Part 1 of the novel I'm trying to write

1.

Robot stood at the window of what had once, briefly, been her childhood bedroom, and watched the glowing, billowing white cube in the field across the way.  Lit from within, it shone in the gathering darkness of the November afternoon.  The wind pushed waves along its sides.

“What’s in there?” she asked.

“I think you can guess,” said Mr Lackland.

His voice was broken china.  Old, refined, shattered and stuck back together, but poorly, with pieces missing, with sharp edges still protruding, with powder still flaking off at the joins.

Powder, thought Robot.

Robot did not turn from the window.  She watched Lackland, lying in bed, reflected in the glass.  The bed was exactly where her own bed had been when she had slept in this room.  But her bed had been pink and ornate; Mr Knott’s idea of a little girl’s bed.  Lackland’s bed was a machine.  The faded and withered figure was cradled by it, surrounded by monitors, caught in a web of tubes and pipes.  A nurse fussed around him.  She seemed to have no difficulty working in the darkness.

“Would you leave us, please,” said Lackland.

Without a word, without a glance, the nurse melted away.

“It must be strange being back here,” said Lackland.  “Being back home.”

“This was never my home,” said Robot.

She saw Mr Napier on the way in.  He nodded as they approached each other.

“You didn’t waste time,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, stopping.

“Concluding my business with Mr Lackland,” he said, stopping too.  “I hope you and he can come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement.  My part is done.”

“Good,” she said.

He smiled thinly and continued past her.  She turned and saw him press a button on the wall next to a lift that couldn’t be there, that had never been there before.  

He swiveled back to her.

“You know,” he said, “there was no need for you to make the trip all by yourself.”

“I don’t like the idea of owing you anything,” she said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said.  “I have no further interest in you.”

He walked into the lift and the doors trundled closed behind him.  Robot continued walking.  She heard the lift’s chime.  She looked around.  The doors were gone.  She’d noticed the way Napier had hit the “I”.

Mr Underwood had brought Mr Lackland’s letter.

Robot had been at the Saturday job Mrs Pleasance had arranged for her, alone in the warehouse.  She heard the chime.  She kept on working, taking stock of the unsold plastic pumpkins and plastic witch’s brooms and plastic ghost masks.  It was almost lunch time on the day after Halloween, and she wanted to have this job finished before she broke for an hour of sitting alone in the staff room.  

She heard metal clattering behind her.  She turned.  Mr Underwood pulled a sheet of paper out of his head and handed it to her.

“Good morning miss,” it said, inkily.

“Hello,” she said.  She did not dislike Underwood, so she said “What can I do for you?” instead of “What do you want?” as she handed him back the sheet of paper. 

Mr Underwood fed the sheet into the portable shredder slung over his shoulder.  It ate with a brief roar of metal teeth.  He pulled a fresh sheet of paper out of the satchel slung over his other shoulder and fed it into his head.  He crossed his forearms, turned his hands inwards, and typed.  He had to pull the carriage back several times.  Robot waited patiently.  She looked around Underwood.  The lift doors had appeared in the side of one of the walk-in meat freezers.  Underwood pulled the completed message out of his head and handed it to her.

“I’m sorry to intrude upon you like this, miss.  We would not be contacting you were it not urgent.  We have had a request from another person who, like you, once inquired after our services.  A Mr Lackland.  We were unable to help him.  He asked for a meeting with you.  Mr Lackland is anxious to stress that the meeting might be to your advantage.”

She read the note and handed it back to him.  He shredded it.

“Why is it urgent?”

“Mr Lackland is extremely elderly,” replied Underwood, “and not in the best of health.”

“How does he know about me?”

“As I understand it, miss, Mr Lackland asked to be informed if anyone ever came to us and told a story featuring certain elements.  You did.”

“So Napier told him about me?”

“He was obliged to do so by the terms of the agreement between us and Mr Lackland.  You made no agreement with us, so we were under no obligation of client privacy with regards to you,” said Underwood.

“How is this man going to help me?” she asked.

“Mr Lackland is a person of resources, miss.  He may be able to assist you with matters that the firm of Hargreaves & Napier cannot.”

Robot regarded him steadily.  He was clearly uncomfortable, but not anxious in the way he’d been the first time she had met him.

“You tried to warn me before,” she said, looking up at him, reading the word ‘UNDERWOOD’ printed in gold leaf across the front of his head.  “Tell me honestly… should I do this or not?”

“I don’t know of any reason to distrust Mr Lackland, miss.  I know nothing about him, besides what I have gathered from dealing with his correspondence.  As far as I know, Mr Napier is simply acting as his agent in this matter.”

Robot looked at the clock on the warehouse wall.  She was on her lunch break now, her tasks for the morning unfinished, her schedule thrown-off.

“Where is this man?” she asked.

Mr Underwood handed her another sheet.  She read it.  She suppressed a wry grimace.  She handed the sheet back to Underwood.

“That can’t be a coincidence,” she said.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” returned Underwood, “but if Mr Lackland is connected with the previous residents, I have no knowledge of it.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Robot.

She felt a sudden and sharp desire to say something kind to Underwood, but he had already turned away.

2.

Robot had found Hargreaves & Napier in a book. She found it in the school library. Robot was making a study of all such books. Books about people - especially children - who find their way through magic doorways into other worlds. Children like she had been on The Night Before Bonfire Night. She was looking for clues, or instructions.

Sometimes, after The Night Before Bonfire Night, Robot saw things.  She once went to the British Library with school. Outside, she saw a paving slab become a pane of glass. She looked through it down into an impossible room, in which men with clothes and skin and hair all as white as chalk were sat in rows, methodically plastering every page of book after book after book with whitewash. She stood mesmerised, hearing the other kids mutter about her as they passed, until one of the men seemed to sense her gaze and looked up at her.

Taken to Ikea, she saw the people who lived in the fake bedrooms and fake kitchens. She saw them eating the plastic fruit and reading the plastic books. The people were themselves smoothly-textured, smartly-designed, interlocking frameworks. They looked at her as she jerked past, following Mrs Pleasance, their expressions as smooth as their matt-finished parts.

Later, she would ask Mr Napier about this.

“Yes, that’s quite common,” he replied. “People like yourself often find that a side-effect of your experiences is the ability to see things that are hidden from other people, things that exist in the cracks between worlds.”

As he answered, she thought that he looked rather like one of the people living in Ikea himself. 

Once, Robot and Mrs Pleasance were in London to visit Mum in the hospice, and they drove past the Pendulum in a taxi.  Mrs Pleasance tutted at it.  Robot seemed to feel it watching her, waiting for her.

In the hospice, Robot always saw strings on the patients. The strings seemed attached to their heads and wrists and feet, and ran upwards and vanished through the ceiling. It made the people look like puppets. Some of the people had fewer strings than others. Some of them had loose, flapping strings that seemed to have been cut.  Taken to Mum’s bed, Robot saw that, for the first time, one of Mum’s strings was severed, the bottom half trailing on the floor.

Robot and Mrs Pleasance were met by one of the doctors.  He asked them to come to a private room where they could speak privately.  He explained to them that the medical directors of the hospice wanted to withdraw Mum’s nutrition.  Robot stared at the box of tissues the doctor had placed ready on his desk.  Mrs Pleasance took one.  The doctor explained that there was a long process of consultations and conferences and courts to be gone through, so nothing would happen immediately. But it had been decided that Mum’s state was almost certainly permanent, and it would be kinder to let her go. Mrs Pleasance sniffled.  Robot didn’t react.  She made herself silently swallow the words that came into her head, which were “You mean you want to starve my mother to death”.

Back at the bedside, left alone, Robot did something she had never done before. She talked to what remained of her mother. She had always understood that Mum could not hear, and she still understood that now. Mum’s eyes were open, her teeth were kept clean, her hair was kept brushed, but she was already as gone as someone could be without their heart actually stopping. It had stopped, of course, after the accident. Machines had kept it beating, had kept the lungs inflating and deflating, until they started working by themselves again. Now, machines pumped food into her, and pumped waste back out. But none of those machines had ever been doing anything more than preserving an image. And soon, if the world had its way, the image would be gone.

Robot was not angry. She did not feel that they were really killing her mother. She was too intelligent to believe that the empty, staring, blinking shell in the bed was still her Mum in any real or recoverable sense. The world, in the form of a speeding car, had already knocked her Mum into some other place.

“Where are you Mum?” Robot asked the slack-faced form in the bed, “Where did you go? Can you come back? Because if you can… now would be a really good time.” As she said it she brushed Mum’s hair and - certain she was unobserved - smiled at her and kissed her forehead.  She tried very hard to ignore the fact that she wasn’t sure she really meant what she was saying.

Robot gave no sign of any of her thoughts as she and Mrs Pleasance left, any more than she gave any sign of seeing the strings, or any of the other things she saw.  They ate lunch by the river.  Mrs Pleasance watched Robot carefully.  She started to say something terribly tactful about how the doctors were probably right, and it would probably be for the best.  That was when Robot knew she was on her own.

Later, Mrs Pleasance took her to Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons. She idly talked about them taking the tour of the inside of Big Ben. Robot had to remind her that there was no way she could cope with that many steps. She didn’t mention that the idea of being that close to that much clockwork gave her the screaming horrors.

Mrs Pleasance swallowed her disappointment. She found it harder to swallow when she learned that the pigeons had all left. There’d always been pigeons in her day. She seemed to take the departure of the pigeons as all of a piece with the other things she didn’t like. The TV news footage of London streets choked with people waving placards, smashing windows, rocking cars. Some of them wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Casting spells at the police who had charged them and herded them and contained them.  London suddenly looking like other places on the news, places further away. To Mrs Pleasance, this all went with the eruption of all these ugly new buildings. Robot thought how strange it was that Mrs Pleasance called them new. The Pendulum was the only one Robot remembered not being there. She supposed, as she looked up, that once people had complained about this ugly new column. She could feel Nelson himself looking down at her with his one eye. The stone lions and the old stone soldiers turned their stone eyes to her. She met their gaze as steadily as she met every gaze.

Mrs Pleasance watched her worriedly the entire rest of the day. On the train home.  In the house as they had dinner.  Robot watched Mrs Pleasance too.  Mrs Pleasance kept showing signs of wanting to touch her, to gather her into some kind of hug. Robot would not resist or object if it happened, but she sent the signal with her every movement that she didn’t need it. Mrs Pleasance got the message. Before she went to bed that night, Robot put her hand on Mrs Pleasance’s shoulder.  Mrs Pleasance looked up from the television, where celebrities were ballroom dancing.  She put her own hand on top of Robot’s, and Robot calculated how long she should stay in that position before she could break the contact without hurting Mrs Pleasance’s feelings.

The next day, Robot started searching out every book she could find that might give her a clue how to get back to where she had gone on The Night Before Bonfire Night, to the place where her legs had suddenly worked again.  

She’d already read many of them.  She read them again.  And she found more.  She disliked many of them.  She didn’t like Peter Pan, for instance.  She especially didn’t like the crocodile.  The book with Inkwell Street in it was her favourite of all the ones she read. It was from the 1940s. It was about a girl who walked to another world. Wendy Darling had flown with Peter.  The girl in this book walked, by herself. The girl walked so much, and with such hope and expectation, that walking became a kind of looking. According to the book, the way to find other worlds is simply to look for them. It isn’t that they hide. It’s that most people never seek.

Robot understood why this idea appealed to her.

Powder, she thought.

Inkwell Street was a street that escaped and had gone travelling. In the book, people could find the street by going to look for it, and looking in a certain way. At times the book became almost an instruction manual, as if the narrator were speaking to you directly, and telling you how to do it. Inkwell Street, the book said, will sense you looking for it, and will turn to meet you. As you look for Inkwell Street, Inkwell Street will look for you. If it wants to, it will meet you somewhere in the middle. It is a ritual which must be performed, and satisfied.

“Inkwell Street is an old street,” said the book. “Old streets become abandoned, closed, changed, renamed, destroyed, re-routed. They are bombed and never rebuilt. They are devastated by depressions, changed forever by recoveries. They disappear. Inkwell Street was a conventional street once. Born in London, and stranded there, the way streets are usually stranded in one place. But it disappeared quite some time ago. Unlike most such disappeared streets, however, Inkwell Street managed to survive. It fled its original location before it could be consumed by time, by the city, by history. It evolved. It can occur anywhere now, temporarily, as long as it is sought by someone who can find it there, someone capable of making it want to be found.”

The book was a novel, a story. But sometimes it felt like a memoir, an autobiography. It was as if someone had lived it, forgotten it, and then written it, imagining they were making it all up. Robot would later learn that this intuition was precisely true.  

When Robot went looking for Inkwell Street, Inkwell Street came looking for her, and they found each other.

She walked through the city alone. It started as a game with herself. But the more she walked, the more she thought she could feel Inkwell Street out there, somewhere. She sensed it waiting for her, looking for her. It was a good feeling. Like being wanted. Like being missed. One part of her mind still thought she was playing make believe. The other had other ideas.

She looked in the places where one part of town stopped and another began. She looked hardest at the ends of streets, poking her head around corners suddenly, hoping to catch Inkwell Street unawares.

“Boundaries are good places to look for Inkwell Street,” the book said, “edges, borders, corners. Cities and towns are full of such features; details and contours that Inkwell Street can grab hold of; nooks and crannies that Inkwell Street can slip into. Complexity creates opportunities. The more intricate the weave, the more holes there are in it.”

There was one particular corner at the shabby end of town. Somehow it seemed promising - possibly because of the nearby railway station, and the sounds of the trains thundering over the bridge. She peeped around the corner she liked. Nothing.

But Inkwell Street was watching her. Suddenly she knew this with her entire self. She felt its gaze, like a sudden shaft of moonlight on the back of her neck. She turned. Again, nothing. But she’d only just missed it. She imagined Inkwell Street giggling as it scampered away.

For a while Robot tried following certain colours. She followed white. Silver. Black. She followed black cars until she could no longer see them, then waited for the next person in black clothes to walk past and followed them until she saw a blackbird, or a shop with its name in black letters.

The shop was empty, abandoned. Posters saying ‘CLOSING DOWN SALE’ and ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO’ clung to the insides of the whitewashed display window, held by crusty yellow tape. ‘YES, EVERYTHING!’ insisted another poster, as if she had expressed doubt.  For a moment, she saw Inkwell Street reflected in the window.  By the time she turned, it was gone.

She walked into a supermarket. Inkwell Street might be inside it, for all she knew. In the book, Inkwell Street did not confine itself to occurring in places where streets normally occurred. Sometimes it occurred in wardrobes, or phone boxes, or cupboards under the stairs.

She wandered the aisles at random. It made her think of a time when she was little, long before The Morning She Was Late For School, when she got lost in a shop. Robot had enjoyed the experience. She hadn’t been frightened. She’d enjoyed the process of looking. She’d enjoyed the idea that she was being looked for. She remembered Mum’s anger when she found her, calmly wandering. 

“Why would you scare me like that?” Mum demanded.

Robot had no idea.  She remembered the painful tightness of Mum’s hand around hers. It had seemed like a reward.

She left the supermarket without buying anything. None of its aisles had turned into streets. She ignored the stares of the customers and staff as much as she ignored their kindness in making room for her. She was used to both.

She kept moving. She looked for hours. Her legs sang operas of pain. No sign of discomfort showed on her face.

She kept an eye out for those narrow paths that sometimes open up unexpectedly in places where you least expect them, and which seem to lead nowhere. She followed such paths, when she found them. She found herself in backstreets, in the wastelands behind supermarkets, in the narrow spaces between people’s garden fences and the canal. She searched behind restaurants, behind their huge bins, in the doorways where people leave crushed cigarette ends on their breaks.

She wasn’t searching anywhere in particular. She remembered what the book said: “Inkwell Street is not anywhere in particular. As far as maps and bus timetables are concerned, it isn’t anywhere at all.”

She was especially vigilant on the hour, when she heard the chimes of the town hall clock. At the sound of the bells, she glanced down to check a watch that wasn’t there. It was her Mum’s nurse’s watch. One of those upside-down ones that hangs from a clip. Robot had worn it for a while after The Morning She Was Late For School. Then she’d lost it somewhere. She still habitually looked down at the place where it wasn’t.

“Even boundaries in time form good points to search,” the book had said, “The turning of the hour. Dawn or dusk. The end or the beginning of the month. New moons and full moons. Blue moons. Eclipses. Equinox and Solstice. It is even slightly easier to find Inkwell Street in Spring and Autumn than in Summer or Winter.”

Dusk came. The street lights came on. They made the drizzle look like showers of golden cinders, raining from a bonfire.

Maybe it was the twilight, and the thought of bonfires, and that October smell in the air. Maybe that was why.

The rain stopped. She was no longer walking over pavement covered in wet leaves, taking care not to let her leaden, unsteady feet slip and slide. There was suddenly no need. The ground here was dry. She was on smooth cobbles strewn with dry straw. She looked up and around, and saw looming walls of soot-blackened bricks. And, illuminated by a dim gas street lamp, a tin sign screwed to a wall.

The sign proclaimed the name of the little alley in archaic block capitals. Here she was. She’d expected to find it and then walk into it. Instead it had found her and enclosed her.

She’d been expecting a boundary she could pause at while she made a decision. She’d expected an opportunity to turn back. She remembered the Greenwich Meridian. She and Mum standing either side of it, half of their bodies on one side of the world, the other halves on the other. She thought of going to bed on New Years Eve, and Mum smiling and saying “See you next year”.

Whereas before she’d been walking through November twilight, now she was in the dead of a summer night. Whereas before there had been golden drizzle in the air, now there was only a dirty, sooty, hothouse aura. She imagined particles landing on her skin. Floating fragments of fuel burned a hundred and fifty years ago, sinking into her pores.

It was too dark to see if she was alone, so she did not permit herself to release the shiver that was clamouring inside her. The book had described the street as bustling, full of life, dotted with shops and offices and agencies and stalls.  The book said to follow the street almost to the end, the way the girl in the story had done. There she would find the offices of Hargreaves & Napier.

Robot looked down the street into darkness that looked tangible. The street lights were on, but even for gaslight they were little help. There was something perfunctory about them. She felt that nobody ever walked down this street any more.

There was no sound except for the rustle of leaves in trees that couldn’t be seen, and something that she thought must be a dripping tap in one of the houses.

She walked on, refusing to give the fear any more attention than the pain. She passed window after window. Domestic windows and shop windows. Many of them were gone, bricked up. The shapes of windows, picked out by a join between old bricks and newer. Ghost windows. Some, especially as she moved further down the street, were still there. Dirty, splintered sash frames. She stopped to try and look inside some of them, but they were all boarded up within, or obscured by old newspapers, or collages of unpaid bills, or dirty muslin, or sheer dirt. Many of the windows were broken, though whether by violence or by time - as the walls around them sagged and the frames compressed - it was impossible to tell.

Just as she had sensed the street looking for her, now she felt it sadly confessing its bareness.

The street was empty. Deserted.

“Everything must go,” she said to herself.

She walked down the street anyway, just to see. She found the offices of Hargreaves & Napier. It was just like in the book, but empty and broken and decayed like everything else. The gleaming plaque the book had described was hanging by one screw, tarnished and rusted. It looked brittle, as if touching it might cause it to crumble to powder.

Powder, she thought.

In the book, the girl had seen her own face reflected in the plaque. Robot could not see anything in this plaque but the ravages of abandonment, and the faint traces of the names she was looking for. It was the same with the door. In the book, the door gleamed black, like the door of 10 Downing Street. This door was the same door, but the lacquer was dried, cracked, and flaking. Great strips of it had peeled away revealing worm-eaten mouldy wood beneath. A great crack ran up it, as if it had been slammed with so much force that it had shattered. It hung ajar.

She hauled herself slowly up the steps. They were steep and she wasn’t agile on steps at the best of times. She didn’t want to use the railings.  They were warped and rusted, and looked unstable.

The knocker had fallen apart.  She didn’t think there’d be much point using it anyway.

She pushed the door. It swung inward silently.

In the book, the girl knocks and is met and invited in by Mr Underwood, a man dressed like a clerk, with a black, box-shaped metal typewriter growing out of his neck. The girl is a little bit frightened at first. Then she realises that he is kind.

Robot called out to the silence and the dust. She kept calling as she walked through the deserted and stripped offices, past the peeling wallpaper and under the cracked ceilings. 

Eventually she stopped calling.

“Yes, everything,” she muttered.

But she realised she was wrong when she found the lift. It was the only thing in the place that was new, unbroken, modern. Two dull steel sliding doors and a small metal control panel with a shining red LED display. 

Good of them to provide disabled access, she thought.

The lift appeared to have been set into the wall suddenly, with no consideration for anything already there. On one side, the doors bisected a painting; on the other, a filing cabinet.

She pressed the button. After a pause there was a chime, and the steel doors slid open.

The endlessly multiplied Robots inside the little box of mirrors regarded each other. She wobbled slightly as the lift rose with a judder and began its ascent. She leaned against the wall, resting herself just a little for the first time in hours.

It occurred to her, as the lift rose - it definitely was rising - that the doors had been set into one of those triangular walls you find under a flight of stairs. There was no normal space into which it could be ascending.

3.

Robot stared Big Ben in the face.  He seemed to be peering in at her.  The Thames curled around him and, over his shoulder, the London Eye jutted out from the city’s inner workings like an errant cogwheel.  

The glass of the window felt alive. Robot breathed on it and half expected to see gooseflesh. It was like that with everything here. Walking on the plush carpet was like walking on sleeping bodies.

“Not what you were expecting,” said Napier behind her.

“I wasn’t expecting anything,” said Robot.

In a way, it was true.  Even so, when the lift doors opened onto a softly-lit, plushly-carpeted corridor that screamed quietly of the corporate, she had been surprised.  She had been surprised again to find Underwood, as described in the book, sat behind a huge reception desk.

“We’re in the Pendulum, aren’t we?” asked Robot.  “Quite high up.”  As soon as she’d seen the view from the panoramic window, she’d known where she was.  Not just because of the view, but because she remembered passing the Pendulum once, and feeling watched by it, expected by it.  

“In a sense,” said Mr Napier.  

“What does that mean?” she asked.  She was already finding Napier annoying, but kept it out of her voice.  

“The offices of Hargreaves & Napier,” said Napier, “occupy what you could call conceptual floors within the building you mentioned.  They cannot be found on any plan.  They are not accessible by any of the building’s literal doors, lifts, or staircases.  They are connected to the building, but they take up no actual space.  Even the view you’ve just been enjoying is borrowed.”

Robot had seen London’s newest and strangest tower many times, on visits to see Mum in the hospice.  A vast, bulbous splinter.  A spiral of gleaming, silver windows.  From which of them was this view stolen?  Between which of the Pendulum’s girders had these offices been squeezed in as a notion, a possibility?

“Is that why Inkwell Street is deserted?” asked Robot.  “You’ve all sold up and moved to places like this?”

“Times change, and you have to change with them,” said Napier, sounding absurdly smug.  

He was making a show of casual, businesslike good-humour.  But Robot could tell he was on edge.  Surprised.  Excited.  Watchful.  She’d sensed it as soon as Mr Underwood had ushered her into this room and introduced her - with some quick typing and a flourish of foolscap - to the man sat at the long, shining conference table.  

Napier had waited patiently enough as Robot sat down.  But her feeling of discomfort did not diminish.  The chair felt strangely responsive, yielding… almost like sitting in someone’s lap.  And Napier’s gaze was amused and condescending.

“There are many developers who now have entire departments dedicated to creating unreal estate,” he continued, “precisely for operations like ours.  We’ve lost a little of our old... hiddenness.  But our partners out there in the less-regulated sector…” he gestured to the window to indicate the ordinary world outside “...are always happy to sign non-disclosure agreements.”

Robot wished she was more surprised by the discovery that the other side of the looking glass was barely any different to the side she’d come from. She looked around. She’d been in many rooms like this over the years.  Official rooms.  Smart, functional, and inhuman.  Rooms for reports and meetings and decisions, not for people.  Her life had been decided - by others, of course - in a series of rooms like this.  The war that took her father had been planned in a room like this.  The man in the car on The Morning She Was Late For School had worked in a room like this.  The doctors in the hospice met in a room like this.  It had been in rooms like this where people told her they had decided where she would live.  This one was strange to her only for its gleaming opulence.  It was just as impersonal, but it did it expensively.  Everything in the room, from floor to ceiling, was flawlessly bland, calm, and professional. Mutedly smart. Expensively null. Smooth, confident, and empty. It was a kaleidoscope of gleaming surfaces, each as meaningless as the next. Mr Napier was all these things too.  He was not the Napier from the book, who had been a genial, twinkling, pickwickian little man in a frock coat and pince nez glasses.  This Napier was more like a mannequin in the window of a high-end tailor.

The only strange thing in the room - aside from the way it felt crowded despite being otherwise empty, and the way everything seemed alive - was the portrait.  It was a portrait of a woman.  She was dressed in the affluent, reserved style of the English upper classes in the late 19th or early 20th century.  She was delicately sharp featured, with dark and piercing eyes.  At first glance, she seemed stern, as if she was glaring out at the viewer.  Closer inspection showed this to be an illusion.  There was no anger or coldness in the face.  Just control, and jealously guarded privacy.

She looks like me, thought Robot.  There wasn’t a real physical resemblance, but the face was as closed as Robot kept her own.

Robot pointed to the portrait.  

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Lady Hargreaves,” said Napier.

“Your partner?”

“The founder of this firm.  The creator of the principles and rules by which we operate.  A silent partner.  Until she died.”

“Who was she?” she asked.

“Someone like you. Someone who went to another world and came back. There are a great many more of you than you might think.”

“So why haven’t I heard about it?”

“Ah, but you have,” said Napier, enthusiasm entering his voice.  “There are many stories. You must have heard or read some of them.”

“One or two,” said Robot, thinking of a hundred books, all telling some version of the same story.  A child finds a magic door and falls through it, out of this world into another.

“So those stories,” she said, “the stories about wardrobes and rabbit holes… they’re all true?  Like the book I read?  The book with this firm in it?”

“Not all,” said Napier. “They have become a literary tradition. But the tradition originates in truth. And even then, the stories tell only a version of events that the author remembers. When it happens, it almost always happens to children. Orphans usually. Generally, only children can create, perceive, and use doorways to other worlds. For the same reason, generally only children can believe in them. Orphans may be more prone to this because they are less attached to the world of adults. Adults generally do not experience such things. And do not remember them correctly.  Things that adults ‘know’ can’t be real…” he put the scare quotes into his voice “…they choose to remember as unreal. They remember some of their friends as imaginary. They remember some of their experiences as dreams or fantasies. They remember them as stories. So some of them retell them as stories. As a result, the details become mangled.”

He was showing off.

“So I’ll forget what happened to me?”

“Probably, if you allow things to take their natural course.  Some exceptional adults, whether through their own uniqueness or through unusual circumstances, manage to remember,” he allowed. “It is unlikely that you will prove to be such a person. I imply no criticism. It is simply rare.”

He had implied a criticism.

“Is that why she…” Robot indicated the portrait of Lady Hargreaves “…started all this?”

“Lady Hargreaves was exceptional,” said Napier.  “She never forgot what happened to her. And she realised that the experience of having touched another world, having travelled there, having walked there and made friends there, changes you, sometimes in ways which leave you unprepared for adult life… more unprepared than usual, that is. She realised that sometimes children who have journeyed to other worlds and come back are no longer the same, no longer fit to remain in this world. They need to be where they went, not where they came from. Sometimes it’s necessary for the world they went to… necessary that they should return and take up some role. But it can be very difficult to find your way back. Often impossible, without help. Lady Hargreaves had resources at her disposal, and a desire to help people like herself. She herself was happy to remain in this world, but she saw no reason why she shouldn’t help people who wanted to go back.”

“It changes you, doesn’t it?” said Robot, “going to a different world, I mean.”

“It can do,” said Napier cautiously, “but the process is unpredictable.” His eyes flicked to her braced legs. “Portals don’t move you so much as translate you, or rephrase you. You are deleted in one place and rewritten in another.”

Portals, thought Robot.

“Rewritten by who?”

“By yourself, in a way. You created the portal, after all.”

Robot’s unblinking stare demanded clarification.

“These doorways are not simply found, you see,” continued Napier, “they are made. When you find one, it is where you find it because you are there, and because you put it there. And you put it there by being there yourself. You don’t do it all by yourself, of course. There are people who can simply create portals at will… but such people are extremely rare. In the vast majority of cases the portal is made unconsciously, so where it takes you, and the way in which it rewrites you, is out of your conscious control.”

In spite of herself, Robot leaned forward. She felt her heart pounding, her blood racing. It was the first time she had ever felt any real hope of understanding what had happened to her on The Night Before Bonfire Night. She could not keep the thirst for answers out of her voice.

“What are portals?” she asked in something like a whisper.

“Portals,” replied Napier, seeming to warm to his theme, and to her enthusiasm, “are places where an accumulation of meaning, of significance, has become so concentrated, so dense, that reality itself is no longer able to support its weight, and has given way beneath it. Meaning itself has piled up to the point where it becomes so heavy it punches a hole in the world. It’s like placing a coin on the surface of a bowl of cold custard. The custard will support the coin. But if you put another coin on top of the first one, and then another… eventually the surface tension will break. The skin of the custard will tear. The coins will fall into the bowl. That’s a portal. Except that, unlike the coins sinking into the custard, the ball of meaning burrows a tunnel as it falls.”

He was one of those men who took delight in explaining things, especially to women.  Robot knew she was displaying her emotions, and that he was enjoying them.  But for once she allowed herself not to care.

“In most cases,” continued Napier, “portals are created by accidental but perfect alignments between people, places, times, dates, names, thoughts... It’s easier than it sounds. All it takes is a few coincidences, really. A coincidence on top of a convergence on top of a conjunction… and then maybe a confluence too, for good measure. And there you are. In such an incalculably vast web of meanings and symbols and memories as the universe, such things happen more often than you’d think. The right person, with the right history, doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time, thinking about the right things… and a connection will be made to somewhere else. A portal will be opened from where that person stands, leading to that other place. The route of the portal, its destination, will be determined by the circumstances. The route of the portal is the channel cut by the flow. And the meaning flows, like water, to its natural resting point… if you’ll allow me to switch fluid metaphors. Where your portal takes you is also up to you, though you don’t know it or mean it, or have any control over it.”

“But you can control portals?” she asked. “You can open them as you please?”

“That is not quite true,” said Napier, a little grudgingly.  “It is not exactly that we can deliberately open or control portals… not portals between worlds, anyway. Portals from one part of this world to another part? Yes. They’re relatively easy, when one has command of the right techniques and the right amount of power. Those we can create, more or less at will. But when it comes to travel between worlds? It’s more that we can connect with portals already in existence, already opened by others. Those we can find and navigate. For the most part we can connect with any portal, provided we can find it. And we can usually find it if we know the circumstances of its creation.”

Robot sat back.

“So, if I tell you what happened to me,” said Robot, “you’ll be able to find my… my portal?”

“Almost certainly.”

“And…” she paused, more afraid that she had been at any moment up to now. But the moment had finally come and the question had to be asked. “And can I take someone with me?”

“Yes.”

Was it as simple as that?

She became aware that he was waiting for her to speak again.

“And if I decide to buy what you’re selling… what do I actually get? And what will it cost me?”

“Let me answer your admirable directness with my own,” he said. “You get a lift. We get your life.”

4.

Robot didn’t have to think about it for long. Instead of going upstairs to the staff area, she walked out the back of the warehouse, hearing the chime of Mr Underwood’s lift departing as she strode into the chilly sunlight.  She walked through the loading bay, through the staff car park, and out into the town.  She withdrew some money from the cashpoint machine.  She caught a bus to the train station.  She got on a train.  On the train she texted “I’m OK, don’t worry, I’ll be back,” to Mrs Pleasance, not knowing if it was true.  

As she watched the fields and streams and woods slowly drown out the buildings, she remembered the first time she had come this way. The year had been somewhere in that fuzzy intersection between late spring and early summer, just as it was now somewhere in that dark zone between Halloween and Bonfire Night.  Now, the fields were dead and sodden.  Then, they had been saturated in unreal colours. Great slabs of golden brown, dusted with blue heather. Huge squares of rapeseed, so bright yellow they looked like chunks of insanity. Wild grass banks either side of every road, all smothered with red poppies. She’d been eleven, on her first trip out of London, on her way to the home of the Knotts. The size and emptiness and brightness of it all had frightened her. She imagined being alone in it, lost, wandering for hours, eventually dying in the heat, sent to sleep by the poppies like Dorothy in Oz, and suffocating amid the stalks of the crops that dwarfed her. The Little Girl Who Was Nearly Robot couldn’t have been more scared if you had threatened to drop her off in the middle of the desert.

She remembered how the case worker in the car with her had tried to engage her enthusiasm by pointing to the lambs and pigs they passed in some of the fields, knowing that the little girl in the back of the car had probably never seen such animals alive before. Robot remembered stopping herself asking when the animals would be killed. She remembered seeing roadkill. More animals she’d never seen in the flesh before, but shattered, blown open and fat with flies. She remembered praying she wouldn’t see the body of a hedgehog.

And then she remembered the journey back the same way in the opposite direction, after The Night Before Bonfire Night, herself a statue being carted away.

She got off the train and took another bus, back to the village.  From the village’s one bus stop, she walked to the Knott house, past houses decked in bedraggled Halloween decorations.  The lights were on behind curtains.  She saw nobody, and was glad.  She’d be recognised here, despite the passage of years and the absence of the crutches she no longer used.  The Knott house was at the bottom of the village, the biggest house, on its own in the fields.  She knew the way.

5.

“Thank you for coming,” said Lackland.  “I realise it can’t be easy for you to travel.”

Lackland waited silently and patiently as Robot accomplished the slow, laborious task of accepting his invitation to sit down. Even without crutches, even after years of work, small things - like sitting in an unfamiliar chair - could still be difficult.  Lackland watched her from his prone position, from behind his strangely wide and curved dark glasses.  She didn’t mind.  She was used to being watched.  She did not make much sense to people, and they stared at her, waiting for her to click into place somewhere.  Sometimes she did it herself, in the bathroom mirror, in shop windows as she lugged herself past them.  She was feminine for a boy; masculine for a girl.  Dark for a pale person; pale for someone dark.  Older than her years; younger than her age.  And that was without the legacy of The Morning She Was Late For School.  Because of that day, her back was crooked, her shoulders hunched and lopsided.  Her legs were short, misshapen, and stiff.  Her left leg was shorter than her right.  She wore a built-up shoe on her left foot, but it only achieved so much.  Beneath the braces she wore, her legs were scarred and jagged.  Even now, when she moved it was with the swaying, jerking rhythm that had been noticed at school after school, and which had always resulted in the same nickname, the nickname she had eventually adopted, claimed, and turned into the basis for a new and stronger version of herself.

Robot felt a strange sense of reversal when Lackland apologised for his appearance.

“In recent years I have taken care not to show myself to people more than can be helped,” he said, “but my condition makes it necessary for me to have constant medical care...”

“What is your condition?” asked Robot, herself too steeped in years of doctors and operations and examinations to be delicate about such matters.

“I’m old,” said Lackland simply.  “I’m very, very old.”

Robot looked at him, at the dim shape in the darkness.

“That’s not all though,” said Robot, “is it?”

“Take a closer look and tell me what you think,” said Lackland, sounding like a teacher setting a test for a pupil.  His strangely large, trembling hand - wrapped in a white cotton glove - reached over to a remote control covered in buttons and pressed one, causing the strip light on the ceiling to flicker into life.

Robot showed no emotion.  Robot never showed emotion if she could help it.  She considered her emotions her own business and nobody else’s.  But as she looked at Lackland, she had to concentrate on her eyes to stop them filling with tears.

His age was frightening.  His skin was pale and thin, like tracing paper wrapped around meat from a butcher’s shop.  It was withered and dry, covered with a network of lines, and dotted with liver spots.  It was baggy, sagging into folds, like the skin of someone who had lost a great amount of weight very quickly, though Lackland was still huge and round - it was structural to his body.  But the worst was the grid of raised, red, hardened circular scars.  They looked like relics of torture, as if a hot and thick needle had once been jabbed deeply into his flesh again and again, methodically.  They covered almost every part of his body not hidden by the huge hospital smock he wore.  The lower parts of his wasted arms were largely free of them, but she could see them dotting his shoulders and his short, wide neck.  She guessed they went all down his oddly bowed and rounded back.  They covered the skin around his face, reaching up under his obvious wig.  The face itself was as false as the hair.  His dark glasses had a fake nose and mouth attached to the front, and fake ears attached to the sides.  Robot thought of joke spectacles you bought in toy shops, though this mask had been created to be as realistic as possible.  She might have laughed, if she was the sort of person who laughed in public.  But Lackland’s false face also reminded her of old photos of young veterans of old wars; men who had been given crude prostheses - complete with doll’s eyes and fake noses and painted mouths - to hide the places where their faces had once been.  This seemed an appropriate thought because, under the mask, the strangely protuberant front of Lackland’s face was scarred.  It looked like a carved-up roast that had been left out to dry.  There had once been a lot more face, and it had been cut away.  

She felt a wave of sympathy for him, and it wasn’t just because she had recognised him for what he was.

“Turn the light off,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, obeying, “not a pretty sight, is it?”

“I don’t mean that,” said Robot.  She had seen how much the light bothered him.  And she knew why.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she asked.  

“Yes,” he said. “I am… or was… one of the Erinac.”

The last word came out wrapped in a sigh.  Robot sensed both the word and the sigh had been held in for a very long time.  And, though she did not show it, somewhere inside herself, she too let something go.

“...though,” he continued, “I have been here so long, the Erinweal sometimes seems like a dream.”

“You’re not…” she began.  “I mean, it’s not… you… is it?”

“We have never met before,” said Lackland, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Okay,” said Robot, sitting back.  

“I’m sorry if I disappointed you,” he said.

“I’m not disappointed,” she said.  It was true.  As much as she would’ve liked to see Deedwill again, she was glad that the figure in the bed was not him.

They sat in silence for a while, Lackland seemingly respectful of her need to pause.

“How did you get here?” she asked at last.

“The same way you once travelled to my world,” he said, “though by a different route.”

“Did you get stuck here?  Is that it?”

“Yes,” said Lackland sadly, “my way home was... closed to me.”

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“I’ve been in this house only a few days,” said Lackland.  “I bought it and had myself moved here, along with my staff, after I learned about you.  I know it was presumptuous of me, but I decided to act as if I could assume your help.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” said Robot.

“I know,” said Lackland.  He seemed to gather himself to speak the words.  “I’ve been in this world of yours for more than one hundred and fifty years.  I came here as a child.”

Robot carefully controlled her face so she did show any of the amazement she felt.

“How have you lived so long?” she asked, “Is that kind of lifespan normal for your people?”

“Not at all,” said Lackland.  “I suspect my longevity is a side-effect of my translation into your world.  Mr Napier told me he explained to you about translation.”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you that the effects of translation are not always immediately apparent?  That sometimes it can continue after the moment of transference from one world to another?”

“You must have left the Erinweal long before I went there,” said Robot, not wishing to discuss Napier.  She knew he had left many things unsaid.

“I suppose I must,” said Lackland.  “In any case, I found myself here, a long time ago.”

“Is that why you…?” she tailed off.

“...tried to change myself?  Yes.  At first I made a life for myself by trading on my strange appearance… strange to your people, that is.  Have you, by any chance, heard of Prickles the Hedgehog Boy?  Or Richard, King of the Hedgehogs?  I understand they are remembered, in some circles.”

Robot stared at him.

She had.

“They were famous…” she tailed off again.

“...freaks?” supplied Lackland.  “Yes, I was.  A famous freak.  It was the only way someone like me could make a living then.”

“You were both of them?  Prickles and King Richard?”

“I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,” said Lackland quietly, and somehow Robot could tell that he had closed his eyes behind his dark glasses, “cheated of feature by dissembling nature… deformed, unfinished... sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and so lame and unfashioned that dogs bark at me as I halt past them…”

He seemed to come back to himself.

“I couldn’t be the hedgehog boy after a while…” he paused, “...the abandoned and disavowed son of an aristocratic family, heir to a fortune and a title, but the victim of a vengeful gypsy’s curse…” he pronounced in the tones of a fairground barker, “...so they made me a king instead.  They dressed me in robes and a crown.  I’ll always remember the speeches I learned… though I’m sure I got that one all wrong,” he added with a disarming chuckle.

“You did okay,” said Robot, who knew that speech.

“I did,” said Lackland.  “At first, the carnival life was hard.  Hard work.  Not very dignified.  Not very well remunerated.  And, while I made good friends among my fellow performers, the men we worked for were often unkind to us… especially to us freaks… and especially to me, the strangest of them all.  But, as you say, I became famous.  I performed on proper stages, if provincial ones.  My name… my assumed name, that is... drew crowds.  Even my likeness became saleable.  I like to think it wasn’t just the sight of… of someone like me reciting Shakespeare.  I like to think I was good at it.”

“Irving saw you once,” said Robot.  “He told Bram Stoker he thought you were excellent.”

Lackland seemed to be studying her through the resumed darkness.

“You really do know about me,” he said, almost wonderingly.

“There was a time,” said Robot, “when I knew everything there was to know about… about hedgehogs.  Including all the lore.”

“Why?” asked Lackland.

“I don’t know,” said Robot.  “I find them… you… beautiful.  I have done ever since I was little.”  

“Well, thank you,” said Lackland, “But it’s been a long time since I was beautiful, if I ever was.”

“Why did you do it?” asked Robot.

She could imagine it all too clearly.  She imagined him pulling out all his quills by the root, hundreds of them, one by one.  She imagined him carving off his own long nose, paring it down as much as he could.  She couldn’t imagine the pain, though she was not unacquainted with pain.

“I didn’t want to be the king anymore,” said Lackland, his voice flat.  “I wanted to be a subject.  An ordinary man.  I wanted to be like everyone else… or as much like everyone else as I could be.”

Robot almost protested angrily, but she stopped herself.  Who was she to judge him?  And then she thought of all the work she had done to make her walk as ‘normal’ as possible, to dispense with her crutches.  She thought of the lift in her left shoe.

“It didn’t work terribly well,” said Lackland, “but it worked well enough.  If I stayed in the shadows, and dressed like one of you, and kept my interactions brief, I could fool people.  I learned.  I wonder if Irving would’ve praised my performance as a human if he’d ever seen me.  Anyway, eventually my performance became my self.”

Robot knew about that too.

She looked at him.  Yes, it might fool someone who only saw him in passing, at a distance, or in darkness.  Another person - someone who, unlike her, had never seen anything like Lackland before - might take him for a human.  An unfortunate human, yes, but a human.  It might be what they assumed, if only for want of any other category in which to place him.  Again, she felt a surge of kinship with the creature in the bed.

“I achieved a certain amount of success,” said Lackland.  “Not by myself, I should stress.  I had help.  I had a mentor and benefactor.  A great friend.  Long dead.  If I had met her before, I would not have mutilated myself in order to…” he stopped himself.  “Anyway,” he continued, “I achieved a great deal.  I achieved wealth.  And wealth is a great insulator, and a great way to induce others to overlook one’s eccentricities or differences from the norm.  An ugly man with money is, effectively, no longer ugly - because he can buy everything beauty brings.  But, of course, there are some things money can’t buy.”

“A deal with Hargreaves & Napier, for instance,” said Robot.

6.

Robot had ignored Napier’s deliberate provocation.  She felt he wanted her to be shocked by his words.  She felt he enjoyed the idea of tempting people into faustian bargains.

“A lift?” she asked, her voice as neutral as before.

“A literal one,” he said. “Like the one which brought you here. But this one will connect with your portal, the tunnel you made out of this reality and into another. It will carry you along that path.”

“And you get my life?”

“That’s right.”

“Which means…?”

“When you leave your own world,” said Napier, “you sacrifice your future in it. You abandon the life you would have led. All the possibility, all the destiny, all the freedom. Every chance, every wish, every misfortune. Every success, every failure, every feeling. Every hope, every regret. Every meeting and every parting. All the money you would’ve made, or lost. Every scar you would’ve acquired. Every bone you would’ve broken. Every child and grandchild you would’ve had. The entire line of your descendants. Or the rupture of heritage that would’ve happened when you died childless. Every mourner at your funeral. Or the melancholy of a death without any mourners. The future you walk away from does not just disappear when you walk away from it. It stays here as potential. As energy. A life, a future, contains a colossal amount of such energy. In return for providing you with the means to make the journey, you must pay us that energy. It is, by that point, useless to you. You will have left it behind. It is your waste. With your agreement, we will harvest it.”

“What do you want it for?” she asked him.

“That is our business,” said Napier.

Robot did not miss the double meaning.

“I thought you were set up to help people,” said Robot.

“We do help people. There is no contradiction. By growing, we make ourselves more able to help more people,” said Mr Napier, his voice thick with annoyance and condescension.  With nowhere comfortable to look, Robot stared up at Lady Hargreaves again.

“It may help,” said Napier, catching the direction of her gaze, “if I remind you that we are bound by our founding charter.  Lady Hargreaves was careful to build free will into our system. We may not do anything that contravenes our clients’ free will. We cannot proceed without their agreement.”

Robot wondered how many children had sat where she was sitting now, and how many of them had asked as many questions as she had. She got the sense Napier was not used to being challenged or questioned like this.  Probably he was used to dealing with kids younger than her.

“Mr Underwood,” said Mr Napier, “can you affirm that every word I have told this young lady is true? That the content and meaning of the contract you will type and she will sign will be exactly as I have outlined them? No hidden clauses, no small print. No tricks. Can you give her your word of honour on that?”

Robot had almost forgotten that Underwood was in the room.  She looked around at him.  He dithered for a moment, seeming pained. Then, reluctantly, but with the urgency of compliance, he typed three letters. He came close to her and handed her the paper.

“Run,” it said.

Robot looked down at her braced legs and then back up at Underwood.  She allowed irony into her eyes.  She said nothing.  She handed the sheet of paper back to Underwood, careful to keep the words hidden from Mr Napier.

“They got your life, didn’t they?” she asked him in a murmur as she followed him back to the lift after turning down Napier’s offer.

Napier had been extremely put out and disappointed by her refusal.  He had tried to hide it but she had seen it clearly.

“If you change your mind,” he had said, “you may summon one of our lifts at any time.  Just press the button.”

“What button?”

“Any button, pressed with the right intent, will summon one of our lifts.  If there isn’t a button to hand, simply draw one and press that.”

Mr Underwood turned to her. He looked around. They were alone in the corridor but even so, he seemed paralysed by indecision.  

“You tried to help me,” she said.  “Please talk to me.”

Underwood looked down at her.  She found herself instinctively staring into the twin spools of ink ribbon in the typewriter, as if they were his eyes.  He looked around again.  He raised his hands, crossed his forearms, turned his fingers inwards, and typed.

“The deal was made. They fulfilled their part of it. I have no complaints.”

She looked up at him and he waggled his hand, anxious to have the paper back, anxious to feed it into his shredder.

“So why did you tell me to run?” she asked.

But Mr Underwood snatched the paper back, destroyed it, and continued down the corridor.  He was done talking.

7.

Robot stopped herself snarling out the word that popped into her mind at the thought of Napier.

“Hargreaves & Napier could not help me even if I still had a future to trade them,” said Lackland.  “They never could have helped me.  I told you, my way home was closed to me.  Which is why I need you.”

“I haven’t agreed to help you yet,” said Robot.  She was not unsympathetic, but she was cautious.

“And I haven’t made my offer yet,” said Lackland.

“There’s only one thing I want,” she said.

“I told you,” said Lackland, “money is not one of my problems.  If you can help me get home, I will pay to have your mother moved to a private hospice where there will never be any talk of withdrawal of nutrition.”

Robot sat back again.  She breathed out slowly.  She looked up and studied the white marbling on the ceiling for a moment or two.

“What do I have to do?” she asked, looking at Lackland again.  “Specifically.”

“I believe,” said Lackland, “that if you are here, in three days, at about this time, and you do, here and now, what you once did here when you were younger, you will reopen the hole you punctured in the world, the path between this world and the world you visited that night… the world I come from.  I believe that you will be able to take me back to my home.  I believe you are still young enough, still… if you’ll pardon me… still sufficiently disconnected from this world.”

“I’ll pardon you,” said Robot, drily.

“I believe,” he continued, excited, “that the same concentration of meaning that created your portal in the first place, centred around you, will reopen it.”

“And then what?  What happens to me?”

But Lackland had excited himself into a coughing fit.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

He held up one of his huge, white-gloved hands.  

“Once I am through,” he said hoarsely, after regaining control of his body, “you may do as you please.  Stay there, come back, whatever.  It won’t matter to me.  I will be home.  I can die there, at peace.  At last.  Translation back through the portal may even extend my life.  Or end it immediately.  It may heal me a little… as you know translation can do.  Or it may remove whatever effect has given me extended life.  I’m not sure.  Either way, I will be where I want to be.  I will be satisfied with that.  I began to think I would never get back.  That I’d never find you… I mean, someone like you, in time.”

Robot looked deep within herself.

“When I first started looking for clues to how to get back,” she said, “I realised I might be able to do it by recreating the circumstances.  I looked for bonfires.  I looked for ways into them.  There never were any.  I thought I needed to be here for it to work.  But I couldn’t come back here.  I just couldn’t.  Not with the Knotts here.”

“Well, they’re not here anymore,” said Lackland quietly.  

For the first time, Robot wondered about them.  

“Where are they?” she asked.  They had once taken her in, for all their faults.  And she had not exactly repaid them.

“I have no idea,” said Lackland.  “They sold up and left before I even inquired about this house.  I bought it from a company, not a family.  It has been deserted for some time.  Apparently the Knotts stopped having bonfires in that field anyway.  This is the first time there’s been a bonfire built in that field since… well almost since you were last here.  When I bought the house, I bought the field too.  I had my people build the bonfire.  Just the way you described it to Napier.  I’m sure the villagers think I’m mad.  Building a bonfire and then enclosing it in a protective tent.  But then, it will never be lit, will it?  That isn’t what it’s for.”

“Won’t that change its meaning?” she asked.

“I don’t believe so,” said Lackland.  “Symbols have meaning beyond our intentions for their individual iterations.”

Robot remembered being in the Erinweal, frantic at how much time had passed - though the Erinac had no concept of time.  She remembered being terrified that the bonfire had already been lit, closing off her way back home, back to Mum.

“If the bonfire is going to be left where it is,” she said, “that means that I can come and go as I please.  Yes?”

“As can anyone who comes with you,” said Lackland.

“So I can bring Mum through too,” said Robot.

“If that’s what you want,” said Lackland carefully, as if his mouth was full of broken glass and he was trying to speak without cutting himself.

Robot looked at him.  

“What do you mean?” she asked.  She asked it more sharply than she’d meant to.

“Well, forgive me,” said Lackland, “but you turned down Hargreaves & Napier’s proposal.  They would have given your mother passage along with you.  Napier told me.  I realise I have intruded on your private business, but I needed to understand you.  Napier told me that he would have accepted your future as payment for your mother’s passage as well as your own.  The energy would have been just as useful to them.  The lift they would have given you could simply have made a stop by your mother’s bed on its way to the Erinweal.  He told me he told you all this.”

“He did,” she said.

“You went looking for Hargreaves & Napier… for something like them anyway… for something like the chance they offered… presumably in the hope of healing your mother’s condition… and then, upon finding them, you refused their deal.  Are you sure you really want your mother awake again?  Or do you prefer her where she is?  Not dead, but sleeping?”

For the first time, Robot sensed cruelty in Lackland… or maybe just a harshness born of desperation.  

“What’s your point?” she asked flatly.

“My point… and if I have given offence I apologise, but I’m far too old, and in far too much of a rush, to dance around matters like this… is that I offer you exactly what I think you want.  Your mother alive.  Saved.  But still sleeping.  And yourself, in several senses at once, set free.”

Robot said nothing.  She was thinking of a proverb she’d heard once.  Beware an old man in a hurry.

“Believe me,” said Lackland, “I understand the desire to escape.”

He suddenly seemed very tired.  He had been sitting forward slightly as they talked.  Now he slumped as far back into the mountain of pillows behind him as his domed back would permit.  He exhaled.

“Do you need me to get someone for you?” asked Robot.

He waved a hand as if to say ‘it’s taken care of’.  He must’ve pressed one of his buttons, because nurses melted back into the room and started fussing around him again, reading monitors, checking dials and drips and levels.

“We can talk more tomorrow, if you want,” said Lackland through the melee.  His voice was suddenly even more cracked and sharp and powdery than before.  “In the meantime, please feel free to stay here.  Someone will show you to a guest bedroom.”

Robot didn’t have anywhere else to go, or anything else to do.  She had very effectively quit the weekend job Mrs Pleasance had arranged for her, and which she had meekly accepted from lack of interest either way, by walking out in the middle of the day.  She knew nobody in the village, except maybe by sight.  Commuting back and forth between the Knott house and home was not an option, if only because of the cost.  But she didn’t want Lackland to assume her agreement to his proposal, though she had already decided to accept it.

He seemed to sense her reservation because he continued: “We have a few days in which to talk more.  You can think about things before you make your decision.  I’m just saying I’d be glad if you did so as my guest.”

Robot nodded and allowed herself to be ushered out by one of the nurses.  Robot wondered what these people, Lackland’s employees, made of him, or of her, or of sudden moves to houses in the middle of nowhere, or of strange instructions to build bonfires in fields and then enclose them in protective tents.  But the nurse’s sympathetic, professional glaze gave nothing away.  Robot knew faces like that very well.

In the bedroom to which she was shown by another equally uninformative member of Lackland’s staff - she thought it was the one that had once belonged to The Boy Who Played Computer Games, though it was so changed that it was hard to be sure - she lay on the bed and texted Mrs Pleasance again, and stared at the ceiling until she fell asleep.

That night, back in the place she would always think of as the Knott house no matter who owned it, for the first time in nearly five years, she had her first clockmare in just as long.

8.

The clockmares started after she arrived at the Knott house.

Let’s peep into a typical example.

We are in Robot’s bedroom in the home of her new foster family, the Knotts.  She has been there for weeks, but there is very little trace of her in the room. Mr Knott had the room decorated in his best guess at what a little girl would like. Everything is terribly well intentioned, and terribly inappropriate. Robot - she is Robot by now - is eleven years old. She has done nothing to put any stamp of herself on the room. That is possibly the greatest sign that she is its occupant. She sleeps. In sleep she is even more grave than in waking.

Robot does not know that she is asleep. She thinks she is in her new school. It is the same local private school that her new foster brother attends. She knows his name, but to her he is The Boy Who Plays Computer Games.  At first he was friendly.  He tried to tell her about his heart condition, his pacemaker.  He tried to make her touch the scar on his chest, to feel the little card under the skin.  She refused.  And she kept refusing him, refusing everything he wanted her to do and think and feel.  So he gave up on her and went back to his computer games, but not before giving her a nickname.

She is just old enough to start at the school. He has been there for more than a year.  In reality, they are in different classes.  In her dream, they are in a class together.

In her dream, she in a Science class. The teacher is talking about a man called Paley. Paley thought that we can deduce that animals are designed by God because we can see his hand in their construction. He invented a story to illustrate his idea. If we are walking and we discover a watch on the ground, we can see that it is a designed thing, a made thing. We can see this because of its complexity.

In her dream, Robot looks down at her wrist to look at her own watch. It is her Mum’s watch. The nurse’s watch. In the logic of the dream, this watch - which was designed to be worn upside down, pinned to the front of a nurse’s tunic on the end of a short chain - is on Robot’s wrist.

Robot has the watch - the real watch - somewhere in one of her boxes.  She wore it for a while after The Morning She Was Late For School but then stopped and put it away. She hasn’t lost it yet. That will happen soon. Unlike her and her mother, the watch is entirely undamaged. It still tells the time perfectly, or would do if Robot ever wound it up. But she rarely takes it out and looks at it these days.

In the dream, she wears it on her wrist.

In her dream, her legs and knees are fine, and the word ‘powder’ simply means powder and nothing else. In the dream she even thinks about how nice it is that the word powder only has one meaning.

Watches, says the teacher at the front of the class, are not alive. They don’t grow by themselves.

And hedgehogs can’t climb, thinks Robot. 

But the watch on Robot’s wrist seems to hear the teacher's remark and take exception to it. As she watches it, the watch watches her. It twitches. It sprouts segmented legs from inside its chrome casing. The legs are also of chrome.

It pulls itself free of the strap that binds it to her wrist. It scuttles across the desk, seeming to pause and give Robot one last look on its way. Its gaze is scornful. It seems to ask why she cannot understand what it wants to tell her. Robot has no answer. In her dream she is still as mystified by clocks as she was before The Morning She Was Late For School.  The watch turns away, as if on important business, and throws itself off the edge of the desk.

Robot looks down at the floor, expecting to see the watch lying in pieces, shattered, dead. A suicidal watch, perhaps driven to self-destruction by the frustration of sitting on the wrist of a stupid girl who can’t understand it. Instead, she is surprised to see that her watch has been lost in a swarming mass of living, crawling watches. All the watches in the room have crawled off the wrists of their owners and are now frolicking all over the floor. They are pink and silver and gold and black and clear. They are blue like heather. They are green and red, like banks of grass covered with poppies. They are luminous yellow, like a field of rapeseed. They are cheap and expensive, large and small, digital and mechanical. They crawl and scuttle. They hop like grasshoppers. There are too many to be just from this room. Is she seeing every watch in the school, congregating for some ritual on the floor around her desk?

None of the other kids in the class have noticed. In the dream, The Boy Who Plays Computer Games hasn’t noticed that his own watch has crawled off his wrist.

The teacher talks on, oblivious.  He is talking about Darwin now.  Darwin looked in his garden and saw animals competing for resources.  Only the fittest survived in that competition.

Among the seething mass on the floor, there are watches that can’t be from the school at all. Antique fob watches on long, spindly legs. They seem to be joining onto each other, melding in an instant. It looks like film of bacteria dividing, played in reverse. The fob watches leap at each other and stick together, and then flip open their hinged covers in unison and flap them like beetle’s wings.

The other watches begin to copy this idea, though in different ways. Robot watches them, fascinated and - as yet - unconcerned. When they meet, they snake around and over and under each other. They start forming themselves into long, segmented strings. They shuffle smoothly along, meshing with each other, becoming long, wriggling, multi-legged beasts.

Milisecondpedes, she thinks. Centimepedes.  Centimepieces.  Centickpedes.

They grow longer and longer, and start devouring the smaller watches that haven’t joined themselves to longer strings and melded themselves into larger, stronger wholes. The watches are preying on each other, hunting each other, catching and trapping and transfixing and biting each other, and eating each other. Some of them push the tiniest, cheapest watches into the way of the great snaking predatory congas so that they are gobbled up first, giving the others time to escape.

Still, nobody else in the room notices what is happening. She shouts to them but they don’t hear her.

The large serpentine clock congas grow bigger and bigger, bloated with all their eating. Soon there are only a few of them left, their bodies great segmented chains of watches and alarm clocks and carriage clocks and ormolu clocks and cuckoo clocks, swaying along on rows and rows of mismatched legs. She thinks the last two will turn upon each other until only one survives, and maybe then that last one will eat itself.

But the two surviving monsters seem to have taken the measure of each other and decided that they are evenly matched, because they turn towards her and start looking at her hungrily. They have realised that they are the top of the food chain in this dream, above even the dreamer… and, small though she is, there is plenty of her for the two of them to share.

Transfixed and paralysed, she sits motionless at her desk as the two crawling clockbodied worm-snake-things come for her. One sinks metal teeth into her ankle while the other slowly winds itself up her other leg. In the dream, her legs are healthy, strong. It is only fear that roots them to the ground.  They certainly look like good eating to the winding, squirming, turning, ticking serpents.

She cries out in pain as the teeth of the first creature seem to burrow through her trousers into the flesh of her ankle, and as the other creature encircles and hugs her other leg so tightly as to cut off the blood supply.

Its head has unfolded like mechanical origami, rearranging itself into a great open set of jaws lined with rotating rows of chainsaw teeth. It winds itself higher and higher up her leg until it springs up and propels itself around her middle, squeezing her like a boa constrictor squeezes prey.

She tries shouting again. This time The Boy Who Plays Computer Games seems to hear. He turns to look at her. He smiles. As he smiles she hears a click, like a door unlocking. Suddenly his face looks wrong. It seems to be in the wrong place. Too far forward. It is swinging open, as if on a hinge. And beneath one kind of face there is another, the hands whizzing around like the propellers of a helicopter.

She feels the thing that has her snaking around her back. She feels it duck and dive under her arm, around her chest, over her shoulder, around the back of her head.  And then it is before her, in front of her face, staring at her with its eyes made of spinning cogwheels.  It rears back like a cobra and lunges for her, as if to bite her face off. Instead it plunges into her open, screaming mouth.

This is mild compared to the clockmare she would have five years later, in the bedroom that once belonged to The Boy Who Played Computer games, a few doors down from what used to be her own bedroom, occupied by a dying old creature from another world.

Over time, the evolutionary process in the clockmares continued. The clock creatures became bigger, more complex. And they all ultimately decided they wanted to eat her.

It changed when Mr Knott gave her Isiah.

Mr Knott didn’t ask her what her nightmares were about. He didn’t ask her what caused her to wake him up almost every night with her screams. He didn’t ask her anything. He just waited until she was alone and plonked Isiah down in front of her.

“What’s that?”

“Old friend of the Knott family,” said Mr Knott.  “He belonged to my Dad.  He got him from his dad.  For all I know, he got him from his.  He’s on the old side.  But I thought you’d like him.”

She just looked at him.

“I know,” he said, “eleven is probably too old for teddies.”  

She understood that he understood that eleven was not too old for teddies, but that maybe she was.

“That’s not a teddy,” she said.

“Well no,” said Mr Knott consideringly, “not a teddy bear maybe… But that’s just it.  That’s why I thought you’d like him.”

Robot studied the thing. It was tattered and threadbare. It was grey and filmy with dust, though Mr Knott had clearly tried to brush it clean.  It had articulated legs and arms and hands, and a head that turned from side to side. Stylised and anthropomorphised, it nevertheless looked somewhat like the creature it represented. It had something of the shape and carriage of an actual hedgehog, despite standing on two legs and wearing clothes.

Robot reached out and picked it up. She studied its ugly, sad, lopsided face.

“His name’s Isiah,” Mr Knott said.

“I can see why,” said Robot.

Mr Knott seemed pleased.

“What should I do with him?” asked Robot.

Mr Knott stared at her, stricken by her question. She almost prayed not to see pity there.

“Just keep him by your bed tonight,” he said, recovering himself. “I can’t promise anything. But just see what happens.” He looked her up and down. “I’m always surprised by the power of small things,” he said.

She didn’t smile. But she did that thing with her eyes that she sometimes did instead of smiling.

It wasn’t that Isiah was in her dream, combating the clockwork, fighting it off, defending her from it. Nothing like that. It was almost nothing at all. There were no dreams. Or rather, there were dreams about dreamlessness. Dreams where she walked through blankness, through emptiness. It was good. She wasn’t alone in the emptiness. The clockwork seethed and coiled and watched, unseen, from the dark corners in the empty corridors she walked through. But it never emerged. Never approached. And she knew at every stage that it wouldn’t, couldn’t. So she just walked. As before, no crutches. No stiff legs. No pain in her knees or pelvis or spine. No jerking, no rolling, no rocking. Just walking. Smooth, easy, untroubled.  But now she understood that this wasn’t the reality of her body. This was a dream in which things were different, for a while. And somehow she knew that Isiah was why all of this was happening, why it was different. He wasn’t there in the dream. But she sensed him outside the dream. Present. Watching over her. And she knew the clockwork could sense him too. And, knowing her to be accompanied, watched over, it didn’t dare attack.

She looked at the toy for a long time when she woke up.  He’d helped, somehow. Even at eleven, Robot was sensible enough to realise she was thinking in metaphors about something that was going on within herself, some chain reaction of feelings. But she was also sensible enough to know that this chain reaction had been triggered by the introduction and rearrangement of symbols in her life. So the symbols mattered. So she would use them. So she kept Isiah. From then on, she took him everywhere.

She took him to school, stuffed into her rucksack. She didn’t take him out but she made no attempt to hide that he was there. Most of the kids were fine about it, in the oddly tactful way they seemed to treat her, leaving a zone around her, a zone of politeness as much as space. There were taunts, but they were strangely perfunctory. Most of the kids adopted a version of the nickname devised by The Boy Who Played Computer Games.  He had tried to popularise it, and thus himself.  But people didn’t like him or his venom.  The kids at school used the nickname without malice, and so she took it, adopted it, forced herself into it, recognising its aptness.  She soon came to like it, and to call herself by it, and require people to do so too.  The kids decided Robot was okay because of this, and because The Boy Who Played Computer Games had decided she wasn’t.  They decided to be on her side because he’d created the sides hoping they’d flock to his, but they didn’t want to.  Robot felt sorry for him.  But it was him or her.  He saw her pity and regret despite her careful concealment of them, and they only made him more resentful.  But that just meant he spent more time shut in his room.  Robot could tell he was disappointed, and that Mr Knott was disappointed.  But she wasn’t.  

When she and Isiah were alone, at night, in the dark, as she lay in bed just before going to sleep - Isiah propped up on the table beside her, never cuddled as another child might’ve cuddled him, but always near - she would talk to him. She did it with a certain ironic self-mockery, but she did it nonetheless. And Isiah replied.  Robot spoke for him. She leant him her voice. He would reply to her whispers with whispers of his own, via her loaned larynx and lips. He would often strike much the same tone as her. Ironic, mocking, arch. He would wheedlingly ask to be held. He would demand, with performative irritation and self-pity, what was the point of cuddly toy animal if he wasn’t cuddled? And she would reply with good humoured scorn. And they would bicker amicably back and forth until she drifted away. And then he would be watching her in her dream.

But then Isiah disappeared.  She eventually found him, stuffed into the hedgehog box she’d set up in the spinney on the border between the garden and the field.  She’d asked Mr Knott if she could have one and he had agreed with pleasure, happy to get evidence of desire and interest from her.  It wasn’t the same type of hedgehog box as Mum had bought her.  It wasn’t as good, though in every respect it was superior.  Robot had placed bowls of food and water around it, in conscious imitation of the arrangement she and Mum had created in their back garden.  When she found Isiah there, the bowls had been kicked over and cracked.  There was no sign of the hedgehogs who had come to nest in the box.  

Robot told no-one.  She removed Isiah from the box.  She refilled it with straw.  She threw away the broken bowls.  She borrowed more from the kitchen.  Nobody noticed.  The kitchen was too big for anybody to notice anything like that.  It was almost as big as the entire flat she had shared with Mum.  She took Isiah upstairs to the room in which she would one day converse with Mr Lackland, and examined the damage.  One of Isiah’s arms had been torn almost off.  One of his legs had been torn off completely.  She’d found it in the grass.  His eyes were still in place - or as in place as they had ever been.  One of his ears was missing.  She’d been unable to find it.  She reckoned he could manage without an ear, but he needed his arms, and he definitely needed his legs.

Robot examined the twisted metal parts which poked through at the broken joints.  His tarnished brass skeleton.  She didn’t think she would be able to mend it.  But she could sew the arm and the leg back on.  They would be as mended as she could make them alone, which was what she was until he was better.

The Boy Who Played Computer Games stopped by her door as she was conducting the examination.  He opened it without knocking or asking for permission.  He stood there, waiting for something she was careful not to give him.

“That’s mine,” he said.

“Isn’t everything?” she replied, continuing her examination.

“Dad gave that to me,” he said.

“And then he gave it to me,” she said, remembering that Mr Knott has said he’d had to fish the toy out of the loft.

“You threw it away,” she said, guessing the sequence of events.  “Twice now.  Besides, your parents gave you a different toy to play with.  Not the toy’s fault you don’t like it.”

In later years, as she remembered saying these words, she would wonder if she had really said them, or had just turned what an older version of her had wished she’d said into a memory.

The Boy Who Played Computer Games walked away, not troubling to close her door, knowing she would have to clamber up off the floor where she was sitting, grab her crutches, jerk herself all the way over to the door to close it again.  As she did so, she heard his door slam.  Soon, the noises of his computer started up.  

She borrowed needle and thread from Mrs Knott, who looked up from her laptop long enough to tell her where to find what she wanted in the cupboard, and to remind her to be careful.  Robot did the sewing.  But that night, the mended Isiah propped up by her bed, she had a clockmare.  In it, the clockwork formed itself into a giant scorpion and tried to skewer her on its sting.

The next day, she searched the spinney for Isiah’s ear, and found it, and sewed it on.  But that night, again, she had a clockmare.  In this one, the clockwork became a swarm of crabs and spiders and lobsters that surged out of the sea at her.  There were reptilian horrors in the same water. Crocodiles made of clocks. 

Clockodiles. 

In her dreams she was glad she could run again.  She just didn’t want to have to.

Clearly, more drastic measures were called for.  Isiah wasn’t just broken.  He was dead.  Or dying.  He had to be resuscitated.  He had to be kept going.  She thought of herself, broken on an operating table.  She thought of Mum, in a coma, kept alive by artificial concertina-like lungs.  Then later, Mum awake and breathing by herself, but fed and emptied by tubes and pumps.  She even thought of The Boy Who Played Computer Games, sleeping a few doors down the hall, the little card under the skin of his chest, next to his heart.

Isiah had undergone operations before. This was written on his body, beyond the crudely sewn patches where Robot had secured his ear and leg and arm back in their places. There were older patches where he had burst open and been sewn back up. One eye he had lost and been haphazardly given back. He just needed another operation. She would be the surgeon. And, like any surgeon, she needed someone to stand next to her as she performed the operation.

She waited until The Boy Who Played Computer Games started acting guilty and conciliatory, and started trying to curry favour with her again, as he always did.  She asked him to get her a knife, or a sharp pair of scissors.  He dithered, but eventually he agreed.  She made him do all the fetching, all the acquisition of all the tools and materials she needed - except for the materials she already had, like the needle and thread.

She remembers that they did it in the middle of the night, somehow realising that secrecy and silence were required.  She remembers herself standing there, Mr Knott’s huge and heavy carpet scissors, fetched by The Boy Who Played Computer Games from his dad’s dusty and locked workshop, in her small hand. She remembers The Boy Who Played Computer Games handing her the scissors, like a nurse supplying a surgeon with the tool he has requested. Exactly the sort of thing - he the nurse, she the surgeon - that would have made him angry, if he weren’t on his best behaviour, trying to make amends. She remembers cutting Isiah’s chest open. She remembers them standing in the dark together, Isiah prone on her desk, the light from the flexi-lamp pouring down into his opened body. She remembers rooting around inside Isiah’s stuffed interior, making space.

She remembers The Boy Who Played Computer Games asking, as she stitched up the slit she had cut in Isiah’s chest, the operation performed, if she wanted to mend him in other ways. Did she want to fix his eye? It would be easy to pull off and then restitch in the right place.

She remembers thinking about it seriously and then saying no. Isiah needed to be helped, not ‘fixed’, not cured. If he were fixed or cured he would no longer be Isiah. He would no longer be himself.

“I love you,” said The Boy Who Played Computer Games.

“I’m holding scissors,” said Robot.

“I mean it.  You’re not like other girls.”

“What’s wrong with other girls?” asked Robot.

“They don't like me,” he said.

“So I am like them,” said Robot.

That night, there were no clockmares.  The operation had worked.

Five years later, lying on the bed in the room that had once belonged to The Boy Who Played Computer Games, drenched in sweat, listening to the knocking of one of Mr Lackland’s attendants on the door, their requests to know if everything was alright, she wondered about The Boy Who Played Computer Games.  She wondered where he was now; what he was playing now.  Lots of YouTube videos about how feminism is a mental illness and black people have lower IQs, she suspected.  She thought about the computer games she had casually played and quite enjoyed in the years since, including the one about the blue hedgehog that The Boy Who Played Computer Games had thought it was so funny to keep on at her about.  And she thought about Isiah, lost.  And she remembered another time when she woke up in the middle of the night.

9. 

It was the night before Bonfire Night, so late it was early, and Mum woke her up. That wasn’t always good. This time it was good.

“Look,” said Mum, bringing the sleepy-eyed little girl to the window, “there…”

She pointed.

The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot looked, obediently.

She saw the back garden. The same as always. but silvery blue in the moonlight. They lived in the ground floor flat, so the little back garden was theirs to use.

“What is it?” she asked.

Mum pointed again.

“There.”

The girl followed her mother’s finger. She followed it to the wooden slatted fence at the back of the little garden.

For a moment she didn’t see it. Then, as it seemed, a part of the fence moved. The little girl narrowed her eyes and peered.

“What is it?”

“Keep looking,” said Mum, and the little girl could hear the smile in her voice. It was good when Mum’s voice smiled. The little girl kept looking. The moving thing crept slowly, methodically, upwards. The little girl saw little hands and feet sticking out from something that looked like a large undulating hairbrush.

“It’s a hedgehog!” said the little girl.

Next day at school, the teacher didn’t believe her.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, “hedgehogs can’t climb. Don’t tell lies.”

The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot silently and blankly seethed with fury at the injustice.

That same day, in the school library, she found a book about hedgehogs. They do climb, she learned. They do it when they have to.

They shouldn’t have to, thought The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot, not if they don’t want to.

That night, she and Mum - still in a good mood - put out low bowls of water, and little plates of leftover cat food, donated by a cat-owning neighbour. They ignored the whizzes and bangs in the sky.  Mum didn’t approve of Guy Fawkes Night.  When she was on duty on the 5th of November, she saw too many burns.  That weekend, the little girl got Mum to borrow a hacksaw from the cat-owning neighbour, and sat and watched as Mum cut a little archway out of the bottom of one of the fence panels. The little girl wrote ‘HEDGEHOG DOOR’ over the archway, Mum checking her spelling unnecessarily.

The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot started staying up late to watch the back garden.  Mum kept catching her tired in the mornings and guessed what was happening.  She said that the door would have to be blocked up, and the plates of food stopped, if The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot couldn’t be responsible.  So the little girl stopped staying up late to watch.  But, in the mornings, she started to see that some of the food had been eaten… though it might’ve been by anything.  

That Christmas, Mum gave the little girl a hedgehog house. It was a little wooden box with a slanted felted roof and an internal divider. The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot drew hedgehogs on the sides, and wrote ‘HEDGEHOG HALL’ on the side.  Together, they filled it with straw and put it in the garden. It wasn’t long before some hedgehogs moved in. The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot watched, her heart pounding, as Mum carefully removed the roof of the box, revealing the two balls of spines, nestled in the straw, sleeping, breathing.

Those were good days.

It wasn’t always good, like when The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot came home with a report saying that, while she was ahead in many things, she was behind in telling the time. Mum brandished her upside-down nurses watch in the little girl’s face and screamed questions the little girl had no idea how to answer. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. She didn’t know why she couldn’t do it. She didn’t know why she couldn’t understand numbers that went in circles, why 1 came after 12, why 1 wasn’t at the top, why everything had to be broken down into fives and tens and then - inexplicably - twelves; and then halves and quarters and three-quarters. Why did the big hand and little hand move at different speeds? How could ‘twenty past’ be the same thing as ‘forty minutes to’? And why did the world have to obey these strange little circles anyway? No matter how many times Mum demanded to know why she didn’t know, or told her she should know, she just didn’t know. Mum would sit down with her and go through it with her. On good days, Mum was patient, and they laughed. And The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot would start to get it. Then time would go by and she would forget. Her old doubts and questions would seep back. The next time Mum asked her the time, she wouldn’t know. And Mum would shout again.

It had been like that sometimes since Dad went to Iraq and didn’t come back. He didn’t die. “That would’ve been better,” Mum sometimes said, because “at least we’d know.” He just disappeared. Mum had cried and cried for days. Then she lay in bed for days. The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot had to phone the hospital and talk to the charge nurse to explain what had happened. The charge nurse asked if she was all right. She lied and said her Nan was there with her, somehow knowing that it would be bad for Mum if people knew what was really happening. She didn’t actually have any nans. Not any nans who were around anyway. Mum’s Mum was dead. And Dad’s Mum didn’t want to know her after Dad disappeared in the desert. She didn’t approve of mixed marriages… which The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot didn’t understand. Did she want her son to marry another man? (Mum had laughed and told her that definitely wasn’t it.) And Mum didn’t make friends with other people on the estate. Not friends she kept anyway. She’d even fallen out with the cat-owning neighbour by now.  So nobody was there. So The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot had to make her own food. She made food for Mum too, but Mum ignored it - except for one time when she threw it across the room. The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot cleaned up the plate and cut herself on the broken crockery. The next day, when she got up, Mum saw the cut on her finger, and started crying again. She grabbed The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot, stroking her hair, crying, apologising. Her apologies, the things she said about herself, were worse than anything else. The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot didn’t want to hear them. She didn’t know why, but they made her feel like it was Mum’s fingers that had been cut, and like she had done the cutting.

The day before The Morning She Was Late For School started as a good day. That evening, Mum had sat down with her and gone over the clock again, holding her nurse’s watch in her hand with The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot sat in her lap looking at it. She explained its face and its hands. The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot thought, again, how strange it was that these little things had faces and hands, like people. And, as Mum went over the principles of the clock’s face for the third time, as patient as she had been the first time, her daughter began to see light dawning. The big hand was big because hours were longer than minutes. Bigger meant longer, like blue meant boys. Minutes were inside hours, and so they had to be shorter. In order to be inside something else, a thing had to be smaller. And big things were made of lots of little things stuck together, like people were made of fingers and eyes and hearts. So the minute hand was smaller. Smaller meant shorter, like pink meant girls. The hands moved at different speeds because time was made of bits, not because bits of it moved more quickly or slowly than other bits. Minutes piled up into hours. And, crucially, she realised that it was all made up. The clock was just a picture of something, an idea in people’s heads. It wasn’t actually making time happen. It was just tracking how people felt time go by. That was why clocks had hands and faces like people. Because they were pictures of people experiencing time. Clocks were things people had invented, and made. They didn’t just exist by themselves. They were like what Mum always said about money. They didn’t grow on trees.

Mum was surprised and delighted to find that delving into these somewhat more theoretical matters seemed to help. She looked at her strange, quiet, puzzling little daughter with new appreciation. She began to wonder for the first time if she might not be too slow for the world. Maybe she was too fast.

By The Morning She Was Late For School, however, things had deteriorated. Entrusted with managing her own time that morning, The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot had failed. The insights of the night before had slipped away from her in the course of a night sat in bed, unable to sleep, worried about the morning, scared of failing. The clarity drained away the more she went over it. The old problems reasserted themselves. By the morning, tired from too little sleep, she looked at Mum’s nurse’s watch - lent to her with confidence and expectation the night before - and saw only a little chrome puzzle. It was pretty. But what did it mean? How could it possibly have any connection to what people did out here in the real world? How could it be that you had to obey it?

Mum was furious when she came into The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot’s room and found her unready, staring fixedly at the watch, frowning. She snatched it from her and clipped it to the front of her blue nurse’s uniform. She paced and fumed as the little girl pulled on her uniform.

“No you can’t have a shower or brush your teeth. You haven’t got time. You’ll just have to explain why you smell and why your teeth are dirty. Because you can’t tell the time!”

The little girl asked about breakfast but there was no time for that either. “You’ll know when it’s lunch time because a bell will go. Is that what we need around here? A bell that goes to tell you what to do and when to do it? If I couldn’t tell the time, and I was late, I’d lose my job, and who would pay for your clothes and food then? As it is, you’ll be late for school and the teachers will think it’s my fault. They’ll see you’re hungry and dirty and think I’m a bad mother. How will I ever explain to them?”

The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot had no answer to any of these questions. They were yet more impenetrable mysteries piled on top of the mystery of the clock. Once again she saw, in her mind’s eye, those cut fingers. And again they were Mum’s fingers, even though the scars were on the little girl’s.

They raced out of the front door, Mum’s hand clamped so tightly around the little girl’s wrist, and pulling so hard that her fingers would leave bruises - though they’d be lost amid all the other injuries the little girl would have before the end of the day.

Robot later learned that the man in the car was probably going so fast because he was late for work.

Only one of us needed to be on time, she would think, much later.

The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot didn’t remember the accident itself. She was later told that this was quite common. The last thing she remembered - she decided to believe this was a real memory - was Mum smiling at her, saying sorry for being in such a bad mood.  

Then there was the hospital ceiling, and the dry mouth, and the pain, and the clock on the wall. As The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot looked at the clock, she found she understood it. It seemed to have snapped into place. It spoke to her plainly for the first time. Instead of a knot of meaningless complexity, she suddenly saw something simple, plain. There was Before and there was After; the hands swept around and turned the one into the other. The spaces left behind by the sweeping hands were empty. Nothing but emptiness. The spaces ahead of the sweeping hands were filled with possibility. And as the hands swept by, they demolished, they wrecked, they decapitated like the blade of a mower passing over the heads of flowers. And this idea chimed with a dim memory. The head of the man in the car, lying in the road, soaked in red and bedded in broken glass.

She screamed.

10.

Robot told Lackland some of this after she had the clockmare.

Robot had opened the door for the attendant who had been knocking on it in response to her scream.  A nurse came along too and said Mr Lackland was concerned about her.

“Did I wake him up?” asked Robot, her forehead resting on the frame of her open door.

“No, no,” said the nurse, her voice low.  “He was already awake.  He doesn’t sleep much.  Rests a lot.  Doesn’t sleep.  He said you’re welcome to come sit and talk with him for a while if you’d like.”

The nurse smiled.  She was wearing an upside down chrome watch pinned to her tunic.

Robot told Lackland about the clockmares and about Isiah.  He listened with a strange attentiveness which seemed to give way to quiet amusement.

“What?” she asked eventually in response to the wide, secretive smile which she could see him trying to suppress behind his false face.  The word turned into a yawn as she said it.

“I’ll tell you another time,” he said, calling an attendant.

She was too tired to be annoyed.

11.

Over the next few days, Robot sat with Lackland for long stretches, which were broken only by his need to receive medical care, or rest.  The rest of the time she wandered the house and grounds, accusing herself of wallowing in nostalgia and defending herself from her own accusation, and failing to win the case either way.  She went to where she had set up the hedgehog box and feeding station, and found it empty.  Of course.  She crossed the spinney and the fence and walked into the field, up to the white tent.  It was not guarded or secured.  But at first she did not look inside.  

She came back to the house and found the paperwork to have Mum admitted to a private hospice, the care to be paid for - in perpetuity - by “Havelock Lackland Esq.”, left on her bed.  He’d already signed it, though she wasn’t foolish enough to imagine that this made anything irrevocable.  Robot’s agreement wasn’t legally required.  Robot was Mum’s only living relative, but she was still a minor, and so Mum’s care had been entrusted to the doctors at the NHS trust that ran the hospice.  They would have to be consulted, as well as the closest living members of her family (none of whom had known Mum well), and Robot’s views would be taken into consideration… but this was still a huge step.  Robot sat next to the sheaf of papers for a long time, her eyes closed, her breathing slowing.

She went to sit with Lackland again.  She didn’t say anything, but he must have known what she had found in her room, and she knew he knew.

He had something on his lap.  A crumbling old scrapbook.  The leather of the binding was cracked and peeling.  Ragged, yellowed papers stuck out from the edges.  Without a word, Lackland handed it to her.

“Relics of my career in showbusiness,” he said.

She leafed through it.  There were playbills, folded posters, cuttings from newspapers, pictures...  Some of the papers were so aged and dry that Robot thought just leafing through them would cause them to crumble to powder.  

The word tolled in her brain, as usual.

Lackland’s history in this world was told in sequence by the rustling scraps and flapping tatters.  Black block letters jostled to announce the sensation; the monster with claws and spines and a snout, but also with speech and manners; the human hedgehog.  Promotional material relayed the story of the ‘gypsy’s curse’.  Snide little reports in magazines for the middle classes repeated it too, but with scorn for the tellers and hearers of the tale as an alibi.  Faded type announced the marvel of the freakish creature, undoubtedly a real prodigy rather than a fraud, genuinely amazing even in the carnival.  The boggling testimonies of gawkers were collected and recounted.  Other testimonies were collected, from people who felt that their medical and scientifical and philanthropical credentials absolved them of any suspicion of morbid curiosity.  These testimonies drooled delight cloaked in sanctimony and sympathy; it almost seemed to drip from the pages of the scrapbook and to puddle on the floor.  Eventually, reviews appeared, marvelling not only at the creature’s power of speech and manners and gentleness, but also his ability to memorize and recite poetry and literature, not only accurately but with sensitivity and skill.  The reviews became more self-consciously nonchalant as the talent and reputation of the performer seemed to grow.  Nonchalance gave way to casual contempt as the performer’s popularity peaked.  Over time, photographs began to appear.  Robot saw Lackland, young, beautiful - to her; frozen in the golden brown amber of the daguerreotype.  She saw him regal in the robes and the crown of a king, gesticulating in passion.  She saw him standing on a stage in a park - Hyde Park she realised - surrounded by people; young and old, rich and poor.

Robot turned one of the last creaking pages and stopped.  The photograph, pasted in place, befuddled her for a moment, as she simultaneously recognised the subject twice over.  It was another photograph of Lackland, this time wearing the country clothes of a Victorian gentleman: tweed jacket and waistcoat with fob, collar and tie, straw hat… but it was also a photograph of Isiah.  Robot stared at the image until it resolved itself into something she could comprehend, aware on some level that she must resemble the people who sometimes stared at her until they got a handle on what they were seeing.  Eventually, the way an optical illusion will suddenly switch from being one thing to being another, she saw it for what it was: a photograph of a toy modelled on Lackland, a toy identical - but for the ravages and losses of age - to the one she had been given, in this room, when she was eleven.

She remembered Mr Knott saying “He belonged to my Dad.  He got him from his dad.  For all I know, he got him from his.”

Robot held the book up to Lackland.  She could tell that he was smiling behind his mask.  He had been waiting for her to reach that page of the scrapbook.

“I realised when you told me,” he said.  

She continued to hold up the book, waiting.

“They made them,” he continued, “when I was at the height of my popularity.  They sold them at theatres where I performed, at my performances.  I didn’t see much of the money, I’m afraid.  But somebody must have done quite well from selling me over and over again, in miniature.  They manufactured quite a number of them.  Apparently they’re quite rare now.  Very valuable…” he tailed off, as if he’d been about to say something and had thought better of it.  “You say that yours was in poor condition?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “he was.  Lots of wear and tear.  We had that in common.”

“So do we,” said Lackland.

Robot put the book back in her lap and stared at the photograph some more.

Suspicions nibbled at her.

“A bit of a coincidence,” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” said Lackland, “at first.  But it only seems like a coincidence because we’re looking at it the wrong way around.”

“You mean,” said Robot slowly, thinking it out as she spoke, “that I’m only here with you now because, years ago, I went to the Erinweal... and I went to the Erinweal because of one of those concentrations of meaning that Napier talked about... and Isiah was part of that.  He was part of what connected me to the Erinweal.”

“Exactly,” said Lackland.  “You went to where I come from because… or at least partly because you were carrying an image of me in your rucksack.”

They regarded each other silently for a while, feeling hopelessly entangled in one another.

12.

She asked him questions, the way she had never had a chance to ask questions of any of her grandparents.  He told her about his days in the travelling circuses, and then the theatres, and then - briefly - the halls of fame of England in the nineteenth century.  It was like listening to a time traveller.  He was expansive and detailed about some things.  Other things seemed to tire or depress him, and he grew cloudy and silent.  He spoke of the places he had seen when touring.  Places eternally wreathed in smoke, great greasy pals of it that seemed to hang in the air over entire cities.  Places where no children came to see him unless he performed on Sunday, because every other day they were crammed into factories.  Places where his audiences - adult and child alike - came smeared black with coal dust, and coughed so loudly during his speeches that he had to entirely alter his performance style to account for it.  He spoke of his long-lost friend and mentor only fragmentarily.  Robot gathered that she was a woman, a benefactor, who had helped him to escape his life in the carnivals and fairs.

“Was it Lady Hargreaves?” asked Robot.

Lackland stopped and studied her.

“You’re very acute,” he said, and she sensed apprehension mixed with his appreciation.

“So your connection with Napier isn’t just…”

“I have no particular connection with Napier,” interrupted Lackland.  “Not with this Napier, anyway.”

“This Napier?”

“Napier is not a person so much as a role, occupied over time by different individuals acquired by the firm.  Similarly, the current Hargreaves is not the original Hargreaves.  Not the one I knew.”

“Acquired?” asked Robot.

“Yes,” said Lackland.  “You were right about the firm, in a way.  When someone enters into an arrangement with Hargreaves & Lackland, the firm acquires that person’s potential future in the form of an alternate version of the person in question.  It works similarly to translation.  The firm puts the potential person they acquire to use.  It absorbs them, and thus grows.  That is the secret of their expansion.  That is how they gradually took over every firm and business in Inkwell Street, and then several other places like it.  It’s how they moved on from Inkwell Street to more opulent and modern surroundings.  You met Mr Underwood?”

Robot nodded.

“Underwood… the Underwood you met... is the alternative possible version of someone like you, but who made a different decision.  He purchased a way back to the world he discovered when he was a child.  You were right to refuse to do the deal he did.  To do so is, effectively, to consign an alternate version of yourself, the version that otherwise would have lived on in this world, to eternal slavery.”

Robot remembered Underwood’s covert warning, and then his subsequent words about having made the deal, about having no complaints, all tapped out on the machine he was somehow becoming.

“You said they absorb people…” she prompted.

“Mr Underwood is only partially absorbed.  He must be useful to the firm as he is.  I don’t know why his absorption should have taken the form it did.  It may be something as whimsical as his surname.  Underwood is the name of a very old manufacturer of typewriters.”

“You mean if his name was Hoover he’d…”

“...currently be being used to vacuum the carpets in Hargreaves & Napier’s Pendulum offices?  Yes, something like that.”

Robot kept her equilibrium despite her horror.  She realised now why being close to the glass of the window had felt like being close to skin, why sitting in the chair had felt like sitting in someone’s lap, why walking on the carpet had felt like walking on bodies.  It was because in each case that was exactly what she was doing.  The firm and everything in it was made of pulped and rendered and recycled human lives.  Even, it seemed, Napier himself.  She felt pity for him to go alongside her loathing.

“I regretted having to deal with Napier,” said Lackland, “but…”

“I understand,” said Robot.  There was nothing Lackland could do about it, any more than there was anything she could do about it.  Lackland had needed to know if anyone ever walked into the offices of Hargreaves & Napier telling the story that she had walked in and told.

“How could your great Lady Hargreaves have anything to do with something like that?” she asked.

“Lady Hargreaves didn’t,” he said, quickly.  “That was not the way the firm operated in her day.”

“But Napier said she laid down the rules by which the firm operates.”

“And so she did.  And those rules, the rules of magic, are binding and cannot be broken.  That is precisely why Napier has brought the firm this far out of the old ways and into your world.  Your world is less regulated than the world of magic… at least, it is at the level of power in your world where Napier chooses to operate.  Napier is adept at finding ways around rules, and the rules of your world are made to be circumvented.  Everything Napier does… everything the firm does now, I should say… is strictly within the letter of the rules laid down by Lady Hargreaves- in the firm’s founding charter.  She could not have foreseen the way in which the letter could be closely followed while the spirit was so egregiously violated.  I’m sure Napier made a song and dance of telling you that he could not make you do anything, that anything you did, any offer or terms you accepted, had to be entirely your choice, made entirely of your own free will.”

“He did,” allowed Robot.

“And he told you the price of accepting the deal?”

“He didn’t go into it in detail,” she said.

“He didn’t have to.  He is not under any obligation to disclose everything that the deal means or entails.  And most people like you don’t ask awkward questions.”

“Who is the current Hargreaves?” asked Robot suddenly.  If the names of the firm’s partners stood for roles that could be filled by different entities, who was Hargreaves now?

“That I do not know,” said Lackland sadly.  “I simply do not know who Hargreaves is now.  All I know is that, whoever they are, they would be a great disappointment to their namesake.”

13.

On the night before the night before Bonfire Night, Robot went out to the tent and slipped inside.

It was lit with arc lamps.  Their beams reflected off the rippling pure white walls.  Being inside the tent was like stepping instantly out of night into day.  Or like standing amid the sails of a wind-buffeted ship.

The bonfire inside was huge, as if Lackland had planned his replica based on her childish recollection of the original.  But she thought she understood.  He had scaled it up.  It towered over her as much, on ratio, as it had when she was eleven.

There was an old door set into the side.  It was different, of course.  An attempt to replicate something from someone else’s story, it was inevitably… off.  But it was sufficiently similar to make her shudder with a feeling that lurked somewhere between excitement and foreboding.

She climbed up the sloping side of the structure.  She perched on a ledge under the base of the door.  She grasped the handle and turned.  She pushed.  The door would not open.  The frame waggled in place as the door levered it up against the piled junk and wood beneath.

Not time yet, she thought.

“We are in the depths of Samhainn,” Lackland had told her, “a region of the year in which the membranes between the worlds become thin, stretched, permeable.  The year is dying, slouching towards death and then rebirth, renewal, regeneration.  The days are shortening, the nights lengthening.  Autumn is giving way to winter.  Life and death, the present and the past, are intermixed.  We are in the interstitial region of Samhainn that, in this country, falls between Halloween itself and Guy Fawkes Night.  Socially-constructed, of course… but then so is Samhainn.  That doesn’t make it unreal.  Both those nights - Halloween and Guy Fawkes, or Bonfire Night - are bound up with great cultural significance.  The night before Bonfire Night was… is… will be… an edge.  A boundary within a boundary within a boundary.  Liminality within liminality within liminality.  There is also the fact that we are in the middle of a place filled with ancient meaning.  There are stone circles and longbarrows, henges and ancient burial grounds, all across this plain.  This is a place of liminality, where ancient peoples celebrated the turning of the seasons, and buried their dead. All this, coupled with the meaning of the night for you… your last chance, as you saw it, to save the creatures inside the bonfire… the creatures you cared about, the creatures that bridged the gap between your former home and this new one, your old life and your new life… and then combined with your connection to me via Isiah… and your own… well, pardon me, but… your own liminality as a person… these are some of the filaments in the concentration of meaning that you unwittingly created around yourself that night… and which you will, I hope, reopen soon.”

My own liminality as a person, she thought.

If Robot’s memories of being The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot, and of The Morning She Was Late For School, were perforated and crumbly like moth-eaten clothes in an attic, held together with stitches and patches so dissonant that they seemed likely to be confabulations, then her memory of The Night Before Bonfire Night, and what she experienced on the other side of the door, was almost… well, she thought, almost powder.  But she remembered the bonfire - the original bonfire - very clearly, the outline of it picked out silver in the moonlight.

She climbed down.  She closed her eyes.  She pictured it, the first bonfire.  She sent herself back in time, to The Night Before Bonfire Night.

14.

It was so late it was early.  The night was cold, the grass wet. The smell of autumn hung in the air. The naked trees rattled bonily in the breeze. Everything around her was underwater blue. Far away, lonely fireworks were erupting in the sky. It was The Night Before Bonfire Night, and some people couldn’t wait. Robot couldn’t wait either.

The moonlight was so bright that Robot didn’t need to use her torch as she traversed the garden, the spinney, the gap in the fence, and the field. It was just as well, because the only torch she’d been able to find in the utility room was a dynamo torch. The light was activated when you squeezed the trigger in its handle. It made a mechanical whining noise, which was less than ideal for midnight stealth. She had crept out of the house in almost pure darkness, not daring to turn on any lights. It was dangerous enough for her without taking extra risks. At eleven, her version of creeping involved not only leg braces but crutches too. With every jerking step forward she heard herself; a cacophony of clanks and clicks and creaks. It was yet another of the things nobody understood. When you can’t walk without help, you can’t walk silently, and when you can’t walk silently, you lose that bit more privacy. Everyone is entitled to sneak. Sometimes you need to. Especially when the world wants to stop you doing the right thing.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t asked. She had broken her still surface to explain and plead, revealing to all how much she cared. The bonfire had been there, under construction, gradually growing, for too long, since before the cold weather started. No barriers had been placed around the base. It had been covered with tarpaulins, but they didn’t stretch all the way to the ground. She had told them this, and explained the implications. There had been expressions of concern, but no action. Frowns followed by indulgent smiles followed by invisible shrugs. The Boy Who Played Computer Games had ignored the whole thing. He had sat in his room, hunched over his games, sulking. She might even have asked him for help, if she hadn’t thought that, in his current mood, he would use it against her. If she’d been older, she might have thought to call some agency or charity or authority. But she was only eleven, looking up at a structure she didn’t understand and which did not care for her concerns.

It loomed over her like a monster or a great ragged pyramid. It had been well constructed. Above its base of crossed bundles of kindling wood, its body was made of junk, contributed by villagers. Planks had been placed around the structure, and it had been reinforced with ropes. The men from the village who had volunteered to build it had taken their job seriously, except in the respect that Robot cared about.

The tarps had come loose in places, and flapped in the wind. In the uncovered areas, the bonfire was wet. But it was so large and dense that the interior must still be dry. With help from petrol, and kindling, and paper pushed inside through the gaps between the square, bound bundles, it would go up easily, even in the pouring rain. Tomorrow night. And all the creatures that were by now undoubtedly inside would go up with it. They would wake to the heat and the smoke and the noise, and never find their way out in time. So much care had been put into the making of the bonfire; none into making it safe for the creatures who might crawl into it, thinking it a haven. Warned, nobody had done anything. They prized their opportunity to gawp at a fire, to gather round it and drink and talk the same old rubbish they always talked wherever they were, and to keep their children quiet for a while with flames and bangs and flashes, far above the innocent lives of the beautiful little beasts who had crawled inside the inviting thing seemingly made for them, wanting nothing but a warm and dry place to sleep, and finding a trap instead. It was a trap, however unintentionally laid. An accidental hotel, designed to become a death chamber. The cruelty of it made Robot cringe and rage all at once. And the waste of it. It didn’t matter how unwitting the cruelty and waste were. In fact, in some ways that made it worse. Such cruelty and such waste, and not even from malice but from laziness and ignorance and disregard.

She looked up at the thing towering over her. It seemed to look back. In that moment it seemed to be made of speeding cars and inexplicable clocks and countries that swallowed fathers. Of angry silences and broken crockery and hands that grasped yours so tight they left marks. Of hospitals and operations and unending waking sleeps. Of racist nans. Of kids who muttered “junkie parents” as they passed you, too quietly for the teachers to hear. Of boys who played computer games, and said they loved you, and tried to kiss you, and then acted like they hated you when you pushed them away, who mocked you and taunted you, who tried to make the kids at school mock you and taunt you too, who stole your possessions and tried to destroy them, who smashed the things you had made, and tried to harm the creatures you cared for. Of time and pain and broken bones. Of insincere encouragement and false consolation.  Of pity as cold as ice.

No, she thought, as if speaking to the monster as it hulked over her and tried to stare her down, gloating about how it would consume the small and solitary and spiky creatures who just wanted a home, invite them in and then burn them in its belly. You don’t get them. Maybe next time. When I’m not here. But not now.

She felt her smallness. Her weakness. They seemed to settle on her in a way they never had before. Faced with the task she had chosen to undertake, she was losing none of her determination, but it was crunching up against the hugeness of the task itself.

A loose section of tarp flapped in the suddenly icy wind.

She adjusted the rucksack on her back. Isiah was inside, reclaimed and surgically repaired, a line of stitches running up his front. He sat alongside the other tools she had thought she might need. She couldn’t see him, but she imagined his steady, crooked gaze.

Should she try to cut the ropes binding the thing together? She had cutting tools in her rucksack. Or should she pull things out from under the ropes, slowly disassembling the bonfire from the top down? That would take a long time, working by herself. Or should she start with the bottom, undermining the structure until it fell? But if it fell, wouldn’t it crush the very creatures she wanted to save?  Wouldn’t it crush her?

Again, she felt the impossibility of the thing pressing down on her, and the necessity of it pressing her from the other direction. It was as if she were being squeezed between the gravitational fields of the Earth and the Moon.

The wind whipped up again, even colder this time, and the loose section of tarp flapped even more violently. There seemed to be some large piece of wooden furniture behind it. In the second or two when the tarp had flapped up, the moonlight had revealed something that looked like wooden panelling.

She decided - and she was aware that she was staving off bigger decisions - to see if she could look inside the base of the structure. Maybe the creatures could be found and removed, making it unnecessary to destroy the entire bonfire. They would, she reasoned, a little self-servingly, only have nested in the warm mess at the bottom, and not crawled up into the tower of junk. If that were possible, maybe she could accomplish what she wanted without doing so much damage that her intervention would be noticed. But then… was she going back to the house anyway? She hadn’t just packed tools in her rucksack. She had packed clothes, and what money she had. She had her phone in her pocket. And Isiah. Wasn’t she, in fact, leaving anyway, as soon as she had accomplished her task? She didn’t know where she was planning to go, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t back to the house in the middle of the fields at the bottom of the village, at the end of a road that just petered out, where The Boy Who Played Computer Games sulked and schemed and pampered his weird thoughts. 

Yet again, the wind whipped up. Again, even colder. And again, the loose section of tarp flapped up. And this time it stayed up. Maybe it had caught on something, or maybe the wind was holding it there.

Robot stared at the thing revealed. It was a door. Or, to be more precise, it was the bottom right hand corner of a door.

The more she stared - oblivious to the wind, which was now so strong it made the bonfire creak and sway, made the tarpaulins thrash like the sails of ships, and threatened to knock her over - the more she felt sure that the door led somewhere. Her brain struggled to rationalise the feeling, which grew in intensity with every second. She wanted to uncover the entire door. So she did.

She put her crutches to one side, leaning them against the bonfire. She could stand unaided for a while. She delved into her rucksack for a pair of scissors she had packed. The same pair she had used in Isiah’s operation. They had never been put back, and so far nobody had noticed. She found them next to Isiah in the rucksack, and laughed inside herself at how he seemed to be handing them to her with an intense upward stare of encouragement.

“There you go,” he said to her, in a whisper that she donated to him.

She set to work on the twine holding the tarp in place, the rucksack slung back over her shoulder. The loops at the bottom were relatively easy, but she had to climb carefully up onto a foothold on the bonfire to reach the loops at the top.  As she thrust the now loose tarp to one side, she revealed the door in its entirety.  She clambered carefully back down off the bonfire.  Back on firm ground, she stepped back to look at the door.  It was old, decayed, partially rotted. In colour it was mainly a dirt-covered pink, but where the paint was peeling she could see previous colours beneath, in layers. Red below pink. White below red. Her intense feeling that the door led somewhere was only heightened by the fact that it was still in its frame, and still had its handle.  The handle seemed to call to her, asking to be turned.

Robot clambered back up onto the bonfire.  Feeling foolish, she steadied herself with one hand against the sloping side of the bonfire, and reached for the door knob with the other.  She felt something gathering, as if the night were thickening and bunching up and closing in around her.  Looking around, the darkness itself seemed to be becoming tangible, visible.  Her body felt heavier, as if something was accreting around her.  She almost felt the molecules of oxygen around her rearrange themselves into loops of magnetic force, with the door at their centre.  She grabbed the door knob. She turned; she pushed.

The door swung open into empty space.  Robot poked her head into darkness.  She held up the dynamo torch and pumped the handle.  Its light vanished into blackness.  She put one foot through the door.  She seemed to find solidity.  

She heard something.  Commotion.  Shouts.  She ducked back out and looked behind her, across the field, past the spinney, into the garden.  The house was ablaze with electric light.  Figures were approaching.  Torch beams raked the night.  Voices called what they considered to be her name.  She had no doubt The Boy Who Played Computer Games had heard or seen her making her escape, waited long enough for her to reach an incriminating distance, his thumping heart regulated by the little card under the skin of his chest, and then raised the alarm.  

No, she thought.

She walked through the door.

15.

“It won’t work,” she told Lackland.

“What?” he gasped, trying and largely failing to sit up.

She had burst into his room, giving no thought to the time.  He barely ever seemed to sleep.  She was more animated than she usually ever allowed herself to become in public.  She was followed in by a protesting nurse.  Lackland waved the nurse away.

“What won’t work?” he asked once they were alone.  But he knew what, so he immediately followed this question with another: “Why not?”

“The meaning has changed,” she said.  “The night I… the night it happened… I was doing what I was doing to save the hedgehogs that I thought had probably crawled into the bonfire.  Your bonfire has been enclosed in that tent the entire time.  I looked at it.  The bottom is very well tethered to the ground, all the way along.  There won’t be any animals in that bonfire.”

“So… what are you suggesting?  We should take down the tent?”

“Yes,” said Robot, “Right now. So there’s as much time before Bonfire Night for them to get in.  It doesn’t really matter if they do or not.  It just matters that they might have done.”

“And that will make it work?”

He seemed oddly ready to trust her instincts.

“Not by itself,” she said, and she steeled herself to say the next bit.  “You have to actually set fire to the bonfire… I mean, you have to plan to set fire to it.  You have to tell your people to set fire to it, on the night of November the 5th.  You have to order them to do it no matter what happens, unless… unless you and I disappear inside the bonfire and then I come back, maybe with a message from you telling them you’re safe.  If that happens… well, then they can cancel the burning.  But that has to be the only way.”

“So… the creatures inside the bonfire… if there are any… and you won’t know for sure that there aren’t… will be in danger unless it works, unless you make it work… and you’ll be saving them by making it work.  Is that it?”

“That’s it,” said Robot.

She sat down slowly and carefully.  To someone who didn’t know her she would have appeared almost perfectly calm.  If Mrs Pleasance had been there, she would have been astonished to see her foster daughter so publicly agitated.

Lackland summoned people.  It didn’t seem to matter that it was the middle of the night.  They were ready.  Robot watched the nurses fussing around him, and thought of Mum.  She watched the jacketed and capped men who came to his bed and called him “Sir” as they took his instructions, and thought of the Dad she had barely known.  She wondered again what it all looked like to them.  Their strange employer, this strange girl, the strange instructions.  She supposed Dad had been as incuriously obedient when someone had told him he was going to a desert.

An hour or so later, the tent in the process of being taken down at Lackland’s orders, Robot texted the privately agitated Mrs Pleasance once again.  

“I’m okay.  I’ll be back,” she said, “before Bonfire Night.  I promise.”

Robot put her phone down and watched the bonfire emerge into the night as the white walls of the tent fell.  In the process of lowering one of the tent’s telescopic corner props, one of the jacketed and capped men stumbled and sprawled on the ground.  She remembered herself crawling on almost exactly the same spot.

Emerging from the bonfire, having escaped the Erinweal with the help of the friends she made there, she had stumbled at the door frame, grabbed at a handhold that hadn’t been there, thudded backwards as her feet flew out from under her, and slipped on her backside down the side of the bonfire, pitching forward and collapsing on the ground beside it, a yell of agony jolted out of her along with all the air from her lungs.  From there, winded, unable to see her crutches, and knowing - by the pain that seemed to be engulfing everything below her waist - that she wouldn’t be able to stand up even with something to lean on, she’d had to crawl.  

Powder, she had thought.  Powder, powder, powder.

In the Erinweal, she had not needed her leg braces.  She had been whole again.  Her back had been straight, her shoulders on the same level.  Her legs had been straight too, the same length, flexible, painless, strong.  She had taken off her leg braces and run through the forest.  She had stopped and hidden when she started hearing and seeing things in the bright, silvery, moonlight-flooded darkness.  Rustlings.  Shapes moving between trees.  She had moved from tree to tree, trying to keep out of sight of the things ahead of her.  But she had discovered exactly how effectively she had hidden from the things in question when one of them had come up behind her and placed a paw on her shoulder.

It was a paw... but also a hand.  It had an opposable thumb, and the flexibility of human fingers, but its back was covered in brown, bristling hair, and the underside was an uneven grid of black leathery pads.  And there were claws.  They were dark and thick and rough.  Blunt... though even blunt they could have done her a lot of damage if they’d wanted to.

But the paw/hand on her shoulder had been gentle.  She had turned to look up at the creature.

In the room, by the window, she saw him in her mind.

“A hedgehog,” said Robot. “Standing upright, wearing clothes, talking… like a person. But definitely a hedgehog.  Like something out of a story.  Just like something out of a stupid story.  But then I suppose that’s where all the stories come from.”

“Not necessarily,” said Mr Napier slowly, with a watchful caution Robot didn’t quite understand, because it seemed disproportionate to what he was speculating about. “It’s often not that clear cut.  From a certain perspective, the opposition you imply simply ceases to be meaningful.”

It was tall.  Taller than a man.  Larger.  Rounder.  Standing on two legs.  Hedgehogs, Robot knew, like humans, are plantigrade animals.  They walk on the soles of their feet.  So making the transition from quadruped to biped had not changed the structure of the hedgehog leg too much.  It had mostly involved a lowering of the knee joint.  The feet had enlarged too, so as to take the full weight of the body.  They were still studded with claws, as were the hands.  The legs and arms and chest were fleshy, covered in pale brown hair that thinned in places to wisps.  

The Erinac - as Robot would come to know them - wore tabards.  They were made of a roughly woven material but came in a rich variety of designs and colours.  They covered the chest and lower body, and it was hard to see how they were secured in place.  Robot eventually noticed fabric fastenings which ran over the shoulders and around the back from the waist, and which seemed to be tied together between the spines.  

The spines covered every inch of the back of the creature she was looking at, from the back of its… his… head, down the back of his neck - which was more articulated than in a hedgehog’s - and all across his domed back, down to his short and stubby tail.  The spines ended at a boundary of shaggy and ruffled fur, coarser and longer than that on the creature’s arms and legs and front.  The boundary ran all the way down from the sides of the torso and down the flanks.  The spines on the creature’s head gradually melted into softer and shorter hair on the face.  The face was recognisably a hedgehog’s face.  Small, deep-set, bulbous, glassy eyes, so dark brown they were almost black, sat, widely spaced, either side of a sloping forehead which gradually became a long nose.  The end of the nose was a black, leathery snout.  Short whiskers emerged from three symmetrical rows of dots on either side of the nose.  Even so, the face was not as long and protuberant as a hedgehog’s face.  It was flatter, a squat triangle, the nose less delineated from the rest of the face.  The hair of the nose and around the eyes was darker.  The hair above this dark area was paler.  The contrasting shades allowed the face to show expression, a feature of which the Erinac took full advantage.  Their faces were mobile, filled with life.  They used their small, round, high-set ears to express themselves too.  They moved with their owner’s words and thoughts, not unlike eyebrows in humans.  They were not ‘human’.  But they conveyed as much as a human face.  In fact, Robot felt they conveyed more.  

She remembered the creature she had met smiling at her.  Compared to a hedgehog, his mouth was smaller in proportion to his face.  But it was still huge.  Open, it showed rows of sharp little teeth, and glittering canines.  It should’ve scared her.  Indeed, she remembered the phrase all the better to eat you with passing through her mind.  But it was so evidently a smile. 

And then he had talked.  His words had been amiable, welcoming, amused, curious.  The voice was deep, coming as it did from a gigantic echoing chest.  It was a human voice, but for the richness and depth of it.  It sounded like a bass stringed instrument.  Of course, instruments cannot form words… but then Robot did not see how this animal mouth - long and almost lipless - could form human words either.  But, somehow, it was achieved.

She asked where she was.

“He said they called the forest the Erinweal because they were the Erinac. I asked him why they called themselves the Erinac. He said because they lived in the Erinweal.”

She remembers him holding up his arms and turning in a circle on the spot as he spoke. She remembers his whiskers waggling almost comically. She remembers his eyes. The eyes of an animal, yet filled with thought, humour, consideration.  

He asked her name.  She told him.  He told her his.

“I remember trying to say it,” she told Napier, “But every time I tried, I got it wrong. I remember him laughing at the way I mangled it. But he wasn’t nasty about it.  What I said came out sounding something like… Deedwall, or Deedwill… something like that. I couldn’t say it but I could… well, translate it into something I could say.  So he just let me call him Deedwill.”

Extremely attuned to sensing mockery, she sensed none in his laughter when she tried and failed to say his name. She wondered if this was because mockery looked and sounded different in creatures like him. But somehow she knew that wasn’t it. His laughter was disconcertingly clear in its meaning. She sensed no mockery because there was none, except of the gentlest kind. As different as they were, they were comprehensible to each other.

She asked how she could understand him.

He replied - reasonably, logically, patiently - that she’d have to be able to understand him. Otherwise how could they possibly have this conversation?

“So I created that place, those people? In my head? And made them real? And that’s why I could understand them?”

“No,” said Napier, “It’s more complicated than that. Your portal took you to a place where you would be able to understand the people already there.  The number of worlds is effectively infinite. There are as many as can be stated.  There was bound to be one where the people spoke a language almost identical to yours. As I say, you made your portal, with your thoughts and your feelings, and your history. And with the words and grammar and syntax they are made of. In many ways, all portals are fundamentally made of words. The bricks of the lift shafts are signs and signifiers. The mortar is syntax and grammar. The cables pulling the lifts up and down are made of woven strings of sentences.”

16.

“I’m lost,” she said.

It was true.  She had run with no thought to finding her way back, intoxicated by the feeling of speed and ability and control, of freedom.  Things she had not felt for years.

Deedwill promised to help her.

“We will find the place where you entered our world and take you back there,” he pronounced.

“How?” she asked, looking up at him.

“We’ll work something out,” he said, sounding absurdly human.

Deedwill was fascinated by Robot’s rucksack and its contents.  He asked permission to study them.  Robot, following him, shrugged it off and handed it to him.  He rummaged around in it, pulling things out and asking her what they were.  By the time they arrived at the Erinac settlement, he had inquired after everything she had brought with her.  He declared his intention of studying the items more closely when he had a chance.  The bag swung from his hand as they walked.  Robot had to stifle a laugh.  Later, she wondered why she’d stifled it.

The forest was warm without being oppressive.  It was filled with the soft sounds of animals.  Calls and chirrups and squeaks.  Lows and trills and bays.  It was almost music, like an orchestra in which every instrument, instead of following a score, gently did its own thing, and yet somehow the resulting cacophony stayed harmonious.  Around the Knott house, the sounds of the fields and hedgerows were often drowned out by the chuntering of farm machinery and the rumbling of tractors and lorries.  The training maneuvers of the army on the nearby plains boomed across and rattled the house’s windows.  

The forest smelled like a herb shop, or a florist.  As they walked, little clouds raced across the face of the huge moon…

“Ish,” said Deedwill.

“What?” asked Robot.

“That,” said Deedwill, pointing a claw at the moon in the centre of the sky, “We call it ‘Ish’.”

...and let gentle, fresh drizzle fall on them.  It pattered on the branches and leaves and flowers and dropped to the forest floor with a cumulative whisper.  The water awoke the smell of the forest even more fully, and Robot sucked it in.  Around the Knott house, the country all too often smelled of trucks and tractors and silage.

Robot was a city girl, but had found herself resentful of the way the country was tainted.  The first night she spent in the Knott house, she had been fascinated by the hooting of owls in the distance, only to hear them silenced by the thundering passage of something huge and heavy and rattling, coming from some nearby farm.

She’d said something about it to the Boy Who Played Computer Games, during one of their occasional periods of relative friendliness.

“You like food, don’t you?” he snapped back, smug.  

Robot found the response deeply unconvincing, though she was unequipped to say why, aside from the obvious fact that the Boy Who Played Computer Games was just repeating what he’d heard someone else say.

17.

At the settlement, the Erinac were amazed by Robot.  They found her as fascinating as Deedwill did, as fascinating as he had found her things, as fascinating as she found them.  They gathered around her and studied her as she and Deedwill walked the path through the centre of the settlement, winding through their thatched dwellings, the covered entrances to their burrows and hides.  

Anyone else might’ve been severely disconcerted. In some ways, to Robot, it almost felt like a normal day. She had long perfected the ability to keep dignity and privacy despite being stared at. And in fact, the interest of the Erinac seemed noticeably more polite and friendly compared to some of the First Day at (New) Schools she remembered. 

Some of the Erinac spoke to her. As before, the words were friendly and welcoming. Their curiosity was so frank and unabashed that there was nowhere for anything mean-spirited to hide inside it. Some of them reached out to her. They did not touch her, until she reached out to one of them in return, and touched a paw. They seemed to take this as permission, and started to draw closer to her and brush her with their paws as she passed. So many started doing this, that she started to feel mobbed. Deedwill, who seemed to have appointed himself her guide and guardian, batted them away, reminding them - in a loud, amiable boom - to give their guest some space. Some of the Erinac were apologetic.  They seemed astonished or charmed when she responded to their greetings or apologies in words they could understand. She understood this, being just as charmed by words coming out of them. Some of them laughed at her when she spoke, as Reedwall had done when she had mispronounced his name. She realised that they weren’t laughing at what she said, but at the fact of words coming out of something so - to them - small and strange. As with Deedwill, their laughter lacked malice or cruelty. The fascination was similarly pure. She didn’t feel like a freak on display. She felt like something beautiful. And, the more she looked at and watched them, the more she found them beautiful in return. She was already disposed to see the beauty of the creatures they resembled.  In this altered form, that beauty was transformed, diminished in some ways, but also rediscovered or rephrased anew.  They did not quite have the transfixing smallness and regularity of their little cousins, and yet their humanlike traits seemed to enhance these features into some new form rather than abolishing them.

The Erinac came in many colours. Some were as brown as Deedwill. Some were greyer. Some were almost black. Some were gingery. Some - especially the small children who crowded around their elders’ legs and gaped at her, their eyes bulging; or came out of hiding as she passed, their instant fear subsiding as they saw her shaking hands with the grown-ups - were pale, with their pink skin showing vividly through their light hair and sparse spines. She reached down to them. Most shied away. One reached up to her, and her hand brushed a tiny pale paw. The little needle-like claws left faint white lines across her palm.

They took her to someone whose name Robot could best render as Herenow, pronounced as two-syllables like all their names.  Herenow, old and infirm, supported by young Erinac who carried them into the assembly, laughed at Robot’s mangled effort at their name just as Deedwill had done but, like Deedwill, they accepted her best attempt.  

“And you…” began the wizened old creature, their voice both a rasp and a whisper, “...you’re not Alice, are you?”

“They definitely asked you about Alice,” inquired Napier sharply.

“Yes,” said Robot, lost in her fragmented memories.

The Erinac had ancient stories about someone called Alice who came to the world where their ancestors had once lived as slaves, as playthings in the game of a cruel monarch, and caused her downfall. It was their story of where they came from. Freed, they had escaped that world and wandered until they found the forest of eternal summer night, watched over by Ish, the benevolent, unchanging, unmoving moon. To them, Robot resembled the Alice of the stories.

“I’m not Alice,” said Robot, surprised.

“Forgive me,” said Herenow. “I just wondered.”

Herenow was not male or female.  Herenow was both.  Herenow was considered wise because of this, because of their ability to see both points of view, and all the points of view created by all the possible combinations of the two, or by their absence as discrete categories.  They were also considered wise because of their great age.   

“Being able to force people to listen to your opinions out of politeness is one of the few compensations that come with being old,” joked Herenow, and the room laughed.  

Herenow was not the leader of the Erinac.  Robot asked this and the assembled Erinac - packed together around her and Herenow and Deedwill - found the question puzzling, even a little disturbing.  Herenow was the Speaker of the Erinac Council.  The Erinac Council had voted to grant Herenow special status.  It came with the responsibility to speak for the council.  This didn’t mean that she decided what the council thought.  It meant that her words were to be judged and weighed and approved, or otherwise, by the council.  

“I am a point of focus,” said Herenow.

The Erinac Council was where they stood, where any group of Erinac stood, but the council was even more the council, even more itself, the more Erinac stood together.  Herenow thanked Robot for being the cause of such a large gathering.  The council had rarely been this complete in her memory.  It soon became clear that they did not define ‘Erinac’, in the context of the council, to mean just their own species.  There were other kinds of people there. They mingled with the crowd.  They spoke up with everyone else.   There were men with the heads of dogs.  There were people with no heads and huge faces in their chests.  

“...of the Cannibals that each other eat,” muttered Lackland, as Robot relayed this part of the story to him, “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders…”

One of the men with the head of a dog asked Robot if she had come here with a map, or by following a map, or planned to make a map.  Robot said no to all the questions.  This seemed to reassure him.  

Robot asked if she could be in the Erinac council.  They didn’t understand the question.

“You’re here now, aren’t you?” asked Herenow.  

“But I’m a stranger,” said Robot.

“Strangers need to be heard as much as anyone else,” said Herenow.

“But I’m not one of you,” she said. 

“You are as much one of us as you wish to be,” said Herenow.  

There was a general nodding of heads and a murmur of approval.

And Robot had to look down to hide her face.

One of the dogheaded men asked if she planned to stay.  He did not sound enthusiastic about the idea.  As with the Erinac, Robot did not quite see how such human-like sounds could emerge from an animal’s face.  But, as with a cartoon where the animation slyly covers over such things, it happened.

Herenow explained to Robot that it was in the nature of the dogheaded people to always want to be where others were not.  It had taken those Cynocephali left in the Erinweal, the ones who had stayed in the Erinweal when their people had passed through, a long time to become fully comfortable sharing a forest with the Erinac.  They rarely came to council.

The dogheaded man said it was more than that.  Robot was a mapmaker.  He said that everywhere mapmakers went on their maps they brought disaster with them.  Robot reminded him that she had no intention of making a map of the Erinweal, or how to get there.  Besides, she just wanted to go home.  She told them about Mum and they were impressed.  They understood that a daughter wanted to be with a mother who was lost in dreams.

Sadly, the Erinac’s best trackers were all away on a foraging party.  The dogheaded man, whose name turned out to be Ethelwulf, said that he could track where Robot had been.  He would follow her scent back to the place where she had appeared in the forest.  Robot got the feeling that Herenow had been hoping Ethelwulf would make this offer, and had been waiting to see if he would without being asked.

Robot thanked Ethelwulf, and asked him to hurry.  She’d been here hours already.  This made the crowd look at each other in mystification.  Soon the bonfire would be burnt and her way back would be gone, she clarified.  She was running out of time.  The Erinac were even more puzzled by her clarification, by the words “hours” and “time”.  

“What is time?” asked someone in the crowd, seeming to speak for many.

Robot tried to explain it, almost overcome by the strangeness of the reversal, unable to stop thinking about being The Little Girl Who Would One Day Be Robot, sitting with her mother, nodding along to explanations she didn’t understand, staring at the blank and inscrutable face of Mum’s nurse’s watch.

“Very strange,” pronounced Herenow. “I don’t know why you would need to employ such a concept.”

“My people are farmers,” said Ethelwulf.  “We know the coming and going of the seasons… we judge when to sow and when to reap not only by the soil and the progress of the crops but also by the regular movements of the celestial bodies…”

Ethelwulf tailed off sadly.  In the Erinweal, he was not a farmer anymore.  Farming was impossible here.  He had stayed behind in the Erinweal, he would later tell her, because he and some of his friends had decided they couldn’t wander anymore and wanted to settle, but it meant they had to renounce farming, the Cynocephali way of life.

Robot seized upon what he said.  She tried to explain time using their moon, Ish.  Robot had studied it on her travels through the forest.  It was huge, and full, and shone brightly.  Its features were clear and, seeing that they were different from the features of the moon she knew, Robot had realised that she was in a different world altogether.

Robot asked them about how Ish moved in the sky, how she waxed and waned.  

“But Ish does not move,” said Deedwill.

They understood perfectly well what Ish was.  They knew that Ish was another world, so close to their own that they could see it up close.  They knew that, in other places, moons moved, grew fat and thin with the passing months.  They knew perfectly well that the light Ish gave them was reflected from somewhere else.  But Ish was special.  Ish never moved or changed.  She just shone warm light down on them, always.  It was because this was the Erinweal, the perfect place for the Erinac, a place made for them.  

“Who made it?” asked Robot.

But the Erinac understood perfectly well that the Erinweal had not really been made for them.  It was just a figure of speech, Herenow explained delicately, as if she did not think Robot would be able to understand such a thing.  

“We know we are not here for a reason, or by any plan.  We are here because we looked for long enough, and were lucky enough to find somewhere where we fit so well that it feels as though we were made for the place and the place was made for us.”

As for time, they understood perfectly well that one thing follows another. That things that were gone were gone forever, never to be regained; that things not yet experienced could not be known. They understood that things were born and lived and died. That things grew and decayed. That things bloomed and withered. That things accreted and crumbled. They understood that youth gives way to age, naivety to wisdom, hunger to satisfaction, and then to hunger again. They understood that ignorance was destroyed by knowledge, wariness to friendship, before to after. But the concept of time as a measurement, of experience and life broken into bits and counted, with these numbers something to be watched and obeyed, constraining people and making demands of them…

“It sounds,” said Herenow, “more like a shackle than a tool.”

Robot tried to explain schedules and appointments and jobs. But the Erinac laughed at her.  To them, it was ludicrous.  Robot wished she hadn’t lost her Mum’s watch. She almost rummaged in her pockets, so strong was the feeling that she had it with her somehow. 

Ethelwulf said that the concept of time sounded far too much like a map for his liking.  But he understood that Robot wanted to go home, and that she felt it was urgent.  He stood up and suggested they start at once.

Robot expected him to get down on all fours and sniff the ground with his muzzle.  She has glad she didn’t say anything about this because he took an instrument out of his rather smart homespun clothes and extended it telescopically until it was very long.  It was curved and bell-shaped at one end, like a trumpet.  He placed the trumpet to the floor near Robot and held the other end up to his muzzle.  He soon caught her scent.

Waving goodbye to the assembled Erinac, especially to Herenow, Robot followed Ethelwulf, Deedwill following her.

Ethelwulf soon picked up the pace.  Robot’s scent was clear because it was so unusual.  He followed the trail Robot and Deedwill had left as they had walked to the settlement from the depths of the forest.  He found the place where they had stood and talked.  And from there he followed Robot’s lone trail.  He ran as she had run, and she ran behind him, Deedwill lagging behind and puffing.  

Ethelwulf almost ran into the darkness in the gap in the tangled bank, almost followed Robot’s trail right into it.  

Robot recognised it immediately as the place where she had arrived.  Walking through the door, into the blackness that had impossibly opened up inside the bonfire, her feet had found an invisible floor that could not be there, and she had reached up and touched walls of some kind, walls that felt like they were made of wooden debris and junk, as if the inside of the bonfire had parted for her, creating a corridor.  She had pumped the dynamo torch again, but the light from it continued to simply vanish.  It sank into the darkness like gold dust sprinkled onto the surface of an oil slick.  She kept walking, aware of the sounds behind her, pulled forwards by some sense of necessity.  And the corridor seemed to narrow and close around her until her face was being brushed by skeletal wooden fingers.  But the path never closed fully, never enough to stop her pressing on.  She started to see soft, silvery light coming from ahead, peeping through what looked like a bush or a hedge.  She pushed towards it, and became aware that the wood she was pushing through now felt soft and fleshy and flexible, and leafy.  She pulled and pushed at the material ahead of her, until she almost fell out and found herself in the moonlit forest, emerging from a dark hole in a great, dense, messy mass of twigs and branches and runaway vines.

Robot stood looking at the darkness from the other side.  She didn’t have the torch anymore.  She’d stuffed it back into her rucksack, finding the forest so brightly lit by Ish.  Her leg braces lay in a heap on the ground nearby, where she had left them in her intoxicated joy upon her arrival, and her discovery that her body was healed.  She walked towards the black hole in the reality of the forest.  She turned.  Deedwill looked shamefaced. 

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I forgot to bring your backsack,” he said.  “Now there’s no… no…”

“Time.”

“Yes.  I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said.  “Keep it until I come back.  You can study all the things in it and tell me what you think.”

“Goodbye Robot,” he said.

For some reason, in the years to come, it was the memory of his voice saying those words, a memory which seemed to have sunk into her skin and become a part of her, that always stopped her accepting the idea that the whole thing had been a dream.  That and the question of her rucksack and leg braces, vanished and never found.

Robot looked up at Ish, hanging huge and shimmering and luminescent in the exact centre of the sky, tainted only by the silhouettes of the tops of forest trees.

She didn’t want to leave.  But the idea was in her head.  Leave.  Come back.  With Mum.  And maybe Mum will wake up if I bring her here.  Maybe she’ll be mended, like my legs, she thought.

Powder, she thought.

“You’ll always be welcome to return,” said Deedwill.  “From now on you will always have a place in the Erinac Council.  We will keep it for you.”

“Just don’t make any maps,” reminded Ethelwulf gruffly.

Robot nodded seriously and turned to walk into the darkness.

18.

Robot was in the hospital on Bonfire Night, her ankle in a cast.

Home, she’d thought, looking around the ward.

She felt foolish.  She’d left the leg braces in the Erinweal.  The idea of strapping them back on had filled her with revulsion.  She’d decided to assume that her legs would still work back on the other side.  They didn’t.  And even in the brief time she’d spent in the Erinweal, she’d forgotten how to take care on legs that needed support.  She had allowed herself to enjoy forgetting.

She tried to stop them burning the bonfire. She told everyone what had really happened. She kept telling them, even through the pain that sliced up her body as she lay at the base of the bonfire, even in the ambulance, even in the hospital.  Mrs Knott sat with her and smiled and did nothing. Mr Knott came back from his business trip early. He was angry and concerned and confused. She felt guilty about upsetting him, about how worried he was about her. She told him what had happened. He didn’t believe her. Nobody believed her, of course. But somehow, Mr Knott’s disbelief was hardest to take.  He just raged about how nobody - and he included himself - had taken the proper care to make sure the bonfire was safe.  Robot, growing silent and stern, refrained from telling him that she had been trying to tell people all along.

Mr Knott was also angry about the loss of Isiah.  He wanted to know where he was.  He was a family heirloom.  He’d given him to her because he trusted her, and she had let him down.

Powder, thought Robot.

In the hospital that night, with no Isiah by her bed, Robot expected a clockmare.  But none came.

Back at the Knott house, her ankle in a cast, she sat in her room, looking out across the fields at the blackened and charred remains of the bonfire, not speaking, not moving, not eating. 

She had vowed she would never speak to any of them ever again. For as long as she stayed with them, she kept her promise to herself.  Mr Knott tried to talk to her. Her case worker tried to talk to her. A therapist tried to talk to her. The Boy Who Played Computer Games came sniffing around, sheepish, apologetic, defensive, clutching his chest the way he did when he wanted sympathy.  He went away furious with self-pity.

She made herself a statue. And eventually, as they will when statues sit around cluttering up places that no longer want statues in them, somebody came and took her away.

19.

Later, after she had renounced her story about the magical forest to the satisfaction of all those who needed to hear her renounce it, and just before she started to lose chunks of the memories like icebergs snapping off the edge of a melting glacier, Robot had searched and found.

She had found the Mappa Mundi of Hereford, a map of the known world created somewhere around the year 1300. She downloaded the huge, high-res photograph.

She wandered the world laid out by centuries-dead men on the cured skin of a centuries-dead calf.

The map is shaped like an arched window. 

At the top, the day of judgement plays itself out. Below, the world is enclosed in a circle. It is a map of time as well as space. And the two are not separate. They coexist in the world of the map, overlapping across its flat surface, overlaid upon each other. The map doesn’t just lay out the land and the rivers and the seas and the cities as the map makers knew them - Europe and Africa and Asia, but not America, not yet - but also history as the map makers knew, right back to the creation.

Robot found the Garden of Eden, a circle within a circle, enclosed by fire and battlemented walls. The website told her that Paradise means ‘walled garden’. She found the Tower of Babel, erupting from the terraces of Babylon. She found the Exodus, the journey of the Hebrews from Egypt, across the Red Sea - the map makers painted it a literal red - to the Promised Land. She found the labyrinth of Crete, the Minotaur nowhere to be seen. Theseus must have come and gone.

But she did find other strange creatures; creatures the map makers knew were out there, somewhere. She found the Cynocephali, men with the heads of dogs. She found the cave-dwelling Troglodytes. She found the Sciapods, men with one great leg and one great foot, which they shelter under when it rains. She found the Blemmyes, a tribe with no heads and huge faces in their chests.

Robot heard from Ethelwulf and Deedwill of the Monopods and the Cave Dwellers.  They had passed through the Erinweal too, on their way through the worlds, looking for their own paradise, fleeing the map and the people who made it.   

And looking at the calf skin, Robot realised this was the map they had escaped from - or one of the maps anyway, because this map was only one in a long line of ancestors and descendants - leaving only their still and silent afterimages behind. As humans had spread across the world, these creatures had wisely run from them, and seized upon escape hatches when they stumbled upon them, finding their way out into new worlds, new realities, new topographies, new cartographies, spreading out as diasporas.

Robot finds the ancestors of the Erinac in one of the books she reads.  Hedgehogs used by a despotic queen, used as balls in a cruel game of croquet.  Even in that story, when Alice tries to aim at her hedgehog with her flamingo, she finds that it has unrolled itself and wandered off.  They were already trying to escape, looking for an opportunity.  At the end, when Alice declares “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” and dissolves the Queen and her realm, that is their chance.  Robot imagines them wandering from world to world, being translated over and over again, the transcription errors piling upon each other, causing them to evolve, until they find a world that seemed to be made for them.  A forest of eternal quiet and eternal night and eternal summer, watched over eternally by an unchanging and unmoving moon.  No daylight to hide from.  No winter to sleep through.  They wandered through their own version of the desert, their own Red Sea of worlds, and eventually found their unpromised land.  

Then, one day, one of them had fallen out of the forest and lost himself in the world of the mapmakers.  And then, later, a small girl from the world of the mapmakers had walked into their forest.  In that moment, Robot saw herself and Lackland as weights on opposite sides of a scale.  At the moment the scales were weighted entirely to one side.  Surely it was right to balance them out?  If Robot belonged in this world, Lackland belonged in his.

But did she want to come back?  With Mum safe, forever, and forever silent, was there anything to keep Robot in this world?  She had told Mrs Pleasance that she would be back.  Was that true?

Lying on a bed in the guest bedroom that had once been the bedroom of The Boy Who Played Computer Games, Robot found tears on her cheeks.  She was alone, so she didn’t mind.  She wasn’t ashamed of her tears in themselves.  They were just nobody else’s business.  They had come from inside her.  She had made them, and they were hers.

She remembered the beautiful creatures she had met in the warm moonlight of the Erinweal.  The sudden thought of Lackland, a few doors down, jabbed into her like a pin.  A ruin of such a being as she had met, and all because he had been forced to slice and carve into himself so he could live in the wrong world, a world he was never meant to live in, a world that saw him and saw only a freak, a monster, a curiosity, a commodity.  His version of The Night Before Bonfire Night, whatever it had been, had also been his Morning He Was Late For School.  But Robot’s Night Before Bonfire Night was the antidote to The Morning She Was Late For School.

The clock in the hall chimed midnight.  It was the morning before the night before Bonfire Night, and there was no way she could make school from here.

20.

Lackland, certain he was not long for this world, spent the day seeing people, making last minute arrangements to cover the gap he would leave behind.  People trooped in and out of the house all day.  Mostly men in suits.  They spent time in Lackland’s room.  From a few doors down, Robot heard them without listening to them.  Their murmured conversations came and went.  The doors opened and closed.  Attendants and doctors and nurses bustled in and out.  

It occurred to Robot that she didn’t know what Lackland did.

Robot stayed in her room most of the day.  Lackland had a library and she had ransacked it for books.  The same old books.  He had them all, curated in a special section.  For the hundredth time, she read about the rabbit hole.  The wardrobe and the painting.  The wood between the worlds.  The cyclone, and the faraway tree, and the train platform.  The Cambridge don’s door.  The wall and the box of delights.  The puzzle box and the tapestry.

She re-read the part of Alice with the croquet match.

‘Get to your places!’ shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder…

Robot looked at the clock on the wall.  She looked out of the window.  It was getting dark.  The room had been sinking into gloom for a while, just under her conscious attention as she read.

What hadn’t slipped under her conscious attention had been the sound of the chime, of the lift coming and then going a little later.

Not time yet, she thought.  She waited.  She read.  The darkness outside thickened.  Eventually, it became so late it was early.

Was it still the night before Bonfire Night if it was actually the morning of Bonfire Night?  Wasn’t it actually Bonfire Night now?  Bonfire Morning?  Bonfire Day?  Nobody said that.  They said Guy Fawkes Day, and Bonfire Night.  The same thing, carved into the thinnest flakes of meaning by words.

She’d read that, in the past, people considered a ‘day’ to be simply the portion of time when the sun was in the sky.  But somehow, over time, the day started beginning during the night.  A rolling set of numbers reset themselves, and a new day began in darkness.  In the Erinweal it was always dark, no days ever came or went, and no time ever passed.  She had walked through the door with people coming from the house to grab her, and had emerged, had fallen back out, as the same people arrived at the bonfire.  Her time in the Erinweal - she must’ve been there hours, or what would’ve been hours anywhere else - hadn’t registered in this world.  She remembered her own incomprehension, staring at Mum’s little chrome puzzle.  She wished she still had it.  She remembered the Erinac laughing as she tried to explain things she herself did not really understand or believe.

She wondered how Lackland had learned about time.  She supposed he’d just had to, the same way she had.  She thought about Lackland, pictured in the scrapbook before he had mutilated himself.  She thought about how, at first, she had wondered if he might be Deedwill.  She wondered if Deedwill would still be there, in the forest.  She wondered what he would say about the things she had left behind with him.  She wondered if Herenow would still be alive.  She wondered if Lackland had been in the crowd of Erinac through which she had passed.  Maybe he had been one of the children who had crowded around her, or shied away from her.  Maybe he had been the one who had left little white lines on her palm.  Surely he would have said.

She walked to Lackland’s room.  Nothing seemed to be happening around or inside it so she knocked and went in.  They were at the point where she didn’t need to wait for his permission to enter.

Lackland was asleep.  She stood over him.  He had removed his white cotton gloves.  His large hands had been shaved of all their fur, but regrowth was already starting to darken them.

Was his entire body shaved every day?

The skin under the dusting of regrowing hair was as pale and papery-thin as the rest of him.  His Erinac claws had been pulled out, leaving gaping wounds in the ends of his chunky, jointed fingers.  The wounds had long ago healed over, and fake fingernails seemed to have been implanted in the midst of the lumpy scars.  One of the hands was lying palm up and Robot saw the fleshy pads had been coated in pale pink make-up.  The white linen sheets under the hands were slightly stained by it, as were the discarded gloves heaped together on the bedside table.

Robot went to the window and looked down at the bonfire in the field.  People were crowded around it, preparing.  Robot heard Lackland stir behind her.  She turned to him.

He was looking at her.  He had his mask on, but she could tell.

“Pardon my disguise,” he said, as if he had only just remembered it.  “I wouldn’t hide my face from you if it were not necessary.  I don’t need to try to fool you into thinking I’m human, but that isn’t the point.  What’s under here is not pleasant to see.”

“I could take it,” she said.

“But why should you?” he asked.

“What were they doing here?” she asked.

Lackland didn’t need to be told who she meant.

“I feel a connection to the firm, in spite of everything,” said Lackland.  “Because of Lady Hargreaves.  I owe her a great deal.  I feel I failed her by standing by and letting her project become so monstrously perverted from within.  I wanted one last conversation with Napier.”

Robot turned back to the window.

A group of men were setting up a large machine at the base of the bonfire under the door, their luminous jackets glowing in the beams of the arc lights.  Rain was spattering them as they worked, driven into flurries by the rising wind. 

“It’s nearly time,” she said.

“Yes,” said Lackland.

For a while they stood silently in the moment.

“I’ve made all the preparations we discussed,” said Lackland.

Robot did not respond.

“I have made arrangements for all my people if I, as I hope, do not come back.  I expect somebody could question my instructions with respect to the question of ‘sound mind and body’... but I doubt anyone will.”

The machine was a flat platform, with rails, attached to a large, collapsed, metal concertina legs.  

“The arrangements for your mother have been finalised.  The paperwork is available should you wish to inspect it.”

Lackland would presumably be put in a wheelchair.  The wheelchair would be secured in place on the platform.  The platform would be raised until it was level with the door.  Robot would open the door.  And...

“I have told my people to take you wherever you wish to go, if you emerge from the bonfire and stay on this side.”

The men in the field all suddenly stood back from the machine, satisfied.  Their action was so simultaneous it was as if they were all obeying a shouted command.

“If,” echoed Robot.

“Yes.  I sense you are undecided.  The choice is yours.  Nor need it be final.  If you choose to go back through the bonfire after cancelling the order to burn it, the bonfire will be preserved and guarded here, on this spot, in perpetuity.  On the other hand, if you emerge and decide not to return, you may stay here.  If you do not wish to return to this guardian of yours… this Mrs Pleasance… then you may stay in this house.  It will be transferred to you.  I have made arrangements for her to be anonymously given a substantial amount of money if you do not return to her.  It may prove some consolation.  And any letter you want to write to her will be delivered.  Or, of course, she may come here to live with you.  It will be entirely up to you.  As, indeed, is all of this.”

“You’ve thought of everything,” said Robot.

“Yes,” said Lackland, a strange note of sadness in his cracked voice.  “I’m afraid I have.”

There was a knock at the door.  It was one of Lackland’s attendants, followed by a nurse pushing an empty wheelchair.

“We’re ready for you Sir,” said the attendant.  Again, looking at the placid face of a man following orders he must feel to be at least inexplicable, at worst insane, Robot thought of her father.

Get to your places, thought Robot.

More nurses entered the room, whispering.

21.

Later, after the screaming girl had been comforted and sedated, the ward was quiet.  It would have been silent but for the whispering voices of the nurses nearby, unaware they were being heard by the tiny figure in the bed whose eyes were open but looked closed, and who was used to sitting quietly and not moving for fear of attracting the irritated attention of a nurse. 

The women were upset. They didn’t know the little girl’s mum personally. But she’d worked at the same hospital. She’d walked in there every morning for years. And now she’d been carried in, alive but broken, knocked into oblivion, and would probably never walk out again. And it was open to question whether her daughter would ever walk out again either. She wouldn’t die. The hours-long operation - the first of many - had seen to that. She’d live. But if she walked again it would only be after years of pain and effort. Unlike her mother, her head had been near-miraculously spared much damage. The mother had been thrown across the street. The little girl had been lucky. The lower half of her body had been crushed between the side of the car and the wall. The real danger was the spinal injury, though it wasn’t as bad as they’d originally thought… but it was too early to say what the long term consequences would be.  And the worst thing to look at was the breaks.  The pelvis was fractured in several places. The legs had been shattered. One of them had been smashed almost to powder. 

That was the word the woman whispered.

“Powder.”