 The Golden Compass
The Subtle Knife
Synopsis
Read an Excerpt
Reader’s Guide
Teacher’s Guide
Cast of Characters
Glossary
The Liber Angelorum
Listen 
The Amber Spyglass
Lyra’s Oxford
The Science of
Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials
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The Subtle Knife: Excerpts
Chapter One - The Cat and the Hornbeam Trees
Will tugged at his mother's hand and said, "Come on, come on..."
But his
mother hung back. She was still afraid. Will looked up and down the narrow
street in the evening light, along the little terrace of houses, each
behind its tiny garden and its box hedge, with the sun glaring off the
windows of one side and leaving the other in shadow. There wasn't much
time. People would be having their meal about now, and soon there would
be other children around, to stare and comment and notice. It was dangerous
to wait, but all he could do was persuade her, as usual.
"Mum, let's
go in and see Mrs. Cooper," he said. "Look, we're nearly there."
"Mrs. Cooper?"
she said doubtfully.
But he was
already ringing the bell. He had to put down the bag to do it, because
his other hand still held his mother's. It might have bothered him at
twelve years of age to be seen holding his mother's hand, but he knew
what would happen to her if he didn't.
The door
opened, and there was the stooped elderly figure of the piano teacher,
with the scent of lavender water about her as he remembered.
"Who's that?
Is that William?" the old lady said. "I haven't seen you for over a year.
What do you want, dear?"
"I want
to come in, please, and bring my mother," he said firmly.
Mrs. Cooper
looked at the woman with the untidy hair and the distracted half-smile,
and at the boy with the fierce, unhappy glare in his eyes, the tight-set
lips, the jutting jaw. And then she saw that Mrs. Parry, Will's mother,
had put makeup on one eye but not on the other. And she hadn't noticed.
And neither had Will. Something was wrong.
"Well..."
she said, and stepped aside to make room in the narrow hall.
Will looked
up and down the road before closing the door, and Mrs. Cooper saw how
tightly Mrs. Parry was clinging to her son's hand, and how tenderly he
guided her into the sitting room where the piano was (of course, that
was the only room he knew); and she noticed that Mrs. Parry's clothes
smelled slightly musty, as if they'd been too long in the washing machine
before drying; and how similar the two of them looked as they sat on the
sofa with the evening sun full on their faces, their broad cheekbones,
their wide eyes, their straight black brows.
"What is
it, William?" the old lady said. "What's the matter?"
"My mother
needs somewhere to stay for a few days," he said. "It's too difficult
to look after her at home just now. I don't mean she's ill. She's just
kind of confused and muddled, and she gets a bit worried. She won't be
hard to look after. She just needs someone to be kind to her, and I think
you could do that quite easily, probably."
The woman
was looking at her son without seeming to understand, and Mrs. Cooper
saw a bruise on her cheek. Will hadn't taken his eyes off Mrs. Cooper,
and his expression was desperate.
"She won't
be expensive," he went on. "I've brought some packets of food, enough
to last, I should think. You could have some of it too. She won't mind
sharing."
"But...I
don't know if I should...Doesn't she need a doctor?"
"No! She's
not ill."
"But there
must be someone who can...I mean, isn't there a neighbor or someone in
the family - "
"We haven't
got any family. Only us. And the neighbors are too busy."
"What about
the social services? I don't mean to put you off, dear, but - "
"No! No.
She just needs a bit of help. I can't do it myself for a little while,
but I won't be long. I'm going to...I've got things to do. But I'll be
back soon, and I'll take her home again, I promise. You won't have to
do it for long."
The mother
was looking at her son with such trust, and he turned and smiled at her
with such love and reassurance, that Mrs. Cooper couldn't say no.
"Well,"
she said, turning to Mrs. Parry, "I'm sure it won't matter for a day or
so. You can have my daughter's room, dear. She's in Australia. She won't
be needing it again."
"Thank you,"
said Will, and stood up as if he were in a hurry to leave.
"But where
are you going to be?" said Mrs. Cooper.
"I'm going
to be staying with a friend," he said. "I'll phone up as often as I can.
I've got your number. It'll be all right."
His mother
was looking at him, bewildered. He bent over and kissed her clumsily.
"Don't worry,"
he said. "Mrs. Cooper will look after you better than me, honest. And
I'll phone up and talk to you tomorrow."
They hugged
tightly, and then Will kissed her again and gently unfastened her arms
from his neck before going to the front door. Mrs. Cooper could see he
was upset, because his eyes were glistening, but he turned, remembering
his manners, and held out his hand.
"Good-bye,"
he said, "and thank you very much."
"William,"
she said, "I wish you'd tell me what the matter is - "
"It's a
bit complicated," he said, "but she won't be any trouble, honestly."
That wasn't
what she meant, and both of them knew it; but somehow Will was in charge
of this business, whatever it was. The old lady thought she'd never seen
a child so implacable.
He turned
away, already thinking about the empty house.
The close
where Will and his mother lived was a loop of road in a modern estate
with a dozen identical houses, of which theirs was by far the shabbiest.
The front garden was just a patch of weedy grass; his mother had planted
some shrubs earlier in the year, but they'd shriveled and died for lack
of watering. As Will came around the corner, his cat, Moxie, rose up from
her favorite spot under the still-living hydrangea and stretched before
greeting him with a soft meow and butting her head against his leg.
He picked
her up and whispered, "Have they come back, Moxie? Have you seen them?"
The house
was silent. In the last of the evening light the man across the road was
washing his car, but he took no notice of Will, and Will didn't look at
him. The less notice people took, the better.
Holding
Moxie against his chest, he unlocked the door and went in quickly. Then
he listened very carefully before putting her down. There was nothing
to hear; the house was empty.
He opened
a tin for Moxie and left her to eat in the kitchen. How long before the
men came back? There was no way of telling, so he'd better move quickly.
He went upstairs and began to search.
He was looking
for a battered green leather writing case. There are a surprising number
of places to hide something that size even in any ordinary modern house;
you don't need secret panels and extensive cellars in order to make something
hard to find. Will searched his mother's bedroom first, ashamed to be
looking through the drawers where she kept her underclothes, and then
he worked systematically through the rest of the rooms upstairs, even
his own. Moxie came to see what he was doing and sat and cleaned herself
nearby, for company.
But he didn't find it.
By that
time it was dark, and he was hungry. He made himself baked beans on toast
and sat at the kitchen table wondering about the best order to look through
the downstairs rooms.
As he was
finishing his meal, the phone rang.
He sat absolutely
still, his heart thumping. He counted: twenty-six rings, and then it stopped.
He put his plate in the sink and started to search again.
Four hours
later he still hadn't found the green leather case. It was half past one,
and he was exhausted. He lay on his bed fully clothed and fell asleep
at once, his dreams tense and crowded, his mother's unhappy, frightened
face always there just out of reach.
And almost
at once, it seemed (though he'd been asleep for nearly three hours), he
woke up knowing two things simultaneously.
First, he
knew where the case was. And second, he knew that the men were downstairs,
opening the kitchen door.
He lifted
Moxie out of the way and softly hushed her sleepy protest. Then he swung
his legs over the side of the bed and put on his shoes, straining every
nerve to hear the sounds from downstairs. They were very quiet sounds:
a chair being lifted and replaced, a short whisper, the creak of a floorboard.
Moving more
silently than the men were, he left his bedroom and tiptoed to the spare
room at the top of the stairs. It wasn't quite pitch-dark, and in the
ghostly gray predawn light he could see the old treadle sewing machine.
He'd been through the room thoroughly only hours before, but he'd forgotten
the compartment at the side of the sewing machine, where all the patterns
and bobbins were kept.
He felt
for it delicately, listening all the while. The men were moving about
downstairs, and Will could see a dim flicker of light that might have
been a flashlight at the edge of the door.
Then he
found the catch of the compartment and clicked it open, and there, just
as he'd known it would be, was the leather writing case.
And now
what could he do? He crouched in the dimness, heart pounding, listening
hard.
The two
men were in the hall downstairs. He heard one of them say quietly, "Come
on. I can hear the milkman down the road."
"It's not
here, though," said the other voice. "We'll have to look upstairs."
"Go on,
then. Don't hang about."
Will braced
himself as he heard the quiet creak of the top step. The man was making
no noise at all, but he couldn't help the creak if he wasn't expecting
it. Then there was a pause. A very thin beam of flashlight swept along
the floor outside. Will saw it through the crack.
Then the
door began to move. Will waited till the man was framed in the open doorway,
and then exploded up out of the dark and crashed into the intruder's belly.
But neither
of them saw the cat.
As the man
had reached the top step, Moxie had come silently out of the bedroom and
stood with raised tail just behind the man's legs, ready to rub herself
against them. The man, who was trained and fit and hard, could have dealt
with Will, but the cat was in the way, and as the man tried to move back,
he tripped over her. With a sharp gasp he fell backward down the stairs
and crashed his head brutally against the hall table.
Will heard
a hideous crack, and didn't stop to wonder about it. Clutching the writing
case, he swung himself down the banister, leaping over the man's body
that lay twitching and crumpled at the foot of the flight, seized the
tattered tote bag from the table, and was out of the front door and away
before the other man could do more than come out of the living room and
stare.
Even in
his fear and haste Will wondered why the other man didn't shout after
him, or chase him. They'd be after him soon, though, with their cars and
their cell phones. The only thing to do was run.
He saw the
milkman turning into the close, the lights of his electric cart pallid
in the dawn glimmer that was already filling the sky. Will jumped over
the fence into the next-door garden, down the passage beside the house,
over the next garden wall, across a dew-wet lawn, through the hedge, and
into the tangle of shrubs and trees between the housing estate and the
main road. There he crawled under a bush and lay panting and trembling.
It was too early to be out on the road: wait till later, when the rush
hour started.
He couldn't
get out of his mind the crack as the man's head struck the table, and
the way his neck was bent so far and in such a wrong way, and the dreadful
twitching of his limbs. The man was dead. He'd killed him.
He couldn't
get it out of his mind, but he had to. There was quite enough to think
about. His mother: would she really be safe where she was? Mrs. Cooper
wouldn't tell, would she? Even if Will didn't turn up as he'd said he
would? Because he couldn't, now that he'd killed someone.
And Moxie.
Who'd feed Moxie? Would Moxie worry about where they were? Would she try
to follow them?
It was getting
lighter by the minute. It was light enough already to check through the
things in the tote bag: his mother's purse, the latest letter from the
lawyer, the road map of southern England, chocolate bars, toothpaste,
spare socks and pants. And the green leather writing case.
Everything
was there. Everything was going according to plan, really.
Except that
he'd killed someone.
Will had
first realized his mother was different from other people, and that he
had to look after her, when he was seven. They were in a supermarket,
and they were playing a game: they were allowed to put an item in the
cart only when no one was looking. It was Will's job to look all around
and whisper "Now," and she would snatch a tin or a packet from the shelf
and put it silently into the cart. When things were in there they were
safe, because they became invisible.
It was a
good game, and it went on for a long time, because this was a Saturday
morning and the shop was full, but they were good at it and worked well
together. They trusted each other. Will loved his mother very much and
often told her so, and she told him the same.
So when
they reached the checkout Will was excited and happy because they'd nearly
won. And when his mother couldn't find her purse, that was part of the
game too, even when she said the enemies must have stolen it; but Will
was getting tired by this time, and hungry too, and Mummy wasn't so happy
anymore. She was really frightened, and they went around and around putting
things back on the shelves, but this time they had to be extra careful
because the enemies were tracking them down by means of her credit card
numbers, which they knew because they had her purse....
And Will
got more and more frightened himself. He realized how clever his mother
had been to make this real danger into a game so that he wouldn't be alarmed,
and how, now that he knew the truth, he had to pretend not to be frightened,
so as to reassure her.
So the little
boy pretended it was a game still, so she didn't have to worry that he
was frightened, and they went home without any shopping, but safe from
the enemies; and then Will found the purse on the hall table anyway. On
Monday they went to the bank and closed her account, and opened another
somewhere else, just to be sure. Thus the danger passed.
But sometime
during the next few months, Will realized slowly and unwillingly that
those enemies of his mother's were not in the world out there, but in
her mind. That made them no less real, no less frightening and dangerous;
it just meant he had to protect her even more carefully. And from the
moment in the supermarket when he had realized he must pretend in order
not to worry his mother, part of Will's mind was always alert to her anxieties.
He loved her so much he would have died to protect her.
As for Will's
father, he had vanished long before Will was able to remember him. Will
was passionately curious about his father, and he used to plague his mother
with questions, most of which she couldn't answer.
"Was he a rich man?"
"Where did he go?"
"Why did he go?"
"Is he dead?"
"Will he come back?"
"What was he like?"
The last
question was the only one she could help him with. John Parry had been
a handsome man, a brave and clever officer in the Royal Marines, who had
left the army to become an explorer and lead expeditions to remote parts
of the world. Will thrilled to hear about this. No father could be more
exciting than an explorer. From then on, in all his games he had an invisible
companion: he and his father were together hacking through the jungle,
shading their eyes to gaze out across stormy seas from the deck of their
schooner, holding up a torch to decipher mysterious inscriptions in a
bat-infested cave....They were the best of friends, they saved each other's
life countless times, they laughed and talked together over campfires
long into the night.
But the
older he got, the more Will began to wonder. Why were there no pictures
of his father in this part of the world or that, riding with frost-bearded
men on Arctic sledges or examining creeper-covered ruins in the jungle?
Had nothing survived of the trophies and curiosities he must have brought
home? Was nothing written about him in a book?
His mother didn't know. But one thing she had said stuck in his mind.
She said,
"One day, you'll follow in your father's footsteps. You're going to be
a great man too. You'll take up his mantle."
And though
Will didn't know what that meant, he understood the sense of it, and felt
uplifted with pride and purpose. All his games were going to come true.
His father was alive, lost somewhere in the wild, and he was going to
rescue him and take up his mantle....It was worth living a difficult life,
if you had a great aim like that.
So he kept
his mother's trouble secret. There were times when she was calmer and
clearer than others, and he took care to learn from her then how to shop
and cook and keep the house clean, so that he could do it when she was
confused and frightened. And he learned how to conceal himself, too, how
to remain unnoticed at school, how not to attract attention from the neighbors,
even when his mother was in such a state of fear and madness that she
could barely speak. What Will himself feared more than anything was that
the authorities would find out about her, and take her away, and put him
in a home among strangers. Any difficulty was better than that. Because
there came times when the darkness cleared from her mind, and she was
happy again, and she laughed at her fears and blessed him for looking
after her so well; and she was so full of love and sweetness then that
he could think of no better companion, and wanted nothing more than to
live with her alone forever.
But then the men came.
They weren't
police, and they weren't social services, and they weren't criminals--at
least as far as Will could judge. They wouldn't tell him what they wanted,
in spite of his efforts to keep them away; they'd speak only to his mother.
And her state was fragile just then.
But he listened
outside the door, and heard them ask about his father, and felt his breath
come more quickly.
The men
wanted to know where John Parry had gone, and whether he'd sent anything
back to her, and when she'd last heard from him, and whether he'd had
contact with any foreign embassies. Will heard his mother getting more
and more distressed, and finally he ran into the room and told them to
go.
He looked
so fierce that neither of the men laughed, though he was so young. They
could easily have knocked him down, or held him off the floor with one
hand, but he was fearless, and his anger was hot and deadly.
So they
left. Naturally, this episode strengthened Will's conviction: his father
was in trouble somewhere, and only he could help. His games weren't childish
anymore, and he didn't play so openly. It was coming true, and he had
to be worthy of it.
And not
long afterward the men came back, insisting that Will's mother had something
to tell them. They came when Will was at school, and one of them kept
her talking downstairs while the other searched the bedrooms. She didn't
realize what they were doing. But Will came home early and found them,
and once again he blazed at them, and once again they left.
They seemed
to know that he wouldn't go to the police, for fear of losing his mother
to the authorities, and they got more and more persistent. Finally they
broke into the house when Will had gone to fetch his mother home from
the park. It was getting worse for her now, and she believed that she
had to touch every separate slat in every separate bench beside the pond.
Will would help her, to get it done quicker. When they got home that day
they saw the back of the men's car disappearing out of the close, and
he got inside to find that they'd been through the house and searched
most of the drawers and cupboards.
He knew
what they were after. The green leather case was his mother's most precious
possession; he would never dream of looking through it, and he didn't
even know where she kept it. But he knew it contained letters, and he
knew she read them sometimes, and cried, and it was then that she talked
about his father. So Will supposed that this was what the men were after,
and knew he had to do something about it.
He decided
first to find somewhere safe for his mother to stay. He thought and thought,
but he had no friends to ask, and the neighbors were already suspicious,
and the only person he thought he could trust was Mrs. Cooper. Once his
mother was safely there, he was going to find the green leather case and
look at what was in it, and then he was going to go to Oxford, where he'd
find the answer to some of his questions. But the men came too soon.
And now he'd killed one of them.
So the police would be after him too.
Well, he
was good at not being noticed. He'd have to not be noticed harder than
he'd ever done in his life before, and keep it up as long as he could,
till either he found his father or they found him. And if they found him
first, he didn't care how many more of them he killed.
Later that
day, toward midnight in fact, Will was walking out of the city of Oxford,
forty miles away. He was tired to his very bones. He had hitchhiked, and
ridden on two buses, and walked, and reached Oxford at six in the evening,
too late to do what he needed to do. He'd eaten at a Burger King and gone
to a cinema to hide (though what the film was, he forgot even as he was
watching it), and now he was walking along an endless road through the
suburbs, heading north.
No one had
noticed him so far. But he was aware that he'd better find somewhere to
sleep before long, because the later it got, the more noticeable he'd
be. The trouble was that there was nowhere to hide in the gardens of the
comfortable houses along this road, and there was still no sign of open
country.
He came
to a large traffic circle where the road going north crossed the Oxford
ring road going east and west. At this time of night there was very little
traffic, and the road where he stood was quiet, with comfortable houses
set back behind a wide expanse of grass on either side. Planted along
the grass at the road's edge were two lines of hornbeam trees, odd-looking
things with perfectly symmetrical close-leafed crowns, more like children's
drawings than like real trees. The streetlights made the scene look artificial,
like a stage set. Will was stupefied with exhaustion, and he might have
gone on to the north, or he might have laid his head on the grass under
one of those trees and slept; but as he stood trying to clear his head,
he saw a cat.
She was
a tabby, like Moxie. She padded out of a garden on the Oxford side of
the road, where Will was standing. Will put down his tote bag and held
out his hand, and the cat came up to rub her head against his knuckles,
just as Moxie did. Of course, every cat behaved like that, but all the
same Will felt such a longing to turn for home that tears scalded his
eyes.
Eventually
the cat turned away. This was night, and there was a territory to patrol,
there were mice to hunt. She padded across the road and toward the bushes
just beyond the hornbeam trees, and there she stopped.
Will, still
watching, saw the cat behave curiously.
She reached
out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite
invisible to Will. Then she leaped backward, back arched and fur on end,
tail held out stiffly. Will knew cat behavior. He watched more alertly
as the cat approached the spot again, just an empty patch of grass between
the hornbeams and the bushes of a garden hedge, and patted the air once
more.
Again she
leaped back, but less far and with less alarm this time. After another
few seconds of sniffing, touching, and whisker twitching, curiosity overcame
wariness.
The cat stepped forward and vanished.
Will blinked.
Then he stood still, close to the trunk of the nearest tree, as a truck
came around the circle and swept its lights over him. When it had gone
past, he crossed the road, keeping his eyes on the spot where the cat
had been investigating. It wasn't easy, because there was nothing to fix
on, but when he came to the place and cast about to look closely, he saw
it.
At least,
he saw it from some angles. It looked as if someone had cut a patch out
of the air, about two yards from the edge of the road, a patch roughly
square in shape and less than a yard across. If you were level with the
patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely
invisible from behind. You could see it only from the side nearest the
road, and you couldn't see it easily even from there, because all you
could see through it was exactly the same kind of thing that lay in front
of it on this side: a patch of grass lit by a streetlight.
But Will
knew without the slightest doubt that that patch of grass on the other
side was in a different world.
He couldn't
possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that
fire burned and kindness was good. He was looking at something profoundly
alien.
And for
that reason alone, it enticed him to stoop and look further. What he saw
made his head swim and his heart thump harder, but he didn't hesitate:
he pushed his tote bag through, and then scrambled through himself, through
the hole in the fabric of this world and into another.
He found
himself standing under a row of trees. But not hornbeam trees: these were
tall palms, and they were growing, like the trees in Oxford, in a row
along the grass. But this was the center of a broad boulevard, and at
the side of the boulevard was a line of cafés and small shops,
all brightly lit, all open, and all utterly silent and empty beneath a
sky thick with stars. The hot night was laden with the scent of flowers
and with the salt smell of the sea.
Will looked
around carefully. Behind him the full moon shone down over a distant prospect
of great green hills, and on the slopes at the foot of the hills there
were houses with rich gardens, and an open parkland with groves of trees
and the white gleam of a classical temple.
Just beside
him was that bare patch in the air, as hard to see from this side as from
the other, but definitely there. He bent to look through and saw the road
in Oxford, his own world. He turned away with a shudder: whatever this
new world was, it had to be better than what he'd just left. With a dawning
lightheadedness, the feeling that he was dreaming but awake at the same
time, he stood up and looked around for the cat, his guide.
She was
nowhere in sight. No doubt she was already exploring those narrow streets
and gardens beyond the cafés whose lights were so inviting. Will
lifted up his tattered tote bag and walked slowly across the road toward
them, moving very carefully in case it all disappeared.
The air
of the place had something Mediterranean or maybe Caribbean about it.
Will had never been out of England, so he couldn't compare it with anywhere
he knew, but it was the kind of place where people came out late at night
to eat and drink, to dance and enjoy music. Except that there was no one
here, and the silence was immense.
On the first
corner he reached there stood a café, with little green tables
on the pavement and a zinc-topped bar and an espresso machine. On some
of the tables glasses stood half-empty; in one ashtray a cigarette had
burned down to the butt; a plate of risotto stood next to a basket of
stale rolls as hard as cardboard.
He took
a bottle of lemonade from the cooler behind the bar and then thought for
a moment before dropping a pound coin in the till. As soon as he'd shut
the till, he opened it again, realizing that the money in there might
say what this place was called. The currency was called the corona, but
he couldn't tell any more than that.
He put the
money back and opened the bottle on the opener fixed to the counter before
leaving the café and wandering down the street going away from
the boulevard. Little grocery shops and bakeries stood between jewelers
and florists and bead-curtained doors opening into private houses, where
wrought-iron balconies thick with flowers overhung the narrow pavement,
and where the silence, being enclosed, was even more profound.
The streets
were leading downward, and before very long they opened out onto a broad
avenue where more palm trees reached high into the air, the underside
of their leaves glowing in the streetlights.
On the other side of the avenue was the sea.
Will found
himself facing a harbor enclosed from the left by a stone breakwater and
from the right by a headland on which a large building with stone columns
and wide steps and ornate balconies stood floodlit among flowering trees
and bushes. In the harbor one or two rowboats lay still at anchor, and
beyond the breakwater the starlight glittered on a calm sea.
By now Will's
exhaustion had been wiped out. He was wide awake and possessed by wonder.
From time to time, on his way through the narrow streets, he'd put out
a hand to touch a wall or a doorway or the flowers in a window box, and
found them solid and convincing. Now he wanted to touch the whole landscape
in front of him, because it was too wide to take in through his eyes alone.
He stood still, breathing deeply, almost afraid.
He discovered
that he was still holding the bottle he'd taken from the café.
He drank from it, and it tasted like what it was, ice-cold lemonade; and
welcome, too, because the night air was hot.
He wandered
along to the right, past hotels with awnings over brightly lit entrances
and bougainvillea flowering beside them, until he came to the gardens
on the little headland. The building in the trees with its ornate facade
lit by floodlights might have been an opera house. There were paths leading
here and there among the lamp-hung oleander trees, but not a sound of
life could be heard: no night birds singing, no insects, nothing but Will's
own footsteps.
The only
sound he could hear came from the regular, quiet breaking of delicate
waves from the beach beyond the palm trees at the edge of the garden.
Will made his way there. The tide was halfway in, or halfway out, and
a row of pedal boats was drawn up on the soft white sand above the high-water
line. Every few seconds a tiny wave folded itself over at the sea's edge
before sliding back neatly under the next. Fifty yards or so out on the
calm water was a diving platform.
Will sat
on the side of one of the pedal boats and kicked off his shoes, his cheap
sneakers that were coming apart and cramping his hot feet. He dropped
his socks beside them and pushed his toes deep into the sand. A few seconds
later he had thrown off the rest of his clothes and was walking into the
sea.
The water
was deliciously between cool and warm. He splashed out to the diving platform
and pulled himself up to sit on its weather-softened planking and look
back at the city.
To his right
the harbor lay enclosed by its breakwater. Beyond it a mile or so away
stood a red-and-white-striped lighthouse. And beyond the lighthouse, distant
cliffs rose dimly, and beyond them, those great wide rolling hills he'd
seen from the place he'd first come through.
Closer at
hand were the light-bearing trees of the casino gardens, and the streets
of the city, and the waterfront with its hotels and cafés and warm-lit
shops, all silent, all empty.
And all
safe. No one could follow him here; the men who'd searched the house would
never know; the police would never find him. He had a whole world to hide
in.
For the
first time since he'd run out of his front door that morning, Will began
to feel secure.
He was thirsty
again, and hungry too, because he'd last eaten in another world, after
all. He slipped into the water and swam back more slowly to the beach,
where he put on his underpants and carried the rest of his clothes and
the tote bag. He dropped the empty bottle into the first rubbish bin he
found and walked barefoot along the pavement toward the harbor.
When his
skin had dried a little, he pulled on his jeans and looked for somewhere
he'd be likely to find food. The hotels were too grand. He looked inside
the first hotel, but it was so large that he felt uncomfortable, and he
kept moving down the waterfront until he found a little café that
looked like the right place. He couldn't have said why; it was very similar
to a dozen others, with its first-floor balcony laden with flowerpots
and its tables and chairs on the pavement outside, but it welcomed him.
There was
a bar with photographs of boxers on the wall, and a signed poster of a
broadly smiling accordion player. There was a kitchen, and a door beside
it that opened on to a narrow flight of stairs, carpeted in a bright floral
pattern.
He climbed
quietly up to the narrow landing and opened the first door he came to.
It was the room at the front. The air was hot and stuffy, and Will opened
the glass door onto the balcony to let in the night air. The room itself
was small and furnished with things that were too big for it, and shabby,
but it was clean and comfortable. Hospitable people lived here. There
was a little shelf of books, a magazine on the table, a couple of photographs
in frames.
Will left
and looked in the other rooms: a little bathroom, a bedroom with a double
bed.
Something
made his skin prickle before he opened the last door. His heart raced.
He wasn't sure if he'd heard a sound from inside, but something told him
that the room wasn't empty. He thought how odd it was that this day had
begun with someone outside a darkened room, and himself waiting inside;
and now the positions were reversed -
And as he
stood wondering, the door burst open and something came hurtling at him
like a wild beast.
But his
memory had warned him, and he wasn't standing quite close enough to be
knocked over. He fought hard: knee, head, fist, and the strength of his
arms against it, him, her -
A girl about
his own age, ferocious, snarling, with ragged dirty clothes and thin bare
limbs.
She realized
what he was at the same moment, and snatched herself away from his bare
chest to crouch in the corner of the dark landing like a cat at bay. And
there was a cat beside her, to his astonishment: a large wildcat, as tall
as his knee, fur on end, teeth bared, tail erect.
She put
her hand on the cat's back and licked her dry lips, watching his every
movement.
Will stood
up slowly.
"Who are
you?"
"Lyra Silvertongue,"
she said.
"Do you
live here?"
"No," she
said vehemently.
"Then what
is this place? This city?"
"I don't
know."
"Where do
you come from?"
"From my
world. It's joined on. Where's your dæmon?"
His eyes
widened. Then he saw something extraordinary happen to the cat: it leaped
into her arms, and when it got there, it changed shape. Now it was a red-brown
stoat with a cream throat and belly, and it glared at him as ferociously
as the girl herself. But then another shift in things took place, because
he realized that they, both girl and stoat, were profoundly afraid of
him, as much as if he'd been a ghost.
"I haven't
got a demon," he said. "I don't know what you mean." Then, "Oh! Is that
your demon?"
She stood
up slowly. The stoat curled himself around her neck, and his dark eyes
never left Will's face.
"But you're
alive," she said, half-disbelievingly. "You en't...You en't been..."
"My name's
Will Parry," he said. "I don't know what you mean about demons. In my
world demon means...it means devil, something evil."
"In your
world? You mean this en't your world?"
"No. I just
found...a way in. Like your world, I suppose. It must be joined on."
She relaxed
a little, but she still watched him intently, and he stayed calm and quiet
as if she were a strange cat he was making friends with.
"Have you
seen anyone else in this city?" he went on.
"No."
"How long
have you been here?"
"Dunno.
A few days. I can't remember."
"So why
did you come here?"
"I'm looking
for Dust," she said.
"Looking
for dust? What, gold dust? What sort of dust?"
She narrowed
her eyes and said nothing. He turned away to go downstairs.
"I'm hungry,"
he said. "Is there any food in the kitchen?"
"I dunno,"
she said, and followed, keeping her distance from him.
In the kitchen
Will found the ingredients for a casserole of chicken and onions and peppers,
but they hadn't been cooked, and in the heat they were smelling bad. He
swept them all into the dustbin.
"Haven't
you eaten anything?" he said, and opened the fridge.
Lyra came
to look.
"I didn't
know this was here," she said. "Oh! It's cold."
Her dæmon
had changed again, and become a huge, brightly colored butterfly, which
fluttered into the fridge briefly and out again at once to settle on her
shoulder. The butterfly raised and lowered his wings slowly. Will felt
he shouldn't stare, though his head was ringing with the strangeness of
it.
"Haven't
you seen a fridge before?" he said.
He found
a can of cola and handed it to her before taking out a tray of eggs. She
pressed the can between her palms with pleasure.
"Drink it,
then," he said.
She looked
at it, frowning. She didn't know how to open it. He snapped the lid for
her, and the drink frothed out. She licked it suspiciously, and then her
eyes opened wide.
"This is
good?" she said, her voice half hoping and half fearful.
"Yeah. They
have Coke in this world, obviously. Look, I'll drink some to prove it
isn't poison."
He opened
another can. Once she saw him drink, she followed his example. She was
obviously thirsty. She drank so quickly that the bubbles got up her nose,
and she snorted and belched loudly, and scowled when he looked at her.
"I'm going
to make an omelette," he said. "D'you want some?"
"I don't
know what omelette is."
"Well, watch
and you'll see. Or there's a can of baked beans, if you'd like."
"I don't
know baked beans."
He showed
her the can. She looked for the snap-open top like the one on the cola
can.
"No, you
have to use a can opener," he said. "Don't they have can openers in your
world?"
"In my world
servants do the cooking," she said scornfully.
"Look in
the drawer over there."
She rummaged
through the kitchen cutlery while he broke six eggs into a bowl and whisked
them with a fork.
"That's
it," he said, watching. "With the red handle. Bring it here."
He pierced
the lid and showed her how to open the can.
"Now get
that little saucepan off the hook and tip them in," he told her.
She sniffed
the beans, and again an expression of pleasure and suspicion entered her
eyes. She tipped the can into the saucepan and licked a finger, watching
as Will shook salt and pepper into the eggs and cut a knob of butter from
a package in the fridge into a cast-iron pan. He went into the bar to
find some matches, and when he came back she was dipping her dirty finger
in the bowl of beaten eggs and licking it greedily. Her dæmon, a
cat again, was dipping his paw in it, too, but he backed away when Will
came near.
"It's not
cooked yet," Will said, taking it away. "When did you last have a meal?"
"At my father's
house on Svalbard," she said. "Days and days ago. I don't know. I found
bread and stuff here and ate that."
He lit the
gas, melted the butter, poured in the eggs, and let them run all over
the base of it. Her eyes followed everything greedily, watching him pull
the eggs up into soft ridges in the center as they cooked and tilt the
pan to let raw egg flow into the space. She watched him, too, looking
at his face and his working hands and his bare shoulders and his feet.
When the
omelette was cooked he folded it over and cut it in half with the spatula.
"Find a
couple of plates," he said, and Lyra obediently did so.
She seemed
quite willing to take orders if she saw the sense of them, so he told
her to go and clear a table in front of the café. He brought out
the food and some knives and forks from a drawer, and they sat down together,
a little awkwardly.
She ate
hers in less than a minute, and then fidgeted, swinging back and forth
on her chair and plucking at the plastic strips of the woven seat while
he finished his. Her dæmon changed yet again, and became a goldfinch,
pecking at invisible crumbs on the tabletop.
Will ate
slowly. He'd given her most of the beans, but even so he took much longer
than she did. The harbor in front of them, the lights along the empty
boulevard, the stars in the dark sky above, all hung in the huge silence
as if nothing else existed at all.
And all
the time he was intensely aware of the girl. She was small and slight,
but wiry, and she'd fought like a tiger; his fist had raised a bruise
on her cheek, and she was ignoring it. Her expression was a mixture of
the very young - when she first tasted the cola - and a kind of deep,
sad wariness. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair would be a darkish
blond once it was washed; because she was filthy, and she smelled as if
she hadn't bathed for days.
"Laura?
Lara?" Will said.
"Lyra."
"Lyra...Silvertongue?"
"Yes."
"Where is
your world? How did you get here?"
She shrugged.
"I walked," she said. "It was all foggy. I didn't know where I was going.
At least, I knew I was going out of my world. But I couldn't see this
one till the fog cleared. Then I found myself here."
"What did
you say about dust?"
"Dust, yeah.
I'm going to find out about it. But this world seems to be empty. There's
no one here to ask. I've been here for...I dunno, three days, maybe four.
And there's no one here."
"But why
do you want to find out about dust?"
"Special
Dust," she said shortly. "Not ordinary dust, obviously."
The dæmon
changed again. He did so in the flick of an eye, and from a goldfinch
he became a rat, a powerful pitch-black rat with red eyes. Will looked
at him with wide wary eyes, and the girl saw his glance.
"You have
got a dæmon," she said decisively. "Inside you."
He didn't
know what to say.
"You have,"
she went on. "You wouldn't be human else. You'd be...half dead. We seen
a kid with his dæmon cut away. You en't like that. Even if you don't
know you've got a dæmon, you have. We was scared at first when we
saw you. Like you was a night-ghast or something. But then we saw you
weren't like that at all."
"We?"
"Me and
Pantalaimon. Us. But you, your dæmon en't separate from you. It's
you. A part of you. You're part of each other. En't there anyone in your
world like us? Are they all like you, with their dæmons all hidden
away?"
Will looked
at the two of them, the skinny pale-eyed girl with her black rat dæmon
now sitting in her arms, and felt profoundly alone.
"I'm tired.
I'm going to bed," he said. "Are you going to stay in this city?"
"Dunno.
I've got to find out more about what I'm looking for. There must be some
Scholars in this world. There must be someone who knows about it."
"Maybe not
in this world. But I came here out of a place called Oxford. There's plenty
of scholars there, if that's what you want."
"Oxford?"
she cried. "That's where I come from!"
"Is there
an Oxford in your world, then? You never came from my world."
"No," she
said decisively. "Different worlds. But in my world there's an Oxford
too. We're both speaking English, en't we? Stands to reason there's other
things the same. How did you get through? Is there a bridge, or what?"
"Just a
kind of window in the air."
"Show me,"
she said.
It was a
command, not a request. He shook his head.
"Not now,"
he said. "I want to sleep. Anyway, it's the middle of the night."
"Then show
me in the morning!"
"All right,
I'll show you. But I've got my own things to do. You'll have to find your
scholars by yourself."
"Easy,"
she said. "I know all about Scholars."
He put the
plates together and stood up.
"I cooked,"
he said, "so you can wash the dishes."
She looked
incredulous. "Wash the dishes?" she scoffed. "There's millions of clean
ones lying about! Anyway, I'm not a servant. I'm not going to wash them."
"So I won't
show you the way through."
"I'll find
it by myself."
"You won't;
it's hidden. You'd never find it. Listen, I don't know how long we can
stay in this place. We've got to eat, so we'll eat what's here, but we'll
tidy up afterward and keep the place clean, because we ought to. You wash
these dishes. We've got to treat this place right. Now I'm going to bed.
I'll have the other room. I'll see you in the morning."
He went
inside, cleaned his teeth with a finger and some toothpaste from his tattered
bag, fell on the double bed, and was asleep in a moment.
Lyra waited
till she was sure he was asleep, and then took the dishes into the kitchen
and ran them under the tap, rubbing hard with a cloth until they looked
clean. She did the same with the knives and forks, but the procedure didn't
work with the omelette pan, so she tried a bar of yellow soap on it, and
picked at it stubbornly until it looked as clean as she thought it was
going to. Then she dried everything on another cloth and stacked it neatly
on the drainboard.
Because
she was still thirsty and because she wanted to try opening a can, she
snapped open another cola and took it upstairs. She listened outside Will's
door and, hearing nothing, tiptoed into the other room and took out the
alethiometer from under her pillow.
She didn't
need to be close to Will to ask about him, but she wanted to look anyway,
and she turned his door handle as quietly as she could before going in.
There was
a light on the sea front outside shining straight up into the room, and
in the glow reflected from the ceiling she looked down at the sleeping
boy. He was frowning, and his face glistened with sweat. He was strong
and stocky, not as formed as a grown man, of course, because he wasn't
much older than she was, but he'd be powerful one day. How much easier
if his dæmon had been visible! She wondered what its form might
be, and whether it was fixed yet. Whatever its form was, it would express
a nature that was savage, and courteous, and unhappy.
She tiptoed
to the window. In the glow from the streetlight she carefully set the
hands of the alethiometer, and relaxed her mind into the shape of a question.
The needle began to sweep around the dial in a series of pauses and swings
almost too fast to watch.
She had
asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy?
The alethiometer
answered: He is a murderer.
When she
saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her
how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might
still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion.
She felt as safe with him as she'd felt with Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear.
She swung
the shutter across the open window so the morning sunlight wouldn't strike
in on his face, and tiptoed out.
Copyright ©1997 by Philip Pullman
Continue to Chapter Two...
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