“Can’t we just travel by those wildways thingies?” Oscar asked. “I was kind of hoping you could sort that out when you woke up.”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, but… I’m just not skilled enough. I don’t know how it’s done.”
“But you always…”
“No,” I said rather brusquely. “Not without help.” Cat… Nightclaw. Why did I feel utterly hopeless whenever I thought about him? It was as if I were sure that I’d never see him again.
I had made several feeble attempts to rouse Aunt Isa and the others with wildsong but it hadn’t had the slightest effect. Perhaps I just wasn’t good enough. Or perhaps not even the wildest wildwitch would have been able to wake them. What was it Aunt Isa had said about zombies? Poor, confused souls so affected by poison and witchcraft that they no longer know if they’re dead or alive. I didn’t think that Aunt Isa and the others had been poisoned, but they were trapped by some kind of witchcraft, and it was difficult to tell if they were dead or alive, and although I’d sung my heart out, they were no more alive than they were before.
“I’m hungry,” Oscar said. “And it’s a horrible feeling. I think starving to death must be a terrible…”
“Stop it. We’re not going to starve to death.”
“We are if we don’t get out of here…”
For a while we sat next to each other, equally despondent.
Then suddenly Oscar slapped his hand against his forehead.
“Doh…” he said. “Now I know why you don’t fancy eating my brain.”
“What? What are you on about?”
“Then again… who says smart brains taste better than stupid ones…”
“Oscar, get a grip!”
He grinned from ear to ear.
“Daylight,” he said. “There’s a gap up there, and a very nice big one at that, or there wouldn’t be this much light down here.”
I looked up. The cave ceiling wasn’t like the ceiling in a house. What I could see was spiky and rugged, and stalactites hung like icicles in large, grey clusters. It was true that there was light from above, but you couldn’t see the hole it was coming from. And the tips of the nearest stalactites were many metres above us.
“Yes, OK, there’s a hole,” I conceded. “But I don’t see how we’re going to get up there.”
“Hello,” he said. “Have you forgotten that I’m the school wall-climbing champion?”
He fell twice. The first time wasn’t too bad, he was only about two metres up, and he pretty much landed on his feet. But the second time…
“Oscar…”
He lay completely still on his back with his mouth open and his arm flailing helplessly.
“… I… can’t…” he groaned.
He couldn’t breathe. I sat down beside him and raised his shoulders and head a little. I took a deep breath and did my best to sing something that sounded like wildsong. Although it hadn’t worked on Aunt Isa and Shanaia and the others, perhaps it would work better on a living boy. Or rather… a boy who didn’t look like a zombie. And Aunt Isa always said that the melody wasn’t important, it was just a way of harnessing your power, the way a magnifying glass gathers light. I hummed some rather false and disjointed notes, and wished with all my heart that Oscar would get better.
I’m not sure if it worked, but he suddenly took a deep, gasping breath and started to cough, splutter and hawk.
“I was… winded…” he gurgled. “… Better now…”
I helped him sit up. He was sweating and dark rims were starting to form under his eyes; for once he didn’t look as if he thought life was one big party.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Do you have a better idea?” he asked.
I looked around. By now most of the cave floor was underwater, and the water was still rising. If we stayed here, we might not even have time to die of hunger. We would probably drown first. And Aunt Isa, Mrs Pommerans, Shanaia, Kahla’s dad and Mr Malkin… They would drown too, wouldn’t they? Even zombies needed oxygen. We could always try sitting them up against the rock wall, but what if the water level rose higher than that? I looked up at the stalactite ceiling and the small wedge of daylight. It was our only way out.
“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t have a better idea.”
Oscar got up.
“Move, peasant,” he said in his best dictator voice – which wasn’t very convincing. “And let the master of the universe show that climbing wall who’s boss.”
I was pretty sure he was bruised all over and I could see that the scratches on his right hand were bleeding. I was also pretty sure that he had no wish at all to climb up the wall and risk falling yet again. This wasn’t something he was doing to show off or to win a competition. He was doing it because it was the only way he could save all of us.
“Oscar?”
“Yes, peasant?”
“I think you’re super-cool. And don’t you dare fall again, do you hear me?”
He grinned across his whole freckled face, clicked his heels and saluted me like a tin soldier.
“Yes, milady,” he said. “Now get out of my way. This time I’ll make it all the way up, just you wait and see!”
A small leap took him to the first ledge and he carried on quickly, without hesitation, up to a gap where he could wedge in most of his body. Then he reached the tricky place where he’d fallen the first time. But he’d learned from experience – his hand into one crack, his foot there, and his knee on a narrow rock shelf, a firm grip on the stalactite, swing himself round, right foot up…
He was nearly at the top. He disappeared behind a protrusion and I stopped being able to watch his every move, I could only hear his laboured breathing and the scraping of feet, hands, clothes, elbows and knees against the cliff wall. I held my breath. If he slipped and tumbled down now…
But he didn’t.
“I’m the master of the universe!” I heard from above – somewhat out of breath and maybe not quite the lion roar he was hoping for. But he was up.
It would be wrong to say that it was plain sailing from there on. Even with the help of an old lawnmower tractor and some ropes Oscar found in the garden shed at Westmark, it was still a challenge to hoist the stiff and uncooperative bodies up through the narrow light shaft. Handling them as if they were plastic dolls was weird. I discovered that it was possible to move their arms and legs, bend a knee, extend an elbow, which made it a little easier to get them up and out. But it also enhanced the sensation that they were dolls. And the water continued to rise, so towards the end I was wading around up to my knees in cold water. But we got them up, all five of them, and finally it was my turn to slip my legs through the improvised harness we’d made and be pulled up through the well.
“The tractor was a really good idea,” I said to Oscar when I was finally back on the grass, in the wind and the sun outside the wall that surrounded Westmark.
“Well, they’re heavy,” Oscar said. “Heavier than us. I’d worked out that we wouldn’t be able to pull them up ourselves.”
Aunt Isa was lying on the grass, staring up at the sky with open eyes. I wanted to close them, but I didn’t because it felt like something you did to a dead person. Mrs Pommerans was lying next to her, with one arm sticking straight up into the air. Mr Malkin…
“Hang on,” I said. “What’s that?”
Because Mr Malkin wasn’t quite as immobile as the others. Something stirred, approximately where his heart was. And suddenly a tiny nose poked out of his waistcoat pocket, and a pair of shiny black beady eyes peered at the sun. It was the baby dormouse. I had completely forgotten it was there.
“Wow, fancy it surviving all of that…” Oscar said. “What a supermouse, eh?”
“It’s actually not a mouse,” I said.
“OK, then a… didn’t he call it a dormouse?”
“Yes. It’ll grow quite a lot bigger than a mouse, and its tail is bushy, almost like a squirrel’s.”
“I still think it’s a supermouse,” Oscar said quietly, holding his hand out to the dormouse. “It’s wearing a mask and everything, can’t you see? I bet it has a secret identity.”
He was right about the mask. Unlike the common dormice Aunt Isa often had hibernating in baskets or shoeboxes on the bookcase, this one seemed to have a black band stretching from its eyes and across its cheeks.
“We have to take it with us,” I said. “Mr Malkin can’t look after it now.”
Oscar looked down at the lifeless bodies. “Is there really nothing you can do to… bring them back to life?”
“If there was, don’t you think I would’ve done it?”
My voice was harsh and angry, and Oscar took a step back.
“Relax,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to hassle you.”
“No, I know.” I was trying really hard to calm down, but everything inside me was whirling around. My head felt like a cement mixer, and my stomach wasn’t much better. My emotions were all jumbled up, there was relief that we’d escaped and brought the others up with us, helplessness because I hadn’t done a better job, fear that Aunt Isa and her friends would die here, all staring eyes and rigid zombie bodies. Guilt. Grief. Loss. I wanted Aunt Isa to wake up and help us. I wanted Cat to come back. I wanted everything to be better than it was.
“It’s my fault,” I whispered. “I called them. They came to help me – and now they’re just lying there.”
“How about Thuja?” Oscar said. “The Raven Mothers? Do you think they’ll know how to wake them up?”
“We have to ask them,” I said. “But… I can’t find my way to Raven Kettle on my own. I can’t even find my way home.” The cement mixer feeling worsened.
Oscar looked at me glumly.
“My mum is going to go ape,” he said.
I don’t know why, but hearing that made me feel a bit better. Perhaps because it reminded me that the ordinary world still existed. Oscar’s mum was out there somewhere. As were my own mum, and my dad.
The problem was just how to find them again.
Then I heard flapping as if a big, clumsy bird was trying to fly past us. I looked up, but I couldn’t see anything. Not until I heard someone sneeze, and I turned around.
“I’b so bery, bery sorry,” The Nothing said and sniffled. Her dust mite allergy was clearly in full flow. “I know I promised to stay at home and look after Bumble, but… I got so lonely, and it’s so hard not to follow someone…” Then she spotted Aunt Isa and the others. “Oh no, oh dear. What happened to them?”
I made no reply. I just grabbed the small, snuffling bird girl and hugged her tight until she started to squirm because I was hurting her.