chapter 2
Crossing the Threshold
The three of them didn’t discuss why they didn’t let Ben and Dipa know they wanted to search the attic. It wasn’t that each of them didn’t think about it. Chloe certainly did. Jordy did too. (And who knew what was in Alex’s head?) But for some reason, unknown even to themselves, none of them mentioned it. Not that it was anything their parents would have objected to. They simply kept it secret. They deliberately waited for a Saturday morning when Dipa was working and Ben was going out to do the shopping. Chloe asked Jordy to go with her. Alex, however, was engrossed in making another kite and said he wouldn’t join them after all.
‘What’s that?’ Ben had asked, coming into the kitchen and catching the end of the conversation. ‘You lot going to the cinema?’
‘We might do later,’ Jordy had said. ‘Is it all right?’
‘What about lunch?’ Ben had asked. ‘Are you going to eat thin air?’
‘We’ll grab a bite in town,’ Jordy had said, and knowing Ben was disapproving of hamburgers added, ‘from the Italian sandwich bar.’
Once Ben had gone Chloe and Jordy found themselves at the trapdoor of the attic, climbing through, armed with torches. Once more the dust and dead air assailed Jordy’s nostrils, but this time he wasn’t so worried by it. He had a means of light with him and he had Chloe. Still, once he was standing on boards inside, shining the torch into the recesses of the attic, a strange feeling came over him. It was as if they were trespassing on the sacred burial ground of another culture. There was the sense, not of being watched, but of being felt by something or someone. The first step he took he walked into a cobweb and covered his face with sticky threads.
‘Urrgh!’ he grunted.
‘What’s wrong?’ Chloe was whispering for some reason. ‘Step in a cow pat?’
‘Very funny. There are spiders up here.’
Chloe said, ‘Don’t try to scare me. I’m not worried about spiders.’
‘I am,’ said a deep voice behind her, sending a shock wave through her. ‘I don’t like ’em.’
It was Alex, who had changed his mind after he’d accidentally snapped the spine of his home-made kite.
‘Don’t do that!’ she hissed at him. ‘You made me jump.’
‘Nearly gave me a heart attack,’ said Jordy, his voice coming out of the darkness.
Alex shone his torch around the rafters. The beam found some hanging flimsy cobwebs, grey as old bread. ‘They’re dead,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t mind dead ones.’
The three of them split up, each searching separate corners of the attic, ducking and weaving under rafters and stepping over beams. Jordy’s area contained the water tank and when he shone his torch in there he was disgusted by the dead insects floating on the surface. ‘We drink this stuff,’ he called to the others. ‘It’s filthy.’
‘No we don’t,’ corrected Alex, ‘unless you drink your own bathwater. That tank feeds the boiler.’
‘All right, I wash in it. It’s still filthy.’
They rooted around in the odds and ends that were up there, kicked aside old cardboard boxes, gingerly lifted clumps of dirty clothes with their torches. They were looking for that glint of old silver which would perhaps tell them they had found the treasure they were looking for. Now that they were up there, Jordy actually felt they were on a wild-goose chase. The watch could be anywhere, if it was there at all. Who could trust an old man’s memory? Mr Grantham might have thought he’d thrown it up there, all those decades ago, but maybe he threw it somewhere else? Or maybe the watch didn’t exist at all?
A beam of light came near him, as he turned over a cardboard box full of clothes with his toe. A woman’s mouldy hat lay flattened beneath it, the ribbon around the crown a sort of pale yellow colour.
‘Where’s Alex?’ asked Chloe, the person behind the light. ‘I can’t find him.’
Jordy shone his torch around the attic, finding different shapes, but none of them belonging to Alex.
‘Alex?’ called Jordy. ‘Alex?’
No answer. Suddenly his torch caught some bright shining eyes that looked up at him balefully. Jordy jumped back, alarmed. Then a familiar sound came from the creature who owned the eyes.
‘Nelson! What are you doing up here? How did you get up those steps?’ He stroked the cat’s back then said, ‘Did Alex go down again, d’you think? Maybe he got bored?’
Chloe replied, ‘No, he’d have said something. One minute he was just here, to my left, and the next moment he’d vanished.’
‘Which way was he going?’
Jordy was suddenly afraid that his step-brother might have hit his head on a beam and was lying unconscious somewhere. Vivid tales of people with concussion had been his bedtime stories from his paramedic father. You needed to get someone with concussion to hospital as soon as possible. He didn’t want to alarm Chloe though, so he said, ‘Could be at the back there, in that patch of darkness. You go back down to the flat, I’ll have a look.’
‘No,’ she replied sharply. ‘I want to look too.’
Like seasoned aircraft pilots they did a square search of the attic to the edge of the floor boards. The unboarded part went out into the darkness. Jordy decided to go further, but had to tread on beams. One wrong step and his foot could go through the ceiling into the flat below. Chloe followed him. They had to concentrate on hopping from one rough beam to the next. Strangely enough, after a long spell of doing this athletic dance between beams, still having to crouch because of the rafters, they came to some more boarding.
Jordy stepped on to it with relief. His legs were beginning to ache.
‘Our attic must continue into next door’s attic,’ he called back to Chloe. ‘There can’t be any wall between the two houses up here.’ His torch light streaked into the darkness ahead.
Chloe came up alongside him. ‘Perhaps that’s how they built houses in those days.’
‘What days?’
‘When it was built – Victorian times.’
She shone her torch beam alongside Jordy’s, then called out, ‘Alex? Are you in there?’
A faint reply came to them, seemingly from a distant place, like a whisper on the still air.
‘Was that him?’ asked Jordy.
‘I don’t know. Let’s go on a bit.’
‘Could have been a bird or a bat or something.’
Chloe was scornful. ‘A bat? Bats don’t yell.’
‘Well, sounds might get distorted up here. There are all sorts of things like roofing insulation, tanks and water pipes and things. You hear all kinds of noises in the plumbing, don’t you? Anyway, aren’t we trespassing? I mean, we must have other people’s homes under our feet now. What if someone comes up and catches us? Won’t we get into a row?’
Chloe considered this. They were one house in a terraced row of houses. Without a doubt they had crossed over from their own home into someone else’s. Perhaps the whole row had just one attic between them, without any walls between. Did that make sense? She thought it did.
‘We need to find Alex,’ said Chloe logically. ‘He might be hurt.’
They moved on, more easily now there were boards under their feet. The deeper they went into the attic, the more the darkness seemed to close around them. Then suddenly they came upon an area where there was a skylight, but high above. When they took stock and stared at their surroundings, they found the edges of the attic had moved back and back, leaving a huge space between. Above them the roof itself went up to dizzying heights. In front and behind, there was no beginning and no end. They were still in that triangular shape of the inside of a roof, but the apex was somewhere high above their heads, while the lower angles on either side had moved beyond the range of their vision.
‘Wha—where are we? It’s grown a bit,’ said Jordy. ‘The attic. It’s become – I don’t know – maybe we’re in a bigger house, at the end of the row? Is there a big house there? I can’t remember.’ He peered into the dimness. ‘I can’t see the corners. And where’s the roof?’
Chloe sneezed violently, making him jump.
‘Sorry,’ she said croakily. ‘Dust up my nose.’
She looked above at a forest of stout rafters, criss-crossing this way and that. A bewildering maze of angled roof timbers, with gloom filling the spaces between. Every so often there was a main support for the roof, a thick roughly hewn wooden pillar that shouldered the architecture above it.
A very big building, certainly. A manor house, perhaps? Or a vicarage? Or maybe even a church? She could see great beams curving overhead, like the flying buttresses of a cathedral. No, there was a skylight there, high above the beams, like a square sun above the network of lumber, its sharp shaft of light penetrating right down to the floor beneath. You wouldn’t have a skylight in a cathedral roof. In the sunbeam it threw down danced those bright specks which her mother used to call ‘angel dust’.
Chloe said in awed tones, ‘Where are we?’
‘It’s massive, isn’t it?’ He looked back into the darkness from which they had come. ‘We could get lost up here. You remember that story of the kid who climbed into the trunk during a game of hide-and-seek, and the lid locked shut behind him? They found him a hundred years later, just the dried-out bones covered in dusty rags …’
‘Don’t!’ warned Chloe, knowing Jordy was trying to scare her. ‘Stop it now.’
Jordy said gleefully, ‘Nobody ever found him.’
Chloe ignored him. ‘Where’s Alex?’ she said, in a tone which registered her frustration with her brother. ‘He’s always sliding off somewhere.’
‘I’m here,’ said a voice behind them, making both her and Jordy jump again.
‘Why did you run off?’ cried Chloe, rounding on her younger brother. ‘How did you get there?’
Alex looked annoyed and surprised. ‘It was you two who went off. I just followed your torch lights. You were a long way ahead of me. I had to run to keep up with you in places.’
Jordy said wearily, ‘Oh, come on, Alex.’
‘No, I’m telling the truth,’ cut in Alex, sounding angry. ‘It seemed like you were trying to get away from me.’
Chloe flushed. ‘That’s not true and you know it.’
Alex was sulky. ‘Well, that’s how it seemed to me.’
Jordy said, ‘Let’s all calm down. We’ve found each other now. No, we weren’t trying to get away from you, Alex. We were looking for you. Chloe was worried about you. She thought you might have banged your head on a rafter or something. I don’t understand how you got behind us, because we searched the attic – our attic, that is – before we set out. Now we’re somewhere in this much bigger attic …’ He looked up, to see two birds – or birdlike creatures – glide from one rafter to another.
‘It is big, isn’t it?’ Alex murmured, looking up and around him. ‘It’s giant size. Maybe we’ve shrunk? That’s what’s happened.’
Chloe said, ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘In that case, the attic’s grown.’
‘Now you’re being even sillier.’
Chloe sounded angry but Jordy knew that Chloe, in her heart, was upset by their situation. Jordy himself didn’t know what to think. It was all very extraordinary, very weird. Out there in front of them was a kind of thicket fashioned from scores of old fishing rods, with their lines going back and forth creating a tangle of cords. Dangling from the lines like loose wicked thorns were fishing hooks of all sizes. It really was like a dense bramble bush, which had obviously been there a long time: it was covered in spiders’ webbing from top to bottom.
He muttered, ‘Come on, we’ve got to find our way home. I hope I recognise which is our trapdoor.’
Jordy started to walk back the way he had come, but Alex cried, ‘That’s not the right direction.’
‘It’s this way.’ Jordy pointed. ‘Isn’t it, Clo?’
‘Well, I thought we came from that way.’
She pointed in a different direction still.
‘Now we’re stuck,’ growled Jordy. He made a decision. ‘I’m the eldest. It’s my responsibility. I say we go my way.’
‘You and your two months,’ Chloe said. ‘You think because you were born in July and me in September you’re the boss.’
‘Well, somebody’s got to be.’
‘Not necessarily. You’ve heard of democracy, haven’t you? We’ll vote on it.’
But a vote did nothing to get them any further, since they voted three ways. It was settled in the manner it always was when they were unsure which way to go. Jordy started out in the direction he wanted to go and the others felt they had to follow or lose him. Both Chloe and Alex still grumbled that it was the wrong way, but they felt they ought to stay together. Jordy felt no triumph on this occasion: he was simply praying he was right.
Chloe decided they were like explorers crossing uncharted regions as they walked the boards of this huge vault of wood and plaster. Deeper and deeper they went, failing to find their own trapdoor, and finally even Jordy was forced to admit they had probably gone wrong. He said he was sure he had the right direction, but the others said obviously not. So they turned round and began to retrace their steps. At least, they believed they had turned round, but after a while Chloe wasn’t even certain about this.
‘Look,’ she said, peering up into the gloom above, ‘you can just see the apex of the roof. It’s running opposite to the lines on the floorboards. We’re going level with them now. If we walk at right angles to the cracks, we should get back to where we started.’
It seemed Jordy was too worried to argue with her this time, so the three of them did what Chloe considered to be sensible, yet after an hour or two they still didn’t know whether they were any nearer to their own part of the attic. They were all becoming quite tired, and thirsty too. Piles of junk containing the clutter that one finds in an attic were here and there on the landscape.
Chloe picked up an old bottle made of green glass, with a loose glass stopper rattling in its neck.
‘Cod bottle,’ she said, having once collected old bottles. ‘These are quite rare.’
‘Is there any cod juice left in it?’ asked Alex, through parched lips. ‘Anything to drink?’
‘You don’t get cod juice in a cod bottle. It’s just called that. I think they used to have lemonade in them.’
Alex wandered off a bit while the other two sat down to rest on the floorboards. Alex was one of those people who usually have luck on their side, and this time was no different. He found a water tank hidden in the shadows. Using his hand as a cup he drank from it, ignoring the dead spiders and one or two down feathers floating on top. Then he called the others. They stood and stared at the water for a while, reluctant to drink.
‘We don’t know when we’ll find another waterhole,’ said Alex. ‘You’d better drink. And Clo should fill that cod’s bottle.’
‘Why do you call it that? A waterhole?’ said Chloe. ‘You make it sound as if we’re wild beasts, lost in the desert or something.’
‘He’s right,’ Jordy said. ‘It is a waterhole. There’s nowhere else to drink, is there? And the light’s going …’
The other two followed his gaze upwards, to see the square sun dimming in the rafter-crossed sky.
‘We must conserve our torch batteries,’ said Jordy. ‘Don’t use them unless you have to.’
‘Who made you boss?’ murmured Chloe, but the heart had gone out of her protests. She found herself gripping her torch as if it were a talisman, as if to let it go would be to abandon any chance of escape from this arid wooden place.
The smell of the water was tempting her now. Her throat was so dry she was rasping her words. She filled her bottle, pushing it right down under the scummy surface. She watched as the escaping air bubbles were replaced by water. Then she took the bottle out and drank from it, not caring that the glass container had probably lain in the attic for over a hundred years. She told herself if there had ever been any germs on the neck, they themselves would have died of thirst before now.
Jordy too succumbed and drank directly from the tank, skimming the surface free of dead insects with his hands first.
‘If we all wake up with stomach ache,’ he muttered, ‘I won’t be at all surprised. No one’s brought their mobile, I suppose?’
‘Not me,’ Alex said. ‘Why would I?’
True, thought Chloe, who did not even bother to answer. Why would they take a phone to search the attic? It wasn’t as if they were even going out of the house.
Normally, if they were camping or sleeping somewhere strange on holiday, they would sit up and talk into the night. Yet here, in this great attic they could think of nothing to say. Chloe simply sat there, hugging her knees through her jeans, staring up at the roof. She half hoped that stars would appear up there, now that the sun had gone down. Only one single such twinkling light came to comfort her. It was a bright one, probably Venus, caught in the skylight window. It did cheer her somewhat, to know that there actually was a real world out there.
‘See that?’ she said, pointing it out to Jordy. ‘The Evening Star.’
‘But locked in here,’ he muttered. ‘Trapped inside a bloody great attic.’ He reflected for a moment, before adding, ‘No wonder they call them trapdoors.’
A silence fell between them again. A little later Jordy’s torch went on for a few seconds. He inspected his wrist. Then it went out again.
He whispered to her, ‘My watch is going backwards.’
They both lay down on the boards and tried to sleep. In the middle of the night Chloe heard noises in the darkness. Not loud sounds, more like people walking softly, or small creatures scratching around. They were not even particularly alarming noises. Simply sounds which told her she and her brothers were not alone.
Later Chloe felt something soft brushing her face. She pushed it away, too sleepy to do anything else. An animal curled in the hollow of her stomach and joined her in sleep.
They woke early. The light was grey and dingy for a while, then the sun came through the skylights. The first thing they did was drink from the tank without any fuss. Alex found half a bar of chocolate in his pocket, which he shared out. Had it been in Chloe’s pocket, or Jordy’s, they would have starved. Alex was the only one who didn’t gobble down chocolate as soon as it was in his hands. He saved things for later. On this occasion his restraint did not irritate Chloe. Instead of saying in a sarcastic voice, ‘Oh, you’re so good, little brother’ she said, ‘Well done, Alex.’
‘Could have told us last night,’ muttered Jordy, chewing his three squares.
Alex replied with some logic, ‘Then you’d have had nothing for breakfast.’
Chloe suddenly looked around her, remembering.
‘Nelson came in the night,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he here?’
The two boys stared around them. ‘Can’t see him. You sure?’
‘Yes, positive. Oh well, he’ll find his way back.’
When Chloe had filled her bottle again, the three explorers set out once more. They were assuming that they would find their way out, but Chloe wondered what Ben and Dipa were doing. She guessed her mother would be frantic. Neither Chloe nor Alex had ever stayed out all night before – not without their mother knowing exactly where they were.
Chloe wasn’t sure about Jordy.
She had picked up inferences from her step-brother that things had not been too stable in his family, during and after the divorce. Chloe had the idea that Jordy had run away at least once, when the split in his family had come. Then Jordy’s mother had declined custody of her son, a rejection which must have hurt him. Perhaps he might still have chosen to be with his father, but to have a mother who did not seem to want him must have been painful.
Maybe Ben was at this moment blaming Jordy, thinking that perhaps he’d run away again, taking the other two with him.
‘What is this place?’ muttered Jordy.
‘Obviously it’s a giant attic.’
‘We guessed that,’ Jordy snapped, ‘but why is it so big?’
‘How am I supposed to know?’
They looked at each other for a moment, then Chloe said, ‘Can we stop arguing for a while? We’re all in a fix and we need to pull together to get out of it. Can we just be friends?’
Jordy stared, then grinned. ‘Yeah, sorry, Clo. I don’t mean to be mean. I mean – well, you know what I mean. Just because we don’t always agree, doesn’t mean anything.’
She smiled too. ‘There’s about three million means in there.’
‘You’re no good at maths. There are only about half a dozen. OK, let’s not worry, let’s get walking.’
‘Have you thought,’ she asked, ‘how Ben and Dipa are going to be worrying?’
Jordy shrugged. ‘Not much we can do about it, except keep going. Got to find a way down, is all.’
Chloe knew that Jordy’s pretence at a casual attitude was a front. She knew he felt responsible for what happened to them in any adverse predicament, such as this one. That was because he was male and because he was the eldest. It was stupid of him, of course, but his real mother had drummed some rubbish into him about men being stronger and having to take care of women, who were supposedly weaker.
Chloe felt well able to take care of herself and didn’t need a guardian who was only two months older than she was, even if he was a male. But she couldn’t tell him that, because he would take no notice and it would only make him all the more anxious. Jordy was a product of someone who believed in the old order, when men ruled the world and women did as they were told. Men were made of iron, women were fashioned of thin glass. It was a load of old rubbish, really.
‘We don’t break any more,’ she muttered. ‘We’re made of tougher stuff these days.’
‘What?’ said Jordy, turning his head, a puzzled look on his face. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’
Suddenly Alex stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Did you see that?’ he asked, staring off to the right of where they were standing. ‘Someone’s out there.’
‘Where?’ asked Jordy, straining to see through the dimness into the far side of the attic. ‘Out there?’
‘Someone moved. I saw a shadow jump.’
Chloe said, ‘Perhaps it’s someone who’s just come up from the house underneath us?’
‘It didn’t move like a person,’ Alex said. ‘It moved like – like some other creature. I don’t know what. An animal or something.’
‘Stop scaring me,’ cried Chloe, her heart beating faster. ‘Don’t play games, Alex.’
‘I wasn’t – look, there it is again. In the shadows. Maybe it’s Nelson?’
‘I saw it. I saw it,’ cried Jordy. ‘It wasn’t a cat, it was – I dunno – it must be a person.’
Alex shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t. It didn’t move right. Look, again! It’s sort of jerky. Now it’s gone. Gone into the blackness.’
‘I think it’s a person,’ said Chloe quickly. ‘I think we’ve got to look for him – or her. Whoever it is. They can tell us the way out.’