Weaveworld

VI

MAD MOONEY

1

al was frightened as he had never been frightened in his life before. He sat in his room, the door locked, and shook.

The shaking had begun a few minutes after events at Rue Street, almost twenty-four hours ago now, and it hadn’t shown much sign of stopping since. Sometimes it made his hands tremble so much he could hardly hold the glass of whisky he’d nursed through an all but sleepless night, other times it made his teeth chatter. But most of the shaking didn’t go on outside, it was in. It was as if the pigeons had got into his belly somehow, and were flapping their wings against his innards.

And all because he’d seen something wonderful, and he knew in his bones that his life would never be the same again. How could it? He’d climbed the sky and looked down on the secret place that he’d been waiting since childhood to find.

He’d always been a solitary child, as much through choice as circumstance, happiest when he could unshackle his imagination and let it wander. It took little to get such journeys started. Looking back, it seemed he’d spent half his school days gazing out of the window, transported by a line of poetry whose meaning he couldn’t quite unearth, or the sound of someone singing in a distant classroom, into a world more pungent and more remote than the one he knew. A world whose scents were carried to his nostrils by winds mysteriously warm in a chill December; whose creatures paid him homage on certain nights at the foot of his bed, and whose peoples he conspired with in sleep.

But despite the familiarity of this place, the comfort he felt there, its precise nature and location remained elusive, and though he’d read every book he could find that promised some rare territory, he always came away disappointed. They were too perfect, those childhood kingdoms; all honey and summer.

The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.

That was why he trembled now, for that was how he felt. Like a man whose head was about to split.