Bad Dreams

by Anne Fine

  There, sitting on the desk, he read it properly.

  It made my blood run cold. It was as if Tyke Sam was in the room with us, telling us everything. We sat like mice as he told of his terror of the dark, and how soot fell in showers, blinding him, blocking his ears, and even filling his mouth if he’d been rash enough to open it to gasp, or take a breath between his sobs.

  ‘And once,’ he told us, ‘I tumbled down the shaft of a chimney into an unswept grate and sent a lady into a fit of screams. I thought I’d startled her out of her wits, because she began to shriek, “Chimney rat! Chimney rat!” over and over.

  ‘But then I realized it was the flying soot that had put her in a fury. And the woman beside her tugged me out from where I crouched, scraped and and bleeding, behind the big brass firescreen, and boxed my poor ears till they rang.’

  Everyone shivered. ‘They couldn’t do that, could they?’ Bridie asked. But Mr Hooper didn’t answer her. He just read on.

  ‘I have this fear that grips me. I think I’m going to stick fast so high up that they can’t hear my cries. I think they’ll wait a day or so. And then decide, for their convenience, it’s easier to think that I’m already dead, because it’s chilly and they want a fire.’

  That was when Imogen jumped to her feet, and ran from the classroom, holding her hands over her ears.

  We all stared at the door she’d left wide open. ‘That is so weird,’ said Bridie. ‘If she can write something as scary and horrible as that, how come she can’t sit and listen when it’s read aloud?’

  ‘Perhaps it embarrassed her,’ said Mr Hooper. But I knew better. And when he sent me after her, to fetch her back, I told her so.

  ‘That wasn’t your story at all, was it? It was still Tyke Sam’s.’

  She looked up from the cloakroom bench, and snapped defiantly, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  But she’d understood what I meant at once, I noticed. So I persisted. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? You left your hand on the book as you were writing, and he poured his story out through you.’

  ‘That is the silliest—’

  ‘Listen,’ I interrupted, pushing Stephen’s football gear to the side, and sitting beside her. ‘I’m not trying to be rude, but someone like you could no more write a story like that than fly to the moon.’

  ‘I could!’

  ‘No, you couldn’t. I know. I sit next to you, remember? And I’ve been watching you.’

  The colour crept up, past the gold necklace and up to her cheeks. ‘There’s nothing to watch!’

  ‘Oh, yes, there is. You’re very strange, you know. Everyone senses it. But I think I’m the only one who’s begun to fit it together. I think you can see into books. For you, books aren’t just imaginary worlds. They’re real. Real people, in real places.’

  She was still trying to fight back. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’

  ‘Imogen!’ I was getting impatient. ‘I’ve guessed your secret. Can’t you see? You might as well give up, and tell me all about it. Because you can’t just keep on rushing out of classrooms, and changing schools, and finding it so hard to concentrate that all the work you do is rubbish unless some character in a book is writing it for you.’

  Her eyes filled up with tears. ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘It might be horrible, but it’s true.’

  I knew I was winning. ‘Listen,’ I said to her gently. ‘You know you can’t carry on like this. You have to talk to somebody. And you can trust me.’

  The tears spilled over. She rooted in her pocket to find a tissue, and I sat waiting.

  In the end, she turned towards me and looked hard, as if she were working something important out. As if she were inspecting me.

  And then, suddenly, her face cleared. It was as if the sun had come out inside her. She looked a different person.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you’re right. I think that I can trust you. After all, I’m not the only one who’s different. You’re different, too, in your own way. What’s odd about you is that you’re not so tied up with all the others that you have to share secrets. I really do think you could treat it all like just another story in one of your precious books, that you can close when you want. So I can tell you.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Story-time. After lunch in the book corner. Deal?’

  And Imogen smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Deal. After lunch, I’ll tell you the story.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If it were a book, I couldn’t put it down, I’ll tell you that. I’d find it a real keep-you-upper. Once she had started, out it poured in torrents. How it began when she was tiny, before she could even read. She had been helping her cousin take down the decorations after Christmas, and he was teasing her.

  ‘The youngest person in the house has to wear everything off the tree for a whole week.’

  She was so innocent that she believed him. So she stood still while Eddie hooked all of the glittering ornaments off the tree onto her woolly. He draped the tinsel round her, and then, as if she weren’t already looking sparkly enough, added a few chocolate Santas and some glitter stars, and then all the rings and bracelets and necklaces he could find in their granny’s old jewellery box.

  By the time Imogen’s mother turned round from the computer, there wasn’t an inch of herself, said Imogen, that wasn’t twinkling or flashing or jangling.

  ‘Aren’t you the Sparkling Lady!’ her mother had said admiringly. ‘Now come over here, both of you, and take a look at all these Christmas photos.’

  Shedding ornaments over the carpet, Imogen rushed to look. Eddie pointed at one of the photographs. ‘Look at Aunt Beth, asleep with her mouth open!’

  Imogen ran her fingers across the photos on the screen and giggled at Uncle Ted in his paper hat.

  Then she said sadly, ‘No Aunty Dora.’

  Her mother pointed. ‘Yes, she’s there, sweetheart. Under your finger. And here. And sitting next to the tree in this one.’

  But Imogen still looked forlorn, and said again, ‘No. No Aunty Dora.’

  Now her cousin was getting impatient. ‘Don’t be silly, Immy.’ He stabbed at the screen with his finger. ‘She’s in this one. And this one.’

  Imogen’s woolly jangled as she tossed her head. ‘Aunty Dora’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where, sweetheart?’

  But there was no way Imogen could explain. And her mother had stopped trying to listen even before the phone rang with the terrible news.

  ‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘So did your mother guess?’

  ‘Not then,’ said Imogen. ‘It was only when it happened a second time, ages later, that she thought back and remembered that morning with the Christmas photos.’

  ‘Why? Was the second time the same sort of thing?’

  ‘No. It was different. But it was just as strange. I’d had a horrible day. I’d lost the toss in my ballet class, and couldn’t be the princess in the show.’ She grinned, embarrassed. ‘I came home in floods. Mum did her best. “You be a princess for me,” she said. So I dressed up and started dancing. But it was stupid, so I ended up in tears again. Mum pulled me onto her lap, and read me a story about a little pit pony called Patch. And suddenly I was going mad, struggling and screaming about water closing over Patch’s head. And when we got further into the story—’

  ‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I had that book, too. That’s a horrible bit, when he falls in the water.’

  “And it seemed to poor Patch that he would never

  again reach firm ground . . .”

  Imogen shivered. ‘Well, next day, when I was calm again, and we reached that part in the story, Mum stopped and gave me a funny look. “You knew this, didn’t you?” And that’s when she guessed.’

  ‘My mum would just have thought I’d had the book read to me in school.’

  ‘I think mine would have thought that, except that she says she’s always had a bit of a gift that way herself.’

  ‘I’m not sure why she
’d call it a “gift”,’ I said.

  Imogen looked blank.

  I tried to explain. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but most of the time your work is terrible, and half of the books in the school give you the frights. On top of that, it seems that if you don’t watch out where you’re putting your fingers, you know in advance when terrible things are going to happen – in books and in real life.’ I spread my hands. ‘Hardly a gift,’ I continued. ‘More like some sort of blight.’

  From the look on her face you’d have thought that I’d said she had some mangy disease, or something. She looked so upset I had to change the subject quickly.

  ‘So how does it work, then, this strange gift of yours?’

  ‘Work?’ The question puzzled her a little. ‘Well, it’s a sort of imagining. Like in a dream.’

  ‘What sort of dream?’

  ‘Depends. If the book that I’m touching is happy, then it’s lovely. Like being there, but on a cloud. In things, but not quite.’

  ‘Like reading,’ I said. ‘Like being lost in a book.’

  ‘More,’ she insisted. And I remembered all the times I’d seen her sitting lost in a rapturous world of her own.

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘I mean, suppose you were holding Tansy at St Clare’s?’

  ‘You might dream the midnight feast bit. You’d smell the cakes, and feel a part of the chatter around you.

  “‘We’ll do it eeny meeny miny mo,’ said Laura . . .”

  ‘Or if it was Philippa and the Midnight Pony, you’d feel the cold air on your face, the hooves thudding beneath you, and all the excitement.’

  Then I remembered all the times she’d acted as if she’d practically been bitten.

  ‘So what if it’s a chiller thriller, or a horror book?’

  ‘Oh, then it’s awful, like being trapped in a nightmare. You have all these horrible and panicky feelings as you see every ghastly thing about to happen, like a train coming round the bend while the car’s still stuck on the crossing, or the toddler leaning too far out of the top-floor window. But, just like in a bad dream, there’s nothing you can do to help. You just have to stand there, holding your breath, and watching and waiting.’

  ‘You can’t ever stop it?’

  ‘No. Because it’s already there, in the words on the page.’

  I thought for a bit. Then I said, ‘You take that book, Clown Colin —’

  She waved her hands frantically in front of her face. ‘No! Don’t! I hate even thinking about when his wooden eyes start spinning round and round. Don’t even talk about it!’

  I tried another one. ‘How about Little Mattie?’

  ‘Noo-oo!’ she wailed. ‘That bit where he’s dragged away from his mum – I can’t bear it!’

  “. . . until he couldn’t even see her any more.”

  That is so weird, I thought. And I couldn’t have felt more sorry for her. After all, I read more than my fair share of books that make me keep the light on all night long. And lots of books that make me sad, or anxious, till things work out right. But I don’t end up in a state like her, halfway to fainting because of three or four grisly pages, and not even able to look at the cover of that book ever again without wanting to shudder.

  ‘A gift’, her mother called it. But, the more Imogen told me about it, the more I thought that that was totally the wrong word.

  ‘Curse’ was more like it.

  Yes. Not ‘gift’, but ‘curse’.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I had a hundred more questions, but the bell had rung, and when we got back to the classroom, Mr Hooper was in one of his ‘Time-to-start-something-new’ moods.

  ‘Compare and Contrast,’ he announced. And through the long afternoon we tried it with fifty different things: light and dark, noise and silence, misery and happiness, on and on and on.

  ‘And that’s your homework,’ he told us afterwards. ‘One and a half pages of Compare and Contrast.’

  ‘Can we do anything?’ I asked him.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘And can it be private?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  (For ‘Private’, you put a large red P up in the top corner. Then, even if it’s the best piece of work in the class, he won’t read it out to everyone.)

  I had a plan. As we left class, I said to Imogen, ‘Shall I walk home with you? I’ll come as far as your house, and then cut back through Stannard’s car park.’

  She seemed so pleased, I felt a little guilty. And I felt worse when Mr Hooper, who’d been listening, whispered in my ear, ‘See? Wasn’t I right? Once you get used to it, it’s nice to have company.’

  But even knowing I was using her to do my homework didn’t stop me asking her questions all the way back to her house.

  ‘Was your mum pleased when she realized you could see into books and photos? Or was she horrified?’

  ‘She was excited,’ Imogen admitted. ‘I think people always teased her when she said she knew things were going to happen. So I think she was pleased I took after her a little bit.’

  ‘Does she encourage it?’

  ‘Encourage it?’

  I tried to explain. ‘When my mum realized I was good at swimming, she signed me up at swim club right away. But when she found out I could crack my fingers, she couldn’t stop me fast enough. “Don’t do that!” she kept saying. “It’s a horrible habit!”’

  Imogen considered. ‘But this isn’t like either of those things. It just happens, or it doesn’t.’

  ‘Is that what your mum thinks?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So she doesn’t go round shoving books at you, just out of curiosity, to see what happens?’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t.’

  ‘But she hasn’t done anything to put a stop to it, either?’

  Imogen stared. ‘Like what?’

  I couldn’t think of anything, anyhow. Somehow, when it came down to it, it hardly seemed polite to mention going to doctors, or hypnotists, or psychiatrists, or anything like that. And anyhow, maybe Imogen and her mother were right, and being able to see into books and photos was one of those things, like blue eyes or freckles, that you couldn’t do anything about if you wanted.

  So I just kept on with the questions, ticking the answers off in my head, ready for later.

  ‘Well, does it worry her that it’s so hard for you to concentrate on your schoolwork?’

  ‘I try not to say too much about that,’ Imogen admitted.

  ‘But she must know you’re having problems. What about when you had to change schools because people thought you were—’ I would have said ‘creepy’, but it seemed nicer to finish up ‘– a little strange?’

  ‘She was surprised it all got so difficult so quickly.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Before last year, it only ever happened those two times – with Aunty Dora’s photo, and that book about the pony. I still had plenty of friends. And my work wasn’t bad, either.’

  That made sense. After all, she’d written out that story from Tyke Sam pretty fast, covering three whole pages in less than half an hour. And Mr Hooper could read it.

  ‘So this whole business just got worse suddenly?’

  ‘Yes,’ Imogen said. ‘And maybe one day it’ll go away again just as quickly.’

  ‘Would you like that?’

  She didn’t answer. She just stared ahead.

  ‘How about your mum?’ I asked. ‘Would she like it?’

  ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’ Imogen burst out.

  I shut up, fast, in case she guessed. But anyway, we were already turning the corner into her road. Imogen led me past three or four plain, boring old houses, then up the path beside another, just the same.

  ‘Mum’s probably round the back,’ she said, pushing open the side gate. I followed her through, and stopped in my tracks, astonished. The back of the house was amazing. I just stared.

  How to describe it? It looked as if fairies and goblins had decorated t
he whole place for a joke. The bricks were yellow, the door red, the window frames green and their shutters blue. All over the lawn were tiny pretend windmills, and gnomes fishing in ponds, and plaster tortoises and rabbits. There was even a wizard sitting cross-legged on a stone mushroom, waving his wand. If you were five, you would have thought you’d fallen through a hole in the real world, and ended up in a Toytown picture book.

  ‘That is incredible!’

  Behind me, there was an excited voice. ‘Do you really like it? Really?’

  I spun round.

  ‘Melly,’ said Imogen. ‘This is my mum.’

  She didn’t look like anybody’s mum to me. She was so young, and tall and bright-eyed, with blazing red hair tumbling over her shoulders like lava spilling out of a volcano. She wore a bright shawl, embroidered with sparkling butterflies, and when she reached out to fold her arms tightly round Imogen, to hug her, Imogen practically vanished beneath the butterflies and the waterfall of hair.

  ‘Good day, my precious?’

  I don’t know what I was expecting Imogen to say. Maybe if I had someone from school standing there listening, I wouldn’t start by launching into a great long wail about what Tyke Sam made me write being so horrid I had to leave the classroom.

  But still I wouldn’t have answered, like she did, ‘It was lovely, Mum. Really good.’ And sounded as if she meant it. I didn’t know if it was because of me that she said nothing, or if she was putting a brave face on her horrible day to hide from her mother the fact that she’d cracked, and told her secret to someone outside the family.

  But, whichever it was, her mother believed her. Her bright eyes twinkled happily. She tossed her hair back, and, releasing poor Imogen from her grasp, held her at arm’s length like a toddler, peered in her eyes, and asked hopefully,

  ‘And did anything “special” happen?’

  I stared. My mum asks, ‘Anything special happen?’ But she’s not really paying attention. If I answered, ‘Yes, Mr Hooper fell off the roof and broke his neck,’ she’d stop clattering pans around long enough to listen. And if I said, ‘Yes, everyone teased me till I cried,’ she’d be on the phone to Mrs Trent in a flash. But mostly, she asks casually. She’s only checking. If something really interesting or funny happened, she wants to hear about it. But that’s all.