a ghastly crack from one of his bones. Jordy’s face went white with shock. He sat up looking dazed and sick. Holding forth his injured limb it seemed his forearm was fractured in the middle. There was a horrible sharp bump in the skin which was a sure sign of a broken bone trying to poke through. Jordy looked as if he were going to pass out, but he rallied, gritting his teeth.
‘Does it hurt much?’ asked Alex, almost as if he were curious rather than feeling sorry for his step-brother. ‘Is there much pain?’
Jordy sucked in his breath, holding up his injured arm with his good hand. ‘Not much. Not a lot, I mean. It hurts, but like someone has kicked me. Not as bad as you’d think it would. It’s a sort of numbing pain.’
Alex then busied himself with stamping on those last few imp inks that now scuttled away from Jordy. Coloured ink squirted everywhere. Chloe told him to stop, then closely inspected the damage to her step-brother. She had done First Aid with her gymnastics coach.
‘We need to put splints on that,’ she said, ‘to hold it in place. It’ll need to be set by a doctor, but if it gets knocked or moved in the meantime, then it’ll hurt. Tonight it’ll ache like anything. I know, I broke my ankle at hockey. It’s tonight it’ll hurt.’
‘Thanks for the warning,’ gasped Jordy.
Alex went and found some pieces of an old orange box for the splints while Chloe looked for something to bind them with. She found some ladies’ head scarves, which would do admirably, she said. They then boxed in the broken forearm with three pieces of wood. Chloe did a really good job of binding the pieces together, so that though Jordy could move his whole limb, his forearm remained still. Chloe then made a sling which would hold Jordy’s splinted arm.
Nelson watched the proceedings with a distinct lack of interest as he licked coloured inks from his fur in distaste.
Standing up and feeling a lot better, Jordy assessed the problems he now caused the three of them.
‘Look,’ he said, his face still the grey shade of stale bread, ‘I’ve got to get to a doctor, you know, or gangrene might set in. If that happens I’ll either lose my arm or at the very worst, I’ll die …’
‘Don’t say that,’ Chloe snapped.
‘I’m sorry Chloe, but I’ve got to face the truth. Thanks for doing this up for me, but I’ve got to get home now, somehow. I’m not sure exactly what gangrene is, or how I would know if I’d got it, but from reading books I do know it smells terrible and that it spreads until it reaches some vital organ.’
‘We have to get you home,’ said Chloe emphatically. ‘You need to get to the hospital.’
‘That’s what I’ve been saying,’ replied Jordy, managing to smile through his own distress at her anxiety. ‘It’s what I’ve got to do.’
Chloe said, ‘Well, the first thing we’ve got to do is see whether we’ve got the map or not.’
With some trepidation she unrolled the huge parchment which Jordy had wrested from the ink imps. At first her heart skipped a beat as she thought they had the wrong piece of paper. She had been expecting wiggly lines in different coloured inks, with contours and lots of numbers for heights above sea level. What she had here looked like a board game. But then she realised a map of an attic would look nothing like a map of the normal world. It would look like this chart did, a floor plan of a room. Gradually, as she studied it, she recognised areas they had been through.
‘Look, here’s the Jagged Mountain – and there – there’s the Forest of Tall Clocks – and over here the place where we met the friendly puppets – oh – oh …’
‘What is it?’ asked Jordy, wincing as the pain grew in his arm. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Here. Look. Down here. Almost off the bottom of the map,’ cried Chloe excitedly. ‘This is where we crossed over from our home attic into Attica proper. I know. I recognise those gently curving rafters, like the flying buttresses on a cathedral. You must remember, Jordy, the way they swept across the sky high above us, as we were wandering around, wondering where we were and how to get back?’
‘I dunno,’ replied Jordy doubtfully. ‘It doesn’t do anything for me.’