The Scream

by Joan Aiken

  Then the music begins to change and she hears something. A bit worried, she thinks it’s time to head for home. Takes the familiar path and skips along it—going rather faster than usual, but still not exactly scared, just rather keen to leave the woods and get back to the village …

  The music drums and flutters up and up, to a high point, and that’s the moment when she looks back and sees IT. As the orchestra goes into its shriek her hands go up in utter horror.

  And Lu-Lyn did her three terrific backward leaps, taking off from the cross I had marked for her.

  The third was the highest of all, and at the top of it she really seemed to hesitate for a moment in mid-air, then crashed to the ground.

  There was a moment’s total silence in the hall. Followed, after a frozen pause, by a tremendous roar of applause. People thumped their feet on the ground, people stood up and shouted. I’ve never heard such clapping.

  But Lu-Lyn huddled in a heap on the ground, lay still, didn’t stir. And I was puzzled because, when she was making her third leap, I thought I had seen her slip, and leave the floor a yard farther along than she should.

  Now Mr. Alleyn was kneeling by her and raised his hand for silence.

  “I’m afraid there has been a serious accident,” he said. “Lu-Lyn appears to have knocked herself unconscious. Could I have a couple of helpers, please, and a stretcher.”

  People bustled on to the stage. Benjy and I left the hall in a hurry to go home and tell Gran what had happened. She won’t have a phone in the flat. “Why not?” I once asked. “The airwaves it makes,” she said, “might prevent my hearing a sound I’m listening for.”

  Lu-Lyn was taken directly to St. Martha’s Hospital, so Gran and I followed her there in a taxi.

  We had to sit outside a room where there was a lot of activity, people dashing to and fro in white coats with tubes and basins and electrical appliances.

  None of it was any use.

  After a couple of hours a sad, serious man came out to tell Gran that Lu-Lyn had broken her back and had died without recovering consciousness.

  6. The Grave

  NEXT DAY TWO THINGS HAPPENED.

  First, Mr. Innes, the headmaster, came to call. He had been shocked to his roots, he said, to hear of Lu-Lyn’s death. He came to express his condolences, such a tragic waste of such a tremendously promising young life. He brought with him a leather box containing the silver chain which Lu-Lyn would have won for her performance if she had been alive to receive it. Or rather, he explained carefully, if she had been alive she would have won the free term’s tuition at the drama school—but, as matters were, that award had gone to Jocelyn Duffy for her singing.

  But he hoped that the silver chain would be a reminder, a sad but important reminder, he interrupted himself to add, a poignant reminder of a talented young life brought to an untimely close, grievously cut short—

  “I’ll bury the chain with her,” Gran said briefly. Sometimes she sounded very like Lu-Lyn. “And, Mr. Innes, what’s this I hear about a patch of grease on the stage?”

  He turned pale with annoyance.

  “Oh, good heavens, has that silly tale got here already? I assure you, my dear lady—”

  You could see that he had been within an inch of calling Gran “my good woman” but was able to stop himself just in time. “My dear lady, I hope that you are not going to pay the slightest attention to such foolish gossip, spread abroad, I’ve no doubt at all, by spiteful sensation-mongers—”

  “I’d hardly call my grandson a sensation-monger,” said Gran, colder and dryer than the east wind. “He saw the patch of grease himself when he went down to the hall to fetch my granddaughter’s things.”

  Not only had I seen the patch of oil, the size of a doormat, spread over my third marker-cross; but I had seen the two-liter cooking-oil container casually dumped backstage behind the grand piano. Somebody had probably planned to come back and pick it up later, but had not been able to because of all the commotion.

  At the funeral there was only Gran and me, Gran with a grim, set face like a tombstone covered in black ice. Not another soul, except for the man who read the words.

  What did Gran feel about Lu-Lyn’s death?

  I truly did not know.

  She was like a closed box, a shut book.

  At night she walked in her room, up and down, up and down. I don’t think she slept at all.

  Sometimes she gave me a queer, puzzled, gloomy look as if she were measuring me for a suit of clothes which she was pretty sure were not going to fit …

  Had those boys been responsible for Lu-Lyn’s death?

  The day before the funeral I had suggested to Gran that we should have Lu-Lyn’s banshee music played, maybe she would have liked that. But Gran said no to that idea, very short and sharp. Wouldn’t be suitable, she said.

  So Gran and I sat side by side on the bench in the crematorium chapel while the man read the words. And then he told us that we could come back in a week to pick up Lu-Lyn’s ashes. By then, he said, they’d have a place ready for Lu-Lyn in the children’s corner of the cemetery.

  After that we caught the bus back to Chateau Mansions. My wheelchair folds up and goes in the luggage place.

  I forgot to mention the flowers. There were hundreds of bunches. Wreaths, crosses, sheaves, bouquets. They were lying along both sides of the path that led up to the chapel—with Kind Remembrances, with Deepest Sympathy, with condolences, with commiserations. From school, from neighbors we didn’t know, from heaven knew who …

  Gran had the lot sent to St. Martha’s Hospital.

  Next week we went back for the ashes—which came in a lumpy plastic casket, tinted up to look like mahogany. Which it didn’t. And this we took to the children’s corner of the graveyard, where a place had already been prepared for Lu-Lyn.

  Gran glanced round the plot, which was about the size of a tennis court.

  “Hmm,” she remarked. “Doesn’t seem particularly appropriate for my granddaughter.”

  Her face was set like a rock. What lay beneath the surface, who could guess?

  The Kiddies’ Korner of the graveyard—as it was named in the local paper—was all stuck about with plastic teddy bears, with pink and yellow flowers—ninety per cent of them plastic too—with the sort of little whirly windmills on sticks that small kids are encouraged to run along the park paths clutching, and which cause plenty of scars on face and stomach. There were garden gnomes and fairy wands, imitation birthday cakes and gift-wrapped parcels, fairy queens’ crowns and spangled wings, there were pink parasols to keep graves dry, or shady, bottles of fizzy drinks and lots of poems and letters in plastic cases to keep them dry.

  Lu-Lyn’s grave—after we had put the casket in it, which also contained the silver chain Mr. Innes gave Gran, after it had had four thick pieces of bright-green artificial turf laid over it—looked pretty plain and bare. Compared to all those other fancy decorations and gifts.

  Much to my surprise Gran brought out three night-lights, which she had in her big handbag, set them in a row on the grave, and lit them.

  Looking up she caught my eye and said gruffly, “Lu always did hate the dark.”

  It was the first sign I had seen which showed that she missed her granddaughter.

  That night I had a queer dream.

  I was on the motorway where, five years ago, Mum and Dad met their sudden and unlooked-for end, under the wheels of a monster articulated lorry.

  I had blacked that day out of my memory as much as I possibly could; never thought of it on purpose. But sometimes in dreams it would come back.

  In this dream I knew the road, knew that it was the one, yet there were no vehicles on it. Whereas, on the day of the crash, it had been packed with holiday-makers coming home, and with trucks and lorries impatient at all this extra traffic.

  Far off in the d
istance the empty road stretched, for five or ten miles both ways, straight and flat as a ruler, with not a vehicle in sight.

  “Why is the road so empty?” I asked Lu-Lyn, who was sitting sulking in the back at my side.

  She said a strange thing: “It’s the path of power. From the runes of the past to the science of the future. A ley line from magic to physics. This was the way they had to go when they were driven out.”

  “Who had to go? Who were driven?”

  “The enemy. The vermin.”

  Dad was driving the car faster and faster.

  Lu-Lyn clenched her hands. She said, “Dad! You must turn round and go back! If you don’t turn and go the other way I shall scream.”

  “How can I turn on the motorway?” said Dad. “Have some sense, girl. Besides, we have to get home.”

  “I shall scream!” said Lu-Lyn. Then she looked past me, over my shoulder, and suddenly her face went blank with shock, her jaw dropped, her mouth and eyes opened wide.

  Something dreadful, something she hadn’t at all expected, was just ahead.

  Lu-Lyn screamed.

  And her scream woke me. Only it was not her scream, it was the Edvard Munch alarm clock which somebody had wound and set.

  They had wound and set it for two a.m.

  Gran came hurriedly limping out of her room, wrapped in her old red woolen robe.

  “Did you set that alarm?” she snapped.

  “No, I most certainly didn’t!”

  She glared at me and I glared right back. Would I do such an idiotic thing? Of course I wouldn’t! But I could see she only half believed me. Perhaps she thought I walked in my sleep (how could I though?) or had wound up the alarm clock in some kind of mental blackout. Anyway, Gran took the clock back to her room when she returned to bed. And for the rest of the night I lay awake, thrashing and tossing, and thought about Lu-Lyn letting out that piercing scream behind Dad’s ear in the car.

  Next morning the doorbell startled us as we were picking at a meager breakfast, neither of us at all hungry.

  The person Gran buzzed in was a policeman. Sergeant Davies. I knew him, as he had given lectures at school.

  He said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Drummond, but vandals last night made a right mess of the kids’ graveyard. And your granddaughter’s grave has been—er—misused.”

  How can you misuse a grave? I wondered.

  “You mean you want me to come and look at it?” said Gran in a wholly discouraging voice.

  “Er—yes, ma’am, if you’d be so kind. I’m sorry to have to ask you. It’s not a pleasant thing to have to do …”

  Sergeant Davies drove us both to the cemetery in his cop car.

  The top right-hand corner, where children are buried, was a real mess.

  All the little windmill sticks had been pulled up and broken and their tops torn off. The plastic flowers had been trampled into the earth, and the gnomes smashed to bits. The birthday cakes and umbrellas and gifts and bottles of fizzy drink had been broken and trampled and thrown about. Garbage from the litter bins had been scattered.

  The turf had been pulled from the top of Lu-Lyn’s grave and the grave itself dug up. The casket had been opened and the lid forced off.

  “Is there anything missing from the casket?” Sergeant Davies wanted to know.

  “Yes … a silver chain,” Gran told him in a flat, dry voice.

  Surprisingly, the ashes themselves, which were contained in a thick plastic envelope, had not been touched.

  “Perhaps they were interrupted,” Gran said.

  Mr. Burbage, the warden of the cemetery, and lots of other people, parents of children buried there, were now arriving, all exclaiming in shock and outrage.

  “Look at that!”

  “Did you ever see such a—”

  “Quite disgusting!”

  “I shall write to our MP, to the Mayor, to the Bishop, to the papers—”

  “It must not be tolerated—”

  Mr. Burbage almost tied himself in knots, apologizing to Gran, promising that a new casket should be supplied, that it would be re-interred in the shortest possible time, that the turf would be re-laid, the night-lights replaced (they were nowhere to be seen) …

  “What about the silver chain?” said Gran, dry as gunpowder.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “If there was one, that would be a matter for the police.”

  I could see that he didn’t like Gran and she didn’t like him. And I noticed, also, that the rest of the angry, upset parents and relatives seemed to be keeping their distance from us—they talked to each other in low, shocked voices, and compared notes and condoled about damages, but very few people seemed to wish to share our dismay and disgust.

  After the sergeant had driven us back to Chateau Mansions I asked Gran why she thought this was.

  “Perhaps they are blaming us,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “None of these outrages have happened before. Only now, the day after your sister was buried there. Perhaps they think that she is the cause …”

  I noticed a difference at school too. All my friends seemed to be busy somewhere else these days, they weren’t around as much as they used to be. Benjy, who used to push my wheelchair to school said he couldn’t manage it any more, he had to practice his violin, so Gran had to pay someone from Youth Concern to come and do it every day.

  Gran was very quiet and tight-faced at this time. She didn’t talk to me much.

  One thing she did say was, “I can’t decide what to do with Lu-Lyn’s things.”

  That surprised me. It was very unlike Gran not to know her own mind.

  Lu-Lyn’s things, her clothes, all her ballet books, her costume, and her black dancing shoes that she used for The Scream, the tape recorder, and the tape of The Banshee’s Exile, were still in her room.

  “You could give them to a thrift shop?” I suggested doubtfully.

  But Gran said, “No. No, I don’t want to do that.”

  Then the phone rang, a few days later, and it was the police to say that the graveyard had been desecrated again. Worse, this time. Worse things had been done.

  This time, Gran said she didn’t want to go and look. What was the point? Let the police do what they could to discover who did it, and Mr. Burbage do what he could to tidy up the mess.

  But Mr. Burbage presently came to call, pale, embarrassed and angry, carrying a wrapped package.

  “I’m very sorry to have to say this, Madam,”—he didn’t sound sorry, he sounded hostile and furious—“very sorry but the other—er—clients of the cemetery have instructed me to request that your granddaughter’s ashes be removed from the plot and re-interred elsewhere.”

  “Why?” snapped Gran.

  “It is only since her—since her interment that these disgraceful acts of vandalism have taken place.”

  “Do you think we did those things?” said Gran, very angry. “Or do you think my granddaughter’s ghost came back and did it?”

  This startled and shocked Mr. Burbage.

  “Certainly not, certainly not, madam! But, you see, the other—the other parents and relatives have come to me with this request and I can only pass it on to you. I don’t like to be put in such a position, I assure you, madam.”

  He laid his parcel gingerly on the table as if it contained something breakable.

  “What do you suggest I do with it?” growled Gran.

  “That is entirely up to you, madam. But,” he added, almost in spite of himself, it seemed, “whatever you do, I would advise you to do it very privately, not to let anybody know anything about it.”

  “Somebody caused my granddaughter’s death,” said Gran. “I’m sure you know that. I know it. Why should we have to behave as if she was the one who committed a crime?”

&
nbsp; “I couldn’t tell you that, madam,” said Mr. Burbage, and snatched up his hat and left.

  Gran sat still as a statue for a long time after he had gone.

  Then I said, “I know one place where Lu-Lyn would like to be. Perhaps under the big fir tree, with Henry.”

  “Yes,” said Gran thoughtfully. “Yes … perhaps she could. But not just yet …”

  Winter had set in, very hard and cold. There was snow on the ground. Just now, it would be almost impossible to dig a deep hole, deep enough, and, even if one could, the traces of it, earth on the snow, would be there for everybody to see, probably for weeks afterward.

  Christmas came and went, without any celebrations by us, and Lu-Lyn’s ashes stayed on the mantelpiece, where Henry the pigeon once used to sit.

  One thing I didn’t like. We had very few Christmas cards, of course, because most of Gran’s friends were dead, and my friends had taken off, but one envelope arrived with two pieces of plain black paper inside. They looked just like the two that Lu-Lyn had sent off to her enemies Mack and Orrin McGregor, who lived in our building. She had taken them upstairs and slipped them under doors, and this envelope arrived in the same way, slipped under the front door. No handwriting, no signatures.

  I would very much have liked to drop those bits of paper in the river, as I had done with the one addressed to Bry Bateman, but it was the school holiday time, my Youth Concern helper was not available for pushing me to school every day. I was housebound, unless Gran took me out for an airing—which she was not at all eager to do.

  And, in any case, I didn’t want Mack and Orrin to go blind. They had not been my enemies.

  Gran solved the problem—if it was a problem—by folding the two bits of black paper into darts; then she opened the window and skimmed them out into the wind, which was biting and fierce that day, straight from the North Pole.

  Down below I could see Mack and Orrin starting off with skates over their shoulders. Probably going to Kelso Pond, where all the kids went at this time of year. (Those who could skate, that is to say.)