The Monsters of Rookhaven, стр. 17
She stepped out into the sunlight and was surprised to find Freddie coming up the steps.
‘I was coming back in,’ he said.
Jem nodded, unsure of what to make of his anxious demeanour.
‘Just to say . . . to say thank you,’ he said.
Jem nodded again, feeling a little stupid and lost for words.
‘For standing up for me,’ he said. He didn’t seem to know where to look, and he gave a nervous nod before heading back down the steps. At the bottom he stopped and looked back up at her.
‘Who was it for you? Who did you . . .’
He couldn’t seem to look directly at her, and Jem, knowing what he meant, felt a sudden tautness in her chest.
Who did you lose?
‘My dad,’ she said. She tried to add and my mum, but it seemed too much to say, as if the words might be so heavy that they would drag her right through the earth, so that she would end up falling, falling forever.
Freddie nodded in understanding. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
He headed back to the van where his father waited, eyes fixed front, unblinking, unseeing.
Jem sat on a step and watched the van drive away. She felt suddenly cold despite the shining sun, and she tried to look straight ahead and not think of anything.
‘He took my pendant.’
Jem jumped at the sound of the voice coming from behind her. Mirabelle was standing just inside the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jem.
Mirabelle shrugged. ‘What do you have to be sorry for?’
‘I annoyed Daisy in the first place.’
Mirabelle sniffed. ‘She annoys everybody else. She deserves everything she gets.’
‘Do you want to come outside?’
Mirabelle shook her head. ‘I can’t. I need my pendant to protect me out there.’
Jem looked at the dark patch on the ground where
Great-uncle Cornelius had allegedly once stood. She tried to imagine what it meant to go unprotected in sunlight for someone like Mirabelle. She found it difficult to imagine, but that didn’t stop her shivering.
‘What will happen to Daisy?’ she asked.
‘She’ll float around in the mirror realm until someone is sent to get her out. She and Dotty are usually very careful around mirrors.’
‘Mirror realm?’
‘It’s the place behind all mirrors apparently. Nothing much there, or so people say. Odd has been, I think. He says it’s very boring.’
‘I see,’ said Jem, although she didn’t really. This was just another very strange piece of information that she was finding difficult to digest.
‘Uncle Enoch says that he doesn’t want you wandering around the house on your own,’ Mirabelle said, then winked at her and waved her inside. ‘But he didn’t say anything about a guided tour.’
Jem went inside, and Mirabelle took her hand.
‘Come on. Let’s show you around, Jem Griffin.’
Freddie
If there was one thing Freddie Fletcher was used to it was silence.
Silence was the great suffocating thing that had squeezed itself in between the cracks of his family since his brother had died, and it had grown, like a great fungal mass filled with poison. Freddie knew that to ask the wrong question was to risk bursting it, and release all of that poison, so he hardly ever spoke to his father, least of all on delivery day.
But today felt different. They’d collected the key from Dr Ellenby, who’d told them that he didn’t think they’d be needing it, but that he would give it to them anyway ‘in case Enoch has done his work and fixed the problem’. They didn’t question this curious statement.
Freddie’s father had allowed him to hold the key as they drove away from Dr Ellenby’s. It wasn’t a conventional key. It was a palm-sized gold disc made up of bands of concentric circles. Freddie had seen his father place it on the appropriate spot on the tor in the forest dozens of times before. Just holding it made him instantly feel more grown up. He was hoping that this would finally be the day his father might ask him to fix it in place and turn it, thereby opening the way to the Path of Flowers. But any illusions he’d had about doing so were dashed when they arrived at the stone.
Now they understood what Dr Ellenby meant by ‘the problem’. This strange tear in the Glamour was not something they’d ever seen before. Both Freddie and his father were slightly stunned by it, but they drove up the path to the house anyway. The flowers were bobbing their heads as usual, as if in greeting.
Freddie couldn’t get the colours around the fringes of the tear out of his head – beautiful shimmering rainbow colours that danced in the air – yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that the rip was an omen of sorts.
‘I can take the key back to Dr Ellenby if you like, Dad?’
Freddie was as surprised as his father at his own offer. His father looked at him, then nodded.
‘Just be quick about it.’
He parked the van outside their butcher shop and handed the gold disc to Freddie.
‘Be careful now,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose it.’
‘I won’t,’ Freddie replied.
His dad grunted and clambered out of the van, heading towards his shop.
Freddie got out and walked away from the butcher’s and up through the main street. He enjoyed walking. It allowed him time to think. It made him feel lighter.
The street was bathed in sunlight, and he could see Constable Griggs across the road talking to Mrs Smith the greengrocer. Both of them waved at him and he waved back.
Alfie Parkin was on the path ahead of him standing outside Nicholson’s Bakery. Alfie was about a year older than James would have been . . .
Freddie winced inwardly, forcing himself to stop thinking about it.
Alfie leaned heavily on the walking stick he’d had ever since he’d come back from the war. Freddie had never got used to seeing him with it. He remembered Alfie