by Ruth Park
Instead of going back to bed, Gret quickly dressed, wrapped the grizzling Tad in a little rug, and let herself out of the house. The vet’s surgery was two streets away, the winter wind was wet and it was pitch dark. Tad seemed as heavy as lead. Gret was very relieved to arrive at last at the vet’s door and press his emergency button.
He was furious when he discovered that Tad had only a torn toenail, and later he rang Mrs Beck and gave her a scolding for letting her little girl go off by herself through darkness and rain with a dog that had nothing serious the matter with him.
Gret was defiant when it was her turn to be scolded.
‘It was all Dan’s fault, cruel pig.’
Dan was not an unkind boy, and he was sorry that he had been the cause of Tad’s getting hurt and upset.
But Gret would not listen to his explanations. All she did was to direct a blue death-ray glare at him and promise she would get him.
Callie thought it was weird the way things had become difficult as soon as Dad left. She looked at the calendar with dread. Three weeks until he came back! It seemed like three years. She tried to explain to Gret how Dan probably felt.
‘Dan’s a funny person,’ she said.
‘You’re telling me,’ said Gret.
‘He wants to do his best. It’s for Dad, really. That’s why he fusses around such a lot.’
‘Don’t care,’ said Gret, grimly. ‘I’m going to get him just the same.’
6
Dan and Gret had to walk home from school together. Neither could help it, as only one could have charge of the key. Dan was the elder, and he was the one chosen. Junior school came out first and Gret had to hang around the playground for a while and then walk home with her grotty brother. She could not bear it, and pleaded for a key of her own.
‘Callie’s got one!’ she said jealously.
‘No,’ replied Heather firmly. ‘At your age you’re not going home to an empty house, and that’s the end of it!’
No one who met Gret and Dan would have dreamed they were together. Dan stayed close to the garden walls on the inside of the footpath, and Gret got as near to the kerb as she could.
Dan chatted away to his sister. When she wasn’t being a toad he quite liked her, and besides, there was no one else to chat to. He was feeling cocky. Mrs Griffith had told him that Mr Berry was impressed with his work.
Dan described to Gret all the things he would do when he started at Rudyard, how he would travel by ferry to the college, which was on the other side of the harbour; the plan he had worked out for making friends with boys with interesting ambitions, and so on. He did not mean to annoy Gret, nor did he notice how she scowled.
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ she bawled at last.
Dan was wounded. ‘I don’t see why.’
‘And give me the key!’
Dan carried the house key hooked into his pants pocket by a complicated invention of his own. He was the faithful guardian of that key.
‘What for?’
‘Because I want to go to the bathroom, stupid!’ cried Gret. ‘I’ll have to run on ahead. Give me the key!’
Dan reluctantly untangled the invention and gave her the key. She darted away.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Dan consoled himself. ‘Callie will be home sooner or later, and I’ll tell her what Mr Berry said about me.’
Callie had grown so much nicer it was almost a pleasure to talk to her.
Gret did want to go to the bathroom, though not in any hurry-up way. She had scarcely entered the house before she thought what a lark it would be to lock Dan out.
No, that won’t work, thought Gret, remembering the spare key hidden under a brick amongst the azalea bushes. She would have taken it herself if she’d had time. No, he’d go and find that key, and come raving in, coughing like a drain and pretending she’d made him catch spotted flu or something by locking him outside.
A mischievous grin spread over Gret’s face. At last she had thought of a way to get Dan.
In fact, Gret no longer felt revengeful towards Dan because of Tad’s bent toenail. Still, she had promised herself and everyone else she would get him and now she knew how.
When Dan came looking for her, she wouldn’t be there! She would have mysteriously vanished. Dan would go completely bonkers wondering where she’d got to. It was exactly the thing to drive him off his trolley.
She locked the door from the inside and hung the key on its usual hook. Dan tried the door, and indignantly banged on it. No answer. Dan was puzzled. Could Gret still be in the bathroom? He backed off a little to look at the upstairs windows. The kitchen curtain twitched, and Gret smirked down at him.
‘You spiteful rat, you’ve shut me out on purpose!’ Dan shouted. Gret stuck out her tongue.
She saw Dan stamp off to fetch the spare key. It took him a while, for there were several bricks under the bushes. Tad, whom Gret had locked out as well, accompanied him when he wasn’t trundling around the garden, wetting a hundred times. Excited because someone had come home at last, Dan supposed.
By the time the pair of them were inside, Tad was muddy and Dan was shivering. He now had a genuine cough.
‘Mean as cat’s-meat, that Gret,’ he informed Tad. He bawled up the stairs: ‘If I catch something awful after this it will be a catastrophe for me, a catastrophe!’
The big word made him feel better, but he still wanted to find Gret and give her a rocket. Tad didn’t care. He trundled into the warm kitchen to have a drink of water, which he needed after all the wets. Then he stretched out in front of the slow-combustion stove, groaning with bliss.
Dan locked the door and put both keys in his pocket. Now Gret couldn’t get out and away from him. She could run so fast that that was her usual custom when he needed to flatten her with a few educated phrases.
Gret had waited at the top of the stairs until she heard the spare key turn in the lock. Then she flitted off to Drac’s room. She now knew exactly how to balance the linoleum on top of the raised trapdoor; when she climbed down into the passage, it slithered gently back into place on the floor.
It was hard for Gret not to giggle as she heard Dan racing around the house, looking under beds and into cupboards. Once he even came into Drac’s room, kicked about a few old suitcases and boxes and then went out again.
‘She’s here somewhere,’ Gret heard him tell Tad. She had crabbed along the passage until she was under the kitchen floor. ‘I know! She must be in the cupola! Callie will murder her when she finds out!’
Callie will murder you, thought Gret gleefully, if you go up there looking for me.
She thought of uttering a groan or two and making him jump out of his socks, but fun though that might have been, she didn’t want to give the Secret away just yet.
Dan hesitated at the foot of the spiral staircase. It was family law that no one should go up there except Callie, and anyone she personally invited, like fat Frances.
He called timidly: ‘You up there, Gret? You’d better come down, Callie will be hopping mad.’
There was no answer. Dan went up the stairs and looked into the little room, filled with rose and blue haze from the coloured windows. It was a fantastic hideaway. Dan suddenly yearned for the time when it would be his very own. He could imagine the bench with all Callie’s rubbish cleared away. He’d put his Children’s Encyclopaedia right there…his desk calculator there. Not that he had one, but maybe Dad would think about that when he returned from Copenhagen. He might even buy one in a duty-free shop on the way home.
Or even a home computer! Dan dreamed about that for a moment, then he put the dazzling thought away. A desk calculator would do for a start, one of the very latest.
But whatever might be in the castle some day, Gret wasn’t there now. Dan began to feel panicky.
He went down to the landing again and listened. The house was as silent as the grave, except for Tad’s snores and the pink-pink-blup of the dripping tap.
‘Gret, come out, wherever you ar
e. I won’t say anything about locking me out. I promise!’ His voice sounded quite shaky. He longed for Callie to come home. But that wouldn’t be for ages. She had gone to Frances’s place to learn how to cook something, probably chips. By the time they’d cooked and eaten all the chips, an hour would have passed.
I’ll have to ring Mum at the nursery, he thought, and she’ll think something awful has happened. She’ll have a blue fit!
Under his feet Gret crouched. She heard him begin to dial. It must be their mother he was calling. Gret pulled a dismayed face. They simply never phoned Mum while she was working. The nursery owners didn’t like personal calls.
She heard Dan’s shaky voice and then silence while he waited. And all at once what had seemed to be a great way of hassling her brother changed into something else. She felt ashamed of herself. Mean. Miserable. She didn’t know why, but that was the way she felt. Gret didn’t try to work it out. All she knew was that her joke wasn’t fun any more.
Sulkily she decided that as she’d come this far she might as well go down to the flat below and poke around. She crept back until she was under the floor of Drac’s room and above the trapdoor that opened downwards into the old pantry. Soon she was climbing down the shelves into the empty ground floor flat.
It was still dim, its curtains tidily drawn, but it had a different smell. Gret couldn’t make out what it was. Not drains, or gas, or anything like that. More like dirty socks. This new smell quite overcame the clean tang of turpentine and paint which Dad had left behind him.
Gret was mystified. She took a few steps out of the cupboard. The kitchen opened out of the lounge room, so she glanced that way. It was a pretty little kitchen, half-painted as Dad had left it, his ladder still in the corner with all the point pots and clean rags. But on the sink bench were half a loaf of bread, a mug, and some used teabags like dead mice. There was also a tin of condensed milk.
Gret could not believe her eyes. It struck her then that the smell like dirty socks was the smell of dirty socks. A heap of them lay on the floor beside a rolled-up sleeping bag.
Until then Gret had been amazed and baffled. But now she felt scared. Her heart beat quickly. Someone was living in the bottom flat and they shouldn’t be! Mum didn’t even know. None of them did.
Her first thought was that she should climb back into the secret passage, scuttle out into Drac’s room and tell Dan all about it. She didn’t usually feel that her brother knew what to do when things turned weird, but now she did. She might have done that if she hadn’t spotted a line of light under the bathroom door. Someone was in there, the intruder who owned the socks.
Gret stopped being frightened. Her curiosity was intense. She was angry, too. To think that someone would just come in and live on her family’s property! And how had he got inside, when Dan checked the downstairs windows and doors every evening?
Gret tiptoed over and put her eye to the keyhole. She could see bits of a man—an arm, a shoulder, his chin, a star tattooed on his earlobe. He stood at the wash basin pulling on a green T-shirt. She could even read what was written on the T-shirt—a rude message to anyone who looked his way. It was the message that turned Gret against the intruder. She thought it was double-yuk. She made, without meaning to, a chuck-up sound.
Like a flash the man vanished from her view, the door whisked open and there he was, staring down at Gret with his mouth open.
‘How the hell did you get in here?’ he demanded. Gret was so alarmed she could not move. She crouched there, gaping at him. He snatched at her, and Gret rolled away, sprang to her feet and sped to the door. It was double-locked. Gret shrieked blue murder.
The man was close behind her. He caught her school shirt by the neck and almost choked her. Gret tore away and darted across the lounge room. She was fast but he was faster. He herded her into the kitchen. There she backed against the sink bench. That was a mistake. He put one dirty hand against the fridge and the other on the stove top and imprisoned her. Gret could neither think nor utter a sound. She gaped at him as she might have gaped at a threatening snake.
Gret had never believed she could be frightened of anything. She had not thought her feet could suddenly turn as heavy as stone. It was not only that she was terrified. She just did not like this man or anything about him.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he grunted. Gret didn’t believe him.
‘You shut up about this, you hear, kid?’ he shouted. ‘I’ve done no harm here, nothin’. I’m off tonight, anyhow.’
Whatever possessions he might have owned, a toothbrush wasn’t one of them. Gret had never seen such teeth. Perhaps it was those scungy fangs that made her bring up the condensed milk tin, which she had seized behind her back, and hit him on the head. Later Mum was to say it was because she was frightened and Dan was to say it was because Gret was, at heart, a killer.
The man dropped like a log, and Gret stared with surprise and horror. She ran for the pantry, scrabbled up the shelves like a rat and flung herself through the open trapdoor. Even as she clambered out into Drac’s room she heard the swearing and shuffling as the man dragged himself to his feet.
As she tore out into her own hall she realised that both trapdoors were open. If the intruder wished, he could follow her. Gret wailed in despair.
Dan had to wait ages for his mother to come to the phone. The person who answered it said she was down at the end of the nursery amongst the tree seedlings. He sounded cross, but Dan said doggedly that he had to speak to her on a matter of utmost importance. So he waited and waited until the receiver stuck to his ear. It was while he was doing this that he heard Gret give her first scream. He knew at once it was Gret. She had a scream like a wounded leopard. But where was she?
Tad lifted his head and growled faintly. Then he bounded to his feet and out the kitchen door like a blur. Dan had never seen him move so fast. He let the receiver drop and followed him.
‘Get her, Tad! Where’s Gret? Good boy!’ he shouted.
To his surprise Tad rushed down the stairs. Halfway down his back legs overtook his front ones, and he landed heavily. But up he leaped, barking and jumping at the wall of the entrance hall.
Beyond it was the downstairs apartment’s kitchen. Dan knew that, but for a moment or two he could not make sense of anything. How could Gret be downstairs when everything there was locked?
He put his ear to the wall and heard the low grumble of a man’s voice, then a thud and cry.
Dan hammered on the wall. ‘You leave my sister alone! I’ve got a savage dog out here! A German Shepherd. Gret, are you all right?’
Only silence answered him.
Dan didn’t know what to do. If Gret were in the downstairs flat, if she were hurt, it was his duty to unlock the flat and help her.
Dan felt as if his blood were running backwards. How could he help? He was only a young boy, and he felt younger by the minute.
He had heard a man’s voice. He was sure of it. But what man? How could a man get into a locked flat? How had Gret, if it came to that? He had seen her upstairs at their own kitchen window, he really had. But now she was downstairs, and in trouble, too.
‘Oh, Tad,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to!’
Tad looked up, wagging what passed as his tail. He was puffing. He had had enough of jumping at the wall, and was considering returning to the warm kitchen.
‘Oh, if only you were a German Shepherd!’ lamented Dan. He took the key of the downstairs flat from its hook. ‘But you have to come with me, Tad, just the same.’
He heard a muffled sob. There was Gret at the head of the stairs! Dan felt he was in a nightmare.
‘Where did you come from? I know you were in there!’
He pointed to the wall. Gret paid no attention. She croaked: ‘Oh, Dan, he’s in Drac’s room, I heard him there. That man. Horrible. He came through the trapdoor. Oh, Dan!’
Dan’s head buzzed. Nothing she said made sense. But he used the brains that Mrs Griffith and M
r Berry were so sure he had. He asked no questions at all. He hastened up the stairs and took Gret by the arm.
‘Oh, Dan,’ she gasped, ‘what will we do?’
‘We’re going to get out of here and fetch the police or someone,’ replied Dan. It was great to hear his sister ask his advice in this time of crisis, but he didn’t think two children could deal with a man. Whatever man it might be.
Over Gret’s shoulder he saw a dishevelled figure, staggering slightly, come out of Gret and Callie’s bedroom.
A burglar? thought Dan, turning pale. Is that what they look like?
The figure had blood on its face and its green T-shirt.
‘I did that, with the condensed milk,’ muttered Gret. ‘Now he’s going into Mum’s room, the pig!’
The terror left her voice. Rage took its place.
Putting the mystery of the condensed milk to one side, Dan whispered: ‘I think he’s looking for things to steal.’
They heard the intruder blundering about the room, and then the clink of metal.
‘He’s knocking off Dad’s ski cups!’ cried Gret, shocked.
Dad’s treasures! Dan forgot he was afraid, forgot he was trying to behave sensibly. Beside him stood Tad, his neck hair bristling a little, his lip up at one side showing smallish teeth. It wasn’t much of a snarl, but it did show that Tad was annoyed at seeing a strange man inside his home.
‘I won’t let him!’ shouted Gret. She had recovered; the red flags of anger and daring were back in her cheeks.
‘Neither will I!’ gasped Dan.
They raced to the kitchen. Dan grabbed a broom, Gret the long metal scraper with which Mum stirred the embers in the stove. It seemed an awful thing with which to hit anyone, but maybe she wouldn’t have to. She took in the other hand a big frying pan.
‘Leave it!’ ordered Dan.
‘It would be beaut for bonging!’ said Gret, but she reluctantly put it down.
They crept silently along the hall, excited and terrified.