The Boy with One Name

by J. R. Wallis

  The bell over the door tinkled as Mrs Easton opened it, and then again before the door clicked shut. A lock snapped, a bolt was drawn, and Ruby heard the hiss of a window blind being drawn down. When the woman came back and stood beside her, she nodded, apparently satisfied.

  ‘Well, then, little girl, or should I say . . .’ Mrs Easton craned her head to look at the newspaper, ‘Ruby Jenkins, I think you’ll do very nicely indeed.’ She raised a hand and gestured towards the bead curtain. ‘After you.’

  Ruby’s legs started moving for her and she found herself walking without wanting to do so.

  After Ruby had left, Jones had followed his nose until he was on the street that ran behind Mrs Easton’s shop. Walking towards it, he could see there was definitely a house attached to the rear. But what intrigued him was the very tall brownstone wall extending out from the back of the building. It surrounded what he presumed was an extremely large back garden, judging by the tall chestnut trees he could see.

  As he approached it, the road he was on ended and he walked through a gate onto a footpath. Stretching out ahead of him was a great expanse of grass dotted with trees and scrub and he recognized it as Hampstead Heath from the tour Simeon had given them. The brownstone wall extending out from the house behind Mrs Easton’s shop was more than triple his height, making it impossible to see over. He started counting his steps as he marched quickly beside it, aware that Ruby might be back in the coffee shop already. By the time he reached the far end, he’d counted 300 paces and estimated the garden must be about 250 metres wide. He stood at the corner and estimated the garden to be longer than its width across. In other words, it was a very big garden indeed.

  He retraced his steps beside the wall, looking for any obvious footholds that might make it easier to climb over. But there were none. Neither were there any chinks or holes that allowed him to see what was beyond the wall, into what he presumed was a garden. Because it backed onto the heath, there were no houses overlooking it. There were no trees tall enough to afford a view into it either. It was, he realized, completely hidden from view, meaning anything could be in there.

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets and was about to walk back to meet Ruby when he saw the same ginger cat that had been sitting on the sill of the shop window earlier.

  ‘Hello, cat,’ said Jones as it rubbed up against his leg. ‘Where’d you come from?’ When he picked it up to give it a stroke, it didn’t seem to mind and looked longingly at the top of the wall before coiling itself against his chest and leaping out of his arms. It did not quite reach the top but scrabbled up the remainder of the wall, looked back at Jones and then leapt down out of sight.

  Instead of walking on, Jones listened very carefully for any sound that might give him a clue about what was behind the wall: paws padding along a gravel path . . . a body winding through long grass . . . claws being sharpened on a tree stump. But all he could hear was the cat purring contentedly. He imagined it sitting on the edge of a large lawn, washing its ears. And then he heard a terrible shriek. The cat’s yowl died down to an awful lingering whisper that faded away. Jones waited a little longer, holding his breath, and heard a soft chattering sound. When no other clues were forthcoming, he started marching back to find Ruby. A moment later, he started to run.

  Ruby was standing in the hallway of the house attached to the shop, the beaded curtain behind her. Some distance ahead of her was a doorway to what she presumed was a kitchen because she could see a sink. Above it was a window through which she could see a huge garden. It looked extremely overgrown. The grass was waist high. Thorny bushes had spread out of control. Ruby glimpsed a very high wall surrounding the garden. Various types of trees had grown up so tall they were towering over it.

  ‘Just a few more steps, dear,’ said Mrs Easton in an encouraging tone, sweeping past Ruby and stopping in front of her. The woman pressed her hand flat against the wall and pushed. There was a click and a hidden door popped out and swung open, revealing a set of dark stairs.

  Ruby shook her head. She gritted her teeth and managed to speak through a slit her mouth had made. ‘I’m not going down there.’

  Mrs Easton smiled. ‘Of course you are. You must do what I say.’ Her blazing blue eyes looked so large behind the glasses they were like two huge marbles. Ruby could not look away. ‘It’ll all be over very soon. Then you won’t have to worry about anything again. Ever.’

  Ruby heard soft chattering sounds drifting up out of the cellar and she realized something was coming up the stairs as they creaked.

  Ruby was desperate to reach for the gun in the pocket of her jacket. But her arms were as stiff as sticks and her fingers were like twigs that she couldn’t move: there was no way of reaching for it.

  ‘Come on,’ cooed Mrs Easton at whatever was coming up the stairs. ‘Come and see what I’ve got you, you lucky thing.’

  A long black and bristly leg emerged out of the dark and landed gently on the topmost stair—

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  A rapid hammering started up on the door at the front of the shop. The hairy black leg darted back down the stairs into the dark and Mrs Easton swung round to see what was happening. But it was impossible to make out much through the beaded curtain.

  ‘Mrs Easton!’ came a distant voice from outside. ‘It’s Sophie. I forgot my wallet. It must have dropped out my bag.’ BANG! BANG! BANG! ‘Are you there? Mrs Easton? I’m supposed to be meeting someone for a drink at The Feathers.’

  Straps seemed to loosen from Ruby’s body, and from her mind, as the Witch was momentarily distracted. But a moment was all Ruby needed and she ran as hard as she could down the hallway.

  When something slammed into her backpack, she heard the scrying mirror shatter before the impact felled her and she hit the floor. Ruby was up again quickly, looking back as Mrs Easton cursed. A long chain with a sharp hook on its end lay between them. Ruby could still feel the impact of it in her back. The chain retracted quickly, disappearing back into the open palm of the Witch’s left hand until she was holding the hook, and then it shot out again, towards Ruby. This time she saw it coming and dodged, but the sharp tip caught the arm of her jacket, nicking her left shoulder as it flew past and struck the door frame ahead of her. Mrs Easton cursed again as she tried to retract the hook, which was embedded in the wood, and then she gave up and whispered a word and the hook and chain vanished. Ruby didn’t bother waiting to see anything else and raced through into the kitchen.

  She didn’t stop when she saw spoons whirling round huge mixing bowls suspended in mid-air, without anyone holding them. Knives were cutting and slicing fruit on boards on their own. Icing was being piped onto cakes out of bags floating above them. A couple of clay Poppets turned to look at her as they stood on the counter, busy rolling out dough.

  Ruby threw open the back door and ran into the garden. Fresh air. The scent of wild roses. Dead leaves gently composting.

  The garden swallowed her up as she ran down a path, snaking through the tall grass. She kept running, the broken mirror clinking in her backpack, afraid Mrs Easton would appear behind her or even in front of her, or worse, that a large bristly black leg would poke its way out of the grass. When she felt a pain starting to throb in her shoulder where the Witch’s hook had caught her, she gritted her teeth.

  Ruby was breathless by the time she reached a large clearing in the centre of the garden where a table was set with twelve chairs around it. On each place setting was a card with a name written in black curly handwriting. Ruby decided not to hang around, but, as she reached for the bottle of Slap Dust in her pocket, she noticed something that made her stop.

  A large cage was standing to her left, its top covered by a green waterproof canvas. Inside were two large objects wrapped up in foil. But not everything was covered. Ruby could see two heads, and she recognized the faces immediately.

  As she stood there, breathing hard, Ruby could hear the gentle crackle of foil as Jones’s mother and father breathed too.
>
  The cage was locked with a dirty iron padlock, meaning there was no way in.

  Beside it was a large clay oven with an iron door and below it a hearth piled with a stack of wood ready to be lit. It looked like a giant pizza oven, but Ruby had already guessed this oven wasn’t for pizza. Set on a metal trolley was a large cookbook, open at a page with a set of instructions. A note written in spidery handwriting had been paper-clipped to the page:

  Mr Davison – 165lbs 8hrs cooking – approx. 2pm IN!

  Mrs Davison – 120lbs 6.5hrs cooking – 3.30pm or thereabouts

  Ruby checked her watch. It was a little after midday. She looked up when she heard a noise. Someone or something was moving in the tall grass. She didn’t bother hanging around to find out what it was and sprinted on until she reached the end of the garden and stared up at the tall wall.

  There was no way over it. But that was okay.

  As she reached into her pocket for the Slap Dust, she noticed something beside her. It was wrapped up like a parcel in white silk. Looking closer, Ruby could see a cat’s ginger head, the whiskers squashed flat. The green eyes weren’t blinking.

  She heard a rustle in the tall grass to her left and then she felt a thunk on her foot that almost knocked her over. Looking down she saw a line of white sticky thread stuck to her trainer. A chattering sound started up and a huge black spider the size of a horse crept out of the tall grass on long black, bristly legs, the thread on Ruby’s trainer attached to the spider’s spinneret. A row of eight glossy eyes stared at her and in each of them was reflected Ruby’s startled face. She kicked off her trainer as the spider scuttled towards her, trying to reel her in. Her shoulder was more sore than before. She was panicking. But Ruby managed to pour out a measure of Slap Dust and slap her hands together, just in time, as the spider lunged at her, its fangs glistening.

  She felt the now familiar whoosh as she left the garden and reappeared on the other side of the wall, where she found herself on Hampstead Heath, breathing hard. Quickly, she followed the path through a gate and out into a road, kicking off her other trainer so she could sprint faster. Ahead of her she spotted the figure of Jones running away.

  ‘Jones!’ she shouted. ‘Jones!’

  He stopped and turned around, hands on his head as he stood panting, a smile forming on his face when he saw she was safe.

  But the smile soon disappeared when she told him what she’d found in the garden.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The cut on Ruby’s shoulder was sore and she felt a great heat welling up in it Thomas Gabriel dabbed at it with a cloth, making her wince.

  ‘I’ve got something for that in here,’ said Jones, delving around in the chest of Commencement gifts that Maitland had left for him, which he’d lugged in from the van. He held up a jar of blue powder, with Deschamps & Sons stencilled on the front. ‘It’s Phoenix Powder.’ He popped the lid off the jar and took out a spoonful.

  ‘Is it going to hurt?’ asked Ruby.

  Jones shook his head. And so did Thomas Gabriel. But Ruby found out they were both lying and she yelled as the Phoenix Powder fizzed and burnt.

  When it was over, Jones inspected her shoulder. The wound had healed perfectly, leaving a small blue mark which Ruby could just about read, twisting her arm to see it more clearly:

  Courtesy of Deschamps & Sons.

  ‘That’ll go,’ said Jones. ‘But they like to advertise, so it may take a few weeks.’

  The boys made her eat a piece of bread sprinkled with something that looked like sugar but tasted earthy, telling her it would give her some strength back. Jones’s leg was pumping up and down the whole time as he watched her.

  ‘Jones, what are we going to do?’ asked Ruby after she’d finished eating and Thomas Gabriel had found her a new pair of shoes. ‘How are we even going to get close to Mrs Easton and use the Dark Bottle? She’ll stop us with her mind tricks.’

  Jones shook his head. He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost one o’clock. His leg pumped harder and harder. And then suddenly it stopped. He seemed to think for a moment more before leaning forward to sort through the gifts in the chest. He took out a piece of wood about the length of a forearm. It looked like any old stick you might see on the ground.

  ‘I know,’ he said, tapping the piece of wood against his palm. ‘I know what we’ll do.’

  Thomas Gabriel nodded as he seemed to understand what Jones was thinking. ‘It might work. If you time it just right.’

  Ruby folded her arms. Gave them both her best knowing look. ‘I’m guessing that’s not just a stick, right?’

  She was right. It wasn’t just a stick.

  It was an ‘In and Out’.

  ‘It works like a passageway,’ said Jones as he made Ruby stand up.

  A passageway?’

  ‘Yeah, because it goes from one place to another. And you’re going to use it.’ Jones put the piece of wood in her hand, but Ruby wasn’t convinced: even up close it looked as if it was . . . well . . . just a stick. ‘I need you to think about Mrs Easton’s garden.’ Ruby raised her eyebrows at that because there was nothing about that place she wanted to remember at all. ‘Please, Ruby,’ said Jones. ‘It’s fine. Nothing’s going to happen, honest.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said and cleared her head and started thinking about it. As soon as she did, the stick began to vibrate very gently in her hand as if there was something powerful contained in it that couldn’t wait to be released.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ asked Jones.

  ‘Yeah, kind of,’ said Ruby nervously, wondering what was going to happen.

  ‘Good. Now I want you to focus in a bit more detail on a particular spot.’

  The stick was starting to tug a little harder in Ruby’s hand and she wasn’t quite sure why. ‘What do you mean? Jones, what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Just focus on the cage you saw. The padlocked door. I want you to imagine you’re standing in the garden in front of that door.’ Ruby tried to hold the image of the cage’s door in her mind. ‘Can you see it?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Okay, now I want you to imagine going there.’

  ‘Jones, that is not—’

  ‘Don’t worry, nothing bad’s gonna happen.’

  The stick was vibrating, making Ruby’s whole arm shake.

  ‘I am not going to do this—’

  ‘Ruby, you have to do this,’ growled Jones. ‘You’re the only one who’s been in the garden, so you’re the only one who can make the “In and Out” work the way I need it to. This is the only plan I can think of. There’s no time to try anything else. You want to be a Badlander, don’t you? You want to help kill a Witch like Mrs Easton, don’t you, and prove you’re as good as any boy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And we’re supposed to be helping each other, ain’t we?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Then do what I’m asking.’ Ruby stared into Jones’s eyes. ‘Trust me. I’d never let anything bad happen to you. Never. Not now, after everything we’ve done to get this far. You believe me, don’t you?’

  Ruby could feel the stick tugging harder and harder. ‘You’d better not be lying this time, Jones.’

  ‘I’m not.’ He looked at her without a flicker in his face.

  So Ruby let her mind go and imagined going back to Mrs Easton’s garden to exactly the spot Jones had mentioned.

  The picture of the place in her mind seemed to stretch down into her arm, as if her blood was carrying it, and went on out of her into the stick, which exploded out of her grip. Ruby screamed, thinking her hand had blown up, but any noise she made was lost in a great whooshing sound as the space directly in front of her swirled and spun in a vortex that stretched out across the room. Faster and faster it went and Ruby saw colours appearing inside it, and as the swirling began to slow she saw grass and sky and garden. And then she was staring down a cloudy, roiling tunnel that stretched the length of the room. At its far end, Ruby could see the cage door and t
wo figures lying wrapped in foil. She could hear birdsong. The faint hum of traffic.

  When she turned to look at Jones, he was beaming. ‘In one end and out the other. That’s how a passageway works, right?’ Ruby nodded. ‘ ’Cept this is one-way so no one at the other end can see it and come through.’

  ‘Not even a Witch?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Not even a Witch.’

  All three of them waited by the entrance of the ‘In and Out’, watching for Mrs Easton to shuffle into view to open the cage and start cooking. Jones checked the Dark Bottle in his overcoat pocket from time to time, reassuring himself it was still there. Thomas Gabriel leafed through pages of The Black Book of Magical Instruction, trying to learn new spells he thought might be useful when the time came. Ruby practised drawing the gun out of her waistband, and aiming it.

  ‘So how big was this spider exactly?’ asked the gun.

  ‘Too big to squish,’ replied Ruby and the gun laughed.

  ‘If it comes to it, just make sure you aim straight and keep your eyes open,’ it advised.

  Thomas Gabriel started checking the clock on the mantelpiece more often as it ticked closer to two o’clock. And then everyone seemed to hold their breath as Mrs Easton walked into view at the far end of the ‘In and Out’, and stood in front of the cage, ready to unlock it.

  Jones licked his lips, waiting for exactly the right moment to surprise the Witch. He crouched, ready to launch himself through the ‘In and Out’ with the Dark Bottle, his fingers tightening round the hilt of the dagger inside it.

  But then Mrs Easton turned suddenly and seemed to look straight at them, her nose sniffing the air.

  ‘Jones,’ whispered Ruby nervously. ‘I thought you said it’s only one-way, that she wouldn’t know about us.’

  ‘I lied about that last bit,’ he said, inching closer to the edge of the ‘In and Out’. Ruby and Thomas Gabriel glared at him. ‘Did either of you have a better plan? Look, at worst, she might be able to sense something, but there’s no way she can see anything or know what’s coming. No Witch could manage that,’ and he crouched, ready to leap. ‘We’ve still got the element of sur—’