The Song From Somewhere Else Read online

  The light came back.

  Frank hardly dared breathe.

  She thought of the shadow in the rec and on the roundabout.

  Her stomach made no comment, firmly looking the other way, reading a newspaper, listening to loud music through big headphones.

  If she made a noise, the woman (it must be the one from the park, mustn’t it? Who else could it be? (Was it shaped like a woman, or like a stickman?)) would find her, and although she knew she wasn’t what the woman was after, wasn’t what the woman was looking for Frank didn’t want to be the next thing she found. Not being that would be a Good Thing.

  She wished Agent Jofolofski would turn up. She was someone who might be able to do something. But she wasn’t coming back until the morning, with her warrant.

  And what had happened to Mr Underbridge? Why wasn’t he talking? Why wasn’t he fighting her off?

  Silence ate her thoughts and spat out the memory of the shadow on the roundabout.

  Hard-heeled footsteps clacked across the floorboards.

  The footsteps came level with the toilet door and stopped.

  Frank stopped breathing.

  The woman walked off into the kitchen and Frank heard the cellar door swing open and the clicking footsteps fade away down the stairs.

  After waiting another few moments, just to be sure the woman wasn’t on her way back up, she eased open the toilet door and tiptoed into the hall.

  The front door had been left open.

  Frank stepped towards it, not knowing whether she was going to shut it or run for it.

  She stopped.

  There on the ground, just outside, was a pram lying on its side, the hood torn and flapping in the cool afternoon breeze.

  The sun shone brightly and warmly. The concrete and mud of the world glowed, invitingly, washed in light.

  ‘Look at that,’ her stomach said. ‘A beautiful sunny day! Let’s go. It’s over now. There’s nothing you can do. Let’s go home.’

  But Frank knew she couldn’t leave. Someone had to do something.

  The black fabric of the pram hood flapped at her accusingly. A knitted white blanket was spilt on the step. The pram was empty.

  It had never had a baby in it, she was sure of that much. Had it just been part of the woman’s disguise, or had she carried something else in it?

  As she watched, another shadow-with-nothing-to-cast-it slipped out from under the blanket, slim like a stoat or weasel, and slid across the earth.

  Watching it was like hearing two balloons rub together, and the smell of far-off crackling fireworks drifted through the air.

  It darted at her, touching her toes, her sandalled foot, covering it in its darkness, slipping back and letting her go, before sliding forward again.

  Her foot was numb, like it was falling asleep; she wobbled as she tried to step backwards.

  This thing had been left to guard the house, to stop people coming in … or going out.

  It slid up her leg, higher this time. It was like stepping into a cold bath, but dry, bone dry.

  It was so odd to see. There was nothing there, nothing attacking her, nothing she could fight against, nothing to get her fingers round or her nails into. It was just her leg in shadow.

  Nevertheless, she tried brushing it away, but her fingers just went over the top, did nothing.

  She tried stepping back. The shadow had stretched itself up to her thigh now and her leg gave way. She fell, banging her bum on the doorstep.

  She should cry out, she thought, but what good would that do? Who could help her? Even if someone heard her, what could they do?

  She felt oddly calm, shocked into calmness by the slow, cold, smooth strangeness of the attack.

  Fingers of shadow were reaching on to her other leg now too. Where she’d fallen, her legs had touched one another and the shadow was creeping across her jeans like spilt water.

  She rolled over and, using her arms, dragged herself half into the hallway. But it was no good. There was no rescue waiting in there. If Mr Underbridge could help, he’d’ve been there by now; he’d’ve done something.

  And then the cold was gone and her legs, no longer numb, just hurt. Sharp, stabbing, tingling, awful pain, but at least she recognised it as a normal stage in that progression from numbness to pins and needles to excruciatingness back, eventually, to ordinary-legness.

  With an effort she rolled over on to her back and half sat up.

  Quintilius Minimus was sat in the front garden. It had one leg up in the air and was washing unmentionable parts.

  Scattered on the earth around it, moving like earthworms, were thin slivers of darkness, the strange remains of a shredded shadow.

  As she looked, the cat looked up at her, the tip of its tongue stuck out. It held her eyes for a moment before rolling over on to all four feet, lifting its crooked tail in the air and jumping on to the garden wall.

  It began washing its shoulder.

  She heard the words from the other night echo in the back of her head: ‘Harmless. Taste of nothing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, forgetting that those are two words cats do not understand.

  The cat, being just a cat, said nothing.

  In the hallway, to the left of the kitchen door, there was a short bit of wall, maybe the length of a ruler, a foot wide, before it turned the corner.

  The hall was white and light, and sun shone in from the open front door behind Frank, from the landing window above and from the kitchen.

  But that corner.

  The corner of the hall by the kitchen door was filled with shadows.

  They moved as she looked at them. There was nothing in the hallway to cast them, no hatstand, no person. But still they shifted and flicked as if a breeze she couldn’t feel was blowing something she couldn’t see.

  Against her best judgement, but swallowing all fear deep inside her, she tiptoed forward.

  The soft soles of her sandals were silent on the floorboards.

  As she got closer to the corner she could see more shape.

  The shadows were flat against the wall, just a place where the light didn’t reach, but there was something inside them, something that she could see through them. And then the wall bulged a little, seemed to shift as well.

  She saw a smudge of a face.

  It was Mr Underbridge, as she’d feared, as she’d expected. He’d been swallowed by shadows, wrapped up by them, pinned against or in or on the wall, like a caterpillar that had wrapped itself up in silk in between two beams in the attic or on the underside of a leaf.

  She reached a hand out to touch the wall where the shadows lay, where Nick’s dad was hidden, but stopped herself short. Her leg went cold at the thought.

  What she thought were Mr Underbridge’s eyes, far away in the darkness, charcoal in charcoal, grey under grey, begged her to run, and she wished she could listen to him.

  And then, creeping in at the edges, came the music. The worlds were bumping together. The window had appeared again. But this time the stick-creature was in the cellar.

  Oh, she thought, where’s Nick?

  She eased open the cellar door, thankful for its silent hinges.

  The music washed around her feet, whispered in her heart, quieted the continual grumbling of her stomach. It felt like the opposite of the shadows, sort of. As if she were being filled with an anti-pins-and-needles, as if she was walking in sunlight, not shade.

  But she didn’t feel brave, not exactly. Her heart was a butterfly and her legs still wobbled, not from the after-effects of the shadow’s touch, but from real fear. Just because she was afraid, though, was no reason to not get on with it.

  What it was exactly that she could do, she didn’t know. But she had to do it now.

  Halfway down the wooden stairs, just before they turned the corner, one step creaked, a sharp and intrusive noise, not like the music, something quite other. She stopped, hoping against hope the stick-woman hadn’t heard it.

  Nothing happened.<
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  Frank crouched down and peered between the banisters.

  The cellar was filled with the light of the other world. There was Nick’s mum, working at her desk, weaving threads of melody together, hushing some, raising others, harmonising and modulating, rewinding and replaying.

  She was beautiful, Frank saw: huge and grey and lumpen, mossy behind the ears and undeniably trollish, but beautiful too. She could see Nick in her, and her in Nick.

  But in front of the vision of the other world, firmly and spikily in this world, was something else, something un-beautiful, something that smelt rotten to look at.

  The young mum she’d seen in the park, who’d wheeled her pram to the front door, was gone. Gone for good now, Frank reckoned. This time she couldn’t just blink and make the unworldly go away. The stick-creature scarecrow-thing didn’t care about disguises any more. Not here. Not now. Unimportant.

  The face was chalk white, flat, cloth-like, the mouth a narrow slit in the blankness, the eyes burning blue dots. She was stretched out and narrow, thin and dandling, like a stick insect who listened to too much heavy metal. Like a withered mummy wrapped in bandages of shadow, black and dark and waving in invisible breezes. How many limbs she had, Frank couldn’t be sure. One moment it looked like just the two arms, but then she seemed to be making too many movements with her hands. They were here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and there seemed to be no time between them. There was something sharply spiderish about her, about it, as if this thing were sat in the middle of its web, as if the world were its web and Frank was a fly who hadn’t realised just how stuck she was. Not until now.

  In front of it was a box on top of a tripod, a machine of some sort that buzzed and clunked like a bike that wouldn’t change gears.

  The thing fiddled with switches and buttons, and made movements with its twig-like, pincer-like hands in the air, leaving shimmering lines in front of it, like on a TV show where the presenter, a jolly idiot in a jumper, writes the number of the week with his finger, leaving a computer-generated digit behind on the screen. But these weren’t numbers. They were symbols, letters, strange shapes from forgotten alphabets, that shimmered, faded and were gone.

  What was it writing? What was it doing? Was it a spell of some kind?

  It looked back at the machine on top of the tripod, adjusted something and the clunking sound stopped, replaced by a smooth, regular ticking and a low hum like something in tune. (Not in tune with the music, which swirled and leapt, always one step ahead, but in tune with itself, which was good enough.)

  Nick’s mum looked up from her desk and seemed to see the stick-creature. She looked shocked or saddened or surprised. Frank couldn’t read the expression on that wide head easily, but then the troll looked up at her, blinked twice with those grey eyes and smiled. Frank was sure of that.

  And then the troll composer vanished.

  The music vanished.

  Frank felt sick, as if all the worlds had just heaved themselves up over a humpback bridge at high speed.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ her stomach said, threatening to revisit its contents through her mouth.

  Frank gripped the railings of the banister tighter and watched.

  The window, or leechway, as Jofolofski had called it, was still there – Frank could see the mistiness – but it had suddenly turned away from Nick’s world, from Nick’s mum’s world, and pointed somewhere else.

  There was dust.

  Grey dust.

  Slowly moving grey dust.

  It sounded like a distant seashore, something shifting, like far-off shingle sucked back by the waves, but constantly, never letting up. On and on the faint noise rolled.

  Dust filled the cellar, like but unlike fog, just as Nick’s mum’s room had a moment before. Frank could still see the boxes and abandoned odds and ends of this world beyond, behind and through the dust, but …

  The music was gone, and the loss of it was a stone across her shoulders.

  This new world wasn’t a place where music came from. It looked to be a grey place, broken and lost. A world long past its sell-by date.

  Although Frank had been told that only light and sound came through the window, the cool foresty smell of Nick’s house had gone, replaced with something like raw meat – faint, just at the edges, but days-old meat.

  Somewhere she heard a fly buzz, but couldn’t tell if it was real or in her mind.

  And then something moved.

  Something moved in this other other world.

  It was another thin stick-man of a person, scribbled black lines of limbs and sharp blue glowing eyes.

  It approached from far off in the dust, far off beyond the cellar.

  Closer and closer.

  Time stretched out, like space.

  Frank didn’t breathe.

  And then the scarecrow stick-person stopped; it was as close now as Nick’s mum had been, elsewhere, but within the walls of the cellar.

  The dust roiled around it, and the creature chittered.

  Just as a cat chitters at a bird through a window, longing to get out there and … well, play with the bird, its soon-to-be new

  best friend. But every bird knows that playing with a cat rarely marks the beginning of a long-lasting friendship. Birds are fragile things, and cats don’t know their own strength.

  The stick-creature that was here already, in this world, in the cellar, chittered back across the divide between them.

  They were talking to one another.

  It was a conversation.

  They were the same. Not the same person, but the same sort of thing, the same species.

  It was obvious now she thought it.

  Frank gulped.

  Behind the new stick-creature, she saw more of them coming forward, stepping into view through the swirling dust. There wasn’t just one waiting for the window, there were many.

  Their blue eyes glowed: four, eight, sixteen, more. They trailed off into the distance, far beyond the bounds of the cellar, back into the endless grey dust storm of their overlapping world, these shrouded, chittering stick-folk.

  They wanted out.

  They wanted in.

  Frank didn’t know what to do.

  She was alone at the far edge of the world, looking out as though from the crow’s nest of a ship. She wanted to shout down to the captain, let them know that she’d seen a Jolly Roger flying on the horizon. But she had no captain to hear her when she shouted. She was all alone as she sailed on. Just her.

  Jofolofski’s metal disc was cold in her pocket. It was heavy.

  She could throw it. Push the worlds apart and shut the window for good. But …

  It shouldn’t have been her down in the basement making these decisions. This was one time when she’d happily have thrown her hands up and said, ‘But I’m just a kid,’ – if only there were a grownup nearby who’d listen.

  The world she could see into looked horrible. What had happened to it? Just dust and dust and more dust. Even the light there seemed dim, seemed shadowed and cold and weak. It limped between dust grains, never quite summoning the energy to really shine.

  It was a world at the end of its life.

  Maybe these people … because that’s what they were, wasn’t it? No matter how they looked, they were people, like Nick was, like she was, like Nick’s mum was … Maybe these people were just looking for a new world, one with sunshine and fresh air …

  Maybe they came in peace. She wanted, in spite of everything she’d seen, to believe that.

  But then she thought of Mr Underbridge writhing in the shadows upstairs. She thought of Neil Noble shuddering on the roundabout, damp-trousered and terrified. She remembered the feel of that thing on her leg and she thought of Agent Jofolofski’s words.

  What could she do?

  ‘Give up,’ said her stomach.

  She didn’t listen.

  There was a noise upstairs, up in the kitchen.

  She heard the back door slam shut and she turned to
look up the stairs.

  Behind her the stick-creatures were chittering to each other, as the one in this world fiddled with the contraption on the tripod.

  The machine began to hum a different note. Lower, deeper, more certain.

  Instantly the cellar filled with a warm breeze, dry and dusty and smelling reddish and rotten with meat and flies and strange spices.

  Frank gasped, choked on it. She held back a cough.

  That was the air of another world. The window was open.

  Glancing back down into the cellar, she saw a small circle suspended in the air, ringed with flickering orange light. Through it, the dust world and the figures in it looked more real, more solid, more there. Outside the circle they were still transparent, visions through which the cellar could still be seen.

  The hole, the opening, was small, but it was growing bigger.

  ‘Dad?’ shouted a voice from upstairs.

  Nick had come back. He’d come home.

  She wanted to shout for him, but didn’t dare.

  The wind from that other world whistled through the cellar, a high-pitched drone, monotonous and hopeless.

  Footsteps thumped across the cellar ceiling, across the kitchen floor, and light burst in at the top of the stairs.

  Nick’s head poked round the corner.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ he asked, to himself or to the world. He wasn’t expecting to find Frank, and his eyes went wide as she scuttled up a few steps towards him.

  ‘Quick,’ she said. She didn’t know what else to say. How could she find enough words to explain what was going on, to tell him the danger, to make him see that the window was open to another world, that it had to be shut, and that she had a thing in her pocket that would do it.

  And then, just for a second, just for a second and a half, she heard the music, Nick’s mum’s music, sweep through the house.

  Nick came galumphing down the stairs as she looked over her shoulder.

  The machine on the tripod was crackling, little orange sparks flickering across it. The stick-figure was fiddling with it, adjusting knobs and chittering angrily.