Rudger opened his mouth and held his finger up as if he had thought of something to say.
‘What you need to do,’ she went on when he didn’t say anything other than ‘But…’, ‘is come with me. We’ll find you a new friend, and then, when they believe in you, if you still insist, you can try and talk them into a trip to the hospital. But you can’t do it alone.’
As much as he wanted to just run out and find Amanda, get his old life back, he knew he had to do what Emily said. She was the one that knew what she was talking about. That didn’t stop it feeling awfully frustrating though.
‘Come on,’ she said, walking towards the notice board.
Emily plucked a likely-looking boy’s picture.
‘This is the one,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about him.’
That morning John Jenkins opened his wardrobe door and looked for his coat.
He needed it, since it was raining yet again.
‘There you are,’ he said as he pulled it out and pulled it on.
As the door shut with a neat little click he had the oddest feeling. It was as if something had crawled across the back of his neck, but on the inside. It said to his brain, ‘Something’s watching you.’
He hurried from the room, across the landing and started down the stairs. His mum and dad were waiting in the hallway.
‘Come on lazybones,’ his dad said. ‘We’ll be late for the film if you don’t get on.’
John hurried down, but just as he got to the place on the stairs where he could see across the upstairs carpet, under the chest of drawers on the landing and straight across into his bedroom, he paused for the briefest of moments.
The door to his wardrobe was swinging open.
That was what it had looked like, anyway. But he was sure he’d shut it properly. Hadn’t he?
He carried on down the stairs, trying to not look behind him.
‘I’ll just go check the back door,’ his mum said, leaving him and his dad in the hall.
John sat on the bottom step and did his shoes up. He could remember the day, at the start of the holidays, when he first tied the knot by himself. It was most peculiar. Before that he was hopeless, he just couldn’t do it. Whichever way his fingers turned and however knot-like the shoelaces had looked, the moment he stood up they’d come undone and his shoes would slip off.
And then one day, without anyone watching him or telling him what to do, when he was just sat on his bed by himself, abracadabra, he did it. It was as if he’d always been able to tie knots.
When his mum had expressed her surprise he’d expressed surprise straight back at her. ‘Of course I can tie my shoelaces,’ he’d shouted. ‘I’m not a baby!’ And he wasn’t, he was six years old.
He made the loop round his finger and prepared to pass the other bit of lace through the—
He stopped.
There’d been a creak on the stairs behind him. Above him.
He and his mum and dad were all downstairs. He had no brothers or sisters. No friend had stayed the night. There was no one up there, but he knew that the only time the second step down from the top of the stairs creaked was when it was trod on. He’d trodden on it many times, he knew the creak like the back of his hand.
He looked at the back of his hand. It was shaking. The knot fell apart.
He didn’t look round. He didn’t look up the stairs.
‘Not done your shoes up yet, John?’ his mum said, coming back.
His dad had been reading a letter and hadn’t noticed.
‘No, Mum,’ John said. ‘Can you do them for me?’
‘Of course, love,’ she said, kneeling down in front of him.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Is there…?’
‘What?’ she said as she tugged his laces tighter than was comfortable.
‘Can you look up the stairs?’
‘What?’ She moved on to the second shoe. She was good at this, fast.
‘Is there anyone there?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, still not looking up.
‘I… I heard something. The creaky step creaked.’
His mum glanced up.
‘Well, there’s nothing there now,’ she said.
‘Did you hear it, Dad? You heard it, didn’t you?’
‘Sorry? What? No,’ was all his dad said, putting the post down and opening the front door. ‘Come on, let’s vamoose.’
John Jenkins stood up, his shoes nice and tight, his coat nice and warm, but imaginary ice-water dripped down his spine. Something was watching him. Something was behind him. He could tell, but he couldn’t turn round.
He hurried out of the front door as quickly as he could, running in front of his mum and dad and going round the corner to where the car was parked.
As they drove away he finally looked back at the house.
It looked just the same as ever, except…except, he thought he saw, although he couldn’t be sure, couldn’t swear to it, but he thought, through the rain, that he saw a face at the hall window.
At the hall window of their empty house.
‘Well, that went well,’ Emily grumbled, throwing herself sulkily onto the settee.
Rudger stood by the lounge door.
‘Are you sure you should be sitting there?’ he said. ‘It’s not our house.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a baby, Rudge. It’s our house now. We’re on assignment. We live here until we’re not needed any more.’
‘But he didn’t see us.’
‘Sometimes it takes a while, that’s all.’
She’s done this before, Rudger thought, she must know what she’s doing.
Emily folded her arms and then unfolded them, scratched at her cheek and then folded them again. It was like an elaborate dance, just not a very good one.
‘We should make another plan,’ she said after a moment. ‘We need to catch his attention. Just get him to see one of us once, and then we’ll be in.’
‘How do we do that?’ Rudger sat carefully next to her. ‘He looked right through us before, in the wardrobe.’
‘Yeah,’ she murmured to herself. ‘If he won’t see us when he looks straight on, well, we need to get him to look sideways.’
‘Sideways?’ Rudger asked.
‘Yeah, Rudge, old pal.’ Emily was cheering up. She rubbed her hands together as she spoke. ‘It’s obvious. This one’s going to be a mirror job.’
The film was so funny that by the time John Jenkins came home, he’d completely forgotten the weird feeling he’d had that morning.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ his dad said, after taking his shoes off.
‘I’m popping to the loo,’ his mum said, nipping up the stairs two at a time.
John was left alone in the hall.
He put a foot on the bottom step and pulled the first of his shoelaces undone. As he did so he glanced up the stairs and suddenly, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, remembered the noise he’d heard earlier on. The fun of the film that had filled him in the cinema sank like a stone in his stomach.
He was looking up the stairs and he couldn’t stop looking up the stairs. He had the feeling that if he took his eyes away for a moment something would happen. A door would slam or the stair would creak. If he turned round something would happen. He was petrified, like a rabbit on a country road who can see the lights of the lorry coming and knows nothing other than that he can’t run.
He swapped feet, lifted the shoe that was still tied up onto the bottom stair.
He reached down, without looking, and tugged at the lace with his fingers. His mum tied good shoelaces, they never got knots and they came apart with one sharp tug.
And then he saw something.
And he jumped.
Literally jumped in the air.
His mum stood at the top of the stairs.
‘Oh, sorry, love,’ she said. ‘Did I scare you?’
‘Mum,’ he moaned.
They sat at the
dining table to eat their dinner. It was the last of their family days and his parents liked to do things properly. There was still a week before school started, but this was the last day his mum and dad could both take off work.
What they called the dining room was just a bit of the living room with a dining table in it. If he’d been really good, or if he nagged enough, they’d have the television on and he could watch it from the table at dinner time, but today they were having to talk to one another.
His dad was talking about his bike, how he needed a set of new tyres before the autumn, and his mum was helping herself to salad, when John looked up.
Behind his seat was a Welsh dresser on which his parents put the horrible plates his grandmother bought them every Christmas. On the opposite wall was a big mirror. His dad had bought it at a car boot sale earlier in the summer. He said it would make the room feel bigger. John didn’t know if it did, the room had always felt big enough to him, but he liked to look in the mirror when the conversation got dull and the telly wasn’t on. He’d look at the back-to-front pictures of kittens on the plates behind him.
There was a kitten sniffing some flowers and there was a kitten sitting on a cushion and there was a kitten with a moustache of cream. Even at six years old and no art expert, John knew his mum was right to think these plates awful. If he’d had a choice as to what plates to have he would have had ones with robots on. Preferably robots breaking things. Preferably robots fighting other robots, and breaking them. Maybe if he asked his gran really nicely she’d give them some of those plates this Christmas.
And then he stopped thinking about robots because he’d seen something else in the mirror.
He looked at the table in front of him. He looked at his plate with his fish fingers and his peas. And then he looked to his right to where his dad sat. And then he looked opposite him at where his mum was sat. And then he looked to the left. There was an empty place there. A fourth chair that no one sat in. Nobody ever sat in it unless they had a guest. There were only three of them in the family.
‘This salad’s gone quickly,’ his mum said, dropping the last of it onto her plate. ‘Did you have some, John?’
John didn’t answer her. He looked back up at the mirror.
He looked himself in the eyes and then he looked at his dad and at the back of his mum’s head, and then he looked at the fourth chair, the empty one.
There was a teenage girl sat there. She had blonde hair and had a lump of lettuce on the end of her fork. He watched as she shoved it gracelessly into her mouth and he almost heard the crunch as she bit down on it.
In the mirror she met John’s eye and she winked.
When the neighbours saw John’s mum the next morning they asked her about the screaming. She was in the front garden with the estate agent. He was hammering a For Sale sign into the lawn. She told the neighbours they’d had some bad news and were all going to stay with her mother for a while.
‘Flipping heck,’ Emily said, pacing round the Jenkins’ front room.
Rudger watched her pacing up and down.
‘Is it usually like this?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she barked. ‘When you get a kid who knows what he’s doing, it’s a piece of cake. But this Jenkins, he’s useless. I mean, what sort of kid makes a noise like that? I’ve never seen such a scene. Ridiculous.’
‘But you scared him, Emily. You gave him a fright.’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t mean to. Look at me, do I look like a ghost? Is there anything scary about me?’ She smiled and ruffled her hair. ‘I’m not a scary Friend, am I? The boy’s obviously, plainly, clearly defective. They should take him back to the shop, get him seen to.’
Rudger waited for her to finish before he said, ‘What do we do now?’
Emily slumped on the settee next to him, and lifted her hand up to her face. Was there a slight tinge of transparency to it? How long could the two of them stay out in the real world without a real person to believe in them? Rudger didn’t know the answer, and kept his hands firmly in his pockets. They tingled.
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ she said wearily. ‘Go back.’
‘Finding the door can be tricky,’ Emily said. ‘It’s not just down any old alley, Rudge. You’ve got to look at it in the right way and it has to want to be seen in the right way. You’ve got to think it’s right for you.’
‘Can’t we just go in the front door?’
‘To the library?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, we could, if we were in the middle of town. But I don’t know where we are. All these streets look the same to me. I tell you what. You keep an eye out for a bus to the town centre and I’ll look for an alley.’
It took them twenty minutes of walking round the Jenkins’ neighbourhood (there were no buses) before they found an alleyway that Emily deemed suitable.
Rudger looked down the alley, a fence-lined passage between gardens. There were some wheelie bins and a broken pushchair a little way down. It smelt sour.
‘This one?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, look at the shadows,’ Emily answered.
She pointed to a nearby lamp post and then at the alley.
The shadow of the lamp post went to the right, away from the alley. But the shadow of the fence went the other way. The alley’s shadows went the wrong way.
‘Down there’s the door we want, if we want it. But we’d best be quick.’
She held up her hand. It was definitely beginning to Fade. There were thin grey smoky tendrils curling up from her fingertips.
Rudger didn’t look at his own hands, but he knew the feeling, as if the softest pins and needles had begun to infest them.
‘Excuse me, young lady,’ said a voice from behind them. ‘Such a dull-weathered day. I’m lost and require assistance finding directions, please.’
Rudger turned round and there on the pavement, moustache bristling, was that man.
‘Emily,’ he said, tugging at her arm, ‘don’t…’
But Emily wasn’t listening. She was stunned. She wasn’t used to being seen. She’d been in the imaginary business for long enough to know something odd was going on here. She didn’t, however, know exactly what it was.
‘Um. How can I help, mate?’ she said, pretending to be calm.
‘Oh, it’s easy,’ Mr Bunting said, leaning over her.
Rudger shouted, ‘No, Emily, he’s Mr Bunt—’
A clammy fish-cold hand clapped across his mouth and tugged him backwards.
It was her.
He struggled, trying to bite her fingers, trying to kick her legs out from under her, but it was no good.
Mr Bunting leant over Emily, a hand on her shoulder, and Rudger watched that endless mouth of his open up, unroll, tunnel back into his head. She seemed stuck, like an insect in amber, unable to move. Rudger assumed she was trying, but she just stood there staring into the dark at the end of his tunnel-throat.
And then she stretched, pulled out like dribbling custard, and with a delicious unlikely slurping noise he swallowed her whole.
Mr Bunting’s mouth banged shut with a xylophonous clatter. Grey wisps of smoke leaked out from under his moustache.
He burped a gunpowder burp.
‘Oh goodness,’ he said, looking happy. ‘Now…’
Rudger had been struggling without success. He redoubled his efforts. She might not have been his friend, exactly, but he’d sort of liked Emily. She’d been good to him, in her own way.
He bit harder than he’d ever bitten before and drove his elbow backwards. The dark pale skinny girl fell off him.
Spitting a finger out into the alley’s dirt, Rudger ran.
There was a whining hiss like steam escaping a broken pipe and then the clatter of running feet behind him.
He ran as if his life depended on it. Which, had he stopped to think, it probably did.
The alley turned this way and that, the walls changed from wooden fences to red bricks to dark crumbling bricks, dr
ipping and plastered with the torn edges of old posters.
Still the thudding footsteps were behind him.
Mr Bunting and the girl weren’t giving up. They weren’t catching up, since Rudger was fast, but they weren’t giving up either.
And Rudger was leading them, he suddenly realised, straight to the Agency, straight to the library. This man who, from what Rudger had seen, ate imaginaries, who liquefied them and swallowed them whole…and Rudger was leading him straight to the one place where he’d find all the off-duty Friends he could ever want.
The thought made him run faster. He just had to get there first.
‘I see you, boy,’ said a voice Rudger recognised.
Rudger jumped as he ran, and said, ‘Kinda busy now, Zinzan.’
The cat sat in a shadow in the middle of the alley, leg up in the air, giving its bum a good, if ineffectual, washing.
And Mr Bunting didn’t see it there, not until his foot slammed into it and he flew forwards, falling to the floor in a tumbling, clattering heap.
Zinzan was tough and flexible enough to come out the other side of the collision a little stunned, somewhat topsy-turvy in the mess of the alley, but quite uninjured. Still, climbing to its feet, it realised there was something else to worry about, something it could smell but couldn’t see. It wasn’t the singed smell of Fading that had passed by with the boy. This was something else, something sickly, like something pickled too long.
Then cold fingers closed around the scruff of its neck and the cat fell numb.
Rudger ran. He heard Mr Bunting trip, heard the screech of the cat kicked, and gave thanks to Zinzan. The smart, fast-thinking cat had saved his bacon.
He turned one final corner and there was the flickering light above the Agency’s door.
A second later he had his hand on the handle.
Looking behind him to see if Mr Bunting had got to his feet yet, Rudger was surprised to see a wall. He looked around. He was stood in a little brick-bound courtyard. The alley had sealed itself up, cutting itself off from where he’d just been. It looked as if he was safe at last.
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