The shepherd looked at the Elephant. “And, I know I should have asked before, but what in the Auld Witch’s name is this?”
“I am a loyal member of the flock,” said the Elephant humbly, in his deep voice, and the Marquis wondered if he had sounded so soulless and flat when he had been part of the flock. “I have remained loyal and in step even when this one did not.”
“And the flock is grateful for all your hard work,” said the shepherd. He reached out a hand and touched the sharp tip of one elephantine tusk experimentally. “I’ve never seen anything like you before, and if I never see another one again, it’ll be too soon. Probably best if you die too.”
The Elephant’s ears twitched. “But I am of the flock …”
The shepherd looked up into the Elephant’s huge face. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. Then, to the Marquis: “Well? Where is this important letter?”
The Marquis de Carabas said, “It is inside my shirt. I must repeat that it is the most significant document that I have ever been charged to deliver. I must ask you not to look at it. For your own safety.”
The shepherd tugged at the front of the Marquis’ shirt. The buttons flew, and rattled off the walls onto the floor. The letter, in its sandwich bag, was in the pocket inside the shirt.
“This is most unfortunate. I trust you will read it aloud to us before we die,” said the Marquis. “But whether or not you read it to us, I can promise that Peregrine and I will be holding our breath. Won’t we, Peregrine?”
The shepherd opened the sandwich bag, then he looked at the envelope. He ripped it open and pulled a sheet of discolored paper from inside it. Dust came from the envelope as the paper came out. The dust hung in the still air in that dim room.
“ ‘My darling beautiful Drusilla,’ ” read the shepherd aloud. “ ‘While I know that you do not presently feel about me as I feel about you …’ what is this nonsense?”
The Marquis said nothing. He did not even smile. He was, as he had stated, holding his breath; he was hoping that Peregrine had listened to him; and he was counting, because at that moment counting seemed like the best possible thing that he could do to distract himself from needing to breathe. He would soon need to breathe.
35 … 36 … 37 …
He wondered how long mushroom spores remained in the air.
43 … 44 … 45 … 46 …
The shepherd had stopped speaking.
The Marquis took a step backwards, fearing a knife in his ribs or teeth in his throat from the rough-furred guard-dog men, but there was nothing. He walked backwards, away from the dog-men, and the Elephant.
He saw that Peregrine was also walking backwards.
His lungs hurt. His heart was pounding in his temples, pounding almost loudly enough to drown out the thin ringing noise in his ears.
Only when the Marquis’ back was against a bookcase on the wall and he was as far as he could possibly get from the envelope, he allowed himself to take a deep breath. He heard Peregrine breathe in too.
There was a stretching noise. Peregrine opened his mouth wide, and the tape dropped to the ground. “What,” asked Peregrine, “was all that about?”
“Our way out of this room, and our way out of Shepherd’s Bush, if I am not mistaken,” said de Carabas. “As I so rarely am. Would you mind unbinding my wrists?”
He felt Peregrine’s hands on his bound hands, and then the bindings fell away.
There was a low rumbling. “I’m going to kill somebody,” said the Elephant. “As soon as I figure out who.”
“Whoa, dear heart,” said the Marquis, rubbing his hands together. “You mean whom.” The shepherd and the sheepdogs were taking awkward, experimental steps towards the door. “And I can assure you that you aren’t going to kill anybody, not as long as you want to get home to the Castle safely.”
The Elephant’s trunk swished irritably. “I’m definitely going to kill you.”
The Marquis grinned. “You are going to force me to say pshaw,” he said. “Or fiddlesticks. Until now I have never had the slightest moment of yearning to say fiddlesticks. But I can feel it right now welling up inside me—”
“What, by the Temple and the Arch, has got into you?” asked the Elephant.
“Wrong question. But I shall ask the right question on your behalf. The question is actually what hasn’t got into the three of us—it hasn’t got into Peregrine and me because we were holding our breath, and it hasn’t got into you because, I don’t know, probably because you’re an elephant, with nice thick skin, more likely because you were breathing through your trunk, which is down at ground level—and what did get into our captors. And the answer is, what hasn’t got into us are the selfsame spores that have got into our portly shepherd and his pseudocanine companions.”
“Spores of the Mushroom?” asked Peregrine. “The Mushroom People’s the Mushroom?”
“Indeed. That selfsame Mushroom,” agreed the Marquis.
“Blimming Heck,” said the Elephant.
“Which is why,” de Carabas told the Elephant, “if you attempt to kill me, or to kill Peregrine, you will not only fail but you will doom us all. Whereas if you shut up and we all do our best to look as if we are still part of the flock, then we have a chance. The spores will be threading their way into their brains now. And any moment now the Mushroom will begin calling them home.”
A shepherd walked implacably. He held a wooden crook. Three men followed him. One of those men had the head of an elephant; one was tall and ridiculously handsome; and the last of the flock wore a most magnificent coat. It fit him perfectly, and it was the color of a wet street at night.
The flock were followed by guard dogs, who moved as if they were ready to walk through fire to get wherever they believed that they were going.
It was not unusual in Shepherd’s Bush to see a shepherd and part of his flock moving from place to place, accompanied by several of the fiercest sheepdogs (who were human, or had been once). So when they saw a shepherd and three sheepdogs apparently leading three members of the flock away from Shepherd’s Bush, none of the greater flock paid them any mind. The members of the flock who saw them simply did the same things they had always done, as members of the flock, and if they were aware that the influence of the shepherds had waned a little, then they patiently waited for another shepherd to come and to take care of them and to keep them safe from predators and from the world. It was a scary thing to be alone, after all.
Nobody noticed as they crossed the bounds of Shepherd’s Bush, and still they kept on walking.
The seven of them reached the banks of the Kilburn, where they stopped, and the former shepherd and the three shaggy dog-men strode out into the water.
There was, the Marquis knew, nothing in the four men’s heads at that moment but a need to get to the Mushroom, to taste its flesh once more, to let it live inside them, to serve it, and to serve it well. In exchange, the Mushroom would fix all the things about themselves that they hated: it would make their interior lives much happier and more interesting.
“Should’ve let me kill ’em,” said the Elephant as the former shepherd and sheepdogs waded away.
“No point,” said the Marquis. “Not even for revenge. The people who captured us don’t exist any longer.”
The Elephant flapped his ears hard, then scratched them vigorously. “Talking about revenge, who the hell did you steal my diary for anyway?” he asked.