The Midnight Chimes

by Paula Harrison

  I sprang back as something thumped the inside of the cupboard. “Yes, miss. It’s . . . great!”

  Annie Makes a Wish

  e ate lunch in the Grimdean dining room under the crystal chandeliers. Paintings of more posh-looking people stared down at us from the walls and I wondered what they’d think if they were really here.

  I guess a hundred kids eating lunch isn’t too pretty.

  “That thing in the cupboard,” whispered Aiden as we sat down with our burgers and chips, “do you think it was a fake skeleton that someone put there for a joke?”

  I shook my head. “I think it was real.”

  “No way! How can something like that be real? It must be a prank. Someone must have tied string to it to make it move. . .”

  I rubbed the cut on my hand where the spiny creature had bitten me. I wanted to believe it was a prank but I had a horrible feeling I’d just be ignoring the truth.

  Aiden munched a chip thoughtfully. “If you think about it we only saw a few fingers – probably plastic ones, so—”

  I nudged him as Sally-Anne sat down opposite. She was one of the worst earwiggers in the whole of Ashbrook School, always listening in to other people’s conversations. She also made stuff up if she decided what she’d heard wasn’t interesting enough. Her aunt was a dinner lady, which was how Sally-Anne seemed to find out loads of things.

  “Guess what? Paggley’s REALLY angry and says he won’t cook here if he’s treated this way.” Sally-Anne widened her eyes like she always did when delivering gossip. Paggley was our school cook and everyone knew he had a short temper.

  “Why?” I knew she was probably making it up but at least it took my mind off those bony fingers. I was starting to feel a bit less shaky.

  “Paggley’s annoyed that he can’t store boxes of food in the basement,” Sally-Anne said. “He reckons this place must have a large cellar – all big old houses do – but Cryptorum won’t even let Paggley see the basement, let alone use it. And my aunt says Cryptorum has private rooms in the north wing, and the only one allowed in is Miss Smiting.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, it’s his house! Having private rooms isn’t exactly gossip of the century is it?”

  “Oh yeah, Miss Smarty-pants?” Sally-Anne sniffed. “It probably means he’s got loads of expensive stuff in there. My aunt says his parents were rich. I bet he’s got masses of gold and jewels!”

  “Of course they were rich if they owned this huge place.” Aiden took more chips. “If I were rich I’d spend it on a massive workshop filled with tools where I could make whatever I wanted.”

  “I’d buy a house where I could have my own bedroom,” I said, looking gloomily at Annie and the other six-year-olds across the hall. She and her friends were pulling faces in the nearest mirror. Sally-Anne sniggered at this, which made me sorry I hadn’t let the monster with the bony fingers out of the cupboard and set it on her. Aiden and me finished our lunch and then headed outside.

  At the back of Grimdean House, pale marble steps led down to a massive lawn ten times bigger than our school field. Part of it was roped off to be our new playground and a bunch of kids were yelling and running up and down on the grass. To the left, a square of tall hedges divided off part of the garden. To the right stood a wooden barn with a row of holes just below the jutting-out roof. A girl with brown plaits was trying to sneak up to the barn, but an old man in a cap and gardening gloves stopped her.

  Me and Aiden sat down on the steps. I knew we were both thinking about the bony fingers in the cupboard. I had to explain to him about the creature I’d seen last night. “I have to tell you something. It might sound a bit weird. Actually it’ll sound worse than weird – on a freakiness scale of one to ten this is like one thousand, nine hundred and eighty.”

  “Did you cut your sister’s hair while she was asleep again?” Aiden looked at me curiously. He often found it strange how much I fought with my family, probably because it was just him and his mum at home.

  “No, it’s not about Sammie. Anyway, I was much younger when I did that.” I broke off as a dark speck rose from the barn roof. Suddenly more black specks poured out of the barn, flapping into the air on leathery wings. They circled the garden a few times, causing massive excitement among all the little kids. “I don’t believe it! Cryptorum really does have a house full of bats!”

  “A barn full of bats,” Aiden corrected me. “Listen, I need to talk to you too. You know the thing in the cupboard back there?”

  I thought I knew what he wanted to say. “You’ve met something like that before but no one else could see it – until now, anyway.”

  Aiden stared at me. “So you’ve been seeing things too?”

  “Yeah. This spiny thing came into my garden last week.” I grinned – not because I liked talking about the spiny creatures, but because I was just SO GLAD that Aiden could see stuff too. It meant I definitely wasn’t going mad and . . . well, Aiden had been my friend since for ever.

  “Why can’t other people see this stuff?” Aiden jumped up and paced along the marble steps. “It’s been driving me mad. I first saw something on Saturday night – like you said, a creature with spikes all over it. I thought my mum was joking when she said she couldn’t see it, but she wasn’t. Now we’ve spotted a skeleton hand!”

  “One of the spiny things bit me.” I showed him the mark on my hand. “Maybe we can detect freakiness better than other people – it would explain why everyone else likes Hector.” I stopped talking as Mrs Perez walked past. “We should go back. I’d rather fight the thing while there’s no one else in the room.”

  “Not a good idea.” Aiden told me. “Think about it! The deadly skeleton tried to come out of the cupboard and you slammed its fingers in the door. Now it’ll be really mad!”

  “C’mon, we have to! What if someone unlocks the cupboard? What if Mrs Perez decides she wants to store her books in there? The creature could get out and attack everyone, and the little kids are only just down the corridor.”

  Aiden sighed. “All right! I know I’m gonna regret this.”

  We sneaked back to the drawing room, Aiden grabbing the poker from the fireplace. The eyes of the woman in the painting were still following me. I looked round for something to fight with but all I found was Mrs Perez’s rolled-up umbrella. It would have to do. “Just hit it as soon as I unlock the door,” I said. “Don’t give it time to do anything.”

  “Got it.” Aiden moved towards the cupboard with the poker raised.

  Fingers shaking, I turned the key in the lock. Nothing happened. I tugged the door open, ready to smack the bony thing with the umbrella.

  The door swung on its hinges. There was nothing but empty space inside.

  “Maybe we scared it so much that it ran away,” I said.

  “I doubt it. Anyway you locked the door, so how did it get free?” Aiden stared into the bare cupboard. I could see his brain working, like in a cartoon where you get those cogs turning inside someone’s head and then a thought cloud hangs above them in the air. He was right about the creature though – there was no way something that creepy had been scared by Aiden and me.

  At dinner that night, Mum and Dad asked a million questions about Grimdean House.

  “Cryptorum invited the school to move in pretty fast,” my dad said. “I don’t think anyone except him and his assistant have been inside that house for years.”

  “It was really Miss Smiting that organized it,” I told him. “I think it was her idea.” That got me thinking. Why had Miss Smiting wanted Ashbrook School to move in when Mr Cryptorum hated the plan so much?

  “I think it’s a lovely way to make use of all those empty rooms,” Mum said as she dished out the stew. “Erasmus Cryptorum can’t possibly use all that space on his own. The mansion was built for his grandfather who got rich from the department store he owned in Main Square. He handed the business on to his son, Erasmus’s father. I guess Erasmus was supposed to take it on after that but he never did.”
/>   “He went off round the world,” my dad said. “Must be nice to be rich! I don’t think he’s ever done a day of work in his life.”

  “Well, at least now he’s doing something good for the town,” Mum said. “I haven’t seen him for months – hidden away inside that big old mansion. Josh! Don’t chew with your mouth open.”

  “He should do something else that’s nice for this town and get rid of that clock on the outside of his house,” Dad grumbled. “It’s the first time he’s had it fixed in forty years, so the newspaper says, and if you ask me it’s a shame he bothered. The chiming nearly broke my eardrums when I was working near Demus Street the other day. It’s not even a cheerful sound!”

  “Yes, it is a bit loud,” Mum agreed. “Eat those carrots up, Annie. There’ll be no ice cream if you don’t!”

  I pictured the huge golden clock stuck to the Grimdean tower. I was going to have to live with the noise every day at school now.

  Sammie eyed me mockingly. “So you’re stuck in Grimdean House. I bet you cried when Lovell said they weren’t closing the school.” She turned to Mum. “My gym coach says I’m in the team that’s going to regionals. She reckons my floor routine’s the best out of everyone’s.”

  “Brilliant, honey!” Mum said. “You’re doing so well. And after that special merit you got for your geography project too.”

  I gave Sammie a dead-eye stare. Just because she goes to high school she thinks she’s so mature.

  I had a strange dream that night. I was following one of the spiny creatures, and it led me all the way through town to Grimdean House. Then the creature disappeared. Cryptorum opened the front door, turned into a bat, and flew away.

  I woke up, my heart racing. My watch showed it was quarter to midnight but I didn’t feel sleepy at all. I threw off my covers and went to the window. Circles of light from the street lamps patterned the road below. I shivered. That’s how I knew one of the spiny creatures was hiding somewhere. It shuffled out of the shadows, spikes bristling, just like it had in my nightmare.

  Why had I dreamt about it leading me to Grimdean House? Why did Mr Cryptorum have a barn full of bats in his back garden? The stories about him couldn’t be true, could they? That would be crazy.

  “Robyn?” Annie said squeakily.

  I dropped the curtain, forgetting for a second that she wouldn’t be able to see the spiny thing anyway. “Go back to sleep, Annie.”

  “I can’t.” She sat up and hugged her knees. “I had a bad dream. It was really scary.”

  I shivered again. I suddenly wondered if there was some freaky creature in the room. I switched on the lamp and started checking under the beds and behind the cupboards but there was nothing there.

  “What are you doing?” Annie said in a small voice.

  “Nothing! Just checking for cobwebs.” I sat down on Annie’s bed and put my arm round her. “Don’t worry, it was just a dream. It’s gone now and you’re fine.”

  I wanted to believe my own words but what if something managed to get in? My stomach churned. How could Annie keep away from things she couldn’t even see?

  Annie picked up her teddy and held him tight. “You have a sad face.”

  I stuck my tongue out and crossed my eyes, making her giggle.

  “I wish you’d read me a book again,” she said. “I liked it when you used to read to me.”

  “Um. . .” I stared at her. As she was talking, a bright round bubble had floated from her lips and sailed into the air. It had a golden sheen all around it and a picture of a book inside.

  For a second, I couldn’t speak. I touched the bubble with the tip of my finger. It didn’t pop and it felt warm.

  “What are you doing?” Annie put her thumb in the corner of her mouth. She couldn’t see it. That was obvious.

  I glanced again at the bubble. The tiny picture of a book had a unicorn on the cover. “Um, do you want me to read you that story with the unicorn?”

  She beamed. “Yes! Unicorn Goes to School.” Bouncing off the bed, she went to the bookcase, fetched the book and plonked it on my lap. A white unicorn with a silver horn was galloping across the cover.

  The book matched the picture in the bubble perfectly, but how had she made it happen? I thought of what she’d said. I wish you’d read me a book again. An idea sparked in my head. “What else do you wish for, Annie?”

  She wouldn’t tell me until I’d read the story, so I did and then asked her again. “So if you could have any wish, what would it be?”

  She smiled like we were playing a game. “I wish I had my own unicorn.”

  Another shiny bubble, with a confused-looking unicorn inside it, popped out of her mouth and floated up to the ceiling to join the other one.

  Her eyes lit up as she had another thought. “Sometimes I wish I was a unicorn.”

  Another bubble popped out. I stifled a giggle because this time there was a unicorn inside with Annie’s face and a silvery horn stuck on her forehead. She did look funny.

  So that was it – I’d cracked the puzzle. The bubble things were wishes and I could now see them just like I could see the weird creatures. It probably wasn’t just Annie’s wishes. Maybe I could see everybody’s.

  “OK, my turn,” I said. “I wish I had a whole mountain of chocolate brownies.” A soft bubble popped out of my mouth filled with an image of a brownie mountain. It drifted across the room and got stuck in the folds of the curtain.

  My talk of food got Annie started on a whole new batch of wishes and soon there were bubbles with pictures of cakes and sweets inside joining the unicorns just beneath the ceiling. She made ten wishes about lollipops, inventing giant ones and rainbow ones and ones that never ran out. She loved lollipops so much.

  I had to add a few wishes about chocolate chip cookies, because, yum! Annie’s wishes were a lot brighter than mine though. However hard I wished her bubbles always came out much shinier and they bobbed about a lot more and sparkled.

  After a while some of the bubbles popped until there were only a few left. One of the ones left behind was Annie’s first wish – the unicorn book. Not far away, the Grimdean clock began striking twelve.

  I tucked Annie in and turned the lamp off before going back to bed. Once my eyes got used to the dark I could see the last few wishes gleaming faintly as they turned in the air. It was strange to see them but also kind of comforting. I knew the creatures might still be there, outside the window, but in here we had our wishes. Something nice in this new freaky world of mine.

  We Find Out What’s Hidden in the Grimdean Dungeon

  couldn’t wait to talk to Aiden about the wish bubbles the following day. At Grimdean House, parents with little kids were waving their children goodbye. Miss Smiting stood by the entrance, keeping a close eye on who went inside.

  Aiden was waiting for me on the steps. He pulled me to the side. “I was thinking . . . maybe everyone’s been hypnotized, except it didn’t work on us and that’s why we’re the only ones who can see these creatures.” He kicked the step thoughtfully. “It’d be hard to hypnotize the whole town though. So maybe it was something that everyone ate. Or something that we ate. Or—”

  “Hey, I have to show you something.” I said.

  “And the trees falling down on our school – that makes no sense either!” he continued. “I’m sure they didn’t fall down by themselves.”

  I wasn’t interested in the trees. “Aiden! You have to see this!” I took a deep breath. “I wish I had a million pounds. I wish I lived in a giant strawberry cake. I wish I had super speed.”

  Aiden’s mouth dropped open as the wish bubbles floated into the air. “What is THAT?”

  “They’re wishes! They’re cool, aren’t they?” I grinned. “I discovered them last night. I wish I could make them all day.” Another wish bubble popped out of my mouth; like the others, it burst in seconds.

  “Hi, Aiden!” A little boy galloped up the steps and ran inside.

  “Hi, Finlay,” Aiden called back, before
muttering, “That’s my next-door neighbour’s kid. He keeps on wanting to help when I’m working on stuff in the garage.”

  “Annie wants to help me all the time,” I said. “It never goes very well.”

  The clock on the tower started chiming, telling us it was time to go in. When we got to class we tried out some more wishes and sent them drifting across the classroom. My wish that the lesson would end popped right on Mrs Perez’s forehead.

  “I wonder why some of them pop right away and other ones don’t,” Aiden whispered. “What was that one?” He jerked his head at an orange-red bubble bumping against the window. No matter how many times it hit the glass, it still didn’t burst.

  “I wished that it was pizza for lunch,” I sighed. “But from the smell, I think it’s probably shepherd’s pie again.”

  The wishing was fun for a while but then the horrible moaning noise started up again. I tried to concentrate on what Mrs Perez was saying but the sound sent icy prickles down my neck.

  By lunchtime, Aiden looked grim and my head was aching.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sally-Anne combed her hair in front of one of the gazillion mirrors as we lined up for lunch. “You keep staring at everything.”

  Just then a grey face with mean-looking eyes zoomed to the surface of the mirror, its mouth open in a snarl. I tried not to gasp.

  “What?” Sally-Anne stared at her reflection. “Do I have something on my face?”

  “No, it’s nothing!” When she’d moved on I pulled Aiden aside. “We have to find out what’s going on. I’ve got to know, even if it means meeting the thing with the bony fingers again!”

  “That groaning is coming from below,” Aiden said. “We need to find the basement.”

  We dodged round dinner ladies and teachers as we hunted for a door marked BASEMENT or some stairs leading down. In the ballroom we nearly got caught by Miss Rawlings, Annie’s teacher, and had to dive under a cabinet before she saw us.