A Box of Nothing

by Peter Dickinson

  “We are a democratic institution. We ask around.”

  “How did you begin, then? I mean, did you have a Mum and Dad? Or anything?”

  “No. Though our first voice came from a doll and said ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa.’ It was not much use. This one came from a video game. What do you think of it?”

  “Pretty good,” said James, mumbling because he’d started eating again without noticing. “Do you mean you just happened?”

  “We are not quite sure. But we think we are the result of the Dump’s ceasing to function.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We do not know. It is just a feeling we have.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said James. “I saw everything outside’s sort of gone fossil. And why’s it all so enormous? Is that because of the Dump getting stuck? What do you mean, stuck? Like an engine seizing up?”

  “A bit like that, we think. We don’t really understand ourself. But nothing is totally dead, you know. Everything is a bit alive, only it is a shapeless kind of life. Unorganized. People get hold of that loose life-stuff and give it a bit of shape and use it for a year or two. Then they throw it away. Nature does much the same. It seems a pity, but it is all part of a process—or it was until the Dump ceased to function. Then most of the stuff here did what you call ‘going fossil,’ but some of us somehow put our lives together and started to become what we are now.”

  “What were you like then?”

  “We do not remember. Do you remember when you were a jellyfish? Ages ago some cells decided to work together and help each other, so they invented themselves into a jellyfish. That was how you started. If you can, we can too. It is the logical way to go about things.”

  “But I’m me. You keep talking about ‘we’ and ‘us.’”

  “You may not be as different as you think. You just feel more like an ‘I’ inside that skin of yours. We are looser.”

  Up on the roof the light twisted itself into new coils, as if it were trying to help explain. James remembered how it had dimmed, and how the Burra had gone into a trance while his supper was getting ready. The “life” must have been busy doing the cooking. Now he suddenly felt that the whole cavern, with its faint lights and hums, really was all alive, all one creature, that twitched and quivered the whole time, a bit like a dog having a dream. The Burra didn’t even stop where the cavern stopped. It said it had felt him walk into the trip wire.

  The trip wire reminded him of something else.

  “What about the rats?” he said. “And the gulls? I mean, they must have been alive already.”

  “Yes,” said the Burra. “But they have changed too. They have become more organized.”

  “They’ve changed, all right,” said James. “Guns and things. And so big!”

  “It is all a matter of life becoming more and more organized. Nothing is totally dead, as I told you.”

  “Well, I’ve got something that’s totally dead,” said James. “Look.”

  He fished the box out of his anorak pocket and passed it across. It felt perfectly ordinary to him, but the moment the Burra’s three-fingered hand closed on it an appalling thing happened.

  The Burra fell to bits.

  It was like an explosion. James only saw the first instant of it before the light went out, but the great glass eye popped off the head and the head jumped away from the shoulders and so did the arms. Then the leg of James’s chair that didn’t belong came loose and the chair tilted him out onto the floor. By the time he’d scrambled to his feet, the bits of the Burra had stopped thumping onto the floor and the cavern was dark.

  No, not quite dark. Right up at the far end a few lights blinked off and on. Something up there clunked, whirred, and stopped with a louder clunk. It was the noise Mum’s old fridge had made when it went haywire. A vacuum cleaner started and stopped. A bit nearer, a TV screen switched itself on for a moment, showing jagged interference patterns.

  “Burra,” James whispered. “Are you all right, Burra?”

  No answer. But James could feel that something was still there. All around him in the darkened cavern something was trying to happen, trying to come to life.

  It was the box’s fault. The first thing to do was to find the box and put it back in his pocket. He got down on his knees and patted around. Lots of loose things were lying on the floor. The back of his hand brushed something furry and he picked it up. The Burra’s teddy bear arm. It twitched slightly in his grip. That was a good sign. If only he could find the box.

  He was groping around under the table when something with a loose, floppy feel brushed the back of his neck. He shrank away, then forced himself to reach up and find what it was. Cloth, with padding inside and some bendy wire. The Kermit arm, dangling over the edge of the table. He rose to his feet and felt along the limp tube. No twitch of life there. But at the far end the three fingers were still clamped around the box.

  With a sigh of relief, James pried them loose and shoved the box into his pocket. Almost at once several more lights came on at the far end of the cavern, and the haywire-fridge noise steadied to a whir. The TV set turned itself on and switched through several channels, all showing rats doing things. The table creaked. Slowly, jerkily, the light tube started to glow.

  The Burra—at least the creature that walked and talked, though it said it was only part of the whole Burra—the Burra still lay around in pieces on the floor. The legs and arms twitched. The donkey’s mouth opened and closed like a gaping fish. James couldn’t stand that, so he picked the body up and shoved it onto the chair. It nearly fell off again because of the chair’s only having three legs, but when James picked up the loose one to prop it steady, the wood suddenly jumped in his hand and clicked into place.

  He lifted the head up and tried to fit it into the collar of the sailor shirt. It didn’t want to stick—why should it? It was only a loose bit of broken toy, and the body under the sailor shirt seemed to be just an old duffel bag full of lumpy bits and pieces.

  James was standing there, wondering whether there was any glue in the cavern, or some string perhaps, when the head wriggled. He let go and it stayed in the right place, shaking itself slowly to and fro, like a TV comic who’s been bonked on the head. The mouth stopped gaping and the big floppy ears stood straight up.

  He went to fetch the teddy bear arm, but while he was getting it the two legs stood up of their own accord and hopped into place. The eye came rolling across the floor and stuck fast as soon as James fitted it to the side of the head. Only the green arm stayed lifeless on the table. It hung limp when James picked it up, and showed no sign of wanting to fix itself onto the shoulder.

  “Who are we?” said the Burra suddenly.

  “You’re the Burra. I’m James.”

  “How do you do? The Burra, eh? Yes, yes, of course. The Dump Burra. What happened?”

  “I showed you my box of nothing, and as soon as you touched it you fell apart. And all the lights went out.”

  “Very alarming. For all of us, including you no doubt.”

  “I’ve just thought of something. When I found my box it was touching an old bucket and a fridge. They were real.”

  “Real?”

  “I mean they hadn’t gone fossil. Everything else out there had. And when you touched it … I think it turns things back into what they used to be. When it touches them, you see. The things up at the other end there didn’t go right out. They kept trying to work, because they were farther away.”

  The Burra stayed silent for a long time.

  “Yes,” it said suddenly. “Some of us up there remember. We were being sucked into blackness and cold, but we managed to cut ourselves off by falling to bits. That was it. How very extraordinary. What an odd world we live in, to be sure.”

  “You do,” said James. “I don’t. Anyway, not usually.”

  The Burra floppe
d back in its chair and laughed its donkey laugh till the cavern echoed.

  Chapter 6: No Way Home

  It took a whole day for the Burra’s green arm to come to life again. In the meanwhile it made do with a monkey arm, which wasn’t as useful. The table set firm at the same time, and the fridge out on the slope had “gone fossil” a little earlier. By then James was almost used to eating food that cooked itself and watching a TV that switched itself off and on when it felt like it, and sleeping in a living bed. The bed was especially good. It snuggled around you when you got into it, and the blankets tucked themselves against your spine to keep the drafts out, and in the morning they folded themselves tidy while you were having breakfast.

  But it wasn’t the same as James’s own bed. It wasn’t home. The cavern was interesting for a bit, and a friendly place, and the Burra did its best, but quite soon James was longing for Floral Street and Mum babbling on about everything and Angie mooning her way through her own dream world and the twins dribbling and squabbling. Just before bed on his second evening he went to the window and looked out across the iron sea. There were clouds on the far horizon, two large flat ones and a smaller pointy one between. If the flat roofs of the two warehouses and the pointed roof of the Nothing Shop had been clouds, they might have been that shape. Again in the silence of dusk James thought he heard his name being called. No, not heard—felt. The feeling came to him like a radio signal across the iron sea.

  He woke up with an idea. He must have had it in his sleep, because it was there, ready, as soon as he opened his eyes. After breakfast he would go back down to the shore and dip his box of nothing into the iron sea. It might work. After all, the box had somehow turned the fridge and the bucket into what they used to be back in James’s world (which he couldn’t help thinking of as the real world, though the Burra’s world seemed completely real while you were in it, much realer than any dream). And the box had made the Burra fall back into the pieces it was made of. Perhaps it would turn the sea back into a fence, and he could find the hole and slip through.

  “We suppose it’s worth a try,” said the Burra. “Mind you, it may not work. Don’t build too much on it. The sea isn’t part of the Dump. It’s different.”

  “What do you mean different?”

  “We do not know. Perhaps we’ll find out now.”

  But it was no good that day. There were too many rats around. A patrol turned up soon after breakfast and spent all morning sniffing around on the slope and fixing extra trip wires and booby traps, and then another one came along in the afternoon and walked straight into one of the booby traps, which meant that a lot more rats came bombing out to see what they’d caught and the whole slope swarmed with them, jumping up and down and squeaking at each other. Next day was almost as bad, but on the third morning the TV switched itself on without being asked. James had been surprised to find that the Dump had its own TV, but it turned out to be rat TV, which was worse than nothing. He couldn’t understand the squeaky rat language, of course, though the Burra had learned a bit, but suppose he could, he wouldn’t have wanted to watch endless lectures about rat economics or endless films about heroic rat workers in factories. This was a bit more interesting. The TV showed an enormous military parade marching past a reviewing stand.

  “It must be General Weil’s birthday,” said the Burra. “Or something.”

  “Who’s General Weil?”

  “The rat president. There won’t be any patrols on his birthday—they’ll all be too busy marching around. Good day for finding new members.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The Burra carried James down as far as the bubbling lake, in case he left any human scent too close to the cavern and got the rats interested again. Then James worked his way back down to the shore, scrambling over the fossil rubbish, aiming as near as he could for the place he’d landed. He kept telling himself not to hope for too much, but he couldn’t help it. In fact he ran the last bit, leaping from jut to jut, but when he stood panting on the crunching edge where the waves lapped he was afraid to try until the Burra caught up.

  “Well,” said the Burra. “Any good?”

  “I was waiting to say good-bye.”

  “All right.”

  James crouched by the sea’s edge. The gravelly surface was quite dry. He noticed that where a wave pushed a lacy fringe of water up the shore and then pulled it back the pebbles it left behind didn’t glisten the way they ought to. The water left them dry as a bone.

  His heart thumped as he dipped the box into the water. He pushed it right under. The brown cardboard shone like silver. His hand and arm tingled strangely, but nothing else happened. The sea was still there, and the long and empty shore.

  “The water is not touching it,” said the Burra. “Look. That is why it is silver. It is keeping the water away. How odd.”

  James pulled the box out. It was dry, though his hand was wet. A dribble of water from his skin slid onto the box and immediately turned into little round drops that scuttered around like water dropped on a hot cooker. James scooped some water up with his other hand and poured it onto the box. It almost exploded away.

  “Very odd,” said the Burra. “But it does not look as though your idea is going to work.”

  “No,” said James.

  “Bad luck. Come and help us look for new members.”

  This turned out to be beachcombing, really. The Burra wandered along the shore inspecting all the rubbish that had been washed up in the night. It chose some very odd things, a rubber bath mat, the flexible hose of a vacuum cleaner, a pink lamp shade, a rubber boot. It picked them up and carried them for a bit, and when it put them down they were alive and followed it around, flumping or slithering along like ducklings after their mother. James was too depressed to pay much attention. He tried his box out on bits of fossil rubbish to see if it was still working, and it turned them back into what they used to be, all right; but when he dipped it in the sea it was still no good. There was always that silvery layer of air between the cardboard and the water. He was glad when they went back up to the cavern at the end of the morning.

  The rat parade hadn’t finished. Some strange old World War One tanks were grumbling past a reviewing stand. The rats who were taking the salute wore enormous caps with rows and rows of gold braid around them. The one in the middle, a small grey animal, had twice as much braid as any of the others, and its cap had to be absolutely enormous to take it all. When the tanks had gone this rat started to make a speech.

  It squeaked away for a few minutes, quite calmly, but soon its voice got shriller. Its fur bristled. It gave a couple of hops. It banged the rail in front of it with its fist, then raised a quivering arm and pointed at the sky. Whenever it stopped for breath the other rats on the dais clapped, and the soldiers and civilians cheered and gave what seemed to be the rat salute, one arm up with the paw clenched. The rat making the speech worked itself into such a frenzy that it almost fell off the platform. It grabbed something from the rat beside it and waved it in the air. The thing looked like an old rag, but all the rats became extremely excited. The civilians screamed and the soldiers loosed off volleys into the air.

  “Hello, that looks like a piece of our old leg,” said the Burra.

  “The one the patrol shot? And the gull stole?”

  “We think so.”

  “Is that General Weil making the speech?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  The camera lingered on the screaming crowd. It ought to have been funny, seeing all those rats getting worked up about a bit of old camel leg, but there were so many of them and they seemed so furious, it was frightening. At last the camera returned to General Weil.

  “Do you think he’s mad at the gulls for stealing your old leg?” asked James.

  “We suppose so. We suppose that to run a place like Rat City you need enemies to blam
e things on.”

  “How is he going to fight the gulls? Have they got aeroplanes? It’s funny how ancient their tanks are, when they’ve got TV.”

  “It depends on what comes to the Dump. There are plenty of TV sets but not much in the way of weapons. They have to invent them, but they are quite clever. A little while ago they were still using bows and arrows. We think they will have aeroplanes soon, if they have not got them already.”

  “It’s funny, isn’t it? The rats turning into super-rats and the gulls turning into super-gulls? I wonder why.”

  “It is all because of the Dump’s ceasing to function.”

  “You keep saying that. What does it mean?”

  “We do not know. It is just a feeling we have. Something has gone wrong. Over there somewhere.”

  The Burra waved its green arm toward the back of the cavern.

  “But it’s only a feeling,” said James. “You don’t know.”

  “When you are ill you do not know what is wrong,” said the Burra. “You just feel something is, and you probably feel where. We are part of the Dump. We have its feelings. You might almost say we are its feelings. And we feel something is wrong.”

  Chapter 7: Awkward Member

  That evening the Burra decided to have what it called “a snooze.” This meant it had taken its head off and left it lying on the table, staring at the roof. The arms lay beside it. The green one seemed to be having a dream—at any rate it kept twitching into Muppety shapes. The wooden leg had hopped over to the tin chest to talk to its twin—not really talk, of course, but they seemed to like being together.

  James knew how they felt. They were family. His own family was in a different world, and though they often drove him mad when he was with them, it was surprising how much he missed them now. To take his mind off that sort of thing, he was drawing with some pencils he’d found. It was rather interesting drawing with the Burra’s pencils, because they helped, and you got much better pictures than usual. Now he’d taken out the messy chestnut tree he’d drawn for Mrs. Last to see if the pencils could do anything about it, and they really had, only it wasn’t a chestnut tree any more.