The Girl In the Cave (3 page)

And so it was. Every Saturday morning Kate bathed her fat Aunt Tina, and every Sunday evening she helped her Uncle Dermott kill butterflies. And every single night in her cave she stared at the water dripping from the rock roof and dreamed about having parents and picnics and going to school like other kids, until she fell asleep.

Chapter Four

A Phone Call

It was a Monday morning. Kate woke up feeling terrible. The night before, Uncle Dermott had made her choose not only the first butterfly for the killing jar but the first ten. And then he'd thrown them all away at the end of the night. Every last one.

She poured a little water out of her jam tin and splashed her face, washing the sleep from her eyes before scurrying up to the house. Uncle Dermott rose early every day and expected his breakfast to be ready in his study by the time he finished showering. Aunt Tina usually woke much later for her usual meal of bacon and fried Mars Bars. Kate was busy boiling the kettle and spreading butter and marmalade on Uncle Dermott's toast when something unusual happened. The telephone rang.

This was strange because the only person who ever called Uncle Dermott and Aunt Tina's house was Aunt Tina's sister, Pina, and she only ever phoned on Wednesday nights, to gossip with Aunt Tina about that afternoon's episode of
Shameless Passions.
Nobody
ever
called in the mornings.

For a couple of seconds Kate stared at the telephone, puzzled and not sure what to do. Perhaps it would stop ringing and she could get on with Uncle Dermott's breakfast. It didn't though, and after a minute Kate hesitantly lifted the handset.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Who is speaking, please?” The woman on the other end of the phone sounded quite confident and sure of herself, but there was a low scrape in her voice that made Kate a bit nervous.

“Kate.”

“My name is Miss Pincushion. Are your parents there, please?”

“I don't have any parents, just my aunt and uncle.”

After a puzzled pause, Miss Pincushion asked, “And what are their names?”

“Aunt Tina and Uncle Dermott.”

“Hmmm. Aunt and Uncle, is it? Would you put one of them on for me, please?”

“Yes, Miss. Just hold on and I'll get Uncle Dermott.”

Leaving the phone off the hook, Kate hurried to the study and knocked timidly on the door.

“Come!”

Uncle Dermott was sitting behind his desk, already in his black suit and tie, waiting for his breakfast. When he saw that Kate wasn't carrying it, he was less than happy.

“Where in damnation is my tea and toast, girl?”

“It's in the kitchen, Uncle. I'd have brought it to you but the telephone rang, and there's this lady named Miss Pincushion, and she …”

As soon as Kate said the name “Miss Pincushion”, Uncle Dermott sprang from his chair, as though bitten.

“Miss Pincushion? Calling here? Now? Did she say what she wanted?”

“No, Uncle. She's waiting to talk to you.”

“Oh dear.”

For the first time in as long as Kate could remember, Uncle Dermott looked genuinely upset. He rushed across the room muttering, “We can't have this. We can't have this at all.”

Suddenly he grabbed the front of Kate's grubby dress and shook her.

“What did you say to her? Did you tell her anything? Did you?”

“No, Uncle Dermott. I just came to get you.”

“Right. Good. Now …” He paced up and down the study like a caged tiger. “I'd better speak to her. I'll have to. You wake your aunt and tell her to get downstairs right away.”

And he rushed from the room.

Kate was amazed. In all the time she could remember, Uncle Dermott had never been this upset, ever. Instead of going straight to her aunt's bedroom, Kate slipped quietly back down the stairs and listened outside the kitchen door.

“Yes, what is it?”

Uncle Dermott sounded angry, but also just a tiny bit scared.

“Really? Are you sure that's necessary? I thought our agreement was quite clear … No… No … Not at all. Tomorrow will be fine. Goodbye.” And he hung up the telephone with an angry thump. Kate quietly trotted back up the stairs and into Aunt Tina's bedroom.

Most of the room was taken up by Aunt Tina's massive bed, a huge timber four-poster with a frilly canopy. In it, behind pink curtains, Aunt Tina snored like a hippopotamus with asthma.

“Aunt Tina?” Kate whispered. She had never been allowed to wake her aunt before. “Aunt Tina?”

No response. Her aunt just snorted and rolled onto her back. A bubble of spit floated out of her mouth and hovered for a couple of seconds before bursting in the air right above her nose.

“Aunt Tina. WAKE UP!”

Kate gently shook one of her aunt's massive ankles, starting a wave which ran all the way up Aunt Tina's body until her chin swung up and slapped her face.

“Hmmmpth, whu…”

Slowly, the giant woman opened her eyes.

“What are you doing here?”

“Uncle Dermott said to wake you.”

“What? Why? Dermott knows I need my beauty sleep. He'd never wake me. What's wrong?”

“I don't know, Aunt Tina. It's just that there was a phone call, from a Miss Pincushion …”

“PINCUSHION! Oh my goodness!” Aunt Tina sprang out of bed so fast that the floorboards creaked dangerously. “When? Why? What did she want?”

“I don't know. Uncle Dermott sent me to tell you to meet him in the kitchen.”

“Miss Pincushion. Oh dear, oh dear.” Aunt Tina bustled around, finding her pink quilted dressing gown and wrapping it around herself.

Intrigued, Kate followed her aunt downstairs. She wondered who Miss Pincushion was to upset them both so. Aunt Tina burst into the kitchen and started questioning Uncle Dermott.

“Is it true? Is it?”

“Calm down, Tina. We need to think.”

“But after all these years? Why? Why call now? What did she want?”

“She's coming to visit.”

“TO VISIT! When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Oh no! Oh gracious, Dermott, what will we do? Why is she coming?”

“She didn't say, but I think I can guess.”

“You don't mean she …”

“Of course,” Uncle Dermott interrupted. “What else could it be?”

“But tomorrow? There's no time.”

“Don't be silly, Tina. There's always time. We'll think of something.”

Kate was just about bursting with curiosity by now and couldn't stop herself from asking, “Who's Miss Pincushion?”

She shouldn't have spoken, because her aunt and uncle seemed to notice her for the first time, and their eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“That's none of your concern,” Uncle Dermott snapped.

“Quite right. No business of yours whatsoever,” added Aunt Tina.

“Now get out to your cave and wait there until we call you. And don't you dare set foot anywhere in the house or yard until then. Understand?”

“Yes, Uncle Dermott.”

And Kate made her way out the door and down the back path, leaving her aunt and uncle to their mysterious mutterings in the kitchen.

Chapter Five

A Glimmer in the Rock

In her cave, Kate lay on the rock shelf and wondered about the strange telephone call. Who was Miss Pincushion, and why were Uncle Dermott and Aunt Tina so frightened of her?

Outside, the sun climbed higher and higher, and still nobody summoned Kate back to work. It was very strange. Looking around, Kate realised that this was the first time she'd ever spent any time in the cave in the middle of the day. Usually she was up early to prepare breakfast, would spend all day working, and then cook dinner and clean up. It was always dark by the time she got back to the cave at night. She sat up on her rock shelf and looked around.

On the whole, the cave was unremarkable in full daylight. The stone roof was grey and dirty, the sand floor damp. Here and there little patches of mould and fungus clung to the walls, but otherwise there was nothing interesting to look at.

With a sigh, Kate lay back and stared at the roof. It had been ages now since she'd been sent from the kitchen and still no word from Aunt Tina or Uncle Dermott. It was most unusual. Soon they'd be missing their lunch, and that had never happened before.

While she was lying there, the morning grew hotter and hotter and brighter and brighter. She wished she could go outside, just to sit on the lawn, but with Uncle Dermott's mood she didn't dare. Instead she lay on her rock bed and tried as hard as she could to remember something about her parents, just as she did most nights before going to sleep. But the harder she tried, the less she seemed to remember. It was as though there was something in her head that blocked her memories. At night, however, as she relaxed, every so often a thought or two might jump into her mind. A picture of a woman with sweet eyes and long brown hair, or sometimes a memory of being pushed through the park in a blue pram with yellow daisies hanging from the hood. But every time, as soon as she tried to hold on to the memory, it would slip away again and Kate would be left lying in the dark, alone in the cave. She had learned that when her special memories floated into her head, she should just relax and let them carry her off to sleep, and then she would have more pleasant dreams.

That was what happened this particular afternoon. As Kate was lying there, with the daylight getting stronger and stronger outside, she suddenly recalled a voice, not Aunt Tina's rasping, whiny one, but a soft, deep, sweet voice singing a song:

Night has come my little one,
Here comes the moon, there goes the sun.
So dream some happy little dreams,
Where nothing is quite what it seems.

And with these words ringing in her head, Kate drifted off to sleep.

When she woke, it was late in the day. At first she wasn't at all certain what time it was, because she was never allowed to sleep during the day. Then she remembered the telephone call, and Miss Pincushion, and being sent to the cave.

Kate sat up, puzzled. Surely Aunt Tina and Uncle Dermott wouldn't have left her to sleep in the cave all day? They needed their meals cooked and the cleaning done and the mail collected. But it seemed Miss Pincushion's call had upset them so much that nothing else mattered.

She wondered if perhaps she should go up to the house and find out what was going on. It was time to start dinner and she hadn't eaten all day, so she was hungry. But Uncle Dermott's instructions had been quite clear: “Get out to your cave and wait there until we call you. And don't you dare set foot anywhere in the house or yard until then.” Those were his words and Kate had the feeling that it would be a particularly bad idea to disobey him at the moment.

Her tummy rumbling, Kate sat on the edge of the rock shelf. The afternoon sun had dropped low in the sky now and was shining directly in through the mouth of the cave, lighting up the inside all the way to the back. That was how Kate noticed something strange or, more accurately, two strange things.

The first was a rock, which might not seem particularly unusual in a cave, but this was an odd, flat rock, right in the deepest, darkest corner at the back of the cave, and it didn't seem to fit in with all the others. It was shimmery black in colour, whereas all the other stones were a dull grey, and the way it was propped against the back wall seemed deliberate and not just higgledy-piggledy. Crawling across the sandy floor, Kate picked up the strange stone. It felt warm and out of place in the cold dampness.

She hauled it back to her rock shelf, to examine it more closely, and as Kate turned the stone over she gave a gasp of surprise. There was writing carved into the shiny black face of the stone:

All that glimmers is not gold.
But then again, who knows?
What's mine is mine and yours is yours,
As this stone clearly shows.

You'll have to dig a little way,
To find the proper vein.
But if you're clever
Then you'll never
Need to dig again!

P.P.

Kate read the little poem over and over. What did it mean? She was still puzzling about it when she noticed the second strange thing. In the back wall of the cave, in the space which until a couple of minutes earlier had been hidden by the flat black rock, the sun was making something shimmer and glint. Something in the rock. Something golden.

Kate leapt back across to the sparkling rock. She crawled the last bit on her hands and knees, but finally, after banging her head a couple of times on the low roof, she was close enough to examine the twinkle carefully.

“How strange!”

Running through the stone was a thin, uneven golden thread, gleaming gently in the dying sunlight. In a couple of places it was as thick as her little finger, but for the most part it was no wider than a strand or two of thin cotton. It meandered this way and that across the face of the grey stone, until it disappeared into the deepest, darkest, tiniest little corner of the cave.

Reaching out, Kate traced a fingertip along the golden trail, surprised to discover that the shining rock felt a little warm and almost soft, unlike the rest of the cold, hard rocks in the cave. Then the sun finally sank and the last rays of light faded inside the cave. The little thread shimmered for a moment or two longer before fading and blending back into the rock. If she peered closely enough, Kate could still make out a dark wriggle across the face of the stone, but without sunlight all the shine had disappeared.

Kate crawled to the mouth of the cave and sat on the sand, looking out into the yard and thinking about what an odd day it had been. She was so used to working hard that now, after spending most of the day fast asleep, she felt awake and restless. The sun had gone completely, and a persistent rumble in her tummy reminded her that she hadn't eaten anything all day.

Kate decided to risk sneaking up to the house to find some food in the kitchen. By night the tangled back garden was full of shadows and hiding places, so if Uncle Dermott came out, she could duck out of sight.

Slowly and carefully she made her way along the path towards the back door, staying deep under the cover of the thorn bushes and weeds. From the cave, it was impossible to see the house, so as she crept out from under the final bush she was surprised to see every light in the house switched on and burning brightly.

Usually Uncle Dermott was very fussy indeed about people leaving lights on. He said that it ruined his butterflies and would get angry if he found a lit-up room with nobody in it. Of course, he always blamed Kate, even though it was usually Aunt Tina.

“Girl!” he would bellow, and Kate would come running.

“Yes, Uncle Dermott?”

“How many times do I have to tell you not to leave lights on? Power isn't free, you know? Are you
trying
to drive your poor aunt and I broke?”

“But Uncle Dermott …”

“Don't make excuses, you wasteful little gnat! I suppose you are going to deny leaving this light on.”

“But I haven't been in this room all day.”

“A likely story. Who left the light on then? Your Aunt Tina?”

Kate knew better than to blame Aunt Tina for anything.

“Sorry, Uncle Dermott.”

“I should hope so. Now, to teach you the importance of honesty and also how evil it is to squander your aunt and uncle's electricity, go and clean all of the tiles in the laundry, using your own toothbrush, in the dark.”

After that, Kate was always careful to turn the lights off after herself, and to also watch where Aunt Tina went, so that she could rush in and turn the lights off after her too.

You can imagine, then, how surprised she was to find the whole house lit up like a fireworks display. It looked like a ship out at sea—every single light beaming, from the basement to the attic. The glow from the windows cast long pools of light out onto the brown-patched lawn. From the protective shadows under the last thorn bushes, Kate stopped and stared.

“How very odd.”

A sharp pain in her stomach reminded her why she was risking life and limb and she decided that she had better be as quick as she possibly could getting up to the kitchen and then back to her cave again. Uncle Dermott was clearly in a strange mood and she certainly didn't want to be caught.

She dashed across to the kitchen door, checked quickly to see that nobody was there, and slipped quietly inside.

It was a mess! A total shambles. All of the cupboards were open, and all of the drawers. Pots and pans and trays were piled on the floor, plates covered every bench top, and the oven was wide open. There was a pair of oven mitts thrown in the sink. Someone had been through that kitchen, pulling everything out, and in a hurry, too.

As fast as she dared, Kate crept across and pulled open the fridge. She found a plate with some leftover cold sausages and she grabbed two or three, as well as an apple.

She shoved the food into her pockets and was just about to sneak back out the kitchen door when she heard something that made her freeze – Aunt Tina and Uncle Dermott were coming down the passage to the kitchen! There was no time to escape! By the time she had picked her way through all of the pots and pans, they'd be there. If she tried to run for it, they'd hear her for sure.

Desperately, Kate looked around. What to do? The footsteps were coming closer and closer and she could hear Aunt Tina now, whining: “But Dermott, it's so
late.”

Like a flash, Kate darted into the pantry cupboard and pulled the door shut behind her, just as her aunt and uncle stomped into the kitchen.

“It doesn't matter, Tina. We have to keep looking.”

“But I'm hungry. We haven't eaten all day. Let's just get the girl to deep-fry a couple of Mars Bars.”

“There's not enough time. And besides, I don't want her anywhere near this house until after that woman has come and gone.”

“But what about me? Who'll feed me?”

“Perhaps you could feed yourself.”

“Don't be silly, Dermott.”

Uncle Dermott's footsteps came across the kitchen towards Kate's hiding place.

“Well then, have a quick drink of water and then we must get back to work. We've still got to search your bedroom and the attic. I might even have to start pulling up floorboards.”

“But Dermott, we did all this when we moved into the place.”

“I know, dear. But that was ten years ago, and we haven't really looked all that hard since. Besides, we made a deal with that horrible woman, and you
know
what will happen if we don't keep it.”

“I know, Dermott.”

“Well, then.”

He stopped right outside the cupboard. Kate held her breath; she could feel her heart thumping in her chest. The pantry door started to open, just a crack.

“Dermott?”

“What, Tina?” Through the crack in the door Kate could see past her uncle's leg to where Aunt Tina was slumped against a bench on the far side of the kitchen. She was filthy dirty, her hair was frazzled, and her dress was torn in several places.

“I think there are sausages in the fridge.”

“There are? Good. We'll have those.”

Uncle Dermott let go of the pantry door and Kate breathed out silently. She listened as the fridge door was opened and then closed, and then a few moments later she heard the two of them stomp out of the kitchen and back along the passage.