‘Others?’ Sapphire stood in the dark doorway of the room.
‘Others like you. And Steel. And Lead.’
Sapphire considered the question for a moment or two. ‘About a hundred and twenty-seven,’ she said eventually, and then gave the tease of a smile as she added, ‘Not counting the non-basic elements.’
Before Rob could ask another question, Sapphire put her finger to her lips.
‘Go to sleep now. We’ve a lot to do tomorrow.’
Sapphire then pulled the door to and left Rob to lie in the bed and think. And he felt more secure down here on the ground floor, with a small table-lamp to counteract the dark, and knowing that Sapphire, Steel and Lead were all close at hand is the kitchen.
And he felt more confident now. Steel had recovered, Sapphire was in her usual fine form, and Lead had arrived to help them. And he wondered how the thing in the attic room would be reacting at this moment, now that they were at full strength with even a captive to bargain with, if they wanted to bargain. Perhaps, under the circumstances, the thing would ask for its ‘child’ back...
Then Mum and Dad could be returned and everything could be peaceful once more.
Calmed by these thoughts, Rob fell asleep. He slept soundly.
From behind the nailed-up door, on the attic landing, there was a single flicker of light. Then there was darkness again for a long time before the light pulsated once more from inside the room. It was like a signal.
Down in the darkness of the cold office room there was a similar glimmer of light. It came from inside the converted cabinet. A single dull flash that glowed and made patterns though the iced-up sheet of heavy glass.
And, on the attic landing, the light behind the door replied in turn. The glow was then extinguished, as if whatever was behind the door had received an answer and was satisfied.
Chapter Twelve
The painting that had trapped Sapphire was the first to be taken down. It was Rob’s job to remove every picture while Helen helped Sapphire to collect up all the books.
One picture in particular was extra heavy. It had also been hung in an awkward place, halfway up the second staircase. Rob was trying to ease the cumbersome picture from the wall as Lead appeared from below and began to climb the stairs. He raised his arm as Helen squeezed by him with half a dozen books.
‘Where’s Steel?’ Lead asked.
‘Top landing,’ said Rob, still struggling with the large picture.
Lead nodded and moved on up the stairs. As he passed Rob, he reached out and plucked the heavily framed picture from the wall with finger and thumb, as if it were a sheet of paper. He did this in one action, without stopping, lowering the picture down on to the stair as he passed by.
‘Given you all the rough jobs, has he?’ Lead grinned as he moved on up the stairs, leaving Rob to marvel at the simple feat of strength.
The picture of the cottage had been burned, by Sapphire, in the kitchen stove, and its frame and glass stacked in the cellar. Since early that morning, another fifteen pictures had suffered a similar fate. So, too, had most of the books. At first, Rob had been concerned about how his parents would have felt about some of their most cherished possessions being destroyed. Then it had dawned on him that those very possessions had been instrumental in the disappearance of his parents. Each one of those treasured objects, a potential trigger. The rare old sea prints, the framed eighteenth-century maps, the few first editions, even the small book of sonnets, that his father had bought as a love token for his mother during their courting days, were possible traps.
Sapphire had said that the burning of the books and the paintings was an emergency measure. A precaution. Looking at the large picture that Lead had removed from the wall, Rob was inclined to agree with her. The picture was of an old sailing ship that had been wrecked in a storm. The artist had painted dark, ominous clouds, wreckage and sailors drowning in a wild looking sea. ‘What if a patch of light had got into this picture,’ Rob thought, and wondered how long Sapphire would have survived, had that one been chosen instead of the cottage.
Deciding to get the thought out of his mind, Rob tried picking the picture up with his finger and thumb, then with one hand. Neither way could he lift it. He tilted the picture on to its back, then began to slide it down the stairs to the landing below.
In the kitchen, flames burned from the stove. The hob lid was off and prints, pictures and books were stacked and waiting on the hearth. Sapphire was tearing up a picture. She dropped the pieces into the flames as Helen entered with the half dozen books.
‘Thank you,’ said Sapphire, as Helen placed the books down on the hearth, then walked back to the door.
‘Spare room next?’ asked Helen.
Sapphire nodded. ‘Spare room next.’
As Helen left the room, Sapphire put the last piece of the picture in the fire. She then reached out for yet another one.
Rob had dragged the heavy picture down to the hallway and left it there with the others that were due to have their glass and frames removed.
Having now cleared the first two staircases and landings, Rob climbed back up to the second landing and opened the cupboard-stair door. He then began taking down the small set of prints that were hung on the narrow walls.
He listened as he heard the voices of Steel and Lead talking on the landing above.
‘You want to take yourself down and walk in there?’ Lead was saying.
‘Yes,’ was Steel’s answer.
‘Walk into that?’
Interested, Rob climbed the stairs and peered between the bannisters to look and listen.
Steel and Lead were standing and studying the boarded-up door of the attic room.
‘I’d like to be able to freeze it back,’ Steel said, testing the wooden boards with his hands. ‘At least as far as the wall.’
Lead pulled a face. He lowered his head and put his ear to the door to listen.
The mechanical voice beyond the door was still chanting, ‘Upstairs and downstairs, Upstairs and downstairs, Upstairs and...’
Lead turned away from the door, a doubtful look on his face. ‘That’s one hell of a chance for you to take,’ was his comment.
‘For us to take,’ said Steel, coolly. Then, seeing the look on Lead’s face, he added, ‘You’ll be in there with me. My insulation, remember?’
‘Yes, I remember,’ Lead gave a slight sigh, but he seemed, to Rob, to be quite resigned and philosophical about the proposed task, as if it was something to be expected when working with Steel.
‘So when do you plan to do it?’
‘If we do it, we’ll go in there as soon as all the books and pictures have been destroyed.’ Steel stared at the door for a moment or two. ‘We can’t afford to leave it any escape routes.’
Lead nodded and shrugged again. ‘Ah, well,’ he said as he turned towards the stairs, ‘I suppose it can’t be any worse than following you around on that flea-bitten, god-forsaken ship.’
And Lead grinned as he saw Rob’s face at the bannisters.
Steel, noticing the grin, turned to look.
‘I thought you were supposed to be collecting pictures?’
‘I am.’ Rob replied.
‘Then collect them,’ said Steel, causing Lead to grin even more.
‘He’s back to normal,’ thought Rob as he climbed back down the stairs and reached out for the nearest print. He then looked up to see that Lead was still looking at him, amused.
‘Did you help on the ship, too?’ asked Rob. Ever since Sapphire had told him, the thought of Time breaking through on a ship had fascinated him.
‘Yeh, I did a day on it.’ Lead had obviously not been that impressed with the job at sea.
‘What was the name of the ship?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lead shook his head. ‘What was it, Steel?’
‘I forget,’ said Steel.
‘Blue something, wasn’t it?’
‘I said, I forget.’
Lead thought about i
t. ‘Or was it Mary? Blue Mary?’ he asked himself, then shook his head again. ‘No.’
And words and names from so many lessons at school raced through Rob’s head. Mary, Maria, Marie, Blue, light blue, dark blue, sky blue — sky blue? He realised as the words formed silently on his mouth.
‘Not the “Marie Celeste”?’ he said excitedly, like someone who had made a momentous discovery.
Lead thought about it. ‘Yeh, that’s the one,’ he said, unenthusiastically.
Helen had found eight books in the spare bedroom on the first floor. They were not large books, so she had no difficulty in carrying them to the door and out on to the landing.
As she approached the top of the stairs, she dropped one of the books. Clutching the remaining seven, she managed to reach down and retrieve the book. She tucked it back in with the others and began to descend the stairs.
Halfway down the stairs, the same book fell from her arms a second time.
The book hit the carpeted stairs, bounced down two or three steps and rested there, face upwards. It was the kind of book that might have appealed to Helen, had it been fairly new, with brightly coloured pictures. But this book was quite old and dull-looking. Its few illustrations were small, bleak pen-and-ink drawings. It was the kind of book that a grandmother or a great aunt might have possessed as a child. The title of the book, picked out in faded gold on the upturned cover, was ‘Miscellaneous Rhymes and Fables’.
Helen clicked her tongue, moved down the stairs after the book and picked it up once again. She sat down on the stairs for a moment to adjust the batch of books in her arms, so that they could be held firmly and carried easily. Helen then descended the stairs to the hallway below without further difficulty, until she dropped the book for the third time.
It happened as she was entering the kitchen. If she had been a few years older, and had the alarmist imagination of a ten year old, she might have sworn that she did not drop the book but that it jumped from her, almost as if it did not want to enter the kitchen.
Sapphire was still burning pictures and books at the stove. ‘Having trouble?’ she asked, without turning from her work.
‘Yes.’ Helen picked up the book for what, to her, seemed the umpteenth time. She then carried the books across the kitchen and set them down by the stove, making sure that this particular book was on the top of the stack.
Sapphire poked at the fire and put out her hand for another book to burn, and Helen reached for the volume of rhymes and fables.
It was no longer on top of the others. It was lying, on its own, a good three feet away from the stove. Helen stared at it.
‘Another one, please.’ Sapphire was still waiting.
Handing Sapphire a small collection of magazines, Helen turned to the book of rhymes and fables once more. This time it had moved a further four feet away upon the floor, as if it was attempting, in stages, to move back towards the door, to get as far away from the stove as possible.
Helen made up her mind to waste no more time on the book. She marched towards it, her hand reaching down for it.
The book opened itself, there on the floor.
With her hand still reaching out, Helen pulled up short, just in front of the book, the pages of which were flickering over and over, very fast, but not in a haphazard way, as if something unseen was looking through the book, looking for a certain page.
‘Sapphire.’ Helen called quietly, her eyes still watching the moving pages of the book.
Sapphire turned to look as Helen knelt down, fascinated, to peer at the turning pages.
‘No, Helen.’
But even as Sapphire spoke and moved quickly across the room, the book stopped at an open page. And Helen was able to glimpse, before Sapphire pulled her away from the book, a page upon which was a short nursery-rhyme. Above the rhyme was a small illustration. A pen sketch of a song-bird, its feathers fluffed out, standing on an area of snow.
‘But I know that rhyme, Sapphire,’ Helen cried, as the word and the illustration seemed to jump from the page and project themselves in the very front of her mind.
‘No!’ Sapphire spoke sharply as she snatched up the book.
‘But I do...’
‘It wants you to know it.’ Sapphire ripped the page from the book.
‘It’s in my head, Sapphire. It’s in my head.’
The hob lid was still off and flames licked from the open stove as Sapphire hurried towards it with the page of rhyme. She crumpled the paper and dropped it into the fire.
The page of rhyme blew back out from the fire, straightening its crumpled shape as it rose in the air above the stove, as if it had no intention of being burned.
Sapphire grabbed at the page, but the piece of yellowed paper, with its rhyme and its sketch of a small bird, twisted and spiralled in the still air of the room, out of the reach of Sapphire’s hands.
‘Catch it, Helen! Catch it for me!’
The torn-out page pitched and swerved and swirled in the air, like a sail, like a kite gliding on a clear blustery day.
‘I can’t! I can’t, Sapphire!’ Helen put her small hands to the side of her head. ‘I know it!’
‘No!’ Sapphire snatched wildly at the page and missed as it ducked within reach, then jerked away again.
‘I do!’ cried Helen. ‘It’s in my head! It won’t go!’
Steel and Lead were descending the attic stairs when Steel stopped to look back.
Rob, at the foot of the stairs, had still been trying to learn more about the ship that appeared to have been the Mary Celeste, but neither Steel nor Lead had seemed concerned. He had tried telling them that it was an important mystery that people, clever people, had been trying to solve for years, but even that had failed to stir their interest.
Rob had then argued that it could not have been the ‘Mary Celeste’ after all, because that ship had been found. Abandoned, but found. Whereas Steel had admitted sinking the ship.
‘We sank the real one — yes,’ Steel had said, before looking back up at the stairs.
‘What’s wrong, Steel?’ Lead asked, before Rob could ask any further questions.
Steel said nothing. Instead, he began to climb back up the attic stairs, fast. Lead and Rob followed behind him.
When he had reached the landing, Steel moved straight to the nailed-up door and scrutinised it. He knelt down, examining the gap at the bottom of the door as Lead and Rob watched him.
‘Draw those curtains. Quickly.’
Lead moved to the small landing window and drew the short, but heavy curtains to shut out the daylight.
Steel continued to make a study of the attic bedroom door.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lead asked again.
Steel rose slowly to his feet. He put his ear to the boards of the door and listened.
‘The rhyme,’ he said at last, turning to look at Lead, ‘It’s changed.’
The window in the kitchen burst open, its glass shattering across the room as the curtains fluttered and flapped inwards, and a biting cold wind, that was almost at gale force, blew into the room. The outside rear door broke its lock and crashed open. And the air was filled with dead leaves and debris that swept through the room and sucked up tablecloth and towels and papers and swung them around and around in the disturbed air.
Helen was blown to the ground, like a part of the debris. She put her arms about her head and screamed as Sapphire, the breath blown from her, ran and grabbed and snatched at the page. But the page dipped and dived and swung fast in the whirl and blast of the cold wind that blew crockery from the table and from the dresser shelves, smashing and bouncing the sharp, broken pieces across the floor. A work-box pitched from the top of the dresser, showering its contents as it fell to the floor. Helen, peering through covered eyes, saw pins cascade and reels of cotton bounce and spin across the floor, like tops on endless pieces of thread, while a pair of scissors plunged downwards, one of its blades thudding and sticking into the table-top, like a thrown knife.
&n
bsp; Then the voice spoke. It was the same flat, mechanical voice that was once trapped in the attic room. But now it was no longer a whisper. It spoke above the storm that raged inside the kitchen.
‘The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow...’
And Sapphire heard it as she scrambled and fought to catch the piece of paper on which was printed the rhyme and the small, innocent drawing of a song-bird.
‘And what will poor Robin do then?
Poor thing,’
In the office room, the ice on the converted freezer cabinet began to melt as the voice rang through the room.
‘He’ll sit in a barn...’
Steel, Lead and Rob watched as the light glowed from behind the attic room door.
‘And keep himself warm...’
‘Down the stairs!’ Steel shouted to Rob, trying to match the power of the voice, which now seemed to fill every room and staircase in the house.
‘And hide his head under his wing...’
The light flowed into the structure of the door and wooden bars, and spread itself out upon the landing.
‘Poor thing.’
‘It’s coming out?’ asked Lead, as he and Steel backed towards the stairs.
‘Yes.’
‘Coming through? Well, I can pull the roof down on it.’ Lead reached up to seize the half-exposed support beam that spanned the attic ceiling.
‘Won’t work,’ said Steel as the light grew brighter and the first, faint rumbling sound began.
And Rob, peering between the bannister rails, saw the wooden surface of the door, and its bars of wood, shift in the same way that the plaster of the attic room wall had shifted and formed another shape. As if they were melting, the jumbled shapes pressed forward once more, through the door and on to the landing. Through a parade of tumbling images, lit by the bright glow, the fabric sound rose to the inevitable, disturbing shriek that would eventually penetrate the nerves and the brain.
Rob ran, stumbling down the stairs, as Steel and Lead moved after him.
‘First a wall, then a room, then a house.’ Rob remembered Sapphire’s warning as he tripped over, and smashed the stacked prints in an effort to push open the cupboard-stair door. He glanced back to see that Lead was at the top of the stairs, moving backwards slowly, using his huge body, which was silhouetted against the glowing light, to protect Steel.
Sapphire and Steel Page 10
