Attica

by Kilworth, Garry

  But being lost in his bonanza the board-comber has not noticed that the bat flew away long before the question was even asked.

  The sun had multiplied. There were skylight windows all along the heavens now, a hundred, maybe a thousand. They let in a grubby light. The boards had opened up into a wide plain, with hills on the periphery. These hills were fashioned from furniture – chests, chairs, side-tables, wardrobes – and junk such as umbrellas, books, walking sticks, rolls of carpet, workman’s tools. At about one o’clock (an hour before noon on Jordy’s watch) the trio came to a forest of hat stands. These were of the kind that had a central pole and curved prongs like horns at the top, of which some were leafed with hats, scarves, feather boas and the odd coat. In parts they formed thickets and in other areas they were spaced apart, to allow for clearings where the party might rest up and look about them.

  ‘It gets weirder,’ said Jordy. ‘What’s that?’

  He indicated the piece of paper which Chloe had taken from her pocket.

  ‘Oh, just my books list – you know, my favourite reads.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  Jordy was not a great reader. He liked sport. It is possible to be good at both, and interested in both, but he was not. Alex was not interested in sport at all, nor especially reading and writing – in fact, all three bored him somewhat. Alex was destined to be an engineer.

  ‘That thing is still following us,’ said Alex matter-of-factly. ‘I saw its shadow on the edge of the woodland.’

  ‘Alex, we’re talking about a person,’ replied his sister. ‘It’s not right to call him or her a thing. It must be someone who’s looking for something in their attic. We mustn’t assume they mean to harm us.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jordy. ‘Maybe it’s just waiting its chance?’

  ‘I’d rather think good of people, than bad, wouldn’t you?’

  Alex said, ‘Listen, stop arguing, you two, we came up here to look for Mr Grantham’s watch.’

  Chloe drew a breath, then nodded. ‘I agree. Mr Grantham is an old man and this is very important to him. We have to stop being petty and put our minds to the task in hand.’

  Jordy was looking around him at the vastness of the attic and shaking his head. They both expected him to disagree, but instead he said to them, ‘You’re right, both of you. But it’s going to be a huge task, don’t make any mistake about that! This place is massive – just look at it.’ He slapped one of the large pillars that rose like a giant rainforest tree into the dark regions of the rafters above. ‘We’ve got a search on here that would try the patience of a saint, as my gran would say. It’s a big job. A very big job. I hope you two know what we’re getting into.’

  ‘A quest!’ cried Chloe. ‘Lord of the Rings.’

  ‘I hope not,’ Jordy said to her. ‘Those Hobbits had a hell of a time getting to where they wanted to go, didn’t they? Oh, I know, I only saw the movie and didn’t read the book, but I know the story.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything,’ Chloe said.

  They all had a drink from Chloe’s bottle.

  Jordy then insisted they stand in a circle and grip right hands, repeating an oath after him.

  ‘We the challenged,’ he cried, ‘do solemnly swear that we shall search this attic for the lost timepiece of Mr Grantham, who does not appear to have a first name. We shall not falter through lack of courage. We shall not hesitate to cross hazards, be they deep gorges, cataracts or high mountains. We shall keep each other’s safety in mind, and if brother or sister fall, we shall go instantly to their assistance. We are the intrepid trio. We are the watch-finders. We shall prevail where others have failed.’

  ‘That’s a really cool oath,’ said Alex, impressed. ‘Don’t you think so, sis?’

  Chloe agreed, smiling. ‘Good as any I’ve read.’

  Alex stepped out of the forest of hat stands and was almost run over.

  ‘What the heck—’ He jumped aside.

  A little man in a little vehicle swished by him.

  ‘Hey,’ cried Alex automatically. ‘Look where you’re going!’

  Then he stared dumbly, into the distance, at an amazing sight.

  Jordy came out of the hat stands now, brushing down his sweater.

  ‘Cruddy dust is everywhere.’ He looked at Alex. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I was nearly mown down. Look, a village.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Huts and what-not. Over there. Oh, there’s another one of those car things.’

  Jordy stared, equally amazed. Chloe came out of the woodland now, wearing one of the hats. They turned to look at her. ‘Well,’ she said, defensively, ‘it doesn’t really belong to anyone. Don’t you think I look cute?’ She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘I can be cute, if I want to be. Just because I’m brainy doesn’t mean I’m not pretty.’

  ‘Never mind the hat,’ Jordy said.

  She glared at him. ‘Never mind the— Oh, what’s that?’

  Alex said, ‘We think they’re cars.’

  ‘Very small cars.’

  ‘From that village over there.’

  Chloe removed the hat and stared.

  The machines, which looked hand-made, seemed to be powered by old-fashioned mechanical sewing machines. There were pedals that the drivers pumped, Alex noticed, which provided the motive energy to propel them around. The drivers had no cover of course, but were open to view. This would not matter, he decided, in a place where it never seemed to rain or snow.

  ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘I’d like a go on one of those things.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Jordy said, obviously not as impressed as his step-brother, ‘you’ll never pick up a speeding ticket.’

  ‘Yeah, but the – the …’

  ‘Ingenuity?’ offered Chloe.

  ‘Yeah, that,’ Alex said.

  ‘But where are these people from?’ asked Chloe reasonably. ‘What are they doing up here?’

  ‘Travellers,’ replied Jordy, nodding. ‘Yes, that’s what they are. Travellers, inhabiting someone’s attic. I guess they must have permission, because to the people in the house below they’re probably making a horrible racket, thundering around up here. I suppose they camped nearby and the people in the house took pity on them and said, “why not use our attic till the weather gets better: it’s big and airy and we don’t use it much, except to store junk in.” Something like that.’

  ‘The weather’s been wonderful,’ Chloe pointed out. ‘Sunshine pouring through all those skylights.’

  ‘Well, now they’ve got used to being up here, they’re probably reluctant to leave, eh?’

  Alex remarked, ‘You don’t think they look sort of … strange? I mean, they’re kind of small and lumpy – there are bumps all over their heads – and they haven’t got any hair!’

  Chloe replied firmly, ‘Alex, we do not pass judgement on people just because they look a little different from us.’

  And they did look a bit like real people, with two arms, two legs and a head and torso. But they were so pale they were as white as baking powder. A sickly-looking white. As Alex had said, they were kind of small and lumpy, with rounded shoulders and bald heads. And their skulls were covered in scabs and bumps where presumably they had banged them on low rafters or the angled ceiling. They must never have washed, because there was plaster dust and bits all over their heads and shoulders. Their eyes – Alex particularly noticed this – appeared so washed-out they seemed to have no colour at all.

  Alex stood in front of one that was on foot and said to him, ‘Hi, my name is Alex. I’m up here looking for a silver pocket-watch. You haven’t seen one, I suppose?’

  The creature, shedding plaster dust as he walked, looked a little frightened behind those pale eyes, but he made no reply. Instead he skirted Alex and continued walking to wherever he was going. Once, he did glance back, but not to any real purpose. It was almost as if he’d forgotten something: like switching off the iron, or a shopping list he’d meant to brin
g. Then he was gone, among the cardboard huts which served as houses to these unusual beings of the attic.

  Jordy said, ‘Zombies then.’

  ‘They can’t see us,’ stated Alex. ‘We’re invisible to them.’

  Chloe argued with this. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they can see us, because they drive round us. They’re just pretending they can’t see us.’

  ‘They’re not exactly friendly, are they?’ Jordy said. ‘Grumpy lot. They never seem to smile. Maybe they can’t? Like animals.’

  Alex said, ‘We had a cat once that smiled.’

  ‘Cats can’t smile,’ Jordy said emphatically. ‘They might look as if they are – showing their teeth or something – but they don’t have the facial muscles for it. We did it in human biology.’ Whenever Jordy stated that he had ‘done it’ in some subject at school, it was for him an irrefutable fact.

  Alex was stubborn though. ‘His name was Dylan and he smiled quite a lot.’

  Chloe interrupted. ‘You know, Dylan Thomas? Dylan Tomcat. I named him,’ she said proudly.

  ‘Do tell,’ muttered Jordy.

  They said no more on the subject, knowing that such a quarrel could go on for hours.

  Instead they walked around the dwellings, unhindered by the occupants who treated them as if they did not exist.

  It was a sort of shanty-town gathering of makeshift huts. It didn’t appear that they slept in them. Instead they apparently slept in wardrobes, standing up. Alex got the fright of his life when he opened a wardrobe only to be confronted by a flour-white villager standing bolt upright, but with its eyes closed. He shut the door quietly and walked away, hoping he had not disturbed the creature at his or her rest.

  That was another thing. You couldn’t tell which were women and which were men. They seemed to wear anything they could lay their hands on. Men and boys had on dresses – sometimes – and women and girls wore business suits. But there seemed to be no set rules, for women also wore dresses and some men had on jackets and trousers. Or boiler suits. Or dressing gowns. Or jeans, sometimes with underpants worn on the outside. Or tights on their heads, the legs wrapped around their necks like scarves. Or long socks and shorts. Anything went.

  It appeared they grabbed a handful of clothes from a pile and threw them on, back to front, the right way around, upside-down, whatever. Everything was fashionable.

  ‘Don’t open the wardrobes,’ warned Alex. ‘Unless you’ve got a hammer and stake in your hands.’

  ‘Vampires?’ cried Jordy. ‘Really?’

  ‘You’d think so, to look at ’em, wouldn’t you? Weird. Really weird. I can’t even sleep on my back, let alone standing up straight. That’s how they do it, Jordy. They look as if they’re standing in coffins, but they’re just bedrooms – tall, thin bedrooms.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jordy, as they held a meeting with the sewing-machine cars whizzing round them, ‘what do we do? Do we stay here for a while, or go on? There’s water here. They’ve got these open upturned umbrellas which they fill from tanks and hang outside their houses. And they’ve got food. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.’

  ‘We can’t steal their food,’ Chloe argued. ‘That wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘Do you want to eat dead spiders?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we have to take what we can find.’

  Alex asked, ‘Well, what is it, this food? Vindaloo? Shish-kebabs? Liver and bacon? What?’

  ‘I think it’s that stuff you can grow without water – you know, it takes its moisture from the air? Doesn’t need soil or anything? What d’you call it? Hyro-something?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Chloe answered truthfully.

  ‘Hydroponics,’ murmured Alex, but no one was listening.

  ‘Well, anyway, it’s that. Looks a bit twiggy and spooky. They grow it in big trays behind the village. We could go and take some. There’s plenty there. These people seem to just wander in and out of that area and take what they feel like.’

  ‘Well, they can, because it’s theirs.’

  ‘We need it, Clo. We’re going to starve to death, else. Look, they also eat dust and dead spiders, insects, beetles – anything they find. They won’t starve on account of us.’

  Alex said, ‘Jordy’s right. We’re all hungry. We’ve got water. We need food.’

  So they went and helped themselves to the crops, not knowing whether the plants were ripe or not. No one objected, even though they were watched. No one seemed to mind this blatant theft. They ate it, washing it down with water from the tanks. It was tasteless but it took the edge off their hunger. Of course, they still dreamed of cola and chips, and roast dinners, and curries.

  ‘We could get into trouble for this,’ said Chloe, feeling guilty once she was fed. ‘It could be forbidden or something, among these people.’

  Jordy sighed. ‘We can’t ask them. No one answers. Oh, come on, you two – look at them. They’re docile. Even if they did get mad at us, what could they do to us? They’re only little.’

  ‘They look quite strong,’ said Alex.

  ‘Nah, we’re all right. They’re harmless creatures.’

  ‘Have you heard them talk? Like doors creaking.’

  ‘There are ghosts here.’

  ‘I know, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘They’re stealing the crops. And they brought one of those mouse-killers with them. A three-cornered thing made of ginger. Savage. It’s stealing our cattle.’

  ‘What can you do? They’re ghosts.’

  Two villagers stand with their arms folded outside a hut, watching the three ghosts pick at their spindly plants. One is a stocky male wearing a blue shapeless frock and a top hat. The other is his sister who has on a boiler suit with a football fan’s scarf for a belt. On her head she has a military officer’s peaked cap with a feather stuck in the hatband. The male has on odd socks and old leather sandals with the stitching coming loose. His sister is wearing Wellington boots with the toes cut out for freedom of movement.

  ‘We could try exorcising them. It’s been done before.’

  ‘Messy business though. All that blood.’

  ‘Well, it’s that or let them run wild.’

  ‘They’ll be gone in a day or two – they always are.’

  ‘I wonder why they haunt us like this?’

  The male villager with the lump over one eye shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘They’re lost between worlds. Poor wandering souls.’

  ‘They’re certainly ugly. D’you think it’s something they did in life? Something bad?’

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps.’

  ‘I think we should exorcise them.’

  ‘So you said, but are you going to clear up the gore?’

  His sister is silent at this suggestion. She does not want the ceremony either. Most children in the village have never seen an exorcism but she remembers one from her young days. Above all, it had been a noisy affair. She remembers the noise. The ghost had screamed a lot. It had opened its mouth and horrible sounds issued from between its teeth. She remembers its teeth very vividly. And the red tongue quivering inside its mouth. That ghost had had a very large mouth which had contained a lot of noise. Then there was the struggling, the violent jerking, and at the very end of the ceremony, the twitching. A lot of mess though, as her brother had remarked.

  ‘Do you think they want some of those books? With the pictures in them? We have some your cousin once found in the region from which these three emerged. Shall we give them to the ghosts?’

  Her brother lifts his tall battered hat and wipes some plaster dust off his bald head with a dirty tea towel he carries in his pocket.

  ‘With pictures of other ghosts?’

  ‘That’s what they often come looking for.’

  ‘You could be right. We should put them out, where they can find them.’

  ‘That’s what we’ll do then. I’ll bring it up at the council meeting.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yes, good. We probabl
y won’t need knives after all.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Board-combers into Bundles

  It seemed the villagers had put a pile of photograph albums purposely where the three could find them. Chloe leafed through a couple of them, but of course they meant nothing to her. They were mostly black-and-white photos, many out of focus and misty. A lot of the people in them wore suits, or full dresses. Others were in uniform. A great many of the subjects had obviously posed for the photo. These were pictures from the beginning and middle of the last century. They were from old wars, one of which Mr Grantham had fought in. To Chloe they were ancient history.

  Those pictures which had no human subjects were of totally unrecognisable landscapes. Foggy, dark mountains. Dense, dark forests. Bleak, cold-looking, dark oceans. Why anyone would want to take a picture of such uninteresting scenes was a mystery to Chloe.

  Then suddenly she came across one which, when she opened it, had ‘Property of Susan Atkins’ written inside.

  Susan? That was the name of Mr Grantham’s fiancée. But there must have been a million Susans out there, past and present. It was unlikely to be Mr Grantham’s Susan. However, the album was small and would fit easily into the bag Chloe was now carrying. It was light too. She would take it back and – if they ever got out of here – show it to Mr Grantham.

  Alex was in the process of stopping a villager in a sewing-machine car. The driver jumped out and ran away on being confronted by the boy. Alex then went down on his knees to inspect the vehicle. Chloe showed him the album and asked him what he thought.

  ‘Those old photos were probably taken with Brownie box cameras,’ he said to his sister as he wobbled a pedal made of cast iron, pushing it down to see how the gears worked which eventually turned the wheels. ‘I saw one once in a backstreet shop. Those places are probably not as bad as they look. It’s just that the cameras weren’t that good.’

  ‘How come you always think you know so much?’ said Jordy, joining them. ‘Smarty.’

  Alex said, ‘Only about things like this.’ He spun the governor wheel of the sewing-machine car, so that an armature whirred rapidly. ‘When this sewed dresses and things, that was the arm that made the needle go up and down. Now it gives this vehicle its forward motion.’