Authors: Savita Kalhan
What lay beyond the gates?
The excitement was almost too much to bear. Sam held his breath. It was almost completely dark outside now, and there were no lights up ahead. The driveway swung round in an arc for about half a mile, and then as they rounded a bend, they were almost upon it before they saw it. It was a huge, enormous house, well, more like a stately home or something. It could have housed hundreds of people, and probably did at one time. You must have had to be fabulously wealthy to own a great big heap like this, so it stood to reason that it had to be the home of someone very famous.
Sam looked askance at Lloyd, who just shrugged. He had no idea who lived here either.
The car sidled slowly towards the grand entrance where it came to a halt. Gleaming white pillars supported a portico with a row of cherubs sitting on top. The cherubs were dancing, all smiles and laughter, frozen in stone.
'Don't leave me on my own,' Lloyd said.
'What?' Sam said.
The driver had switched off the engine and was getting out of the car.
'Please, Sam, don't leave me on my own.' Lloyd's voice was barely more than a whisper. His face was in shadow, so Sam couldn't see his expression, but the whites of his eyes glowed iridescently, reflecting the porch light.
'I won't,' Sam promised his friend. 'We're going to have the best time ever, Lloyd. We're gonna have a blast!'
Sam's door opened and his heart beat just a little faster. His mouth had gone dry and he wished he had a long, tall glass of water. The excitement had got the better of him.
'Out you get then,' the driver instructed.
But Sam found that his legs had gone a bit jellylike, all wobbly and hard to control. Lloyd had infected him with his nerves. Get out of the car, you idiot, he cajoled himself. He couldn't see the driver's face as the man was standing back, holding the door open, but what caught his eye were the shiny, black, pointy boots that peeked out from beneath the black jeans the man was wearing. Strange things for a driver to be wearing, but, he supposed, if you had to drive around for pop stars all the time, you were bound to try to be a bit more trendy than regular people.
'Come on, I haven't got all day.' A note of irritation had crept into the man's voice, but when he continued all trace of it had gone. 'Got to get you two settled in and start the dinner before all the others get here.'
'All the others?' Sam said, finally regaining control over his legs and swinging them out of the car. It sounded like there was going to be a bit of a party.
Lloyd followed him out. He'd hidden the bag of sick in the car as Sam was getting out, just in case he got in trouble with the driver.
'I'll take you both straight to the room where you'll probably be spending most of your time – I know I'd be if I was a kid.' The man laughed, and didn't seem to notice that neither of the boys were laughing with him.
He slammed the car door shut and crunched across the gravel to the heavy wooden door. The boys swung their rucksacks over their backs and followed him.
'Nice car,' Lloyd said to the man, who was busy flicking through a key chain heavy with hundreds of keys.
Sam grinned at his friend happily. Lloyd had spoken, which meant that he must have been feeling a bit better. It had been getting a bit boring, but all that would change now that Lloyd had bucked up.
'Yeah, kids love it,' the man said distractedly. 'Ah, got it,' he said, and inserted a key into the lock, he turned it and then used the next key on the key chain to open another lock. 'Here we go,' the man said.
The door inched open with an aching groan and a dimly lit hall came slowly into view.
'After you, lads,' the man said.
Sam and Lloyd stepped inside together.
The hallway was an elaborate oak-panelled affair with hard wood flooring to match, a vaulted ceiling, and hundreds of portraits of white-haired old people who could have come straight off the walls of Hogwarts. The only relief came from the two very large mirrors on either side of them, but even those were enclosed within heavily gilded frames. The sharp smell of lemony furniture polish hung in the air, but it didn't mask the faint mustiness clinging to the walls.
The boys caught sight of themselves in the mirrors and their eyes met. They seemed to be saying something that their mouths couldn't. Behind them, the man dropped his bunch of keys and cursed. He fumbled around for the key fob and laboriously went through the whole process of finding the right key again so he could lock the front door. Lloyd stuck his tongue out at the mirror, like a kid half his age might do, but it made Sam grin nevertheless. Lloyd was back to himself.
They were led through the hall and up a flight of creaky old stairs to the first floor. Another long corridor faced them, lined with overstuffed bookcases and more ancient portraits, and then finally they reached another door. This time the man had the key ready and unlocked the door quickly.
'I should get you to close your eyes, but I think you'll be impressed enough. Besides, it's not like you're six year olds or anything.' He opened the door. 'Welcome to the Pleasure Dome!' he said, beaming at them. 'Every kid's dream!'
Neither of the boys knew quite what to expect. In a house like this, they probably expected to see a musty old snooker room, or billiards room, which would have been fun for about five minutes as Sam and Lloyd weren't really into stuff like that.
They stepped cautiously into the room, and gasped. It was like nothing they had ever seen before – and definitely not in keeping with the rest of the house. Sam wondered whether Charlie had felt like this when he first entered Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. The room was practically the size of a football pitch and full of everything that any kid in his right mind would want for Christmas. The TV must have been the biggest one in England. It took up the whole of a very large wall. Sam turned his eyes away from it and let them feast on the rest of the room. Dotted around were things like a pinball machine, table football, a jukebox, a table-tennis table, and, unbelievably, a whole arcade of games, most of which Sam had never been allowed to play on because his parents disapproved of games arcades.
It was better than brilliant, and wicked, and cool and every other word that Sam knew, but Lloyd had taught him the new word for it, and this was one of those times when it was the perfect thing to say. 'Totally legend!' he breathed.
'With you there!' Lloyd exclaimed.
One of the other walls was lined with what looked like framed records, and pictures of famous bands and singers. Lloyd's dad
had
arranged it all for them – and this was just the beginning. It was all just as the man had said, 'stuff of dreams'.
'Make yourselves at home,' the man said. 'Play with anything you want, for as long as you want. I'll bring your dinner up in a bit.' He went out, leaving Sam and Lloyd alone in the room with every kid's dream.
'Dunno where to start,' Lloyd said, his eyes as big as footballs. He shook his head. 'Still can't believe Dad did all this, and he didn't let on about any of it!'
'Let's check out the games first,' Sam said. Not that he was anxious that it might all suddenly disappear and he'd never get to play on them.
'Okay. I know the good ones,' Lloyd said, leading the way.
An hour later, Sam's fingers were sore from pressing buttons like a maniac. It had taken him a while to get the hang of some of the games, but now he was a pro. Where was the nearest arcade to his house, he wondered? He didn't remember seeing any in his town. Maybe you could only find them at the seaside now. Lloyd would know. He would ask him when he finished this game. The only problem was that every time he set himself a goal, once he'd reached it, he'd set another one and so the game went on. He wasn't addicted to it or anything. He just found it hard to stop because it was way too much fun.
He did stop in the end, but that was because the man came back with a tray of food that smelled too good, and that made Sam and Lloyd realise that they were starving.
'Eat as much as you want. I'll be back in a bit,' he said, and left them to it.
Three different types of pizza, nuggets, sausages, chips, and a giant-size bottle of ketchup – kids' food. Junk food, his mum called it. She always made proper food with homemade sauces, and she loved to experiment. Some of the experiments had gone horribly wrong and even his mum had said 'yuck', but most of the time they were pretty good. Although, since Tab had become a vegetarian, they had all started eating less meat, and Sam struggled with that. When he was younger his dad had called him 'T-rex', or 'my little carnivore', and occasionally, very embarrassingly, he still did!
Sam speared his second sausage with his fork, dunked it liberally in his puddle of ketchup, and took a bite.
'Like a bit of sausage with your ketchup?' Lloyd said.
'I usually drink it out of the bottle,' Sam replied, going in for a second dunk, 'but it's not good manners to do that in public.'
'Hey, we forgot to ask the bloke when the others were arriving.'
'Oh yeah. We'll ask when he comes back for the tray.' Sam eyed the last sausage.
'Go on, you can have it,' Lloyd said. 'I can't stand them, and anyway, I'm full. Can't fit another thing in, and I'm desperate for the loo.'
'I need to go, too. Let's go and look for it. I'll eat this on the way.'
Lloyd led the way across the room, taking the longest route and weaving in and out of all the tables.
'Catch me if you can,' he called out before legging it, which turned it into a race with Lloyd getting there a split second before Sam.
'Beat you,' he chimed.
'Only because I was still eating!' Sam objected.
Lloyd turned the handle and pulled, but the door didn't open.
'Let me try,' Sam said, sticking the rest of the sausage in his mouth. 'It's really stuck!' Sam said, heaving as hard as he could. He stopped and looked at Lloyd. 'Or – or maybe it's locked, or something.'
'Why would he lock us in?'
'I dunno. Maybe there's another surprise and it would be ruined if we saw it.' As soon as Sam had said them, he knew how stupid his words sounded. They probably would have been okay if he was six, but he wasn't six, he was a very grown-up eleven. Even Lloyd was looking at him sceptically. 'Well, you think of a reason,' he said irritably.
Lloyd shrugged. 'Can't think of one. Unless he thinks we'll go snooping around and trash the house.'
'Or go exploring and get lost.'
'Or steal the family jewels,' Lloyd suggested.
'Or . . .' but Sam had run out of reasons.
'Or?' said Lloyd.
Neither of them said it, but they both thought it at exactly the same moment.
To keep us prisoner.
No, it couldn't be that. Not that, Sam reasoned. 'It's got to be something to do with the surprise . . . Hasn't it?'
'Yeah, must be,' Lloyd agreed readily. 'Problem is, well, I'm really desperate!'
'How do we call him?' Sam wondered aloud.
'Beats me.'
They looked around the room again. It was chock-a-block with stuff, but neither of them had seen a phone or an intercom system when they had been exploring. They knew there had to be a way of getting in touch with the man for emergencies and stuff – like now. There were several windows running down the outside wall of the room, but they were too high up to look out of. Sam would have to climb onto Lloyd's shoulders to see out. All the other walls were covered in framed records and pictures, apart from one which the TV took up entirely.
'Look,' Sam said, pointing towards it.
'What?' Lloyd said, hopping from one foot to the other. 'I really need to go, Sam!'
'There's a door there, isn't there?'
'Oh yeah, looks like it. It'd better be a loo!' Lloyd said, zigzagging past the pinball machine and the table-tennis table. He turned the knob and the door opened. 'Kerching!' he exclaimed in relief. 'Me first!'
Sam leaned against the wall, waiting his turn. He was used to waiting. At home, he shared a bathroom with Tab and that meant a lot of waiting around on the landing, unless he timed it right – and either he rarely ever did or Tab spent all her time in the bathroom. His mum, in her wisdom, had put a bookcase right next to the bathroom door in a sneaky effort to get him to read more. Sam smiled to himself, because her plan had actually worked. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced round. There was no one there. They must have knocked against the pool table on their way past and nudged the balls. The balls were still now.
'Hurry up!' he yelled at Lloyd.
'I'm trying,' Lloyd answered. His voice sounded muffled through the door.
There it was again. Something had moved. Sam let his eyes wander round the room, and then he looked up. He saw it, but didn't look at it for long. He pushed off from the wall and inspected the large collection of DVDs and videos on the shelves next to the TV. On the lower shelves were all the kiddies stuff like
Jungle Book, Bambi
and
Barney,
and some
Tweenies.
The middle shelves had stuff like
Toy Story,
and
The Incredibles,
and all the Harry Potters and even
A Series of Unfortunate Events,
which was one of Sam's favourite films. There were even some films there which Sam didn't think were out on DVD yet. The shelves above were full of 15s and 18s, and Sam hardly recognised any of them. There was a whole collection of videos with nothing written on them. Sam was reaching up to them when Lloyd came out of the bathroom with a grin on his face.
'You've got to see it! Wish I had a bathroom like that.'
'That's what I've been waiting for. You were
ages,
' Sam grumbled, pushing past Lloyd.
'Okay, okay, not my fault. It takes as long as it does, doesn't it?'
'Whatever,' Sam muttered. As he closed the door he glanced up, and a little red dot next to the eye seemed to wink at him. He slammed the door shut and locked it quickly.
Lloyd was right about the bathroom. You had to see it to believe it. It was all hard, shiny, pink marble and gleaming chrome, with a sunken bath right slap bang in the middle, surrounded by a thick deep white carpet. There was a whole stack of fluffy towels and little soaps set neatly on shiny chrome and glass shelves, and a row of porcelain animals, which looked completely out of place.
Sam almost took his shoes off before going any further, but he didn't. He really needed the loo, and somehow the thought of taking his shoes off made him feel a bit funny.
Vulnerable, that was probably the word for it. He had overheard his mum explaining his sister's recent mood swings to his dad. She had said, 'Tabitha's feeling a little vulnerable at the moment, Derek,' and Sam had thought that it was quite an interesting word, but until now he hadn't really understood its meaning. He didn't much care for it any more and couldn't understand why he'd liked it in the first place. It was actually quite horrible. Poor Tab, he thought. Now he knew how she felt.
He didn't look up into the corners of the room because he really needed a wee and that would have stopped him from being able to go. He finished much faster than Lloyd had and went and washed his hands. Whoever owned the house must have had an army of cleaners, Sam decided. He had never seen such a clean bathroom before, not that his wasn't clean, it was; but this was a different sort of clean. It was the kind of clean that something can only be when it's brand new and never been used before. He padded through the deep carpet back to the door and unlocked it. Only then did he risk a quick look up. His shoulders tensed, but it was okay as there was nothing there.
He caught sight of his face in the mirror and didn't know who it was for a minute, which felt a bit weird. His eyes were like black hollows and his face looked longer, kind of thin and gaunt. He was a bit skinny, he supposed, which was why his mum practically force-fed him at every meal. Well, she wasn't quite
that
bad, but she did make him have seconds at home, and pudding when she'd had time to make it. If he hadn't stopped and looked in the stupid mirror, he wouldn't have noticed it. But he had. In the corner of the mirror, a little red dot was reflected back at Sam. He turned and fled, slamming the door behind him.
Lloyd was at the pool table, rolling the balls up and down and off the side cushions at great speed in some kind of demented game. He stopped when he saw Sam coming out of the bathroom. 'What's up with you? You look like you've seen a ghost or something.'
'Don't know,' Sam replied, shrugging. He dug his hands deep inside his pockets, and leaned back against the jukebox, his back to the far corner of the room.
'Wanna play something?' Lloyd asked.
'Nah, don't feel like it. Lloyd?'
'Yeah?'
'I – I think we're being watched,' Sam said, his voice so quiet that he wasn't sure whether he had actually said the words out loud or thought them.
'What?'
'I said, I think we're being watched.'
'What do you mean?'
'Don't look up, but there's a camera on in the far corner. I said don't look!' Sam hissed angrily as Lloyd looked around for the camera in such an obvious way that if anyone was watching they would have known exactly what Lloyd was doing.
'Okay, okay. Take it easy. So what if there's a camera? We've got them too. It's like an alarm system or something, Dad said. And you'd need it in a room like this. This stuff must be worth a fortune. You wouldn't want anyone to nick it.'
'That's true, but there's one in the—' he lowered his voice to barely a murmur, 'in the bathroom, too.'
Lloyd looked doubtful at first, and then annoyed, very annoyed. His eyebrows knitted together and bore a macabre resemblance to a deep gash across the length of his forehead. 'No, there isn't! You're just trying to creep me out. Just shut up, will you?'
Sam shook his head. He felt wretched. 'I'm not, Lloyd, and there is one. I saw it.'
All the balls had come to a stop on the pool table, so Lloyd sent them whizzing round again. His hair had fallen over his eyes and Sam couldn't see his expression, or what he was thinking. Or whether he was thinking the same thoughts as Sam and that was why he couldn't trust himself to look up.
'There's probably a good reason for that, isn't there?' Sam said. 'You know, for that camera to be there?'
Lloyd racked up the balls on the pool table for a break and picked up the pool cue.
'Something to do with the alarm system, or something . . .' Sam's voice trailed off.
Lloyd had not replied, but Sam could see that his hand was shaking hard and he could barely hold the cue, never mind line it up for a shot.
'But lots of things haven't added up,' Sam continued in a measured tone. He was actually amazed at himself for keeping his cool. 'Next time he comes in, we'll have to ask a few questions.'
'Without letting on what we . . . what we suspect,' Lloyd added, and he whacked the white ball hard. It bounced off the table and rolled away.
What they suspected still had no name. Because really, Sam thought, it was just too silly. So it couldn't be that, or anything like that. Could it? Ever since they had come back to live in England his mum had been warning him and Tab about things like that. She would read about it in all the papers – the
Local Fright
was the worst paper, because it's on your doorstep, she would say. Life abroad had been very different. Cocooned. Protected. Easy. Sam had tried to tell Lloyd about it, but he hadn't really understood.
'Yeah, that's it. We could ask him about who he works for, and about all the other people who are supposed to be coming. No, I know, we'll ask him about music, bands and singers and stuff, because you know all about that.'
'And I'll know if he's lying,' Lloyd said, setting the cue down.
'But what if he knows all the right answers?'
'Then everything's fine, duh-brain! Isn't it?'
Sam wasn't so sure. 'Suppose so. And what if he . . .' Sam was reluctant to finish his sentence. He didn't want to get Lloyd all upset and angry again, but at the same time they had to talk about a back-up plan, or something. He'd been hoping Lloyd would come up with one, but that wasn't happening. 'What if he
is
lying?'
The boys turned towards the door at the unmistakable sound of a key being turned in the lock, and the question was left hanging in the air, begging for an answer.