The Teen, the Witch and the Thief

by Ben Jeapes

  It was almost like this wasn’t just one street, it was many different streets and somehow they were all here at once ... now, why did that seem a familiar idea, he wondered? But that fragile little thought wasn’t so much put to one side as swept away to the back of his mind by the overwhelming flood of sensory data.

  The light was dim, as if the whole thing were inside an old brown sepia photograph. Ted glanced up at the sky and suddenly his eyes watered and he looked quickly back to earth again. There was no sky. It wasn’t light, it wasn’t dark; there was no sun or moon or clouds; there was just no sky.

  Across the shifting rooftops he could see the spire of the cathedral. At least something was familiar.

  Ted retreated a few steps back into the house, and closed the door, and locked it and put on the chain. Then he backed up against the wall of the hall and slid down into a crouch.

  And there he stayed for he didn’t know how long. He gazed blankly at the door, which was all that stood between the comforting familiarity of home and the weirdness outside. It was a very tenuous security but it was all he had.

  “Maybe I’m dead,” Ted said out loud, just to hear a familiar voice. It sounded much too loud. “Maybe something killed me and this is the afterlife.”

  He was a little surprised that it didn’t really upset him. Then he thought of Robert and Sarah and his mum, who would never see him again (until, presumably, they died too), and how upset they would be. That saddened him, but only a little. It would piss Barry off too, which was some consolation.

  True, at first glance it wasn’t an afterlife he felt familiar with from his RE lessons. He quickly ran through the list of usual options in his head. Heaven (happy place), Hell (nasty), reincarnation or nothing. This was obviously not nothing, it was something. He obviously wasn’t being reincarnated, because he was still Ted. He held his hands in front of him for inspection, then gave the rest of himself a quick once over, just to be sure. Definitely still Ted, down to the scar at the base of his finger where he had once put it through a window. He fingered his chin and found the spot that he had woken up with and which wasn’t quite squeezable yet.

  Hell? Couldn’t see any demons.

  Heaven? No angels.

  Maybe none of the religions had got it right. Maybe there was no empty void, no demons with pitchforks, no being reborn as a woodlouse. Just this. He could do whatever he liked. Just him and a shape-shifting Mr Furry. Forever.

  “Yay,” he muttered. “On with the sinning!”

  The front door rattled and Ted pressed himself even further back against the wall. The weird world outside was trying to get in? Could he stop it? His eyes fixed on the door handle. In a movie it would have been moving slowly up and down. This one just rattled some more. He had locked it, so it couldn’t move.

  There was a thump, as of a frustrated foot kicking the door from the other side.

  Ted moved slowly forward, careful not to make a noise, and peered with one eye through the spy hole. Outside was the same scene as before, distorted by the fish-eye lens, but there was no one there.

  The handle rattled again and the door came in for some more kicks. Ted couldn’t quite believe that some invisible force was trying to get into the house but couldn’t get through a perfectly normal white UPVC front door.

  Or maybe, he realised suddenly, it was a perfectly visible force – just one that was too small to be seen through the lens? Someone small enough could stand close enough to the door that the lens wouldn’t show them up.

  He peeked cautiously back through the hole and this time he did see something moving, right at the bottom of his vision. It was the tousled, matted top of someone’s head. The someone stepped back and glared up at the house and Ted saw the whole person.

  For just a moment his brain refused to acknowledge that it was who his eyes said. But then, even without his brain’s permission, his hands were fumbling, tearing at the lock and at the chain. It should have taken seconds but seemed to take forever to pull the door open and Ted was sobbing in case the opportunity passed and the visitor was swallowed up by the ground or just walked away into this strange world.

  But then the door was open and the child outside was staring up at him, and Ted could feel a huge smile splitting his face.

  “Robs!”

  He stepped forward, once, twice, afraid that the slightest vibration would make this illusion disappear.

  “Robs! It’s me!”

  It was the Robert of four years ago – a nine-year-old little boy, but he was still Ted’s brother. His face was grimy, his clothes were tattered and his hair was tangled and filthy. What exulted Ted’s heart was his expression. He looked intelligent. This was a face with emotion going on behind it, the first Ted had seen in four years.

  Unfortunately the emotion was fear. Robert slowly backed away. Ted took another step and Robert backed away a little faster, staring at Ted as if he had just been confronted with a blood-stained murderer wielding an axe.

  “Hey, Robs, come on! You remember me? Ted?”

  “Ted?”

  Ted had forgotten how high a nine-year-old’s voice was. And, he realised, it worked both ways. Robert would remember Ted aged twelve. In Robert’s mind, Ted would be several inches shorter with a voice that could sing treble.

  So, Ted sat down on the front step and looked his brother in the eye.

  “Look, I’m probably bigger than you remember ... my voice broke, okay? It happens. But it’s me. I’m Ted.”

  Robert looked sideways at him, suspicion stamped on his face, but he edged a little closer. Ted kept trying.

  “We, uh ... we played football, remember? In the garden.”

  Robert had sidled to within a few feet of him. He peered into Ted’s face.

  “Why are you all spotty?”

  “Goes with the voice breaking,” Ted said wryly. A smile spread slowly across Robert’s face, and then suddenly he flung himself at Ted and nearly knocked him flat.

  “I knew you’d come and get me! I knew you would!” he sobbed.

  They were curled up together on the sofa in the living room. Robert was nestled snugly against Ted, secure in his big brother’s hug. Ted hadn’t realised nine-year-olds were so little.

  “There’s this witch,” Robert said darkly. “She’s in charge.”

  “Sort of, long robes and–” Ted brushed his hair back. “Really weird hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ted groaned. Figured. If this was the same place as the mall, why shouldn’t she be here too?

  “Okay, I’ve seen her ... What does she do?” Robert stayed quiet but Ted felt him begin to tremble as if a major tantrum was on its way to the surface. He tightened his arms. “Okay, okay, never mind!”

  “She’s in charge,” Robert said again. “I was so scared when I got here, Ted! I really was! You were gone, and everyone was gone and ... and ... I really wanted you to come and get me back, Ted.”

  “Yeah,” Ted said softly. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

  “I kept watching the house ’cos I thought that’s where you’d come. You got really big, Ted! And your voice is funny.”

  Ted smiled.

  “Yeah, it’s been a while.” He gave Robert a tickle, which made the little boy squeal with delighted laughter. They subsided together and stayed quiet for a moment, just relishing being with each other. Then Robert butted Ted gently with his head.

  “I like it that you’re big,” he said with a shy smile. “Are you going to take me home now?”

  Ted thought for a moment, then helplessly said, “Ehh–”

  There was nothing Ted would have liked more. There was also nothing he knew how to do less.

  “I want to go home, Ted,” Robert mumbled. Ted gave him a comforting squeeze.

  “Yeah, me too. But I don’t know how–”

  “It’s easy. She does it all the time.”

  Ted paused. “She what?”

  Robert looked up at him. “The witch. She goes to our world al
l the time. I’ve seen her.”

  Ted frowned. “So ... why didn’t you just follow her?”

  Robert’s face screwed up as if he was about to cry again. “I was scared, Ted! I couldn’t get close to where she does it!” He snuggled against his brother again with adoring eyes. “But I bet you can.”

  “Right–” Ted murmured.

  “No, really!” Robert looked at him with nine-year-old earnestness. “I can show you where she does it!”

  He hopped off the sofa and pulled Ted to his feet. Then he led Ted by the hand to the front door and opened it, and pointed.

  “That’s where.”

  “Well, of course,” Ted said flatly, after a moment. “Like, duh.”

  The spire of the cathedral rose above the roofs of the shimmering city.

  Chapter 11

  “Oh, great,” said Ted, half a second or half an hour later. “Now we’re teleporting.”

  Two very solid brothers stood among the transparent ghosts of not-quite people that walked along the pavements. Ted looked around him. They had stood in the front door of no. 34 and Robert had pointed out the spire, and now they were here, elsewhere in the city of all-the-Salisburys, with no actual memory of time passing but somehow a sense that a lot of it had.

  The street had been overgrown by trees, or maybe the trees had had a street paved around them. Shop fronts lurked behind the foliage. What looked like cars were parked along the kerbside, though when Ted peered into one he saw that the interior was just an image apparently drawn on the window. But then someone would get into a car like that and drive off.

  Robert skipped his way ahead between paving stones.

  “You can never just walk between A and B,” he said, looking back. “The world writes and rewrites itself all the time. You can only move when the fixed points become apparent.”

  “Well,” Ted said with a stab of disappointment, “naturally.”

  A nine-year-old shouldn’t make speeches like that, he thought. What kind of kid talked about walking between A and B? But maybe a nine-year-old could have thoughts like that and this place somehow drew the information out of his head in the form of words.

  The cathedral spire was dead ahead, but Robert turned left into an alleyway so Ted followed him. When he looked up he saw ...

  The cathedral spire.

  Huh?

  Ted stepped back into the road they had just left, ignoring a cluster of Civil War soldiers drifting down the street on horseback. There was the spire. He looked to his left. And there it was again, ninety degrees away down the alleyway, but it was still the same spire ...

  Robert plucked at his sleeve as his head began to spin.

  “What did I just say?”

  Ted looked down at him, and then back up at the spire – but now it was behind a completely different building and the brothers stood in the outline of an old house. It looked as if a mad builder had once started on a house, then decided on just the wall, then given up on that and gone for the ‘heap of bricks’ look, then decided on a completely different building. Salisbury had just rewritten itself again.

  He frowned as familiarity scratched at the back of his mind. It was like ... it was like ... He grinned. It was like data on a drive. The computer shows a file as being in a particular folder, in one place, but in fact the data that creates the file is scattered in little fragments everywhere. Same thing here. This place held all the information that created Salisbury – past and present, from the look of it, and possibly future too –but not all in the same order as the mind said it should be.

  Now that concept also sounded familiar, and suddenly Ted laughed. Last night, when Zoe and Stephen had come round and Zoe had talked about a database in the mind of God ... Was this the database that made Salisbury?

  “Hst!”

  With a gasp of alarm, Robert flung his arms round Ted’s waist and dragged him to the ground.

  “What–”

  “Don’t look up!”

  “Huh?” Ted looked up.

  The empty sky was full. The witch looked down from the void above the city.

  Her face stretched between the horizons. Pockmarks on her face looked like the craters of the moon and her nostrils were black holes that could swallow the sun. Her lips, so thin and pinched the last time Ted saw them, were like twin ranges of red mountains. Her cold, hard eyes swept the city like X-ray lasers from orbit.

  Ted quickly concentrated on the ground. For some reason he knew he must not meet that gaze. If his eyes even touched her own, she would know everything. She would know he was here.

  “Don’t think of anything!” Robert whispered.

  “That’s impossible!” Ted protested, also in a whisper. Even though he wasn’t looking, he could sense the witch’s attention. He knew she was still up there.

  “Don’t think of yourself. Don’t think of me. Don’t give her something to pick up.”

  That seemed a little more doable. Ted couldn’t think of nothing but he could think of something vague, something general. He could think of ...

  Sex? No, way too specific.

  Computers? Ditto.

  Come on, come on ...

  Cats. That was it. Ted knew how to befriend a cat. His mum had shown him the trick when Mr Furry was introduced to the house as a skittish kitten, and it worked on adults cats too. You sat down nearby, and you kept still, and you very carefully didn’t quite look at it. After a while the cat would settle down too, and carefully not quite look at you in return. No threat. No danger. No one really here. Purr purr purr.

  Now he could sense the weight of the witch’s attention fading. Going, going ... He looked up from under his eyebrows just in time to see her face turn away into the sky and withdraw, as if she had moved away from a giant window. He drew a breath and felt his heart pound.

  “Bloody hell,” he murmured. The brothers climbed slowly to their feet and Ted kept one eye on the sky in case she reappeared suddenly.

  “We’re almost there–” Robert said, and then they were in the Close.

  *

  Unlike the rest of the city, the cathedral looked solid and immoveable. Ted supposed it had been there a long time with not much variety in its history. Even the newest bit, the spire, was six hundred years old. It wasn’t going to chop and change.

  Also, like the cathedral Ted was used to, it sat in the middle of a wide open space. He grimaced. If the witch appeared again while they were crossing it then he doubted they could hide, however hard he thought about cats.

  The boys lurked next to a wall and looked across the gap. They were facing the eastern end of the building.

  “This is where I see her most often,” Robert whispered. “Once I peeked in through a door. There’s this thing–”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “This thing,” Robert repeated impatiently, and his voice shook, “and that’s how she comes and goes, and I saw her appear.”

  “So, we absolutely have to get into the cathedral.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay,” said Ted. He really couldn’t think of any other options. “We’re going to run for it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “On your marks, get set ... go!”

  The brothers pelted across the open space. The ground underfoot was grass and tarmac and paved stone all at once, which made Ted stumble and nearly fall. He made sure his much longer legs didn’t carry him ahead of Robert, if only because a high, piercing “Te-e-d!” would carry right across the city and attract who knew what kind of attention. Robert ran alongside him in a windmill of furiously waving limbs.

  Any moment now Ted expected the face to appear in the sky and spear them with a glance: or, surely this sudden burst of activity in the quiet, ghostly city would raise a hue and cry. Other witches and wizards with V-shaped haircuts would appear out of the stonework and give chase. But then they were at the wall of the cathedral and he put his hands out to absorb the impact of himself against the stone. Robert reached the cathed
ral at the same time and skidded to a halt, panting a little. He grinned up at his brother and Ted grinned back.

  “Right, let’s find our way in!”

  They were at the east end of the cathedral. The nearest door he could think of was in the north porch, to their right, three quarters of the way towards the West Front. They made their way along the wall. The cathedral was shaped like a giant cross and the north transept stuck out at right angles halfway along. They sheltered behind the sturdy buttress at the corner and Ted peered round. There the porch was, further along the north side, sticking some yards out of the building. They could have just run for it but it would mean crossing more open ground and he didn’t want to push their luck again.

  He pointed straight down the side of the transept’s exposed west side. “This way,” he whispered.

  Robert nodded, wide-eyed and silent. Ted took his hand, and gathered courage, and then the brothers ran down until they were in the shadow of the north wall, hiding behind another of the buttresses that regularly ribbed the sides of the building. They could worm their way along the wall, buttress to buttress, until finally they tipped themselves over the edge of the porch and they were at the door. It was a powerful barrier of thick, strong wood.

  Ted could see his little brother’s excited grin and he had to admit he felt pretty keyed up himself. He fumbled for the heavy iron ring that was the door latch and twisted. The mechanism opened with a loud clunk that made him wince, but then he pushed the door open a crack and peered inside. Robert wormed his way around him to poke his own head through at Ted’s waist level and drew in a breath.

  Billowing sheets of light draped themselves over the ancient stone. Torrents of colour, cold and silent, poured down and along and up the walls. Because Ted couldn’t see much of the interior beyond the row of slender pillars that divided the north aisle from the nave, he couldn’t see where the light was coming from. Robert suddenly gave a wriggle and squeezed through the partly open door, and before Ted could grab him he was inside. Ted had no choice but to hurry after him.

  Robert didn’t go far. He crouched by the low stone platform between the pillars, down beside the tomb of a dead bishop. Ted caught him up and Robert pointed.