The Imaginary (12 page)

The marshmallows were imagined too, but they tasted delicious, sticky and gooey. The library was a generous home, dreaming up all of this for them.

‘That's one thing
we
can't do, Rudge,' Emily had explained. ‘That's what the reals are for, dreaming stuff up. I bet your Amanda did it?'

‘Yeah, every day.'

‘Our job is to share it, to enjoy it. Guide it if you can, make suggestions, make requests, but you're always working with someone else's imagination. Remember that.'

He sipped another mug of hot chocolate and said nothing. He was thinking about Amanda. Emily's words from earlier were still rolling round his head. He was sure he'd be able to prove
her
wrong. Maybe no other imaginary friend had made it back to their real friend before, their original friend, but that just meant he'd be the first.

He listened to the conversations going on around him. They were about people he didn't know who'd done things he didn't understand in places he'd never heard of with children he'd never met. After a while he decided he had to speak up.

He coughed.

‘Excuse me,' he said.

The room fell silent, except for the rhythmic bouncing noise of a Friend who was the spitting image of a ping pong ball. (Rudger was more than glad Amanda had imagined him as an ordinary boy. It made things much easier.)

‘I'm new here,' he said. ‘As you know. Emily's been very helpful and has told me about how this place works. But…I don't…I don't think I'm meant to be here, not yet. There was an accident, you see.'

He began to tell the story, beginning the night before, when they'd been playing hide and seek with the babysitter.

‘Did you say “Mr Bunting”?' Snowflake asked, from somewhere near the ceiling, when Rudger first mentioned the man.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘That's what Amanda said his name was. She heard him tell her mum.'

‘“
Mr Bunting
”?'

There was something funny about the way the dinosaur said the name. As if it were teasing him.

‘
What is it?' he said.

Emily put a hand on his shoulder and chuckled.

‘Sorry, Rudge. We all know about Mr Bunting already. It's no good trying to make out you
met
him. You're not gonna fool us. Sorry to ruin your story.'

‘No, but we
did
meet him. He tried to—'

The teddy bear, a girl called Cruncher-of-Bones, laughed.

‘Oh yeah? Next you'll be saying you met Simple Simon.'

‘Who's Simple Simon?'

‘He's even scarier than Mr Bunting,' Emily said. 'He takes the place of your real friend in the night. Puts on their skin, looks at you through their eyes, and he tells you to do things. Weird things. Dangerous things. And because he says it in their voice, using their tongue to make the words, well…you have to do it.'

‘Oh, be quiet, Emily,' said Snowflake. ‘Simple Simon gives me the willies. I'll not be able to sleep tonight now you've put the thought in my head.' The dinosaur gnashed its great teeth together and shook as if a shiver were going up its spine. ‘Brrr.'

‘But it wasn't this Simple Simon bloke,' Rudger said, ‘it was Mr Bunting. Tell me about him. What do you know?'

‘Only what everyone knows, Rudge,' Emily said. ‘He was born hundreds of years ago,' she went on, sounding as if she were reciting from an encyclopaedia, ‘but he made a bargain with the devil. Blah, blah, blah.'

‘I heard it was with pixies,' someone said.

‘
No, aliens,' said another.

‘I thought it was with a bank manager,' said Cruncher-of-Bones.

‘Well,
I
heard it was the devil, but it don't matter,' Emily went on. ‘The point is, he just keeps on living. He don't die, even though he's hundreds of years old.'

‘And what keeps him alive is…go on…' the ping pong ball urged between bounces.

‘He eats imaginaries, Rudge. He eats people like us. And for each one he eats, he lives another year longer. That's what they say. But the stories don't say anything about him having a Friend.'

‘Yes they do,' Snowflake said. ‘What I heard was that he eats Friends to give himself enough imagination to keep believing in
his
Friend. Now he's a grownup, and has been for years and years, he should've forgotten her. But he doesn't want to, and the only way to keep believing is to eat…imagination.'

‘I never heard that,' Emily said.

‘How does he find Friends?' Rudger asked.

‘Oh, he sniffs them out,' Cruncher-of-Bones answered. ‘He can smell Fading, like cats do. Get a whiff of that up one nostril and he'll be on the trail like a bloodhound. And once he finds you it's cutlery out and eyes down for some speedy gobbling before you're all Faded away. Would you like another cake, Rudger?'

Rudger shook his head at the cake. He could smell Fading, eh? Well, that wasn't how he'd found Amanda's house and found him. Mr Bunting had been hunting for Friends then, not just waiting.
He'd
been searching for them door-to-door. And from the moment Amanda had seen the girl on the doorstep Mr Bunting had known there was a girl living there who could see imaginary people, and that meant…

‘Can he be killed?' he asked.

Emily looked at him. ‘I don't remember any story where he got killed. Anyone?'

There was a general shaking of heads.

‘Zinzan said,' Rudger said, ‘that we just disappear if our children are killed. Is that true?'

‘Yeah,' said Emily, chewing a marshmallow. ‘And it happens the other way round too.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘If an imaginary dies, then the real friend dies too.'

‘I've not heard that,' said the bouncing ping pong ball.

‘It's true,' said Emily. ‘There was this kid I heard of once. Him and his Friend, PikPik, fell off this cliff, yeah? They'd been mucking about and there was an accident. And they were falling, and PikPik hit the ground first. She smashed to pieces…vanished, poof! And then her real friend died too.'

There was a moment's silence before Snowflake said, ‘But they'd fallen off a cliff. Of course the real friend died.'

‘No,' said Emily, lowering her voice so everyone had to lean in to hear, ‘you didn't listen proper. The imaginary died,
then
the real kid.'

‘But they both fell from a great height,' Snowflake protested.

‘
Yeah, but the real kid was dead
before
it hit the ground.'

The silence dragged out a little longer before the dinosaur said, ‘How do you know?'

Emily shrugged. ‘That's just what I heard.'

It had grown late. The fire was dying down.

Some imaginaries were already heading off to bed.

Emily led Rudger between bookcases and down aisles until they reached one where there were hammocks slung from side to side.

‘Here, let me give you a leg up,' she said, cupping her hands together and helping Rudger climb into the dangling bed.

He'd spent all his life sleeping in the bottom of a wardrobe, so this was new to him. There were blankets and a pillow and the hammock rocked a little, as if the whole library were out at sea. It gentled and soothed him. After the long, dark day he'd had, the library was singing him a lullaby.

He didn't expect to sleep. So much had happened and was running round in his head. He was wondering where Amanda was. Was she at home or was she in a hospital? Was she thinking of him? And where was Mr Bunting, and was
he
thinking of Rudger too?

But he did sleep, without even noticing it, and the next thing he knew it was morning.

When he woke up, with the electric lights of the library flickering overhead and real people flicking through books either side of his hammock, he climbed down and made his way through the stacks back to the clearing where they'd had the campfire the evening before.

Snowflake wasn't there, but some of the other imaginaries were.

Emily smiled when she saw him. ‘Breakfast?'

Cruncher-of-Bones wheeled her squeaking trolley towards him and offered him cakes and another mug of hot chocolate.

There were real people all over the place. One was sitting at the table next to the bouncing ping pong ball, reading a newspaper. The real people simply didn't see the imaginary ones and the imaginaries were ignoring the real ones. It was as if two different worlds had been superimposed on top of each other in the one library. Although they shared the same space, they didn't actually touch.

Or
that was what Rudger thought until he put his mug down on top of a book. The book was more on the edge of the table than he'd realised. The hot chocolate unbalanced it and sent it spinning to the floor.

The mug and its contents vanished before they hit the ground, but the book landed with a thud.

The man reading the newspaper looked up.

‘We try not to do that, Rudge, me pal,' Emily said, punching him on the arm in a friendly manner. ‘It can scare them and we're the good guys, remember?'

Rudger leant down to pick the book up.

‘Leave it,' Emily said.

‘But…' began Rudger.

‘Think about it a moment, Rudge. The bloke's surprised by a book falling off the table. But books do that. Things fall down. It's gravity. He'll go back to his paper in a second and think no more about it. On the other hand, if he sees a book flying up
off
the ground and
onto
the table, that's a different thing altogether. That's just weird and he'll think the place is haunted or something. He'll start having nightmares and it'll all be your fault. And you don't want to do that, do you?'

Rudger shook his head.

‘Okay,' she said. ‘I've decided, you and me, we're gonna go and befriend a kid this morning. We'll do it together. No point hanging around.'

‘
But I want to find Amanda,' he said.

‘And how you gonna do that?'

‘I'll find out where the ambulance took her. I mean, it's obvious isn't it, she's probably in the hospital. I'll go look there.'

Emily shook her head.

‘It's as if you've not listened to a word I've said, Rudge. You can't go out there looking by yourself. You leave the library and you'll start to Fade.'

Rudger opened his mouth and held his finger up as if he had thought of something to say.

‘What you need to do,' she went on when he didn't say anything other than ‘But…', ‘is come with me. We'll find you a new friend, and then, when they believe in you, if you still insist, you can try and talk them into a trip to the hospital. But you can't do it alone.'

As much as he wanted to just run out and find Amanda, get his old life back, he knew he had to do what Emily said. She was the one that knew what she was talking about. That didn't stop it feeling awfully frustrating though.

‘Come on,' she said, walking towards the notice board.