by John Kitchen
Rudi seemed uneasy. He glanced towards Martin. “We shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s only bedrooms and locker rooms and Dave said we’ve got to be supervised if we go in there.”
“So?” Lloyd said, and he could see Martin had no qualms about Dave’s rulings. He didn’t look easy about it though.
“Okay,” he said at last. “There isn’t no one around, not till the rest get back from school.”
There was nothing on the door to keep them out – no security locks or anything, and that seemed odd seeing as no one was supposed to go in there. Lloyd followed the others and pushed into a dark, low ceilinged passage. There were doors leading off on either side and the smell was worse than in the main building. It seemed to bear down on him – damp with degenerating stones, and a stench of decay and must. It nearly made him choke, and he couldn’t help himself. He coughed convulsively and the others stared.
“What was all that for?” Martin said.
“The smell. It made me gag. It’s gross in here.”
“It’s nothing,” said Martin. “It’s a bit musty – that’s all.”
In the room to their left was a stairway leading to the first floor.
“You want to see some of the bedrooms?” Rudi said.
They climbed to a low ceilinged landing. There was only one small window at the far end. There was a silence up there, so thick you could almost touch it.
They pushed through into one of the bedrooms and straight away the cold bit into him. It clawed through his clothes and it wasn’t like anything he’d ever felt before.
The others were very quiet, but they didn’t seem fazed and he knew if they played it this way, that’s how he must play it too. That was the way he dealt with stuff anyway. The place felt old and sick, but it was okay. It was natural for something this ancient to feel like this. He had to live here for the next year or so after all so no way was he going to be taken in by all Lee Peddar’s talk about curses. “Yeah, it’s okay, this is,” he said.
Martin looked at him and there was a hint of a sneer in his voice. “Thought you was gagging at the smells a minute ago.”
“I could get used to that, couldn’t I?”
“We going down the cellar then?” Martin said.
He saw an expression of uncertainty in Rudi’s face, but – bedrooms, cellars – it was all the same to him. One was above ground, the other below ground. It wasn’t any kind of a big deal. “Yeah, why not?” he said.
At the end of the passage downstairs, there was a door – an old, wooden thing, held closed with a metal latch. Martin pushed at it and flicked a switch on the wall, and somewhere, from the bowels of the building, Lloyd saw the disembodied glow of light glimmering on the stairwell. He couldn’t see the light itself and it felt eerie.
When they reached the bottom, there were no windows, and the cement, or whatever it was that bound the stones, had crumbled, forming dust piles on the floor. There were massive holes between the stones – rat runs most probably. And what lit the place was a forty-watt bulb, with clear glass. The filament was burning yellow inside like a glowing spider’s web. The light was hanging from a worn flex, and the shadows it cast seemed to dissolve into the general gloom.
The stillness hummed in his ears, and he looked at the others.
There was still a strain on Rudi’s face, and nothing moved, not even the air.
Then, in the far corner, where the light barely reached, he saw something that made him start – just the faintest disturbance of the dust to begin with, but slowly the movement strengthened, as if a wind was whipping the dust into a spiral.
There was no sound, but the dust carried on swirling, growing into a vortex, like a small tornado and he gasped, “Did you see that?”
Martin looked blank. “See what?” he said.
“Over there.”
He watched as Martin shrugged. “What we meant to be looking at?” he said.
The tornado had already died back though and now there was nothing.
“It was the dust,” said Lloyd.
“Everywhere’s dust,” Rudi said.
“But this… it come up like a whirlwind, didn’t it?”
The others shook their heads and Martin stared at him.
It was all getting too much. Suddenly he turned towards the stairs and said: “Let’s get out.”
It hurt him to say it. He never showed weakness – but spirals of dust rising out of the ground for no reason? That wasn’t natural. He needed to be out in the air to get his head around something like that.
Chapter 2
When they were outside, he was aware of the other two watching him – and it wasn’t them that had chickened out.
Admittedly they hadn’t seen the vortex but they still didn’t seem bothered by the cellar or the North Wing.
He could see that neither of them were mental like Lee Peddar had suggested, and whatever was going on here, they appeared to have developed some kind of strategy to cope with it.
Martin’s, he suspected, was easy. He let it flow over him, and whatever didn’t flow over him, he denied. He couldn’t work out Rudi’s strategy though. Apart from the dull eyes, Rudi was totally sane and Lloyd knew that’s just how he had to be.
It would be no problem to cope with the atmosphere and the smell. That was the breathings of an old house disintegrating. He could let that flow over him like Martin did. Spirals of dust in the cellar though, that took some explaining – but he’d battled with mountains and chasms for the last thirteen years… and he’d done that by getting his head around stuff. He grasped what was going on and then he controlled it.
That’s what he would do now.
“Would there be some sort of air vent down there?” he said suddenly.
Martin’s stare intensified. “What are you talking about – air vent? What’s an air vent got to do with anything?”
“I mean, making that whirlwind, with the dust.”
He saw Martin kick at a divot. He was looking irritable. “You’re always on about weird things,” he said. “It’s creepy down there, okay, but there wasn’t no whirlwind, was there, Rudi?”
Rudi shrugged. “I didn’t see anything,” he said.
“Well I did,” said Lloyd. “I just figured, if there was some sort of air vent, it would explain it, that’s all.”
“The only thing that would explain it is your sick head,” Martin said. “Because I was down there, and there wasn’t no whirlwind.”
“You saying I’m mental?” Lloyd said. He gave Martin the full benefit of his face. “There isn’t nothing mental about me, and I don’t go winding people up – not like that. If you didn’t see it, that’s your business. I seen it. And you want to make something of that, it’s okay by me.”
Martin looked at him and there was a weariness in his face. He pulled his coat around him and grunted, “It’s freezing out here. I’m going in.”
“You’ve seen just about everything now, anyway,” Rudi said. “You’ll have to put your cases in the North Wing when you’ve unpacked.”
“Not my travel case, no way,” Lloyd said. “That’s staying with me.”
“Whatever,” said Martin. “The guy’s only telling you how it is. It’s no big deal. You do what you like with your travel case.” Then he slouched off across the lawn towards the main building.
Lloyd thought he knew what to expect when the other kids came back. There would be shouting and laughing, kids shoving each other, glad to see the back of school, coats and bags being dropped in untidy heaps. The carers would be doing their heads in, shouting at kids to pick up stuff and tidy it away. In every home he’d been in since before he could remember there’d been laughing and joking, and a cheerful chaos.
But when the kids came back this time it was different.
There was noise, although it was more like insurrection. No one was laughing. There were quarrels and arguments. Dropping coats and bags was a preliminary to kicking coats and bags, and it was other people’s coats and ba
gs the kids were kicking.
Nothing was good-natured and that applied to the carers too. You could feel the tension. When the carers shouted for them to pick up their stuff, the kids just kicked it out of the way and walked off. Some retaliated with jibes like, “You pick it up if you want it picked up.”
No one spoke to him. One or two looked, as if to register that someone was there who they hadn’t seen before, but the looks ranged from indifferent to hostile.
Dave came out of his office and yelled, “Will you kids shut up? I’m trying to work in here!” Then he slammed his door, while a girl on the stairs took another girl’s bag, ripping it away and hurling it at a boy in the hall. The boy kicked up – mainly to make trouble for the girl, and one of the carers bawled, “Caitlin Jamieson. Come down here and pick that up.”
But the girl just swore and headed off towards the bedrooms.
Eventually it took two carers to hold her down.
They dragged her off to Dave’s office, and Rudi looked at Lloyd. He grinned.
“That’s Caitlin,” he said. “She’s in the North Wing. She’s got one of the single rooms. None of the girls will have her in their bedroom.”
Lloyd stared. “I thought I was bad,” he said. “But this lot, they’re off the wall, man.”
“It’s what happens. You’re expected to be like that,” Rudi said.
“Yeah? You telling me you do this stuff?”
“They’ll have you if you don’t.”
“Who’ll have you?” Lloyd said. He glanced at the seething mob and Rudi nodded towards a tall kid. His hair was shaved right down to his skull and he was standing away from the rest, watching the chaos with a sideways smirk.
“Craig Donovan. You really want to watch him.”
A few kids wandered off to their bedrooms, while the rest pushed into the television lounge, shoving past Rudi and Lloyd. The carers started clearing up, hanging up coats and stashing bags, and slowly the tension eased, but it didn’t go away. And dinner was seismic.
When the gong rang, it was one big scrum. Lloyd had to get stuck in or he’d have been flattened, but he did manage to get a place by Rudi.
It wasn’t in his nature to cling to one guy. He could mix it with the best in other homes. But this was a whole different ball game.
He needed an anchor. The place was like a bear pit, and everything seemed barbed with spite. Kids kicked each other under the table and, when the staff weren’t looking, they chucked food. A couple even got into stabbing with their knives.
Most of them headed for the television lounge after dinner, and the dining room looked as if it had been subjected to an exploding bomb.
Normally he would have gone to the television lounge too. He liked watching TV but, even before dinner, there were rows about what to watch, and the kids who lost kept winding up the ones who won. Then, when Craig Donovan came in, he took over completely, grabbing the remote, and it was clear that no one was going to argue with him. The carers didn’t do anything, other than join in the shouting, and Lloyd reckoned, with a whole lot more in there now, he’d rather be somewhere else.
He decided to go into the garden, but as he made for the front door, there was a voice. “Lloyd Lewis.”
Christine was standing behind him.
“Where do you think you’re off to?” she demanded.
He gave her a look to match any he’d seen here and he said, “I’m going in the garden. No law against it, is there?”
“You stay in the grounds, then. You go wandering off and you’re in big trouble,” she said.
“I said I’m going in the garden, didn’t I? And if I did want to go anyplace else, there isn’t nothing you could do about it.”
He pushed through and slammed the door, putting four centimetres of solid oak between him and the chaos.
He knew Christine wouldn’t follow, but he wished he’d grabbed a coat. It was freezing and he clasped his arms around himself to ward off the cold.
He’d got a lot to get his head round – the resentments, the sickly smell, the tensions and hate, that whirlwind of dust in the cellar. If he was going to survive in this he needed to be on top of it – and, to be on top of it, he had to understand it.
The wild behaviour might be down to Dave. He’d been in places before where they had weak house parents – where kids didn’t have any bounds. But, even in these places, it wasn’t as bad as this. In these places the kids didn’t seem to hate each other, and it didn’t go on all the time. Then there was the smell and the icy chill of the North Wing. That could be Lee Peddar and the rest back at the other home planting stuff in his head.
The vortex though, that wasn’t Lee Peddar. The only thing that would explain that was something physical. He knew he’d have to go down the cellar again to check it out.
He was deep into his own thoughts, and when he heard a voice it startled him. “You okay?” the voice said. “I haven’t seen you before. You new?”
The sky was darkening, and it was hard to see, but he could just make out a figure stepping from behind some shrubs.
It was somebody on the staff by the look of it – some young guy with long, loose hair. As he came nearer he could see the hair was fair and it might have been natural, because the guy’s eyes were an amazing blue. There was a small mole above his top lip, on the right, and he had a fantastic smile.
But he was holding a shears, so he had to be staff. Lloyd didn’t trust any adults, especially those connected with social services and children’s homes, and he found the best way of keeping them at bay was to be as offensive as he knew how.
“Any of your business, is it?” he said.
He waited for the face to cloud and the barriers to come up. But this guy was still smiling and his teeth gleamed white and even – totally right for that massive smile. “It’s just – I haven’t seen you around, that’s all.”
“Well you’ve seen me now. Make you happy, do it?”
The boy put his sheers down, and he was still unperturbed. “What’s your name?” the boy said.
“That isn’t none of your business neither. You one of them carers?”
He laughed and his long hair shook. He didn’t have the sour look that the others had, and he didn’t have that irritating “we’re trying to relate, here” attitude, the trademark of all the social workers. “Do I look like a carer?” he said.
“Dunno. What do carers look like?”
“Not like me, I hope.”
Lloyd didn’t speak straight away, but then he said, “If you aren’t a carer, what you doing here?”
“I work in the garden mainly,” the boy said. “Trying to give it a bit of life.”
“Well, if you just work in the garden, why you asking for my name? You weird or what?” He flinched, because he’d gone as far as he dared – and he waited for the retaliation. But all the boy did was shrug.
“Wouldn’t get a job here if I was,” he said. “Police checks and all that stuff.”
“You do work here then,” Lloyd said.
“I told you, I do the garden. Aren’t you cold?”
“Yeah, a bit. But I wanted to get out. You married?”
The boy laughed. “Give us a break. I’m only twenty.”
“Got a girl then?”
“Not so as you’d notice. Why?”
“Just wondered,” Lloyd said. He paused. He was beginning to be wary. This was getting too much like friendly conversation. He needed to watch his mouth. “Thought you might have kids, that’s all.”
The boy laughed again. “I told you, I’m twenty. I’ve got things to do before I get stuck with kids.”
“What’s your name then?” Lloyd said. There was a rough garden seat by the wall. They wandered towards it.
“Justin,” he said. “You going to risk telling me your name now?”
“Lloyd McKenzie Lewis,” Lloyd said. “That enough information?”
“Lloyd would have done. I didn’t need a full CV,” said Justin. “So, what do
you make of this place?”
“The biggest dump I’ve ever been in, if you want to know.”
“You been in many places?”
Lloyd gave him another intense stare. “You planning to write my biography or what?” he said. “Five or six, if you must know. I’ve been in homes all my life. What about you?”
“Lucky I guess,” Justin said. “I had parents. They were okay. Still are, really.”
“You still living with them?”
He shook his head.
“Living in, then?”
“No way.” And immediately Lloyd knew. This guy understood. “I’ve got a flat in the village. I could have lived with my parents if I’d wanted to. They don’t live far away, but… I like my independence I guess.”
“So why don’t you live in?” Lloyd said.
Justin laughed. “What independence would I get if I lived in?”
But that wasn’t what he meant and Lloyd knew it – and he didn’t have to say anything either. He just looked and straight away Justin said, “Okay. Like you said. It’s a dump. No way would I live here.”
There was a cold wind scudding across the bench and Lloyd gave an involuntary shiver.
“I tell you what, man, there’s something really bad going on in there. My mate at the other place, Lee Peddar, he told me there was some kind of curse on the place, like it makes kids go mental. And there’s that gross smell. Have you smelt that smell? Then, down the cellar…”
“You’ve been down the cellar?” said Justin.
It wasn’t an accusation. It was more curiosity, and Lloyd didn’t feel threatened.
“Yeah. Me, Martin and Rudi.”
Justin smiled again. “Rudi? He’s all right. He’s a nice kid.”
“He’s the only one that’s not sick in the head around here, if you ask me,” said Lloyd. Then he added, “You always want to be a gardener?” And Justin shook his head.
“I dropped out of university.”
“What you do that for?” Lloyd was staring at Justin for another reason now. For Lloyd education had always been the perceived escape route. Dropping out of university was beyond reason. “Education – that’s important,” he said.