Mennyms Under Siege Read online

  “You haven’t been in touch with Tony again?” said Pilbeam when Appleby failed to answer her first question.

  “Nothing like that,” said Appleby. “Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “Well,” said Pilbeam, “now you come to mention it . . .”

  It was not the wisest of things to say to Appleby, but no one is wise all the time. Strangely, however, Appleby did not fly into a temper. She just pulled a face and sat silent for a few seconds. It was not the right time for a row. Appleby had something else in mind.

  “There’s another door over there, you know,” she began, nodding towards the far wall.

  “Yes,” said Pilbeam. “I know. What about it?”

  “Have you ever wondered what might be behind it?” asked Appleby innocently.

  “I know what’s behind it,” said Pilbeam. “It’s perfectly obvious what’s behind it.”

  Appleby looked surprised.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Well, I saw it ages and ages ago. It is obviously built into the house wall. If it led anywhere, it would have to lead to some outside staircase.”

  “But there isn’t one,” said Appleby.

  “No,” said Pilbeam, “there isn’t one now. There was one at some time. It was removed and the doorway has been bricked up from the outside. If we opened that door now, just supposing it still does open, we would see a brick wall.”

  “Then why did Aunt Kate forbid me to open it?” said Appleby, startled into forgetting her original plan. “And how do you know all that?”

  “Come off it, Appleby!” said Pilbeam. “You’ve never seen Aunt Kate. If you really had you’d have told me long before now. You couldn’t have helped yourself.”

  “I don’t tell you everything,” said Appleby raising her voice. “I don’t tell anybody everything. You didn’t tell me about the door either. You’re no better than I am.”

  Pilbeam looked at Appleby calmly.

  “There was nothing to tell, Appleby. I spent a long time in this attic, looking round and getting to know every part of it. I saw the door from the inside. Months later, I saw the house from the outside and the signs of a fire-escape that had been removed and brickwork that had been added. It was, I suppose, mildly interesting, but not hot news. Now, if you had really seen Aunt Kate’s ghost, that would have been something else.”

  “Well, I did see her,” said Appleby with gusto, “and I’ve been dying to tell you but . . .”

  Appleby looked cautiously at her older sister and wasn’t quite sure how to finish the sentence.

  “But what?” said Pilbeam, beginning, rightly, to suspect that Appleby was up to her tricks again. Appleby was fun. She was lovable. She was vulnerable. But she was completely untrustworthy. It was a fact of life that every Mennym knew.

  “But what?” said Pilbeam again, more insistently.

  Appleby coiled a lock of her long red hair round her right forefinger. Pilbeam had long recognised this as a sign of prevarication.

  “Come on, Appleby,” she said. “Don’t try anything on with me. I’ll always be one step ahead of you. You know I will.”

  “Clever clogs,” said Appleby sharply.

  “Well, if you think I’m just here to be insulted, I’m going.”

  Pilbeam got up from the rocking-chair and gave her sister a very cold look.

  “Wait,” said Appleby, jumping to her feet. “Sit down. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “No lies,” said Pilbeam firmly, “and no more cheek.”

  They both sat down again.

  “I was going to try and persuade you to open the door without telling you anything,” Appleby began with unusual frankness, “but you took me by surprise when you knew all about it. Only you don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know the whole truth about the door. It was when I ran up here after Granny was so nasty about the letter.”

  “Yes,” said Pilbeam grimly.

  “I had locked myself in to punish everybody, but I was getting bored. I looked round, pretty much as you must have done. I found that door and I was just about to open it when a voice warned me not to.”

  “A voice?”

  “Yes. And when I looked round it was Aunt Kate. She looked just the way Albert described her. I suppose that’s why I wasn’t terrified.”

  “Then what?”

  “She said something terrible would happen if I opened the door, and then she left.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “I didn’t see her disappear. I turned my head for a second and when I looked back she was gone.”

  Pilbeam looked at Appleby searchingly.

  “So what do you think?” said Appleby. “Would you try to open it? Just to see if she’ll come and stop you?”

  “I don’t want to open it,” said Pilbeam. “There’s no reason to. And if Aunt Kate’s ghost really did tell you not to, then obviously you shouldn’t.”

  “You don’t believe me,” said Appleby crossly. “I’m telling you the absolute truth and you don’t believe me. It’s not fair.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” said Pilbeam. “I do know it’s pretty dodgy to open a door that hasn’t been disturbed for years and is obviously not meant to be opened. Maybe that’s what Kate meant. If you open that door you might make the whole house collapse.”

  “You must be a right idiot if you believe that!” said Appleby scornfully.

  “I would be a right idiot if I believed what you wanted me to believe.”

  “Which is?”

  “That that door is governed by some supernatural force.”

  “It could be,” insisted Appleby, “and Aunt Kate definitely came and told me not to open it. I don’t know how to make you believe me. I don’t always tell lies. I am not telling lies now. Why don’t you believe me?”

  Pilbeam tried hard to be kind. Appleby looked so distressed. It could all be an act. Appleby was such a good actress. Pilbeam was not completely sure what to believe.

  “I think maybe you dreamt it,” she said. “You’d been awake half the night. You’d been upset by Granny Tulip. You must have dozed off and had a nightmare. Dreams can seem very real, you know.”

  “But . . .” began Appleby again.

  “We will leave it at that,” Pilbeam interrupted in her firmest voice, “and I think that you should stay out of the attic. It makes your imagination run riot.”

  She got up from the rocking-chair and walked out of the room. Appleby, as usual, followed her reluctantly.

  31

  The Forbidden Door

  APPLEBY STAYED OUT of the attic for over a week. She played records and read old magazines and talked to Pilbeam. They stayed, as they had to stay, trapped indoors. Tulip kept a careful watch on everything. Outside, the late summer weather was temptingly bright but unattainable. The keys to the house were locked in a drawer, and Tulip carried the key to that drawer always on her person. Even the telephones were never left untended. The phone in Granpa’s room had always been impossible to use, since the old man never left his bed. Now, purely to protect the phone, Tulip began to lock the breakfast-room door whenever she went to any other part of the house. There was no possibility of anyone ringing the police, or the fire-brigade, or Albert Pond. It was hard to keep one step ahead of Appleby, thought her grandmother, but not impossible.

  Vinetta’s attempts to get Magnus and Tulip to change their policy had proved unavailing. They were so sure that their ideas were right, and Vinetta, always the reasonable one, was never completely sure that they were wrong.

  “If we were very cautious,” she said, “it might actually be safer to go out than to stay indoors all the time. Anthea Fryer might begin to wonder where we all are. She might even come round to see.”

  “And if she does,” said Granpa, “she will see nothing. We shall not answer the doorbell. Anthea Fryer has no right to come anywhere near us. No one has.”

  So it was necessary to go on watchi
ng the street. Even Appleby took her turn at the window. That was also a time of distressing inactivity. She did think about telling them there was a prowler in the garden, or that smoke was drifting round the corner from the back of the house. But she recognised such pretends as feeble and abandoned them. And the worst of it was the way Tulip looked at her. It was as if she had stuck a notice saying, ‘Danger, unexploded bomb’ round her granddaughter’s neck.

  “Why are you looking at me like that, Granny?” she said when Tulip came and sat beside her in the lounge, not wishing to leave her alone too long. “Have I suddenly sprouted another head?”

  “You know why I am looking at you,” said Tulip. “I don’t care how much they all take your side, you are an untrustworthy little madam. And I am looking at you and wondering just what mischief’s brewing in that brain of yours. I haven’t told Granpa about the letter. It would distress him too much. But don’t think I’ll ever forget about it. I forget nothing.”

  Appleby gave her grandmother a sly look.

  “The devil finds work for idle hands to do,” she said, quoting one of Granpa’s pearls of wisdom. “If I do anything wrong, it will be all your fault, yours and Granpa’s. Keeping us all in here day after day is just asking for trouble.”

  “As long as we know where we stand,” said Tulip. “Your grandfather has very wisely decided that we should all stay indoors for the duration . . .”

  “What duration?”

  “For the time it takes to be sure that it is safe to go out again. You don’t like it, I know, but you will just have to put up with it. And I will have my eye on you night and day. You can be as cheeky as you like, and as defiant as you like, but you are not leaving this house. I will see to that.”

  At last Appleby could endure it no longer. So, one evening, just after Joshua had gone to work and the front door had shut behind him, she slipped quietly out of the lounge and went slowly upstairs. She knew that Pilbeam was in the kitchen with Vinetta. No one else in the family had any idea of the secret of the attic. Tulip’s guns were pointing in the wrong direction!

  As Appleby passed by her own room she thought, I haven’t made up my mind yet. I might not open the forbidden door. I might not even go into the attic. So it was that she drifted into danger, not intent upon disobedience, but rather just toying with the idea.

  But she did go into the attic. She sat down on the rocking-chair and looked across the room to the shadowy door on the far wall. What were the possibilities? The house, as Pilbeam had warned, might collapse. Unlikely, thought Appleby, very unlikely. Or something might come into the room and devour her. Improbable, she thought, highly improbable. Kate might reappear. Possible, and interesting. Appleby had decided that there was no need to fear Aunt Kate. She was indeed a most unghostly ghost.

  But, Appleby mused, it was more than likely that she would see nothing except a wall of bricks. Perhaps she had imagined Kate. She had had Albert Pond’s description to go on, combined with a strong desire to encounter the supernatural, and she had been very upset at the time and very tired. All in all, opening the dummy door was neither here nor there.

  The attic grew darker but for a long time Appleby, seated in the rocking-chair, could not be bothered to go to the landing and switch on the light. When at length she got up to do so, the spirit of mischief took over and, instead of going out of the door behind her, she, like another lady grown weary of imprisonment, ‘made three paces thro’ the room’ – more than three paces! A dozen strides swiftly taken, and then she had her hand on the doorknob. She paused, waiting. But Kate’s voice did not come to her in the gloom, a weakened Kate no longer had the power to appear to her beloved but totally irresponsible child.

  The brass knob turned in her hand almost of its own accord. She made no attempt either to open the door or to keep it closed. It moved. Very, very slowly, very, very slightly.

  Through the narrow opening came a thin stream of liquid light, magical, milk-white, honey-sweet and fresh as Spring. It was enough to captivate, to make anyone want to fling wide the door and enter. Almost anyone. Not Appleby. Suddenly, for the first time in her existence, she was visited by a sense of the consequences of her own actions and was filled with terror. Desperately she put her shoulder to the door and tried to close it, but a power was there that she had not reckoned with. The door wanted to open.

  And the more it pitted its strength against hers, the more of the wonderful light filtered into the room. It bathed the bare floorboards making the wood look precious as diamonds. And there was music too, like water-bells chiming far away. Whatever this was, it was another world and Appleby knew that it could destroy her own, no matter how beautiful it might be.

  “Help me, Kate Penshaw,” she cried. “Please help me!”

  The power behind the door was growing stronger.

  “Aunt Kate,” shouted Appleby. “Please, please, please come and help!”

  32

  Statues

  VINETTA WAS STANDING in the kitchen. The large earthenware bowl was cradled in her right arm, in her left hand she held the long wooden spoon. She was making a cake for Sunday tea. The imaginary mixture would be poured into the cake tin and then it would be left in the oven for precisely one and a half hours. After that it would be turned out onto the cooling tray in the middle of the kitchen table. Tomorrow a cardboard model of a cake would be put onto the turntable and carefully iced and decorated. It was not something Vinetta did every weekend, but she had baked cakes more frequently recently. It was a way of compensating herself for being kept indoors.

  Just as she was about to pour the mixture into the tin, lined with real grease-proof paper, time stood still. Vinetta froze where she stood and became a statue.

  At that precise moment, there were statues all over the house.

  Sir Magnus, sitting up in bed writing yet another account of the Battle of Edgehill, was stopped in mid-sentence.

  In this, the first battle of the Civil War, the physician, William Harvey of Folkestone . . . The pen was still touching the paper, the old man was bent forward over his work, but totally immobilised. His purple foot trailed on the floor.

  Lady Tulip was in the breakfast room, knitting. In, over through . . . but not off. The loop stayed on the needle. Only the ball of wool took on a life of its own and rolled away into a corner.

  In the day nursery, Miss Quigley had just finished putting Googles into her nightdress. She was making a fuss of her, holding her high up in the air and saying, “Who’s my best baby?” And there was Googles, everybody’s best baby, hands outstretched, giggling excitedly, when everything froze. There in the middle of the nursery was the tableau of a nanny holding up in front of her a baby as stiff and as still as a doll.

  Pilbeam was going upstairs to her room, having left Vinetta in the kitchen only seconds before. She had suddenly found herself wondering what Appleby was doing. After all they had been through, worrying about her sister came as naturally to Pilbeam as it did to Granny Tulip. So she set out to see where she was. And then time stood still. Pilbeam was no longer worried. She ceased to think, to move, even to breathe. One hand gripped the banister, one foot was on the top stair of the flight, the other on the stair below it. In that position, she remained.

  Soobie was alone in the lounge where he had been watching a programme on TV about Wainwright’s coast-to-coast walk. I could do that, he thought, as the titles rolled up at the end. I could secretly walk the breadth of England and all I would need would be a mackintosh and a spare pair of trainers. Some day, when the siege is ended, I think I will.

  He crossed the room and bent down to switch off the set. And at that moment life ceased. The blue rag doll was just returning to the vertical and not quite well enough balanced to freeze without falling. It swayed and tumbled over and landed clumsily on the floor in front of the fire. A little too close. The bars were glowing. In a very short time the doll’s navy blue hair would begin to singe.

  In his bedroom. Poopie was pretending to feed
Paddy Black, holding out a piece of green plastic that passed well enough for lettuce. He was sitting on the floor in front of the hutch. The room was still full of dead and wounded soldiers. Poopie had decided to play a different game, but first he had to put away his army. This was no easy task and feeding the rabbit was a delay before the start. Poopie was lying on his stomach, leaning towards the hutch, his legs sprawled out on the floor behind him. The lettuce was held between his thumb and forefinger. And there it stayed.

  Wimpey was already in bed, propped up against her pillows, reading Rivals of the Chalet School. At the moment when time stood still, Wimpey was turning the page. . . . Her black eyes were half-open and her cheeks were scarlet. A tearing, rusty sound . . . Wimpey read no further. The page remained unturned. The doll in the bed looked sweet and lovable, almost like a real little girl.

  Whoever next crossed the threshold of Number 5 Brocklehurst Grove would find it full of intriguing tableaux. What questions there would be to ask! What are these dolls? Where is the owner of the house? It has not been long deserted. The electricity still works. The telephone still rings. The gas fires still warm the rooms. Where are the human beings who control everything? Where on earth can they be? The newcomers would feel they had stumbled upon a suburban Mary Celeste.

  Ah, but that was not the worst of it. What about Joshua?

  He had reached Sydenham’s and taken the keys from Max the short-sighted, simple-minded labourer – a good worker and a good son to his widowed mother, but one of nature’s children. Joshua appreciated this and felt safe enough with him to spare a word or two.

  “It’s a warm night, old son,” he said as he held the door for him to leave. “More like July than September.”

  He closed the door and went to the solitude of his office. He removed the overcoat that he always wore to walk through the streets to work, no matter how warm the night, and he went to hang it on its peg on the coat-stand. He was just reaching up to do so when time stood still. He froze in the act. What did he look like? The effigy of a middle-aged man, grizzled hair, stocky figure, wearing a blue shirt and navy trousers. Only an effigy, a very good likeness. Not the real thing.