Before You Sleep (2 page)

I stood in hot sunshine on the other side of the gate, smiling. The light was brighter over there; glinting off all the white stone and glass on the hill. And the air seemed weird, real thick and warm. When I looked back through the gate, the world around Ritchie seemed grey and dull like it was November or something. He stood on his own, biting his bottom lip. Around us, the overgrown grass was so glossy it hurt my eyes to look at it. Reds, yellows, purples, oranges and lemons of the flowers flowed inside my head and I could taste hot summer inside my mouth. Around the trees, the statues and the flagstone path, the air was wavy and my skin felt so warm that I shivered. Closing my eyes, I said, ‘Beautiful.’ A word that I wouldn’t usually use around Pickering.

‘This is where I want to live,’ he said, his eyes and face one big smile.

We both started to laugh and hugged each other, which we’d never done before. Anything I ever worried about seemed silly now. I felt taller, and could go anywhere, and do anything that I liked. I know Pickering felt the same. Anything Ritchie said sounded stupid to us, and I don’t even remember it now.

Protected by the overhanging tree branches and long grasses, we kept to the side of the path and began walking up the hill. But after a while, I started to feel a bit nervous. The house looked even bigger than I’d thought it was, down by the gate. Even though we could see no one and hear nothing, I felt like we’d walked into a crowded but silent place where lots of eyes were watching us. Following us.

We stopped walking by the first statue that wasn’t totally covered in green moss and dead leaves. Through the low branches of a tree, we could still see the two stone children, naked and standing together on the marble block. One boy and one girl. They were both smiling, but not in a nice way, because we could see too much of their teeth.

‘They’s all open on the chest,’ Pickering said. And he was right. Their stone skin was peeled back on the breastbone, and cupped in their outstretched hands were small lumps with veins carved into the marble – their own little hearts. The good feeling I had down by the gate went.

Sunlight shone through the trees and striped us with shadows and bright slashes. Eyes big and mouths dry, we walked on and checked some of the other statues that we passed. We couldn’t stop ourselves; it was like the sculptures made you stare at them so that you could work out what was sticking through the leaves, branches and ivy. There was one horrible cloth-thing that seemed too real to be made from stone. Its face was so nasty that I couldn’t look at it for long. Standing under that thing gave me the queer feeling that it was swaying from side to side, and ready to jump off the block and come at us.

Pickering was walking ahead of me, but he stopped to look at another statue. I remember he seemed to shrink into the shadow that the figure made on the ground, and he peered at his shoes like he didn’t want to see the statue. I caught up with him, but didn’t look too long either. Beside the statue of the ugly man in a cloak and big hat was a smaller shape covered in a robe and hood with something coming out of a sleeve that reminded me of snakes.

I didn’t want to go any further and knew that I’d be seeing these statues in my sleep for a long time. Looking down the hill at the gate, I was surprised to see how far away it was now. ‘Think I’m going back,’ I said to Pickering.

Pickering never called me a chicken. He didn’t want to start a fight and be on his own. ‘Let’s just go into the house quick,’ he said. ‘And get something. Otherwise no one will believe us.’

The thought of getting any closer to the white house, and the staring windows, made me feel sick with nerves. It was four storeys high and must have had hundreds of rooms. All the windows upstairs were dark, so we couldn’t see beyond the glass. Downstairs, they were all boarded up against trespassers.

‘It’s empty, I bet,’ Pickering said, to try and make us feel better. But it didn’t do much for me. He didn’t seem so smart or hard any more. He was just a stupid kid who hadn’t got a clue.

‘Nah,’ I said.

He walked away from me. ‘Well, I am. I’ll say you waited outside.’ His voice was too soft to carry the usual threat. But all the same, I imagined his triumphant face while Ritchie and I were the piss pots. I’d even climbed the gate and come this far, but my part would mean nothing if Pickering went further than me.

We never looked at any more of the statues. If we had, I don’t think we’d have reached the steps that went up to the big iron doors of the house. Didn’t seem to take us long to reach the house either. Even taking slow, reluctant steps got us there real quick. And on legs full of warm water I followed Pickering up to the doors.

‘Why is they made of metal?’ he asked me.

I never had an answer.

He pressed both hands against the doors. One of them creaked but never opened. ‘They’s locked,’ he said.

But as Pickering shoved at the creaky door again, and with his shoulder and his body at an angle, I’m sure that I saw movement in a window on the second floor. Something whitish, behind the glass. It was like a shape had appeared out of the darkness and then sunk back into it, quick but graceful. It made me think of a carp surfacing in a cloudy pond before vanishing as soon as you saw its pale back. ‘Pick!’ I hissed.

There was a clunk inside the door that Pickering was straining his body against. ‘It’s open,’ he cried out, and he stared into the narrow gap between the two iron doors.

I couldn’t help thinking that the door had been opened from inside. ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. He smiled and waved for me to come over and to help him make a bigger gap. I stayed where I was and watched the windows upstairs as the widening door made a grinding sound against the floor. Without another word, Pickering walked inside the big white house.

Silence hummed in my ears. Sweat trickled down my face. I wanted to run to the gate.

Pickering’s face reappeared in the doorway. ‘Quick. Come and look at the birds.’ He was breathless with excitement, and then he disappeared again.

I peered through the gap at a big, empty hallway. I saw a staircase going up to the next floor. Pickering was standing in the middle of the hall, looking at the ground, and at all of the dried-up birds on the wooden floorboards. Hundreds of dead pigeons. I went inside.

No carpets, or curtains, or light bulbs, just bare floorboards, white walls and two closed doors on either side of the hall. On the floor, most of the birds still had feathers but looked real thin. Some were just bones. Others were dust.

‘They get in and they got nothin’ to eat,’ Pickering said. ‘We should collect the skulls.’ He crunched across the floor and tried the doors at either side of the hall, yanking the handles up and down. ‘Locked,’ he said. ‘Both locked. Let’s go up them stairs. See if there’s somefing in the rooms.’

I flinched at every creak our feet made on the stairs, and I told Pickering to walk at the sides like me. But he wasn’t listening and was just going up fast on his plump legs. When I caught up with him, at the first turn in the stairs, I started to feel real strange again. The air was weird, hot and thin like we were in a tiny space. We were both sweaty under our school uniforms too, from just walking up one flight of stairs. I had to lean against a wall.

Pickering shone his torch at the next floor. All we could see up there were plain walls in a dusty corridor. A bit of sunlight was getting in from somewhere upstairs, but not much. ‘Come on,’ he said, without turning his head to look at me.

‘I’m going outside,’ I said. ‘I can’t breathe.’ But as I moved to go back down the first flight of stairs, I heard a door creak open and then close, below us. I stopped still and heard my heart bang against my eardrums from the inside. The sweat turned to frost on my face and neck and under my hair. And real quick, and sideways, something moved across the shaft of light falling through the open front door.

My eyeballs went cold and I felt dizzy. From the corner of my eye, I could see Pickering’s face too, watching me from above, on the next flight of stairs. He turned the torch off with a loud click.

The thing in the hall moved again, back the way it had come, but it paused at the edge of the rectangle of light on the floorboards. And started to sniff at the dirty ground. It was mostly the way that she moved down there that made me feel as light as a feather and ready to faint. Least I think it was a
she
, but when people get that old you can’t always tell. There wasn’t much hair on the head and the skin was yellow. She looked more like a puppet made of bones and dressed in a grubby nightie than an old lady. And could old ladies move that fast? Sideways like a crab she went, looking backwards at the open door, so I couldn’t see the face properly, which I was glad of.

If I moved too quick, I’m sure that she would have looked up and seen me, so I took two slow steps to get behind the wall of the next staircase, where Pickering was already hiding. He looked like he was trying not to cry. I thought about them stone kids outside, and what they held in their little hands, and I tried not to cry too.

Then we heard the sound of another door opening downstairs. We huddled on a step together, trembling, and we peered round the corner of the staircase to make sure that the old thing wasn’t coming up the stairs, sideways. But another one was down there. I saw it skittering around by the door like a chicken, and all the air leaked out of me before I could scream.

That one moved quicker than the first one, with the help of two black sticks. Bent over with a hump for a back, it was covered in a dusty black dress that swished over the floor. What I could see of the face, through the veil, was all pinched and was sickly-white as the grubs you find under wet bark. And when she made the whistling sound, it hurt my ears deep inside and made my bones feel cold.

Pickering’s face was wild with fear and it was like there was no blood left inside his head and I was seeing too much of his eyes. ‘Is they old ladies?’ he said in a voice all broken.

I grabbed his arm. ‘We got to get out. Maybe there’s a window, or another door round the back.’ Which meant that we had to go up the stairs, run through the building and find another way down to the ground floor, before breaking our way out.

I took another peek down the stairs to see what
they
were doing, but wished I hadn’t. There were two more of them. A tall man with legs like sticks was looking up at us with a face that never changed, because it had no lips or eyelids or nose. He wore a creased suit with a gold watch chain on the waistcoat, and was standing behind a wicker chair. In the chair was a bundle wrapped in tartan blankets. Peeking above the coverings was a small head inside a cloth cap. The face was yellow as corn in a tin. The first two were standing by the open door so that we couldn’t get out through the front.

Running up the stairs into a hotter darkness, my whole body felt baggy and clumsy and my knees chipped together. Pickering went first with the torch and used his elbows so that I couldn’t overtake him. I bumped into his back, and kicked his heels, and inside his fast breathing I could hear him sniffing at tears. ‘Is they comin’?’ he kept asking. I didn’t have the breath to answer and kept running through the long corridor, between dozens of closed doors, to get to the end. I just looked straight ahead and knew that I would freeze if one of the doors opened. And with our feet making such a bumping on the floorboards, I can’t say that I was surprised when I heard the click of a lock behind us. We both made the mistake of looking back.

At first, we thought it was waving at us. But then we realised that the skinny lady in the dirty nightdress was moving her long arms through the air to attract the attention of the others that had followed us up the stairwell. We could hear the scuffle and swish as they came through the dark behind us. But how could this one see us, I thought, with all those rusty bandages around her head? Then we heard another of those horrible whistles, followed by more doors opening real quick, like them things were in a hurry to get out of the rooms.

At the end of the corridor, there was another stairwell with more light in it, which fell from a high window three floors up. But the glass must have been dirty and greenish, because everything around us on the stairs looked like it was under water. When he turned to bolt down the stairs, I saw that Pickering’s face was all shiny with tears and the front of his trousers had a dark patch spreading down one leg.

It was real hard to get down to the ground. It was like we had no strength left in our bodies, as if our fear was draining us through the slappy, tripping soles of our feet. But it was more than terror slowing us down; the air was so thin and dry, and it was hard to get our breath in and out of our lungs fast enough. My shirt was stuck to my back and I was dripping under the arms. Pickering’s hair was wet and he’d almost stopped moving, so I overtook him.

At the bottom of the stairs, I ran into another long, empty corridor of closed doors and greyish light that ran along the back of the building. Just looking all the way down it made me bend over with my hands on my knees to rest. But Pickering just ploughed right into me from behind and knocked me over. He ran across my body and stamped on my hand. ‘They’s comin’,’ he whined in a tearful voice, and stumbled off, down that passage.

When I got back to my feet I followed him, which never felt like a good idea to me, because if some of them things were waiting in the hall by the front doors, while others were coming up fast behind us, we’d get ourselves trapped. I even thought about opening the door of a ground-floor room and trying to kick out the boards over a window. Plenty of them old things seemed to come out of rooms when we ran past them, like we were waking them up, but they never came out of every room. So maybe we would have to take a chance on one of the doors.

I called out to Pick to stop. I was wheezing like Billy Skid at school who’s got asthma, so maybe Pickering never heard me, because he kept on running. As I was wondering which door to pick, a little voice said, ‘Do you want to hide in here?’

I jumped into the air and cried out like I’d trod on a snake, and stared at where the voice had come from. There was a crack between a door and the door-frame, and part of a little girl’s face was peeking out. She smiled and opened the door wider. ‘They won’t see you. We can play with my dolls.’ She had a really white face inside a black bonnet all covered in ribbons. The rims of her eyes were red like she’d been crying for a long time.