by Caro King
The crowd fell silent. All eyes were on Susan Jones and the boy with white-blond hair and hazel eyes.
Fish Jones had been having a really great morning, right up until he turned the corner of the road to see ruins where he had expected to see their home.
It was only three hours since he and his mother had left the house, and then it was still standing and looked very solid and not at all likely to fall down. In that three hours, they had gone into town, where Fish had spent the morning at the swimming baths with his friend Jed, while Susan had gone shopping for the new jacket she needed. Afterwards, they had visited the Star Bar, where Jed had talked happily about waterslides and jumping in the deep end, and Susan had told them all about the people she had seen in the shops. Fish, who much preferred listening to talking, ate his ice cream and watched their faces, and laughed so hard at one of Jed’s stupid jokes that a spoonful went down the wrong way and they had to bang him on the back until he stopped coughing.
When the boys had finished their ice creams and Susan had drunk her coffee and eaten her doughnut, they headed back home, dropping off Jed on the way. Fish was looking forward to lunch followed by an afternoon in the park with Alice, who had promised to teach him to roller-skate. Or at least to roller-skate and still be upright at the end of it!
So when they saw the bright yellow excavator grinding forward over the wreckage of their home, it came as a horrible shock.
Fish’s first thought was that they had accidentally walked down the wrong street. Then he saw the sofa, lying mangled and broken in the middle of the rubble, and his heart turned over in his chest. He’d spent many rainy afternoons reading on that sofa and would know it anywhere.
Although he was horrified, shocked and not a little bewildered, Fish’s first thought was for his mother. He looked up at her. She had turned pale and her eyes were oddly bright and shiny as she struggled to take in what she was seeing. She put one hand up to her forehead, pushing back her wavy brown hair that refused to be neat.
‘Wha … ?’ she said.
Thinking that she might be about to faint, Fish took her arm supportively and looked around for help. He immediately spotted Ray Harris, who lived over the road, and waved at him. Mr Harris was already hurrying forward with a chair, which he put neatly behind Susan just as she sat down from shock, saving her from some nasty bruises.
Patting Susan reassuringly on the arm, Ray looked at Fish, sighed and shook his head sadly. Fish nodded, to show he understood that Ray would have stopped this if he had been able to.
‘I don’t know, Su,’ Ray was saying now, an embarrassed look on his kindly face. ‘I got home from the golf course and they were already … well … at it, if you see what I mean.’
Fish certainly did see what he meant. The evidence was all over the place in the form of bricks, dust and the mangled remains of their belongings.
A burly man in overalls picked his way over the devastation towards them. Susan got to her feet, looking upset but composed. Irresistibly drawn to the wreckage of their life, Fish edged away towards the rubble.
‘Is there a problem?’ Jon Figg asked Susan. He still sounded irritable, but underneath the irritation there was an anxious note.
‘I’m afraid there is,’ Fish heard Susan reply. Her face was ashen, but her voice steady. For a moment, a puzzled expression crossed her face, as if the man in front of her looked familiar, but the thought was soon pushed aside by the awfulness of what was happening.
‘A very large problem,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the wrong address.’
Jon Figg paled. He cleared his throat nervously. He was having the same feeling of faint recognition too, as if he knew Susan from somewhere but couldn’t quite place her. He shook the feeling aside.
‘Hey, Wayne!’
Wayne, who had climbed out of the excavator, headed over to join them. When he reached Fish, he sent the boy a sharp glance and paused.
‘Oy, kid,’ he said, ‘get outta there. It’s not safe.’
Fish stopped in his tracks and sent Wayne a look. It was one of his special looks, the sort that made people immediately want to switch their attention somewhere less complicated. He didn’t use it often, not even when he was late with his homework, but he used it now because he was, quite suddenly, very angry that the person who had knocked his home down should now be telling him to keep out of it. Fish didn’t often get angry, he didn’t see the point in it, but right now it was the only feeling that fit.
Wayne’s blue eyes met Fish’s hazel ones for a single second, before he gave in and looked away. Blinking, Wayne cleared his throat and amended his words to, ‘Be careful, right?’ before hurrying over to join the throng gathering around Susan and Jon Figg.
Fish took a deep breath, then returned to exploring the ruins, looking for anything salvageable. It was very clear by now that his whole life, or at least his life as he knew it, had just been brutally ripped away. For a moment, he felt angry again, but he let it pass and dropped to one knee to rummage in the debris at his feet.
‘What’s the address on the worksheet?’ Jon Figg was demanding, over on the edge of the demolition site.
Wayne hurried to a van parked nearby, dug out a clipboard and squinted at the typed notes pinned to it.
‘Trod on my reading specs this morning,’ he grumbled. ‘Blowed if I know how they got on the stairs like that. Right … Number … twenny-seven … Nightingale … Road.’
Eyes swivelled to the road sign. All except for Fish’s. He pulled something out of the rubble, inspected it and threw it away.
Jon Figg grinned. It was the grin of a man who was trying not to look doom in the face. ‘Right … er …’
‘Row,’ said Ray. ‘This is Nightingale Row. Ar, oh, doubleyew.’
Beads of sweat broke out along Jon Figg’s forehead. He tried to say something, but it came out as a meaningless croak.
‘So, what you’re saying is we demolished number twenty-seven, Nightingale Row, when we should have demolished number twenty-seven, Nightingale Road, right?’ Wayne was asking carefully.
‘Right.’
‘And there’s, like, people living here?’ Wayne wore the expression of a scorned man proved right. Which he was.
‘Not any more there aren’t,’ snapped Mr Harris. ‘Didn’t you check the address? How on earth did this happen?’
‘I know.’
Many pairs of curious eyes turned to look at Jon Figg. A few yards away, Fish looked up from his search to listen. Seeing the movement, Wayne sent him a nervous glance.
Jon Figg had gone the colour of unbaked pastry. He rubbed an arm across his clammy forehead, pushing back his hat and leaving a grimy smudge.
‘It’s like this.’ His eyes went glazed. ‘I was late this morning, see, on account of the dog exploding and the tree falling on the roof and crushing the car and all that. So what with the worry, because my Emily was in the car and got her head bashed, see, I guess I wasn’t paying attention when I read the address and I got it wrong. Wayne couldn’t see it properly anyway, so he wasn’t able to spot the mistake. When we arrived he did point out that there were curtains up …’
Wayne nodded righteously.
‘… but I was just too wrapped up in my own worries to listen.’
Fish studied him. Jon Figg looked like a man whose world was falling apart, which Fish thought was pretty grim since all he had done was misread an address. But then, demolishing people’s homes while they were still living in them was pretty grim too.
His gaze left the sagging form of Jon Figg to sweep over the curious faces of the watching crowd and then beyond them to the long curve of the street. In that glance he saw cars and houses and trees and the postman and a small grey cat. He saw a bicycle with a bent wheel propped against a wall, a scrap of paper dropped on the pavement, and a fallen dustbin.
And he also saw a demon on the postbox.
3
NOT ORDINARY
A shiver of fear ran down Fish’s spine and he
hastily switched his gaze back to the circle of people around his mother – his direct gaze, at any rate – but out of the corner of his eye he watched the demon cautiously. The creature was sitting in full view, confident that ordinary humankind couldn’t see it.
Fish didn’t know why he was different. He had always been that way and had come to the conclusion that he was just one of those unfortunate people that fate had allowed to be born with extra-special vision. There didn’t seem to be any reason for it that he could figure out. At least, he hadn’t found one so far. Apart from Alice and Jed, the two friends he trusted absolutely, Fish had never told anyone about his extra-special vision, not even his mother. He knew how hard it would be for her to believe. She would worry, and take him to the doctor, and it wouldn’t be good.
Now, so it wouldn’t guess that he could see it, Fish tried to act as if the creature wasn’t there. He hoped it would go away soon, but he had a nasty feeling that it wouldn’t, that it was somehow connected to the destruction of their home.
From this distance he couldn’t make out the details, but the demon reminded him of a bony cat, only nearly the same size as Fish. It had a horrible skinned look about it, sort of red and glistening. It moved, raising its head to examine the group of humans in front of it. In case it spotted him looking, Fish switched his attention back to the rubble around him. After a moment, he risked one more quick glance at the demon. Strangely, the creature seemed to be writing in a notebook.
Unaware of Fish’s scrutiny, Grimshaw had flicked back a page and was adding ‘Wretched with Humiliation’ to the notes underneath Jon Figg’s name. He then put a tick through the word ‘Job’. As he turned back to Susan Jones, Grimshaw felt that glow of pride again. Symmetry, that was definitely the word. Under her name he put a bold tick through the word ‘Home’. There were no comments yet. He was hoping for something like, ‘Screaming and Crying followed by Collapse and Ambulance’, so he sat with his pencil poised and his tail curling and uncurling as he noted their every expression.
Susan Jones took a quivering breath, drew herself up and looked Jon Figg in the eye.
‘I’m sorry about your terrible day,’ she said with the faintest quiver in her voice, ‘but the fact is you’ve just made a horrible mistake.’
Grimshaw flicked his ears, surprise registering on his ugly features. He stared from Mrs Jones to his notebook, and then back again. None of the usual comments would do. Finally, after an inner struggle, he wrote: ‘Dignified in the Face of Disaster’. Reading it over, he nodded, satisfied. It was fitting and it made a nice change too. Lampwick wouldn’t like it, but Grimshaw felt that it was important to be honest about these things.
By now Jon was the colour of old dishcloths. He nodded speechlessly.
‘We will, of course, be in touch with your company about this,’ Susan went on. ‘In the meantime I don’t suppose I can go … the word “in” doesn’t seem quite right, but …’ her voice tailed off then picked up again. ‘I mean, there must be things in the … remains of the house that we could save?’
Fish stood up from the rubble and looked at her. She caught his eye and sighed as he gave a brief shake of his head.
Jon was in agony. ‘Erm … see …’
‘I suppose it’s too dangerous for us to go in there. Even if there was anything to save.’
Jon nodded dumbly, though she had really been speaking to Fish.
‘I thought so. Then we’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got.’
The crowd murmured. Some of them were already slipping away, their eyes suddenly guilty. With great concentration, Grimshaw wrote, ‘Of NOBLE Bearing’. He put noble in capitals because he liked capitals and felt they gave things a certain style.
‘Where will you go?’ asked Ray.
Susan squared her shoulders. ‘We will go to my sister’s,’ she said. ‘We will go and live with Marsha.’
Impressed, Grimshaw added, ‘And BRAVE’, then underlined it. He wasn’t used to his Sufferers behaving so well. Not to mention that he had already encountered Marsha and thought the Joneses were in for a rough time. Well, up until he killed them, anyway.
By now the crowd had disappeared, apart from one or two hardened disaster-lovers who didn’t care how much they were intruding on other people’s lives, so long as there was a good tragedy to look at. Jon was having a long conversation with his HQ on his mobile phone, and Ray was pressing Susan to at least have a sit-down before she set off for her sister’s.
Susan shook her head. ‘Thank you, Ray, but we should go straight to Marsha.’
While they talked, Fish took a last look round. This time, something caught his eye, something in the wreckage that he hadn’t noticed before, although how he had missed it he didn’t know. It was sticking out of the rubble, and right under his nose too.
He leaned down to pick it up. It was his favourite book, the one about a girl who had her whole life stolen away, and apart from a little dust and a bent cover it was all right. He stuffed it into his back pocket. Then he stood in the ruins of his home and, with a hollow feeling inside his chest, said a silent goodbye to his past. A whole chapter of his life had just been closed without warning. Which meant that a new chapter was about to begin. He was afraid it might not be a comfortable one.
That done, he hurried back to his mother.
‘Then let me drive you, mmm?’ Ray was saying. ‘You won’t want to worry about the journey after a shock like this.’
Susan hesitated, but Fish got in front of her and nodded firmly, looking Ray in the eye. It was just what they needed. Rubble blocked the garage and driveway, Susan was obviously still light-headed with shock, and the trip to Marsha’s by public transport meant going on the train. From Fish’s point of view this was a bad thing because he would have to face the whispers that loved the dark and tended to hang out in attics, cellars, telephone lines and railway tunnels. Whispers were the echoes of things that people buried deep inside, the darknesses from the corners of their mind that they would die rather than say, or even think, out loud. And since they had no place in their owner’s heads, they had to go somewhere. These whispers were not something Fish wanted to deal with today.
Susan picked up the message. ‘Thank you, Ray,’ she said gratefully, her voice cracking.
Fish pressed his mother’s hand and she squeezed back, giving him a small but reassuring smile. He could see past it to her eyes, which were the dark grey they always went when she was unhappy, so he looked into them firmly. Her smile widened and, more importantly, her eyes lightened.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We’ll be fine!’
By now, Ray had run the car out of the garage and was waiting for them. Susan climbed into the front and Fish into the back. It felt strange, as if they were starting off on a long journey and had forgotten their luggage. As they drove away, Fish turned so that he could see out of the back window. He knew that anyone who saw him would think that he was taking a last look at his old home, but he wasn’t. He was looking at the postbox.
The demon that had been sitting on top of it was gone.
4
A SHEEP FROM ABOVE
Susan’s finger had hardly left the doorbell of her sister’s large and very expensive house when the door was jerked open and Marsha appeared. She was dressed in black from head to foot.
‘Oh! Susan! I’m so glad you came! It’s been the most terrible day!’
Susan blinked, taken by surprise. ‘Um … yes, it has rather.’
Fish shivered, though it wasn’t cold. There was something wrong with his aunt. She looked … shiny. Really shiny. Not just glowing with inner feelings or anything, but actually radiating light. His heart chilled as he wondered what this meant. From the things he could see that ordinary humans couldn’t, he understood that children, the newly in love, and the truly innocent always wore a golden light around them, but the shine that came from Marsha was paler, more silvery. He had seen people with it before, but they were just people on the street o
r in shops, no one he knew well enough to find out why they were shining.
‘Welcome, dear sister,’ sighed Marsha. She hugged Susan as soon as they were through the door, though Fish thought that old-fashioned, romantic novelists would describe it more like, ‘She clasped Susan to her bosom,’ or some such. Marsha read a lot of romantic novels. In fact most of the time she thought she lived in one.
When she let Susan go, Marsha turned to Fish. She hesitated a moment then pursed up her mouth and kissed him delicately from as far away as she could manage. Fish didn’t blame her. Once, when he was very small, he had bitten her when she tried to cuddle him, because he didn’t like the stifling sweetness of her perfume. She had kept her distance ever since. Now, he smiled at her. Marsha gave him a confused look.
‘Darling child,’ she murmured.
‘How did you know?’ asked Susan, taking off her coat and dropping it over the banister.
‘I was about to ask the same thing! Some kind of sibling telepathy, I suppose! How wonderful! But then we were always so close.’
‘We haven’t spoken for over a month, we only see each other at Christmas and birthdays …’
‘Oh, don’t be so tiresome, dear. Sibling telepathy goes so much deeper than mere visits!’
Gently, Fish pushed Susan ahead of him in the direction of the lounge. Waiting for an invitation from Marsha was like waiting for mountains to crumble.
Marsha’s lounge was beautiful. It was also pale cream and gave Fish the heebie-jeebies, because every smudge showed up like a beacon of muck. The clouds had darkened on their way here and it had rained briefly but heavily. Fish hoped he hadn’t stepped in any puddles walking to the door.
‘Mind the carpet, dears,’ said Marsha, as if they could avoid treading on it.
‘So, what exactly is the matter?’ demanded Susan. Fish edged her towards the sofa. She sat down and he settled next to her, relieved. Once she was sitting down, her voice dropped again to more like its normal softness.