Thief! (19 page)

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Authors: Malorie Blackman

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Science Fiction

BOOK: Thief!
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The voice sent Lydia’s heart racing. All at once, her palms were sweaty and her heart was pounding. Surprised, Lydia realized that she was actually frightened. But why?
Daniel opened the door. Lydia followed him in.
The room was cold, gloomy. A single lamp at the other end of the room gave off the only light. It took several seconds for Lydia’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. This room was filled with books like the one downstairs but, unlike the one downstairs, this room smelt lonely and dark. That was the only way she could describe it. A couple of chairs decorated the room. The floor was polished wood and in the wall adjacent to the door was an unlit fireplace.
With a start Lydia realized that what she had first believed to be a long shadow in the corner of the room was actually a person. Someone was standing there watching her – an old-looking woman leaning heavily on a walking-stick, her face shrouded in shadow. The prickling all over Lydia’s body was back with a vengeance and her blood roared in her ears.
The woman started walking towards her. Her stick made a dull thud as it hit the wooden floor with each step. She was wearing a long dark skirt which reached down to the floor and a white shirt buttoned up to her neck. With each step, the lamplight stole slowly up her body until only her face was still in darkness.
Even when Lydia realized that she was holding her breath, she still didn’t dare to release it. She glanced at Daniel. He, too, was watching the woman as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Lydia turned back to the woman, who was once again moving forward. Then all at once Lydia could clearly see her face and her breath came out in a horrified gasp.
The woman’s face was horrible – not so much her face as her eyes. They seemed to burn right through Lydia’s body. The woman’s face was all deep creases in her forehead and permanently turned-down lips. A scar ran from her right eye across to her right ear, but that wasn’t what made the old woman ugly. It was her expression, full of bitterness and pain and overwhelming hatred. She stared at Lydia and, not once, not once did she blink.
Lydia moved closer towards Daniel. She was trembling and couldn’t stop. She wanted to close her eyes and turn away from the woman before her but she couldn’t. It was as if an invisible clamp had locked onto her head and was stopping her from looking anywhere but at this old woman.
The woman made her slow, painful way over to Lydia to stop directly in front of her. Without a word she unbuttoned her left shirt sleeve and pushed it up past her elbow to her shoulder. Then she turned her arm slightly so that Lydia could take a closer look. Lydia’s heart leapt. The old woman had a smooth, deep-brown scar on the slightly lighter-brown skin of her arm. The scar was shaped like an S on its side, like a Sidewinder snake.
Lydia looked down at her own arm. She unbuttoned her left shirt sleeve cuff and pushed it up. Under the medical staples, beneath the slight smear of blood where the wound had started to seep again, was the identically-shaped scar. Lydia’s was a fresher wound and it hadn’t yet healed, but there was no doubt about it. The scar was the same shape and in exactly the same place.
With horror, Lydia looked into the woman’s face.
‘Hello, Lydia,’ the woman said.
‘No, it can’t be . . .’ Lydia looked up at Daniel but he looked away, unable to meet her eyes.
Lydia shook her head. It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t. It was impossible and yet . . . Lydia stretched out her hand and touched the scar on the old woman’s arm. The scar was warm and smooth, unlike the skin surrounding it. Lydia’s arm fell slowly to her side. The scar, just like the old woman, was very real.
‘I didn’t die in a car crash . . .’ Lydia whispered, totally shocked. ‘You’re . . . you’re
me
!’
Chapter Twenty
A Lesson In Hatred
Lydia couldn’t take her eyes off the bitter old woman standing before her. It was her, years and years into the future.
It was her
 . . . Lydia turned to Daniel. ‘You lied to me. You said I died in a car crash. How could you do that?
How could you?
’
‘He only told you what everyone else was told,’ the woman interrupted. ‘We
were
in a car crash a week before my thirteenth birthday. I was critically injured. And even when I did eventually recover, for a while everyone thought I’d never walk again.’ The old woman paused and looked pointedly down at her walking stick. ‘By the time I was able to leave hospital, our parents decided never to return to Tarwich. So we moved back down to London.’
‘But why did you let everyone think you’d died?’ Lydia asked, bewildered.
‘A part of me
did
die in the accident,’ the woman said softly. ‘The part of me that believed in other people. That’s why I had the dates put on my memorial. So I’d never forget. I don’t trust or rely on anyone. The monument was built to attest to the truth of that.’
Lydia looked from the woman to Daniel and back again.
‘It’s you!’ she said, dumbfounded. ‘
You’re
the one who’s making everyone’s life miserable in this town. Everyone thinks it’s Danny, but he’s only doing it for you.’
‘Danny’s doing what he knows is right,’ said the woman.
Lydia looked up at her brother.
‘But it’s not right, Daniel,’ Lydia said urgently. ‘Dad always says that two wrongs don’t make a right.’
‘The people of this town are getting exactly what they deserve,’ Daniel replied.
‘Then why do you look so unhappy?’ Lydia asked. ‘What’re you getting out of it, if it makes you just as miserable as everyone else in Tarwich?’
‘Hensonville,’ Old Lydia corrected softly. ‘This is my town now. Everyone and everything in it belongs to me.’
‘You can’t own people. You can buy all the houses and the roads and the buildings, but you’ll never
own
the people here. You can’t own how they think and feel. And they hate you. Is that really what you want?’ Arguing with Old Lydia was like beating her head against a brick wall, but Lydia had to try. She had to make her older self see sense.
‘Enough! I don’t remember being like you at all.’ Old Lydia shook her head. ‘I can’t remember ever being that . . . naive.’
‘How old are you?’ Lydia whispered.
‘Forty-nine,’ Old Lydia replied. ‘Going on one hundred and forty-nine.’
And it was true. The woman looked a lot older than forty-nine. Her eyes showed that what she looked like outside was just a reflection of what she was inside – as cold and hard as permafrost.
Lydia’s head was spinning. She didn’t die in a car crash, after all. But as she looked up at the woman before her, Lydia realized it wasn’t that simple. She hadn’t died, but she’d turned into something she didn’t recognize. Something she didn’t
want
to recognize.
‘Danny, don’t listen to her. She’s wrong. She’s . . . evil . . .’
‘You and I are the same, Lydia. Don’t forget that,’ Old Lydia said. ‘You hate the people in this town just as much as I do. You’re going to grow up into me.’
‘No way. Never,’ Lydia denied vigorously. ‘I’ll never become you. I’m going back to my own time and I’m going to change the future.’
‘You can’t. I exist, just as much as you do,’ Old Lydia scoffed.
‘But . . . but I’m changing things already – just by being here. I must be.’ Lydia spoke her thoughts out loud.
Lydia looked up just in time to see the look which passed between her older self and Daniel.
‘What is it? There’s still something you’re not telling me,’ Lydia confronted them.
Silence.
‘I want to go home. Now. How do I get back to my own time?’ Lydia asked her older self.
‘I don’t know,’ Old Lydia admitted after a long pause.
Lydia stared at her. ‘You must know. Just tell me how you got back when you were my age.’
‘I never came into the future when I was your age. This never happened to me,’ said Old Lydia.
‘I don’t understand. Then how did you get the scar on your arm?’ Lydia asked.
‘On the moors – when I got lost,’ said Old Lydia. ‘I can’t remember much about it, but I always thought I must’ve fallen on some broken glass or maybe been kicked by a moor pony or something . . .’
‘But how is that possible?’ Lydia asked. ‘How can something happen to me that hasn’t happened to you?’
‘We don’t know,’ Daniel admitted. ‘I wish we did. Maybe the past, present and future all exist simultaneously so each can be reached and each can have an effect on the other? I don’t know.’
‘Then this future isn’t for definite?’ Lydia frowned.
Daniel shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it is – no. Maybe this is just one possible future. I believe there are many others.’
From the expression on his face, Lydia knew that Daniel was aware of what she was asking. She wanted to know if by going back to her own time she could change the future. Could she change the present as Daniel and Old Lydia knew it and as she had seen it?
‘I think I understand,’ Lydia said slowly. ‘But how does that help me? How do I get back?’
‘You said you were on the moors in the middle of a storm when you were knocked unconscious. Maybe the storm had something to do with it,’ Daniel suggested.
The storm . . . The swirling colours and the lightning flashes . . . That had to be it!
‘There’s an electrical storm over the moors now,’ Lydia remembered. ‘That must be how I get back to my own time.’
‘How?’ asked Daniel.
‘I don’t know, but I have to go back there. And this time I have to go into the storm instead of away from it. The moors are where it all started,’ said Lydia.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ said Old Lydia silkily.
Lydia stared up at Old Lydia.
‘What’re you talking about?’ she asked. ‘I have to get back to my own time. I don’t belong here.’
‘You’re not leaving this house until you tell us who the leaders of the Resistance are and when they’re planning to attack us,’ said Old Lydia.
Lydia couldn’t believe her ears. Here she was with a chance – albeit slim – to change this . . . this nightmare, and all Old Lydia cared about were the names of the leaders of the Resistance.
‘Don’t you understand? I have to get back to the moors,’ Lydia pleaded. ‘The storm might fizzle out and disappear at any time. Then I’d be stuck here.’
‘Why should I care about that?’ Old Lydia raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what I want to know. Then we’ll make sure that all the members of the Resistance are dealt with.’
‘Daniel, you’ll help me, won’t you?’ Lydia appealed to her brother. ‘I can change all this – I know I can.’
‘And if we don’t want it changed?’ asked Old Lydia, feigning patience.
‘You don’t mean that . . .’ Lydia thought for one brief moment that she’d misheard, but the expression on Old Lydia’s face told her otherwise.
‘What’re you so afraid of?’ Exasperation made Lydia’s voice grow louder and more desperate by the second. ‘If I go back to my own time and I fail then nothing changes here. But if I succeed . . . Danny,
please
.’
‘Don’t you see what this means, Lydia?’ Daniel spoke to the old woman before him. ‘If we
can
get her back to her own time, she might be able to change the future – for both of us. We won’t have to live like this any more.’
Old Lydia stared at her brother as if he’d lost his mind.
‘You want to help the people of this town?’ Old Lydia scorned.
‘No. No way. But I do want to help
us
. You and me. That’s all I’ve ever cared about.’
‘Don’t let that one . . .’ Old Lydia pointed a disdainful finger at her younger self. ‘Don’t let her make you forget why we’re doing this.’
‘I haven’t forgotten, Lydia. And I never will. But I’m getting tired.’ Danny sighed. ‘When we crush the Resistance, within months a new one will spring up in its place.’
‘And we’ll crush them as well,’ Old Lydia said at once.
‘And then what? Is this really how you want to spend the rest of your life?’ asked Daniel.
‘There is nothing else.’
‘But there might be – if we help Lydia to get back to the past and she changes her present. There must be something more than this. And we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.’
The old woman’s eyes took on an icy glint as she looked from Lydia to Daniel and back again. Lydia glared at the old woman and hated what she saw. Old Lydia was what she’d let herself become. She’d grown bitter and twisted, both inside and out, and here was the end result. Old Lydia leaned more heavily on her walking-stick as she continued to scrutinize her brother.
Lydia remembered what she’d heard about the motorway accident. But it wasn’t the town’s fault. A lorry had ploughed into them. Daniel had told her that. More than ever, Lydia longed to get back to her own time. She knew with absolute certainty that once she got back, even if she couldn’t prove that she didn’t take the Collivale sports cup, she would
never
turn into the embittered, old battleaxe who stood in front of her. Never in a million years.

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