The Hidden World (4 page)

It was then that the voices whispered, ‘Help us.'

‘What?'

Jessica took hold of his arm. ‘Listen! That was them!'

‘I thought it was you.'

‘No – listen, it's them!'

They stood silent and still for nearly a minute. ‘I don't hear anything,' said Renko at last. ‘I mean, maybe it's just the wind blowing across the stack. That happens sometimes. It's like when you blow across the top of an empty Coke bottle.'

‘Help us. It's coming closer.'

Renko stared at Jessica and his mouth opened and closed.

‘You heard that?' said Jessica.

‘You bet I did. Holy Moly. That wasn't any wind.'

T
hey crossed the landing, treading as lightly as they could because the floorboards groaned. Renko tried the handle of the big bedroom door, but it was locked, and there was no key in it. He bent down on one knee and peered through the keyhole.

‘What can you see?'

‘Nothing. A curtain. Part of a window.'

Jessica tapped on the door panel with her knuckle and called out, ‘Hello? Hello? Is there anybody there?'

They waited, but there was no reply. She tapped again, and hissed, ‘Don't be afraid! We're here to help you!'

There was still no answer. Eventually Renko stood up and said, ‘There's nobody in there, Jessica. We'll have to look through all of the other rooms.'

Together they went along the upstairs corridor, trying every door handle and tapping at every door they couldn't open. The house had nine bedrooms altogether, as well as a box room and Grannie's sewing-room, but the bedrooms they could open were empty, and there was no reply from the rooms that were locked.

‘Forget it,' said Renko. ‘There's nobody here.'

‘But you heard them.'

‘I know I heard them. I'm not saying I didn't.'

‘So where are they, then?'

‘Maybe they're in the attic.'

‘They sounded so close.'

‘Yeah, well, it's amazing how voices can travel along chimneys and drainpipes and stuff.'

‘All right then. Let's take a look in the attic.'

She was about to open the narrow cream-painted door that led up to the attic when Grandpa Willy came puffing up the stairs. ‘How's it going, kids?'

‘Fine, thanks, Grandpa. I was just showing Renko my CDs.'

‘You like that stuff, Renko?'

‘Beck, and Eminem? Sure.'

‘Andy Williams is more my style. “The Days of Wine and Roses”. Jeez, I think I ate two muffins too many. I think I need to lie down.'

Jessica glanced at Renko and she could tell he was thinking the same thing. They couldn't explore the attic while Grandpa Willy was up here.

‘Renko was just leaving, Grandpa.'

‘OK then. Good to meet you, Renko. Good to see some of Jessica's friends paying her a visit for a change. You come again.'

‘Yes, sir. I certainly will, sir.'

Grandpa Willy went off to his bedroom in a fit of coughing while Jessica and Renko went downstairs. Renko took his coat off the rack and shuffled himself into it.

‘Grannie and Grandpa are going out tomorrow afternoon. They always go out Thursdays for their over-sixties' club. Do you want to come round?'

‘I don't know … I'm kind of busy tomorrow.'

‘How about Saturday? Do you want to come around Saturday? I could make pizza or something. I make really good pizza.'

‘I don't know. I'll have to see what I'm doing.'

‘I'm going to take a look in the attic even if you don't come with me.'

Renko hesitated for a moment, and then he said, ‘Listen … I don't know if I really want to get involved in this. I heard something, for sure. I heard somebody talking, I'm not saying that I didn't. But, you know, maybe it's just one of those what-d'you-call-its. Natural phenomena. Like when you can see cities that are hundreds of miles away, floating in the sky. Only this is voices.'

‘So you're not going to come, then?'

Renko gave a non-committal shrug.

‘That's all right,' said Jessica. ‘At least you came around to say you were sorry, even if I didn't know what it was you were supposed to be sorry about.'

‘Yeah. Sorry.'

She opened the door for him and he stepped out into the wintry chill. She watched him walk all the way down the pathway to the gate, but he didn't turn round once. The sky was orange and the first few flakes of fresh snow were falling.

‘Jessica! Is that front door open? There's a howling draft in here!'

Jessica closed the door and the log fire in the hallway billowed out a cloud of eye-stinging smoke. She went into the kitchen where Grannie was making pies. ‘Sorry, Grannie. I was just saying goodbye.'

‘That Ringo's a nice boy,' said Grannie, sifting flour onto her pastry board. ‘You should ask him around more often.'

Jessica said nothing, but sat down at the kitchen table and started to draw patterns in the flour. This is the secret sign that shows you the way to the fairy kingdom. A circle, and a knot, and a pattern of evening stars. Whenever you see this sign, you will know that the Fairy Kingdom is closer than you think. But whether you've got the courage to go there, that's a different matter altogether.

‘Jessica, will you stop messing around with my flour, girl!'

Jessica brushed away the secret sign, and then clapped her hands together to get rid of the flour. Clap your hands once and the fairies will hear you. Clap them twice and the door will open. Clap them three times and you will always get more than you bargained for.

She went back up to her bedroom and stood at the window. The snow was hurrying down all over the garden, so thick that she could barely see the statue of Pan. ‘Strange pretty', Renko had called her. She pressed her forehead against the window-pane so that she could feel the cold in her brain. For the first time in a long time, she felt desperately lonely.

Jessica lay in bed and listened to Grannie and Grandpa Willy go through their usual pantomime performance of going to bed.

‘Did you lock the back door, Willy?'

‘No, Mildred, I left it wide open with a sign saying, “Come on in, burglars, and help yourselves!”'

‘Have you washed your teeth yet, Willy?'

‘I would if I could find the dang things.'

They opened and closed the bathroom door about twenty-eight times, and flushed the toilet over and over, as if a flush-toilet was a novelty. They had an argument in the corridor about who was getting in whose way, and then they closed their bedroom door, still arguing, and then they opened it again to switch off the landing light.

‘You never remember to switch off that light!'

‘Well, why didn't you tell me it was on?'

‘Why should I tell you? You're not blind!'

‘No, but the way you nag, I'm practically deaf!'

Eventually there was nothing but the feather-soft pattering of snow against the window, and the eerie light of a late-November night. Jessica waited for nearly half an hour, and then she climbed out of bed and put on her bathrobe. In the top drawer of her dressing-table, under her neatly folded panties, was Grandpa's big red flashlight, which she had borrowed from the closet in the kitchen.

She carefully opened her bedroom door, and listened. The landing was almost totally dark, except for the faintest reflected light from the hallway downstairs. At this time of the evening, the house was talking to itself about the day gone by. The ashy logs in the living-room fireplace suddenly lurched and dropped. The range in the kitchen started a slow, regular ticking as the hob cooled down. The clocks chimed; the plumbing rattled as the tanks in the attic filled up. And on winter nights like this, with so many pounds of snow on top of the roof, the whole house would creak and complain, an arthritic old man in a heavy overcoat.

At the far end of the landing stood a tall bureau and on top of the bureau was a vase with ostrich feathers in it, with an oval mirror behind it. In the darkness, the vase looked like the head of a giant vulture, with a scrawny neck and a hooked beak. Jessica stared at it before she opened the attic door, just to make sure that it wasn't a vulture, but even when she stared she didn't feel sure.

Jessica crossed the landing to the attic door. She lifted the latch, opened the door and shone the flashlight up the narrow wooden stairs. She could smell dust, and something else, like faded pot-pourri. There was a light switch there, but she didn't want to turn it on in case Grandpa Willy made one of his regular visits to the bathroom and saw it shining under the door.

She climbed the stairs as quietly as she could. If there were any children up here, she didn't want to wake them. She reached the top, where there was a banister, and shone the flashlight quickly from one end of the attic to the other.

All she could see were steamer trunks, boxes, old-fashioned lamp standards, heaps and heaps of books and magazines, a treadle sewing-machine and two dismantled brass beds. In the darker recesses of the attic, however, she could make out other shapes: something that looked like a black dog, lying on its side; and something that looked like a man, bent over it. And something that looked like a huge spider, dangling from the ceiling: something which idly swayed.

‘Hello?' she whispered. She paused, and then repeated, ‘Hello?' but much more loudly.

She took a step forward, and then another, and then she trod on something that felt pleated and sickeningly soft. It let out a hideous wheezing noise, and she stumbled back against the banister, her heart banging and pins-and-needles prickling all the way down her back. She shone the flashlight toward the floor, and there was a broken piano-accordion, leaking out its last cacophonous breath.

‘Scaredy-cat,' she chided herself. But all the same she made her way into the further reaches of the attic with much greater caution, sweeping the flashlight from side to side to make sure that she didn't tread on anything else.

She couldn't see any children here, but there were heaps of gray blankets at the other end, under the sloping eaves, and she thought she ought to look underneath them, just to make sure. That would mean making her way between the black dog and the man who was leaning over it.

It couldn't possibly be a black dog, not really; and it couldn't be a man; and as she came nearer she expected the shapes to resolve themselves into what they really were. A black blanket, maybe, and a coat hung over a chair. Yet she was only six metres away from them now and they still looked like a dog and a man. She shone the flashlight directly at the back of the man's head and she was sure she could see the curve of his ear, his dusty gray hair.

She stopped. She was too frightened to carry on. The man hadn't moved, and neither had the dog, but she was less than five metres away from them now and they hadn't changed. She could even see the dog's red tongue, and its gleaming white incisors.

‘Ah – pardon me,' she said, in a voice so high that it didn't sound like her own.

The man didn't move, and neither did the dog.

‘I'm looking for some children.'

Still the man didn't move. Jessica kept his head in the wavering beam of Grandpa's flashlight. She didn't know if she ought to retreat downstairs or take another few steps forward.

‘Hello?' she said. ‘I'm looking for some children!'

She heard her breath squeak with anxiety as she took one more step toward the man, and then another. Please don't be a real man, please be a coat. She took another step, and then another. She reached out to touch his shoulder.

And then the man whipped his head around and for one split-second she saw a dark face like the face of a devil and wild white eyes without any pupils and then the desk-lamp fell from the chair with a clatter and the rug that was wrapped around it fell too.

For a moment she couldn't move. But then, with her heart palpitating, she shone the flashlight onto the floor. The devil's face was nothing but a brown glass Tiffany lampshade, with diamond-shaped patterns of clear glass all around it. His hair was nothing but the fringe around the rug. And when she directed the flashlight toward the black dog, she saw that it was only a golfing-bag, with the front pocket unzipped to reveal its red leather lining and two or three white plastic tees.

She turned around. The spider-thing that had been swaying on the ceiling was a beaded lampshade, stirring in the draft that blew under the eaves.

She was still trembling, but she had never felt so relieved in her life. She felt that she had suddenly grown up, and realized for the first time that the frightening shapes she saw in the darkness were only imaginary. The bathrobe hanging on the back of her bedroom door never turned into an evil goblin, even at midnight, and the hunched creature who sat in the corner was only her jeans, thrown over the back of her chair.

Stepping over the golfing-bag, she made her way toward the heaps of gray blankets. The roof was so low here that she had to bend double. The blankets were spread all the way across the width of the roof, and they were covering a series of lumps and bumps. Now that she had seen the man and the dog for what they were, she knew that there couldn't be children under here, but all the same she felt that she had to look.

She knelt down beside the edge of the blankets, and lifted one up. It was very difficult to see what was under it. She saw what looked like a brown velvet sleeve, and a small black lace-up boot, very worn-out.

She dragged the blanket back further. The blanket dust tickled her throat and prickled her eyes. There was a velvet suit there, only a small one, a child's size, and a jumble of other clothes, socks and rolled-up nightshirts and tweed knickerbockers. Then she saw something oval and pale.

The blankets were heaped one on top of the other, so they were difficult to lift. But in the end she manged to pull back one layer, and then another. She crawled forward, over the clothes, and then she saw what the pale thing was.