The Imaginary Read online

  ‘We call it the Agency,’ she said sitting down next to him. ‘And who are they?’ She spread her hands to indicate the whole lot of them. ‘I guess you could say they’re your family. Welcome home!’

  The girl was called Emily.

  ‘Do you want a cup of tea, or a hot chocolate, or something like that?’ she asked.

  The teddy bear pushed a trolley brimming with drinks and cakes over towards them. One of the wheels squeaked.

  ‘Um, hot chocolate, please,’ Rudger said.

  ‘Here you go,’ said the bear, handing him a steaming mug. ‘Cake?’

  Rudger was surprised how hungry he was. He didn’t normally eat much. Amanda kindly finished off whatever he left and she usually encouraged him to leave the lot. It had become a habit.

  ‘Can I have one of those?’ he asked, pointing at a little cupcake.

  The bear handed it to him, with a napkin. He picked a few strands of fur off the icing and took a bite.

  ‘Good, now you’ve got yourself a cake,’ Emily said, ‘I’d best give you The Talk.’

  ‘The Talk?’ Rudger asked, spitting crumbs.

  The teddy bear trundled the squeaking trolley away as Emily wiped crumbs off the bib of her dungarees.

  ‘Yeah, The Talk. It’s what everyone gets when they come through that door for the first time. You’re frightened, you’re scared, you’ve been forgotten, you’ve been Fading and then, just before you blow away on the wind, you find a magic door and next thing you know you’re being stared at by Snowflake.’

  ‘Snowflake?’

  Emily pointed at the pink dinosaur, who was playing cards with some other imaginary friends. It was having difficulty seeing what cards it had in its hand. The tip of its tail was tapping the bookcase behind it in annoyance.

  ‘Of course, not everyone gets stared at by Snowflake. Depends who’s around at the time. We do try to be friendly.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘This, Rudge,’ she said, shortening his name annoyingly, ‘is a place for people like us to hang out between jobs.’

  ‘Jobs?’

  Emily took a deep breath before launching into the explanation. ‘Here’s how it is,’ she said. ‘Some kids have big imaginations and they dream us up. They make us and we’re best chums and that’s all good and proper, and then they get older and they lose interest and we get forgotten. That’s when we start to Fade. Normally that’s the end, your job’s done, you turn to smoke and blow away on the wind. But if we find you before that happens, or if one of our colleagues spots you, we can get you in here, where you’ll be safe.’

  ‘Why here?’ Rudger asked.

  Emily held her hands up and pointed to the shelves that surrounded them. ‘You and me, Rudge, we’re imagined. Look around, this place is like an oasis: it’s made of imagination. Course, it’s not fresh, but it’s enough to keep you going for a few weeks.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then you’ve gotta go to work.’

  ‘Work?’

  Emily stood up.

  Rudger stood up too. He put the cupcake wrapper in his pocket and held his half-empty hot chocolate mug warm in his hands.

  ‘Come with me,’ Emily said.

  They walked through the maze of bookcases until they came to an open space at the front of the library. Here was the desk where the real people checked out their borrowed books during the day. In front of it was a sleeping dog. An imaginary sleeping dog, Rudger noticed. (Or a sleeping imaginary dog; he wasn’t sure how the adjectives fitted.) There were a pair of glass doors that looked out onto the high street.

  It was dark outside. The orange of a streetlight lit the pavement and a few people walked past under umbrellas. It was raining again.

  The woman Rudger had seen pushing the trolley and shelving the books a little earlier unlocked the doors and went out, locking them behind her.

  ‘That’s the last of the reals gone home now,’ Emily said. ‘It’s all ours until morning.’

  On the wall at their side was a notice board, filled with the things library notice boards are usually filled with: adverts for book groups and babysitters; coffee mornings and art courses. As Rudger looked, though, something happened to them.

  ‘That’s it,’ Emily said, ‘you’ve just gotta relax and let your eyes see what they need to see.’

  From behind all the flyers and posters, or maybe from in front of them, photographs began to appear. It was as if they had been hidden by a mist that was now being blown away by a wind he couldn’t feel. Soon the board was covered with them.

  ‘These are the children,’ Emily said, pointing at the photos, ‘who need Friends, or who want Friends, but who don’t have enough imagination to dream one up. It’s a rare kid who can do that, it takes a really sparky one.’

  ‘Like Amanda?’

  Emily nodded slowly.

  ‘It’s tough when they begin to forget, Rudge,’ she said, ‘but…’

  ‘Oh, she’s not forgotten me,’ Rudger interrupted. ‘It’s just there was this accident. I’m going to find her and—’

  ‘Rudge,’ Emily said, before he could say any more. ‘Slow down. Look, I’m sorry. I know it’s hard, but I gotta tell it to you straight. You ain’t gonna find her again. It don’t work like that. I don’t make the rules, but there are rules. This is just how it works. You get forgotten; then you pick a new one. There’s no going back.’

  Rudger didn’t believe her, but he kept his mouth shut. He could tell he wasn’t going to convince her, not there and then. Not tonight. (And besides, all the same, there was a voice flickering at the back of his mind, a little voice that said, ‘But maybe she’s right.’)

  There was a whimpering sound from behind them. Rudger turned and saw that the old sheepdog was dreaming. It gave a little snort and its feet twitched as if it were chasing a squirrel behind its eyelids.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Emily said. Her voice softened as she talked about the dog, as if remembering good times long gone. ‘He’s waiting for his last job. Too old for his own good, he says. Says he’s looking for something really special. Waits out here most of the time so as not to miss it when it turns up.’

  ‘When what turns up?’

  ‘Whatever kid it is he’s looking for. I dunno. To be honest, he misses a lot of them by keeping watch while snoring, if you get my drift.’

  Rudger looked at the old dog, chuckled nervously for a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on and then turned back to the notice board.

  Emily carried on with The Talk.

  ‘So you come down here in the morning,’ she said, ‘and you pick a kid you like the look of, and then you go up the Corridor and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘That’s all there is to it?’

  ‘Yep, that’s it.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Emily said with a shrug. ‘It just does.’ She paused before coughing and putting on an official-sounding voice, ‘So, Rudge. You’ve had The Talk, as best as I can do it and now you’re in the Imaginary business. Welcome aboard.’ She raised an imaginary glass in an empty hand. ‘Here’s to loads of good jobs for years to come, eh? Let’s go introduce you to the others.’

  Later that evening Rudger was sitting beside a campfire in the middle of the library.

  At first he’d been worried by this, fire and books not being best friends, but he saw that the fire was the sort of thing Amanda would have dreamt up. It was imagined. The library was in no danger of burning down, no books were being burnt, but still the imagined people sitting around it felt warm and looked kindly in the flickering firelight.

  ‘It’s the right thing for the evening,’ Emily had said. ‘It’s what you’re supposed to do. Toast a marshmallow and tell some ghost stories.’

  The marshmallows were imagined too, but they tasted delicious, sticky and gooey. The library was a generous home, dreaming up all of this for them.

  ‘That’s one thing we can’t do, Rudge,’ Emily had expl
ained. ‘That’s what the reals are for, dreaming stuff up. I bet your Amanda did it?’

  ‘Yeah, every day.’

  ‘Our job is to share it, to enjoy it. Guide it if you can, make suggestions, make requests, but you’re always working with someone else’s imagination. Remember that.’

  He sipped another mug of hot chocolate and said nothing. He was thinking about Amanda. Emily’s words from earlier were still rolling round his head. He was sure he’d be able to prove her wrong. Maybe no other imaginary friend had made it back to their real friend before, their original friend, but that just meant he’d be the first.

  He listened to the conversations going on around him. They were about people he didn’t know who’d done things he didn’t understand in places he’d never heard of with children he’d never met. After a while he decided he had to speak up.

  He coughed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  The room fell silent, except for the rhythmic bouncing noise of a Friend who was the spitting image of a ping pong ball. (Rudger was more than glad Amanda had imagined him as an ordinary boy. It made things much easier.)

  ‘I’m new here,’ he said. ‘As you know. Emily’s been very helpful and has told me about how this place works. But…I don’t…I don’t think I’m meant to be here, not yet. There was an accident, you see.’

  He began to tell the story, beginning the night before, when they’d been playing hide and seek with the babysitter.

  ‘Did you say “Mr Bunting”?’ Snowflake asked, from somewhere near the ceiling, when Rudger first mentioned the man.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s what Amanda said his name was. She heard him tell her mum.’

  ‘“Mr Bunting”?’

  There was something funny about the way the dinosaur said the name. As if it were teasing him.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  Emily put a hand on his shoulder and chuckled.

  ‘Sorry, Rudge. We all know about Mr Bunting already. It’s no good trying to make out you met him. You're not gonna fool us. Sorry to ruin your story.’

  ‘No, but we did meet him. He tried to—’

  The teddy bear, a girl called Cruncher-of-Bones, laughed.

  ‘Oh yeah? Next you’ll be saying you met Simple Simon.’

  ‘Who’s Simple Simon?’

  ‘He’s even scarier than Mr Bunting,’ Emily said. 'He takes the place of your real friend in the night. Puts on their skin, looks at you through their eyes, and he tells you to do things. Weird things. Dangerous things. And because he says it in their voice, using their tongue to make the words, well…you have to do it.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet, Emily,’ said Snowflake. ‘Simple Simon gives me the willies. I’ll not be able to sleep tonight now you’ve put the thought in my head.’ The dinosaur gnashed its great teeth together and shook as if a shiver were going up its spine. ‘Brrr.’

  ‘But it wasn’t this Simple Simon bloke,’ Rudger said, ‘it was Mr Bunting. Tell me about him. What do you know?’

  ‘Only what everyone knows, Rudge,’ Emily said. ‘He was born hundreds of years ago,’ she went on, sounding as if she were reciting from an encyclopaedia, ‘but he made a bargain with the devil. Blah, blah, blah.’

  ‘I heard it was with pixies,’ someone said.

  ‘No, aliens,’ said another.

  ‘I thought it was with a bank manager,’ said Cruncher-of-Bones.

  ‘Well, I heard it was the devil, but it don’t matter,’ Emily went on. ‘The point is, he just keeps on living. He don’t die, even though he’s hundreds of years old.’

  ‘And what keeps him alive is…go on…’ the ping pong ball urged between bounces.

  ‘He eats imaginaries, Rudge. He eats people like us. And for each one he eats, he lives another year longer. That’s what they say. But the stories don’t say anything about him having a Friend.’

  ‘Yes they do,’ Snowflake said. ‘What I heard was that he eats Friends to give himself enough imagination to keep believing in his Friend. Now he’s a grownup, and has been for years and years, he should’ve forgotten her. But he doesn’t want to, and the only way to keep believing is to eat…imagination.’

  ‘I never heard that,’ Emily said.

  ‘How does he find Friends?’ Rudger asked.

  ‘Oh, he sniffs them out,’ Cruncher-of-Bones answered. ‘He can smell Fading, like cats do. Get a whiff of that up one nostril and he’ll be on the trail like a bloodhound. And once he finds you it’s cutlery out and eyes down for some speedy gobbling before you’re all Faded away. Would you like another cake, Rudger?’

  Rudger shook his head at the cake. He could smell Fading, eh? Well, that wasn’t how he’d found Amanda’s house and found him. Mr Bunting had been hunting for Friends then, not just waiting. He’d been searching for them door-to-door. And from the moment Amanda had seen the girl on the doorstep Mr Bunting had known there was a girl living there who could see imaginary people, and that meant…

  ‘Can he be killed?’ he asked.

  Emily looked at him. ‘I don’t remember any story where he got killed. Anyone?’

  There was a general shaking of heads.

  ‘Zinzan said,’ Rudger said, ‘that we just disappear if our children are killed. Is that true?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Emily, chewing a marshmallow. ‘And it happens the other way round too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If an imaginary dies, then the real friend dies too.’

  ‘I’ve not heard that,’ said the bouncing ping pong ball.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Emily. ‘There was this kid I heard of once. Him and his Friend, PikPik, fell off this cliff, yeah? They’d been mucking about and there was an accident. And they were falling, and PikPik hit the ground first. She smashed to pieces…vanished, poof! And then her real friend died too.’

  There was a moment’s silence before Snowflake said, ‘But they’d fallen off a cliff. Of course the real friend died.’

  ‘No,’ said Emily, lowering her voice so everyone had to lean in to hear, ‘you didn’t listen proper. The imaginary died, then the real kid.’

  ‘But they both fell from a great height,’ Snowflake protested.

  ‘Yeah, but the real kid was dead before it hit the ground.’

  The silence dragged out a little longer before the dinosaur said, ‘How do you know?’

  Emily shrugged. ‘That’s just what I heard.’

  It had grown late. The fire was dying down.

  Some imaginaries were already heading off to bed.

  Emily led Rudger between bookcases and down aisles until they reached one where there were hammocks slung from side to side.

  ‘Here, let me give you a leg up,’ she said, cupping her hands together and helping Rudger climb into the dangling bed.

  He’d spent all his life sleeping in the bottom of a wardrobe, so this was new to him. There were blankets and a pillow and the hammock rocked a little, as if the whole library were out at sea. It gentled and soothed him. After the long, dark day he’d had, the library was singing him a lullaby.

  He didn’t expect to sleep. So much had happened and was running round in his head. He was wondering where Amanda was. Was she at home or was she in a hospital? Was she thinking of him? And where was Mr Bunting, and was he thinking of Rudger too?

  But he did sleep, without even noticing it, and the next thing he knew it was morning.

  When he woke up, with the electric lights of the library flickering overhead and real people flicking through books either side of his hammock, he climbed down and made his way through the stacks back to the clearing where they’d had the campfire the evening before.

  Snowflake wasn’t there, but some of the other imaginaries were.

  Emily smiled when she saw him. ‘Breakfast?’

  Cruncher-of-Bones wheeled her squeaking trolley towards him and offered him cakes and another mug of hot chocolate.

  There were real people all over the place. One was sitting
at the table next to the bouncing ping pong ball, reading a newspaper. The real people simply didn’t see the imaginary ones and the imaginaries were ignoring the real ones. It was as if two different worlds had been superimposed on top of each other in the one library. Although they shared the same space, they didn’t actually touch.

  Or that was what Rudger thought until he put his mug down on top of a book. The book was more on the edge of the table than he’d realised. The hot chocolate unbalanced it and sent it spinning to the floor.

  The mug and its contents vanished before they hit the ground, but the book landed with a thud.

  The man reading the newspaper looked up.

  ‘We try not to do that, Rudge, me pal,’ Emily said, punching him on the arm in a friendly manner. ‘It can scare them and we’re the good guys, remember?’

  Rudger leant down to pick the book up.

  ‘Leave it,’ Emily said.

  ‘But…’ began Rudger.

  ‘Think about it a moment, Rudge. The bloke’s surprised by a book falling off the table. But books do that. Things fall down. It’s gravity. He’ll go back to his paper in a second and think no more about it. On the other hand, if he sees a book flying up off the ground and onto the table, that’s a different thing altogether. That’s just weird and he’ll think the place is haunted or something. He’ll start having nightmares and it’ll all be your fault. And you don’t want to do that, do you?’

  Rudger shook his head.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided, you and me, we’re gonna go and befriend a kid this morning. We’ll do it together. No point hanging around.’

  ‘But I want to find Amanda,’ he said.

  ‘And how you gonna do that?’

  ‘I’ll find out where the ambulance took her. I mean, it’s obvious isn’t it, she’s probably in the hospital. I’ll go look there.’

  Emily shook her head.

  ‘It’s as if you’ve not listened to a word I’ve said, Rudge. You can’t go out there looking by yourself. You leave the library and you’ll start to Fade.’