He pushed back from the wall and spun around. He could still see his house, with the tiny coloured shapes of his parents inside it, but it was a fragile glass toy in the middle of a creeping, dripping forest.
He felt one of the wandering newspapers wrap itself around his calf, and the shock of the touch woke him.
Ryan had a ritual for making sure he was awake after nightmares. He blinked hard three times, clenching his eyes tight each time so that he could not fall back into sleep without knowing it. Then he picked out the arrow-slit of dark silver sky between the curtains, the luminous display on his alarm clock. It was not enough.
He got up and went to the bathroom, let the light fill his world with colour, saw the soap glisten creamily in the belly of its holder on the bath-side. It was still not enough. There was now a slight tingle in the knuckles of his unburnt hand, and when he pulled off the flannel to stare at them there seemed to be new tiny bumps pushing up under the skin.
Ryan sat up all night on the window sill, reading by the growing daylight that fell in through the curtains. By morning he felt queasy with sleeplessness.
When he came down to breakfast his mother took one look at him and told him to go back to bed, he wasn’t well. She brought him up a soft-boiled egg with soldiers, and a grapefruit. She’d used a knife to cut the grapefruit in half with a zigzag line, and put a glacé cherry on top. Ryan felt guilty, but not too guilty to eat it. He knew his mother well enough to guess that she was worried about him but had to go out, and the zigzag grapefruit was meant to make up for that.
It felt strange sitting in bed all day, his stomach turning over and over like a tumble-dryer. He almost started to wonder whether he might be ill after all.
Ryan’s father did not look up from his crossword when Ryan came into the living room fully dressed.
‘I’m feeling a lot better,’ Ryan explained quietly. ‘I thought I might go out in the garden.’
His father looked up blankly for a moment. ‘Good.’ There was a pause while his brain hopped back and actually heard what Ryan had said. ‘Good,’ he said again, with more sincerity.
As Ryan’s hand closed around the back-door handle the cold of the metal chilled him with the memory of his dream. For a moment, he was afraid that he would find himself looking out on a windswept tarmac plain in sepia shades.
The door opened to show the garden, his garden. He looked over his shoulder, and his home had not paled into glass, but somehow he kept feeling as if it had each time he turned his back on it. And that just beyond the fence, there might be a windswept stretch of tarmac, or the litter-tangled slopes of the Magwhite wood . . .
He walked to the end of the garden, through the gate and down the familiar footpath that led along the backs of all the adjoining gardens. But perhaps the end of the footpath would be where the painted page ended and the strangeness began . . .
No, there was the road, sweeping under the bridge in the most sensible manner possible. He would not go far, Ryan told himself, just up on to the bridge so that he could look out and see that there were no fences where his world suddenly stopped. There was a man up on the bridge, washing graffiti off the cement with a high-powered hose. Ryan would wait until he had finished, slip up to the bridge, then go home.
Under the bridge the road ran between two concrete walls. On one wall someone had pasted a poster of a young woman sitting at a table. She had long straight hair that shone in the way that hair only shines in adverts, as if it was polished wood. Her dress was green. She was smiling and her eyes were lowered, as if someone had said something that embarrassed her but made her happy at the same time. On the other side of the table one could just see the edge of a man’s face and shoulder. From the bulge of his cheek you could tell he too was smiling.
Water from the hose above was running down through the cracks in the concrete and over the poster. Ryan was just turning away when the woman in the green dress moved. She dropped her chin to her chest, then angled her head away from the smiling poster man until she was facing Ryan. She started to open her eyes.
Her eyes were fountains. Ryan could not see if there were actually eyeballs there at all, the water gushed so fiercely from between her lids. Her lips trembled and parted, and water rushed from her mouth too, as if she was a churchyard gargoyle.
Ryan made a small noise. He was not sure what it was meant to be. It choked up out of him as if his own lungs were full of water.
A terrible bubbling sound came from the poster woman’s throat, and Ryan realized with horror that she was trying to speak through the torrent.
‘Thlphlllay . . .’
‘No . . .’ It was all that Ryan could manage. He felt as if everything inside his chest had vanished. No, make this not be happening . . .
‘Schlllaayyyy . . .’
It was only when she held out one hand, fingers spread, that Ryan understood the word. Stay. He realized that his hands were gripped in his own trouser pockets, as if holding his legs motionless. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the sunlit road beyond the bridge shadow, but it seemed as unreachable as a vista on a cinema screen.
‘Phlook . . . fomm . . . mlee . . .’
‘I don’t . . .’ Ryan shook his head, terrified.
‘Phtook . . . flrom . . . mee . . .’
Took from me. Was that it?
‘Phlphllllischlesh.’
‘I don’t . . . I can’t underst . . .’ Ryan’s words came out in broken, husky squeaks. He covered his eyes with his hands and clenched them tight into fists. There was a sting as the bandage dragged back from the tautened skin. Something between the knuckles on both his hands quivered and loosened, and then suddenly, despite his covered eyes, Ryan could see the poster woman more clearly than ever before.
She was swinging her head angrily from side to side in a slow snaking motion, and her hair followed the movement of her head draggingly, like reeds in the tug of a wave. The poster man had vanished now, and yellow leaves were tumbling past her, fumbling across her face. Behind her a soupy darkness was striped with pale tree trunks. The woman turned to face him again, and Ryan recognized her. It was the figure from his dream, the one that he had seen sitting in the woods of Magwhite.
He felt sure that if he ran she would drag herself dripping from her poster and come after him while the world around him turned to sepia. She would walk through his parents without even seeing them, shatter the walls of his bedroom like glass and find him.
And with his strange new sight Ryan suddenly noticed that an ooze of darkness was bubbling up through the leaves at her feet. Beneath the oily surface of the black water he glimpsed a dull, coppery gleam. Coins, coins, hundreds of them, some bright, some verdigris-dappled, some blackened almost beyond all recognition.
There must have been something down the well, Josh had said.
Something down the well . . . The figure in his dream had been sitting near the mouth of the well . . .
Took from me . . .
Oh no . . .
‘We’ll get you all the coins you want!’ Ryan cried. ‘We will, we’ll get you better ones than the ones we took . . .’
‘Noooo! Hhwwhphhhhischessss . . .’
Ryan realized that his own lips were pursed, trying to help by mouthing the bubbling word. She opened her mouth again and released a long, hissing waterfall of words, pointing at him as she spoke. She was giving an order. She finished, and waited. She waited for him to agree.
‘I can’t . . . I can’t understand, I’m trying but I can’t . . . I can’t . . .’
Her mouth made angry shapes, and water spattered Ryan’s shoes, his T-shirt, the backs of his hands. She leaned forward with a menacing hiss.
‘All right! All right!’ Ryan clenched his fists uselessly into his eye sockets.
A sudden roar at his back made him jump. He looked over his shoulder in time to see a moped slice through the darkness under the bridge before curling away down the daylit road. When he looked back at the wall, the woman sat fla
t and demure in her poster, her paper face darkened and rippled by the dying trickle of water from above.
Slowly, he stretched out his trembling fingers. For two cold, dark seconds he stared at his knuckles, and at what the warts had become. Then, at long last, he remembered how to run.
6
Crook’s Baddock
‘Get a grip – there’s a snuffly yelpy noise coming from your end. Is that you or the phone? It’d better be the phone.’
‘Josh, listen, it was this woman in a picture, but she moved and there was water coming out of her eyes, like it did with my reflection before, but much worse. And it’s my hands, Josh – the warts’ve gone normal again now but right after I could see what they were and they’re eyes! I’ve got eyes growing on my hands, it’s just mostly they’re closed . . .’ Ryan was curled on the window sill in the lounge, behind the curtain. From his hiding place he could watch the garden path to make sure nothing was making its way from the gate.
‘Hey.’ Josh’s voice was sharp but not unkind. ‘C’mon. Don’t lose the plot.’
‘Josh, it’s the well. There’s something down the well, and it wants . . . I don’t know what it wants, I couldn’t understand it because of all the water . . .’
‘I went down the well. There was nothing living down there. Just some old wrappers and muck in the water.’
‘She was there, Josh, even if you couldn’t see her . . . Josh, this is real, I swear . . . it’s . . . we’re not radioactive, she’s doing something to us . . .’
The line made strange churning noises while Josh thought.
‘Did you catch any of what she said?’
‘I don’t know. Bits. There was something at the end that sounded like . . . Crook’s Baddock.’
‘Crook’s Baddock. Ryan, have you told anybody else about this?’
‘No . . .’
‘Then don’t. We’re going to sort this out. I’m going to find a way out of here, and Chelle and me will come and get you. We’ll get a bus to Crook’s Baddock, and on the way you’ll tell us everything that happened, and when we get there we’ll have a plan, OK?’
And, sure enough, an hour later the three of them were on a ‘homework research trip’ on the Crook’s Baddock tour bus, and Ryan was recounting his ordeal blow by blow. And this was where everything went wrong.
‘You said yes to her?’ Josh asked for the sixth time.
‘I told you how it was.’ Ryan felt hot and miserable as he stared out through the bus window. ‘I thought she was going to throw a flood or something . . .’
‘But you don’t say yes! Idiot! You don’t agree to things like that! You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve only gone and promised this whole . . . wet-spooky-puking-god-thing . . . that we’ll all go and do something – and we don’t even know what it is!’
Chelle for once said nothing. Her expression was damp and crumpled, as if she’d left it out in the rain overnight.
‘But I didn’t!’ protested Ryan. ‘I didn’t say anything about you two . . .’
‘Oh, wake up!’ The seat back huffed as Josh dropped his weight back against it. ‘Ryan, she must know about all three of us, but she only appeared to you. Don’t you get it? She picked you as a representative.’
And that, Ryan realized, was the real problem. Josh was angry that someone else had made a decision for the group, but he was far, far angrier that he had not been the one asked.
‘It’s just because of these,’ Ryan said quickly and apologetically, running his fingertips over his knuckles. There were now undeniably three new warts on his unbandaged hand. ‘It’s not like I’m a leader or anything. She just wanted one of us to have these so they could see her properly and take her orders, I’ll bet. ’
‘Ooh, that’s really creepy and horrible.’ Chelle shuddered, and then brought herself up short. ‘Oh no, I didn’t mean it to sound like that, I just meant to say, eyes on your hands – that’s really, really weird. In a horrible kind of way.’
Ryan swallowed, fighting back a memory of his knuckles blistering with oozing, greenish-brown orbs, a little star of slick light trembling in each.
‘Yeah,’ he murmured. ‘Look, maybe she just decided to affect us in different ways. So with you, Josh, there’s all this business with phones and TVs and watches going weird around you . . .’
‘Yeah, right,’ snarled Josh, while Chelle stared nervously at her feet. ‘She wants someone to take her orders, and somebody else who can make toasters go insane. That makes sense. You can’t promise things for other people, you know. Chelle and me don’t even have to be here.’
It was about the third time Josh had said this, and yet he was still on the bus as it entered the old town.
Crook’s Baddock was only a handful of miles north of Magwhite. However, unlike Magwhite, which had the outskirt shabbiness of many villages entangled on the edges of Guildley’s sprawl, Crook’s Baddock lay amid true countryside, nestling pristinely among soft, duvet-fold hills.
To begin with, Crook’s Baddock had been just a small weaving village. Some of the oldest houses still survived, with surprised thatched eyebrows above their windows and doors, but now they had little signs outside saying how old they were, and history leaflets in brackets on the wall. Most of them had become museums, with tiny model looms inside, and posters about weaving and dyeing. Nearly everything that had not become a museum seemed to have become a tea shop.
Once a year, towards the end of the summer holidays, coachloads of children were brought down for the Crook’s Baddock Festival and forced to look at hundreds of spinning wheels and make sketches of timber-frame houses.
Across the aisle a girl of about five, half buried under her mother’s shopping, watched Josh with frightened fascination, her lower lip pulled down at the corner by one tiny, curling finger. Josh noticed her and stared back for a bit, then pushed his sunglasses down his nose and bulged his eyes as if the little girl was the most alarming thing he had ever seen. The free corner of the little girl’s mouth twitched, then turned up. For some reason small children tended to like Josh, however outrageously he behaved.
‘Do you know what you’re looking for?’ Now that Josh was happily occupied by a new audience, Chelle had shuffled a little closer to Ryan. ‘I mean, did she say anything else, I mean, any more instructions . . .’
‘Ki-i-i-nd of . . . Something like, “Hlaarrlley Daarrrridphum.”’
‘Harry Daddy what?’
‘More like, Hhhllllaar. Leee. Daarrrrid. Phum.’
‘Kind of hhhhlll . . .’
‘Hhhhllleeeugh . . .’ Josh joined in suddenly, making it sound like a vomiting noise. He grinned. In his usual unpredictable way, he seemed to have recovered his temper in less than a minute. ‘No, go on, show us again.’ Ryan demonstrated, and the other two tried to imitate him. The three of them rasped and gurgled like coffee percolators until Chelle could no longer breathe from giggling.
‘Do you think . . .’ Chelle began when she’d recovered, ‘do you think we could get some rolls and things, just small ones, and go to the park maybe? Last time there was that stand by the park which did crushed ice and lime, only they just had paper straws and I hated that because they go soggy and tear – but you can’t just drink crushed ice because it makes your teeth hurt so you have to wait for it to melt and then it goes all funny like the goo from ice lollies when you lick the wrapper and that’s ten pound seven don’t give me a tip then you mean-faced old harridan . . .’
Ryan stiffened. Chelle’s voice had become much louder and had a new, hard edge. The accent was not her own.
‘. . . what have they been doing with this table, playing football on it, we’ll need another tablecloth oh God it’s Moaning Minnie and the Banshee child back again for chocolate yes yes I know chocolate with double cream for the screaming little horror I’ve served you a hundred times and you don’t even remember me do you . . .’
‘Chelle?’ Ryan stared at her.
Chelle’s eyes were wide and p
anicky. She shook her head slightly but her mouth kept moving, spilling out words.
‘Chelle, get a grip!’ Josh leaned forward and peered into her face. ‘Hey, Chelle! Hey!’
What was it that Chelle had been trying to tell Ryan the day before? Something about words pouring uncontrolled out of her mouth?
‘. . . Oh that God-awful child’s using the coffee pot as a gong again TAKE THE TEASPOON AWAY FROM YOUR CHILD TAKE THE TEASPOON AWAY FROM YOUR CHILD BEFORE I DO SOMEBODY A MISCHIEF!’ Chelle was shouting now, her face turning bright red as everybody else in the bus turned to stare at her.
Hastily Josh pressed the button for the bell. As the bus slowed at a stop Ryan and Josh seized an arm each and guided Chelle to the doors.
‘Thank you!’ Josh called to the bus driver with manic enthusiasm.
‘Sorry!’ called Ryan as they reached the pavement.
‘FOR GOD’S SAKE USE A NAPKIN!’ Chelle shouted as the doors closed.
‘What do we do?’ hissed Ryan.
‘I don’t know . . . walk her somewhere until it stops happening. And stuff something in her mouth.’ They had to crumple up several leaflets about the Crook’s Baddock wool trade and bung them in before Chelle’s words became truly muffled. ‘Give us a nudge if you start to choke or anything.’
After the relative darkness of the bus, the sunlit street was brilliant. Outside a green-painted pub, a fleet of motorcycles dazzled Ryan with the shine of two dozen wing mirrors. Next door, an ice-cream sign swung outside a pale pink tea shop with curtains printed to look like patchwork.
‘So what the hell was that? Is she picking up local radio or something?’ asked Josh.
Chelle shook her head. She waved her hands in frustration.