me!” Hayley said delightedly. They stared at one another wonderingly. “Why are you here?” Hayley asked.
“Being punished,” her father said glumly, “for marrying Merope. It was forbidden. I never understood why, but I knew there was some kind of prophecy. So you’re Hayley? You don’t look much like your mother, but you’ve grown up very pretty. Where have you been all this time? Were you being punished too?”
“I’m all right,” Hayley assured him. “I had to live with Grandpa. He’s all right, but Grandma isn’t. Can’t you leave here now, so that I can live with you?”
“No,” said her father sadly. “I’ve tried to leave over and over, but I always find myself back at this desk, whatever I do.”
“But it looks awful!” Hayley said.
“It is,” he said. “You know what it feels like? It feels as if I’m rolling a huge stone up a hill, and every time I get it nearly to the top, it rolls straight down to the bottom again.”
Hayley thought of the man she had seen crashing down the hill under the boulder. That had been her father too. This was the way the mythosphere worked. Things got harsher and stranger the further out you were in it. “Oh!” she cried out. “Isn’t there any way I can rescue you from here?”
Cyrus Foss smiled at her. It was a harrassed smile, but Hayley had seldom seen a nicer one. “I don’t think you can,” he said. “But maybe your mother could.”
“So where is she?” Hayley demanded.
“Somewhere else in this hell,” he said. “She—”
He was interrupted by an office lady carrying a neat pile of shiny plastic files. “These are all wrong,” this lady said. “They all have to be done again.” She dumped the files on top of the stack already in the IN-tray. The stack was too high to take them. Every one of them slithered off sideways and fell on the floor, taking half the rest of the papers with them.
Cyrus Foss gave a moan of despair and bent down to collect them. Hayley dived down under the desk to help. Face to face down there, her father whispered, “She’ll be in a women’s strand, somewhere much wilder than here, I think.”
“Right,” Hayley whispered back. She crawled across under the desk and stuck her head out beside the office lady’s neat feet. “Can’t you help?” she said.
“Not my job,” the lady said coldly.
“But you made them fall down,” Hayley pointed out.
“I don’t want to ladder my tights,” the lady retorted. “And you shouldn’t be here. You’re interrupting this prisoner in his work. You’d better leave here before the manager finds you.”
“Cow!” Hayley’s father murmured, with his face still under the desk. He added loudly, “Yes, better leave Hayley. We don’t want you in trouble too.”
“All right,” Hayley said. “See you.” She scrambled violently out past the lady’s neat feet, hoping she would ladder the tights as she went, and stood up among the other desks. “I’ll be back,” she told the lady. “So watch out.” But the lady simply turned and walked away.
Hayley threaded her way between the busy desks and came to a door. She turned round there to wave to her father, but he was frantically at work again and did not look up. Hayley sighed – the kind of sigh you seem to drag up from near your knees – and pushed her way out through the door.
Outside, the strand leading away in front of her was cloudily transparent now, like smoked glass. Hayley hurried along it, blinking back tears and refusing to look at any of the dreary scenes happening on either side of her, until the strand suddenly turned almost as clear as air underneath her feet. She found herself walking high above the jumbled roofs and turrets of Aunt May’s guesthouse. She could see the gutter and the window she had squeezed out of the day she arrived. Ahead of her and below her were the grounds of the place, full of racing figures as the Tighs and the Laxtons all hurried towards the paddock, where Harmony was standing by the card table. Hayley could hear the clock, chiming out Over the Rainbow, but very slowly, as if it had almost run down. And Tollie had almost won. He was halfway up the paddock, pushing and rolling an immense egg. This reminded Hayley so of the man pushing the boulder that she stood still and shuddered.
Then, Hey! she thought. I can win!
She ran. She came charging down the almost unseeable glassy strand, brushed past Tollie and his egg and landed panting in front of the card table. Tollie screamed with fury.
“That does it!” he yelled. “I’m telling!”
“I’ve got one – a golden apple!” Hayley panted to Harmony.
Harmony seemed to have got over her bad temper. She smiled and said, “Let’s see it then.”
Hayley unzipped her pocket and fetched the apple out. For a moment it glowed bright as a small sun and smelled wonderfully of apple. But as Hayley held it out towards Harmony, it was a plastic Christmas ornament just like the ones Harmony gave out as prizes. “Oh!” Hayley said. “But it was! It really is!”
“I know,” Harmony said. “They go like that here.” And she passed Hayley another apple just the same. “Your prize,” she said.
“I hate you both!” Tollie snarled, leaning both arms on his vast egg. “Still” he added smugly, “I stole a lot of diamonds too. And I’m still telling of Hayley.”
James arrived then, waving what looked like a spike with threads of silk streaming off one end. “Is this it?” he asked Harmony. “It was on her spinning wheel. But it was a real closie. She sort of half woke up and said ‘Kiss me!’ and I just ran!”
Lucy pushed up from the other side with a dry-looking slice of cake in one hand. “Out of her cottage wall,” she panted. “She saw me and she chased me all the way back here. I don’t think I want to play this game again.”
“I’ve got a roc’s egg!” Tollie said loudly.
He went on saying this as the others began arriving, waving peculiar objects and jostling Hayley about as she carefully zipped both apples into her pockets. “Do these look like thumbscrews?” she heard someone ask.
“I know it looks like a handful of jelly,” said someone else, “but it really is an eyeball.”
“I’ve got a roc’s egg!”
“This card really was the Queen of Hearts, honestly. It’s alive. It sort of squiggles.”
“I caught the fox, but he bit me and got away. Do I need an injection, Harmony?”
“I’ve got a roc’s egg!”
“Sorry about the blood, Harmony. He’d just killed her when I got there. It was horrible.”
“I’ve got a roc’s egg!”
“Oh, be quiet, Tollie!” Harmony snapped. “What’s the matter, Troy?”
“And
