But still she sort of liked them and they could be fun to go and stay with at Christmas, and, most importantly, they fitted perfectly with her plan for tonight.
Twenty minutes after they’d started their film, Ember slipped silently down the stairs, dressed and in her coat, and, under cover of
explosions roaring out of the TV
and kisses spilling from the settee,
crept out of the front door,
popping Harry’s spare keys into her pocket.
She felt amazing.
Buzzing.
She walked through the streetlight-lit streets as if she did this every evening.
Head up. Confident.
There were teenagers on bikes outside the newsagent’s.
A bus passed by, an illuminated room gliding down the road.
The air was cold and there were a few speckles of rain in it.
She slipped into the alley behind Uncle Graham’s house and pulled the map from her pocket.
Was it going to work? Was just holding the map enough to make the corners appear for her to go round? Were there other rules?
She stood in the alley and it looked perfectly normal. A dead end at one end, the way out to the street at the other.
Even shutting her eyes and opening them again, even turning around and then turning back didn’t change it.
The map chilled her skin, like holding a box of fish fingers straight from the freezer.
She turned the handle on Uncle Graham’s gate. Maybe the map would only work its magic if she started from where she’d started before, from that back garden, by walking through that gate.
She pushed it open carefully and peered around.
The kitchen light wasn’t on, but one of the upstairs lights was. A shadow was moving about in the room up there.
The garden was dark and she didn’t think whoever was there (presumably her uncle, but you never knew) would see her, not if she was quick.
She took a couple of steps on to the mud that should’ve been a lawn and took a deep breath.
Pause.
Then she turned round and took a couple of steps back to the gate and went through it into the alley.
The map shivered in her hands like a kitten beginning to purr in its sleep.
She turned left and – yes! – ahead of her was the junction.
She ran round the corner, and then round the next one and the next, her heart keeping steady in the same way a girl walking a tightrope’s does: arms wide, eyes shut.
As she passed the fourth corner she wondered where the cat was. It had normally seen her by now, normally made a comment of one sort or another. But not today.
In a way she felt relieved. It would only have tried to talk her out of this again. But at the same time she half missed it. It seemed to be on her side, more so than anyone else, even if it didn’t agree with her plans.
But it wasn’t there today.
Round the next corner and she pushed her uncle’s gate open for the second time in a couple of minutes and there she was, back in the life-leeched black and white world. Dusty and drear.
It looked to be the same grey early evening it always was there.
She stepped from the darkening alley into thin, insipid daylight.
The back door was shut, but not locked this time. (Was that how she’d left it?)
As she tiptoed through the empty house she remembered, with a shiver, what Ness had said: ‘There’s something in there.’
The rustling, shifting sound she had heard before didn’t come again. There was a faint crackle in the air, but all else was silence.
She hurried on.
She wedged the front door with the umbrellas and walking sticks, as before.
And she froze.
A bumblebee battered itself against the window of her chest.
She was filled with a sudden fear, a sudden flood of uncertainty.
Get Ness, she told herself. Get Ness and get out of here.
But, standing in the hallway, about to go out into the world, she felt like she was being watched.
The stairs reared up beside her. Was there someone up there?
And then – a noise from the front room.
Something shifting, something settling in place.
No footsteps.
No voice.
A humming, though, a hint of someone singing to themselves inside their head, and a faint, distant crackle in the air all around her.
Without turning to look, she jumped out into daylight, into the disappointing grey sunshine.
Ness wasn’t in the front garden, wasn’t waiting in the street for her, but nor was Ms Todd, so Ember turned left and headed off to their own houses.
Only once, walking those empty streets, did she see anything moving.
As she passed the school, something looped across the playing fields.
It was a squirrel, a dead squirrel, bouncing over towards the trees.
It saw her as she saw it and froze in place.
It looked at her, clutching its tail to its chest like an embarrassed woman with a handbag.
‘Hello,’ she said.
It didn’t reply, but after having judged her to be no rival for ghost-nuts or phantom-acorns, or whatever squirrels ate in that dead world, it sprang off, bouncing across the field until it reached the tree, and wrapped itself around the trunk in spiralling loops, right up into the branches and out of sight.
So, she thought, squirrels remember themselves longer than snails. She didn’t know what she would do with this information, but she stored it away, like an acorn.
What the scientists or psychologists would’ve given, she thought years later, looking back, to be able to come here and make a study of which animals hung around longest, which had the greatest dose of self-consciousness. But she wasn’t a psychologist or a scientist … not yet.
Soon she was stood outside Happiness’s house, yet again.
Happiness was back on her doorstep. Back in place. As if she'd never moved.
Did she look even fainter, even greyer, even more washed out than before? Maybe. Maybe.
It was hard to say. From the very first time December had found her here she’d been grey and washed out. Was she fading, or just waiting for a switch to flick from ‘echoing’ to ‘silence’? The snail had been there, and then vanished – the robin too.
It was this place: it sucked the joy out of you.
Ember hoped that taking Ness back to the real world would fill her up with life and light and energy again. Everything that made Ness Ness.
‘Deck?’ Ness said quietly, without much surprise. ‘I thought it was you.’
‘I said I’d be back,’ Ember said, and she found that her voice wobbled halfway through and the last word choked in her throat.
She felt her eyes growing misty.
‘I said I’d come back,’ she tried again.
‘Thank you,’ said Ness.
She stood up slowly, climbing to her feet like it was a great effort.
‘We’re going to have to be quick,’ Ember said. ‘We’re going back the way we went before, but this time we won’t get –’
‘Won’t get what?’
‘– caught,’ said Ember as she turned to look at Ms Todd.
‘Ah,’ said the woman.
She wasn’t smiling any more.
‘You shouldn’t be here. I have warned you and saved you and sent you home and warned you again, but you insist on coming back.’
‘Of course I keep coming back,’ Ember said. ‘How can I leave her here?’ She pointed at Happiness. ‘She’s my best friend. This is what friends do.’
Ms Todd gave Ness barely a glance as she spoke.
‘It’s not anything. There are no friends here. This isn’t that sort of place, December, my dear girl. That business is all over the moment you step through my gates.’
‘No,’ said Ember. She was bubbling inside, boiling like a kettle. ‘No, that’s not true. She’s my friend … here
, there and everywhere. Anywhere. That don’t change.’
Ms Todd dismissed her with a wave of her hand.
‘I can’t be your protector any more. I’m busy. We are done. It’s over. I’m sorry.’
She snapped her fingers, turned on her heel and strolled away up the street.
Ember shivered.
She’d been ignored, left as if she didn’t matter.
It felt odd.
She felt odd.
Then she happened to look up, and across the street she saw the net curtain fall back into place as Mrs Miłosz stepped away from the window.
How long had she been watching? Ember wondered, and then she went to glance at her watch.
And she stopped.
Her heart stopped in her chest.
Her breath stopped in her throat.
Her mind stopped thinking; thoughts drifted to the ground like snow and lay unmoving around her feet.
Her watch, her wrist, her hand, her sleeve, her fingers were all drained of colour.
She was black and white.
She was shades of grey.
She was like Ness.
Like the world.
She
was
dead.
‘Oh, Deck, you’re …’ began Ness. Then she stopped.
Ember looked round and, for the first time in this bleached-out, leeched-out, black and white, not-right world, for the first time in the three visits she’d made here, Happiness was smiling.
It didn’t matter what she’d been about to say. How she’d planned to finish the sentence she hadn’t finished. Whether she’d been about to say ‘dead’ or ‘black and white’ or just ‘like me’, Ember recognised, and understood, that the sadness in the words was overcome, overwhelmed, by the fellowship, by the welcome, by the we’re-together-again-ness of them.
She couldn’t really, shouldn’t really, blame Happiness for that, should she?
How lonely must she have been here all by herself?
Now they were together again.
Forever.
Or for as long as it took them to forget they’d ever been alive.
Dust on the wind, Ember thought. Soon enough we’ll be dust on the wind.
But however much she understood Ness’s words and her smile, she found it made her angry. Angry and sad.
She wanted to kick things. Wanted to break things. Wanted to shout the rudest words she knew at Ms Todd.
She wanted her dad.
Harry, where are you?
And she knew that if he knew about this place, he’d’ve been here in a shot, breaking down the walls between worlds, running through alleys, bursting through doors in order to rescue her. Just like she’d come to rescue Ness.
But he didn’t know. There was no way he’d ever find her.
And then she wondered how it looked, back in the real world.
Ness had fallen off the swing. Someone had found her and they’d rushed her to hospital and she’d died, leaving a body back there and sending a different part of her here.
But when Ms Todd had done the trick on Ember, her body had been here. There was no body in the real world. She would just be missing, lost and gone, whereabouts unknown forever.
Would Harry think she’d run away, gone missing and never come home?
Oh.
That thought, the thought of Harry not knowing where she was, of him forever wondering without finding an answer, was like turning to ice. She shivered with it. She felt the world plunge down the other side of the rollercoaster, her stomach levitating and empty and complaining.
Was it my fault? he’d think.
Oh.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Ness said, breaking the spell of her thoughts. ‘I was lonely. I was afraid. But now … now we’re together again.’
She’d sat back down and was holding her hand out to Ember, gesturing at the spot on the step next to her. Sit down, she was saying, sit down and stay.
‘No,’ snapped Ember, who hadn’t given up. ‘No, we’ve got to go. Get up. Get up. There’s still a way out, a way back.’
Ness shook her head.
‘I don’t think so. I’m too tired. Come and sit down. I’m cold.’
‘Gah!’
It was frustration. She didn’t like being angry with her friend; who did? But why was Ness being like this?
Yes, it had turned cold. Yes, she too felt tired, like a little nap wouldn’t be so bad. But … they needed to get moving.
Ember pulled Ness up by the hand.
‘Come on,’ she said.
Ness didn’t resist, but as soon as Ember stopped pulling, Ness stopped moving.
‘I can’t,’ she murmured.
With her arm linked through Ness’s arm, Ember marched her friend up the road.
It was slow-going.
Not just because they were arm in arm, and not just because they were tired, but because they seemed to be heading uphill.
There’d never been a hill here before, and if you looked you couldn’t see one now, but that was how it felt.
And as they walked Ember noticed other ways in which the world seemed to have changed – changed with the change that had happened to her.
Someone had turned the lighting down: the whites of the black and white seemed dimmer, greyer, grimmer, and the blacks sharper, deeper, darker. It was as if night were falling, but the black sun still hadn’t moved in the sky.
Either side of them a faint mist rolled that you could only see out of the corner of your eyes.
And the silence was no longer as silent.
Far off there was a sound like a continual rolling thunder or a moaning, or the shuffling of waves on a shore, or a train passing by in the deep of a summer’s night. It was a mournful, dispiriting sound, whatever it was.
And inside Ember’s chest her heart didn’t beat.
There was no pulse at her wrist or neck.
Sometimes she forgot to breathe, and minutes went by and then she noticed and took a deep breath and it made no difference. Breathing was something the dead didn’t need to do.
She felt like crying, but didn’t. Dead tear ducts are dry.
The anger she had felt at first had long since evaporated. All she felt now was a numbness, a blanketing boredom. And she knew, at last, how Ness had felt all along, all this time.
The girls said nothing as they walked past the school and the bakery and the newsagent’s, nothing or nothing much.
Knowledge had arrived in Ember’s mind when her life had vanished.
The dead know things.
She knew, for example, that there was no way out, no way back, no resurrection available.
That fact sat inside her like a twin sister, whispering to her.
Going through the gate, back to the colour of the alleys, would do to her what it had done to Betty. She would be not-dead and not-alive. The worst of both worlds.
Balance was the only thing that would work.
A swap. A deal. A trade.
A life for a life.
A death for a death.
One in. One out.
She didn’t mention this to Ness. Didn’t let on that this was all in vain. Was pointless, fruitless, hopeless. Had always been so.
She guessed Ness already knew.
The other thing Ember knew, though, was that if she stopped moving, if she stopped trying, then she would lose herself, lose all will to do anything.
And it would be so easy to stop.
So easy.
She felt bored and tired and cold.
She felt like she didn’t care any more.
She told herself she cared.
Kept telling herself that.
But, really, she just wanted to close her eyes.
Being dead was so easy.
Just close your eyes.
Let go.
Go.
Eventually they turned into Uncle Graham’s street.
It had been an effort.
The greyness was everywhere
.
‘Can’t we just sit down?’ Ness whispered. ‘You and me, Deck. You and me. Just sit down over there. I’m so tired.’
She pointed at a shadowy patch of tarmac beside the sign that said the road’s name, much like any other patch of tarmac.
‘Of course we can’t,’ said Ember. ‘We’re so close. We’ll be home soon.’
‘I can’t go home,’ said Ness. ‘I just want to sleep.’
Not in a million years would Ember admit that she felt the same urge.
It was like late at night, under the duvet, when the lights were out and the house was quiet and there was a CD playing with a story softly rolling out into the dark. She felt any moment now she’d be dreaming.
But at the same time she was cold, like the duvet was a winding sheet, damp and musty.
‘Come on,’ she said, pulling Ness up the road.
A cat-shaped smudge appeared in the air from nowhere, and in a second a dead mouse scuttled into its short afterlife, hopping away from the thing that had hitched a ride to the afterworld on the dying rodent’s coat-tails.
The cat glowed, bright and multicoloured.
A searchlight had been switched on, a torch that shone in Ember’s eyes.
Instinctively she lifted her arm to block the light.
‘You?’ she said.
‘Me,’ said the cat.
Ember snuck a look between her fingers.
The colours, the browns and dirty greys and patches of scuffed white and muddy orange, were dazzling, but slowly her eyes grew accustomed.
Although it was hard to look directly at the cat, she could glance at it and keep it at the edge of her vision without too much effort.
‘You said you wouldn’t come,’ said Ember.
‘A cat may change its mind,’ said the cat.
The words ‘A cat may look at a queen’ came into her head and she wondered why, where they were from … Was it a nursery rhyme?
The Afterwards Page 7