with oddities, and there was nothing that Otto liked better than an oddity. People with pink hair, blue hair, black lipstick (on men!), ears that were stretched wide with huge disk earrings, and every available patch of skin pierced or tattooed. The children stared at them in much the same way that people in Little Tunks stared at theHardscrabbles—with a mixture of curiosity and uneasiness.
“Do you think they’re dangerous?” Otto asked, which ironically is something people often asked about him.
“Very, I’m sure,” Lucia said. It was a waste of everyone’s time to have an adventure without the element of danger.
“Rubbish,” Max said. “Anyone can put on clumpy black boots and pierce themselves silly. A truly dangerous person would be someone you’d never even look at twice.”
They wandered through the outdoor markets, a jungle of circus-coloured clothing and shoes and wild wigs and everything else you could imagine. They saw boots that had plastic heels with tiny plastic goldfish swimming in them, necklaces made out of old typewriter keys, and shirts made out of mice bones. The children were so fascinated that they forgot to mind about lugging their bags around. They even nearly forgot their messy predicament. They ambled through the streets, gazing into shop windows, their healthy pink Little Tunks lungs eagerly pulling in the stink of coach fumes and Indian curry and occasionally some really impressive body odor.
Then suddenly, without realizing it, they found a secret opening into the Perilous-World-at-Large. There are lots of these openings scattered about at certain longitudes and latitudes. There is one, for instance, right outside El Djem, Tunisia, and another to the left of a raspberry bush on Mr. DiMorelli’s dairy farm in Stone Mills, New York. Most people pass through one or two at some point in their lives without realizing it. But if they were paying attentionthey’d notice that far more perilous things begin to happen to them almost immediately. The Hardscrabbles certainly had no idea that anything unusual had occurred when they entered the portal on Camden High Street although Lucia swears that she felt dizzy, but Max says that was due to the coach fumes.
Otto stopped short quite suddenly.
He was staring at a man perched on a parked car. The man’s head was shaved and he wore no shirt. Every inch of exposed skin was tattooed, even his scalp and face, which had fierce-looking swirls covering it. His lips were blue. It took a moment to see that the blue was not lipstick, but a tattoo that stained his lips and covered his chin. It looked as though he’d eaten blue ice cream and it had dribbled down his chin in curling rivulets.
“And I suppose
he’s
not dangerous either?” Lucia said to Max.
Max didn’t answer. He was looking at the man thoughtfully. Actually he was looking at the man with a stupid expression on his face, but he always looked stupid when he was doing his best thinking. The man was obviously used to being looked at and he ignored them.
“There’s one for your collection.” Lucia nudged her elbow into Otto’s side.
That’s all she said. It was completely innocent, but of course they all blamed her later for what happened.
Otto whipped his camera off his shoulder and began to fumble with the case, and then with the lens cap.
“I wonder,” Max said, the stupid expression now gonefrom his face, “if that man knows he’s wearing a woman’s tattoo on his face?”
“What do you mean?” Lucia asked.
“Well, the Maori people in New Zealand tattoo their faces just like that, only the men have one sort of tattoo and the women have another. That bloke has a lady’s tattoo on his face.”
Otto snapped a picture. The tattooed man’s head swiveled sharply at the sound of the click. Lady tattoo or not, the sight of that face staring directly at them made their eyes go wide. His nose had the oddest shape. It looked like a frog that had been smashed flat in the