Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

by G J Lee

  Chapter 32

  What We Both Saw and Heard

  “What was that?” said Lizzie

  “What was what?”

  “You said something. What was it?”

  I sat up in bed amongst my heap of bedclothes and tried hard to remember. Then I saw the face of Ernie Raynor and his mouth was moving silently. I tried to repeat what he was trying to tell me. My mouth flapped like a goldfish. Slowly, like mist clearing, words started to form.

  “Gr…gr…gr…”

  Lizzie’s grey and white eyes widened. “Jay? Are you not well? Is something wrong?”

  “Gr…Gros…”

  “Jay?”

  “Gross tichow,” was suddenly spat out towards Lizzie. The words were fading fast. I don't know why, and Ernie had disappeared from my mind's eye, so I found a blunt pencil and tried to spell the word out on the back of an old birthday card. I spelt it like this:

  gros ticow

  poland

  When I'd finished, Lizzie sat on my bed and looked at the piece of white card. Then she looked at me.

  “I’ve got a weird feeling this is important,” I said and I told her what I’d seen.

  “I don’t understand,” said Lizzie. “A man in a hat and cloak and a place we can’t pronounce!” A pause as she thought it through. “Unless…”

  Lizzie grabbed the card and jumped to her feet.

  “I’m just going to 1946. Won’t be a tick.”

  When Lizzie returned we talked about my dream and the familiar man in the hat and coat. I was getting used to dreaming now but it didn’t make what I’d experienced earlier any easier. I told Lizzie what I dreamed he’d said about Rosie and us. But I left out the bit about Ernie.

  I just couldn’t tell her. Besides, there was no proof that he was dead.

  Not yet.

  Lizzie was instantly on edge.

  “We have to be careful,” she said, looking around the room suspiciously. “You saw at the séance how nasty the dead can get when they don’t get their own way. I don’t like it. It seems like you’re being followed by this man in the hat.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” I agreed. “We have to be careful. But if Rosie is in that house I want to get her out.”

  Lizzie was sparked into conversation as she remembered something. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about what I saw and heard the night we went to the spooky house.”

  “OK.”

  “Well, after I left you I crept up to the bottom windows and peered in. There were people in the house because there were lights on but I couldn’t see anybody in any of the rooms. So I decided to go round the side of the house. There were a few bushes and weeds there but I managed it. There was a window open. When I looked in I saw that it was the kitchen. And that’s when I saw the men in suits. Right posh looking they were, sat around the kitchen in ties and hats. All cross-legged and smoking.

  “Ciggies?”

  “No. Cigarettes.”

  “Oh!”

  I thought about this.

  “But is that unusual?”

  “Unusual?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I know they were wearing posh suits,” I said, “but men sat around smoking? There’s quite a bit of that about I reckon, despite the smoking ban.”

  “Smoking ban?”

  “Never mind. Do you get what I’m trying to say?”

  “Sort of,” frowned Lizzie. “But the smoking and the suits aren’t the real reason I’m telling you this. It was what they were saying.”

  “What were they saying?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. They were talking like foreigners.”

  “What type of foreigners?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” squirmed Lizzie, thinking hard, “and I’ve only heard it on the wireless, but… I reckon…it was, well, German.”

  Lizzie went on to tell me how she watched them smoking and talking and laughing in the kitchen of the house in the alley. How they all spoke in German. How the few Germans in her area had been rounded up and put to work in camps years ago, at the outbreak of war.

  So having Germans in Lizzie’s neighbourhood in 1946 was very unusual.

  “There was something else I remember. When they were talking I heard one of them say the word Fuh-rer.”

  I’d heard that and I knew it meant something bad. I frowned. Lizzie must have seen me thinking and tried to explain. “Well, the Jerries called Adolf Hitler ‘The Fuhrer’ during the war.”

  This made sense. Mr Butler had explained all this in history and I knew who the ‘Jerries’ were. “Maybe all the Germans have been released now,” I said in explanation, “and are all coming back. The war is over isn’t it?”

  Lizzie considered this. “Yes, but…but it just didn’t make any sense.”

  A pause.

  “But what scared you so much?” I asked Lizzie. “You still haven’t told me.”

  “Well, I’m stood on tippy-toe watching these Jerries smoking and talking when I slip and give a little squeak of surprise. Before I can count a second one of the men has grabbed my hand, the one that’s still holding onto the window ledge. It was the hand of an old man. A man all veiny and yellow. He had big gold rings on and hard nails. He was strong. Look!” Lizzie showed me the red marks that were still clear on one of her wrists. “I struggled and squirmed but the man still held on and was shouting in German. I don’t know how, but I managed to get free and I scrambled across the weeds and bricks back to you. All I could hear was ‘Halt! Halt!’ and all I could think of was to get away and to get to you and back home.” She looked up at me and those little black eyes reminded of a hurt and lost puppy. “I thought I was going to be captured by the Germans.”

  I got out of bed and stood up stiffly in my piranhas.

  “There’s nothing else for it. We’ve got to rescue Rosie, and soon. Lizzie, we need a plan!”