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.