Haunted Legends (41 page)

He needn’t make it seem as if Robbie’s caution were the problem. Robbie followed him along the hall, which at least was free of bicycles, and through a kitchen cluttered with furniture into the yard. He had a manly toke that made him thoroughly aware of the spectators—upstairs windows, all of them lifeless except for the wailing of a child somewhere he couldn’t locate. Before he and Duncan finished the joint he’d had enough of the windowless cell above which fireworks clawed at the sky on his behalf. “Where’s Chucky, then?” he said.

“Waiting for you.”

Duncan meant for both of them, of course. He led Robbie to the front room, where a plump couch and two undernourished chairs were miming patience at a blank television. The chair that had been on less of a diet was occupied by a romance of the Liverpool slums, while a woman’s orange cardigan sprawled across half of the couch. Duncan slipped a disk into the player and lounged beside the cardigan. “Chuck that,” he said.

Robbie laid the rumpled paperback on the carpet and propped his spine—more especially the cumbersome head it was sprouting—against the chair as
Child’s Play
started on the screen. That was the name of the film and, he supposed, what you called the mischief that the Chucky doll got up to once a killer’s spirit hid inside it. Why did everyone blame the boy who owned the doll? Why couldn’t they see that the doll was pretending to be him? They even took him to a psychiatrist for the doll to kill. At last the boy’s mother caught Chucky misbehaving and the boy helped throw him on a fire, burning him for the sake of all the kids as the paper said you should, though the mother still had to blow him to bits with a gun. Robbie was relieved she’d seen the truth at last. As he let go of the bony arms of the chair, which had apparently been bruising his hands for some time, Duncan said “Wimp.”

“Who is?”

“Him, going crying to his mam. Hope the other one’s better.”

How could the doll come back? It had grown its stitches now, but this wasn’t even its second film, and so Robbie couldn’t tell what had revived it. It killed a woman who used to go with the killer, and then it put her inside a girl doll. As that one began to speak, a noise crept into the room—giggling that ballooned into shrieks. “What’s so funny?” Robbie was panicked into asking.

“It’s Marge out of the Simpsons.”

At once Robbie recognised the croaky female voice from his mother’s favourite cartoon show. He felt isolated with the sight of Marge Simpson disguised as a doll that helped Chucky kill people. Eventually she was burned alive, which didn’t finish her off, and Chucky was exhaustively shot once again despite shouting “I’ll be back.” Didn’t someone else say that? How many films had Chucky and his partner taken over? A baby or a bloody doll popped out of her to end the film. Duncan ejected the disk and set about searching the cable channels, which fluttered past like slides snatching at the chance to move until Robbie cried “He’s there.”

Duncan jumped up, and the cardigan cowered away from him, flailing an armless arm. “Who?” he snarled, dashing to the window.

“Chucky. Not out there.”

Duncan shut the curtains and glared at Robbie, whether for unnerving him or because he hadn’t pointed out that passersby could see what they were watching. “That’s not him.”

“It’s one of him,” Robbie protested, but as the grinning doll sprang from under a boy’s bed Duncan poked the information button to reveal it was a Spielberg film. It was meant to be about a poltergeist, which didn’t reassure Robbie. “I’d better get home before she does,” he said.

Duncan grinned like Chucky. “You’re never scared of your mam.”

“I’m not scared of any fucker or any fucking thing.”

“Better believe I’m not. My dad tried to make me scared of stupid fucking Chucky. Not my real dad, the one I got for my birthday when I was four.”

“What did he do?”

“Never mind what he done.” Having stared at Robbie, Duncan added “Said Chucky would get me if I was bad. That’s what they used to tell kids.”

Had someone once told Robbie that? It seemed uneasily familiar. “They didn’t know what they were on about,” Duncan said. “That’s not how Chucky works.”

He meant in the films, of course—he couldn’t mean anything else. “See you at school,” Robbie said.

“Shut it on your way out. I’m going to watch him give the doctor shocks again.”

The street was deserted. Lamps patched the pavements with light, which mouldered on the roofs of parked cars. If Robbie were a girl or in a film he might be daunted by the gaps between the vehicles, where a small jerky figure could dart out as its victim reached one of the stretches of pavement the lamps didn’t entirely illuminate. The only place he had to look for Chucky was on all the televisions, and he was lingering outside a window to see that no doll attacked the young couple in bed on the screen when a woman in an armchair caught sight of him. As she sprang to her feet he fled home. She didn’t chase him, but did she know where he lived? Suppose she told his mother? She couldn’t say he’d been looking for Chucky; nobody knew that, not even Duncan. Chucky was safe in his head where nobody would notice him.

The house was unlit, which meant that Robbie’s mother wouldn’t see him until he had a chance to sleep off any guilt that might escape onto his face. It didn’t look guilty in the bathroom mirror, where it foamed at the mouth while the toothbrush polished its grin. He was in bed well before his mother came home, though he couldn’t sleep. If he’d been allowed a computer in his room he would have played on it, but the games might have been
too violent for his mother’s taste; she’d decided even board games were aggressive. He slept once the grinning doll subsided inside the jack-in-the-box of his head.

He thought he was behaving normally at breakfast, however dull his head felt, until his mother said “What’s the matter, Robbie? Why are you looking like that?”

“I’m not looking like anything.”

“Your eyes are. Aren’t you sleeping?”

“It’s all the stuff you’ve been saying about Chucky.”

“I won’t again. Don’t worry, we’ll be getting rid of him.” As a further comfort she said “My turn to make dinner.”

So there wasn’t a meeting. Perhaps that was why Duncan didn’t seek him out but only gave him a grin across the classroom. He joined him at the morning break, when the girl who’d accosted them yesterday caught up with them in the schoolyard. “Hope you’re happy now,” she said.

Robbie grinned, though it felt inadvertent if not meaningless. “Why?” Duncan demanded.

“Someone’s brought your Chucky back.”

“We haven’t lost him,” Robbie blurted as Duncan said louder “Who’s brought what where?”

“They’ve got him in a shop down by the Strand, in the window where everyone can see him.”

“They’ve got no respect,” her friend said.

“Nobody can stop him. He’ll get everywhere,” Duncan said, baring his teeth.

He kept the grin up until the girls left them alone. If he seemed to find it hard to abandon, that was just a joke. He made the face at any girls who looked at him and Robbie as they slouched around the yard, and the trick amused Robbie so much that he couldn’t help joining in, even if it felt as though strings were attached to the corners of his mouth. His lips had grown weary by the time the bell herded everyone into the school.

The history mistress wanted to hear stories of the past that people’s families had told them. One boy said how the government had hated Liverpool so much they’d tried to take all the jobs down south, and a girl retorted that the unions hadn’t let her dad or anybody do their jobs. “I think those
are legends more than they’re history,” Mrs Picton said, and Robbie took the cue. “What about Chucky?” he said.

“What about . . .”

“He’s a story mams and dads tell, isn’t he? How it all started when those kids watched that film.”

Before Mrs Picton could respond, Robbie’s classmates did. Someone used to dream Chucky was under the bed after she’d read about him in the paper. Someone knew a girl who’d set her dolls on fire in case any of them might be Chucky. Someone else had heard of a boy who’d attacked his sister because he thought Chucky was inside her. Several people confirmed this, but Duncan said nothing at all. “It’s only a film,” Mrs Picton said, which sounded somehow familiar. “That doesn’t mean any of you should watch anything like that at your age.”

“Didn’t those boys really kill anyone, then?” Robbie said.

“Of course they did. It’s history, and now please leave it alone.”

Why should he feel accused? He didn’t speak for the rest of the lesson, despite the doubtful glances she kept giving him. When the bell jerked him to his feet at last she said “Will you wait, please, Robbie.”

He stood like a doll at his desk until she took him to the headmistress. If someone had reported him for being Chucky in the yard, why wasn’t Duncan with him? It should be Duncan who was being stared at and whispered girlishly about as he was escorted along the corridor like a killer to the execution chamber. Robbie and his guard were almost at Mrs Todd’s office when he realised they couldn’t do this to him; his mother had to be there. But she was in the office.

She looked even more disappointed than the other women did, and he turned on Mrs Picton. “You said it was only a film.”

“What have you been watching?” his mother said.

“I didn’t see them all. Dunk saw more. They haven’t done anything to us. Like she says, it’s just a legend. Just some wimpy films.”

“Have you been too busy watching films,” Mrs Todd enquired, “to do your homework?”

“I did it all. Who says I haven’t?”

“The school does,” Robbie’s mother said sadly. “Your teacher found it on the Internet.”

Robbie’s skull felt close to cracking like plastic. “That’s only like looking it up in a book.”

“It was practically word for word,” said Mrs Picton. “You’d think you wanted to be caught.”

“What have you been filling your head with instead?” his mother clearly didn’t care to know.

“Try devoting your imagination to your schoolwork. That’s what it’s for,” Mrs Todd said. “I’m letting you off with a warning this time, but I’ll treat any further offence much more seriously. Please remember you’re letting yourself and your mother down as well as the school.”

“And I’ll want to see that work from you done properly,” Mrs Picton said.

His mother played his silent jailer as far as the schoolyard. She was hardly out of the gate when Duncan came to him. “What did they want?”

“Just about my homework.”

“Was it bad?”

Robbie had to imitate his grin, because he didn’t know if Duncan meant the homework or the interview. “It was evil.”

This widened Duncan’s grin, which aggravated Robbie’s. It was starting to feel like a contest when a girl said “What do you two think you look like?”

“Chucky,” the boys said in chorus, which made them grin until Robbie’s cheeks felt in danger of splitting like plastic.

He couldn’t keep it up all afternoon, though his lips stirred if any of the teachers even glanced at him. Though the lessons felt interminable, they ended far too soon. Where could he go except home? He wasn’t about to be scared of his mother when he wasn’t scared of Chucky, especially since she was. Her nagging would just leave his head duller still—and then he thought of somewhere to go on the way home.

The metal benches outside the shopping precinct were crammed with quartets of pensioners, warily eyeing his schoolmates while they fought at bus stops or flung litter at each other. Robbie felt watched by them as he caught sight of the face across the road, in a small shop on the side street opposite a corner of the precinct. He sprinted in front of a bus stuffed with children and gave the driver his best grin, encouraged by the face in the shop window full of skulls and hairy visages and greenish corpse heads. Though the eyeless round rubbery mask was decorated with stitches, Robbie wasn’t
sure whether they were all where they should be. The longer he gazed at it, the more secretive the grin seemed to grow. He thought of wearing the mask while his mother lectured him, but she wouldn’t let him own it, any more than he could buy even one of the fireworks lined up at the foot of the window. Suppose she didn’t know? He could wear it when he went out at night while she was with Midge. He hadn’t enough money on him, but there was more in his room, and that was why he hurried home.

His mother came into the hall as he shut the front door. “What have you been doing now?”

“Nothing. Coming home.”

“Can’t I trust you any more? Whose idea was it to do exactly what I told you not to?”

“Both of ours.” Robbie dropped his schoolbag on the stairs, only to feel that it was blocking his way as she and her bicycle were. “You won’t tell his mam what I said about him, will you? You don’t have to. Please don’t, please.”

“Why, are you frightened how he’ll behave now you’ve watched those films?”

“Course not. That’s stupid. Why do you want to stop people seeing them? They aren’t that scary, and they only make little kids be bad.”

“I wouldn’t grin about it. Is that really what you think? You’d better look at this.” Grabbing her rucksack, she extracted the crumpled pages and flapped one at him. “What do you call them?” she said.

She was brandishing the report about the girl who’d been tortured in Manchester. Robbie thought he was expected to say that her tormentors were monsters or just men until he saw what he’d overlooked: the people who’d listened to Chucky’s voice had been years older than he was now. He would have liked to have the Chucky mask to hide his face. All he could find to say was “Some of them were girls.”

“That shows how bad those films are. That’s why they have to be stopped, and now I can’t leave you on your own.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I almost wish we had your father back. Are you going to turn into something else for me to worry about? Aren’t you ever going to do anything to make me proud?”

Robbie ducked to his schoolbag so that she wouldn’t see his face. “My homework,” he muttered.

While he was no more eager to do it than usual, rewriting the history essay distracted him intermittently from his fears—that the English teacher would notice he’d copied from the Internet, that Duncan would discover Robbie had told on him, that they weren’t as immune to the films as they’d thought, because they weren’t old enough after all. His nerves kept jabbing the dull lump of his mind, and he was glad when his mother called him to dinner.