Diana Wynne Jones’s Magic and Myths Collection. Diana Wynne Jones

       CHAPTER NINE

      Fiddle came a little way along the coaly path with Hayley. He said he wanted to make sure she didn’t miss the way, but Hayley was fairly sure he was being kinder than that. There seemed to be horrible things going on on either side of the path. There were screams and groans, and somewhere someone who sounded to be dying kept saying, “Water! Water! Oh, please, water!” Fiddle hurried Hayley along and Hayley tried not to look, until they came to a place where the air was full of desperate panting and a sort of grinding sound. Hayley could not help looking here.

      There was a hill to one side and she could dimly see someone trying to heave a boulder up it. All she could really see was a pair of straining legs in ragged trousers, some way above her head. But just as she looked, the person lost control of the boulder and it came rolling and crashing down, bringing the man with it. “Oh, curses!” he cried out, ending up in a heap, half under the boulder, almost at Hayley’s feet.

      “Is he all right?” Hayley said to Fiddle. She thought the man might be crying.

      Fiddle pushed her on. “Not really,” he said. “But there are no bones broken. He has to get up and push the stone again until he gets it to the top of the hill.”

      “Why?” said Hayley.

      “Because your uncle Jolyon says so,” Fiddle said. “He’s in charge here. This is what happens to people who offend him.”

      Hayley was glad to think she had never liked Uncle Jolyon. “Can’t anyone stop him?” she said.

      “Not very easily,” Fiddle said, “though they tell me that a seer called the Pythoness said it could be done. We’re trying to find a way. Now this is where I have to leave you. You’ll find things become more and more normal from here on, but do try to keep going whatever you see.”

      “Will I see you again?” Hayley said.

      “Quite probably,” Fiddle answered. He waved to her and turned back up the path.

      Hayley sadly watched him go. Even though she had only talked to him once and nodded to him with Martya, she always thought of Fiddle as her first real friend. She sighed and walked on.

      The path became a passage with barred prison cells on either side of it. Behind one of the thick doors, someone was yelling out, “I hate the lot of you! The whole lot of you!” From behind other doors, chains clinked.

      I suppose this is more normal, Hayley thought, shivering.

      She marched on. The passage went from arched stone to dingy brick and then to modern-looking concrete with strip lights in the ceiling, but there were still prison cells on either side. She came to a squarer part, where soldiers with guns were kicking someone who was writhing about on the floor. This was more normal, Hayley supposed. There had been scenes like this on Grandpa’s telly. But seen up close it was very nasty.

      “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she told the soldiers.

      Only one of them took any notice. He swivelled his gun round to point at Hayley. “Get out!” he said to her. And the woman soldier who seemed to be in charge snapped, “Shoot her,” without looking up from kicking.

      Hayley moved on in a hurry. There seemed to be nothing else she could do. Next moment, she was in a huge office, very brightly lighted, where people sat at desks in rows, all hard at work with computers and telephones. Hayley pattered quickly down the space at the side of the desks, hoping not to be noticed, until she came to the desk at the very end, where there was a man who seemed to be working harder than all the others put together.

      Here something made Hayley stop and look. This man had a large tray marked IN on one side of his desk, piled with papers, forms and plastic files. He was snatching these out at the rate of two a minute, studying them swiftly, marking some with a pen, putting some in a copier and then snatching them out, making notes about them on his computer, signing both copies and slapping them into a smaller tray marked OUT. Then he snatched up another set. He was going so quickly that Hayley was sure that he was going to get the IN-tray empty any second. But, just as he was down to one file and two forms, someone came along and dumped another huge pile on top of them. The man groaned and started working on those.

      What had made Hayley stop and stare, however, was not how hard the man was working: it was the look of him. He had black curly hair and a brownish skin. The curly hair was receding from his wrinkled forehead and there were rays of further wrinkles fanning from the sides of his big black eyes. He looked familiar. The way he moved was a way Hayley knew. In fact, although he was not young, he looked extraordinarily like the young man in the wedding photo that Grandma kept on Hayley’s mantelpiece.

      “Excuse me,” she said to him. The man looked up. The moment he did, Hayley was absolutely sure who he was. “What’s your name?” she asked him.

      “Foss,” he said. “Cyrus Foss. Forgive me – I’ve got so much work—”

      “Then you’re my dad!” Hayley said. “I’m Hayley Foss.”

      The man had bent over his papers again, but now he put them down and stared. “Hayley?” he said. “We had a baby girl called Hayley.”

      “That’s me!” Hayley said delightedly. They stared at one another wonderingly. “Why are you here?” Hayley asked.

      “Being punished,” her father said glumly, “for marrying Merope. It was forbidden. I never understood why, but I knew there was some kind of prophecy. So you’re Hayley? You don’t look much like your mother, but you’ve grown up very pretty. Where have you been all this time? Were you being punished too?”

      “I’m all right,” Hayley assured him. “I had to live with Grandpa. He’s all right, but Grandma isn’t. Can’t you leave here now, so that I can live with you?”

      “No,” said her father sadly. “I’ve tried to leave over and over, but I always find myself back at this desk, whatever I do.”

      “But it looks awful!” Hayley said.

      “It is,” he said. “You know what it feels like? It feels as if I’m rolling a huge stone up a hill, and every time I get it nearly to the top, it rolls straight down to the bottom again.”

      Hayley thought of the man she had seen crashing down the hill under the boulder. That had been her father too. This was the way the mythosphere worked. Things got harsher and stranger the further out you were in it. “Oh!” she cried out. “Isn’t there any way I can rescue you from here?”

      Cyrus Foss smiled at her. It was a harrassed smile, but Hayley had seldom seen a nicer one. “I don’t think you can,” he said. “But maybe your mother could.”

      “So where is she?” Hayley demanded.

      “Somewhere else in this hell,” he said. “She—”

      He was interrupted by an office lady carrying a neat pile of shiny plastic files. “These are all wrong,” this lady said. “They all have to be done again.” She dumped the files on top of the stack already in the IN-tray. The stack was too high to take them. Every one of them slithered off sideways and fell on the floor, taking half the rest of the papers with them.

      Cyrus Foss gave a moan of despair and bent down to collect them. Hayley dived down under the desk to help. Face to face down there, her father whispered, “She’ll be in a women’s strand, somewhere much wilder than here, I think.”

      “Right,” Hayley whispered back. She crawled across under the desk and stuck her head out beside the office lady’s neat feet. “Can’t you help?” she