Strangeworlds Travel Agency Read online

  “It’ll be good to get away from the city and to somewhere with a bit of green around it,” her dad had said.

  Flick disagreed. She liked living in the city. And anyway, it wasn’t like the St Bosco’s estate had been right in the center. It had been great living high up and above everyone else, with a panoramic view over town. In the cold weather, you could watch the cooling towers of the power station belching out steam and smoke. Flick’s mom used to tell stories about the towers, and say they were hiding dragons inside. Not that Flick believed that sort of rubbish anymore.

  She glanced at her backpack, beside her. It was brand new, because, once September rolled around, she’d be going to a new school. She’d spent a year getting used to the size of Lawrence Academy, where the year sevens moved in packs like prey animals, and now she was going to be attending Byron Hall, where there were fewer than four hundred kids in the whole school. And she had to wear a tie. The only bit about it that didn’t sound awful to Flick was the fact they let students use real pianos for music lessons.

  They turned off the motorway onto a tree-flanked road, following it past some very posh houses. The new Elm Tree Estate had been built right on the edge of the village of Little Wyverns, and apparently there’d been a lot of complaints about it. When the road narrowed to the width of about one and a half cars, Flick breathed in, as though she could make their old Corolla thinner. Another turn, and abruptly the houses of the new estate seemed to spring up around them, lining the pavements and filing backward, each one perfectly placed behind the other, like dominoes.

  Flick shut one eye and poked her finger at one of the buildings, imagining it collapsing backward and taking the whole estate with it.

  “This is us,” Flick’s dad said, pulling onto the driveway. “Crikey. The garden looks a bit different from the model home.…”

  Flick thought that was the understatement of the century. The picture on the front of their housing association brochure had shown the sort of lawn that got cut with nail scissors. But there was no neat grass in front of their new house. In fact, there was no grass to be seen at all. There were, however, weeds. It looked like someone had played a bad game of Jumanji in the yard. Some of the nettles were as tall as Flick. Freddy, freshly released from his car-seat prison, made a grab for one of them, but was quickly yanked back by their mom. He howled, and a cat shot out of the undergrowth and down the street like a ginger-and-white rocket. The cats around the flats had got used to Freddy’s in-built siren. These new ones would have to learn fast.

  * * *

  “This is my room,” Flick said, holding Freddy in front of her. He burbled and rammed a fist in his mouth. “I’ll assume that means you understand. My room. Not ours anymore. Your room”—she walked back across the landing—“is this one. Nice and small, because you’re a small person.” Using the word small about the bedroom was being generous. Once Freddy needed a single bed he wouldn’t even have room to stand up beside it.

  The baby kicked his legs to get down. Flick put him on the carpet, which still smelled of the carpet shop, and let him crawl away, leaving a fine trail of crumbs as he went, like a specialized snail.

  There was a baby gate at the top of the stairs, which Flick had no doubt her brother was going to learn to scale before the week was out. Like everything else in the house, it was new. New carpets, new paint, new oven, even new electrical outlets, which were crisp white and smooth—nothing like the ones in the old place that sometimes crackled alarmingly when you put a plug into them.

  Flick sighed as she put Freddy’s night-light on to charge. You couldn’t pretend to be controlling the electricity with your mind if the plugs didn’t crackle.

  Downstairs, the two movers were leaving. Flick’s dad was giving each of them a tip and thanking them for their help. Flick gave them a smile as she carried Freddy over to the baby jail (or playpen) her mom had put up to keep him away from the boxes and bags.

  “So, what do you think of your room?” her mom asked.

  “It’s nice,” Flick said, flexing her arms after putting Freddy down. “It’s a bit beige.”

  “The whole house is beige,” her mom said. “Cream paint and beige carpets. If we ever get around to changing them, we can choose something more cheerful. I suppose they think it looks clean.”

  “It is clean. There’s a plastic wrapper on the toilet.” Flick went over to the box labeled FELICITY’S CLOTHES and picked it up. “I’ll start taking things up, then?”

  “Thank you, sweetheart.” Her mom handed the baby a teething biscuit. “Be careful on the stairs, won’t you?”

  * * *

  By the end of the day, most of the boxes had been sorted through. Freddy’s crib was assembled, and everyone’s bed was made, but they hadn’t gotten a dining table or chairs yet, so they were having fish and chips on the living room floor “as a treat.” Though Flick’s mom was still making them eat off plates with cutlery, even if Flick insisted that the wooden forks from the fry shop made everything taste nicer.

  Flick’s dad sat picking at his fish. Isaac Hudson didn’t trust anything that came out of the sea. “There’s a free plastic bag comes with every fish,” he would say loudly when they walked past the fish counter in Morrisons, “and it’s inside it.” Flick was sure she would die of embarrassment before she ever got to leave home.

  “It’s a shame we won’t get a full day at it tomorrow,” her dad said, abandoning his dissection of the haddock. “But we’ve made a dent in it. I can carry on unpacking tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You’ve got Freddy,” her mom reminded him. “His new childcare doesn’t start for a day or so.”

  Flick rolled her eyes. Her parents were rarely under the same roof. Her dad worked as a trash collector and was out the door at 4:00 a.m., coming back as her mom left for her afternoon shift as a post office clerk. Her mom would come home just in time to bathe Freddy and was sometimes so tired that she would go to bed at the same time as the baby. Flick’s dad would try to stay up to keep Flick company, but often fell asleep in front of the TV. Most of the time, Flick would wake him up and make sure he went to bed, but sometimes she covered him with a blanket and left him.

  “What are your plans for tomorrow, Felicity?” Her mom put her plate down.

  This was a trap. Flick knew she should offer to help her dad unpack, but she’d been unpacking all day. She’d seen enough brown tape and cardboard to last a lifetime. She couldn’t say so without sounding like the most ungrateful daughter in the universe though.

  She stirred a fry through what was left of her ketchup. “Um…”

  Her dad saved her. “I think you should have a wander,” he said. “See what’s happening in this little place. You could find out where your school is.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be difficult to find,” Flick said. “There’s like ten buildings in the whole village, if you don’t count these new ones.” She put her cutlery down. “But yeah, I’ll go and find it. See where the library is, and stuff, for after school.”

  Her mom nodded. “That’s very sensible. You can unpack your toys and things in the evening.”

  Flick scowled. She was twelve. She didn’t have toys. She had Collectables, and Items of Sentimental Value. But not toys. “Sure.”

  Freddy stretched from his position on the playmat, managing to yawn and fart simultaneously, and looked immensely pleased with himself.

  * * *

  Flick drew her new (beige) curtains and switched on the lamp she’d brought with her from the old place. It was shaped like a mushroom and had been a present from Nanna and Grandad Pitchford when she was very small. There was a mouse at the base of it, and Flick used to pretend it was alive. She didn’t do that anymore, but she loved the memory of being able to pretend like that. Sadly, the lamp now had a big crack in the dome where Freddy had smacked it with a full bottle. It made the light form a sort of zigzag pattern across the ceiling.

  There were half a dozen boxes against the wall, each with her nam
e on it. Flick picked up the smallest one and lifted the lid. As she expected, there wasn’t only her stuff in it—at the end of the packing, her dad had panicked and started to throw things into any box that still had space.

  On the top, though, was the last thing Flick had packed. She lifted out a poster that had been folded over and over, and held it by a corner to let it flop open. The poster had been a Christmas present, and Flick stuck it straight onto the wall, the Blu Tack from the old house still on the paper.

  It was a very impressive poster, Flick thought. It was a map of the world, and the idea was to put a sticker onto each country you visited. Flick didn’t have the stickers that had come with it anymore—one memorable Saturday Freddy had found them and stuck them all over himself—but it didn’t matter. The only country she’d managed to mark off the map was the United Kingdom, anyway.

  Flick pressed two of her fingers to the UK, and made them walk like legs over the Channel to France, and then onward through different countries, right until she got to China, and the land ran out. She sighed, a little seed of sadness sprouting in her chest. China might as well be Jupiter—she had about as much chance of ever getting there.

  She went back to unpacking, lifting out a battered-looking shoebox that she didn’t think she’d seen before. There was a crossed-out address on it, and a faded sticker on the front said I. T. HUDSON—her dad’s name. She opened it and tutted in despair at the folded bits of paper, the expired key-card, and the broken and dry pens her dad seemed incapable of throwing away. There was a wooden jewelry box at the bottom, with a gold catch.

  Flick pulled it out. It was heavy. Her mom didn’t have a lot of jewelry, and her dad had worn the same Casio watch for as long as she could remember. Maybe this box held some sort of family secret, she thought excitedly. A box full of jewelry, or money, or proof that they were somehow related to a royal family halfway around the world.

  She flicked the catch up.

  And sighed in disappointment. The inside was stuffed full of yet more envelopes and paperwork. If she found the library, she really needed to get her dad that magical tidying-up book she’d heard people talking about.

  She closed the wooden box, put it to one side and went back to searching through her things. At last she found what she was looking for—a slice of agate crystal.

  The agate was one of the few precious things Flick owned that had survived her baby brother. Her dad had bought it for her when they went to the Blue-John Mines together, just the two of them, a couple of years ago. The agate was as thin as drinking glass and swirled through with pink and purple.

  She put it on top of her lamp and the zigzagged light turned into an aurora on the ceiling.

  Flick smiled and got into bed, letting the colors of the light paint themselves into her dreams.

  Flick didn’t feel even slightly guilty as she escaped out of the house the next day. Her mom had given her some change and told her not to stay out late, but to have fun. Flick wondered how often kids were told to “have fun,” and whether or not they did in the end. There was probably an interesting statistic there. Flick liked numbers. Math was much simpler than English, where you could have lots of right answers depending on how you wrote them down. Math you were either right or wrong.

  “Ah.” Mr. Kalil, Flick’s favorite Math teacher had smiled when she pointed this out. “But numbers don’t always mean one thing alone. For instance, you can use numbers to lie.”

  “How?”

  He’d shown her some of the statistics work from the year above and how those same numbers could be used to prove different things by different people. Flick hadn’t known whether to be pleased or not that her precious straightforward numbers could be made to seem more (or less) important, depending on who was using them.

  Her parents had quickly gotten tired of her pointing this out when they watched the news.

  Now, she went around the back of the house, followed the paths between the gardens, and walked past two more families who were unpacking moving vans. She ducked under the curtains of a wild silver birch, brushing at her dark curls in case some spiders had decided to hitchhike on her head, and came out at the pedestrian crossing that led to the main street.

  Flick felt quite surprised as she walked to the market-place. For such a small village, Little Wyverns was busy. There were crowds of people, open shop doors, and stalls and canopies everywhere.

  Flick had never minded crowds—it was impossible to avoid them in the city, after all. But this crowd felt like one she didn’t belong in. People were glancing at her, clocking her as someone from the new estate. She had a weird sensation—like she’d turned up to a soccer match wearing the wrong color shirt.

  In a village as small as this, any stranger would be like an interesting specimen in a jar.

  Flick peeled away from the market, and went to lean against one of the buildings, pretending to check her phone. The sun was already beating down, and the air was full of that strange sour tang from the fake plastic grass stallholders put their strawberry baskets on. There were a lot of swinging shopping bags and even more babies squalling in strollers.

  The groups of chattering villagers were making her feel like she was standing awkwardly at the edge of a party she hadn’t been invited to. Flick was tempted to go back home, where there was only one squalling baby, and he at least was easily distracted with a banana, but she felt she’d quite like at least one baby-free day in the whole summer holidays. Freddy had been what their parents called “a surprise.” Flick thought “a shock” was probably more accurate. He’d been hogging attention since before he was even born.

  She started walking again, veering off the main street, trying to put some distance between herself and the tiny Freddy-reminders, and turned down a quiet Victorian arcade. The arcade was made of old stone on all sides, and it seemed to suck the heat out of the air completely. Flick shivered. She passed a busy haberdashery and an empty bar and came out beside a bridal shop. The bustle of the village was in the distance now. There was a small church ringed with a sharp arrow-like fence directly opposite where she stood.

  And beside the church, leaning drunkenly into the alleyway, was a tiny, squashed-looking shop with a big bay window. It had a shiny black door and a corner porch with a stone step so worn it appeared to be melting into the pavement.

  Flick looked up at the sign.

  THE STRANGEWORLDS TRAVEL AGENCY

  Something prickled under her skin. The feeling wasn’t unpleasant; if she’d had to describe it, she would have said it was curiosity mixed with oranges. She felt her fingers curl into her palms in an involuntary clench that sent an electric sort of feeling through her bones. She wanted to get closer to that shop.

  She couldn’t say exactly why.

  The travel agency, if that’s what it really was, looked the same as the other shops on the street: old, unpopular, rather unloved, and as though it might have a bit of a weird smell. It did have fresh red and gold paint spelling out its name, though, and a gleaming glossy globe at either end of the sign. There was also a brass plaque beside the door, though at this distance Flick couldn’t make out what it said.

  Her legs, moving almost without permission, took her across the cobblestoned road and up to the shop door before she could think of a reason not to.

  The porch had a bit of an overhang, to shelter people from rain, and once under it Flick felt as if she was standing in a little cocoon. She brushed a hand against the sandy brickwork, and some of the dusty masonry clung to her fingers. She rubbed it off on the leg of her jeans, and touched the brass plaque bolted to the outside wall. It was dented and scratched. It had also been vandalized—the letters were scoured as though they had been attacked with a chisel. Flick could just make out the letters: “ociety.”

  She studied the big bay window. The glass, shining in the sunlight, seemed to look back at her. And Flick realized the shop wasn’t really so grubby, after all.

  It was… sort of beautiful. Like a book t
hat’s been read so many times the cover has fallen off and the pages have started to curl, or a soft bear that’s had all its fur loved away.

  Flick felt a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. There was a soft, affectionate feeling growing in her chest that she couldn’t explain. Like the feeling you get when you see a photograph of a person taken before you met them. You recognize them, and you know you’re going to meet them someday, but it’s as though they’re not quite… ready. Not yet.

  She put a hand on the door and pushed.

  The door swung open easily, and she stepped in after it, catching it before it could bang against the wall. It closed softly behind her, letting out a dusty sigh as it settled back into place.

  Flick looked around.

  She had never seen anywhere that seemed less like a travel agency in her life. The air was slightly dusty, almost as though the place seemed to have a sepia filter thrown over it. The wall to Flick’s left was a mosaic of luggage. Dozens of different sized suitcases were slotted into perfectly proportioned holes of varnished dark wood; only one single cavity was empty.

  To her right, in the corner behind the door, was a glass-and-wood cabinet stuffed to bursting with books and files and tiny knickknacks and a glass case of insects. Beside this corner cabinet was a stretch of wood-paneled wall that was home to a dozen photographs in heavy, dark frames. The pictures were all of people. Flick frowned as she looked at them closely. There were tiny brass plaques beneath each picture, with barely readable names engraved into them.