Alex had been more difficult to identify, for he seemed quite lumpy now. Then Jordy realised his step-brother was bundled up for some reason, with coats and other clothes, a hat, and was wearing some kind of mask. But it had definitely been Alex: you could tell by the way he dragged his feet and walked in that dreamy kind of way which told you he was lost in his head somewhere.
‘I expect they’re missing me,’ he told Nelson, who paid him a visit once the clocks had stopped. ‘I can’t see them getting on very well without me. They’re not practical like me. I’m a survivor.’
Nelson agreed with Jordy, of course: he always did.
But after that initial sighting, Alex and Chloe vanished. They must have taken another turning, or direction. Jordy was disappointed. He longed to have someone real to talk to now. Loneliness was not a pleasant thing, especially in a strange place. It dragged you down. He found himself waking in the middle of the night with a start, wondering if he’d heard voices or had simply been caught in a dream. He would stare out into the darkness, hoping that Alex and Chloe were nearby, and that morning would reveal them. Once or twice he even called out their names, but received so many mocking replies from attic creatures, he never did it again.
At night the attic was like a jungle. Even with the clocks stopped Jordy was plagued with sounds. There were twitterings, squealing, screeches, scratchings and scrapings and the like. These were noises he could more or less identify and put down to live creatures. But there were other more sinister sounds: whirrings, rattlings, mechanical buzzings, high whining noises, raspings. Some of them were quite loud and near to him, others were softer and further away.
In the night it seemed as if the whole of Attica was swarming with mechanical beasts, roaming the boards, looking for prey. When morning came around, however, it became relatively quiet again. He would stand on the edge of the plain and stare out, thinking to see herds of clockwork elephants, or robot monkeys, or automated leopards out there. But once the darkness had lifted, the boards were bare of such creatures. There was just him, alone, without a single companion of any kind.
The nights gave him the feeling of being besieged, threatened and menaced by hordes of unseen creatures. The days left him convinced that he had been abandoned, acutely aware of his solitude, like a castaway sailor on a desert island. Neither sensation was very pleasant. Yet he was swiftly falling in love with the attic. He guessed it was the same sort of feeling his grandfather had spoken of, when talking of Africa. In his grandfather’s youth Africa had been a dangerous place, with wild animals which roamed everywhere. Snakes, crocodiles, lions and other beasts. There had also been the extremes in climate, deadly diseases and mosquitoes. Yet Jordy’s grandfather had loved Africa with a great passion. This is how Jordy felt about Attica: it was a dangerous place, but it captured your heart.
When Nelson was around Jordy felt better, but Nelson was not one to stay long and once he’d gone again the bitter taste of loneliness returned to haunt him. He found he needed to talk to himself to avoid going crazy. One’s own company is better than nothing. Otherwise he was afraid he might come to believe he was not there at all: a figment of an imagination. How terrible that would be, to discover he did not exist except in the mind of a spider or a fly. To go swiftly from a point where he believed he was the only real living thing in the world, to the sure knowledge that he was nothing but a stirring of the dust, a draught of air, a splash of light.
‘I must try to stop these weird thoughts coming into my head,’ he told himself. ‘Otherwise I will go crazy.’
He tried making noises to prove to himself he was there: clashing old saucepan lids together and kicking hollow drums. But somehow the noises made things worse. He found himself listening very hard in the silence that followed, for sounds that he might have missed during the racket. What if there had been a search party out there, calling his name, and he had blotted those calls out with his stupid noises? Every solution turned out to be a problem and every problem grew to