His Dark Materials Omnibus (57 page)

“Lizzie. I pretended to call myself Lizzie before. I can remember that.”

“All right, Lizzie then. And I’m Mark. Don’t forget.”

“All right,” she said peaceably.

Her leg was going to be painful; already it was red and swollen where the car had struck it, and a dark, massive bruise was forming. What with the bruise on her cheek where he’d struck her the night before, she looked as if she’d been badly treated, and that worried him too—suppose some police officer should become curious?

He tried to put it out of his mind, and they set off together, crossing at the traffic lights and casting just one glance back at the window under the hornbeam trees. They couldn’t see it at all. It was quite invisible, and the traffic was flowing again.

In Summertown, ten minutes’ walk down the Banbury Road, Will stopped in front of a bank.

“What are you doing?” said Lyra.

“I’m going to get some money. I probably better not do it too often, but they won’t register it till the end of the working day, I shouldn’t think.”

He put his mother’s bank card into the automatic teller and tapped out her PIN number. Nothing seemed to be going wrong, so he withdrew a hundred pounds, and the machine gave it up without a hitch. Lyra watched open-mouthed. He gave her a twenty-pound note.

“Use that later,” he said. “Buy something and get some change. Let’s find a bus into town.”

Lyra let him deal with the bus. She sat very quietly, watching the houses and gardens of the city that was hers and not hers. It was like being in someone else’s dream. They got off in the city center next to an old stone church, which she did know, opposite a big department store, which she didn’t.

“It’s all changed,” she said. “Like … That en’t the Cornmarket? And this is the Broad. There’s Balliol. And Bodley’s Library, down there. But where’s Jordan?”

Now she was trembling badly. It might have been delayed reaction from the accident, or present shock from finding an entirely different building in place of the Jordan College she knew as home.

“That en’t right,” she said. She spoke quietly, because Will had told her to stop pointing out so loudly the things that were wrong. “This is a different Oxford.”

“Well, we knew that,” he said.

He wasn’t prepared for Lyra’s wide-eyed helplessness. He couldn’t know how much of her childhood had been spent running about streets almost identical with these, and how proud she’d been of belonging to Jordan College, whose Scholars were the cleverest, whose coffers the richest, whose beauty the most splendid of all. And now it simply wasn’t there, and she wasn’t Lyra of Jordan anymore; she was a lost little girl in a strange world, belonging nowhere.

“Well,” she said shakily. “If it en’t here …”

It was going to take longer than she’d thought, that was all.

As soon as Lyra had gone her way, Will found a pay phone and dialed the number of the lawyer’s office on the letter he held.

“Hello? I want to speak to Mr. Perkins.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“It’s in connection with Mr. John Parry. I’m his son.”

“Just a moment, please …”

A minute went by, and then a man’s voice said, “Hello. This is Alan Perkins. To whom am I speaking?”

“William Parry. Excuse me for calling. It’s about my father, Mr. John Parry. You send money every three months from my father to my mother’s bank account.”

“Yes …”

“Well, I want to know where my father is, please. Is he alive or dead?”

“How old are you, William?”

“Twelve. I want to know about him.”

“Yes … Has your mother … is she … does she know you’re phoning me?”

Will thought carefully.

“No,” he said. “But she’s not in very good health. She can’t tell me very much, and I want to know.”

“Yes, I see. Where are you now? Are you at home?”

“No, I’m … I’m in Oxford.”

“On your own?”

“Yes.”

“And your mother’s not well, you say?”

“No.”

“Is she in hospital or something?”

“Something like that. Look, can you tell me or not?”

“Well, I can tell you something, but not much and not right now, and I’d rather not do it over the phone. I’m seeing a client in five minutes. Can you find your way to my office at about half past two?”

“No,” Will said. It would be too risky; the lawyer might have heard by then that he was wanted by the police. He thought quickly and went on. “I’ve got to catch a bus to Nottingham, and I don’t want to miss it. But what I want to know, you can tell me over the phone, can’t you? All I want to know is, is my father alive, and if he is, where I can find him. You can tell me that, can’t you?”

“It’s not quite as simple as that. I can’t really give out private information about a client unless I’m sure the client would want me to. And I’d need some proof of who you were, anyway.”

“Yes, I understand, but can you just tell me whether he’s alive or dead?”

“Well … that wouldn’t be confidential. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you anyway, because I don’t know.”

“What?”

“The money comes from a family trust. He left instructions to pay it until he told me to stop. I haven’t heard from him from that day to this. What it boils down to is that he’s … well, I suppose he’s vanished. That’s why I can’t answer your question.”

“Vanished? Just … lost?”

“It’s a matter of public record, actually. Look, why don’t you come into the office and—”

“I can’t. I’m going to Nottingham.”

“Well, write to me, or get your mother to write, and I’ll let you know what I can. But you must understand, I can’t do very much over the phone.”

“Yes, I suppose so. All right. But can you tell me where he disappeared?”

“As I say, it’s a matter of public record. There were several newspaper stories at the time. You know he was an explorer?”

“My mother’s told me some things, yes.”

“Well, he was leading an expedition, and it just disappeared. About ten years ago. Maybe more.”

“Where?”

“The far north. Alaska, I think. You can look it up in the public library.

Why don’t you—”

But at that point Will’s money ran out, and he didn’t have any more change. The dial tone purred in his ear. He put the phone down and looked around.

What he wanted above all was to speak to his mother. He had to stop himself from dialing Mrs. Cooper’s number, because if he heard his mother’s voice, it would be very hard not to go back to her, and that would put both of them in danger. But he could send her a postcard.

He chose a view of the city, and wrote: “D
EAR
M
UM
, I
AM SAFE AND WELL, AND
I
WILL SEE YOU AGAIN SOON
. I
HOPE EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT
. I
LOVE YOU
. W
ILL.”
Then he addressed it and bought a stamp and held the card close to him for a minute before dropping it in the mailbox.

It was midmorning, and he was in the main shopping street, where buses shouldered their way through crowds of pedestrians. He began to realize how exposed he was; for it was a weekday, when a child of his age should have been in school. Where could he go?

It didn’t take him long to hide. Will could vanish easily enough, because he was good at it; he was even proud of his skill. Like Serafina Pekkala on the ship, he simply made himself part of the background.

So now, knowing the sort of world he lived in, he went into a stationery shop and bought a ballpoint, a pad of paper, and a clipboard. Schools often sent groups of pupils off to do a shopping survey, or something of the sort, and if he seemed to be on a project like that he wouldn’t look as if he was at a loose end.

Then he wandered along, pretending to be making notes, and kept his eyes open for the public library.

Meanwhile, Lyra was looking for somewhere quiet to consult the alethiometer. In her own Oxford there would have been a dozen places within five minutes’ walk, but this Oxford was so disconcertingly different, with patches of poignant familiarity right next to the downright outlandish: why had they painted those yellow lines on the road? What were those little white patches dotting every sidewalk? (In her own world, they had never heard of chewing gum.) What could those red and green lights mean at the corner of the road? It was all much harder to read than the alethiometer.

But here were St. John’s College gates, which she and Roger had once climbed after dark to plant fireworks in the flower beds; and that particular worn stone at the corner of Catte Street—there were the initials SP that Simon Parslow had scratched, the very same ones! She’d seen him do it! Someone in this world with the same initials must have stood here idly and done exactly the same.

There might be a Simon Parslow in this world.

Perhaps there was a Lyra.

A chill ran down her back, and mouse-shaped Pantalaimon shivered in
her pocket. She shook herself; there were mysteries enough without imagining more.

The other way in which this Oxford differed from hers was in the vast numbers of people swarming on every sidewalk, in and out of every building; people of every sort, women dressed like men, Africans, even a group of Tartars meekly following their leader, all neatly dressed and hung about with little black cases. She glared at them fearfully at first, because they had no dæmons, and in her world they would have been regarded as ghasts, or worse.

But (this was the strangest thing) they all looked fully alive. These creatures moved about cheerfully enough, for all the world as though they were human, and Lyra had to concede that human was what they probably were, and that their dæmons were inside them as Will’s was.

After wandering about for an hour, taking the measure of this mock-Oxford, she felt hungry and bought a bar of chocolatl with her twenty-pound note. The shopkeeper looked at her oddly, but he was from the Indies and didn’t understand her accent, perhaps, although she asked very clearly. With the change she bought an apple from the Covered Market, which was much more like the proper Oxford, and walked up toward the park. There she found herself outside a grand building, a real Oxford-looking building that didn’t exist in her world at all, though it wouldn’t have looked out of place. She sat on the grass outside to eat, and regarded the building approvingly.

She discovered that it was a museum. The doors were open, and inside she found stuffed animals and fossil skeletons and cases of minerals, just like the Royal Geological Museum she’d visited with Mrs. Coulter in her London. At the back of the great iron-and-glass hall was the entrance to another part of the museum, and because it was nearly deserted, she went through and looked around. The alethiometer was still the most urgent thing on her mind, but in this second chamber she found herself surrounded by things she knew well: there were showcases filled with Arctic clothing, just like her own furs; with sledges and walrus-ivory carvings and seal-hunting harpoons; with a thousand and one jumbled trophies and relics and objects of magic and tools and weapons, and not only from the Arctic, as she saw, but from every part of this world.

Well, how strange. Those caribou-skin furs were
exactly
the same as hers, but they’d tied the traces on that sledge completely wrong. But here was a photogram showing some Samoyed hunters, the very doubles of the ones who’d caught Lyra and sold her to Bolvangar. Look! They were the same men! And even that rope had frayed and been reknotted in precisely the same spot,
and she knew it intimately, having been tied up in that very sledge for several agonizing hours.… What were these mysteries? Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

And then she came across something that made her think of the alethiometer again. In an old glass case with a black-painted wooden frame there were a number of human skulls, and some of them had holes in them: some at the front, some on the side, some on the top. The one in the center had two. This process, it said in spidery writing on a card, was called trepanning. The card also said that all the holes had been made during the owners’ lifetimes, because the bone had healed and grown smooth around the edge. One, however, hadn’t: the hole had been made by a bronze arrowhead which was still in it, and its edges were sharp and broken, so you could tell it was different.

This was just what the northern Tartars did. And what Stanislaus Grumman had had done to himself, according to the Jordan Scholars who’d known him. Lyra looked around quickly, saw no one nearby, and took out the alethiometer.

She focused her mind on the central skull and asked: What sort of person did this skull belong to, and why did they have those holes made in it?

As she stood concentrating in the dusty light that filtered through the glass roof and slanted down past the upper galleries, she didn’t notice that she was being watched.

A powerful-looking man in his sixties, wearing a beautifully tailored linen suit and holding a Panama hat, stood on the gallery above and looked down over the iron railing.

His gray hair was brushed neatly back from his smooth, tanned, barely wrinkled forehead. His eyes were large, dark and long-lashed and intense, and every minute or so his sharp, dark-pointed tongue peeped out at the corner of his lips and flicked across them moistly. The snowy handkerchief in his breast pocket was scented with some heavy cologne like those hothouse plants so rich you can smell the decay at their roots.