Steve and the Sabretooth Tiger

by Dan Anthony

  I pulled the library hat tighter down over my head. It made me feel safe.

  Mum stopped the car with a judder outside the big arched doorway to St Esther’s Church.

  The desks were arranged in a big square in the middle of the church hall and the students sat around the square. I say students, they were actually just old people. Some of them had houses in Spain, one of them, one of the worst at speaking Spanish, actually had a yacht which he kept near Barcelona.

  So there I was, sitting at an old desk in the old church hall. The sunlight streamed through the high windows. I held a big fat crayon and some scrappy bits of paper left over from Sunday School. I was writing the story of 29th July, so that Jay, Miff and Kyled would know what happened to their brother on this dreadful day. As Mum asked the old people what they’d bought in the pretend Spanish supermarket, I put down my last words and drew a picture of the prongy thing. I had about two hours to live. Then it was Death by Dentist.

  I was trying to think what else to put when something happened. Mum asked a lady in a blue dress with big golden flowers on it whether she preferred black or green olives. This lady, Mrs Prothero, couldn’t understand the question, but she didn’t want the other students to know, because she considered herself to be one of the smart ones. Before she retired, Mrs Prothero was the Librarian at Oliphant Circles’ Library and she couldn’t stand getting things wrong.

  ‘Espera uno momentito,’ said Mrs Prothero carefully.

  I looked across from my corner. All the students were looking at Mrs Prothero. My mum looked at her. My mum can be quite scary when she’s being a teacher.

  Mum asked Mrs Prothero again, ‘Aceitunas negras o verdes?’

  Mrs Prothero knew she'd been asked a question, she was pretending that she knew the answer. She looked one way, then shrugged, then another and shrugged again.

  Mum tapped her fingers.

  Mr Rochdale coughed and whispered at the same time. ‘Olives,’ he spluttered.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Mrs Prothero, ‘olivas. Hmmmm.’

  Mum looked at Mrs Prothero.

  We all looked at Mrs Prothero.

  Did she prefer black or green olives?

  It was the most important question in the world.

  I put my crayon down. I pushed the brim of my hat back on my forehead.

  I could see beads of sweat on Mrs Prothero’s face. She was going to have to fess up. She didn’t understand the question.

  She looked around desperately. And then her eyes locked on me.

  ‘Black or green?’ I muttered.

  But then Mrs Prothero started coughing and spluttering. She rolled off her chair onto the floor and started writhing around on the dusty old wood. Her grey hair spilled out of her tight little bun.

  ‘Water…’ she cried.

  For a moment Mum and the Spanish class didn’t move. They were all thinking that Mrs Prothero was just pretending to choke, to avoid the question.

  Mum walked around to her. She knelt down.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘I’ll get you a glass of water. I asked if you prefer black or green olives.’

  But Mrs Prothero got worse. Her eyes fixed on me and then, as if possessed by some strange spirit, she began crawling towards me.

  ‘The boy,’ she hissed. ‘The library,’ she snarled.

  Her hand extended towards me, her index finger stretched out, pointing straight at me. The old librarian was crawling across the church hall as if she wanted to eat me.

  I shrank back.

  Mum tried to hold Mrs Prothero. ‘Help me!’ she shouted.

  In an instant the Spanish students sprang to life. Doctor Pearson, who had a villa outside Malaga, pulled back her pointing finger.

  ‘Go to the library,’ whispered Mrs Prothero at me, then she fainted.

  5

  The Dentist

  She came round quite quickly. As Doctor Pearson loosened Mrs Prothero’s orange scarf, I could hear her saying that she thought she’d be OK if she could have a sit down. They hoisted her up into a chair next to me and brought her plastic cups of water. Before long Mrs Prothero was sitting with a cup of tea and a biscuit on one side of her and her head between her knees. Doctor Pearson said that it was some kind of nervous disorder and … guess what? The heat.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she whispered to me, as the lesson continued, ‘I’ve never felt like that before.’

  I nodded. I knew Mrs Prothero’s attack was brought on by global warming, sunspots and not being able to understand Spanish. I had other things to worry about.

  ‘That was the worst class I’ve ever taken,’ said Mum, crashing the gears so that they made the car jump and bump along the Western Distributor Road. We swung off and entered a leafy avenue. I decided to have one last go at saving myself.

  ‘Stop the car!’ I said.

  Mum didn’t stop the car.

  ‘Mum, this is a mistake,’ I said.

  Mum said nothing.

  ‘Mum, you’ve got to believe me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something important to say!’

  She stopped the car outside a big old stone house. On the wall in front of the garden was a shiny brass plaque:

  MRS ETHERINGTON – DENTIST

  ‘Do you believe in oracles?’ I asked. I didn’t get out of the car.

  Mum looked straight ahead. ‘What?’ she sighed.

  ‘Oracles, soothsayers, people who have the power to see into the future. A bit like the elves in The Hobbit.’

  Mum shook her head and looked at her watch.

  ‘Mrs Prothero’s attack was a premonition. It means we’re heading towards danger.’

  ‘Steve, we’re late,’ said Mum opening the door.

  I grabbed her arm. This was my last chance.

  ‘Did you see her point?’ I said.

  ‘It was the hat,’ said Mum. She thought for a moment. ‘She’s a retired librarian. I think she just got a bit confused.’

  ‘She knew I’m in danger,’ I said. ‘She knew Mrs Etherington will trip on the cable and stick her prongy thing straight into my brain.’

  ‘Steve,’ said Mum, pulling away from me and onto the pavement, ‘You’ve been coming here for years. It’s just a check-up. For goodness’ sake, stop being such a wimp.’

  I stopped. My face went red. I felt my lip quiver. I felt like saying, ‘I am not being a wimp.’ But that would have been wimpy.

  I said nothing. I knew that this was the brave thing to do. I had to deal with it myself. A dentist would kill me with a prongy thing. Like a brave king heading for the beheader, I stepped out of the car. I walked in silence through the neat little front garden of Mrs Etherington’s surgery. I walked through the door in front of Mum. I went to the counter and gave my name to the receptionist and Mrs Etherington’s head immediately popped into view from behind a white door. She looked strangely smiley.

  ‘Steve! I’ve been waiting for you,’ she laughed. She was practically cackling. ‘You’re my last patient. Once I’ve got you out of the way I can go and play tennis.’

  I walked, stiffly, calmly. I thought about Groucho lapping up the sarsaparilla from a curry carton in the back lane. I remembered how he looked up at me, wagging his tail. I could see his sparkly black eyes. He was trying to say: ‘Thanks, Steve, this stuff, whatever they call it, is great.’

  Mrs Etherington waved at Mum. She asked Mum if she’d like to go to tennis too. Mum said she didn’t have time.

  I clambered into the big chair. I noticed that there was no helper, just as Mrs Etherington bounded over. She tripped on the cable connecting the big light to the socket.

  I flinched.

  ‘Ooops,’ she laughed. ‘It’s just me and you today. I let Nurse Pedwell go early. It’s such a nice day and he wanted to get outside.’

  Mum sat on a chair. I tried to catch her eye but she avoided my glance.

  The nurse was absent. Just as I had imagined. Now all Mrs Etherington had to do was get Mum out of the room and the stage would be
set for the fatal accident.

  ‘Open wide,’ said Mrs Etherington. ‘My, what a lovely set of gnashers you’ve got. That’s a lovely hat you’re wearing. A lot of my patients keep their hats on. It helps them relax.’

  She started tapping on my teeth. ‘Left upper,’ she muttered, ‘left upper 2,3,4.’ Her face was really close to mine. I watched her blue eyes looking at my teeth. Suddenly she looked sideways, at Mum.

  ‘I wonder if I could ask you to do me a favour?’ said Mrs Etherington.

  My heart was pounding. She was going to get Mum to leave the room.

  ‘Could you ask Joyce at the reception desk to come and join us, just to check off the teeth?’

  Without putting up any kind of argument, Mum walked out.

  I realised, too late, that the only possible explanation was that Mum was in on it too.

  My skin went cold. All I could see now was the big round silver and white light and Mrs Etherington’s head. She had blondy grey hair tied back behind her ears. She approached me with the prongy thing. I closed my eyes.

  When I opened my eyes, we were in the car again. Mum was driving back down the Western Distributor Road. She looked very angry. I felt weird: wobbly, fuzzy, as if I’d just been having an incredibly vivid dream. Then I remembered – I had been murdered by my dentist.

  I must be a ghost.

  ‘How could you?’ I said to Mum, staring right at her.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, swerving the car into a line of traffic on the dual carriageway.

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘How could you?’ she said.

  ‘How could I what?’

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, with a serious look in her eye.

  Then I realised I’d been brought back to the living world to help my mother and shouldn’t be angry with her.

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘for a ghost.’

  ‘Come on, Steve,’ said Mum. She smiled at me. ‘You worry too much, nobody’s angry with you.’

  Mum was clearly in shock.

  ‘Don’t be sad,’ I said. ‘I’m here to help. You can call me Spirit of Steve if you like.’

  Mum ignored me. ‘I’m afraid we haven’t got time to go to the library today,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right.’ I wasn’t sure if ghosts went to libraries.

  The next road sign we passed was new. It said:

  GO TO THE LIBRARY.

  I’d never seen one like that before. I don’t think Mum noticed it. I didn’t like to point it out to her. She had enough on her plate.

  We passed another one. This one said:

  STEVE – GO TO THE LIBRARY.

  I gripped the sides of my seat. I touched my hat. It hit me like a punch. Someone, or something wanted us to go to the library.

  I thought about the package.

  I thought about my hat.

  I thought about Mrs Prothero.

  ‘I think we should go to the library,’ I said.

  Mum just ignored me. If anything, she drove faster.

  We pulled off the Western Distributor Road and onto the roundabout to the retail park. We slid past the computer shop and the shoe shop and came to a halt at the supermarket.

  I decided not to go on about the library, at least not until I’d made sure Mum was OK. She must be upset. I sprang out of the car and went off to fetch a trolley.

  ‘What a day,’ I said, as we rolled into the supermarket.

  She smiled. ‘Yes, Steve, it was a bit stressful.’

  ‘First Dad’s birthday, then the collapsing lady and finally – poor old Steve. But don’t worry. I’m Spirit of Steve and I’m here to help.’

  Mum was holding a box of Shreddies.

  ‘What?’ she asked. She had a kind of cross look on her face.

  Mum is a very calm person. But sometimes she gets angry. You can tell when she’s losing it because first she goes red in the face, then her eyes go fiery and then she shouts, loudly. I don’t mean that in an ordinary way. I mean that in an extra-ordinary way. She shouts – LOUDLY. It’s a three-step process. Once you notice it happening, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

  1. Mum started to go red. It was happening.

  ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘I’m the ghost of your son, Steve. I want you to know, he doesn’t blame you.’

  2. Mum’s eyes went fiery. That was the second step done.

  I looked around, I was desperate for some way of stopping her. ‘Don’t go nuts. Count to ten. Try not to blame yourself,’ I said, but it was too late.

  3. ‘STEVE!!!!!’ she shouted, waving the packet of Shreddies in the air. ‘I’VE HAD ENOUGH.’

  Everyone in the aisle turned their heads and watched.

  ‘You’re not dead,’ shouted Mum. ‘You passed out in the dentist’s chair. We had to take you into the front garden and wave towels in your face. You fainted. Just like Mrs Prothero.’

  ‘You mean, I’m not Spirit of Steve?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course you’re not,’ said Mum. Now she was smiling. ‘You’re Steve. Real Steve.’

  I thought about this for a minute. That made sense. I sighed with relief. ‘Thanks for telling me,’ I said.

  She laughed. Mum doesn’t stay shouty for long and I was glad to be back alive. I had a lot to live for.

  I hugged her – she’d been through a lot.

  Mum grabbed the trolley and we moved on to my favourite part of the supermarket: the big freezers where they keep the frozen chips. I like jumping up on the side just to get a waft of the cool air from inside.

  ‘Crinkle-cut or straight?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Crinkle,’ I said, ‘we had straight last week.’

  ‘Jaydee prefers straight.’

  ‘She straightens her hair: she’s a straight-a-holic.’

  Mum pushed the freezer lid right open. There were plenty of packets of straight chips. But just one crinkle-cut packet. It was in the far left-hand corner. Mum leant but she couldn’t quite reach.

  ‘Come on, Steve,’ she said, ‘just have straight – they’re all the same.’

  Mum was clearly losing her grip. Nobody in their right mind would say crinkle-cut chips and straight chips were the same. I pushed myself up on the side of the freezer and leaned right in so that my feet tipped off the ground. I reached out as hard as I could and grabbed the last crinkle-cut chip product with the tips of my fingers.

  I was off-balance on the edge of the freezer, stretching as hard as I could. My head was actually resting on the packets of straight chips. Then I saw it. In between two straight packets.

  A blue dummy!

  I yanked the crinkle-cut chips out as fast I could and stepped back from the freezer.

  ‘What now, Steve?’ said Mum.

  I went back for another look. There it was, a little blue dummy, furred up with a layer of ice crystals. I grabbed it and pulled it out. I knew I couldn’t tell Mum what I’d found.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, shoving the dummy in my pocket.

  We finished the shopping and went home. Mrs Etherington called, after her tennis match, to make me a new appointment and check that I was OK. I was OK.

  I realised, as I climbed up into bed that night, what a lucky escape I’d had.

  But now I had found something even more worrying.

  I lay on the top bunk, still wearing my lucky library hat, listening to Kyled snoring below, staring up at the turquoise summer night sky through the skylight. I held the frozen dummy up. It wasn’t icy any more. And in a way, that made it even worse.

  I had known it was strange straight away. Something to be investigated. But it had taken me this long to work out what it must mean. Still there, way down beneath those bags of straight-cut frozen chips, there must be – an ice baby. It may have fallen in, it may have crawled in, it may even have been placed there by some cruel childminder. It didn’t matter. I knew I would have to go back to the freezer. I had to rescue the ice baby. The only thing I couldn’t work out was what it all had to do with the library.r />
  I looked up at the night sky, framed by the neat square of my skylight. A shooting star slid across the pane. I followed it with my eyes as it slit the sky in two.

  The star stopped. I watched it for ages. It didn’t move. I stood and pushed the window above my head open.

  After all this time watching the sky something had finally happened. The star didn’t move.

  I stepped out onto the roof to get a closer look.

  6

  The Library Of Dreams

  ‘Well, have you got it?’

  ‘What?’ said Steve, spinning on his heels, trying not to disturb the roof slates or lose his balance.

  Steve searched the sky for the slow-moving star. But something strange obscured his vision; something so odd that it took his breath away. Not far from the roof, floating above the trees, he could make out a huge stone archway and it was moving towards him. The entrance was curved, like a church door and inside he could see a vast flame-lit room. Orange light spilled out through the archway and shadowy figures hurried around inside. Steve moved towards the archway. But his feet kocked the tiles and he almost slipped off the roof.

  ‘You are Steve? This place is Oliphant Circles, near Newport in some weird place called Wales?’ said the voice. The voice seemed to be outside and inside Steve’s head at the same time.

  Steve steadied himself and looked out into the night. He could see a figure leaning on one of the columns by the entrance. The entrance slid closer. It was almost like a spaceship, except it was made of stone and it looked like the entrance to St Esther’s church.

  ‘Wales?’ whispered Steve.

  ‘Don’t tell me we’ve messed up the coordinates,’ said the voice, ‘I’m really sorry. I thought we were in a small, almost unheard of country called Wales, I thought I was talking to a small, totally unheard of boy called Steve.’

  As the doorway moved closer to the roof, Steve saw more of the man. His face was wide, with a smile like a crack in a teacup. His shiny, bright, little blue eyes glinted in the firelight and his grey hair stuck out from the rim of his pork-pie hat like a crown.