He wondered whether that had been a mistake. But there was nothing he could do now except keep walking, and within a few minutes he was relieved to see the trees begin to separate again in the distance and a third village appear before him. It was much smaller than the previous two and held only a small collection of peculiarly shaped buildings situated at irregular intervals along a single street. It was not quite what Noah was expecting to find, but he hoped that the people would be friendly there and that he might find something to eat at last before he passed out in a dead faint from hunger.
However, before he could take another step, his attention was taken by one curiously constructed building at the very end of the street, on the opposite side.
Noah knew one thing about houses: they were supposed to be built with straight walls all put together at right angles to each other, and with a roof sitting comfortably on top to stop the rain from making all the carpets soggy or the birds from doing their business on your head.
This building, however, was nothing like that.
He stared at it, astonished to see that every wall and window was entirely misshapen, parts coming out here, sections peeping out there, none of it making any sense at all. And while there was certainly a roof on top in roughly the correct place, it wasn’t made of slate or tiles – or even thatch like his friend Charlie Charlton’s house. In fact, it was made of wood. Noah blinked and looked at it again, cocking his head to the side a little and wondering whether it would look more normal if he looked at it askew.
But as curious as the building appeared to be, it was as nothing compared to the enormous tree that stood outside it, blocking his view of the sign above. Through the branches he could make out a few letters – a pair of Ns and an I in the first word, an O and a Y close together in the second, a final P in the third. He stared at it, trying to use his X-ray vision to see through the branches until he remembered that he didn’t have X-ray vision – that was a boy in one of his books. But still, he wanted to read the sign and couldn’t take his eyes off the tree. Without being able to say why, he found that it had entirely captured his attention.
Yes, it was tall, but no taller than many of the other trees that he had seen over the course of his life. (He did live at the edge of a forest.) They’d all been around for hundreds of years, or so he’d been told; it was no wonder they grew to such sizes. Trees, after all, were the opposite of people; the older people became, the smaller they seemed to get. With trees, it worked the other way round.
And yes, the bark was a healthy shade of brown, more like a block of rich, delicious chocolate than regular bark, but still, it was nothing more than the bark of a good, healthy tree and hardly anything to get over-excited about.
And it was clear that the leaves that hung from the strong branches were a lustrous shade of green, but they were no greener than any of the other leaves that fluttered in the summer breeze on trees around the world; no different to the leaves he could see on the trees that stood outside his own bedroom window.
But there was something extraordinary about this tree that he just couldn’t put his finger on. Something hypnotic. Something that made his eyes grow wide and his mouth drop open as he forgot, for a moment or two, that he was supposed to keep breathing.
‘You’ve heard the stories, I suppose?’ said a voice to his right, and he spun round quickly to see an elderly dachshund trotting towards him, a half-smile on his face, accompanied by a heavy-set donkey who was looking around the forest floor as if in search of something he had lost. ‘I can always tell when someone’s come to take a look at her. You’re not the first, young man. Won’t be the last either. WOOF!’ The dachshund let out a tremendous bark at the end of his remarks and looked away, raising his eyebrows haughtily with the air of a man who has just made a rude noise in a lift.
‘I don’t know anything about it, sir,’ said Noah, shaking his head. ‘I haven’t heard any stories. I’m not from here, you see. I was just passing through, that’s all, and I noticed the tree standing in front of that funny-shaped building and it grabbed my attention.’
‘You’ve been standing in the same place for almost an hour,’ said the dachshund, laughing a little. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘You haven’t seen a sandwich around here, have you?’ asked the donkey, looking up and fixing him with a stare. ‘I heard rumours that someone had lost a sandwich here. It contained meat of some description. And chutney,’ he added.
‘I haven’t, I’m afraid,’ said Noah, wishing he had.
‘I have a hankering for a sandwich,’ said the donkey in an exhausted tone, shaking his head sadly. ‘Perhaps if I keep looking …’
‘Don’t mind him,’ said the dachshund. ‘He’s always hungry. It doesn’t matter how much you feed him, he still wants more.’
‘You’d be hungry too if you hadn’t eaten in more than twenty minutes,’ sniffed the donkey, sounding a little hurt.
‘Anyway, it’s true,’ continued the dachshund. ‘You were standing there when I went for my run earlier, and I’m just back – I go through the fields and out to the well every day; it keeps me supple, you see – and here you still are. Staring at it.’
‘Really?’ asked Noah, crinkling up his face in surprise. ‘Are you sure? I thought I’d just arrived.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said the dachshund. ‘People lose track of time when they start staring at that tree. It’s really the most interesting thing in our village. Apart from the statue, of course.’
‘What statue?’ asked Noah.
‘You mean you didn’t notice it? It’s right behind you.’
Noah turned round and, sure enough, a tall granite statue of a furious-looking young man wearing a pair of running shorts and a singlet stood behind him. His arms were raised in the air in triumph, and beneath his feet, carved into the stone, were the words, DMITRI CAPALDI: QUICK. It took Noah quite by surprise as he was sure it hadn’t been there a moment before.
‘Something sugary perhaps?’ asked the donkey, stepping forward now and poking his nose so suddenly into Noah’s pockets that he jumped back in surprise.
‘Leave the boy alone, Donkey,’ said the dachshund. ‘He doesn’t have anything sugary on him. Do you?’ he asked quickly, narrowing his eyes at Noah.
‘Nothing at all, sir,’ said Noah. ‘I’m quite hungry myself, as it happens.’
‘It’s very disappointing,’ remarked the donkey, shaking his head and looking as if he might cry. ‘Very disappointing indeed.’
‘You know, there are those,’ continued the dachshund, leaning forward a little now and lowering his voice, ‘and I would consider myself of their number, who think that the tree is far more interesting than the statue. Which is why people stare at it for so long. I tend not to look at it myself if I can possibly avoid it. I missed a friend’s birthday party once on account of it. Two years running.’
‘You missed an excellent cake,’ said the donkey slowly, allowing himself to smile at the memory of it, his large brown eyes welling up with tears. ‘On both occasions it had frosted icing around the top. In the shape of roses. One year the icing was green, the next year orange. I can barely sleep for wondering what it will be this year. Do you think it might be red? I think it might. Or possibly blue … There’s yellow too, of course,’ he added after a long pause.