by Peter Twohig
Against the back wall of the big house, there was a ladder. It was wooden and grey, like everything else, but it looked strong. It went right up to the second floor, and I realised that it had been used to get up to a part of the roof that jutted out at the top. On the ground at the foot of the ladder was a stack of reddish roof tiles, big enough to hide behind, if necessary. Either side of the ladder were windows. My idea was that if this was a ghost house it would be empty, as that, too, is a well-known fact. I needed to know what I was up against, or rather, what I might have to retreat from. I had no problems with retreat, and it would give me an excuse to use the escape route. I took off my bag and started climbing up the ladder.
On I went, and looked through the window on the first floor. Inside was a large room with a fireplace covered by a copper screen with a couple of Irish setters on it. There were lounge chairs and the biggest sofa I had ever seen. There were several tables with newspapers, magazines and books all over them, and on one a typewriter. There were stacks of books on the floor too, and shelves of books against a wall. The door into the room was open, and through it I could see a passage, and stairs. This was not a ghost house: ghosts did not read the paper or type things. Somewhere, there were people.
I looked down and almost fell off the ladder with fright. I was high off the ground but still within the jungle. I knew that as long as I was on the ladder I was relatively safe. Barring boa constrictors. Had the guys who’d gone after the treasure known that … well, they didn’t. Further up I went, steeling myself, and found that the ladder had an iron bit in the middle — that looked as if it belonged in a torture chamber as well. I stopped and worried for a while, and decided that I had never heard of an outdoor torture chamber. And besides, there were still no flaming torches to be seen.
Just as I was getting close to the second-floor window, there was a hell of a ruckus inside the house and someone — a lady — came to the window, while I hid myself under the ledge, and threw something into the garden — a book by the look of it — so that it landed in the bushes. Then I heard her go back into the room, then deeper into the house, where she started yelling at some bloke who was doing a bit of yelling of his own. It was too good to miss. I climbed up the last few rungs and had a look into the room. This window had white lace curtains tied back against the sides, and was wide open. Inside there was a bed covered with a white bedspread. There were neat wardrobes and sets of drawers, chairs, and a dressing table covered with pretty bottles of all shapes and sizes. I could smell the room, everything in it. Nothing about it smelt grey; everything was alive. I would have given it a high number on the scale. The scents danced invisibly for me and played with me. I had never smelt a room like this one. It was fresh. But it was not quiet.
2 The map
Somewhere in the house the man and the woman were fighting, and she was definitely keen for him to get out. It must be one of those days, I thought. She was yelling over and over at him to get out, and he was yelling that he wouldn’t leave until he got what he came for. It was just like Larry Kent, Detective. Larry said: ‘Dames are dynamite,’ and now I could see why.
The woman kept on screaming her head off, and the man was still growling and swearing at the dame, and losing his temper. I peered into the empty room and listened to the voices that seemed to be coming from just outside the door — it almost sounded as if they were on the wireless. Then, suddenly, they were right there in front of me, and he was pushing her over and pulling out a gun. That stopped her. One minute she was telling him she didn’t have what he wanted and he didn’t know what he was getting into, and the next she was as quiet as a mouse, which is an effect that pulling guns tends to have on people, or I don’t know my Larry Kent.
‘So,’ said the bloke. ‘That shut you up, didn’t it?’
He put the gun to her head.
‘Just tell me where they are and I won’t blow your fuckin’ head off.’
‘If they were here, I’d give them to you, but they’re not.’
‘Well, I can find the bloody things myself — they can’t be far away. You haven’t had time to hide them. But first we’ll have a bit of fun.’
He waved the gun at her.
‘Take ’em off — or would you rather get shot?’
So she does, because he’s a mean bastard. I’ve seen a few when I’ve been out and about with Granddad, and I know what they’re like. She does as she’s told, but he hits her with the gun and splits her head anyway. So now she’s lying on the bed and there’s blood all over the place, and the bloke puts the gun down and gets on top of her and grabs her around the neck and starts choking her; and she’s making a hell of a lot of noise — she is dynamite! But then she stops screaming, because in the end you stop screaming and you just kind of give in, though she didn’t faint, but instead stuck her fingernails into the man, whose bum was white. And he just killed her by making her face purple until she stopped moving. But she never stopped staring, and she was staring right at me. But what could I do?
And then he got off her and sat on the bed with his face in his hands for a while. And there was blood everywhere; some bits of her were red, mainly her lipstick and her blood, and some bits were pink and some purple and some black. I looked at her and she looked at me, but I realised she didn’t really care about me being there. The man with the white bum just sat there and sort of breathed hard, while I watched him.
I was looking at another dead body, I realised, but what horrified me was not that she was dead, but that she had stared at me the same way Tom had when the monkey bar had fallen across his throat, like she was trying to tell me something important, a secret maybe. I had tried so hard to lift the monkey bar off him that my hands had stopped working, and were in pain for days. Nothing had changed. A year later people were still turning purple and staring at me, and I still couldn’t do anything about it.
I felt a kind of thickness in my face, and an odd sensation, like everything was wonderful and I was somewhere else; and when I snapped out of it I saw that the bloke had looked up and was looking straight at me. His face was red and kind of round, his hair was short and black and his eyes were blue and twinkly. His nose was a bit on the small side, I thought, but maybe that was only because all the grown-ups in my family — on both sides — have the kind of conks you see in a cocky’s cage. He did not look like a murderer, more like the kind of bloke you see walking up and down in the city, wearing a suit. Even when he saw me, he didn’t seem startled, but quickly pulled his pants up. All the while I could see that the wheels in his head were turning flat out.
For some reason I couldn’t pull my head back; I just stared at him as if he was a snake getting ready to pounce. I must have looked like one of those fish Granddad once caught by throwing a stick of gelignite into Mordialloc Creek. Suddenly, he took a step towards me, then changed his mind and headed for the door.
The escape route! It was still there. I tried to take a step down the ladder — I didn’t want to be next — and I realised with a cold stab in my throat that I would never make it to the bottom before he got to me. When I reached the first-floor window, I heard him thundering down the stairs inside, so I swung myself onto the window ledge like Jungle Jim and hopped into the fireplace room. I slipped behind the door, which was open — as good a hiding spot as any.
I heard him run down to the back gate then return and go around to the front of the house, then through the front door and back up the stairs. He went straight to the Death Room and ransacked it. I knew he wouldn’t find what he wanted, but I wasn’t so sure any more about getting out of this alive, and I asked God to give me a hand: ‘Please, God, make that bloke have a horrible accident, maybe shoot himself or fall down the stairs or have a heart attack — I’ll leave it up to you.’ It was the best I could do on the spot, but Granddad would have liked it. I don’t know about Tom. He probably would have yelled to the bloke that he was the police and he had the place surrounded. He liked taking chances, like on that last day, at R
ooney Park.
But the bloke gave up looking and made a roar like a man who’s just put his shirt on a very promising mare in a distance event, only to watch her jockey take her out too early. He was running out of time now that he’d lost me; he had to get out of there before I came back with the police. So, deciding that the Death Room had nothing more to offer, he came back down the stairs, and I knew he was going to come into the fireplace room. I was at the window in a flash, and swung back onto the ladder and out of sight of the window, but I only got down a few rungs before I felt it slide sideways a few inches. I couldn’t move for fear the ladder would slide right over; all I could do was wait while he gave the place the benefit of his gentle touch, then left — thankfully by the front door, and onto what I guessed was Kipling Street.
I thought it would be a simple matter then to climb down, but the whole situation suddenly caught up with me with the force of a brewery truck, and I found I was frozen to the ladder. I couldn’t move my hands or my feet. To make matters worse, I had wet myself without even noticing, and my shoes and socks were soaked in pee. It got worse: my throat was totally blocked, and I felt as if I was going to suffocate. When I started to shake, I almost fell off the ladder. Suddenly it had got cold. And there I was: stuck, shaking, unable to breathe, wet, and wondering if I was going to be next. The man with the white bum was gone, but he had seen my face, and he still hadn’t got what he came for, whatever that might be. I should have read the comics more carefully. I should have listened to Tarzan more closely. Larry Kent had known. I had no place here. The murderer could be anywhere: he could reappear at the bottom of the ladder. He could be waiting for me around the corner, a popular place for bad bastards to wait. Jesus Christ, I thought, I’m going to die.
I stayed on the ladder for a long time, all the while expecting the bloke’s hand to grab me by the foot. I thought that if only I could cry, even if all I could make was a little squeak, I would be able to breathe, and move again, and I would be able to escape. But all I could do was stand there and hang on, holding my breath and shaking. I knew that the woman would still have her eyes open, and would still be watching the window for me. I thought that by now she would probably have become a ghost, and was using her ghost eyes to watch me. I realised with a fright that now she was a ghost she would know all about me, who I was and probably where I lived. And the bloke who killed her — oh, God! I mustn’t let him follow me home too. A ghost would be more than enough!
That galvanised me and down the ladder I went, slowly, and all the way down I could feel my limbs creaking as if I’d left them out in the rain for about six weeks, and they needed oiling. When I stepped off the ladder my legs went on strike and I slowly sank to the cold ground, and lay there shaking and freezing, and wishing I could relieve the pain in my head. I turned over and looked back up the ladder and saw its top moving across the sky, as if it was alive and I had never noticed before. I expected the woman’s bloody ghost face to appear at the window any second and stare down at me, but it didn’t.
When the twitching began, it was as if my head was a giant light bulb, and someone was switching it off and on real fast. I knew what was going to happen next, and started to cry. The crying switched itself off and on.
After a long period of exhaustion and dim awareness, it occurred to me that I was waking up from one of my turns, and that I had probably been lying there for hours. I was as sick as a small hospital, moaning ‘Mu … mm … y’ in a way that was both embarrassing and uncontrollable, as if there was another kid inside me who was actually doing it and making my body follow like a puppet. To make matters worse, my mouth had blood in it. As usual, I tried not to heave, but there’s always a point where you just have to go: Oh, what the hell … so now my face was covered in spew. Apart from that I was having the time of my life.
My ‘turns’ — actually fits, according to Dr Dunnett, who liked to call a spade a bloody shovel — started a few days after Tom died. Everyone had their own way of talking about them, as if they were a new form of social mistake, like sneezing without covering your mouth, or farting, but, all things considered, nothing to be alarmed about. Blarney Barney, Granddad’s offsider, called them funny turns; Mrs Carruthers called them little turns; Uncle Ivor called them odd turns; Aunty Jem called them sympathy turns; Dad called them stupid bloody turns; and Aunty Betty called them silly turns, and said I was pretending. Granddad didn’t call them anything, he just winked at me to let me know he was on my side.
I couldn’t do a thing about them, though when I felt one starting — whenever I got a sudden fright for no reason, or smelt fresh toast when there was none to smell, or my brain started to switch off and on — I’d begin to sing to myself, usually a few bars of ‘The Happy Wanderer’, followed by a bit of ‘Jolly Jack Tars’, a song about brave men we’d learnt for the school concert. But it wouldn’t do any good, and I’d start to shake and drop things until finally I’d sort of disappear, without even knowing it had happened, and wake up vomiting and crying like a baby.
Dr W. Dunnett — Tom and I were hoping the W stood for ‘Who’ — declared that I had epilepsy, and put me on some tablets that made me vomit blood. Mum said: ‘I don’t think we’ll give him any more of those, thank you very much.’ So it was back to plain old ‘turns’. Now I was not only the kid who’d killed his own brother — at least that’s what the kids said — I was also the local loony.
I lay there crying and feeling sorry for myself for about half an hour — I reckoned nobody else was going to do it for me — but in the end I knew I’d have to make the effort to go home. I pulled myself to my feet using the ladder. My body weighed a ton, but I staggered to a tap at the back of the house and washed my face and mouth. Then I forced myself to plod down the escape route.
A part of me remembered the way back perfectly, which was just as well, as I was so exhausted my mind had conked out. I found my way home like a dog, without thinking, just by smelling. I remembered all the street corners and all the stops and all the signs. Kipling Lane had come off Empire Street, and that had come off Empire Lane, and that had come off Raglan Street, and that had come off Devon Street and then there had been a tangle of lanes: Carnival, Dress Circle, Strawberry (no strawberries), Fourmile (it was nowhere near that long) and Lancaster. Next was the tea-tree paddock, where I could follow a path completely hidden from view, confident for the first time that I could not be seen by the murderer or the Ghost With the Bloody Face. I came out at Yorkshire Street, a street that was very familiar to me. I headed for home. When it began to rain, I walked around the block until I was soaked, so that Mum wouldn’t see that I’d peed myself.
When I got home I hopped into a hot bath and fell asleep, and when I woke up I was in bed and could smell dinner. I could have eaten a horse, even one cooked by Mum, so I got up and went to the kitchen to get some food.
When I got down there, Granddad had arrived. He was the only person — except for Aunty Queenie and his next-door neighbour, Mrs Morgan — who didn’t treat me worse after Tom died. In fact, he usually treated Tom and me as if we were separate kids, and not ‘the twins’, which he never called us, though he did like his Daily Double greeting. Mum says he doesn’t give a bugger about anyone, because he’s been around and he’s hard, but I’m not so sure about that. He was in the First World War, and fought the Turks, and even rode a horse. And he talks about it too, if you give him a bit of a nudge. He’s got a medal, and once he even showed it to Tom and me.
As for Mum, she had managed to transform herself into the Woman of Steel while I had been away, and was now acting as if nothing had happened at our place. But I knew things wouldn’t be the same for her with Dad gone.
After dinner, I went to my room and got out a huge sheet of butcher’s paper from the pile I’d nicked from Mr Klabber’s and started to draw a map. I had never seen a map of a town before, only maps of countries in our old school atlas. But I had no trouble remembering the details of my walk, and the map just spilled out o
nto the page as I watched it appear through teary eyes.
The map’s job was to remind me not to go that way again. At least that’s what I told myself. But there was another reason for starting it. I hadn’t been back to the park, which was hard for me, because I wanted to do something special to mark the spot where Tom died. But something always stopped me whenever I tried to head that way. It was like an invisible force-field, the kind that superheroes have to put up, only a billion times stronger. Now I had a way to mark the spot without actually going back. It hurt me inside just to think about making that mark, and I didn’t want to make a cross, as that was the sign we put on our old dog’s grave down the back, and Tom was not a dog. So I thought about a big ‘T’, which stood for both of our names, and might make me feel a bit better about doing it. But the same invisible force-field stopped me putting my ‘T’ on the map.
So I got stuck into the rest of the map. As it expanded I made little drawings to mark the places that spelt trouble, and why. When I came to the woman, I coloured one bit red, one bit black and one bit purple. The eyes of the woman were slightly different, one greenish blue and one bluish green. The bloke’s bum was white, but I coloured it pink, because the paper was already white.
So that was how the map started. The map was my greatest invention, and I knew that as long as I had it I would always know how far I was from that house, so I would never wander there again. It never occurred to me that the route to the house was probably burnt into my memory. Everyone knows that there are only two ways to get to the Phantom’s cave: by accident or with a map. Either way, going back to that house could only lead to terrible things. Besides, the park — Tom’s park — was at the end of the street it was in.
