by Chris Ward
‘Oh, yuck. That sounds awful.’
Miranda nodded. ‘Godfrey and his mates always lick their plates just in case.’
A few cubicles farther along, the door opened and a tall boy Benjamin hadn’t seen before leaned out. ‘Hey, shut up over there! Some of us are trying to concentrate so we can get back upstairs before breakfast!’
‘Buzz off, Derek, you clown,’ Miranda snapped. ‘If you’re lucky, Godfrey’s underpants will come past in a minute. You wouldn’t want to miss out. You want them clean for next time you kiss his butt, don’t you?’
The tall boy scowled, but before he could reply, Miranda pulled Benjamin into her cubicle. She closed the door behind her, and Benjamin found himself in a tiny room with a single flickering candle on a table just in front of the conveyor belt moving past the open far end. Attached to the wall on the left was a rack of sprays and brushes. There was only one chair, so Benjamin sat down on the floor next to a pile of stacked buckets.
Miranda pointed at a ticker counter on the wall above Benjamin’s head. And as he watched, the tickers flapped over, the number changing from 306 to 291.
‘Getting there,’ she said, giving him a tired grin.
‘What are you doing?’
She plucked a plastic ruler off of the conveyor.
‘Feel it.’
The plastic was warm, and as Benjamin looked at it, the ruler twitched. With a gasp, he dropped it on the floor.
‘Quick, pick it up!’
Benjamin scooped it up as though it were a frog or a beetle, and plopped it onto the table in front of Miranda. He rubbed his tingling fingers on his trousers.
‘It’s alive!’
Miranda grabbed a spray can and doused the ruler with a fine mist that smelled of chamomile. Then she gave it a quick polish with a cloth, and when she held it back out, the warmth was fading away. This time it didn’t move.
‘Put it in the bucket, please.’
‘Is it dead?’
Miranda laughed. ‘Don’t be a fool. It’s a ruler. It was starting to reanimate, so I cleaned it with this deanimation spray. Another two-hundred and ninety and I can go.’
‘You’re killing objects?’
She slapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make him yelp. ‘You can’t kill something that wasn’t ever alive! It doesn’t have a brain; it’s just got a few nerves and stuff.’
‘How do you know it doesn’t have a brain?’
‘I don’t! But if it does, it’ll grow back if you wait long enough. That’s the whole point. The cleaners collect stuff that’s started to get a bit jumpy and dump it on the conveyor for us poor kids to deanimate. Then they take it away again. This place is just for small stuff. All of the big stuff, like the rooms themselves, get deanimated during monthly cleaning parties, and the stuff that’s reanimated too many times gets sent to the incinerator. The Locker Room is just for the fiddly bits and bobs that we use over and over again.’
‘Oh. Don’t you find it a bit weird, technically killing stuff?’
Miranda glared. ‘No, I don’t. See how you feel after you sit here all afternoon cleaning hundreds of these stupid things. You’ll quickly stop caring. Spray on, brush and polish. Toothbrush in the tight places. In the bucket. Next.’
Her nostrils flared in the flicker of the candlelight.
‘Perhaps I should leave you to it, then,’ Benjamin said.
Miranda glared a moment longer, then sighed. ‘Thanks for coming to see me,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it. It’s my fault; I wasn’t supposed to let you go across the bridge on your own. I just had to … meet someone.’
‘It’s okay.’
She smiled. ‘I thought you’d make it okay. I didn’t expect the wind to get up. I thought I’d get away with it, though, and I didn’t. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry, too. Friends?’ Benjamin stuck out a hand.
‘You didn’t shake Wilhelm’s hand with that, did you? He’s always getting dirty. He likes climbing up walls to spy on teachers through their windows. Scatlocks poo on those walls.’
‘I washed it after.’
‘Good.’
She shook his hand. ‘Look, I’d better get on with this. If I hurry, I can be back in the dorms by eleven. If you have a chance, can you grab me some dinner? For anything less than a thousand cleans, they don’t bring you food.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Thanks. I’m on the second floor, room twenty-three. Just leave it with my roommate. I owe you. Go on, you’d better hurry. How many cleans did you ask for?’
‘Fifteen.’
Miranda rolled her eyes. ‘Easy life. Still, it always takes ages on your first time. Once you’re up to speed, you can do two or three a minute if you don’t get all the fiddly stuff. Thanks again for thinking of me. I’ll see you tomorrow, I hope.’
Benjamin headed for Locker Four. The sin keeper still stood immobile next to the Locker Room entrance, and Benjamin gave him a smile anyway as if to say ‘sorry for wasting time,’ but the suit of armour didn’t move.
Inside his cubicle, the ticker on the wall said 15. A little cat statue sat waiting for his attention, as if someone had put it there to get him started. He picked it up, turned it over, feeling a warmth seep through the hard clay. When he put it down onto the table and reached for the spray, though, one porcelain paw slashed at his hand in a slow, lazy arc, easily avoidable had he been paying attention.
‘Ow!’
He pulled his hand back as the paw slashed at him again. Luckily, the rest of the cat couldn’t move, but it was too late; a line of blood cut from the back of his thumb across to his little finger. He licked away the blood, then hugged his throbbing hand.
The cat’s paw started moving again. This time, Benjamin grabbed the spray from the rack and doused it. The paw stopped moving. He gave the cat a tentative touch, but the statue was already cooling down.
Trying to ignore the ache in his hand, Benjamin rubbed over the cat statue with a cloth until it felt cold all over. Then, worried that it might remember him during a future reanimation, he placed it carefully into the bucket.
As he watched the conveyor, he wondered why nothing coming past seemed easy. Everything consisted of oddly shaped items, things with sharp edges or difficult-to-reach insides. Then he remembered that, because the conveyor moved from left to right, kids in the higher-numbered cubicles had the first pick of the easy stuff. It would really suck to be in Locker One when a lot of kids were being punished, he thought. He grabbed a metal colander with a revolving centrepiece to spin salads, and as he put it down, the insides spun threateningly.
Quite a hazardous job, he thought, rubbing the back of his scratched hand, which continued to throb. Then, almost as an afterthought, he gave the scratch a quick squirt from the spray can.
Can’t do any harm. Can it?
15
Threats
Miranda wasn’t joking. Even with only fifteen on his ticker, it was an hour before Benjamin had finished. He had nearly gotten into trouble at one point because he had naively gotten up and headed for the door after he put what he had counted as his fifteenth item into his second full bucket and saw a cleaner carry it away. As he reached the sin keeper, the reanimated suit of armour pointed his crossbow at Benjamin’s chest.
‘You’re not finished. Return to your locker.’
Thinking there was some mistake, Benjamin went back to Locker Four to check, only to find his ticker still showed the number 3, and with a sigh, discovered he hadn’t cleaned some of the items well enough to deanimate them. This time, when he put out the bucket, he stayed in the cubicle until the ticker started to move: 3 … 2 … 1 …
The word GO appeared in red lettering, and Benjamin breathed a big sigh of relief. This time, the sin keeper stayed on his pedestal as Benjamin opened the main door and went out, casting one last regretful glance back at Miranda’s cubicle as he closed the door behind him.
With no sign of Wilhelm down in the corridors outside, with the hum o
f the conveyor receding into the distance, an uneasy quiet fell over the bowels of the school. Far fewer candles flickered than before, and Benjamin remembered what Wilhelm had said about whole suites of rooms being forgotten and unused. What if he stumbled into some long-lost section of the school? He might never find his way out.
He passed staircases leading both up and down, some wide and grand, others tight and twisting. Some had dusty marble steps, the lack of footprints betraying their disuse, while others were just wooden ladders ascending tight shafts leading into subterranean attic space. Benjamin figured up was best and chose whatever well-lit, rising staircases he could find. Heading toward sound also seemed like a good idea, so when a loud rustling came from behind a door at the end of a corridor, he ran to it and threw it open, only to teeter on the edge of a rocky ledge with the sea tossing below and thousands of roosting scatlocks for company. The sound, he realised, had been coming from the creatures, which now began to stir like windswept leaves on some giant, grey-white tree. Benjamin slammed the door shut and quickly retraced his steps before any could rouse themselves for a pursuit.
He was beginning to despair he might be lost forever, when he heard metal clanking on metal, and at the top of the next staircase, found himself around the back of the kitchens, where a handful of cleaners were washing up. The Dining Hall itself was empty, the central fire’s embers lending a dim flicker of light. He cut through it to the front entrance, where he managed to get one cleaner’s attention.
Unmasked and without their sunglasses now that the pupils were gone, they were terrifying to behold as they stomped back and forth behind the empty food displays, carrying pans, stacks of trays, and boxes of cutlery, occasionally frowning and throwing something into a large crate on a central preparation table.
The cleaner, responding with jerky nods and grunts, did as Benjamin asked and found a bowl of leftover food for him to take up to the dorms for Miranda. As he headed out of the kitchens and into the dark corridors, the sounds of activity were soon lost. The school was silent, and as Benjamin passed staircases and intersecting corridors, he began to wonder where the teachers lived. There were no signposts or maps anywhere.
After several wrong turns, he finally emerged onto the concourse at the main entrance. Mrs. Martin’s office was unlit, but inside, a light flashed on a console at the back that was otherwise dark. Benjamin paused.
Though he was desperate to return to the dorms with the food for Miranda and then finally get some sleep, what if something inside that console could give him a clue as to how he had gotten here and how he could get home? If he was careful and didn’t move anything, would it cause any trouble to take a quick look inside?
Benjamin moved for the door before he could stop himself. It wasn’t locked, although the handle was uncomfortably warm. Inside, Mrs. Martin’s office looked like any other office—all computers and fax machines and photocopiers. In fact, it was so normal, he felt a certain kind of retro shock at the mundane nature of everything—a paperweight shaped like a duck holding down a stack of papers, a mug still a third full of a liquid that smelt of chamomile—
Then he spotted it: the telephone.
While everyone on their street was obsessed with the newest smartphones, his parents had kept an old-fashioned landline in the hallway by the door. Benjamin glanced up at a clock just visible in the dim light. It was nearly ten p.m., later than he’d realised, but not so late as to wake anyone up. Assuming, of course, that time here worked the same as it worked there.
The warm receiver had a dial tone when he pressed it to his ear. His family’s phone number was engrained on his memory, forced into his head by rote memorisation almost as early as he could speak. And even now, the numbers came easily to his tongue: 01732-243-9213.
Before he could stop himself, his fingers moved across the buttons, and he wondered dumbly whether he ought to use the international code. However, in this world of two suns, he figured his number would either work or it wouldn’t.
He held his breath, waiting. Surely it wouldn’t work. He felt like he was calling home out of a dream.
A ringing tone. His heart beat almost too loudly to hear the brrr from the other end of the line. Would someone answer? What would he say if they did—
‘Hello?’
Benjamin froze, phone shaking in his hands. He pushed it against the side of his head as the voice came again, and this time he managed to answer in a croak: ‘Lo?’
‘Hello? This is the Forrest household. May I take your name?’
For a moment, Benjamin had no idea who he was speaking to. He had never heard the words spoken in this way before, and after a moment of hesitation he realised why: he had always been in the room, not on the other end of the line.
‘Mum? Is that you?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s me, Benjamin.’
A short pause, followed by: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, calling like this. How dare you—’
‘Mum, it’s me—’
‘This isn’t funny. I’ll be checking this number and calling the police in the morning. I’m not putting up with this any longer. This is harassment.’
‘Mum! Wait!’
The line went dead. In his frustration, Benjamin slammed the receiver against the desktop. It let out a little squeal, and when he lifted it again it snapped at his fingers like the head of a snake, the plastic having folded over to form crude jaws. He dropped it, backing away in terror, but it had gone still again.
Obviously she had not recognised him. If he could just speak to her again, he could make her understand. He reached for the receiver, then paused.
Someone was walking through the lobby area, coming toward the office.
A thin figure, dressed in black, face hidden beneath a hood.
Benjamin held his breath, overcome by a sudden dread. It sounded ridiculous, but he’d become almost accustomed to seeing the zombie-like cleaners wandering about. They moved with a lethargic stagger, and since none had shown any interest in eating him, he felt no real fear.
This, however, was something quite different.
It walked with an arched back like an old man, though with greater haste. Thin, almost skeletal fingers shifted like crab’s claws drifting in an underwater current, their deathly pale colour gleaming, reflecting the dim night-lights in the lobby ceiling.
The creature appeared to be looking for something: as it crept from one wall to another, its fingers brushing over the curves and contours of every surface as if searching for the lock to some hidden door. Benjamin peered out from behind a filing cabinet as it walked in front of the partition window, its fingers scraping as they brushed across the glass. Benjamin, heart pounding, inched back into the shadows, terrified of being seen.
A desk bumped into his lower back. He reached behind him, feeling for it, and knocked a tray of pens to the floor.
The clatter was impossibly loud, and Benjamin yelped, sinking to his knees, cowering back from the window as the creature spun toward him, hood lifting. Metallic robot eyes glowed orange, peering out of a bleached human skull, jaw opening to emit a sharp gasp that could have been either surprise or a warning. Then it was gone, bolting down the corridors, cloak billowing in a sweeping wave that blended into the dark.
Benjamin didn’t move for a long time. Whatever it was, it had looked right at him. All he wanted to do was hide, but he wasn’t safe here. What if it came back with others?
Shaking hands pushed him back to his feet. He could barely grip the door handle to turn it, and only when he had gotten outside in the lobby he realised he had forgotten to replace the spilled pens. No matter. He would happily confess his trespassing in exchange for a thousand cleans in the Locker Room, if he got back to his dorm room unharmed.
Once again, silence had descended upon the school. The main entrance was before him, twin staircases rising up to a wide concourse at the rear. In the shadows beneath them stood half a dozen doors and intersecting corridors. Other
than the one to the extreme left leading to the Dining Hall, Benjamin had no clue where they went.
Unsure of what he was doing, Benjamin pushed through the main doors and out onto the wide courtyard on the clifftop in front of the school. Despite the gloom and shadow of the building’s interior, outside it wasn’t totally dark, with the orange sun still visible on the far horizon, lighting up the clouds beyond the edge of the world in a rainbow of brilliant colours.
Benjamin walked to the wall surrounding the courtyard and looked left back toward the bay where the rope bridge hung now in shadow, its location pinpointed by a handful of solar lamps hanging from its underside. Back and up to his right, the cliff rose to near vertical behind the school, with the headland on which the dormitory stood cast in its shadow. The building itself was just visible, a couple of lights glowing in the downstairs common room windows, but by now, most of the pupils had probably gone to bed.
Despite near-freezing air, Benjamin didn’t want to go back in. That creeping thing, and whatever other horrors he was yet to meet, waited through those doors. Perhaps it would be better to just let the elements claim him. After all, his mother hadn’t recognised his voice, and if his family no longer wanted him, he was as good as lost anyway.
He walked to the edge and looked down at the shadow of the ocean, a blend of greys and dark blues until it suddenly no longer was. Without a horizon he felt robbed in a way; symbolic of a future that no longer existed. Nothing over there, nothing to wish for, nothing on which to pin his hopes—
A black shadow rose up over the cliff’s edge and huge, billowing wings wrapped around him, pulling him forward and knocking his knees against the balustrade, almost toppling him over. Benjamin screamed and beat at them, slapping away the massive flapping creature. It rose up, then turned and swooped at him again, falling out of the night sky like a great black tarpaulin.
He ran, making it to the main entrance just ahead of the creature, and ducked down as it slammed into the glass. Then he pulled the door open and slipped through as the creature retreated to make another pass.