The Pit
Ann Pilling
The Pit is a powerful story, encompassing plague-ridden London, ghosts from the past and present, and one boy’s determination to solve unanswered questions and cure an old man’s terror.When an old man comes to stay with Oliver’s parents, Oliver is astonished by the man’s acute phobia of fleas and rats. Determined to discover the source of the old man’s terror, Oliver is drawn to a demolition site, where workmen are suffering appalling mental injuries. Oliver realises that something of enormous, terrifying power has been unearthed by the workmen but before he can find out more, a terrified scream comes from the cellar of his house. Thinking the screams to be from the old man, Oliver plunges into the cellar… to find himself in plague-ridden London, trapped in the body of a boy, surrounded by plague victims.
for David
1948 – 1986
in loving memory
Take him, earth, for cherishing
“Ring a ring o’ roses,
A pocket full of posies,
Atishoo, Atishoo,
We all fall down!”
CONTENTS
COVER (#uf0df1366-a391-512f-a600-3fccb1f0856f)
TITLE PAGE (#uf957566a-cba8-5aa6-be97-ab8f01406b02)
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_286b23fd-c95b-5a1a-a00a-b5e49824dd24)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_ce1daef8-2dd4-5a55-bef1-907ed21c06db)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_2a98c86d-6a48-51e8-a40f-e4ea6b8be6ac)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_1751ffad-a1a3-5421-81f8-d03c1f1e501f)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_40f1539c-4bf6-59dc-bcca-f539b0095ee6)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FROM THE PAGES OF HISTORY (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_e3b6c9b5-2119-5c39-9723-024494ff1b4d)
Oliver Wright was walking home from the bus stop with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. You never knew what you might find in a London street. He’d picked a five pound note up once, all screwed up like an old sweet paper. He didn’t get much pocket money, and even for that he had to do jobs. That five pounds had been riches.
As he turned the corner into Thames Terrace a cold wind blew up suddenly from the river and made him prickle with cold. It felt like January, not June, and the coldest, wettest summer he could ever remember. July would be worse, August worse still because there’d be nothing to do, and no summer holiday. His father was in hospital, having a hip operation, and his mother was fully occupied, running the house like an army camp. He thought back wistfully to other holidays, several of which he’d spent with his cousins, Prill and Colin Blakeman. When those three got together odd and frightening things happened. Oliver and his curious hunches about spooks and hauntings usually started off as a bit of a joke, but he was the one who always got to the bottom of things, the one who always rooted out the reason for these strange adventures of theirs. Nothing interesting was going to happen this year though, not if he’d got to spend the summer all on his own.
The Wrights lived at Number Nine, the shabbiest house of all in a gloomy-looking old terrace. It was painted mud brown, and was full of old people, and it belonged to a special society that provided homes for the elderly. Oliver thought it was a ridiculous house for them to choose because it was so very tall and narrow, with fifty-seven stairs between the cellar and the attic. The old people never went down to the cellar, of course. It was infested with spiders and running with damp, and the attic was just a storage area, with one tiny bedroom for him.
He kicked gloomily at a stone and watched it bounce into the gutter. He liked their house with its views of the Thames and his bedroom under the roof, it was home. But on a wet Friday afternoon, with the whole weekend yawning drearily ahead, he wished there was another family in the street. Nobody lived there now, except the Wrights, and a few young trendies with their sports cars and their window boxes. The buildings opposite were old warehouses, shut up and abandoned, and at the bottom of their garden there was only the river. One end of the terrace looked out on to a little egg-shaped graveyard, neatly grassed over and raised up, almost two feet higher than the pavement. Its church, St Olave-le-Strand, had been pulled down last year, even though his mother had led the local campaign to save it. She enjoyed protests. Beyond the graveyard there was a demolition site filled with excavators and concrete mixers, and an enormous crane that swung an iron ball against crumbling walls and sent them tottering into dust. A huge warehouse was being pulled down and a new office development called River Reach built on the site. That would be something else for his mother to complain about. Why did she have to be so awkward?
Oliver was adopted, as Mrs Wright never failed to tell people. It was as if she thought they might ask difficult questions if she didn’t explain – she looked rather too old to be the mother of such a young boy. He didn’t much like the parents he’d landed with. Mother, with her iron-grey hair and wrinkled face, always so busy ruling Number Nine, and Father, so silent and always buried in exercise books, peering out at him occasionally from behind thick glasses. They were kind enough, in a remote sort of way, but they weren’t really tuned in to his world at all, and Oliver was lonely.
As he walked past Number Five he stopped to look at a black Porsche parked outside. It belonged to a young couple who had moved in last week. He smiled to himself. A car like that would mean parties, and doors banging in the middle of the night – another thing for his mother to complain about. He was just bending down to have a look through the window when a sudden noise at the end of the street jerked him upright again. It was a man’s voice, shouting hysterically, then other voices and someone yelling “Hang on mate, for Gawd’s sake, wait can’t you!” Then, round the corner and running along past the graveyard, came somebody he knew quite well. Ted Hoskins, who worked on the demolition site.
Ted was over six feet tall, and beefy, and he wore very heavy boots, but he came tearing down past Oliver like a bat out of hell. His eyeballs were rolled up, right back into his head, horribly, like something dead, and there was an awful noise coming out of his mouth, half a groan, half a scream.
“Ted?” Oliver shouted, stepping into the street as two men from the site pelted past him, then “Ted!” He was always nice to Oliver, and he sometimes gave him things they found on the site. But now it was as if he’d gone both blind and deaf. He ran on, struggling to shake off the arms that clutched at him as the two younger men caught up, only stopping when he was brought down to his knees by a flying rugby tackle.
As Ted collapsed, and the two workmen bent over him, three more came hurtling along the pavement. Oliver crouched behind the Porsche, listening hard. He could hear the noise Ted was making quite clearly, and it chilled him. It was a moaning, sobbing noise, more like the helpless crying of a child than the voice of a grown man. He crept out from the car, stole along the pavement, and peered through a jungle of blue-denimed legs at the man lying in the middle of the road.
Ted Hoskins looked dead. His eyes were still open and staring, and his mouth had flopped open too, but the noises had stopped now and it was uncannily quiet. All Oliver could hear were the gulls mewing over the muddy river and, somewhere in the City, a muffled bell was ringing.
“Give him air,” someone shouted. “The man needs air. Don’t crowd him.” Oliver recognized the voice at once. It was Rick, the bad-tempered foreman. He’d told him off several times for hanging round the site. “I’m getting the boss,” he said. “Throw a coat over him, somebody, and leave him where he is. We need a doctor for this. I’ll go and phone.”
As he turned round he almost fell over Oliver who was crowding round with the others, unable to take his eyes from Ted’s face. “Clear off, can’t you!” Rick yelled. “Can’t you see the poor bloke’s ill? Make yourself scarce, and quick, or you’ll be in trouble. Now get!”
Oliver stood upright, and opened his mouth, but no words came out. He wanted to say he could help, that his mother was a trained nurse and that Rick could use their phone, but he couldn’t speak. It was Ted’s face. The look in those awful, rolled-up eyes had struck terror into him. Whatever had frightened the big kindly workman, down at the site, had stretched out a hand and was touching him too. Not just touching either, but plunging right down, down to the dark buried deep inside him, to the place where his worst fears were.
Everyone at school knew that Oliver Wright was a bit of a weirdo, always borrowing other people’s horror comics and taking them home to read in secret, always taking the creepiest books out of the library; and he’d never denied that he liked grisly things. What he felt now though was of a different order from all that. As he stared into Ted’s face, he found himself remembering the worst moments of his life.
He remembered the day one of his mother’s old ladies had died in her bedsitter, and how he’d seen the shiny coffin being carried down the stairs. He’d been told to stay in the flat that morning but he’d peeped, through the banisters, and he’d thought he’d heard the body, rolling about inside. Then he saw the damp cellar under the house, mouldy and reeking, where he was sometimes sent to look for jam jars, and he remembered the terrible day when his father had switched the light off, not knowing he was there, and how he’d been left all alone in the pitch dark, crawling about and unable to find the steps.
The look on Ted’s face was about the darkness. As he stared at him, Oliver felt he’d been snatched away from the dull familiar street, with the rain falling and the knot of men still huddled in the road, plucked out of the dreary present and swept back, to the secret horrors and fears he struggled with at night, when the rest of the house slept. A deep silence enveloped him now, broken only by the curious, muffled tolling of that single bell. The very sound lapped him in darkness, and Oliver felt suffocated. Whatever had sent Ted Hoskins screaming down the street was here too, inside him. It was like a physical weight, dragging him down. “Did you hear me?” Rick was saying, and he shook him hard. “Do you want this boot in your backside?” But Oliver was already running, running away from the blackness, down the dingy street, not stopping till he was safe on his own doorstep, with the thin, cold rain dripping down his neck.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_63320107-8f94-5feb-b7c5-35a95797e234)
He woke next morning to the sound of water drumming on the roof. He got out of bed and lifted up a corner of one curtain; the sky was the colour of pea soup. There’d been thunder in the night, followed by rain, the kind that set in with a vengeance then fell steadily, hour after hour. The demolition site would certainly be deserted this morning but it would also be a sea of mud. His mother might ask awkward questions if she saw him sliding off down the street, so he decided to postpone his visit to the site for a bit. It had been a bad night, full of horrible dreams about cellars and coffins. He didn’t really feel up to tackling his mother.
On his way down to the kitchen, two floors below, he stopped on the narrow half-landing and looked through a front window. The sky looked several shades darker now, and it was still pouring down, but someone was out there, standing quite still on the opposite pavement, staring up at Number Nine.
Oliver pressed his nose to the glass and stared back. All the houses in Thames Terrace had tiny front gardens where nothing much grew, but theirs was special. Right in the middle was a massive oak tree, so wide that the front railings actually bulged out, over the pavement. It was supposed to be nearly four hundred years old, an “historic tree”, according to Oliver’s father, and there was a little bronze plaque on the trunk, telling you all about it.
Perhaps the person in the road was a tree expert. Oliver couldn’t think of anything else interesting about their house. He stayed at the window, his pale cheeks flattened against the cold glass, and watched the figure move a few steps along the pavement. He could see it properly now.
It was an old man, very tall and spindly, with a lot of white hair blowing out from under a large black hat. He wore a very long black coat, black trousers and black shoes, and he was carrying a stick.
A funny cold feeling began to creep down Oliver’s spine, and his dark dreams of the previous night started coming back again. This old man didn’t belong to Thames Terrace at all; perhaps he was a ghost.
He shut his eyes tight and counted slowly to ten. When he opened them the tall black figure would have disappeared, flitted back to the world of make-believe, where it belonged. But when Oliver looked again the man was still there, pacing up and down the pavement, still looking up at the house, then down towards the little graveyard where the old people sometimes sat out on green benches.
Oliver watched him. Looking carefully both ways, and leaning on his stick, the gangly black figure crossed the road cautiously and disappeared into a green fuzz of leaves and branches. Seconds later there was a loud banging at the front door.
He peered down the stairwell and saw his mother come out of their kitchen. A smell of bacon and tomatoes wafted out with her. Muttering to herself, and wiping her hands on a tea towel, she began to go down the stairs. Oliver followed silently, and stopped when he reached his usual vantage point, a little niche at the top of the first flight of steps where he could stay safely hidden behind a large plant stand.
The old man had a thin wavery voice but he spoke with a very refined accent. When he said “Good Morning” it sounded like a TV announcer, and he actually raised his hat. Oliver’s mother would approve. She was always nagging him about good manners and good speech.
“I’d like one of your rooms,” he was saying politely. “I understand you have a vacancy. I’ve filled in the necessary papers, and I have my cheque all made out. How soon could I move in? I don’t want to inconvenience you, of course …”
“Well, I don’t know about this at all,” Oliver’s mother was saying, and she sounded distinctly annoyed.
Raising his large black hat a second time, the old man had already walked past her, into the hall. He’d produced a sheaf of papers from inside his coat and he was fanning them out, under her nose. “The Society is quite happy for me to have the room,” he said, “if you’re in agreement, of course.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I am, Mr – what did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. It’s Verney. Thomas Verney.”
“I have to explain, Mr Verney, that this is rather irregular, you see—”
“Dr Verney. Not a medical doctor, you understand, a Doctor of Science. I used to teach at the University. That’s all behind me now, of course. I’m retired.”
“I see.”
Oliver peeped round the plant stand. His mother’s voice had changed slightly. She’d put her glasses on now and she was inspecting the papers more carefully. He knew just what she was thinking, that a well-spoken retired professor from London University could give Number Nine a touch of class.
“As I say,” Mrs Wright began again, handing back the papers, “the usual procedure is for a new resident to come along to the house first, with someone from the Society. The room may not be to your liking, you see, and in any case we may not get on with each other. It’s a very small community, Dr Verney, and if people don’t get on …”
“Oh, I’m sure I shall be very happy here,” the old man interrupted, looking pointedly at the stairs. “I’m familiar with this street, you see, and I’ve always wanted to live here. So I wonder if you’d be so kind as to let me see the room?”
“As a matter of fact, it isn’t quite ready,” Oliver’s mother said firmly, standing with her back to the staircase. “I’ve not quite finished dealing with the last resident’s belongings.”
The old man wasn’t in the least put off. On the contrary, he started to ask a lot of questions about the house, questions which made him sound just a bit peculiar. He seemed obsessed with hygiene for one thing. Were there any rats or mice in the house, he wanted to know, with it being so near the Thames.
“Rats? I can assure you, Dr Verney,” Mrs Wright informed him frostily, “I’ve seen nothing like that in this house, not in all the years I’ve lived here, and in any case, Mrs McDougall, one of my residents, has a cat. I don’t care for cats myself, but they do deter rodents.”
Oliver smiled to himself when he heard that. Mrs McDougall’s Binkie was fat and spoiled. He wouldn’t recognize a mouse if he saw one. And if he saw a rat he’d probably run a mile.
When he heard his mother coming up the stairs, with the old man behind her, he made himself scarce. As he let himself through their own front door he could still hear her going on about the empty room being “by no means ready”, and about the Society’s rules and regulations. So he was a bit surprised when she came up half an hour later and told him she’d given Dr Verney the room after all. “Well, if he settles in, it could be pleasant company for your father,” she told him. “He’s a nicely-spoken old man, highly educated of course, a real gentleman. It makes quite a change from Mr Porter.”
“That wouldn’t be difficult, would it?” Oliver grunted. Old Joe Porter occupied a large front room on the ground floor. He flew into violent rages when people failed to wipe the top of the sauce bottle, and he sometimes came home drunk from the pub. “When’s he coming then?”
“Tomorrow. I explained about church but he said that Sunday was the only day his daughter could drive him here with his things. I told him not to arrive before twelve. We’ll be back by then. There won’t be very much to carry in anyway, only the necessities. I’ve explained about the month’s trial period … Dr Thomas Verney … I must write it down.”
Thomas Verney. It sounded old. The boys at his school were called Kevin, Mark, and Lee, and they had surnames like Bates and Whittaker. The cold, creepy feeling he’d had, when he’d spotted the old man through the window, hadn’t quite gone. Why on earth did he want to live at Number Nine anyway, with its fifty-seven stairs and its view of old warehouses? And how did he know there was an empty room? Oliver’s mother hadn’t told him.
Next day, as they walked back from church, the gang from the nearby flats were out in force as usual. Oliver always dreaded going past them. In two years’ time he’d be at their school and if he hadn’t grown a few inches by then …
The gang sniggered and made rude signs at his mother’s shapeless brown hat. If only she knew how daft she looked, marching along with her Bible under one arm and his hand tucked firmly under the other. On seeing the gang Oliver shook free and pelted down Thames Terrace.
Dr Verney had already arrived at Number Nine, but there was no sign of his daughter, and no car. The front door was open and he was trying to pull a small tea-chest up the front steps, into the hall. It was crammed with books and it obviously weighed a ton.
“I thought we’d agreed that you should just bring the minimum, Dr Verney,” Mrs Wright reminded him, eyeing the chest. Books were dust-traps, they’d got far too many in their own flat, and her new cleaner might object.
“But I must have my books around me, Mrs Wright.” The old man was very polite but very firm. “Apart from those I’ve only got a small suitcase.” And in two minutes he’d disappeared into his new bedsitter, and shut the door. They could hear him bumping around, then water running into a basin. “He’s washing his hands already,” thought Oliver. “He’s obsessed with rats and mice, and keeping clean. He might have good manners and a posh voice, but underneath he’s crazy.”
His mother was still staring up at the first floor landing. She was lost for words – an unusual state for her.
“Shut the door will you, Oliver,” she said, irritably. “It’s blowing a gale in here. Some summer we’re having; I wish it’d warm up a bit. There’s no sign of his daughter, I don’t suppose? I’d have liked a word with her.”
Oliver went outside again and peered down the street. It was deserted apart from a young man in jeans and sneakers, lovingly washing the black Porsche; all its windows were open, and a radio was on full blast.
He put his hand on the door knob; he’d better get inside quick, or his mother would start complaining. Then he saw something. On the peeling mud-brown paint of their front door someone had daubed a bright red cross.
The paint was still wet and sticky, and running down the door in streaks. “What on earth,” began his mother, coming out and seeing it. She looked down the street suspiciously, at the man cleaning his car, then she looked the other way, towards the Silk Merchant’s house, the ancient, gabled shop that the tourists sometimes came to photograph. There were no signs of life at all, apart from rubbish blowing about and an empty Coke can rolling in the gutter.
“Well, we know who’s responsible for this, don’t we?” she said angrily, folding her arms and staring at the crude red cross, “and they won’t get away with it either.”
“Who?” said Oliver.
“Those louts from the flats, of course. They must have done it while we were out at church. I’m going inside to phone the police. They’ll sort them out. It’s an absolute disgrace.”
Oliver lay awake for hours that night. Every time he drifted towards sleep his muddled, troubled thoughts tugged him back to consciousness. He was getting frightened. First Ted Hoskins appeared to have gone off his head, and had run screaming down their street, then this peculiar old man had turned up out of the blue. Now some yobbos had daubed their house with red paint. Oliver didn’t like it at all. His mother was always nagging him, about the creepy books he read, and about his curious obsession with grisly things. “You can have too much imagination, Oliver,” she was always telling him. But it wasn’t imagination; he knew something was wrong.
The police had interviewed the gang at the flats and they’d denied everything. “Well, they would, wouldn’t they?” his mother had informed the young sergeant. “Of course they did it, it sticks out a mile.”
“But why paint a cross, Mrs Wright?” the man had said nervously.
“Because we’re churchgoers, of course. They’re always on the streets when my son and I go to morning service.”
His mother was going to scrape the front door first thing tomorrow morning. But Oliver was haunted with the idea that she would never actually manage to get the paint off. However hard she rubbed, that awful red cross would stay.
He drifted into unconsciousness at last with the sound of a muffled bell tolling in his head. That was odd too, because it sounded quite near. The only church he knew of round here was St Olave-le-Strand, and they’d pulled that down months ago.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_929b17cb-6f97-523e-a40c-7b58f15e5643)
He set off for school early next day because he wanted to call in at the demolition site on the way to the bus. His mother was already busy on the front door, hacking away viciously with a rusty old scraper from his father’s toolbox. She’d got all the red paint off but the cross still showed through. It was a sandy-white now, because she’d scraped down to bare wood.
“The Society will just have to get it repainted,” she said. “They can’t put it off any longer.” Oliver slid off while she was still talking. At least the awful red cross had gone and the weather had improved too; it was actually quite warm. As he walked down the sunlit street, his fears of last night seemed slightly ridiculous. Perhaps Dr Verney was just an ordinary old man; all his mother’s residents had their odd little ways.
At the site, most of the men were in T-shirts, and a few had stripped to the waist. Oliver stood by a huge pile of rusty pipes and watched them working. After making sure that the foreman wasn’t anywhere around, he walked over to Geoff Lucas, one of his favourites. The whole site was marked off into sections by posts strung together with lengths of orange tape. “Is this where you are going to start excavating?” he asked Geoff, secretly admiring his suntan, and his big rippling muscles. Why did he have to be so puny and small? Why couldn’t he grow?
“That’s right,” Geoff said, rubbing the sweat off his face and leaving a great smudge across one cheek. “When you put up a building as big as this the foundations have got to go down deep. We won’t be starting on the footings yet, though. We’ve got to clear all this rubbish first.”
“But I thought you’d already started. What are those big holes everywhere?” He could see quite a few places where the soil went down several feet. They looked like moon craters except that they were square, not round. He’d thought those were the new foundations.
“Those were cellars, under the old warehouse. We’ve been taking old drainpipes out of those. Ted Hoskins was working on the job when—”
“When he was taken ill?” Oliver’s heart gave a queer flip and he stared hard at Geoff Lucas. “He was ill, wasn’t he?” he went on, when he got no answer.
“Dunno mate. Don’t ask me.” The man bent over his spade and started to scrape thick gooey mud off it with his boot – he’d begun whistling tunelessly.
Oliver was quite determined to find out what had happened to Ted Hoskins, and he stood over Geoff while he worked, firing off a battery of questions. “Look, mate,” the man said at last, throwing down his spade, “all I know is that he went running out of this place. Perhaps he just needed the bog or something. I mean, I dunno, do I? Anyway, he’s off sick today. Go and ask him what’s up, if you’re so interested.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“At the flats. It’s only a stone’s throw. The caretaker’ll give you the number.”
“The flats” was bad news for Oliver. Going there might mean being seen by that gang. But he was definitely going to visit Ted after school, gang or no gang.
He decided on a change of tack; it was no good irritating Geoff. He might turn nasty, like Rick. “Found anything interesting lately?” he said, more casually. At home he’d got a very old penny that Geoff had given him, and two pieces of white tubing that his father said were bits of old clay pipes. Geoff felt in his pocket. “Well, there’s this. I picked it up on Friday … Not sure I’m going to give it to you, though. You’re a bit of a nosy parker, you are.”
“Go on, Geoff. What is it?”
“How do I know? You tell me.”
Oliver took it and held it at arm’s length. It was a small, insignificant-looking stone, smooth and black, like something you might pick up on a beach, but it was shaped like a rough triangle, not an egg, and at the narrow end there was a hole bored right through.
“There are some marks on it,” Geoff said, fishing in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, and lighting up. “Can’t read them. I bet your Dad’d know what it was.”
“He’s in hospital,” Oliver told him. “He’s just had a big operation on his hip. I could show it to him though.” He held the stone up to the light and squinted at it. If the marks were letters he certainly couldn’t read them. He’d need quite a powerful magnifying glass to do that. “The hole’s odd,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps it used to have a string through it. Perhaps someone wore it, you know, like a necklace.”
Geoff sucked on his cigarette and pulled a face. “Not very pretty though, is it? Why wear a thing like that round your neck, for Gawd’s sake?”
“Can I have it?”
Geoff nodded. “OK. But don’t say I never give you anything. And I’d keep out of Rick’s way if I were you. He’s in a bad mood this morning.”
“He’s always in a bad mood,” Oliver said, slipping the little black stone into his pocket and slinging his bag of books on to his back again.
* * *
The minute Oliver walked into the playground a girl called Tracey Bell waddled over to talk to him. She’d obviously been waiting for him to show up. People laughed at Tracey behind her back because she was very short and very fat. She wasn’t at all pretty and she had a frizz of blonde hair the texture of pan scrubbers; she was no good at school work either.
Oliver felt a bit sorry for her. Lessons were no problem for him, he was always near the top, but he knew how it felt to be different. He was odd to look at too, with a large head that looked much too big for the scraggy neck that supported it and pale, rather bulgy eyes; and he was the smallest, weediest boy in the whole class. He was no good at games either, even worse than Tracey Bell. People called him a wally.
Tracey didn’t have a dad but everyone knew Mrs Bell. She was just a bigger version of her daughter, with the same kind of pan-scrubber hair. “I might be coming to your house this week,” she told Oliver excitedly. “My mum’s doing a cleaning job for your mum. Good, i’n’t it?”
Oliver stared at her round moon face; he could have kicked himself. He’d told Tracey last week that his mother was looking for a cleaner, but he’d never imagined that she’d tell her mother, or that Mrs Bell would knock on the door and ask for the job.
The news put him in a bad mood. In spite of his secret sympathy for Tracey, he felt threatened, afraid that she might start poking and prying. She’d ask him why they hadn’t got a television and why he always had to go to bed so early, and why his parents were so old.
At nine o’clock he filed miserably into the school hall with the others, all set for a depressing week. Most lessons bored Oliver because he was so clever; he always finished first then he had hours to kill. He usually ended up messing with the things in his desk, then he got told off, or sent to the library for private study. That was boring too, because he’d read all the books that interested him.
But after assembly something quite exciting happened. The science master stood up and told them that their school, Dean Street Middle, had been chosen as the main location for a new television project. Kit McKenzie, the famous TV “animal lady”, wanted to come to the school and film them. It wouldn’t be lions and tigers, it’d be domestic animals, ones you could keep at home. But she was on the lookout for something unusual. “If you’ve got an interesting pet at home, or can get one,” the science master told them, “find out all about it, make notes on the way it behaves, what it eats, all that sort of thing. You never know, you might be one of the lucky ones and end up on television.”
At break everyone was talking about the animal project. Most people had pets like mice and hamsters but one boy had a lot of stick insects and a girl in 3B said she was going to borrow a parrot from her Grandad and Grandma. “It can sing pop songs,” she told everybody, “and it swears.”
“I don’t think they’d want that on TV,” Tracey Bell said, in her loud, penetrating voice, sidling up to Oliver.
He was feeling rather depressed as he listened to all the talk about gerbils and Siamese cats, and about a large spider called Boris that had lived for two years in William Briggs’ bathroom cupboard. His mother would never let him have a pet, not even for something educational; she made enough fuss about Binkie. There was no way he’d get on TV. Then Tracey sprang a surprise. “My Uncle Len’s got a pet shop,” she whispered, cornering him in the playground by the bike racks. “He could get us something interesting.”
“Us?” Oliver repeated suspiciously.
“Well, we could do our project together, couldn’t we? It’d give us a lot more chance.”
It was Tracey Bell’s dream to go on television, and she’d got it all worked out. Oliver was the cleverest boy in the school so he could do all the writing and reading up, and her Uncle Len would get them the animal, something a bit different, if she wheedled him. They just couldn’t lose. “What sort of thing do you fancy, Oliver?” she said brightly. It was hard to crush Tracey Bell.
Oliver didn’t fancy anything, and he didn’t fancy appearing on the TV screen next to her. They’d look ridiculous, like Little and Large. “A rat,” he said stonily. That might shut her up.
“A rat? Ugh … Oliver. What do you want one of them for?”
He didn’t know, he’d just said the first thing that had come into his head, though he must have been thinking about rats anyway, because of all Dr Verney’s questions about rats and mice.
“Well, at least it’d be something different,” he told Tracey, feeling a bit mean. Surely her Uncle Len didn’t sell rats in his shop? He’d never actually heard of anyone keeping a rat as a pet. Though now he actually thought about it, studying rat behaviour might be quite interesting. Weren’t they supposed to be highly intelligent? He dimly remembered reading a book once, a science fiction story in which rats had taken over the world.
“If Uncle Len can get us anything it’ll have to come to your house,” Tracey told him. “We live in a flat and we’ve only got a balcony. My mum won’t let us keep anything out there.”
Oliver didn’t reply. Tracey’s uncle would probably say no, for a start, and if he did come up with anything he couldn’t see his mother letting him have it at Nine, Thames Terrace. As for keeping a rat … he could just see her face if he came home with one. It was such an awful thought it was almost funny.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b231a4c7-cc00-5d4d-9664-9d718367d703)
He found Ted in a stuffy room, sprawled in a chair, staring listlessly at a TV set. It was on low and the news commentary was hardly a mumble, he couldn’t be listening. And he wasn’t looking at the screen either, his eyes were going straight past it.
“I’ve brought you a present,” Oliver said, holding a paper bag out. Ted took it and looked inside. It was a chocolate bar, fruit and nut, the kind he sometimes brought in his lunch box. Oliver knew he liked it.
“Thanks, pal.” But the man didn’t eat it, he just carried on staring at the television. The voice didn’t sound like Ted’s, and the face wasn’t Ted’s either. It looked too white and shocked, and the eyes were still fish-like and glassy. “What’s up?” said Oliver, sitting down next to him, on a red leather pouffe.
There was a long silence. “Are you coming back to work soon?” Oliver tried again. He was looking at the man’s large, square hands, lying idly in his lap, at the kindly, weather-beaten face and the scanty fringe of greying hair round the speckled, bald head. He was fond of Ted Hoskins, and he’d decided that if he ever had a serious problem he’d go to Ted with it. In fact, he sometimes pretended that Ted was his real dad. It was awful, with his own father in hospital.
“No, I’m not, son. I’m not going back there. They can give me my cards if they want. I’m not bothered.” His voice was colourless and flat, as if all the stuffing had been knocked out of him, and Oliver felt little prickles going up and down his back. The neat sitting room, with its hard, bright colours, seemed to fade into a dull blur. Something else was taking its place, a harsh cold breath, like the first nip of winter. It was in his brain and it was inside him, squeezing out all the warmth and the light, all the ordinary, reassuring things.
“What exactly happened, Ted?” he could hear himself saying. “Did you find anything? I mean, at the site?” But Ted’s wife had suddenly materialized from the kitchenette. She’d gripped Oliver firmly by the arm and was now steering him out of the room. He tried hard to resist. He’d not even started his investigations yet.
“But I want—” he began.
“He didn’t find anything, duckie, nothing at all. He just came over a bit queer, that’s all. He’s got high blood pressure, you know.”
“But it was worse than that, Mrs Hoskins,” Oliver said doggedly, a helpless feeling coming over him as he saw the living room door shut on Ted. “Something really awful must have happened. I mean they must have dug something up, something nasty. I saw the look on his face.”
The plump little woman in the blue overall looked at him thoughtfully. She’d never met a child like this before. He seemed so old, so knowing and he had such staring eyes. Well he wasn’t going to upset her Ted with his questions. “They didn’t find anything,” she told him. “Ask one of the others if you don’t believe me. It’s true.”
“Well, what did happen then? Why did he run away? He did run away, I saw him.”
She hesitated. He wasn’t going to leave unless she told him a bit more; he was obviously that sort of kid. “He said … he said it went all black like,” she began slowly, “all dark. Very dark and … thick, you know, foggy … oh, I don’t know, duckie. Life’s a funny thing.”
She felt very embarrassed. She’d told Oliver exactly what Ted had told her, and she still couldn’t make head nor tail of it. She opened the front door pointedly, and waited for him to go through.
But Oliver didn’t budge. “What went all black?” he repeated, in his high, penetrating voice. “Did he see something? That’s what I want to know. What frightened him?”
“I’ve told you, he just came over a bit muzzy. He’d probably forgotten to take his pills.”
“Well, if that’s all it was why won’t he go back?” demanded Oliver, “and why did they get an ambulance?”
“Look, love, it was nice of you to come and that, but I don’t want him upset. Off you go now, he might be back at work next week.” And she shut the door on him.
Oliver stood outside on the landing, staring at Number Sixteen. He felt like kicking the door in. It was quite obvious that Mrs Hoskins knew things she wouldn’t tell; it was probably in the hands of the police by now. All she’d wanted was to get him out of the flat. He turned away angrily, and started to go down the chilly staircase. Why did grown-ups treat children like idiots?
But he was wrong about Mrs Hoskins. She’d been unnerved when they’d brought her Ted home in that ambulance. He hadn’t been able to tell her what he’d seen, but it must have been bad because he’d threatened to give his notice in.
Oliver thought about Ted all the way home. He simply didn’t believe what Mrs Hoskins had said about the pills; Ted’s face had told him the truth. Perhaps they’d not actually dug anything up at the site, but they must have disturbed something.
It was as if a great black bird was on the wing, flinging a cold dark shadow across London, changing the way everything felt, changing him. “Blackness and darkness”, that’s what Mrs Hoskins had talked about, in her tight, embarrassed voice, not understanding. He’d felt that darkness himself, out in the street, peering down at Ted’s face. He’d felt, but he’d not understood. And he still didn’t understand, not properly. Big beefy Ted, always whistling and cracking jokes. What on earth had happened at River Reach?
After tea Oliver slipped down to the cellar. Mrs Wright had bought a lot of plums and she was planning to make jam. He’d offered to go down and find new jam jars for her. It was a good move because he wanted to have a good look round, but he didn’t want to make her suspicious.
As he went past Dr Verney’s door he heard raised voices. His mother was in there, talking to him, and she sounded annoyed. “I can assure you, Dr Verney,” she was saying irritably, “there is nothing like that in this house, and, if there were, Mrs McDougall has a cat. Now you really must stop worrying like this …” He must be going on about rats and mice again, Oliver decided. He was nuts. He felt rather uncomfortable as he made his way down the cellar steps. If only Dr Verney knew what he and Tracey Bell were hatching up between them.
If Uncle Len did produce a rat for them, it would have to go in the cellar of Number Nine. It wouldn’t mind the dark, and Oliver was planning to put the cage against the front wall, where there was an iron grating, and where you could peer through a little cobwebby window and look up into the street. The thing was to keep it a secret from his mother. If the rat behaved itself, and they got on well with the project, the time may come when he could risk telling her. But even though she hardly ever came down to the cellar it was vital to keep the rat out of sight.
Fortunately that would be fairly easy. There was rubbish of all kinds heaped up round him, boxes and crates, and discarded doors, and sagging piles of yellow newspapers. And since the cellar was much too damp to be of any practical use, it was just a place for jam jars and paint cans, for large hairy spiders and now … rats.
It was large, occupying as much floor space as the house above. Oliver crept about in the dim light, trying not to bump into things. He couldn’t spend too long down here, he’d only come for jam jars, and if he didn’t go upstairs soon his mother would appear and fetch him out. She didn’t like his habit of grubbing around.
He ran his fingers over the damp walls, under the flaky white paint; they were all knobbled and bumpy. It didn’t feel like bricks at all, more like big pebbles, all flung together. His father had told him that this part of the house was centuries old, that there’d been at least two houses built and pulled down on top of it. He couldn’t get down here any more, because of his bad hip.
Oliver wandered about, putting dusty jars in a box, and trying to decide on the best place for the rat. Then he saw them, not skulls or rolled-up documents or heaps of gold coins, but cracks, dozens of little cracks running down the wall from top to bottom, on the left side of the iron grating.
He stared hard, put his face close to the greenish, cheese-smelling wall, and examined them carefully, sticking a finger in. They were new, he could see bits of plaster on the floor, plaster that must have fallen out of the cracks. So his mother was right after all. She’d been up in arms from the beginning about the lorries from the building site rumbling past the house at all hours, and about the huge trailers dragging heavy equipment. She’d said it would shake the old house to its foundations, and it had. These cracks were living proof.
She’d be pleased about the damage in one way, at least these cracks proved she’d been right to complain. A couple of them were quite big, almost big enough to get your hand in. He leaned forward cautiously, and sniffed. A cold sooty smell came out of the holes but he couldn’t see anything. Next time he was down here he’d bring his torch and examine everything properly.
“Oliver? Oliver!” He scuttled round, putting a few more jam jars into his cardboard box, and wedged it under one arm. He needed a free hand to negotiate those stone steps, he’d really hurt himself if he fell backwards, with a load of broken glass on top of him. “OLIVER!!” His mother wasn’t very patient, she’d finished sorting out Dr Verney and now she wanted to make a start on her plum jam.
But her high, piercing voice was suddenly drowned by a terrific noise up in the street; a great yellow machine was being dragged past, on its way to the building site. He could hear the rumble of enormous wheels and an orange light was flashing through the bars of the grating. As it rolled past, the house over his head seemed to rock slightly, the naked light bulb shook on its flex, and a lump of plaster suddenly detached itself from the sagging ceiling, hitting him on the shoulder as it fell to the floor.
“OLIVER!!” She was getting really angry now, but the boy took no notice. He put his box at the foot of the cellar steps and made his way back towards the grating, groping as he crossed the dusty floor. The dangling bulb seemed much dimmer, in fact he could hardly see, and the sun wasn’t filtering down through the grating. It had gone quite dark outside.
He stood quite still, with his hands in his pockets, one little finger playing with the hole in his stone, the stone with the marks on that Geoff had given him. Slowly he ran his eyes over the ceiling; now he looked more carefully he could see several places where large pieces had fallen off, and there was rubble on the floor, and on the bundles of News Chronicles.
Oliver listened. At least his mother had stopped yelling. She’d have gone up to their flat to look for him. But someone was in the hall – or was it outside? He could hear a voice, rather faint, but getting clearer, a woman’s voice, gentle and young, and she was crying.
He glanced up through the grating but there was nobody in the street outside. Then he turned round; whoever it was must surely be standing very close to him. But there was nobody there. Oliver’s stomach lurched, and a cold icy feeling swept over him. Every inch of his scalp tingled, as if he’d been stripped naked and plunged into freezing water.
Slowly, unable to stop one foot moving ahead of the other, he moved steadily towards the grating. Then he found himself gliding sideways towards those long dark streaks in the wall, and one of them was opening up, like the earth cracking, like a huge mouth. Out of it came a roaring, terrible blackness, sweeping round him and over him, stopping his breath.
And Oliver let himself be taken, soundlessly, without struggle; the only noise in the cellar was the woman’s voice, that desperate, anguished weeping that went on and on, losing its gentleness and turning strident and hard until, at last, it became one ear-splitting agonized scream.
Oliver passed into nothing. It was as though his own head had grown huge and split open silently, and as if all the darkness inside had flowed out like a great river choking him, and swallowing him up.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_70f5c53b-c66d-5bf5-b9be-789cf06790e0)
He was looking out of a dirty window, down into a street, standing on tiptoe because his chin barely reached the sill. He wore a greasy brown tunic with a leather belt round the middle. His feet were bare and, between his toes, he could feel grit and dirt from the wooden floor.
It was suffocatingly hot and the small square of sky outside was a flat, hard blue. But worse than the heat was the overpowering smell, and Oliver was trying to snatch quick light breaths of air. If he took proper lungfuls he knew he’d be sick. He tried to analyse the smell but he couldn’t. One minute it reminded him of meat that had gone bad, the next of a huge manure heap. But farm smells could be quite pleasant in a funny sort of way. This wasn’t, it was a smell of rot and decay, not just hanging in the air he breathed but somehow in his own body.
He looked down. His hands and feet seemed curiously small and they were filthy, every inch of skin uniformly grey. His mouth tasted foul, his teeth sticky, as if he’d not brushed them for years and years.
He pushed his face up against the window, rubbed a little hole in the dirt, and looked through again. There were houses opposite, half-timbered with sagging tiled roofs, and with upper storeys that stuck out over a cobbled street. They were so close he could have leaned out and shaken hands with someone opposite, if there’d been anyone at home. But the house looked shut up and deserted, so did the houses to the right and left, and up through the egg-shaped cobbles he could see grass growing in little tufts.
He must be in a town because there were roofs and gables and chimneys, stretching away till they dissolved into a brown-red blur under the heartless blue sky. But it felt like a town of ghosts. Nobody came or went in that narrow little street, nobody called out. The only sound he could hear was a bird twittering away in the leaves of a fresh young tree that was growing up, just under the window.
Oliver craned his neck till he could see right along the street and spotted something he recognized, a different sort of house, more like a shop. He thought he saw a figure moving about behind the upper windows but the lower part was all boarded up, as if they were going to pull it down. The street door was a faded green colour, studded with diamond-headed nails, like the entrance to a dungeon, and painted on it, in broad rough strokes, was a bright red cross.
As he stared he saw a figure pass in front of the house opposite, walk down to the shop and take up a position outside the peeling green door. It was an old man, quite bent, with a straggly beard. He wore a peculiar cone-shaped hat and faded knee breeches and, in spite of the heat, he had a cloak wrapped round him, dark red, the colour of plums.
Oliver saw him put something down on the cobbles. It was an old-fashioned lantern, the kind that took candles; he’d only ever seen them in books. The man looked up at the house then peered vaguely along the street. No one moved, no one spoke, there was only the bird, singing its heart out in the pale green leaves of the little oak tree.
Then he picked up a pole that had been leaning against a wall. It was a pike. Oliver could see the sun flashing on the big curved blade as the old man hobbled up and down. He took six steps up the street, then six back. Then he leaned against the shop and closed his eyes for a minute, before setting off again. He was obviously doing some kind of sentry duty, as if it was his job to make sure the people inside didn’t escape. But why? That house looked ready for the demolition squad.
He watched the man take a couple more turns up and down the street, then he dropped away from the window. His feet were aching after standing on his toes for so long so he turned round to see what was behind him.
Precious little. A dark room that smelt nearly as foul as the air blowing through the gap in the window frame; low box-like beds, each one a tumble of blankets. There were no pictures, no shelves with ornaments, no books, and the floor was bare except for a dented tankard lying on its side, and a tin plate scattered with crumbs.
Oliver could hear muffled voices. He spotted a little door in the far corner and began to tiptoe across the floor, grit sticking to the soles of his feet like spilt sugar. Then he stopped dead. Something was moving by one of the beds, creeping across the floor in and out of the dusty shadows. Something sleek and black with quivering whiskers; it was a rat.
He shrank away, watching open-mouthed as it found the plate, ate the mouldy crumbs delicately, taking its time, then sat on its tiny haunches, dabbing at its face like a miniature cat. Oliver clapped his hands and stamped one foot smartly. The rat shot away towards the wall and he saw its long pinkish tail disappear through a hole in the crumbling lath and plaster. There were dozens of holes; dozens of rats, probably. But he’d thought house rats were bigger, and brown. The only others he’d ever seen were fat white ones with pink eyes.
Why did he feel that he knew about rats? And why did he feel that if he got to the back of this dark little house he would find the river Thames? Memories tugged at him, then danced out of reach, floating round his bewildered head like scraps of paper caught by the wind. Warily, keeping one eye on the holes in the rotting wall, he reached the door and pulled it open gingerly.
“Thomas … Thomas! Where are you, bird?” A woman’s voice, gentle even though she was shouting, and somehow familiar, came up the narrow wooden stairs.
“Leave him, mother, he’s sleeping. Better to leave him.” This voice was younger, different. He’d not heard it before.
“Thomas!” the woman called again, anxiously this time, but he took no notice. His name was Oliver, not Thomas, so she couldn’t mean him. Anyway, he’d found another door at the top of the staircase. He pushed at it, and crept through.
This room was tiny and contained nothing but a bed, a small one with high sides, a bed like a coffin. There was a rough grey blanket on the floor and a small lumpy object on top of it, something with a polished round head and two stuffed legs. It looked like a doll made by a witch doctor, something evil, to stick pins in. For a minute he stayed over by the door, he’d seen movement. Rats, three or four of them, had shot away into the walls like streaks of ink. They must live in the plaster all over this house. “Runs” their escape routes were called. How did he know about rats? And where was his mother, fussing about getting a good set for her jam? And where were the old people?
But he didn’t go looking for them, he looked through the tiny back window at the Thames; that river was more familiar to him than anything else in life. It was like breathing.
When he saw it, majestic and glittering under the hot blue sky, relief flooded over him. This was London, and he was Oliver; here was the Thames. It curved round in its old way, like an arm with its hand disappearing east, under the double railway bridge and out towards a power station. But the bridge he saw now was quite different, low-arched and narrow and cluttered with houses, and where the chimneys of the power station should have been he saw green fields, blue-edged in the haze.
The river was busy. Crude wooden dinghies, piled high with bundles, scurried under the low bridge like water beetles, heading east and out of sight. There were bigger craft too, sailing boats, their whitey-yellow canvases plump with wind. Some were moving slowly down river, others were moored to the far bank, and he could see little black figures, like stick people, going down swinging gangways with boxes and baskets, stacking things on deck. But no one was tying up and coming ashore, he noticed. They were all leaving London.
Oliver wiped the sweat off his face. It felt like an oven in that tiny room and his dirty brown tunic was sticking to him. Underneath he was naked. His mother always insisted on sensible underwear, even in summer, but he wasn’t thinking about her any more; she’d become irrelevant.
He turned away from the window, crossed the room and started to creep down the stairs. Another door stood open on the floor below and through it came a sound he’d heard before, the woman’s voice weeping again. Oliver stopped. He wanted to see who was there but he hated the crying, the sound of that desperate, unknown voice filled him with pain. It cut right down inside him, making him want to cry too. What was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she stop?
He peeped round the door into a largish room, smelly and hot, and faintly smoky. There was no fire though, the smoke seemed to be coming from some little brown pots. There was one on a table, another on a shelf. They gave off a peculiar chemical smell, a bit like fireworks.
The woman sat at the table with her face in her hands and there was a girl standing behind her. They were both dressed in the same coarse brown, and their skirts swept the ground. Their long dark hair was braided and pinned up.
“Don’t, mother, don’t,” the girl was saying, in a frightened whisper, and he saw her bend down and put her arms round the woman’s neck.
“The sickness is in White’s Alley, Elizabeth,” he heard. “The houses are all shut up. And Biddy Skelton is taken away, and her man fled to Greenwich with the children and ’tis come to the Marleys’ house too, in Bearbinder Lane, all five of them dead, Elizabeth, and Susan, she that was my good friend …”
“We must pray, mother,” the girl said quietly. “We must say our prayers and take comfort from the scriptures. That’s what the Reverend Pearson told us to do.”
“Priests,” the weeping woman said bitterly, “and doctors. Where are they now when the people need them? The whole city is dying, Elizabeth, and there is no one to comfort it. Don’t speak to me of Reverend Pearson. He’s gone into the country, he was one of the first. It was his own skin he wanted to save.”
But the girl had put a book down on the table and started to read, tracing the words with her finger like a child that barely knows its alphabet. “Unto Thee, O Lord, will I lift up my soul,” she began. “My God, I have put my trust in Thee. O let me not be confounded, neither let mine enemies triumph over me. For all they that hope in Thee shall not be ashamed …”
The weeping gradually changed to a quiet sobbing, then stopped altogether. The woman’s hands dropped from her face and she stared blankly across the smoky room. Oliver looked at her. The tear-stained face, framed in its heavy dark hair, was very beautiful. Oliver had never seen her before and yet he knew her. As the girl called Elizabeth read on, two smaller girls wandered up to the table and tried to bury themselves in the woman’s skirts. He saw her arms stretch out and gather them in, like a hen gathering her chicks, and a pain shot through him. He wanted to go to her as well. In this terrifying world, a world he knew yet did not know, Oliver wanted comfort too.
At the bottom of the stairs was an oblong of dusty sunlight and a bit of cobbled street. He started padding down, on his dirty bare feet, but when he heard more voices he stopped and shrank into the shadows. The foul rotten smell was still there but now mixed with something more familiar, the clean, ordinary smell of new leather. He was looking into what appeared to be some kind of shop, the walls were lined with hooks and nails, and belts and bridles hung from them. On the floor there were crude buckets, also of leather, and a couple of saddles. A man in a greasy apron was sitting behind a long table, bending over a piece of harness.
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