by Coral Walker
“Two cushions,” said Brianna.
“Two cushions then!” said Jack, irritated. What’s the fuss? They were cushions. And anyway, he wasn’t really aiming at her, although one of them had hit her by accident …
Brianna lowered her head to stare at her blue floral leggings and sniffled.
Jack thought of the dream he had had, and the wiggly caterpillar. Caterpillars … abandoned and alone … WHY?
Sergeant Emma looked at Brianna sympathetically and stuffed a piece of tissue into her hand.
Toddling over, Bo climbed onto Brianna’s lap, and rested his head on her chest. Brianna responded with a tight hug.
“What did your Mum and Dad do about that?”
“Mum was very disappointed and Dad said he would stop our pocket money for a week,” Jack answered.
“Did they suggest in any way that they might leave?”
“Of course not!” snapped Jack and Brianna together.
Tim leaned slightly forward, interested. “How often do you argue? Lots?”
“Once or twice a day, roughly,” said Jack.
“But we argued more than three times just yesterday,” Brianna cut in.
“Can’t you tell! I said ROUGHLY!” The words almost slipped from his lips. Instead, he stood rigid in absolute silence, reining in the surge of anger. They had enough trouble already.
It became clear that neither the policeman nor the policewoman would do more than just look around and take copious, pointless notes. When Sergeant Emma made a phone call to the social services to collect the children, Jack felt painfully that all the hopes he had nurtured, which had been alive and flourishing when the police had arrived, were now fading and dying.
How he wished he could do something.
Bo was tired. His need for his parents suddenly became urgent and insistent, and so he cried. Nothing would comfort him, not even the sour peach jelly beans he usually liked or the brand new Dino Rangers that had been saved for his birthday. After a long exhausting hour of crying, he was finally worn out and started to calm down, lying in Brianna’s arms, only occasionally whimpering.
This was a relief for everyone in the house, and was clearly written on Emma and Tim’s faces. When the social worker arrived they made a quick but cheerful farewell and hastened away, looking pleased to be released from the crying and troubled children.
They were now alone with the social worker — a stern-faced woman, sturdy and chunky just like the other two.
What a coincidence!
+++
The woman was clothed in a tight grey jacket with a matching skirt. She had her hair in a short and neat bob and her long thin eyebrows had been shaped to be neat and symmetric. From the start she made no pretence that any of the children’s interests were high on her priority list.
“I’m Ms T. Upright. Call me Ms Upright.” Neither her voice nor her expression showed any discernible emotion.
“I am a senior social worker with the Dare Valley social service centre,” she said and made an abrupt turn. Immediately Jack found himself face-to-face with the woman. Her pale, lifeless eyes cast a chill over him.
“Are you Jack?”
“Yes,” he mumbled.
“Say yes clearly.”
“YES!”
Brianna received a similar question and the same penetrating stare. After a dry, robotic “Yes”, she lowered her eyes, looking distressed. Something inside Jack started to burn.
When it was Bo’s turn, the woman’s voice softened. Jack could sense the effort she made to sound sweeter. Nevertheless, like a spoonful of sugar added to a pot of smelly smoked haddock soup, her naturally hoarse voice sounded stranger rather than sweeter.
When Bo heard his name called, he dived into Brianna. The woman, however, animated by Bo’s shyness, made a forward movement, stretching out her hand towards him. She had extraordinary hands, small as a child’s but with incredibly bony and disproportionally long fingers. Her skin was pale and translucent, revealing purple veins underneath crawling all over her white bones.
Aware of the approaching hand, Brianna, her face flinching with disgust, tucked Bo’s head tightly into her chest, with only part of the back of his head accessible between her slender arms. Ms Upright touched Bo’s head regardless, with a sigh of satisfaction.
Every minute with Ms Upright was torture. Her presence was a continuous reminder of their hopeless situation without the protection of their parents, and their ages gave further evidence of their inferiority. Ms Upright’s coldness, superiority, and judgmental glances only made matters worse.
“The boy and the girl,” she announced, her bony finger pointing at Jack and Brianna. “You two will stay in the house until tomorrow morning, until the status of your parents’ disappearance is confirmed.”
She paused, and then, satisfied by the silence, continued. “I’ll take Bo to the centre.”
Brianna jumped. “Why?”
Still in Brianna’s arms, Bo straightened up his back.
“Why? Because you two are old enough to look after yourselves, and the house is your familiar living environment. My colleague will —”
“Why does Bo have to go?” Jack cut off her sentence.
Annoyed by the interruption, Ms Upright gave him a long cold stare. “Someone needs to take care of your manners, young man. I am just doing my job.” she said haughtily. “Bo is too young to stay here. He needs the care of responsible grown-ups.”
“He’ll be upset alone by himself,” said Brianna, “but we can look after him. We always take care of him and play with him when Mum and Dad are busy. We make him happy … let him stay with us, please.”
Jack appreciated that Brianna was using “We” instead of “I”. She had always been a little motherly towards Bo, in a domineering kind of way. She liked Bo to think she was the only one, apart from their parents, who could take care of him, and would always try to show her importance to him whenever there was a chance.
“That’s impossible,” Ms Upright said. There seemed no question of arguing with her, no matter how desperately Brianna pleaded.
Brianna was almost in tears.
Suddenly, Jack heard his voice echoing in the hall, quivering a little, but adamant.
“Then we’ll go with him!”
Quietly Brianna and Bo came to stand behind him.
Ms Upright eventually changed her mind, with much reluctance, and agreed to take all of them to the centre. It was a wise thing too that she did. She might very well have observed that both Jack and Brianna, in spite of their age, were physically very capable. The rows of medals and trophies from swimming, climbing, rugby, hockey, and other sports, proudly displayed on top of the white marble fireplace, proved that. Perhaps, had she known that Jack was a Dare Valley fencing champion and Brianna was a judo orange belt, Ms Upright would have been a little kinder in her manner.
Leaving the house seemed to be harder than they would have imagined. Ms Upright gave them ten minutes to pack and timed them meticulously. Necessary clothes, toilet articles and Bo’s favourite toys quickly filled up the suitcase. Jack put on his jeans with the old dark brown belt that used to be Dad’s and had been given to him when a belt was urgently needed for a school play. Brianna was fidgeting with something shiny around her neck. Catching Jack’s gaze, she blushed, tucked it away, and hurriedly picked up something from the table. Between a pair of Ms Upright’s now-familiar scrutinizing glares, she scurried over to him and smuggled something into his hand.
Tied securely by a red shoelace to make it into a necklace was Dad’s ring that Bo had discovered.
“Keep it safe,” she whispered and shot off.
Putting on the ring necklace and tucking it under his vest, he immediately felt it, cold against his skin. As his heart pounded beneath, it seemed to be whispering.
“JACK, FIND US!”
4
Scream
The double glass door of the entrance didn’t open and close automatically, as one would expect w
ith that kind of door. A small woman behind a well-lit desk answered readily to their approach by pressing a button on the wall. The door toiled open with a heavy groan and closed behind them with similar reluctance.
“Miss Johns,” Ms Upright intoned, half greeting, half introducing.
Miss Johns, who, curiously enough, was short and stubby with a pear-shaped face and body, put on a jolly expression.
How peculiar, thought Jack. I bet she also has bony hands like Ms Upright’s.
They were asked to sit on a sizeable L-shaped sofa and wait. Jack took a detour to settle himself on the far end at the corner. Brianna hesitated a little, but then followed and sat next to him.
He glanced at her, hoping to see how she might respond to the place or the women there who shared such peculiar features, but she looked weary and bewildered, bereft of her usual controlling manner. She offered quietly to have Bo sit on her lap. But Bo, ignoring her, scrambled up onto the sofa and started jumping on it as if it were a bouncy castle. His restlessness caught the women’s attention, and they frowned in his direction. Then Miss Johns vanished through a sliding glass door. When she reappeared she was holding a sweet jar.
“These are super-duper yummy sweets made of one hundred percent natural ingredients,” she spoke pleasantly, holding out the jar. Her smile was flat and fixed, and her hands, now below Jack’s eyes, were indeed bony and translucent, just as ghastly as Ms Upright’s.
Neither Jack nor Brianna wanted any sweets. Bo, however, helped himself to a generous handful.
“Green and purple.” He described one that he had unwrapped, before slipping it into his mouth. Bo, a four-year-old, still confused his colours at times. But the diamond-shaped sweet was indeed a delicious apple green with patches of dark purple.
When Miss Jones’ back turned, Brianna, leaning slightly to tuck her body safely in his shadow, whispered, “Don’t you think it’s rather odd here?”
Jack nearly breathed an audible sigh of relief when he heard her say this. Strange? Odd? However you put it. The wall was too white; the hall was too brightly lit. Hadn’t they heard of the new Energy Saving Ordinance? And, above all, they were all cast in the same mould. What was the chance of that?
“Do you think they are what they say they are?” continued Brianna.
He winced. “I don’t know ... but why shouldn’t they be?”
He must have raised his voice as Ms Upright stopped talking at once and glanced at them suspiciously.
The silence resumed.
Bo, after quickly eating four or five sweets, yawned and fidgeted. Brianna took him in her arms. Shuffling away from Jack to allow some space, she gently laid him down, his head on her lap. He fell asleep almost instantly.
Outside there was a screech and an orange convertible car pulled up. At the sight of a tall, middle-aged man stepping out of the vehicle, Miss Johns rushed to open the door. The man trotted in.
Tall, with remarkably shiny and immaculately groomed hair, the man had a certain air of flamboyance. He walked with long strides, flourishing his long arms in wide swings. The women looked timid in his presence, and he took no notice of them but strode at once over to the children. Once near enough he patted each of them on the shoulder. An earnest “ze, ze” sounded from his lips as he patted Bo.
Jack strained his eyes as his hand touched Bo. The sight of an ordinary hand with neatly cut fingernails pleased him, so he gazed up at the man and spoke, “I’m Jack.”
“I … I know.” With an impish grin, the man fluttered his eyelashes. “Brianna and Bo.” He pointed at each of them, and when he returned his glance to Jack, he continued in a more dramatic tone, “I’m Dr Kevin Renshell, a medical expert.”
“I know you,” Brianna said unexpectedly.
The man’s eyebrows arched.
A smile brightened Brianna’s face. “Dr Peter Pentland mentioned you once on one of his school visits.”
“Peter Pentland, oh yes, my colleague.” The man grinned widely. “Just once, no more? Did he label me as a goggle-eyed monster or an erratic, good-for-nothing knight crazy about his quest?”
Brianna giggled. “A kind of knight, I guess, a scientific one. You are the man who founded the Centre, and … and are behind the grand project that is to save Earth from its energy problems.”
“You are right, Brianna. You know me better than I know myself …” he muttered, for a while lost in thought.
He said no more but started retracing his path. After a quick nod to Ms Upright, he disappeared behind the sliding door.
+++
The sliding door opened again, and two women marched in with synchronous steps. Without ado, they crossed the hall and strode out through the front door. They, too, were short and chunky.
When the clock on the wall struck twelve Ms Upright made herself briefly absent. She came back with a man she called Baker. According to her, Baker was to escort them to their temporary rooms and then to lunch.
Baker, with a timid grin, looked friendly enough, and the promise of food and a room seemed like a step forward. Tossing a sweet he was fiddling with back into the jar, Jack stood up, ready to go. Brianna, glancing down at Bo, who was lying asleep, wavered.
“Bo will be fine,” Ms Upright said, in a tone remarkably sweet for a voice as hoarse as hers.
Brianna shuffled uneasily, still hesitating, but Jack’s gentle tug at her arm did the trick. She got up and followed him.
Three subdued ceiling lamps dimly lit the lengthy corridor behind the sliding door. The end of the corridor, however, was brightly illuminated by natural light shining through a glass door, which they were heading towards.
They were almost at the door when Jack heard hurried footsteps bouncing off the bare walls. Alarmed, he turned instantly to look.
It was Brianna, somehow lingering behind in the darkest part of the corridor, so badly lit that he couldn’t tell which way she was heading. Without warning, she burst into a run, heading back towards the reception hall, screaming as she ran.
“Jack, Jack, they’re taking Bo!”
The urgency was immediate and almost palpable. At top speed he dashed, and in a flash was just a few yards away from her. Before he reached her, someone seized him from behind, hauling him backwards, and clasped him in his strong arms.
He wrestled, but the bony arms were firm around his waist with their claw-like hands locked in a knot. He was at Baker’s mercy.
“Brianna!” he called in desperation.
Instantly Brianna turned, eyes glaring. She charged at once and set upon them in a rush. In the confusion, they toppled over in an untidy heap. Baker, the bottom one of the three, his head bleeding, groaned in pain. Jack groaned too, rubbing his chest where Brianna’s angular elbow had landed.
“You hurt me,” he complained.
“I saved you!” she snapped, heading back to the door.
“Code, Jack. Do you know the code?” she called impatiently.
Wincing from the pain, Jack answered, “6908.”
The sound of the click was satisfactory to the ear. Jack grinned — it’s always useful to keep watchful when someone enters a code.
Ms Upright and Miss Johns awaited them, each with a rigid grin on their pear-shaped faces, and spoke in a monotonous tone. “Don’t worry, children. Bo is fine. We are taking care of him. We have experienced staff ...”
Beyond them, one of the two women they had seen earlier was carrying Bo in her arms. With his head reclining on the woman’s narrow shoulder, Bo was rubbing his eyes. The other woman took a step forward and pressed the button on the wall. The heavy double door moaned and parted.
With remarkable determination, Brianna jostled her way forward, and Jack, equally resolute, followed her. Ms Upright and Miss Johns wavered and took a few steps back. But as soon as they regained their composure, they thrust themselves upon them. Their arms spread wide and coiled around them like snakes.
Jack wriggled hard, but Ms Upright’s grip was surprisingly strong for a woman of he
r build. Helplessly he watched as the women with Bo hurried out through the door. Next to him, Brianna, writhing and kicking just as he was, stuck out her hand all of a sudden and punched her captor square in the face. The woman howled miserably and let go of her.
Straight away, Brianna shouted at him, "Punch her in the face, Jack! Punch her in the face!"
At the sound of her sharp and decisive command, Ms Upright took on a timid expression and, at the first sight of his hand clenched into a fist, trembled and drew back, much to Jack’s relief.
There came the groan again, and the door was closing. Bo, still in the woman’s arms, woke up. Looking frightened in the hands of a stranger, he thrashed his arms about. Then his fearful glance fell on Jack and Brianna, just as they reached the closing door. On seeing them his face crumpled, ready to cry.
Brianna shot to the wall. The sight of the many buttons troubled her. “Which one, Jack?” she shrilled.
“Blue one!” said Jack.
The heavy door made its usual sluggish moan and, ever so slowly, opened. One inch, two inches … then it stopped dead.
A few steps away, Ms Upright was clutching a black box resembling a remote control. Beyond her, several men in grey, led by Baker, swarmed in through the sliding glass door.
Jack and Brianna bashed on the door and watched powerlessly as the women strapped Bo into the orange car. Before long the men grabbed them. A pair of strong arms squeezed Jack’s chest, and another pair of hands seized his kicking legs. Brianna was not much better off. By chance she wrestled free from a man, but the hands of three other men overcame her. She writhed to no avail.
Bo, tears glimmering over his cheeks, was staring in their direction. His cheeks red and his lips pressed together, he had a tense, angry look. Slowly he extended an arm forward, and his lips parted.
He screamed.
It didn’t sound like a scream, for they could hardly hear it, but they felt it.
The soundless scream, too high-pitched to hear, nevertheless threatened to pierce the eardrums of anyone in its range. Jack shuddered from the sharp pain in his ears and, as his startled captors released him, clamped his free hands to his ears.
