Chimera Book One

Chapter Eleven

The cavern above the ankle-snatchers’ prison was dominated by a series of huge stalactites.  In the soft light given out by toadstool lamps, they glimmered with different colours.  As Kyp and Atticus neared the first of them, Kyp became aware of their peculiar smell, a curious mixed-up fragrance of cheese and onion crisps, tangerines, and chocolate.  He was amazed to find the jewel-like objects studding its surface were chocolates in foil twists.  Also embedded were spirals of dry, wrinkled orange peel, clusters of nuts and countless one penny and two pence pieces.

‘Setteement,’ explained Atticus.

Kyp’s stomach rumbled. The sweet-savoury scent was making him light-headed.  He hadn’t eaten since his bowl of cornflakes at breakfast and that had been - when?  He wasn’t even sure.

‘Do you think the chocolates would be all right to eat?’        

‘I suppose so,’ reasoned Atticus. ‘Though I wouldn’t dig too deep.’

Kyp selected a crescent-shaped chocolate in purple cellophane, and picked it off the stalactite.  He unwrapped it, sniffed it, and then popped it onto his tongue.  He chewed it carefully.  It tasted good.

‘We’d always have a big jar of chocolates at Christmas,’ said Kyp, licking his lips. ‘Mum liked the orange crèmes.  Dad liked toffees.  I liked them all.  Dad used to put the wrappers back in the jar.  It drove Mum mad.’

‘We always know when Christmas has come to your world,’ said Atticus.  ‘First to arrive are the aged and the out-of-date, last year’s models and the novelties-no-more.  Then come all the unwanted presents, some still wearing their gift-tags and ribbons. Chimera teems with leather driving gloves and woolly jumpers.  We can’t move for all the socks and scarves. They drift here in their thousands.’

‘Is that how you got here?’

‘How some of me got here certainly.  It takes a great many lost socks to give rise to a snake of my size.  We’re rolled together like pastry.’

Using his tail to point, Atticus directed Kyp’s attention towards a yellow diamond halfway along his body.

‘That one belonged to poet who couldn’t rhyme if his toes were cold.’ He pointed at another, which was off-white and rather grubby. ‘This one protected an intrepid explorer from frostbite.  I know all of their stories.  I’m made from them.’

Kyp stared at the hundreds of different diamonds patterning Atticus’s body.

‘It’s wonderful, of course.  I know so much.  I’m wise with experience.  I’m much greater than the sum of my parts, but it’s tiring too.  Every inch of me aches, Kyp, and not just for past lives lead in the Elsewhere World.  Every sock making up my length and breadth yearns to be reunited with its missing half, to be complete again, a matching pair.  There’s nothing I can do for them.  It’s too late.  We’re too changed.  We’re something else now.  I’m this.’

Kyp thought about the shear-shrike, how it sought to rebuild its cocoon, how it wanted to curl inside it, how change meant never going home.

‘Hey,’ said Kyp, and he touched Atticus very lightly with his hand. ‘Back home there’s this museum.  It’s full of great stuff.  It’s got a dressed flea and a horn of a narwhal. It’s got snakes in great big tanks and dinosaur bones and dodos, but there’s nothing like you there.  There’s a circus Sprat and me would go to, Fatty Barnstorm’s. He’s got a tiger called Pinstripe and there’s Petula, the human projectile.  She gets fired from a cannon.  People ooh and ahh, but if they saw you, Atticus, if they saw you, they wouldn’t believe their eyes.’

‘Everyone is afraid of me.’

‘I’m not.  I think you’re pretty amazing, and if Sprat was here, she’d think you were amazing too.’

After eating his fill of caramels and coconut cracknel, Kyp put a handful of chocolates into the back pocket of his jeans, and then followed Atticus through more settement-scented grottos.  They crawled through a tunnel into another cavern and found themselves blinded by daylight.

‘Last one out is a toe-biter!’ announced Kyp.

Atticus hushed him.  He pointed with his tail to the body of the shear-shrike lying on the floor nearby.  The creature was covered in a crust of dirt, inches thick, its beak clogged with muck.

‘We’re not alone,’ whispered Atticus.

Only now did Kyp see that the cavern’s walls, floor and ceiling were crawling with large brown beetles. There was a loud popping noise, as one launched its fat, drab body into the air, trailing grey powder from its backside.

‘Dust-bugs,’ cautioned Atticus. ‘Try not to -.’ 

His warning came too late; erupting like firecrackers, the beetles took off in unison, the air turning black and unbreathable with the dirt sprayed from their bottoms.  Kyp staggered towards what he hoped was the exit from the cave, dust-bugs ricocheting off the walls like artillery shells.  He managed to crawl his way out and stand up, a dust-cloud surrounding him.

‘Atticus?’

‘Over here!’

Kyp froze. 

If Atticus was ‘over there’ then who, or what, had touched him on the shoulder?