Mr Mumbles (7 page)

My left knee had landed on a small scrap of the metal roof. It was barely a foot square and it was rusted badly, but it was the only thing which might be able to protect me.

I grabbed for the piece of iron and looked up in time to see Mr Mumbles bring the axe back around. The blade passed behind him, then curved up and over his hat. I blinked, unable to move, transfixed by the graceful movement of the axe, as it swung down, down,
down
towards my face.

A split second before I was split in half, the floodgates opened and reality came rushing in. I was about to die – this was no time to admire his axe-work. Recoiling, I shut my eyes tight and held up the broken section of roof for protection. It felt like a pointless gesture, but there was nothing else I could do.

The axe hit my forearm with a dull
clang.
Cautiously, I opened one eye. I couldn’t quite believe what I saw.

I was no longer holding a rusted piece of scrap iron. Instead, my hands clutched a round, polished metal shield. It glinted in the glow of the bare bulb, and I could have
sworn when the light reflected off the thing it actually went
ting
.

I stared at it, barely even noticing Mr Mumbles, who was also gazing at the sculpted sheet of metal that had saved me from his attack. Neither of us, it seemed, knew quite how to react.

He made his mind up before I did. With a screech, he drew back the axe and brought it down hard on the shield. The impact made my whole skeleton vibrate. I slipped my arm into the leather straps on the inside of the shield, just as he slammed down hard with another violent strike. A sharp pain shot along the length of my arm. Even with the shield protecting me, the axe was doing damage. If this didn’t stop soon, it could break my arm in two.

‘L-leave him alone.’

Both my imaginary friend and I turned at the same time to see Ameena getting shakily to her feet. A thick splodge of treacle-like blood clung to her hair just above her left ear, and her eyes were almost rolling backwards into her head. Despite all that, she was still trying to save me. Me. No one
had ever even stuck up for me in school before, so this total stranger was going well beyond the call of duty.

For a second I felt a strange kind of happiness, but the now familiar feeling of utter, absolute terror soon came rushing back. Mr Mumbles had turned his back on me, and was advancing on Ameena. She staggered and slipped back down to the floor, her legs not yet strong enough to support her. I saw him raise the axe. I saw her close her eyes.

Something began to tingle at the base of my neck.

‘GET…AWAY…FROM…HER!’ I roared, my legs launching me forwards like springs. Mr Mumbles turned, the axe still raised above his head. I swung at him with the shield before he could bring the blade down. As the metal connected with his jaw, something like an electric shock coursed across the surface of my skull. For a split second, a bright flash filled my vision. When it cleared, Mr Mumbles was hurtling backwards, a barely recognisable blur of speed.

The metal door bent with a boom and a creak, as the monster crashed through it, tearing it free of the wall. The
warped aluminium skidded and skittered along the wet driveway, before coming to rest on the road, ten or fifteen metres away. Somewhere inside the wreckage, my imaginary friend lay deathly still.

‘Wow, whoever that dude is, he
really
doesn’t like you,’ said Ameena. I felt her hand slip into mine and braced my arm against her weight as she hauled herself up. She looked out of the garage, seeing the buckled remains of the door for the first time. ‘Whoa,’ she gasped. ‘How did you do that?’

I stared into the empty street. Flashing lights of red and green spilled their Christmassy glow across the tarmac. Behind us, the bare light bulb went out with a fizzle and a pop. ‘I don’t know,’ I managed, eventually. ‘It just sort of…happened.’

‘But it was…I mean, you…it’s not…’ Ameena’s eyes seemed to be focusing properly now, and were open wide with shock. I knew she had a question in there somewhere that was trying to get out, but I didn’t have any way to explain what I’d just done.

‘It must’ve been a lucky punch or something,’ I said.
‘Come on, now that he’s down we can go get the police. They can take care of him.’ I chewed my lip. Could the police take care of him? Even if there was an officer on duty, would he be equipped to deal with homicidal imaginary men? I doubted it was something the local constabulary had ever had to worry about before.

‘The police, are you crazy?’ Ameena scoffed. All drowsiness seemed to have left her now, and – aside from the splodge of blood in her hair – she was back to her swaggering self. ‘You just knocked the guy clean through a metal door. With one punch!’

I shrugged, trying my best to play it cool, despite the fact I was trembling from head to toe. ‘So?’

‘So when he wakes up he’s going to be angry. He’s going to be bloody
furious.’

I glanced again at the twisted metal of the door. Did something move in there? Surely not. Not already.

‘He’ll come for you, kiddo,’ Ameena warned. ‘And when he does I don’t think any police force on Earth is going to be able to stop him.’

T
here are two churches in our village. One of them is small and white and looks just like a normal house, except with a rainbow painted right across one side. The other is a big, old-fashioned spooky place, with a graveyard at the back, and a spire that looks like it might topple over at any minute. One of them is called Saint Mary’s and the other is The Church of the Friendship Fellowship. No prizes for guessing which is which.

Unfortunately, the creepy one with the graveyard was closest to the garage, and Ameena decided it would be a good idea to go hide there in case Mr Mumbles came after us again.

‘Why a church?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s close,’ she replied. ‘And because there’s not a whole lot else open right now.’

I didn’t argue. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that people used to hide out in churches for safety and protection. Right now the idea of being protected sounded pretty good.

The heavy wooden doors creaked loudly as we pushed them open. I should have expected it. Just once tonight, I’d have liked something to not sound all ominous and evil. What was it with people? Didn’t anyone oil their hinges any more?

The big doors led into a low-roofed room, and a second, smaller doorway. Blue paint flaked from the walls, peeling off in large, jaggy strips, exposing the bare plaster beneath. The place smelled exactly like the attic at home, and for a moment the stench of damp triggered the first stirrings of panic, before I was able to swallow it back down.

I’d never been in a church before – Mum didn’t believe in ‘any of that nonsense’ – but from everything I’d heard about them, I was expecting something a bit more grand and
impressive. This was just like a corridor – a narrow space with a tatty rug on the floor and a cork-board on one side with some boring-looking notices pinned to it.

‘It’s like a shed or something,’ I muttered.

Then Ameena stepped past me and pulled open the second set of doors.

At once, I realised my mistake. A long aisle of polished wood shone all the way from the entrance to an imposing statue of a giant Jesus on the cross. Around the hall, the walls curved up and up, until they became the thick, oak beams of a vast, ornate ceiling.

From the ceiling hung two huge chandeliers, which looked like they’d been made to hold candles, but which were now rigged up with dozens of little light bulbs. Their soft white glow cast a strange, almost magical sheen over the rows and rows of wooden pews.

In all directions, stained-glass saints looked lovingly down from the windows, watching over the congregation from worlds away. Right now, though, the congregation consisted of Ameena, me and not another living soul.

‘You must have a really impressive shed,’ she whistled, stepping into the church. Her footsteps echoed on the wooden floor, and the sound seemed to bounce all the way around the room.

‘Pretty amazing, eh?’ I said, my voice hushed.

‘Not too shabby,’ she admitted, quietly. ‘But why are you whispering?’

‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged, still keeping the noise down. ‘Aren’t you supposed to whisper in churches? Isn’t that like a rule or something?’

‘I think that’s libraries.’

‘Oh, yeah.’

We were still speaking in hushed tones, neither one of us daring to be the first to raise our voices.

‘I really want to shout,’ Ameena said. She giggled, nervously. It was the first girly thing I’d seen her do. ‘Like, properly shout, just to see what happens.’

‘Don’t!’ I hissed. ‘You’ll get us chucked out!’

‘By who? There’s no one here but us and the Big J over there.’ She glanced across at the enormous statue. ‘And I
can’t see him grassing us up.’

‘Look, just don’t, will you?’ I pleaded. I wasn’t used to churches, and they made me uneasy. With everything I’d been through already tonight, I didn’t know if my nerves could take any more strain.

‘Fine, I won’t,’ Ameena sighed, ‘but only if we stop whispering.’

‘OK,’ I agreed, still hushed. ‘Just don’t shout!’

‘Right, then,’ she said, in something closer to her normal volume. ‘There, I’ve done it. Your turn.’

‘What should I say?’ I asked, quietly.

‘It doesn’t matter! Just say anything.’

‘Anything,’ I said. My voice sounded stupidly loud in the silence of the church hall.

‘There, wasn’t so bad, was it?’

I shrugged. It still felt wrong to be speaking out loud in a church, but then I figured that people sang hymns and stuff there, so talking was probably allowed, too. I also had a vague memory of a man who came to visit our school two or three times a year. He wore a black suit and a white dog
collar, and spoke as if everyone else in the world was deaf. If he was allowed in a church, then speaking in a normal voice couldn’t possibly be against the rules.

Ameena nodded and smiled as she scraped her hair away from her face and tied it back. It was the first time I’d been able to look at her properly since she’d shown up. To begin with I’d thought she was older than me, but now I wasn’t so sure. A little taller, yes, but maybe my age.

Her skin was pale brown, like coffee with milk in. She was skinny – a little bit too skinny to be healthy – and I wondered where she’d found the strength to hit Mr Mumbles so hard with my bat earlier in the night. Adrenaline, I guessed.

Her clothes were shades of black and grey, and looked like they’d been slept in. But so did mine right now, so I couldn’t exactly blame her for that. Either her feet were ridiculously out of proportion to the rest of her body, or the shabby black boots she wore were a good few sizes too big. Either way, I imagined getting a kick from one of them would be like being booted by a horse.

I watched her set off to explore the church. Living in the
middle of nowhere, I didn’t get to meet a lot of people. It was usually the same faces saying the same things, day after day after day.

Ameena was different. Not just because she was new, but because she was…well, just
different.
I’d never met anyone like her before. I doubted there was anyone else quite like her
to
meet.

It was lucky she’d shown up when she had. Another one of tonight’s coincidences that I didn’t want to start questioning too much. That said, though, there was something about her…Something about the way she was taking most of the weirdness in her stride, which made me wonder if—

‘Hey, check these out,’ she called, waving at me from the closest corner of the hall and derailing my train of thought. I jogged across and found her standing stock-still, pretending to be part of the full-sized nativity scene which had been set out in the corner nearest the door. She stood there, hands clasped together, between the Three Wise Men and the shepherds, and just behind a donkey with an ear broken off.

‘You make a good angel,’ I told her. Instantly, a blush
stung at my cheeks. That sounded like a corny chat-up line. ‘I mean…I didn’t…’

‘I’d make a terrible angel,’ she replied, choosing not to comment on my remark. ‘Feathers freak me out.’ Her whole body convulsed at the thought of them. Nope, I’d definitely never met anyone like Ameena before.

When her shuddering had passed, she rapped her knuckles on the donkey’s ribcage. ‘What do you think of this baby?’ she asked.

‘It’s…a donkey?’

‘It’s not just a donkey, kiddo, it’s a
heavy
donkey.’

I looked from the statue of the animal to Ameena and back again. She was nodding like she was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t have a clue what it was.

‘So?’

‘So, super strength, remember?’

‘Nope, you’ve lost me.’

Ameena threw up her arms and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘Look, you punched a full-sized man through a metal door, right?’

‘Like I said, it was a lucky punch, that was—’

‘Shut up, I’m not finished. Lucky punch or not, what you did shouldn’t have been possible. Under any normal circumstances, a weakling like you – no offence – should not have been able to do something like that.’ She paused for a moment, letting her words sink in. Much as I’d have liked to, I couldn’t argue.

‘Meaning that for a split second there, you used muscles you don’t even have. For just that moment, you were strong.
Super
strong.’ She gave the donkey statue a shove. It didn’t budge. ‘Aren’t you even a little curious how you did it?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Liar! Come on, have a go. See if you can lift it. It could come in handy for when your friend gets back on his feet.’

She had a point. Something
had
happened to me when I’d run at Mr Mumbles. Something I didn’t remember ever feeling before. I thought about the tingling at the top of my spine, the feeling of electricity crackling across my skull. Something had definitely been happening to me. The question was: What?

And then there was the other stuff. The light bulb which burst into life just when I’d needed it most. The axe which had appeared out of nowhere. And as for the shield…