Nine Open Arms

by Benny Lindelauf

  Through the doors that stood ajar I could hear snoring and breathing. I waited, counting to ten, till I was sure no one had woken up. Then I went downstairs. It would have come off perfectly if my mind hadn’t been so busy with the letter. It made me forget about the sixth step. I stood on it with my full weight, felt the tread move down, and the wailing noise tore the silence apart. For minutes – it felt like hours – I stood stock-still. I was convinced Oma Mei had heard me, that she was about to call out and come storming onto the landing, her swivel-eye spinning in alarm.

  But nothing happened.

  Downstairs, the table was already set for breakfast. The moonlight was so clear you could even see the pale-green edges of the breakfast plates. The cutlery shone. Cutting through that strange silence came the ticking of the clock.

  The kitchen door was not locked.

  Outside, the wind had dropped. The sky was clear, apart from a few wisps of haze. Like a huge dented egg, the moon sat high above Sjlammbams Sahara. Carefully avoiding the muddy puddle in front of our house, I walked to the gate. Here, too, it was remarkably quiet, as if the whole world was covered by a gigantic blanket.

  I walked up to the garden wall. With every step I took, it seemed taller and more massive.

  I searched in the grass verge. I searched in the hedge. I searched along Sjlammbams Sahara, as far as the cutting. After five minutes, my shoes and dress were already soaked through, and even though it wasn’t a very cold night, I shivered. With every step I took, my feeling of hopelessness increased. Had I really thought I would be able to find those snippets of paper on that windy road?

  I stood with my back to Nine Open Arms and peered down Sjlammbams Sahara.

  In the distance, I saw the ink-black, familiar outline of the main church. Somewhere, a fox yipped.

  I thought of Fie, asleep in the house opposite our old house. I thought about how we used to reach for each other with our hands through the window. And I thought of the time when Muulke had pushed a plank through the window and wanted to crawl across to the other side, and how Oma Mei must, as always, have felt trouble looming and had come thundering into the room just as Muulke had put her knee on the fearsomely creaking plank.

  I felt homesickness overwhelm me, a terrible homesickness, and I knew I would never be able to feel like that about Nine Open Arms, even if after this we really did move to the end of the earth. I didn’t cry often, but now I felt tears coming, and I did nothing to try to stop them. Nothing made sense anymore. It wouldn’t be long before I was found out. Oma Mei would explode; the Dad would try to smooth things over. That would make Oma Mei even more furious; the Dad would walk out, stay away for a long time and come back with a new plan, a new place, a new opposite of worrying. We had been through it so often already. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Everything was hopeless.

  I sobbed loudly, and with every howl some of the pressure that had built up in my head and my heart escaped. I covered my face with my hands and felt terrible and relieved at the same time.

  When, after a time, a wail that wasn’t mine cut through my wailing, at first I thought in my misery that it was a fox who was crying with me. But when I realised what I had heard, what I was really hearing, my head cleared in an instant. I turned in amazement.

  I knew this sound. I had heard it often. What’s more, I had made that sound myself often enough. It was the pump in the cemetery. Someone was pumping water. In the dead of night, someone was busy pumping water!

  Later, it would become one of our favourite what-if stories.

  What if we’d come home from school later that day?

  What if we’d missed the man from the Rotterdam Banking Society and hadn’t then fought about that letter?

  Would I have discovered what I discovered then?

  Would we ever have solved the mystery of Nine Open Arms?

  If it had been a ghost, something left behind by Muulke’s tragical tragedy, I wouldn’t even have found it strange. Perhaps I had rather expected something like that. But it was no ghost.

  In the moonlight, among the looming white gravestones, pale as a ghost, but wearing a grim expression that had nothing ghostly about it, and moving in a brisk way I would have recognised anywhere, sat Oma Mei. She sat by the grave without a name and scrubbed and scoured as if her life depended on it.

  they’re just beds

  The Dad and our brothers had gone out. Oma Mei was still at Nol and Nettie’s. I was planning to talk to Muulke without Jess around: I didn’t want to make her even more fearful than she already was.

  We were sitting on the wooden front fence.

  ‘Will you do something for me?’ I asked Jess.

  I pointed at the baby carriage with the empty tubs inside.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘All you have to do is take the tubs to the cemetery and pump water into them. I’ll bring the full tubs back.’

  She stared at me.

  ‘Now’s your chance,’ I said. ‘When Oma Mei comes home . . . ’

  Jess thought. Her coal-black eyes became even darker. She was the only one of us who had eyes like that. She’d inherited them from the Mam with the rag-doll heart. I knew she loved doing jobs that she wasn’t really supposed to do.

  ‘Only if you come with me,’ she said eventually.

  I shook my head. ‘All or nothing.’

  ‘But my wreckbone . . . ’

  ‘It can cope with that.’

  ‘But Oma Mei says . . . ’

  ‘Oma Mei exaggerates at times.’

  Jess stared towards the cemetery. I could see she was hesitating. I could see the fear was winning. I should have known better: no matter how much Jess wanted to be part of everything, she would always be scared of the cemetery. Next to me, Muulke shifted. ‘If you half-shut your eyes,’ she said, ‘and look at the gravestones, they look just like beds. All of them, bedheads and bed ends. And then you tell yourself, They’re just beds.

  ’ Jess stared at the hedge.

  ‘Say it,’ said Muulke.

  ‘They’re just beds . . . ’ ‘And nothing else.’

  ‘And nothing else.’

  ‘Once more.’

  Jess repeated the words again and again. I was relieved to see her hunched shoulders relax a little. She took hold of the baby carriage. Muttering, and with her eyes already squeezing shut, she walked over to the hedge. At the gap, she turned around.

  ‘Just beds, all of them,’ Muulke called.

  ‘Only pumping,’ I warned. ‘I’m doing the rest.’

  Jess waved and was gone.

  I told Muulke everything. At first, she looked jealous (when I told her I’d snuck outside by myself), then she laughed (when I told her how I’d searched on my knees for the snippets of paper), but finally she fell silent.

  ‘Oma Mei?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the middle of the night in the cemetery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she was scrubbing the gravestone without a name?’

  ‘As if it was a matter of life and death.’

  Muulke whistled. Then she said nothing for a while, but I could see something brewing in her eyes. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure telling her had been such a good idea.

  ‘Strange things happen here,’ she said in a lugubrious voice.

  ‘One strange thing,’ I said.

  Muulke shook her head. ‘And what about those pinched cigars? And that ‘argh’ from under the ground?’

  Perhaps I’d hoped that she’d give me a logical explanation. Or that she’d laugh at me. Either way, I would have preferred anything rather than what she was doing now.

  ‘That was just once,’ I said. ‘We’ve never heard it since. And those cigars . . . they were just nicked, it happens all the time.’

  ‘And Oma Mei scrubbing gravestones in the middle of the night, does that happen all the time, too?’

  ‘I may have dreamed it,’ I snapped.

  ‘You wish!’
/>   Sometimes I hated Muulke so much I scared myself.

  ‘You can hit me later,’ Muulke said calmly. ‘But first you have to listen.’ She shifted, picked a bit at the splintery wood and smoothed her dress.

  ‘Perhaps Oma Mei walks in her sleep,’ I said. But who was I trying to fool?

  ‘You’re not the only one who’s discovered something,’ said Muulke.

  ‘What?’

  In the distance, the pump-handle began to squeak.

  ‘Do you remember the flood?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘When the Dad and our brothers dragged everything from the third cellar?’

  ‘Yes?’

  Muulke was silent.

  ‘Muulke.’ I was getting annoyed. ‘Stop being such a drama queen. Just tell me.’

  She jumped off the fence. ‘You’d better come and see for yourself.’

  ‘Quickly then,’ I said. ‘I want to be back before Jess is finished.’

  Mr Wetsels’ field was next to our house. Near the fence we shared with the field stood a small shed. It was built of pieces of old timber, with a roof of broken tiles. There was a small window in one of its side walls.

  ‘Here,’ said Muulke. She lifted the shed door up by its bottom end and shook it a few times. I heard a metallic click, and then the door slid open with hardly any noise.

  I stopped at the threshold. ‘So what’s here?’

  ‘At the back.’

  She shoved me suddenly and I stumbled inside. The floor was made from clay and weathered cement. There was a smell of sweat, old rags and cow pats.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ I complained. ‘I could have fallen. God knows what sort of creepy-crawlies there are on this floor.’

  Muulke said nothing. When I turned, all I could see was her finger pointing to one half-dark corner.

  It took a little while before I could see what she saw. I frowned.

  ‘Well?’ Muulke said triumphantly.

  ‘Well what?’ What did she expect? That I’d faint? After wreckbone curses, floods, disappearing letters and Oma Mei scrubbing gravestones in the middle of the night, there wasn’t all that much left that would shock me.

  We stared at the old bed that leaned in pieces against the wall. I remembered the last time we had seen it, that time when the ‘argh’ had come up from under the cellar floor. But there was nothing scary about it now. It was just a shabby piece of furniture, taken apart and put away. Nobody would ever sleep in it again. Rather than scary, it was sad. Without thinking about it, I took a step closer.The crumbled cement cracked under my feet.

  ‘Awful, isn’t it?’ said Muulke.

  I recognised the knobs on the bedhead. Automatically, I stretched out my hand. The knobs felt strangely familiar. My finger slid down along the carved wood.

  ‘Leaves,’ Muulke said softly. ‘All the legs have leaves carved on them. Almost real, as if they’re blowing around in the wind. Lovely, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s just a stupid old bed,’ I said, because I hadn’t forgotten that push yet.

  And then it happened: as if the sun was protesting, a beam of light came through the little window. Countless dust motes floated by. I felt the warmth of the coming summer. I heard Muulke take a deep breath – or was that me?

  Next to the bedhead stood the footboard. It was lower, and had graceful scrolls at the top, but that was not what took my breath away. Carved into the board was an exquisite landscape, with fields full of waving corn, a town in the distance, and in the middle a long, winding road with . . .

  ‘What is that?’ asked Muulke, sounding surprised.

  ‘It looks like a little chair,’ I said.

  We looked at the tiny carved chair on the road.

  ‘What’s that chair doing in the middle of Sjlammbams Sahara?’ we asked each other.

  Because we instantly recognised our road and our town.

  ‘Oma Mei knows more about this,’ said Muulke when we were outside again.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something we don’t know anything about.’

  ‘Yes, but what?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Muulke, annoyed, ‘I don’t know yet. But I’ll find out.’

  I sighed. ‘Just as last year you decided you’d find out what the matter was with Mrs Brouwers?’

  ‘That was something else altogether.’

  ‘Then you thought she’d stolen her neighbour’s earrings.’

  ‘It could have been true.’

  ‘Or that time you followed Mattie from the fairground for a whole week.’

  ‘He had hair on his back. You’ve seen it yourself.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean I immediately think he’s a werewolf.’

  Muulke shrugged. ‘Just because I was wrong once doesn’t mean I’m wrong all the time. Oma Mei is behaving strangely. She scrubs gravestones in the middle of the night, and she said she’d burned this bed while all the time it was here.’

  ‘Perhaps she changed her mind.’

  ‘If that was so, then why did she say everything had been burned? And why did she hide it here instead of storing it in the cellar again? And why—’

  I never found out what more she wanted to ask, because at that moment we heard a bloodcurdling scream.

  As we ran up the road we saw Jess plunge through the gap in the hedge, sobbing. She stumbled across Sjlammbams Sahara. I ran towards her. She hurled herself at me so violently that I nearly toppled over. While I was trying to get my footing, she clung to me so hard that it felt as if she wanted to climb up on me. Her hands on my arms were like a little bird’s claws.

  ‘What’s the matter this time?’ Muulke asked.

  Jess whimpered. I couldn’t understand a word of what she was trying to say.

  ‘Calm down. Ouch! Don’t pinch! Jess! What’s wrong?’

  ‘Dea-dea-o-y!’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘A-dea-o-y!’ She swallowed and bit her lip. ‘A dead body!’

  Where?’

  ‘In the cememe . . . cemetery.’

  ‘That’s where they belong,’ said Muulke dryly.

  Jess’s eyes flashed. Her face was twisted, as if the tears still wanted to come but her anger was winning out.

  ‘There was a dead body. A real one, Fing.’

  ‘Perhaps you thought you saw a real one,’ I said.

  ‘It was real!’ Jess screamed. She kicked the gate.

  ‘Mind your back,’ Muulke and I said in unison.

  Muulke and I walked through the cemetery, hand in hand.

  ‘It’s really true,’ Jess shouted from the other side of the hedge.

  ‘So what did that body look like?’ Muulke shouted back.

  There was silence for a few moments. ‘Couldn’t see.’

  ‘You saw a body,’ I called. ‘But you couldn’t see what it looked like?’

  ‘I saw a part of it.’

  ‘A part?’

  ‘An arm.’

  Muulke and I looked at each other.

  ‘An arm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Well, actually it wasn’t an arm,’ shouted Jess. ‘More like a hand.’

  ‘A hand?’

  ‘A finger. But it was terribly dead, and it stuck out of that window.’

  ‘Window?’

  ‘In the hedge.’

  Muulke tapped her forehead, and at that moment even I didn’t know what to think. Windows, hands, bodies. One thing I did know: sending Jess to the cemetery had been the dumbest thing I could ever have done.

  ‘Fing,’ said Muulke.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fing!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over there.’

  She pointed.

  It was by now several months since the hedge had been clipped, and although it was still very straight, its outline was softening a little.

  There was a hole in the hedge.

  No, not that untidy gap we always came through – here was another hole, in the
middle of the hedge – or no, not a hole. Jess was right. It was a little window. It was no larger than a handkerchief, and if you didn’t look carefully, if you didn’t really pay attention, you’d miss it. But there was a neatly cut square window in the middle of the evergreen hedge. And a curtain hung over it. I swear, a green velvet curtain covered the window cut into the evergreen hedge. And the strangest thing was that it looked as if it had always been there.

  We went closer. We squatted. Later, Muulke would insist that she saw it straight away, but I know better than that. It took both of us at least three seconds before we really saw anything. And when we realised exactly what we were seeing, we still couldn’t believe it.

  The curtain slid open.

  And through the opening, a face stared at us.

  the secret of the hedge

  At the end of Sjlammbams Sahara stood a house. The house of Nine Open Arms.

  We had no idea yet about Nienevee from Outside the Walls and Charley Bottletop, but from the moment we saw the face in the hedge, that would begin to change.

  Everything was going to change, although we didn’t know that yet.

  An arm came sliding out. A green, grubby arm came sliding out of the hedge and reached for me. I wanted to run, but I was rooted to the ground. I thought, Now the hedge is going to grab me. Now it is going to slurp me up, and nobody is ever going to hear of me again.

  But I hadn’t reckoned with Muulke. Uttering a savage cry she hurled herself forward at the arm and dug her teeth into it. Smothered moans came from behind the window. The arm tried to pull back, but it wasn’t for nothing that Muulke had for years played the soldier in Threatened Treasure. Grimly she held on, as she was pulled forward and pushed backwards, disappearing headfirst into the hedge and coming out again. Twigs got stuck in her hair, her dress got caught, baring her legs well above her knees, but she hung on.

  I wanted to shout something, do something, but my voice had vanished and I stood there like a sack of coal.

  ‘Muulke!’ came a cry.

  Muulke was still half-hanging in the hedge, her feet at an angle, one elbow stuck among the branches. She still had a hold on the arm, her mouth open wide.