Stonebird (6 page)

“If you say anything, you're dead.”

They're the only words Jess says to me on the way home.

Apparently I Spoiled the Mood, so Jess said,
Please just go
to Ben. Then she told me to
find that stupid dog
, and now we're heading back so
Mom doesn't ruin my day even more than you already have
.

Jess can be really angry when she wants to be.

Once she snuck into Mom's room and tried to use her hair straighteners and had them on for so long that her bangs snapped right off. I tried not to laugh, but if you've ever seen someone with snapped-off bangs, you know that not laughing is pretty much the most impossible thing in the world. Anyway, Jess got so angry that she burst into my room and thumped me on the arm three times.

But I don't really mind about her, because all I can think about is the gargoyle.

You know how sometimes you hear a noise and it's so random that you think you're going crazy? Like, one day I was on a bus for a school trip and I heard a cow moo even though we were on the motorway, and Sam heard it too, and we looked at each other and burst out laughing, but even now we don't know if we really heard it or not?

That's how I'm feeling now.

Because first of all there were the glowing eyes.

Then there was the warm stone.

And now the gargoyle's gone.

I guess someone could have gone in and moved it, but I've still not seen anyone else use the church. And, anyway, how do you move a gargoyle that's as big as a whole room?

Then I think back to Grandma's diary. This must be how she felt when her gargoyle disappeared from the cathedral. And my story—

I told a story about the gargoyle vanishing, and now it's gone . . .

It was just a story,
I think.
Words can't make a gargoyle move.

Mom's still not back when we get home, so I feed Daisy and put some water in her bowl, then take my schoolbag with Grandma's diary in it and go upstairs to my room.

Hopefully she's written something else about Stonebird; otherwise the only other option is that I'm going crazy.

I sit on my bed and flick through the pages, trying to find any mention of the gargoyle. But after the one with the debris, it's all about escaping the country.

The entries stop and start after that, and none of them are very long. And there's nothing about the gargoyle. I flick through more and more pages and I'm about to give up when something makes me stop in my tracks.

I close the book, and even though I'm sitting in silence, my mind is twisting and turning and all my thoughts are crashing into one big mess.

I know it's impossible for a stone statue to follow Grandma from Paris to Swanbury. It's impossible for it to move at all. But it doesn't matter if it's the truth or a lie or a made-up story. Because if Stonebird really is the gargoyle, then he's our gargoyle; he's our secret.

It's another thing we have in common.

She might be a murderer,
I remind myself.

I haven't found any mention of that yet, but that doesn't mean anything. If it hasn't happened by now, maybe I was wrong about it happening in the War. Maybe . . .

Maybe she killed someone right here in Swanbury.

Suddenly the diary's hot in my hands. I quickly slide it back under the bed.

But something doesn't feel right. Before I found the diary, I didn't know Grandma at all. Now it's like she's my friend, even if she doesn't know it. The more I read, the more normal she seems.

How could a girl like that ever kill anyone?

In the morning I find Mom asleep on the sofa.

Dark marks have spread under her eyes like bruised fruit. There's still a wineglass in her hand, dangling from her fingers. I sit next to her and take the glass and put it on the table. There's a tiny bit of red wine left in the bottom, but it's dried up and scabby. The bottle's empty.

“Mom?” I whisper,

She blinks. Her eyes open slowly.

“My darling,” she says.

“I really don't mind about school. You don't have to pick me up.”

She smiles and looks as if she's about to say something, but her eyes drift closed.

I brush the hair out of her eyes and sit back and listen to the quiet of the house, all the little noises you only
normally hear when you're trying to get to sleep. Sometimes I think houses are like people. They get tired just like we do and sigh just like we do. They even have faces, sometimes, if you look close enough, with windows for eyes and a door for a mouth.

If Mom was a house she would be a white one, like one of the houses up by the church. Her face is white as a mask. Mom has never liked Halloween, but if she went trick-or-treating looking like this, I think she'd get a lot of sweets.

“She's been like that all night,” says a voice from the door.

Jess. She's not wearing her school uniform.

“Aren't you going to school?” I ask.

“Nope.”

I guess that means she's still not talking to me.

What's got into her? She's starting to remind me of Dave back in Colchester. He didn't do anything his mom wanted him to do unless he wanted to do it too, which was not very often. He played on his PlayStation until after midnight and spent all his pocket money on sweets and hid in the park in the morning so he could ditch school but not get caught.

Mom used to say Dave was a Bad Influence. I think she was scared I would ditch school too. I stopped spending so much time with him because I wanted Mom to be happy, and then we moved, so now I don't get to see him at all.

Jess's boyfriend seemed nice in the church, but I'm starting to think he's probably a Bad Influence because Jess has never skipped school before. It's not like she'll ever
listen to me, so I don't say anything, just watch her in the doorway until she turns and walks away.

I don't think she's forgiven me for following her into the church.

“See you later, Mom,” I say before I head out to school.

“Today we're going to learn about the White Mouse,” Mrs. Culpepper says.

“What have mice got to do with the War?” says Matt.

Mrs. Culpepper writes
The White Mouse
up on the board, then turns around and says, “Not mice.
Mouse
. Singular. It's the nickname of one of the Second World War's greatest heroes.”

She tells us about how this lady called Nancy Wake helped smuggle people out of France, and about how she went on top-secret spy missions and even killed a man with her bare hands. Apparently the Germans wanted so badly to capture her that they tortured her husband, only he didn't give anything up.

“She was named after a mouse because she was so sneaky,” says Mrs. Culpepper. “She was so stealthy and quiet that she managed to get away from her enemies before they could capture her. Can you imagine how scary it would be to have Nazis after you at every turn? I'd like you to imagine you're a spy behind enemy lines and come up with a nickname for yourself based on your favorite character trait. But to make it more fun, I'd like you to
draw
whatever your nickname might
be, and we can put the best ones up on the wall this afternoon.”

She hands out some paper, then she smiles, which means
get to work
, and there's shuffling and banging as everyone prepares to draw. I pick up the pencil and move the paper closer to me, staring at the blankness.

How do you come up with a spy nickname anyway? It should be easy, because lately I've felt like a bit of a spy myself, sneaking around and trying to find out the truth about the killing. But the more I look at the white page, the more I think I'm never going to be able to start. I wonder if Grandma ever had any trouble with her drawings.

Mrs. Culpepper moves around the class, peering at people's work. I start doodling just so I'm drawing something. I sketch and shade and sketch and shade until I hear a noise behind me and look up to find her frowning at me.

“What's that?” she says.

I look at what I've drawn. It has horns and wings and sharp claws, and it's snarling out of the page. All of a sudden my cheeks burn, and I can feel sweat on my neck. I guess if I was a spy my nickname would be Stonebird.

“It's—um—it's a gargoyle,” I say.

“Like the one in your story? The one your grandmother found in Paris?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

She opens her mouth to say something, then stops. “Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Liam?”

Why is she looking at me like that?

“No,” I say quietly.

She nods, as if deciding something, and taps my drawing. “A fine creature. You can't get much nobler than a gargoyle. I look forward to seeing this one when it's finished.” She goes to move away—

“Mrs. Culpepper?” I ask.

“Yes?”

“What do you mean by ‘You can't get much nobler than a gargoyle'? What . . . what are they actually for?”

Her face is full of friendly crinkles. I wonder if one day a demon will move inside her head and turn her into a ghost, into stick-like bones and saggy skin, with fire in her eyes, with tears and hatred.

“Gargoyles are wonderful things,” she says. “In the old stories, in the days of King Arthur and the like, people believed that gargoyles protected them. Protected them from demons and evil spirits. Kept them safe. But there are those who say they're dangerous too.”

My heart's pounding in my chest. I can feel it. A rush of images flashes in my mind, but I can't make anything out. All I can hear is Mrs. Culpepper's voice saying
Protected them from demons and evil spirits,
over and over again.

“What do you believe?” I ask.

“They're good stories,” says Mrs. Culpepper. Then she turns away and walks to the next desk, and says, “Ooh, a dragon!”

When we're done, we hand in the drawings, and Mrs. Culpepper piles them on her desk at the back of the room. “These are excellent,” she says. “I can't wait to have a proper look.”

Then she picks up the marble egg, and the room falls silent.

“Now,” Mrs. Culpepper says, looking around at each of us, “we've done introductions. We've done War stories. Now it's time to move on to stories of your own. Stories that you make up, stories that you tell.”

A shiver of excitement runs around the class.

Everyone loves the magic egg.
Stories stories stories
is all anyone's gone on about. Even the other classes have heard about it, and whenever you walk around school you can hear whispers of jealousy. It's better than doing math, I guess.

“These can be about anything you like. If you'd like to tell a nonfiction story, a real story that happened to you in real life, you can. But, equally, if you'd like to create something of your own, go right ahead. The floor is yours.”

Mrs. Culpepper doesn't even have to ask us to form a circle this time.

We sit and wait for her to take her place in the middle. I think back to the first time I sat here, remembering the fog and my heavy tongue and the egg hot in my hands, remembering not being able to say anything at all.

Just think of a story.

I cast my mind back to everything that's happened this week, from Jess and her boyfriend to the church and—

The gargoyle.

She did say it doesn't have to be about me.

My fingers wriggle in excitement, but I try to keep it secret, because I don't want to look like a massive weirdo in front of the class.

Where's the egg?

There! With a girl called Samantha Potts. Five people away from me.

The gargoyle. Right. But what can I say? I've still got to have a story.

“—and I took my little brother to see him, and all the way I was so nervous. I kept chewing my lip without realizing it. We got in line and we were holding our books for him to sign, and all I could think of was that bit in
Blue Planet
when the shark jumps out of the sea in slow motion—”

What do gargoyles do? They sit on castles and hide in churches and watch.

But that's when we're looking at them.

One of my favorite movies is
Toy Story
. The best thing about it is that the toys come alive, but only when no one's looking. And even though everyone knows toys are just toys and they can't move and they don't even have hearts, how can we be sure they're not really alive if they move only when we're not there to see them?

“I want to talk about my dog, Bertie,” says a boy whose name I can't remember. “He's the greediest dog in the world, and he begs all the time, but, anyway, at the weekend, he ate some paint and started doing blue poos all around the garden—”

Jess says
Toy Story
is a What If? story.
What if
toys came alive when you weren't looking? I like What If? stories. They're the best kind. You can ask What if? about nearly everything in the world, but the best What If? stories are
ones where the question is short and simple. What if our principal was an alien? What if Daisy could fly? What if dinosaurs came back to rule the world?

All that's going through my head is
what if, what if, what if
when the egg's passed to me and I can feel it hot in my hands and all the faces in the class turn to look at me. And I just talk, talk without even thinking. It just comes out.

There's a gargoyle in the haunted church, and it's alive.

You might not believe me, but it's true. It's there with the shadows and the ghosts. It's there in the dark.

I know because I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes, two weeks ago.

I ran out of my house and all the way up Church Lane until I was in the churchyard, and the building stood over me. It was so dead you could almost imagine it was alive.

The wind swirled around me and the trees creaked. It sounded like they were whispering. Probably saying
Don't go in there. Don't go in that church. It's haunted.

But I did.

I opened the door and walked in, and I could hear the ghosts all around me.

Whispering things.

But I knew I had to keep going. Because there was something up ahead.

The gargoyle. There were three claws at the top of each of its wings. Its tail was long and coiled, with a sharp point. And its legs . . . its legs were lion's legs. It prowled the church in the shadows. And it turned to face me.

I stared at it and it stared at me, and I could feel its eyes burning into me, flickering like white-hot moonlight, and as I looked at them I knew things in my head. I knew about its cathedral in Paris. It watched over Notre Dame and watched over the people there, and no one looked up, no one cared. I knew it because the gargoyle knew it.

It showed me.

Showed me how it flew through the night to find a new home.

I saw it all when I looked at it.

And I know it saw everything about me too.

It didn't speak, but I heard it. Like when you can almost hear a dog's thoughts when it's looking at you. I heard it and I knew what it wanted to say.

That it was looking out for me.

That I wasn't alone.

That it would protect me.

I'm staring at the floor, squeezing the egg with everything I've got. Every face is on me, every pair of eyes.

Even Matt. Even Mrs. Culpepper.

“What an imagination,” she says.

She doesn't take her eyes off me as I pass the egg to Tilly, next to me, and she keeps watching me even when Tilly starts talking about trying to break the world record for how many crackers you can eat in a minute.

I'd quite like to listen to Tilly, because I've tried to break that world record myself. We all tried in my old school, but your mouth gets so dry it's practically
impossible. But I can't listen to her, not really, because Mrs. Culpepper is still looking at me, and it sends eels wriggling up my neck.

The warmth of the egg still lingers on my hands. I glance down at them, wondering where that story came from. Could I really have just made it up?

When I look back up, Mrs. Culpepper's smiling and nodding at Tilly's story and laughing along with the rest of the class.