Strangeworlds Travel Agency Page 7

  Jonathan waved a hand. “You didn’t know.” He rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. “Would you excuse me? I’d like to try to do something with… this.” He gestured vaguely at himself.

  Flick nodded and watched him go through the kitchen to the stairs at the back of the shop. She waited a moment and then went into the kitchen herself. There was an uncut loaf of bread and a jar of pasta twists on the counter and a glass bottle of milk on the windowsill in the shade. There was no fridge.

  Flick decided to do what everyone else in the country did when action was needed. She took the kettle off the burner and filled it at the sink. The kettle used a gas ring, the same as Flick’s nanna had at her house. She remembered her nanna showing her how to do it and she turned the gas on, so blue flames shot out.

  Putting the whistle on the spout of the kettle, she listened up the stairs and heard water starting to run. Finding some china cups in one of the tiny cupboards, she set them out before wandering back into the travel agency.

  Around her, the suitcases seemed to hum with anticipation. One singular case, close to the desk, wobbled slightly as the bathroom door upstairs slammed shut. It wasn’t stacked; it was leaning against the desk, looking for all the world as though it was waiting for her.

  Flick pulled a face at it. The suitcase was light brown and battered, though the leather handle wasn’t too worn. There was a faded red stamp on the broadest side and peeling painted letters spelling out a ghost word.

  She pulled the case onto the desk. Jonathan hadn’t said not to touch. And she had made a trip down. She could take a little peek.…

  She tested the latches, pushing the round bits of the mechanism apart.

  They stayed closed and tight, and she wondered if the suitcase was locked. But it couldn’t be, she realized—there was no keyhole on the fastenings and no padlock.

  “Come on,” she breathed through gritted teeth, pushing on the catches again with her thumbs. “Open up.”

  The catches popped open, but only partially—Flick had to pry them from the fittings with her fingernails the rest of the way. They must be stiff from age. She gripped the edge of the lid and tried to pull. The leather stuck.

  The suitcase was resisting her mightily.

  In the kitchen, there was a rattle and a groan as the pipes upstairs were coaxed into giving up the last of the hot water.

  Flick yanked harder.

  The suitcase lid flew up.

  And Flick fell down.

  Flick scrunched her eyes shut, preparing for the pain of hitting her chin on the desk.

  But it didn’t come.

  The falling sensation whipped around her face for a moment longer than it should have. And when it stopped, she landed on her feet, not her face.

  But only for a moment.

  Her sneakers slipped on the ground, and she opened her eyes just as her backside hit the ground. Her hands banged against the ground, and she felt sand beneath them graze her palms.

  Sand.

  Sand?

  Flick stared at her shoes, half-buried in it. This was distinctly not the dusty little travel agency she’d been in a moment ago.

  “Oh, no…” She scrambled to her feet, powered by nervous uncertainty, trying not to sink into the softness underfoot. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the yellow sun and focused on the dry, still dunes.

  Behind her, the suitcase lay, lid up, wedged into the sand. She turned away from it and brushed her sandy palms against her shorts. The sand trickled through her fingers. It didn’t blow away through the air, though. Instead, it fell straight down.

  “This is different,” she said, her voice carrying loudly. It was extremely still. There wasn’t a breath of breeze to be felt. The air felt frozen, almost, though the sun overhead was warm.

  Flick turned on the spot slowly.

  She was standing on a pale beach that sloped down gradually toward a body of water, some fifty yards away. The water was so still it might have been a mirror. Behind her, on a slight incline easily within her ability to climb, was a browning grass-covered cliff top.

  On the top of this flat stretch of land was a lighthouse.

  It looked just as a lighthouse should—a red and white striped tube, with a curved glass vessel on the top—only it was about half the height you’d expect. It was made of painted brick, and there was a stack of leftover unpainted gray bricks to one side, resting on a collapsed wooden pallet.

  Beside the lighthouse was a space where a garden might be, but there was no green whatsoever—only brown grass, sand, and stone. Flick could make out laundry hung on a string line, stiff as boards and rotting from the salt in the sea air.

  An uneasy feeling stirred under her skin.

  Flick bent down and fished the suitcase out of the sand, shaking it out before closing it. She peered out at the water. On the horizon, the only thing that broke the flat mirror-surface of the water was a rock.

  She gripped the suitcase tight and began to walk toward the water, half watching the stone in the sea, in case it tried anything. The sand slid heavily as she walked, making it difficult to move with any speed.

  Something crunched, horribly, under her shoe.

  She froze in fright, steeling herself before looking down.

  The remnants of a picnic were scattered over the sand. There was a checked blanket and a wicker basket and even wineglasses (one of which Flick had stepped on and broken). The food was long gone, presumably rotted under the sun. And even though there was no breeze, the blanket was disturbed—as though several heavy footsteps had gone over it.

  She wasn’t the first person to have found this picnic site.

  Leading away from the scattered debris were several long, deep, gouges in the sand. As though something, or someone, had been dragged off.

  The drag marks led to the sea.

  Something very cold crept down into Flick’s stomach.

  She changed direction and, her feet digging into the sand like ineffective shovels, headed quickly for the lighthouse instead. She wanted to put as much distance between herself and those awful drag marks as possible. The sand changed to rock as she climbed, and before long she was standing on top of the stone cliff.

  The lighthouse was so still it somehow seemed to give Flick vertigo. She half expected it to fall over at any moment and looking up at the glass dome made her head swim. She walked closer anyway, the suitcase still tight in her hand. Her footsteps in the dead grass sounded extremely loud to her own ears.

  There was a red handprint on the white paint, close to the door. It had smeared a little, the fingers dragging and long, disappearing as the color ran out.

  Flick realized her legs had stopped moving. “It’s just paint,” she said to herself. “Only paint.” She gripped the suitcase tight, as if it could protect her as she walked past the eerie handprint and around the lighthouse to the door.

  The wooden door was swollen, and it wasn’t so much closed as wedged most of the way into the doorframe. The paint was a green-blue eczema of color, peeling where the salted air had eaten into it.

  Flick put her hand on the door, feeling the sharp edges of the paint coming away against her palm. She dragged her hand over to the black steel door handle and gripped it hard. It took several hard tugs, but she eventually yanked the door free.

  The door groaned and swung outward, releasing a sour smell of yeast and coldness that made Flick wrinkle her nose as she stepped into the cool space.

  Rather than the darkness she expected, the inside of the lighthouse was fairly bright from the light that filtered in through the dirt-coated windows and the dome above.

  There was a spiral staircase of black metal in the center of the circular room, and at the edges were various pieces of furniture, all curved to fit the strange space. Farthest away from the door was a desk, and above it was a collage of papers and pictures and maps and photographs.

  There were no cobwebs, and no signs of mice.

  Like the beach, the lighthouse w
as completely devoid of life.

  Flick shivered. She had never been anywhere that felt more dead, and it made her very aware of her own muscles moving, the anxious rush of blood through her veins, and the way her fingers gripped tight at the leather suitcase handle.

  It was noticeably colder inside the lighthouse, almost unpleasantly so, and she rubbed her bare arms as she looked about. The spiral staircase was made of iron, and dust clung to the cast shapes and patterns in great clumps, along with red-orange rust on the screwheads and bolts. Although Flick was interested in what lay up in the glass dome, the staircase seemed too rickety to try climbing.

  She walked over to the desk instead. It was littered with pens and papers. Flick put the suitcase down and touched some of the papers. They were stiff and crispy. She felt as if they might crumble in her hands. They were the color of tea and covered in a thin film of dust.

  She cast her eyes up at the domed ceiling again. Where had the owner of this place gone? Nothing was packed. Nothing was tidied away. It was just…

  Abandoned. The whole world seemed to be abandoned.

  She gave a grateful glance down at the suitcase. She had a way out of this place, at least.

  There was a photograph on the wall of a couple beside the lighthouse when it was half-built, and Flick walked over to it. They were laughing and wearing overalls, and one of them was hefting one of the large bricks. Beside the photograph there were more scraps of ephemera pasted to the wall: newspaper clippings, and pages torn from books with notes scribbled on them. The writing on the paper was in a language Flick didn’t recognize.

  There were more photos too. The pictures all seemed to be of the same family: there was a man with long black hair, shot through with gray and tied back in a ponytail, outside a shop whose windows were filled with bottles. There was a picture of a woman with a thundercloud of tight black curls, laughing at a little girl blowing bubbles through a hoop; then a shot of all three of them on a beach not unlike the one Flick had landed on, except there were other families in the background, and there was clearly a wind blowing, as the little girl had her hand on her straw hat. The three of them looked happy, giggling at whoever was taking the picture. The man’s hair didn’t have any gray in it in this picture. It was tucked back, and Flick could see his ears had a point to them, rather than a rounded edge like her own. She couldn’t see the ears of the other subjects, but somehow, she knew they couldn’t be from her world.

  A tightness gripped the back of Flick’s skull, and she could hear her own heartbeat. This was a picture not meant for her eyes. Flick reached out and touched the glass covering the photo. Her fingertip came back covered in a pale dust, a clear space on the man’s face.

  Had those people lived here? Picnicked on that beach?

  What had happened to them?

  She went back to the desk and moved some of the papers, her fingers sifting through the sheets until she touched a soft-edged photograph, lifting it to get a better look.

  The man and woman were in it again. They were younger, but sadder. And each of them held a baby. Two infants in matching white blankets, their tiny noses just visible.

  Flick frowned at the photo. Her own mother had been grinning like a kid in a sweet shop when Freddy was born, in every photo that she hadn’t been sleeping. Flick had seen her own baby photos, and it was the same in them—her parents sporting identical goofy grins in every shot.

  So, why did the woman in the photograph look so sad? And the man so solemn?

  Flick looked back to the beach photograph. There was only one child in it, with the two adults. Two babies and then, later, one child.

  Something must have happened to the other one.

  A wave of sadness crashed into Flick without warning. She compared the photo of the girl with her parents against the one with the two tiny bundles. It felt as if a pit had opened somewhere inside her, and everything was being dragged into it. With a plummeting feeling, she thought about her own parents and wondered what would happen if she fell into another world but never came back. The thought made her miss them terribly, and she wrapped an arm around herself in a pitiful half-a-hug that didn’t do the job at all. She put the photograph down on the desk.

  Of course, there was every chance the beach picture was taken by the missing child. He or she could have been holding the camera. But there was no other trace of them, not on the desk or in the frames on the wall. They were… gone.

  All at once, Flick felt as if she was intruding on something deathly private, and she stepped back from the desk, feeling sick. She knocked the chair as she stepped away. It spun and banged against the surface of the desk, sending several books and a slim walnut box with a gold catch straight to the floor. The clatter echoed horribly in the empty space.

  Flick quickly picked all the things up and put them back in their pile on the desk. The photograph with the babies was buried under the heap.

  She was about to turn away from the desk, when something caught her eye.

  Among the papers and letters covered with writing Flick could not read was a word she most definitely could:

  Mercator

  Heart beating fast, Flick hurriedly pushed sheets of paper aside to uncover a very slim notebook—the sort of thing she used in school, with lined paper on the inside. And on the front cover, in neat leaning script that belonged to an adult’s hand, was the name “Daniel Mercator.”

  The book wasn’t as dusty as the rest of the items on the desk—it hadn’t been there as long. Flick hesitated. She longed to open it. But this belonged to Jonathan more than her. And even if Jonathan had said it was a bad thing to take something from another world, surely she had to make an exception for this?

  As she nodded to herself, one of the framed pictures on the wall slid awkwardly to one side on its nail and hung there, wobbling strangely, barely balancing at an angle.

  Without a doubt, this was her cue to leave. This place was too empty, too full of mystery, and too sad. Putting Daniel Mercator’s book into the back pocket of her shorts, she glanced for a final time at the picture of the gray-haired man standing in front of the shop. His arms were folded, and he wore an apron with a name badge on it. How many years were there between the photograph of him holding that tiny baby and him gray-haired and alone, in front of that store?

  Was this lighthouse where he had lived? Was his family all gone?

  And what had Daniel Mercator been doing in this place?

  Flick left the desk, moved quickly back to the open door, opened the suitcase and hastily climbed back in.

  She’d forgotten the case was on the desk. She tumbled out awkwardly, banged her hip hard on the corner, and fell to the floor swearing under her breath.

  From upstairs, she heard a door close, and then footsteps come down the stairs.

  Flick quickly kicked the suitcase back down the side of the desk and leaned against the wall, trying to look innocent.

  Jonathan appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “The kettle has been whistling for quite some time,” he said. He stared deliberately at the space where the suitcase should have been, two feet to the left of where it now was, and at the sand on his previously clean floor. He raised an eyebrow.

  Flick felt her face begin to heat up. The kettle was indeed screaming.

  Jonathan sat himself back in the desk chair and gave Flick such a severe look it could have melted an anvil. “I do very much hope what I think just happened did, in fact, not.” His voice was soft but dangerous.

  The fire in Flick’s face somehow grew thorns as well. “Um.”

  “On your own, no supervision, and not even a note to say where you’d gone.” He shook his head. “I suppose it’s fortunate that you failed to pull the suitcase through after yourself—at least I could have followed you, if you failed to rematerialize after a few hours.”

  Flick swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

  Jonathan sniffed. “Not to mention that case was supposed to be locked,” he said. “You shouldn’t
have been able to get into it at all.”

  Flick decided not to mention the way she’d forced the latches. Was Jonathan really angry? Was he going to ban her from the travel agency and say she couldn’t be a Society member after all? She swallowed, feeling regret and anxiety balling up in her throat. “I’m really sorry. I just opened it up to have a look, and I sort of fell in.”

  Jonathan sighed and went to take the kettle off the boil. Flick followed him. The kettle’s underside was glowing, and Jonathan fanned his hand quickly after turning the gas off. “You shouldn’t apologize for being curious. And, in fairness, I didn’t forbid you to touch. I’m glad you made it out all right. I assumed it was locked tight, and safe.” He checked his cuffs. “Since it was supposed to be locked, it could have been dangerous.”

  Flick relaxed slightly. He didn’t seem overly cross or disappointed, which in turn made her feel slightly odd. “It didn’t seem dangerous, exactly. Just… empty. Really empty.” She swallowed. “Dead.”

  He looked at her. “You’re back, and that’s all that matters.” He went over to the desk, and half collapsed into the chair. “However, simply because you didn’t experience any danger doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  Flick bit her lip. The knowledge that the cases could be dangerous was like finding a worm at the center of a chocolate truffle. Shamefaced, she pulled the notebook, now creased from its inelegant journey back to Strangeworlds, out of her pocket. She held it out to Jonathan. “I found this.”

  “You took something from another world?” Jonathan’s eyes popped behind his glasses. “After I distinctly—”

  “It says Daniel Mercator on the front,” Flick said quickly, before Jonathan could build up steam.

  Jonathan’s mouth snapped shut like a trap. He blinked rapidly and took the workbook out of Flick’s hand. “Where did you find this?”

  “It was on a desk in a lighthouse, with a load of other papers. I didn’t open it,” she added hurriedly. “I just saw the name… it was the only thing I could read. The rest was all another language. Is it your dad’s?”