by Tony Lee
For the first time, Billy agreed with him.
*
They didn’t see Dave for the rest of that day, and nobody called during the evening. Billy spent most of the night in his room, standing in front of a full-length mirror, waiting for bits of his body to disappear. But nothing happened. And the following day he went into school wondering if Dave had lost any more pieces, or whether Rickey had been right and it was just some kind of sick joke.
The one thing he wasn’t expecting was the policeman who appeared during assembly.
As soon as the policeman took the stage, Billy felt a cold hand of fear travel down his back. Was the policeman there because of what they’d done? Was he there to arrest them? He could see Rickey across the hall, looking over to him with the same expression on his face. Where was Dave?
“If anyone knows where David Chapman is, could they please contact us,” the policeman said. “His parents are very worried.”
“What happened to him?” Billy couldn’t help himself as he blurted the question out.
“We don’t know,” the policeman replied. “All we know is that at nine o’clock last night we found a pile of his clothing on Stone Hill. What he’s wearing, if indeed he is wearing any clothes right now, is unknown to us.”
Billy kept his mouth shut after that, but he could see from Rickey’s face that he had arrived at the same answer: Dave had run out of jigsaw pieces and had simply disappeared, either as he walked to, or away from, the Jigsaw Lady’s house. He was gone.
Dead.
And as the classes walked out of the hall, Rickey made his way over.
“We need to talk,” he hissed.
“About Dave?” Billy asked. Rickey shook his head.
“I don’t care about Dave,” he muttered. “He walked away from us, he insulted us. It’s his fault he died. I wanted to talk about this.”
He held up his hand and Billy saw that there was a jigsaw-shaped hole in it. Rickey was fading away, just like Dave had.
“I’m next,” Rickey said, looking around. “I’m gonna die, just like Dave.”
Billy shook his head.
“We’ll work it out,” he said. But secretly he knew that Rickey was right. If it was anything like what had happened to Dave, Rickey would be gone by tomorrow, nothing more than a pile of clothes on the floor. And Billy?
Billy would be next.
CHAPTER 4
Billy spent the rest of the day avoiding Rickey, too scared to see what other pieces of his one-time bully had now disappeared. But the final lesson was extra Maths, and Billy found himself sitting two rows behind Rickey, able to see the whiteboard through the large, jigsaw-shaped hole in Rickey’s head. With one eye being almost all that was left, Rickey wasn’t able to speak to Billy, he just kept looking around and staring, the one eye wide and filled with tears. Billy kept looking away, looking at anything but Rickey as, in front of his very eyes, he saw another jigsaw-shaped hole appear, removing Rickey’s left ear.
Graham, sitting beside Billy, looked at him.
“Will you stop fidgeting?” he hissed. “I’m trying to listen to the teacher and you’re distracting me.” He looked over to what remained of Rickey.
“Why don’t you sit with your new best friend?” he asked mockingly. Billy choked back a tear.
“Look at him!” he hissed back. “Don’t you see anything wrong with him?”
“Are you OK?” Graham asked. “Are you on drugs? Did they get you doing bad stuff?”
“He’s disappearing!” Billy hissed. “You can’t see it, but I can! Why do you think he’s so quiet! His mouth’s gone!”
Graham stared at Billy for a moment.
“You really believe this, don’t you?” he asked. Billy nodded.
“We were cursed by the Jigsaw Lady,” he said. “We burned her jigsaws – well, Rickey burned them, we just emptied them outside. And then Dave disappeared, piece by piece. And now Rickey is, too.”
“Wait, are you saying that Dave’s clothes were found because he ran out of jigsaw pieces?” Graham started to chuckle. “That’s just…”
He stopped as, in front of him, Rickey stood up and staggered towards Billy. All that was left of him that Billy could see was one eye and three fingers of his left hand. Billy started to scream as the horrible figure staggered towards him…
And then the last pieces disappeared. The now empty school uniform of Rickey Randall fell to the floor.
The class turned into chaos. The teacher was crying for calm, shouting that wherever Rickey had hidden, this wasn’t funny and he should come out now, and the other students were cheering, saying it was the best trick they’d seen. But Billy looked at Graham. He might not have seen the pieces disappear, but he had seen Rickey fade away in front of his eyes.
“Now do you believe me?” he asked. Silently, Graham nodded.
“Will you help me?” Billy grabbed his one-time friend’s arm. Graham snatched it back.
“You hit me with a tennis ball. You gave me a bleeding nose.”
“I know, but I thought it was the only way to stop being bullied.”
Graham stared at the pile of clothing on the floor. “And how’s that working out for you?” he asked. He looked away for a moment.
“Look, I’ll help you but only because we used to be best mates,” he said. “And I’d hate to have to explain to your mum why you’ve disappeared. But you’ll have to prove yourself again to me. We can’t go back to what we were.”
“I’ll take anything,” Billy said, smiling for the first time in four days. “So what do we do?”
“We go to the Jigsaw Lady,” Graham said. “We go to her and beg for your life.”
When Rickey Randall didn’t appear after the lesson, school ended early and Graham and Billy went to Stone Hill to face the Jigsaw Lady. Walking through the garden, Billy saw with shame the burned patch on the grass where, less than a week ago, he had helped burn all of the Jigsaw Lady’s puzzles.
Nervously, he knocked on the repaired front door. Three heavy hammers on the door knocker, and then a tense couple of minutes waiting for an answer. Nothing happened.
“She’s not in,” Billy whispered to Graham. “We should go.”
“Wait!” Graham stepped back and looked up at the house.
“Hello!” he shouted to the windows. “My name is Graham and I wasn’t part of this, but I really think you should listen to my friend here.”
He paused. There was no sound.
“You’re right,” he said. “I don’t think she’s – ”
He was stopped by the sound of the front door creaking open. Looking at each other, Billy and Graham pushed at it, opening the door wide.
There was nobody there.
Slowly, Graham entered the house, Billy walking in behind him. He hadn’t been in the house last time, so Billy didn’t know what to expect.
It was dark, with the curtains pulled against the light. There was a terrible smell coming from the kitchen and the sound of something bubbling on the stove could be heard. There was a window in the middle of the main room, a table beside it, and a chair backing against a large, open fire. A lamp and a bookcase were the only other things in there. The carpet was old and worn, the wallpaper was peeling. It looked like a house that hadn’t been lived in for years.
An old woman appeared suddenly, standing at the door to the stairs. Billy jumped in shock, a little scream coming out of his lips as she walked into the room, staring at him. She wore a grey dress that looked as if it was once very colourful, but had never been washed. Her hair was wild and stringy and looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb in years. Her face was wrinkled and one eye was closed as she stared at Billy in anger.
“You’re one of them,” she whispered. “You’re one of them.”
Billy nodded, too scared to do anything.
“I am, and I’m really sorry,” he said, looking at Graham for support. “I didn’t want to be bullied any more, and I thought that joining them would stop that. B
ut I didn’t know they were going to do this.”
“And yet when you did find out, you did nothing.”
Billy shook his head. “I was scared,” he said. “I thought they’d just mix the puzzles up and run away. I was going to come back later and help you put them in the right boxes. I didn’t know Rickey had the lighter fluid.”
“You destroyed all of my jigsaws.” The Jigsaw Lady walked over to the table, sitting down slowly in front of the fire. “But I’m making new ones.”
Billy saw the two jigsaws on the Jigsaw Lady’s table. They were small, each one a simple sketch of a boy in school uniform. It was a familiar uniform and, with a sick feeling in his stomach, Billy recognised both of the boys in the pictures.
Rickey and Dave were in the jigsaws, frozen forever.
And they were screaming.
CHAPTER 5
“So tell me, what do you want, boy?” The Jigsaw Lady smiled, a toothless grin that did nothing to make Billy feel any safer. By the light of the fire, the flames made the pictures of Rickey and Dave look as if they were screaming and moving around in pain. Graham nudged him, waking him back up.
“I want… I don’t want to be like them,” Billy said, pointing at the jigsaws. The Jigsaw Lady nodded.
“And what are you going to give me that will stop me doing this to you?” she asked. Billy looked around in terror.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
“You’re not the first to come here,” the Jigsaw Lady said as she got up from her chair and walked into the kitchen, taking a large spoon and pouring some of the terrible smelling liquid into a cup. Walking back in, she offered it to Billy.
“Coffee?” she asked. Billy didn’t know what it was, but the one thing he knew it wasn’t was coffee. He shook his head.
“What do you mean, Billy’s not the first?” Graham asked. The Jigsaw Lady made a strange coughing noise, a hur-hur-hur sound that Billy suddenly realised was laughter.
“The other two both came to me,” she said as she sipped from the mug. “Each of them offered to do anything I wanted, blaming the others for the ‘game’ that they played on me.” She stared hard at Billy.
“Would you call it a game?” she asked. Billy shook his head.
“No, I wouldn’t either. And I let them tell me what they would do. And when I didn’t like their answers, they shouted at me, tried to threaten me. Are you going to do that?”
Again, Billy shook his head.
“Then what are you going to do?” The Jigsaw Lady sat back down by the fire. Putting the mug down on the jigsaw of Rickey, the hot liquid splattered onto the picture, and Billy thought he could hear a faint scream of pain.
“Tick-tock,” she said. “You don’t have much time to decide.”
Billy looked around the room, trying to think of something that he could do to make up for his crime. All he could think of, however was the fact that if he didn’t think of something fast, he’d soon be a jigsaw like Rickey and Dave, the only two she now had, being taken apart and put together daily…
Suddenly Billy had an idea.
“We took your jigsaws from you,” he said. “It’s only fair that I get them back for you. I mean, I know I can’t get you the same jigsaws, but I’ll bring you a brand new one every week. And as I get more money, I’ll bring you more. I’ll hunt every charity shop, I’ll go on eBay, I’ll bring you as many jigsaws as you lost and more.”
The Jigsaw Lady thought about this for a moment.
“And these two?” she asked, pointing down at the jigsaw pieces.
“When I’ve done what I said I would, you can decide what to do with them,” Billy replied, secretly hoping that the Jigsaw Lady would keep them. As much as he felt bad about it, the idea of school without Rickey and Dave sounded far better than the idea of school with them back.
The Jigsaw Lady nodded.
“Fine,” she said. “Bring me a jigsaw a week and we’ll see how it goes.”
Billy smiled in relief. “Thank you,” he said as he started to back out of the room. “I’ll bring you the first one tomorrow.”
And with that, Graham and Billy left the Jigsaw Lady’s house. Back in the sunlight of the garden, Graham looked at Billy.
“She didn’t seem that bad,” Graham said.
Billy didn’t stop laughing all the way home.
*
Billy kept his word, and the next day he arrived at the house with a five-thousand-piece jigsaw of the Eiffel Tower in France. A week later it was a picture of William Shakespeare. He never entered the house again, he just placed the jigsaws on the ground, banged the door knocker and ran away.
The weeks turned into months. Billy and Graham became friends again, although never the best friends that they once had been. School ended and, after the holidays, Billy returned as a year ten.
At the same time, something odd happened to Billy. He started to grow, finally catching up with the other boys in his class. He also started to fill out a bit more. Graham even joked that Billy was starting to catch a few looks from the girls. After all, he was a local celebrity, the last boy to see Rickey and Dave alive. Again, the stories changed. Rickey and Dave were on the run from a drug gang, or the police, or they had been hired as secret agents… only Billy knew the truth, and he kept quiet.
And every week, without fail, Billy left a jigsaw on the step of the Jigsaw Lady’s house.
But after a year had passed and nothing bad had happened, Billy started to get distracted, mainly by Jenny Davies, a new girl in his class. He’d asked her out to see a film and she’d said yes, but he’d realised at the last moment that by paying for the tickets he’d not kept enough aside for that week’s jigsaw. And so he had gone to the Jigsaw Lady’s house and left a note, explaining that he’d bring two the following week. And he kept that promise. But, knowing that he could miss a week meant that he started to miss several weeks, as other activities took up his time. After all, he’d given the Jigsaw Lady over sixty jigsaws by now, maybe even a hundred. He didn’t remember burning that many. Maybe he’d fulfilled his debt and she simply hadn’t told him?
And so, against Graham’s advice, Billy left a note on the Jigsaw Lady’s door, saying that he felt that he’d kept his side of the bargain and that she should enjoy the jigsaws that she had now as he wasn’t bringing any more. And, feeling good about himself, he went to see a film with Jenny.
It was a few weeks later when the Jigsaw Lady came back into Billy’s mind. It was almost summer break again, and Billy had decided that, as a gift, he’d find a few more jigsaws and pass them on to the Jigsaw Lady as a thank you. But, when he took his shirt off to get ready for gym, he saw Graham staring at him in horror.
“What’s up?” he asked, knowing with a sinking, sickening feeling that he already knew.
“Your shoulder,” Graham replied, pointing. “Look.”
Billy went to the mirror and looked at his shoulder, knowing what he was going to see. It was small, almost too tiny to make out, but it was there. And as Billy stepped back, tears welling up in his eyes, he thought that he could hear laughing, the laughter of a mad old woman, from far away. Billy knew he was dead, doomed to be a sketch on a jigsaw, to live the rest of his days in a silent scream…
Because a small, jigsaw-shaped piece of Billy Pearce was now missing.
THE END
Jigsaw Lady ISBN 978-1-78464-213-6
Text © Tony Lee 2014
Complete work © Badger Publishing Limited 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in any form or by any means mechanical,
electronic, recording or otherwise without the prior permission
of the publisher.
The right of Tony Lee to be identified as author of this Work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
Publisher: Susan Ross
Senior Editor: Danny Pearson
Publishing Assistant: Claire Morgan
Copyeditor: Cheryl Lanyon
Designer: Bigtop Design Ltd
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