The elsewhere emporium, p.11
The Elsewhere Emporium, page 11
“Hello,” said Mr Ivy. “You’d better go home, young lady. You’ll catch your death.”
She took a single step towards him, and he caught proper sight of her in the light spilling from his home. When he saw her shadow – the shadow of a man, not a young girl – the breath caught in his tired old chest.
He nodded once. It was a tired nod. A nod of resignation.
“I know what you are,” he said. “I’ll never forget the feeling of being around you all those years ago. The feeling of dread and fear.” He stared into the girl’s eyes, knowing that he was not really talking to a young girl at all, but something dark and ancient and powerful that had taken her prisoner. “I assume you’re going to kill me? You won’t have any trouble this time, I imagine. I’m old, and weak, and alone. But at least let me go inside and have one last drink, eh? Let me die in the comfort of my own home?”
The girl nodded.
Mr Ivy turned and hobbled through the house. He heard her shutting the front door, heard the rain fading to the background, heard her footsteps follow him into the comfortable sitting room. He poured himself a drink, and sat in his favourite chair, and listened to the sound of the ice in his glass.
The girl did not sit. She stood in the centre of the room, rain dripping from her clothes and her hair and the end of her nose, and she stared at him.
“Please let the girl go,” he said. “Use my shadow instead. She doesn’t deserve this.”
The girl’s shadow, the shadow that was shaped like a man, spoke in a voice as old and dry as a dead autumn leaf. “Why would I want you? You said it yourself – you are old and weak, like the others I’ve killed. The girl is young and strong. I think I’ll stay where I am. Soon I won’t need to use another’s shadow in any case.”
Mr Ivy searched the girl’s eyes. “Are you still in there? Can you hear me?”
The shadow became agitated. “She’s gone!”
“No. I don’t believe that.” Mr Ivy looked up into the girl’s eyes again. “What’s your name? Can you tell me that? Do you remember?” As he watched the girl’s eyes, he saw a flicker of light there, of life. “That’s it. Fight it. Think of the people you love, the places you feel warm and comfortable and safe. Hold on to those feelings. Now, what’s your name?”
The girl was shaking with effort, and beads of sweat were mixing with the rain on her skin. “Ed-Ed-Edna.” Her voice was so weak it almost wasn’t there.
Mr Ivy climbed from his seat, took her hands. “That’s it, Edna. Fight! Push back!”
“I’ve done something bad,” whispered Edna. “I can’t go back. I’ll get in terrible trouble…”
The man in Edna’s shadow reared up, and a great blast of energy knocked Mr Ivy back into his armchair. When he next looked up at Edna, she was staring at the floor, unable, unwilling to meet his gaze.
“Where is the old lady?” asked the shadow. “Where is the walking corpse who wears the necklace?”
Mr Ivy put his drink down on the coffee table. He knew at once the reason this creature wanted Mrs Hennypeck. Her necklace.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his crimson silk scarf. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He held the scarf close to his face. “It was a gift from my dear wife, many years ago. I don’t suppose I’ll be needing it any more, will I? Not where I’m going.” He balled up the scarf and tossed it into the fire, and it burned in a brilliant flash of light and became dust.
“Where is the dead woman?” the shadow repeated.
Mr Ivy took another sip of his drink. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll tell me in the end.”
Mr Ivy finished his drink. “I might.” He stood up, managing for the first time in many years to stand straight and tall. “Let’s see, shall we?”
This time his eyes were drawn to his own shadow, and he saw it shift and grow and move, saw it rise up from the floor. As his shadow swallowed him, Mr Ivy’s thoughts turned back many years, to those terrible shadows he’d discovered on his investigations, and he knew that he was going to experience what those poor people had gone through, that his last moments would be identical to theirs.
He closed his eyes.
And then it began.
CHAPTER 27
FINDING EDNA
London, Present Day
“It’s not working!”
“You sure you’re holding it right?”
“Ellie, how many ways can there be of dangling a stick from a bit of string?”
“Well, I don’t know how this works, do I?”
The two of them stood in their raincoats peering down at the hazel stick on the end of the string, rain falling so hard around them that it bounced as it hit the pavement. Miniature rivers at the edge of the roads coursed into overworked drains.
The stick wasn’t moving. Daniel gave it a flick, and it spun in lazy circles and came to a stop in exactly the same position. There was no sign at all that the wand was picking anything up.
“Give it here,” said Ellie. “You sure it’s tied properly?” She took the string from Daniel, and as soon as her fingers touched it, a spark shot from the end of the twig and it began to twirl.
“How’d you get it to do that?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t do anything!”
They waited and watched, and the stick spun faster and faster, until it was a blur in the rain. Then, suddenly, it stopped, the sharp end pointing off across the road in an entirely new direction. Daniel looked up at Ellie, who was smiling in stunned amazement.
“I’ve never done anything magic before!” She tried to hand the wand on the string back to him, but he backed away.
“No. You hold on to it. It’s working for you.”
They began to hurry in the direction that the stick indicated, and as they moved it swung gently, pointing towards some unknown force the way a compass points north. On they went, along another road, this one quite narrow, and out into a circular junction with seven roads leading off it and a tall stone sundial standing in the centre.
“I know where we are,” said Daniel. “It’s Salem Road!”
Ellie looked at him blankly, blinking rain from her eyes.
“Are you kidding me?” said Daniel. “You’ve never heard of Salem Road? Your dad must’ve come here hundreds of times! I had a trip here not long after I took over the Emporium. Don’t you remember me going on and on about it?”
Ellie shrugged. “To be honest, Daniel, I don’t listen to a lot of the guff that falls out of your mouth. Oh, don’t take it personally – it was the same with Papa. I’m just not interested in any of that technical magical history-type stuff. I’m more of a wing-it-and-let’s-see-what-happens type of person, you know?”
“Right,” said Daniel, feeling more than a little affronted on behalf of magicians everywhere. “OK. As I was saying – and don’t worry, I’ll try not to bore you too much – Salem Road is the magic district here in London. It’s one of the biggest in the world. A lot of it’s empty now, but it’s still the capital of British magic. And the way in is…” He went to the stone sundial pillar in the centre of the circular street. The pillar reached up towards the dark sky from a large, square base. Daniel walked around it once, and then placed his hand on the stone facade of one of the base’s sides. He stood up and smiled, and pointed over Ellie’s shoulder.
The entrance to an eighth street had appeared.
The hazel wand turned and pointed towards Salem Road.
“In we go, I guess,” said Ellie.
Salem Road was mostly quiet at this late hour, and the few magicians they did pass seemed too occupied in their own affairs to even raise an eyebrow at the sight of two children following a spinning hazel wand on a bit of string. In fact, those they passed in the cobbled street were, if anything, up to even stranger business than Daniel and Ellie.
One woman struggled past, a sack slung over her shoulder. There were things moving inside it, and strange slime had soaked through the material and was dripping on the road, hissing and spitting as the rain fell upon it. Another magician, a young man in a wide-brimmed hat, was laughing hysterically at a seemingly invisible companion, slapping this invisible person on what Daniel presumed was the back.
“Oh, good form!” he was yelling between great bellowing laughs. “Oh, you are a hoot!”
Ellie stared after him and said, “I’m beginning to think that Papa might have actually been one of the more stable magicians around…”
The rain showed no sign of letting up; if anything it was falling heavier than ever, spraying back towards the sky as it hit the ground, forming a thin mist that hung in the eerie yellow lamplight of London’s magic district.
The hazel wand spun suddenly to the left, pointing to the door of a comfortable-looking house. A single light was on in one of the front rooms.
“The door’s open a little,” said Ellie in a hushed voice. “You think Edna’s here?”
Daniel stared hard at the front door of the house. “I think we’re about to find out.” He tried to sound brave, but he couldn’t hide the waver in his voice. “Together?”
Ellie gave him a nod, and to his great surprise she took his hand. “Together.”
They reached up at the same time and pushed on the door.
Through the falling rain, two sounds came from the house. First a smash, like a vase or glass shattering. And then an echoing scream.
Daniel’s heart almost jumped into his throat. Without thinking properly about what he was doing, he pushed through into the hallway. The house was in dark silence. At the end of the hallway, a door was lying open, and light from the room cast a hazy bar of gold out onto the floor and the wall.
Standing in this light was Edna.
It was obvious that something was very wrong with her.
Her face was gaunt, her flesh waxy and slick with sweat. Her eyes were blank, devoid of emotion. And then Daniel looked at her shadow, and he saw that it was not her shadow at all. It was the shadow of a man.
“Edna. It’s me, Daniel. You remember? From the Nowhere Emporium.”
Edna stared straight ahead. But her shadow – the shadow shaped like a tall man in a hat – moved, then pointed towards Daniel and Ellie.
At once Daniel’s chest became tight, his heart cold and weak, and his own shadow broke away from the floor, growing and billowing around him, locking him in a dark fog.
Somewhere, he heard Ellie call his name. “Daniel!”
It seemed he was back in the dormitory of St Catherine’s Children’s Home, the cold, forbidding building where he’d lived before Mr Silver had helped him escape to the world of magic. He felt the sterile air, smelled the too-clean tang of bleach and choking air-freshener.
Spud Harper was there too, the bully who’d made Daniel’s life miserable, and his gang, standing all around him. Spud smiled down maliciously. “It was all a dream, Danny boy. None of it was real. This is your future. You’re nobody. No pals. No magic. No way out.”
“No,” cried Daniel. “No!”
They began to laugh at him.
He was shaking badly, shivering with panic. What if they were right? What if he’d dreamed the whole thing, the Emporium and Mr Silver and the world of magic? Every passing moment was dragging him further away from the world, into a never-ending darkness.
Then Ellie’s voice broke through. The sound of it warmed him, made him wake up, and suddenly she was beside him, standing with him in his own nightmare as Spud and the gang pointed and laughed and yelled names at him. Ellie took Daniel’s hand, and she touched the tip of the hazel wand to the floor, and traced a circle around their feet. At once the vision of the orphanage, of Spud and his cronies, turned to ash, and Daniel’s shadow shrunk back and became his own once more.
The man in Edna’s shadow yelled out and sent a great shockwave down the hall, knocking Daniel and Ellie to the ground. They scrambled up, spun around, braced for another attack, but found the hallway empty. There was no sign of Edna or her shadow, and the only sound was their own breathless gasping.
A distant, ghostly moaning sound drifted from the open door up the hallway, and they ran to the door, bursting into the room. The sitting room was comfortable, decorated in warm golds and deep reds. A fire was burning well.
On the floor was a shadow.
Wait.
No.
Not just a shadow.
The shadow of a man who wasn’t there; it was as if he was standing in the room and the light was hitting him and casting the shadow on the floor. The shadow was flickering, and as Daniel crept towards it, he gasped at what he saw. “There’s someone in there!”
It was a frightening vision: the face of an old man in the shadow, barely visible, staring up at them.
“He’s saying something,” said Ellie, moving closer.
The old man’s face flickered. His eyes were wide and his mouth moving, screaming something they couldn’t quite make out.
“We have to help him!”
“How?”
Daniel bent down, reached into the shadow; it was cold as ice water, and he brought his hand out again quickly, shook the feeling back into his fingers.
A weak, echoing voice drifted out of the shadow. “Please…” The man strobed in and out of view, and his features blurred and darkened at the edges.
“How can we help?” Daniel asked. “How can we get you out?”
“No,” said the old man in the shadow. “Not me. Too late…” He faded again, and it seemed that every time he came back more of him was shadow than before. “Mrs He-He-Hennypeck. Help her. It’s after her necklace. You must—”
His eyes grew wider, and a look of great fear contorted his features as he seemed to fall down, down, down into the shadow. This time he did not come back.
Daniel touched the shadow on the floor, the impossible shadow, and it was no longer cold. “He’s gone.”
Ellie covered her mouth in shock. “What is this, Daniel? How can someone just become a shadow like that?”
Daniel was unable to tear his gaze from the floor. “Edna’s in real trouble, Ellie.” The feeling of helplessness was rising in his chest. “I don’t know what to do…”
“Don’t move! Not an inch!”
This new voice gave Daniel and Ellie a jolt, and they each spun around and raised their hazel wands.
There was a man in the room. He had ebony skin and a crop of neat black hair, and he was dressed in a smart suit and long coat and gloves. His piercing green eyes were alert and intelligent, and they scanned the room from Daniel to Ellie and finally to the shadow on the floor. His mouth dropped open, and he took a step towards Daniel.
“You! What happened??”
“Whoa! Back off! We’re not the bad guys here!”
The man reached into his coat, brought out a wallet and opened it, showing them an official-looking silver badge.
“Grover Flintwitch, Chief of the Bureau of Magical Investigation.”
Daniel screwed up his face. “The Bureau? What’s going on here?”
“I’m the one with the badge, boy, so I’ll ask the questions. Who are you?”
“Daniel Holmes. Look, we came here because we’re trying to help someone. A girl… It sounds mental, but there’s something living in her shadow. We think it’s controlling her. We found her here but she had already attacked the man who lives here.” Daniel pointed to the shadow on the floor.
Mr Flintwitch looked torn between anger and fear. He took a little black leather-bound book from his pocket. The sight of it immediately reminded Daniel of the Book of Wonders. Mr Flintwitch opened it, read a passage under his breath, and Daniel felt a warm sensation washing over him, like the tongue of some giant creature had licked him from head to foot.
Mr Flintwitch gave both Daniel and Ellie a final, appraising look. Seemingly satisfied, he snapped the book shut and approached the shadow on the floor.
“What was that? What did you just do?”
“Made sure you were telling the truth,” said the man. He began to examine the shadow on the floor.
“When we got here he was still in there,” said Ellie. “Inside his own shadow. He said something to us before he disappeared.”
“Mr Ivy? What did he say? Please try to remember exactly.” The man looked up at Ellie, and she couldn’t help but recognise the look in his eyes, the look of grief.
“He said it was too late to save him,” said Ellie softly. “And then he asked us to save someone else… Mrs Hen… Henny-something.”
Mr Flintwitch made in involuntary movement; his hand went to his chest, pressed against his heart. “Hennypeck?”
“Yes! That’s it! He said this shadow thing is after a necklace.”
Mr Flintwitch’s arms dropped to his sides. He began to look all about, and Daniel could almost hear the spark and fizz of his mind working.
“I must go. I only hope I can get there in time. You two – with me. There are more questions I want to ask.” He turned and dashed for the door, into the rain-soaked night.
Daniel and Ellie followed close at his heels.
“Hey! Wait!” said Daniel. “What’ll happen to Edna? The girl? She hasn’t done anything wrong. Will she be hurt?”
“Honestly?” replied Mr Flintwitch, “I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 28
THE LAIR
London, 1967
At one time, Filigree & Son had been the grandest, most exclusive department store in all of London. Now, as Mr Ivy and his friends stood in the deserted darkness of the main atrium, staring up and around at the overlooking floors, it was nothing more than a shell, the bare bones of a once-great creature.
“I remember when this place opened,” said Mrs Hennypeck, glancing sadly around. “Why, Queen Victoria herself cut the ribbon. For many years this was the place to be seen in the eyes of everyone who was anyone.” She recited a light spell, and a glowing orb appeared in the air above their heads, casting the place in cold, pale light. “Look at it now, eh?”
