by Ben Jeapes
Times like this were the closest Ted came to believing in demons. He could imagine supernatural entities roaming Salisbury and looking for a nice, warm, empty space to play in. Here’s one! This boy’s head! Let’s have our party here!
It made as much sense as anything else since That Day. Something had caused this.
That Day, he and Robert and Sarah had walked back from school together, as usual. Ted was entrusted with picking up his younger sibs from their primary school and escorting them. Back home, Sarah had gone off to do her girl stuff. Ted and Robert had kicked a ball around in the garden. Then their mum had given them a five-minute warning for tea, so they had gone upstairs to get out of their school clothes and wash hands. They had gone into their separate rooms and that was the last time anyone had seen Robert normal. Their mum had called them down. Sarah had gone skipping past his door for the stairs and Ted had gone down after her, expecting Robert to follow.
He never had. And when Barry finally lost patience and went upstairs to see what was keeping him, Robert was like this.
“Just get better, right?” Ted pleaded. He squeezed Robert’s hand. “You’re so missing out. You’re thirteen now. It’s so much better than being nine.” He thought for a moment. “Okay. There’s also zits and you keep growing out of your clothes and Barry will want to give you the Talk but don’t worry ’cos I’ll give you the anti-Talk to set you straight again ... But there’s girls, I mean, mate, when you were nine you thought girls were just pests but trust me, you have no idea, it’s so great when it hits you but you’ll never know if you don’t get better–”
Ted trailed off without hope.
“Arse,” he murmured. Nothing was going to happen.
He yawned again and shuffled back to the laptop. The download had finished and he hadn’t been wrong about the source:
“Dear Malcolm, Diana and Louise. As you know Jane is quite an ‘accomplished artist’ and, she drew the enclosed of our little group’s ‘mutual acquaintance’. We both agree, it would look excellent on the website and should certainly ‘garner attention’ from, any similarly experienced individuals who ‘come across it’. Sincerely, Dennis K. Dempster.”
“That’s a picture?” Ted murmured in disbelief. It was several megabytes large, for a start – Dennis didn’t know how to change the settings on the scanner to get something small and manageable. And it was a document – Dennis was one of those people who thought he was being helpful sending a picture embedded rather than just the raw file. Ted would have to open it up, extract the picture and boil it down to something more web-suitable.
The picture was so big that all Ted could see on screen was a mass of swirling pencil lines. He zoomed it down to something that would fit on screen-
-and almost fell off the bed.
“Whoa!”
Two monochrome eyes glared hate back at him.
The artist, Jane, had shaded the whole sheet very lightly with grey pencil, then shaded again with something darker. There was no clear form – it simply emerged from the darker tint. But the overall effect was a face, and Ted recognised it.
It wasn’t quite the woman Ted had seen in the mall – for a start, he was pretty sure it was a man – but he could easily be the woman’s brother. The face was half hidden in the shadow of a high collar patterned with strange symbols, and the same pointed fringe of a V-shaped haircut hung down between blazing eyes.
So, Ted and Malcolm – and the ‘book club’ – all hallucinated the same kind of people.
“That’s just impossible,” he mumbled through another yawn. Impossible, but also exciting. There had to be something in this. He was going to tell Stephen about it. He had to tell someone. Tomorrow. Stephen would bring his sceptical, rational mind to bear on the problem and together they would work it out.
Another yawn, and Ted felt his limbs grow heavy. Wasn’t there enough oxygen in the room or something? He pushed himself up off the bed to check the window, and staggered when a wave of fatigue swept over him. He stumbled to the curtains, pulled them back. The top half of the window was open and there was a gentle breeze, cool in the summer evening. Ted took several deep breaths but felt his eyes grow heavy.
Robes fluttered in the corner of his vision and he jumped round, heart thumping against his ribs. But there was no one there – only Robert, still in bed and still out of it.
His heart kept racing. Hey, Ted, it was just a picture! Get a grip. He took a step back towards the camp bed and there was a loud thud, as if from far away. It took a moment to realise he had dropped to the floor as the weight of the room pressed down on top of him.
Had he eaten something? He couldn’t be drunk. Had a nurse accidentally slipped him a pill, like Robert?
A whimper broke from his throat. Help me, someone, help me ...
Red. Something in his vision was red. It was important. The thought forced itself through the fuzz that clogged his mind. The alarm cord! That was it. It dangled from the ceiling above his bed.
He levered himself onto the bed and reached up, fingers brushing the handle at the end of the cord. And then the weight of his arm was too much and it flopped down onto the bed beside him, and he felt himself shut down and tumble into the darkness.
Chapter 8
It wasn’t comfortable, lying on the floor.
Ted opened his eyes and squinted sleepily at the carpet. His body felt heavy but relaxed, as if he had just woken from a good, long sleep, but no, it really wasn’t comfortable. Why hadn’t he gone to bed properly? He rolled over and looked around.
Fury blazed in his heart and he sat abruptly up. This was Robert’s room – not his room at St Ossie’s but his real room, his room back home at 34 Henderson Close. And it was untidy.
Robert’s room was dusted and vacuumed every week along with the rest of the house. It was always ready to receive him back at a moment’s notice, immediately he got better. But now there were clothes scattered about on the floor and the table was covered with a jumble of toys and junk. Who had been mucking around in here?
“It’s bloody Sarah, isn’t it?” Ted muttered. He clambered to his feet. He was going to tell his sister, once and for all, that she did not go into Robert’s room.
He took a step towards the door and the room shimmered.
Huh?
The moment he stopped moving, so did the room. But it was too big. The ceiling was a little higher than it should be, the furniture a bit bigger.
He tried again, and again the room wobbled around him. Instinct made him put his arms out for balance, but he didn’t feel unsteady. It wasn’t like a bouncy castle, shifting around him as he walked. It was like ... he tried to think what. It was like a very slow computer connection, where you move the mouse and the screen refreshes itself bit by bit around the pointer.
He tried a third step and the room only trembled a little. By the time he had reached the door, the house seemed used to his presence. It was as steady as it had ever been. But it was still too large.
Something at the back of his mind told him that Sarah wasn’t responsible for this. In fact – a little fact floated to the top of his memory – Sarah wasn’t even in the same country. She was in Italy.
Other memories began to crystallise around that little seed. He was living alone at home for a week. He had gone to keep a sedated Robert company at the hospice. But there was one thing conspicuously absent from all of this: he had no memory of going back to his house after seeing Robert, and then going to sleep on the floor of Robert’s bedroom.
Ted cautiously poked his head out into the landing. That too was just a little too big and subtly distorted in all directions. Then there was a very loud miaow and Ted’s shoulders sagged with relief. He hadn’t realised how tense he was but it was punctured by finally hearing something familiar. He turned round with a big grin on his face.
“Hi, Mr ... Furry–” His voice and his grin faded away.
It was Mr Furry padding down the landing, but his head was much too big and h
eavy for the body, his tail was stubby and his legs were tiny. He didn’t look like an adult cat, just a magnified kitten, but he prowled like a lion.
“What happened to you?” Ted exclaimed. Mr Furry yawned up at him and revealed a set of fangs that should have been too large for his head. Ted pressed back against the wall with a shout of fear. Mr Furry growled like a dinosaur and gleaming, curved claws slid from his front paws to tear at the carpet. A voice that was cold and inhuman spoke into Ted’s head.
One day, when everyone is asleep, I will come for you.
Mr Furry lifted up one of his massively clawed paws to give it a nonchalant lick, then sauntered away down the landing. He disappeared into Ted’s mum’s room at the end. Ted didn’t follow.
The house began to shimmer again, as if it had suddenly noticed it was the wrong size and intended to do something about it. The ceiling was getting lower – or was he getting taller?
“Screw this,” Ted muttered, and he ran for the stairs. He didn’t want to end up like Alice in Wonderland, arms and legs sticking through the windows: if the house was shrinking, he wanted to be outside it.
The shifting perspectives as the house changed caused him to stumble. He missed a step and fell, and his arm wrenched painfully as he hung onto the banister. Ted climbed to his feet and made his way quickly but more carefully down the stairs, rubbing at his shoulder.
By the time he reached the bottom the house had stopped changing. Everything was the right size. Mr Furry appeared at the top of the stairs and he was back to the proportions that Ted remembered. The cat trotted down towards him and instead of issuing telepathic threats he rubbed himself against Ted’s legs.
Ted reached down cautiously and stroked him. No fangs appeared. Ted grinned and picked the cat up, and Mr Furry settled into his arms as he usually did.
“You wouldn’t believe what happened to you earlier. You were this monster, with huge great claws and teeth, but who would be afraid of you, you stupid soppy ... Ah. Yes.”
Robert. Robert had been afraid of Mr Furry – or at least, he would never let himself be alone in the same room as the then kitten. Robert would tolerate Mr Furry in mixed company but had always kept an eye on him.
“Anyway–” Ted looked cautiously around him. “Looks like the trip’s over–” He checked his watch, as easily as he could with his arms full of cat. The display was blank. “You got the time on you? No?”
He looked around uneasily. The house seemed back to normal but some deep instinct said it was far from it. He shook his head to clear it. “God, I just want to get out of here.”
So Ted put the cat down, pulled the front door open and stepped outside. He stopped dead on the front step.
“Oh ... balls.”
Chapter 9
Stephen’s mum poked her head around the door for a brusque goodnight.
“Don’t be up too late.”
Stephen was in his usual coding position, lying on his bed with the laptop on his chest. He spared one eye to cock up at her.
“’Night.”
She rarely smiled, but he liked to think she looked at him with a little more fondness than anyone else got.
“It’s eleven thirty, you know.”
“Eleven thirty-three.”
“Love you.” She said it like she might say “sky still blue”.
He grinned. “Yeah, whatever.”
She wasn’t the kind to smile even when she knew it was a joke, so she just closed the door. Stephen’s attention was already back on the screen.
He could already sense that this was going to be a good session. STOOPID was welling up inside his brain and flowing down his arms and fingers into the computer. The room seemed to be growing dim around him, as if his brain couldn’t spare the resources to register images in the usual way. The tap-tapping of fingers on keys was no more than the far-off rustle of leaves in the trees. His whole being was focused on the jewel taking shape in front of him. The screen, the code, the toolbox of software that he had designed himself filled his thoughts and mind and vision.
A voice spoke urgently, like a shout in his ear.
“Stephen!”
Stephen convulsed as all his senses returned. The laptop slid off his chest and for the first time in his life he was staring at a ghost. He scrambled back on his bed as far from the apparition as he could.
The door hadn’t opened, there hadn’t been any sound, but there was someone else in his room. The man was old and stooped. His face was heavily wrinkled but his eyes pierced into the depths of Stephen’s soul from beneath a point of white hair. His pipe-stem frame was clad in bulky robes that rippled as if a breeze were blowing. They were ornate with a pattern that Stephen instinctively began to analyse: complex but suggesting a very deep logic if you only knew how to look. He was very slightly transparent: through the robes Stephen could just see the lines of his curtains and desk.
And, to his amazement, he recognised the man.
“I ... I dream of you, sometimes,” he whispered. He could hear the astonishment in his own voice. “I never remember when I wake up but–”
“Yes, I have walked in your dreams for a long time.” The voice was thin but did not waver, accustomed to command. “Stephen, this is important–”
I don’t believe in ghosts, Stephen told himself, and he felt his pounding heart begin to slow down. He closed his eyes experimentally and found the man was still there, clear as day, against the shifting colours at the back of his vision. He grinned.
“I can still see you,” he said, eyes still closed. “So you’re just in my mind. You’re not real.”
The man’s face clouded with such naked anger that Stephen recoiled a little.
“There is no time for this! Ted is in trouble and needs your help.”
“Hey!” Stephen snapped. He opened his eyes. “You leave Ted out of this!”
“You love him, Stephen.”
“I–” Stephen squeaked with the effort of keeping his voice down. He even glanced at the door for fear his mum should hear the hallucination speaking his deepest secret out loud. “Well, yes, but you’d know that, wouldn’t you, just being in my mind?”
“Ted is at St Osmund’s–” the man began.
“And I know that.” This was interesting. Stephen sat up on his bed, cross-legged. “And so of course, so do you. You can’t know anything I don’t.”
“Oh, by all the–” The man bellowed. He hobbled around Stephen’s room, where a younger man would have paced. Sometimes he went a bit too far and an elbow or a foot would disappear into the wall. His sandals hovered about an inch above the carpet. “He is looking after Robert. He is in room 21. He is asleep–”
“I know, I know and I guessed.” It wasn’t everyone who got to debate with their own madness, and now Stephen was properly over the shock he was starting to enjoy it. “I know he’s looking after Robert, ’cos he texted me, and I remember Robert is in room 21 at St Ossie’s, and it’s nearly midnight and he needs to be up early for his job so–”
“Be silent!” the man thundered. “Understand this. He is in very great danger. The witch, my rival, has invaded his dreams and–”
“Oh come on, you know I don’t do witches either–”
“Before he went to sleep he uploaded code for the interface to module C of STOOPID. He also debugged lines 1073 to 1194. He left comments in them. He didn’t tell you that, did he?”
Stephen was suddenly left stranded like a rock before a tsunami as his certainty drained away. The hallucination sounded a bit too sure. The product of his own mind wouldn’t be making unsubstantiated claims, would it?
“Yeah, right–” His mouth was suddenly dry.
“Why not check?” The old man cocked his head as a challenge.
Stephen’s fingers tapped automatically at the keyboard, but suddenly he so badly didn’t want to look at the FTP site on screen. If the hallucination was right then it wasn’t a hallucination after all and he, Stephen, would be wrong about so many things.
He could see Ted had made some uploads, and it took only a few more clicks to verify that the man in his room was completely right.
Stephen stared at the ghostly visitor. It took a couple of goes to make his voice work.
“What do you want?” he whispered.
Chapter 10
Ghosts moved purposefully along the busy road that ran past 34 Henderson Close.
Ted stretched his neck out and peeked left and right, not wanting to move any further than he had to from the security of his own home.
Opposite him, and to his left and right, should have been the familiar, modern, identical houses of Henderson Close. Stephen’s place, and others like it. Henderson Close should have been a quiet cul de sac. Now no. 34 was just one house on a busy road. On either side nos. 32 and 36 morphed into rows of buildings Ted had never seen before, old and modern and every stage in between. Some of the buildings looked as if they had been built to be vague and indistinct – though how you went about designing an indistinct building, Ted had no idea. This was a residential street, but somehow it was composed of many different residential streets.
Ted recognised the ambience immediately: the feeling that there were many more buildings crammed into one space than should be physically possible; the sensation of seeing everything separately all at once. He had felt it briefly that time in the mall. This was the same place. Well, same city. Presumably the mall was here somewhere.
A spectral car pulled up further down the road and a transparent family climbed out with the shopping. The ghost of a normal, twenty-first century woman walked her dog slightly above the pavement, not noticing the six-inch gap between her feet and the ground. A man walked straight through her in the other direction and dwindled very quickly as he walked away, as if he were walking down a long tunnel.