Where Monsters Lie Page 9

  ‘See you then, Effie dear,’ she said.

  ‘Bye, Mrs Daniels,’ I said, but I did not move from the front door.

  ‘You know you can call me Deidre, dear.’

  I’d never call her that.

  ‘Umm.’

  ‘You OK, dear? You look a wee bit pale.’ She thrust out a hand and felt my forehead. ‘You don’t feel hot, though. Is there anything the matter?’

  ‘Umm,’ I said again. The oldies always did this to me. They stood right in front of me, and I could never get my words out.

  ‘I wondered if you’d . . . you’d seen any slugs . . .’ The words tumbled out of my mouth in a rush, before I could stop myself.

  ‘Slugs?’

  ‘Yes, in the house. I mean, in our house.’

  ‘Slugs in this house?’ Her eyes narrowed in disgust at the thought of it. ‘Why do you ask? Have you seen any?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You have, haven’t you? Whereabouts?’ I could almost see Mrs Daniels mentally pulling her sleeves up and reaching for the bleach.

  ‘Well, downstairs. In the kitchen. On the wall in the living room. And on the carpet,’ I said, listing the places.

  ‘Oh my goodness, it sounds like a . . . like an infestation,’ she pronounced, lingering over every syllable. ‘Mind you, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one in this house. I’ll have to check with William.’

  It took me a moment to realize that she was referring to Old Bill.

  ‘Don’t you worry, my dear. If there are slugs here, we will stop them in their tracks, you mark my words. I’ll ask Rosemary – she will know what to do. She has a remedy for everything, has Rosemary. Only,’ she added quickly, ‘don’t mention that to your father. I’ll just ask her what to do, not to come to the house.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, remembering Dad’s reluctance to accept Rosemary Tanner’s offer of help. ‘Yes, that would be good. Thanks.’

  Mrs Daniels strode out of the house, full of purpose, and even after I had shut the front door behind her, I could hear her muttering to herself down the path, ‘Slugs! Of all things – slugs!’

  The very next day the house was attacked in a blitz of cleaning that left the rooms transformed. Nothing was left untouched. Not the pile of post that Dad had not got round to opening. Not my half-done homework. Every corner was bleached and exposed, and outside, where there were any holes or vents, lay a grey-looking sort of dust.

  ‘It’s just a mixture of herbs and a few other things that will send them back where they came from,’ Rosemary Tanner told me. ‘My da passed it down to me. An old Mivtown recipe. It always worked in our house.’ Despite what Mrs Daniels had said, when I got home from school, Rosemary Tanner was there helping her.

  ‘How long have these slugs been getting in?’ she asked almost as soon as I walked through the door.

  I shrugged. ‘A few weeks,’ I said, although I remembered the first one very clearly – gliding across the wall outside my parents’ bedroom just after Mum had gone missing.

  ‘Only for a matter of weeks then?’ she persisted. ‘Not longer? Not since, say, Tindlemas?’

  I shook my head, although Mum had gone missing shortly after the Christmas holidays had finished, not too long after Tindlemas.

  ‘And have you noticed anything . . . odd about the way they are behaving?’

  ‘Erm, no. Not really,’ I said, although my voice wavered.

  ‘Are you sure, girl?’ Rosemary Tanner’s voice changed suddenly. It reminded me of a dog growling, low and rumbling. But at that moment Mrs Daniels came in, and she quickly said, ‘OK, then. Well, that should do it,’ in a light sort of way, looking around at the gleaming room with a satisfied sigh.

  Mrs Daniels nodded in agreement, dusting her rubber-gloved hands down her apron.

  ‘If you do notice anything, though, Effie, you know you can always tell us . . .’ Rosemary Tanner said, stepping closer. ‘I mean, you should tell us. You don’t have to deal with everything on your own.’

  She looked over to Mrs Daniels as though to prompt her, and Mrs Daniels’s eyes widened in agreement.

  ‘Oh yes, Effie. You can tell us anything – you know you can.’

  I nodded, but found myself taking a step backwards.

  Rosemary Tanner made sure she was gone before Dad came home, and Mrs Daniels looked at me appraisingly when I didn’t mention that she had been there.

  That night, as I got ready for bed, I heard Dad exclaiming, ‘Look at the bathroom! Effie, have you seen the colour of these tiles?’ They were gleaming white – far whiter than the pearly new teeth that had pushed their way through Tommi’s gums; whiter than snowflakes falling from a winter sky.

  I nodded. ‘That Deidre,’ Dad muttered, and I didn’t tell him that it was actually Rosemary Tanner who had scrubbed the bathroom.

  I fell asleep quickly that night, lulled by the thought that things would get better from now on.

  Rosemary Tanner and Mrs Daniels had tackled the house, and I felt sure that under their watch, no slug would dare to cross the threshold.

  Sometimes I feel as though I am watching myself from a distance. I walk into a room and I pick something up, but it’s not where I mean to be and I’m not holding something I want. Nonetheless it’s happening and I can’t stop it. I’m just watching it unfold.

  It’s like what happened by the loch. I couldn’t stop myself. It was out of my control.

  I couldn’t stop myself doing what I did.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The following morning I was washing up the dishes. I hadn’t done them last night because I’d been working on my map of Mivtown. I had started adding all the places that Mum had liked: the spot where the bilberry bushes fruited in summer; the place where the old cherry tree grew.

  I remembered having a picnic under the tree that looked like a bent arm beckoning. Kathleen and Finn had been there with us, but it was before Tommi was born. There was more food than we could eat, and Finn and I had been practising cartwheels; we kept falling flat on our stomachs, and in the end we gave up.

  ‘You show them how to do it,’ Kathleen had told Mum.

  ‘It’s been years!’ Mum said, laughing.

  ‘Go on!’ Kathleen encouraged her.

  ‘Can you do it, Tori?’ Finn asked shyly.

  ‘All right.’ Mum stood up and brushed the crumbs off her lap. She stood tall, and pushed up on her heels for a second while her arms reached up into the sky. Then she took a deep breath and started cartwheeling down the hill. She did five in quick succession; you couldn’t see the gap between one finishing and the next one beginning.

  We whooped and cheered and begged her to do some more.

  ‘Go on, Mum,’ I said, and in the end she did another lot that left her breathless, her face red and flushed.

  ‘Well, there’s no following that,’ said Kathleen. ‘We’d better get off, Finn. Your daddy’s coming home early tonight.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ I had protested. ‘Stay a little longer.’

  ‘We don’t have to go just yet, Effie,’ Mum said. ‘I could teach you how to cartwheel, if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay if Finn’s going,’ I said, and so we didn’t. We packed up our things and trailed after them down the hill.

  The previous evening I had started to add the tree that looked like an arm to my map, but remembering how the day had ended, I rubbed out the lines.

  Now I was running late, trying to clean up and make lunch and leave the house all at once; something was bound to go wrong sooner or later. That’s what happens whenever I try to do more than one thing at a time: if I carry everyone’s dinner plate through from the kitchen, I catch my foot on the rug and all the plates come crashing down; when I try to run a bath for Tommi while changing her sheets, the water always gets too hot, and then I have to put cold in, and then I add too much and it’s too full and I have to start the whole thing again.

  Things need your whole attention; even inanimate things. Or maybe i
t’s just that humans make mistakes when they try to do too many things at once. But sometimes I feel like things want you to notice them.

  I filled the washing-up bowl with hot soapy water; at the same time I started to get things out of the fridge to make a sandwich for lunch. There was a knob of stale cheese and an almost empty jar of pickle. That would do. I began scraping off the hard edges of the cheese into the bin, but it was overflowing: a heap of potato peelings sat on top of a mouldy old loaf, threatening to spill over onto the floor. I stopped what I was doing to pull out the heavy bag of rubbish.

  Just as I’d tugged the bin bag free, I heard the tell-tale sound of water overflowing, and sure enough, soapy bubbles were now cascading over the side of the washing-up bowl. I considered putting the bag down on the floor to turn off the taps, but it was bulging, rank and ripe; I needed to get it out of the house.

  At just that moment, as I stood looking at the roaring water, holding onto that foul-smelling bin, I felt a sharp pain on my right index finger and dropped the bag immediately, spilling the contents onto the floor.

  I looked down at my hand – and there was a shiny black slug.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I shook it off my hand and it landed by the pile of rubbish, curling in on itself like a hedgehog.

  I spun round to the kitchen sink to wash the cut. Droplets of my blood landed in the water, making red ribbons that danced and then disappeared. I studied the cut: five little pin-pricks that must have been deep – as quickly as the blood was washed away, it came back again.

  I turned round and saw that the slug was now moving towards me, leaving a silvery trail in its wake.

  Just then I heard someone knocking on the door. Old Bill. Both he and Mrs Daniels have keys, but Old Bill always knocks, while Mrs Daniels just lets herself in.

  Without thinking, I knelt down and picked up an empty yoghurt pot that was lying on the floor – one of those big ones that have a proper lid. I quickly scooped the slug into the pot and closed the lid firmly, then dropped it into my school bag as I went to open the door for Old Bill.

  ‘Morning there, Effie,’ he said.

  ‘Morning,’ I said awkwardly, trying to ignore the pain in my finger. ‘I’ve just had a bit of an accident, I’m afraid. Spilled the rubbish.’

  ‘Oh, right. Leave that to me, Effie. I’ll get it cleared up,’ and his voice only dropped slightly when he saw the jumbled mix of food and old containers.

  ‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ I said, bending down to pick up the potato peelings; it was difficult using only one hand – I kept the other hidden from him in my pocket.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. You should see my kitchen. You’d better be going, young ’un, or you’ll miss your bus.’

  I ran all the way down the lane. I could see the bus as I rounded the corner, waiting for me at the edge of the road. The engine was ticking over in the stillness of the street. How could a bus manage to sound cross that I was late? I ran faster still.

  When I heard the yoghurt pot knocking against my books, I started to slow down, even though the bus had sounded its horn, a sharp nasal warning. I didn’t care, though. I carried my secret carefully onto the bus, avoiding the disapproving glare of Terry, the driver. He muttered something about children today, and pulled away with a jerk before I could find my seat.

  ‘That was close,’ Finn said as I slumped down next to him, looping the strap of my bag cautiously over my head. ‘I really thought he was going to go without you.’

  I didn’t reply. My finger was still throbbing and I dug around in my bag for a tissue to staunch the blood.

  ‘How’d it go—’ Finn started to say, and then, when he saw the blood, ‘Hey, what happened to your finger?’

  I looked into his familiar face. I knew it better than my own. His forehead had creased, as it always did when he was worried about something. I’d only seen him do it a few times: when I’d told him about Buster disappearing, and when he found out what had happened to my mum.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ I said, thinking of the shiny little slug sitting on my hand.

  ‘Try me,’ he said.

  Whispering the events of the morning took the best part of the journey. We had turned down the road of our school by the time I’d finished telling him.

  ‘So it’s in the yoghurt pot right this minute?’ Finn said in a low voice.

  ‘Yes, in my bag.’

  ‘I hope it’s still in there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I couldn’t prevent my voice from rising sharply.

  ‘Well, they must be sharp – their incisors. Just look at your finger.’

  I remembered those deep holes and clutched my finger tightly, as if by doing so I could bind the flesh together.

  ‘I just wonder if they are sharp enough to get through plastic,’ said Finn.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘All off!’ Terry shouted gruffly.

  Finn and I were the last off the bus. I held my bag at arm’s length all the way along the narrow aisle and down the steps.

  I could see our classmates disappearing through the school entrance, their brightly coloured jackets engulfed by the stone’s dull grey.

  ‘What do we do?’ I said to Finn. My arm was beginning to ache.

  The bus had driven away now, so there was no one to see us running, hand in hand, in the opposite direction to the school and stopping, breathless, behind an old stone wall.

  ‘We have to see if it’s still in the pot,’ Finn said.

  We both looked at my bag as if it might do something weird like grow two legs and start to dance. But it sat innocently on the grass, keeping its secrets.

  Finn found a long stick on the ground; he bent down carefully and lifted the flap. I held my breath. The inside looked dark and ominous, but there was no sign of the creature.

  ‘Don’t put your hand in there!’ I couldn’t help calling out.

  ‘Effie,’ Finn chided me. ‘You know me better than that.’

  Using the stick once more, he lifted the strap so that the whole bag swung off the ground, and then, pinching the base with two fingers, turned it over and emptied it onto the grass in front of us.

  ‘Effie! Finn!’ It was the high-pitched call of Miss Bell. We both sank down immediately, our backs to the wall. The contents of my school bag lay half buried in the grass: my pencil case, an old flattened wrapper of a chocolate bar I must have had months ago because I couldn’t even remember eating it, the worn cover of my homework diary and, lying not a metre from my feet, the yoghurt pot I’d scooped the creature into. It had pictures of blueberries on its packaging, and as we waited for Miss Bell’s calls to fade away, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were made to look shiny and bright, not like the dull, smoky skin of blueberries at all.

  ‘OK, let’s see if we can find it,’ Finn said.

  The yoghurt pot still had its lid in place, but before I could say anything, Finn had turned the pot over, and there, amidst all the writing, was a small round hole.

  It had escaped.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  We trudged back to school. It was quiet and still, and through the windows I could see the hunched backs of our classmates at their desks.

  We’d missed registration and the first lesson had already started. After discovering the hole in the yoghurt pot, we had checked my school bag and the contents on the grass. But there was no sign of the slug.

  ‘You go first,’ I said to Finn.

  ‘OK,’ he said reluctantly, although we both knew that he was good at this kind of thing. In the face of Miss Bell’s astonished expression, Finn described how he’d felt sick when we got off the bus; he’d run off and I had spent all this time persuading him to come back to school.

  ‘Well, you look very well now,’ said Miss Bell, taking in his red cheeks and bright eyes.

  He stared at her, unblinking, and said, ‘I just needed some fresh air,’ and for a moment even I start
ed to believe him.

  We barely talked about it for the rest of the day. What was there to say anyway? Having come so close to finding out more about the slugs and whether they had anything to do with the legend, I think we both felt cheated when it disappeared through our fingers.

  The monsters from the legend lingered as blurry, shadowy beings at the edge of my mind; as soon as I turned my attention to them, they seemed to disintegrate and disperse like smoke into the night air. The monsters were for chants and taunts between Finn and me, or the sacrifices made by the villagers, not for the clear light of the day; not for the rubbish bag, not for Mum’s beloved binoculars.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what Old Bill had said about the girl twin touching the monsters in the loch; about the slippery smoothness of their cold skin. Just like a slug’s. Were they one and the same? Or was it just a coincidence? Was the legend just for scaring children, as Old Bill thought?

  What was galling, we decided, was that we had nothing to show for the events of that morning. I had a cut that could have been made by anything, and a hole in a yoghurt pot. It was like it hadn’t really happened at all. We decided not to tell anyone else; to keep it just between us, like the raft and the Tree Cave.

  By the time I got home and found that Old Bill had made one of my favourite dinners, dhal and rice, and Tommi had climbed up onto my lap to pat me on the head and say, ‘G’ girl, Effie,’ very solemnly, I was telling myself that maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe I’d cut my finger on some rubbish. Maybe.

  Perhaps it was better to forget about it and let it fade away completely. Could we have imagined it after all?

  I thought about all this, I really did. I hoped that, despite everything, it was not something real and with every day that passed it would fade from me.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  A few days after the slug escaped I woke up in the middle of the night, my tongue furry and heavy in my mouth, my throat sore.

  When we were walking home the previous afternoon, I had felt like I was getting flu. My legs had felt heavy and my head had begun to throb: I had come to a standstill outside the MacGails’ cottage and let my head drop.