Figures of Fear: An anthology (11 page)

‘Right, then, you going to burn it?’ said Mick. ‘Should have brought some hot dogs and stuff. We could have had a barbie.’

‘Sorry, Mick,’ Jerry told him. ‘I want you to go now, and leave us alone.’

‘Oh, that’s nice! I practically break my flipping back helping you carry that bleeding great wardrobe. I find you a great place to burn it, and now you won’t let me even watch!’

‘There’s a good reason, Mick. Honestly. Besides, if somebody sees us and we get into trouble, you don’t want to get involved, do you?’

‘All right. But you owe me five pints for this, got it?’

‘Mick – whatever you want, mate, it’s yours.’

‘All right. Five pints and a night with Rihanna.’

‘Whatever. I promise you.’

Mick went stumbling off over the mountains of broken yellow bricks. When he had climbed back through the security fence, Jerry unscrewed the lid of the petrol container and said, ‘OK, then, sweetheart. Here goes nothing.’

He circled around the wardrobe, splashing it with petrol. Then he took out a box of matches, lit one, and tossed it toward the wardrobe door. With a soft
whoomppphh
, the wardrobe was enve-loped in rippling flames.

Dawn and Jerry stood side by side watching it burn. The walnut veneer crackled and curled, and soon the oak underneath was being scorched black. Sparks flew up into the evening air like fireflies.

‘I wonder what’s going to happen to him now?’ asked Dawn.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well – this wardrobe is like his only doorway to the real world, isn’t it? Now he’s going to be trapped forever in Narnia – although I don’t suppose it’s anything like the Narnia that’s in the books.’

The wardrobe was blazing furiously now, and the flames were licking nine or ten feet into the air. Dawn could see that a woman was watching them from a third-floor window in the block of flats next to the demolition site.

After five more minutes, the flames began to subside a little. Suddenly, however, there was a loud cracking noise, and then another, and then another, and the whole fiery wardrobe was violently shaken with every crack.

Dawn stepped back a few paces. ‘What’s that?’ she said. ‘It’s not …’

There was yet another crack, even louder, and the wardrobe door burst open and fell flat on to the rubble. Dawn couldn’t stop herself from screaming. Out of the skeletal remains of the wardrobe, a fiery figure of a man appeared, blazing from head to foot. He was burning so fiercely that it was impossible to see his face, but she knew that it must be the black-faced man.

‘
Aaaaaahhhhhhh!
’ he roared at her, and it was a roar of rage and agony and utter desperation. He stepped out of the wardrobe and came toward her, both blazing arms raised, walking with his knees half-bent as if he were almost on the verge of collapse.

‘
Bitch!
’ he bellowed, and a gout of flame rolled out of his mouth. ‘
I’ll have you
,
you bitch!
’

He began to stagger toward Dawn much faster. Jerry said, ‘Run, Dawn! For God’s sake! Run!’

Dawn hesitated, and then she started to run, jumping and scrambling over the broken bricks. When she was halfway across the demolition site, she turned, to make sure that Jerry was running too. The fiery man was still staggering after her, and he was much closer than she had realized. She saw Jerry kick out at him, trying to knock him over, but then Jerry lost his balance and fell backward, and the fiery man kept on coming toward her. His flames made a soft rushing sound as he approached, and she could feel their heat.

‘
Aaaaaahhhhhhh!
’ he roared again, but this time he sounded even more desperate.

She started to run again, but the broken bricks gave way beneath her feet in a tumbling cascade, and she had to scrabble for a handhold to stop herself from sliding backward.

The fiery man had almost reached her, and she twisted around and held up her arm to shield herself.

‘
I’m not Sophie!
’ she shrilled at him. ‘
I’m not Sophie Stephenson!
’

The fiery man stopped still.

‘I’m not Sophie Stephenson,’ she repeated, much more softly.

The fiery man lowered his fiery head, and began to turn away. As he did so, however, Jerry jumped on his back, even though he was blazing, and wrapped his arms around him.

‘
Aaaaaaaahhhhh!
’ roared the fiery man, and Jerry roared, too, except that Jerry’s roar came from nothing but pain, as the flames shrivelled his skin and cauterized his nerve-endings.

The fiery man lurched, and spun around, but he didn’t fall over. Jerry was still clinging tightly to his back, but now he had no choice because the two of them were irrevocably welded together by the heat. They went around and around, and each time they went around, Dawn saw that Jerry’s face was burning scarlet, and then crimson, like a Satanic mask. His arm muscles were charring, so that his white bones began to gleam through the black.

Dawn sank to her knees, stricken with shock. There was nothing she could do but watch Jerry and the fiery man as they continued to teeter around in circles, like some terrible children’s wind-up toy. After less than two minutes they were blazing so fiercely that she couldn’t see which of them was which. Then, quite abruptly, they collapsed, and lay amongst the bricks, still burning.

Over on the far side of the demolition site, the back of the wardrobe fell to the ground with a clatter.

Dawn didn’t hear the sirens, but she saw the blue flashing lights, and she heard the firefighters crunching across the demolition site toward her. A firefighter laid his hand on her shoulder and leaned down to look into her face.

‘Are you all right, love? What happened here?’

‘You’re not Aslan, are you?’ she asked him.

‘No, love. Alan. Come on, let’s get you out of here.’

He reached down and picked her up as easily as if she were a little girl and carried her back to reality.

UNDERBED

A
s soon as his mother had closed the bedroom door, Martin burrowed down under the blankets. For him, this was one of the best times of the day. In that long, warm hour between waking and sleep, his imagination would take him almost anywhere.

Sometimes he would lie on his back with the blankets drawn up to his nose and his pillow on top of his forehead so that only his eyes looked out. This was his spaceman game, and the pillow was his helmet. He travelled through sparkling light years, passing Jupiter so close that he could see the storms raging on its surface, then swung on to Neptune, chilly and green, and Pluto, beyond. On some nights he would travel so far that he was unable to return to Earth, and he would drift further and further into the outer reaches of space until he became nothing but a tiny speck winking in the darkness and he fell asleep.

At other times, he was captain of a U-boat trapped thousands of feet below the surface. He would have to squeeze along cramped and darkened passageways to open up stopcocks, with water flooding in on all sides, and elbow his way along a torpedo tube in order to escape. He would come up to the surface into the chilly air of the bedroom, gasping for breath. Then he would crawl right down to the very end of the bed, where the sheets and the blankets were tucked in really tight. He was a coal-miner, making his way through the narrowest of fissures, with millions of tons of Carboniferous rock on top of him. He never took a flashlight to bed with him. This would have revealed that the inside of his space helmet didn’t have any dials or knobs or breathing tubes; and that the submarine wasn’t greasy and metallic and crowded with complicated valves; and that the grim black coalface at which he so desperately hewed was nothing but a clean white sheet.

Earlier this evening he had been watching a programme on potholing on television and he was keen to try it. He was going to be the leader of an underground rescue team, trying to find a boy who had wedged himself in a crevice. It would mean crawling through one interconnected passage after another, then down through a water-filled sump, until he reached the tiny cavern where the boy was trapped.

His mother sat on the end of the bed and kept him talking. He was going back to school in two days’ time and she kept telling him how much she was going to miss him. He was going to miss her, too – and Tiggy, their golden retriever, and everything here at Home Hill. More than anything, he was going to miss his adventures under the blankets. You couldn’t go burrowing under the bedclothes when you were at school. Everybody would rag you too much.

He had always thought his mother was beautiful and tonight was no exception, although he wished that she would go away and let him start his potholing. What made her beauty all the more impressive was the fact that she would be thirty-three next April, which Martin considered to be prehistoric. His best friend’s mother was only thirty-three and she looked like an old lady by comparison. Martin’s mother had bobbed brunette hair and a wide, generous face without a single wrinkle, and dark-brown eyes that were always filled with love. It was always painful, going back to school. He didn’t realize how much it hurt her, too; how many times she sat on his empty bed when he was away, her hand pressed against her mouth and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Daddy will be back on Thursday,’ she said. ‘He wants to take us all out before you go back to school. Is there anywhere special you’d like to go?’

‘Can we go to that Chinese place? The one where they give you those cracker things?’

‘Pang’s? Yes, I’m sure we can. Daddy was worried you were going to say McDonald’s.’

She stood up and kissed him. For a moment they were very close, face to face. He didn’t realize how much he looked like her – that they were both staring into a kind of mirror. He could see what he would have looked like, if he had been a woman; and she could see what she would have looked like, if she had been a boy. They were two different manifestations of the same person, and it gave them a secret intimacy that nobody else could understand.

‘Good night,’ she said. ‘Sweet dreams.’ And for a moment she laid a hand on top of his head as if she could sense that something momentous was going to happen to him. Something that could take him out of her reach for ever.

‘Good night, Mummy,’ he said, and kissed her cheek, which was softer than anything else he had ever touched. She closed the door.

He lay on his back for a while, waiting, staring at the ceiling. His room wasn’t completely dark: a thin slice of light came in from the top of the door, illuminating the white paper lantern that hung above his bed so that it looked like a huge, pale planet (which it often was). He stayed where he was until he heard his mother close the living-room door, and then he wriggled down beneath the blankets.

He cupped his hand over his mouth like a microphone and said, ‘Underground Rescue Squad Three, reporting for duty.’

‘Hello, Underground Rescue Squad Three. Are we glad you’re here! There’s a boy trapped in Legg’s Elbow, two hundred and twenty-five metres down, past Devil’s Corner. He’s seventeen years old, and he’s badly injured.’

‘OK, headquarters. We’ll send somebody down there straight away.’

‘It’ll have to be your very best man – it’s really dangerous down there. It’s started to rain and all the caves are flooding. You’ve probably got an hour at the most.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll manage it. Roger and out.’

Martin put on his equipment. His thermal underwear, his boots, his backpack and his goggles. Anybody who was watching would have seen nothing more than a boy-shaped lump under the blankets, wriggling and jerking and bouncing up and down. But by the time he was finished he was fully dressed for crawling his way down to Devil’s Corner.

His last radio message was, ‘Headquarters? I’m going in.’

‘Be careful, Underground Rescue Squad Three. The rain’s getting heavier.’

Martin lifted his head and inhaled a lungful of chilly bedroom air. Then he plunged downwards into the first crevice that would take him down into the caves. The rock ceiling was dangerously low, and he had to crawl his way in like a commando, on his elbows. He tore the sleeve of his waterproof jacket on a protruding rock and he gashed his cheek, but he was so heroic that he simply wiped away the blood with the back of his hand and carried on crawling forward.

It wasn’t long before he reached a tight, awkward corner, which was actually the end of the bed. He had to negotiate it by lying on his side, reaching into the nearest crevice for a handhold, and heaving himself forward inch by inch. He had only just squeezed himself around this corner when he came to another, and had to struggle his way around it in the same way.

The air in the caves was growing more and more stifling, and Martin was already uncomfortably hot. But he knew he had to go on. The boy in Legg’s Elbow was counting on him, just like the rest of Underground Rescue Squad Three, and the whole world above ground, which was waiting anxiously for him to emerge.

He wriggled onwards, his fingers bleeding, until he reached the sump. This was a ten-metre section of tunnel which was completely flooded with black, chill water. Five potholers had drowned in it since the caves were first discovered, two of them experts. Not only was the sump flooded, it had a tight bend right in the middle of it, with rocky protrusions that could easily snag a potholer’s belt or his backpack. Martin hesitated for a moment, but then he took a deep breath of stale air and plunged beneath the surface.

The water was stunningly cold, but Martin swam along the tunnel with powerful, even strokes until he reached the bend. Still holding his breath, he angled himself sideways and started to tug himself between the jagged, uncompromising rocks. He was almost through when one of the straps on his backpack was caught and he found himself entangled. He twisted around, trying to reach behind his back so that he could pull the strap free from the rock, but he succeeded only in winding it even more tightly. He tried twisting around the other way, but now the strap tightened itself into a knot.

He had been holding his breath for so long now that his lungs were hurting. Desperately, he reached into his pocket and took out his clasp knife. He managed to unfold the blade, bend his arm behind his back and slash at the tightened strap. He missed it with his first two strokes, but his third stroke managed to cut it halfway through. His eyes were bulging and he was bursting for air, but he didn’t allow himself to give in. One more cut and the strap abruptly gave way.