Seven Sorcerers (3 page)

Kneeling by the cupboard she had been rooting through, Nin stared at him thoughtfully. She didn’t know what Grandad was going on about half the time,
but if you listened long enough it usually made sense.

‘Truth is, kid, memory is something you can shape any way you want. Tell yourself a lie often enough and you’ll end up believing it, just you keep that in mind.’

Nin sighed, giving up any idea of telling him more. When you got right down to it, Grandad was saying the same as Linette. Ninevah Redstone was bonkers. It was all in her head.

Grandad watched for a moment or so longer. ‘Still looking, then?’

‘Yep.’

He nodded. ‘That’s the spirit. Give up and you’re certainly done for, I say.’

Nin looked up at him. Her ordinary blue eyes met his watery grey ones.

‘I thought you said …’

‘You don’t
have
to do things my way, kid.’ He smiled at her sadly and went back to his paper.

When she had done the house, Nin pulled on her dressing gown to go outside.

Right at the bottom of the garden, past the lawn and the flowerbeds and down a couple of broken brick steps, was the patch her mother called ‘the Rough’. The Rough was all long, coarse grass over lumpy ground. At the end was a wild, overgrown wall of shrubs and trees. And at the farthest point of the Rough, under the farthest tree just before the garden ran out altogether, Nin finally found what she was looking for.

Evidence of Toby.

In the conservatory, Nin dropped Monkey on to the floor, sat down next to it and began to look it over. Monkey had been fluffy once, but years of being hugged, washed and dragged about had worn him half-bald. Because he had been out in the rain, lost all night in the ragged grass, what was left of his ginger fur had turned a murky mud-colour. If she had any doubts about her sanity, they vanished instantly. It was Toby’s, all right, she would know it anywhere. And it proved without a doubt that Toby was real. He had been there. Now he was gone. Something had stolen her brother.

Nin put the grubby toy in for a wash. She was going to keep it so that she wouldn’t lose sight of the truth. With everyone around her acting like nothing had happened she was afraid that somehow their forgetful-ness would infect her, make her forget too. Rub Toby out in her head so that he faded slowly into nothing.

Watching Monkey spin around in the machine, Nin wondered what on earth could sneak a kid away in the middle of the night, without a sound. Then remove all trace of him from his home and wipe all memory of him from the minds of his family and friends. The thought that there might be a person … no … a
creature
out there that could do all that made her shiver.

Except of course that the whatever-it-was had made a mistake.

Not Monkey, that wasn’t a mistake. An old toy lying
about in the garden would not have been a problem if Nin’s memory had been stolen too. After all, it could have been dropped there by a fox or just flung in by some passer-by.

Nin was the mistake. Nin had remembered.

She sat there, thinking about it, until the wash cycle was finished. Then she fished out Monkey, still damp but a whole lot cleaner, and headed up to her room. As she hurried down the hall and turned to go up the stairs she realised with a horrible lurch that there was something under the stairs, pretending to be one of the dark shadows that always lingered there.

Nin kept going without so much as a false step. She wasn’t going to let the beastly thing know that she was scared.

Because she
was
scared. Bone-deep, jelly-legged petrified.

The thing that had stolen Toby had come back for her.

Over the next week life went on as normal, but Nin scarcely noticed. The THING became a constant presence. It watched her, with eyes that she could feel rather than see, from anywhere dark and shadowy. Like the back of the wardrobe when she went to get a fresh shirt for school. Or the big cupboard in the hall where the umbrellas were kept. Nobody noticed, although Lena kept feeling her forehead and talking in a worried way about the doctor.

There was nothing the doctor or anybody else could do about it though. Nin was sure that her fate was sealed. At least she would find out what had happened to Toby, all she had to do was wait. She just hoped it wouldn’t be too long.

The turning point came on Tuesday, nearly a whole week after Toby had been vanished. Funnily enough, the person who shared the moment with her was the school nerd, Dunk the Chunk.

Normally, Nin would rather have smooched a tarantula than spend longer than a nanosecond within speaking range of Dunk the Chunk, even though he was always trying to be friendly. But when the THING followed her to school and groaned at her from out of the plughole in Domestic Science, she made an exception. Compared to that, talking to Dunk the Chunk was small beans.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

Nin swallowed. She was staring blankly at the sink. Dunk’s voice dragged her back from the brink of hysteria and made her blink and manage a half-smile. She was vaguely conscious of her ex-friend Linette sniggering and whispering about her to one of the other girls.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Nin. ‘Just, my brother’s been stolen and something horrible is stalking me.’

‘Right,’ said Dunk. ‘I did notice you hadn’t been yourself lately.’

‘It’s all over the place,’ she grumbled to him on the
bus on the way home. ‘Mostly it hangs out under the stairs, but not always.’

Dunk was staring at her, his eyes wide.

‘Once,’ Nin went on, ‘it was
under the bed
.’

‘What!’ Dunk’s voice came out in a squeak. ‘
Your
bed!’

‘Course, idiot. Wouldn’t be anyone else’s, would it!’

‘What did you do?’

Nin shrugged. ‘Ignored it and went to sleep,’ she lied, trying to forget about the fit of screaming. ‘Next morning, I got a broom, like, in case I had to hit it. Only it was gone. Turned up under the stairs again.’ She shrugged.

Dunk stared at her in humble amazement.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it sniggers when I go past.’ She looked away, out of the bus window. ‘Thing is, there’s nothing I can do. No way I can fight. I wish it would just get on with it and steal me away like Toby. Then everyone would just forget me too and it would be all over.’

‘No,’ said Dunk quietly. ‘I won’t forget you. I’ll make sure somehow.’

Barely hearing him, Nin stared at the rain-wet street trundling past outside the bus, a feeling growing inside her. Anger. The bus jolted to a halt.

‘I just thought,’ she said as realisation dawned, ‘it doesn’t know it’s forgotten to make me forget! It doesn’t know that
I
know what it’s up to.’ The anger was growing. She clenched her fists. ‘So I
have
got something, haven’t I? Something to fight with! If I only knew
when it was going to come for me, I could be READY.’ ‘But you don’t know,’ said Dunk anxiously, following

her off the bus. ‘Do you?’

‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘it’s Wednesday tomorrow, isn’t it?

It’s bound to be tonight then.’ And she was right.

kerridge was only doing his job. It was just that his job happened to be stealing kids for Mr Strood.

Peering out from behind a musty-smelling duffel coat, Skerridge watched as the front door opened. He didn’t have a shape at the moment and was just being a sinister patch of extra-dark shadow with eyes. It was his favourite disguise. Excellent for scaring kids, and restful too. Much better than mad-faced clown or bug-eyed monster. All that maniacal laughter and slobbering really got him down.

The mother walked in through the door, carrying four bulging carrier bags. She was followed by Right Madam. Skerridge never bothered with the kids’ names. He just gave them a description and left it at that. For example, the one before this had been Mangy Monkey because of the state of the toy he carried around. Before that it had been Droopy Socks and before that it had been Snotty.

He sighed. Gently. Just enough to make the girl pull up and send a sharp glance in his direction. She shivered.
Skerridge grinned to himself.

‘You start putting this lot away, while I sort out the freezer,’ said the mother, ‘then we’ll think about dinner.’

Skerridge didn’t often notice people other than the kid he was after, but there was something about this woman that made him look at her more closely. She was sad, he could see that at a glance. He wondered where Right Madam’s father was. Dead, perhaps? Some horrible tragedy?

Not for the first time in his long and tattered life Skerridge felt the stirrings of curiosity. He crushed them at once. It didn’t do to get curious about the Quick.

He could hear sounds from the kitchen. The creak and slam of cupboard doors, the clink of tins and the rustle of bags.

‘You’re quiet today?’

‘Just tired is all,’ said Right Madam.

It was probably true. Skerridge knew she hadn’t been sleeping well because he had been giving her the frights.

He chuckled to himself. He hadn’t taken to this one at all, not like Mangy Monkey who had been quite a cute kid really. Mangy Monkey had just stared at Skerridge with those deep blue eyes and hung on to his tatty toy. Skerridge had almost felt a twinge of regret when he stuffed the kid into the sack. Almost. But he
had
tied the top especially loose to let in a little light and made sure to keep the kid turned the right way up.

On the other hand, this one would be a nuisance. Skerridge felt it in his bones. And since, when he was in
his own shape, he was mostly made of bones feeling something in them really meant it.

‘Made it up with Linette yet?’ asked Sad Mum, sympathetically. The unpacking sounds stopped and Skerridge wondered what they were doing now. Then he heard the clunk of a saucepan.

‘Nope. No point anyway, she’s such a bore!’

Sad Mum laughed. Skerridge thought it was a nice laugh.

Although Right Madam was up at the older end of the age range, nearly too old to see him in fact, it wasn’t her age that bothered Skerridge. The ones that thought they were as good as grown-up often turned into complete jellies once they got a look at him.

It wasn’t that she was a bright girl and might try to escape either. Skerridge was faster than any Quick and liked to give them a head start when they made a run for it – let them think they might get away – before scurrying after them. He liked to run over the walls and ceiling and then drop down in front of them just when they thought they had nearly made it.

Doors weren’t any kind of a problem either. Turning up behind kids when they’d shut themselves in a cupboard for safety and whispering ‘Boo’ ever so quietly in their ear was another good one.

No, the problem with Right Madam was that she looked like a right madam. The sort who would argue. Skerridge couldn’t bear the sort who argued. He was especially nasty to them and had once delivered one to
Mr Strood half-eaten, which didn’t go down too well. Skerridge shuddered at the memory.

There were more sounds from the kitchen.

‘Oh look,’ Sad Mum said, ‘coats all over the place. Could you hang them up, please?’