The Moon King (2 page)

Something woke Rosheen that night. She was a light sleeper. She was used to all the creakings and rustlings of the old house turning over in its sleep by now, so these things didn’t wake her any more, but strange sounds woke her, and this was a very strange sound. She sat up sleepily, her fair hair tangled like a web before her eyes, her
eyelashes
prising reluctantly apart, and listened. There it was again. A sort of high-pitched yowl, a bit like a cat’s night
lamentings
, but not exactly that either.

Could be a banshee, thought Rosheen, swinging her pink feet out from under the duvet, and feeling for her slippers. Lucky she slept on the bottom bunk. Helen had fought for the top and won, but now Rosheen was glad. Being on the bottom gave her more freedom. A banshee would be good. The others would be dead impressed. She pushed the web of hair back off her forehead with a sleep-dampened hand and rubbed her eyes good and hard, to make sure she was fully awake. If she was going in
search of a banshee, she’d better be awake and able to see properly. She patted the bed, searching in the dark for her bright yellow dressing-gown, and struggled into it.

Rosheen crept along the wall to the door, and eased it open. The dim yellow glow of the landing nightlight filtered into the room, but Helen didn’t stir. Lazy lump. You couldn’t wake her if you tried. Rosheen stifled a giggle. Funny how being awake when someone else was asleep made you feel stronger than they were. Rosheen wouldn’t dare even to think like that when Helen was awake. Helen was supposed to be her friend – they were almost the same age – but sometimes she was hard to like, and today had been one of those times.

Rosheen closed the door carefully behind her, the triangle of light on the bedroom carpet gradually diminishing till it was just a crack, and then at last the door fitted into place and the seal against the light was complete.

She pressed her back against the door, arching her neck so that as much of the back of her head as possible touched the door, and, jamming her calves into a straight line against the wood, she listened again for the sound. This was how people creeping about furtively at night were supposed to behave. She knew from watching films on the telly. She wondered whether she looked sufficiently dramatic in her lemon dressing-gown with her hair mussed up and one hand behind the small of her back, the fingers spread out against the door. She cocked her
head, and sure enough, as if on cue, there came the yowling sound again. It was coming from downstairs, she thought.

Rosheen bent over and ran with her bottom in the air and using her hands as forepaws, as if dodging bullets. This was cool fun. When she got to the stairs, she grasped the banister rail for dear life and edged down from step to step, keeping her feet carefully on the varnished edge of the stairs, between where the strip of stair carpet ended and the banisters began. If she stepped on the carpet, the banshee would catch her. When she arrived at the last step before the hall, Rosheen wavered. She would have to step on the dreaded carpet now, banshee or no banshee, because here the floor was completely carpeted, with no wooden margin. She closed her eyes and leapt into the air. It was like diving off a whaling ship. It was like launching into space. It was like swimming into the stratosphere. Goodness knows where she would end up.

She landed with a thump, feet first, outside the living-room door.

Then came the high-pitched yowl again, much closer now. There could be no doubt about it. It was coming from inside the living-room door. What did banshees look like? Rosheen wondered. They combed their hair, she thought, or was that mermaids?

Gingerly, she pushed the door open, half-expecting to see a ghostly woman combing her ghostly locks in the moonlight, but of course there was no such thing, just a lot
of dark shapes and an irregular ridge under the covers of a makeshift bed that Mammy Kelly had somehow constructed for the new boy, because he wouldn’t climb the stairs. He’d stood in the hall, gazing up at the half-landing, and resolutely resisting encouragement to go up. He was a funny lad. Didn’t say a word. In the end, Mammy Kelly said he could sleep downstairs, just for tonight, until he got used to the house.

Rosheen was secretly relieved there was no banshee, but she wouldn’t admit it for the world and was busy making one up to tell the others about in the morning when the eerie yowling came again. It filled the room. It sounded much weirder close up like this, like an animal in pain, lifting its maw to the skies and bewailing its plight to the moon. Rosheen yelped without meaning to, and the smudge on the pillow shot up in the air. The ridge under the covers flattened and there was Ricky, sitting bolt upright, his hair standing about his head like a chimney brush and his face white in the yellowy light from the hall.

Ricky stared. He’d been dreaming about the small child with the dandelion-clock hair. He’d dreamt that somebody had puffed at the child’s head the way you blow a dandelion-clock and that the child’s hair had drifted apart, like a dandelion clock. There were dandelion seeds everywhere floating and drifting, like aerodynamic cottonwool, in his dream. But this wasn’t a dandelion seed. This thing that had appeared in his room was yellow, all shimmery, maybe a fully grown dandelion, and it shook
with bubbly laughter, its yellow hair all bobbing and its shimmering yellow gown falling in butter-yellow folds onto his bed.

‘You were snoring!’ snorted Rosheen. ‘I thought you were a banshee!’ And she was off into ripples of laughter again.

Ricky smiled uncertainly. He didn’t know what a banshee was, but that didn’t surprise him. Words often evaded him. He nodded at the dandelion, bobbing and wafting at the foot of his bed. Then he lay back carefully on the pillows and stared at his surroundings, all the wooden things looming in the dark at him, the handlebars of the bicycle gleaming in the light that flooded in from the open door.

‘I’m sorry. You’re tired. I’ll go.’

The dandelion girl stood up. Ricky nodded again. She bent over him. ‘I’m Rosheen,’ she whispered. ‘Good night.’

And she was gone, the door following her into the dark. Good night. Good night.

Breakfast was a rowdy affair in the tall house. Mammy Kelly stood in the hall and smote a mighty brass gong that looked as if it must have come from some Indian temple, and she was answered by shufflings and scuttlings and yelps from several storeys up, and presently an assortment of children, some of them Kellys, some not, came trooping down the stairs in mismatched pyjamas and outgrown nighties and tracksuit-trousers that would have to do, worn, as often as not, with somebody else’s T-shirt.

Mammy Kelly was a believer in a good breakfast. There was a steaming pot of porridge, mounds of fluffy scrambled eggs and soggy halves of grilled tomatoes and a battered silver toast-rack laden with triangles of pale brown toast. There was a large pot of weak tea at each end of the table (strong tea not being healthy for young bones, according to Mammy Kelly) and a small pot of rich-smelling coffee, for Mammy Kelly herself, whose health was beyond rescuing, as she said comfortably to anyone who cared to enquire.

Ricky, asleep in his campbed in the living room on
that first morning, heard the gong in his dream. It had a soft, dull, resonating voice, such as an elderly musical bear might have, and he turned over at the sound, wondering fuzzily what it meant. Then he heard the tripping of feet down the stairs, and this sound wasn’t in his dream any more. He edged up on the pillow and listened. Feet continued to flap and patter past his door, dozens of feet it seemed. He opened his eyes. Strange wooden things, hatstands, stared at him, hulking in the half-light that escaped through the curtains. The tall, tall house. Of course. That’s where he was. At the very bottom of it, and now all the creatures were coming down the stairs, creeping and tumbling and skipping down, and the top of the house hadn’t fallen over in the night, as it hadn’t fallen over any other night in the past hundred years since it had been built.

He tried to think about the feet and who they belonged to. What sort of creatures. Dandelions, he thought. Roses. He shook himself. Children. It was children. That was the word. And then he knew. As soon as he found the word, he knew that he was going to have to get up and be one of those children.

At that thought, he tunnelled under his blankets and stopped his ears with his pillows. The dark down there was warm and comforting, and Froggo was with him there. He could hear muffled laughs from the next room, though. They were sure to be laughing at him.

The door opened with a creak. Oh no! They weren’t
going to make him come now, were they? Ricky sat up. The pale grey light of the hall invaded the dark room. Something shimmered in the greyness. Rosheen. The name popped into his mind from nowhere and startled him with its sureness. How could he possibly know this shimmer-creature’s name? He had never seen her in his life before.

He lay down again quickly so he wouldn’t have to look at her. Spiderboy. He was Spiderboy, and he had things to do, webs to spin, cracks to scuttle into.

‘Mammy Kelly says your breakfast is ready,’ said Rosheen to the bump on the bed that was Ricky.

She waited for a moment or two, but the new boy didn’t say anything.

‘Come on then, so. Where are your slippers? Or have you slippers? People usually have when they arrive, but they don’t last. Lauren had hers for two weeks. Billy’s disappeared on his very first day. I don’t remember if I had any. I’ve been here since I was … oh, I don’t remember, very small anyway.’

Ricky sat up again and looked at Rosheen.

‘No slippers?’ said Rosheen.

Spiderboy nodded.

‘Is that a yes or a no?’

Spiderboy nodded again.

‘I mean, is it yes you have no slippers, or is it no you have no slippers?’

Spiderboy nodded again.

‘Or yes you have slippers?’

Spiderboy stared.

‘Oh come on anyway. The toast will be getting soggy.’

Spiderboy looked under his bed, to make sure he had no slippers. He checked under the covers. No slippers. Only Froggo. He shoved Froggo further down under the blankets, in case Rosheen saw him, and eased himself out of bed.

‘Dressing-gown?’ asked Rosheen.

Spiderboy stared.

‘Here, use this,’ Rosheen said, and threw his anorak at him.

Spiderboy nodded.

And Rosheen danced out into the morning light of the hall and into the sounds of breakfast, with Ricky, awkward in his anorak and too-short pyjamas, trailing behind her.

Ricky survived breakfast by sitting still and eating only the food that was put directly in front of him. He didn’t dare to stretch out for anything beyond his immediate grasp. Not that there was any need to be nervous. The other children had no intention of fighting him for toast or the marmalade jar. It was just that he was nervous because he wasn’t used to so many people and loud noises made him jump. He couldn’t get it out of his head that when somebody shouted it meant he was in trouble. At home, he had nearly always been in trouble anyway, whether people were shouting at him or not. He certainly wasn’t used to people just shouting so they could be heard over the din all the other people were making.

He was glad when they all clattered off to school, in a babble of screeches and last-minute panics about missing homework copies and hockey socks. All except the mother and the smallest child, the one with the dandelion-clock hair – the little boy in dungarees who was called Billy. And Ricky of course. Nobody suggested he should go to school. The front door closed with a boom after the last of the
children, and Ricky could hear their voices still raking the air as they scuffled and rolled and shrieked their way down through the steep garden. Gradually the sounds faded away, and peace descended on the tall house.

Mammy Kelly was sloshing away at the sink, washing up and humming to herself. Billy sat on the floor amid the debris of breakfast with his little legs stretched straight out in front of him and quietly ate a sticky crust that had fallen off the table, examining his plump fingers between bites with great interest. Ricky wandered into the hall and looked up the stairs, into the dark at the top of the house. There were things all the way up the stairs, and at the top, on the half-landing, there were more things, books mainly.

High up in the dark, among the books, Ricky could make out the outline of a rocking-chair.

Ricky longed to climb up to the rocking-chair, but he was afraid of the stairs and afraid of the dark. The dark was like a big, damp blanket, and there were sure to be things
in the shadows, looking at him, watching, waiting to pounce on him.

In a panic, his heart throwing itself against his ribs, Ricky searched for the light switch to make the things in the shadows go away. This one? No. This one? Yes, this one. The light came on and suddenly Ricky could see all the way up the stairs to the rocking-chair. He could see that there was nothing at all waiting or watching or getting ready to pounce. It wasn’t scary any more, now the light was on. Maybe he could try it.

Ricky climbed cautiously up the stairs, stepping carefully between all the toys, books and clothes that lined the staircase, taking care not to disturb any of them. At last he reached the rocking-chair at the top of the first staircase. Gingerly, he sat into the deep cushioned seat.

Panic leapt in Ricky again, till he realised that it was just that somebody had switched off the light. He heard steps in the hall, and humming. Mammy Kelly had found the light on and just switched it off automatically. She wasn’t to know that Ricky was crouched up there in the dark, terrified.

But it was only the bathroom door, Ricky knew, because he could smell the crisp sweet smell of toilet cleaner. There was nobody in the bathroom. He knew that really.

Ricky blinked, trying to force the panicky feelings down into his stomach. He made himself sit still and look carefully around him. He knew that if he concentrated the dark wouldn’t seem so black. He blinked again. There! it wasn’t really too dark, it was only a daytime dark, just grey. Those shapes were books, on bookshelves, nothing worse than that. There were books everywhere in this house. It was like some sort of mad library on a hill.

When he opened his eyes again, and looked around a
little, he could see that there were more stairs, going up again, into more dark, and that there were more things on those steps too. Craning his neck a little, he could see up to the next landing, and he could make out doors up there. Is that where Rosheen sleeps, up there? he wondered. That door? Or that one?

Suddenly a door creaked open up there and the panic started again. Ricky wanted to leap out of the rocking chair and flee down the stairs but he was afraid of breaking something on his way down. So instead he sat very still, wishing the door would close again, that whoever had opened it would change their mind.

Ricky kept his eyes tightly shut, still willing the person to go away, but then came a voice in his ear, a big, boomy voice saying ‘Good morning.’ The voice was so big it seemed to echo in Ricky’s chest.

A man.

Holding his breath with fear and with his eyes still tightly closed, Ricky slid off the chair, and then slithered on his back down the stairs, bump, bump, stair by stair, bump, bump. But he’d forgotten about all the things lining the staircase, and within seconds he had started an avalanche of cardigans, coat-hangers, a doll with hard
arms, books. Everything was loosening, more books were dislodged, their pages fanning out and getting crushed and crumpled. Ricky arrived in a heap in the hall, a tangle of limbs and things. His bottom hurt and he’d banged his funny bone, but as soon as he reached the hall he jumped to his feet, looking quickly for the door of the room where he’d slept the night before. Quickly, quickly, quickly, his heart said. He threw himself at the door, slammed it shut once he’d got inside and slithered to the floor. Safe.

Knock, knock.

Ricky slithered under the bed.

Knock, knock, ‘Hello?’

Cre-eeak, said the door. Clump, clump, clump. A big person came into the room.

‘Ricky?’ This man had such a big, booming voice, like Santa Claus.

Creeeeee-eeeak, said the bed, moaning.

The Santa Claus person sat on the bed. Ricky could see his boots, big, big boots. Then he shut his eyes again and waited for the big man to go away.

‘Only, I was hoping you might be able to help me.’

‘There’s this amazing heap of things in the hall. They didn’t look so much when they were spread out on the stairs, but when they all came tumbling down and landed in one big pile in the hall – you wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff there is.’

‘There’s cardigans and books and photographs and a doll with no head and somebody’s runners and a basket of dried flowers (spilt) and a few more books and a hairbrush and three packets of toothpaste (unopened) and what looks like my favourite mug that’s been missing for the past three weeks and could do with a wash, and I think I can see five socks, none of them with mates, and any number of bills, still in their envelopes, about forty-five assorted pens and pencils, bits of paper, drawings, seashells, computer disks (which is funny, because we haven’t got a computer), a bottle of wine (unopened, and more to the point, unbroken), half a Toblerone (that’s even better than the wine), one wellington boot, too small to fit anyone in this house except Billy and it’s too big for him, a bicycle bell, two lipsticks, a few more books, and a whole laundry basket full of clothes – clean, but not ironed (well, one out of two ain’t bad).’

Ricky laughed.

‘We could just get a big black plastic sack and fire the whole lot into it and no-one would be any the wiser.’

Oh no, Ricky thought. You couldn’t pile all those nice clean clothes in with all that rubbish.

‘Except the Toblerone of course. And the wine. And the clean clothes, I suppose. Oh dear, decisions, decisions.’

Creee-eeak, said the bed again. The boots moved.

‘I never could make decisions. Which is why this house is so full of stuff. Can’t make the decision to throw anything out. Unless it’s actually stinking.’

Ricky laughed again.

‘So I was just wondering, Ricky, if you would come out for a minute and help me to sort this heap of stuff.’

Ricky was thinking.

‘You wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just make the decisions, and I could do the actual physical part, throwing the stuff in the plastic sack or putting it wherever you suggest. And you needn’t worry. Anything we can’t decide about, we can just put it back on the stairs again. What d’you say?’

Ricky thought he’d better open his eyes. But when he did, he got a shock. There was an upside-down face talking, hanging over the edge of the bed. It had hair on top and hair underneath. For a moment, Ricky thought he
was imagining things. Then he realised the face had a beard, a huge beard like a bush, no, like a forest. It really was Santa Claus!

‘I’m Tomo, by the way,’ the upside-down face was saying, the mouth where the eyes should be. ‘I’m the dad around here. Except everyone calls me Tomo. No respect!’

The upside-down eyes twinkled, though. He didn’t look as if he cared much for respect.

‘And you must be Ricky, right?’ Tomo went on.

Ricky nodded.

‘C’mon so. I’ll get the plastic sack. You start thinking, OK?’