Maskerade

said Agnes.
    She felt a complete idiot. She’d gone through the mirror looking for…well, she wasn’t quite prepared to admit what she might have been looking for, but whatever it was it certainly wasn’t this.
    She’d have to shout for help.
    Of course, someone might hear , but that was always a risk when you shouted for help.
    She coughed.
    “Er…hello?”
    The water gurgled.
    “Er…help? Is there anyone there?”
    A rat ran over her foot.
    Oh, yes , she thought bitterly with Perdita’s part of her brain, if Christine had come down here there probably would have been some great glistening cave and delicious danger. The world saved up rats and smelly cellars for Agnes, because she had such a wonderful personality.
    “Um…anyone?”
    More rats scuttled across the floor. There was a faint squeaking from the side passages.
    “Hello?”
    She was lost in some cellars with a candle getting shorter by the second. The air was foul, the flagstones were slippery, no one knew where she was, she could die down here, she could be—
    Eyes glowed in the darkness.
    One was green-yellow, the other pearly white.
    A light appeared behind them.
    Something was coming along the passageway, casting long shadows.
    Rats tumbled over themselves in their panic to get away…
    Agnes tried to press herself into the stone.
    “Hello Miss Perdita X Nitt!”
    A familiar shape juddered out of the darkness, just behind Greebo. It was all knees and elbows; it carried a sack over one shoulder and held a lantern in its other hand. Something fled from the darkness. The terror leached out of it…
    “You don’t want to be down here Miss Nitt with all the rats!”
    “Walter!”
    “Got to do Mister Pounder’s job now the poor man is passed away! I am a person of all jobs! No peas for the wicked! But Mister Greebo just hits them with his paws and they’re off to rat heaven in a jiff!”
    “Walter!” repeated Agnes, out of sheer relief.
    “Come for an explore have you? These ole tunnels goes all the way to the river! You have to keep your wits about you not to get lost down here! Want to come back with me?”
    It was impossible to be frightened of Walter Plinge. Walter attracted a number of emotions, but terror wasn’t among them.
    “Er…yes,” said Agnes. “I got lost. Sorry.”
    Greebo sat down and started to wash himself in what Agnes considered to be a supercilious way. If a cat could snigger, he would be sniggering.
    “Now I’ve got a full sack I have to take it to Mister Gimlet’s shop!” announced Walter, turning around and loping out of the cellar without bothering to see if she was following him. “We get a ha’penny each which is not to be sneezed at! The dwarfs think a rat is a good meal which only goes to show it would be a strange world if we were all alike!”
    It seemed a ridiculously short journey to the foot of some different stairs, which had a well-used look to them.
    “Have you ever seen the Ghost, Walter?” said Agnes, as Walter put his foot on the first step.
    He didn’t turn around. “It is wrong to tell lies!”
    “Er…yes, so I believe. So…when did you last see the Ghost?”
    “I last saw the Ghost in the big room in the ballet school!”
    “Really? What did he do?”
    Walter paused for a moment, and then the words came out all together. “He ran off!”
    He stamped up the stairs in a way that suggested very emphatically that the exchange was over.
    Greebo sneered at Agnes and followed him.
    The stairs went up just one flight and came out through a trapdoor backstage. She had been lost only a door or two from the real world.
    No one noticed her emerge. But then no one noticed her at all. They just assumed that she’d be around when she was needed.
    Walter Plinge had already loped off, in something of a hurry.
    Agnes hesitated. They probably wouldn’t even notice she wasn’t there, right up to the point when Christine opened her mouth…
    He hadn’t wanted to answer, but Walter Plinge spoke when spoken to and she had a feeling that he wasn’t able to lie. Telling lies would be being bad.
    She’d never seen the ballet school. It wasn’t far backstage, but it was a world of its own. The dancers issued from it every day like so many very thin and twittering sheep under the control of elderly women who looked as though they breakfasted on pickled limes. It was only after she’d timidly asked a few questions of the stagehands that she’d realized that the girls had joined the ballet