Before You Sleep Read online

  Sunlight shone through the trees and striped us with shadows and bright slashes. Eyes big and mouths dry, we walked on and checked some of the other statues that we passed. We couldn’t stop ourselves; it was like the sculptures made you stare at them so that you could work out what was sticking through the leaves, branches and ivy. There was one horrible cloth-thing that seemed too real to be made from stone. Its face was so nasty that I couldn’t look at it for long. Standing under that thing gave me the queer feeling that it was swaying from side to side, and ready to jump off the block and come at us.

  Pickering was walking ahead of me, but he stopped to look at another statue. I remember he seemed to shrink into the shadow that the figure made on the ground, and he peered at his shoes like he didn’t want to see the statue. I caught up with him, but didn’t look too long either. Beside the statue of the ugly man in a cloak and big hat was a smaller shape covered in a robe and hood with something coming out of a sleeve that reminded me of snakes.

  I didn’t want to go any further and knew that I’d be seeing these statues in my sleep for a long time. Looking down the hill at the gate, I was surprised to see how far away it was now. ‘Think I’m going back,’ I said to Pickering.

  Pickering never called me a chicken. He didn’t want to start a fight and be on his own. ‘Let’s just go into the house quick,’ he said. ‘And get something. Otherwise no one will believe us.’

  The thought of getting any closer to the white house, and the staring windows, made me feel sick with nerves. It was four storeys high and must have had hundreds of rooms. All the windows upstairs were dark, so we couldn’t see beyond the glass. Downstairs, they were all boarded up against trespassers.

  ‘It’s empty, I bet,’ Pickering said, to try and make us feel better. But it didn’t do much for me. He didn’t seem so smart or hard any more. He was just a stupid kid who hadn’t got a clue.

  ‘Nah,’ I said.

  He walked away from me. ‘Well, I am. I’ll say you waited outside.’ His voice was too soft to carry the usual threat. But all the same, I imagined his triumphant face while Ritchie and I were the piss pots. I’d even climbed the gate and come this far, but my part would mean nothing if Pickering went further than me.

  We never looked at any more of the statues. If we had, I don’t think we’d have reached the steps that went up to the big iron doors of the house. Didn’t seem to take us long to reach the house either. Even taking slow, reluctant steps got us there real quick. And on legs full of warm water I followed Pickering up to the doors.

  ‘Why is they made of metal?’ he asked me.

  I never had an answer.

  He pressed both hands against the doors. One of them creaked but never opened. ‘They’s locked,’ he said.

  But as Pickering shoved at the creaky door again, and with his shoulder and his body at an angle, I’m sure that I saw movement in a window on the second floor. Something whitish, behind the glass. It was like a shape had appeared out of the darkness and then sunk back into it, quick but graceful. It made me think of a carp surfacing in a cloudy pond before vanishing as soon as you saw its pale back. ‘Pick!’ I hissed.

  There was a clunk inside the door that Pickering was straining his body against. ‘It’s open,’ he cried out, and he stared into the narrow gap between the two iron doors.

  I couldn’t help thinking that the door had been opened from inside. ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. He smiled and waved for me to come over and to help him make a bigger gap. I stayed where I was and watched the windows upstairs as the widening door made a grinding sound against the floor. Without another word, Pickering walked inside the big white house.

  Silence hummed in my ears. Sweat trickled down my face. I wanted to run to the gate.

  Pickering’s face reappeared in the doorway. ‘Quick. Come and look at the birds.’ He was breathless with excitement, and then he disappeared again.

  I peered through the gap at a big, empty hallway. I saw a staircase going up to the next floor. Pickering was standing in the middle of the hall, looking at the ground, and at all of the dried-up birds on the wooden floorboards. Hundreds of dead pigeons. I went inside.

  No carpets, or curtains, or light bulbs, just bare floorboards, white walls and two closed doors on either side of the hall. On the floor, most of the birds still had feathers but looked real thin. Some were just bones. Others were dust.

  ‘They get in and they got nothin’ to eat,’ Pickering said. ‘We should collect the skulls.’ He crunched across the floor and tried the doors at either side of the hall, yanking the handles up and down. ‘Locked,’ he said. ‘Both locked. Let’s go up them stairs. See if there’s somefing in the rooms.’

  I flinched at every creak our feet made on the stairs, and I told Pickering to walk at the sides like me. But he wasn’t listening and was just going up fast on his plump legs. When I caught up with him, at the first turn in the stairs, I started to feel real strange again. The air was weird, hot and thin like we were in a tiny space. We were both sweaty under our school uniforms too, from just walking up one flight of stairs. I had to lean against a wall.

  Pickering shone his torch at the next floor. All we could see up there were plain walls in a dusty corridor. A bit of sunlight was getting in from somewhere upstairs, but not much. ‘Come on,’ he said, without turning his head to look at me.

  ‘I’m going outside,’ I said. ‘I can’t breathe.’ But as I moved to go back down the first flight of stairs, I heard a door creak open and then close, below us. I stopped still and heard my heart bang against my eardrums from the inside. The sweat turned to frost on my face and neck and under my hair. And real quick, and sideways, something moved across the shaft of light falling through the open front door.

  My eyeballs went cold and I felt dizzy. From the corner of my eye, I could see Pickering’s face too, watching me from above, on the next flight of stairs. He turned the torch off with a loud click.

  The thing in the hall moved again, back the way it had come, but it paused at the edge of the rectangle of light on the floorboards. And started to sniff at the dirty ground. It was mostly the way that she moved down there that made me feel as light as a feather and ready to faint. Least I think it was a she, but when people get that old you can’t always tell. There wasn’t much hair on the head and the skin was yellow. She looked more like a puppet made of bones and dressed in a grubby nightie than an old lady. And could old ladies move that fast? Sideways like a crab she went, looking backwards at the open door, so I couldn’t see the face properly, which I was glad of.

  If I moved too quick, I’m sure that she would have looked up and seen me, so I took two slow steps to get behind the wall of the next staircase, where Pickering was already hiding. He looked like he was trying not to cry. I thought about them stone kids outside, and what they held in their little hands, and I tried not to cry too.

  Then we heard the sound of another door opening downstairs. We huddled on a step together, trembling, and we peered round the corner of the staircase to make sure that the old thing wasn’t coming up the stairs, sideways. But another one was down there. I saw it skittering around by the door like a chicken, and all the air leaked out of me before I could scream.

  That one moved quicker than the first one, with the help of two black sticks. Bent over with a hump for a back, it was covered in a dusty black dress that swished over the floor. What I could see of the face, through the veil, was all pinched and was sickly-white as the grubs you find under wet bark. And when she made the whistling sound, it hurt my ears deep inside and made my bones feel cold.

  Pickering’s face was wild with fear and it was like there was no blood left inside his head and I was seeing too much of his eyes. ‘Is they old ladies?’ he said in a voice all broken.

  I grabbed his arm. ‘We got to get out. Maybe there’s a window, or another door round the back.’ Which meant that we had to go u
p the stairs, run through the building and find another way down to the ground floor, before breaking our way out.

  I took another peek down the stairs to see what they were doing, but wished I hadn’t. There were two more of them. A tall man with legs like sticks was looking up at us with a face that never changed, because it had no lips or eyelids or nose. He wore a creased suit with a gold watch chain on the waistcoat, and was standing behind a wicker chair. In the chair was a bundle wrapped in tartan blankets. Peeking above the coverings was a small head inside a cloth cap. The face was yellow as corn in a tin. The first two were standing by the open door so that we couldn’t get out through the front.

  Running up the stairs into a hotter darkness, my whole body felt baggy and clumsy and my knees chipped together. Pickering went first with the torch and used his elbows so that I couldn’t overtake him. I bumped into his back, and kicked his heels, and inside his fast breathing I could hear him sniffing at tears. ‘Is they comin’?’ he kept asking. I didn’t have the breath to answer and kept running through the long corridor, between dozens of closed doors, to get to the end. I just looked straight ahead and knew that I would freeze if one of the doors opened. And with our feet making such a bumping on the floorboards, I can’t say that I was surprised when I heard the click of a lock behind us. We both made the mistake of looking back.

  At first, we thought it was waving at us. But then we realised that the skinny lady in the dirty nightdress was moving her long arms through the air to attract the attention of the others that had followed us up the stairwell. We could hear the scuffle and swish as they came through the dark behind us. But how could this one see us, I thought, with all those rusty bandages around her head? Then we heard another of those horrible whistles, followed by more doors opening real quick, like them things were in a hurry to get out of the rooms.

  At the end of the corridor, there was another stairwell with more light in it, which fell from a high window three floors up. But the glass must have been dirty and greenish, because everything around us on the stairs looked like it was under water. When he turned to bolt down the stairs, I saw that Pickering’s face was all shiny with tears and the front of his trousers had a dark patch spreading down one leg.

  It was real hard to get down to the ground. It was like we had no strength left in our bodies, as if our fear was draining us through the slappy, tripping soles of our feet. But it was more than terror slowing us down; the air was so thin and dry, and it was hard to get our breath in and out of our lungs fast enough. My shirt was stuck to my back and I was dripping under the arms. Pickering’s hair was wet and he’d almost stopped moving, so I overtook him.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I ran into another long, empty corridor of closed doors and greyish light that ran along the back of the building. Just looking all the way down it made me bend over with my hands on my knees to rest. But Pickering just ploughed right into me from behind and knocked me over. He ran across my body and stamped on my hand. ‘They’s comin’,’ he whined in a tearful voice, and stumbled off, down that passage.

  When I got back to my feet I followed him, which never felt like a good idea to me, because if some of them things were waiting in the hall by the front doors, while others were coming up fast behind us, we’d get ourselves trapped. I even thought about opening the door of a ground-floor room and trying to kick out the boards over a window. Plenty of them old things seemed to come out of rooms when we ran past them, like we were waking them up, but they never came out of every room. So maybe we would have to take a chance on one of the doors.

  I called out to Pick to stop. I was wheezing like Billy Skid at school who’s got asthma, so maybe Pickering never heard me, because he kept on running. As I was wondering which door to pick, a little voice said, ‘Do you want to hide in here?’

  I jumped into the air and cried out like I’d trod on a snake, and stared at where the voice had come from. There was a crack between a door and the door-frame, and part of a little girl’s face was peeking out. She smiled and opened the door wider. ‘They won’t see you. We can play with my dolls.’ She had a really white face inside a black bonnet all covered in ribbons. The rims of her eyes were red like she’d been crying for a long time.

  My chest was hurting and my eyes were stinging with sweat. Pickering was too far ahead for me to catch him up. I could hear his feet banging away on loose floorboards, way off in the darkness, and I didn’t think I could run any further. So I nodded at the girl. She stood aside and opened the door wider. The bottom of her black dress swept through the dust. ‘Quickly,’ she said with an excited smile, and then looked down the corridor, to see if anything was coming. ‘Most of them are blind, but they can hear things.’

  I moved through the doorway. Brushed past her and smelled something gone bad. It put a picture in my head of the dead cat, squashed flat in the woods, that I found one time on a hot day. But over that smell was something like the bottom of my granny’s old wardrobe, with the one broken door and little iron keys in the locks that don’t work.

  Softly, the little girl closed the door behind us, and walked off across the wooden floor with her head held high, like a ‘little Madam’, my dad would have said. Light was getting into this room from some red and green windows up near the high ceiling. Two big chains were hanging down and holding lights with no bulbs, and there was a stage at one end, with a heavy green curtain pulled across the front. Footlights stuck up at the front of the stage. It must have been a ballroom once.

  Looking for a way out, behind me, to the side, up ahead, everywhere, I followed the little girl in the black bonnet to the stage, and went up the stairs at the side. She disappeared through the curtains without making a sound, and I followed because I could think of nowhere else to go and I wanted a friend. But the long curtains smelled so bad around my face that I put a hand over my mouth.

  She asked me for my name and where I lived, and I told her like I was talking to a teacher who’d just caught me doing something wrong. I even gave her my house number. ‘We didn’t mean to trespass,’ I also said. ‘We never stole nothing.’

  She cocked her head to one side and frowned like she was trying to remember something. Then she smiled and said, ‘All of these are mine. I found them.’ She drew my attention to the dolls on the floor; little shapes of people that I couldn’t see properly in the dark. She sat down among them and started to pick them up one at a time, to show me. But I was too nervous to pay much attention and I didn’t like the look of the cloth animal with its fur worn to the grubby material. It had stitched up eyes and no ears; the arms and legs were too long for its body too, and I didn’t like the way the dirty head was stiff and upright like it was watching me.

  Behind us, the rest of the stage was in darkness, with only the faint glow of a white wall in the distance. Peering from the stage at the boarded-up windows along the right side of the dancefloor, I could see some bright daylight around the edge of two big hardboard sheets, nailed over patio doors. There was a draught coming through the gaps too. Must have been a place where someone got in before.

  ‘I got to go,’ I said to the girl behind me, who was whispering to her toys. And I was about to step through the curtains and head for the daylight when I heard the rushing of a crowd in the corridor that me and Pickering had just run through; feet shuffling, canes tapping, wheels squeaking and two hooting sounds. It all seemed to go on for ages; a long parade I didn’t want to see.

  As the crowd rushed past the ballroom, the main door clicked open and something glided inside. I pulled back from the curtains and held my breath while the little girl kept mumbling to the nasty toys. I wanted to cover my ears. A crazy part of me wanted it all to end; wanted me to step out from behind the curtains and offer myself to the tall figure down there on the dancefloor. Holding the tatty parasol over its head, it spun around quickly like it was moving on tiny, silent wheels under its long musty skirts, while sniffing at the air for
me. Under the white net attached to the brim of the rotten hat and tucked into the high collars of the dress, I saw a bit of face that looked like the skin on a rice pudding. I would have screamed but there was no air inside me.

  I looked over to where the little girl had been sitting. She had gone, but something was moving on the floor. Squirming. I blinked my eyes fast, and for a moment, it looked like all of her toys were trembling. But when I squinted at the Golly, with the bits of curly white hair on its head, the doll lay perfectly still where she had dropped it. The little girl may have hidden me, but I was glad that she had gone.

  Way off in the stifling distance of the big house, I then heard a scream; a cry full of all the panic and terror and woe in the whole world. The figure with the umbrella spun around on the dancefloor and then rushed out of the ballroom towards the sound.

  I slipped out from behind the curtains. A busy chattering sound came from the distance. It got louder until it echoed through the corridor, and the ballroom, and almost covered the sounds of the wailing boy. His cries were swirling round and round, bouncing off walls and closed doors, like he was running far off inside the house, and in a circle that he couldn’t get out of.

  I crept down the stairs at the side of the stage and ran to the long strip of burning sunlight that I could see shining through one side of the patio doors. I pulled at the big rectangle of wood until it splintered and revealed broken glass in a door-frame and lots of thick grass outside.

  For the first time since I’d seen the old woman, scratching about the front entrance, I truly believed that I could escape. I imagined myself climbing through the gap that I was making, and running down the hill to the gate, while they were all busy inside with the crying boy. But just as my breathing went all quick and shaky with the glee of escape, I heard a whump sound on the floor behind me, like something had just dropped to the floor from the stage. Teeny vibrations tickled the soles of my feet. Then I heard something coming across the floor toward me, with a shuffle, like a body was dragging itself real quick.