Fire and Hemlock (34 page)

They were just going in. Someone had already paid for her. Polly dodged after them under a plywood portcullis and fought round a sacking curtain into lurid red light. A skeleton loomed at her, yattering its teeth. Polly swerved round it, pretending to laugh, though it was not very convincing. The others had got ahead of her, thanks to Seb, and she was all on her own. She could hear their exclamations in the distance, and their feet treading hollow boards. She pushed through string cobwebs, past a barred window with mechanical groans coming from behind it and Dracula towered at a corner. His fangs gleamed. He was almost convincing. Polly hurried, feeling deserted, into clanks, groans and rattles, to a part where the light was dim and blue. She drew back with a gasp from a ghost.

“Oh thank goodness!” Tom said beside her, amused but relieved. “I thought I’d lost everyone.”

It was quite dark, but Polly could see the blue light glinting on his glasses and pick out the stoop of his head as he looked at her. The jet of misery tried to force itself up past her hand. She crammed it down. “Not very convincing, is it?” she said, and hated her voice. It sounded bright and social.

“No, but I suppose they can’t have people going mad with terror,” he said. “Your hair looks pale blue.”

“All the better to drive you mad with terror with,” said Polly. “They put me in here as a hallucination.”

Tom gave his yelp of laughter. “Not very convincing, are you?”

“Spit!” said Polly. “Round one to you.”

They walked along the hollow boards under the clutching arms of two more ghosts. Polly thought Tom had run her into silence again. But the jet of misery seemed to be dying down. Then he said, “Leslie seems quite happy. How’s he really doing at Wilton?”

Hint, Polly thought. Leslies are for Pollys. “All right,” she said, “when he’s not skiving off. Seb said he was a popular little beast. But he had a bit of trouble at first, not being the same as the other boys.”

“I was afraid he might,” Tom said. “I feel responsible. I told Edna how good the music was there, but I didn’t dream she’d take me seriously. I hated the place when Laurel sent me there.”

“Laurel sent you?” Polly said.

More string cobwebs surrounded them. It was quite a fight to get through. Polly thought silence had descended for certain this time, but Tom said, dim and blue, and breathless from being tangled in string, “My parents had died and we’d nothing. I was in Council care when Laurel almost adopted me. I know how Leslie felt.”

Telling me things, Polly thought. A farewell gift. She came loose from the string and turned to watch Tom fight through. Something clanked beside her. A suit of armour with an axe raised in its metal first was seemingly bearing down on her. Knowing it would stop before it reached her, Polly ignored it. “Leslie’s tougher than—”

Tom shouted, “Watch
out!
” and tore loose from the string.

Polly snapped round to see the suit of armour really coming for her, and another clanking up from the other side. After that, things happened so fast that her memory had it simply as a clanking, blue-lit whirl. She remembered aiming a great kick at the nearest suit of armour and seeing it sway away backwards. The whistling wind from its axe as it just missed her face was one of the things that stood out. So was the gong-like ringing from her other kicks. But her chief memory was a dim blue sight of Tom wrestling to hold up the arm of the second suit of armour, which kept going mechanically up and down, up and down, with the axe just missing his hair. With that went a rumbling of some sort from overhead.

Polly came at a run to kick that suit of armour too. Tom said, “No, don’t be a fool!” and kicked her instead, hard, on the thigh. Polly staggered sideways and fell over, in a whirl of frantic blue metallic sights – something was falling out of the roof, and the first suit of armour was raising its axe again. Polly rolled desperately away, deafened by crashing metal. Next thing she knew, an iron portcullis had dropped out of the roof, trapping Tom underneath it. That held him in place while the first suit of armour brought its axe down. Polly knew, because she felt him jerk while she struggled to heave the spiked metal grille up off his back. She did not remember getting up. She was just there, heaving at the bars.

“Get this
off
me!” he said.

“I’m
trying!
” Polly snapped. Lucky I’ve got muscles, she thought as she somehow rescued his glasses and rammed them in her pocket. The portcullis was mechanically forcing itself down and down. Polly trembled with the effort of heaving it. Tom fell on his face under her feet, and that just enabled her to hold it clear of him while he rolled out from underneath. It dropped with a clang then, and the metal spikes ran into the floorboards. “Jesus wept!” said Polly. Tom was simply lying there with his face in his arms. In the blue light the back of his shirt seemed to be oozing black, shiny stuff.

“Get us out,” he said, “before anything else comes for us.”

Polly looked round rather wildly. Quite near her face a white crack of light threaded the blue dimness. She put out her hand and felt plywood. “Here’s a way,” she remembered saying, and after that a fury of kicking and tearing until she had managed to loosen a panel of plywood and let sunlight come blinding in. She went on bashing and made a bigger hole. Tom climbed to his feet and she somehow helped him drop several feet down into the white, white daylight, to trampled grass smelling of petrol, into a roar of heavy engines.

Tom went on his knees there, bent over, muttering things. The stuff oozing from his shirt was red by daylight.

“You’re bleeding,” Polly said, shouting above the engines. “A lot.”

“That’s what it feels like,” he said. “It hurts like hell. Can you get my shirt off and look?”

“Yes.” Not at all wanting to, Polly helped him get one arm out of its sleeve and then gingerly took hold of the green shirt by its collar. She had to peel it off. It made her teeth ache and her spine fizz with horror. More blood kept coming, and she was terrified that he was only being held together by the shirt.

While she peeled, Tom said in a tight, grating sort of way, “You are now about to see a human back.”

“Oh shut up,” she said. “You would say that! I’ve seen backs every time I go swimming.” And, having by then pulled the shirt down and seen the mess the portcullis and the axe had made between them, Polly could think of nothing else. She dithered, holding the shirt wadded up, not knowing whether to press it to the big oozing cuts or not. Her teeth felt about to fall out. There were maroon-coloured dents too that must have been really painful. “Tom, this looks awful!”

“But how about the bit round the edges?” Tom said almost jeeringly.

“Brown – and you’ve got muscles,” Polly said. “I don’t know what to
do!
”

People’s feet appeared, trampling round them in the grass. Ed said, “Hell’s bells! That’s what the noise was!” Ann threw herself down on her knees beside Polly, demanding to know what had happened. Sam took hold of Polly’s elbow and pulled her to her feet. “Are
you
all right? What happened?”

“It was—” Polly began, but Tom interrupted her. “From playing the cello in Australia,” he said. “That’s all.”

“What’s he on about?” said Ed.

“Nothing,” Polly said. “There was a portcullis and it fell on him.”

“Leroy again,” said Ann. “Polly, can you run and find Mary? She used to be a nurse. I don’t know enough to touch this.”

“We’d better find a doctor or an ambulance,” said Sam.

He and Ed and Polly hurried away in different directions. Tom called after them in that scratchily painful voice, “
And
Leslie! Find Leslie! I
must
talk to Leslie!”

As Polly ran, she could hear Ann trying to say soothing things to Tom. They were in a back lane of the fair, among engines on huge wheels, blue oil fumes, and the canvas rears of stalls. The sensible place to look for Mary would be the proper exit to the Castle of Horrors. Polly dived through the nearest gap that seemed to lead to the main fairground and cut in past a deafening lorry engine. Mr Leroy and Seb were just beyond the gap. Polly saw them both in profile, yelling at one another, and backed hastily out of sight.

“—do it this way! There’s a much better way!” Seb almost screamed. His voice cracked as badly as Tom’s.

And Mr Leroy bellowed, “To save our skins! That’s why!”

Polly fled, found another gap, and sped through. There was a throng of people outside the Castle of Horrors, most of them angry and frightened. The man in charge was waving his arms and shouting, “It’s all quite safe, I tell you!” He seemed panic-stricken. “It’s quite safe!”

Mary turned away from the back of the crowd and saw Polly. Her face changed from annoyance to horror. “Polly! What’s all that blood?”

Polly looked down and saw that the front of her white shirt and some of her hair were stained with bright red blotches. “It’s Tom’s,” she said. “Come quickly. A piece of the castle fell on him.”

Mary put a firm arm round her. “Easy now,” she said. “Show me where. It’ll be all right.” That was the thing about Mary. She was nice, even though she and Polly did not like one another.

They were slower getting there than Polly wanted to be. Her leg and side quite suddenly began to hurt appallingly where Tom had kicked her. Mary helped her limp through into the back part of the fair again, where they arrived too late to be of use. An ambulance, with its blue light flashing on top, was already backed up into the grassy lane. Two ambulance men were just finishing putting some kind of dressing on Tom’s back. Everyone else was standing watching, including Leslie, who looked as sick as Ann did. Polly gathered that Leslie was the one who had called the ambulance.

Tom was now swearing steadily. His face looked odd. Polly remembered she had his glasses in her pocket, and she limped over and gave them to him. He put them on, as he was, still crouched over the grass, and went on swearing. His face looked just as odd with his glasses on. It had gone a strange colour, which was not white, as Polly might have expected – muddier than that – and it went stranger as the ambulance men helped him to his feet.

“Up you come now, sir! Can you manage to walk up the ramp?”

Polly heard Sam mutter to Ed, “Curse this. What about that recording session on Tuesday?”

“I know,” said Ed. “We’ll have to cancel. He can’t possibly play in that state.”

Tom contrived to hear this somehow, through his own swearing and the cajoling of the ambulance men, in spite of the noise of the fair and the grinding of heavy engines. He turned and called over his shoulder, “Don’t you dare cancel it! Either I’ll play or you’ll get Dowsett or someone. Ann, do you hear? You’re not to cancel that recording. And Leslie,” he added, turning the other way, “don’t you forget what I said either!”

“Gives his orders, doesn’t he?” Leslie said to Polly as the doors of the ambulance closed.

“He was in pain, you little fool!” Mary snapped. Mary, Polly remembered, vented her feelings in anger. She raged at Ann and Ed and Sam and wanted them to sue the fair for negligence. The three of them just shrugged, which made Mary angrier than ever.

“We’ll try if you like,” Ann said at last, in an effort to pacify her, “but I’m willing to bet you there’ll be no evidence to go on.”

Polly understood what Ann meant when she looked round to find the place where she had forced a way out of the Castle of Horrors and saw only a smooth painted plywood wall, with no sign even of a loose panel.

Ed drove Leslie and Polly back to Granny’s, while the other three went in Tom’s horse-car to the hospital. Ann promised to ring up as soon as there was news.

Granny was upstairs resting. Polly and Leslie sat on the sofa with the telly on, waiting for Ann to telephone. They both felt so strange that they wrapped their arms round one another and leaned head to head, unseeingly watching cricket. Polly kept reliving the wild blue clanking scene, over and over, and her desperate effort to hold the iron portcullis up as it forced itself down.

Leslie was a comfort against that, but nothing seemed to plug the jet of misery inside her. That seemed to be a separate thing, and stronger than ever.

“I hate that Mary Fields,” Leslie remarked. “First female I’ve ever hated.”

“So do I,” Polly confessed. “Leslie, those suits of armour—”