The ink it was written in was black. Blacker than any ink she’d seen before, which was, she realised as soon as she’d thought it, a really odd thing to think. Black was black. But still …
As she looked, the spiral seemed to revolve, to go round, but it wasn’t moving.
Obviously an optical illusion, she thought. Harry had shown her them on the internet. It wasn’t anything unnatural, but that knowledge didn’t slow her heart down.
She couldn’t hear anyone behind her in the alley. Maybe she’d lost Graham; maybe he’d been left behind somewhere where there weren’t any junctions.
She must be somewhere in between, she thought as she slowly walked forward to the next junction, not quite there yet, but not quite here either.
‘Somewhere you shouldn’t be,’ said a voice.
The cat was sat on the same dustbin she’d seen it on the day before.
‘Go back,’ it said.
‘I can’t,’ she replied.
‘Going on is not an option either,’ the cat said. ‘Not for you.’
‘I need to save my friend,’ she said. ‘I need to go on.’
She walked past the cat. She’d come this far and she was right: she couldn’t turn back. Wouldn’t turn back.
Behind her the cat scratched at one of its tatty ears.
Blinked its odd-coloured eyes.
Stepped away and
vanished.
She opened the gate and, as before, stepped into a world where all the colour had been washed away.
The alley was still bright behind her; sunlight fell on the fence opposite, turning it fiery green and brown and orange.
The garden before her was grey and grey and grey.
She stepped in and shut the gate.
She waited a moment, and then opened it again.
The alley wasn’t grey.
She heard a bird singing somewhere out there.
This was still the door back to her world, back to the world of the living.
Maybe it stayed open until someone went through it?
Someone living?
Someone dead?
How could she know?
Yesterday the alley had become grey and cornerless only after Graham and Betty and Ms Todd had gone through the gate. When they’d left her behind.
She needed the black and white alley though, to get out to the black and white street.
She opened the gate again, just to check, and it was still colourful.
So she wasn’t going to find Happiness by going that way, not this time. She turned back to the house.
It looked just like Uncle Graham’s house.
She ducked under the washing line and walked up to the back door.
It was locked.
She folded the piece of paper, the strange, cold spiral-map that had opened the alleys, and tucked it in her trouser pocket. She pulled the key from her other pocket.
It fitted and the door opened easily.
Inside was dark.
It was still.
Dust.
Her nose tickled with the desire to sneeze.
She stepped in.
She tiptoed through the kitchen, which was more or less the same as the one she’d been in just minutes earlier, except … the table was different … smaller, in a different place. Were the cupboards arranged differently too? It was hard to tell. She’d only ever seen the room a couple of times.
She went through into the passage and down to the hall.
On her left the stairs went up into darkness.
Shadows flickered between the bannisters.
On her right the door to the front room was ajar.
She remembered Betty’s basket in there, back in the real world. She remembered it being empty, and she remembered it being full …
With shaking fingers she twisted the latch on the front door and opened it.
Out there was the grey street she’d hoped for.
She looked around in the hall for something to block the door with. She couldn’t let it click shut after her or she’d never get back in, and as far as she knew the only way back to life was out the back gate …
There was an umbrella stand full of walking sticks that she was sure hadn’t been there in Uncle Graham’s house, but which felt solid and real enough when she touched it. (So whose house was this?)
She pulled a bundle of sticks and umbrellas out and laid them in the doorway so the door could swing to but couldn’t close.
She just had to hope no one came along to tidy things up.
As she pulled the door open and lifted her leg to climb over the brollies, she heard a noise.
It came from the front room, from just behind the half-open door, from that room where the dog had been.
But it hadn’t sounded like a dog. Not a bark or a woof or a yelp.
It had sounded more like a chair moving, or maybe someone moving in a chair. Springs and creaking. A sigh. A breath of some sort. And now her ears were open, she realised there’d been a low buzz, a hum, a rustle in the house all along. The atmosphere crackled faintly.
Whose house was this?
When the creaking, shifting sound didn’t come again, she hopped over the sticks as quietly as she could and, not daring to look over her shoulder, walked on.
And so, out into the street.
And so, out into the world.
And so.
The silence of the world smothered her. No bird sang, no car roared, no voice laughed.
Even her footsteps were dulled, softened, hushed.
Whenever she looked behind her, there was no one there. Just the black and white and empty reflection of the world she knew.
Passing the school, she looked at the playground.
She and Happiness had run around there like idiots, arms out like fighter planes, shooting each other down, before falling in a heap and laughing. So many times. So often. So simple.
That was what she remembered most. Laughter.
They sometimes laughed until they cried, not always at anything particularly funny, just because.
She hurried on.
Happiness was sat on the doorstep where December had left her the day before.
She covered her eyes with the back of her hand as she looked up, as if she were blocking out the sun on a summer’s day.
‘Deck?’ she said.
Her voice was flat, quiet.
‘Yes, it’s me. I’ve come to rescue you.’
Ness lowered her hand. Looked away.
‘I didn’t think you’d come back. That woman …’
Woman?
‘Ms Todd?’ Ember said.
‘I don’t know her name. The one who took you away just now.’
Just now?
‘Just now?’ Ember said.
Ness looked confused.
‘It was just now, wasn’t it?
Or was it years ago?
I don’t know.
I feel so odd.
Like I’m not myself,
like I’m asleep
or falling asleep.
And then I look up and the sun hasn’t moved. Nothing’s happened.’
Ember looked behind her, over to the houses on the opposite side of the road where she’d seen the black sun setting the day before. And there it was, round and black like a hole in the sky, exactly where it had been before. It hadn’t moved, had it?
And as she looked at the sun, she was startled by a movement. Not in the sky, but in the house below.
A curtain twitched.
A net curtain in an upstairs window moved to one side and she saw a face looking out.
The curtain fell back again and the face was gone.
‘Mrs Miłosz,’ Ness whispered, having seen what Ember had seen. ‘She scares me. She looks at me. Watches me. And I’ve got nowhere to go.’
Mrs Miłosz was an old lady who had lived opposite the girls until the previous summer. She’d fallen down the stairs and the district nurse had found her. Ember remembered the ambulance. She�
��d never seen one in her street before. It had been exciting – the flashing lights, the colours, the sheer boldness of the thing sitting there on her street.
Mrs Miłosz’s sons had come and cleared the house with a big van the following week and a new family moved in a few weeks after that and soon the whole affair had been forgotten.
Ember was silent for a moment, spiders crawling across her skin.
‘The woman?’ she asked. ‘You were saying something about Ms Todd.’
‘She said you wouldn’t be back,’ Ness said. ‘She said I was to forget you, that I was to forget everything. She told me not to hope. “Don’t hope any more,” she said.’
‘Well, ignore her. Forget about her instead,’ Ember said. ‘She was wrong. I found a way and I’ve come to take you back. To take you back home.’
She explained, as quickly as she could, trying to make it make sense in her head as she said it, about the deal Uncle Graham had made. Explained how he’d swapped her for Betty – how leaving a live person behind had let him take a dead one back. ‘But,’ she added quietly, ‘the important thing is he found a way to here, from there. And the gate’s open now, it’s open back to the real world. I checked. There’s still sunlight and colour out there. If we both go through it together, then we’ll be in the alleys and we can go home. Nothing can go wrong.’ She added that last bit, not because she believed it (she was being careful not to believe in anything too much) but to sound confident for Ness.
She put her hand out, ready to haul her friend to her feet.
‘Come on,’ she said.
Ness had nodded as Ember had talked, but she didn’t seem excited, didn’t seem to want to do anything but sit down.
‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually, with something like a sigh.
‘Maybe I should just stay here.’
Oh. It was as if when all the colour had been drained from her, all the energy had gone too, all the spark that used to be there. The Ness Ember knew would’ve jumped to her feet, would’ve shouted an enormous ‘Yes!’ to the sky, would’ve been the first one to make an adventure of it.
(Was she greyer now? Flatter than the first time they’d met here? Ember didn’t want to think about it too hard. Sometimes if you asked questions you learnt the answers, and answers aren’t always good things to hear.)
Being dead had changed her, and knowing that meant that Ember forgave her. She was sure, she hoped, that going back to the world of the living, getting some colour back into her, taking her back to her mum and dad would bring the old Ness back. She didn’t doubt that the old Ness was just hiding, was just underneath the grey, but knowing that, and forgiving her, couldn’t stop the frustration bubbling up.
‘I bunked off school to bring you back from the dead,’ she said, louder and sharper than she’d intended. ‘I’m gonna be in so much trouble if I don’t bring you back.’
She really didn’t mean to snap, really didn’t want to sound (or be) angry with her friend, but something needed doing.
‘Come on,’ she said, getting her hand round Ness’s wrist and pulling her to her feet.
Ness said nothing, but stood up, shaking her wrist free and rubbing at it.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That hurt.
It stung.
Burned.’
But still she followed Ember
up
the
crazy-paving
path
and
out
on
to
the
pavement.
Friends, still.
As they walked through the familiar but alien-looking streets, Ember tried to keep a stream of jolly chat going. It’s what you do when your friend’s feeling down, isn’t it? she told herself. But it was hard because Ness didn’t join in.
‘So Harry said,’ she continued, ‘that I can have a phone for my next birthday and I’m worried he’s gonna get me one of those pink ones with sparkles and stickers that you can use to individualise it for yourself. But I just want one that works and doesn’t look stupid, but he still reckons I’m a little girl and that I want everything to be pink all the time …’ This wasn’t true. Harry didn’t think that and she knew it and felt bad saying it, but she had to say something.
Ness just nodded, and said, ‘Oh yes?’ every now and then, but she wasn’t coming up with any stories of her own. She wasn’t making an effort to help Ember out.
She was blunted.
‘So there was this programme on telly last night,’ Ember tried, ‘about this bloke who collected the labels from soup cans. Not soup cans themselves, just the labels, and he got arrested in the supermarket once for peeling the label off a can he’d never seen before when he didn’t have enough money to buy it, and then when the soup company heard about it they sent him a whole box of tins of soup because it had been such good publicity for them, but the thing was he hated soup, couldn’t stand the stuff, so he took the labels off and gave the tins away to the local food bank. He wrote the flavours on in marker pen, because he wasn’t stupid, but they wouldn’t take them because of health and safety, even though there were people who could’ve really done with some soup. But you can’t go round giving out tins of soup with the names written on in marker pen because … well, you can’t really trust a bloke who goes round writing on tin cans with a marker pen, can you?’
‘Suppose not,’ said Ness.
They’d long passed the school and were now about to turn into the road where Uncle Graham lived.
At the corner, Ember stopped walking.
She tugged at Ness’s sleeve and stopped her too. (She was careful to not touch her this time.)
‘What is it?’
‘Look,’ said Ember.
‘It’s that woman,’ said Ness, turning away.
There, halfway down the road, outside the house they were aiming for, was Ms Todd. Her summer dress flapped in the breezeless air, bright and colourful and dazzling after the grey, grey, grey of the town.
She wasn’t looking their way, so Ember quickly, without thinking, dragged Ness into someone’s front garden.
They ducked down behind the low wall.
Grey flowers grew in neat little flowerbeds, poking up from the grey earth, surrounding a grey lawn.
‘She said I shouldn’t hope,’ Ness said, almost to herself.
‘There’s always hope,’ Ember replied. ‘I didn’t think there was hope when Mr Dedman said your name in assembly the other day, but then look what happened … look where we are. We’re together again and I didn’t think to even hope for that, it was such a mad idea, but here we are. Sometimes hope turns up when you least expect it.’
‘When did you get so wise, Deck?’ Ness said, reaching up and almost touching Ember’s cheek with her grey fingers.
It was a strange gesture, not one Happiness had ever done before, not when she’d been alive. It was the sort of thing a mother would do, the sort of thing someone sad and saying goodbye might do.
‘Dunno,’ Ember said, answering the question. ‘I just did what I had to do.’
She poked her head out and snuck a glance up the road.
‘Has she gone?’ whispered Ness.
‘I can’t see her,’ said Ember. ‘She’s not in the street any more, so yeah, maybe.’
The two girls, the one full of colour and blood and light and nerves, the other washed out and black and white and made of grey, crept up the road, keeping close to the walls of the front gardens.
‘It’s this one,’ Ember said as they reached the house.
The front door was still wedged open, just how she’d left it. All they had to do was go through the house and out the back gate.
It was easy.
So easy.
‘We’re almost there,’ she said, smiling to herself.
‘I can’t,’ said Ness.
She didn’t move when Ember pulled her sleeve. She remained glued to the pavement.
‘Come on.’
&
nbsp; ‘I can’t.’
Ember took a deep breath.
Don’t get angry, she thought. Don’t be mad.
‘Look, I know you’re nervous,’ she said. ‘You’re probably worried about what we’ll say to your mum and dad. But forget that. They’ll just be so happy to have you back. They won’t even ask any questions.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Ness.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the house.
‘What are you looking at?’ Ember asked.
She was beginning to worry.
She tugged her friend’s sleeve again and still she wouldn’t move.
‘There’s something in there.’
Ember looked at the house.
‘Ms Todd?’
‘Something else,’ whispered Ness. ‘Her, maybe, but something else too. Something worse.’
Ember thought about what she’d heard as she’d passed through half an hour earlier. What had she heard?
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘We’ll just run through. It’ll take five seconds. The back door’s open.’
And then the front door opened and Ms Todd was there. She was looking over her shoulder, back into the house, as if she were talking to someone.
She bent down to pick up the umbrellas and sticks that blocked the door and she saw the girls.
A strange look crossed her face. Amusement, perhaps? Weariness, maybe?
‘You again,’ she said, looking Ember straight in the eyes.
‘Yes, me again,’ said Ember, puffing up tall.
‘I did you a favour last time,’ Ms Todd said. ‘I sent you home, despite the paperwork, despite the promises made. Because it was the right thing to do. A dog, for you? No!’ She shook her head, almost laughing. An angry, disbelieving, narrow little laugh. ‘It would serve you right if I left you this time. This time you’ve got no one else to blame, have you? This time it was your doing, your idea. But still, young lady, I’m not ready for you. You’re not ready for this. Not ready for here. Not ready for “Goodbye”. I am Pity. I am Forgiveness. I am Kind.’
Ms Todd stepped forward, tall and awful, her movements smooth and relentless, like a train clearing the platform.
Ember ran, a sudden wordless cry in her chest urging her on, urging her to get away. Away!
The Afterwards Page 5
