The hallway clock chimed midnight. I’d been dead for a full day, and it was exhausting.
I wandered back to Mum and Dad’s bedroom and tried to peel back the duvet so I could crawl into their bed – I was so cold – but my fingers did their new usual and nothing happened. So instead I just stretched out on top of it, right in the middle of Mum and Dad’s pillows.
Mum’s pillow smelt of her moisturiser. I turned my head to the side and laid my cheek against it. My eyes closed and I shivered all through the night with yearning and shock.
Dawn had stained the sky a pale prawny pink by the time I felt ready to get up again. The bedside clock read 07:29. All around me was that empty abandoned-beach feeling, and I knew what that meant. Several feelings rushed in at once, all loosely organised around one theme.
Panic – they still hadn’t come back?
Anger – they still hadn’t come back?
Sadness – they still hadn’t come back?
I made a move to get up. Something fell out of my pocket and on to the mattress with a soft thud. It was the glass vial Jill had pressed into my hand.
She’d called it a sleeping potion. ‘You’ll wake when anyone walks through the front door. In the meantime, the worst of your loneliness will pass you by.’
On the front was a faded handwritten label.
Sweet Elixir of Unconsciousness for the Not Quite Dead. Reduce painful waiting time, take a break from inertia, and wake up refreshed, revitalised and raring to face the yawning existential void of the afterlife once more!
Underneath that it said: One drop on the tongue. Spell will be broken in the presence of other people, dead or alive.
I took another look at the label. One drop on the tongue.
What did I have to lose?
I unscrewed the cap, feeling a stab of joy that, on this object at least, my hands worked, held the dropper over my tongue and let go. The liquid was bitter but bearable and within seconds it had dissolved.
I sighed with relief as drowsiness overcame me, welcome as a warm bath.
And when I woke up, surely the faces I’d see would be theirs.
My eyes closed. I just had time to wonder, Can ghosts dream? before my brain, mercifully, went quiet, and all my questions finally disappeared.
JINGLE. JANGLE.
Mutter. Mumble.
Groggy with confusion, I tried to open my eyes. Hang on. I couldn’t open my eyes. I was blind! I was dead and now blind?
Jill hadn’t said anything about this.
I touched my eyes with shaking hands. They met with a layer of something cold and velvety. I rubbed it off, shuddering, and it fell away.
Had Mum and Dad’s bedroom always been so dark?
I stared in confusion at the soft grime I was lying in.
Oh please, oh please don’t say my skin is coming off my body. I don’t want to look like one of those medical illustrations in my lift-the-flap What’s in Your Body? book.
Oh.
It wasn’t skin. It was dust. All over me, thick as a duvet.
And there was an alien, a mass of writhing limbs, climbing in through Mum and Dad’s window. It had wrapped itself around the bed and those tentacles were pressing down on my legs. I tried to scream, but my throat felt dry and out of practice.
Stand down.
It wasn’t a spidery alien.
It was a bramble.
A massive blackberry bush had sprung up overnight outside the house, pushed its face up to Mum and Dad’s window and decided to break in. That would explain the broken glass all over the carpet. It filled the entire window frame and blocked out the sky. Its tendrils had crept across the carpet and grown over the chest of drawers. The bed itself had practically disappeared under the knotty network of its thick vines.
Then I heard that noise again and realised that there was something more important to think about.
I had been startled awake out of my blackout by noises.
Human noises.
Jingle.
Jangle.
Mutter.
Mumble.
‘You’ll wake when anyone walks through the front door,’ Jill had told me.
Which could only mean one glorious thing.
THEY WERE HERE! MY FAMI LY HAD RETURNED!
I leapt up off the bed, and my throat worked again, and eventually I managed to force a rusty shout out. ‘Hi!’
In return, faint voices.
I stumbled along the top landing – on a grey slippery carpet I’d never noticed before, but I didn’t care about that right then and there. I’d just reached the top of the staircase when there was the beautiful sound of a key unlocking a lock.
And the front door opened.
MUM AND DAD were in the doorway, gasping and laughing. I joined in. Mostly out of shock at how different they looked. They’d gone completely white-haired, and wore shapeless brown boiler suits, which smelt quite strongly of mushroom soup.
Then they both walked into the hallway properly and my welcoming smile died on my lips.
It wasn’t them at all. Just a pair of men I’d never met in my life, standing in my hallway.
They didn’t just look and smell weird. They were also being weird. This is what they were doing: wincing with pain while smiling joyfully at the same time.
One took out an electric lamp from his bag and placed it on the floor. In its dim light, I realised they were blotting beads of blood off their faces. They didn’t seem bothered.
‘Worth it though,’ said the man with the straggly ponytail as he roughly swiped at his skin with a hankie. ‘I’d have fought off a dozen hammerhead sharks just to get in this place.’
‘Toadly,’ said his companion, a round fellow with a pink face. ‘A few nicks and scratches are a small price to pay, really. Tent udder.’
He flicked on the head torch strapped around his forehead and began to dart it around the hallway.
Hammerhead sharks? Tent udder? What were they on about? Then again – what did it matter? That elixir had been next to useless. What was the point of waking up if it wasn’t to my family coming back?
What I needed, at this point, was what Mum and Dad in their ongoing attempt to refocus my anger had called ‘an alternative thought’. Break the thought pattern that isn’t serving you, Frankie, and try to think in a new way.
It was as hard and slow as walking up Legkiller on a muggy day, but with an effort I wrenched my thoughts upwards. Maybe they weren’t here yet, but perhaps my family weren’t too far behind. These men might be able to help me find them. Or tell me what I was meant To Do anyway.
‘Hi,’ I rasped. ‘I’m Frankie. I’m dead. Are you dead?’
‘Better just check there isn’t any gas leakage,’ said the man with the white ponytail, fishing a gadget out of his pocket.
Well, that answered that. And I went back to feeling rubbish.
Questions dropped inside me like felled trees. Who were these men? Why did I keep seeing unsettling details in the beam from their head torches, like the waist-high drifts of powder piled up against the walls of the hallway? How had they managed to get their hands on our house keys? And why did they smell of mushrooms?
After a few minutes, Ponytail tucked his gadget into his shirt pocket. ‘We’re just a pair of eyes today, okay? Don’t touch anything, don’t open anything.’
‘No touching, no opening,’ said his companion agreeably.
‘And look out for rats.’
‘Rats?’
‘The more established their lairs are, the more territorial they can get, and they’ve had the run of this place for a while.’
‘Toadly. How long again?’
‘Well, it’s been empty ever since the Cliffstones tsunami in 2019 …’
‘And it’s 2121 now …’
‘So a hundred and two years.’
What? A spasm of shock ripped through my body. I tried to steady myself on the top step, slipped on the rotting carpet, and went plummeting down the stairs,
one
step
at
a
time.
TWO YEARS WOULD have been okay. I could have dealt with that. It was just the other hundred I was struggling with. I lay at the men’s feet, gasping and trembling like a gill-hooked fish thrown on deck.
The words boomed and banged in my head. Now everything made sense. The spiderwebs. That shroud of dust I’d woken up in. The bramble taking over the bedroom. That hadn’t happened overnight but year by year. Decade by decade.
The only other thing, in my life to date, that had ever lasted for one hundred years – or felt like it had – was double maths on Thursday afternoons. And this was even longer than that.
‘Start in the kitchen?’ said the chubby man.
They moved cautiously, with wonder, as if they’d landed on the moon, their boots leaving track marks on a thick carpet of dust. I staggered in behind them, unsteady and disorientated on weakened corpse muscles, and peered round. Then instantly wished I hadn’t.
The last time I’d seen it, before All The Death, the kitchen had looked … well, like our kitchen. Like anyone’s kitchen. Like yours. Normal. Cheerful.
Birdie’s drawings on the fridge. Slightly wilting but valiant houseplants, overdue library books, half-empty jars of strawberry jam on the kitchen counter. You know. The bright sweet tangle of normality you don’t realise you love until it’s gone.
And now? The kitchen was as brown and mouldy as an unwanted apple left to rot on a branch; collapsed, sunk in on itself, speckled by time. Birdie’s drawings had crumbled away from the fridge magnets and fallen to the floor in a heap. There was a disturbing stain on the lino. It must have been caused by all the food in the fridge – those turkey leftovers that could have saved our lives – decomposing, leaking out, and drying to a crust.
And to top it all off, the house had vomited on to the kitchen table.
I took a closer look.
Well, it wasn’t vomit, technically. But at some point over the last century, the kitchen ceiling had ripped open and smothered our kitchen table with dank wood, plaster and what looked like—
‘Pigeon droppings,’ said the shorter man.
I looked at it in horror.
The men, on the other hand, seemed delighted. Even in the gloom of the kitchen their eyes shone with childlike joy.
‘Tent udder,’ said the tall man happily. ‘Ping fleck.’
The shorter man nodded eagerly. ‘Echo that. Verified purchase amazing.’
They were certainly using some interesting words for it. They just happened to be totally the wrong ones.
‘What’s in there?’ said ponytail man, shining his torch through the damp rotting doorway that led to Mum’s study.
Off they went.
It looked pretty bad in there too. Black mould covered the walls, carpet and desk in frenzied whorls. It was worst on the corkboard next to Mum’s desk. In her lifetime, it had been covered with cheery photos of us.
Well, they weren’t cheery any more, not unless you thought people looking like they were being eaten up from the inside by a bubonic plague was cheery.
While most of our old snaps were lost to the creeping mildew, there were some that hadn’t succumbed completely. Those were almost worse to look at. Us larking about on the beach as fungus lapped at our feet; Birdie at bath time, grinning at the camera, skin spotted with the first beginnings of rot.
‘It would have been better if the ceiling had fallen in here too,’ I muttered.
But the two weirdos in my house didn’t seem to think so. Instead they went into paroxysms of delight at the sight of Mum’s old computer, the crumbling pile of Post-it notes by her keyboard, the framed photos on her desk. As their beams swept over the mildewed motivational posters on the walls and stumps of dead plants on the windowsill, they gushed to each other about how brilliant it all was.
‘This home office is so twenty-first century, so evocative,’ said Ponytail.
The other man nodded vigorously. ‘That mountain of old coffee cups,’ he said excitedly. ‘Great bit of local colour, wonderful insight into the way people worked and the dietary habits of the time.’
I stared at them both. Seriously? They were both getting excited by Mum’s old coffee mugs? You’d think they’d found the Holy Grail or something. Did they not get out much?
We roamed the bottom half of the house for hours, gasping in delight or horror, depending on whether we were alive or dead.
I couldn’t understand it. While all I saw was devastation, they delighted in it. They got excited about the weirdest things. The sofa. Our toilet brushes. Dried-up soap in the bathroom. One of Birdie’s school shoes lying on its side under the hallway table, its leather now brittle and cracking with age. They called them ‘artefacts’, ‘snapshots’ and ‘poignant pieces of a life once lived’.
Eventually, we ended up back in the hallway again.
‘Shall we take a look outside? The aerial pictures showed a building out in the back garden, facing towards the sea,’ said one.
They walked through the porch. I followed them. There was a snapping, ripping sound. I stared outside and finally understood why, when they’d first appeared, they’d been bleeding all over their faces.
IT WAS A jungle out there.
There was no garden any more. Just a century’s worth of scrub and gorse wrapped around our house in dense coils. It pressed up and broke through every single window, and poured down the chimney. The house looked as if it was being eaten alive.
But that’s not to say it was all bad.
The rampaging growth had at least one thing going for it.
It blocked out the sea. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t even smell it any more. And that was fine by me.
The men looked at the mass of spiky undergrowth in front of them, took a few stoic breaths, and plunged in.
‘Should have brought a machete,’ said the chubby man, as new scratches flowered on his cheeks and thorns tugged at his belly.
‘Next time,’ said Ponytail, wincing bravely as a stalk jabbed his eye.
I trailed behind them like a reluctant bridesmaid. We may as well have been walking through an overgrown rainforest. Here and there among the undergrowth were reminders of my old life – a few planks on the grass where the picnic table used to be, a toddler-bike skeleton, fragments of the red-brick path my parents had laid.
After what felt like hours of slow bramble-hacking, they came to a stop.
‘Here it is,’ said Ponytail, in front of a dilapidated, tumbledown shack.
Dad’s shed.
It didn’t look good. Although, to be fair, it had been on its last legs even when Dad had been alive. Still, time and sea air had left their mark. The felt roof had all but disappeared and when the door was opened, it paused for a minute before falling off completely, startling a small fox inside who ran out indignantly. The wooden floor had given way to grass which towered over our heads. Through its stalks I saw the remains of Dad’s easels.
I hung my head. I could almost smell paint, turps and smoke.
‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ I could imagine him saying. ‘Ask if they’ve got any pets! We make our own luck, right? Go on, girl – hustle!’
The two men walked away, back in the direction of the cottage.
I sniffed the air again, longingly, but the smell had gone.
There was something slower and thoughtful about the chubbier man’s movements. All of his earlier exuberance had gone.
‘Play again what you know about the Cliffstones tragedy,’ he murmured. ‘I learnt a bit about it at school, but my download’s slightly rusty.’
The older man’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, it was tent udder sad,’ he said, pushing back the brambles as he spoke. ‘There’d been a freak earthquake in a French village, which was tragic enough – loads of people there had died. But what no one had anticipated was where the shockwaves of the earthquake might go. It sent ripples along the ocean flo
or, straight towards Dorset, and Cliffstones bore most of it. The entire village – all three thousand residents – was wiped out completely.’
‘Well,’ I muttered. ‘Not completely.’
‘Unlike,’ said the other man sadly.
‘The Ripley house was the only building left standing, because it was so much higher above the village. The family itself wasn’t so lucky. They were out at the time, so they drowned too. That selfish girl Frankie – you wouldn’t like her – she was born in a storm—’
‘All the worst ones are.’
‘… made them all go out for lunch even though they had leftovers to eat and a good film to watch on the telly. Horrible child.’
‘I heard that. And her hair went frizzy in the rain, didn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Makes you think.’
‘It certainly does.’
‘Hey, boss?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are we having this conversation in real life or in Frankie’s guilty conscience?’
‘Does it matter? It’s all true.’
And that was the second time I heard my death story.
Hadn’t got any better with age.
Ponytail stopped a moment and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘The village was never rebuilt.
No one wanted this cottage. Some well-meaning
relative boarded up the house. Then, once nature took its course …’ he jerked his head at the brambles,
‘people forgot anyone had ever lived here at all.’
‘Until now.’
‘Toadly,’ said Ponytail. ‘The find of the century. Can’t wait to get going on it.’
What did that mean? And why had they said they’d bring a machete to cut back the brambles next time?
And why did Ponytail look so smug? Look at him, hacking back at the growth with a triumphant lion-tamer flourish, strutting about like our garden belonged to him. Gazing up at the cottage – our cottage – with that calculating expression, like a judge on a talent show deciding whether or not to press a golden buzzer.
Storm Page 6
