Finally the noise of the road became audible and brought with it some sense of normality. His earlier thought came back to him – why had nothing stopped? Why was everything carrying on as normal? His eyes turned to the cars that flew past, the drivers apparently unaware of anything extraordinary; to the occasional person rushing along the street, huddling under an umbrella; to a tramp in dark, ragged clothes standing in a puddle. No one seemed to have heard the sound.
It was as if the bell was ringing only for him.
Suddenly the room shook and the curtains flew into the room. His ears felt as though they were being pierced with needles and a blast of rain hammered into his face. He wanted to scream, but the air had rushed from his lungs.
It was happening again.
Sylas threw his hands over his ears, but that had little effect – it was as though his very bones were vibrating with the sound of the bell. He shut his eyes and tried to focus his mind, but the aftershock hummed in his skull and shattered his thoughts.
He slid down below the window and wrapped his arms round his head, rocking backwards and forwards. He wondered if he was going to die, or worse, if this was the end of all things.
But slowly, too slowly, the noise began to subside. He had no idea how long it took, but finally the timbers beneath his feet ceased their shuddering and the wall at his back became still.
Frightened as he was, Sylas pushed himself up and leaned out of the window to see if anything had changed. He looked along the length of the street, across to the houses and over them to the town, but again the world seemed unaware of the strange chime.
And yet he had the inexplicable sense that something was out of place, as if he was looking at the world through a distorted windowpane.
Then he saw it. His eyes were fixed on the sphere of orange light around one of the electric streetlamps. He could see thousands of tiny raindrops falling from the dark night sky, but there was something wrong. The rain was not falling straight down, but at a steep angle to the ground, as though being carried on a high wind.
There was no wind.
His eyes shifted from one streetlamp to the next all the way up the street and, sure enough, the rain was the same everywhere: it was being drawn towards the source of the sound. As he watched and the sound gradually waned, the rain returned to a normal, vertical path. As the noise died, its hold over the tiny drops weakened and fell to nothing.
Then the chime struck again.
He recoiled and covered his ears, but forced himself to stand at the window and watch. As the shock hit his room, the rain was driven back, away from the hills, sending another cold, painful blast into his face. He tried with all his might to keep his eyes open and after the impact of the chime he saw the rainfall gradually swing about, once again sweeping towards the source of the sound. The long note of the bell was drawing it in.
Drawing it towards what?
His thoughts came to him in fragments, but somehow he managed to piece them together: something magical was happening. His mind went to the dark corridors of the Shop of Things, the beautiful birds flying without strings, the strange shifting runes of the Samarok. He turned and peered across the room at the Samarok glistening on the trapdoor. Suddenly Mr Zhi’s words came rushing back to him.
“The Samarok is yours, and its journey of discovery will be yours too. Only you will know when that journey has begun, and where it is taking you.”
Surely he couldn’t have meant this? But then Sylas thought about the street outside – everyone else just carrying on as though they could not hear the bell...
“Only you will know...” he murmured.
Could it be that somehow the bell was calling to him, drawing him in, like the rain? But even as he started to believe that it might just be true, his thoughts returned to his mother – surely he should be looking for her, not following some bell? That was the only journey that mattered now.
But Mr Zhi had made it sound as though this ‘journey’ had everything to do with her.
“I’ll try to understand,” Sylas had said.
“... that is all your mother would ask.”
He looked around the room, at the papers strewn across the floorboards, at the kites scattered and broken. The empty shell of his sanctuary seemed even more lifeless than before, now riddled with questions and deceits. There was nothing here to keep him, nothing that made sense to him any more. All that lay ahead of him now was his search for his mother and the journey to understand the Samarok. Somehow these journeys were one and the same. And the bell was the beginning of it all.
He picked up the Samarok and put Mr Zhi’s message between its pages, then snatched the rucksack from the shelf and slid the book inside it, followed by a bottle of water from his sink. He pulled on a sweater and his trainers and hesitated, looking back at the papers on the floor.
He ran over and rummaged through the documents, picking out the Order of Committal. He checked for the name and address of the Winterfern Hospital, then slipped it into his bag. Seconds later he was clambering down the dark staircase towards the corridor.
The chime had almost faded away. He could hear the rain lashing the outside of the building and the flutter of a moth against one of the wall lamps. The corridor seemed darker and more ominous than usual – a few of the bulbs had burned out at the other end, leaving it in blackness. But Sylas felt a surge of excitement as he took his first steps towards a destination he could only guess at.
As he picked his way along the corridor, he looked warily at his uncle’s apartment door and then at the next one, the one leading directly into the office. He willed them to stay closed, and to his relief he was soon past them.
He was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the bell sounded again. The din was almost unbearable, seeming to reverberate between the walls and ricochet along the length of the passageway. He held his ears, expecting his uncle and the other residents to burst out of their apartments in a blind panic, but the doors remained closed. He continued, reminding himself to step carefully over the loose floorboards – if no one else could hear the bell, they would surely be able to hear a clumsy step. He looked carefully from board to board, planning his way ahead. Finally, when he was nearing the staircase, he began to relax.
He looked ahead into the passageway, into the darkness, and felt the blood drain from his face.
A surge of adrenalin charged through his body. There, suspended in the darkness at the end of the corridor, were two pale yellow eyes. As Sylas watched, they blinked slowly, coldly, and moved towards him.
The monstrous jaws of the wolfish hound emerged into the lamplight. For a moment the two faced each other. The beast stood with its head and shoulders in the flickering light, its long body disappearing into the blackness. Its head moved slowly up and down as it drew long, rasping breaths. The sound of the bell was fading once more and Sylas could hear the air hiss between its teeth and a growl as it exhaled. It blinked lazily and its tongue curled upwards to the fangs that protruded below its wrinkled snout. Its eyes were fixed on his in a way that left no doubt of its intent.
Sylas was motionless: breathing deeply, trying to steady his nerves, his eyes avoiding the beast’s drooling jaws and lolling tongue. He glanced towards the first step of the staircase. It was about halfway between him and the beast. There was no way he would make it, and if he did, the hound would pounce on him from behind. When he looked back, it too was looking at the staircase and he had the unnerving feeling that it was willing him to try. He swallowed hard and drew in another long breath.
As a chime crashed through Gabblety Row, Sylas whirled about and threw himself forward, charging back down the corridor. He could hear nothing but the bell, but he could sense that the beast was already in motion. He pictured its sinewy muscles tightening as it launched itself out of the darkness. He thundered down the corridor, his