“You’re letting all the heat out.”
He hung his head and slowly closed the door. Then he turned round, keeping his eyes down.
Alice was there, standing at the foot of the stairs. She was in her dressing gown; a golden box of cigarettes was glinting in her hand. He didn’t need to see her. He just knew.
“You’re so distant,” she said. “You won’t even look at me. Why won’t you look at me?”
It was too much. He pushed past her and fled up the stairs.
For a long time afterwards he sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, waiting. And when Alice had gone back to bed and the house had fallen silent and still, he stood up, turned on the light and began stuffing his schoolbag with clothes. When he was dressed and his shoelaces were good and tight he stood facing the door.
He should have gone long ago.
Goodbye hexagons!
But then the stairs were creaking under heavy footsteps, coming nearer, coming nearer. He held his breath. A key rattled in the door. The footsteps retreated.
He waited a moment, then tried the handle.
Locked.
He was trapped.
His shoulders began to shake, and he cried bitterly.
Later he stood at the window, staring out at the flurrying snow. He thought about all the people Vanishing at that moment. Apparently one person disappeared every four seconds.
Couldn’t he be one of them?
Wasn’t it possible for children to Vanish?
He hugged his thin body and squeezed as hard as he could, trying to pour himself into the darkness, to cast himself into nothingness.
“Me next!” he whispered. “Me next!”
But the night made no reply and suddenly, instead of Vanishing, he was in his room more than ever, the walls closing in on him like bullies. His chest tightened and his head began to spin. No air came into his lungs. He flung open the window. Wind surrounded him, swirling snow against his face, bringing with it a soft, musical whisper that calmed his mind. Slowly the panic subsided, leaving him peaceful and a little sad—how he’d felt, sometimes, at the end of a story.
He stayed in that position for many minutes, grateful for the night-time breezes that played around him. Then—footsteps again. On the landing. They stopped outside his bedroom. The doorknob rattled.
He scrambled into bed. In moments he was beneath the covers, tugging the blankets under his body so they covered him like a shell. But the door did not open, and the footsteps moved away, and the lonely, painful sobs that wracked his body softened and broadened and rocked him to sleep.
GOING… GOING… GONE!
He woke in a tangle of blankets.
Sunshine was bursting through the curtains, filling his room with light. He blinked and stretched, then tensed as the events of the night before came back to him.
He lay still, listening for clues to the mood of the house. Sometimes there would be arguing, and he would stay in his room until things calmed down. But today not one sound could be heard. Not even the distant hum of the refrigerator or the gurgle of hot water in the pipes.
He sat up, his palms pressing into the bed and the hairs prickling on the back of his neck.
He was in the middle of a deadly and sinister silence.
He slipped out of bed and checked the landing, realizing as he did so that his door had been unlocked. Their bedroom door was open too. He tiptoed up to it, waited a moment, then quickly looked in. Empty. Nobody was in the bathroom either.
He sneaked downstairs.
Maybe they’d gone out.
He opened the front door, squinting in the bright, glancing light. The car was there, under a white curve of snow. A single track of footprints led up to and away from the morning milk bottle.
They were still in the house.
He picked up the milk and walked through the hallway, turning his head as he passed the living room. The sleeping bag lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of the armchair.
That left the kitchen.
He put his ear to the door and stood there for what seemed like an age, waiting for a clink of cutlery, a drawer opening, the rustle of a newspaper, a word, a whisper, a breath.
Silence.
Maybe they had gone out and another fall of snow had covered their footprints. That had to be it—they’d left for some reason, and unlocked his door. Maybe they’d even run away, beating him to it, and he’d been abandoned again. So much the better, he thought, shoving the door open with the tip of his foot. It cleared the way for his Forever Parents.
The swing of the door revealed Forbes first, then Alice.
They were sitting at the table in their pyjamas, still and unmoving, like waxwork models.
The milk bottle slipped from his fingers. Feeling it go, he looked down and watched it fall towards the tiles, where it exploded with a sharp detonation. Ice-cold milk splashed his feet—he jumped back from the spreading pool.
Forbes and Alice didn’t react at all.
He crouched and started collecting the broken glass, his eyes flicking up at them, until his hand was full of clicking shards.
“Put the glass on the table,” Alice said suddenly, in a voice he could barely hear.
He did as he was told, then stepped back. They were both looking at him now, like they’d only just noticed he was there. And something in their eyes told him: the stillness and silence was not coming from the snow or from anything else, but from the kitchen, and what was going on in it.
“You’ve cut your hand,” Forbes said. “Run it under the tap.”
Sure enough blood was trickling down his fingers from a thin cut on his palm. He hurried past them to the sink, glad to get out from under their eyes.
“Don’t look round,” Alice whispered. “Only look round when we tell you to.”
So he stayed at the sink and did not look round.
He stared at the cups and plates piled up on the draining board. He watched a tiny spider make its way across the windowpane. He held his hand under the tap until he could hardly feel it.
And after a while he began to cry, because he knew without looking that the room behind him was empty.
The disappeared do not think of themselves as disappeared. They know where they are. It is the people left holding the photographs who do the wondering. A disappearance is something observed rather than experienced.
But what if that were to change?
What if the Vanishings are the first true and proper disappearances? Not just a disappearance from the world, but also a disappearance from your own self?
DOCTOR BORIS PESHKOV
Reflections on the Vanishings
1
THE PASSING SPARKLE CHANCE
He turned off the tap.
The room was quiet. Just the steady drip of water in the sink.
Then even that was gone.
He wiped his wet hand against his trousers. In the silence, he sensed the Vanishing was still in the room, sitting behind him at the breakfast table, its legs crossed, its long fingers steepled under its chin as it watched him, waiting for him to make his move.
“Children don’t Vanish,” he whispered to himself. “Children don’t Vanish.”
He closed his eyes and felt his way towards the door, sticking to the left wall. As he manoeuvred round the fridge, near where Forbes had been sitting, he stepped on something small and hard. It embedded itself in his foot, making him limp. When he made it to the hallway he closed the kitchen door, then stooped to remove it.
It was a tiny metal nugget, twisted like a small piece of chewing gum.
One of Forbes’s fillings.
He dropped it. Ran upstairs to his bedroom. Slammed the door. Put his back against it. He stayed there, his heart throbbing, waiting for the sound of the Vanishings on the stairs.
The Vanishings on the stairs?
Stupid!
He opened the door.
Peeped out onto the landing.
The house was so empty it boomed.
>
He closed the door again and sat on his bed, looking at the hexagons and the peeled patches of wallpaper.
They really had Vanished.
He picked up his schoolbag, which was still stuffed with clothes, and made a phone call to the Vanishing Response Unit. A minute after he gave the address, he was pedalling down Bickerstaffes Road on his bicycle.
First he went to the site where the Book House had once stood. Now nothing more than a weedy wasteland, it was fenced off from the other houses. The poplar trees that had always welcomed him did not seem to know he was there. Stripped of leaves by the freezing winter, they were motionless under the leaden sky. Even the gusty Wind had gone.
He gave the place a quiet goodbye, then headed into London, cycling slowly through the slush. On his way he stopped at a café and bought breakfast with the last of his pocket money. A bacon and egg roll, a Styrofoam cup of tea and a chocolate bar—he ate them leaning against a wall, watching the traffic rumble by.
By the time he got to Kensington Gardens it was afternoon. He chained his bike to a fence, and walked through the park. He had expected a quiet, snowbound landscape—instead he found a riot of laughter and happiness. It seemed every family in London had turned out to enjoy the snow. Missiles swirled in the chilly air; hands packed and threw; faces twisted into grimaces.
He watched from the path, wondering why it had to be so different for him. A snowball struck him above the knee and he hopped back. A girl waved and laughed, her eyes sparkling; he found himself about to duck, swipe together some snow, and join in.
Instead he kept his hands in his pockets, turned away and followed the path to his solitary destination.
He’d come to Kensington Gardens to summon his Forever Parents. The altar for this ceremony was a sundial hidden behind trees and bushes near the Serpentine River. Little more than a block of concrete, it was so high you had to climb the metal rungs in its side to tell the time, and so ugly even the birds avoided it. He would stand on it, stretching his arms up to the sky. Once or twice he had felt a rush of air against his fingertips, which in a moment of pure exhilaration he’d imagined to be the Hot Air Balloon, swooping low. But it had only ever been the Wind.
Today was different, though.
Today it would work.
He would just dream harder.
He pulled the sleeves of his donkey jacket over his fingers and climbed the freezing rungs. The dial, a metal disc bolted into the top, showed no time under the cloudy sky. Standing astride it, his breath puffing in the air, he closed his eyes, and lifted his arms.
It was important to stretch as high as possible. If he didn’t, he might miss the rope ladder when it came swinging down. Tottering a little, he forced himself onto tiptoe and reached up, his fingers groping for what had never been there, but would certainly be there today.
Now.
They would come… NOW!
They didn’t come.
He drew in a breath, steadied his balance and stretched up higher than before.
They would come in ten seconds.
He counted them off.
Eight. Nine. TEN!
Nothing.
He’d gone too quickly. He started again, slower this time. Flying a Balloon was difficult and you had to account for the Wind.
Five…
Six…
Seven…
Eight…
Nine…
Nine and a half…
crunch
crunch crunch
Footsteps!
Their footsteps, coming across the snow!
crunch crunch crunch
They’d landed the Balloon in the wide fields of Kensington Gardens, and now they were right here at the foot of the sundial.
He didn’t dare look!
This was it!
They were about to speak!
“You up there! You! Boy! Care to hurry it along?”
He opened his eyes.
Something had gone very wrong. Instead of a Hot Air Balloon, he’d got an old granny with a golf umbrella.
But what a granny!
Not his Forever Parents, but she’d stepped out of a dream for sure.
Old age had twisted her body into a sharp stoop, so that her head, looking up at him, was almost upside-down, as if she was peering at the underside of a table. Her black overcoat and matching dress were embroidered with shimmering thread, and a purple tie was fastened in a hard knot round the collar of a spotless white shirt. Rings, silver bracelets, necklaces and earrings glittered on her bony fingers, round her narrow wrists, and from her drooping earlobes, while a long silver pin held her snow-white hair in a twisted tower of gleaming coils.
“Would you mind getting down from there?” she asked. “I’ve work to do.”
“I was here first,” he said uneasily, not sure if those rules applied to strange old women.
Instead of arguing she flipped a rucksack off her back and took out a heavy-duty battery-powered drill and a pair of aviator’s goggles—those leathery ones that pilots wore in the first days of flying.
“Suit yourself,” she said, snapping the goggles over her eyes. “Don’t blame me if the cops show up.”
She revved the drill into a whine and pressed it into the side of the sundial, setting her whole body against it, as if she might suddenly start spinning herself, being so tiny.
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtz
grrrrtz
grrrrrrrrrrrrrtz
In a matter of moments she’d made four holes, and not even carefully, just by jamming the drill in any old how.
The noise was ear-splitting.
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtz
She showed no sign of stopping. She seemed to have forgotten he was there and carried on tirelessly.
He looked up at the sky. It was getting late. How could his Forever Parents spot him from the Balloon if it was dark?
He had to get rid of her.
He squatted and shouted down: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
She lowered the drill. “I’m making breathing holes,” she said, as if nothing was more obvious. “What does it look like?”
“Breathing holes?” he said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Is that so?”
She leant in again.
grrrrrrrrrtzzzzz
“IS IT GOING TO TAKE LONG?”
She rested the drill on her shoulder. “I’d say a good few hours at least. I’m an old sort after all. And old women are slow! Oh, we’re slow!” Her face assumed a crafty look. “Now, if there was a young lad about, he would have the job done in a jiffy. Especially now my poor fingers are seizing up, and my back’s giving in. I made a fast start, maybe too fast. I ought to pace myself. Slow and steady wins the race!”
“OK! OK!” he said. “I’ll do it!”
He climbed down. The moment his feet touched the ground she thrust the drill into his hands, pulled the goggles over his head and scampered up the ladder. When she got to the top she made a visor with her hand and scanned the Gardens.
“Coast’s clear!” she called down. “We’ll need about fifty, I reckon. You’d better work fast though—I have to be away before dark.”
He didn’t hear. He was examining the holes she’d made. By chance or design, they were arranged in a perfect hexagon.
Hexagons…
He lifted the drill.
He didn’t like hexagons.
grrrrrrrrtz
He’d had enough of them.
grrtz
grrrrrrrrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrtz
And then the sundial wasn’t a sundial any more.
It was Forbes and Alice.
Bickerstaffes Road.
The Censorship.
The world.
Everything.
Goodbye!
grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrr
tz grrrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz
grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz grrrrrrrrtz
SCRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH
The drill jerked and sparks flew over his shoulder. He fell back, his hands fuzzy with vibration. Concrete chunks lay at his feet, and wide cracks split the sundial.
“What was that?” the old woman demanded. “What have you done? Speak!”
“Nothing. I just hit something.”
He prodded the drill into one of the cracks—it clunked against metal. The next moment the old woman was elbowing him aside.
“Breathing holes I said! What do you call this? Road works?”
He pulled off the goggles. “Something’s under there.”
“Don’t play the innocent with me, Sonny Jim. We all know what’s under here.”
A screwdriver appeared in her hands. She forced it into the crack and strained against the damp concrete, jemmying the screwdriver back and forth until another chunk fell away.
They both bent close.
“You see?” she whispered. “Like I said. Breathing holes.”
There was a girl under the concrete.
A tiny girl made of bronze.
Her face stared sadly back at them—the rest of her body was still encased. A few more digs of the screwdriver revealed her narrow shoulders and a pair of wings.
She was a fairy.
“I’ll clear her airways,” the old woman said. “You dig for other survivors.”
She produced a leather wallet from the inside pocket of her jacket and opened it to reveal a gleaming set of dentist’s tools—probes, hooks and chisels. Selecting one, she began picking grit from the fairy’s nostrils and mouth. Max revved the drill and burrowed into the sundial, eager to uncover more. Chunks of concrete tumbled one after another at his feet. He found a rabbit. Another fairy. A family of tiny mice. All gathered in the nooks and crevices of a mound or tree stump.
“The Symposium did this,” the old woman explained as they worked. “They came in the middle of the night with a crane and lowered an iron cylinder round it and backed up a truck that went BEEP BEEP BEEP THIS VEHICLE IS REVERSING and slobbed a load of concrete into it. I was watching from the bushes.”
The Beginning Woods Page 10