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“But why paint a cross, Mrs Wright?” the man had said nervously.
“Because we’re churchgoers, of course. They’re always on the streets when my son and I go to morning service.”
His mother was going to scrape the front door first thing tomorrow morning. But Oliver was haunted with the idea that she would never actually manage to get the paint off. However hard she rubbed, that awful red cross would stay.
He drifted into unconsciousness at last with the sound of a muffled bell tolling in his head. That was odd too, because it sounded quite near. The only church he knew of round here was St Olave-le-Strand, and they’d pulled that down months ago.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_929b17cb-6f97-523e-a40c-7b58f15e5643)
He set off for school early next day because he wanted to call in at the demolition site on the way to the bus. His mother was already busy on the front door, hacking away viciously with a rusty old scraper from his father’s toolbox. She’d got all the red paint off but the cross still showed through. It was a sandy-white now, because she’d scraped down to bare wood.
“The Society will just have to get it repainted,” she said. “They can’t put it off any longer.” Oliver slid off while she was still talking. At least the awful red cross had gone and the weather had improved too; it was actually quite warm. As he walked down the sunlit street, his fears of last night seemed slightly ridiculous. Perhaps Dr Verney was just an ordinary old man; all his mother’s residents had their odd little ways.
At the site, most of the men were in T-shirts, and a few had stripped to the waist. Oliver stood by a huge pile of rusty pipes and watched them working. After making sure that the foreman wasn’t anywhere around, he walked over to Geoff Lucas, one of his favourites. The whole site was marked off into sections by posts strung together with lengths of orange tape. “Is this where you are going to start excavating?” he asked Geoff, secretly admiring his suntan, and his big rippling muscles. Why did he have to be so puny and small? Why couldn’t he grow?
“That’s right,” Geoff said, rubbing the sweat off his face and leaving a great smudge across one cheek. “When you put up a building as big as this the foundations have got to go down deep. We won’t be starting on the footings yet, though. We’ve got to clear all this rubbish first.”
“But I thought you’d already started. What are those big holes everywhere?” He could see quite a few places where the soil went down several feet. They looked like moon craters except that they were square, not round. He’d thought those were the new foundations.
“Those were cellars, under the old warehouse. We’ve been taking old drainpipes out of those. Ted Hoskins was working on the job when—”
“When he was taken ill?” Oliver’s heart gave a queer flip and he stared hard at Geoff Lucas. “He was ill, wasn’t he?” he went on, when he got no answer.
“Dunno mate. Don’t ask me.” The man bent over his spade and started to scrape thick gooey mud off it with his boot – he’d begun whistling tunelessly.
Oliver was quite determined to find out what had happened to Ted Hoskins, and he stood over Geoff while he worked, firing off a battery of questions. “Look, mate,” the man said at last, throwing down his spade, “all I know is that he went running out of this place. Perhaps he just needed the bog or something. I mean, I dunno, do I? Anyway, he’s off sick today. Go and ask him what’s up, if you’re so interested.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“At the flats. It’s only a stone’s throw. The caretaker’ll give you the number.”
“The flats” was bad news for Oliver. Going there might mean being seen by that gang. But he was definitely going to visit Ted after school, gang or no gang.
He decided on a change of tack; it was no good irritating Geoff. He might turn nasty, like Rick. “Found anything interesting lately?” he said, more casually. At home he’d got a very old penny that Geoff had given him, and two pieces of white tubing that his father said were bits of old clay pipes. Geoff felt in his pocket. “Well, there’s this. I picked it up on Friday … Not sure I’m going to give it to you, though. You’re a bit of a nosy parker, you are.”
“Go on, Geoff. What is it?”
“How do I know? You tell me.”
Oliver took it and held it at arm’s length. It was a small, insignificant-looking stone, smooth and black, like something you might pick up on a beach, but it was shaped like a rough triangle, not an egg, and at the narrow end there was a hole bored right through.
“There are some marks on it,” Geoff said, fishing in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, and lighting up. “Can’t read them. I bet your Dad’d know what it was.”
“He’s in hospital,” Oliver told him. “He’s just had a big operation on his hip. I could show it to him though.” He held the stone up to the light and squinted at it. If the marks were letters he certainly couldn’t read them. He’d need quite a powerful magnifying glass to do that. “The hole’s odd,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps it used to have a string through it. Perhaps someone wore it, you know, like a necklace.”
Geoff sucked on his cigarette and pulled a face. “Not very pretty though, is it? Why wear a thing like that round your neck, for Gawd’s sake?”
“Can I have it?”
Geoff nodded. “OK. But don’t say I never give you anything. And I’d keep out of Rick’s way if I were you. He’s in a bad mood this morning.”
“He’s always in a bad mood,” Oliver said, slipping the little black stone into his pocket and slinging his bag of books on to his back again.
* * *
The minute Oliver walked into the playground a girl called Tracey Bell waddled over to talk to him. She’d obviously been waiting for him to show up. People laughed at Tracey behind her back because she was very short and very fat. She wasn’t at all pretty and she had a frizz of blonde hair the texture of pan scrubbers; she was no good at school work either.
Oliver felt a bit sorry for her. Lessons were no problem for him, he was always near the top, but he knew how it felt to be different. He was odd to look at too, with a large head that looked much too big for the scraggy neck that supported it and pale, rather bulgy eyes; and he was the smallest, weediest boy in the whole class. He was no good at games either, even worse than Tracey Bell. People called him a wally.
Tracey didn’t have a dad but everyone knew Mrs Bell. She was just a bigger version of her daughter, with the same kind of pan-scrubber hair. “I might be coming to your house this week,” she told Oliver excitedly. “My mum’s doing a cleaning job for your mum. Good, i’n’t it?”
Oliver stared at her round moon face; he could have kicked himself. He’d told Tracey last week that his mother was looking for a cleaner, but he’d never imagined that she’d tell her mother, or that Mrs Bell would knock on the door and ask for the job.
The news put him in a bad mood. In spite of his secret sympathy for Tracey, he felt threatened, afraid that she might start poking and prying. She’d ask him why they hadn’t got a television and why he always had to go to bed so early, and why his parents were so old.
At nine o’clock he filed miserably into the school hall with the others, all set for a depressing week. Most lessons bored Oliver because he was so clever; he always finished first then he had hours to kill. He usually ended up messing with the things in his desk, then he got told off, or sent to the library for private study. That was boring too, because he’d read all the books that interested him.
But after assembly something quite exciting happened. The science master stood up and told them that their school, Dean Street Middle, had been chosen as the main location for a new television project. Kit McKenzie, the famous TV “animal lady”, wanted to come to the school and film them. It wouldn’t be lions and tigers, it’d be domestic animals, ones you could keep at home. But she was on the lookout for something unusual. “If you’ve got an interesting pet at home, or can get one,” the science master told them, “find out all about it, make notes on the way it behaves, what it eats, all that sort of thing. You never know, you might be one of the lucky ones and end up on television.”
At break everyone was talking about the animal project. Most people had pets like mice and hamsters but one boy had a lot of stick insects and a girl in 3B said she was going to borrow a parrot from her Grandad and Grandma. “It can sing pop songs,” she told everybody, “and it swears.”
“I don’t think they’d want that on TV,” Tracey Bell said, in her loud, penetrating voice, sidling up to Oliver.
He was feeling rather depressed as he listened to all the talk about gerbils and Siamese cats, and about a large spider called Boris that had lived for two years in William Briggs’ bathroom cupboard. His mother would never let him have a pet, not even for something educational; she made enough fuss about Binkie. There was no way he’d get on TV. Then Tracey sprang a surprise. “My Uncle Len’s got a pet shop,” she whispered, cornering him in the playground by the bike racks. “He could get us something interesting.”
“Us?” Oliver repeated suspiciously.
“Well, we could do our project together, couldn’t we? It’d give us a lot more chance.”
It was Tracey Bell’s dream to go on television, and she’d got it all worked out. Oliver was the cleverest boy in the school so he could do all the writing and reading up, and her Uncle Len would get them the animal, something a bit different, if she wheedled him. They just couldn’t lose. “What sort of thing do you fancy, Oliver?” she said brightly. It was hard to crush Tracey Bell.
Oliver didn’t fancy anything, and he didn’t fancy appearing on the TV screen next to her. They’d look ridiculous, like Little and Large. “A rat,” he said stonily. That might shut her up.
“A rat? Ugh … Oliver. What do you want one of them for?”
He didn’t know, he’d just said the first thing that had come into his head, though he must have been thinking about rats anyway, because of all Dr Verney’s questions about rats and mice.
“Well, at least it’d be something different,” he told Tracey, feeling a bit mean. Surely her Uncle Len didn’t sell rats in his shop? He’d never actually heard of anyone keeping a rat as a pet. Though now he actually thought about it, studying rat behaviour might be quite interesting. Weren’t they supposed to be highly intelligent? He dimly remembered reading a book once, a science fiction story in which rats had taken over the world.
“If Uncle Len can get us anything it’ll have to come to your house,” Tracey told him. “We live in a flat and we’ve only got a balcony. My mum won’t let us keep anything out there.”
Oliver didn’t reply. Tracey’s uncle would probably say no, for a start, and if he did come up with anything he couldn’t see his mother letting him have it at Nine, Thames Terrace. As for keeping a rat … he could just see her face if he came home with one. It was such an awful thought it was almost funny.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b231a4c7-cc00-5d4d-9664-9d718367d703)
He found Ted in a stuffy room, sprawled in a chair, staring listlessly at a TV set. It was on low and the news commentary was hardly a mumble, he couldn’t be listening. And he wasn’t looking at the screen either, his eyes were going straight past it.
“I’ve brought you a present,” Oliver said, holding a paper bag out. Ted took it and looked inside. It was a chocolate bar, fruit and nut, the kind he sometimes brought in his lunch box. Oliver knew he liked it.
“Thanks, pal.” But the man didn’t eat it, he just carried on staring at the television. The voice didn’t sound like Ted’s, and the face wasn’t Ted’s either. It looked too white and shocked, and the eyes were still fish-like and glassy. “What’s up?” said Oliver, sitting down next to him, on a red leather pouffe.
There was a long silence. “Are you coming back to work soon?” Oliver tried again. He was looking at the man’s large, square hands, lying idly in his lap, at the kindly, weather-beaten face and the scanty fringe of greying hair round the speckled, bald head. He was fond of Ted Hoskins, and he’d decided that if he ever had a serious problem he’d go to Ted with it. In fact, he sometimes pretended that Ted was his real dad. It was awful, with his own father in hospital.
“No, I’m not, son. I’m not going back there. They can give me my cards if they want. I’m not bothered.” His voice was colourless and flat, as if all the stuffing had been knocked out of him, and Oliver felt little prickles going up and down his back. The neat sitting room, with its hard, bright colours, seemed to fade into a dull blur. Something else was taking its place, a harsh cold breath, like the first nip of winter. It was in his brain and it was inside him, squeezing out all the warmth and the light, all the ordinary, reassuring things.
“What exactly happened, Ted?” he could hear himself saying. “Did you find anything? I mean, at the site?” But Ted’s wife had suddenly materialized from the kitchenette. She’d gripped Oliver firmly by the arm and was now steering him out of the room. He tried hard to resist. He’d not even started his investigations yet.
“But I want—” he began.
“He didn’t find anything, duckie, nothing at all. He just came over a bit queer, that’s all. He’s got high blood pressure, you know.”
“But it was worse than that, Mrs Hoskins,” Oliver said doggedly, a helpless feeling coming over him as he saw the living room door shut on Ted. “Something really awful must have happened. I mean they must have dug something up, something nasty. I saw the look on his face.”
The plump little woman in the blue overall looked at him thoughtfully. She’d never met a child like this before. He seemed so old, so knowing and he had such staring eyes. Well he wasn’t going to upset her Ted with his questions. “They didn’t find anything,” she told him. “Ask one of the others if you don’t believe me. It’s true.”
“Well, what did happen then? Why did he run away? He did run away, I saw him.”
She hesitated. He wasn’t going to leave unless she told him a bit more; he was obviously that sort of kid. “He said … he said it went all black like,” she began slowly, “all dark. Very dark and … thick, you know, foggy … oh, I don’t know, duckie. Life’s a funny thing.”
She felt very embarrassed. She’d told Oliver exactly what Ted had told her, and she still couldn’t make head nor tail of it. She opened the front door pointedly, and waited for him to go through.
But Oliver didn’t budge. “What went all black?” he repeated, in his high, penetrating voice. “Did he see something? That’s what I want to know. What frightened him?”
“I’ve told you, he just came over a bit muzzy. He’d probably forgotten to take his pills.”
“Well, if that’s all it was why won’t he go back?” demanded Oliver, “and why did they get an ambulance?”
“Look, love, it was nice of you to come and that, but I don’t want him upset. Off you go now, he might be back at work next week.” And she shut the door on him.
Oliver stood outside on the landing, staring at Number Sixteen. He felt like kicking the door in. It was quite obvious that Mrs Hoskins knew things she wouldn’t tell; it was probably in the hands of the police by now. All she’d wanted was to get him out of the flat. He turned away angrily, and started to go down the chilly staircase. Why did grown-ups treat children like idiots?
But he was wrong about Mrs Hoskins. She’d been unnerved when they’d brought her Ted home in that ambulance. He hadn’t been able to tell her what he’d seen, but it must have been bad because he’d threatened to give his notice in.
Oliver thought about Ted all the way home. He simply didn’t believe what Mrs Hoskins had said about the pills; Ted’s face had told him the truth. Perhaps they’d not actually dug anything up at the site, but they must have disturbed something.
It was as if a great black bird was on the wing, flinging a cold dark shadow across London, changing the way everything felt, changing him. “Blackness and darkness”, that’s what Mrs Hoskins had talked about, in her tight, embarrassed voice, not understanding. He’d felt that darkness himself, out in the street, peering down at Ted’s face. He’d felt, but he’d not understood. And he still didn’t understand, not properly. Big beefy Ted, always whistling and cracking jokes. What on earth had happened at River Reach?
After tea Oliver slipped down to the cellar. Mrs Wright had bought a lot of plums and she was planning to make jam. He’d offered to go down and find new jam jars for her. It was a good move because he wanted to have a good look round, but he didn’t want to make her suspicious.
As he went past Dr Verney’s door he heard raised voices. His mother was in there, talking to him, and she sounded annoyed. “I can assure you, Dr Verney,” she was saying irritably, “there is nothing like that in this house, and, if there were, Mrs McDougall has a cat. Now you really must stop worrying like this …” He must be going on about rats and mice again, Oliver decided. He was nuts. He felt rather uncomfortable as he made his way down the cellar steps. If only Dr Verney knew what he and Tracey Bell were hatching up between them.
If Uncle Len did produce a rat for them, it would have to go in the cellar of Number Nine. It wouldn’t mind the dark, and Oliver was planning to put the cage against the front wall, where there was an iron grating, and where you could peer through a little cobwebby window and look up into the street. The thing was to keep it a secret from his mother. If the rat behaved itself, and they got on well with the project, the time may come when he could risk telling her. But even though she hardly ever came down to the cellar it was vital to keep the rat out of sight.
Fortunately that would be fairly easy. There was rubbish of all kinds heaped up round him, boxes and crates, and discarded doors, and sagging piles of yellow newspapers. And since the cellar was much too damp to be of any practical use, it was just a place for jam jars and paint cans, for large hairy spiders and now … rats.
It was large, occupying as much floor space as the house above. Oliver crept about in the dim light, trying not to bump into things. He couldn’t spend too long down here, he’d only come for jam jars, and if he didn’t go upstairs soon his mother would appear and fetch him out. She didn’t like his habit of grubbing around.
He ran his fingers over the damp walls, under the flaky white paint; they were all knobbled and bumpy. It didn’t feel like bricks at all, more like big pebbles, all flung together. His father had told him that this part of the house was centuries old, that there’d been at least two houses built and pulled down on top of it. He couldn’t get down here any more, because of his bad hip.
Oliver wandered about, putting dusty jars in a box, and trying to decide on the best place for the rat. Then he saw them, not skulls or rolled-up documents or heaps of gold coins, but cracks, dozens of little cracks running down the wall from top to bottom, on the left side of the iron grating.
He stared hard, put his face close to the greenish, cheese-smelling wall, and examined them carefully, sticking a finger in. They were new, he could see bits of plaster on the floor, plaster that must have fallen out of the cracks. So his mother was right after all. She’d been up in arms from the beginning about the lorries from the building site rumbling past the house at all hours, and about the huge trailers dragging heavy equipment. She’d said it would shake the old house to its foundations, and it had. These cracks were living proof.
She’d be pleased about the damage in one way, at least these cracks proved she’d been right to complain. A couple of them were quite big, almost big enough to get your hand in. He leaned forward cautiously, and sniffed. A cold sooty smell came out of the holes but he couldn’t see anything. Next time he was down here he’d bring his torch and examine everything properly.
“Oliver? Oliver!” He scuttled round, putting a few more jam jars into his cardboard box, and wedged it under one arm. He needed a free hand to negotiate those stone steps, he’d really hurt himself if he fell backwards, with a load of broken glass on top of him. “OLIVER!!” His mother wasn’t very patient, she’d finished sorting out Dr Verney and now she wanted to make a start on her plum jam.
But her high, piercing voice was suddenly drowned by a terrific noise up in the street; a great yellow machine was being dragged past, on its way to the building site. He could hear the rumble of enormous wheels and an orange light was flashing through the bars of the grating. As it rolled past, the house over his head seemed to rock slightly, the naked light bulb shook on its flex, and a lump of plaster suddenly detached itself from the sagging ceiling, hitting him on the shoulder as it fell to the floor.
“OLIVER!!” She was getting really angry now, but the boy took no notice. He put his box at the foot of the cellar steps and made his way back towards the grating, groping as he crossed the dusty floor. The dangling bulb seemed much dimmer, in fact he could hardly see, and the sun wasn’t filtering down through the grating. It had gone quite dark outside.
He stood quite still, with his hands in his pockets, one little finger playing with the hole in his stone, the stone with the marks on that Geoff had given him. Slowly he ran his eyes over the ceiling; now he looked more carefully he could see several places where large pieces had fallen off, and there was rubble on the floor, and on the bundles of News Chronicles.
Oliver listened. At least his mother had stopped yelling. She’d have gone up to their flat to look for him. But someone was in the hall – or was it outside? He could hear a voice, rather faint, but getting clearer, a woman’s voice, gentle and young, and she was crying.
He glanced up through the grating but there was nobody in the street outside. Then he turned round; whoever it was must surely be standing very close to him. But there was nobody there. Oliver’s stomach lurched, and a cold icy feeling swept over him. Every inch of his scalp tingled, as if he’d been stripped naked and plunged into freezing water.
Slowly, unable to stop one foot moving ahead of the other, he moved steadily towards the grating. Then he found himself gliding sideways towards those long dark streaks in the wall, and one of them was opening up, like the earth cracking, like a huge mouth. Out of it came a roaring, terrible blackness, sweeping round him and over him, stopping his breath.
And Oliver let himself be taken, soundlessly, without struggle; the only noise in the cellar was the woman’s voice, that desperate, anguished weeping that went on and on, losing its gentleness and turning strident and hard until, at last, it became one ear-splitting agonized scream.
Oliver passed into nothing. It was as though his own head had grown huge and split open silently, and as if all the darkness inside had flowed out like a great river choking him, and swallowing him up.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_70f5c53b-c66d-5bf5-b9be-789cf06790e0)
He was looking out of a dirty window, down into a street, standing on tiptoe because his chin barely reached the sill. He wore a greasy brown tunic with a leather belt round the middle. His feet were bare and, between his toes, he could feel grit and dirt from the wooden floor.
It was suffocatingly hot and the small square of sky outside was a flat, hard blue. But worse than the heat was the overpowering smell, and Oliver was trying to snatch quick light breaths of air. If he took proper lungfuls he knew he’d be sick. He tried to analyse the smell but he couldn’t. One minute it reminded him of meat that had gone bad, the next of a huge manure heap. But farm smells could be quite pleasant in a funny sort of way. This wasn’t, it was a smell of rot and decay, not just hanging in the air he breathed but somehow in his own body.
He looked down. His hands and feet seemed curiously small and they were filthy, every inch of skin uniformly grey. His mouth tasted foul, his teeth sticky, as if he’d not brushed them for years and years.
He pushed his face up against the window, rubbed a little hole in the dirt, and looked through again. There were houses opposite, half-timbered with sagging tiled roofs, and with upper storeys that stuck out over a cobbled street. They were so close he could have leaned out and shaken hands with someone opposite, if there’d been anyone at home. But the house looked shut up and deserted, so did the houses to the right and left, and up through the egg-shaped cobbles he could see grass growing in little tufts.
He must be in a town because there were roofs and gables and chimneys, stretching away till they dissolved into a brown-red blur under the heartless blue sky. But it felt like a town of ghosts. Nobody came or went in that narrow little street, nobody called out. The only sound he could hear was a bird twittering away in the leaves of a fresh young tree that was growing up, just under the window.
Oliver craned his neck till he could see right along the street and spotted something he recognized, a different sort of house, more like a shop. He thought he saw a figure moving about behind the upper windows but the lower part was all boarded up, as if they were going to pull it down. The street door was a faded green colour, studded with diamond-headed nails, like the entrance to a dungeon, and painted on it, in broad rough strokes, was a bright red cross.
As he stared he saw a figure pass in front of the house opposite, walk down to the shop and take up a position outside the peeling green door. It was an old man, quite bent, with a straggly beard. He wore a peculiar cone-shaped hat and faded knee breeches and, in spite of the heat, he had a cloak wrapped round him, dark red, the colour of plums.
Oliver saw him put something down on the cobbles. It was an old-fashioned lantern, the kind that took candles; he’d only ever seen them in books. The man looked up at the house then peered vaguely along the street. No one moved, no one spoke, there was only the bird, singing its heart out in the pale green leaves of the little oak tree.
Then he picked up a pole that had been leaning against a wall. It was a pike. Oliver could see the sun flashing on the big curved blade as the old man hobbled up and down. He took six steps up the street, then six back. Then he leaned against the shop and closed his eyes for a minute, before setting off again. He was obviously doing some kind of sentry duty, as if it was his job to make sure the people inside didn’t escape. But why? That house looked ready for the demolition squad.
He watched the man take a couple more turns up and down the street, then he dropped away from the window. His feet were aching after standing on his toes for so long so he turned round to see what was behind him.
Precious little. A dark room that smelt nearly as foul as the air blowing through the gap in the window frame; low box-like beds, each one a tumble of blankets. There were no pictures, no shelves with ornaments, no books, and the floor was bare except for a dented tankard lying on its side, and a tin plate scattered with crumbs.
Oliver could hear muffled voices. He spotted a little door in the far corner and began to tiptoe across the floor, grit sticking to the soles of his feet like spilt sugar. Then he stopped dead. Something was moving by one of the beds, creeping across the floor in and out of the dusty shadows. Something sleek and black with quivering whiskers; it was a rat.
