Before long the lids of some of the compartments began to twitch. It was his debilitated vision or the shaking of the table, if not both. Whenever his head lurched more or less upright, having slid off his fists that were propping it up, he had to force his eyes wide and count the open doors afresh. “Eight,” he kept declaring, even when someone thumped on the wall of the kitchen. “Had enough for one day, have you?” he retorted, though he wasn’t sure to whom. He didn’t notice when the fluorescent glow merged with pallid sunlight, but it seemed to be an excuse for retreating into bed.
It was almost dark by the time he gave up dozing. He had enough food to last until Christmas—enough that he needn’t be troubled by the identical doors on the balcony. He ate some of a bowl of cereal while he glared a raw-eyed challenge at the calendar, and then he listened to a carol concert on the radio—it was many years since he’d heard carollers at his or anybody’s door. The music lulled him almost to sleep until the choir set about amassing the twelve days of Christmas and all that they brought. Even after he switched off the radio, the numbers kept demanding to be totalled in his head.
Well before midnight he was at the kitchen table, where he stood the bedside clock next to the calendar. The digits twitched into various shapes on their way to turning into eyes, which he could have imagined were refusing to blink because they were determined to watch him, even without pupils. At last—it seemed much longer than a minute—the final digit shrank, but nothing else moved. Didn’t that last number look more like an I than a 1? Summers was attempting to ignore it when it crumbled into segments, but he mustn’t feel compelled to count them; he had to catch the calendar opening today’s door, or see whatever happened. He gripped his temples and dug his thumbs into his cheeks, feeling the bones of his skull. His face began to ache, but not enough to keep him alert, though he didn’t know he’d dozed until his head jerked up. “Eight,” he said when at last he thought he was sure of the number. He oughtn’t to start bothering the neighbours again, and there was a way to avoid it—by tearing all the open doors off the calendar. They and the boxy holes they left put him in mind of a vandalised graveyard, an idea that felt capable of shrinking Smart no larger than an insect. “That’s all you are. That’s all you ever were,” Summers muttered as his head drooped.
When had he eaten last? No wonder he was weak. At least he didn’t need to leave the table to find food. He dragged the calendar to him and fumbled a door open. Some instinct must have guided him, since it was the first unopened one—the number of his flat. As he bit the chocolate, the coiled object on the little slab writhed into life. Its tail slithered from between his teeth, and it wormed down his throat as though it had rediscovered its burrow in the earth.
His head wavered up, and he clapped a hand over his mouth. No more doors were open after all—only eight, he was able to believe once he’d counted the gaping compartments several times. The calendar wasn’t as close to him as he’d imagined, and he might have been sure he’d dreamed the grisly incident except for an odd taste in his mouth. Perhaps it was merely stale and sweetish, or was there an underlying earthiness? It sent him to gulp brandy straight from the bottle, and he turned back to the table just in time to glimpse a movement. A lid had been lifted, although it was instantly still.
“Caught you,” Summers cried. It bore today’s date. The prize it had exposed was marked with scratches, as if someone had been clawing at it for want of a better victim. He shook the chocolate into the bin and tore off the date. “Finished for today?” he demanded, but couldn’t interpret the lack of an answer. He was sinking shakily onto the chair when he glanced at the clock. The number beside the blind red eyes was his apartment’s. No, it was upside down with its tail in the air, but it still showed he’d spent the night in front of the calendar.
He felt as if Smart had robbed him of all sense of time as well as any confidence about numbers. He would be no fun on Christmas Day if he’d had so little sleep. “You won’t spoil this Christmas as well,” he vowed. Suppose the presents for his family and Tina were ruined somehow? He threw the calendar on its face and pinned it down with a saucepan so heavy that his arms shook. Once he’d returned the clock to the bedside table he fetched the presents from the living-room and lined them up in bed before he joined them.
He had to keep reminding himself that the muffled rustling came from the presents, especially whenever it wakened him after dark. His lurches into consciousness were too reminiscent of the Christmas he’d spent dreading next year’s days with Smart, far too many to count—shivering awake to realise the worst nightmare wasn’t in his sleep. The nights leading up to his retirement had been just as bad, and Smart’s fault too. He saw the eyes blink wide to stare towards him, and managed to name the digits next to them. “One and two, that’s three to you,” he mouthed, and “Happy Christmas” when the right eye narrowed to a slit. He didn’t need to go and look at the calendar; surely he would hear if anything happened. He lay awake listening, and tried not to move in case that disturbed the wrappings of the presents, though why should he fear being heard? It was almost dawn by the time he went to look.
The light in the fluorescent tube buzzed and fluttered like an insect and eventually grew still. Summers used both hands to remove the saucepan and then turned over the calendar. It put him in mind of lifting a slab—one from beneath which something might scuttle or crawl. Nothing else stirred, however. That wasn’t why he let the calendar fall on its back with a hollow flimsy sound. All the numbers on the remaining doors were blurred beyond any possibility of recognition, while the festive faces were no more than blotches with misshapen blobs for eyes. Had age overtaken the calendar? Summers only needed to open today’s door to finish celebrating his triumph. He could open all of them to find it if he had to—but prising one open revealed that the sweet was as unrecognisably deformed as the number on the door. The next was the same, and its neighbour, and he felt as if they were showing how deranged Smart had always been or was now. At last Summers wakened enough to realise that he didn’t have to try every door; today’s was larger. As soon as he located it he dug his fingertip under the lid.
His nail sank into a substance too firm for chocolate but in another way not firm enough, and then the object moved beneath his finger. As he recoiled, the door sprang up, exposing a greyish piebald surface in which a rounded lump bulged. He was trying to grasp the sight when the lump into which he’d poked his finger blinked again and glared at him. Even though it had already begun to wither and grow discoloured, he knew it all too well.
He swept the calendar onto the floor and trampled on it, feeling more than cardboard give way underfoot. He might have been stamping on a mask, but not an empty one. Once it was crushed absolutely flat he watched to be sure that nothing crept from beneath it, not even a stain, and then he retreated to the bedroom.
Suppose he’d set the madness free? He didn’t like to keep the presents so close to the remains of the calendar. In any case it might be wise to set off for his old house—he was afraid it could take him some time to find. At least he hadn’t undressed for bed. He clutched the presents to his chest and hurried onto the balcony, beyond which a greyish light was starting to take hold of the world. He gazed at his door until he succeeded in fixing at least the shape of the number in his mind. “You’re the one with your tail hanging down,” he said.
It was daylight now, however grey, and he did his best to hasten through the streets. He shouldn’t be distracted by trying to count Christmas trees in windows, let alone Christmas lights. Today’s date ought to be enough for him. “Two and five and you’re alive,” he told some children before they fled across the road. He mustn’t frighten anyone. Among the reasons he’d retired had been the fear of needing to resemble Smart so as to teach.
He came to his old road at last, only to feel as if someone had gone ahead of him to jumble all the numbers. He just had to locate his old home, not remember which number it was. He didn’t have to count his way to it, and he
was surprised how soon he found the wrought-iron porch. He hugged the presents—one, two and another—as he thumbed the bellpush. “Two and five and you’re alive,” he carolled until the boy ran to open the door. Summers was about to hand him the presents when the boy turned his back. “I don’t know what he wants,” he called. “It’s some old man.”
Holding the Light
As his cousin followed him into the Frugoplex lobby Tom saw two girls from school. Out of uniform and in startlingly short skirts they looked several years older. He hoped his leather jacket performed that trick for him, in contrast to the duffle coat Lucas was wearing. Since the girls were giggling at the cinema staff dressed as Halloween characters, he let them see him laugh too. “Hey, Lezly,” he said in his deepest voice. “Hey, Dianne.”
“Don’t come near us if you’ve got a cold,” Lezly protested, waving a hand that was bony with rings in front of her face.
“It’s just how boys his age talk,” Dianne said far too much like a sympathetic adult and blinked her sparkly purple eyelids. “Who’s your friend, Tom?”
“It’s my cousin Lucas.”
“Hey, Luke.”
Lezly said it too and held out her skull-ringed hand, at which Lucas stared as if it were an inappropriate present. “He’s like that,” Tom mumbled but refrained from pointing at his own head. “Don’t mind him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to give you his germs, Lezly.” To the boys Dianne said “What are you going to see?”
“Vampire Dating Agency,” Lucas said before Tom could make a choice.
“That’s for kids,” Lezly objected. “We’re not seeing any films with them.”
“We don’t have to either, do we, Lucas?” Tom said in a bid to stop his face from growing hotter. “What are you two seeing?”
“Cheerleaders with Guts,” Dianne said with another quick glittery blink.
“We can’t,” Lucas informed everyone. “Nobody under fifteen’s allowed.”
Tom glared at him as the girls did. At least none of the staff dealing with the noisy queues appeared to have heard the remark. Until that moment Tom had been able to prefer visiting the cinema to any of the other activities their parents had arranged for the boys over the years—begging for sweets at neighbours’ houses, ducking for apples and a noseful of water, carving pumpkins when Lucas’s received most of the praise despite being so grotesque only out of clumsiness. Now that the parents had reluctantly let them outgrow all this Tom seemed to be expected to take even more care of his cousin. Perhaps Lucas sensed his resentment for once, because he said “We don’t have to go to a film.”
“Who doesn’t?” said Dianne.
Tom wanted to say her and Lezly too, but first he had to learn “Where, then?”
“The haunted place.” When nobody admitted to recognising it Lucas said “Grinfields.”
“Where the boy and girl killed themselves together, you mean,” Lezly said.
“No, he did first,” Dianne said, “and she couldn’t live without him.”
It was clear that Lucas wasn’t interested in these details, and he barely let her finish. “My mum and dad say they did it because they watched films you aren’t supposed to watch.”
“My parents heard they were always shopping,” Tom made haste to contribute. “Them and their families spent lots of money they didn’t have and all it did was leave them thinking nothing was worth anything.”
That was his father’s version. Perhaps it sounded more like a gibe at the girls than he was afraid Lucas’s comment had. “Why do you want us to go there, Luke?” Dianne said.
“Who’s Luke?”
“I told you,” Tom said in some desperation, “he’s like that.”
“No I’m not, I’m like Lucas.”
At such times Tom understood all too well why his cousin was bullied at school. There was also the way Lucas stared at anybody unfamiliar as if they had to wait for him to make up his mind about them, and just now his pasty face—far spottier than Tom’s and topped with unruly red hair—was a further drawback. Nevertheless Dianne said “Are you sure you don’t want to see our film?”
She was speaking to Tom, but Lucas responded. “We can’t. We’ve been told.”
“I haven’t,” Tom muttered. He watched the girls join the queue for the ticket desk manned by a tastefully drooling vampire in a cloak, and then he turned on Lucas. “We need to switch our phones off. We’re in the cinema.”
Accuracy mattered most to Lucas. Once he’d done as he was told Tom said “Let’s go, and not to the kids’ film either.”
A frown creased Lucas’s pudgy forehead. “Which one, then?”
“None of them. We’ll go where you wanted,” Tom said, leading the way out into the Frugall retail park.
More vehicles than he thought he could count in a weekend were lined up beneath towering lamps as white as the moon. In that light people’s faces looked as pallid as Lucas’s, but took on colour once they reached the shops, half a mile of which surrounded the perimeter. As Tom came abreast of a Frugelectric store he said “We’ll need a light.”
Lucas peered at the lanky lamps, and yet again Tom wondered what went on inside his cousin’s head. “A torch,” he resented having to elucidate.
“There’s one at home.”
“That’s too far.” Before Lucas could suspect he didn’t want their parents learning where the boys would be Tom said “You’ll have to buy one.”
He was determined his cousin would pay, not least for putting the girls off. He watched Lucas select the cheapest flashlight and load it with batteries, then drop a ten-pound note beside the till so as to avoid touching the checkout girl’s hand. He made her place his change there for him to scoop up while Tom took the flashlight wrapped in a flimsy plastic bag. “That’s mine. I bought it,” Lucas said at once.
“You hold it then, baby.” Tom stopped just short of uttering the last word, though his face was hot again. “Look after it,” he said and stalked out of the shop.
They were on the far side of Frugall from their houses and the school. An alley between a Frugranary baker’s and a Frugolé tapas bar led to a path around the perimeter. A twelve-foot wall behind the shops and restaurants cut off most of the light and the blurred vague clamour of the retail park. The path was deserted apart from a few misshapen skeletal loiterers nuzzling the wall or propped against the chain-link fence alongside Grinfields Woods. They were abandoned shopping trolleys, and the only sound apart from the boys’ padded footsteps was the rustle of the plastic bag.
Tom thought they might have to follow the path all the way to the housing estate between Grinfields and the retail park, but soon they came to a gap in the fence. Lucas dodged through it so fast that he might have forgotten he wasn’t alone. As Tom followed he saw his own shadow emerge from a block of darkness fringed with outlines of wire mesh. The elongated shadows of trees were reaching for the larger dark. By the time the boys found the official path through the woods they were almost beyond the glare from the retail park, and Lucas switched on the flashlight. “That isn’t scary,” he declared as Tom’s shadow brandished its arms.
Tom was simply frustrated that Lucas hadn’t bothered to remove the flashlight from the bag. He watched his cousin peer both ways along the dim path like a child showing how much care he took about crossing a road, and then head along the stretch that vanished into darkness. The sight of Lucas swaggering off as though he didn’t care whether he was followed did away with any qualms Tom might have over scaring him more than he would like. He tramped after Lucas through the woods that looked as if the dark had formed itself into a cage, and almost collided with him as the blurred jerky light swerved off the path to flutter across the trees to the left. “What’s pulling something along?” Lucas seemed to feel entitled to be told.
“It’s got a rope,” Tom said, but didn’t want to scare Lucas too much too soon. “No, it’s only water.”
He’d located it in the dried-up channel out of sight below
the slope beyond the trees. It must be a lingering trickle of rain, which had stopped before dark, unless it was an animal or bird among the fallen leaves. “Make your mind up,” Lucas complained and swung the light back to the path.
The noise ceased as Tom tramped after him. Perhaps it had gone underground through the abandoned irrigation channel. Without warning—certainly with none from Lucas—the flashlight beam sprang off the ragged stony path and flew into the treetops. “Is it laughing at us?” Lucas said.
Tom gave the harsh shrill sound somewhere ahead time to make itself heard. “What do you think?”
“Of course it’s not,” Lucas said as if his cousin needed to be put right. “Birds can’t laugh.”
Once more Tom suspected Lucas wasn’t quite as odd as he liked everyone to think, although that was odd in itself. When the darkness creaked again he said “That’s not a bird, it’s a tree.”
Lucas might have been challenging someone by striding up the path to jab the beam at the treetops. As he disappeared over a ridge the creaking of the solitary branch fell silent. Though he’d taken the light with him, Tom wasn’t about to be driven to chase it. He hadn’t quite reached the top of the path when he said “No wonder aunt and uncle say you can’t make any friends.”
He hadn’t necessarily intended his cousin to hear, but Lucas retorted “I’ve got one.”
Tom was tempted to suggest that Lucas should have brought this unlikely person instead of him. His cousin was taking the light away as though to punish Tom for his remark. Having left the path, he halted under an outstretched branch. “You can see where they did it,” he said.
The flashlight beam plunged into the earth—into a circular shaft that led down to the middle of the irrigation tunnel. At some point the entrance had been boarded over, but now the rotten wood was strewn among the trees. Tom peered into the opening, from which a rusty ladder descended into utter darkness. “You can’t see if you don’t take the bag off.”
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