The World House (38 page)

  "Erm…" Miles shrugged. "Not very well, I mean, I passed my test and everything but I've never driven since… why?"

  "I've got an idea!"

 

The empty Sophie is filled by brick and plank, plaster and paint. Her intestines become corridors, her stomach a kitchen, her heart a playroom, her head a library… she is becoming the house and the house is becoming her. The prisoner's captors may well have considered it a perfect solution, ensuring the house could perpetuate itself through humans. A never-ending supply of neuroses and nightmares, imaginations to imprison and terrify. They did not, however, consider what the house might do when presented with a mind like Sophie's.

  
Wrong. All wrong. This is a Very Strange House.

  "Yes, very wrong," the man who is not even a man is saying, "and what do we need to do to make it right?"

  
When something is always wrong then wrong becomes
right.

  The prisoner has not anticipated this and for the first time he is wrong-footed. "What are you talking about? The house should be neat and ordered, perfect little boxes, one two three!"

  
Not this house. In this house that would be wrong.

  The prisoner cannot believe that this – the most simple element of its plan – is going awry. Sophie's logic is turning against him. He needs to think of another way around the problem. A solution occurs: "If you can get inside somewhere you should be able to get out again," he says.

  Yes.

  "And here you can get in from lots of places, any time you like, any location. So it makes sense that there must be a way to travel from here to to all of those places, yes?"

  There is silence and he wonders if Sophie has been listening. He tries again.

  "Somewhere in the house there must be a way to travel in the opposite direction." He makes it a statement this time rather than a question. "A place like…" he is trying to think of something a human could relate to "…a place like…"

  Sophie has been thinking of somewhere she once visited with her mother.

  
A train station.

  "Yes!" The prisoner is relieved. "A train station that can take you to all the places in the world you want to go, all the different time periods."

  
A train station to everywhere.

  "Yes." He can sense that she understands. Quietly, and with the sort of feigned, casual gentility that always surrounds the really important questions in life, he whispers: "Let's go there."

  
Yes, let's go there.

  The house shifts around them, the corridor falling apart like unravelled origami, walls falling back to reveal space, the ceiling lifting and breaking away, replaced by arched roofs of glass and iron.

"That's it!" the prisoner shouts. "That's it!"

 

In the greenhouse, Stefania's tribe were more in disarray than ever. Their cavern reeked of burned fabric and skin, and black swathes of soot were painted across the walls. Stefania sat and darned her skirt, determined to ignore the sobbing and whining of her people. They were a pitiful lot. Many were the times she had been tempted to walk out on them and never return. Perhaps one day she would. Brave the hole in their world as the old man and his child had done, and see if there wasn't somewhere better to spend her days.

  "He's not coming back, is he?"

  She looked up to see Lauren (Oxford, 1989, housebound one year), twin tracks leading from her eyes where tears had swept away dirt.

  "If you mean that idiot Whitstable, then no, I don't expect he is." Stefania threw her darning on to a table in disgust. "I always knew he was unreliable."

  "He used to be so nice," muttered Lauren, "soft, gentlemanly. Talked a lot about his wife."

  "Well, now he's an idiot," Stefania replied. "A dead one."

  Lauren began to cry and Stefania took a deep breath, ready to hurl insults. Before she could speak, a rumbling noise distracted her. It was like the advance of heavy plant machinery, a rolling and pounding that trembled through the earth.

  "What's happening?" someone shouted, as always looking to someone else to do their thinking for them.

  Stefania ran outside, aware the tribe would follow.

  The jungle thrashed as if in a storm, the leaves of the trees whipping to and fro. The disturbance wasn't in the air though: there was no wind. Stefania could feel it beneath her bare feet. The ground was rippling. There was a crack as a nearby palm was uprooted, pushed up from below and sent toppling.

  "Keep back!" Stefania shouted.

  "Is it the creatures in the walls?" someone asked.

  Stefania had no patience to answer, stumbling forward as the grass beneath her feet rose up. She landed on all fours, immediately furious at having been rendered foolish in front of the tribe.

  "It's the end of the world!" someone else chimed in.

  With a roar of exasperation she pulled herself to her feet and turned to face her people. "Don't be so ridiculous!" she shouted, "it's just an earth tremor, no reason to start squealing like babies. God!" She was shaking now, her pent-up frustrations pouring out. "What are you for? Pathetic sheep! The minute something happens it's tears and begging. You sicken me, the lot of you. There's nothing to worry about, it'll settle in a minute. Now get on with your work!"

  The jungle had little but contempt for her, taking her words as a cue for greater carnage. The ground shook again, this time knocking all to the floor. The trees thrashed with greater frenzy. The air was filled with the squeals and shrieks of wildlife as it stampeded, directionless with panic.

  "I will not have it!" Stefania screamed, determined to have her authority returned. "I will not."

  There was a deep cracking noise that she couldn't place, a whistle of wind. She looked up towards the sky and wondered why the light seemed to move. It was the last thought in her mind before the section of roof glass embedded itself in her, from temple to hip.

  Some of the tribe squealed at that; some were far too concerned about their own safety even to have noticed.

  "What are we going to do?" someone asked Lauren. She stared at their bisected leader as the undergrowth turned crimson.

  "We stay under cover and hope the tremors die down," she replied. "Not much else we can do, is there?" She began to turn towards the cavern when a thought struck her. "Hang on, let's bring Stefania's body. If we're all to die then let's do so with a full belly. It's what she would have wanted."

 

Hawkins and his crew had been reluctant to stay near the plughole after Alan and Sophie had disappeared. Alan's certainty that it was the way out was the only thing to give Hawkins pause. The wraith had seemingly vanished with its prey – it was hard to tell because you couldn't see the damn thing.

  Ryan, ever fearless, had been the first to look over the rim into the dark pipe below.

  "No sign of them," he said, to nobody's great surprise.

  "Course there ain't," said Barnabas, "poor bastards will be smeared like soup at the bottom of the pipework."

  "If you've nothing better to say," Hawkins muttered, "perhaps it's best you say nothing at all."

  Barnabas grumbled at that but thought better than to challenge his captain.

  They waited for a few minutes. Hawkins paced around the plughole, weighing up their options.

  "What's the alternative?" his wife asked him. "March all the way to shore? Not as if we don't know what lies that way, is it?"

  "True."

  Just as he was deciding to lower some ropes and make the climb there was a rumbling from above them. Looking up, they could see clouds beginning to gather, dark and weighty with the promise of rain.

  "Looks like a storm," said Jonah.

  "And here's us with lots of shelter," moaned Barnabas.

  Lightning pulsed in the building gloom, a heartbeat of electric blue in the dark grey of the roof.

  The ground shook. A spray of plaster rained down across the wet tiles. Thunder churned above them, rain and tiles falling side by side. They cowered, packs over their heads, as the bathroom broke up around them.

 

• • •

 

"That's it!" the prisoner shouted, "that's it!"

  Sophie can feel the damage around her, the cracking and the crumbling of all the perfect boxes that keep the madness in. She is trying to build not break, she does not understand why the house cannot see this.

  
Build not break.
She insists.
Build not break.

 

The damage was felt everywhere. Pictures shook on walls, their subjects screaming and digging oil-paint nails into the canvas in an effort to hold on. The gas lamps alternately flared and died, their flames moving from amber to red like malfunctioning traffic lights. Statuary writhed on its pedestals. The wallpaper rippled like a field of barley in a storm. The carpet split and unravelled like rotting skin.

  In the library, books began flying off the shelves, flapping their covers like lame birds as they collided with one another in mid-air.

  The pack of stuffed wolves howled as they ran ahead of an avalanche, the crest of snow building higher and higher as it surged down the mountain.

  In the cellars, the living sea began to crash against the walls of the tunnels like an animal in confinement. It could feel the storm heading its way and wanted nothing more than to surge away.

  In the dark spaces, the wraiths chased their own tails, spinning faster and faster as the devastation around them made them hunger for more.

  The house was coming apart and nothing would please it more than to take everyone else with it.

 

• • •

 

Tom fought to hold on as the shaft vibrated around him, unbuckling and re-forming even as he reached for the base of the elevator, hoping to pull himself inside. Below him the flood water surged, forced away by an unseen hand. The cellars darkened into a single circle of black that receded as his hands pedalled at the air. Everything around him blurred as if viewed from a speeding car. That wasn't right, surely? How come he was still moving forward? The blur resolved and he was freaked to find himself on his hands and knees riding an escalator.

 

"When you shout, 'I've got an idea!'" said Miles, having to bellow over the roar of the house's shaking walls, "that tends to make everyone assume something really cunning is about to happen. Something that will save the day and have us all home by teatime."

  "I'm not a miracle-worker," complained Carruthers, trying to get comfortable on the passenger side of the Morgan Tourer, "and I'm open to suggestions if you can think of another way around the situation."

  "You know I can't," sighed Miles. "If I could I would hardly be sitting here, would I?" He tried to figure out how to start the engine.

  "You two in?" Carruthers called over his shoulder.

  "Yes," Ashe replied, "though I'm far from convinced about this either."

  "It'll be fine," said Penelope, squeezing Miles' shoulder. "I have every faith in you."

  "That's the spirit!" said Carruthers. "Though if Miles is correct as to the limitations of his driving ability…"

  "And he is," Miles mumbled, finally finding the manual choke.

  "…then you would do well to hold on tight," Carruthers continued.

  The Morgan roared and Miles tried to stop swearing under his breath.

  "Ready, old chap?" Carruthers asked.

  "I suppose so…" Miles put the car in first, lifted the handbrake and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The Morgan leaped forward with enough force to throw them all back in their seats.

  "Open your eyes!" Carruthers shouted to Miles, "you can hardly drive blind!"

  "I can hardly drive at all!"

  The car hit the glass just as the re-formation of the house reached their section of the wall. It burst forth in a shower of crystal shards as the bricks fell away. The view through the windows was nothing the eye could fix on, shifting shapes and flashes of colour as the house rebuilt itself. It solidified in time for the tyres to hit the ground, the wheels screeching against a polished stone floor as the car went into a skid. Miles didn't have the first idea how to deal with that. "Feathering the brakes!" he shouted, if only to reassure everyone else he was doing something.

  "Only you know, darling!" Penelope shouted.

  The car spun until it smashed into a newsstand and came to a safe, if rather noisy, halt in a pile of London
Standards.

  "I recognise this," said Miles, peering through the windscreen. "We're in Saint Pancras Station!"

 

"The train now approaching platform 18,672 is the 10.14 to 1978, calling at Brussels, New York, Lyons and Bournemouth, terminating in the front room of the Thompson family residence, just in time for lunch."

  The house had seen minor changes in its time, was in fact in a constant state of flux, yet never before had something so drastic affected its geography. With the resources of mankind's subconscious to hand, however, the alteration was quick to take hold. Not just that, it was elaborated on. The world's dreamers took the concept and fleshed it out, adding detail and colour. The coffeeshops began to wake with the sounds of hammered coffee-scoops and hissing milksteamers; the amusement arcade flashed lights and top scores in a hail of bleeps and fanfares; pigeons fluttered in the eaves, or scoured the concourse beneath them for scraps of left-over panini or smeared chocolate wrappers. Passengers appeared, ethereal figures staring up at the impossibly long announcement board or dashing towards listless guards who took pleasure in stringing out the process of clicking ticket stubs just long enough for them to board their train with only seconds to spare.