Saving Sophia (8 page)

Abandoned

I watch Sophia bounce lightly down the wall and unhook herself at the bottom. She clips the harness back on to the rope and waves up at us. All I can hear are seagulls. It’s as if they’re laughing at my attempt at having a proper friend.

“So,” says Ned. “Who’s going with her? We can’t leave her on her own, she’s clueless. But then, so are you – you haven’t the faintest idea about survival.”

“Hang on,” I say. “We were supposed to be a team, and yet you’d leave me to face the police and Pinhead and everyone.”

“I was simply thinking of the best way of saving
Sophia.” He pulls the ropes slowly back through the window.

I breathe in but there are so many words to come out I can’t choose which one’s going first. “Saving Sophia?” I explode. “I’m supposed to be doing that! Right from the beginning you’ve just muscled in with your sad SAS stuff and your survivalist equipment and things. All that guff about sleeping under trees and tracks and hens. If it had been up to me—”

“You could have said.”

I turn to the empty room, as if the chairs might back me up. “I
did
say, I said a million times, but OH NO, clever Ned, he’s been listening to Mum and Dad, he knows exactly what to do, when his silly ‘Eeeew’ sister doesn’t; he can take charge, he can be a hero.”

“Right, you’ve made your point,” says Ned, holding up his hand. “You go – you can look after Sophia. I can see I’m not wanted – time for me to drop out.”

I stand, my mouth hanging open as Ned undoes the harness and holds it out towards me. “I’ll keep them off you for a bit. Bye, sis – enjoy the rest of your trip.”

And he pulls the rope around his back again and braces himself, gazing out of the window, every bit the selfless hero.

What?

I hold the harness in my hands. He’s right, I haven’t a clue how it works.

He looks at the wall as if it’s really interesting. The complete toe-rag.

Buying time, I go back to the middle of the room and drink the remains of the orange squash.

I look out of the window. Sand at the bottom, but the bottom’s still a long way away.

No, this is not how it’s supposed to be.

This is unfair.

I did not think it would end this way.

Suddenly I have become a hopeless heroine. Not the strong decisive type but the bewildered abandoned type.

“Go on, then,” says Ned. “She’ll have vanished by the time you get down there.”

I pick up the harness and tighten it around my waist and my bum, like Sophia did. Then I realise I’m supposed to have used the little metal clasp as well.

I hold the clasp, and the sliding rope, and I
wonder just how you’re supposed to join them together. This is stupid.

I catch Ned watching me, but the moment I look at him he turns his head back towards the wall.

I drop the rope I’m supposed to hold on to out of the window. I look down its length. It’s very long, very straight and very slidey.

When I get home after all this I’m going to kill him. Him, his snails, his stick insects, his entire collection of
EYE SPY
books, all of it, and I’ll lock him in the boot of the car and make him listen to the sound of his possessions being destroyed, just like Dan Harper had to in
My Day of Revenge
.

I stand up, walk to the window and lift up my leg, and stop. I don’t think I can do this.

This is real; this is not a story.

The shock of the revelation is so great that I have to sit down.

Ned’s staring at me.

“Shall I go?” he says.

“No, I’m going to do it.”

“But you don’t know how, do you?”

I try really hard not to shout at him. “It’s just this bit.” I hold out the clasp.

He doesn’t make eye contact. He swoops down,
tightens the harness, clips it to the rope and resumes his rope-holding stance.

“Ha,” he says to the wall.

I recognise it as a “Ha” of satisfaction.

He knows I’m terrified, he knows I don’t want to hang over a beach on a piece of nylon. I don’t feel safe and I don’t like feeling unsafe, but I badly want to be a hero, and heroes don’t lie around worrying, they just get on with it. Irene Challis walked across Scotland, she didn’t let a little thing like a small drop on a rope stop her from getting back.

I look out of the window again. I reckon it’s not very far. If I fell, I’d only break my leg.

Wouldn’t I?

I tie a knot in the holding rope about four feet from the top. It’s not a very big knot so I take one of the African figurines from the miserable man’s mantelpiece and tie that into it, like a toggle. I do the same thing again, about a foot down. I keep doing it until I’ve used up all six of the figurines.

“Sorry, animals,” I say, tying the last knot. “But this is an emergency.” They might not help much, but they’ll give me more to hang on to.

I drop the rope back out of the window, and sit on the sill. It’s further up than the floor and there’s a breeze. I wasn’t expecting a breeze.

I crouch – it feels better that way – and wrap the rope over my shoulder, across my back and under my arm until I’ve got a wooden zebra wedged in my armpit. It holds me and it doesn’t seem to want to drop me, but I don’t know what to do with my legs. I pay out a little more of the rope and walk down the wall about a foot. I probably couldn’t climb back in through the window now if I tried, which means I can only go down.

Ned’s face appears at the window above me. “That’s it,” he says. “You’re halfway there. Keep going.”

I look up at him. Something flickers through my fury – it might be guilt, it might be love – but hanging off a piece of string over a beach I can’t be sure, and I can’t spare the time to analyse it. The stone grates on my knees. This is all real.

The stone in front of my nose is real. The rope slipping slightly through my white fingers is real. My heart’s beating as fast as I’ve ever felt it. Is this good? Would I rather be at home? Would I rather be with Miss Sackbutt?

I don’t know – I can’t work out if it’s all just too scary or if I like it.

I take a deep breath and let the zebra go until I’m gripping a lion. The stone goes past in front of my nose and I graze my knuckles but I don’t think there’s much I can do about that. “Yay!” I say aloud, as cheerfully as possible, and slip down until I’ve got the giraffe in my hand. It’s the last animal.

I look down.

Looking down is always a mistake and this is no exception. What I hadn’t realised is that by tying knots in the rope, I was making it shorter. So now it’s run out.

I look down again. I suppose it’s only about six feet.

“Let go, sis,” calls Ned. “It’s not very far, you won’t break anything.”

A siren sounds behind the castle.

My heartbeat steps up a notch until I can barely hear the sea – I’m going to explode if I don’t do something soon.

Above me is impossible. Below me might be painful. I hang for probably slightly too long before letting go.

Finding Sophia

The sand is harder than it looks, and for a moment, I’m winded. I stand, bent double, gulping the air and waiting for my heart to slow down.

I’m alive.

I start to feel more normal and look around. I’m too obvious standing here so I run to the shadow of the cliff, glancing back to see if there’s anything I can do to cover my tracks. Not really. Ned’s taken the rope back up into the room but my feet have left perfect prints, and although Sophia’s are lighter, even the dimmest policeman would spot them straight away. Short of a herd of elephants
galloping through there’s not much hope of hiding them.

I follow her faint footprints until they stop. There isn’t an actual footpath, just a place where you might be able to scrabble up through collapsed stones to the grassy piece at the top. It’s steep and I’m instantly out of breath, but I keep feeling that a policeman’s about to jump up behind me, so even though I think I’m going to die, I manage to stumble over the crumbly sandy grass and out of sight of the castle. I find myself in a small clearing among tall thin pine trees. There’s no sign of anyone.

“Sophia,” I call, and my voice disappears into the thick pine needle carpet. Even my footprints don’t make a sound.

“Sophia?” I wander through the trees following what must be a badger track. Sometimes I think I catch sight of Sophia’s green shirt, but then it disappears and turns out to be a tree trunk. I can’t hear the sea any more, just birdsong. It’s like a green cathedral.

“Sophia?” Perhaps I should have waited at the castle.

I stumble on further and come to a timber yard. There are men working in the distance and several
pickup trucks parked at the back. To get past I’m either going to have to scramble through a mass of brambles or creep through the yard. The yard seems the better option. For a moment, I wonder if I could just walk through like there’s nothing wrong, but then I realise that everyone must know about us, so I drop to my knees and crawl slowly to the pickup trucks.

I hover for an age at the back of the first truck, listening. The more I listen, the odder it sounds because although the noise of the chainsaws rings through the woods, I’m sure I can hear someone rustling, close by, in a whispery sort of a way.

“Sophia?” I call.

A yellow pile of leaves in the corner of the yard quivers and an arm pokes out. “Come inside,” she says. “It’s cosy.”

“Are you mad?” I whisper, poking at the pile with my foot. “Two seconds with a sniffer dog and they’d have you. Come on, the police must be at the castle, I heard the sirens; we have to get out of here.”

The pile of leaves shakes and Sophia emerges, grubbier than before.

“I couldn’t think where else to hide,” she says,
following me out of the yard and down the track, shedding leaves as she runs.

“Well, it was a rubbish idea.” I stumble up to the left, through a thicket of bracken to the edge of the woods above the track.

“Sorry – I just thought it would be safer than standing there, waiting – where’s Ned?”

I ignore her question. “They always have dogs. In books, they have loads, especially with missing children.”

“Oh,” she says. “And Ned?”

“Ned? He’s being an idiot. He’s not coming.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “Don’t you think we should wait?”

“I don’t know,” I say, a huge Ned-less cavern opening up inside me.

Dog breath

We do wait. For about ten minutes. Sophia looks anxious and picks at her fingernails. I try to pretend I don’t care, but actually I don’t just feel sick, I feel as if my whole stomach’s missing.

I don’t understand it. I mean, I can’t stand Ned, we’re definitely better off without him, so why do I feel punched now that we’ve left him behind?

“We should get moving,” says Sophia quietly. “You’re right, Pinhead’s probably got extra dogs in – Rottweilers or something.”

“Rottweilers?” I say.

“With big teeth,” says Sophia. “And heavies.”

“D’you mean thugs?”

Sophia nods. The more I hear about Pinhead the more I can understand why she’d want to run away.

With every step that takes us back towards the castle car park, I’m expecting to be caught. In fact, I don’t think I’ve breathed in for about twenty minutes. Not properly.

The tall yew hedge that encircles the entrance is all that’s left between us and certain failure – or a faint chance of success.

“That’s Wesson’s, that black one, over there.” Sophia crouches next to me and points at an enormous four-wheel drive with blacked-out windows, parked next to a couple of police cars. “Do you think this’ll work?” she asks.

“I don’t know, but I can’t think of another way out of here.”

We wait until the car park’s silent. Distantly, I can hear calling and dogs, but nothing close up.

“Here goes,” I say and step forward, out of the hedge.

No one shouts. No one moves to stop us. We stand at the back of the giant car.

Sophia opens the boot, and with my heart
somewhere near my heels, I follow her inside. The car’s so big that we fit easily, there’s enough room for us to lie under the black floor lining, and poke our heads along the edge under the shelf although there’s no way of seeing if we’re actually invisible.

“This is mad,” I say.

“It’s warm,” says Sophia. “And comfy. And there are no sea creatures.”

“I’m trying to think of a story where the hero has to hide in the villain’s car, but apart from
Deadlock at Deadfall,
I can’t think of any, and that one ends badly because the car goes over the cliff with the hero in it. He survives, but he has to swim the river and fight off a bear and he loses a finger and his girlfriend.”

“Hmm,” says Sophia.

Something crunches on the gravel outside, and I listen.

Wesson?

I imagine her opening the door and throwing her boots in. They’ll be tall leather boots with spurs. On top of that she’ll have a floor-length black leather coat, and golf clubs or a shotgun.

Or will she look first? Will she wonder what the
lumps are under the floor mat? Will she poke the end of the shotgun under the edge and lift it up so that we’re caught like woodlice under a log?

Oh no – did the lights come on? I didn’t notice. Will we be starkly lit by searchlights lining the side of the boot? Or is there some kind of alarm that’ll tell her we’re in here? Perhaps she already knows.

And how are we going to get out?

“Pinhead might be with her,” whispers Sophia.

“What? I thought he was in New York.”

Sophia doesn’t say anything, just lets out a long sigh, followed by a tiny hiccupy sob.

“Sophia?” I whisper.

She sniffs. “It’ll never work.”

“It will,” I say. “Ned will have told them something good.” I manage to say it as if I mean it, but I’m wondering where he is. Is he even still at the castle, or is he on his way back to Bream?

Sophia laughs and sobs at the same time.

CLICK.

The driver’s door?

But that’s the only sound.

I daren’t breathe, but if I don’t breathe soon I’ll choke. I let a little air out and suck a little in.
The car is utterly quiet. It hasn’t moved – surely if she’d climbed in it would have moved? Of course, Sophia might be wrong and it might not be Wesson’s car; it could belong to the miserable vegetable bloke.

Now someone’s opening the boot. I lie completely still. If Wesson finds me I’m dead – I mean, I’ll play dead and pretend I died in her boot; equally, I will die of shock. I’ll have a Miss Sackbutt moment. But then it could be him – it could be the butcher, bouncer, racehorse trainer. Murderer? Pinhead. He might be bunging his golf clubs in.

“Just thought I’d check,” comes a man’s voice. “Oh, and does the dog go in there?”

Dog? What dog? Then I remember: Wesson’s stupid terrier.

Something thumps on to the mat over my chest and every scrap of air I ever had explodes from my lungs.

“All right, boy,” says a man’s voice. It’s definitely not Pinhead’s, maybe it belongs to a policeman? The door slams shut.

It takes the dog a millisecond to find us under the mat.

It takes him two milliseconds to start licking my face.

The car joggles as Wesson climbs into the driver’s seat, then shakes as the engine starts.

I close my eyes, screwing up my mouth so that my lips are sealed. Not even an amoeba could get through.

And suddenly we’re moving, reversing, at speed and then thumping forwards through the lanes. The dog rearranges his legs but goes on licking.

The car revs as it takes the small hill up from the castle, and I imagine we must be passing the sawmill, but Wesson doesn’t slow down and we swing on for about ten minutes. The dog stops licking my face and starts licking my neck instead.

“Ugh,” I cough. I breathe in thick damp dog air and wonder how long I can stand this for. As well as dog there’s a strong smell of trainer. It’s probably mine. I can’t blame it on Ned any more. The hole in my stomach opens up again and I imagine him back in that room in the tower, this time handcuffed to the chair with no orange squash.

The radio comes on. It’s a music station that I can’t quite hear. Then the phone beeps.

I wipe dog spit from my face with the raggedy sweatshirt and strain to listen, but there’s a great deal of expensive upholstery between us.

“No… The little horrors, they got away. I know, I know…” It goes quiet, she’s still talking but I can’t hear the words properly. “…jumped out of the tower!” There’s more chat, but I can only pick up the odd word. And then she says: “I’ll be back at Bream in an hour or so!”

There’s a pause and she says. “Love you.” And makes a kissing sound.

“Bream?” says Sophia, shaking her head away from the dog that is really fairly lovely as things with sharp teeth go but far too friendly when you’re trapped under a rug. “But we want her to take us to Pinhead’s office!”

“I think I heard her say Bream,” I whisper.

The car pulls out on to a smooth straight road and picks up speed. “But we don’t want to go back – do we?” I ask.

The dog curls up on my legs and settles its head on Sophia, gazing at her with big brown eyes. Perhaps it sees her as another potential lollipop.

“We’ve had it now,” says Sophia. “She’s going to drive us back and there’s nothing we can do.”

“I think we should get out,” I say.

“How?” says Sophia. “We’re going at sixty miles an hour.”

“We need to make her stop,” I say.