Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon

Author:Jeff Noon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857668516
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Use these strands of Creeping Jenny’s hair to attach one object to another. They will then be connected in a story. You too can act like Creeping Jenny, joining the strangest things together! Hours of fun guaranteed!

He reached into his coat pocket for the envelope of photographs. He studied each scene not as a stranger might, but as a long-term resident: the church, the high street, the shop, Clud Tower, the Bainbridges outside their house. His father’s face. But it was the seventh image that he concentrated on, staring deep into the blank landscape, and deeper still, and deeper… and then the answer came to him. Of course! It seemed incredibly simple, now that the thought had taken hold. One strand connecting to another.

Nyquist made his way to the photographer’s studio. The front door was open. The place was exactly as he’d left it: the bird prints in the dust of the kitchen table, the portraits of Agnes Dunne on the walls, and the stink of old chemicals. He walked into the darkroom and placed the seventh photograph in the developing tray. The remains of the dead moth were still floating on the surface. He recognized the clear blue liquid with its scattering of silver particles: it was the same fluid that filled the hill pool of Birdbeck tarn. Thomas Dunne had collected liquid from there, and was using it in the photographic process. With a shudder, Nyquist recalled his plunge into the pool and the things he’d seen among the rocks and pebbles, submerged, and the feelings that had taken him over.

Magic. Transformation. One thing becoming another.

He gave the tray a gentle shake and he looked inside. Last time this process had formed an image for him – that of Len Sadler’s house; now it did the same, but of a very different subject.

The bell chimed in the room behind him, dancing in the air: the dream of the village at play. But he didn’t turn around. For he knew that no one would be present, not even a ghost. Instead his entire focus was on the tray and the photograph in the liquid, on the picture that was slowly emerging, a shadow darkening on the white ground, creating a building… no, a room, or some kind of interior space. Nyquist kept his eyes in focus as the image faded into view, one detail at a time – shelves, a glass cabinet of some kind, not yet seen clearly. And a person who stood to one side of the cabinet, now taking on form, color, shape and features, her face now clear, a woman. She was holding aloft a small silver bell, the kind used in handbell ringing.

He stood where he was for a good long while, not knowing how to move, with only his eyes alert and functioning as he took in the image and its various details, all he could gather: foreground and back, her body and stance, her face, her hair. But this was a stranger. Not a villager he had seen before, nor someone from his life, his past.

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