Seven Sorcerers

by Caro King

  Today there was nothing but a horrible-looking boy dressed like a tramp with a ragged black coat and a frayed red scarf. He was a few years older than Nin and she had seen him hanging around the town a lot lately. She strode past him, making sure she didn’t catch his eye.

  At last she was at the steps and then she was out in the street again. Her spirits lifted and she hurried on up Dunforth Hill as fast as she could. It wasn’t easy.

  To say that Dunforth Hill was steep was like saying that water was damp. On the plus side, the view was amazing. It had turned into a bright, sunny afternoon and if Nin had been in the mood to look she would have been able to see all the way across the patchwork of fields and the spangly strip of the river to Midtown.

  The house loomed into view, sitting under the shade of the Christmas tree that Dad had planted when Nin was five and that had grown to be enormous. It all looked very ordinary and peaceful. For a moment she almost forgot that anything was wrong.

  She let herself in with her key and stood in the doorway listening anxiously. Normally her mother would be there with Toby. Today the house was silent. They weren’t back yet, was all, she told herself. And then her heart plunged as the truth hit her like a falling brick.

  Her mother wasn’t there because she was still at work.

  And she was still at work because she didn’t have to leave early to pick up Toby any more.

  And she didn’t have to pick up Toby any more because Toby had ceased to exist.

  2

  Monkey

  he evening had all the usual things in it except one. There was homework, which was supposed to be an essay on an historical figure of her choice, but which turned out to be the name ‘Toby’ doodled over and over again on the page. Then there was dinner, which Nin ate but barely noticed. And TV, where she got to choose what they watched and had absolutely no interruptions while she watched it.

  It was quiet and peaceful and very, very empty. It was amazing how much she missed him. Far more than she would have guessed, considering the kid was mostly just a nuisance.

  By bedtime Nin was numb with helplessness and worry, and on Thursday morning she told her mother that she felt sick. She had a plan and school didn’t come into it. Fortunately, having spent the night going round and round things in her head until she felt dizzy, she looked pale and drawn and Lena sent her straight back to bed. As soon as she heard the front door bang shut behind her mother, Nin got up. She reckoned that Grandad and Granny would be down at intervals to check on her, but she could work around that. Then, apart from pauses to have a drink (brought by Grandad), eat lunch (brought by Granny), go to the bathroom and so on, she searched the house from top to bottom.

  Still in her pyjamas she even searched her grandparents’ flat, watched over by Grandad with his usual strong cup of tea and a newspaper. Fortunately Granny had popped to the shops, which was good because she would have asked too many questions. Grandad rarely asked questions, although when he did they were often difficult ones. He might be more ancient than the ark, but Nin had figured out long ago that Grandad wasn’t daft. His pale eyes watched her from behind bushy, grey eyebrows.

  ‘Looking for anything particular, kid?’

  ‘Just something I thought I had.’ Nin hesitated. ‘Do you think that you can be absolutely sure of something and yet …’ She stopped, not sure how to go on.

  ‘The brain’s a funny thing,’ said Grandad after a moment, when he could see she wasn’t going to finish her sentence. ‘People think that memory is a fact,’ he went on, tapping his head with his finger, ‘that a thing is unchangeable once it’s in there. If they remember it then it must be right. But that’s just people wanting to feel safe.’

  Kneeling by the cupboard she had been rooting through, Nin stared at him thoughtfully. She didn’t know what Grandad was going on about half the time, but if you listened long enough it usually made sense.

  ‘Truth is, kid, memory is something you can shape any way you want. Tell yourself a lie often enough and you’ll end up believing it, just you keep that in mind.’

  Nin sighed, giving up any idea of telling him more. When you got right down to it, Grandad was saying the same as Linette. Ninevah Redstone was bonkers. It was all in her head.

  Grandad watched for a moment or so longer. ‘Still looking, then?’

  ‘Yep.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s the spirit. Give up and you’re certainly done for, I say.’

  Nin looked up at him. Her ordinary blue eyes met his watery grey ones.

  ‘I thought you said …’

  ‘You don’t have to do things my way, kid.’ He smiled at her sadly and went back to his paper.

  When she had done the house, Nin pulled on her dressing gown to go outside.

  Right at the bottom of the garden, past the lawn and the flowerbeds and down a couple of broken brick steps, was the patch her mother called ‘the Rough’. The Rough was all long, coarse grass over lumpy ground. At the end was a wild, overgrown wall of shrubs and trees. And at the farthest point of the Rough, under the farthest tree just before the garden ran out altogether, Nin finally found what she was looking for.

  Evidence of Toby.

  In the conservatory, Nin dropped Monkey on to the floor, sat down next to it and began to look it over. Monkey had been fluffy once, but years of being hugged, washed and dragged about had worn him half-bald. Because he had been out in the rain, lost all night in the ragged grass, what was left of his ginger fur had turned a murky mud-colour. If she had any doubts about her sanity, they vanished instantly. It was Toby’s, all right, she would know it anywhere. And it proved without a doubt that Toby was real. He had been there. Now he was gone. Something had stolen her brother.

  Nin put the grubby toy in for a wash. She was going to keep it so that she wouldn’t lose sight of the truth. With everyone around her acting like nothing had happened she was afraid that somehow their forgetful-ness would infect her, make her forget too. Rub Toby out in her head so that he faded slowly into nothing.

  Watching Monkey spin around in the machine, Nin wondered what on earth could sneak a kid away in the middle of the night, without a sound. Then remove all trace of him from his home and wipe all memory of him from the minds of his family and friends. The thought that there might be a person … no … a creature out there that could do all that made her shiver.

  Except of course that the whatever-it-was had made a mistake.

  Not Monkey, that wasn’t a mistake. An old toy lying about in the garden would not have been a problem if Nin’s memory had been stolen too. After all, it could have been dropped there by a fox or just flung in by some passer-by.

  Nin was the mistake. Nin had remembered.

  She sat there, thinking about it, until the wash cycle was finished. Then she fished out Monkey, still damp but a whole lot cleaner, and headed up to her room. As she hurried down the hall and turned to go up the stairs she realised with a horrible lurch that there was something under the stairs, pretending to be one of the dark shadows that always lingered there.

  Nin kept going without so much as a false step. She wasn’t going to let the beastly thing know that she was scared.

  Because she was scared. Bone-deep, jelly-legged petrified.

  The thing that had stolen Toby had come back for her.

  Over the next week life went on as normal, but Nin scarcely noticed. The THING became a constant presence. It watched her, with eyes that she could feel rather than see, from anywhere dark and shadowy. Like the back of the wardrobe when she went to get a fresh shirt for school. Or the big cupboard in the hall where the umbrellas were kept. Nobody noticed, although Lena kept feeling her forehead and talking in a worried way about the doctor.

  There was nothing the doctor or anybody else could do about it though. Nin was sure that her fate was sealed. At least she would find out what had happened to Toby, all she had to do was wait. She just hoped it wouldn’t be too long.

  The turning point came on Tuesday, nea
rly a whole week after Toby had been vanished. Funnily enough, the person who shared the moment with her was the school nerd, Dunk the Chunk.

  Normally, Nin would rather have smooched a tarantula than spend longer than a nanosecond within speaking range of Dunk the Chunk, even though he was always trying to be friendly. But when the THING followed her to school and groaned at her from out of the plughole in Domestic Science, she made an exception. Compared to that, talking to Dunk the Chunk was small beans.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  Nin swallowed. She was staring blankly at the sink. Dunk’s voice dragged her back from the brink of hysteria and made her blink and manage a half-smile. She was vaguely conscious of her ex-friend Linette sniggering and whispering about her to one of the other girls.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Nin. ‘Just, my brother’s been stolen and something horrible is stalking me.’

  ‘Right,’ said Dunk. ‘I did notice you hadn’t been yourself lately.’

  ‘It’s all over the place,’ she grumbled to him on the bus on the way home. ‘Mostly it hangs out under the stairs, but not always.’

  Dunk was staring at her, his eyes wide.

  ‘Once,’ Nin went on, ‘it was under the bed.’

  ‘What!’ Dunk’s voice came out in a squeak. ‘Your bed!’

  ‘Course, idiot. Wouldn’t be anyone else’s, would it!’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Nin shrugged. ‘Ignored it and went to sleep,’ she lied, trying to forget about the fit of screaming. ‘Next morning, I got a broom, like, in case I had to hit it. Only it was gone. Turned up under the stairs again.’ She shrugged.

  Dunk stared at her in humble amazement.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘it sniggers when I go past.’ She looked away, out of the bus window. ‘Thing is, there’s nothing I can do. No way I can fight. I wish it would just get on with it and steal me away like Toby. Then everyone would just forget me too and it would be all over.’

  ‘No,’ said Dunk quietly. ‘I won’t forget you. I’ll make sure somehow.’

  Barely hearing him, Nin stared at the rain-wet street trundling past outside the bus, a feeling growing inside her. Anger. The bus jolted to a halt.

  ‘I just thought,’ she said as realisation dawned, ‘it doesn’t know it’s forgotten to make me forget! It doesn’t know that I know what it’s up to.’ The anger was growing. She clenched her fists. ‘So I have got something, haven’t I? Something to fight with! If I only knew when it was going to come for me, I could be READY.’ ‘But you don’t know,’ said Dunk anxiously, following

  her off the bus. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I dunno,’ she said, ‘it’s Wednesday tomorrow, isn’t it?

  It’s bound to be tonight then.’ And she was right.

  3

  Mum Will Sort It

  kerridge was only doing his job. It was just that his job happened to be stealing kids for Mr Strood.

  Peering out from behind a musty-smelling duffel coat, Skerridge watched as the front door opened. He didn’t have a shape at the moment and was just being a sinister patch of extra-dark shadow with eyes. It was his favourite disguise. Excellent for scaring kids, and restful too. Much better than mad-faced clown or bug-eyed monster. All that maniacal laughter and slobbering really got him down.

  The mother walked in through the door, carrying four bulging carrier bags. She was followed by Right Madam. Skerridge never bothered with the kids’ names. He just gave them a description and left it at that. For example, the one before this had been Mangy Monkey because of the state of the toy he carried around. Before that it had been Droopy Socks and before that it had been Snotty.

  He sighed. Gently. Just enough to make the girl pull up and send a sharp glance in his direction. She shivered. Skerridge grinned to himself.

  ‘You start putting this lot away, while I sort out the freezer,’ said the mother, ‘then we’ll think about dinner.’

  Skerridge didn’t often notice people other than the kid he was after, but there was something about this woman that made him look at her more closely. She was sad, he could see that at a glance. He wondered where Right Madam’s father was. Dead, perhaps? Some horrible tragedy?

  Not for the first time in his long and tattered life Skerridge felt the stirrings of curiosity. He crushed them at once. It didn’t do to get curious about the Quick.

  He could hear sounds from the kitchen. The creak and slam of cupboard doors, the clink of tins and the rustle of bags.

  ‘You’re quiet today?’

  ‘Just tired is all,’ said Right Madam.

  It was probably true. Skerridge knew she hadn’t been sleeping well because he had been giving her the frights.

  He chuckled to himself. He hadn’t taken to this one at all, not like Mangy Monkey who had been quite a cute kid really. Mangy Monkey had just stared at Skerridge with those deep blue eyes and hung on to his tatty toy. Skerridge had almost felt a twinge of regret when he stuffed the kid into the sack. Almost. But he had tied the top especially loose to let in a little light and made sure to keep the kid turned the right way up.

  On the other hand, this one would be a nuisance. Skerridge felt it in his bones. And since, when he was in his own shape, he was mostly made of bones feeling something in them really meant it.

  ‘Made it up with Linette yet?’ asked Sad Mum, sympathetically. The unpacking sounds stopped and Skerridge wondered what they were doing now. Then he heard the clunk of a saucepan.

  ‘Nope. No point anyway, she’s such a bore!’

  Sad Mum laughed. Skerridge thought it was a nice laugh.

  Although Right Madam was up at the older end of the age range, nearly too old to see him in fact, it wasn’t her age that bothered Skerridge. The ones that thought they were as good as grown-up often turned into complete jellies once they got a look at him.

  It wasn’t that she was a bright girl and might try to escape either. Skerridge was faster than any Quick and liked to give them a head start when they made a run for it – let them think they might get away – before scurrying after them. He liked to run over the walls and ceiling and then drop down in front of them just when they thought they had nearly made it.

  Doors weren’t any kind of a problem either. Turning up behind kids when they’d shut themselves in a cupboard for safety and whispering ‘Boo’ ever so quietly in their ear was another good one.

  No, the problem with Right Madam was that she looked like a right madam. The sort who would argue. Skerridge couldn’t bear the sort who argued. He was especially nasty to them and had once delivered one to Mr Strood half-eaten, which didn’t go down too well. Skerridge shuddered at the memory.

  There were more sounds from the kitchen.

  ‘Oh look,’ Sad Mum said, ‘coats all over the place. Could you hang them up, please?’

  The kitchen door opened and Right Madam appeared, clutching the jackets they had been wearing when they came in. She moved cautiously towards the space under the stairs, holding the coats ready to throw on their hooks.

  Skerridge grinned to himself. He let out a soft, slow hiss. Right Madam stopped. Her eyes got very wide and she took a deep breath.

  Skerridge let his own eyes glow a little brighter. She wouldn’t see them, but she would feel him watching.

  Right Madam stayed still, her gaze searching the shadows, her breath coming in short huffs. Any minute now, thought Skerridge, she’s gonna cry.

  Then, in one jerky movement, she stepped forward and plonked the jackets right over him. Skerridge blinked in the sudden darkness. He hissed again – this time not for Right Madam’s benefit. Usually Skerridge liked to terrorise a kid for at least a month before snatching them, but this one wasn’t being half as much fun as usual.

  ‘Pah!’ he muttered to the lining of the jacket. ‘Playin’ games, are we? We’ll see about that!’

  Perhaps it was time to move things along.

  When the house was dark, Skerridge got to work. Because he had a lot t
o do he moved at superspeed whenever he could – so fast that he was just a blur.

  First he took out a thin, sharp spindle. Skerridge had made it himself from a stray bone he had found in the House. It was etched with tiny shapes and swirls and had taken him ages to do.

  Using the spindle skilfully, he began to draw all memory of Right Madam out of her mother’s head. When he had done that, spinning the threads into a tight ball, he went on to her grandmother, her grandfather and her best friend.

  The nature of the universe was such that once he had removed all trace of the girl from the minds of those who loved her most, anyone else who simply liked her, knew her or happened to bump into her from time to time, forgot about her too.

  This was the part of his job that Skerridge enjoyed most. It took skill not to break the thread and to catch every last strand of it. He loved the way it spun into a bright, shining ball like a pearl full of strange colours. Once it was done he tucked the ball carefully into the small bag made of spider silk that he carried in a secret pocket hidden in his waistcoat, and moved on to the next task.

  After all, there was no point erasing the girl from memory if he left bits of her lying around all over the place. There were her clothes to get rid of, not to mention her books, toiletries and other personal items. Photographs too, and postcards, school projects, all manner of things scattered about the house, the town and even the country.

  This time he used the spindle in a different way, turning it widdershins instead of clockwise. As he did so, all the physical things that Right Madam had left around became less and less THERE, until they quietly and completely evaporated from existence. The only personal things left would be the ones she was wearing or holding. All Skerridge would have to do was a little tidying up afterwards to make sure the gaps didn’t show. Like filling empty wardrobes with somebody else’s old jackets, that kind of thing.

  Of course, even magic wasn’t perfect and sometimes, very, very rarely, an item would get missed. It never mattered, because even if some much worn jumper or grinning photo image did slip through, one thing alone was never enough to unlock a memory pearl. People just thought, ‘I wonder where that came from?’ and threw it in the bin.