The Imaginary (14 page)

And then he stopped thinking about robots because he'd seen something else in the mirror.

He looked at the table in front of him. He looked at his plate with his fish fingers and his peas. And then he looked to his right to where his dad sat. And then he looked opposite him at where his mum was sat. And then he looked to the left. There was an empty place there. A fourth chair that no one sat in. Nobody ever sat in it unless they had a guest. There were only three of them in the family.

‘This salad's gone quickly,' his mum said, dropping the last of it onto her plate. ‘Did you have some, John?'

John didn't answer her. He looked back up at the mirror.

He looked himself in the eyes and then he looked at his dad and at the back of his mum's head, and then he looked at the fourth chair, the empty one.

There was a teenage girl sat there. She had blonde hair and had a lump of lettuce on the end of her fork. He watched as she shoved it gracelessly into her mouth and he
almost
heard the crunch as she bit down on it.

In the mirror she met John's eye and she winked.

When
the neighbours saw John's mum the next morning they asked her about the screaming. She was in the front garden with the estate agent. He was hammering a
For Sale
sign into the lawn. She told the neighbours they'd had some bad news and were all going to stay with her mother for a while.

‘Flipping heck,' Emily said, pacing round the Jenkins' front room.

Rudger watched her pacing up and down.

‘Is it usually like this?' he asked.

‘No,' she barked. ‘When you get a kid who
knows what he's doing
, it's a piece of cake. But this Jenkins, he's useless. I mean, what sort of kid makes a noise like that? I've never seen such a scene. Ridiculous.'

‘But you scared him, Emily. You gave him a fright.'

‘Yeah, but I didn't mean to. Look at me, do I look like a ghost? Is there
anything
scary about me?' She smiled and ruffled her hair. ‘I'm not a scary Friend, am I? The boy's obviously, plainly, clearly defective. They should take him back to the shop, get him seen to.'

Rudger waited for her to finish before he said, ‘What do we do now?'

Emily slumped on the settee next to him, and lifted her hand up to her face. Was there a slight tinge of transparency to it? How long could the two of them stay out in the real world without a real person to believe in them? Rudger didn't know the answer, and kept
his
hands firmly in his pockets. They tingled.

‘There's only one thing we can do,' she said wearily. ‘Go back.'

‘Finding the door can be tricky,' Emily said. ‘It's not just down any old alley, Rudge. You've got to look at it in the right way and it has to want to be seen in the right way. You've got to think it's right for you.'

‘Can't we just go in the front door?'

‘To the library?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Well, we could, if we were in the middle of town. But I don't know where we are. All these streets look the same to me. I tell you what. You keep an eye out for a bus to the town centre and I'll look for an alley.'

It took them twenty minutes of walking round the Jenkins' neighbourhood (there were no buses) before they found an alleyway that Emily deemed suitable.

Rudger looked down the alley, a fence-lined passage between gardens. There were some wheelie bins and a broken pushchair a little way down. It smelt sour.

‘This one?' he asked.

‘Yeah, look at the shadows,' Emily answered.

She pointed to a nearby lamp post and then at the alley.

The shadow of the lamp post went to the right, away from the alley. But the shadow of the fence went the other way. The alley's shadows went the
wrong
way.

‘Down there's the door we want, if we want it. But we'd best be quick.'

She
held up her hand. It was definitely beginning to Fade. There were thin grey smoky tendrils curling up from her fingertips.

Rudger didn't look at his own hands, but he knew the feeling, as if the softest pins and needles had begun to infest them.

‘Excuse me, young lady,' said a voice from behind them. ‘Such a dull-weathered day. I'm lost and require assistance finding directions, please.'

Rudger turned round and there on the pavement, moustache bristling, was
that
man.

‘Emily,' he said, tugging at her arm, ‘don't…'

But Emily wasn't listening. She was stunned. She wasn't used to being seen. She'd been in the imaginary business for long enough to know something odd was going on here. She didn't, however, know exactly what it was.

‘Um. How can I help, mate?' she said, pretending to be calm.

‘Oh, it's easy,' Mr Bunting said, leaning over her.

Rudger shouted, ‘No, Emily, he's Mr Bunt—'

A clammy fish-cold hand clapped across his mouth and tugged him backwards.

It was
her
.

He struggled, trying to bite her fingers, trying to kick her legs out from under her, but it was no good.

Mr Bunting leant over Emily, a hand on her shoulder, and Rudger watched that endless mouth of his open up, unroll, tunnel back into his head. She seemed stuck, like an insect in amber,
unable
to move. Rudger assumed she was trying, but she just stood there staring into the dark at the end of his tunnel-throat.

And then she stretched, pulled out like dribbling custard, and with a delicious unlikely slurping noise he swallowed her whole.

Mr Bunting's mouth banged shut with a xylophonous clatter. Grey wisps of smoke leaked out from under his moustache.

He burped a gunpowder burp.

‘Oh goodness,' he said, looking happy. ‘Now…'

Rudger had been struggling without success. He redoubled his efforts. She might not have been his friend, exactly, but he'd sort of liked Emily. She'd been good to him, in her own way.

He bit harder than he'd ever bitten before and drove his elbow backwards. The dark pale skinny girl fell off him.

Spitting a finger out into the alley's dirt, Rudger ran.

There was a whining hiss like steam escaping a broken pipe and then the clatter of running feet behind him.

He ran as if his life depended on it. Which, had he stopped to think, it probably did.

The alley turned this way and that, the walls changed from wooden fences to red bricks to dark crumbling bricks, dripping and plastered with the torn edges of old posters.

Still the thudding footsteps were behind him.

Mr Bunting and the girl weren't giving up. They weren't
catching
up, since Rudger was fast, but they weren't giving up either.

And
Rudger was leading them, he suddenly realised, straight to the Agency, straight to the library. This man who, from what Rudger had seen, ate imaginaries, who liquefied them and swallowed them whole…and Rudger was leading him straight to the one place where he'd find all the off-duty Friends he could ever want.

The thought made him run faster. He just had to get there first.