Chimera Book One

Phil Gomm

Description

Kyp Finnegan is lost in Chimera after running away from the imposters pretending to be his parents. Chimera is as remarkable as it is dangerous - a fantastical world of lost properties in which bowties evolve into butterflies and abandoned sofas transform into snorting herds of soffalos! With the help of Atticus Weft, a sock-snake with a secret, Kyp must evade the clutches of Madame Chartreuse, who is determined to add him to her collection of lost children and imprison him in Chimera forever...

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784628116
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Chimera Book One
Phil Gomm

Copyright © 2014 Phil Gomm
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Matador ®
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Kibworth Beauchamp
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Fax: [phone]
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Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1784628 116
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador ® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

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Contents

Cover


Chapter One


Chapter Two


Chapter Three


Chapter Four


Chapter Five


Chapter Six


Chapter Seven


Chapter Eight


Chapter Nine


Chapter Ten


Chapter Eleven


Chapter Twelve


Chapter Thirteen


Chapter Fourteen


Chapter Fifteen


Chapter Sixteen


Chapter Seventeen


Chapter Eighteen


Chapter Nineteen


Chapter Twenty


Chapter Twenty-One


Chapter Twenty-Two
Acknowledgements


For Aaron, with whom it began.
For Georgia W, who liked it first and said so.
For Phill, who drew it.
For Jules, who never doubted.
For Lorraine, who inspired me.
For Dog, without whom I d be as lost as Kyp.
for Mum Bill, for pretty much everything else.


***


Cover art by Phill Hosking
Find more of Phill s work at:
http://www.phillhosking.co.uk
Chapter One

Kyp Finnegan glowered at the grown-ups sitting in the front of the car. With his creased blue shirt and bald-spot, his dad looked like his dad, and his mum smelled of soap like always, but they weren’t his parents.
He reached into the pocket of his jeans and rooted for the leaf, the scrap of wallpaper, and the sandy-coloured carpet thread; digging deeper, he felt for the conker, which he pulled out by its thick red bootlace and shined against his jumper. He turned, looking through the rear window of the car. He searched the dazzle of headlights for a girl with a go-kart.
Kyp sighed. He missed everything about the way things used to be. He missed his room and the long green garden with its sunflowers and climbing tree. He missed his favourite places: Professor Pettifog’s Museum of Oddities, Fatty Barnstorm’s Circus, and the spectacular Thrill-A-Minute Fairground. He missed his old school, his teachers. He missed his friends, and one friend most of all.
He turned back, glaring at the strangers who were chatting as if everything was normal. The man even sounded like his dad. When the woman with his mother’s smile swivelled in her seat to glance at him, Kyp refused to meet her eye.
It started to rain. The dad-who-wasn’t flicked on the wipers.
Outside, the town slipped past in dismal stripes. Kyp stared at its unfamiliar streets. His reflection stared back. His large blue eyes looked serious and grey.
‘We’re here,’ announced the man.
Kyp didn’t know where ‘here’ was. He didn’t care. The imposter wearing his dad’s shirt twisted around to look at him. He said, ‘You can’t sulk forever.’
Kyp pulled a face. ‘You can’t tell me what to do!’
The woman said, ‘That’s enough,’ but Kyp wasn’t finished.
‘I wish I could disappear like Joe and Jamie Bean!’
‘I knew we shouldn’t have brought him,’ the man fumed and when he got out of the car, he slammed the door so violently the vehicle shook. The stranger with his mum’s face rubbed her forehead with her hands. She turned, fixed Kyp with a forbidding stare and said, ‘We can’t go on like this.’
Kyp jumped as the door on his side of the car opened with a blast of rain.
‘Out,’ the man commanded, and when Kyp didn’t move, he reached into the backseat, unclipped his seatbelt and pulled Kyp from the car. Kyp struggled, but the dad-who-wasn’t dragged him across the wet pavement towards the door of a grimy looking shop. ‘Don’t make this more difficult,’ he said.
*
Inside, the shop was like a museum. Cabinets brimming with bric-a-brac surrounded a curved wooden counter. Light bulbs dangled like electric pears.
‘Welcome!’ a voice boomed. ‘Welcome to Open Sesames .’
Kyp turned in fright to see a large man with a fox fur coloured beard appear from the shadows. The man tucked his hands into the pockets of his velvet waistcoat. A large brass key, old and patterned, hung from his belt. He looked at Kyp with curiosity. Kyp stared at the floor.
‘You’ll have to excuse him,’ apologised the mum-who-wasn’t. ‘He’s been like this since we moved house.’
The shopkeeper nodded. ‘Feeling a bit lost, are we? You’re in good company. Open Sesames is full of lost things. I do what I can to help them on their way.’
The shopkeeper examined Kyp a moment longer, before returning his attention to the mum-and-dad-who-weren’t.
‘So what can I do for you?’
The man and woman exchanged glances. When neither answered, the shopkeeper turned to Kyp and said, ‘Why don’t you go off and explore? You might find something you didn’t know you were missing.’

*
The junk shop was bigger than Kyp expected. He walked between dark wooden wardrobes and suitcases chequered with labels. He paused to blow the dust off pewter tankards and jangle tobacco tins filled with silver thimbles.
Overhead, the light bulbs grew sparse. Shadows deepened like coal-dust. Clocks ticked. Heavy glass-fronted cabinets surrounded him. Kyp paused to examine one, wiping away its gauze of cobwebs. Inside sat a collection of china dolls, their round, fat faces very white in the gloom. They stared as if resenting his intrusion. Kyp was reminded of his first day at his new school. The children in the silent classroom had looked at him the same way.
The next cabinet was filled with stuffed animals; with pouting trout and long-bodied weasels, with butterflies, beetles and hairy-legged tarantulas skewered on pins. A crow fixed him with the beady shine of its eyes.
Ahead, the furniture was crammed together so tightly only the narrowest of corridors existed between it. A single light bulb illuminated the cramped passageway, which a sudden draft set swinging. Shadows moved restlessly over the floor.
No, Kyp thought. He wouldn’t be going in there.
He walked quickly to the front of the shop, where the man and woman who weren’t his parents were deep in conversation with the shopkeeper. Unnoticed, Kyp ducked down behind the counter.
‘It’s been a difficult time for us,’ the dad-who-wasn’t said. ‘Particularly with Kyp around.’
The mum-who-wasn’t said, ‘We haven’t told him what’s going on. He thinks we’re here to buy some furniture for the new house. He doesn’t know the rest. He doesn’t know why we’re here. We wanted to leave him behind, but we don’t know anyone who would have him.’
‘What is it you’re looking for exactly?’ asked the shopkeeper.
‘A replacement,’ said the dad-who-wasn’t. ‘For Kyp.’
Chapter Two

‘Good riddance,’ muttered Kyp, as he crept back into the shadows of the junk-shop. He should have been shocked or upset, but all he felt was relief and the desire to run.
Ever since the mum-and-dad-who-weren’t had told him he was to leave the house in which he’d grown up, Kyp had been afraid of the future. In the days after the move, his fear had only worsened, his sense of dread so acute he’d gone looking for its cause, if only to hasten an end to the suspense. He’d hunted for it in the cupboard under the steep narrow stairs of the new narrow house. He’d checked the sky above the red brick cul-de-sac to see if it was falling. He’d searched the thin, pinched faces of the imposters who kissed him goodnight. For the longest time, Kyp had been expecting the worse, and now, at last, it was here.
*
Kyp went further this time, deeper, pushing through racks of old clothes that smelled of perfume and pipe-smoke, and picking his way across causeways of boxes. He ducked beneath dangles of dusty chandeliers and inched past steeples of leather-bound books, ignoring how the hairs on his neck stood up as unseen things creaked and shifted in the shadows. He was soon lost, but he didn’t care.

*
Out of breath finally, Kyp stopped. He listened, hearing only the percussion of clocks: and then something else:
Slide-shuffle-sliiide.
The noise came again.
Slide-shuffle-sliiide.
This time he felt it too, a low tremor throbbing through the floorboards.
Something else was here with him.
The cabinet nearest him was supported on carved claws, the gap underneath big enough to hide him. He wriggled under it and made himself lie still. A great shadow moved past his hiding place.
Kyp waited until all he could hear was the distant cry of cuckoos leaving their clocks. Satisfied, he crawled from under the cabinet and stood up, only for something tentacle-like to entangle his legs. With a vicious tug, it tipped him face-first onto the floor and reeled him backwards like a fish. He came to an abrupt halt as the tentacle tried pulling him through a too narrow gap between cupboards. It yanked him once, twice, but Kyp was wedged fast. Enraged, the tentacle released him.
On his feet again, Kyp sprinted away. Cupboards crashed to the floor as the thing gave chase. He ducked into a corridor between thick walls of cloth-bound books, only to find it blocked by high wooden shelves. Undeterred, Kyp used the shelves like a ladder and climbed on top of them. They teetered precariously and Kyp jumped onto a nearby cabinet before the shelves could tip over. He leapt across to a second cabinet as the shelves top