by Joan Aiken
‘Are there rats here?’ he asked Eunice, who said,
‘Why? Did you hear scurryings in the roof? Starlings, more likely; or mice. Lob wouldn’t allow rats; he keeps the place clear of them. But he despises mice; they are beneath his dignity – they could sit on his feet and he wouldn’t bother.’
Lob was very fond of chocolate, and Cosmo had the idea of enticing the old dog up to his room with crumbs of Mars bar, but the result was rather disconcerting: Lob stopped in the doorway, growling deep in his throat, with the fur on his shoulders all ruffled up, and flatly refused to come inside. Then, ignoring offers of more bits of Mars, he turned round and hurried away down the wide, polished stairs with his toenails rattling and his tail between his legs.
However, despite another very careful search, Cosmo could see nothing in the room. He decided to sit down and do his prep at once, get it over with. These days the evenings were growing lighter; it would not be dark until seven. Eunice was outside the house, mowing the lawn; he could see her, each time she came across. Her pale hair was tied back with a handkerchief and she wore an old pair of corduroys all stained with green. She was a reassuring sight.
He opened the window and called, ‘Shall I help?’
‘Get your work done first. There’s plenty of grass!’
He had laid the three Mars bars in a row on his bed. He intended to eat them at the rate of one a day over the weekend: the first, what was left of it, tonight after supper, while reading Flatland, an extraordinary book that Eunice had given him; the second tomorrow while doing farm work, maybe Mr Marvell would share it; and, if he got all his pitons hammered in, the third up in the fork of the walnut tree on Sunday.
With this planned in his mind, he settled down to work. Maths first, then a description of an experiment done to prove that potatoes contain starch, fairly elementary stuff; then an essay about the Silk Route; quite interesting, that was, he became really absorbed in it, only noticing, with about an eighth of his attention, how the sound of the mower became gradually louder as Eunice worked her way back and forth across the lawn, slowly coming closer to the house.
At last he had finished, and stood up, stretching his stiff writing-fingers. Eight pages! Even sour-faced Cheevy ought to be satisfied with that.
There was still a third of the lawn left to mow, he saw; he could go out now and take over from Eunice. He turned to leave the room – and stood still in shock. For, as he moved, the draught from his movement, or perhaps from the open window, caused the three Mars bar wrappers to flutter from the bed to the floor. The wrappers were empty – the contents were gone! What was even more extraordinary, he found, as he picked them up – first looking sharply about the room and under the bed – was that the two unopened wrappers were still unopened, square and tidy, the ends neatly sealed, just as they had come from the factory – only they were hollow, there was nothing inside. Not a crumb of chocolate remained. Rather wildly, Cosmo began hunting about the room again – under the bed, in the cupboards, the wardrobe, his empty suitcases. Then, while he had his back half turned from the window, something caught his eye, a flash of movement, and he spun round, just too late to see exactly what it was that had scrabbled over the sill. He bounded across the room and leaned out of the window. There was a sloping roof down below, over a kind of garden room, running the length of the house, where tools and deckchairs were kept. A useful emergency exit from his room, he had already decided, since the drop from the edge of the roof to the ground was only about seven feet; now it seemed that something else had had the same idea. Whatever it had been was already out of sight. Thinking that he might intercept it if he went the other way, Cosmo raced down the stairs and out the side door. He ran round the side of the house to where Eunice was still mowing.
‘D’you want to take over now?’ she said.
‘Yes, okay. Eunice, did you see anything come out of my window?’
‘What sort of thing?’
He explained about the Mars bars – rather embarrassed by them, but she didn’t say ‘Greedy pig’ or anything like that, only remarked, ‘It might have been a squirrel. They are terrible thieves, and they do get into the house sometimes; Emma lost a whole batch of quince jelly she’d left on the windowsill to cool last year.’
Cosmo thought about the half-glimpse he’d had of the escaping creature. No, he was sure it couldn’t have been a squirrel – it was too big, for a start. And too pale in colour – sallow, greyish white. He couldn’t help feeling sure that it was the thing that had come out of his sleeve – only now it had grown. Unless it was another of the same kind, larger. This had been about the size of a cat or rabbit – as far as he could judge out of the corner of his eye. And there was something about its shape – tapering like a tadpole – or a fish – or like some rather beastly pictures that hung in the school dining room, pink people like sardines gazing up at God. By William Blake. They gave him the gooeys.
All this went through his mind fast. He decided that he could not – definitely could not – tell Cousin Eunice any more about the white thing. It had been too disgusting. Anyway – whatever it was – had left the house now. That, at least, was something to be thankful for, he thought, taking the warm handles of the mower and beginning to guide it across the grass. Should he have shut his window? But very likely the thing wouldn’t be able to climb back in again, because of the drop from the edge of the roof to the ground. You’d need to be pretty athletic to get up there. And it hadn’t looked athletic – not at all. More like a horrible little embryo.
‘Has this house ever been haunted?’ he asked in a careless manner at supper.
‘Are you thinking that a ghost might have made off with your chocolate?’ said Eunice laughing.
‘Haunted? This house? Never!’ declared Mrs Tydings with great firmness. ‘And I ought to know, for my uncle Sid was the miller here, when I was scullery maid up at the Place at age twelve; no one’s ever heard of a ghost here. Not in the house, that’s to say – o’ course there’s the coach-and-six that drives past the gate at full moon – but that’s never been known to stop, anyway.’
‘A coach-and-six? Are you kidding?’
‘Certainly not!’ She was affronted. ‘I’ve seen it meself, time and again – mostly when I was took bad with the indigestion, and had to get up in the night for a bit of bicarb –’ with a sniff of a chuckle. ‘Three o’clock or thereabouts it’s supposed to pass by; yes, I’ve seen it plain enough. It goes along where the old road used to run; by the side of the meddar and then round the edge of the wood. You can see it easy from my upstairs windows.’
‘Have you seen it, Cousin Eunice?’
Eunice answered vaguely and exasperatingly that she thought she had, but couldn’t be positive. ‘It’s one of those muddly memories – you don’t know if you really saw something, or only intended to. Your father and I always meant to get up at half past two and come down here from the Place to watch for it; only now I’m not certain whether we ever did or not.’
The tale of the coach-and-six somehow cheered Cosmo very much. That was a proper kind of ghost – he could hardly withhold a grin as he wondered how his enemies in Remove would react to that, if he told them about it. More lying, they would label it, doubtless, more swank and romancing. He certainly intended to try and see the coach himself – full moon wasn’t for several weeks, there had just been one. He resolved not to miss the next opportunity.
And somehow, oddly, the thought of the phantom coach made the other thing easier to take.
But still he hoped very much that it would not come back. It was welcome to his Mars bars.
On Saturday Mr Marvell showed Cosmo how to run the electric milker. He was made to take a lot of stringent precautions before being allowed into the milking shed, wading in his wellingtons through a trough of disinfectant, putting on clean overalls: ‘Against bovine tuberculosis, that is,’ said Mr Marvell, who was very sold on hygiene – and washing his hands and arms most thoroughly before putting on rubber glo
ves – but it was worth all the trouble, for the little Channel Island cows were so charming – Cherry, Merry, Kerry, Berry, Perry and Sherry – with their silky mouse-coloured coats and great black-ringed eyes and elegant scooped-out faces. They all had to be shampooed before milking and were so clean and sleek that he felt they ought to come into the house and sit in a ring round the fire like Lob. They were hardly bigger than the dog, it seemed amazing that they could produce all that creamy milk.
After milking, Cosmo worked on his island camp, making a palisade of elder branches round it, and cutting down a lot of nettles that were sprouting fast. He could not withstand the fidgety feeling, while so occupied, that something was watching him: every now and then he heard a rustle among the undergrowth; but whatever it was never came into view. An otter, perhaps?
Then he hammered six more pitons into the walnut trunk. He was getting quite high by now, working round in a spiral, spacing them about two foot six apart. It was a particularly hellish job. Mr Marvell had kindly lent him a drill to start the holes, which was some help – but even so the walnut trunk was formidably hard, with greyish wrinkled bark like the hide of a prehistoric hippopotamus. Being obliged to drill and then hammer while precariously balanced on a lower piton was very bad; if he used both hands, to hold the piton and to hammer, he unbalanced himself and fell off; while if he used only one and hung on with the other, then the piton tended to fall out and he had to climb down and fetch it, cursing. He had tried Eunice’s fruit ladder but it unfortunately wasn’t high enough. His arms and legs ached like blazes – the muscles were being worked to death. Two more pitons would be enough, he decided – now he was almost within reach of the fork.
Mr Marvell passed by, on his way to inspect the water meadows for sogginess; he tested a couple of the lower pitons, and said that Cosmo was making a gradely job of it – gradely was his highest term of praise.
Dusk was falling, and Cosmo had almost made up his mind to leave the final piton for Sunday morning, when a little shrill whining voice from below, at the foot of the tree, caused him to start so violently that he almost fell, and dropped the last piton with a clang.
The voice cried, peevishly, ‘Lemme up too! Con wants to come! Lemme up, lemme up!’
‘Who the devil are you? And where did you come from?’ Cosmo croaked, when he had recovered his voice.
Down at the foot of the tree was a horrible little boy – aged four or five, perhaps? Cosmo had never had anything to do with younger children, so he didn’t know – jigging fretfully up and down, clutching the lowest piton, which was just within his reach, and whining like a gnat, ‘Lemme up! Not fair leave Con out! Connie come up too!’
Cosmo was immensely thankful that he had deliberately placed the lowest piton quite high up, so that only a long-legged, agile person could start the climb. This monstrous little imp couldn’t make it, that was for sure. Could he be something to do with Mr Marvell – a nephew, grandchild, friend’s child?
Mrs Tydings came from the house with a basketful of tea cloths to peg on the line, and Cosmo shouted to her,
‘Hey, where did this one come from?’
Then he got another bad shock. For she replied, ‘What’s that, dear?’ and walked right past, without appearing to notice the little monster wailing and hopping up and down.
‘Why him! That beastly little brat!’
‘Brat, what brat?’
‘That boy!’
‘There’s no boy about, dear,’ she replied, and passed so close to the kid that she could have knocked him over with her basket.
Cosmo came slowly down the trunk until he was on the bottom-but-one piton, where he stopped, taking a good look at the child. He saw a small stocky boy, pudgy-faced, with short dirty fair curls, a scowling pugnacious expression, dressed in grubby ragged clothes that were much too small for him – he resembled somebody – who could it be? Brown goo was smeared round his mouth and over his cheeks. The reason for that flashed upon Cosmo at the same time as he noticed something else odd about the kid’s appearance: he flickered. He came and went like a faulty film, or the sound of a radio station that isn’t properly tuned; although shaped so solidly, he quivered on the air as if printed on a screen that wasn’t quite there. Cosmo had seen an exhibition of holographs once in Sydney – pictures written on the air with laser beams. They seemed quite real, three-dimensional, yet they were just an effect of light. So with this little monster.
‘You’re nothing but a beastly spook!’ Cosmo snapped at him. ‘So how the devil could you eat my Mars bars? You little thief!’
‘Connie wanna come up too! Lift Connie up!’
Secretly, Cosmo had always wanted a younger brother. Mark had been the leader since before Cosmo was born – the hero, somebody to admire and follow, superior in every way. It would have been a great comfort to have someone smaller as well, somebody to protect and instruct and boss a bit, a person who would look up to him as he looked up to Mark. It was still very much a part of his hollow, sad, resentful feeling against Mark and Ma that, by going off together like that – deserting him – they had also robbed him of the chance of a younger brother. But he would have been quite different from this horrible little creature.
‘Get away from here – buzz off!’ he called down. ‘You don’t belong here.’
‘Connie come up! Lemme come up too.’
‘No! You’re much too small.’
The ache in Cosmo’s arms, hanging on the piton all this time, had become nearly unbearable. He would have to jump down. And it would certainly be shameful to show fear of a brat half his size.
Cousin Eunice put her head out of the open kitchen window and swung the dinner bell.
‘Cosmo! Supper’s ready!’
‘Coming!’ he called back, and jumped. And when he hit the ground, there was no child to be seen. It was as if the shock wave from Cosmo’s landing had jiggled him out of existence, dissolved him back to some other plane.
At supper Cosmo was rather silent. But that was all right; nobody expected him to talk if he did not feel like it. Mrs Tydings was talking about spring-cleaning the attics, and Eunice, in between spells of brooding about a lecture that she was constructing, talked about the book Flatland.
‘It’s meant to be a satire,’ she explained, ‘like Gulliver’s Travels. The idea of people living in a two-dimensional world, perfectly satisfied with having just length and breadth, and quite unable to imagine height. What the author means to suggest is that we are just the same – all we know about is our three dimensions, and we are quite positive that there can’t be a fourth.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘And of course the author pokes fun at other things along the way. Like the women in Flatland, for instance, who are just straight lines, pointed at each end.’ Eunice picked up the book and read. ‘ “Place a needle on the table. Look at it endways, and you see nothing but a point: it has become practically invisible. Just so is it with one of our Women. When the end containing her eye or mouth – for with us these organs are identical – is the part that meets our eye, then we see nothing but a highly lustrous point. The dangers to which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity; what can it be to run against a Woman except absolute and immediate destruction!” … So the Flatlanders have special laws for women, that when they are walking in a public place they must constantly keep up a Peace-Cry, and that any woman suffering from violent sneezing or St Vitus’ Dance must be instantly destroyed. And then there are all the penalties suffered by the Irregulars. There the author is making fun of the way that society as a whole always turns against people who don’t conform to all its rules. “Doubtless the life of an Irregular is hard, but the interests of the Greater Number require that it shall be hard. If a man with a triangular front and polygonal back were allowed to propagate a still more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life? Are the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered to accommodate such monsters?” ’ Eunice ch
uckled, and gave the book back to Cosmo.
‘People are just like that everywhere. If you are a different shape, they send you to prison, or say you are mad, or, like the Flatlanders, shut you up in a government office as a clerk of the seventh class.’
‘Cousin Eunice, do you believe that there are dimensions we don’t know about?’
‘Oh, sure to be. Why should we assume that we know everything there is to be known? Well, we know that we don’t, because we keep discovering new things all the time, like black holes in space, or the fact that some molecules seem to be magnetized.’
‘Well then – if there are other dimensions – can there be some connection between what is happening in them – and us?’
‘How do you mean, exactly?’
‘Well – well, that coach-and-six that passes the gate when the moon is full – that could be something that’s happening in another dimension, right? We just happen to see it because there’s a fold in space at that point – or in time – it happened a couple of hundred years ago, but because of the fold it keeps coming back again – like a stuck gramophone record?’
‘Something of the kind.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘can we get in touch with the coach?’
‘You mean, can we affect what happens in other dimensions? Or can those happenings affect us?’
‘Yes.’
‘I honestly don’t see why not,’ said Eunice thoughtfully. ‘After all, even if you just see a thing, it can affect you in all kinds of ways – frighten you, or make you laugh, or make you sad. Seeing a film can change your life. And if the sight of a thing can do that to you, then the sight of you can affect it. There’s a theory, you know, that no experiment can be wholly detached and scientific if somebody is observing it: “Dear sir, it is not at all odd, I am always about in the quad, And that’s why the tree, Still continues to be, In the sight of, Yours faithfully, God!” ’
‘It’s high time that boy was in bed,’ said Mrs Tydings, bustling about and whipping a plate from under Cosmo’s elbow. ‘He’s got great black circles under his eyes. Reading in bed till all hours, I daresay! That’s what comes of giving them bedside lamps. I saw your light last night, shining at eleven! Let’s see it go out a bit earlier tonight.’