He led Clive to the place where Terry had once lived in a caravan. The cottage was in darkness, as was the driveway. Clive followed blindly. When they reached Morris’s old garage-workshop, Sam told Clive to wait. He forced his way down the side and entered by the rickety window. He unlocked a side door to admit Clive.
‘You been here recently?’
‘Some time ago.’
They sat on the floor in the dark, and Sam offered a flame from his Zippo lighter. The place was as quiet as the dust. For some time there was only the sound of rain on the roof, of sucking on the lighted joint and of the exhaling of lungfuls of smoke.
Sam broke the silence. ‘Deep Mood. All those years ago. You painted the walls, Clive.’
Clive snorted. ‘So what. How did you know?’
‘Paint pot in your garden,’ slurred Sam. ‘You put it there, so’s everyone would think it too obvious to be you. You wanted us to think Alice had planted it on you. Y’out-smarted yourself. Always trying to be one chess move ahead.’
‘ ’Strue,’ said Clive. ‘ ’Strue. I overestimated everyone’s dumbness.’
‘You pretended to be furious with Alice. As if she’d stitched you up.’ Sam saw that Clive was dozing. ‘You were hiding your true feelings.’
‘Let’s keep off Memory Lane, shall we?’
A fresh gust of wind swept rain across the leaking roof of the old garage. Something breathed sourly in the dark, and Sam stiffened. Reaching for his Zippo lighter, he spun the milled wheel and the tiny explosion of light chased the blackness back a few feet. There was Clive, sack-like, hunkered against the cold wall, his eyes closed. The handcrafted cigarette, still clenched between his knuckles, had gone out. The puttering lighter illumined the immature peach-fuzz moustache lining Clive’s upper lip. Sam advanced the flame dangerously close to his friend’s weak moustache, and Clive, opening his eyes in time to see the flame coming, interpreted it as an invitation to relight his cigarette.
‘You fell asleep,’ Sam slurred. ‘You’re drunk.’
Clive smacked his lips, trying to moisten a furred mouth. He looked about uneasily. ‘I don’t like this place. I never did. Why did you make us come here?’
‘She’s had us all you know. One way or another.’
Puzzled, Clive took a deep pull on his cigarette. ‘I’d give you some of this,’ he croaked through crowded lungs, ‘but you’ve had too much. Let’s go.’
‘She’s had me. She’s had Alice. Terry. Morris. Linda. Even Derek – remember him? Skelton, too. And she’s had you. That school exam thing, when you flipped out? That was her.’
Sam flicked his lighter again, catching the bitter gleam in Clive’s eye. Clive stubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his boot and got up unsteadily. Rain lashed at the shed roof. ‘I’m going. Don’t stay here. It’s like a tomb.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Go home, Sam. Don’t fall asleep here.’
Clive shuffled his feet before turning decisively, pushing his way out of the door. His presence in the shed was replaced by a draught of rain-bearing cold. Sam was afraid to stay there alone but knew it was the only place where he would find an answer. It was in there somewhere. The answer had to come from Morris’s old workshop.
His senses were alerted by a familiar scent, a whiff of someone else in the shed with him. A blend of tobacco, whisky and hair-oil and of another more elusive odour he associated with Morris’s mind working at speed. Sam felt himself drifting into sleep. And as he did so, he sensed something out there, waiting, hovering, as if motionless under the surface of a familiar stretch of water.
He shifted himself. He remembered having a conversation with Clive, but he couldn’t recall what it was about. Then Clive was gone, and he couldn’t remember seeing him go. He felt only that he had some question to ask of the fattening dark.
Sam closed his eyes and let sleep overtake him. He didn’t know how much time had passed before he was roused by a faint stirring at the far end of the shed. The air was suddenly chilled and fetid, like that of a newly opened tomb. Someone was in there with him.
A faint glow came from the desk. Half in shadow, a man sat at the table, working, drawing with geometrical instruments. Sam recognized the shape of Chris Morris, Terry’s father.
‘Mr Morris,’ he breathed.
Chris Morris laid compass and ruler on the desk and
turned slowly. Seeing Sam, he put a finger to the side of his head, like a gun. As Sam gazed back in awe and horror, Morris brought his hand round, extended his finger and thumb, and gently pinched the side of his own nostril.
‘Suicide,’ Sam uttered in a tremulous voice. ‘You also had a Tooth Fairy. That’s why you did it. Is it the only way out?’
Morris opened his mouth and worked his jaw slowly, but no sound came out. Finally he made a winding motion with his hands, and for the second time pinched his nostril with thumb and forefinger. In the next moment a low buzzing sound emerged from somewhere behind him. Then Morris was gone, as the buzzing became louder, furious, ear-splitting. Sam saw that it was coming from a jamjar standing on the desk where Morris had been. The jar crawled with live, angry wasps. Almost instantly the noise and the vision of the jamjar was gone, and Morris was back again. He made an O of his mouth, as if it was painful to work his jaw.
Let them out,
a voice said.
They get in but can’t get out.
Morris suddenly looked horribly bewildered, and the apparition faded.
Sam gagged before his limbs unlocked. He scrambled to his feet and got out of the shed quickly. Outside the rain was still falling in a light shower. Shuddering, he turned up his collar and made his way home.
In the dark of his bedroom, the Tooth Fairy was waiting for him. She looked exhausted and depleted. Her clothes seemed more ragged and threadbare than at any previous time. He wondered if their last encounter, in her world, had done that to her. ‘I thought you’d never get home,’ she said softly.
‘It’s been a long night. But I’m glad to see you here,’ Sam whispered, beginning to undress. ‘That last time. In your world. Did I dream it? Or was that real?’
‘How many times, Sam? How many times will you ask me that?’
‘Not many more times. This can’t go on, can it?’
‘No.’
‘No,’ Sam said soothingly. ‘It can’t. You know, tonight has been a night of goodbyes. To Alice and other people. Will you get into bed with me?’
She complied, stripping off her ragged clothes, her tunic and her mustard-and-green tights, and stood naked before him. Her smooth skin glowed blue-white, exaggerating the dark vine of her pubic hair. Sam took her hand and breathed deep the sexual, earth-raking odour of her, and they lay down together.
‘All along people have been telling me what to do to be rid of you. But even though I thought it was not entirely in my power, I never really wanted to, did I?’
She said nothing. Her dark eyes were starbursting as he stroked her and whispered to her. ‘Even you told me, didn’t you? That’s why you took me over to your world. It was our last time, wasn’t it?’ She closed her eyes and he held her until he sensed her falling asleep in his arms, as she’d done so many times before.
‘I never realized how I was holding on to you. At least not until that time in your world, when I finally let go.’
Reaching under his bed, his hand found the clock of the Nightmare Interceptor. He lifted it carefully, wires trailing. Its crocodile-clip sensor was padded with cotton wool. ‘And I have my little sister to think about. After all, I helped make her. And even if I go away, she would tie you to this world, wouldn’t she? You understand I have to let you go, don’t you? For Linda Alice? I couldn’t let her go through all of that.’
The Tooth Fairy was asleep. ‘You told me how when you said you weren’t my dream, but that I was yours. I just wasn’t listening properly. And tonight Chris Morris showed me how.’
He opened the spring of the crocodile clip and let it close gently, not on his own nose but this time on the Tooth Fairy’s nostril. ‘All this time I’ve been trying to wake up from
my nightmare. And I’d got it wrong. Now it’s time for me to let you wake up from yours.’ She stirred slightly in her sleep but didn’t awaken. Sam carefully trailed the wires from her and set the clock by the bedside. Then he put his head on the pillow and held her until he himself fell asleep.
In the morning he woke to find the Nightmare Interceptor clip in his bed, wires trailing from the pillow where her head had been. The impression of her body was still on the bed. The scent of her was left on the pillow. He thought he remembered the alarm triggering at some point in the night. The window to his bedroom was firmly closed.
He knew he would never see the Tooth Fairy again.
The following evening Sam was packing his suitcase, preparing for departure the next morning. Connie fussed around him, ironing shirts, sewing on buttons, folding trousers. ‘Astrophysics,’ she kept saying as she bustled about. ‘Astrophysics.’ It was as if she’d discovered a liking for the taste of the word in her mouth.
Sam had already bidden farewell to Clive that afternoon. He’d left for Oxford a day early. Everyone had been at Terry’s house immediately prior to Clive’s departure, and they all made promises about writing and being serious about staying in touch. London was going to be the location for a full-battle-dress rendezvous, since both Sam and Linda would already be there and it was on hand for Clive. Their enthusiasm about the perpetuation of the Redstone Moodies almost outweighed their unspoken instinct that the fellowship was finally being broken.
Sam blabbed Clive’s secret from years ago, about daubing the walls with graffiti. Clive loudly denied it, but only for five minutes, and mainly because Dot and Charlie were present. Finally he admitted it. Charlie innocently asked him why he’d done it.
‘Brainstorm,’ said Clive.
‘Deep Mood,’ said Sam.
Alice, who’d been the main suspect all along, only shook her head in astonishment. Then, amid gales of laughter, they told Dot and Charlie the saga of the Dead Scout, after which
it was Charlie’s turn to shake his head. ‘You all want locking up,’ was his only comment.
Then Clive had to go, and Dot was dabbing her eyes while Charlie told her not to be so damned silly. Sam didn’t stay much longer. Alice and Terry had promised to go with him to the station in the morning, and he told them he had his packing to do, but his main reason for following Clive out of the door was because he couldn’t stand dragging out the farewells.
Linda stopped him at the door and planted a special kiss on his cheek. ‘I don’t feel worried about you any more,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I’ve always felt concerned for what happened to you above all the others. Now you’re moving on, and I don’t feel worried any more. Strange, isn’t it? You’ll be all right.’
‘Thanks,’ he said ironically.
She laid her hand on his cheek again, and then she let him go.
Later that afternoon, alone and trying to walk off a certain mood just as he always used to do, Sam made his way towards the pond. He was simply out to kill time. He had to get away from people: the affection of everyone was almost bruising in its intensity. Approaching the pond, he considered how often he had been drawn to this place. This womb-opening in the earth had always been there and had always found a way of speaking to him, though with an ever-diminishing voice. He fondly recalled the days when the pond seemed to stretch – at least to a small boy – like an ocean across the land.
Now the pond was a poor reduction of its former mysterious and life-breathing self. As he stood on the bank and sighed, something floating on the still, slightly scummy water caught his eye. It was the carcass of a pike. The dead fish was perhaps two feet long. He knew nothing about the average life-span of a pike, but he thought it couldn’t possibly be the
same creature which had stripped Terry of two of his toes one day long ago. In any event, that original pike had been a monster – or so it had seemed at the time. Surely that king of a mythological realm hadn’t been reduced to this?
‘Or maybe,’ Sam said aloud, ‘this pond just got too small for you.’
The pike, dead in the water, gave no answer.
Sam went home. He thought about it all while he was packing a few last things in his suitcase. He thought about three small boys running wild in the early morning, collecting cobwebs from a hedgerow blanketed by a pearly mist.
‘Are you taking this with you?’ Connie stood by the windowsill. The curtains of his bedroom hung open to the evening twilight, and behind her early stars were breaking out in the sky.
‘Sorry, Mum, I was miles away’
‘I said, are you taking your telescope with you? Will you be wanting it in London?’
‘No. There’s too much light pollution in London. Loss of stars, Mum, the effect is loss of stars. It’s a condition of—’
‘Just as you like.’ Connie turned away and busied herself with his suitcase.
Sam moved over to the telescope. It was angled low in the sky. He squinted into the eyepiece. The telescope was already trained on Sirius. The great, mythical star scintillated in the twilight; glimmering, iridescent in the lens; unattainable, impossible to know, and yet generating endless delight in its singular capacity to shine.