The Nightmare Game

by Gillian Cross

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe she was in a hurry.”

  “But she hasn’t padlocked it either. That’s really peculiar. She’s always nagging at me about padlocking mine.”

  “Well, now you’ve got a chance to nag her,” Tom said. “That’ll make a change.”

  “Not till she gets back from Shelley’s,” Robert said. He wheeled both bikes toward the shed. “And we’ll probably be at Magee’s by then.”

  “What time do you want to go?” Tom said. Thinking, Ten? Half past ten?

  “We ought to be there before nine,” Robert said briskly. “We don’t want him going out before we get there. Leave your phone on and I’ll call you at half past seven, to make sure you’re awake.”

  “Great,” Tom said sarcastically. It was no use arguing. There wouldn’t be any peace until Robert had caught up with Magee. “I’d better go and take Helga out for a proper run now, then. She’s not going to get much in the morning.”

  “Please yourself.” Robert locked his bike to Emma’s and shut the shed door. “I think I’ll go in and ring Em, so she knows what’s going on. She might decide to come with us tomorrow morning—instead of slopping around Shelley’s house in her pajamas all day.”

  You think so? Tom had a feeling that Emma wanted to stay a long way away from Magee. And he could understand that. As he pedaled home, there was only one thought running through his head.

  He’ll be there tomorrow. . . .

  14

  WHEN ROBERT PHONED IN THE MORNING, HE WAS IN A VERY bad temper. “At least you’ve got your phone turned on,” he muttered when Tom answered it.

  “Only because I knew you’d call early.” Tom was whispering, trying not to wake his mother. “What’s bugging you?”

  “I can’t get Emma. Her phone’s been off all this time.”

  Tom laughed. “Must have been a great party.”

  “But how can she cut out like that? And forget about what’s going on?”

  “Give her a break, Robbo. She’s only having twenty-four hours off. It’s been pretty intense for the last few days. Don’t you wish you could switch off?”

  “No I don’t,” Robert said. “But you sound as if you do. Are you going to run out on me as well?”

  Tom sighed. “Of course not.”

  “Good. I’ll see you around here in half an hour, then.” Robert hung up before Tom could protest.

  Being there in half an hour meant getting up instantly. Tom tried to do it without disturbing his mother, but she appeared in the kitchen doorway while he was swigging down a quick glass of milk.

  “This is a surprise,” she said sleepily. “You’re not usually so eager to get to Tesco.”

  Tom stared at her. “Tesco?”

  “You promised,” his mother said reproachfully. “Because I need to get all the really heavy stuff today.”

  Of course. He had. Dad had always taken her in the car, and she hated going on her own. She couldn’t really manage all the bags on the bus. Don’t worry, Tom had said the Saturday before. I’ll come with you next week. He couldn’t go back on that now. And the shopping wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

  He gave his mother a cheerful smile. “Don’t panic. I remember. But can we go soon? I said I’d do something with Robert afterward.”

  “No problem.” His mother grinned back. “I’ll be ready in twenty minutes.”

  She rattled back upstairs, and Tom took out his phone and dialed Robert’s number, reluctantly. His head was already starting to ache and he wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. Robert was going to be furious with him.

  He was.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “Can’t you go shopping this afternoon?”

  “No,” Tom said. “Sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  Because I promised. Because Mom always goes shopping on Saturday mornings. Because. “It’ll only take a couple of hours,” Tom said soothingly. “I can be back before eleven.”

  “Eleven!” Robert said. “That’s much too late. Magee might be out again by then and I’m not risking that. If you won’t come with me now, I’m going on my own.”

  Tom knew that wasn’t a good idea, but he wasn’t going to let himself be blackmailed. And his headache was getting worse. Soon it wouldn’t be safe for him to cycle anyway.

  “I’ve got a terrible migraine,” he muttered, fudging a half-truth. “If I go shopping with Mom, I’ll be able to get some painkillers. Then I can join you afterward—if you still need me.”

  “You’ve never had migraines before,” Robert said sharply. “Is it something to do with Magee?”

  Don’t start on that, Tom thought. He could hear his mother coming down the stairs. “Adolescence often triggers the onset of migraines,” he said. In the best Great Scientist voice he could manage.

  “Other people make do with acne,” Robert still sounded annoyed, but he was calming down now.

  Tom decided to end the conversation while he was winning. “I’ll phone you as soon as we’ve got the shopping home. If you need me then, I can be around at Magee’s in fifteen minutes. OK?”

  “Have to be, won’t it?” Robert said grudgingly. “Just be as quick as you can.”

  He hung up just as Tom’s mother came into the kitchen.

  BUT IT WAS ROBERT WHO MADE THE NEXT CALL, LONG BEFORE eleven. Tom and his mother were only halfway around the supermarket when Tom’s phone rang, between the pasta and the bread.

  Tom took it out of his pocket. “Hi, Robbo.”

  “Can’t he leave you alone for a second?” his mother muttered irritably.

  Tom put a hand over the phone and grinned at her. “No one can do without me. I’m indispensable.”

  He dodged the amiable cuff his mother aimed at him and ducked away down the aisle.

  “Tosh?” Robert said in his ear. “Are you there?”

  “What’s up?” said Tom. “I thought I was going to phone you.”

  “You don’t understand,” Robert said. He was almost whispering. “I had to phone you. Because of Magee.”

  Inside Tom’s head everything suddenly went very still. “What about Magee?”

  “He won’t talk to me. He just says, ‘It’s the other one I want.’ You’ve got to come, Tosh.”

  Tom took a long breath. “He wants to talk to me?”

  That made sense, of course. He was the one who’d been given the little white card. From the moment their eyes first connected, he’d known that he had business to settle with Magee.

  “You’ve got to come now,” Robert was saying. “Straightaway.”

  Tom could hear the urgency in his voice. But he could see his mother, too. She was watching him anxiously, waiting for him to finish his call. He couldn’t just take off and leave her to carry the shopping home.

  “Look, Robbo,” he said, “I won’t be long. I’ve just got to help Mom—”

  “I don’t believe it!” Robert said furiously. “We’ve finally found Magee—and all you can think about is shopping?”

  Tom closed his eyes and took a long breath, trying to stay calm and reasonable. He was still trying to work out how to reply when he heard a completely unexpected sound from the other end of the phone.

  Someone was laughing.

  “Who’s that?” he said sharply.

  The voice that replied wasn’t Robert’s. It was another voice. He’d never heard it before, but he knew instantly who it was. Who it had to be.

  “Hello, boy,” said Magee. “How are the bruises coming along?”

  How did he know about those? Even Robert didn’t really know.

  “What do you mean?” Tom said, very fast and low. “What bruises?”

  Magee laughed again. A wry, hoarse laugh. “They’ll get worse before they get better. Believe me.”

  “What do you mean?” Tom said again.

  But it was too late. Magee had gone. It was Robert who answered the question.

  “I don’t know what any of this stuff is about,” he
said, in a low, secret voice. “But you’ve got to get over here, Tosh, as fast as you can. When I heard Magee speak, I was—he sounds just like Zak. We’ve got to persuade him to talk.”

  Tom glanced quickly at his mother. She was standing farther down the aisle, in exactly the same place as before. Staring at exactly the same loaf of bread.

  He did a quick calculation. “I can be there in an hour and a half.” It would take that long to get the shopping home. “Tell Magee I’m coming.”

  “An hour and a half?” Robert said. “What use is that? I need you here now.”

  Tom heard Magee’s voice in the background, muttering something. And then Robert spoke into the phone again.

  “OK, Tosh, Magee’s going to stay around until you come. I’m going off for a walk and I’ll probably have some coffee and give Emma a ring. Just call me as soon as you get here. And make sure it’s not more than an hour and a half.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be there.” Tom hung up and went back down the aisle to his mother. She was still staring at the bread. “Let’s have them both,” he said, putting his head over her shoulder. “The bloomer for breakfast and the multigrain for tea.”

  She turned around, with such a wide grin that he knew she’d been afraid he was going to abandon her. “Boys!” she said. “You’re all the same. Hollow legs and no sense of economy.”

  BY THE TIME TOM REACHED STEPNEY SQUARE, ROBERT WAS back there, hovering outside 17A.

  He’d obviously been thinking while he had his cup of coffee. “What’s all this with you and Magee?” he said as he opened the door.

  “I wish I knew,” Tom said. “Maybe we’ll find out now.”

  “But what did he mean about the bruises?”

  “Nothing,” Tom said quickly. “That’s not important.”

  “Oh, come on.” Robert pulled him inside and shut the door behind them. “If we’re going to talk to him, I have to know what’s going on. Tell me about the bruises.”

  He was obviously not going to be put off. Reluctantly, Tom loosened his sweater and T-shirt and lifted them up, to show the bare skin of his chest.

  Robert gasped.

  It was a much stronger reaction than Tom was expecting. He knew there were a lot of bruises, and they were very sore, but they’d appeared one at a time and he’d grown used to them. It was only now, looking at Robert’s face, that he realized how shocking they were. His whole chest was patched with dull red shading into purple.

  “Is that all of them?” Robert said faintly.

  Tom shrugged and stripped off the Tshirt and sweater altogether, so that Robert could see the bruises running up his left side. They went all the way from his hip to his armpit. His right shoulder was bruised, too. And he could feel a tender patch in the middle of his back.

  “Who did it?” Robert said faintly. “Was it Magee?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “Not your mother—?”

  Tom laughed out loud, even though his ribs were sore. “Come on, Robbo. You know my mom. Do you really think she’d hit anyone?”

  “So why are you keeping it a secret?” Robert said. “If someone’s beating you up, you’ve got to tell the police—”

  “It’s not like that,” Tom said slowly. “No one’s hit me. The bruises just—come. When I see someone like that boy we met here yesterday, it just hurts me. And afterward there’s a new bruise.”

  Robert stared at him. “You mean they just come? On their own?”

  Tom looked down at his feet. “I think so. There doesn’t seem to be any other reason.”

  He could see Robert didn’t want to believe him. If he hadn’t been standing there shivering, with his bruises actually showing, Robert would have brushed the whole thing away as “imagination.” But there was nothing imaginary about those savage red blotches.

  “There’s the headaches, too,” Tom said. “And my eyes go blurred and I see strange colors. I can’t help it.”

  Robert was still staring at the bruises. “You really got those like that? Just from looking at people?”

  “It’s more like—feeling,” Tom said awkwardly. “As if I can see inside their heads.”

  For a moment, Robert just looked at him, bewildered and speechless. Then he waved a hand at the clothes Tom was holding. “Put those on again and let’s get upstairs. We’ve got to talk to Magee.”

  15

  TOM HADN’T REALIZED HOW FRIGHTENED HE WAS UNTIL ROBERT lifted his hand to knock on the door. Then he found he was trembling.

  Before he met Magee, his life had been simple. When he looked at people, he’d seen what everyone else saw—ordinary faces that didn’t give much away. Now everything had changed. Wherever he went, he was battered by feelings and fears and pain, and he didn’t like it. He wanted his old life back.

  But that wasn’t what they’d come for. They’d come to try and rescue the people in the cavern.

  Robert gave him a quick glance. “You OK, Tosh?”

  Tom shrugged. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Robert knocked and immediately they heard someone moving inside. A second later, Magee opened the door.

  He was smaller than Tom remembered. And older. A thin, wiry man, with graying hair and fine, tired wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. But there was nothing tired about the eyes themselves. They were bright blue, as clear and cool as still water. And they went straight to Tom’s face.

  “You’re here,” he said. “Good.”

  Tom hunted for the right words to answer him, but Robert interrupted before he found them, bursting in eagerly.

  “You said you’d talk if Tom came. You said you’d explain. Are you going to tell us—?”

  Magee was still staring at Tom and his eyes were very sharp now. Probing. “What do you want to know?” he said, without looking around.

  “I want to know how I landed in the cavern,” Robert said. “And I want to know about all the others, too. What made us shrink? And why?”

  Magee glanced sideways at him. “You call that shrinking? That was when you started to grow. Beforehand—when I passed you on the plane—your body may have been big, but you were shriveling inside.”

  “What?” Robert gaped at him.

  Tom understood a bit better, but he thought Magee was exaggerating. “Surely it wasn’t that bad? I mean—he wasn’t in a prison, like Hope.”

  Magee gave a small, wry smile. “No? You’ve never lived with a rival who’s always better than you are. You haven’t got a sister, have you? Or a brother?”

  Tom shook his head, not understanding, and Magee’s smile twisted bitterly. “Believe me, it’s just another kind of trap. If you met Robert now—as he was then—you’d be able to feel it choking him. It nearly knocked me over when I passed him on the plane.”

  It sounded wildly exaggerated. Melodramatic. “Just because Emma kept putting him down?” Tom said, unconvinced.

  “Oh, she wasn’t the only one.” Magee’s eyes swiveled suddenly, fixing on Robert’s face. “Was she?”

  Robert went bright red. “I just didn’t know what I could do,” he muttered. “That’s all. I thought—”

  “You thought you were pathetic and incompetent,” Magee said evenly. “And you didn’t find out you were wrong until you were put in a place where you had to survive. Where only real things mattered. That’s what saved you.”

  “But—I could have died,” Robert said.

  “And would that have been so bad?” said Magee. “Everyone dies in the end. Isn’t it better to have some real life before that happens—even if has to be short?”

  “That’s nonsense!” Robert said angrily.

  But it made a horrible kind of sense to Tom. He knew what Magee meant. But he couldn’t agree with him. He couldn’t let himself.

  “Robert escaped,” he said hotly. “He did this real-life thing of yours and then he came back. That’s what we want to do for the others. How can we get them out of the cavern?”

  “You haven’t even told us how they got i
n,” Robert said. “You promised to explain—and you haven’t explained anything.”

  Magee spread his hands, rejecting the accusation. “I can only explain what you’re ready to understand. I’ve told you I rescued them—for their own good. What more do you want me to say?”

  “You know what we want,” Robert said furiously. “We want to know how.”

  He was shouting now and his voice must have carried farther than he meant it to. A chain rattled behind them and when Tom looked around he saw the old man peering out of 17B. Magee raised a hand and waved, telling him not to worry.

  “It’s time you went,” he said. “I can’t tell you any more until you’ve found out for yourself.”

  “That’s not fair,” Tom said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Oh yes it does,” said Magee. “You’ll discover the game for yourself when you really need it. Just as I did. When I couldn’t take any more.”

  “What game?” Robert said wildly. “None of this is a game.”

  Magee was looking at Tom. “You’ll find it out for yourself,” he murmured. “When the pressure’s strong enough. All you have to do then is visualize the place—and the power will come.”

  Tom scrabbled to grasp what he meant. “What place? What are you talking about?”

  But it was too late. Magee took a step back and shut the door in their faces.

  Robert knocked on the door angrily, with his fist, but there was no answer. It was obvious that Magee wasn’t going to come back.

  “What do we do now?” he said. “We can’t just leave it like that.”

  Tom felt the same. Magee’s final words were swirling around sickeningly in his head. He knew they were important, but he couldn’t make any sense of them.

  “Let’s go and find Emma,” he said. “Maybe she’ll understand better than we do. She’s good at sorting things out.”

  Robert scowled. “That’s great—if we can ever get in touch with her again.”

  There was a sudden stillness inside Tom’s head. “What do you mean?”

  Robert pulled a face. “Well, she’s had her phone off for twenty-four hours now. She just doesn’t care what happens to us. ”