The Gold Thief

“Boys, look around, will you? Gorrn, would you kindly search the bedrooms? Whiskers, look for anything out of the ordinary.”

“Arr,” said Gorrn, and the ominous creature was in the shadows and oozing up the stairs.

“Move, Gorrn!” hissed Ned.

His slovenly familiar gave an undulating shrug of what might have been shoulders, and began moving at two miles per hour instead of one.

The second third of his mostly mute search party promptly gave a squeak from behind the sitting-room’s sofa. His keen clockwork eyes had indeed found something “out of the ordinary” on the carpet. It had collected by the far wall and looked almost exactly like liquid mercury. Ned got down on his knees and took a closer look. The sudden absence of his parents must have something to do with the odd-looking liquid, but what?

“Blimey, Whiskers, what is this stuff and what’s it doing on our carpet?”

His trusty mouse, as wonderful as it was, had no answer.

“Take a sample, our friends on the other side will want to have a look at this.”

Whiskers did as he was told, using his tiny metal tongue as a syringe. The mercurial liquid was now Ned’s only clue and whatever it might mean, he was quite sure it had originated from the other side of the Veil – the side he would have to go to for answers.

To his left was the family Christmas tree. It sagged under the weight of lights and baubles and the promise of happier days. He looked at the pile of presents beneath it and his chest tightened. In a few days he would have been opening them with his mum and dad. But today and now, everything had changed. He would have to leave shortly and had no way of knowing when he’d come back. There were two presents that he’d been particularly excited about. As daft as it was, he couldn’t bear to leave without them, and scooped them up into his arms.

“Yes, Chief Inspector, but why, why are they being taken?” blared the radio.

Ned thought of his parents’ smiling faces and willed the interview to stop. As he did so, there was an angry bang! from the kitchen and his mum’s radio exploded. His powers had spiked again, loudly enough for something upstairs to take notice.

From the ceiling directly above Ned’s head came a low growl and it was one that he didn’t recognise. It was followed by a wailing sound from Gorrn, who Ned guessed had found an intruder!

“Gorrn? Gorrn, what’s going on up there?”

Silence.

If Ned’s training had taught him anything, it was that Terry and Olivia Armstrong were the best of the best. They wouldn’t have gone down without a fight and yet there were no signs of a scuffle, at least downstairs. He prayed that whatever Gorrn had come across had made them flee, and that if they’d done so, they’d escaped without getting hurt.

“Please be OK,” he whispered.

CRASH!

There was a loud tinkling of broken glass and another of Gorrn’s wails, at which point Whiskers responded with a highly agitated flashing of his eyes.

Two dots and a dash; “U”, followed by an “S”, then an “E”.

“USE, O, N, E,” translated Ned, “W, A, Y.”

“One way?” he mouthed.

“H, E, L, P – I, S – I, N – T, H, E – P, A, R, K.”

Ned froze. The One-Way! The Glimmerman had given it to him before he’d left the circus. His dad never let him leave the house without it, never. In an emergency it could be used to travel by mirror, any mirror, to a Hidden-run safe house. There were several problems with Whiskers’ frantic blinking message. Parks in general did not contain safe houses, at least not as far as Ned knew, and any clue to finding out what had happened to his parents was not going to be found in a bush, but upstairs, where Gorrn was fighting with … something.

As Ned cursed himself for not thinking ahead, the largest and most immovable problem presented itself.

He had left his bag containing the One-Way Key in Mr Johnston’s shed.

That decided it.

There had been moments in Ned’s life where one might think he’d acted bravely. In truth he had acted out of necessity. Today, here and now, was one such moment. No matter what the protocol was, if he was going to find his parents, he had to see what was upstairs. He placed the two Christmas presents by the front door and turned to his mouse.

“Right, Whiskers, you lead the way upstairs – I’ll be right behind you. On my count; three, two, one – GO!” he spat.

And Whiskers did go, right up his trouser leg.

“Coward.”

The Debussy Mark Twelve answered with a nip at his ankle. Heart now racing, Ned crept forward. On the landing outside his bedroom he saw Gorrn, rushing towards him at a decidedly faster pace than the last time he’d seen him. Whatever was behind the now-fleeing creature had clearly spooked him, and Gorrn did not spook easily. There was no sign of an intruder of any kind – which was how Ned guessed it was a bargeist.

He had come across one before. Completely invisible, unless you were scared, and the perfect hunter. Gorrn had dispatched one for him at the Circus of Marvels. If Gorrn was having trouble with this creature, it must be old – maybe even an alpha?

“Gru,” mumbled an out-of-breath Gorrn, which in this instance meant sorry.

“Gorrn? Gorrn, you’re supposed to protect me, you big lump!”

His familiar gave him an oozy, deflated shrug, before shrinking into Ned’s shadow.

“You two are useless!” grimaced Ned, before trying to focus on the problem at hand. All of his training told him to remain calm, yet the only way he was going to actually see the creature was if he let it frighten him, which as it turned out would be no problem at all.

High-level bargeists were not only particularly violent but had also developed the ability to grow in size. Ned swallowed as a shiver of genuine fear trickled down his spine. As he did so, the first part of the blood-hound started to show. Two smouldering eyes, under heavy furred lids, stared at him down the corridor. Two eyes that were growing bigger.

That was the thing about a bargeist, the more frightened you became, the more you saw of it and, in turn … the more you got frightened.

This was not going to be like sparring with his dad. Somewhere in the partly visible creature was a wolfish dog, with the bulk of a crocodile. Add jet-black fur as hard as nails and teeth as sharp as razors, sprinkle in a demon’s evil heart, and what you had was a bargeist.

Wasn’t this what Ned had wanted? A fight without rules? No manual to hand, no overprotective parents.

Yes and no.

His freedom had lost its lustre, along with his mum and dad.

From somewhere within him something flared, a spark of anger, a snap of rage. Ned didn’t care how frightening a creature the bargeist was. It had done something to his parents and it would pay. He only had to think it, and his ring crackled like electric fire – carpet and plasterboard came tearing from the walls and floor. A great angry mess of swirling debris formed beside him, and quickly he turned their atoms to hardened stone, using nothing more than raw willpower and a good dose of malice.

“What have you done with them?” he yelled, his hand raised in a threat and his weapons ready to let fly.

But even as he blustered, more of the creature showed itself. No matter how loudly you beat your chest, you can never lie to a bargeist. Ned saw it lowering its head and its great jaws widening to something of a … grin.

“Hra, hra, hra,” came a sound like wet gravel.

“Tell me that isn’t a laugh?”

It paced forward suddenly and Ned “told” his barrage to fly, but he’d been too eager, pushed them with too much force and the projectiles missed their mark, splintering the far wall with a violent crash. Even now, with the creature pushing towards him, he could hear his dad telling him to focus.

Ned backed down the stairs, the bargeist following but its pace slowing. Why wasn’t it attacking?

“Think!” breathed Ned.

There was a horrible scraping of iron-hard hair along the wall as the bargeist turned down the stairwell.

“Nice doggy,” whimpered Ned.

And the “doggy” gave him another canine grin, though there was nothing nice about it. Without even trying, Ned’s mind flicked to the memorised pages of the Engineer’s Manual. The very same pages he’d asked to abandon only the night before.

“Page one hundred and thirty-seven, ‘C-containment’,” he stammered.

But before he could focus, two things happened and in no particular order.

First, a now completely visible bargeist sat down at the top of the stairs.

And second, Ned’s friends burst in through the front door and slammed it shut behind them.

One-way Ticket

rchie and Gummy’s faces were bright red and covered in sweat.

“N-N-Ned,” started Archie. Ned’s position was now officially unmanageable. Gummy looked as though he was about to go into cardiac arrest, and though they couldn’t see it, there was a slack-jawed killing machine at the top of Ned’s stairs – which for some reason had decided to take a break.

“What are you two doing here?!” Ned squealed.

“Cycled over as quick as we could. Y-you were being so weird – we were worried about you, and your mouse, Ned! Its eyes lit up like bulbs!” managed Archie between gulps of air.

His two friends may well have had his best interests at heart, but they’d now seriously endangered themselves – and no doubt Ned too.

“What? GET OUT OF HERE!”

But Archie had not finished.

“There’s something else, Ned – the nit inspector, he’s coming down the street.”

“Hra, hra, hra,” came the gravelly laugh of the bargeist.

“So that’s your game!” Ned sneered back. The hound wasn’t there to hurt him – he was just delaying things till his master returned.

Gummy had finally come to his senses and was beginning to breathe normally again. “What was that sound, and why are you talking to the stairs?”

“It’s nothing and you two have to go.”

But before Gummy could answer, they were cut off by a knock on the door.

“Hello? Hello – Ned? Do open up, will you, I would so like to meet you,” came an oily voice through the letterbox. “I know you’re in there – I can smell you.”

“Barking dogs – that’s him!” cried Archie. “First you go all Gandalf on us and now this!”

Barking dogs indeed, thought Ned, as the bargeist started pacing down the stairs. And with every step the creature continued to grow. Ned had to make a break for it, but how? If he ran, on his own, the nit inspector might hurt his friends. Or he could allow himself to be captured … No, that wasn’t an option. If his parents had been taken, he needed to be free, so he could try to get them back.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he whispered to his friends, eyes flitting between door and stairs.

“We had to. You left your bag and you never go anywhere without it. Besides, if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have seen the inspector. Is he what all this is about? Are you OK, Ned? Where are your mum and dad?”

But Ned wasn’t listening.

“My bag? Please tell me you’ve got it!”

“There’s hardly anything in it,” said Archie, pulling Ned’s small messenger bag from his shoulder and handing it to his friend.

“Archie Hinks – I could kiss you!”

“Just you try it! See, Gummy – he’s not himself, it’s the magic talking.”

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! went the door.

“Ne-eeeed,” cooed the inspector. “Come on, we both know I’ll find a way in, Ned, I always find a way in. Besides – in a minute or two you and your little friends will most certainly want a way out.”

To push home his point, the bargeist bared its teeth.

“Er … Ned?” said Archie. “What’s going on?”

“What have you done with them?!” shouted Ned, ignoring his friend.

“Mummy and Daddy? Oh, don’t worry, they’re back in my little hidey-hole. They’re a tricky pair, aren’t they, put up quite a fight once they came round. But I knew my little pet would keep you busy till I returned.”

And there it was: they’d put up a fight but they were alive. If the nit inspector had wanted them dead, there’d be no point in kidnap. Ned was brought back to the moment by some rattling in the lock of the door. The inspector was trying to break in and his bargeist was now dangerously close, creeping down the stairs one slow paw at a time.

Ned grabbed the presents from the floor and stuffed them into his bag, before dragging his two friends into the kitchen and its waiting full-length mirror. Both Gummy and Archie were now visibly shaken, though thankfully unaware of the enormous set of teeth approaching from the bottom of the stairs.

“Ned, what’s going on? How did you make your mouse’s eyes do that in the shed? And why is a nit inspector trying to break into your house?” clamoured Archie.

Ned cleared his throat as the bargeist prowled into the kitchen, its powerful body readying to pounce.

“I’m going to ask you to do something that you’re going to find a little bit odd,” he said. “Actually, you’re going to be freaked out as hell. I’m really sorry, but you see there’s a monster standing behind you, a really big nasty monster that you can’t see, and if we don’t walk through this mirror, I think it’s going to hurt you, or maybe just me.” As he spoke, he kept his eyes glued to the bargeist’s teeth.

“Have you lost your marbles?” spat Archie, now looking beyond freaked out.

“I promise you, Arch, I haven’t cracked, but you might well think you have in a minute. I don’t want you to worry – there are some nice people waiting for us on the other side and they’re going to take really good care of you.”

Ned could only hope that he was right. Gummy and Arch had nothing to do with the man outside or the creature in his kitchen. They were simply in the wrong place and at the wrong time and only because they’d wanted to help. If they could just get to the Circus, Benissimo and the others would be able to get Gummy and Archie back home again. Whether Ned would be so lucky was another thing entirely.

“Don’t be scared,” he said, before placing the One-Way Key in Archie’s hand and then quite forcibly pushing his two friends through the Armstrongs’ kitchen mirror … and, just like that, they were gone.

Ned had no idea where his parents were or what lay ahead, and yet somewhere deep down inside he felt a small pang of excitement – he was going back to the world of the Hidden.

He took a deep breath and stepped through his own reflection, till there was nothing left of him at all.

Hide Park

ed had not known what to expect. The mirror was as cold as ice, though thankfully not as hard. His reflection started to bend around him, or was it the glass? In the blur of streaking light that followed he could see an altogether different room from the one he was leaving. Movement was slow at first, as though he were pushing through a spider’s web of jelly, till something in the jelly pulled.

Shluup.

What had initially resisted now yanked him from his kitchen and through the mirror. In that brief instant between places, every fibre, every speck of dust had been removed from his body, his skin left as smooth as glass. A hand as large and strong as a metal spade now held him by the shoulder.

“Nied – Nied! De boy, da! De boy is comink!”

Ned stumbled through, on to grass, by a canvas wall. He didn’t understand. This couldn’t be a safe house. This … this was the Circus of Marvels.

Towering over his two friends and staring at him closely was a large ruddy-red face. Rocky, the Russian mountain troll, in his human form, was waiting to greet him. But Ned was not the last to step through the mirror.

There was a bone-shaking ROARR! behind him.

He felt a gust of wind as the two slobbering jaws of the bargeist snapped at his back. One of its front teeth grazed his shoulder just enough to draw blood with a fiery sharp sting of pain.

“Agh!” Ned yelled, and rolled to the floor.

The creature tried to follow through the portal, but its shoulders were now too bulky to edge their way along. The great Russian tank that was Rocky might not have been able to see the bargeist, but the size of his fists left little room for error.

“Niet, little monster!” bellowed Rocky, before dispatching the bargeist with a heavy crunch of his fist and sending the yelping creature back to the Armstrongs’ kitchen. A second later he whipped off his coat and threw it over the mirror, preventing anything else from coming through.

Ned exhaled with relief. An enlarged alpha male bargeist was one thing. Clearly, Rocky the Russian mountain troll was quite another.

Ned tried to get his bearings. He was in the Glimmerman’s hall of mirrors, he realised. Beside Rocky were the two shaking figures of Gummy Johnston and Archie Hinks – they had gone through the mirror first, and it looked very much to the wounded Ned as though their brains had somehow remained in his kitchen. It was Archie who spoke first.

“See, Gummy? I knew he was a blooming wizard.”

Which was when his two friends fainted into a pile of overwhelmed limbs.

With the creature dispatched and the Glimmerman’s mirror safely covered, Ned was hoisted on to the excitable troll’s shoulders. The graze that he’d been given would have felt like little more than a scratch from a normal dog, but the bargeist’s spit burned like a hot coal.

“Rocky?! Wait – Gummy and Arch, I need to look after them!”

“Niet, niet! Jossers stay sleep for moment, de troupe look after.”

“My mum and dad, Rocky, they’re gone!”

“Da, we know. But don’t worry – de boss, he always have plan and your parents are tough cookies.”

Ned could only hope he was right. The nit inspector – whoever he really was – had somehow managed to take them from their home, away from Christmas, away from their safe suburban hideaway; but more importantly than any of that – he’d taken them away from Ned.

A moment later both troll and wounded cargo were out of the Glimmerman’s tent and parading around the Circus of Marvels encampment.

“Come see, come see!” bellowed Rocky. “We have de boy and he brought little jossers with him!”

Ned didn’t understand how he’d wound up at the circus instead of the expected safe house, but he couldn’t have been more grateful. A blur of fairy lights and campfires, sawdust and bunting filled his eyes. The pain of his throbbing shoulder gave way to relief and no small amount of hope. He had been forced to leave one home and been transported to quite another. His parents might well be missing, but the circus would have answers and if Rocky was right, the ever-commanding Benissimo would have a plan.

At first sight the troupe were just how he remembered them. Some were wearing bowler hats with ruffled shirts, others resembled gypsies of old – no two were dressed the same or even in clothes from matching eras. But that wasn’t the wonder that was the Circus of Marvels. What set it apart, what made it a spectacle to behold, was that very few of them were actually human.

The dancing girls in their fur and feathers were cartwheeling towards him, and there was general whooping and hollering as the Tortellini brothers, with their satyr-horned heads and enthusiastic backslapping, spread the word. Several bearded gnomes from the kitchen ran to take care of Gummy and Arch, laden with oversized tubs of popcorn and hotdogs the size of ostriches. Everyone dropped everything, wet clothes were left unhung, a half-constructed tent left to topple, and through all the clamouring and colour Ned saw the unmistakable figure of Alice, the circus’s white winged elephant, in a full charge.

“Alice!” pleaded Norman, her ineffectual trainer, who was as ever chasing behind.

“AROO!” she trumpeted happily, before coming to a sudden halt right by Ned and licking him clear across the face.

The passing of many months had done little to change her feelings for him, it seemed, nor had it done anything to improve her breath.

“Hello, girl!” grinned Ned, doing his best to push away her trunk without hurting her feelings.

“She’s right happy to have you back, Master Ned, haven’t seen her this sprightly in months,” wheezed Norman.

“Oh, stop pesterin’ ’im, you lumps – he’s been through enough for one day!” chimed in the sing-song voice of Rocky’s wife.

Abi “the Beard” looked as cheery and plump as ever, as she waddled over to greet Ned.

“Come on, you big cossack, put ’im down so I can have a proper look at him.”

Ned was unceremoniously placed on the grass before Abigail, and she gave him a rib-cracking hug; it put pressure on his graze but that was a small price to pay for one of Abigail’s best.

Even though Ned had missed them all, for a brief moment he was quite overcome. The Circus of Marvels and its band of oddities had been, till just now, a memory. Up close in the flesh they were brighter, shinier and more strange and noisy than a hundred memories jumbled together.

“You poor love, don’t you worry, you’re with us now and we’ll have your ma and pa back in no time. Now what’s all this about jossers comin’ with you?” Abigail grinned.

“I couldn’t leave them at home! I had a bargeist in my kitchen, I think it was an alpha.”

“Bargeist, is it? Nasty blighters. You send ’em my way next time and I’ll give ’em a wallop they’ll remember,” Abigail winked back, before she noticed the way he was holding his shoulder. “Oh, Ned love, you’re hurt! Lucy’ll want to take a look at that, she’ll have you fixed up in a blink.”

“Could have been a lot worse, if it hadn’t been for Rocky.”

“He has his uses,” grinned Abigail. “Though to be fair, they’re mostly about givin’ folk a thump.”

“It’s good to see you again, Abigail. But … where are we?” Ned could see small lights in the distance, but closer by there were only trees, and grass, and darkness.

“Hyde Park, dear, central London.”

“Hyde Park?”

“Yep. If you’re in the capital and need to hide, Hyde Park’s your best bet. Been a fair-folk stronghold for donkey’s, and as good a place as any to lay low. It’s off the radar, see? But large enough to conceal a small army and with good access to the rest of the city. The woods here are full o’ sprites, kindly little things and always ready to help when it’s needed. It’s lucky we were in the area when the Olswangs messaged us. Soon as we got here, Bene sent Couteau and his best blades to find you.”

“I must have stepped through the mirror before they got there.”

“Yes, dear. Still, you’re with us now and this Park will keep you hidden till we figure out what’s what.”

Ned peered through the darkness. Sure enough, in the canopies of the trees he now recognised the tell-tale glow of sprite light, dancing in the branches. Behind Abigail, the Guffstavson brothers, Sven and Eric, were letting off a celebratory bolt of electricity, for once without needing to be angry, when they were unceremoniously barged out of the way by the most welcome sight Ned had seen all day. A giant mound of furred gorilla in the shape of dear George the Mighty, his friend and protector, who in turn was jostling for position with Lucy Beaumont. She was more than a friend or even family, and the bond between them as unbreakable as the rings they both wore at their fingers.