The Impossible Boy

by Mark Griffiths

  But as it turned out the lesson had been the most troubling one she had ever taken.

  She had been about to demonstrate to the class how mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid produces hydrogen gas, and had the necessary apparatus set up on her desk. In her handbag under the table, her mobile phone suddenly emitted an electronic bleep. She was meant to have her phone switched off in class but she had been waiting all day for a text from her best friend about whether she’d been able to buy tickets to a concert by their favourite boyband. Eagerly, she ducked under her desk. A strange acrid smell greeted her. It was coming from her handbag. She scooped it up and laid it on the desk. Thick, stinking fumes were rising from its interior. Someone had poured acid into it! Everything inside was churning and dissolving as the hissing acid devoured it. She watched, goggle-eyed, as her mobile phone disintegrated into a pool of bubbling plastic and metal.

  ‘WHO DID THIS?’ she demanded in a voice that sent icicles of terror through the hearts of her class. ‘WHO. IS. RESPONSIBLE?’

  The horror-struck Year Ten class stared back, mute with fear. Miss Roberts met their gaze, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. She could normally sniff out a culprit easily, few children being able to withstand her ferocious stare, but today all the kids in her chemistry lesson looked equally shocked and alarmed by what had happened.

  Very well, she thought. Time to turn up the pressure. She’d have the guilty party tearfully confessing in no time. She reached for her metre ruler, which leaned in its usual position against her whiteboard. One swift slap of the ruler on the desk produced a clap as loud as thunder and was usually excellent for inspiring terror in wayward children. But as she raised the ruler to strike it on her desk, its wooden length crumbled to dust in her hands, spraying her with tiny splinters. Someone had dipped it in acid! The fragments of wood clattered softly on to her desk. The class gasped in unison. It was then that Miss Roberts gave up and decided she’d rather be elsewhere. She snatched her coat off the back off her chair. Its collar came away in her hand – the rest of the coat, she saw with horror, reduced to acid-ravaged scraps of cloth. She let out a grunt of frustration and stormed from the class and up the corridor towards the staffroom, where she was pretty sure Mr Osborn kept a bottle of whisky hidden in the umbrella stand.

  This was not the only odd event to happen in Blue Hills High that day. At morning break, a Year Eleven girl named Maisy Quench had been demanding to be given the lunch money of two Year Eight girls. Maisy was explaining that if the two girls didn’t hand over their cash, she would push both of their heads down a toilet and flush it, much as she had done to some speccy Year Ten girl called Gabby something the previous week. The two girls exchanged a frightened glance and reached in their schoolbags for their money. But when they looked up, much to their astonishment and relief, Maisy had vanished. She was discovered later that afternoon by a bemused Year Nine girl, her head wedged in a toilet bowl and with no memory of how she had got there. A plumber had to be called to release her.

  Another strange occurrence was what happened to David Brume. David – an eccentric kid whose chief delight in life was scribbling on people’s books, clothes and schoolbags with a large fluorescent yellow highlighter pen he called Excalibur – was lurking in a quiet corner of the playground like a spider in its web, waiting for some unsuspecting victim to come within highlighting range. He chuckled quietly to himself as he remembered how the previous week he had drawn a beautiful long yellow line down the back of Gabrielle Grayling’s white blouse. Without warning, the highlighter pen jerked out of his hand and pressed its wedge-shaped tip against David’s forehead.

  ‘Excalibur,’ cried David, ‘what’s got into you?’ He always spoke to his highlighter pen as if it were alive but it had never until this day done anything to suggest it actually was. The pen danced in the air before his eyes and drew another line, this time down his right cheek. He pressed his hand to it. ‘Stop it!’ he demanded. ‘Stop it at once!’

  But Excalibur had only just begun.

  A few minutes later, a strange bedraggled figure limped into the school nurse’s office. Upon seeing it, the school nurse, Miss Blakeway, let out a scream – as, indeed, would anyone who had just met a boy whose entire face was a vivid, fluorescent yellow.

  A fourth odd event concerned the trophy cabinet outside the headmaster’s office. In it was a large bronze-coloured cup awarded annually to the pupil who won the school’s popular end-of term general knowledge quiz. The name ‘Gabrielle Grayling’ had been engraved on the cup five times in a row, but the latest name to be added was not Gabby’s but that of Abigail Pipit, a girl who Gabby was convinced had cheated on the quiz by photocopying the answer sheet and memorising it a week in advance. The bronze cup lay now on the floor in front of the cabinet. It appeared to have been stamped on and smashed almost beyond recognition. Oddly, the cabinet itself was still intact and locked. Odder still, and which would not be discovered yet for some while, the names engraved on the cup had mysteriously transformed into mirror writing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  INJURY TIME

  The side of Barney’s boot connected perfectly with the football. It made a tump sound. Barney loved that sound. It usually meant the ball was going to go exactly where he wanted it. In this case, he wanted the ball to sail majestically over the head of Adam Crabtree and just to the right of where Thomas Gilchrist, the goalkeeper, would dive, arms furiously outstretched, on to the cold dry mud of the goalmouth. And this is exactly what happened.

  Thomas rose slowly to his feet and retrieved the ball from the net, muttering grimly in a Glaswegian accent.

  ‘Top scoring, dude!’ Barney’s team captain, Nick Goodwin, yelled and clapped Barney on the back.

  Barney winced.Nick was one of those kids who referred to everyone as dude, including his mother, all teachers, and even, when he was putting them on before a game, his football boots. But Barney hated it.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Barney and jogged back to his side’s half of the pitch. He was not one for extravagant celebrations after scoring a goal. He didn’t run around the pitch with his shirt over his head or slide spectacularly along the grass on his knees, arms raised. He preferred merely to nod with quiet satisfaction and maybe indulge in a dignified handshake or two with his teammates. Anything more looked like showing off – and that wasn’t his style.

  It was a bright, cold, early evening, perfect for football. Blue Hills High had sold its playing fields years ago so the school team always practised in the nearby park. They usually attracted a decent crowd while they were practising but the park was peculiarly empty this evening, with only the players’ coats and schoolbags dotting the perimeter of the pitch.

  ‘OK, dudes!’ Nick called to his team. ‘That makes two-all! One more goal, dudes! That’s all we need! One more little goal! Let’s do this, dudes!’

  ‘Yeah, dudes, called a mocking voice. Someone laughed. Nick ignored them.

  The opposing team (who were, in fact, the other half of Blue Hills High’s squad as this was a practice game) took their positions for kick-off. Their captain, a squat, cocky kid called Dan Perch, placed the ball on the centre spot. He intended to give it a swift kick almost immediately, passing to midfielder Rob Yellowwood, but when Dan drew back his leg he was astonished to find the ball had gone. Assuming some freakish gust of wind, he searched around for it, without success.

  ‘Anyone seen the . . . er . . . ball?’ he called out, feeling a bit of an idiot.

  ‘Look!’ cried someone.

  ‘There!’ shouted another.

  ‘Blimey!’ yelled someone else.

  ‘Above your head!’ bellowed a fourth.

  Dan looked upwards and was dumbstruck to find the ball floating quite contentedly in the air about twenty centimetres above his head. Furious, he grabbed it with both hands, as if the ball were somehow misbehaving on purpose and showing him up in front of his friends. But it refused to budge, however hard he yanked it, remaining steadfastly in position in the
air. In fact, he was able to lift himself clean off the ground by hanging on to it. Silently he mouthed the words ‘What the flipping heck . . .?’ before letting go and dropping down on to the grass.

  ‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘that’s weird.’

  Dan looked around at the other boys, finally regaining the power of speech. ‘It’s stuck. What do we do?’

  ‘Stuck?’ growled Thomas. ‘It cannae be stuck in the air! That makes no sense!’

  ‘Well, you come and move it then if you’re so clever, Professor Stephen McHawking!’ suggested Dan. ‘I would love to see you have a go, I really would.’

  Thomas strolled up to the floating ball. Barney had never seen him worried or intimidated by anyone or anything for as long as he’d known him and he didn’t expect the big Scots lad to start freaking out now just because some pesky football was refusing to behave in the usual manner.

  ‘Right, you,’ said Thomas, staring hard at the football. ‘Stop messing about and let us get on with our game!’

  He leaped into the air in a great two-footed jump and planted his forehead against the ball with the force of a jackhammer. There was a loud tump noise not dissimilar to the one Barney was so fond of and Thomas’s head rebounded backwards at enormous speed, toppling him over on to the ground in a dizzy heap.

  The football remained hovering in the air, completely unmoved, and, as far as is possible for a football, looking a little aloof.

  Some boys ran to see if Thomas was hurt. He shooed them away noisily and stared at the football with wide, terrified eyes, as if it were some hideous demon. ‘That’s no ball o’ this Earth,’ he hissed.

  Nick now approached the ball, feeling, as captain of the school team and as there was no referee present, that he should take charge of the situation. ‘Now look here, ball, dude,’ he began in reasonable tones, assuming as Thomas had done that the ball had a mind of its own as well as the ability to defy gravity, ‘we mean you no harm. I know we’ve kicked you about a bit – but we thought you didn’t mind. We assumed, what with you being a football, you’d be OK with us treating you like—’

  He didn’t get to finish the sentence, at least not audibly to the others, because at that moment the ball suddenly lowered itself through the air and made contact with the top of Nick’s head. There was another tump sound, softer this time, as the ball distorted, flattening as if squashed by a great weight, and then a flomp as it swallowed Nick’s head completely.

  The other boys now began seriously to freak out. Some ran away screaming; some ran up to Nick and tried to help him remove the football encasing his head. Nick himself wasn’t helping matters, running in random directions, shouting muffled instructions to the other boys, gesticulating wildly and clawing, panic-stricken, at the football he was now wearing like a space helmet.

  Barney watched as the football-headed boy ran blindly into a goalpost and bounced off it like a striker’s poorly aimed shot. ‘Bad luck,’ he thought wryly. Then the seriousness of the situation hit home. Nick was almost certainly suffocating inside the football. Barney dashed to his schoolbag and fumbled in it for his pencil case. He drew out his compass, a blunt stubby pencil still clasped in its arm, and ran to Nick, who was lying on the ground just behind the goal, his skin a sickly bluish white and his legs kicking convulsively. Barney thrust the point of the compass into the top of the football and ripped, hoping the point would not spike the top of Nick’s head. There was a loud pop! and the football burst, dropping on to the grass in a scraggy mess of torn plastic. Nick gasped for air, wheezing loudly. The colour slowly returned to his face.

  ‘Thanks, dude,’ he croaked at Barney.

  ‘No worries, mate,’ said Barney and helped him sit up. From the corner of his eye he noticed a bright flicker of light. Lightning? He waited for the thunder but none came. More explosions of brilliant light followed, like rapid bursts of a camera’s flashbulb. Barney turned his head away and shielded his eyes with his arm. He could hear boys shouting in panic and confusion. What was going on now? He lowered his arm and blinked at the pitch. Rob Yellowwood had his arm around another boy, who was doing his best to hold back tears. The boy’s lip was quivering uncontrollably.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ called Barney, rising to his feet.

  At the far end of the pitch there was another flash of white light and a startled yelp of surprise from one of the players.

  ‘Stay back!’ yelled Rob. ‘Don’t come on the pitch!’

  Barney kept outside of the pitch’s perimeter line. ‘Why? What’s up?’

  ‘It’s the lines on the pitch,’ said Rob. ‘We can’t go outside the lines. Don’t you come on and get stuck too.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t go outside the lines?’

  ‘Watch,’ said Rob. He strode towards Barney. As his foot crossed the white painted line marking the edge of the pitch, there was a flash of white light and Rob vanished. Barney gasped. A figure at the opposite end of the pitch waved at him. It was Rob. He jogged back up towards Barney.

  ‘What just happened? You vanished!’

  ‘Vanished as I crossed the line – appeared again back there. It’s mad!’ said Rob. ‘Every time someone tries to leave the pitch, they end up vanishing and then reappearing on the opposite side!’

  ‘Whoa,’ said Barney. ‘That’s pretty messed up.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Rob. ‘What the heck are we gonna do? I’m supposed to be going for a meal with my mum and dad and sister later. I don’t want to be stuck on a football pitch for the rest of my life!’

  Nick struggled to his feet. ‘Stay there, dudes,’ he wheezed. ‘I’ll go and get help,’ adding, ‘my dad’s an engineer,’ as if that explained everything. He sprinted towards the park gate.

  ‘Stay here?’ repeated Rob. ‘Is he having a laugh? Like we have any choice.’

  ‘Psssst! Barney!’ hissed a voice.

  Barney spun around. There was no one there. ‘Hello?’ he called uncertainly.

  ‘Psssst! Over here.’ It was Gabby’s voice. And it was coming from a clump of trees not far from the pitch.

  Barney approached it, a little warily. ‘Gab? Is that you?’

  ‘I’m here!’ said Gabby’s voice.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In this tree.’

  Shading his eyes against the low evening sun, Barney looked up into branches of the trees. There was no sign of Gabby.

  ‘I can’t see you . . .’

  ‘Don’t look up. Look at the trunk of the tree directly in front of you.’

  Barney looked. Then he said a single word. A very bad word.

  A moment passed.

  ‘Ha!’ said Gabby. ‘That’s pretty much the reaction I had earlier. Maybe the fourth dimension just has that effect on people.’

  Barney nodded dumbly. The reason why he was so dumbstruck was that Gabby’s face seemed to be protruding from the trunk of the tree in front of him. It wasn’t that the tree was hollow and she was sticking her face out of a hole in the trunk. Her face seemed actually to be growing from the wood.

  He ran his fingers over the rough bark of the trunk and stopped when he reached Gabby’s face. It was a normal, warm, fleshy human face and it was as embedded in the tree trunk as a firmly as chocolate chip in a cookie.

  ‘Stop that!’ smirked Gabby. ‘It tickles.’

  ‘Why is your face in a tree?’ said Barney, mentally adding this question to his list of weird sentences no one in the history of the world had ever uttered before the creation of Geek Inc. ‘Where’s the rest of you?’

  ‘In the fourth dimension!’ said Gabby.

  ‘In the what?’

  ‘The rest of me is in another universe! I can enter ours at any point I like – even inside a solid object! Amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m starting to think someone might have slipped something a bit stronger into my pre-match energy drink,’ said Barney, rubbing his eyes. ‘It’s been a very unusual day. What do you mean, the fourth dimension? I can’t believe I’m
talking to a tree.’

  ‘I followed Chas earlier to find out what’s going on with him, and it turns out he’s from another dimension – the fourth dimension to be exact. That’s why he can do all those impossible things. He’s something called a hyperbeing – and actually the coolest boy I ever met, as it turns out.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Barney firmly. ‘Do you mean all the . . .’ he struggled to find the word ‘. . . insanity I’ve just witnessed on the football pitch – that was Chas?’

  ‘No, silly,’ said Gabby. ‘That was me.’

  ‘What?’ said Barney. ‘You put the football on Nick’s head?’

  The face in the tree giggled. ‘Yes! Wasn’t it hilarious? I’ve always thought he was a bit annoying – “dude” this and “dude” that.’

  ‘And you did something to the pitch so no one can leave it?’

  ‘I curved the surface of the pitch in the fourth dimension!’ said Gabby proudly. ‘It’s a mini loop in the space-time continuum. Chas has shown me all sorts of cool things you can do from the fourth dimension, even just the small bit that we can get to.’ She squinted at Barney. ‘When I look at you from here in the other universe I can see thousands and thousands of Barneys, all lined up like paper dolls, each one a different layer of your body. I can see your skin, your nervous system, your blood, your organs, your bones. And I could reach out and touch them if I wanted.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Instead,’ said Gabby, ‘I’ll do this!’ A hand appeared in mid-air and clutched the top of Barney’s right sock. It gave the sock a swift tug and removed it from his foot, pulling it through the solid material of his football boot as easily as a ghost walking through a wall. ‘Ha ha!’ The disembodied hand passed the sock to Barney and vanished.