The Grasshopper's Child

by Gwyneth Jones

  She had a stitch again.

  There was a briny, unmistakable smell in the air: it lifted her spirits.

  To her right the lane grew wider, and a faded, broken white line ran down the middle. Heidi sensed Virtual Verruca’s evil powers in that direction, so she turned left. Soon there was a sign in the winter grass of the verge: MEHILHOC. Then a fingerpost, pointing up an even smaller lane to the Ancient Church of St Mary Of The Harbour; and then she reached the village. Houses, a pub and a shop, all clustered round a harbour where small boats lay lopsided on the mud, on either side of a dark river channel. The tide was out but the sea must be near: breathing its salt air on Heidi; bathing her in happy memories.

  The pub was called The Blue Anchor, the shop was called The Fertile Crescent. The river looked harmless, almost jumpable, but there’d obviously been floods. Every building had layers of mud and scummy tidelines, the highest almost up to the upstairs windows.

  Nothing stirred. Heidi had heard of places like this, abandoned seaside villages. People got sick of fighting the floods: they just walked out and left everything behind. The lane went on, over a stone bridge at the top of the harbour. Heidi followed it and kept going, and still there wasn’t a sign of life. Where the houses ran out there was a Rural Learning Centre.

  Learning Centres were for everyone, not just kids; especially since the Ag. Camps started up. A Centre was a place where ordinary people, stranded by the Crisis, could reach out and touch the Futuristic World.

  Where Heidi came from, usually the old fashioned school buildings had been cannibalised, and the playing fields dug up for Food Farms. This place looked new, and custom-built, but it was bound to have the same facilities . . . She ought to get back. Any moment now Virtual Verruca would pop out of the air, accuse her of trying to escape, and drag her off to Indentured Teen Detention. But the Centre drew her, and she couldn’t resist. A scene had flashed into her mind. The Police Inspector was talking to her. He was saying, in his carefully kind, deep and gravelly voice, if you remember anything, anything at all, that you haven’t told us, be sure to call me, any time.

  The thought of what she might have said in that interview weighed on Heidi’s mind. She couldn’t remember a thing about it, except for the closing line.

  Call me.

  She knew she had his number on her phone, she didn’t need to check. She went up the steps, and through the Solar Power collecting automatic doors. The Public Access Point stood where she’d expected it, right beside Reception: but now Heidi was shaking. She stared at notices, pulling herself together. Only get one chance, only get one chance. What could she say, that would make an impression? How could she make him listen?

  She didn’t hear anyone coming, then suddenly a voice rang out—

  ‘Hallo! I’m sorry, this will sound weird, but are you Heidi Ryan?’

  The woman was young, she had pebble-lensed glasses and a mop of vivid red-dyed hair: she wore street-style dungarees, big earrings, a striped shirt and a man’s jacket.

  Heidi nodded, caught off guard. ‘Yes, I am. Er, are you Rose?’

  ‘No, I’m Tanya. I run the weekly meetings for Exempt Teens.’ Tanya laughed, ‘Along with many other duties! I’m the Assigned Learning Centre Manager, I do everything. You’ve missed this week’s session, Heidi. I’m sure you couldn’t help it, but it’s always the same time: Wednesdays, 3 p.m. We get together and chat, and talk about your academic work, and Sharing the Care, and so on. They’re a great bunch. I hope you can make it!’

  Heidi didn’t bite her tongue in time. It escaped.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask my owners.’

  ‘Oh—’ Tanya’s eager grin collapsed. ‘Well, I can help you with that. Heidi, I am so sorry, so very sorry about what’s happened to you!’

  ‘Me too,’ said Heidi. ‘Excuse me, I’m late, I have to go now.’

  The sky was dark by the time she reached the ridge and looked down on Swan Lake: all the silver fishes had dived into the depths. She headed for those ugly chimneys.

  Old Wreck was monkey-crouched behind the desk in the Book Room again, dabbing at her leaky old eyes with her sleeve, absorbed in her storybook. She didn’t react, even when Heidi stood right in front of her.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Nothing. Heidi read the top lines of Old Wreck’s page upside down and was startled to see her own name. The book was Heidi, by Johanna Spyri. Old Wreck was reading the chapter about the kittens. She had an oil lamp far too close. The glowing hot chimney glass was actually brushing against tinder-dry old paper pages. Heidi needed a favour, so she kept her hands to herself, cleared her throat loudly and waited some more. Finally she saw the earbud lead, trailing down by Old Wreck’s scraggy throat.

  ‘EXCUSE ME—’

  Old Wreck Tallis jumped like a scalded cat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Heidi, ‘but I have to tell you. I need to have Wednesday afternoons off.’

  The old lady gradually managed to focus. Something clanked in her dressing gown pocket as she tugged out an earbud; releasing a faint wave of song, I don’t have to sell my soul . . .

  Stone Roses, thought Heidi. Homemade vodka.

  ‘Time off? You’re Indentured!’

  ‘It’s not my idea. There’s an Exempt Teens Meeting in the village, I met the teacher. I don’t want to go, but I think they can make me.’

  ‘Indentured means indentured, you don’t get holidays. Go away. And switch off the electric light as you leave. You are NOT to switch lights on in here.’

  The page of Heidi had grown a crisp black margin. A miniature burst of smoke and flame sprang up: Heidi gasped, grabbed the book and crushed the flame between her fingers.

  ‘I was ABOUT to do that myself! ’ snarled Tallis. ‘Interfering busybody!’

  ‘I know you were,’ said Heidi, handing Heidi across the desk. ‘I was just quicker.’ She picked up the lamp. ‘I’ll bring you a wind-up. It’s safer around all these books.’

  ‘I detest electric light. It has no atmosphere. Give me my lamp!’

  ‘I’ll bring you a wind-up,’ said Heidi again. She headed for the door, and then turned back.

  ‘Why are you still here, little bully? I told you to get out.’

  ‘There’s one other thing. I go running in the gardens, for exercise. I just wondered. Would it be okay if I did some work out there, as well as in the house?’

  Old Wreck pushed back nests of mad grey hair and stared at Heidi with a strange, wondering expression, almost like a kind of smile. ‘Might I have a bit of earth? ’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Heidi: thinking of the door in the wall, except in this case the door led out of the Garden. ‘Like in The Secret Garden, if you like. I honestly won’t do any harm.’

  ‘Except that Mary Lennox, we are told, was an ugly, sullen child. Stubborn, seems a shared trait. What do you know about gardening?’

  ‘Some. Read what it says on the packet. Don’t put things where they won’t thrive, mulch to keep the moisture in. Er, sow seed singly, always give new things a good soaking before you plant, never hold a seedling by the real leaves. Clear away winter debris—’

  Old Wreck stopped her, waving a hand impatiently. ‘Do what you like. You can’t make things worse. And if you want to be a goody-goody, you may go to those meetings, whatever the State calls them. Now GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll serve dinner at seven. Er, by the way, if we can’t get new smoke alarms, where can I find batteries for the old ones? They’ve all had the batteries taken out and—’

  ‘GET OUT!’ screamed Old Wreck. ‘GET OUT, GET OUT! GET OUT!’

  The first book smacked Heidi painfully on the side of the head. Luckily she’d turned out the lamp. She managed to dodge the shower that followed, but Old Wreck’s mad shrieks chased her all the way down to the kitchen.

  At seven o’ clock nothing had changed. Old Wreck sat at one end of the table, Stubbly Chin at the other, both of them totally silent while the slave served them th
eir dinner.

  4: Nightmare

  On Saturday Heidi remembered she’d seen carpet tacks in the Utility Room. She borrowed a handful to scatter, point up, on the attic stairs: just as a warning. Even an Indentured Teen’s surely got some rights. If she collected them again every morning, nobody could say she was causing trouble. She found the oven and cleaned it: scrubbed the kitchen floor and washed the rugs. On Sunday she scrubbed the entire hall floor, a task that nearly broke her back — and was screamed at by Old Wreck for invading the Bedroom Floor, even though she’d only been trying to clean the matted carpet in the passage. She hadn’t touched any of the closed doors.

  She was NEVER, EVER to enter the private areas of the house. She must collect washing from the basket on the landing, and return clothes, CLEAN and IRONED, to the same place.

  In the afternoons she ran in the Gardens, and investigated the small greenhouse. She found a store of gardening tools, not too rusted; and assorted old wellies. The Unmissable Blue Walk tempted like a dream, but she left it alone.

  Old Wreck marched into in the kitchen at random intervals, ranting and pulling wild faces because Heidi had used the wrong soup bowls. Or Roger’s breakfast boiled egg had been hard, which her brother could not tolerate!

  Stubbly Chin, now named as Roger, never appeared except at meals.

  She worked like a dog, thinking all the time about the Police Inspector; the words she’d say to him forming and reforming in her head: like a poem she was making up. She’d be at the Learning Centre by two, if she raced her chores. Plenty of time. She only had to choose the exactly right words.

  She could make him believe that Mum was innocent.

  So the days were all right, as long as she kept busy. The nights were terrible. She’d taped cardboard over the hole in her window, but she couldn’t shut out the moonlight, and she couldn’t stop herself listening for flabby, padding footsteps. She lay there rigid, the house a tower of threatening darkness under her, the same old, same old loop running round her brain. Dad in a pool of blood. Mum clutching the knife. The terrible thing Heidi had done. And then, when she was off guard; when at last she began to doze, the nightmare would lie down beside her. She felt its warmth, she smelt its stink, but she didn’t dare to light her candle, didn’t dare to stir. In the middle of the night, unprotected by her chores, she was afraid it might really be her mother. That Mum’s tormented living ghost had wandered out of her body, and come to Heidi’s bed; and this was the most horrible fear of all.

  Insomnia was driving Heidi crazy.

  On Monday night she was so tired that as soon as she lay down she fell into a horrible pit of confusion, dreaming but still awake. Without leaving her bed, aware of the cold dark room around her, she was trying to get to Dad, who lay bleeding behind the Steel Door in the basement. Her mum, small and slimy as a slug and crying like a baby, was crawling around the Garden House kitchen floor, stabbing at Heidi with a carpet tack. The dark tower under her was full of noises, creaks and mutterings. A throbbing murmur rose from the depths, as if the sea had got in: flabby footsteps fell clammily on hundreds of winding stairs. With a jolt she woke in darkness, sitting bolt upright; and only then knew she’d been asleep.

  There was no moonlight. Rain pattered at her window; which probably explained the sea-sounds in her dreams. The nightmare hadn’t been with her, for once. There was no foul smell, no horrible warm dint in the duvet. What time was it? She reached for her candle and the matches (more precious than candles: you can light a candle again and again, but when you light a match, it’s gone). The room appeared, bare and shabby as in daylight. Her door was slightly open. She was sure she hadn’t left it like that, but she’d been very tired. Her phone wasn’t on the seat of the broken chair. She remembered she’d left it in the kitchen, and felt as horrified as if she’d left Mum alone down there.

  Okay, it wasn’t a person, it was just a phone, but she had to have it. She couldn’t sleep without knowing it was safe, and anyway she needed to know the time.

  She was already wearing her jumper, over the teeshirt she used as a pyjama top. She stowed the precious matches in her trackie-bottoms pocket: put on her trainers so she wouldn’t step barefoot on any slugs down in the kitchen, and set out. At the top of the steps she stopped to check for carpet tacks. All clear, she must have forgotten to scatter them before she went to bed, but there was light coming from somewhere. She snuffed the candle, put it in her pocket and descended cautiously. Surely the Old Wrecks couldn’t still be up?

  The windows on the Studio Floor landing were black dark. The light, a blueish glow, welled up from the floor below. Heidi peered over the bannisters, and immediately jerked back. Old Wreck Tallis was there, staring right up at her.

  Nothing happened, so she looked again. Old Wreck was still there, but she wasn’t staring at Heidi. She stood in the open doorway of a room on the forbidden Bedroom Passage, staring at something invisible in front of her. No, not quite invisible. Heidi made out a small transparent figure, like the luminous shadow of a child, wearing a short, filmy nightie; a bit too big for her, slipping off her shoulders.

  The child had her back to Heidi, her face to Old Wreck: who gaped in horror, in total dumb terror, at this shadowy vision—

  Heidi sat down, very quietly, on the Studio Floor stairs. She wondered if she was dreaming. The cold felt real, the stairs felt real. She could smell the dust of the rooms she wasn’t allowed to clean. She wondered if she was somehow seeing a nightmare that Tallis was having. But how was she going to get by? She absolutely must have her phone.

  A door closed, the eerie glow vanished. Heidi looked down again, and couldn’t see a thing: the Bedroom Floor was now pitch dark. She carried on, without her candle. Down to the front hall, down to the basement, and into the night kitchen: where she dared to strike a match (it sounded incredibly loud) and light her candle again. All was quiet. Everything looked midnight-strange, as if the pots and pans had been playing all kinds of tricks until the moment she struck a light, but she saw her phone immediately.

  She grabbed it. Mission accomplished!

  In the dank well with the three doors she crushed the candle flame, between fingertips toughened by years of doing that job, stuffed the candle away, and listened. She couldn’t exactly hear anything, but she could feel that sea-sound: like the echo of a whispered, sinister conversation; somewhere close. Something weird’s going on in this house, she thought. She switched on her phone’s torch, and held it up.

  The Steel Door gleamed. In her nightmares Dad was behind there. Dad was dead, but still choking on his own blood, lying in the Garden House basement, smelling of rotten meat. And then something alive, with cold wet fur, brushed against her ankles—

  Heidi didn’t scream, she didn’t drop her phone, but she bolted: up all the stairs, all the way back to her attic: practically without drawing a breath until she was sitting on her bed, gasping in the dark, with the door shut—

  For about half a second she felt safe. But she could smell the stink of decay, and something was making a scratching noise over by the window.

  It had been waiting for her in the basement. It had followed her back upstairs. It was here.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t ghostly silent. And I’m awake this time, thought Heidi, grimly. She switched on her torch and saw a dark, fuzzy shape scrabbling at the cardboard mend. Dropping the phone on her bed she crossed the room in a bound and pounced. Too slow! The cardboard fell down, the broken window spat cold rain: the fuzzy shape had vanished.

  But Heidi’s door was shut. It hadn’t escaped. ‘I’ve had enough,’ said Heidi, aloud. ‘I’m sick of this. I’m going to get you.’

  She dragged the broken wheelback over and used it to wedge the cardboard mend back in place. She lit all six of her candles, and stood them round the room, dripping wax to fix them upright. The effect was surprising: a proper blaze of light. Gripping the Rock Mouse, both a weapon and her one true friend, she searched.

  This took about ten se
conds: there was nowhere to hide.

  Then she listened, and heard a tiny sound from behind the rickety bookcase. Still clutching the Mouse, she shifted old copies of Gardener’s World. The backboard inside the bottom shelf was loose. There was a space behind it. The thing was dead quiet now, but Heidi could feel it crouching there, praying not to be found. She yanked the loose board, thrust her arm into the dark, and closed her fist on fur.

  It struggled but it didn’t attack. It was timid, and Heidi was far stronger. The nightmare was a cat. A smelly old big black cat, with paws like saucers, flat ears, a snub nose, and two huge, sulky, pleading orange eyes.

  ‘It was you all along, wasn’t it,’ said Heidi, shaking it. ‘Stupid cat. You don’t look a bit like my mother. Bad dream cat, where do you normally live? Out on the roof? Well, I’m sorry, but my window is staying shut from now on.’

  She dumped it on the floor: noticing, regretfully, that with six candles ablaze the room was almost warm. But it was a long time to the end of the month. When she’d finished putting the candles away the cat was hiding under her bed. Heidi decided she didn’t care. She left the door a little open, so it could get out to do its business wherever it normally did; and lay down. Her phone was safe. The Nightmare was just a stray cat. She could sleep. Within about ten seconds she felt a stealthy humble weight settling beside her, and smelt a poisonous waft.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ muttered Heidi. ‘You can’t sleep there, Mr Bad Dream. Not now I know. You stink.’

  She got hold of it, and sat up. It hung damp and limp, the dull gleam of its eyes begging for mercy. It was trembling like mad. ‘No.’ said Heidi; but she said it gently. ‘Out of the question, mate.’ A puzzle struck her. ‘Hey, cat, my window was shut. How did you get into the house just now?’

  Suddenly it started fighting to get free: silently, but like a cat possessed.

  ‘Okay, okay, forget it,’ said Heidi, dropping it on the floor.

  Then she heard what the cat had heard: the faintest of stealthy footsteps. Somebody was coming. Heidi lay down, pulled the limp duvet to her chin and listened, as if the Cat had infected her with its superhuman hearing as well as its fear — as something terrifying came creeping, from far, far away: up hundreds of stairs, out of the bottomless pit.