“Yeah? What do you want?” he said finally.
“Is Jessie Reynolds disappeared?”
“Yeah. Why?”
'“Cause a gyptian kid disappeared today and all.”
“They're always disappearing, gyptians. After every horse fair they disappear.”
“So do horses,” said one of his friends.
“This is different,” said Lyra. “This is a kid. We was looking for him all afternoon and the other kids said the Gobblers got him.”
“The what?”
“The Gobblers,” she said. “En't you heard of the Gobblers?”
It was news to the other boys as well, and apart from a few coarse comments they listened closely to what she told them.
“Gobblers,” said Lyra's acquaintance, whose name was Dick. “It's stupid. These gyptians, they pick up all kinds of stupid ideas.”
“They said there was Gobblers in Banbury a couple of weeks ago,” Lyra insisted, “and there was five kids taken. They probably come to Oxford now to get kids from us. It must've been them what got Jessie.”
“There was a kid lost over Cowley way,” said one of the other boys. “I remember now. My auntie, she was there yesterday, 'cause she sells fish and chips out a van, and she heard about it….Some little boy, that's it…I dunno about the Gobblers, though. They en't real, Gobblers. Just a story.”
“They are!” Lyra said. “The gyptians seen 'em. They reckon they eat the kids they catch, and…”
She stopped in midsentence, because something had suddenly come into her mind. During that strange evening she'd spent hidden in the Retiring Room, Lord Asriel had shown a lantern slide of a man with streams of light pouring from his hand; and there'd been a small figure beside him, with less light around it; and he'd said it was a child; and someone had asked if it was a severed child, and her uncle had said no, that was the point. Lyra remembered that severed meant “cut.”
And then something else hit her heart: where was Roger?
She hadn't seen him since the morning….
Suddenly she felt afraid. Pantalaimon, as a miniature lion, sprang into her arms and growled. She said goodbye to the youths by the gate and walked quietly back into Turl Street, and then ran full pelt for Jordan lodge, tumbling in through the door a second before the now cheetah-shaped daemon.
The Porter was sanctimonious.
“I had to ring the Master and tell him,” he said. “He en't pleased at all. I wouldn't be in your shoes, not for money I wouldn't.”
“Where's Roger?” she demanded.
“I en't seen him. He'll be for it, too. Ooh, when Mr. Cawson catches him—”
Lyra ran to the kitchen and thrust her way into the hot, clangorous, steaming bustle.
“Where's Roger?” she shouted.
“Clear off, Lyra! We're busy here!”
“But where is he? Has he turned up or not?”
No one seemed interested.
“But where is he? You must've heard!” Lyra shouted at the chef, who boxed her ears and sent her storming away.
Bernie the pastry cook tried to calm her down, but she wouldn't be consoled.
“They got him! Them bloody Gobblers, they oughter catch 'em and bloody kill 'em! I hate 'em! You don't care about Roger—”
“Lyra, we all care about Roger—”
“You don't, else you'd all stop work and go and look for him right now! I hate you!”
“There could be a dozen reasons why Roger en't turned up. Listen to sense. We got dinner to prepare and serve in less than an hour; the Master's got guests in the lodging, and he'll be eating over there, and that means Chef'11 have to attend to getting the food there quick so it don't go cold; and what with one thing and another, Lyra, life's got to go on. I'm sure Roger'11 turn up….”
Lyra turned and ran out of the kitchen, knocking over a stack of silver dish covers and ignoring the roar of anger that arose. She sped down the steps and across the quadrangle, between the chapel and Palmer's Tower and into the Yaxley Quad, where the oldest buildings of the College stood.
Pantalaimon scampered before her, flowing up the stairs to the very top, where Lyra's bedroom was. Lyra barged open the door, dragged her rickety chair to the window, flung wide the casement, and scrambled out. There was a lead-lined stone gutter a foot wide just below the window, and once she was standing in that, she turned and clambered up over the rough tiles until she stood on the topmost ridge of the roof. There she opened her mouth and screamed. Pantalaimon, who always became a bird once on the roof, flew round and round shrieking rook shrieks with her.
The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky. The spires and towers of Oxford stood around them, level but no higher; the green woods of Chateau-Vert and White Ham rose on either side to the east and the west. Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London. Lyra watched it climb away beyond the spire of St. Michael's Chapel, as big at first as the tip of her little finger when she held it at arm's length, and then steadily smaller until it was a dot in the pearly sky.
She turned and looked down into the shadowed quadrangle, where the black-gowned figures of the Scholars were already beginning to drift in ones and twos toward the buttery, their daemons strutting or fluttering alongside or perching calmly on their shoulders. The lights were going on in the Hall; she could see the stained-glass windows gradually beginning to glow as a servant moved up the tables lighting the naphtha lamps. The Steward's bell began to toll, announcing half an hour before dinner.