Dark Companions (23 page)

Beyond Kiddiegear and The Wholefood Shop, Frank’s yard was a maze of new timber. Frank was feeding the edge of a door to a shrieking circular blade. He gazed at Lee as though nobody had told him anything. When Lee kept his temper and explained, Frank said “No problem. Just give a moan when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now.”

“Ah, well. As soon as I’ve finished this job I’ll whiz round.” Lee had reached the exit when Frank said “I’ll tell you something that’ll amuse you…”

Fifteen minutes later Lee arrived back, panting, at his shop. It was intact. He hurried around the outside of the cinema, but all the doors seemed immovable, and he couldn’t find a secret entrance. Nevertheless he was sure that the thieves—children, probably—were sneaking in somehow.

The buses were full of old people now, sitting stiffly as china. The lunchtime trade trickled into the shop: men who couldn’t buy their brand of cigarettes in the pub across the road, children sent on errands while their lunches went cold on tables or dried in ovens. An empty bus raced along the deserted street, and a scrawny youth in a leather jacket came into the shop while his companion loitered in the doorway. Would Lee have a chance to defend himself, or at least to shout for help? But they weren’t planning theft, only making sure they didn’t miss a bus. Lee’s heart felt both violent and fragile. Since the robberies had begun he’d felt that way too often.

The shop was still worth it. “Don’t keep it up if you don’t want to,” his father had said, but it would have been admitting defeat to do anything else. Besides, he and his parents had been even closer here than at home. Since their death, he’d had to base his stock on items people wanted in a hurry or after the other shops had closed: flashlights, canned food, light bulbs, cigarettes. Lee’s Home-Baked Bread was a thing of the past, but it was still Lee’s shop.

Packs of buses climbed the hill, carrying home the rush-hour crowds. When the newspaper van dumped a stack of the evening’s
Liverpool Echo
on the doorstep, he knew Frank wasn’t coming. He stormed round to the yard, but it was locked and deserted.

Well then, he would stay in the shop overnight; he’d nobody to go home for. Why, he had even made the thieves’ job easier by helping the door to collapse. The sight of him in the lit shop ought to deter thieves—it better had, for their sakes.

He bought two pork pies and some bottles of beer from the pub. Empty buses moved off from the stop like a series of cars on a fairground ride. He drank from his mother’s Coronation mug, which always stood by the electric kettle.

He might as well have closed the shop at eight o’clock; apart from an old lady who didn’t like his stock of cat food, nobody came. Eventually he locked the door and sat reading the paper, which seemed almost to be written in a new language:
HEAD RAPS SHOCK AXE,
said a headline about the sudden closing of a school.

Should he prop the storeroom door in place, lest he fall asleep? No, he ought to stay visible from the cinema, in the hope of scaring off the thieves. In his childhood they would hardly have dared sneak into the cinema, let alone steal—not in the last days of the cinema, when the old man had been roaming the aisles.

Everyone, perhaps even the manager, had been scared of him. Nobody Lee knew had ever seen his face. You would see him fumbling at the dim gaslights to turn them lower, then he’d begin to make sounds in the dark as though he was both muttering to himself and chewing something soft. He would creep up on talkative children and shine his flashlight into their eyes. As he hissed at them, a pale substance would spill from his mouth.

But they were scared of nothing these days, short of Lee’s sitting in the shop all night like a dummy. Already he felt irritable, frustrated. How much worse would he feel after a night of doing nothing except waste electricity on the lights and the fire?

He wasn’t thinking straight. He might be able to do a great deal. He emptied the mug of beer, then he switched off the light and arranged himself on the chair as comfortably as possible. He might have to sit still for hours.

He only hoped they would venture close enough for him to see their faces. A flashlight lay ready beside him. Surely they were cowards who would run when they saw he wasn’t scared of them. Perhaps he could chase them and find their secret entrance.

For a long time he heard nothing. Buses passed downhill, growing emptier and fewer. Through their growling he heard faint voices, but they were fading away from the pub, which was closing. Now the streets were deserted except for the run-down grumble of the city. Wind shivered the window. The edge of the glow of the last few buses trailed vaguely over the storeroom entrance, making the outlines of cinema seats appear to stir. Between their sounds he strained his ears. Soon the last bus had gone.

He could just make out the outlines of the seats. If he gazed at them for long they seemed to waver, as did the storeroom doorway. Whenever he closed his eyes to rest them he heard faint tentative sounds: creaking, rattling. Perhaps the shop always sounded like that when there was nothing else to hear.

His head jerked up. No, he was sure he hadn’t dozed: there had been a sound like a whisper, quickly suppressed. He hunched himself forward, ears ringing with strain. The backs of the cinema seats, vague forms like charcoal sketches on a charcoal background, appeared to nod towards him.

Was he visible by the glow of the electric fire? He switched it off stealthily, and sat listening, eyes squeezed shut. The sudden chill held him back from dozing. Yes, there were stealthy movements in a large enclosed place. Were they creeping closer? His eyes sprang open to take them unawares, and he thought he glimpsed movement, dodging out of sight beyond the gap in the wall.

He sat absolutely still, though the cold was beginning to insinuate cramp into his right leg. He had no way of measuring the time that passed before he glimpsed movement again. Though it was so vague that he couldn’t judge its speed, he had a nagging impression that someone had peered at him from the dark auditorium. He thought he heard floorboards creaking.

Were the thieves mocking him? They must think it was fun to play games with him, to watch him gazing stupidly through the wall they’d wrecked. Rage sprang him to his feet. Grabbing the flashlight, he strode through the doorway. He had to slow down in the storeroom, for he didn’t want to touch the shelves fattened by grime. As soon as he reached the wall he flashed the light into the cinema.

The light just managed to reach the walls, however dimly. There was nobody in sight. On either side of the screen, which looked like a rectangle of fog, the theatre boxes were cups of darkness. It was hard to distinguish shadows from dim objects, which perhaps was why the rows of seats looked swollen.

The thieves must have retreated into one of the corridors, towards their secret entrance; he could hear distant muffled sounds. No doubt they were waiting for him to give up—but he would surprise them.

He stepped over a pile of rubble just beyond the wall. They mustn’t have had time to clear it away when they had made the gap. The flashlight was heavy, reassuring; they’d better not come too near. As soon as he reached the near end of a row of seats and saw that they were folded back out of his way, he switched off the light.

Halfway down the row he touched a folding seat, which felt moist and puffy—fatter than it had looked. He didn’t switch on the light, for he oughtn’t to betray his presence more than was absolutely necessary. Besides, there was a faint sketchy glow from the road, through the shop. At least he would be able to find his way back easily—and he’d be damned if anyone else got there first.

When he reached the central aisle he risked another blink of light, to make sure the way was clear. Shadows sat up in all the nearest seats. A few springs had broken; seats lolled, spilling their innards. He paced forward in the dark, stopping frequently to listen. Underfoot the carpet felt like perished rubber; occasionally it squelched.

At the end of the aisle he halted, breathing inaudibly. After a while he heard movement resounding down a corridor to his left. All at once—good Lord, he’d forgotten that—he was glad the sounds weren’t coming from his right, where the Gents’ had been and still was, presumably. Surely even thieves would prefer to avoid the yard beyond that window, especially at night.

Blinking the light at the floor, he moved to his left. The darkness hovering overhead seemed enormous, dwarfing his furtive sounds. He had an odd impression that the screen was almost visible, as an imperceptible lightening of the dark above him. He was reminded of the last days of the cinema, in particular one night when the projectionist must have been drunk or asleep: the film had slowed and dimmed very gradually, flickering; the huge almost invisible figures had twitched and mouthed silently, unable to stop—it had seemed that the cinema was senile but refusing to die, or incapable of dying.

Another blink of light showed him the exit, a dark arch a head taller than he. A few scraps of linoleum clung to the stone floor of a low corridor. He remembered the way: a few yards ahead the corridor branched; one short branch led to a pair of exit doors, while the other turned behind the screen, towards a warren of old dressing-rooms.

When he reached the pair of doors he tested them, this time from within the building. Dim light drew a blurred sketch of their edges. The bars that ought to snap apart and release the doors felt like a single pole encrusted with harsh flakes. His rusty fingers scraped as he rubbed them together. Wind flung itself at the doors, as unable to move them as he was.

He paced back to the junction of the corridors, feeling his way with the toes of his shoes. There was a faint sound far down the other branch. Perhaps the thieves were skulking near their secret entrance, ready to flee. One blink of the light showed him that the floor was clear.

The corridor smelled dank and musty. He could tell when he strayed near the walls, for the chill intensified. The dark seemed to soak up those of his sounds that couldn’t help being audible—the scrape of fallen plaster underfoot, the flap of a loose patch of linoleum that almost tripped him and left his heart palpitating. It seemed a very long time before he reached the bend, which he coped with by feeling his way along the damp crumbling plaster of the wall. Then there was nothing but musty darkness for an even longer stretch, until something taller than he was loomed up in front of him.

It was another pair of double doors. Though they were ajar, and their bars looked rusted in the open position, he was reluctant to step through. The nervous flare of his light had shown him a shovel leaning against the wall; perhaps it had once been used to clear away fallen plaster. Thrusting the shovel between the doors, he squeezed through the gap, trying to make no noise.

He couldn’t quite make himself switch off the flashlight. There seemed to be no need. In the right-hand wall were several doorways; he was sure one led to the secret entrance. If the thieves fled, he’d be able to hear which doorway they were using.

He crept along the passage. Shadows of dangling plaster moved with him. The first room was bare, and the colour of dust. It would have been built as a dressing-room, and perhaps the shapeless object, huddled in a corner and further blurred by wads of dust, had once been a costume. In the second deserted room another slumped, arms folded bonelessly. He had a hallucinatory impression that they were sleeping vagrants, stirring wakefully as his light touched them.

There was only one movement worth his attention: the stealthy restless movement he could hear somewhere ahead. Yes, it was beyond the last of the doorways, from which—he switched off the flashlight to be sure—a faint glow was emerging. That must come from the secret entrance.

He paused just ahead of the doorway. Might they be lying in wait for him? When the sound came again—a leathery sound, like the shifting of nervous feet in shoes—he could tell that it was at least as distant as the far side of the room. Creeping forward, he risked a glance within.

Though the room was dimmer than fog, he could see that it was empty: not even a dusty remnant of clothing or anything else on the floor. The meagre glow came from a window barred by a grille, beyond which he heard movement, fainter now. Were they waiting outside to open the grille as soon as he went away? Flashlight at the ready, he approached.

When he peered through the window, he thought at first there was nothing to see except a cramped empty yard: grey walls that looked furred by the dimness, grey flagstones, and—a little less dim—the sky. Another grille covered a window in an adjoining wall.

Then a memory clenched on his guts. He had recognised the yard.

Once, as a child, he had been meant to sneak into the Gents’ and open the window so that his friends could get in without paying. He’d had to stand on the toilet seat in order to reach the window. Beyond a grille whose gaps were thin as matchsticks, he had just been able to make out a small dismal space enclosed by walls that looked coated with darkness or dirt. Even if he had been able to shift the grille he wouldn’t have dared to do so, for something had been staring at him from a corner of the yard.

Of course it couldn’t really have been staring. Perhaps it had been a half-deflated football; it looked leathery. It must have been there for a long time, for the two socketlike dents near its top were full of cobwebs. He’d fled, not caring what his friends might do to him—but in fact they hadn’t been able to find their way to the yard. For years he hadn’t wanted to look out of that window, especially when he’d dreamed or had seemed to remember that something had moved, gleaming, behind the cobwebs. When he’d been old enough to look out of the window without climbing up, the object was still there, growing dustier. Now there had been a gap low down in it, widening as years passed. It had resembled a grin stuffed with dirt.

Again he heard movement beyond the grille. He couldn’t quite make out that corner of the yard, and retreated, trying to make no noise, before he could. Nearly at the corridor, he saw that a door lay open against the wall. He dragged the door shut as he emerged—to trap the thieves, that was all; if they were in the yard that might teach them a lesson. He would certainly have been uneasy if he had still been a child.