Page 85 of The Society of Unknowable Objects
Magda approached, for the first time noticing the other idling cars, the pedestrians stopped and staring, no longer hurrying to get out of the rain.
“What is this?” Henry asked from behind Magda, but Magda didn’t answer; she was staring at what looked like vines or branches tangled around the wheels of the cars in the middle of the street. Drivers were leaning out of windows or stepping out of their cars. The branches were moving, she saw, almost like creaturescrawlingalong the road. And then Magda noticed the flowers, big red and green blooms, circular and glowing like traffic lights flashing in the dark night.
“Look,” James said, tapping Magda on her shoulder and pulling her attention to the townhouses farther down the street. The branches were there too, crawling like fingers across the brickwork.
“Roses,” Magda said, eyes wide in disbelief. It appeared that the thorny bushes were spreading steadily across the face of the buildings and curling around the trunks of the trees that lined the pavement. Pedestrians yelped and jumped out of the way of the crawling branches as they progressed along the street, staring in wonder at the roses, which blossomed and shrunk again rapidly, as the rain continued to beat the pavement and the wind howled in shock.
Don’t you remember Alabama? Those vines that dragged Mum back into the woods? It’s Lukas, isn’t it? He is doing this.
The noise of the people on the street was slowly changing, from confusion and uncertainty to a low rumble of anxiety and outright fear, and Magda heard the van driver mutter, “What the bloody hell is this?”
“It’s him,” Magda shouted, facing Henry and James. “Heishere. He’s doing this!” She thought of Frank and Will in Bell Street Books, only a few streets away. “Come on! We have to get back!”
She sprinted away through the rain, jumping over crawling branches and bumping past onlookers and pedestrians. Nobody cared, nobody threw annoyed glances her way. They were preoccupied with other things. As she ran, Magda didn’t stop to check that James and Henry were with her, but heard their footsteps beating the sodden street behind her.
They reached a corner and came to a stop. They saw more of the same—impossible flowers halting traffic and pedestrians—but the bushes seemed thicker here, and denser farther back down the street, whole buildings now covered with leaves and thorns and multicoloured roses that glowed like spotlights.
“I thought I saw something,” Henry gasped, hands on her hips. “On the flight. It was bumpy and I looked out the window and I thought I saw something—a man, spinning like a top, arms out by his sides. Just a silhouette in the sky when the lightning cracked. I thought I was going mad. Nobody could have been up that high in the air.”
“Oh god,” Magda muttered, her eyes dancing around the growths and the awful colours. London was being eaten, it seemed to her, the neat, ordered structures being corrupted by the chaos of nature—or something thatresemblednature, but wasn’t really.
“What is it?” James asked.
She turned on the spot to face them, James peering at her intently, Henry still panting from the jog.
“He’s not a man!” Magda hurried to explain. “He’s an artefact. He was made by the book!”
Henry wiped rain from her hair and then refocused on what Magda was saying, eyes narrowing. “He’swhat?”
Tendrils crawled along the sodden pavement beside them, awful, crawlingfeelersfrom the bushes and the plants that were inching nearer.
“He’s an artefact,” Magda repeated, trying to ignore the movement. “He’s magic. And I don’t know what to do about it because artefacts can’t be destroyed, can they? What do we do about a man who can’t be destroyed?”
Neither James nor Henry answered. James stared at her, while Henry turned her eyes to the bedlam on the street. Magda followed her gaze, seeing thick branches lined with thorns curl around a double-decker bus, cracking windows and scraping against metal. The rear doors of the bus opened and passengers tumbled out, turning to stare as the centre of the bus was compressed and crushed by the sinewy and constricting snakelike limb.
“This is all him,” Magda said, seeing London change before her eyes. “The storm, the plants. Come on!”
She led them on, crunching over stems and foliage that now covered the road in a tangled mat, hearing shouts and screams and sirens wailing like banshees through the storm.
It’s a dark and stormy night. Perfect for magic and mayhem.
They turned onto Bell Street, shuddering to a halt just beyond the corner. The street in front of them, the street Magda knew so well, was changed beyond recognition. In between the rows of terraced townhouses, along the road where parked cars would normally line the street, a gnarled wall of roses now occupied the space, as tall as the buildings. The hedge was formed of densely knotted fingerlike branches, skeleton thin and dotted with sharp thorns. Those fingers seemed to stretch and creak arthritically, constantly moving and never settling. Magda glanced down to her feet and saw tendrils crawling forward along the road. The surface of the hedge was dotted with large flowers, a vast array of colours blooming and shrinking endlessly in a light show...There was something off-putting about those flowers; to Magda it was like the pores opening and closing on the skin of some huge monster. This was the same growth that they had seen on the other streets, but much further advanced, as if the rosebushes and the flowers had been spreading westwards towards them from Bell Street.
“Oh no,” Magda said.
Bell Street Books was farther down the street, on the next corner, somewhere inside the hedge.
Behind Magda cars were queued up in the street, headlights shining on the giant knot of branches where previously there had been a road, and residents had stepped out of their houses and shops to gaze in horror, rain battering their faces. Magda heard questions and exclamations of confusion, people on their phones calling for help, and the wind whipped up and stirred the voices into the air, in a swirling stew of panic and confusion.
“It’s Lukas,” she said.
“But how did he know to come to the bookshop?” James asked.
“He can sense the magical items; that’s what he said,” Magda answered.
Magda tentatively reached towards the hedge, and one of the branches twitched and whipped out towards her, thorns slicing through the air. “We have to get in there!” she said, her panic rising. “We have to help Frank and Will!”
“I can get them,” Henry said. She handed Magda the Impossible Box. “Hold this.” Without saying another word, without discussing any plan, Henry walked straight through the wall of branches, the thick, jagged thorns making Magda think of the teeth of some huge animal. She shivered, consumed briefly by the awful idea that Henry had just beenswallowedand chewed up by the beast.
