Attack of the Cupids by John Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

infinity. The walls were made of crystal that pulsed with gentle colours. Muddlespot could see through them. He could even see through floors, to other chambers and corridors far above his head, or many, many levels below his feet. It was dizzying. Looking down through a hundred and fifty different layers of assorted Facts made his stomach tingle.
    There were slogans and mottos and signs up on the walls. Some were about the way Sally wanted things done in her mind. They said things like PLEASE WALK ON THE LEFT or HURRY UP, YOU’RE NEEDED.
    Others said things like ASK NOT WHAT MISS SMITH CAN DO FOR YOU BUT WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR MISS SMITH. (Miss Smith was the new Art teacher at Darlington High. Muddlespot had tried telling Sally that she was hopeless. Sally said yes, she knew. That was the point.)
    In Sally’s mind there were war rooms with charts and maps upon the tables, where steely-eyed, square-shouldered thoughts gathered to take reports, write letters to important people and plan appeals for Operation Save The World. The thoughts wore green uniforms with rank badges in the shape of oak leaves.They moved purposefully and spoke in short, clipped voices like crack troops who knew that, whatever the odds, they were going to win.
    In the corridor below Muddlespot’s feet, Sally’s French thoughts were knocking off their shift and returning to their rooms. There were smiles among them and a sense of a job well done. They wished each other cheerful goodbyes and disappeared through doors marked Nouns, Subjunctives, Irregular Verbs etc. The German and Spanish thoughts and the Japanese club thoughts lived in other corridors around the mind. They were all kept separate from each other. No mingling was allowed. No way was Sally going to go looking for a word like
saucisson
and find a
Würst
popping up instead. That sort of thing didn’t happen to her.
    There was a list on the wall. It was headed ‘One Thousand Things To Do With My Life.’ There were exactly a thousand things on the list. Some of them even had ✓s against them. ‘Save the World’ didn’t have a ✓ yet but the way things were going it might not be much longer.
    She had everything sorted out and in its place. She had Dates, Must-do’s and Should-do’s. She had libraries of Things I Know. She had fountains ofGenerosity, gardens of Patience and an entire lighting system of Hope with bulbs that
never
blew. Her mind was built upon space, purpose and clarity. And the greatest of these was clarity.
    â€˜Boo,’ said Muddlespot sulkily.
    He shuffled past another war room. This one was working on Operation End World Poverty. The guys in there looked as though they were winning too. If Muddlespot had had something to kick he would have kicked it.
    He skirted the Reading Corridors carefully. The normal rules of Sally’s mind (space, purpose etc) did not seem to apply so much to the Reading Corridors, which were dark and narrow and the nearest thing her brain had to a rough end of town. They tended to turn sharp corners so you couldn’t see what was waiting round them. Doors and little windows opened on these passages, and from behind them came strange sounds, music maybe, and the noise of hidden feasting, or perhaps screams and cries of battle. Some very queer things lived down there, and sometimes came out. Whenever you found something unexpected in Sally’s mind, the chances were that it had wandered out of the Reading Corridors. It was an unsettling place. Muddlespot could never quite escape thefeeling that he himself might somehow have come from there, even though he knew with every part of his scientific and rational being that he had been created when someone had hit someone else with a brass hammer in the City of Pandemonium far below, and that he had flown in here on a batskin airplane with squadrons of enraged doves on his tail. Sally had been reading
Paradise Lost
at the time.
    He came to the