Blink and You Die

by Lauren Child

She told herself to get it together, or as her RULE 8 had it: DON’T LET YOUR IMAGINATION RUN AWAY WITH YOU OR YOU MIGHT WELL LOSE THE PLOT.

  She walked on past the trashcans and dumpsters, keeping her eyes trained on the street ahead; there was nothing to worry about … And then came the sound of a bottle smashing on the cobbles. Her heartbeat quickened.

  ‘Anyone there?’ she called.

  A cat ran out of the darkness and leapt onto the wall.

  She closed her eyes. Get a grip, Redfort. She really shouldn’t be walking down dark alleys if it was going to get her freaking out like this. But then came that whispered sound again. It definitely seemed human.

  She tapped the Escape Watch, which triggered a bright beam of light to shine from it. She directed it into the shadows and over the stacked-up crates and piles of garbage. She heard a noise behind her and turned to see a figure trundling a shopping cart across the top of the alley. Mrs Beesman? she wondered. But in the dark one old lady pushing a shopping cart looked very much like another.

  She was about to move on, using her watch flashlight to make one more sweep of the alley, when she saw it. It was chalked on the ground, freshly written she guessed, because the chalk was only just beginning to bleed into the damp surface of the alleyway. It was hard to make it out in the dark, but when she did she saw it was a message and she could be in no doubt that the message was for her and her alone:

  Ruby had no intention of hanging around, but her legs had become sort of rubbery and she tripped and went sprawling forward, her coat now tangled in a section of chain-link fence that ran down one side of the alleyway.

  She tried to yank herself free, but couldn’t.

  She pulled at the zip, slid herself out of the parka and left it where it lay ensnared.

  Then she ran and ran and she didn’t look back.

  RUBY ARRIVED AT THE CREWS’ PLACE, teeth chattering and unable to feel her feet.

  The door was opened by eleven-year-old Nancy.

  ‘Hey, Ruby, I guess you’ve come to pick up Bug?’

  Ruby nodded, almost too cold to speak.

  ‘Clance!’ she yelled. ‘Ruby’s here. By the way, where’s your coat? It’s cold out, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, Nancy, I noticed that too.’

  Clancy appeared, followed by Bug, and the Crews’ own little dog Dolly, who trotted along behind. Ruby reached out to pat the husky, but her hands were so numb she could not feel the dog’s fur.

  ‘Are you OK? You’ve gone sorta blue,’ said Clancy.

  ‘Where’s your coat?’ said Olive, skipping across the hall.

  ‘Oh, am I not wearing one?’ said Ruby, her tone sarcastic, though Olive seemed unaware of this.

  ‘No,’ said Olive. ‘My mom says it’s stupid to go outside in winter without a coat.’

  ‘You should talk,’ said Nancy. ‘You are always doing stupid things.’

  ‘Get inside, Rube,’ said Clancy, pulling her into the house and slamming the door shut.

  ‘My fingers are actual icicles,’ said Ruby.

  ‘You want a ginger tea?’ asked Clancy. ‘It might thaw you out.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ruby. ‘Right now I’ll take anything.’

  ‘Did something happen?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Ruby. ‘Though where to start?’

  They sat up in Clancy’s room drinking tea. With a woollen blanket wrapped around her and two hot water bottles under her feet, Ruby was slowly beginning to thaw.

  She told Clancy about the survival training and her failure to complete the avalanche task.

  ‘Give yourself a break, Ruby. I mean it is actually your deepest most profoundest fear,’ said Clancy.

  ‘The point is, that doesn’t matter an iota, fear – whether deep, profound or just regular – has to be handled. What if I end up buried alive somewhere and I find I just can’t cope?’ She looked at him, her expression deadly serious. ‘I mean I’d be a goner, right?’

  ‘You’d handle it, Rube, I know you would.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but I think I’d rather come face to face with a bear than be buried alive.’

  ‘Did they teach you that?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘What’s to teach?’ said Ruby.

  This was a running thing between the two of them. Ruby had compiled a lot of rules, 80 in all, and RULE 79 was the rule for bears. It was more of a joke than a rule really, one that she and Clancy shared: WHAT TO DO IF YOU MEET A BEAR – WISH YOU HADN’T! The reason being that if you met a bear there were a number of ways you might persuade it to back off, but only the bear knew which of these approaches was going to work.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that whole bear problem actually,’ said Clancy.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Clancy. ‘What you have to do is go on instinct; you have to use your sixth sense – if you don’t, you’re dead.’

  ‘And what if you don’t have a sixth sense?’ asked Ruby. ‘What then?’

  ‘Everyone has a sixth sense,’ said Clancy, ‘it’s just most people have forgotten how to tune in to it.’

  ‘OK, so suppose I tune in and I go with my gut and I’m wrong because I just feel it wrong.’

  Clancy shrugged. ‘Then I guess you’re dead, but at least you can die reassured that you’d be dead anyway. Tuning into your sixth sense just gives you a better chance; I can’t promise you that it will save your life.’

  ‘Great,’ said Ruby, ‘truly terrific. Personally, I think what you gotta do is read the signs.’

  ‘The signs?’ spluttered Clancy.

  ‘Check out the bear’s behaviour, what signals he’s giving you.’

  ‘You read bear signals now?’ said Clancy.

  Ruby ignored the ridicule in his question. ‘You just gotta react to what he’s giving you. Is it curiosity? Is it fear? Or is it simply that there might be something on your person that he wants to eat?’

  ‘What, like your head?’ suggested Clancy.

  What they did both agree on is who would be the person most likely to save you if you were unfortunate enough to find yourself in this bear clinch situation.

  ‘Mrs Digby,’ said Clancy.

  ‘Without a doubt,’ said Ruby.

  The bear problem didn’t only apply to bears. It applied to all people or problems that were unpredictable. It’s something of a bear problem, Ruby would say when she just couldn’t figure out how things might go.

  Some problems started off as bears and then given time one could see how they might be tackled, but others remained unpredictable and unsolvable. The Count was perhaps the biggest bear problem of them all.

  ‘If there’s bears around, maybe you should be wearing that barrette of yours,’ suggested Clancy. ‘You might need rescuing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Ruby. ‘I always wear the fly-barrette – see!’ She went to pat it with her hand, but it wasn’t there.

  ‘Oh jeepers, I lost it!’

  ‘No, no, it’s there,’ said Clancy. ‘It’s caught in your sweater.’

  ‘Boy, that’s a relief,’ said Ruby. ‘I thought maybe it had fallen out when I tripped and got tangled in that fence.’

  ‘You got tangled in a fence?’ said Clancy.

  ‘Actually yeah,’ said Ruby. ‘My coat got caught up in it and I just sorta left it there.’

  ‘Why?’ said Clancy. ‘Why would you just leave your coat?’

  ‘I got spooked by something,’ said Ruby.

  ‘What kinda something?’ said Clancy.

  ‘Something a bit like a bear,’ said Ruby.

  Clancy looked at her, his eyes round as saucers.

  ‘He left a message for me,’ said Ruby.

  ‘He? You mean the Count?’ said Clancy.

  Ruby nodded. ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Clancy

  ‘I smelt his cologne.’

  ‘So what was the message?’

  ‘It said: Beware the child who yearned to be Larva, disguised a
s a fly, but emerged a spider.’

  ‘Creepy,’ shivered Clancy. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I have no idea, except for the fly bit, which stands for agent, and I guess spider could be fly killer.’

  ‘Where was it, the message?’ said Clancy.

  ‘In that back alley that joins Flaubert.’

  ‘You walked down that alley at night? When it’s dark?’ said Clancy. ‘What are you, on some mission to be murdered?’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ said Ruby, ‘it’s just a back alley full of trashcans and garbage.’

  ‘And, it would seem, murderers,’ added Clancy.

  ‘OK,’ said Ruby. ‘Maybe it was a little dumb.’

  ‘What you have got to ask him,’ said Clancy, ‘if you ever get the chance to speak to him, that is, is: who is this boss of his?’

  ‘I’ll be sure to ask him next time I run into him.’

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ said Clancy. ‘You need to know.’

  ‘Seriously?’ said Ruby. ‘Shouldn’t you be saying, whatever you do, don’t run into this guy again?’

  ‘Ordinarily yes, but I have a feeling that’s no longer an option. I have a hunch you have to face facts here – you figure this out or you move to a secret bunker somewhere.’

  ‘I hate to say it, Clance, but I know you’re right.’

  It was as she was walking home, hands pushed deep into the pockets of Clancy’s snow jacket, that she felt something dig into her palm.

  ‘Ow,’ she squealed.

  The dog looked alarmed, alert for danger.

  ‘It’s OK, Bug.’

  Ruby pulled out her hand; a tiny bead of blood there in her palm.

  What?

  She fumbled in the pocket and out fell the badge.

  A small circle of white, barely visible against the snow that had recently fallen.

  Her badge.

  Looking at it lying there next to the kerb shook up another memory from the depths of her brain. This time she saw a yellow leaf flutter through the air. She stood stock-still, trying hard to join the image of the yellow leaf to something else and anchor it to something real. She had found the badge a long time ago on the street near her house. She had kept it pinned to the inside of her coat, a habit she had not let go of.

  It had begun, this habit of secrecy, because she had not wanted her parents to take away this ‘found thing’. She, being an intelligent child although not yet three, knew that once her parents saw its sharp spike of a pin they would most certainly confiscate it and no doubt bury it deep in the trash bin.

  Later on, as Ruby got older, the badge had become a sort of charm, something she liked to have with her. And then in June, she had lent it to Clancy when he’d had to take part in the spring swimathon. She had persuaded him that it was some kind of talisman, and would protect him from sharks and seamonsters, and generally ward off nibblers. He had believed her. It worked.

  She had all but forgotten it, the badge, replaced now by actual lucky charms in the form of high-tech Spectrum gadgets: the voice thrower, the Escape Watch, the fly-barrette and a whole lot more.

  Now she looked at the metal badge with renewed interest, a white circle embossed with random bumps. Her dog was still looking at her, waiting to know what was next.

  Something lost, something found.

  ‘Come on, Bug,’ she said, ‘let’s go.’

  When she reached Cedarwood Drive, Ruby did not make straight for Green-Wood House. Instead she walked the whole length of the street, up one side and then down the other. She concentrated hard, trying to remember the place she had found this circle of tin. She walked up the road and down the sidewalk until she arrived just outside the grey clapboard house with its white picket fence, and flash went that memory.

  Grey house, yellow leaf, white circle of badge.

  Slowly, she turned and crossed to her house and began walking up the steps. Bug began to bark and Ruby slowed as she saw something lying by the front door. She could not make out what the thing was. She got closer. Not a living creature. Stranger than that. A shiver went down her spine as she realised that: it was in fact her coat.

  MRS DIGBY’S VOICE GREETED RUBY as she stepped into the hall. ‘Child? Is that you?’

  ‘Uh huh, yeah,’ called Ruby.

  She hung her coat on the peg and went upstairs to the kitchen where she found Mrs Digby dicing apples.

  ‘Did you happen to notice anyone outside?’ asked Ruby. ‘Earlier, I mean – like an hour ago?’

  Mrs Digby shook her head. ‘I don’t spend my time standing on the stoop looking out into the darkness,’ she said. ‘I keep the door shut in winter, and the lights lit. Best not ponder on what lurks out in the gloom.’

  Ruby went to the window and peered into the dark. A few houses were lit up brightly, but most people had their curtains drawn against the chill. From here she could see the little grey clapboard house.

  ‘Who used to live there?’ she asked.

  ‘Where?’ said Mrs Digby

  ‘In the grey house just down the street, where the Joneses were living until about a week ago.’

  ‘Why, the Hendons,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘Remember they had that awful parrot? Mr Parker threatened to strangle it and plenty would have been grateful to him.’

  ‘No, before the Hendons, I mean, a long time ago.’

  The housekeeper gave her a suspicious look. ‘What’s got you asking that?’ she said.

  Ruby shrugged. ‘I don’t know, just wondered is all. Maybe because I was thinking about the tornado and how that little house was lucky not to be whirled away.’

  Mrs Digby nodded. ‘That house is lucky all right: survived earthquake and tornado.’

  ‘Have you ever been inside?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘Often times back when it belonged to the old gentleman – I spent many a sweltering day sitting on that porch getting a little shade.’

  ‘Who was he, the old gentleman?’

  ‘His name was Mr Pinkerton,’ said Mrs Digby.

  ‘P i n k e r t o n?’ said Ruby, slowly, letting the name tumble around her brain.

  ‘Pinkerton, that’s right. He was a nice old fellow. We saw eye to eye on things.’

  ‘Was he a professor?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘Why would you ask me that?’ she said. ‘No, he was just plain old regular Mr Pinkerton, though I’ll admit he was as smart as any professor I ever met – not that I’m sure I’ve met a whole clutch of them. Educated is what you’d call him, travelled the world, so he told me. He seemed to know everything, memory like an elephant.’

  ‘How come I don’t remember him?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘I don’t see how you could,’ said the housekeeper. ‘You weren’t much more than the size of a turnip when you first met him. It was the day the old Fairbank house was turned into matchsticks during the earthquake of 1960. Mr Pinkerton took us in for a few nights. We became firm friends after that.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s a real shame he left, quite sudden it was, a few days before your first chess tournament: you were not even three. He’d promised he’d come along because he’d been coaching you.’

  ‘He had?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘He said you had an aptitude for it, he said you had brains. Said you were the most interesting infant he had ever studied – met, I think is what he meant, he always talked peculiar.’

  ‘So where did he go?’ asked Ruby.

  Mrs Digby stood, hands on hips, gazing out of the window at the moonless sky. ‘Now you got me there,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know – all I heard was, he was dead.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘The sheriff,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘The police investigated his disappearance and one day they turned up evidence that suggested poor old Mr Pinkerton was no more. I wasn’t so surprised.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘He was a broken man,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘After … what was it called … what was its name?’

  ‘Wha
t was whose name?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘That dog of his, name something like Nemosign, I never could say it right …’

  ‘Mnemosyne?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘That was it!’ said Mrs Digby. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I sort of guessed,’ said Ruby.

  Mrs Digby tutted. ‘Why people insist on calling animals stupid names is beyond me.’

  ‘She was the Greek goddess of memory,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Who was?’ asked Mrs Digby.

  ‘Mnemosyne,’ said Ruby.

  ‘If you say so,’ said the old lady. ‘But all I know is, when that mutt disappeared, that was that.’ She sighed. ‘The heart and soul went out of him – never saw a person more chewed-up about an animal, a small one at that.’

  ‘It ran off? Was lost?’

  ‘That dog was too loyal to leave, and too smart to get itself lost; smartest dog I ever met. My old pa used to say, the only dog worth its keep is a smart dog.’

  ‘Like Bug,’ said Ruby.

  ‘Smarter,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘You know, I taught it that trick, the one my pa taught my hound and I taught Bug.’

  ‘The go find trick?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘I’ll tell you what, that mutt learned it in one day flat.’

  ‘What type of dog was it?’

  ‘The small and pointless kind, looked funny, like a cat – fluffy thing, big bulgy eyes, black nose.’ Mrs Digby made a face.

  ‘Pekinese?’ guessed Ruby.

  ‘Pekinese.’ Mrs Digby tutted. ‘He always did keep that breed – photographs everywhere of Pinkerton and those darned Pekineses, decades worth of them and each one looked the spit of the one before. If an uglier breed of dog exists then I’ve not seen it and nor would I want to.’

  ‘So what do you think happened to Mnemosyne?’

  The housekeeper sighed. ‘Well, the reason it hit the old fellow so hard was because the dog wasn’t lost, she was stolen, dognapped while Mr Pinkerton was helping some truck driver with directions.’

  In the far reaches of Ruby’s mind, a memory was stirring.

  She saw again the yellow leaf whirling through a cold blue sky. ‘When was this?’ asked Ruby. ‘What time of year?’

  Mrs Digby looked up and tapped her head. ‘There you got me.’ The old lady thought for a moment. ‘November, I think – no, it was October, I know that because I was preparing pumpkins for Halloween.’