Deep Secret (Magids 1) - Page 43

We sat for some time. Nick was quite happy. He got out a notebook and set to perfecting his Wantchester game, bringing it up to Bristolia standard, he said. I was pretty restive. It was an unrestful spot. Waiters and waitresses kept coming out through a door disguised as a mirror, carrying glasses and boxes of bottles for the publishers’ parties. They all seemed to be talking about music. The waitress who had brought Nick his cornflakes hurried by saying, “It’s not that I mind music – it’s not that. I just want to know where it’s coming from.”

And the waiter who had brought the coffee said, “Yeah, I know. It’s creepy. Music in the air.”

A few minutes after they had gone, I heard music too. It was coming from behind the closed door of the Filk Room. It didn’t strike me as creepy, but it seemed unlikely that Rupert Venables and Mervin Thurless had both suddenly started playing guitars. “Nick…” I said.

Nick looked up, listened and said, “Oh no!” The guitars had now been joined by a sweet soprano song.

We both jumped up and Nick tore open the Filk Room door. The three women alone in there looked rather startled. “We were just having a bit of a rehearsal,” said the one who had been singing. “The filking doesn’t really start until eight.”

Nick spotted the door at the other end of the room, where the women must have come in and Rupert and Thurless gone out. “Sorry,” he said, sprinting for it. “Looking for someone.” We crossed the room like an army crossing the stage, with the women gaping at us, and crashed out the other side into a shabby passage where the service stairs were. Nick seemed to have no doubt that Rupert had recently gone up those stairs. He went up them at a gallop and I panted behind, thinking that, even if Rupert had gone that way, he was long gone by now. There was a fire door at the top, saying it led to the Second Floor. Nick pushed it open, looked, and beckoned me on with a large excited sweep of his arm.

I panted up to him to see a long corridor ahead, with the usual mirrors at the corners, and Rupert Venables just turning left at that end. We raced after him. I was almost as frustrated as Nick by then. I’d wasted a whole afternoon and I was determined to catch him this time. We whirled round that corner, me on Nick’s heels, only seconds behind Rupert.

It was only when we had run some yards down a passage lined with mirrors, but the glass all faint and dark, like the reflections of reflections, that I had a clear memory of the hotel corridor and knew something was very wrong. There hadn’t been a cross-corridor. There never was this side of the hotel. There was always only a right-hand turn. There was no way we could have turned left without crashing into the wall. But we had.

Nick realised all this too, a second later. “Where are we?”

“In the soup,” I said. “Run. Keep him in sight.”

Rupert Venables was still ahead, calmly walking along there in the dim distance. I was fairly sure that if we lost him we were lost for good. If I looked over my shoulder – and I did, about six times, in increasing panic – there was, well, not the hotel. A sort of fuzzy strangeness. Nick looked once too. Then he seized my wrist and we ran. And that was another thing about this strange experience. Rupert Venables just walked, a bit jauntily, swinging along as if he knew where he was going, but not walking fast. We fair pelted. But he was always the same distance away.

I was going to type, ‘It was hard not to panic,’ but the fact is we did panic. Running and running and not making any difference is like your worst dreams. Hot and horrified and nightmarish, we ran. And shortly it was exactly like my worst dreams, because there, just to one side, was the bush with my thornlady in it – or that she was part of, or whatever. She said to me, sneeringly, “What good do you think this is doing you?”

“Oh shut up!” I told her.

I don’t think Nick heard her or knew she was there. He went trampling and crunching through one side of her bush, bellowing, “Rupert the Mage! WAIT!” with his voice roaring and cracking with panic. The bush whipped about with indignation. She was furious. But I had no attention for that, because Nick w

as dragging me away at my wrist and Rupert Venables just walked on and didn’t seem to hear us yelling.

We seemed to be mostly out in the open air by then, on a hillside of steep slanting banks, going downwards ahead of us. But there were regular dreadful places where it was all fuzzy sliding instead, where what was almost hillside, but not quite, moved giddily this way and that. There was hillside sliding overhead in those places, and we had to duck under, with our stomachs squirming with vertigo, and then jump over the fuzzy slidings underfoot, because we neither of us dared touch those bits. And the relief of getting to grassy slope again would have been inexpressible, except that Rupert was always just that bit ahead and we had to go hurtling, shouting, ducking and jumping down after him again. In the grassy bits, the sky kept changing, from cloudy to blue, to near-dark, to sunset, and back to blue with white clouds. It made me feel sick.

The nightmare ended in a lovely Spring afternoon. Rupert jumped down ahead of us, and we jumped down after him, from what seemed to be the bank of a hedge, into a dirt road. He walked slantwise across the road to a shabby white gate in the hedge opposite. We scuttled over after him for dear life.

“Stop! Wait!” Nick croaked.

“Help!” I added.

He had his hand on the gate latch, but he spun round and stared at us. I have never seen him look so utterly outraged and angry, not even when he interrupted the Witchy Dance. “What the hell are you two doing here?” he said. His voice had the sort of cold clank to it of someone chipping stones.

Nick quailed. “I – er… I wanted to speak to you,” he quavered.

“We sort of followed you by mistake,” I apologised. “We did shout, but you didn’t seem to hear. And we didn’t dare lose you.”

Rupert said nothing. He simply did that thing of taking hold of his left lens and pinning us with it, like vile germs on a gold-rimmed slide. I began to get angry myself at that. I remember thinking it was ridiculous, us all humble and him glaring at us for something we couldn’t help, in a spot like that. There were violets and primroses growing on the banks by the gate, and a clump of tiny daffodils to one side. I could hear distant, gentle country noises, sheep bleating and hens clucking and so on, and it seemed quite out of place and stupid for him to stand glaring and blaming us for being there.

Nick was completely crushed by the lens treatment. That surprises me whenever I think of it. Until then I’ve never known Master Nick crushed by anything. He said “Sorry!” and looked like a dog with its tail between its legs.

That made me even angrier. “I’m sorry too,” I said, “but it was an accident. Nick wanted to talk to you about computer games, so we ran after you. There’s no call to fry us on your lens for it!”

Rupert breathed in. I could see he was going to say something that would blast me. But the gate opened out of his hand before he could speak and a tall, untidy, farmerish man in green wellies looked out at us all. “Hello, Rupe!” he said. “What’s going on here?”

“Oh – hello, Will,” Rupert said, rather let down and wind-out-of-sails. “You seem to have some uninvited guests, is what’s going on. Nick and Maree followed me here somehow.”

The man Will grinned sweetly. I could tell he knew Rupert was furious. “You weren’t invited either,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not glad to see you.”

“It’s not the same!” Rupert said. He didn’t exactly stamp his foot or even yell particularly, but the way he said it was doing both those things, and I somehow understood from it that Will was his elder brother and had had years of experience in winding Rupert up.

“Is your name Venables too?” I asked Will, testing my theory.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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