24

The key rattled in the lock and Maximilian sat up slowly in the dimly lit cave. Leonard Levar’s unconsciousness spell had not worked. Maximilian had not gone to sleep as he was supposed to. Wolf had, but something in Maximilian’s system had simply refused to accept Levar’s magic.

The first strange thing was that he’d actually felt the spell approach him. Did people normally feel spells as they approached? It seemed unlikely. When Maximilian was younger, his mother had taken him to see the sights of London. Whenever he’d stood underneath one of those tall monuments and looked up, it had seemed as if the monument were falling on him. Down, down, down, until splat, he was dead. Although, of course, that had been just in his imagination. A sort of optical illusion. But it turned out that the falling-monument sensation was very similar to how it had felt having a spell approach him and then fail. Down, down, down, until splat, he was unconscious. Except he was not. He was quite awake.

Maximilian had no idea where Levar had gone or what he was doing. He had taken the spectacles with him. Maximilian’s precious, beautiful spectacles, without which the world made even less sense. Maximilian sighed. At least it wasn’t completely dark. There was some kind of skylight in the ceiling and the moon was almost full. Could he climb up to the skylight and escape? No. Could he get out through the door? No. Could he wake Wolf up by shaking him a lot? No. But Wolf did have a beaten-up old phone in his pocket with a torch function, which Maximilian was sure Wolf wouldn’t mind him borrowing. So now Maximilian could explore, and read. And there was lots of reading material around: crates and crates of books that had belonged to Griffin Truelove, the famous Master scholar.

Most children who had just been locked in a cave by a dark mage on an evil mission would probably cry, scream, beat their tight little fists against the thick wooden door. But Maximilian was not most children. If only Mrs Beathag Hide could have seen him now, her so-called Bottom of the Class. Calmly, he used the torch to help him see to open one of the crates. Calmly, he chose a book – a dark blue cloth-bound hardback with silver lettering on the front called Beneath the Great Forest. Then, calmly, he sat down with his torch to read it. If he was going to die, then he was going to die doing the thing he most loved. He was going to die reading. But not just any old book, either. Maximilian knew these books were in some way powerful, he just didn’t know how.

Once upon a time . . . began the book. Maximilian found he was oddly sleepy. Sleepier than he usually was when reading. Once upon a time there was a boy in a cave with no hope of escape. Well, that was a coincidence. Once upon a time . . .

When Maximilian woke up, the cave felt colder than it had before. There was still no sign of Levar. Wolf remained unconscious on the floor. He was breathing, but Maximilian still couldn’t wake him, however hard he tried. He looked at his watch. He hadn’t been asleep for long at all; no more than five minutes or so. But things had changed. As well as being colder, the cave was also a little darker now. A little, well, greener. There was also, suddenly, a smell of damp earth and leaves.

Maximilian looked around and found the reason. A large tree was growing up through the uneven cave floor and out of the skylight in the ceiling. Its vast, aged trunk now took up most of the far corner of the cave. Had Maximilian simply not noticed it before? It was possible. Sometimes we do choose to ignore the biggest, densest, most gnarled things that surround us. The tree had thick roots, some of which were now visible as bulges under the cave floor. And at the bottom of the trunk was a sort of hollow that looked like an entrance to somewhere.

The hole was surrounded by thick, twisted bits of trunk that almost looked like an ancient carving. Maximilian even fancied there were words written there, too, in the old brown bark, but he could not read their language. One of them seemed to say something like bitteren; another said dirre. Maximilian wished he had the spectacles for a translation, although he wasn’t entirely sure they would work on these words.

He crawled into the hole, and, after passing through a strange kind of grey mist, found himself in a low passageway lit by candles. The ground underneath his feet was soft and earthy and felt quite pleasant. But the darkness here was blacker than anything he had ever encountered before. Without the small candles he would have been completely lost. Soon Maximilian heard singing coming from somewhere ahead of him. It sounded deep and dusky and strange: sad one moment, then betrayed, then angry. But it was still very beautiful, unlike the noises emitted by his tuneless school choir and the old ladies in that church his mother had once made him go to.

Soon the passage opened out into a night-time forest still lit by small, flickering candles. Maximilian had the uncanny sense that although other children would be terrified in this place, he was not. He felt there was something for him here, although he had no idea what it would be. Something had happened before – around the time he picked up the Pen of Prescription – that had made him feel different, almost as if he had epiphanised again. It was odd, but this new feeling was somehow connected to that.

He walked on. Soon he came to a little cottage, with smoke curling out of its chimney. The cottage was on the bend of a thin, twisting river. Just beyond it was a rowing boat tied to a small jetty on the riverbank. If Maximilian was going to go any further he would need to cross the river. Perhaps there was someone in the cottage who would take him across? Maximilian had never rowed in his life. And there was no point in stealing a boat if he didn’t have to.

He knocked. There was no answer. He tried again. Nothing. Perhaps now was the time to go and get Wolf. It was likely that Wolf could row that small boat. Although he’d have to wake up first, and who knew when that would happen. Maximilian knocked and knocked. There was still no answer from the little cottage, so, for the first time, he looked back the way he had come.

Everything was gone.

There was no path. No candles. Nothing visible in the deep blackness. Maximilian knocked on the door again, this time with desperation.

‘All right, all right,’ said a voice inside. ‘Keep your hair on.’

The door opened. There stood a thin young man of around twenty, dressed entirely in black, with black braces over his black polo neck. He was smoking a thin black cigarette.

‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .’ said the young man seriously. Then he laughed. ‘Ahahaha . . .’ He fake-swooned. ‘I think he died for me . . .’

Maximilian had no idea what he was talking about.

‘You’d better come in,’ said the young man. ‘My name is Yorick. As in “Alas, poor . . .” and so on. Although no actual relation, I’m pleased to say.’

‘O William?’ called a woman from inside. ‘Is that William? Has he brought a pineapple?’

The cottage opened onto a thin hallway, rather like something you’d find in an urban terraced house. On the walls were many posters and handbills advertising bicycles for sale, poetry reading groups and art exhibitions, as well as an ‘existentialist support group’, whatever that might be, and a man who was promising to shoot himself on the 9th of September as long as nine or more people came to watch. There was a WANTED poster for someone called Woland.

Maximilian followed Yorick past a pram and into a sitting room, in which there were seven people – all as thin as Yorick, all dressed in black, all smoking the same black cigarettes – and a blue Persian cat.

There was a fire glowing in the small brick fireplace. One of the men was feeding sheet after sheet of a manuscript into it. He was muttering something about turning thirty and going to a sad aircraft hangar and burning whatever remained of his work, which looked as if it wouldn’t be much.

Two of the other young men were standing up and looking at each other solemnly. One was reading to the other. ‘And they both realised that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning,’ he said.

One of the women was writing in a notebook. She read out what she appeared to have just written. ‘No paper or envelopes, of course. Only a morsel of pink blotting-paper, incredibly soft and limp and almost moist, like the tongue of a little dead kitten, which I’ve never felt.’ Maximilian couldn’t make any sense of what was happening. It was like one of those adult jokes that go on for too long.

The table in the centre of the room had bowls containing olives, gherkins, hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, fish mousse, coffee creams, rye bread, very smelly cheese, liver sausage, lambs’ kidneys, caviar, coriander salad and one huge pale quivering white blancmange. Maximilian felt sick just looking at it all.

‘Coffee?’ said Yorick, producing a small cup and saucer.

‘I don’t really like . . .’

‘Any of it. Of course you don’t. What child likes olives and coffee? What youngster can stomach liver sausage? But you have to eat it all before Isabel takes you across the river. That’s the rule. Don’t blame me.’

‘I have to eat all that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where exactly am I?’ said Maximilian, still feeling sick at the idea of eating even one thing from the table.

‘We are condemned to be free,’ said the man by the fire.

This didn’t seem like much of an answer.

‘Drink the coffee,’ said Yorick. ‘Before it gets even darker outside.’

‘Hurry, dear William,’ said the woman Maximilian thought was called Isabel. ‘I do hate to row in the dark. Although, of course, it always is dark here.’

‘Why does she think I’m called William?’

‘Drink the coffee and maybe she’ll tell you while she rows you across.’

Maximilian took the small cup. The smell made him feel a bit sick. But adults liked coffee, didn’t they? And this seemed somehow to be the most coffeeish coffee you were likely to find anywhere. An adult who liked coffee would probably love this, Maximilian realised. It was thick and black with a sort of pale cream on the top from being so strong. The little cup it was in was also black, with a delicate silver handle. He sniffed the coffee. It smelled grown-up, dark and complicated, rather like the place he seemed to be heading for. He sniffed once more and then drank it all.

After that, the olives actually tasted quite nice. They were black, wrinkled and very, very salty. But after the coffee they made a sort of sense. Maximilian almost liked them. Well, at least he didn’t completely hate them. He didn’t vomit. He looked at the remaining dishes on the table. The trick, he thought, was to have the things in the right order. To balance something salty with something sweet. Now that he almost liked coffee, the coffee creams might not be so bad. He should save them for last, to take the taste away from everything else. And . . . He approached the table again. Smelly cheese on rye bread. Yes, not a bad combination: the sourness of the bread blending with the pungent depth of the cheese. After that, the liver sausage wasn’t so terrible. And the anchovies could have been nice if it hadn’t been for all the little bones Maximilian had to crunch through.

‘Can I have another cup of coffee?’ he asked Yorick.

‘Well, that’s a first,’ Yorick said, pouring it. ‘No one’s ever asked for seconds before. In fact, barely anyone has ever managed to complete this task before. Not that very many have tried, for, well, obvious reasons.’