Part 1 (2/2)

There were seven vultures flying down towards him, wearing ruffs around their necks, like European n.o.blemen in old paintings, or like circus clowns. They were ugly, smelly and mean. The biggest, ugliest, smelliest and meanest vulture settled down on Luka's windowsill, right next to him, as if they were old friends, while the other six hovered just out of reach. Bear the dog woke up and came to the window fast, growling and baring his teeth; Dog the bear leapt up a moment later and towered over Luka, looking as if he wanted to rip the vulture to pieces there and then. 'Wait,' Luka told them, because he had seen something that needed to be investigated. Hanging from the ruff around the Boss Vulture's neck was a little pouch. Luka reached for it; the vulture made no move. Inside the pouch was a scroll of paper, and on the scroll of paper was a message from Captain Aag.

'Dreadful black-tongued child,' the message read, 'disgusting witch-boy, did you imagine I would do nothing in return for what you did to me? Did you think, vile warlock infant, that I could not damage you more grievously than you damaged me? Were you so vain, so foolish, feeble pint-sized maledictor, that you thought you were the only witch in town? Throw out a curse when you can't control it, O incompetent pygmy hexer, and it will come back to smack you in the face. Or, on this occasion, in perhaps an even more satisfying act of revenge, it poleaxes someone you love.'

Luka began to s.h.i.+ver, even though the night was warm. Was this the truth? Had his burning curse against the circus boss been answered by a sleeping curse on his father? In which case, Luka thought with horror, the Big Sleep was his fault. Not even the arrival in his life of Dog the bear and Bear the dog could make up for the loss of his dad. But on the other hand, he had noticed his father's slowness long before the night of the dancing stars, so maybe this note was just a hideous lie. At any rate he was determined not to let the Boss Vulture see that he was shaken, so in a loud, firm voice, like the one he used in school plays, he said, 'I hate vultures, to be honest with you, and I'm not surprised that you are the only creatures who stayed loyal to that terrible Captain Aag. What an idea, anyway, to have a vulture act in a circus! Just shows you the type of guy he is. This, also,' Luka added, and tore the note to bits under the vulture's cynical beak, 'is the letter of a nasty man, trying to make out that he could make my father ill. He can't make anyone unwell, obviously, but he does make everyone sick.' Then, summoning up all his courage, he shooed the big bird off his windowsill and closed the window.

The vultures flew away in disarray, and Luka collapsed onto his bed, trembling. His dog and his bear nuzzled at him, but he could not be comforted. Ras.h.i.+d was Sleeping, and he, Luka, could not get rid of the notion that he himself and he alone was the one who had brought this curse down on his family.

After a sleepless night, Luka got up before dawn and crept into his parents' bedroom, as he had done so often in happier times. There lay his father, Asleep, with tubes running into his arm to feed him, and a monitor showing his heartbeat as a jagged green line. To tell the truth, Ras.h.i.+d didn't look cursed or even sad. He looked ... happy happy, as if he were dreaming of the stars, dancing with them while he slept, living with them in the sky, and smiling. But looks weren't everything, Luka knew that much; the world was not always what it seemed to be. Soraya was sleeping on the floor, sitting with her back against the wall. Neither parent woke up, as they always used to do when Luka was sneaking towards them. That was depressing. Dragging his feet, Luka made his way back to his own room. Through the window he could see the sky beginning to lighten. Dawn was supposed to cheer people up, but Luka couldn't think of anything to be cheerful about. He went to the window to draw the curtain so that he could at least lie in the dark and rest for a while, and that was when he saw the extraordinary thing.

There was a man standing in the lane outside the Khalifa residence, wearing a familiar vermilion-coloured bush s.h.i.+rt and a recognisably battered panama hat, and plainly watching the house. Luka was just about to call out, and maybe even send Bear and Dog to chase the stranger away, when the man threw back his head and looked him right in the eye.

It was Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa! It was his father, standing out there, saying nothing, but looking wide awake!

But if Ras.h.i.+d was outside in the lane, then who was sleeping in his bed? And if Ras.h.i.+d was sleeping in his bed, then how could he be outside? Luka's head was whirling and his brain had no idea what to think; his feet, however, had started to run. Pursued by his bear and his dog, Luka ran as fast as he could to where his father was waiting for him. He charged downstairs barefoot, stumbled slightly, took a step to the right, felt oddly giddy for a moment, regained his balance and hurtled on through the front door. This was wonderful, Luka thought. Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa had woken up and somehow slipped outside for a walk. Everything was going to be all right.

2.

n.o.bodaddy.

As he ran out of the front door with Dog and Bear, Luka had the strangest feeling: as if they had crossed an invisible boundary; as if a secret level had been unlocked and they had pa.s.sed through the gateway that allowed them to explore it. He s.h.i.+vered a little, and the bear and the dog s.h.i.+vered, too, although it was not a cold dawn. The colours of the world were strange, the sky too blue, the dirt too brown, the house pinker and greener than normal ... and his father was not his father and his father was not his father, not unless Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa had somehow become partly transparent. This Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa looked exactly like the famous Shah of Blah; he was wearing his panama hat and his vermilion bush s.h.i.+rt, and when he walked and talked it became obvious that his voice was Ras.h.i.+d's voice, and the way he moved was an exact copy of the original, too; but this Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa could be seen through, not clearly but murkily, as if he were half real and half a trick of the light. As the first whispers of dawn murmured in the sky above, the figure's transparency became even more obvious. Luka's head began to spin. Had something happened to his father? Was this see-through father some sort of ... some sort of ...

'Are you some sort of ghost?' he asked in a weak voice. 'You are certainly something peculiar and surprising, to say the very least.'

'Am I wearing a white sheet? Am I clanking chains? Do I look ghoulish to you?' demanded the phantom dismissively. 'Am I scary? Okay, don't answer that. The truth is that there are no such things as ghosts or spectres and therefore I am not one. And may I point out that right now I am just as surprised as you?'

Bear's hair was standing on end, and Dog was shaking his head in a puzzled way, as if he had just begun to remember something.

'Why are you you so surprised?' Luka asked, trying to sound confident. 'You're not the one who can see through me, after all.' The see-through Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa came closer and Luka had to force himself not to run away. 'I'm not here for you,' he said. 'So it is, hmm, unusual for you to have crossed over when you're in perfect health. And your dog and bear, too, by the by. The whole thing is exceedingly irregular. The Frontier is not supposed to be this easily ignored.' so surprised?' Luka asked, trying to sound confident. 'You're not the one who can see through me, after all.' The see-through Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa came closer and Luka had to force himself not to run away. 'I'm not here for you,' he said. 'So it is, hmm, unusual for you to have crossed over when you're in perfect health. And your dog and bear, too, by the by. The whole thing is exceedingly irregular. The Frontier is not supposed to be this easily ignored.'

'What do you mean?' Luka demanded. 'What Frontier? Who are you here for?' The moment he asked the second question, he knew the answer, and it drove the first question out of his mind. 'Oh,' he said. 'Oh. Then is my father ...?'

'Not yet,' said the see-through Ras.h.i.+d. 'But I'm the patient type.'

'Go away,' Luka said. 'You're not wanted around here, Mr ... what is your name, anyway?'

The see-through Ras.h.i.+d smiled a friendly smile that somehow wasn't entirely friendly. 'I,' he began to explain, in a kindly voice that somehow didn't feel completely kind, 'I am your father's dea-'

'Don't say that word!' Luka shouted.

'The point I'm trying to make, if I may be allowed to continue,' the phantom insisted, 'is that everyone's dea-'

'Don't say say it!' Luka yelled. it!' Luka yelled.

'-is different,' the phantom said. 'No two are alike. Each living being is an individual unlike all others; their lives have unique and personal beginnings, personal and unique middles, and consequently, at the end, it follows that everyone has their own unique and personal dea-'

'Don't!' Luka screamed.

'-and I am your father's, or I will be soon enough, and at that time you will no longer be able to see through me, because then I will be the real thing and he, I'm sorry to say, will no longer be at all.'

'n.o.body is going to take my father away,' Luka cried. 'Not even you, Mr whatever your name is with your scary tales.'

'n.o.body,' said the see-through Ras.h.i.+d. 'Yes, you can call me that. That's who I am. n.o.body is going to take your father away: that is exactly right, and I am the n.o.body in question. I am your, you might say, n.o.bodaddy.'

'That's nonsense,' said Luka.

'No, no,' the see-through Ras.h.i.+d corrected him. 'I'm afraid that Nonsense is not involved. You will discover that I am a no-Nonsense kind of guy.'

Luka sat down on the front step of the house and put his head in his hands. n.o.bodaddy n.o.bodaddy. He understood what the see-through Ras.h.i.+d was telling him. As his father faded away, the phantom Ras.h.i.+d would grow stronger, and in the end there would be only this n.o.bodaddy and no father at all. But he was very sure of one thing: he was not ready to do without a father. He would never be ready for that. The certainty of this knowledge grew in him and gave him strength. There was only one thing for it, he told himself. This, this n.o.bodaddy had to be stopped, and he had to think of a way to stop him.

'To be fair,' said n.o.bodaddy, 'and in a spirit of full disclosure, I should repeat that you have already achieved something extraordinary by crossing the line, I mean so perhaps you are capable of further extraordinary things. Maybe you are even capable of bringing about the thing you are even now dreaming up; maybe ha ha! you will succeed in bringing about my destruction. An adversary! How enjoyable! How positively ... darling darling. I'm so so excited.' excited.'

Luka looked up. 'What do you mean exactly, ”crossing the line”?' he asked.

'Here, where you are, is not there, where you were,' explained n.o.bodaddy, helpfully. 'This, all of this that you see, is not that which you saw before. This lane is not that lane, this house is not that house, and this daddy, as I have explained, is not that one. If the whole of your world took half a step to the right, then it would b.u.mp into this world. If it took half a step to the left ... well, let's not go into that just now. Don't you see how much more brightly coloured everything is here than it is back home? This, you see ... I shouldn't even tell you, really ... this is the World of Magic.'

Luka remembered his stumble in the doorway, and his brief but intense feeling of giddiness. Was that when he crossed the line? And had he stumbled to the right or the left? It must have been the right, mustn't it? So this must be the Right-Hand Path, must it not? But was that the best Path for him? Shouldn't he, as a left-handed person, have stumbled to the left? ... He realised that he had no idea what he meant. Why was he on any sort of Path at all, and not just in the lane outside his house? Where might such a Path lead, and should he even think of going down it? Should he be thinking about just getting away from this alarming n.o.bodaddy and finding his way back to the safety of his bedroom? All this talk of Magic was much too much for him.

Of course Luka knew all about the World of Magic. He had grown up hearing about it from his father every day, and he had believed in it, he had even drawn maps and painted pictures of it the Torrent of Words flowing into the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge and the Fire of Life, all that stuff; but he hadn't believed in it in the way that he believed in dining tables, or streets, or stomach upsets. It hadn't been real in the way that love was real, or unhappiness, or fear. It was only real in the way that stories were real while you were reading them, or heat mirages before you got too close to them, or dreams while you were dreaming.

'Is this a dream, then?' he wondered, and the see-through Ras.h.i.+d who called himself n.o.bodaddy nodded slowly in a thoughtful way. 'That would certainly explain the situation,' he replied agreeably. 'Why not put it to the test? If this is indeed a dream, then maybe your dog and your bear would no longer be dumb animals. I know your secret fantasy, you see. You'd like them to be able to talk, wouldn't you? to speak to you in your own language and tell you their stories. I'm sure they have extremely interesting stories to tell.'

'How do you know that?' asked Luka, shocked, and again the answer arrived in his head as soon as the question was out. 'Oh. You know because my father knows. I talked to my father about it once, and he said he would make up a story about a talking dog and bear.'

'Quite so,' said n.o.bodaddy calmly. 'Everything that your father has been, and known, and said and done, is slowly crossing over into me. But I mustn't hog the conversation,' he went on. 'I do believe your friends are trying to get your attention.'

Luka looked round and saw to his astonishment that Bear the dog had risen up on his hind legs and was clearing his throat like a tenor at the opera. Then he began to sing not in barks, howls or dog-yaps this time, but in plain, understandable words. He sang with a slight foreign accent, Luka noticed, as if he were a visitor from another country, but the words were clear enough, although the tale they told was bewildering.

'O I am Barak of the It-Barak, The Immortal Dog Men of yore, Born from the egg of a magic hawk, We could sing and fight and love and talk And could never, ever be slain.Yes, I am Barak of the It-Barak, A thousand years old and more, I ate black pearls and I wed human girls, I ruled my world like an earl in curls, And I sang with angelic disdain.And this is the song of the It-Barak, A thousand years old, it's true, But we were unmade by a Chinese curse, Were turned into pooches and pye-dogs and curs, And the Kingdom of Dogs became quicksand and bogs, We no longer sang, but could only bark, And we went on four legs, not two.

Now we go on four legs, not two.'

Then it was the turn of Dog the bear, who also rose up on his hind legs, and folded his paws in front of him like a schoolboy at a public-speaking contest. Then he spoke in clear, human language, and his voice sounded remarkably like Luka's brother Haroun's, and Luka almost fell over when he heard it. n.o.bodaddy saved him by stretching out a protective arm, exactly as if he were the real Ras.h.i.+d Khalifa. 'O mighty pintsized liberator,' the bear began grandly, but also, it seemed to Luka, a little uncertainly, 'O incomparably cursing child, know that I was not always as you see me now, but the monarch of, um, a northern land of deep woods and s.h.i.+ning snow, hidden behind a circular mountain range. My name was not ”Dog” then, but, er ... Artha-Shastra, Prince of Qaf. In that cold, lovely place we danced to keep ourselves warm, and our dances became the stuff of legend, for as we stamped and leapt the brilliance of our spinning wove the air around us into strands of silver and gold, and this became both our treasure and our glory. Yes! To twirl and to whirl was all our delight, and by whirling and twirling we came round right, and our golden land was a place of wonder and our clothes shone like the sun.'

His voice strengthened, as if he had become more certain of the tale he was telling. 'So we prospered,' he went on, 'but we also aroused the envy of our neighbours, and one of them, the giant, bird-headed fairy prince called ' and here Dog the bear stumbled again 'um ... ah ... oh yes, Bulbul Dev, the Ogre King of the East, who sang like a nightingale but danced like an oaf, was the most envious of all. He attacked us with his legion of giants, the ... the ... Thirty Birds Thirty Birds, beaked monsters with spotted bodies, and we, a dancing, golden people, were too innocent and kindly to resist. But we were stubborn folk, too, and we did not give up the secrets of the dance. Yes, yes!' he exclaimed excitedly, and rushed on to the story's end. 'When the Bird Ogres realised that we would not teach them how to spin air into gold, that we would defend that great mystery with our lives, they set up a fluttering and a flapping and a screeching and a cawing so dreadfully terrifying that it was plain that Black Magic was afoot. Within moments the people of Qaf, shattered by the Ogres' shrieks, began to crumble, to lose human form and become dumb animals donkeys, marmosets, anteaters and, yes, bears while Bulbul Dev cried, ”Try to dance your golden dance now, fools! Try to jig your silver jigs! What you would not share, you have lost for ever, along with your humanity. Low, grubbing animals you will remain, unless ha ha! you steal the Fire of Life itself to set you free!” By which he meant, of course, that we would be trapped for ever, for the Fire of Life is no more than a story, and even in stories it is impossible to steal. So I became a bear a dancing bear, yes, but a golden dancer no more! and as a bear I wandered the world until Captain Aag caught me for his circus, and so, young master, I found you.'

It was just the sort of story Haroun would have told, thought Luka, a tall tale straight from the great Story Sea. But, when at last it was over, Luka was overcome by a strong feeling of disappointment. 'So you're both people?' he asked regretfully. 'You're not really my bear and my dog, but enchanted princes in dog and bear suits? Am I supposed not to call you ”Dog” and ”Bear” but ”Artha-whatever” and ”Barak”? And here I am, worried sick about my dad, and now I'm supposed to worry about how to get you guys turned back into your real selves as well? You do know, I hope, that I'm only twelve years old.'

The bear came back down onto four legs. 'It's okay,' he said. 'While I'm in bear form you can go on calling me ”Dog”.'

<script>