‘That’s really creepy,’ Chelle said in a small voice. She did not try to tell him that he had imagined it. Ryan felt a surge of relief. ‘I wish Josh was here,’ she added.
‘Isn’t he coming?’
‘Yes, but he’ll be late. He’s serving time, didn’t you know? Because he came back all sludgy and green from the well and wouldn’t tell them where he’d been.’ Josh’s parents thought that the most enlightened way to punish him for his escapades was to trap him in useful tasks that would make him a better person. Often this involved staying with the elderly aunts his mother hated, gardening and cleaning out their sheds. Instead of ‘grounding’ him and refusing to let him out of the house, his parents refused to let him into his own home. His key was taken from him, and he had no access to any of his own possessions until he had served his time.
Anything to get rid of me, Josh had said once. They’d send me back if they could find the receipt.
Ryan could not imagine how he would feel if his own parents sent him into this kind of exile. Josh, who took most punishment with fierce good humour, tended to react to a stint in Merrybells – the name of the house where his aunts lived – with a weird, glowering craziness unlike any of his other moods. His aunts, whom he despised, he obeyed with a sullen, dangerous taciturnity – it was that or face an extension of his exile – but his conversations with everyone else became a forest dense with tripwires.
Somewhere a phone rang, and then they heard footsteps approaching the door to the Cavern. Chelle’s sister Caroline opened the door, phone in hand.
‘It’s Josh. Five minutes, OK? I’m expecting a call.’
Chelle waited until Caroline had closed the door before uncovering the receiver.
‘Hello, Josh, we were just starting to wonder where . . . oh no, but Ryan had a weird thing . . . no, he’s right here.’
Ryan took the phone with a sinking heart. If Josh was cutting short Chelle’s sentences, he was in a bad mood.
‘It’ll take less time if I tell you,’ Josh began ungraciously enough. There was a hard, knuckley edge to his voice, muffled only by a faint whirr in the background like a washing machine. ‘I’m at the Aunts’. I can’t get to the Cavern. If there’s anything important, tell me now before they come back.’
Ryan tried to tell Josh what he had told Chelle, but quickly, so that Josh wouldn’t get impatient.
‘Make a better story if one of the eyes fell out of the socket on a string and swung about a bit,’ Josh said, unimpressed. ‘Uh-oh, the Aunts are back.’
Ryan suddenly became aware that something other than Josh’s tetchiness was setting him on edge. Something was bothering him, like the feel of fingers drumming on the back of his neck. It took him a moment to realize that the familiar, repetitive pic-pic-pic sound from above had accelerated.
‘I’ve got to go. If your face is too scary for you, stay away from mirrors.’
‘Josh . . .’
Pic.
Pic.
Pic.
Pic. Pic. Pic. Pic-pic-pic-picpicpicpicpicpic . . .
The filament of the bulb started to pulse slightly with each faint chink. As Josh hung up on the other end, it flared blindingly and died, leaving the tiny red scrawl of the wire floating in darkness.
4
Running Down the Clock
Ryan slept badly that night. The invisible stranger who had sat tapping the back of his neck while he listened to the bulb die was back every time his eyes closed. Now sitting on his bed, it tip-a-tapped on the skin between the knuckles of his burnt hand. His hands moved of their own accord to brush away the tickle. His questing fingernails discovered a cluster of small bumps on his skin and scraped over them, waking a sleeping itch.
It was too hot. Whenever he got close to sleeping, the tickle would spread into wide red pools of itch bigger than his hands and pulse like the bulb in the Cavern had before it died. The bandage tightened with every throb. At last he staggered to the bathroom and peeled back its edge.
The swellings on his hand were not part of the burn. They were white and tight like new nettle stings, but swollen as dewdrops. There was a slight slit down each, like the first narrow split in a conker shell, and the slits were fringed with tiny black hairs. With each throb, the tiny hairs fluttered.
Ryan turned on the cold tap and pushed his hand into the sink. I didn’t see that, nothing could look like that; I’m asleep; if I don’t look at them, then they didn’t look like that . . . There was a penny of panic in his throat.
Only when his hand was so numb with cold that it hurt did he dare take it out of the sink. Between his knuckles were clustered five white, shrivelled warts, nothing more.
See, they didn’t look like that. Ryan went back to bed, resolving to tell nobody about it so that it wouldn’t have happened. He settled himself with his hand dangling into a mug of water. Someone had told him once that if you were asleep and someone wet your hand, you wet the bed. He hoped it wasn’t true.
The next day, his ‘dreams’ preyed on his mind.
‘Well done,’ his mum said when she saw him surrounded by his textbooks. He did not tell her that he was actually trying to bury himself in maths. The cold, smooth lines of numbers always took over his mind so completely that he couldn’t concentrate on anything else.
But today even maths felt hot. Just as he was starting to concentrate, he was jarred by the phone’s ring. When he answered it, there was nothing at the other end but a fuzzy grinding noise, and a high note that cut through his brain like a cheese-wire.
‘It’s probably somebody’s fax machine,’ said his mother. ‘We had about three messages like that on the answering machine this morning.’
Ryan went to open the window. The leaves of the trees outside gleamed like coins. The invisible stranger had followed him and was still tap-tap-tapping at the back of his bandaged hand.
‘Ryan!’ called his mother. ‘Chelle on the phone for you.’
When he held the receiver to his ear, he hit a wall of incoherent words.
‘Chelle, c’mon, slowly,’ Ryan interrupted as kindly as he could.
‘It happened again! Only this time it was really bad because Miss Gossamer was there and she looked at me, I’m sure she thought I was talking about her . . . and I don’t even know if I was or not.’ Her breath had a faint woollen rasp to it, and Ryan knew that something had worried her into asthma again.
‘Chelle, what happened again?’
‘You remember, I . . . I told you about it yesterday . . .’
With a sick, guilty feeling Ryan realized that at some point the day before Chelle must have trusted him with something important, and that he had no idea what it was.
‘Well, tell me what happened this time,’ he said gently.
‘Oh, it was just the same, only we were out shopping, and then suddenly all this strange rude stuff was coming out of my mouth about somebody pushing in a queue and somebody else having a fat bottom . . .’
Then again, perhaps if I had listened to her it still wouldn’t have made much sense.
‘. . . and I tried to phone Josh, only when someone picked up the phone there was this weird noise like they were standing next to a digging machine, and I couldn’t hear them properly, only I could kind of hear a bit of a voice and I think it was Josh. And I think he said something about how we had to do something before we grew more heads, but at the end he just gave up and kept saying “Merrybells” over and over again, like he wanted to make sure I’d heard it.’
‘He’s still on aunt duty.’
‘Ryan . . .’ quavered Chelle, ‘what do you think he meant?’
‘We’ve got to talk to him.’ Ryan hesitated. ‘We’ll mount a mission. To Merrybells. Let’s find out if the Water Clock plan works.’
Before heading out, Ryan discreetly checked the answering machine and found that another message had been left. It was filled with the same rush of static and ear-splitting note, but there was a voice drowning in the grey noise.
‘. . . it’s n
ot funny any more . . .’ It sounded a lot like Josh, but Josh without his usual confidence.
An hour later Chelle and Ryan were gingerly climbing up the back of an enormous clock.
Josh’s family lived surrounded by a garden called The Haven. At one end of the grounds stood his parents’ great house, and at the other stood the little thatched cottage known as Merrybells. The Haven was more of a park than a garden, Ryan had decided. People spent time in gardens. People showed each other around parks. Gardens had spots: a sunny spot for basking, where the flowers have been crushed to the shape of a cat belly, a shady spot with ruts from a deckchair. Parks did not have spots. They had ‘features’.
One of the features of The Haven was the Water Clock, designed after a famous one in a square in Munich. You could see right into its innards, where jets of gleaming water spilt down a series of tiny steps from a high vat to a great basin at its base. It was made of bronze, coated in a ‘verdigris finish’. Ryan knew that ‘verdigris’ was the greenish colour that old metal sometimes took on after years of exposure to damp and air. It was a nice-sounding word for a nice-looking sheen that was really a kind of mouldy tarnish. ‘Verdigris finish’ was an expensive kind of fake tarnish, and Mr Lattimer-Stone, Josh’s father, was very proud of it. A big central rod pounded up and down as if it was churning butter, and its motion nudged cogs, which turned big grooved cylinders, which from time to time rang bells or set little metal figures dancing merry-go-round style.
‘If I ever rob a bank and get sent to Merrybells for ten life sentences,’ Josh had sometimes said, ‘then you two bring the getaway car and park it near where the Water Clock’s built into the wall. Then you can climb up and throw me a file or a Kalashnikov or something. Only signal with a mirror first so I know you’re there.’
So here they were, perched on top of the wall.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ asked Chelle, but she did not wait for an answer. Josh will know what to do, she was no doubt thinking, and that thought was enough for her to be hunched in a tangle of clematis, angling a little mirror towards Merrybells. ‘How am I even supposed to know if it’s shining at the house? I’m just flashing it all over the place just in case – oh, there he is . . .’
Josh strode over. He wore wellingtons, and there were grass stripes like camouflage paint on his arms – presumably the result of gardening duty. His tinted sunglasses hid his eyes.
He looked behind him for a second. When he looked back up again his face was set and certain.
‘It’s bad. There must have been something down the well. I don’t know what, but I think someone dumped something radioactive down there, and now I keep – look at this.’ He flipped back the buckle of his watchstrap, and snatched it off. ‘You see this? Dead.’ He waved it at them, though they were too far up to make out the tiny digital screen. He flung the watch into the basin, where it hit the water with a reproachful plop.
‘It’s been like that ever since . . . I’m giving off some kind of . . . radiation . . . and the bulbs keep blowing and the television screen’s kind of pink on one side and green on the other. And by now everybody thinks I’m doing it on purpose.’
‘Then we’d better tell—’ began Ryan.
‘No!’ Josh bit off his sentence. ‘We’re not telling anyone. I’ve decided. If we told them they might never let us hang out together again. We just need to take care of this ourselves. Milk’s good for radioactivity. We need to drink lots of milk. And take showers. And just phone me, will you?’
A bubble rose from the water basin as if Josh’s watch had been holding its breath and had finally given up. Ryan thought he could make out its tiny, ghostly face dancing beneath the surface, but there were so many lights skimming across the water that he couldn’t be sure.
Ryan blinked and suddenly felt sick. The curving arc of water from the spout by his head gleamed like a twist of metal. The drops that sprang from the corners of the cogs looked heavy and he expected them to chime and clatter as they dropped. He half closed his eyes, and his lashes filled the world with soft gold discs that floated around Josh like ghostly coins. Josh nestled in the middle of this phantom treasure trove, tinted yellow pennies on his eyes.
Josh, he thought, get out of there . . .
‘Josh!’ It was Chelle’s squeak. ‘Get away from there!’
The rod at the heart of the clock had started juddering and jerking. The cogs of the inner works jumped in sympathy, and resumed their positions with a crunch, forgetting how they had locked smoothly together. A screw punched its way out of its socket with a ‘pock!’ and Josh leaped back just in time as a large metal piston fell towards him and bounced off the grass. A pipe hissed, and water sprayed outwards.
‘We didn’t do it!’ shrieked Chelle.
‘I didn’t touch it!’ Josh shouted at the same time.
As they scrambled backwards through the clematis, Ryan could hear Josh running away with the watery, lolloping sound that wellingtons sometimes make. Chelle and Ryan dropped to the ground and walked quickly away, so that nobody would connect them with the sounds of the Water Clock dying behind them.
5
The Glass House
The lasagne at dinner seemed as heavy as cement, but Ryan struggled to wash it down with as much milk as he could manage.
He wasn’t at all sure about milk helping with radioactivity, but the medical encyclopedia was in disguise again. His mum hated the way the dust jackets of books always got torn, so she took them off and kept them safely in a drawer. When an important guest visited she would hastily slap the jackets back on, but randomly, on to any books of the right size. At this moment, the medical encyclopedia was probably masquerading as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or something.
All the while that he ate, Ryan was wondering about radioactivity. Maybe it would all just get better and then nobody would ever need to know . . .
At least he hadn’t started making bulbs explode or TVs go green. Of course, he hadn’t gone down the well like Josh . . . but he had tried to help wring out his jacket, and maybe that was why the weird warts were sprouting on his hand. The fork was warmed by his fingers and he set it down. Didn’t radioactive people make things around them radioactive? He glanced with a sudden pang at his parents, talking just across the table from him.
‘I . . . think I’ll go to bed early.’ Both parents looked up as Ryan’s chair scraped backwards.
‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’ Ryan flinched away as his mum reached out a hand to feel his forehead for a temperature.
‘I’m fine, just a bit tired.’ He wished he had just said that he wanted to do some homework in his room. As he climbed the stairs he told God that God could make him radioactive just as long as it didn’t hurt his parents. At the same time he knew that he was partly saying that so God would be impressed by his bravery and decide not to make him radioactive either.
He took a long shower. The soap stung the warts on his knuckles, and he could not help noticing that another small bump was starting to form on the back of his unburnt hand. He wrapped wet flannels around both and went to bed.
It was bad enough lying awake, but everything got worse when his mind became foggy with sleep and he couldn’t control his thoughts. The rest of his body seemed to disappear, leaving only the nagging red itch on the back of his hand. For a while he had the sleepy notion that if he opened his eyes he would see the warts gently glowing in the dark. This was followed by a growing certainty that he had left the shower on.
He would have to go and check, because he was sure that the house was filling up with steam, and water was running down the landing into the bedrooms. Eyes still closed, he sat up and lowered his feet to the floor. The surface beneath his soles was ice cold and impossibly smooth, and with that chill moment of contact Ryan knew where he was.
He opened his eyes. Sure enough, he was back in the Glass House.
His bare feet left prints in the steamed glass of the floor, and through them he could see
the living room, where his father sat on a glass sofa turning the leaves of a glass book. Ryan did not try to skate along the landing. In the bathroom he found the shower silently pouring steam and turned it off.
Above the ceiling he could see a hazy tangle of rafters, and beyond that a sky the colour of old paper. Down through the surface of the stairs he could see the translucent outline of the vacuum cleaner in the understairs cupboard. The air around him smelt like greenhouses and damp blots on walls.
In her little office his mother was cutting clippings from a newspaper sheet so transparent that the print seemed to float in the air.
Ryan’s fingers slithered against the back-door handle, then found a grip. For once, the door opened.
Outside, Ryan’s garden was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was a rough plain of tarmac like a schoolyard or car park. The colours here were old and faded like those in Victorian photos. There was a wall at the edge of the tarmac, and Ryan had a weak-kneed edge-of-cliff feeling as if the earth just dropped away beyond it. A chain gang of trolleys gently swayed and strained against their bondage, and Ryan thought he glimpsed two or three dark figures chained among them, moving to and fro in the same restless, useless way.
He walked to the wall and pulled himself up so that his chest rested on the top and his feet dangled. He looked down and found himself staring down through the tumble-thicket of Magwhite. The trees were strange to him though, older and crusted with fungus. Yellow moss oozed from their bark like custard, dripped to the ground and grew back again as he watched. Swaying in the breeze, the twigs lost their grip on their dying leaves and then somehow caught them again.
A long way down amid the dripping trees he could see a dark dimple that could only be the well. It seemed to be drawing a spiral of shadow and leaf-whirl down into it like a ragged plughole. Beside the well someone sat almost motionless. It was a woman, Ryan thought, for the figure’s hair was very long. She had her back to him, or at least he could see no gleam of a face. It seemed that on either side of her head something was in motion. Ryan thought that it must be hair snaking in the wind, for the motion was too liquid and supple to be gestures of her arms, and yet the movement was so slow that she might have been underwater. Strangely, it was only when she shrugged her head down to her chest and started to turn towards him that Ryan began to realize how large she was.