Dogsbody (27 page)

T
he train journey was horrible. There was a heatwave that September in 1939, and the railway authorities had fastened all the windows shut so that none of the children packed on to the train could fall out. There were several hundred of them and nearly all of them screamed when they saw a cow. They were all being sent away from London from the bombing and most of them had no idea where milk came from. Each child carried a square brown gas mask box. All of them had a label with their name and address on it, and the littlest ones (who cried and wet themselves rather often) had the label tied round their necks with string.

Vivian, being one of the bigger ones, had her label tied to the string bag Mum had found to take the things that refused to fit into her suitcase. That meant that Vivian did not dare let go of the string bag. When your surname is Smith, you need to make very sure everyone knows just which Smith you are. Vivian had carefully written Cousin Marty’s name and address on the back of the label, to show that she was not just being sent into the country, like most of the children, to be taken in by anyone who would have her. Cousin Marty, after a long delay, had promised to meet the train and have Vivian to stay with her until the danger of bombs was over. But Vivian had never met Cousin Marty and she was terrified that they would somehow miss each other. So she hung on to the string bag until its handles were wet with sweat and the plaited pattern was stamped in red on her hands.

Half of the children never stayed still for a moment. Sometimes the carriage where Vivian was filled with small boys in grey shorts, whose skinny legs were in thick grey socks and whose heads, each in a grey school cap, seemed too big for their bare, skinny necks. Sometimes a mob of little girls in dresses too long for them crowded in from the corridor. All of them screamed. There were always about three labels saying Smith on each fresh crowd. Vivian sat where she was and worried that Cousin Marty would meet the wrong Smith, or meet the wrong train, or that she herself would mistake someone else for Cousin Marty, or get adopted by someone who thought she had nowhere to go. She was afraid she would get out at the wrong station, or find out that the train had taken her to Scotland instead of the West of England. Or she would get out but Cousin Marty would not be there.

Mum had packed some sandwiches in the string bag, but none of the other evacuees seemed to have any food. Vivian did not quite like to eat when she was the only one, and there were too many children for her to share with. Nor did she dare take off her school coat and hat for fear they got lost. The floor of the train was soon littered with lost coats and caps—and some labels—and there was even a lost, squashed gas mask. So Vivian sat and sweltered and worried. By the time the train chuffed its crowded hot fighting screaming crying laughing way into the station at last, it was early evening and Vivian had thought of every single thing that could possibly go wrong except the one that actually did.

The name of the station was painted out to confuse the enemy, but porters undid the doors, letting in gusts of cool air and shouting in deep country voices. “All get out here! The train stops here!”

The screaming stopped. All the children were stunned to find they had arrived in a real new place. Hesitantly at first, then crowding one another’s heels, they scrambled down.

Vivian was among the last to get off. Her suitcase stuck in the strings of the luggage rack and she had to climb on the seat to get it down. With her gas mask giving her square, jumbling bangs and her hands full of suitcase and string bag, she went down on to the platform with a flump, shivering in the cool air. It was all strange. She could see yellow fields beyond the station buildings. The wind smelt of cow dung and chaff.

There was a long muddled crowd of adults up at the other end of the platform. The porters and some people with official arm bands were trying to line the children up in front of them and get them shared out to foster homes. Vivian heard shouts of “Mrs. Miller, you can take two. One for you, Mr. Parker. Oh, you’re brother and sister, are you? Mr. Parker, can you take two?”

I’d better not get mixed up in that, Vivian thought. That was one worry she could avoid. She hung back in the middle of the platform, hoping Cousin Marty would realise. But none of the waiting crowd looked at her. “I’m not having all the dirty ones!” someone was saying, and this seemed to be taking everyone’s attention. “Give me two clean and I’ll take two dirty to make four. Otherwise I’m leaving.

“Vivian began to suspect that her worry about her Cousin Marty not being there was going to be the right one. She pressed her mouth against her teeth in order not to cry—or not to cry yet. A hand reached round Vivian and spread out the label on the string bag. “Ah!” said someone. “Vivian Smith!” Vivian whirled round. She found herself facing a lordly-looking dark boy in glasses. He was taller than she was and old enough to wear long trousers, which meant he must be at least a year older than she was. He smiled at her, which made his eyes under his glasses fold in a funny way along the eyelids. “Vivian Smith,” he said, “you may not realise this, but I am your long-lost cousin.”

“Well, Vivian thought, I suppose Marty is a boy’s name. “Are you sure?” she said. “Cousin Marty?”

“No, my name’s Jonathan Walker,” said the boy. “Jonathan Lee Walker.”

The way he put in that Lee made it clear he was very proud of it for some reason. But Vivian knew there was something peculiar about this boy, something not as it should be that she could not pin down, and she was far too worried to wonder about his name. “It’s a mistake!” she said frantically. “I was supposed to meet Cousin Marty!”

“Cousin Marty’s waiting, outside,” Jonathan Lee Walker said soothingly. “Let me take your bag.” He put out his hand. Vivian snatched the string bag out of his way and he picked up her suitcase from the platform instead and marched away with it across the station.

Vivian hurried after him, with her gas mask banging at her back, to rescue her suitcase. He strode straight to the Waiting Room and opened the door. “Where are you going?” Vivian panted

“Short cut, my dear V.S.,” he said, holding the door open with a soothing smile.

“Give me my suitcase!” Vivian said, grabbing for it. Now she was sure he was a robber. But as soon as she was through the door, Jonathan Lee Walker went galloping noisily across the bare boards of the little room towards the blank back wall.

“Bring us back, Sam!” he shouted, so that the room rang. Vivian decided he was mad, and grabbed for her suitcase again. And suddenly everything turned silvery.

“Where is this?” Vivian said. They were crowding one another in a narrow silvery space like a very smooth telephone booth. Vivian turned desperately to get out again and knocked a piece of what seemed to be the telephone off the wall. Jonathan whirled round like lightning and slammed the piece back. Vivian felt her gas mask dig into him and hoped it hurt. There was nothing but a bare silvery wall behind her.

In front of Jonathan, the smooth silvery surface slid away sideways. A small boy with longish nearly red hair looked anxiously in at them. When he saw Vivian, his face relaxed into a fierce grin with two large teeth in it. “You got her!” he said, and he took what may have been an earphone out of his left ear. It was not much bigger than a pea, but it had a silvery wire connecting it to the side of the silver booth, so Vivian supposed it was an earphone. “This works,” he said, coiling the wire into one rather plump hand. “I heard you easily.”

“And I got her, Sam!” Jonathan answered jubilantly, stepping out of the silver booth. “I recognised her and I got her, right from under their noses!”

“Great!” said the small boy. He said to Vivian, “And now we’re going to torture you until you tell us what we want to know!

And don’t forget . . .

Polly Whittacker has two sets of memories. In one, her childhood is boringly normal. In the other, she is friends with the unusual Thomas Lynn, a cellist whose complicated life expands to include her, too. As she packs to return to college, the second set of memories blazes up to displace the first, and Polly knows something is very wrong. Why did she forget? Is someone trying to make her forget? Soon she is the detective of her own history, and the trail leads her back to Tom Lynn, whose life, she now knows, is at supernatural risk. Fire and Hemlock is an intricate, romantic fantasy filled with sorcery and intrigue, magic and mystery, all background to a most unusual and thoroughly satisfying love story
.

With an introduction by Garth Nix

1

A dead sleep came over me
And from my horse I fell

T
AM
L
IN

P
olly sighed and laid her book face down on her bed. She rather thought she had read it after all, some time ago. Before she swung her feet across to get on with her packing, she looked up at the picture above the bed. She sighed again. There had been a time, some years back, when she had gazed at that picture and thought it marvellous. Dark figures had seemed to materialise out of its dark centre—strong, running dark figures—always at least four of them, racing to beat out the flames in the foreground. There had been times when you could see the figures quite clearly. Other times, they had been shrouded in the rising smoke. There had even been a horse in it sometimes. Not now.

Here, now, she could see it was simply a large colour photograph, three feet by two feet, taken at dusk, of some hay bales burning in a field. The fire must have been spreading, since there was smoke in the air, and more smoke enveloping the high hemlock plant in the front, but there were no people in it. The shapes she used to take for people were only too clearly dark clumps of the dark hedge behind the blaze. The only person in that field must have been the photographer. Polly had to admit that he had been both clever and lucky. It was a haunting picture. It was called
Fire and Hemlock
. She sighed again as she swung her feet to the floor. The penalty of being grown up was that you saw things like this photograph as they really were. And Granny would be in any minute to point out that Mr. Perks and Fiona were not going to wait while she did her packing tomorrow morning—and Granny would have things to say about feet on the bedspread. Polly just wished she felt happier at the thought of another year of college.

Her hand knocked the book. Polly did not get up after all. And books put down on their faces, spoiling them, Granny would say. It’s only a paperback, Granny. It was called
Times out of Mind, editor
L. Perry, and it was a collection of supernatural stories. Polly had been attracted to it a couple of years back, largely because the picture on the cover was not unlike the
Fire and Hemlock
photograph—dusky smoke, with a dark blue umbrella-like plant against the smoke. And, now Polly remembered, she had read the stories through then, and none of them were much good. Yet—here was an odd thing. She could have sworn the book had been called something different when she first bought it. And, surely, hadn’t one of the stories actually been called “Fire and Hemlock” too?

Polly picked the book up, with her finger in it to keep the place in the story she was reading. “Two-timer” it was called, and it was about someone who went back in time to his own childhood and changed things, so that his life ran differently the second time. She remembered the ending now. The man finished by having two sets of memories, and the story wasn’t worked out at all well. Polly did not worry when she lost her place in it as she leafed through looking for the one she thought had been called “Fire and Hemlock.” Odd. It wasn’t there. Had she dreamed it, then? She did often dream the most likely seeming things. Odder still. Half the stories she thought she remembered reading in this book were not there— and yet she did, very clearly, remember reading all the stories which seemed to be in the book now. For a moment she almost felt like the man in “Two-timer” with his double set of memories. What a madly detailed dream she must have had. Polly found her place in the story again, largely because the pages were spread apart there, and stopped in the act of putting the book face down on her rumpled bedspread.

Was
it Granny who minded you putting books down like this? Granny didn’t read much anyway.

“And why should I feel so worried about it?” Polly asked aloud. “And where’s my other photo—the one I stole?”

A frantic sense of loss came upon her, so strong that for a moment she could have cried. Why should she suddenly have memories that did not seem to correspond with the facts?

“Suppose they
were
once facts,” Polly said to herself, with her hand still resting on the book. Ever since she was a small girl, she had liked supposing things. And the habit died hard, even at the age of nineteen. “Suppose,” she said, “I really am like the man in the story, and something happened to change my past.”

It was intended simply as a soothing daydream, to bury the strange, pointless worry that seemed to be growing in her. But suddenly, out of it leaped a white flash of conviction. It was just like the way those four—or more—figures used to leap into being behind the fire in that photograph. Polly glanced up at it, almost expecting to see them again. There were only men-shaped clumps of hedge. The flash of conviction had gone too. But it left Polly with a dreary, nagging suspicion in its place: that something
had
been different in the past, and if it had, it was because of something dreadful she had done herself.