It’s not lightning. It really is a plant, after all.
It’s a giant beanstalk.
*
Chapter 40
The clouds rumble angrily once more. The drumming booms of thunder.
The beanstalk vibrates, its twang like that of a strummed guitar string.
The dwarf nervously grabs hold of Pearl.
‘Someone’s coming down it! Down the beanstalk!’ he shrieks in panic.
Through the break in the clouds that the massive green shoot had originally emanated from, there’s now a flash of bright red, of black.
It’s someone running. Running as fast as they can down the weaving, curling beanstalk.
Yet it doesn’t seem to be a giant.
Going by the width of the beanstalk rooted by us, I’d guess that he’s not much bigger than Pearl.
The bright red is his jacket, the black his boots and hat.
It’s a uniform.
And the closer this solider get towards us, the more I recognise him.
It’s the solider. The solider who, along with his men and the doll Diana, had rescued me earlier when I’d been imprisoned by the wendigoes.
*
The soldier’s taller now that he had been when I’d last seem him.
Perhaps, after all, he and his men had been the ones who had eaten the magical cake, rather than the rats.
Good: I’d hate to think they’d lost out to those awful rats.
As he sprints ever closer towards us, he stares at me in growing astonishment, then absolute delight.
‘Diana?’ he yells excitedly. ‘You survived!’
‘No, no,’ I cry back, realising that he’s mistaken me for the friend he’d lost as we’d fought our way through the massed rats, ‘it’s me; the girl you rescued!’