Having done their damage, the whipping frames could be dismantled. Klaes, with the carpenter still leaning heavily on his arm, could not oversee the work himself, but he had to be doing something. He called over Sergeant Frydek and tasked him with taking down the remaining two structures. The sergeant received the order with what looked like relief, and in a very few minutes had assembled two teams of men, some of them noticeably pale and gulping, to begin removing the traces of their commander’s display of justice.
The townspeople paid them no attention. Many seemed stunned; some of the women had begun keening. A number of the men were still watching the departing backs of August and his lieutenants with angry looks that quickly became angry words and gestures. Jursitizky, in charge of the larger cannon, had his men raise the muzzle to point directly at the troublemakers, but the threat was not enough to still their resentment: a furious buzz of protest broke out, and a stone flew past Klaes’s head and landed near one of the cannons.
Dame Weichorek wheeled in an instant and seized the thrower by an ear. “As God is my witness, Pieter Hessel, you make another move and my husband will have you in the stocks! All of you! Put your stones down and go home!”
She glared at the young man until he let the second stone fall and turned away. In twos and threes, the Narutsiners began to leave. Klaes watched with sudden admiration: grieving and distraught as she was, the woman had authority. On an impulse, he went over to her and her husband. Beside him, the carpenter had regained his feet, though the old man was still shaking.
“Meister Weichorek; madam,” he said. “Your son is recovering. I’ll conduct you to him, if you wish.”
She started as he addressed her, then gave him a look of freezing scorn.
“You are kind to offer, Lieutenant. But I can find my own way.”
Weichorek, in silence, took the arm of the carpenter, and the three of them left him without a backward glance.
Drozde walked through the camp in a zigzag line, veering away from every solid object that came into her path. She had no idea where she was going, or why. Voices were ringing in her head. Each seemed hard-edged and angular, glancing off the other voices around it until her brain was full of sounds that lay over and across one another, jammed solid to block all thought.
And yet the thoughts found their way through, soundless, in blood-red dribbles.
“Drozde. Are you well?” A hand came down on her shoulder, and in pulling away from it she got half-turned around. It was Taglitz. He took a step back, hurriedly, hands raised to show he meant no harm. “It was a brutal sight for a woman to see,” he said. “I was just worried for you, that was all.”
“Worried?” Drozde repeated.
“That you might be sick, or something. From the blood. Or that your emotions might get the better of you. If you want to sit down, my tent . . . it’s right here. Only a step away. And I’ve beer, to refresh you.”
“You saw me in disputation with Sergeant Molebacher,” Drozde translated, “and you thought it might be time to go to market.”
Taglitz didn’t blush at being so quickly found out, but he looked sheepish. “If you want to go with another man, Drozde, you’ll have your pick. Of course you will. I know a pottle of beer won’t buy you. But sit with me anyway, until you feel a little better. I’ll lift your spirits one way or another, or chuck my flute in the stream.”
“Fuck off, Tag,” Drozde growled. “And take your flute with you. Touch me and I’ll gnaw your hand off.”
She walked away from him, but Taglitz was not put off. He gave a strained laugh and continued to walk along beside her. “I’m only a private,” he said. “Is that it? Or that I’m fond of my drink? For I can mend, if it’s that. Only let me show you. I can be a sober man and a good one when I put my shoulder to it.”
“Be as sober as a judge,” Drozde invited him. “But your bench is somewhere else.” She headed for the house. The enlisted men knew they could not enter there—and unlike her, they took that prohibition seriously. Now, of course, without Molebacher’s patronage, she was as likely to be whipped out of doors as they were. Even with those images fresh in her mind, the men’s backs like ploughed fields rucked and ruined, she didn’t care. She’d do damage to anyone who tried it.
Taglitz fell back at last, his steps slowing. “Only tell me what I have to do,” he shouted at her back. “I care for you, woman. Tell me how to have you.”
She stopped and turned. “You want me?” she demanded.
Tag threw out his arms as though to summon her into his embrace. “Yes!”
“Then kill Sergeant Molebacher.”
The soldier’s eyes went wide with shock at this heresy. “Kill—? I can’t do that!” he yelped.
“Why not?”
Tag looked comically puzzled. So many reasons. Which would he choose?
“He’s too big for me.”
“Then get some friends to join you in the enterprise. I’ll fuck you all.”
She left him standing there, still calling after her. He wouldn’t do it, she knew. He might carry a musket, but he would never kill a brother soldier. He probably couldn’t kill at all without the smell of blood and cordite on the wind and the holy terror of a Prussian battle line, or a French or a Dutch or a Russian or a Turkish one, rushing down on him. He had cheered on the floggings, but that was something a man did because the men around him were doing it—which in the end was why men like Taglitz did anything. He could strike out in a quarrel when his blood was up, but he would never kill for his own advantage. And if he ever did go after Molebacher, he’d break on him like water on a rock. There was not enough harm in Taglitz to help her.
She went down to her cellar room, and closed the door. She thought it would be some comfort to be among her puppets, and it was, but it was a foolish place to have come, after all. It would be the first place Molebacher would search for her, if he searched at all.
She looked for a bolt, and there was a stout one, but it was on the outside of the door. The builders of the house had never envisaged somebody wanting to lock the cellar from the inside.
She gripped the edge of the cupboard and pulled it away from the wall, leaning back to apply her full weight to the task. It was of solid wood and moved slowly, with a great deal of scraping and creaking and catching on the edges of the tiles, but gradually she was able to drag it across the room, an inch or two on this side and then an inch or two on that, until it blocked the door.
She finished her work none too soon. She heard the rattle of the door handle, and a dull report as the door hit the back of the wardrobe.
“Drozde?” It was Molebacher’s voice, breathless and angry. She didn’t bother to answer him. It was obvious that she was there, and beyond that she had nothing to say.
“Come out of that, you stupid bitch. I want to talk to you.” The cupboard creaked as he set his weight to it. Drozde leaned hard against its back and dug her heels in. It slid a few inches, then held. Molebacher was much stronger than her, but he wasn’t able to push directly against the cupboard. All he could do was throw his weight against the door, which touched the cupboard at a shallow angle. She could hold him for a while.
“Are you mad?” Molebacher snarled. He kept his voice low, presumably because he was wary of being overheard and bringing onlookers to this dispute. She understood him, and it filled her with a sort of bleak disgust that she had known him so well and judged him so poorly. He always settled his scores.
He stopped to get his breath back. Quickly Drozde looked around her. Some old timber in the corner of the room caught her gaze. She snatched up a baulk of wood, threw it aside as being too short, grabbed another. She wedged it against the door of the cupboard and jammed the other end between two flagstones.
Once that bulwark was in place, she picked out another, stouter and longer. She could hear Molebacher grunting with effort as he pushed at the door again. The wedge she’d set in place began to bend, but before it could break Drozde slid the long plank between the cupboard and the further wall of the room. It was a tight fit, leaving only an inch or two of play at either end.
She kicked away the wedge and the cupboard slid again at once, but not very far. It hit the plank, drove it into the opposite wall, and then stopped dead. As soon as Drozde could feel that it was held firm, she let go of it. Nothing would move the cupboard now.
Molebacher was cursing at her from its other side. There were scratching sounds as he slid his hand around the partly opened door to explore what was blocking it. Drozde took her first makeshift wedge, which was now surplus to requirements, walked around the flank of the cupboard and peered into the crack between its front face and the door. It was dark, but she could just about see Molebacher’s fingers wriggling about in there.
She swung the plank into the narrow gap and felt a solid impact. Molebacher wailed in anguish and the fingers withdrew.
But he hadn’t gone away. “You dirty little whore!” he whispered into the gap. “I’ll fucking starve you out. You’re mine. Do you hear me? You fuck me, and no one else.”
Drozde put her own mouth to the gap. “I was never yours, Eustach,” she said. She used his given name with deliberate malice, knowing that he hated it. And she spoke much louder than him: if he wanted to keep their falling out quiet, that was reason enough for indiscretion.
“What? What did you say?”
“I was never yours. You were just a man I befriended for a while, because good food’s not cheap and I was hungry. I’m fine now. You can go your ways.”
Molebacher made no answer, but the cupboard creaked and groaned like a ship in a gale as he threw his weight against it. The plank held.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Drozde warned him. “You’re not a young man, Eustach. You must learn to take things easy.”
She waited for another assault on the cupboard, but it didn’t come. For a while there was nothing to be heard apart from Molebacher’s ragged breathing. Then that ceased, too. Either he’d withdrawn himself or he wanted her to think that he had. She knew better than to put her head out and see. In his present mood, Molebacher would tear it from her shoulders.
She sat down on her trunk, alone at last with her feelings. Apart from misery, she found she did not know what they were. She had hardly known Anton. His death was terrible, but he had never belonged to her in the way that Sergeant Molebacher thought Drozde belonged to him. What did his death mean? Nothing. Barely anything. Except that the quartermaster set more store than she did on the exclusivity of their relationship, even though he knew she’d been a whore before and would be a whore again after.
But misery without meaning was enough, right then, to fill her. She put her face in her hands and began to sob.
That was how Magda found her. The little girl put her arm, lighter than gossamer, around her friend’s shoulder and embraced her, issuing urgent pleas into the spaces left by Drozde’s in-breaths.
“Don’t. Please don’t. Don’t be unhappy. We love you. Everybody here loves you. It’s all right. Nothing can hurt you. Everything is fine. I’m here. I’ll stay with you. You can have Amelie. She’s the best. The best kitten. You can stroke her whenever you want.”
Eventually this constant stream of reassurance made Drozde laugh in spite of herself. The offerings were so slight, set against the torrent of her unhappiness, that they were ridiculous.
“I’m fine,” she told the girl, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I’m all right, Magda. You can stop now.”
Magda drew back to appraise her with earnest eyes. “You’re still unhappy,” she said. “Tell me what the matter is.”
“It’s . . .” How to tell a child about death? But then, this was a dead child. Presumably she knew more about the subject than Drozde did. “A friend of mine was hurt. Very badly. He died of his hurts, and I couldn’t help him.”
“Anton,” Magda said.
“What?” Drozde raised her bleary eyes and stared at the ghost-child. “What did you say? What do you know about Hanslo?”
“Everything,” Magda said simply. “You always say anything less than that isn’t enough.”
“That again!” Drozde shivered, and shook her head. “Go away, Magda. Please. I don’t have time for this foolishness right now.”
The girl threw her head back and laughed. “That’s what you always say when you don’t really understand something and you don’t want to ask about it!”
Drozde stood. “That’s enough,” she said. “If you want to make yourself useful, go outside and see if Molebacher is still waiting for me out there.”
She pointed to the cupboard. “All right,” Magda said at once, and walked through it.
She was not gone for long. “Yes, he’s still there,” she said. “He’s sitting on a folding chair at the top of the stairs. Off to the side a bit, so you wouldn’t see him until you got to the very top and stepped out. He’s all by himself. And there’s a pan on top of the stove that’s all boiled over and gone dry. I think it had soup in it. Red soup, like with beetroots or something.”
“Borscht.”
“Yes. That. He should take it off the fire, because the pan will be ruined.”
And the officers will be waiting for their dinner and wondering what the world is coming to, Drozde thought. Molebacher would need to watch himself. He tended his camaraderie with Colonel August the way a gardener tends a fruit tree, and for the same reason—to increase the yield. But if Drozde knew one thing well it was the minds of men, and she could count on her fingers the number of missed meals a friendship like that would survive.
Still, that was not for her to worry about. Molebacher’s fortunes were not hers any more.
“Thanks,” she said to Magda. “We’ll let him wait a while, shall we? Perhaps he’ll fall asleep.”
It would take more than that, though. The noise she’d make when she moved the cupboard away from the door would surely wake him, even if he were in his cups. And she had brought nothing with her to eat or to drink, so she was poorly placed to stand a siege.
These troubling thoughts must have shown on her face. The ghost girl stroked her cheek, wide eyes beseeching her to be of stouter heart. “Shall I tell you a story?” she asked.
Drozde shook her head emphatically. “No more stories. This isn’t the time.”
“It might be, if you knew what story I meant.”
Drozde pretended not to hear. She stood and walked around a little, to ward off the chill. She’d never lingered in the little room for more than a few minutes before, so she hadn’t noticed how cold it was down here. A freezing draught was blowing in from somewhere—from under the door, perhaps. She folded up the canvas that made up the wings and backstage of her puppet theatre when she performed, and wrapped it around her shoulders.
It became clear to her that she wasn’t going anywhere. Not for a long while. Not until Molebacher had given up on his vigil or been called away to other duties. The man was tenacious and wily. If anyone would watch a mousehole better than a cat, it was he.
She turned to glance at Magda, sitting cross-legged on the floor and watching her in silence.
“Go on then,” she said. “Tell me a story.”
Magda brightened at once. “I will,” she said, clapping her hands. “I’ll tell you your favourite. How would that be?”
“Which is my favourite?”
“‘The Man Who Stole the Moon.’”
“All right. Tell me that.”
Magda patted the tiles beside her. “Then come and sit by me!”
“It’s too cold down there,” Drozde said. “I’ll sit on the trunk.”
She set herself down, rearranging the canvas so it went under her as well as around her. It would do well enough. It kept off at least some of the chill, and protected her from being scratched by the nail-heads that stood proud of the trunk’s lid.
“But you’re too high for me up there,” Magda complained. She wriggled her skinny body a little, and somehow swam in the air as a fish swims in water, raising herself to a position about level with Drozde’s chest. Drozde was inured to the girl’s strangeness by now, but this made her shiver a little in spite of herself.
Magda seated herself on the empty air as though it were a cushion and turned to Drozde.
“I tell it like Ermel told hers,” she said. “Like it happened to someone else, because that’s how it feels to me now. I was Madigan then, and now I’m Magda. And when I was alive, Mr. Stupendo was my favourite of all, but I hadn’t met you then, and it all changed so much after you came that nothing was the same any more. Are you sitting comfortably?”
“No.”
“Drozde, say yes!”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll begin.”
Madigan loved Pokoj from the moment she arrived. For one thing, it was old. It had been an abbey in the Middle Ages, her guidebook said, and after that it had been a lot of other things too: an army barracks and a glass factory and a big house, and finally the Pokoj Heritage Site and Hotel, where Madigan was now staying. Madigan liked old things: they seemed more permanent to her than everything else, as if all the time they had been around already was useful preparation that would help them to last out all the time to come.
As soon as they had driven up the long gravel driveway and parked the car, Madigan climbed out and pressed her hands up against the building’s weathered stone walls. They felt cold against her skin. Madigan thought that they were full of secrets, and imagined underground passages and hidden rooms, like in the pyramids in Egypt, which were older even than Pokoj. She thought about how the hotel had been there before cars and planes and toaster ovens, and how it would still be there when everyone was gone, and the thought made her feel peaceful, like its name.
In the huge reception hall, Madigan clattered slowly up and down the stairs, pretending that she was a great lady and everything in Pokoj belonged to her. But then she got tired, so she sat down on the bottom step to listen to her mom talking to the receptionist while she collected their keys. “We’re not staying long,” she was saying. “Madigan has an appointment at the clinic in Stollenbet, so we’re only here while we sort a few last details out.” She smiled and leaned across the counter, like she was telling a secret. “It’s the best in the world for her condition.” And the receptionist frowned and nodded, and before they got into the lift she gave Madigan a lollipop.
When they got to the room, Madigan’s parents started doing lots of things straight away. Her dad heaved the cases onto the bed, throwing clothes everywhere as he looked for his paperwork, and her mom snatched up the phone.
“I’m going to call the consulate again, Nick,” she said, jabbing at the buttons on the keypad.
“Okay.” Madigan’s dad glanced at his watch. “It’s not quite five yet; you should get through. Shall I email the clinic?”
”Wouldn’t you like to play a game first?” Madigan cut in quickly. “I brought the frog one, and the one where you have to rhyme all the words.” She had to describe the games instead of giving them their proper names because mom and dad never knew what they were called. Her dad smiled at her and gave her a hug, but he shook his head.
“Sorry, sweetheart, we can’t play today.”
Madigan wailed in dismay. “But you always say that! I have the frog one, dad, that’s your favourite!”
She ran to get it out of her bag and show him, but it made no difference. “There’ll be plenty of time for that soon,” mom said, stroking her hair. “Right now, we have to focus on getting you well.”
After that there was really nothing for Madigan to do. She was too tired to go and explore, and there was no one to play with in the room. So she counted the little swirls on the patterned carpet for a while, and then she imagined an adventure for herself where Pokoj got attacked by goblins and she had to save everyone, and then she fell asleep.
When she woke up it was dinner time, and all the phone calls and the emails were done for the evening. She and her parents went down to dinner together. The restaurant in the hotel was called The Old Ballroom, because that was what it had been, once, back when Pokoj was still a house rather than a Heritage Site and Hotel.
When he saw the sign on the door, Madigan’s father grinned at her. “A ballroom? Well, in that case . . .” He swung her off the ground and waltzed her inside, and her mom put on a silly voice and said, “Announcing Lord Nicholas of Pittsburgh, and his daughter, the lovely Madigan!” Madigan laughed and laughed. She laughed so hard that she started to cough, and her chest felt like a tunnel of jagged rocks that caught and scraped at the air as she sucked it in. When her dad put her down, she stumbled and almost fell over. The waltzing had made her dizzy, and the room was covered with dark blotches all running together, which hadn’t been there before.
“Dad,” she mumbled, “I think that thing’s happening again,” and he was beside her at once, kneeling down with one arm around her and a bottle of water in his hand. “Oh Mads, Mads, I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Are you out of breath, sweetie?”
Madigan nodded, so he picked her up again very carefully, and carried her to their table. She lay in his arms and tried to take deep, slow breaths until she could see the room properly. After a while the jaggedness in her chest calmed down enough for her to sit up and look around her. The restaurant was very posh: there were some people playing violins and cellos up on a stage at the back, and waiters in black suits wandering around carrying silver plates with lids on. Whatever was underneath smelled delicious, but Madigan wasn’t sure that she could eat much right now. So she just had the bread and butter that was already on the table, in a basket with a white ribbon on the front. Her parents talked quietly as they ate, and Madigan knew that they were talking about her, and worrying that the thing with the black blotches might happen again.
But by the time the dessert menus arrived they had cheered up, and she felt much better again too. As their plates were cleared, Madigan’s mom stretched her arms and looked around the table. “Now,” she asked, “who wants ice cream?” She meant Madigan, of course. But Madigan frowned at her.
“I’m not allowed,” she pointed out.
“Why are you not allowed?” Her mom said it like it was a game Madigan was playing, but it wasn’t. She frowned harder.
“It’s against the rules. I had a cake at the service station before, you know that!” The rule was that she was only allowed to eat one dessert a day. Her parents were very strict about it, most of the time. But now her mom was smiling, and pointing to something behind Madigan’s head. She turned with a sort of twisting feeling in her stomach to see another black-suited waiter, carrying a large glass bowl. They had ordered her some without telling her. Her dad was laughing as if it was a wonderful surprise, but Madigan felt her face getting hot, like someone was filling her up with water from a kettle. She shoved the bowl away from her, hard, glaring at them both.
“I don’t want it. It’s against the rules.”
Her mom was still smiling at her, but her smile had gone wrong somehow. When she smiled like that Madigan always knew that really she was sad, but trying to pretend that she wasn’t.
“Mads, sweetheart,” she said, “the rules don’t matter. You can have as much ice cream as you want.”
“But I don’t want! I don’t want any!” The buzz of conversation in the restaurant got suddenly quieter, and Madigan realised that she had been shouting. She felt like everyone was staring at her. She was breathing too quickly again, and her mom had an expression on her face like she had broken something that she didn’t know how to fix. Madigan wanted to tell her she was sorry, only she couldn’t now because the hot water inside her was trying to spill out from her eyes, and she had to screw up her face to stop it from escaping.
And then she felt something brush against her cheek, and she looked up to see a man standing by their table. He was wearing a long cloak, dark blue with silver stars on it, and a top hat to match. His eyes when he looked at Madigan were deep green and brown, like the reflection on a pond in the middle of summer.
“You don’t want any?” the man repeated gravely. “Well this won’t do at all then, will it?”
He pulled a large cloth from his pocket—it looked like the sky, Madigan thought, all black silk and silver sparkles—and shook it out like a toreador’s cape so that it covered the ice cream on the table.
“Now then . . .” The man looked at her, one eyebrow arched in a question.
“Madigan,” Madigan supplied.
“Madigan; a pleasure to meet you!” He took off his top hat with a flourish and bowed to her. “Allow me to rid you of this inconvenient ice cream.”
In spite of her shame and the tears still seeping from her eyes, Madigan giggled.
The man flexed his shoulders and stretched his arms as if he was preparing for a race. His hands darted back and forth in front of Madigan’s face, fingers wiggling over the covered ice cream as he said the magic words. Abruptly one of his hands held a fork from the table, which he handed to Madigan’s father.
“A drum roll, if you please, sir.”
The man paused, and looked into Madigan’s eyes again. Then he pulled off the cloth. The ice cream was gone. Madigan stared at the empty space on the table, her eyes wide. Then she looked at her parents. Her dad was clapping, her mom laughing in delight. She had her proper smile again, the sadness vanished along with the ice cream. Madigan had never seen anything so incredible in her entire life.
That was how she first met Mr. Stupendo.
He stayed in the restaurant after that, sometimes at other tables and sometimes at Madigan’s, but never so far away that she lost sight of him. Every now and then he would glance over at her and smile, or raise one eyebrow as he had before. She watched him all the way through her parents eating dessert, and when they were done she pretended that she wanted a hot chocolate, just so she could watch him for a little longer. She sipped it as slowly as she could: by the time she was finished, they were almost the only people left. Mr. Stupendo came back over then, and Madigan’s mom shook his hand.
“Thank you so much for your wonderful trick earlier,” she said. “It really cheered Mads up.”
“You’re the best magician in the world!” Madigan burst out. Mr. Stupendo grinned at her.
Madigan’s parents chatted with Mr. Stupendo while the waiters tidied up for the night and put the chairs upside down on the tables. He told them about how he was staying at Pokoj for a few months while he worked in the restaurant and in the pub in Puppendorf, the nearby village. He was mostly doing magic, he said, but also some child-minding for the hotel. Madigan gazed at his cloak and his hat and his beautiful smile, and eventually she gathered up enough courage to ask him if he would do more tricks for her while she stayed at the hotel.
“I accept the commission,” he told her solemnly. “And I will place myself entirely at your disposal.”
“Thanks so much,” Madigan’s mother said. “We’ve got a lot on at the moment, and she gets so bored when she’s on her own.”
“So long as she doesn’t get to be a nuisance,” her father said.
Then Madigan’s mother started explaining about the clinic, and about all the phone calls and the emails. “We’re not staying here for long, only while we sort the details out.” Madigan watched her fingers dance and drum on the table as she spoke, like she was saying magic words.
Next morning, Madigan went to see Mr. Stupendo as soon as she woke up. He lived at the very top of Pokoj, in the attic: the lady at the desk had told her where. The hotel had a lift which would take you to the first and second floors, but it didn’t go all the way up there, so Madigan had to climb the last flight of stairs herself. It made her so tired and breathless that she was afraid the blotches might happen again, but by stopping after every few steps and sitting down to have a rest she managed at last to make it to the top.
When she knocked on the door and Mr. Stupendo opened it, he seemed surprised to see her. He didn’t have his top hat on, but he ducked back behind the door and then reappeared wearing it, just so that he could doff it again as he bowed to her. Madigan laughed.
“Good morning, Mr. Stupendo,” she said in her best polite voice. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“Not at all, Madigan,” he replied, equally seriously. “If you’ll give me just a moment or two, I’ll be with you presently.”
He didn’t invite her in, but he didn’t close the door. While he gathered his things, Madigan stood in the doorway and looked past him into his room. It was small: just a narrow bed, a wardrobe and a sink with a crack in it squashed together against peeling white walls. His suitcase took up most of the space on the floor. Madigan thought that a magician as good as Mr. Stupendo must be able to stay in a nicer room than this. But maybe he had booked into Pokoj at the last minute, and this was the only one left. As he went over to the wardrobe to get his cloak Madigan saw his face reflected in the mirror on the inside of the door. For a moment he looked as tired as she had felt when she climbed the steps, and so sad that she wanted to run to him and hug him. But she didn’t, because she knew that she wasn’t supposed to have seen the sadness, just like she wasn’t supposed to notice when her mom’s smile went wrong. Mr. Stupendo’s expression smoothed out into a smile as he turned to face her, and he held out a hand towards the corridor.
“Let’s go and explore,” he said, shutting the door behind him.
They couldn’t explore very fast because Madigan was still tired out from the steps, but Mr. Stupendo didn’t seem to mind. Every time she needed to stop and rest, he pointed out something interesting that they had just passed. He knew so much about everything! When she paused for breath halfway down the corridor outside his room, he showed her a square patch in the carpet just next to where she stood.
“Touch it,” he said.
Madigan did, and felt how the floor underneath was a little lower within the square than to either side of it, and wobbled slightly when she trod on it.
“When Pokoj was a mansion, that used to be a trapdoor,” Mr. Stupendo told her. “This whole floor was used to store things like sheets and pillows, and there were doors like this all over it which the servants could use whenever they needed to make the beds in the rooms upstairs. They’re all sealed now, but once upon a time you could use them to get into almost every room on the second floor.”
“Secret passages,” Madigan breathed in awe.
“Exactly.”
They carried on chatting as they walked down the stairs, about magic tricks and goblins, and how cool it would be if the trapdoors still opened and they could use them to sneak into people’s rooms and spy on them. Mr. Stupendo took Madigan to the hotel museum on the ground floor, which had vases and bowls from the glass factory and a gold hoop which was found in the ground when the builders came to turn it into a hotel. There were paintings from when Pokoj was a mansion, and a wooden cat from the same time which Madigan looked at for ages. It was a beautiful kitty, even though the carpenter hadn’t finished it.
They made up stories about all the things they saw. Mr. Stupendo said that the gold hoop, which was almost as big as Madigan’s head, was a giant’s earring. That made them both laugh. After they left the museum, they went and sat outside on the terrace and chatted some more. Madigan told Mr. Stupendo about her school back home, and all the places she’d been since she got sick. And eventually, because he was her friend, she told him about the lump in her chest, which was growing and growing and sometimes made it hard for her to breathe and to run around like other people.
“That’s why mom wanted me to have extra dessert after dinner,” she admitted, “and why she says that I can stay up past my bedtime.” She looked at Mr. Stupendo carefully. She was a little worried now that she had told him about the lump, because a lot of the time people who knew about it went strange on her. They looked at her differently, like they might catch it if they stood too close, or like she was made of glass now, and they couldn’t touch her any more. But Mr. Stupendo held her gaze, and his expression didn’t change.
“And what do you think?” he asked her.
“I think that rules are rules,” Madigan said firmly.
“Then I think so too. And I am at your service to dispose of unwanted desserts whenever the need arises.”
It was almost midday now, and Madigan knew that she would need to go back to her parents for lunch soon. So she thanked Mr. Stupendo for a lovely morning and told him that she was going back to her room now. When she tried to stand up, though, she realised that she couldn’t. Her legs had gone like legs in a dream: she could feel them under her, but however hard she tried she couldn’t make them move more than an inch. Not being able to stand made Madigan cry a bit, not because it hurt, but because she was scared that she would be stuck like this for ever. But Mr. Stupendo sat by her and spoke to her in a soothing voice, telling her that it had been a busy morning and she had walked a long way, and that everything would be fine once she had had a good rest. Then he carried her back into the hotel and up in the lift, right to the door of her room. It felt nice being carried, and the rocking motion of his steps lulled and calmed her so that she soon fell asleep.
When she woke up, she was in her own bed, with her mother sitting beside her and Mr. Stupendo hovering just inside the door. He looked worried, but when he saw that her eyes had opened his face relaxed.
“I think we’d better stick to less strenuous activities in the future,” he said.
Madigan tried to raise herself up a little on her pillow so that she could see him properly, but she was still too weak, and she flopped back down onto the bed.
“Will you stay and talk to me?” she asked him. “Mom, please let him!”
“He’s got work to do, Mads,” her mother said. “He’s already given up a lot of time to be with you. Let him go and do his work now.”
“I’ve nothing to do until the restaurant opens,” Mr. Stupendo said. “I can stay a little longer. That is, if it’s not . . .”
“It’s fine,” Madigan’s mother said. “If you’re sure. Thank you.”
“Please. It’s nothing. Madigan, what would you like to talk about?”
“I’d like a story,” Madigan replied eagerly.
That afternoon, while Madigan drifted in and out of consciousness and her mother came and went in the background, Mr. Stupendo told her the story of how he stole the moon. It was for a magic show, he said, a really big one. Ten thousand people came from all over the world to a huge round circus tent in a park just to see it. There were lots of magicians at the show, who did all sorts of things. One swallowed fire, and another knew how to escape from a locked chest with his hands tied behind him, and another could tell you your name just by looking at you. But Mr. Stupendo was the star. He was the last person to perform, and when he walked onto the stage everyone in the audience went quiet. He bowed to them. Then he drew back a curtain at the back of the stage and there was the moon, stuck firmly in the sky like a sequin on black paper.
“No one thought it possible,” Mr. Stupendo told Madigan. “The moon is as much a part of the landscape as the earth or the sea. How could one man shift it from its place? But I told them that the moon was a coin dropped from the pocket of God. It might fill our night sky with its light, but it is no more than loose change to the heavens, destined to glitter for a time and then to be gathered up again into that vast celestial pocket. You won’t miss it; it was never yours in the first place.”
He drew the curtain again as he finished his speech, and passed his hands across it once and twice and three times, drawing his fingers together as though to pluck the moon out of the sky. On the third time, he swept the curtain back once more and the sky was empty.
Everyone was too astonished even to clap. Mr. Stupendo had done it! Normally, magicians could only pretend to make big things disappear. They used trick photography, or the studio audience was really in on it all along and only pretending to be surprised. But no one could guess how Mr. Stupendo had stolen the moon, and when they asked him he only raised an eyebrow and smiled in reply.
As Madigan listened to the story, pictures chased each other through her mind almost too quickly to follow: the audience sitting in shocked silence, the full moon hanging in the sky like an apple on a tree, and Mr. Stupendo himself, his cloak and hat sparkling in the lights of the stage.
“You stole it?” she asked him after he had finished speaking. “Right out of the sky?”
“Right out of the sky.”
“And then you got really famous, and everyone said you were the best magician of all?”
Mr. Stupendo looked at her and laughed. The laugh sounded a bit like a cough and a bit like a sigh, and not as if he thought that Madigan had said something funny at all.
“Something like that,” he replied.
Madigan must have slept then, because the next time she woke up Mr. Stupendo had gone to his shift at the restaurant, and it was dark outside. Her mom was sitting by her bed now, and she stroked Madigan’s hand with hers and sang to her, just like she had used to when she was very little.
In Madigan’s dream that night, Mr. Stupendo towered as tall as the clouds and strode past trees the size of matchsticks. He pulled the night from his pocket, a cloth of black silk and silver stars, and shook it across the air until the stars glittered. And then he reached up into the sky that he had made, took the moon between finger and thumb, and offered it to Madigan like a silver coin.
It was taking Madigan’s parents a long time to sort out the last few details at the clinic. They stayed at Pokoj for a whole week, and then they paid for another week after that. The longer they stayed, it seemed to Madigan, the more time they spent on the phone, or writing emails, or leafing through important looking folders full of paperwork. She had given up asking them if they wanted to play with her.
Madigan had good days and bad days. Sometimes she visited the museum or played in the grounds, and sometimes she was too tired even to get out of bed. However she was feeling, though, she always spent as much time as she could with Mr. Stupendo. When she was having a bad day he would visit her in her room to talk and tell stories, and sometimes he brought her fresh cherries from the market in Puppendorf, because they were her favourite. And on the days when she felt better he would walk with her, or she would sit in the restaurant and watch him do magic tricks for the guests.
Almost every time she saw him Madigan asked him when he was going to steal the moon again. She couldn’t stop picturing it all in her head: the moon shining up from the palm of Mr. Stupendo’s hand, the black sky vast and empty without it. She badly wanted to see him do it, but whenever she asked him he said no. His excuses were different each time, but the answer stayed the same.
“It’s broad daylight now,” he would say. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Or, “Too much fog tonight—I can’t steal it if I can’t see it.”
He always raised one eyebrow at her as he spoke, because he knew it made her laugh. But he started talking about something else as soon as he could, and sometimes he would just say, “Later, Madigan,” in a worn-out voice, like she was annoying him. Madigan began to worry that he wasn’t allowed to steal the moon for some reason, or maybe he didn’t remember how any more.
The night of her tenth day in Pokoj, Madigan could not sleep. Her chest was hurting more than usual, and she tossed and turned, trying to make herself comfortable. When she did finally drift off, it was only to wake again a few hours later, stiff and sore from lying in a funny position. She pushed herself up onto her pillows and glanced out of the window to see if it was morning yet. The moon stared back at her, round and full, casting its light across her bed in a wide beam.
Madigan could hear her parents’ sleepy breathing from the bed next to hers, so she put on her shoes and dressing gown over her pyjamas and slipped out of the room. The stairs to the attic were hard work, but she didn’t mind because they looked so beautiful, the moonlight making them shine like they had just been given a new coat of silvery paint. Mr. Stupendo could have no excuses tonight, she thought. This time, he would have to steal the moon.
When he opened his door, Mr. Stupendo did not look like Mr. Stupendo at all. He was wearing his pyjamas, and his eyes were all red round the edges from tiredness. In the room behind him Madigan could see a photo album open on the bed, lit up by the yellow light of the bedside lamp.
“Madigan,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “It’s two in the morning. What are you doing here?”
“Look outside,” Madigan said.
“What?”
“Look!” She pulled him over to the window and pointed to the moon. “Go on,” she said eagerly. “Steal it. Like you did before.”
“Go back to bed. I’ll do it some other time.”
“No, now,” Madigan insisted. She knew that if she didn’t make him do it straight away then he would just come up with more excuses, and she would never get to see it. Mr. Stupendo looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat down heavily on the bed.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “I just can’t, Okay? I never could in the first place.”
Madigan frowned at him in confusion. “But you said you did,” she pointed out.
“Well I lied!” Mr. Stupendo snapped. “It was a trick, Madigan, just a trick. The audience and the stage were on a platform, and when I drew the curtain I pressed a button that made the platform go round, just until the moon was out of sight, and so slowly that no one could tell that it had moved at all. I didn’t steal the moon; I moved the world around it. And that kind of trick takes a lot of money, and a lot of people who believe in you enough to give it to you.”
He propped his elbows on his knees, resting his chin in his cupped hands so that he was staring at the floor. When he spoke again, the anger in his voice had gone, and he sounded tired and sad. “I don’t have either of those things any more. So I can’t ever do the trick again. Do you see now?”
Madigan did see. Mr. Stupendo had told her the truth about stealing the moon, even though he hadn’t wanted to because the story was better. She looked at him sitting all hunched over on the bed. He had gone quiet, as if he expected that Madigan would leave now that he had snapped at her. She sat down beside him, leaned over, and kissed him on the cheek.
“I still think you’re the best magician in the world, Mr. Stupendo,” she told him. “And it was nice of you to be honest with me, so I think that I should be honest with you too. There isn’t a clinic. Well, there is, but I’m not going there. Mom and dad took me last week, but when they saw how ill I was the doctors there said I couldn’t stay. I don’t think I was supposed to hear, but I did, and they said that there was no point, that it was too late to do anything now. So mom and dad have been lying too,” Madigan explained. “They’ve really been trying to get the people at the clinic to change their minds this whole time.”
She looked at Mr. Stupendo levelly, just as he had looked at her that first night in the restaurant, when he had pulled away the cloth and revealed nothing but empty space underneath. “Mom and dad still think that they can make the lump in my chest disappear, like you made the moon disappear in your story. But they can’t,” she said. “I’m going to die, Mr. Stupendo. They just don’t know it yet.”
Mr. Stupendo’s face was so white and so shocked that it was as if Madigan was already dead and it was her ghost sitting there on the bed talking to him.
“Madigan . . .” he began. And then again, after a pause, “Madigan. I . . .”
He stared at her, and his expression was the strangest thing. He was looking at her, Madigan thought, but through her too, like he was trying to see past her to all the years that she might have lived but now would not.
“It’s nice to be able to tell the truth to someone,” Madigan said. “My parents always want to pretend everything is fine, so I have to as well, and that’s much worse.”
She realised with a sudden wave of sadness that once she left Pokoj the pretending would carry on, and she would not have Mr. Stupendo any more to tell her stories and play with her, and to listen to her when she told him things that her mom and dad wouldn’t understand. Her lips went wobbly at the thought, and she had to look away from him quickly and stare at the floor so that he wouldn’t see the tears if they came.
“We’ll probably go away soon,” she said, her voice shaking. “They’ll find me another clinic, and that will mean more flights, and pills, and injections, over and over, until I’m all used up and I can’t have any more. I don’t know where I’ll be when I die.” Madigan risked a glance at Mr. Stupendo, and started to sob.
He put his arms around her then, and she buried her face in his chest.
“Where would you like to be?” he asked her quietly
“Here,” Madigan said. “I like it here. It’s old, and there’s a museum and a big garden. And you’re here, and I love you best of all.”
“Then here is where you’ll stay,” he said, and when Madigan looked up at him he was Mr. Stupendo again, the Mr. Stupendo who stole the moon. He smiled at her, and though the smile was a sad one Madigan found that it reminded her of his grin from that first day, the day when he made her ice cream disappear. He looked now, as he had then, like he was about to perform the best trick in the world, something so wonderful that Madigan would hardly be able to believe it.
He did so the very next morning when he visited Madigan’s parents. He talked to them for most of the day, and when he left, although the moon was still hanging firmly in the sky, Madigan was allowed to stay at Pokoj for good.
Mr. Stupendo’s best trick turned out not to be a trick at all.
“I never found out what he said to them, to make them understand,” Magda said thoughtfully. “But when he came out my mom was crying, really crying. She’d never done that before, not even when she found out I was sick. She just cried and cried, and hugged me, and told me that she was sorry.
“After that, mom and dad never mentioned the clinic in Stollenbet any more, and they started playing games with me again. They spoke to the manager of the hotel and explained everything, and after that they hired me my own nurse to look after me. I stayed in Pokoj until I died, and Mr. Stupendo stayed too, right until the end. He left a few days afterwards; he was going to give up magic and become a teacher, he said.
“I know that he always felt a little bit bad, because he couldn’t save me. But really he did, though he didn’t know it. He moved everything around me, just so that I could stay put. I wish I could tell him how important that was, because if he hadn’t then I would have died somewhere else, and if that had happened then I never would have met you.”
Magda had climbed into Drozde’s lap by this point, and Drozde realised that her arms had encircled the little girl while she spoke. Somehow she had become more solid, more tangible. Drozde could almost imagine that she felt Magda pressed up against her skin, her phantom breath brushing her cheek. She held Magda cradled against her chest, and now the dead girl returned Drozde’s embrace, her touch as light and insubstantial as the hollow bones of a bird. They sat like that in quiet for a while.
“Did you like it?” Madigan asked her at last.
“Yes, Magda. I liked it very much.”
“I knew you would. It’s because you and Mr. Stupendo are just alike.” Magda beamed at Drozde. “You’re both funny and kind, and you look after me, and you tell the best stories. But you’re most the same because when it’s important enough, you know how to tell the truth as well. You make people see.”
Drozde barely heard these words. She was drifting into sleep, exhausted by the events of the day and lulled by the strangely comforting embrace of the dead girl, who seemed to love her so much for so little reason.
Her dreams were like fever dreams, a cage of repeated images and sensations from which she couldn’t free herself. She woke at last, freezing, her own sweat slick and icy on her skin. Magda’s face was close to hers, watching.
“I didn’t wake you,” she said. “You seemed so tired.”
“Thank you, Magda,” Drozde mumbled. “That was kind of you. Now do me another favour, please. Go and see if Molebacher is still there.”
He was, Magda reported. Sitting exactly where he’d been before, with the same expression on his face. It was as though he’d turned into a statue of himself.
“What time is it?” Drozde asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well is it day or is it night?”
“I don’t know. I see day and night all at the same time now. We all do. You said—”
“Oh, I said!”
“—that there are only two things you miss when you’re dead. Times and places.”
“Do I ever say anything that makes sense, Magda?”
“That does make sense. All the different times sort of become the same time, and all the places . . . well, there aren’t any. There’s only here. But the times turn into places, so when we walk it gets to be something that happened before or after.”
This made no sense at all, but Drozde raised no further argument. The story of Magda’s death lingered in her mind and tangled itself with the other death she’d witnessed that day until there seemed to be nothing left in the world but mourning.
And Molebacher.