‘Who are you talking to?’ Amanda asked. ‘Who’s Roger? What’s that hissing?’
The man who she had thought at first was a doctor but who she now thought probably wasn’t (mainly because he was stood in the middle of the room talking to himself ) turned to look at her.
‘Oh, look at that,’ he said, from under his moustache. ‘She can’t see you.’
Even though he looked into her eyes as he said it, she had the distinct feeling he wasn’t talking to her. Her head ached. There was something wrong.
He turned away and went on. ‘She doesn’t remember you, Rudger. A bang on the head can do that. So sad. Worth a tear perhaps? Sweeten the flavour. I’d best have you before you Fade. Think of me as a friend, kind Mr Bunting doing a Friend a favour.’
She had had a bang on the head, he was right, and she knew that made people lose their memories. It was called amnesia. She remembered that. But what was it she had forgotten? He was right. There was a hole there somewhere. She waggled the tongue of her memory in the space of it. A definite hole.
But what it was that was missing, she couldn’t say.
The room was in half-darkness, the sapling had died, the ceiling tiles had fallen back into place. She was feeling sick and tired. Ever so tired.
She lay back down on her pillows. It would be easier to sleep, wouldn’t it? She needed her rest, didn’t she? That’s what they always said on the telly, wasn’t it?
So tired, she felt her eyes falling shut under their own weight.
‘Amanda!’ Rudger shouted again, summoning the strength to speak from deep in his despair, his panic and anger. ‘Help me!’
She’d slumped back on to the big white pillows.
The fact that she could see Mr Bunting but couldn’t see him was like salt on a grazed knee. It was an insult. It stung. She was his friend, not Mr Bunting’s. If she saw anyone it ought to have been him.
It was unfair, it was unkind, and it hurt him inside.
With Mr Bunting looming, and the distant desert smell of rotting spices edging into the room, Rudger put the very last of his energy into one more struggle.
He bucked and the girl stumbled. Her grip didn’t loosen, her hand was still tangled up tight in his hair, but at least he’d made her stumble.
They toppled backwards and banged against the cupboard marked For patient use only.
With a retching gurgling hiss the girl lurched upright and shoved Rudger forwards again, in front of her, until they were stood exactly where they’d been before.
Amanda heard a bang from the cupboard and pushed herself up on her elbows to look. She saw the cupboard rock back against the wall.
And then its door swung open.
The light from the hallway outside lit the inside of the wardrobe.
She saw her coat and a pair of jeans hanging on a hanger and her rucksack on the floor. It was all her stuff. All waiting for her.
On the inside of the wardrobe door was a full-length mirror. One day, when she was better, she’d put her own clothes back on, and she’d look at herself in the mirror, and—
Oh, she thought, as the previous thoughts all fell silent.
The door was swinging to and fro and the mirror was reflecting something different to what she could see in the room.
There was a girl dressed in pink struggling in the arms of some pale monster. A skeleton-shape wrapped in a thin shifting cover of moonlit flesh and skin. Long black hair ragged and split and cobwebbed.
The sight jogged something inside her, a memory, a memory, a memory…of being in her mum’s study. She remembered hiding under the desk, remembered Goldie, the babysitter, looking for her.
What was that all about?
And who was the girl struggling with the ghoul?
And why did Amanda want to think the word ‘boy’ instead of ‘girl’?
And then it came back to her.
All of it.
Rudger felt a shudder go through him, a weird warming shiver, and then something happened.
He was free.
Although the girl had loosened her grip on his arm when they’d fallen, she’d twisted his long red hair tighter in her other hand. But now that long hair was gone. She had been left clutching mist as Veronica had vanished and he’d become the real imaginary Rudger.
Forgotten energy surged in his limbs, his heart beat free, and he seized the moment. He pushed away from her, ducked past Mr Bunting and ran for Amanda’s bed.
Free of the girl, he felt hope surge back into him. They had a chance.
‘Quick,’ Amanda said, holding out her good hand and pulling him up onto the mattress.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ Mr Bunting said, turning round slowly to face them and shaking his head. ‘I had hoped to not have to…upset…young Miss Shuffleup. Forgetting is quite natural, my dear, and hurts so much less. When I take him now—’
‘You’re not going to take Rudger,’ Amanda said, interrupting him.
‘He eats imaginaries,’ Rudger whispered. ‘I’ve seen him do it.’
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Amanda whispered back.
‘How?’
They looked around. It did seem, at first sight, an impossible task. Not only was Amanda still weak and injured (though feeling brighter, more awake now she had Rudger by her side), but the only way out was through the door behind Mr Bunting and he wasn’t going to let them go. It looked an impossible task at second sight too.
There was a high hissing noise and the dark-haired girl leapt at them. She didn’t look like the monster Amanda had seen in the mirror, just the sad pale girl she’d seen once on the doorstep, but even that was frightening enough.
Rudger shrank back, remembering the touch of her hands, but before she landed on the bed something happened.
There was a shimmer in the air.
Instead of landing on top of them, the girl crashed onto the glass dome that had appeared from nowhere and now covered the bed.
Rudger looked around. At his side was a control panel, a bank of brass buttons and gauges and handles. He recognised it. He remembered it. Of course he did. It was the submarine they explored the oceans in.
But that had been imaginary. It hadn’t been real.
He looked at Amanda.
‘First thing that came to mind,’ she said. ‘If it keeps the water out, it might keep them out.’
‘But it’s not real,’ Rudger said.
‘And I don’t reckon they are neither,’ said Amanda.
The girl above them was scratching at the thick, impervious glass, her face white with anger, her eyes motionless dark pits. Her hair floated around her, like a black dandelion, wafted back and forth by underwater currents.
‘She’ll never get in,’ Amanda said. ‘I built this thing to last.’
The girl stopped scratching at the dome. She sat up, sat still and looked away. She looked at Mr Bunting.
He was clapping. He had on a diving suit, one of those old-fashioned ones with the big brass helmet and the little round glass windows. Fish swam past him.
‘Very clever it is,’ he said. His voice crackled as it played through their cabin’s speakers. ‘A girl with bright sparks. A girl with big dreams.’
Amanda pressed the intercom button and said, ‘Not with dreams. With a two-person submersible capable of staying submerged for up to eight hours at depths of greater than three miles. You’ll just have to wait.’ She took her finger off the button and whispered to Rudger, ‘By then Mum must’ve come back and she’ll get a security guard or something. Chuck him out.’
‘You forget one thing, little girl,’ Mr Bunting said.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m so much older than you. So much cleverer, bigger, wiser. I have seen so many more things. I have dreamt of so much. I have imagined worlds that you couldn’t even think names up for. I have travelled and eaten in every—’
The girl, perched on top of the submarine’s dome, banged on the glass and hissed bubbles at him.
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‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Bunting said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘Too long and perambulatory a speech, I know, I know. But, at least, please, let me just say this. You, girl…’ He raised a hand and slowly pointed at Amanda. ‘…are in my way.’
His moustache ruffled inside the brass helmet and in the blink of an eye both the ocean and the submarine, controls, glass dome and all, vanished. In their place Amanda and Rudger found themselves lying, suddenly and unexpectedly, in a bed of writhing, wriggling, coiling snakes. But before they could scream about that, the girl fell on top of them.
As she fell she turned like a cat, twisting in the air so she landed with her hands already gripping Rudger’s wrists and her knees pinning his legs to the bed. She was dripping wet.
Before Amanda could move warm ropes of snake curled round and across her arms and legs and waist and neck. She was caught.
‘You’re not the only one with an imagination, little girl.’ Mr Bunting chuckled sourly. ‘Now, I’m hungry. I’ve been hungry for hours and I need to…borrow your friend, if you don’t mind. Bring him here.’
The girl dragged Rudger off the snake-bed, pulled him back into the middle of the room, wrenched him into an upright position.
There was nothing he could do. He felt so tired, and the cold grip of her fingers dripped despair into his brain. He could hardly be bothered to struggle at all.
Amanda was no better off. She was trapped in her bed by snakes and, although she wasn’t especially scared of snakes, the experience was not thrilling her. She tried imagining herself free. She tried imagining Rudger free. She tried imagining anything, but it was too hard. The snakes filled too much of her mind up, the way they squeezed, the way they writhed around her. It ruined her concentration.
All she could do was watch.
‘At last,’ Mr Bunting said. ‘You got away too often, you did. It was fun, yes. A challenge. Better than most. But in the end, boy, it changes nothing.’
Mr Bunting stopped talking and unhinged his jaw. That tooth-tiled, unnatural, supernatural tunnel-throat unfolded into his head and beyond, back to wherever its dark-eyed ending was. The scent of rotting spice, of hot dust and sand, hit Rudger in the face and he tried to get a hand free, tried to get loose, tried to make one last weak attempt to get away.
But his world tipped up and Mr Bunting’s throat was suddenly beneath him, a tiled pit, a white well with that far speck of absolute darkness at the bottom of it.
He felt himself falling, he was beginning to go, and then, unexpectedly, a voice he knew interrupted it all and the lights crackled and came back on and Mr Bunting’s mouth snapped shut with a clanging, clattering boom.
‘Excuse me?’ Amanda’s mum said.
She had a cup of coffee in one hand, with a plastic-wrapped cake balanced on top of it. She’d used her other hand to open the door and was just shutting it with her bum when she saw Mr Bunting.
‘What are you doing in my daughter’s room?’ she asked. ‘Can I help you?’
She wasn’t worried exactly, more curious. There was probably a perfectly simple explanation. This was a hospital, after all, and there were people in and out of rooms all the time. Except he didn’t look like one of the nurses or the cleaners, they all had uniforms, and he wasn’t the doctor who’d examined Amanda before.
And then she realised that she recognised him. But where had she seen him before? That bright Hawaiian shirt? Those Bermuda shorts? That bald head? Oh, she did know him, she thought, but couldn’t think where from.
‘Ah, Mrs Shuffleup,’ he began. ‘I’m just in the hospital conducting a survey.’
‘In my daughter’s room?’
‘I was looking for you.’
‘You came to the house the other day,’ Mrs Shuffleup said, finally remembering him. ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘What a good memory it has,’ he said.
Mrs Shuffleup recalled the odd feeling she’d had then. She was having it again now.
‘I think I’d like you to leave,’ she said firmly.
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said, in his smoothest tone of voice. ‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Mum!’ croaked Amanda.
She’d been struggling with the snakes more than ever since her mum had come back, but one had slithered right across her mouth, silencing her. By biting and blowing, though, and by tickling it with her tongue, she’d managed, finally, to get it to wriggle out of the way.
‘Mum!’ she croaked again. Her voice was weak, little more than a whisper. The snake across her throat was wound round tight.
‘Amanda,’ her mum stuttered with shock. ‘You’re awake! Oh, my darling.’
She ran over to the bedside, sat down in the chair and stroked Amanda’s forehead. She didn't see the snakes.
‘You’re so hot,’ she said. ‘But you’re awake, at last. Darling, I had hoped and hoped. Oh, I wish I’d been here for you when you—’
‘Don’t believe him, Mum,’ Amanda whispered, interrupting her. ‘He’s got Rudger.’
‘Rudger?’
‘He’s going to eat him.’
‘Oh, that’s such a mean thing to say, little girl,’ Mr Bunting said. ‘Eating isn’t the right word at all. I’m going to borrow him. Use him. Annihilate him.’
‘What are you all talking about?’ Amanda’s mum said, looking from one to another.
‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ Mr Bunting lied, voice light and bright, eyes sparkling.
‘No. Something’s going on. I want to know what it is, or I’m going to call security.’
‘Mum, he’s—’ Amanda choked on her words. The snake at her neck had suddenly constricted its coils, strangling her. But, even as she struggled in panic, Amanda knew all her mum could see was her daughter gasping for air.
‘Amanda,’ her mum cried, trying to get Amanda to sit up with one hand, trying to loosen her pyjamas with the other. ‘Oh, Amanda! Amanda?’ She turned to Mr Bunting. ‘You. I don’t care why you’re here. Go get help. Quick. Can’t you see she’s choking?’
‘Now they’re busy,’ Mr Bunting said, ignoring Mrs Shuffleup and turning back to Rudger, ‘we can go back to our business, yes? Where were we?’
He began the gruesome chittering task of unhooking his jaw again.
Rudger wasn’t watching. He was looking at Amanda and her mum. He could see the snake throttling her, but Mrs Shuffleup couldn’t.
Could Mr Bunting’s imaginary snakes really hurt Amanda? Could they actually strangle her? Rudger didn’t know. But he had the feeling, the sense, the certainty that if only Amanda’s mum could see them, then she’d be able to fight them, to pull them off, to free Amanda.
And although she couldn’t see them now, although she was a grownup and grownups didn’t have the sort of imagination to see all this stuff, he knew that once she had. He’d met Fridge, hadn’t he? He knew Amanda’s mum’s old imaginary friend. And that meant that once upon a time she had been part of this world.
Mr Bunting had his imaginary-eating mouth open now. Rudger could feel the world beginning to tip up again.
‘Amanda,’ he shouted desperately. ‘Amanda, tell your mum about Fridge. Tell her I met him. Tell her he’s waiting for her. Tell her he’d come if she asked. Tell her about the mirror.’
‘Mum,’ Amanda wheezed.
‘Hush, baby,’ her mum said. ‘Don’t try to talk.’
‘It’s Rudger,’ Amanda managed. ‘He wants me to tell you…’
‘What, darling?’
‘About…about a fridge? I don’t under—’
‘What about the fridge, darling?’
Amanda paused as if she were listening to something far off. Her breaths whistled in her throat, and there were tears on her cheeks.
Her mum stroked her hand, kissed her brow.
‘A dog?’ Amanda whispered, finding each word hard to say, her breaths coming so short. ‘Fridge…a dog? Rudger… Rudger met him.’
Amanda’s mum looked at her, shocked.
‘What?’ she stuttered.
‘He says,’ Amanda could hardly get the words out, ‘he’s waiting. Use the…the mirror.’
It had taken Lizzie Downbeat ages before she’d realised Fridge wasn’t a real dog. Even when he had talked to her from underneath the bed at night, she just thought her parents had found her the best dog in the world. She didn’t know any better. It had only dawned slowly that no one else could see Fridge, that no one else seemed to know about him, that her parents denied having bought him for her. It was only then that she had realised what he was.
Imaginary.
Such a strange thing.
And now, here in this hospital room, where she’d spent so long hoping and wishing and, yes, imagining that her Amanda would wake up, here where her daughter finally had woken up (she wasn’t imagining that, was she?), she thought she could smell Fridge’s damp fur once again.
And, looking down at her daughter, she saw something else. Not just sheets, not just her girl, but there was something else there.
She couldn’t make it out. No sooner had she seen the something than it had gone again.
She heard a faint voice, a faint boy’s voice from far away, saying, ‘The mirror. Tell her about the mirror.’
Was it talking to her? It had sounded like mist speaking, it was so faint, so thin, but she looked around.
She saw the wardrobe where Amanda’s clothes were hanging. The door was open and on the inside of the door was a full-length mirror.
She looked straight into it and saw herself reflected back. She looked tired, like she’d not slept for days. She felt it too. She’d not left Amanda’s bedside for more than a few minutes this whole time. And there, next to her in the mirror, was Amanda in her bed with her wriggling green duvet.
No. That wasn’t what it was. It wasn’t a duvet, it was…
She looked down at the bed next to her and saw the snakes. They looked as real as anything and were coiling around and across her daughter, holding her tight, pinning her down.
The Imaginary Page 11