The furry ball was thudding up the stairs, its bushy tail brushing against the tinsel Honey had wrapped around the railings, before being completely swallowed by the darkness on the landing, a darkness that seemed to be creeping down the carpeted steps, invading the house bit by bit, like a growing stain of ink.
When Teddy’s hand was just an inch from the switch, his sister slapped it away.
“What on earth was that?”
“Squirrel invasion!” cried Teddy. “That one was a lot bigger than the baby.”
“Maybe it’s the baby’s mum.”
Honey flinched at the word mum, the way you would flinch at the words ‘chocolate cake’ when you know this is a treat you’re not likely to ever have again. A soft, blood-freezing, hair-rising sound, the kind of sound that made her grateful the lights weren’t on, echoed around the empty rooms of the house. For a few more seconds, she could pretend it was nothing.
No, the sound was not nothing.
It wasn’t scary either, not scary in a scary sense. In fact, it was the sort of sound she had heard a million times on the streets of London.
But in fact, it was scary. Because the last thing you expect when you’re home alone in a house where no one smokes is to hear the hiss of a match being lit…
It was hard to see, unless you had cat eyes, that, in the gloomiest corner of the room, outside the range of the tree lights, Mum’s rocking chair had changed shape. And it had changed shape because there was a new shape in it, a large shape that was almost spilling out of it. The shape was so heavy that the rocking chair had stopped rocking, and instead of its normal, reassuring squeak, it gave out a sort of groan. A column of smoke hung above the chair where a head was beginning to take shape in the dark. The smoke was hanging quite high in the air, and if Honey let her imagination run wild she would think it looked pretty much like a ghost. The ghost seemed to be winking her at her. An eye as red and hungry as the mouth of a demon was blinking…
It all happened as quick as a wink, too.
Something huge and wispy fell over her head. A faint whiff of familiar perfume tickled her nose.
Then, all was dark.
7. Dwarves and Dogsleds
“What happened, sir?” The white-haired dwarf took one look at the vehicle and untied the dogs. “Easy. Easy does it.” He chuckled as they threw themselves at him and licked his face.
“We had an accident,” the man answered, stepping out of his soaked clothes into a towel that a young woman held out for him. He rubbed himself vigorously, washing his arms and face with a handful of snow. “Terrible. I lost two dogs. The bolts are buggered.” He stopped, glaring at the woman who was waiting with the bowl of snow in her hands. They were in a wide barn, serving, by the looks of it, as a shelter for dogs and a garage for sleds. “What are you still doing here?” he snapped. “Is my bath ready?”
The woman bent over to collect the dirty items of clothing and rushed out into the cold.
“This is bad,” said the dwarf, examining the damage. “How did it happen?”
“A skidoo. Racing. Must have been. Crashed into us at top speed. Nearly killed me. Those snowmobiles will be the end of us. They’re bad for the ice, bad for the air.”
“And bad for business. That’s why we barely use ours. You don’t want too many of those tourists around, even if they make good bait.”
The man gave the dwarf a sharp look, to which the creature responded with a grin. He scratched the dogs’ ears, dipping his hands into the shaggy, matted fur. They were large, beautiful beasts, with blue eyes and powerful claws.
“Careful, Midget. The ice has ears.”
The dwarf nodded.
“As if that wasn’t enough, the Radars fined me,” sighed the man. “Midget, we are living in times of evolution! Fined for speed, while on a dogsled!”
“Ridiculous,” said the dwarf, leading the dogs away to be fed.
“Yes, that’s right. Feed the babies. Oh, and Midget…”
“Sir?”
“Did you keep an eye on her? No more writing, I hope? I’m not in the mood for experimenting with anything else.”
The dwarf smiled weakly. His front teeth, impressively large, bit into his lower lip.
“I couldn’t say, sir. But I think not.”
“All right.”
The man took a deep breath: the smell of the wild is what he had missed. It was good to be home. He looked around at the white desert, the frozen fjord, the gloom that clung to everything like a shadow of death. Yes, that was it. Everything looked dead, and this is what he liked most. It was like looking over a wide graveyard, a graveyard where the tombstones had been swallowed by snow.
He smoked for a while, immersed in his thoughts, before gathering his long hair, which was the colour of the absent sun, under the balaclava. The balaclava was a black mask with only two holes on each side, and the man’s eyes shone as bright and cold as the ice glazing the fjord, and as sharp as the knife he cleaned of blood in his mouth, before sticking it in a fur pouch hanging on his waist.
8. Bleak Sleeping Quarters
The first thing Honey thought when she opened her eyes on Christmas morning was that there had been an accident. Whilst driving down the motorway towards their ridiculous destination, the bottle of Ribena exploded, killing Dad and Anaconda at once. Honey’s fingerprints were found on the bottle: she was a murderer.
The second thing she thought was that this wasn’t her room on the top floor of Chess Cottage, because even the wicker chair in the bathroom where she sat keeping Teddy company when he was in the bath was more comfortable than this bed.
The third thing she thought was that she had no idea where her brother was and that Dad was going to kill her (if he wasn’t already dead).
The room she woke up in was full of beds, the way the rooms in orphanages are, and just as the beds in orphanages looked unfriendly and uninviting, the prettiest thing about these bunk beds, with their splintered wood frames and torn mattresses, were the shadows falling on the high walls in a variety of patterns.
At the back of her mind, there was the peculiar sensation of having slept a hundred years, a dreamless sleep apart from the dream that woke her.
In her dream, Honey had been with Mum, holding her hand on a wide plain of snow. There were footprints on the snow, but they were red, like blood.
And then Mum vanished and she was back on the dark twisting corridors of Chess Cottage, running away from Dad. Something was sticking out of Dad’s back. A key? A key that you could turn to make Dad move around, like the key of the doll who laughed in the night…
Honey’s whole body jolted.
“Ouch!” she yelped, when her head hit the ceiling.
And that’s when, groping blindly with her hands, she saw that she was high up the wall, so high she could stretch her foot and pluck out the dangling light bulb with her toes if she wanted to. She was in a skyscraper of beds, and the only means to climb down was by a rope tied to the creaky headboard. Honey tried it: it didn’t feel safe at all, and with the second tug, the headboard protested with a loud creak.
This was all wrong. Honey had never felt so trapped before, not even when she had gotten stuck in the empty chest Dad kept as a prop for his pirate show at school.
At least now she didn’t have to sniff some kid’s skull and crossbones stockings. But, nevertheless, there were smells.
Bad smells.
Rotten smells.
No, this couldn’t be a grave. It was way too big, for one. And cold. A grave wouldn’t smell of urine, because dead people don’t pee, and worms don’t pee, either. Honey couldn’t see worms anywhere. Even if worms live underground and go to graves the way people go to fish and chip shops, somehow she knew it would be way too cold for them. If there had been any worms, they would certainly be dead by now, too.
Honey could see the shape of the door, and barely had time to register the rectangle-shaped glow on the far wall when, with an ear-splitting sound of clattering chains and padlocks, it opened.
A wedge of light fell on the opposite wall to her, where small, shivering mounds of flesh began to uncurl and rub their eyes.
Children.
“Watsinak!” the figure at the door shouted, and the foreign word had a wakening effect on the little people, who started to climb down immediately. Some used the ropes and some just slid down the climbing frames the way Honey had done so many times down her own banister at home.
Honey shuddered. This place, wherever it was, was draughty and about as comfortable as a train station on a windy morning. The ropes with the children hanging onto them made her think of an earthquake she had seen live on TV. The boys and girls looked like insects shivering in the chilly draught of the mysterious room, the way people escaping out of the collapsing building looked like insects shivering in the wind of the helicopters coming to save them.
Only there was no one coming to save these children, or Honey who, she realised, had to slide down the ropes herself if she was ever going to get down and find out why and how she had gotten here.
She remembered…nothing. Her head felt empty like a pumpkin carved for Halloween. No matter how many times she blinked, the short person in the doorway did not shift into Dad or even Grandma Florence with her silly curlers. For the first time ever, Honey would have been relieved to hear her say: “Had a bad dream, puppet?” in her thick French accent, relieved even to feel her cold claws sifting through her hair. But this wasn’t a bad dream, and the woman standing in the doorway was certainly not Grandma who, short as she may have been, was definitely not a dwarf.
Honey followed the row of children out of the door and into a wide corridor. The ceilings were high and the sound of water gurgling through the pipes that ran along the two sides sickening, but at the end of the passageway, she felt a slight whiff of food floating towards her. There were no windows to look out through, and she remembered the time when Grandma Florence had taken her on a ‘prison adventure’ in Paris. Honey was very small, but still she thought she recognised Grandfather Flaubert in the fat man sitting in the glass cubicle beside a guard, despite his bushy moustache which was powdered with the vanilla sugar Grandma used to ice her doughnuts, just the way she had recognised him in the Santa Claus costume when he’d knocked on their door on a winter night, bringing with him a sack of fireworks that blew up the kitchen window.
Honey wanted to ask the girl in front of her a million questions – Where were they? Why were the bunk beds so high up on the wall? Why was it so cold? – but she was afraid that as soon as she opened her mouth she would dissipate into thin air like a dream.
Her brain felt as if it had been burgled and her memories stolen. Honey wondered if she had fallen asleep reading some adventure novel. Mum always warned her that if she fell asleep reading, she would slip into the open book and drown in the story.
But Honey knew that the last thing she did last night was step into the pool of light that the Christmas tree made on the floor of their lounge, and the twinkling fairies on the branches were the last things she saw before darkness swallowed her.
Worst of all, she had no idea where her brother was. She almost hoped to see him on top of her when she opened her eyes, trying to sneak a toy spider into her mouth to make up for the time when she gave him a haircut in his sleep. But Teddy was nowhere in sight. And the room she had suddenly found herself in didn’t smell in the slightest of lavender, mothballs or French cooking, a smell Honey expected to wake up to on Christmas morning. In fact it smelled of…porridge.
And then she saw it. Gooey, slimy and thick, bubbling in large cauldrons, it made her stomach turn upside down in protest. She didn’t like porridge at the best of times, but this was just a revolting concoction made even worse by the fact that the children were slurping it down as if it was delicious ice cream.
“Have you seen my brother?” Honey asked the red-cheeked dwarf lady when her turn came to receive a bowl of slug-vomit and a cup of watery cocoa. “His name is Teddy…”
But the next moment, Honey flinched at the sting of hot food on her cheeks, as the woman slapped her ladle back into the pot, shouting the same mysterious word through her terrible crooked teeth.
What the heck does ‘Watsinak’ mean? Honey thought to herself as she walked to a table where a group of children had already finished their porridge and sat in silence, blowing in their hands for warmth.
That’s when Honey realised that she was only wearing pyjamas and that she was freezing. She coughed and sat down in an empty chair.
“Well, I am sorry to interrupt this insightful…conversation,” Honey mumbled, wondering if the cook put the grease from the children’s filthy hair to good use in the kitchen.
And, to her surprise…she was so hungry she didn’t care. When she finished the slug-vomit, which was actually very tasty despite the gruesome bits swimming in it, (not that even Grandma’s snail salad wouldn’t do now), she knew that ‘Hunger is the best chef’ is not just a proverb to excuse Dad’s bad cooking, but a true fact. Hunger was a reality as much as the cold, a frost so deep it seemed to cut clean through her bones, so when at last the heavy, dusty drapes were drawn back from the far wall of the canteen, Honey was not entirely surprised to see that it was a glass wall, and that behind it, darkness had not lifted with the arrival of morning, but remained clinging to the landscape outside the windows, like a web of the silvery moon.
In that instant, even if it didn’t make the slightest sense, Honey knew that she was home. She could almost see herself outside on the snowy field, holding Mum’s gloved hand in her own, feeling happy, looking into Mum’s eyes and seeing them go as red as the bloody footprints around them, like in her dreams.
9. Teddy and the Sinister Kitchen
The last thing Teddy expected on that Christmas morning was to wake up to the sound of chopping wood, despite the fact that he lived next door to a vast area of woodland, and his neighbours stacked firewood they didn’t need in niches by their front doors. When his eyes opened, the cold kicked in like pain after an anaesthetic.
Teddy listened. The tat-tat-tat sound didn’t come from far away, and it was as disturbing as the drip of a faulty tap.
He was lying on a bare floor, with nothing to keep him warm but a stinky animal skin, in a room no bigger than their broom cupboard at home. Leaning against the wall was a large sack, and Teddy’s feet rested on something warm. He was barefoot and wearing the same pyjamas he had put on before going to bed on Christmas Eve.
There was something warm in the sack. What could be warm? He had a few ideas.
Hot chocolate could be warm.
The sun could be warm.
Chess Cottage could be warm.
And…
Human bodies could be warm.
Living bodies. And recently dead bodies – before rigor mortis sets in. Rigor mortis. Two Latin words his sister taught him when Kitty’s kitten died and his mouth wouldn’t close so Honey tied her hair band around it. Rigor mortis – it means dead, and cold, and stiff…
But somehow, Teddy didn’t think there could be any hot chocolate, sun or cottages inside that sack. As for human bodies…well…
That something seemed to be moving, making the fine hairs on his toes stand on end. The sack was leaking something dark, something that gave out a strong, disturbing scent. Blood?! Up on the low ceiling, a light bulb made a buzzing sound, flashing on and off like a wasp trapped in a jar. The light it shed was fainter than that of a candle, so most of the tiny room was immersed in shadow.
Teddy peered helplessly at these new surroundings. Where was his Spiderman poster? Where were his books and marbles? Where was his desk? He was half expecting to see the morning light smiling through t
he curtain that Mum had made from fabric she’d stumbled upon in the family loft, or the ink stains that Dad hadn’t bothered to try and remove from the armchair in the corner. He jumped to his feet, scanning the room around him, but the old TV set wasn’t in its place, either. He wished. A kidnap victim wasn’t supposed to be having fun, after all. Because that much he could remember.
His sister and him had been kidnapped.
A strange sensation that he was doing something he wasn’t meant to be doing came over him. Instantly he knew why. Holly moley! Today was CHRISTMAS!! Well, the last day he remembered was Christmas Eve, and the last day you remember is always yesterday…right?
He sat back down, pulled his knees up to his chest and waited. He wished he was sitting on the floor of his own house unwrapping presents, not in this ugly cupboard of a room next to a bag that could be filled with chopped-up bodies. What if his sister was in there?
Should he untie the string?
Oh no, he couldn’t do it. As much as he hated Honey, he just could not bring himself to look at her dead body. In the flickering light he distinguished a few words on one of the walls:
A L L A I N
S O F I A
E M E L I
The names Allain, Sofia and Emeli (spelled wrong) must have been scribbled with a sharp object. A shard of metal, maybe? He ran his finger over the faint indents of the children’s names, listening to the drip-drip of the blood oozing out of the sack…
Was this the same sack that was used to take him and his sister away from Chess Cottage?
Because they had been taken in a sack. He remembered that, too. A sack that stuck to them like a murderous bed sheet. Through a tiny rip in the rough fabric, Teddy had seen the snowman in the garden. The snowman had different coloured eyes, one a green olive and the other a black one. Its nose was an old carrot they found at the bottom of the fridge, in the drawer that was green with grime and mould. The carrot made the snowman seem more alive, so Teddy was disappointed to see it next to the broom on a pile of snow. A bird snatched the pickled red pepper that Honey had fished out from one of Dad’s jars of pickles with tweezers to make the mouth.
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