Un Lun Dun

66. Skipping Historical Stages

People stared at them curiously. Sitting on his step opposite was the old man they had spoken to before entering.

“So in my opinion,” he said, “you should avoid going in.”

Deeba gave him a scorching look. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Hemi, can you find somewhere?” They stumbled off to a less crowded street, and Hemi read the signs until he found them an emptish house, where they washed as best as they could under the taps, went to the living room, and collapsed.

“What exactly was that…smombie?” Deeba said.

“They used to be really rare, but these days there are more of them,” Hemi said. “Smog gets everywhere. Into cemeteries, and through the earth into the graves.”

“How do you know so much about this?” said the book.

“Do you remember where I’m from?” Hemi snapped. “There’s not much gets people in Wraithtown more riled than mistreating the dead. We’ve been complaining about this for ages. Not that anyone listened.

“Smog gets inside bodies and pulls them around like puppets. Some are nothing more than skeletons with clots of Smog around their joints. Some are like the one we saw in there.”

“Aha,” said Deeba. “And sometimes they might look even more as if they’re still alive.”

“Yeah…Of course,” Hemi said, his eyes widening as he remembered the Unstible-thing.

“And how’d it find us?”

“The Smog must’ve sent them all over the place.”

“It probably didn’t expect to find you,” the book said. “There’d have been more than one. But the forest is well known enough that it was worth staking out. Which means that there may well be others, waiting for us elsewhere.”

Deeba held up the feather and turned it in her fingers. Its key-shape was made of intricate whorls and beautifully plaited threads of matter. Its reds and blues glinted like colored glass.

“So what now?” Hemi said.

“Well,” the book said. “That was the first task. There are six more. The next thing we have to fetch is the squidbeak clipper. That’ll mean going to the docks. After that we need the bone tea. After that…”

“We can’t,” Deeba said, twirling the feather.

“What?” said the book.

“What?” said Hemi.

“Look…what are we supposed to do with all these things once we’ve got them?”

“It depends,” the book said. “The clippers are supposed to, well, to snip something open. The bone tea’s there to send something to sleep. The snail…it’s not exactly clear what the snail’s for, but there are two distinct schools of thought—”

“What do you mean ‘it’s not clear’?”

“Don’t take a tone with me! I told you, prophecies can be vague.”

“Yeah, and wrong,” muttered Hemi.

“A lot of these things,” the book went on, “the idea is that as situations arise you’ll…sort of know what to do. Some stuff is explained in detail, some isn’t. Or it’s…well…contradictory.”

“This is ridiculous,” Deeba said. “Trying to follow prophecies is obviously way too hard.”

“But this was your idea,” the book said. “And look, we got what we needed, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, and it took us two days, and we lost two people!” Deeba yelled. There was silence.

“Diss is dead, and Cavea probably is,” she said. “Do the maths. We still have six more things to get. At this rate that’s going to cost us twelve people, and there are only six of us left, and that’s if we count you, book, and Curdle! And, it’s going to take twelve days. And I haven’t got twelve days! You know that. I’ve got seven at the most.”

“That started again, though,” the book said tentatively. “After the phone call. And the number may not be accurate…”

“It’s too long. And too risky. You saw what happened to Diss! We can’t do it this way. Like you said, we don’t even know what we’re supposed to do with this stuff.” She held up the featherkey. “Like, what do I do with this?”

“Well, you open a door, obviously,” the book said.

“What door?”

“A very important door. A door without the opening of which the Smog cannot be stopped!”

“You don’t know, do you?” Deeba said.

“No,” said the book.

“No idea?”

“Not really.” It sounded quite defeated. “I think it’s the doorway to the room where the squid beak is, but…no. Not really.”

Deeba stamped around the room in rage.

“We spent two days crashing around in a forest, and people died, and we aren’t even sure what for! I’m supposed to use it to get something to get something else! Why don’t I just get the last thing in the first place?”

“As I say, the occasions tend to present themselves, and then it’s clear…” the book said.

“I’d shut up now, if I were you,” Hemi muttered to it. The book took his advice.

“If Diss hadn’t died getting us this,” she said, staring at the key, “I’d tear the bloody useless thing up. I know it’s not your fault,” she said to the book. “It was my idea. And I know it would be nice for you if what’s written in you turned out to be sort of true. But we don’t have time. And it’s too risky. So go through the tasks, and tell me what each one’s supposed to do.”

“Well, as I say, the squidbeak clipper’s supposed to hold on to something in the tearoom—”

“Forget it,” Deeba said. The book hesitated, then continued.

“The bone tea’s refreshing—”

“No.”

“But…we need it to give to the aleactor, to send him to sleep when we play ludo, so we can take the teeth-dice—”

“I said no.”

“The teeth-dice we need to chew up a—”

“No.”

“The snail, I think, can prove to us that slow and steady wins out—”

“Are you joking? No.”

“The black-or-white king’s crown explains an outcome—”

“Whatever. Don’t even know what that means.”

“— and the UnGun’s a weapon.”

There was a pause.

“Is it? A weapon? For real?”

“For very real,” Hemi said. “I didn’t know it was in the prophecy, but everyone’s heard of the UnGun.”

“It’s the most famous weapon in UnLondon’s history,” the book said.

Hemi nodded— surreptitiously, so the book wouldn’t see that Deeba wanted independent verification of everything it was saying.

“Why?” she said. “What did it do?”

Hemi looked at the book, and Deeba was sure the book was looking back at him.

“I dunno,” said Hemi. “Heroic stuff.”

Deeba rolled her eyes. “What is it?”

“A gun,” the book said, “only an un one. It says in me, ‘The Smog’s afraid of nothing but the UnGun.’ That’s what all this, all the seven tasks, leads up to. The fetching of the UnGun. It was put in a very safe place, where no one would mess with it, years ago.”

“Smog’s afraid of nothing but the UnGun, eh?”

“Yes,” the book said, then added nervously, “Well to be honest it actually says ‘nothing and the UnGun,’ but we realized that must be a misprint.”

“You’re kidding me,” Deeba snapped. “So you did know you there could be mistakes in you?”

“It was three letters,” the book said forlornly. “We didn’t think anything of it…”

“Alright. Whatever.” Deeba thought. “A weapon. Alright. Right now we haven’t got much to fight the Smog with. We need a weapon, and the Smog’s obviously scared of this one.

“So that’s what we’re going to do,” Deeba said. “We’ll skip the rest of the stuff. Save us some time. We’ll go straight to the last stage of the quest. Let’s go get the UnGun. Then we can deal with the Smog, and I can go home.”