A: Chapter One

1

Aniseed felt ill.
"What's wrong with you then?" said the school nurse. She was scottish and she didn't take any shit.
"I feel like I've got an octupus in my head," she said. "My earhole isn't big enough to pull it out." The nurse gave her a skeptical look. Alright, let's have your temperature."
She sat with the thermometer under her tongue. She tried to read the headlines of OK! magazine. They didn't seem to make sense. Everything felt far away.
"Your temperature's up, and you look a bit peaky. Have two of these, and be off home."

Aniseed sat on the Northern Line, huddled on her jumper, her eyes only half open. At least she had missed Miss Hedge in Double Chemistry - the second half of a 1970's video about Sheffield Steel. A wave of nausea came over and she shut her eyes.

Later that night, after spag bol and barricading her room against her little brother, David, Aniseed looked out of the window, her hands clasped round her knees, shivering. The sky was clear and the moon was bright, and the pale clouds were rushing away across the sky. She watched the lights going off in the tower blocks, one by one. Down below, the road had been eaten up by roadworks and a big hole gaped where the pavement should be. Next door's cat, Albert, slipped through the garden and into the street. It peered into the whole, and crouched, as if about to pounce. Then it suddenly leapt forwards and disappeared.

She ran downstairs barefoot and shut the front door as quietly as she could, and ran over to the hole. "Albert," she whispered. "Come on little puss. Albert". She couldn't hear him, but it was a good 6 foot drop. It would be a miracle if he was ok. She crouched down and shone her maglite down into the hole. There was no Albert down there, and no ground either. In fact, there was nothing at all, just dark, empty space that looked like it went on forever.

"Alright sausage, time to get up."
Miss Gallagher. That was the first thought that came into Aniseed's head the next morning, her brain full of fog.
"Come on, breakfast,"
"Yeah, ok. I'll be down in a minute,"
Maths with Miss Gallagher and twenty quadratic equations that she hadn't done in the bottom of her bag, and she'd only doodled all over her exercise books in a stupid, futile gesture. A cold sick feeling sat in her stomach like a dead jellyfish.

"Mum," she said, as she stood in the doorway of the kitchen. "I'm still not feeling very well," in her best ill whisper. In fact, she was feeling awful, but it never did any harm to ham it up.
"Have some breakfast and you'll feel better,"
"I don't really want to eat anything."
"What about a glass of water? Some dry toast? You'll feel better when you get to school."

She sat without moving, waiting for the water, hunched over in her chair.
"I don't think that's the best idea I've ever heard."

Aniseed reached out her hand and touched cold, damp stone. She opened her eyes. The air was dark, cold and musky. Instantly she was filled with releif: no maths class, no miss Gallagher. But this was all very strange. She was lying on some cold, hard bricks. She had no memory of coming here. It wasn't the school sick room. It wasn't home. It wasn't anywhere. Anywhere that she knew at all. She reached out, scooping out the dark. She stood up, and heard something creak nearby. Like a door. Shivering now, and starting to breathe fast - not scared, of course, not scared, she was always calm- she found the matches in her pocket and lit one: a comforting hiss of the match. It flared.
What she saw first, was that stone walls rose around her, as far as she could see, and that on the wall facing her, there was a picture. A kind of picture, she thought. Unless it was a window. She could see that there were people in the picture. And the people were not ordinary people at all. They had huge heads, long noses, and strange, fat bodies. Squashed down people, they were all waddling along a road. Behind them, furhter away, there were fields, and towers, and trees. She could hear the hum of them talking. And they were moving.
Whereever they were, it was a rainy day, and she watched as they battled under umbrellas in the cold, against the wind. Some of them, she noticed, were walking along at the top of the picture: that is: upside down. They looked looked just as squashed as the people down at the bottom. Then, almost by accident, Aniseed started looking at one thing caught her eye, because it was something at least vaguely familiar to her.
It was standing in a field. The rich, rust coloured, shaggy hair, the stupid, kind face, the stocky legs. She'd never seen one, but she knew it was a highland cow. She looked at it. Docile, stupid looking animal. They always looked like they stank, although you could never tell that. She liked the dumb, stupid expression in its eyes. The longer she looked at it, the closer it got. Until, suddenly, it was in front of her.
Or rather, she was in front of it.