by Gene Kemp
‘Evening,’ the woman said and Anna wondered if she should tell her about the passage, but tell her what? She hadn’t seen anything. It was only Toby who’d growled and carried on.
She bought the pint of milk and put it in the carrier bag her mother had given her.
When she was out of the shop, she looked up the long dark hilly street and blazed with relief to see her brother walking towards her.
‘Dad sent me to meet you,’ he grumbled. ‘Dunno why. There’s not much can happen between here and home.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Anna said weakly and told Jason about the passageway.
‘Probably a cat,’ he shrugged. ‘You know what Toby is for cats,’ and Anna laughed.
Of course, she thought, why hadn’t she realized it was probably a cat.
They walked up the street, chattering about the day. About how different these small dark streets were to the wide orange-lit streets of the estate. They walked past lighted windows which were only slightly taller than themselves.
‘I really like this,’ Jason said. ‘You look up and all you see is sky. No windows staring down at you like in the flats.’
‘And nobody throwing things at you either,’ Anna replied.
They were so engrossed in their talk that the only warning they had was when Toby sprang forward on his lead, barking wildly.
In front of them, near enough to be touched, a giant shadow catapulted out of a passageway. The shadow flew high in the air, came down heavily, bent until it was half its size and then, with another leap, had vanished.
Anna saw a monstrous creature, dark as the night itself, in front of her. It seemed to jump as high as the houses. She felt her cheek grazed by the flick of a hard material. Then the giant became a dwarf whose pale oval face was almost on a level with Anna’s. She caught a glimpse of spiteful bright eyes and then the face was gone.
It happened so quickly and so soundlessly that the two children were still gaping at where the apparition had been by the time it had gone. They hadn’t even had a chance to move their positions.
And then Anna opened her mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed, while Jason, white-faced, tried to comfort her.
The street came alive with noise and people. Lights went on, doors flew open, people fell out of their houses, all exclaiming and asking questions.
‘Who?’ ‘What?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Where?’ ‘When?’, they called, shouted and demanded.
They quickly had the story out of the two children but it turned out to be an old story.
‘Spring-heeled Jack,’ they said angrily and the men got together in a tense crowd.
The police came. The people were sent home. Anna and Jason taken home.
‘He doesn’t do anything,’ the policeman told their parents. ‘All he does is jump out and then disappear.’
‘He was a giant,’ Anna wailed.
‘Massive,’ Jason agreed. ‘But little too,’ and Anna thought of those white eyes staring into hers and she shuddered.
The men were going to search the streets. The police were in and out of the passages and back gardens but after a thorough look, they came up empty-handed.
‘Never find anything,’ Anna heard. ‘He comes and goes like a blooming ghost.’
‘There’s nothing ghostly about this graze on my daughter’s face,’ Anna’s mother said tartly.
The days passed. The memory of Spring-heeled Jack lessened a little, her cheek started to heal and Anna went to bed more easily. She started to treat the small streets with caution.
From time to time, they heard of more jumpings. The lodger next door said, ‘It’s since they pulled down the old church, I tell you. If you asks me, they let something out of there,’ and Anna, looking at him, felt a slight sense of recognition.
Recoiling from the lodger, she dodged behind her father’s back.
The lodger’s mouth curved in a smile but he never smiled directly at anyone with his eyes. He always smiled at the floor.
Anna’s mother glanced sharply at the man but he held his teacup so carefully. He put it on the table so gently. He seemed a grey, careful, gentle man.
Anna asked if anyone had a picture of the old church and the lodger said he had.
‘I’ll get it for you,’ he said and came back with it held tightly in his thick fingers.
The girl studied the picture intently, going back to it again and again.
The lodger smiled as he watched her.
Later that evening when Anna and her mother walked past the waste ground where the church had once stood, Anna said, ‘Do you think the lodger’s telling the truth?’
‘What?’ said her mother. ‘About the church? Lot of nonsense. Ought to have more sense scaring folk half to death. I’ll have a word with him,’ she finished, angry again as she remembered the lodger’s words and saw her daughter’s strained face.
Anna stared at the waste ground all the time they were walking past it. The land was dark and deserted. She shivered and turned her head but a flickering point of light drew her attention. She looked away but had to look back. It was still there.
‘Mum,’ she whispered. ‘Look. That light,’ and her mother turned and looked.
‘Where?’ she said.
‘There,’ Anna pointed.
The light was like Spring-heeled Jack. One minute it seemed large. The next, it almost disappeared.
‘My word,’ her mother said crossly. ‘We’ll see about this,’ and she moved towards the nearest house. ‘We’ll get some help, Anna, and go and see exactly what’s going on there.’
The people in the house got other people and they all went to see what the light was.
It was just a candle, pressed into the earth, burning. Beside it lay an untidy scattering of grey stone.
‘Why, it looks like an altar candle,’ a man said, leaving the long white candle where it was. ‘Steal anything these days they will. Anything that isn’t tied down. Steal the breath out of your mouth if they could.’
Anna flinched as she thought of someone stealing the breath from her mouth.
She moved the stones with her foot then turned away.
‘I’ll wait over here,’ she told her mother, and made her way back across the wasteland. Back to the street and the lamp posts.
She had almost reached the pavement when she felt a prickling on her skin.
Sharply, she turned round and there, standing against the dark wall, was a black shadow. The next instant, Spring-heeled Jack lurched towards her and then his familiar movements appeared. Anna saw the dark shape leap up into the air and it seemed as if he had taken her breath after all, because when Anna tried to scream, no sound came out of her open mouth.
By the candle, someone glanced over.
‘It’s him,’ they shouted, ‘It’s him,’ and a stream of people poured across the rough uneven land.
They put Anna to bed with a glass of hot milk and a tablet from the doctor.
‘They didn’t catch him, did they?’ she asked harshly.
Her mother shook her head.
‘He’s after me,’ Anna cried. ‘Why? What does he want? Why is he picking on me?’
Her parents looked helplessly at each other. The move was going wrong.
‘We should have stayed where we were,’ her mother said and locked the doors and drew the curtains. ‘Nothing like this ever happened in the flats.’
Every night now, the men in the streets roamed up and down but they were almost as frightening as Spring-heeled Jack if you didn’t see them hiding, waiting. To look down a passage and see the quiet lighted end of a cigarette wasn’t always the comfort the men meant it to be.
The lodger appeared at the back door to ask ‘How’s the child today?’
Anna’s mother retorted sharply, ‘Very well. Very well,’ and the lodger’s plasticine grey face folded itself about with satisfaction.
Anna was sitting in a chair, well wrapped up against the cold and the chill of fear that was in her body. Sh
e had slept and now she woke as the lodger’s voice broke through her sleep.
She turned her eyes on him and followed the curved-down smile. The sense of recognition overwhelmed her tantalizingly.
As if feeling her gaze, the lodger looked straight at her and his malicious flickering eyes stared briefly into hers.
‘Still using the picture of the old church, are you?’ he asked, his voice sounding as ancient and rusty as an old key in a lock.
Anna nodded.
The lodger murmured softly and was gone.
Anna reached for the picture and concentrated her attention upon it. Thoughtfully, she traced the printed stonework with her finger. Suddenly, an almost hidden detail leapt out at her. Her breath caught in her throat and she let the picture fall to her knee.
Later that day, Anna made her pilgrimage to the waste ground.
The thin winter sun played at shadows with the ivy climbing over the rubble.
Anna walked through the old church land and stopped where she thought the candle would have been. She knelt down and moved the debris around with her fingertips, carefully, carefully.
She went in a wider and wider circle and then, pulling back the straggling stems of a clump of weeds, she found what she was looking for.
She picked it up and held it in her hands. The malicious stone face smiled back at her. A gargoyle displaced.
Anna stared sombrely at the grotesque head. She took it down to the old priory in the town and left it on the font, close to a source of the water that was its life’s blood, and where it was sure to be found.
In her mind, she could hear the lodger.
‘It’s since they pulled down the old church. They let something out of there.’
Well, Anna thought, brushing the grey dust off her hands. Now they’ve got it back.
And maybe they had.
Anyway, no one ever heard of Spring-heeled Jack again.
The Spring
PETER DICKINSON
When Derek was seven Great-aunt Tessa had died and there’d been a funeral party for all the relations. In the middle of it a woman with a face like a sick fish, some kind of cousin, had grabbed hold of Derek and half-talked to him and half-talked to another cousin over his head.
‘That’s a handsome young fellow, aren’t you? (Just like poor old Charlie, that age.) So you’re young Derek. How old would you be now, then? (The girls – that’s one of them, there, in the green blouse – they’re a lot bigger.) Bit of an afterthought, weren’t you, Derek? Nice surprise for your mum and dad. (Meg had been meaning to go back to that job of hers, you know …)’
And so on, just as if she’d been talking two languages, one he could understand and one he couldn’t. Derek hadn’t been surprised or shocked. In his heart he’d known all along.
It wasn’t that anyone was unkind to him, or even uncaring. Of course his sisters sometimes called him a pest and told him to go away, but mostly the family included him in whatever they were doing and sometimes, not just on his birthday, did something they thought would amuse him. But even those times Derek knew in his heart that he wasn’t really meant to be there. If he’d never been born – well, like the cousin said, Mum would have gone back to her job full-time, and five years earlier too, and she’d probably have got promoted so there’d have been more money for things. And better holidays, sooner. And more room in the house – Cindy was always whining about having to share with Fran … It’s funny to think about a world in which you’ve never existed, never been born. It would seem almost exactly the same to everyone else. They wouldn’t miss you – there’d never have been anything for them to miss.
About four years after Great-aunt Tessa’s funeral Dad got a new job and the family moved south. That June Dad and Mum took Derek off to look at a lot of roses. They had their new garden to fill, and there was this famous collection of roses only nine miles away at Something Abbey, so they could go and see if there were ones they specially liked, and get their order in for next winter. Mum and Dad were nuts about gardens. The girls had ploys of their own but it was a tagging-along afternoon for Derek.
The roses grew in a big walled garden, hundreds and hundreds of them, all different, with labels. Mum and Dad stood in front of each bush in turn, cocking their heads and pursing their lips while they decided if they liked it. They’d smell a bloom or two, and then Mum would read the label and Dad would look it up in his book to see if it was disease-resistant; last of all, Mum might write its name in her notebook and they’d give it marks, out of six, like skating judges, and move on. It took hours.
After a bit Mum remembered about Derek.
‘Why don’t you go down to the house and look at the river, darling? Don’t fall in.’
‘Got your watch?’ said Dad. ‘OK, back at the car park, four fifteen, sharp.’
He gave Derek a pound in case there were ice creams anywhere and turned back to the roses.
The river was better than the roses, a bit. The lawn of the big house ran down and became its bank. It was as wide as a road, not very deep but clear, with dark green weed streaming in the current and trout sometimes darting between. Derek found a twig and chucked it in, pacing beside it and timing its speed on his watch. He counted trout for a while, and then walking further along the river he came to a strange shallow stream which ran through the lawns, like a winding path, only water, just a few inches deep but rushing through its channel in quick ripples. Following it up he came to a sort of hole in the ground, with a fence round it. The hole had stone sides and was full of water. The water came rushing up from somewhere underground, almost as though it were boiling. It was very clear. You could see a long way down.
While Derek stood staring, a group of other visitors strolled up and one of them started reading from her guide book, gabbling and missing bits out.
‘… remarkable spring … predates all the rest of the abbey … no doubt why the monks settled here … white chalk bowl fifteen feet across and twelve feet deep … crystal clear water surges out at about two hundred gallons a minute … always the same temperature, summer and winter …’
‘Magical, don’t you think?’ said another of the tourists.
She didn’t mean it. ‘Magical’ was just a word to her. But yes, Derek thought, magical. Where does it come from? So close to the river, too, but it’s got nothing to do with that. Perhaps it comes from another world.
He thought he’d only stood gazing for a short time, hypnotized by the rush of water welling and welling out of nowhere, but when he looked at his watch, it was ten past four. There was an ice cream van, but Dad and Mum didn’t get back to the car till almost twenty to five.
That night Derek dreamed about the spring. Nothing much happened in the dream, only he was standing beside it, looking down. It was night-time, with a full moon, and he was waiting for the moon to be reflected from the rumpled water. Something would happen then. He woke before it happened, with his heart hammering. He was filled with a sort of dread, though the dream hadn’t been a nightmare. The dread was sort of neutral, half-way between terror and glorious excitement.
The same dream happened the next night, and the next, and the next. When it woke him on the fifth night, he thought: this is getting to be a nuisance.
He got out of bed and went to the window. It was a brilliant night, with a full moon high. He felt wide awake. He turned from the window, meaning to get back into bed, but somehow found himself moving into his getting-up routine, taking his pyjamas off and pulling on his shirt. The moment he realized what he was doing he stopped himself, but then thought why not? It’d fix that dream, at least. He laughed silently to himself and finished dressing. Ten minutes later he was bicycling through the dark.
Derek knew the way to the abbey because Mum was no use at map-reading so that was something he did on car journeys – a way of joining in. He thought he could do it in an hour and a quarter, so he’d be there a bit after one. He’d be pretty tired by the time he got back, but the roads were flat down her
e compared with Yorkshire. He’d left a note on the kitchen table saying ‘Gone for a ride. Back for breakfast.’ They’d think he’d just gone out for an early-morning spin – he was always first up. Nine miles there and nine back made eighteen. He’d done fifteen in one go last month. Shouldn’t be too bad.
And in fact, although the night was still, he rode as though there was a stiff breeze at his back, hardly getting tired at all. Late cars swished through the dark. He tried to think of a story in case anyone stopped and asked what he was doing – if a police car came by, it certainly would – but no one did. He reached the abbey at ten past one. The gate was shut, of course. He hadn’t even thought about getting in. There might be ivy, or something.
He found some a bit back along the way he’d come, but it wasn’t strong or thick enough to climb. Still, it didn’t cross his mind he wouldn’t get in. He was going to. There would be a way.
The wall turned away from the road beside the garden of another house. Derek wheeled his bike through the gate and pushed it in among some bushes, then followed the wall back through the garden. No light shone from the house. Nobody stirred. He followed the wall of the abbey grounds along towards the back of the garden. He thought he could hear the river rustling beyond. The moonlight was very bright, casting shadows so black they looked solid. The garden became an orchard, heavy old trees, their leafy branches blotting out the moon, but with a clear space further on. Ducking beneath the branches he headed towards it. The night air smelt of something new, sweetish, familiar – fresh-cut sawdust. When he reached the clear space, he found it surrounded a tree trunk which had had all its branches cut off and just stood there like a twisted arm sticking out of the ground. Leaning against it was a ladder.
It wasn’t very heavy. Derek carried it over to the abbey wall. It reached almost to the top. He climbed, straddled the wall, leaned down, and with an effort hauled the ladder up and lowered it on the further side, down into the darkness under the trees that grew there, then climbed down and groped his way out towards where the moonlight gleamed between the tree trunks. Out in the open on the upper slope of lawn he got his bearings, checked for a landmark so that he would be able to find his way back to the ladder, and walked down in the shadow of the trees towards the river. His heart was beginning to thump, the way it did in the dream. The same dread, between terror and glory, seemed to bubble up inside him.
