‘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.