The House at World's End (6 page)

She went to wake Tom. ‘You imagined it,’ he said, ‘like you imagined the ghost on the stairs.’

‘Come and see. It looks like a torch.’

Grumbling, he went down the passage to her toom. The light had gone out. He grumbled back to bed. He had been out on Old Red all day and would be out again early tomorrow, trying to find a job as errand boy, stock boy, cow hand, dish washer, anything. It had been easy to say, ‘I’ll leave school and get a job.’ Not so easy to do it.

Carrie got up early to make him her special breakfast of greasy bacon and flat eggs and burned toast. It was not yet quite light as she stood at the door under the inn sign to wave him Good Luck. It must be her imagination that made her think she saw a face watching her through a gap in the hedge that separated the front grass plot from the stable yard.

‘I am going mad,’ she thought, like Valentina. ‘I really do see things.’ Soon she would no longer know what was real and what was imaginary and they would lay her on a couch, like that girl Frenzie at school, and try to talk it out of her.

She bent her knees to look straight into the gap in the hedge. Staring at her, a few yards away, was a boy’s
brown pointed face like a goblin, with dark, unblinking eyes.

‘Wha-what do you want?’ Carrie licked her lips. Her mouth was suddenly as dry as a desert, although she had drunk two mugs of last night’s stewed-up tea.

The boy butted his head forward and scrabbled himself through the hedge with tough scratched hands.

‘I want my dogs.’ He stood up. He was about Carrie’s age, perhaps a bit younger. Skinny, but neat and wiry, not all over the place with huge dangling hands and feet, like Tom.

‘What dogs?’ She was afraid she knew what he meant, but she shook back her hair and opened her eyes wide, to look innocent.

‘The pointer and her puppy.’

‘She’s not really much of a pointer. There’s more terrier in her, and perhaps some springer.’ Carrie got interested in Perpetua’s ancestry, and then remembered. ‘She was wounded and starving. We rescued her. Go away, or I’ll prosecute you.’

The boy put his hands in his pockets and smiled in a weary sort of way, as if she were a grown-up who had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. ‘I rescued her,’ he said patiently. ‘When she growled at Bernie because of her puppy, he hit her with a spade - I was spying on him -so I had to get her away. I went back for the puppy later.’

‘Who’s Bernie?’

‘Vile Bernie. Vile name, vile soul. He lives in one of those shacks at the old rubbish pit. Bottle Dump, they call it. He catches stray dogs and cats - sometimes not even strays, but people’s pets - and sells them.’

‘Who to?’

‘A laboratory.’

‘What for?’

To experiment on. They practise operations on them, and inject them with germs.’ He picked a stick out of the hedge and broke it in tiny pieces with his thin brown fingers. ‘They poison them.’

‘How do you know?’ Carrie’s scalp was prickling with horror.

‘I know things. My father works for the Railway. He’s seen Vile Bernie bring animals to the station in boxes. He says it’s for the good of the human race, my father does.’

‘That’s not
fair
!’

‘Especially as it’s all the same thing. Dead people come back to life as animals, you know, and animals as people. That cat of mine you stole, the ginger one, I think she may be my great-aunt Gertrude.’

‘Her name’s Pip. And she’s orange, not ginger. We didn’t steal her. We found her ages ago, when we first came here.’

‘I know.’ The boy bent swiftly down to pick a piece of grass to chew. He had a pointed lock of dark hair that fell over one eye. ‘I saw you. I’d brought Gertrude here to hide. I’d got into the house.’

‘I saw you.’
Carrie stared at him, remembering the picnic at the top of the meadow, and the face she had thought she saw beside the tattered curtain.

‘Yes.’ The boy nodded. ‘I thought you did.’

‘Why didn’t you come and tell us about Pip when we moved in? Why didn’t you tell us about Perpetua and her puppy instead of trying to hide them?’

‘I thought you’d tell.’

Tell? I’ll
help
you! What’s your name?’

‘Lester. I don’t like it. In my last life, I was called Rajah.’

‘Why?’

‘I was a circus elephant. They beat me, so I stampeded and they shot me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, instead of answering.

‘Carrie.’

‘How
do you
know?’

Well, I -I remember.’

‘That’s it.’

He remembered being an elephant! Carrie stared at him. He had dark shining eyes, like washed grapes, and a gleeful goblin smile. He used his hands like birds’ wings when he talked, and made sudden, darting movements, casting himself on the ground and rolling over, jumping up and running in a small circle leaning inwards, as if he had more energy in him than he could stand.

‘Don’t you remember who you were?’ he asked.

‘No. I mean …’ She didn’t want to disappoint this extraordinary boy. ‘I expect I was a horse. I often feel like one.’

‘Vile Bernie’s got a horse at Bottle Dump. It’s thin and miserable. It eats the wood off the shed where he keeps it, because it’s starving.’

‘Why don’t you tell the police?’

‘And be pinched for stealing his cats and dogs?’

‘Could we buy the horse?’ She could see it so clearly, almost feel it and smell it, see herself leading it away from the prison of Bottle Dump, thin and lame and needing her.

‘What with?’

‘I might be able to get the money.’
Dear Uncle Rudolf, I am writing to ask if you could possibly lend me some money
for something terribly important
… Go and ask Vile Bernie how much he’d sell it for.’

‘I can’t,’ Lester said. ‘He knows me. I was scouting round, looking for the puppy, and he came out with a gun and yelled, “If I ever see you round here again, I’ll blow your head off!”’

‘But I could go.’ Carrie was in a fever of excitement. The day had looked dreary. Getting up in the dark, ruining poor Tom’s breakfast, seeing him ride off so forlorn with Old Red going ‘Squee-clunk’ as the pedal hit the chain guard. Now it was beginning to look marvellous.

‘Come on then!’ Lester ran into the lane, looked quickly right and left for spies, and was off into the wood with his arms spread wide. ‘If you think you’re flying,’ he called back, ‘you are!’

Carrie raced after him. It was only afterwards, remembering, that she thought they really
had
flown through the green tunnel of the beech trees. Had they? With Lester you never knew. He was extraordinary. The most extraordinary boy she had ever met.

He led her across fields she had never seen, over hidden ditches like elephant traps, through secret gaps in thick thorn hedges and down winding car tracks she never knew existed. With Lester, you had the feeling that he had invented, not only the adventure, but a whole new landscape.

They came at last to Bottle Dump, an old gravel quarry, long disused, with hillocks of disgusting rubbish and a few old cars upside down without glass or wheels.

Lester pulled Carrie behind a bush and pointed to the steep cliff at the far end of the pit. ‘That’s where they still see the Headless Horseman, galloping to his death.’ He made a dash with her to another bush from where they could see into the quarry. ‘And that’s where Bernie lives, rot his vile soul.’

Some dilapidated shacks made of old boards and beaten-out tin cans leaned drunkenly against each other. Outside, tied on a short chain to a piece of rusted iron, a thin brown horse with a mangy tail and big bony knees nosed hopelessly among old newspapers and rotting cabbage stalks.

‘Oh, Lester—’ Carrie looked round, but he had disappeared as if he had never been there. She walked for ward. The horse raised his head and backed away as far as the chain would go. What had Vile Bernie done to make him so terrified of people?

‘Come on, boy. It’s all right.’ She walked towards him with her hand out. The horse stood quivering, ears tight back, sweat already darkening the stringy neck.

Carrie knew how animals talked and got to know each other. She put her hands behind her back and stuck her head forward and blew gently down her nose. The horse squared his nostrils. One ear came cautiously forward. She sent her breath towards him like a message, coming closer. To her joy, the other ear swung forward and he blew back at her. The chain grew slack. He relaxed, dropped his head, and they stood with their faces together, blowing and making friends, until there was a hideous yell from one of the shacks, and Carrie and the horse shied apart in terror.

Vile Bernie looked as evil as his name. He had filthy tangled hair and beard, clothes stiff with dirt and grease, one yellow eye squinting at Carrie along the barrel of a huge gun like a blunderbuss.

‘Get out of here!’ He stepped through the doorway. Carrie would have turned and run, but since Lester was watching her from some hiding-place, she had to make herself step forward.

‘I came to see if you would sell your horse.’

‘That ugly brute?’ Vile Bernie raised his head, but kept the gun to his shoulder.

‘He’s beautiful. Just what I want.’

Then you must be a worse fool than you look. Get out! I’m sick of you rotten kids hanging round here.’

He turned to go inside, putting down his gun, and Carrie ran forward before he shut the door. ‘I really want to buy him. How—’

‘Get out, I said!’ Vile Bernie held the door almost shut and stuck his horrid tangled head through the gap.
Beyond, Carrie got a glimpse of the filthy inside of the shack, wheresomething was cooking that smelled like putrid cod heads.

‘How much?’

‘One hundred pounds.’ He laughed, showing black and rotted teeth in the cave of his mouth.

‘A hundred pounds!’ She’d be lucky to get a hundred
pennies
out of the Prince of Plumbers, who had already cut down their allowance. That was why Tom
had
to find a job.

‘Anyway,’ jeered Vile Bernie, closing one yellow eye and putting a warty finger to the side of his purple nose, ‘it’s too late. I’m sending him to the coast tomorrow with One-Eyed Jake, the Pig Man, to ship to Belgium. Brute’s worth more dead than alive. They like horse meat over there.’ He threw back his head in a laugh like sulphur fumes and slammed the door.

Carrie could not bear to look at the horse again. She stumbled out of Bottle Dump, tripping and cursing and sobbing, and ran down the rutted track, away from that terrible place.

‘Zo,’ said a voice behind her. ‘Zo, now vee make a plan, yah?’

Half blind with tears, she turned to see Lester following her at a sprightly trot.

‘What plan?’

‘Listen.’ With one of his sudden movements, he pulled her down on to the grass under the hedge and began to talk fast. ‘Listen…’

‘Now listen,’ they said to Michael. ‘Listen very carefully. You’ve got to do exactly what we tell you.’

It was that evening.

Carrie had not told Michael about
the Plan until she got him away from the house, through the beech wood and down the path to the crossroads where Lester waited in a hollow tree, playing the mouth organ as softly and sadly as the wind on an autumn night

She had not told anyone about the Plan. Em might have said, ‘Yes, that’s all right,
but
…’ and pointed out all the snags. Tom, who was tired and grouchy after a long hopeless day of job hunting, might have played Man of the House and said, ‘I won’t let you do it. It’s against the Law.’

Michael only said, when they had told him the Plan and his part in it, ‘That’s easy. I thought you said it was going to be dangerous and difficult.’

When Lester hopped out of the hollow tree, putting his mouth organ in his pocket, Carrie said politely, ‘This is my brother, Michael.’

They said ‘Hullo’ without looking at each other, the way boys did. Then Lester turned swiftly, bent at the knees and put his face close to Michael’s. ‘Can I trust you?’

Michael was unmoved. ‘Everybody else does,’ he said calmly.

‘Good.’

Carrie could see that Lester liked him, although he was little. When they had decided they needed a third person, and she had said, ‘There’s my brother, but he’s very young,’ Lester had said, ‘Age is only a stupid label. He might be thousands of years old, for all you know. He might be a re-incarnated dinosaur.’

‘Are you prepared,’ he asked Michael, ‘for a mission fraught with peril and hardship?’

‘Well, I’m ready for a bit of a change from cleaning out the chicken house, if that’s what you mean.’

The Plan was this:

The road down which One-Eyed Jake, the Pig Man
must drive his van from Bottle Dump to the main road to the coast had recently been under repair. A lorry had skidded through one side of a narrow bridge - ‘No harm done, shallow water, the driver climbed out with the wireless still playing. I was first on the scene,’ said Lester, who didn’t seem to miss a thing.

While the bridge was being repaired, a detour sign had been set up at this crossroads to send traffic round in a loop through the village of Wareham, and back on to the road on the other side of the bridge.

After the repairs were finished, the detour sign was taken down, but not away. It was lying in the ditch, a board with legs. ‘DETOUR THROUGH WAREHAM.’

They took Michael over to see it. ‘DOCTOR THROW WAR HAM.’ he read. ‘What on earth does that mean?’

‘What’s the matter with this boy?’ Lester asked, not crossly, but curiously. ‘Can’t he read?’

‘Of course he can,’ Carrie said. ‘He just reads differently.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ Lester said. ‘Everyone does everything the same these days, like sheep.’

‘Henry doesn’t,’ Michael began. ‘He never—’ But Lester told him to cut out the social chatter and listen to orders.

Tomorrow was Sunday. One-Eyed Jake, said Lester, who knew everything about everybody in this neighbourhood, including people who probably did not exist, drove his wife to chapel in the morning. He could not get to Bottle Dump before two, which meant that after pushing or pulling the brown horse into his smelly pig van, he would pass this crossroads some time after two-thirty.