by Joan Aiken
Very intelligently, John concluded that she must mean pocket, and he pushed his right hand, which luckily was still free, into her left-hand jeans pocket, and there found a pair of scissors—they were the very thing that was needed. Dragging them out, he began to snip and snap and slash at the strong, rubbery strands that curled and twisted and dragged them towards the water.
“Let go! Loosen up! Take that! Blimey, there’s hundreds of them! Where do they come from?”
By huge good luck the Tibetan scissors, with their solid notched blades, had a powerful and speedy effect on the twining, grabbing strands; besides slicing through them, the thick copper blades seemed to burn and shrivel the rubbery tentacles, which curled up and shrank like scorching wool at every snap of the cutting edges. Fairly soon, John was able to drag himself free, and then do the same for Nonnie; both of them stood trembling, gulping air, getting their breath back—for both had been half-strangled—and gazing in horror at the black waters of the canal, which heaved up and down as if, below them, something huge still floated unseen, waiting for another chance to pounce.
“Let’s get away from here,” said John hoarsely.
“The fish-and-chips—”
But the parcel of fish-and-chips had gone, had been whipped away with silent speed while they were still battling off the attack.
“Can’t be helped,” said Nonnie. “There’s eggs in the pantry, I’ll make an omelet. Nothing’s going to make me go back that way again. What in the world was it, John, do you think?”
“Some kind of octopus?” guessed John. “Or a huge jellyfish? There’s a thing called a Portuguese man o’war that has hundreds of poisonous tentacles—”
“I’m coming up all over in itchy bumps,” said Nonnie. “Wherever those strings touched me.”
“Yes, I am too. Let’s go.”
As they hurried away, they did not notice that in the foggy distance, there was a slight splash and a loud gulp; then a faint series of diminishing barks. The monster had claimed some other victim.
Weak and breathless though they were, John and Nonnie ran all the way home.
Mrs. Sculpin let out a frantic wail when she saw them.
“My sainted thingummy! What ever have you two been up to?”
“It was the m-m-m-monster!” gulped Nonnie. “I’m afraid it got off with the fish-and-chips—”
“You never came by the towpath? You saw the monster?”
“And now we’re all covered in blisters—”
“You pair of little castaways!” cried Mrs. Sculpin. “You cotton-witted little sketches! How could you be so bacon-brained? Oh I could shake you—taking such a risk! And losing all our suppers! And never thinking of me and my feelings—suppose the monster had eat you all up?”
Luckily at this moment Colonel Njm came downstairs, expecting fish-and-chips. He had to be told the story of their escape. He seemed very much concerned, asked a great many questions, and recommended apple juice, which, applied to their blisters, did indeed reduce the pain and swelling.
“I’ll put a nice pizza in the oven, Colonel,” said Mrs. Sculpin. “It’ll be ready in ten minutes. We could have had us an omelet but—would you believe it!—every single egg we broke had a snake inside. I’m going to give that dairy a real piece of my mind.”
“Snakes, Mrs. Sculpin? In the eggs? Oh, dear me—” The Colonel seemed deeply upset at this news, almost as if he felt it was his fault.
“Never you mind, Colonel dear, our cat Euston killed the lot of them. A real terror on snakes, Euston is. John, as you are near the set, just switch on Channel Nine, will you? It’s that TV program I like—Lucky Lukie, the quiz game, the fellow who lines up people in the street—”
Lucky Lukie, who soon appeared on the screen, was an active, dynamic question-master, leaping about like a firecracker, poking fun at the two teams he had assembled in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, teasing and abusing them.
“Right, now, you lot, here’s the first question, it’s an easy one. And if you set of dullards don’t know the answer, let’s hope someone from the other side does—dickory dock, who’s inside the clock? And, while you’re thinking, one for the other team—who are the Winter People? Come on, don’t look so pie-faced—”
Colonel Njm, with what sounded like a muttered oath, swung round to leave the room.
“Excuse me—I cannot endure television—such dreadful vulgarization of life-and-death matters—”
He shut the door behind him with a slam, and this seemed to upset the TV. The screen flashed white, then turned a dull red, and no thumps or kicks or pressing of different buttons on the control panel would restore it to proper functioning.
“Oh well,” sighed Mrs. Sculpin, “I did get it out of a builder’s skip. Never mind, the pizza’s just about done. Shame, though; I always enjoy that Lucky Lukie. He’s a real clever fellow—chats up people in the street, asks them questions, always has something sparky to say. He stopped Una, two or three weeks ago, asked her something—I forget—but she was a match for him. She was cool as could be. John, be a dear and take up Colonel Njm’s tray.”
While John was upstairs the cat Euston shot in through his cat-flap at top speed. He seemed unusually disheveled and wild-eyed, with patches of fur missing.
“Euston? What’s up with you? Oh, dear, Nonnie, I think you are right, there’s some nasty creature comes into that yard at night,” said Mrs. Sculpin, as John came downstairs. “The lights keep flashing on even when Euston’s indoors. John, tomorrow morning I think you’d better sprinkle a handful of that Pest Peril Pepper about the place …”
After they had eaten their pizza they planned to finish with apples. But it proved impossible to open the grandfather clock which, at present, still reclined in Mrs. Sculpin’s shopping trolley in the front hall, till John had time to mend it.
“That’s funny,” said Mrs. Sculpin, greatly perplexed, when no wrenching would open the door in the front. “It wasn’t locked at the sale hall. And when I stopped by the canal to buy apples off the barge, it opened as easy as easy and I put the apples inside. Nice green ones they were. Granny Smiths. There’s no key to the clock. They never gave me one.”
“Well it seems to be locked now, all right,” said John, gently prising at the door with a screwdriver.
They tried all the spare keys in the house, but none of them fitted the lock.
“Oh, well, drat it,” yawned Mrs. Sculpin. “I’m tired. I’m off to bed. And so should you two, pretty soon, after all you’ve been up to. Monsters! The idea! We’ll find a way to open the clock in the morning.”
After Mrs. Sculpin had gone off to bed, Nonnie and John played a few flute-and-triangle duets, which brought Marcus Magus floating out of the past to listen and applaud.
They told him all that had been happening to them, and he went into a long and contemplative silence.
“Are you still there?” asked Nonnie after a while.
“Yesse, childe; I do but reflecte. —You are the youngest of nyne children, isse thatte notte soe?”
“Yes it is.”
“Your mother was likewise the youngest of nyne?”
“Yes.”
“And your lost sister is the eldest? Describe her.”
“Well,” said Nonnie after some thought, “she has very fair hair—and she’s fond of apples. And she used to tell me stories, beautiful ones.”
“Her natal day?”
“March twentieth.”
“Aha! The firste daye of springe. Didde shee ever tell you a historie of a shepherd choosing a lyttle blue flowre out of a caverne filled with preciousse jewels?”
“Why yes, she did,” said Nonnie in surprise. “But what has that to do with—”
“Itte may bee thatte yr revered Gueste upstairs is the one to whome you should turn for advyce. For whatte can hee be doing here, so farre from his owne playce?�
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“He’s doing research at the Unwelcome Institute,” John said.
“Your sister spake of apples in that crie for helpe? And of a white garmente?”
“Yes. At least she said, ‘Wrap me in white.’”
“I thinke you should weare or carrie your whyte shirte at all times, in case you meet her.”
“I have it on now, over my sweater.”
“And she sange a melodie? And you saw the notes of thisse melodie on the train window?”
“Yes. The tune went—”
“Waite, childe, waite! Trie singinge or playinge the melodie againste the locke of the clocke.”
“The clock? What has that to do—”
“Nothinge is happeninge by chance at present,” said Marcus Magus.
But when they went into the front hall to act on his advice, they were angry and disconcerted to find that the grandfather clock was no longer there.
“Well, I’m blest! Look at that!” said John indignantly. “The front door lock’s been cut right out—like the core of an apple—”
“The thieves took Aunt Daisy’s shopping trolley too,” said Nonnie, putting her head out of the front door. “For you can see wheel tracks in the snow along the pavement. It’s snowing quite hard—they can’t have been gone more than a few minutes. There’s two sets of footprints. Quick! Let’s go after them.”
She grabbed a coat.
“Waite, waite, my headstronge younge friends!” called Marcus Magus anxiously. But John and Nonnie set off running along Pond Walk in pursuit of the wheel tracks.
“I’m just fed up!” panted John. “These Winter People—whoever they are—seem to be closing in on us. First Una, then our fish-and-chips, now Ma’s clock—it’s got to stop—”
“Lucky Lukie said something about a clock,” gulped Nonnie. “And he talked to Una—Aunt Daisy said—perhaps that’s what started the whole thing—”
At the end of the street they met a policeman.
“Oh, hello, PC. Finch,” panted John. “Did you see anyone pushing a trolley with a grandfather clock on it? They just pinched it from our house, Number Five—”
“Yes, I did see two characters in black they went that way towards the graveyard wait, stop a minute, young ’uns, don’t you go off so fast—”
But heedless of his warning cry they raced on their way. P.C. Finch took a step after them, then thought better of it, and started back towards Number Five, talking on his mobile phone as he went.
“If they’ve gone to the cemetery,” puffed John as they ran uphill, “that gives us quite an advantage.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the cemetery warden. It’s my second-string job. The place is a bit of a spooky tangle, but I know all the paths and I carry the keys—”
Rumbury Cemetery, as they approached it in fog and snow, did indeed look like a ghost forest. The overgrown bushes and trees drooped under their load of snowflakes, or vanished upwards into dappled haze.
But the trolley tracks could still be seen, leading through the wrought-iron gates, which somebody had left open, and along a narrow path between high clumps of bamboo.
“Why in the world would they want to come here?” gasped Nonnie.
“Shh! I think they must have stopped! Slow! Tiptoe!”
Caution was hardly needed in the muffing snow. John and Nonnie stole forward and peered round a cypress tree into a clearing, where two paths met. To their great astonishment they found the shopping trolley and clock stationary in the middle of the track. But the thieves could be heard not far off in the bushes, thumping and clinking.
“What can they be doing? Digging up graves? That’s what it sounds like.”
“Never mind! Now’s our chance—quick!”
They darted forward noiselessly. John pointed left, and they steered the trolley along a narrow winding path between overgrown conifers. After rounding a couple of corners they came to a brick tower in a small clearing. The tower was slender in girth but quite high. Nonnie, peering up, saw that its top was veiled in driving snow and mist.
“We can go inside—I have the key,” John explained, and produced it from a cord round his neck.
“Goodness, John! How—how very efficient of you,” said Nonnie, much impressed.
“You see I keep tools in the tower for clipping and chopping. Now you go in front and pull, I’ll push at the back. Hoist it over the step—that’s good. We can lock ourselves in.”
“But they are sure to follow our tracks here.”
“There’s a phone to call the Parks Department, in case I ever find somebody who’s lost and starving,” John said, switching on a light. “What’s the matter?”
“John! There’s blood trickling out of the clock!”
Chapter Nine
AN EMERGENCY MEETING OF THE Grand and Ancient College of Siberian Witches had been hastily summoned and, for lack of a more suitable location, was being held in the Rumbury Canal Tunnel, where the cut ran westwards for a mile under the high dome of Rumbury Rise, before it emerged to cross the flat plain of Sadlers Green.
The delegates were huddled together like nesting rooks along the brick paved towpath, peevish and mumbling, silently struggling for better places while pretending to be unaware that they were doing so.
“Are we all here yet?” hissed the Convener, in a whisper that carried easily from end to end of the mile-long tunnel.
A fidgeting and shuffling and rustling followed, as heads and horns were counted.
“Azriel—Goontas—Mrs. Nightshade—Wizard Wullie—Limping Len—Blacklassie—Num—Nga—Ulgan—Erlik—”
Then the response.
“Not all here yet, Mistress. More are still to come. And the two brethren with the clock, though close at hand, are not yet present.”
“The shirt?”
“Very near also, but not yet in our possession.”
A dry snarl of impatient rage met this news.
“Useless—idle—impotent—blockheads! Let the laggards be summoned urgently. The time draws on—”
A strange, soft, rattling sound began to pour out from each end of the tunnel, audible to bats and cats and dogs, but not to normal humans.
Candidates and late comers far away across the Atlantic and the Sahara heard it, and hastened their pace.
The doorbell at Number Five, Pond Walk rang loudly, twice. Mrs. Sculpin, who was upstairs winding her hair on to curlers, heard it, and began to grumble.
“Who on earth can it be at this time of night? And why don’t those children answer the door, haven’t heard them come by, they must still be up, the light’s on downstairs.”
The bell pealed again, so Aunt Daisy went crossly down in her dressing-gown and headscarf.
She snatched open the door, without noticing that the lock was missing, just as the bell rang for a fourth time.
“All right, all right, I’m not deaf, I heard you, what is it?”
Two skinny girls in tight-fitting T-shirts and trousers stood outside. Their faces were pale, their eyes glittered, their hair stood up in spikes.
They spoke together. “Oh, hi, Mrs. S, we’re collecting ashes for a folk sculpture exhibition to be held on Rumbury Waste next summer—would you be able to let us have a couple of buckets of household ash?”
“Ash? You come here at this hour of night asking for ash? And how in the world is sculpture going to be made out of ash, may I ask?”
“Ashes make brilliant material for sculpture, Mrs. S, just brilliant, you bind them together with epoxy resin. Now if we could just have a pailful or two from your boiler (I expect you empty out the ashes every night?)—just tell us where your back yard is, or where you throw out the ashes, we have shovels and buckets, you won’t be put to the least trouble—?”
“Well, I dunno,” said Mrs. Sculpin, “I never heard a
nything of the sort before in all my born days, collecting ashes in the middle of the night; still, please yourselves, the yard’s out through the kitchen door, the ash heap’s down at the far end, take as much as you fancy. There’s lights that’ll come on as you go outside. But hurry up! And mind, when you come back in, that you don’t track any ashy footprints over my kitchen floor.”
The girls made haste to follow her directions, scurrying out of the back door, whispering together as they went.
Mrs. Sculpin sat down, resignedly, at the kitchen table, to wait for their return. Instead, after a couple of minutes, a terrific hubbub broke out in the back yard. There were shrieks, gasps, wails, thumps, and a very unusual snuffling sound.
Then a long, long silence.
Mrs. Sculpin put her head out of the back door. But there was nothing to be seen. Only the radiance from the sensor lights, shining on ash-sprinkled snow.
“Well, I dunno,” said Mrs. Sculpin for the second time. “I’m certainly not going out there. No way. Can those girls have done a bunk over the garden wall? And where can John and Nonnie have got to? It’s long past their bedtime.”
She went back into the front hall and noticed, now, that the clock was missing.
“Well I never! Where’s my clock? And my trolley? What’s going on round here?”
The doorbell rang again.
The tower in the middle of Rumbury Cemetery was called Lady Ermintruda’s Tower, because it had been built in memory of that lady by her sorrowing father. No one could remember exactly what her history had been, but no doubt it was very sad.
Inside this tower John and Nonnie faced one another, trembling, over the grandfather clock.
“We’ve got to get it open, right away.”
“You don’t think we should wheel it home first?”
“But we have to see what’s in it. And those people are probably outside.”
“Well—that’s true.”
“Marcus Magus said play the tune against the lock—those three notes that Una sang—that I saw written on the train window—”
