Mennyms Alive Page 3

  CHAPTER 5

  The Conference

  TULIP WENT FIRST into Magnus’s room, righted the cabinet and gave a loud ‘tut’ in her husband’s direction. Vinetta, following, picked up the fruit bowl and put the pieces of fruit back in place.

  “About time you all remembered me,” said Granpa, glaring at them. “Get yourselves in here and find somewhere to sit. We’ve got some figuring out to do. We’ll have to . . .”

  His voice tailed off as he saw the last arrival standing framed in the doorway. The others had come in. Appleby deliberately made a grand entrance! She was not quite sure what it was she had to brazen out, but brazen it out she would. If there was any fuss to be made, she would be the one to make it! She held one hand high against the door jamb and the other stiffly on her hip.

  Magnus leant forward in his bed, the pillows behind him tumbling, his velvet mouth open in mute amazement.

  Tulip looked at him sharply.

  “Yes, she’s here,” she said, flashing a look of annoyance at her granddaughter, “and back in form as you can see. Pull yourself together, Magnus. Tell her you’re pleased to see her and get it over with!”

  Appleby pulled a face, and that convinced her grandfather he was not just seeing things.

  “Appleby,” he said, almost choking on the name. “Appleby! This . . . this is wonderful.”

  “Don’t you start,” said Appleby. “I’ve had enough already. I’ll give you fair warning. I’m not going to stand for a lot of sentimental rot. Least said, soonest mended. That strikes me as being one of your better pearls of wisdom, Grandfather.”

  She went up to the bed and flopped down on the rug, resting her back against the cabinet. Granpa ignored her sarcasm. Coming from Appleby it was tolerable, even welcome! His own unexpected return to life had given him nothing but heartache, a weariness for what lay ahead, a yearning for some great unknown. But here was Appleby, his best loved grandchild, coming back into their lives and bringing with her the energy he dimly remembered from his own invented youth.

  “So where do we go from here?” he said gruffly, directing his question to everyone in the room, but clearly expecting any answer to come from Appleby. In his eyes, she was the cleverest of them all. He was not disappointed.

  “We must begin,” said Appleby smoothly, “by pooling our knowledge and then trying to make sense of all we know.” It was a brighter suggestion than any of them realised. If they pooled their knowledge, Appleby would be able to catch up on things she had missed.

  “Dad says Soobie’s been left behind in the attic at Brocklehurst Grove,” said Poopie, his blue eyes bright under the yellow fringe. “And I know that someone has been playing with my soldiers.”

  Joshua gripped the pipe that was still in his hand.

  “We also know where this house is,” he volunteered.

  The others looked at him.

  “It’s in North Shore Road,” he said.

  “North Shore Road?” said Vinetta.

  “Obviously,” said Joshua. “Where else would we have that view from the window – the river straight ahead, the bridges and the quayside away to our left? And the number over the front door is thirty-nine. We are now living at 39 North Shore Road.”

  “It’s an upstairs flat,” said Tulip. “What is on the ground floor?”

  Her crystal eyes looked down at the faded carpet as if she were trying to see through it, and through the floorboards, to the room beneath.

  “We don’t know yet,” said Joshua. “That is one of the first things we shall have to find out. It won’t be difficult.”

  Wimpey, sitting on a wicker trunk in the far corner of the room, looked wonderingly at the grown-ups.

  “How did we get here?” she asked quietly. “Why are we here?”

  “We were brought here whilst we were not conscious,” said Vinetta, pleased with herself for thinking of a nice euphemism to cover their death. “Somebody must have wanted us to be here.”

  “So somebody,” said Appleby, “must think that we belong to them.”

  “We do,” said Granpa sombrely. “I know that. I knew it as soon as I woke up in this confounded room. We have become somebody’s property.”

  “No we haven’t,” said Tulip. “They might think we are their property, but we belong only to ourselves and to each other.”

  “Try telling that to our new owners when they appear,” said Magnus. “See what effect it has!”

  “Now we come to the point,” said Appleby. “We know that whoever put us here, whoever owns this building, will be coming back. They will believe that we are inanimate rag dolls. And it is vital that they should never suspect anything else.”

  That gave them all pause for thought. From the very beginning, nearly half a century ago, they had avoided human contact. Only one human being had ever known them and that had been Albert Pond, a very special human being, not just some casual acquaintance who might walk in from the street. He was Kate’s great-nephew, summoned to their aid by Kate herself, and then made to forget them when the crisis was over.

  “We’ll have to freeze as soon as anyone begins to climb the stairs,” said Joshua. “That staircase at least gives us some protection. We will hear the door open and shut. We will hear footsteps on the stairs. The carpet’s not very thick. That didn’t come from Brocklehurst Grove!”

  “If only everything were that simple!” said Tulip. “When the owner returns, he or she will expect to find us exactly where we were put. We’ll probably get away with small discrepancies, but any big difference would be noticed and queried. We can’t, for example, all be found in this room.”

  “Yes,” agreed Vinetta, “before ever anyone comes up here, we must return to the positions we were in when we first awoke.”

  Even Miss Quigley, seated on a stool by the door, nursing Googles in her arms, was worried by now. It would take time to train Googles to freeze in the corner of the playpen, to sit absolutely still and not reach out for anything. It might even be impossible.

  “It would help if we knew when all this was likely to happen,” she said, looking anxiously at Vinetta.

  “Not tonight, I should think,” said Tulip, nodding towards the window where the light was beginning to fade.

  “There’s obviously no one at home on the ground floor at the moment,” said Pilbeam. “The noise we’ve made would have been enough to bring them up to investigate. We’ve made no attempt to be quiet.”

  Suddenly Vinetta was struck by a thought that had so far troubled no one else.

  “We don’t even know what day it is,” she said.

  “There’s a way we might find out,” said Appleby. “The television in the living room. If that is working, we should be able to discover something.”

  Vinetta stood up to go and spotted an apple she had missed earlier when restoring the fruit to the bowl.

  “That’s another thing we’ll have to be careful of,” she said. “It is not just ourselves that will have to be where we were. Nothing in the house must be too much out of place.”

  Poopie gasped.

  “My training tower!” he said. “I knocked it over. It’s the first thing I remember seeing – all the pieces flying across the floor.”

  Joshua, glad of a way to be useful without entering into any more long conversations, said, “Come on then, son, I’ll help you to build it up again. That’s something we can put right.”

  Leaving Sir Magnus propped up in his bed, with promises not to neglect him for long, the others all hurried down to the room below. Vinetta switched on the television.

  “I hope it is working,” she said as she pressed the buttons. Sound came through and the screen brightened. The picture was not perfect. Through the ‘snow’ on the screen, they all made out the familiar sight of numbered balls spinning in a transparent casing. “And the first number is . . .” said the compère’s voice.

  “It’s the lottery,” said Pilbeam, “the National Lottery. It must be Saturday.”

  Apple
by knew nothing about the lottery. It was a gap in her knowledge which she noted briefly as she accepted Pilbeam’s deduction.

  “That’s all right then,” she said. “If it’s Saturday evening, my guess is that we’ll not be troubled at all till Monday. The flat below us is likely to be some sort of shop or office. That would explain there being nobody there to hear the noises we’ve made.”

  The television picture became more blurred and the sound seemed to be failing.

  “And the bonus ball is . . .” said the compère in a crackly voice, but before he could pronounce the number, the sound dried up completely.

  “Some use that is!” said Tulip as she turned off the set.

  CHAPTER 6

  Soobie

  SOOBIE SAT IN the rocking-chair. After months of involuntary stillness, there was now a need to be still as he tried to come to terms with what had happened, and what was likely to happen.

  When the skylights in the roof above him became dense black, he got up again and walked around the attic. He crossed to the other door, the door that had once been magical, that had seemed to lead to another world in another unknown dimension. It was open wide to the wall, on rusty broken hinges. Its doorway was entirely bricked up, the bricks well-aged, the plaster old and crumbling.

  Soobie ran the tips of his fingers lightly across the rough surface, wary of clicking them. So the magic has gone, he thought. This door will never again lead anywhere . . .

  The Mennyms had been frightened but fascinated by the door that Appleby had been forbidden to open. She had opened it, just a fraction, but a fraction too much. Whatever was on the other side had begun to drain the house of life. Appleby, terrified, had fought back and had died. Then, on the night two years later when all of the Mennyms ceased to live, the door had swung gently open and a kindly light had entered the attic. Was it friend or foe? Mystery, oh mystery!

  And what now? Soobie looked at the brickwork, the physical reality. That doorway had been Kate’s way out, her spiritual path to whatever is beyond this earth. Now only the material existed, as if the spirit world with all its hopes and all its fears had ceased to be. For us, that means life, thought Soobie. What does it mean for the woman who made us?

  Forget it, said a voice in his head, speaking firmly. Forget it, and get on with living.

  It was very dark outside now. The watch told him that it was ten to eleven. So he decided that now was the time to move on. He went out of the attic, switched off the light at the doorway and cautiously began his explorations. He was totally sure that the house was empty, but he moved as quietly as he could. When the stairs creaked, he increased the weight he put on the bannister so that he could tread more lightly.

  He then walked carefully along the landing of the top floor, keeping to the left, his guide to the next flight of stairs. There was nothing to light his way and he was alert for obstructions, though there were none. The bare boards beneath his feet presented no difficulty for his trainers with their strong soles. He followed the wall with his left hand, past the closed door of Miss Quigley’s room.

  At Granpa’s door he paused, considered, then opened it and looked in. The curtains were partly open and light from the street made it possible to see just how bare the room was. Not a stick of furniture remained. The carpet was gone from the floor. Not even a picture was left on the wall. The only object in the room was the telephone, tucked up against the skirting board on the floor beneath the window.

  Soobie came out and closed the door. He made his way to the ground floor without inspecting any other rooms, knowing that they would all be the same. He sat on the bottom step of the stairs, as his father had once done long ago. He cupped his chin in his hands and he pondered on what to do next.

  Suddenly it became clear what he must do. He knew where the rest of the Mennyms were, or thought he did. Not the actual house, but the street – and the street might hold some clue.

  I’ll jog down to North Shore Road, he thought, and see what I can see. For some years now, Soobie had been used to jogging along the streets of Castledean late at night. Tonight he would do so again, but with a far more serious purpose.

  He went through the kitchen to the back door and there came up against his first obstacle. The door was secured with three strong bolts and a mortice lock. Unbolting it would be no problem. But there was no way he could open that lock. He rattled the handle, but knew that his efforts were futile. He looked round the room, wondering whether to exit and enter by a window. He could not go out without considering how he would get back in.

  Then he remembered the spare key. It might still be there, it might not.

  The kitchen at Brocklehurst Grove was not antique, but neither was it full of modern units and fitted furniture. The only ‘unit’ was a cupboard under the bench next to the sink. It had a drawer and in the drawer, right at the back, there had always been a little wooden dish in which was kept a spare key for the back door.

  Soobie held his breath as he opened the drawer wide, wide, wider. There at the back was the wooden dish. He lifted the lid and saw the key lying untouched. He picked it up and let himself out.

  Leaving the house with the utmost caution, he moved along the outer walls and round the hedge to the front gate. He stayed close to the hedges all the way to the end of the street, though there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  Once clear of the Grove, he began to jog as of old, head down and well-covered by his hood. He felt in his pockets and found that his goggles were still there. That gave him additional protection. In the darkness, he was not recognisably blue.

  He jogged along the High Street, past the Market Place, and then turned off into the long broad road that curved down to the river. It was a pleasant night, quite warm for the time of year. There were a few people around at the top of the street, going about their business and paying no attention to anyone else. By the time Soobie reached the bottom of the hill, under the majestic railway viaduct, he had the whole place to himself.

  It had taken him about half-an-hour to reach the riverside. Once there, he slowed down and looked around him. He was on North Shore Road, the darkest part of the river’s reach. The city that never slept was half a mile downstream under the well-lit bridges. Here, on North Shore Road, the middle of the day was quiet; the middle of the night was silent as the grave. Even the street lamps were smaller and dimmer than anywhere else.

  Soobie jogged along the path on the side nearest the river. This pavement, old and uneven, crudely edged a broad, modern promenade. Between the tiled promenade and the buildings on the other side of the road was a gap of centuries. These buildings had once been home to wealthy merchants who ‘lived over the shop’, goldsmiths, silversmiths and jewellers. Now they were mainly offices and warehouses, with one or two less exalted shops in between.

  The shops were all shuttered and would remain so till Monday morning. Signs over their doors, and glimpses through wire mesh, gave some indication of their wares.

  Soobie looked up at the buildings, all at least three or four storeys high, all looking dark and grim.

  Where was he to start? His family was in one of those buildings – somewhere.

  They might as well be on the moon, thought Soobie bitterly after he had walked the length of the street several times. They don’t know I am here and I don’t know how to reach them.

  A solitary car came towards him. Soobie lowered his head, pulled his hood well down, crossed the street and jogged up a steep lane that led in the general direction of home. It was just round the corner from Daisy’s shop, but Soobie had no way of knowing that.

  CHAPTER 7

  What to Do Next

  VINETTA DREW THE curtains across both windows in the living-room. They were heavy curtains, made of thick green brocade with a lining yellowed like pages in a very old book.

  “We can’t sit in the dark,” she said, “whatever the risk. These curtains won’t let out a chink of light. And the street is empty anyway.”

  Everyone e
xcept Sir Magnus was in the living-room now. It was, for one reason and another, a very subdued assembly. Appleby was still acutely conscious of not quite belonging yet. Her glance flitted furtively from one to another. The anger she had felt at first was gone. Her confidence was returning and the need to bluster was over, but she was still struggling with strange ideas. Miss Quigley was quietly worrying herself frantic over how she would manage to teach Googles to be still and silent when the need arose. The rest of them were simply bewildered.

  “My training tower’s all right now,” said Poopie, in an effort to be positive. “Dad found every single bit.”

  Tulip, sitting on a high-backed chair that she had set in the centre of the room so that she faced all of them, gave Poopie an impatient look which he failed to notice.

  “Now,” she said, “we must really get down to business. We need to consider very carefully what we are to do next.”

  But whenever Tulip said ‘we’ it invariably meant someone else, acting on her instructions. That was how it had always been. The others looked at her warily.

  “Joshua,” she said, turning her crystal gaze on her son, “we are very fortunate. Your outdoor coat is in your father’s wardrobe. I couldn’t believe our luck when I saw it! You will be able to go out.”

  This did not startle Joshua at all. It was no more than he expected. With or without the coat, he knew he would have to leave the flat some time. And he was well used to the streets of Castledean by night.

  “Where do you want me to go?” he said. “Apart from finding out what is on the floor below us, what else would you like me to do?”

  Tulip’s answer was crisp and to the point.

  “Walk as far as Brocklehurst Grove. Look out for any sign of Soobie. See if our old home is lived in yet.”

  Joshua nodded.

  “And buy a newspaper if you can find a vendor anywhere at this time of night. That way we’ll find out the day, the month, and, more important, the year.”