by Gene Kemp
‘Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?’
‘David, you’re a psychologist.’
‘I should hope so.’
‘Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?’
‘Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency towards a slight paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing.’
They walked down the hall. ‘I locked the nursery up,’ explained the father, ‘and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.’
There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.
‘There it is,’ said George Hadley. ‘See what you make of it.’
They walked in on the children without rapping.
The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.
‘Run outside a moment, children,’ said George Hadley. ‘No, don’t change the mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!’
With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.
‘I wish I knew what it was,’ said George Hadley. ‘Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and –’
David McClean laughed dryly. ‘Hardly.’ He turned to study all four walls. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘A little over a month.’
‘It certainly doesn’t feel good.’
‘I want facts, not feelings.’
‘My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts, I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.’
‘Is it that bad?’
‘I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel towards – destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them.’
‘Didn’t you sense this before?’
‘I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?’
‘I wouldn’t let them go to New York.’
‘What else?’
‘I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business.’
‘Aha!’
‘Does that mean anything?’
‘Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.’
‘But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?’
‘I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.’
The lions were finished with their red feast.
The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.
‘Now I’m feeling persecuted,’ said McClean. ‘Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.’
‘The lions look real, don’t they?’ said George Hadley. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way –’
‘What?’
‘– that they could become real?’
‘Not that I know.’
‘Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?’
‘No.’
They went to the door.
‘I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,’ said the father.
‘Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.’
‘I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?’
‘Paranoia is thick around here today,’ said David McClean. ‘You can follow it like a spoor. Hello.’ He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. ‘This yours?’
‘No.’ George Hadley’s face was rigid. ‘It belongs to Lydia.’
They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.
The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.
‘You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!’
‘Now, children.’
The children flung themselves on to a couch, weeping.
‘George,’ said Lydia Hadley, ‘turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can’t be so abrupt.’
‘No.’
‘You can’t be so cruel.’
‘Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!’
And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe-shiners, the shoe-lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.
The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.
‘Don’t let them do it!’ wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. ‘Don’t let Father kill everything.’ He turned to his father. ‘Oh, I hate you!’
‘Insults won’t get you anywhere.’
‘I wish you were dead!’
‘We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.’
Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. ‘Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,’ they wailed.
‘Oh, George,’ said the wife, ‘it can’t hurt.’
‘All right – all right, if they’ll only just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off for ever.’
‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’ sang the children, smiling with wet faces.
‘And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.’
And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.
‘I’ll be glad when we get away,’ she sighed.
‘Did you leave them in the nursery?’
‘I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?’
‘Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?’
‘Pride, money, foolishness.’
‘I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again.’
Just then they heard the children calling, ‘Daddy, Mummy, come quick – quick!’
They went downstairs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. ‘Wendy? Peter!�
�
They ran into the nursery. The veldtland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. ‘Peter, Wendy?’
The door slammed.
‘Wendy, Peter!’
George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.
‘Open the door!’ cried George Hadley, trying the knob. ‘Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!’ He beat at the door. ‘Open up!’
He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.
‘Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,’ he was saying.
Mr and Mrs George Hadley beat at the door. ‘Now, don’t be ridiculous, children. It’s time to go. Mr McClean’ll be here in a minute and …’
And then they heard the sounds.
The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veldt grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.
The lions.
Mr Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, crouching, tails stiff.
Mr and Mrs Hadley screamed.
And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.
‘Well, here I am,’ said David McClean in the nursery doorway. ‘Oh, hello.’ He stared at the two children seated in the centre of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water-hole and the yellow veldtland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. ‘Where are your father and mother?’
The children looked up and smiled. ‘Oh, they’ll be here directly.’
‘Good, we must get going.’ At a distance Mr McClean saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the shady trees.
He squinted at the lions with his hand up to his eyes.
Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water-hole to drink.
A shadow flickered over Mr McClean’s hot face. Many shadows flickered. The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.
‘A cup of tea?’ asked Wendy in the silence.
Goosey Goosey Gander
ANN PILLING
The Bostocks were moving from the pretty Lancashire village of Brampton to a house slap bang in the middle of the town, and Lawrence and Julia didn’t like it one bit.
Julia was ten, and had lots of friends at her primary school. Why go and buy a house miles away in horrible, dirty Darnley-in-Makerfield? You couldn’t hear the birds sing there because of all the factory noises, and you had to keep your eyes peeled wherever you went, for fear of walking under a bus. ‘It’s not fair,’ she pouted, watching her mother wrap up china in newspaper and pack it in cardboard boxes. ‘I hate the new house.’
‘I hate it too,’ said Lawrence. He was five and he always copied what Julia said. Secretly though, he felt rather excited about moving. It meant he would go to school at last, and he’d been promised his own bedroom too. In the cottage he had to share with Julia. Besides, Great-aunt Annie was already living at the new house and Great-aunt Annie had a sweet tin.
‘You can’t hate what you’ve never seen,’ Mrs Bostock said wearily. ‘Dad’s offered to take you to see Baillie Square half a dozen times now it’s all been redecorated, but you just won’t go.’
‘Well, I still don’t think it’s fair,’ moaned Julia. ‘I like the country. Darnley’s dirty, and it smells.’
Her mother abandoned her china-wrapping and sat down on the floor. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘First of all, Darnley doesn’t smell, and 19 Baillie Square is a beautiful house. It’s all been cleaned up and the factories aren’t allowed to have smoking chimneys any more.’
‘But I won’t have any friends. People don’t live in places like Baillie Square, right in the middle of towns.’
‘That’s not true either. There are the Wilkinsons two doors away, and the Shaws just opposite, and the three vicarage children on the corner …’
‘Yuk! That’s another thing, Aunt Annie’ll make us go to church. She’s church-mad.’
‘Remember what the doctor told Dad,’ Mrs Bostock reminded her. She’d gone beyond the red-faced arguey stage now and looked all set to burst into tears. ‘He ought to give up the long drive into work. It’s miles from here to his office, love, and when there’s a hold-up on the motorway …’
‘But why couldn’t we just buy somewhere nearer, in another village? Why Darnley? Ugh!’ and Julia did cry now.
‘Well, it’s only an experiment. We’re not buying the house from Aunt Annie yet. We’re just renting part of it, and if it doesn’t work out we can come back here, to Sweet Briars. Dad’s only letting the Jacksons use it for a year.’
A year. It felt like for ever to Julia. ‘Some experiment!’ she said rudely, glaring at all the packing cases. ‘I’m going to see Charlotte. It’ll probably be my last chance,’ and she stormed off.
Lawrence cuddled up to his mother. He didn’t like it when Julia shouted. ‘Is there a fire station at Aunt Annie’s?’ he said timidly.
Mrs Bostock hesitated. Just before Christmas he’d managed to find some matches and started a blaze in the garage. Two fire engines had come over from Headingford and he’d been fascinated by them. He’d not understood that he could have burned Sweet Briars to the ground, only that two gleaming red trucks and eight men with shiny yellow hats had come tearing up their lane. And all because of him. Since then all matches had been kept hidden. But Lawrence was still fascinated by fire. Only last week they’d caught him fiddling with a cigarette lighter.
‘There’ll be one in Manchester,’ she said cautiously. ‘That’s a very big city. We could go there on the bus. There are lots of shops in Manchester, and cinemas, and a skating rink, and there’s a famous orchestra called the Hallé.’
But his glassy eyes told her that he’d not heard one word about Manchester. All he cared about was living near the fire station.
‘I can smell something burning,’ Dad said. ‘Have you left the milk pan on, Auntie?’ It was eleven o’clock and Mr and Mrs Bostock were having a late-night drink down in the basement flat. Julia was there too. Her official bedtime was eight thirty, but she came down most evenings complaining that she couldn’t sleep. She’d started off in the big back attic, next to Lawrence, but that had only lasted a week. Her bedroom was on the floor below now, next to Mum and Dad. She said she felt ‘safer’ there.
‘Safe from what?’ Dad had said rather grumpily, watching Mum trying to manoeuvre a mattress down the narrow attic stairs. He wasn’t allowed to lift heavy things, since his illness.
Julia wouldn’t tell, except that she thought Aunt Annie’s had a ‘creepy feeling’.
‘Stuff and nonsense. It’s a lovely old house.’
Great-aunt Annie was eighty-one. She was still very fit but she did get muddled about things. ‘It’ll be them students,’ she said, as Dad went to investigate the smell. ‘They’re up at all hours, cooking.’ The Bostocks exchanged glances. Four students from the Polytechnic had rented rooms at 19 Baillie Square last year but they’d left months ago.
‘I’ll just go up and check in our kitchen then, Auntie,’ Dad said. ‘There’s certainly nothing on in yours.’ And he climbed the stairs to the ground floor. Mum and Julia followed and they all stood together in the long narrow hall with its pattern of black and white tiles, tiles that had been washed morning and evening, years ago, by a little servant girl, according to Aunt Annie. She’d been born in the house, and her father before her.
The smell was stronger here. Julia ran into the front room where they’d had a fire burning in the grate. But nothing remained of it except a heap of reddish ash and anyhow, the big fireguard was firmly in position.
‘It’s upstairs,’ Mum said, turning very pale all of a sudden. ‘It’s … Lawrence!’ And she began to mount the staircase, two steps at a time.
Julia shoved past and was in the attic before her mother had reached the second-floor landing. Dad, who wasn’t supposed to rush anywhere, made his way up more slowly.
‘Well there’s
nothing burning,’ Julia said, coming out of the tiny back bedroom. ‘It’s all OK in here, and Loll’s fast asleep.’
Nothing could be seen of Lawrence except a little mound of bedding. The room smelt of fresh paint and wallpaper but the scorching, burning smell was much stronger now.
‘There must be a big fire in town,’ Dad said, puffing slightly as he appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘I didn’t hear any sirens though.’
‘Well, Loll must have because he’s not in this bed.’ Julia had deliberately sat down right in the middle of the hump, just to annoy him, and discovered it was empty.
Mrs Bostock tore back the covers. All she found was a collection of stuffed toys, half a biscuit and an old comic. He wasn’t in the attic and he wasn’t in the rooms down below. Loll had vanished into thin air.
Back in the hall Dad pulled open the heavy front door and looked out. A small five-year-old surely couldn’t have climbed up, unbolted it and slipped through, yet he was starting to panic. Loll was drawn to fires like ducks were to water.
As he stood staring up and down the street Great-aunt Annie suddenly rapped on her basement window. Dad looked down the grating in the pavement and saw her smiling, and pointing at something. She’d got Loll in her arms, wrapped up in a blanket, and he was waving a picture book.
‘Lawrence!’ Dad went back inside and took the phone off Mum. She was nearly in tears now, and in the middle of dialling 999. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘He was with Aunt Annie. Don’t know how on earth he slipped past us.’
‘Perhaps he was in that little loo on the second-floor landing,’ she sniffed. ‘He likes that game. I never thought of …’
‘No he wasn’t,’ Julia interrupted. ‘I looked in there.’
‘Now come on, Loll, this is naughty. You’re keeping Aunt Annie out of bed.’ Down in the basement sitting room Dad took him into his arms, restored the tatty nursery rhyme book to its shelf and went to the door. ‘I’m sorry, Auntie. This won’t happen again.’
‘It’s all right, chuck, I don’t mind. I wasn’t in bed any road.’
But Lawrence had started to howl. ‘I want to see the lady again, I want to show you that lady.’
‘Tomorrow. You can come down for a story tomorrow. Listen, we should all be in bed by now, it’s nearly midnight.’
