Attica

chapter 12

Bortrekkers and Electric Dust Storms

‘You want to become a bortrekker?’ asked the youth. ‘Is that it?’ He looked up and waved an arm and sighed. ‘This here place, the attic, is a wonderful land when you get to know it. I love it. It’s in my blood now, every plank, every splinter. When it knows you like it, the attic looks after you, in its timbery way. I can understand why you want to stay here. I felt the same after I’d been here a bit. I never want to leave.’

‘No,’ replied Jordy honestly, ‘I don’t want to stay here. This is a great place, I’ll give you that. I like it here. It’s exciting. Things happen to you. But I don’t want to stay for ever. I just need to know how you find your way around. I have to find a pocket-watch, you see. Not just any watch, a special one. Could you teach me how to navigate? You say you don’t have a compass or a map. How do you do it? I need to know because I also have to find my brother and sister, and then the way out.’

The bortrekker settled back into his raincoat, tipping his big hat over his eyes.

‘Compasses are no good up here. The needle always points to the middle of the attic. You see, the natural or the unnatural way of this place is to draw you into the centre. So a compass will take you in that direction. Charts? There is a map …’

‘… in a golden bureau where the ink imps live.’

‘Ah, someone told you. Yep, that’s where it is, down by the Great Water Tank. Never been that way myself, but I’m told it’s there. I’ll get there one day, before I die. Other places to go first. Bortrekking ain’t so much a living as a pastime. I guess I’m like a tramp or a hobo, wandering the world. There’s no great purpose in it. It’s just somethin’ to do. I could be readin’ books – read most of them I wanted to – but I can do that anyway, while I’m roamin’ here, there and everywhere.’

Jordy leaned his back against one of the great pillars.

‘My sister likes books – my step-sister. Chloe. She carries a list of her top favourites in her pocket always.’

‘Used to do that. Till I read all my favourites and started on those I’d never heard of.’

‘I’ve got a step-brother too: Alexander.’

‘Magnificent name,’ said the bortrekker. ‘Alexander the Great. Warrior king, conqueror of empires, horseman, traveller, undoer of difficult knots – he was a bortrekker, you know – reached the mighty river Indus.’

‘Well, Alex’s ancestors came from India, but he’s no Alexander the Great. He’s a bit into himself. Likes engines and inventions and things. I’m more into sport myself.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes. I tried to join in with a game the Atticans were playing with T-squares, but they chased me away when I got a goal.’

The bortrekker shook his head.

‘You want to stay away from them locals. They’re not like us humans. May look a bit like us, but they’re from here and we’re not. You must’ve noticed I stayed hidden in the dark when I played my violin. That’s ’cause they think we’re spectres. How would you like ghouls roamin’ over your cricket pitch, eh? Not much. That’s the way they feel, I guess. They leave me gifts when I get Arthur and Harold dancin’ for ’em, but they don’t know it’s me. I don’t know who they think it is – maybe some god? – but so long as I don’t show myself I can get away with it.’

‘Arthur and Harold?’

‘My rats.’

The bortrekker pointed to the two creatures who were washing themselves with their paws. One of them now wandered off and found the crook of a rafter in which to curl up and go to sleep. The other kept looking at Jordy with a rather disconcerting stare. Jordy supposed Arthur and Harold were not used to seeing their musician talking with another human.

Jordy said, ‘And you call it a violin, not a fiddle?’

‘Same difference. I’m told a fiddle is a violin played with the base tucked into the elbow joint, and a violin is a fiddle played with the base tucked under the chin.’

Jordy laughed. ‘That’s a bit like how you can tell a crow and a rook apart.’

‘What’s the answer?’

‘A rook is a crow if it’s on its own and a crow is a rook if it’s in a flock.’

The bortrekker laughed. ‘God, I haven’t laughed in a long time. That feels good. You’re all right, boy. Teachin’ me to laugh again. Tell you what I’m goin’ to do for you in return. I’m goin’ to teach you to navigate this world. It ain’t easy, but I’ll teach you the basics. You’re not tired, are you?’

‘I’m wide awake,’ said Jordy. ‘I can sleep tomorrow.’

‘Good. All right then, this is how it’s done. Short trek navigation. This is the easy bit. If you want to go in a straight line, ’stead of getting drawn into the middle of the attic, you need to look ahead for two sunshafts, comin’ down from skylights. Line up two more or less one behind the other. Don’t matter if they’re a bit out, the line don’t have to be dead straight. So, then you start off from a particular point and head towards the first sunshaft, still keeping the one behind it in view, keeping them lined up, like the sights on a gun. When you reach that first one, take another sighting on the second and a third sunshaft, and do the same again. Simple. All you got to remember is you have to do the sightings at the same time every day – noon if possible – so the shafts are always striking the deck at the same angle. You see what I mean?’

‘I think so,’ replied Jordy, wondering how this helped someone get from one particular geographical spot to another. ‘I’ve done orienteering and that makes sense insofar as going in a straight line. It won’t help me find, say, the Great Water Tank, though, will it?’

‘I guess not, but it’ll keep you heading in one direction. You see, up here it’s a bit like before sailors had longitude to help with navigating. Up here we only have latitude: the cracks between the floorboards. They only go in one direction. So you can tell how far you are along, say, an east to west line, but you can’t tell where you are north to south.’

‘That seems to make sense too, but I don’t think it helps me much,’ said Jordy. ‘Thanks for trying, anyway.’

‘You’re welcome. Now long trek navigation. The stars.’

‘Stars?’ repeated Jordy, looking mystified. ‘What stars?’

‘Two kinds. Glass and timber. The first kind is the skylights. The second kind is timber. In the outside world they can only see stars at night. We can usually only see ours during the day, though sometimes a bright moon will illuminate them. Now, over there,’ he pointed, ‘a bunch of skylights will appear in the morning. They’re my Ursa Major. Beyond them is a big bright skylight, my Sirius, which lines me up neatly for the constellation of Capricorn, a series of glass tiles which dot the heavens of the Far Corner of the attic. Orion’s Belt, Capella, I’ve got ’em all in my head. They speak to me, as the night stars speak to explorers in your world.’

‘Wow!’ cried Jordy, fascinated.

‘Now the timbers – the rafters – are different. I guess they’re not so much like stars as like mountain ranges. You look up, you recognise angles, shapes, formations. There’s the Cat’s Cradle Matrix formation just a short day’s trek from here, and Johnson’s Totems beyond that. That leads to the Mechano group. Anywhere I am I just look up at the rafters and there’s a pattern I know – or if I don’t know ’em I log ’em in my head for future reference, notin’ just where they are in relation to other timber formations.’

‘That’s ab-so-lutely brilliant,’ murmured Jordy, impressed. ‘You think I could learn?’

‘If you’re a lifer, sure.’

‘Oh.’ That didn’t sound so good to Jordy, who certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in an attic.

They seemed to have run out of conversation for now and Jordy sensed the bortrekker wanted to be quiet for a while. He found the pillar beneath which the rats were now both sleeping and leaned against it, staring out into the darkness of the Attican night. The moon out there in the outside world seemed to have gone behind a cloud, for there were no lunar shafts striking through from the skylights. Jordy’s former loneliness had now drained from him and he was feeling refreshed. He still missed his brother and sister, of course, but that awful empty feeling of forced solitude had gone.

Jordy liked the bortrekker. He knew Chloe wouldn’t approve of him: she was a bit funny about purposeless souls, but Jordy found him fascinating. No school. No real work. Nothing but this day and the next, one after the other.

There was a flash in the sky, like sheet lightning.

‘What was that?’ cried Jordy, sitting bolt upright. ‘Did you see that?’

‘Happen I was asleep,’ grumbled the bortrekker. ‘What’re you gabbing about?’

‘There,’ said Jordy excitedly. ‘There’s another one. Out there. Did you see it? A flash of light.’

‘Oh, that.’ Jordy could hear the rustling of the coat of many capes, as the bortrekker settled back again. ‘That’s a storm. Probably over the Great Water Tank. Electric dust storm.’

‘Electric dust storm?’

‘Yep. You know this place is full of dust. Dust on the rafters, on the beams, on the boards of the floor. It’s lain here since the attic was created. Some places it’s knee deep. There’s even areas where it’s so thick and wide you can drown in the stuff. Quickdust we call it. You want to stay away from quickdust, or you’ll go under and choke, a horrible dry death. Yep, half this world is dust. You can see it in the moonshafts, you can see it in the sunbeams. Dust, dust and more dust. Dead insects, cobwebs, dried rodent droppings and dusty old dust. That’s why I wear a kerchief over my mouth an’ nose most of the time. Here’s not bad, but there’s places you can’t even breathe when the South Draught blows. In a blistering high summer there’s a mistral draught comes in from the fractured roof of the East Wing – hot and weary – and dries you to a piece of leather …’

‘What’s that got to do with the storm?’ Jordy demanded to know. ‘Apart from them both being dust storms.’

‘Well, like I say, dust motes have been here since the dawn of time, since prehistoric attic time. In all that time they’ve got charged with static electricity. It’s in the air, you know, everywhere, even up here. Some particles of dust are negative charged, others are positive charged. When a cloud of positively charged dust motes meets a negative cloud, there’s a discharge of electricity. Lightning, you might say. That’s what you can see out there. Can you hear the crackle? No, it’s a long ways off then. If you count the seconds ’tween the crackle and the flash, that’s how many miles away the storm is.’

Jordy was amazed. ‘This really is an ancient place then?’

‘Ancient? This place must have been built by a powerful creator, you’ll give me that. An attic of these dimensions, these complexities? And who had a son who was a carpenter? Maybe the son followed in the father’s footsteps, made a trade out of his pappy’s favourite hobby?’

‘Really?’

‘Well, your guess is good as mine, but I reckon it must have been. Maybe he built it as a tree house when he was a kid, supposing he ever was a kid. Being who he was, of course, it was a miracle tree house, bigger than anything of its kind made before. Maybe he built it to play in, when he wanted to get away from the heavy duties put on his shoulders. Then again,’ the bortrekker shrugged inside his coat, making it rustle again, ‘maybe it was someone else, someone we’ve never heard of or could comprehend?’

Jordy watched the electrical dust storm. In itself it was a miracle of dazzling light. True, it did look a long way away, but being high in the Attican sky he could see the individual sparks building up, cracking from dust particle to dust particle, jumping motes, until there was one big rush when a million dust specks discharged their static electricity. This terminated in an almighty blanket flash illuminating the whole roof space. What a wonder of nature! The wild elements in their savage glory! He wished he were closer to it so he could get more of a sense of the power being released. He also wondered if Chloe and Alex could see the same storm. There was no reason why not. The idea seemed to bring them closer to him.

Jordy could hear the bortrekker snoring through the whole wonderful experience and thought to himself that he could never get so blasé about such a thing. There was a point when he could see tiny streaks leaving the dust cloud, lit up like fireflies or sparks, which curved out and down towards the boards.

‘Falling stars,’ he murmured.

What a fantastic sight: nimbus magic, a spangled show just for Jordy’s eyes. He did not think he would ever forget this moment, when the pyrotechnics of the attic had been let loose, and had filled his heart with the marvels of navigation and weather.


Chloe woke to see pulsing lights in the attic heavens far in the distance. Every so often there would be a crackle and a lightning fork would flash down to the boards below. Alex was still fast asleep so she left him there while she watched this phenomenon taking place in the faraway regions of this world of boards and timbers. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees and enjoyed the spectacle as one might from the cosiness and security of a bedroom window in the middle of the night at home.

‘How strange,’ she murmured. ‘How very strange.’

As with bedroom window storms, the sight was not alarming; in fact, it was somehow comforting. She had called it strange but in fact it felt familiar: an experience which reached down into her racial memory. Humankind has witnessed magnificent storms since they first got up on to their back legs and started calling their fellow mammals ‘beasts’. She could have been viewing it from the window of a modern office building or from the entrance to a cave. It was an ancient sport, watching the distant storm.

Finally, Chloe had had enough of the wonders of the attic and once again curled up and went to sleep, a little easier in her own mind.

When she woke again a bleary-eyed Alex was speaking to her from the depths of the folds in his greatcoat. ‘Any tea going?’

She was surprised to see his stomach move under the coat.

What was happening to him? Something was coming out.

Whether it was a monster which finally emerged depended upon your point of view. Certainly Chloe didn’t regard him as such, but a mouse or a sparrow might. Nelson’s gingery face appeared in the gap between the second and third button on the coat. He stared, gave an enormous yawn which not only showed his teeth but also the back of his throat, then he squeezed out, popping one of the buttons as he did so.

‘What’s Nelson doing in there?’ asked Chloe indignantly. ‘Has he been sleeping inside your coat all night?’

‘Yep.’

‘And I suppose he’s brought you another rat?’

‘Nope.’

‘In that case, it’s a veggy breakfast.’

Alex groaned. He stood up and went for a wash in the nearest water tank, which was about fifty metres away. When he got back he found Chloe had boiled the eggs given them by the puppets. Alex sat down and, full of gratitude for Punch and Judy, ate his fill.

‘Not too many of those,’ warned Chloe. ‘You’ll block up. Eggs do that to you.’

‘You sound like a mum.’

Chloe acknowledged this. She felt a bit like a mum sometimes. Boys needed to be told to wash, eat properly and to change their socks. Why they didn’t respect cleanliness or treat the food they threw down into their stomachs with caution she couldn’t imagine, but they started out life with a mum and most seemed to need one for ever.

Nelson didn’t appear to need anything to eat. He limped over to a spotlight thrown down from the roof, and stretched out again. There he lay in the warmth of the sun, gathering the energy necessary to go out and kill things by the dozen. It was he, however, who rolled over and was suddenly alert when a distant noise was heard.

‘What’s that?’ asked Chloe, a hard-boiled egg halfway to her mouth. ‘Did you hear that, Alex?’

Nelson was gone, slipping away into the shadows.

Alex took out his binoculars, looking through them.

‘Those doll things with the straggly hair and pins. Them that went for the villagers at that last collection of Attican wardrobes huts. They’re coming,’ he said. ‘D’you think they’ll attack us?’

Chloe was alarmed. ‘You’re sure they’re heading this way?’

‘Positive. They keep stopping and sniffing the ground before pointing at us. I think they’re tracking us.’ The glasses came down. ‘We’re being hunted.’

Chloe jumped to her feet, quickly followed by Alex. They gathered up their things, put them into packs, and began jogging away from the scene. Makishi, on Alex’s back, complained that he was being ‘bounced’. Alex said he couldn’t do anything about it. Things were looking desperate for the two children, who prior to this had no idea they had upset some of the attic’s most savage creatures.

As they ran Chloe kept looking at the ubiquitous piles of junk that they passed lying on the boards. Finally she saw something.

‘Clogs,’ she yelled. ‘Quick. Put a pair on over your shoes.’

‘But they’ll slow us up,’ complained Alex.

‘Yes, maybe – but they’ll destroy the trail. Be careful how you put them on. Don’t touch the bottoms. Then our smell won’t be on the trail we leave behind. It’ll just be old clogs against wooden boards. Wood on wood. The dolls won’t be able to follow us then.’

Alex saw the sense in this and found a large pair of clogs that would go over his shoes. Soon the pair of them were clumping along, making the most fearful racket, but hopeful that their trick would work.

However, when they stopped to rest and Alex used the binoculars again, he informed his sister that the dolls were still coming.

‘They’re gaining on us,’ he said. ‘What about doubling back and hiding somewhere?’

‘I don’t like that idea. If they can sniff our trail while we’re wearing clogs, they can certainly find hiding places.’

The wooden clogs were abandoned. The pair raced for their lives over the boards, hoping to come across some sort of habitation full of creatures who might help them. Nothing appeared on the horizon though and now the voodoo dolls were visible without the glasses. A dust cloud told of their coming. There were swarms of them, some dark, some pale, scurrying over piles of junk: a horde of warriors. The children tried to throw things in the dolls’ path, like old chairs and boxes, but nothing seemed to deter their pursuers. The glitter of long needles was visible now, as the small hunters ran through shafts of sunlight, their beady eyes intent upon their prey.

‘We’re not going to get away,’ gasped Alex. ‘They’re going to catch us, Clo.’

‘You go on,’ said his sister. ‘I’ll stay here and see if I can stop them.’

‘Not a chance.’

‘I’m the eldest. You should do as I say.’ Her tone was desperate. ‘You have to do what I say.’

‘No way. We stick together.’

Chloe said, ‘If we split up, one of us might make it.’

‘Don’t care. Don’t want to split up. Nelson could arrive. He’d make mincemeat of those dolls.’

‘No he wouldn’t. They’d get him too. Look, there are hundreds of them. He wouldn’t have a chance.’

There was a pile of hockey sticks in the next junk heap. Alex stopped and grabbed one, turning to face the enemy.

‘I’ve had it, Clo. I’m going down fighting.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she cried. ‘Come on. We can still run.’

‘Nope.’

Alex stood there, waiting, swinging the hockey stick.

Chloe knew they had run themselves out. She grabbed one of the old hockey sticks and stood by her brother. The dolls were triumphant, now having their quarry in their sight. They streamed towards the two children, jabbing the air with their nasty steel weapons.

Alex realised at the last minute that he could protect his face from those needles. He put Makishi on. Then he turned towards the dolls, swinging his club. The little fiends were almost on them now, only metres away. This was it, this was where the children’s journey through Attica ended. They had been hunted down and trapped by these awful effigies of man, and were about to die.

‘Stop. I command you to stop. You will obey.’

Makishi had spoken in a powerful voice.

The voodoo dolls skidded to a halt.

Makishi’s expression was severe.

‘Why do you attack us?’

Just metres from the children, the voodoo dolls fell on their little knees and bowed in reverence to Makishi. There were rows and rows of them, some still coming, who halted and bowed down low. Finally, all was so quiet you could almost hear the dust settling on the boards. Alex and Chloe waited breathlessly, wondering what would come next.

A shimmering went through the dolls as they stuck their needles back into their wax bodies. They knew there would be no sacrifice here. Makishi was one of their lords. They could do nothing more than sheath their weapons and wait for Makishi’s reprimand.

‘These are my friends,’ Makishi said at last in deep tones. ‘You will respect the carriers of Makishi or shame will fall on your heads. The masks have provided homes for the voodoo dolls since our Collector went the way of all Collectors. You are our tenants, our subjects.’

‘Yes, lord,’ incanted the voodoo dolls. ‘We are your subjects.’

‘Leave us alone then, with our friends, our carriers.’

One voodoo doll looked up, with the sharp words, ‘But, master, we have hunted long and hard—’

A strong baleful stare from Makishi was enough to silence this audacious creature. The dolls gradually got to their feet, looking sheepish. They ambled away, in ones, twos, groups of three or four, heading back in the direction they had come. The audacious one was pricked in the buttocks by those who walked behind him in an attempt to curry favour with Makishi. One of their landlords had spoken and the humans were under his protection.

They could do no more than return to their homeland.

When the voodoo dolls had gone, Alex took off his mask and looked into its hollow eyes.

‘Thanks Makishi,’ he said. ‘You saved our lives.’

‘My pleasures!’ replied the mask.