The Hidden World by Graham Masterton

Please.’
    â€˜Are you coming?’ demanded the rose.
    Jessica glanced back at the gloomy outline of her bedroom. High above her head, a thin swirl of clouds had formed, in the same pattern as her curtains; and the V-shaped birds were flying across it as if they were migrating far away, to somewhere sane.
    This is complete and utter madness, she thought. Talk about people who need locking up in asylums. But the roses started to mantis-walk away from her, with an irritating claw-like rustle, and after only a moment’s hesitation she went after them.

Through the Woods
    T he roses led her down a wide, windy hill. At first she thought that they were walking through dry, knee-high grass, scattered with brown poppies; but when she looked down she realized that it was the pattern from the cover that she had stuck on her geography workbook.
    Not only was the sky growing darker, but the wind was rising, so that Jessica’s sleep-T billowed and leaves came whirling through the air, as well as fragments of all kinds of decorations and patterns. She saw the curlicues from her grandmother’s lacy tablecloth, and the leaves and stars that were embossed around the edge of Grandpa Willy’s leather-topped desk. She saw spots and dots and feathers and flowers, and even the horseshoes, clubs and four-leaf clovers from the Lucky Charms cereal box.
    â€˜Hurry!’ demanded the roses. ‘We don’t have all day!’
    They reached the foot of the hill and began to make their way down a narrow, winding gully. The grass from Jessica’s geography book lashed at their ankles. The wind had lifted to a soft, morbid scream, and it was filled with a blizzard of carpet patterns, dress designs and fragments of curtain material. Jessica was lashed on the cheek by a bramble from the wallpaper in Grannie’s sewing-room. She lost her balance, stumbled, and fell down on one knee, but the roses came ripping back and shrieked at her, ‘Up! Up! We haven’t far to go, and it’s much too dangerous!’
    This is a dream, Jessica tried to persuade herself, but now she was quite sure that it wasn’t a dream at all, that she was living every moment of it, and it was real. No matter how hard she tried to wake up, she was still slithering down the gully with the roses and she knew that there was only one way for her to get back to her bedroom, and that was to turn around and run there, on her own.
    As they neared the foot of the gully they began to run into gorse bushes and scrub, which snagged at Jessica’s T-shirt and caught in her hair. The gorse grew thicker and higher, and soon they were entering a gloomy wood filled with hundreds of slender trees with shining dark-brown trunks and curled-up branches – except that they weren’t trees at all, but hat-stands, and what had seemed at first sight to be overshadowing foliage was thousands of hats, both men’s and women’s, trilbies and fedoras and black funeral hats with ostrich feathers.
    â€˜Faster,’ insisted the roses.
    It was so shadowy in the woods that Jessica could only just make out their spindly arms and legs, and underneath the heaps of overhanging hats the air was suffocating, like hiding in a closet filled with your grandparents’ old clothes, wishing that your party guests would hurry up and find you.
    They emerged at last on the banks of a wide, iridescent river. The light was failing fast, and Jessica began to realize that the hours behind the wall seemed to pass much more urgently, as if time itself were in a panic.
    The river was fifty or sixty feet wide, and the water wasn’t water but rippling moiré silk of the iciest blue. On the far side stood a landing-stage constructed of yellow majolica tiles, and behind the landing-stage rose trees so dark that they almost looked black – yet sparkling, all of them, with millions and millions of tiny lights. They reminded her of the trees she had seen in her fairy