Un Lun Dun

There were other shoppers in hotchpotch outfits of rags, and patchworks of skins, and what looked in some cases like taped-together bits of plastic or foil. Za

“Za

Here and there were the strangest figures. People whose skins were no colors skin should ever be, or who seemed to have a limb or two too many, or peculiar extrusions or concavities in their faces.

“Yeah,” said Za

“Is that it? You see them? What are they, for God’s sake?”

“How should I know? But are you surprised? After everything?”

A woman went by above them, pedaling furiously as if she were on a bicycle, striding on two enormous spindly mechanical legs. Strange little figures flitted by at the edges of the market, too fast to clearly see. Deeba murmured an apology as she bumped into someone. The woman who bowed politely to her wore glasses with several layers of lenses, lowered and raised on levers, seemingly at random.

“Lovely arrangements!” the girls heard. “Get them here! Brighten up the home.”

Beside them was a stall bursting in flamboyant bouquets, carefully arranged in colored paper.

“They’re not flowers,” Deeba said. They were tools.

Each was a bunch of hammers, screwdrivers, spa

“What on earth are you wearing?” someone said. Za

It was print. His clothes were made from pages from books, immaculately sewn together.

“No, this won’t do,” he said. He spoke quickly, tugging at Za

He whipped a tape from his pocket and began to measure Za

The man did not bleed or seem to suffer any discomfort from treating himself as a pincushion. He wedged some of the pins back into his head, and there was a faint pfft with each puncture, as if his skull were velvet. Busily, he began to pin bits of paper to Za

“But what if it rains, you say? Well then rejoice as your outfit cuddles you in its gentle slushing, and you’re given the opportunity for an entirely new book. How wonderful! I have a vast selection.” He indicated his stall, crammed with volumes from which assistants tore pages and stitched. “What genres and literatures are to your taste?”

“Please…” stammered Za

“Leave it,” said Deeba. “Leave us alone.”

“No thank you…” Za

The girls turned and ran.

“Hey!” the man shouted. “Are you alright?” But they did not slow down.

They ran past chefs baking roof-tiles in their ovens and chiseling apart bricks over pans, frying the whites and yolks that emerged; past confectioners with jars full of candied leaves; past what looked like an argument at a honey stall between a bear in a suit and a cloud of bees in the shape of a man.

At last they reached a little clearing deep in the market containing a pump and a pillar. They stopped, their hearts pounding.

“What are we going to do?” said Deeba.

“I don’t know.”

They looked up that empty-hearted sun above them. Deeba dialed her home once more.

“Hello Mum?” she whispered.

There was that frenetic buzzing. From a little hole in the back of her phone burst a handful of wasps. Deeba shrieked and dropped the phone, and the wasps flew off in different directions.

Her phone was broken. She sat heavily at the pillar’s base.

Za

“It’ll be okay,” said Deeba. “Don’t. It’ll be alright.”

“How?” said Za

Za

8. Pins and Needles

Deeba put her arm around her friend. Neither of them wanted to attract the attention of the strange market-goers. They sat quietly for a couple of minutes.

“Ahem…”

Cautiously, the two girls looked up. Standing before them was the boy— the boy who had scared off the trashpack. He eyed them with a look somewhere between sarcasm and concern.

“I was just wondering…” he said slowly. “Is that yours?”

He pointed near their feet, at an empty cardboard milk carton. Za

The carton moved eagerly towards them, opening and closing its folded spout. Deeba and Za

“I was going to kick it back into the maze,” he said. “But I thought maybe it was a pet…”

“No,” Deeba said guardedly. “No, it’s not ours. We was…It was…”

“It must have followed us,” said Za

“Righto,” the boy said, stuck his hands in his pockets, and whistled a tune for a second or two. He looked at them quizzically. “Well I’ll…” He hesitated. “Can I just ask…Are you okay?”

He sat down beside them. “What’re your names, then? I’m Hemi. Pleased to meet you and all that.” He stuck out his hand. Za

“We don’t know what’s happened,” Za

“We du

“We don’t know what’s going on,” Za

“Well…” the boy Hemi said slowly. “You two don’t know a lot, do you? But I might be able to help you. I can tell you where you are, for a start.” His voice dropped, and the girls eagerly leaned in close to hear him.

“You’re…” he whispered slowly, “in…Un Lun Dun.”

The girls waited for the words to make sense, but they didn’t. Hemi was gri

“Un,” said Za

“Yeah,” he said. “Un Lun Dun.”

And suddenly the three sounds fell into a different shape, and Za

“UnLondon.”

“UnLondon?” Deeba said.

Hemi nodded, and crept an inch closer.

“UnLondon,” he said, and he reached for Za

“Hey!” A loud voice interrupted. Za

Hemi leapt up, made a rude noise, and sped away, ducking at astonishing speed between the legs of passersby, into the crowd and out of sight.

“What you doing?” Za

“Helping?” the man said. “Do you have any idea who that was? He’s one of them!”

“One of who?”

“A ghost!”

Deeba and Za

“You heard me,” he said. “A ghost. He’s from Wraithtown, and…Did he make you get really close to him? I saw him trying to grab!”