Boy in the Tower Page 7

  She called them spores.

  I didn’t know what spores were or where they came from but I was glad that I saw that lady on the news. She said it was best to stay indoors if you could and avoid going outside. I hoped Gaia knew about the spores so that, if she was still in her tower, she would know how dangerous it was to go out. Mum and I were going to be out of food again soon, so I had been planning to go to the shops, but I wasn’t going to leave the tower now.

  In the end, I decided to knock on a neighbour’s door to see if they had any food. I hadn’t left our flat in a good few days now and as I opened the front door, I started to feel nervous about stepping out of it.

  This is what Mum must feel like, I thought.

  The corridor was completely empty. I couldn’t hear a sound apart from the tread of my own footsteps. I crept out of my flat, looking all around me as if something was going to jump out at me.

  The first door I came to was Michael’s mum’s flat, although I knew that they had gone, so there was no point in knocking. As I walked past it, though, I could see the door had been left ajar by just a few inches.

  I gingerly pushed the door open and it swung wide, revealing the deserted flat.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, although I knew there wasn’t anyone there.

  Inside, the flat looked like it had been turned upside down and shaken really hard. Clothes were strewn across the floor, books had been flung off the shelves. Cupboard doors were left gaping open, waiting to be closed. A lamp in the sitting room stood illuminating the chaos. I walked towards it and switched it off.

  I went into the kitchen and plucked a couple of cans of beans and a bag of rice from the first cupboard I came to. I told myself that I’d make a list of everything I took, so that if things ever got back to normal, we could replace it all when Michael and his family came home.

  I hurried back to my flat then, putting the cans and the rice into a sling I made with the front of my T-shirt.

  I left the door ajar, just as I’d found it. Perhaps they had left in a real rush and forgot to pull the door closed to lock it. I’d never seen it left open before.

  Or, a voice in my head said, perhaps Michael’s mum left their flat open on purpose, so I could take their food if I needed it.

  I’d never know, but I had a feeling in my belly that she did leave it open for me.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I watched so much television during this time that after a while I realized I wasn’t really watching it any more. It was just noise that was making my head sore. Gaia used to say that too much television was bad for you, so now and again I switched it off and tried to do something else.

  Sometimes I would play this little game that I made up, called Five in the House. I had to clear a space on our table to play it.

  I had collected lots and lots of little yogurt pots which I kept in a box under my bed. They all looked exactly the same because I had taken the labels off and I’d washed them so they didn’t smell or anything.

  I’d put out loads and loads of yogurt pots upside down on the table, until it was completely covered with them.

  It looked like a little city.

  Then I would screw up five bits of paper, so I’d have five little paper balls, and I’d hide them under the yogurt pots. Sometimes I would put just one ball under five pots. Other times I might put three under one pot and two under another. I could do it any way I liked.

  When I’d done that, I would move the yogurt pots round and round, so they were all mixed up. There was no way I could tell where I’d put the paper balls because I’d mix them up for a really long time.

  The object of the game was to lift up the right pots to find all five balls, to find five in a house. I would let myself have ten chances to find them.

  It was quite hard and I’d only managed to do it a handful of times, but I liked it because it took quite a long time to play it. It always took me a while to choose which ten yogurt pots I would lift up.

  The other thing I spent my time doing was filling in my scrapbook.

  Before, when I’d been able to go outside, I had cut out pictures from old newspapers I’d found on the street to stick into my scrapbook. But now I had to copy out pictures and words that I’d heard from the television instead. The pages were filling up.

  I sometimes look back to the page where I first wrote down their name.

  They are called BLUCHERS.

  It took us a long time to find them.

  I’d filled loads of pages with all the terrible things that had been happening before we found out about the Bluchers.

  It was just after they found out about the spores, when they first saw them. I was playing Five in the House, so I’d switched the television off for a bit. When I turned it back on, the first thing I saw was a Blucher, filling the screen.

  Of course, I had no idea what it was at that moment, so my first thought was that it looked quite beautiful. It was shiny and had a bit on the top that was shaped like a sunflower seed, with the tip pointing upwards. Except that it was more like a ball; it wasn’t flat. It was about as big as one of my fists, I suppose, with a little stalk holding the top part up.

  What made me think it was beautiful was its colour. It was almost blue and almost silver. Not like any colour that I could make up with paint or pencils, anyway. I couldn’t make my picture of that Blucher look very much like it at all.

  And the funny thing was that the colour seemed to be moving.

  It wasn’t changing colour exactly, but the colour was moving. It’s the best way I can describe it.

  ‘These images are coming live from the Blucher Disaster area,’ the newsreader was saying, ‘where this plant has just been discovered. Its origin has not been identified and scientists have already confirmed that this is a completely new species.’ I guess because they had a little stalk and a bit on top, they were first called a type of plant. Although really they weren’t anything like a plant. They looked like nothing else I had ever seen.

  When I realized what it was I was looking at, I could see its beauty dissolve before my eyes. The blue-silver colour reminded me of knives, of grey clouds before a thunderstorm. The way the colour moved and shifted made me think of a predator stalking its prey, silently pacing towards it before it goes in for the kill.

  Bluchers weren’t beautiful at all. They were evil, menacing, deadly.

  After the first sighting of the Bluchers, they started to pop up more and more.

  Soon, I was able to see clusters from my window. What started out as little patches of silvery-blue soon spread out and covered the ground below me. They grew so fast that sometimes it seemed the patches were swelling in front of my eyes.

  Now they had lots of people on the television who knew about plants and fungi.

  I wasn’t able to follow most of it. I caught certain words like fruiting body and chemical trails, which I wrote down in my book, but I didn’t understand how the Bluchers worked.

  The only thing I truly grasped was that they thought they knew why the buildings were falling down. It was because of the Bluchers. Gaia had been right all along. The falling buildings and the people collapsing on the street were linked. They were both being caused by the Bluchers.

  Not only were they sending out deadly spores into the air; they were feeding on concrete and stone and glass and metal. They released some kind of wet stuff which could dissolve all those kind of things. That had a special name too. Enim or enzim, or something like that.

  Bluchers.

  The word sat heavily on my chest. Whenever I closed my eyes I could see their shiny silvery heads leering towards me. I could sense their hunger, urgently and desperately feeding upon the buildings that were our homes. And when I opened my eyes again, I could see that we were surrounded by them.

  When I first learned that the Bluchers fed on buildings, I went to lie next to Mum for a bit. I started to go over everything that I had heard about them in my head. When I thought about it, it made me want to ho
ld onto Mum tight. I didn’t want to wake her, though, so I just put my head against her back and leaned into her a bit. She felt warm and solid and real against me.

  I wished she would wake up.

  I was afraid.

  I guess I had always been a bit worried that our tower might fall down like all those other buildings. But I’d never really thought it would happen. Because our block was so tall I thought that it was too big to collapse underneath us. But if the Bluchers were eating buildings and were getting bigger all the time, then they could start feeding on the tower at any moment.

  I forced myself to get up and look out of the window.

  I hadn’t looked out properly in the last day or so. I had been glued to the television or sleeping.

  When I looked out that morning, I heard myself gasp out loud. As far as I could see, I saw the silvery-blue colour of the Bluchers.

  The city was being flattened out.

  We had used rolling pins once in class to roll out some clay, and it made me think of that. Like someone had taken a giant rolling pin and was evening all the buildings out.

  There were still some standing. The other towers around me were still there. I had even seen some of their lights on a couple of nights ago.

  One night I had counted up to Gaia’s flat on her tower, to the seventeenth floor, and saw a light on. I told myself that it didn’t mean she was definitely still living there. Perhaps they’d left the light on in their rush to leave. I remembered the way Michael’s flat looked. They’d forgotten to turn a lamp off when they’d left.

  But part of me couldn’t stop thinking that she could still be in there, that her dad might not have let them leave, and if that was true, then they were trapped. Just like me and Mum.

  I’d never been afraid of heights before, but as I looked down, the ground suddenly seemed much further away than before and I thought I felt the floor move beneath me. I had to sit down very still on a chair until I felt normal again. It was quite a while before I could stand.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  It was too late to leave now because of the spores in the air that we could not see. And it was only a matter of time before the Bluchers would eat the tower and we would crash to the ground.

  I wasn’t going to be able to save myself and Mum. Not on my own, anyway.

  We needed someone to rescue us.

  I decided to ring the police.

  They would come and get us out. They probably had some masks that they could wear over their faces that would stop spores getting into their mouths. And they would bring two extra ones for me and Mum too.

  We don’t have a phone in our flat but Mum had a mobile, although I wasn’t sure where it was. In the end, after looking through a couple of bags and in a few drawers, I found it under a pile of unopened post on the side. Nothing happened. The battery was dead. I’d seen Mum using the charger but I didn’t know where she kept it. I looked in all the drawers in the sitting room and the kitchen, and even in the little cupboard in the bathroom that has a mirror on it, but I couldn’t find it. I realized it must have been in her bedroom.

  The room was dark because she kept the curtains closed all the time. I tried to see if I could feel the charger on the floor with my hands, and then I tried to look in the wardrobe, but the door banged against something when I opened it and made a noise.

  I heard Mum move in her bed. She didn’t say anything but I gave up then. I didn’t want to risk waking her up.

  There wasn’t a lot I could do, so I sat in front of the television for most of the day. Every channel had something on about the Bluchers. I wished they’d put something else on instead. I was sick of hearing about them. Maybe I should have switched it off but I wanted to hear people speaking, anything other than the voice in my head asking me how could we possibly survive this. In the end, I left it on all night and fell asleep on the sofa, in front of the lit-up screen.

  The first thing I heard the next day was people talking in really loud, cross voices on the television. There were about eight people sitting on a stage and there was an audience in front of them.

  People in the audience were asking questions about the Bluchers, and they kept clapping and cheering when someone on the stage answered them. I couldn’t follow what they were talking about but they kept saying the same word over and over.

  I wrote it down in my book so I didn’t forget it.

  Contaminayshon

  I didn’t know what it meant but it sounded bad. I changed the channel to the news. They were talking about how they’d tried to set fire to the Bluchers. They showed a film of a fireman with what looked like a water hose but when he pressed a button, a jet of fire came out of it. He covered a group of Bluchers in flames.

  At first, you couldn’t see them through the fire. It looked like they’d been burned out.

  Then the smoke cleared and you could see that they weren’t hurt by the fire at all.

  Not one bit.

  I wrote that down in my book too.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The next morning when I woke up, everything seemed very quiet.

  I lay in bed, unmoving, listening. There was nothing to hear.

  I turned onto my side and my bed creaked loudly, disturbing the silence. It seemed to echo on after I’d moved.

  I stood up slowly, very aware of every movement I made. I could hear the pad of my feet on the floor, the rasp as I scratched my head, the clash of my teeth as I swallowed.

  Why could I not hear anything but the sounds I was making? Where was everyone else?

  I was afraid to look out of the window, frightened of what I would see or what I wouldn’t see, but I walked towards it in small steps and climbed up onto the ledge to look down at the streets below me. Except I couldn’t really call them streets any more. You couldn’t see where there had been roads now. The Bluchers had eaten through them all.

  Everything was still. No buses or cars or ambulances whizzing around any more. No people walking. No little bicycles weaving in between everyone. Those things were all long gone now. Before, there had been helicopters flying over a lot, but that morning they weren’t there. The sky was completely empty. I couldn’t even see any planes flying past.

  I’d stopped filling in Gaia’s map days ago. There was not enough space for the red dots any more.

  I didn’t like the silence and went to switch the television on but the screen didn’t flicker. I tried it again. Nothing.

  I remembered that I had left it on last night again, when I went to sleep. It must have broken in the night. I tried switching it on and off at the wall but I couldn’t make it work.

  Without the voices from the television, I started to feel lonely. I knew Mum was there but she hadn’t been talking to me a lot recently. I’d even started to think that she was waiting for me to go to sleep before she got up. The last few nights, I thought I had heard the sound of a door opening just as I was falling asleep.

  I decided to add a new drawing to my notebook.

  I drew the wide, empty sky and the deserted ground. It didn’t take me long to finish it.

  After that I thought I’d cook lunch early to give me something to do, but when I tried to turn the taps on, no water came out. Sometimes, our taps don’t let out water straight away and then they give a sort of splutter before some comes out. That day, I couldn’t even make it splutter. I turned the taps round and round so many times, I couldn’t remember the right way to turn them on or off any more.

  I tried the taps in the bathroom, but those ones weren’t working either. I even went to Michael’s flat and tried his taps too.

  In our kitchen fridge, we had a little bit of milk left and a few cartons of orange juice, but that was all we had to drink.

  I poured out a cupful of milk and took a gulp but it had soured and tasted horrible and it was all I could do not to spit it out on the floor. I made it to the sink just in time.

  I emptied one of the cartons of orange juice into a cup and then p
oured half into another cup. I tiptoed into Mum’s room and left her half on the bedside table, and then I sat on the sofa trying to drink mine as carefully as I could.

  Time went very slowly that day and I found myself wishing I was back at school again.

  I played with some Lego for a while and I read through my notebook a few times but mostly it felt like I was waiting for something to happen.

  I played a game that I used to play all the time, called Wink Murder. I’m not sure why I call it that because it’s not the one that everyone plays when you sit in a big circle and someone winks at you and you pretend to die and make silly noises. And it’s not about murder either. This one you can play by yourself.

  You look out of the window and hold one finger up right in front of you. Then you close one eye and open the other and keep doing that, closing and opening one eye at a time. You’ll see that your finger looks like it’s moving from one side to the other, jumping back and forth.

  The aim of the game is to try and line up your finger so that it jumps between two things. I used to do it between two buildings from my window.

  When you can get it to jump from one thing to another thing, that means that you’ve got those ones and then you play again.

  I didn’t play it for long this time though.

  It didn’t seem like much fun any more.

  There was a new kind of darkness that night. It was blacker, thicker and it happened a lot faster, like someone had quickly drawn a curtain on the day. I hadn’t known a night like it. It took me a while to realize that the orange streetlights had not come on. In fact, I couldn’t see any lights from my window, and there were no lights on in Gaia’s tower either.

  I went to switch the lights on in our flat but they didn’t come on. I tried every light switch – even the one in Mum’s room – but none of them worked. I tried them all again, just to be sure, running around frantically, desperately checking each one. But they wouldn’t come on. There was nothing to break the black hold of the night.