I shake my head again. “No, I want to look this stuff over before Baz comes back.”
Finally she gives in, and runs down the tower stairs like she doesn’t give a fig about getting caught. I go to the window to see if I can spot Baz out on the pitch.
36
PENELOPE
My mum insisted on me having a mobile after what happened with the Humdrum.
For a few weeks this summer, she was saying I couldn’t come back to Watford at all, and my dad didn’t even try to talk her down. I think maybe he felt responsible. Like he should have figured the Humdrum out by now.
Dad spent the whole month of June in his lab, not even coming out to eat. Mum made his favourite biryani and left steaming plates of it outside his door.
“That madman!” Mum kept ranting. “Sending children to fight the Humdrum!”
“The Mage didn’t send us,” I tried telling her. “The Humdrum took us.” But that just made her angrier. I thought she’d want to work out how the Humdrum had done it. (It’s impossible to steal someone like that, to port them that far. The magic required … Even Simon doesn’t have enough.) But Mum refused to approach it intellectually.
It made me really glad that she doesn’t know the details of every other scrape Simon and I have got ourselves into—and got ourselves out of, I should add. We deserve some credit for that.
Mum probably would have cooled down sooner, if it weren’t for the nightmares.…
I didn’t scream when it actually happened:
One minute, Simon and I were in the Wavering Wood, gaping at Baz and Agatha—me holding Simon’s arm. And the next minute, we were in a clearing in Lancashire. Simon recognized it—he lived in a home there when he was a kid, near Pendle Hill. There’s this big sound sculpture that looks like a tornado, and I thought at first that the noise was the Humdrum.
I could already feel that we were in one of his dead spots.
Dad studies dead spots, so I’ve been to loads of them. They’re the holes in the magickal atmosphere that started appearing when the Humdrum did. Stepping into a dead spot is like losing a sense. Like opening your mouth and realizing you can’t make any noise. Most magicians can’t handle it. They start to lose their shit immediately. But Dad told me he’s never had as much magic as most magicians, so it isn’t as terrifying for him to think of losing it.
So Simon and I show up in this clearing, and I can feel straight away it’s a dead spot—but it’s more than that. It’s worse. There’s this weird whistling on the wind, and everything’s dry, so dry and hot.
Maybe it’s not a dead spot, I thought, maybe it’s a dying spot.
“Lancashire,” Simon said to himself.
And then—the Humdrum was there.
And I knew it was the Humdrum because he was the source of everything. Like the way you know that the sun is what makes the day bright. All the heat and dryness were coming from him. Or sucking towards him.
And neither of us, Simon or me, cried out or tried to run, because we were too much in shock: There was the Humdrum—and he looked just like Simon. Just like Simon when I first met him. Eleven years old, in grotty jeans and an old T-shirt. The Humdrum was even bouncing that red rubber ball that Simon never put down our first year.
The kid bounced the ball at Simon, and Simon caught it. Then Simon started screaming at the Humdrum, “Stop it! Stop it! Show yourself, you coward—show yourself!”
It was so hot, and so dry, and it felt like the life was getting sucked out of us, sucked right up through our skin.
Both of us had felt it before during the Humdrum’s attacks—that sandy, dry suck. We knew what he felt like, we recognized him. But we’d never seen the Humdrum before. (Now I wonder if that was the first time the Humdrum was able to show himself.)
Simon was sure the Humdrum was wearing his face just to taunt him. He kept howling at it to show its real face.
But the Humdrum just laughed. Like a little kid. The way little kids laugh once they’ve got started, and they can’t stop.
(I can’t really say why I think so or what it means, but I don’t think that the Humdrum appeared that way as a mean joke. I think that’s his true form. That