Joe got down from the cupboard and went to the mirror. He saw himself and the room behind. He touched the hard glass. He pushed it. He moved from side to side, so that he saw into the whole room. He backed away from the mirror towards the door by the chimney, watching. When he reached the door he turned and looked over his shoulder, and saw himself looking over his shoulder in the doorway, nothing like Kit and Whizzy and the Brit Basher in the mirror running from the empty room.
He went back up to his mattress and counted his marbles. They were all there, except for the dobber glass alley. He shook his comic, but nothing fell out. He went to the window to look closely in the better light.
The pony and cart were in the yard; and Treacle Walker was sitting against the pear tree.
Joe ran down and opened the door. The clouds had broken.
‘Treacle Walker!’
He ran across the yard into the sun.
‘Joseph Coppock.’
‘What are you at? Where’ve you been?’
‘I have been through Hickety, Pickety, France and High Spain, by crinkum-crankums, crooks and straights,’ said Treacle Walker. ‘And I am at your pear, with my ears in my hat, my back in my coat, and two squat kickering tattery shoes full of roadwayish water. The sun is not good for you, as I recall.’
‘So what?’
‘Your visage is wan. If we may, let us go to the chimney and calm our thought.’
‘Why?’
‘You are a trifle furibund.’
‘Shurrup.’
They went to the house. Treacle Walker paused at the step. ‘May I enter?’
‘It’s up to you,’ said Joe.
‘It is not up to me,’ said Treacle Walker. ‘Now that the stoning is done, neither I nor any other can cross save by your leave. May I enter?’
‘Have it your own way,’ said Joe. ‘You can come in if you like. It’s daft.’
They went in and sat facing each other across the fire basket in the chimney.
‘What is amiss, Joseph Coppock?’ said Treacle Walker.
‘What’s amiss?’ said Joe. ‘I’ll tell you what’s amiss. I shall. I shall that. You come here, you and your box and your pots and your donkey stone, and fetch in enough to make me frit to death. You’re on about bones and all sorts; and then you’re off, some road or other, and I can’t tell where I am. I’ve got a pain in my eye. I can’t see proper. And I go down the bog and get stuck; and this chap with no clothes on and a daft silly hat, he sits up in the water and he makes no more sense than you do. He says I’ve got glammeritis, and then Stonehenge Kit, he’s gone, and so’s my best dobber; and Whizzy’s with a Brit Basher and they’re after Kit and the mirror’s all wrong then he’s back in the picture. And there’s this here.’ Joe pulled the crumpled paper from his pocket and lobbed it across the fire basket. ‘What’s happening? What the heck’s up?’
Treacle Walker straightened the paper and looked at it.
‘Did you write this, Joseph Coppock?’
‘I was having my eyes tested –’
‘When?’
‘When they were being tested. And the man said –’
‘What man?’
‘The man in the room.’
‘Which room?’
‘Where I was having my eyes tested!’
‘Where was the room?’ said Treacle Walker.
‘It was – there,’ said Joe.
‘Who was the man?’
‘The man testing my eyes! Give over!’
‘I am but asking the question,’ said Treacle Walker. ‘Who was the man?’
‘He was – I dunno. He said what I read wasn’t real. So I wrote it, but it still wasn’t real, he said.’
‘Yet it is,’ said Treacle Walker. ‘And how does it speak to you?’
‘It’s jumbled letters, same as they always are, but not like he said.’
‘Jumbled letters? “Hic lapis exilis extat pretio quoque vilis. Spernitur a stultis. Amatur plus ab edoctis.” Two catalectic hexameters. You have no Latin?’
‘No what?’
‘“This stone is small, of little price; spurned by fools, more honoured by the wise.” My friend, you saw; yet you do not see.’
Treacle Walker leaned his head against the timber behind him and looked up into the stack.
‘Axis mundi.’
‘Eh?’
‘The chimney. It is the heart of all that is. The sky turns on it. It is the way between.’
‘Between what?’
‘The earth, the heavens and the sapient stars.’
‘It’s to let smoke out,’ said Joe.
Treacle Walker went to the door.
‘May I pass?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Then I presume an affirmative.’
He crossed the step.
‘Joseph Coppock. When Thin Amren wakes and cuckoo calls,’ he opened his bag and reached inside, ‘look to your dobber.’ He put the glass alley into Joe’s hand and closed the door.