The Imaginary Page 3

  After a moment’s quiet Amanda heard the babysitter’s footsteps come closer. Through the legs of her mum’s chair she saw the silhouette of the girl in the doorway. Goldie reached out, flicked on the study light.

  Amanda resisted the urge to wriggle back further under the desk. Making a noise at this moment would be disastrous. Keep still, she told herself, keep quiet.

  Goldie looked around at the bookcases and then pulled open the top drawer of Mrs Shuffleup’s filing cabinet. Amanda wasn’t in there. She took a step into the middle of the room.

  Amanda could see her legs, and watched her turning in a slow circle. She thought about the study. There weren’t any cupboards to hide in, there wasn’t a laundry basket or a wing-backed armchair for a girl to crouch behind. In fact, she realised with a sinking feeling, the only hiding place in the room was the place where she was hiding. Even Goldie was bound to work it out any moment.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  And Goldie went to answer the front door.

  There was a boom of thunder that rattled the windows and Amanda shifted underneath the desk. Her left leg had begun to go to sleep. This was a good opportunity to get comfortable, while the babysitter was distracted.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, young lady,’ said a man’s voice from the hallway, ‘but my car has broken down…there. It’s a dreadful weathered evening tonight…my portable telephone is out of… be so kind as to let me borrow your telephone to call for…’

  ‘Um,’ said Goldie, the uncertainty in her voice obvious. ‘Well, it’s not my house. Mrs Shuffleup, she’s out right now. I’m just the babysitter. I don’t know if I…’

  ‘Oh, I understand. Really I…been left in charge of an…and you feel troubled by a stranger knocking. But…will only take a moment. Really… Do be my saviour, young ma’am. What harm…’

  Amanda didn’t hear everything, because the rain was thudding loudly against the study window now, but she had the oddest feeling she recognised the voice. It wasn’t a voice she knew, she was sure it wasn’t one of her mum’s friends and it wasn’t one of the neighbours, but…

  ‘Well,’ Goldie was saying. ‘It’s not my house, I…’

  ‘Of course, of course, I understand. No harm… I see the light’s on next door. I’ll try there. Good evening.’

  ‘Yeah, ’kay. Night.’

  The front door shut and the sound of the rain on the front path was hushed. Still, that voice was working its way round the inside of Amanda’s brain. She couldn’t quite place it. It was most annoying, but the man was gone now, so, she said to herself, never mind.

  And then the lights went out.

  Two minutes earlier, Rudger had crept out of the wardrobe. From Amanda’s bedroom window you got a good view of the front garden. He climbed carefully, quietly up on to her bed and pressed his face against the cold glass.

  It was amazing how dark it had got out there. It was as if night had fallen early, but it was just a covering of huge black clouds that were dumping their warm damp contents over the town.

  He peered down. He could see the path and the light from the hallway spilling out of the house. There was a person-shaped shadow in the middle of it, but the caller himself was out of sight, tucked under cover by the front door. Rudger would need to open the window and lean out to be able to see who it was, but he didn’t feel that inquisitive, especially not when a sudden gust of wind flung a vicious squall of rain right against the pane.

  Rudger jumped with fright, bouncing on the bed. He stood there wobbling for a moment before he heard the front door bang shut downstairs.

  He leant forward once again. Water was pouring down the window, but he could just make out the shape of someone walking back up the path. It was a big man, Rudger could see that much. He was underneath an umbrella and appeared to be wearing shorts.

  When he reached the pavement he turned to face the house and just stood there, as if he were waiting for something.

  That’s odd, Rudger thought.

  And then the lights went out.

  Back downstairs Goldie was shouting in the dark hallway. ‘Hey, ’Manda! Don’t panic. It’s just a power cut. Nothing to worry about. Where are you?’

  Power cut or no power cut, Amanda wasn’t going to be tricked into giving away her hiding place. She sat quietly where she was and didn’t say a thing.

  ‘Let me get my phone out. Use it like a torch,’ Goldie said.

  Amanda heard a thunk as something fell to the floor, presumably the mobile in question. The babysitter obviously had butterfingers. Amanda pretended not to hear the bad language that accompanied them.

  ‘Oh, where are you?’ Goldie muttered frustratedly.

  Amanda couldn’t see round corners, or in the dark, but she could picture the scene as Goldie scrabbled around on her knees in the hall searching. Maybe she should disentangle herself from under the desk, and go and help her look. But then she’d lose the game and she didn’t like losing. She decided to stay still and a second later was glad that she had.

  A flash of lightning lit the study and, through the wooden legs of the chair, she saw, illuminated in the split-second snap of light, a pair of thin pale human legs stood in the middle of the room.

  Then it was dark again.

  Amanda gasped at the unexpected sight and clapped her hand over her mouth. Her brain buzzed. Keep quiet, keep still, it whispered.

  The rain lashed against the windows and Goldie was still shuffling around in the hall. (Amanda heard her bang into the little table on which the post was put.)

  She waited for the next rumble of thunder and crack of lightning with bated breath. She dared not move. The one thing she knew from the glimpse she’d got was that they weren’t legs that she knew. They weren’t Goldie’s, they weren’t Rudger’s, they weren’t the cat’s and they weren’t her own. And there was no one else in the house. Or rather, there was supposed to be no one else in the house.

  Of all the legs she’d considered, they looked most like hers. White socks under a black dress and black buckled girls’ shoes. Not that Amanda wore buckled shoes, except for school. She wasn’t wearing any shoes now.

  ‘Amanda! Come and help me look for my phone. I think it’s fallen underneath something. Do you know where there’s a torch?’

  A startling flash of lightning lit the room at the same time as the house was shaken by a great cracking boom of thunder, the biggest yet, directly overhead.

  Amanda was staring exactly where she thought the legs had been, but this time she didn’t see the girl’s legs. They’d vanished.

  Instead, between the legs of the chair hung a face. An ashen girl’s face, curtained on either side by long straight black hair. It was a sad face, grim and small-mouthed, and it was looking straight at her.

  And the room was in darkness again.

  Amanda did something she hadn’t expected to do, something quite out of character: she screamed. Without thinking she kicked out at the chair, and at the place the girl had been crawling.

  It was ridiculous, she thought later on, to scream like that—to scream like a girl—when all she’d seen was a face lit up in the dark, and maybe not even that. It had flashed before her so fast, so briefly, could she even be sure she’d seen a face at all? (The answer to that, upon a moment’s reflection, was ‘Yes’.)

  Within seconds Goldie had run into the study, knocking over the wastepaper basket and swearing again. She had her phone held out in front of her, the screen illuminating the room with a hazy blue glow.

  And there was no one there.

  Goldie pulled the chair away from the desk and put a hand out to help Amanda to her feet.

  They were without any doubt the only two people in the room. Amanda looked around and Goldie pointed her phone in all the corners.

  ‘There was a girl here,’ Amanda said, breathing heavily.

  ‘Well, there’s no one here now,’ Goldie replied, putting a hand on Amanda’s shoulder. ‘You probably imagined it. It’s the dark
, the unexpected dark. Power cuts are spooky like that. There, there.’ She patted Amanda’s head, which at any other time would have infuriated her. Right now she hardly noticed it, she was too busy thinking.

  Amanda knew she hadn’t imagined it (had she?), but she didn’t know what else to say. Her brain was ticking through the house, wondering where the girl might have got to, and in that moment she thought of Rudger.

  Upstairs Rudger was still in the bedroom. He couldn’t see in the dark any better than a real boy.

  When he heard Amanda’s scream he ran for the doorway. It stood as a darker rectangle in the dark grey of the room’s wall. Before he reached it, a third burst of lightning flashed its stark glare through the windows and he saw her, stood there.

  The girl. The one with the long straight black hair, the dark dress, the white socks and the half-hidden deep sad eyes.

  He recognised her from Amanda’s description. She was the imaginary friend of the man who’d come to do a survey that afternoon. There was no question, no doubt about it.

  Even if Amanda hadn’t told him what she was, Rudger would’ve known. He couldn’t say how, couldn't say what gave the game away, what tipped the last clue into his hands, but he could tell she wasn’t real. Maybe it just takes one to know one, as the old saying says.

  But it was only a flash of lightning and as soon as he saw her, as soon as he knew who she was, the darkness returned and he found himself flying backwards.

  She must’ve run at him and now her cold hands were gripping his T-shirt and she was pushing him backwards into the bedroom.

  She was stronger than she looked. Stronger even than Amanda was. (Sometimes an argument with Amanda turned into a wrestling match and Rudger always lost, partly because she was pretty strong for a girl and partly because she cheated.)

  His foot caught on the edge of a rug and they tumbled backwards, the girl on top of him. Her hair fell into his face like spiders' webs and he tried to blow it away.

  ‘Get off,’ he gasped between puffs. ‘Let go of me.’

  She got off him, but she didn’t let go.

  She picked herself up and clambered to her feet, all in the dark, and pulled him toward the window. His T-shirt dragged half off as he, and the rug he’d fallen on, slid across the floor.

  Another lightning bolt split the sky and looking up he saw her pale arms and that straight black hair. He didn’t see her face (it was turned away) but he felt something dreadfully wrong about her.

  It wasn’t just that she’d attacked him, knocked him over, and was dragging him away. These things, of course, were wrong and unexpected, but on top of all that, on top of the frightening, weird turn this evening had taken, there was something else. He felt it in his heart, the way it was beating slower rather than faster, a tingle down his spine like a dull trickle of boredom. This girl was not right.

  She heaved him onto Amanda’s bed and finally let go. He could see her now, in front of the window, lit by the orange glow of a street light. She was touching the lock of the window handle with her fingertip.

  She hissed and there was a click and then she was turning the handle and a windy spray of rainwater whipped into the bedroom.

  ‘Help!’ he shouted, rolling himself off the bed. ‘Amanda!’

  And as he shouted a different sort of light swung across the window, circling round the bedroom wall, and he heard the revving of a car, and then silence as the engine was switched off.

  Just the rain pattering outside.

  The girl hissed again as they heard the clunk of a car door.

  She turned to look at him. Silhouetted as she was in the window he couldn’t see her eyes, but he felt them burning icily into him. His knees wobbled.

  There was a buzz in the air, a flicker from somewhere behind him and Rudger heard the noise of a key turning in the front door.

  Lights came on all over the house: in the hallway, in the study, in the kitchen, on the landing.

  A shaft of bright light poured into Amanda’s bedroom. A lopsided rectangle of light that ran from the door right across the carpet and up onto the bed.

  Rudger looked round, just for a moment, as if the light were a friend he wanted to greet coming into the room, and then something lifted up off him. Not a solid thing, not a weight, but something washed out of him, a worry, a pain, a fear, and when he turned back to the window the girl was gone. There was just the night and the rain.

  ‘I’m home,’ called Mrs Shuffleup as she pushed open the front door. ‘Amanda? Marigold? The storm was too bad. Ruth couldn’t leave her little Simon on his own, stupid dog, and Mr Stott was afraid Bishops Road was going to flood again, so the meeting’s postponed, which is silly because—’

  ‘Mum!’ Amanda said, running into the hall. ‘There was this power cut and the lights went out and there was this girl in your study and she was dead creepy and—’

  ‘Slow down, love,’ her mum said, hanging her coat up on the hatstand by the radiator. ‘What’s all this?’

  Goldie came out into the hall.

  ‘Hi, Mrs Shuffleup. We were playing hide and seek and there was a power cut, that’s all. Amanda was in the study there, and she thought she saw something in the lightning. She didn’t half scare me with her screaming—’

  ‘I did not scream,’ Amanda interrupted, defending her honour angrily. ‘I’m no scaredy-cat.’

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t, love,’ her mum said, sitting down on the stairs and pulling Amanda close for a cuddle.

  Amanda struggled away.

  ‘There was this girl, right. The same one I saw this afternoon, and she—’

  ‘Oh, you do let your imagination run away sometimes, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Amanda protested. ‘I didn’t imagine her, she was—’

  ‘There was no one there,’ Goldie said, cutting in. ‘We looked everywhere and there was nowhere to hide in there…except… except under the desk.’

  Amanda clenched her mouth anxiously. She had a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach.

  ‘And that was where Amanda was hiding! Ha! Found you!’

  ‘It doesn’t count,’ Amanda snapped. ‘You didn’t find me. You didn’t. Tell her, Mum.’

  ‘I helped you out from where you’d got tangled up with the chair. I pulled you out of your hiding place. I definitely found you. I win.’

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Amanda said. ‘I’m going to go find Rudger.’

  Rudger was sat on the messed-up bed. He’d shut the window, but his T-shirt was still untucked and his hair looked unusually spiky. When he saw Amanda he said, ‘You’ll never believe what happened. All the lights went out and there was this girl. The one you saw with that man. The imaginary one.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that,’ Amanda said, dismissively, as if it were old news. ‘I saw her downstairs.’

  ‘She attacked me,’ Rudger said. ‘Tried to drag me out the window—’

  Amanda looked at him, but wasn’t really listening. The babysitter had cheated. The unfairness of it filled her head.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’ she said, ignoring Rudger’s story. ‘That Goldie reckons she found me, even though I’d already come out of hiding. Can you believe that?’

  Rudger stood there with his mouth open for a moment before saying, ‘Did you hear what I said? The girl, the scary-looking one with the hair and the hissing, she attacked me. It was horrible. Her hands were all—’

  ‘Oh, stop exaggerating. You always make such a fuss about everything. I saw her downstairs and she wasn’t that scary.’

  ‘You didn’t have her touch you, I’ll bet.’ Rudger shivered at the memory. ‘Her hands. Ugh. They were all cold and clammy. All wrong. It was just horrible.’

  ‘Rudger,’ Amanda said, sounding suddenly shocked, ‘you’ve knocked my moneybox over.’

  Rudger hadn’t even noticed it. Her moneybox, shaped like a red pillar box with a slot in the top, had been a birthday present from Granny and Grandad Shuffleup. It lay on the floor, broken, and coins ha
d spilled out.

  ‘Sorry,’ he stuttered. ‘I guess she must’ve knocked it over when she climbed onto the windowsill.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Amanda said, waving his explanation away and brushing past him. She knelt down at the edge of the bed and began picking up the money.

  Rudger stared, his heart beating oddly, hollowly in his chest.

  ‘I could’ve been dragged out the window,’ he said slowly, watching her clutch her coins, ‘kidnapped by some imaginary ghost-girl, and you’re…you’re not even listening to me.’

  She was driving him mad. Driving him crazy. She was supposed to be his friend, to be his best friend, and she wouldn’t even listen to him. He’d just had the most terrifying experience of his short life (two months, three weeks and a day) and what did she care about? Some spilled coins and a stupid game of hide and seek. That wasn’t how a friend was supposed to behave, was it? She should have said how sorry she was and asked what she could do to make him feel better. But instead she picked up the last few coins and put them in a pile on her bedside cabinet, before turning and flashing him the sort of smile a hungry spider gives a tired fly.

  What now? he thought.

  ‘There you are,’ Amanda said pointing at him. ‘That’s the most rubbish hiding place I’ve ever seen. Amanda wins!’

  She pumped the air with her fist, like a winner.

  ‘Hang on,’ Rudger said, ‘that’s not fair. I didn’t think we were still playing.’

  ‘I never said we weren’t,’ Amanda explained, ‘and so I win.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said. ‘I’m going to my wardrobe.’

  He walked across the bedroom, stepped inside his wardrobe and shut the door behind him. That’ll teach her a lesson, he thought.

  ‘Can we go swimming today, Mum?’ Amanda asked the next morning.

  She waved her spoon at the window. It had stopped raining out there, but the morning light was grey like dishwater, the rain pooled in huge puddles and drops were dripping from the blocked gutters. ‘We can’t go play in the garden, and me and Rudger ain’t been swimming for ages.’