Chapter 48
Turn and Turn About
The grenade sailed lazily through the air, hit the skin of the Sphere and plopped to the kitchen floor. Why didn’t it go in? Maybe the Sphere thought it was a threat? The Junction Sphere didn’t like threats, and who could blame it. I had no time to stop and think. I scrambled back to where Rosie was trying to free herself from the tentacle, got under the table with her and forced her head to the floor. I pressed myself as close to her as I could and waited. I was panting like a racehorse.
The hum of the Sphere and the moaning and screaming carried on for far longer than I wanted. Then a loud crump which I felt rather than heard and a small draught and bits and pieces of whatever dropped onto my back. Long seconds passed, seconds where I checked myself for pain and movement. I asked Rosie if she was OK.
“Get it off!”
The tentacle! I looked down the length of Rosie’s small body to the end of her leg. With relief I realised that it had gone, but so had Rosie’s sock and shoe. I looked further, towards the wall of the J-Sphere, and noticed the wall of colour moving violently. The calm sea that I had noticed earlier had now become rough and choppy.
It also looked dangerous. It looked like the Sphere was going to be the next thing to explode.
There had been a change. The moaning had stopped and the hum of the J-Sphere itself was going up and down, up and down, like some piece of failing electrical equipment. As I watched, one by one the things that had been trying to get through to the 21st Century struggled back to where they had come from and all that we were left with was the broken sound of the Sphere and a dark black and rough sea.
Something was about to happen, that was for sure.
Then the hum of the Sphere started to rise and the dark wall became so ferocious I thought that it was going to actually burst in. I covered my ears as the sound reached a pitch that was almost deafening. Rosie did the same and she shook with fright beside me.
I hid my face again. Didn’t want to see what was coming. What was going to happen. How we were going to die. The whoosh of the Sphere’s wall and the wailing seemed to carry on for ever.
Suddenly, silence.
Absolute silence.
So much silence it was hard to hear anything. Slowly my hearing adjusted to the silence and, after a while I heard the tick of the kitchen clock and the hum of the fridge.
“What’s that?” asked Rosie.
“What’s what?” I said, lifting myself away from her.
“That humming.”
“Oh. It’s just the fridge. Just the fridge.”
A pause. Breathing. Clock. Fridge.
“Is it gone?” Rosie asked. Her voice was muffled. Her head was still held close to the kitchen floor.
“I think so.”
“Shall we look?”
“Yeah.”
So we looked. The black wall, the things that had been trying to get in, the tentacle, the horrible noises, they had all gone!
We both crawled out from under the kitchen table expecting to brush away little bits of whatever that had fallen on us when the J-Sphere had exploded. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. Just our patio doors. It was still dark outside and we both looked at our reflection in the glass. Rosie gasped when she saw herself framed by the white of the doors.
“Oh no! I’m dead! I’m a ghost!”
Rosie had turned into that sort of ghostly grey that I was so familiar with.
It took a while to settle her down, to tell her what had happened and to remind her why she had turned grey. I poured her a glass of water and we sat alone in the gloomy kitchen and the fridge eventually switched itself off and we watched shadows created by the small light underneath the kitchen cabinets.
“Will they come back? asked Rosie, still hypnotised by her reflection in the patio doors.
I shrugged. “Dunno.” I was exhausted. “Hope not.”
Then I heard the clump clump clump of slippered feet on the stairs and me and Rosie got back under the kitchen table. It was Dad. We watched him coughing his way to the fridge, watched him get a drink and swear as he stubbed his toe on one of the kitchen chairs. Then we watched him stand listening for a while. Finally, with another up-in-the-middle-of-the-night type cough, he clumped back to bed.
“Who was that?” asked Rosie.
“My Dad.”
“He’s got a bad cough.”
“Mmm.”
We listened to the night noises of the kitchen for a bit.
“Do you know,” I said after a while, “you’re a really good friend of mine’s Grandmother?”
“I know. I’ve heard.”
For what we hoped would be the last time that night we clambered out from underneath the kitchen table.
“So this is your house?” said Rosie, “where you live?”
“Yeah,” I replied, digging my hands into the pockets of my coat. “I’m back where I started, at least.”
“Turn and turn about.”
I didn’t know what that meant but I liked the sound of it, so I agreed. “Yeah. Turn and turn about.”
We had a drink of coke then I made us a ham sandwich with mayonnaise each and we took it up to my bedroom. We were both knackered and we would deal with what the morning brought in the morning. Before I went upstairs I went to the front room door and checked on Mum. She was wrapped up in her blanket on her made-up bed, breathing peacefully.
In my bedroom I checked the green carpet at the point where the stairs from 1946 had once been, jabbing at the area with my foot.
But I found nothing. Just grubby green carpet.
It was just like the stairs – and the Junction Sphere - had never been there at all.