bed that next night, he was almost wondering if it was worth dreaming.
But he did dream, because Uncle Ralph had asked him to, and got out of bed as usual and walked around the fireplace to the valley, where his clothes were lying on the rocky path as usual. By now this lot of clothes was torn, covered with mud and assorted filth from a hundred Almost Anywheres, and at least two sizes too small. Christopher put them on quickly, without bothering to do up buttons that would not meet. He never wore shoes because they got in the way as he climbed the rocks. He pattered around the crag in his bare feet into The Place Between.
It was formless and unfinished as ever, all slides and jumbles of rock rearing in every direction and high overhead. The mist billowed as formlessly as the rocks. It was one of the times when rain slanted in it, driven this way and that by the hither-thither winds that blew in The Place Between. Christopher hoped he would not have to spend too long here hunting for Uncle Ralph’s man. It made him feel so small, besides being cold and wet. He dutifully braced himself on a slide of rubbly sand and shouted.
“Hallo!”
The Place Between made his voice sound no louder than a bird cheeping. The windy fog seemed to snatch the sound away and bury it in a flurry of rain. Christopher listened for a reply, but for minutes on end the only noise was the hissing hum of the wind. He was wondering whether to shout again, when he heard a little cheeping thread of sound, wailing its thin way back to him across the rocks. “Hallo-o-o!” It was his own shout. Christopher was sure of it. Right from the start of his dreams, he had known that The Place Between liked to have everything that did not belong sent back to the place it came from. That was why he always climbed back to bed faster than he did when he climbed out to a new valley. The Place pushed him back.
Christopher thought about this. It probably did no good to shout. If Uncle Ralph’s man was out there in the mist, he would not be able to stand and wait for very long, without getting pushed back to the valley he came from. So the man would have to wait in the mouth of a valley and hope that Christopher found him. Christopher sighed. There were such thousands and thousands of valleys, high up, low down, turning off at every angle you could think of, and some valleys turned off other valleys—and that was only if you crawled around the side of the Place that was nearest. If you went the other way, towards the Anywhere that did not want people, there were probably many thousands more. On the other hand, Uncle Ralph would not want to make it too difficult. The man must be quite near.
Determined to make Uncle Ralph’s experiment a success if he could, Christopher set off, climbing, sliding, inching across wet rock with his face close to the cold hard smell of it. The first valley he came to was empty. “Hallo?” he called down it. But the river rushed down green empty space and he could see no one was there. He backed out and climbed up and sideways to the next. And there, before he reached the opening, he could see someone through the mist, dark and shiny with rain, crouching on a rock and scrabbling for a handhold overhead.
“Hallo?” Christopher asked.
“Well I’ll be—Is that Christopher?” the person asked. It was a strong young man’s voice. “Come on out where we can see one another.”
With a certain amount of heaving and slipping, both of them scrambled around a bulge of rock and dropped down into another valley, where the air was calm and warm. The grass here was lit pink by a sunset in the distance.
“Well, well,” said Uncle Ralph’s man. “You’re about half the size I expected. Pleased to meet you, Christopher. I’m Tacroy.” He grinned down at Christopher. Tacroy was as strong and young as his voice, rather squarely and sturdily built, with a roundish brown face and merry-looking hazel eyes. Christopher liked him at