Taken by surprise, I’d caught the kitten.
‘Yours!’ Squelch ran off laughing back to the village. ‘Yours!’
The kitten was cold and stiff as a pack of meat from the fridge. Only now did I realize it was dead. I dropped it. It thudded.
‘Finders,’ Squelch’s voice died off, ‘keepers!’
Using two sticks, I lifted the kitten into a clump of nervy snowdrops.
So still, so dignified. Died in the frost last night, I s’pose.
Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.
Nobody’d be out on the frozen lake, I’d suspected, and there wasn’t a soul. Superman 2 was on TV. I’d seen it at Malvern cinema about three years ago on Neal Brose’s birthday. It wasn’t bad but not worth sacrificing my own private frozen lake for. Clark Kent gives up his powers just to have sexual intercourse with Lois Lane in a glittery bed. Who’d make such a stupid swap? If you could fly? Deflect nuclear missiles into space? Turn back time by spinning the planet in reverse? Sexual intercourse can’t be that good.
I sat on the empty bench to eat a slab of Jamaican ginger cake, then went out on the ice. Without other kids watching, I didn’t fall once. Round and around in swoopy anti-clockwise loops I looped, a stone on the end of a string. Overhanging trees tried to touch my head with their fingers. Rooks craw…craw…crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs.
A sort of trance.
The afternoon’d gone and the sky was turning to outer space when I noticed another kid on the lake. This boy skated at my speed and followed my orbit, but always stayed on the far side of the lake. So if I was at twelve o’clock, he was at six. When I got to eleven, he was at five, and so on, always across from me. My first thought was he was a kid from the village, just mucking about. I even thought he might be Nick Yew ’cause he was sort of stocky. But the strange thing was, if I looked at this kid directly for more than a moment, dark spaces sort of swallowed him up. The first couple of times I thought he’d gone home. But after another half-loop of the lake, he’d be back. Just at the edge of my vision. Once I skated across the lake to intercept him, but he vanished before I got to the island in the middle. When I carried on orbiting the pond, he was back.
Go home, urged the nervy Maggot in me. What if he’s a ghost?
My Unborn Twin can’t stand Maggot. What if he is a ghost?
‘Nick?’ I called out. My voice sounded indoors. ‘Nick Yew?’
The kid carried on skating.
I called out, ‘Ralph Bredon?’
His answer took a whole orbit to reach me.
Butcher’s boy.
If a doctor’d told me the kid across the lake was my imagination, and that his voice was only words I thought, I wouldn’t’ve argued. If Julia’d told me I was convincing myself Ralph Bredon was there to make myself feel more special than I am, I wouldn’t’ve argued. If a mystic’d told me that one exact moment in one exact place can act as an antenna that picks up faint traces of lost people, I wouldn’t’ve argued.
‘What’s it like?’ I called out. ‘Isn’t it cold?’
The answer took another orbit to reach me.
You get used to the cold.
Did the kids who’d drowned in the lake down the years mind me trespassing on their roof? Do they want new kids to fall through? For company? Do they envy the living? Even me?
I called out, ‘Can you show me? Show me what it’s like?’
The moon’d swum into the lake in the sky.
We skated one orbit.
The shadow kid was still there, crouching as he skated, just like I was.
We skated another orbit.
An owl or something fluttered low across the lake.
‘Hey?’ I called out. ‘Did you hear me? I want to know what it’s—’
The ice shucked me off my feet. For a helter-skeltery moment I was in mid-air at an unlikely height. Bruce Lee doing a karate kick, that high. I knew it wasn’t going to be a soft landing but I hadn’t guessed how painful a slam it’d be. The crack shattered from my ankle to my jaw to my knuckles, like an ice cube plopped into warm squash. No, bigger than an ice cube. A mirror, dropped from Skylab height. Where it hit the earth, where it smashed into daggers and thorns and invisible splinters, that was my ankle.
I spun and slid to a shuddery stop by the edge of the lake.
For a bit, all I could do was lie there, basking in that supernatural pain. Even Giant Haystacks’d’ve whimpered. ‘Bloody bugger,’ I gasped to plug my tears, ‘Bloody bloody bloody bugger!’ Through the flinty trees I could just hear the sound of the main road but there was no way I could walk that far. I tried to stand but just fell on my arse, wincing with fresh pain. I couldn’t move. I’d die of pneumonia if I stayed where I was. I had no idea what to do.
‘You,’ sighed the sour aunt. ‘We suspected you’d come knocking again soon.’
‘I hurt,’ my voice’d gone all bendy, ‘I hurt my ankle.’
‘So I see.’
‘It’s killing me.’
‘I dare say.’
‘Can I just phone my dad to come and get me?’
‘We don’t care for telephones.’
‘Could you go and get help? Please?’
‘We don’t ever leave our house. Not at night. Not here.’
‘Please,’ the underwatery pain shook as loud as electric guitars, ‘I can’t walk.’
‘I know about bones and joints. You’d best come inside.’
Inside was colder than outside. Bolts behind me slid home and a lock turned. ‘Down you go,’ the sour aunt spoke, ‘down to the parlour. I’ll be right along, once I’ve prepared your cure. But whatever you do, be quiet. You’ll be very sorry if you wake my brother.’
‘All right…’ I glanced away. ‘Which way’s your parlour?’
But the dark’d shuffled itself and the sour aunt’d gone.
Way down the hallway was a blade of muddy light, so that was the direction I limped. God knows how I walked up the rooty, twisty path from the frozen lake on that busted ankle. But I must’ve done, to’ve got here. I passed a ladder of stairs. Enough muffled moonlight fell down it for me to make out an old photograph hanging on the wall. A submarine in an Arctic-looking port. The crew stood on deck, all saluting. I walked on. The blade of light wasn’t getting any nearer.
The parlour was a bit bigger than a big wardrobe and stuffed with museumy stuff. An empty parrot cage, a mangle, a towering dresser, a scythe. Junk, too. A bent bicycle wheel and one soccer boot, caked in silt. A pair of ancient skates, hanging on a coat-stand. There was nothing modern. No fire. Nothing electrical apart from a bare brown bulb. Hairy plants sent bleached roots out of tiny pots. God it was cold! The sofa sagged under me and sssssssssed. One other doorway was screened by beads on strings. I tried to find a position where my ankle hurt less but there wasn’t one.
Time went by, I s’pose.
The sour aunt held a china bowl in one hand and a cloudy glass in the other. ‘Take off your sock.’
My ankle was balloony and limp. The sour aunt propped my calf on a footstool and knelt by it. Her dress rustled. Apart from the blood in my ears and my jagged breathing there was no other sound. Then she dipped her hand into the bowl and began smearing a bready goo on to my ankle.
My ankle shuddered.
‘This is a poultice.’ She gripped my shin. ‘To draw out the swelling.’
The poultice sort of tickled but the pain was too vicious and I was fighting the cold too hard. The sour aunt smeared the goo on till it was used up and my ankle’d completely clagged. She handed me the cloudy glass. ‘Drink this.’
‘It smells like…marzipan.’
‘It’s for drinking. Not smelling.’
‘But what is it?’
‘It’ll help take the pain away.’
Her face told me I had no real choice. I swigged back the liquid in one go like you do Milk of Magnesium. It was syrupy-thick but didn’t taste of much. I asked, ‘Is your brot
her asleep upstairs?’
‘Where else would he be, Ralph? Shush now.’
‘My name’s not Ralph,’ I told her, but she acted like she hadn’t heard. Clearing up the misunderstanding’d’ve been a massive effort and now I’d stopped moving I just couldn’t fight the cold any more. Funny thing was, as soon as I gave in, a lovely drowsiness tugged me downwards. I pictured Mum, Dad and Julia sitting at home watching The Paul Daniels Magic Show but their faces melted away, like reflections on the backs of spoons.
The cold poked me awake. I didn’t know where or who or when I was. My ears felt bitten and I could see my breath. A china bowl sat on a footstool and my ankle was crusted in something hard and spongey. Then I remembered everything, and sat up. The pain in my foot had gone but my head didn’t feel right, like a crow’d flown in and couldn’t get out. I wiped the poultice off my foot with a snotty hanky. Unbelievably, my ankle swivelled fine, cured, like magic. I pulled on my sock and trainer, stood up and tested my weight. There was a faint twinge, but only ’cause I was looking for it. Through the beaded doorway I called out, ‘Hello?’
No answer came. I passed through the crackly beads into a tiny kitchen with a stone sink and a massive oven. Big enough for a kid to climb in. Its door’d been left open, but inside was as dark as that cracked tomb under St Gabriel’s. I wanted to thank the sour aunt for curing my ankle.
Make sure the back door opens, warned Unborn Twin.
It didn’t. Neither did the frost-flowered sash window. Its catch and hinges’d been painted over long ago and it’d take a chisel to persuade it open, at least. I wondered what the time was and squinted at my granddad’s Omega but it was too dark in the tiny kitchen to see. Suppose it was late evening? I’d get back and my tea’d be waiting under a Pyrex dish. Mum and Dad go ape if I’m not back in time for tea. Or s’pose it’d gone midnight? S’pose the police’d been alerted? Jesus. Or what if I’d slept right through one short day and into the night of the next? The Malvern Gazetteer and Midlands Today’d’ve already shown my school photo and sent out appeals for witnesses. Jesus. Squelch would’ve reported seeing me heading to the frozen lake. Frogmen might be searching for me there, right now.
This was a bad dream.
No, worse than that. Back in the parlour, I looked at my grandfather’s Omega and saw that there was no time. My voice whimpered, ‘No.’ The glass face, the hour hand and minute hand’d gone and only a bent second hand was left. When I fell on the ice, it must’ve happened then. The casing was split and half its innards’d spilt out.
Granddad’s Omega’d never once gone wrong in forty years.
In less than a fortnight, I’d killed it.
Wobbly with dread, I walked up the hallway and hissed up the twisted stairs, ‘Hello?’ Silent as night in an ice age. ‘I have to go!’ Worry about the Omega’d swatted off worry about being in this house, but I still daredn’t shout in case I woke the brother. ‘I’ve got to go home now,’ I called, a bit louder. No reply. I decided to just leave by the front door. I’d come back in the daytime to thank her. The bolts slid open easily enough, but the old-style lock was another matter. Without the key it wouldn’t open. That was that. I’d have to go upstairs, wake the old biddy to get her key and if she got annoyed that was just tough titty. Something, something, had to be done about the catastrophe of the smashed watch. God knows what, but I couldn’t do it inside the House in the Woods.
The stairs curved up steeper. Soon I had to use my hands to grip the stairs above me, or I’d’ve fallen back. How on earth the sour aunt went up and down in that big rookish dress was anybody’s guess. Finally, I hauled myself on to a tiny landing with two doors. A slitty window let in a glimmer. One door had to be the sour aunt’s room. The other had to be the brother’s.
Left’s got a power that right hasn’t so I clasped the iron door knob on the left. It sucked the warmth from my hand, my arm, my blood.
Scrit-scrat.
I froze.
Scrit-scrat.
A death-watch beetle? Rat in the loft? Pipe freezing up?
Which room was the scrit-scrat coming from?
The iron door knob made a coiling creak as I turned it.
Powdery moonlight lit the attic room through the snowflake-lace curtain. I’d guessed right. The sour aunt lay under a quilt with her dentures in a jar by her bed, still as a marble duchess on a church tomb. I shuffled over the tipsy floor, nervous at the thought of waking her. What if she forgot who I was and thought I’d come to murder her and screamed for help and had a stroke? Her hair spilt over her folded face like pondweed. A cloud of breath escaped her mouth every ten or twenty heartbeats. Only that proved she was made of flesh and blood like me.
‘Can you hear me?’
No, I’d have to shake her awake.
My hand was halfway to her shoulder when that scrit-scrat noise started up again, deep inside her.
Not a snore. A death rattle.
Go into the other bedroom. Wake her brother. She needs an ambulance. No. Smash your way out. Run to Isaac Pye in the Black Swan for help. No. They’d ask why you’d been in the House in the Woods. What’d you say? You don’t even know this woman’s name. It’s too late. She’s dying, right now. I’m certain. The scrit-scrat’s uncoiling. Louder, waspier, daggerier.
Her windpipe bulges as her soul squeezes out of her heart.
Her worn-out eyes flip awake like a doll’s, black, glassy, shocked.
From her black crack mouth, a blizzard rushes out.
A silent roaring hangs here.
Not going anywhere.
Hangman
Dark, light, dark, light, dark, light. The Datsun’s wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain, not even at the fastest setting. When a juggernaut passed the other way, it slapped up spumes on to the streaming windscreen. Through this car-wash visibility I only just made out the two Ministry of Defence radars spinning at their incredible speed. Waiting for the full might of the Warsaw Pact forces. Mum and me didn’t speak much on the way. Partly ’cause of where she was taking me, I think. (The dashboard clock said 16:05. In seventeen hours exactly my public execution’d take place.) Waiting at the Pelican crossing by the closed-down beautician’s she asked me if I’d had a good day and I said, ‘Okay.’ I asked her if she’d had a good day too and she said, ‘Oh, sparklingly creative and deeply fulfilling, thank you.’ Dead sarky, Mum can be, even though she tells me off for it. ‘Did you get any Valentine’s cards?’ I’d said no, but even if I’d had some I’d’ve told her no. (I did get one but I put it in the bin. It said ‘Suck My Dick’ and was signed by Nicholas Briar, but it looked like Gary Drake’s handwriting.) Duncan Priest’d got four. Neal Brose got seven, or so he reckons. Ant Little found out that Nick Yew’d got twenty. I didn’t ask Mum if she’d got any. Dad says Valentine’s Days and Mother’s Days and No-armed Goalkeeper’s Days’re all conspiracies of card manufacturers and flower shops and chocolate companies.
So anyway, Mum dropped me at Malvern Link traffic lights by the clinic. I forgot my diary in the glove compartment and if the lights hadn’t turned red for me, Mum would’ve driven off to Lorenzo Hussingtree’s with it. (‘Jason’ isn’t exactly the acest name you could wish for but any ‘Lorenzo’ in my school’d get Bunsen-burnered to death.) Diary safe in my satchel, I crossed the flooded clinic car park leaping from dry bit to dry bit like James Bond froggering across the crocodiles’ backs. Outside the clinic were a couple of second- or third-years from the Dyson Perrins School. They saw my enemy uniform. Every year, according to Pete Redmarley and Gilbert Swinyard, all the Dyson Perrins fourth-years and all our fourth-years skive off school and meet in this secret arena walled in by gorse on Poolbrook Common for a mass scrap. If you chicken out you’re a homo and if you tell a teacher you’re dead. Three years ago, apparently, Pluto Noak’d hit their hardest kid so hard that the hospital in Worcester’d had to sew his jaw back on. He’s still sucking his meals through a straw. Luckily it was raining too hard for the Dyson Perrins kids to bother w
ith me.
Today was my second appointment this year so the pretty receptionist in the clinic recognized me. ‘I’ll buzz Mrs de Roo for you now, Jason. Take a seat.’ I like her. She knows why I’m here so she doesn’t make pointless conversation that’ll show me up. The waiting area smells of Dettol and warm plastic. People waiting there never look like they have much wrong with them. But I don’t either, I s’pose, not to look at. You all sit so close to each other but what can any of you talk about ’cept the thing you want to talk about least: ‘So, why are you here?’ One old biddy was knitting. The sound of her needles knitted in the sound of the rain. A hobbity man with watery eyes rocked to and fro. A woman with coat-hangers instead of bones sat reading Watership Down. There’s a cage for babies with a pile of sucked toys in it, but today it was empty. The telephone rang and the pretty receptionist answered it. It seemed to be a friend, ’cause she cupped the mouthpiece and lowered her voice. Jesus, I envy anyone who can say what they want at the same time as they think it, without needing to test it for stammer-words. A Dumbo the Elephant clock tocked this: to – mo – rrow – mor – ning’s – com – ing – soon – so – gouge – out – your – brain – with – a – spoon – you – can – not – e – ven – count – to – ten – be – gin – a – gain – a – gain – a – gain. (Quarter past four. Sixteen hours and fifty minutes to live.) I picked up a tatty National Geographic magazine. An American woman in it’d taught chimpanzees to speak in sign language.
Most people think stammering and stuttering are the same but they’re as different as diarrhoea and constipation. Stuttering’s where you say the first bit of the word but can’t stop saying it over and over. St-st-st-stutter. Like that. Stammering’s where you get stuck straight after the first bit of the word. Like this. St…AMmer! My stammer’s why I go to Mrs de Roo. (That really is her name. It’s Dutch, not Australian.) I started going that summer when it never rained and the Malvern Hills turned brown, five years ago. Miss Throckmorton’d been playing Hangman on the blackboard one afternoon with sunlight streaming in. On the blackboard was