Twisted Winter (2 page)

I scrambled to my feet. “Let go of him! He's
my
dog! Give him back!” Miles threw the end of the lead
at me, laughing. A car swerved past, with a honk. And Chips bolted up the hill.

Something exploded inside me. I hurled the freshly-filled poop bag at Miles. He jumped back with a yell, but I didn't wait to see if it hit him. I tore after Chips, who was pelting up the pavement ahead of me, much faster than I could go – his ears flapping, his white coat a dingy yellow colour under the streetlights – and then he vanished. When I got level with where he'd been, I saw what he'd done. He'd rushed through the iron gates into the cemetery.

I don't think I hesitated. I ran up the path after him, shouting, “Chips! Chips!” Dark yews loomed over me, and there was a sad, sharp smell of leaf mould and earth. Pointed headstones leaned this way and that. Chips was nowhere to be seen. I came panting to the place where the obelisk stood in the middle of a gravelled circle. The path split four ways, one leading straight ahead, the others heading uphill and downhill between trees and bushes.

“Chips, where are you? Chips!” Tears pricked my eyes.

Feet pounded behind me. Voices howled. “Where are you, Timid? We're gonna get you! We're gonna
kill
you!”

I jumped off the gravel circle, dodged behind a tall ivied headstone and crouched there as Miles and his friends skidded to a halt under the obelisk.

“I saw him a minute ago.”

“He's hiding. We'll never find him in this lot.”

“We don't have to. He's gotta come out soon, hasn't he? They lock the gates at six. We can wait for him outside.”

“I'm gonna kill him!”

One of them laughed. “Good thing the bag didn't burst, Milesy. You'd'a looked good, decorated with –”

“I'm gonna kill him anyway,” said Miles. “Look, there are two gates, yeah? You two go down to the one on the bottom road, in case he goes that way. I'll watch the one we just used. If he comes out your side when they lock up, bring him round to me.” He raised his voice. “Timid, you zombie! I know you can hear me! You got fifteen minutes to get out before they lock the gates. We'll be waiting for you!”

They crashed off in different directions. I huddled down in the wet ivy, thankful for the dark camouflage of my navy school sweatshirt. My phone buzzed. It was a text from Mum.

Where r u? Tea in 15 mins ok?

I was hiding in damp bushes, behind a gravestone. I'd lost Chips. The cemetery gates would be locked in fifteen minutes. Less. And when I came out, Miles Bennett was going to kill me. I texted:

With chips in park. Might be bit late.

Ok have fun. Love u.

I'd had a dog, and I'd lost him. And I
deserved
to lose him – but Chips didn't deserve to be lost. I didn't dare call him any more, or Miles would hear me. I imagined Chips, alone and terrified somewhere. He wouldn't know how to find his way home. He didn't even know he
had
a home. Nearly crying, I shoved the phone back in my pocket, and my fingers touched something cold and hard.

The dog whistle! Miles wouldn't be able to hear it, but Chips would: I'd already seen the way he sat up the first time I used it. I sprang out of the bushes and ran to the obelisk at the crossways, where I could see down all four paths. I set the whistle to my lips and
blew. I could hear nothing, but it felt powerful. I could feel the resistance of the air as I blew. I could sense the signal speeding out in all directions, a piercing summons.

When I stopped blowing, the air seemed charged, electric. My skin prickled up in goosebumps. And the cemetery felt, I don't know how to describe it – disturbed. Aware. As if, in a radius all around me, things had suddenly lifted their heads and looked my way.

I didn't quite like it. My heart beat hard. The cowardly half of me wanted to run; the other half wanted to stay and wait for Chips. And I was full of anxiety about the time. It must be nearly six. What if I got locked in? But Chips, Chips…

Then I saw with relief that after all I wasn't alone. Halfway down one of the paths, a late walker was coming slowly up out of the dusk towards the obelisk. I wasn't the last person in the cemetery; there was still time. I blew the whistle again, two short blasts, and listened. Something rustled in the undergrowth. I choked back a cry – and Chips came hurtling out on to the path, lead trailing.

I fell to my knees. “Chips! Good dog! Oh you
good, good dog!” He tried to climb into my arms. We were both trembling. He licked my face with his warm tongue. I pulled him close, hugged him hard, and stood up. “Come on boy. Let's go.”

Footsteps rasped on the gravel behind us. Chips looked round. His hackles rose and he growled. I turned in fright, but it was only the person I'd seen walking up towards the obelisk, a man in a shabby-looking coat and hat. I couldn't really make out his face, it was very dark under the trees, but there was enough reflected glow from the streetlights to see that he wasn't very big, and he looked old. I reckoned Chips and I could easily outrun him if we had to.

He nodded as he dropped into step beside me. “Found him, then. Your dog,” he said after a minute. His voice was unpleasantly rough and low.

“Yes. Yes, I have! Did you see him running around?”

He shook his head. “Heard your whistle.”

I put aside a stir of unease. He couldn't mean that. He must have heard me when I was shouting earlier.

We walked on. After a moment he said slowly, “Time you got out of here. The gates are locked every night, an hour after sunset.”

So
, I thought,
he must be the gatekeeper
. “I know,” I said. “Are you coming to lock them?”

He didn't answer. Then he said, “I'll see you out.”

I wasn't very keen on him, but he seemed all right, and besides, if Miles was waiting for me at the gates I'd have a better chance of getting away if I came out with someone official. It was really getting dark in the cemetery, but ahead of us the gates were still open. I could see the streetlights gleaming orange out there on the road, and cars passing.

“Nice dog,” said the man.

“Thanks,” I said, although Chips wasn't behaving well. He was pulling really hard, his paws scrabbling in the gravel, as though he couldn't wait to get to the road. “He's a bit nervous.”

“Can't blame him,” said the man. “Kept a lot of dogs in my time. Not now, of course.” He had a funny way of talking, lots of pauses. “They don't like me now.”

I was only half listening. We were nearly at the gate. And waiting on the pavement, peering in, was Miles. He spotted me. I saw his head go up.

The man stopped, and I stopped too, even though Chips was nearly throttling himself, galloping on
the spot, breathing in harsh panting gasps. I needed an excuse to hang around while the old man locked the gates. I wanted to keep him talking so Miles would know we were coming out of the cemetery together. The orange streetlight fell across the nearest gravestone, and lit in curling black relief the word:

I pointed at it. “That's funny, isn't it? Why d'you think it just says ‘Dark?'”

The way he answered, you could tell it he thought was the stupidest question he'd ever heard. “Because that's what it is,” he said. He paused. “Down there.” And I was realising with an incredulous shudder that he wasn't being funny, that he
meant it
, when he jerked his head and added, “Go on. Out,” and I was on the pavement under the streetlamp, and Miles Bennett was grabbing me.

Miles was grabbing me, but he wasn't punching or kicking me, or doing anything on purpose to hurt me, even though his fingers were digging into my arms. He was clinging to me like a drowning man, his face
was pushed up against mine, and he was hissing in a high-pitched strangled whisper, “What is it? Oh God, what is it,
what is it
?”

I looked back. The old man was pulling the gates shut – from the inside. Bars of orange streetlight fell across his face, and I saw – both of us saw – he didn't have eyes.

Miles left me strictly alone after that. I'm fifteen now, and he's at sixth form college. Sometimes if I'm in town with my friends, I'll see him, but he'll cross the street to avoid me. I can tell he still remembers.

Chips is a great little dog. Cars and buses don't worry him any more. He sleeps on my bed at night, and Mum and I love him to bits. But I don't walk him in the cemetery, and I threw the dog whistle away. And I don't like orange streetlights.

They make everyone look dead.

Susan Cooper

It was never quite clear whose idea it had been to have a party. Nobody in The Close had ever held a formal celebration of Hallowe'en before, though each of the six families laid in a healthy store of sweets and bars of chocolate every year. They knew that inevitably the youngest residents would appear in costume at each front door just before dark, shrilling “Trick or Treat!” with an apologetic, smiling parent dimly visible beyond. Last year, most admiration had gone to nine-year-old Freddie Thomson as a rotting
mummy, accompanied, some said, by an ingeniously disgusting smell.

But this year, through some forgotten adult negotiation, there was instead an elaborate party at the Ransoms', and all the grownups were in costume as well. The Ransom children and their friends in The Close found this disconcerting. The focus of life in the weeks before Hallowe'en had always been on them, not on Dad's pirate costume or Mum's witch mask. Besides, Dad looked like an overgrown kid and Mum looked, well, embarrassing.

To distract the young, Charlie and Ruth Ransom had kitted out their barn for the party with every Hallowe'en-related game they could think of. (It was a fake barn, of course, since like almost every house in The Close it was only ten years old.) They had a barrel of water with apples floating in it, for bobbing-for-apples; they had more apples hanging on strings from the fake beams of the barn's roof; they had pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey; they had a row of pumpkins for a family decorating contest. There were many prizes to be won, all of them inside envelopes decorated with gold, silver or red rosettes.

“Money,” Charlie had said to Ruth.

“Oh no,” Ruth said. “No, no, no. A prize has to be something beautiful, something that shows we've taken trouble.”

Charlie said, “Money.”

“Money is
vulgar
.”

Charlie rolled his eyes. “Ask Verity,” he said.

Verity was their thirteen-year-old daughter.

“Darling,” Ruth said to her, “if you won a Hallowe'en prize, would you like it to be a really pretty scarf, or some lovely ear-rings, or chocolates, or money?”

Verity said, “Are you joking?”

So the prize envelopes contained five-pound notes. Sometimes more than one. The residents of The Close were a prosperous group, and Charlie Ransom, a commodities trader, managed somehow to appear more prosperous than most whatever the state of the national economy. The same could be said of his neighbour and close friend Julian Hogg, who happened also to be the property developer who had erected The Close in the first place.

On Hallowe'en the Hoggs were the first guests to arrive at the Ransoms' door, at the top of the handsome marble steps, between the gleaming marble pillars.

“Trickatreat!” screamed six-year-old Tristram Hogg, a diminutive Spider-Man, as the front door opened. He rushed forward, brandishing his red plastic loot-bag. Then he stopped, and stood very still.

The door had been opened by a bent, truly hideous hag, with long grey hair wisping round a drooling mouth and bristly chin. Behind her was darkness, lit only by a dim red bulb.

Tristram backed away, reaching for his mother.

“Come inside, my dear,” croaked Mrs Ruth Ransom. Then she gave a girlish little giggle, behind the awful immobile face.

Shirley Hogg, tall and slinky in a low-cut purple dress of a design worn by a certain TV presenter, shifted her cowering son to one side and embraced the hag. “Brilliant, Ruthie,” she said.

Little Tristram Hogg breathed again. Slowly, he managed to smile. “Mrs Ransom! You're
super ugly
!”

“And the ugly lady must pour me a drink instantly,” said his mother, “if I have to look at that face all night.”

Up the long driveway came the next elaborately masked family, to gather in the dimly lit barn hung with strands of filmy plastic cobweb, and the party
became loud and happy, as the children bobbed for apples and carved grinning mouths into pumpkins that nobody would ever eat. Soon three other sets of Close neighbours had arrived, the Thomsons, the Macaulays and the Fothergills, in costumes ranging from a caveman to a rap star. The caveman, dressed in two sheepskins, was Mr Macaulay, who believed improvisation was more virtuous than buying, and who had impressive muscles to display.

Julian Hogg snatched a triumphant bite of one of the hanging apples, having craftily chosen to become a bulging-eyed frog with a mask that covered only the top half of his face. He was wearing a green velvet jacket whose colour exactly matched the shade of the frog mask; his wife had spent weeks shopping for it. Julian Hogg had a talent for persuading people to give him what he wanted.

He said to Charlie Ransom, chewing, “No Mrs Wallace yet?”

“She said she'd come,” Charlie said.

“I need to talk to her. For my Belgians it's very nearly a done deal. Are you sure your Swiss friend will be in on it?”

“Guaranteed.”

They looked at each other, the frog and the pirate, and raised their glasses silently.

Mrs Wallace was a very different person from the other residents of The Close, and her house was very different from theirs and about four hundred years older. It was the original manor house of the estate which Julian Hogg had bought from Mrs Wallace ten years earlier, after her husband had died and left her with a great deal of property and no money. There were no Wallace children to hinder the sale. Julian had agreed that Mrs Wallace should be allowed to go on living in the manor for the rest of her life, and on the many acres surrounding it he had built the handsome houses of The Close, including his own. Mrs Wallace's only remaining possession was an ancient thirty-acre stretch of woodland known locally as Hunter's Wood.