The Song From Somewhere Else

by A. F. Harrold

  It wasn’t dark down there. As she crept round the corner she saw the cellar was filled with light. Not bright light, not like stepping out into daylight, but an indoors light, a late-night light. It almost flickered and as it did the music crackled, as if it were a recording that was beginning to jump.

  She could make out the last few steps before her and tiptoed down them as she glanced around the room.

  For a moment it looked like the sort of basement you read about in books or saw in films, full of piled-up boxes, junk, old stuff; but then the cellar changed. It flickered, like a candle, and she saw something else … saw something else through it all.

  There’s another room, she thought, somewhere else, but also here. It was brighter, neater, emptier. Light fell in this other room from tall windows. Frank heard the music swell, and she saw something move.

  There was a desk on the other side of the room, and something was sat there. It clicked buttons on an oversized keyboard with long, fat fingers.

  It was bigger than a man. Bigger than anyone she’d ever seen. Not fat, but overgrown in all directions. It was hairless, or almost. It was a woman, perhaps. Flowing robes like sheets fell from its shoulders, clasped there with round gleaming brooches. It was grey and rocky-looking. The word ‘troll’ echoed in Frank’s head, even though she didn’t believe in such things; she was a sensible girl, had never believed in fairy tales and children’s stories.

  ‘Bet you’re glad you’re not a goat, all the same,’ said her stomach.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, gruffly.

  She saw this troll, sat at its desk, through the cellar she’d first seen. The boxes hadn’t gone, hadn’t vanished, but had become wispy, smoky. Or maybe they’d stayed sharp and crisp and it was the other room, the one with the desk and the light, that was smoky. Either way she could see through them like a misty window. It was hard to understand, hard to keep straight in her mind. It was as if two places were trying to exist in the same place at the same time.

  Her feet asked if they could back away, tiptoe up the stairs and get out of there before it turned, before the thing at the desk turned round and saw her. But the music kept playing, calmed her heart (which should have been beating madly with fear), touched her hot brow like a cool flannel … held her hand, almost.

  And then the troll turned round, and it saw her.

  The music stopped dead with a click.

  Silence fell harder than Frank had ever heard it fall before. It took the wind out of her.

  Two tiny white eyes peered at her from a huge, flat, ugly, grey, stony face. Sharp white pinpricks through the mist.

  Frank thought nothing.

  The troll stared at her. Blinked.

  And then it said something. A voice like a landslide rumbled words she didn’t understand, couldn’t understand.

  It didn’t roar at her, didn’t growl.

  It didn’t seem like a very good troll, not the sort you read about in books: the sort that tears people’s arms off and eats their insides. It seemed to be, almost, friendly, the way it looked at her with those little eyes.

  It said something else and Frank felt the words vibrate in her stomach.

  ‘I told you,’ her stomach said, feeling ever so slightly seasick. (It didn’t say what it had told her.)

  And then, as Frank watched, as she considered stepping forward, as she contemplated taking a step towards the troll instead of away from it, the whole scene faded. The other room was gone and all Frank was left with was the woody smell, and the faint tingle of the music still curling around the hairs at the back of her neck.

  She took a deep breath. Stood up straight.

  ‘Be sensible,’ she said.

  She didn’t believe in trolls. Didn’t believe in seeing things, except normal things. Didn’t believe in things that disappeared. Nothing had just happened, she told herself. Nothing.

  The basement was dark, dim, lit only by the light from a row of cobwebbed windows high up on the far side.

  Her heart echoed in the junk-crowded, shadow-cornered room.

  Something rubbed against her ankles.

  She looked down.

  There was nothing there, just a draught maybe fluttering a bit of rag across the floor.

  ‘Frank!’ called a voice from upstairs. ‘Frank! Where are you?’

  God, Frank thought. It’s Nick.

  ‘This wasn’t my idea,’ her stomach said.

  He was going to be mad, going to be angry. How could she explain what she’d just seen? And how could she explain what she’d just done? You didn’t sneak round other people’s houses exploring cellars on your own. It just wasn’t on. He had every right to be angry.

  Nick looked at her as she shut the door.

  She was more scared now than she’d been down there. In the cellar she’d hardly had time to think, but the climb up the stairs had been endless. Now her heart shook like a cat-rattled bird.

  ‘The toilet,’ she said.

  ‘Brilliant lie,’ her stomach said. ‘Utterly convincing, except –’

  ‘What?’ Nick said.

  ‘I was looking for the toilet,’ she explained weakly.

  ‘It’s in the hall,’ Nick said, slowly. ‘Or there’s one upstairs.’

  ‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ Frank replied, pointing at the cellar door. ‘I saw the door and thought … I mean, I-I-I …’ Oh no, she thought, that flipping stutter. ‘I-I-I was l-l-looking …’

  Nick didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he said, ‘What did you find?’

  Frank tried to think. What had she seen? Back in the kitchen, with the warm summer light washing the terracotta-tiled floor, what had happened in the cellar no longer seemed real. The back door was open. She could hear birds singing, a ball being kicked against a wall. Off in the distance, traffic humming.

  ‘No toilet,’ she said. ‘Just boxes and old stuff.’

  Nick sighed.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a bit of an old junk room,’ he said. ‘You should be careful. You could get lost down there.’

  ‘But …’ she began and stopped.

  Nick was smiling. He seemed to have relaxed. He wasn’t angry after all.

  The music was long gone.

  A door opened in the hallway.

  ‘Was that your gran, Nick?’ Mr Underbridge called.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How was she? What’s new up there?’

  Frank looked at cupboard doors while Nick and his dad spoke about family things.

  The cupboard doors weren’t very interesting.

  Nick’s dad had paint on his hands, and paintbrushes in them. She thought of how she wore one of her dad’s old shirts back-to-front to do art at school to keep her own shirt clean. Mr Underbridge hadn’t done that; he just had paint on his shirt, speckles and dribbles and splotches. But maybe it was one of his own old ones or maybe he bought a new one for each new painting. Her head spun. She sat down quickly.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Are you going to stay for lunch?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Dad’s making lunch.’

  ‘Something nice?’

  ‘No.’

  Mr Underbridge snorted a tiny laugh.

  ‘I’d best be off in a minute,’ she said, glancing at the clock.

  She went out the back door, which had been open all morning to let the warm, fresh, clear summer air in, and turned. There were a couple of steps down on to the little square patio.

  Nick stood huge in the doorway, looming over her.

  ‘We OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, course we are,’ she said.

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘You gonna come back?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  As she picked her bike up from the lawn where she’d dumped it earlier, she noticed a row of windows that ran along the bottom of the wall below the kitchen. Grass was growing in front of them and she could see cobwebs. T
hey weren’t clean, but they looked into the cellar. (At least something had been real; she’d seen those windows from both sides now.)

  She turned to look up at Nick again, smiling, and as she did she could’ve sworn something like a shadow slipped out from among those cobwebs and slid into the garden. But it was just a movement in the corner of her eye, and when she turned to look there was nothing there.

  ‘Let’s not come back,’ her stomach said.

  ‘Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow,’ Frank replied.

  ‘Cool,’ said Nick.

  She pushed at the salad with her fork.

  ‘Did you have a good morning?’ her dad asked.

  ‘It was OK,’ she said.

  ‘What did you do in the end?’

  ‘Went round Nick’s. Did some drawing and stuff.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ he said, shoving a massive lettuce leaf in his mouth and crunching wetly.

  Some people in this world are lettuce people, Frank thought, and some people simply aren’t.

  She pushed the leaves around on her plate until she uncovered a cube of salty cheese, speared it and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t very nice.

  She didn’t need anyone to tell her that what she’d seen in the cellar (or what she’d thought she’d seen in the cellar) wasn’t something to mention at home. Her mum and dad weren’t the sort of people who believed in ghosts, trolls or otherworldly things. They got embarrassed shouting for Quintilius Minimus from the back door; that’s how ordinary they were.

  And although Frank herself didn’t know what it was she’d seen, didn’t know exactly what it meant, the image stayed sharp in the front of her mind, fluttering around like a newspaper in the wind. It crackled and kept reminding her of itself. It didn’t explain itself, but it didn’t go away, not like a dream does when you’ve woken up. And that meant, she thought finally, that it must’ve been real … whatever it was.

  Her dad’s mobile phone buzzed on the side.

  He leant back in his chair, picked it up and looked at it.

  ‘I don’t know the number,’ he said, raising an eyebrow at Frank, which was his way of saying, ‘Curiouser and curiouser’.

  He held it to his ear and said, ‘Hello?’

  It continued buzzing.

  He lowered it, tapped the screen with his finger, then lifted it again and said ‘Hello?’ a second time.

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, gosh,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the address?’ he said.

  Frank, not being an idiot, grabbed a pen and an envelope from the sideboard and put them in front of him.

  He wrote down an address.

  ‘Yes, in about half an hour,’ he said and hung up.

  ‘Is it Quintilius Minimus?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Someone’s found him.’

  They picked Hector up from his friend Sanjit’s house.

  Frank sat in the front seat with the cat cage on her lap. It was empty, except for an old towel and some scattered biscuits in the bottom. ‘He’ll probably be hungry,’ she’d said.

  Hector was strapped into the child seat in the back and was quite happy talking to his reflection in the car window.

  Frank’s head buzzed. Not only was she ten minutes away from being reunited with the best cat in the world, but the morning’s events refused to stop turning and turning inside her. It wasn’t just the whole seeing-things-in-the-cellar business, but also the whole being-friends-with-Nicholas-Underbridge thing as well. How had that happened? How had she let it happen? What would she say when Jess came back from holiday? Did she only like him because of the music that came from the ghost-troll-thing in his cellar? Or did she actually like him as a real friend, an ordinary one? It was perplexing, that’s what it was.

  But now Quintilius Minimus was almost back, maybe she’d understand better. There was something unbalanced about the world while he was missing, something a bit skew-whiff.

  The car drew to a stop outside a white-panelled bungalow in a street of white-panelled bungalows. All the front gardens had matching neat rosebushes in them. Frank had been watching the roads as they’d driven, and although they’d gone a roundabout route to get here, they weren’t a terribly long way away from where they lived. A fair way for a cat to walk though.

  She followed her dad out on to the pavement, holding the cage in front of her.

  ‘You stay there, Hector,’ her dad said. ‘Guard the car for us.’

  They walked up the path together and Frank pressed the doorbell.

  Before the ding-dong had stopped echoing in the air, the door opened a crack.

  ‘Mr Patel?’ an old voice asked from inside.

  Frank could just make out a wisp of white hair, a smudge of painted pink cheek, a dark glint of eye.

  ‘Yes, we’re here about the cat,’ her dad said.

  Frank held the cage up to the door.

  ‘Mr Patel?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ her dad repeated. ‘And this is my daughter, Francesca.’ He put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. ‘It’s her cat really.’

  ‘I see. You can never be too careful.’

  The door shut.

  Frank and her dad looked at each other. He raised an eyebrow. Frank giggled nervously.

  There was a noise from inside of metal jingling.

  The door opened again, slightly wider.

  ‘He turned up at the weekend,’ the old lady said. ‘Wouldn’t go away. I had to share my sandwich. Tuna, it was. Do you have tuna where you come from? It’s a sort of fish. I’m a touch fond of it and so is he. But I can’t be sharing sandwiches at my time of life. That’s what I said to my Marjory … that’s my daughter –’

  ‘I hate to interrupt,’ her dad said, interrupting. ‘But is the cat here? Frank’s got some homework to be doing and I’ve left some potatoes on the hob. We’ve really got to get going.’

  ‘Oh,’ the old lady said. She looked slightly shocked.

  There was a miaow from somewhere further inside the house and Frank’s heart sank. She let the cage slump in her arms.

  A cat that almost looked a little like Quintilius Minimus (if you ignored this one’s sleek shiny coat and its bright green eyes) walked up the hall and rubbed its head on the old lady’s bandaged ankles.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said her dad.

  ‘Yeah,’ Frank said.

  ‘Oh, here he is,’ said the old lady, shuffling her feet away from the cat’s nose. ‘All yours and don’t worry about the reward. I mean, I’ve got my pension, I get on fine.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not our cat.’

  They were silent in the car home.

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ her dad said when he let her in the back door. She put the cage back under the stairs and her dad gave her a hug, whether she wanted it or not.

  TUESDAY NIGHT

  That night Frank’s mum didn’t come home. She often had to stay away overnight on business in other towns, but at least, unlike Quintilius Minimus, she always told them beforehand. Frank was used to it.

  After her dad had put Hector to bed and then, later, had hustled her off upstairs too, she heard him murmuring softly to her mum on the phone. It was a good noise. It meant something was normal.

  Now she was finally on her own, without anyone demanding her attention, she listened to the questions in her head. There were so many of them and they were all speaking at once. Some were still asking her about what had happened in the cellar. About what she had seen. (What had she seen?) Some were worried about Quintilius Minimus. Some were wondering how a whole day had managed to go by without it being ruined by Neil Noble. Some asked her if she thought Nick was OK, if she thought he was happy, if she thought he was thinking about her. Some were thinking about that other cat, the one that had turned up at the old lady’s house. Was it going to be OK? (Maybe they should have taken it home with them anyway.) How come there were so many missing cats these days?

  Underneath it all, her stomach grumbled to its
elf in words she couldn’t quite make out.

  It must have been somewhere in amongst all these thoughts, worries and questions that Frank had fallen asleep, because suddenly she woke up.

  It was dark. The landing light was off.

  She reached out with her foot under the covers as she always did when she woke in the night. There was no heavy, warm, snoring-purring lump down the end.

  She got out of bed and crept over to the window. She slipped herself under the curtain and looked out.

  She could see stars and she could tell that the moon was out, full or nearly full. It must have been round the other side of the house, because the garden was silvery, except for the nearby bit that was in darkness.

  Out of the shadows stepped a cat. Yet another cat!

  Or was it Quintilius Minimus?

  In the greyness of the night she couldn’t tell. Was it him?

  As she watched, it moved away, slid through the night, across the lawn, between shrubs, and she was no longer sure it was even a cat. The way it moved was like water, flowing.

  She shivered, even though the night was warm.

  ‘Oh,’ her stomach said, peering over the edge of the window sill, ‘that’s not a cat. It’s just a shadow that’s got nothing casting it.’

  Over the fence it went, strange and shapelessly, sniffing the night with no nose, moving with no legs. A shadow-thing. Silent, and gone.

  Frank wondered if she was still dreaming.

  It had been so strange.

  And with that thought, the thought of strangeness, she found she was suddenly thinking about Nick’s house. What might be happening there right now? What if she was missing something important? She wanted to see the troll, to hear the music, to know the secret again.

  A crazy idea bobbed up in her brain. (‘Just go!’ it said.) She didn’t know where it came from because she didn’t recognise it at all. It wasn’t the sort of thought she normally thought. (‘Just go!’ it said again.) It was bold, adventurous, mad. It was the sort of idea that the people she read about in books might have, not her. (‘Just go!’ it urged a third time.) It was the sort of thought that could get her in trouble, and she tried to avoid trouble.