D Page 5

  “All right,” said the voice. “Sssit.”

  Dhikilo sat, feeling cross and confused. A lorry passed by in the street, making everything seem hopeless and too big. Clouds covered the sun and it began to rain. She tried her “Sun!” trick again, and again it failed. Arithmetically speaking, that meant that her success rate was dropping towards a random 50/50, indicating that she didn’t have any special powers at all. If she went home now, she could clean up the bath before Ruth came back from work. Maybe she could even catch the last lesson at school. It would be either History or Geography, she couldn’t remember which. Or maybe Citizenship?

  At her back, there was a clunk and a creak. The door swung open, inwards.

  Antique Splendours

  “Oh!” cried Dhikilo, at the sight of a large Labrador standing in the hallway, its paws resting on a dark Persian carpet. A line of such carpets, overlapping and of different designs, was laid all the way down the hall, which was painted dark blue and rather gloomy.

  “Mrs Robinson?” said Dhikilo. She hadn’t recalled the Professor’s dog being quite so big. But it was the right colour: chocolate, rather than the more common pale gold. “Mrs Robinson, remember me?” She reached out her hand to pat the animal.

  The Professor’s dog bared its teeth, and Dhikilo drew her hand back. Then the teeth-baring turned into a yawn, and the dog padded up the hall and disappeared around a corner. And, from somewhere around that corner, a voice rang out.

  “Come in, Miss Bentley! And shut the door!”

  It was the same voice, and even the same sentence, with which Professor Dodderfield had summoned her into his office at school. Dhikilo took a deep breath and entered.

  As soon as she’d shut the door behind her, the hallway was as dark as the inside of a wardrobe, or so it seemed to her unaccustomed eyes. She hurried towards the light around the corner, and so made a rather sudden entrance into the room where the Professor sat with his dog.

  It was a large room, with very high walls painted the same dark blue as the entrance hall and, as Dhikilo had already noticed from the street, thick curtains shrouding the windows. A fantastically ornate and dusty chandelier hung from the ceiling, with only three or four of its bulbs working, throwing a feeble yellowy light on the parlour’s antique splendours, which included:

  A grandfather clock, several vast glass-fronted bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes, a big wooden lectern like the pulpit in Saint Ursula’s Church, more Persian rugs, Mrs Robinson (difficult to see, at first, in the gloom, but she was there, near the fireplace), a tall brass lamp that wasn’t switched on, a sagging spinach-coloured sofa piled high with oak branches and twigs and bits of broken furniture that looked as if they’d been dragged out of skips, a preposterously plump purple armchair and...seated in that armchair, dressed in his usual suit, with a dressing gown on top...the Professor himself.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” the old man said, “it’s a school day. Which means you’re committing an act of truancy.” With a grunt of exertion, he stretched his legs and wiggled his feet, which were loosely shod in threadbare tartan slippers that were far too large. “Sad to see a good girl go bad.”

  “I have permission,” Dhikilo pointed out. “To attend a funeral, actually.”

  “Ah,” said the Professor.

  “Your funeral.”

  “Ah,” said the Professor.

  In truth, even though he wasn’t dead, he didn’t look very well. In his last year teaching at the school he’d looked about 58 and now he looked about 158. He had grown his beard longer and tried to sculpt it into a perfect triangle, like an upside-down V hanging off his chin, but it was thin and straggly. His moustache drooped over his lips. The hair on his head was sparser than she remembered, and stuck up at random. All the wrinkles in his flesh had deepened, particularly the bags under his eyes, which gave the impression of unimaginable exhaustion. And, although it was perhaps a trick of the dim light, his eyes no longer seemed milky, but dark as shoe-polish.

  “How are you?” said Dhikilo.

  “Oh, fair, fair,” sighed the Professor. “I’ve seen better days. Tens of thousands of them, as a matter of fact.” He gestured towards the sofa. “Take a seat.”

  “There’s no room,” observed Dhikilo. “It’s covered in firewood.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the Professor. “Well then, sit on the floor. Children often sit on floors, don’t they? And it’s good enough for Nelly.”

  Dhikilo knelt on the carpet, which was none too clean. She looked towards the fireplace, and noticed that it was crammed with logs and other lumps of wood, but so poorly organized that it was alight only in one small corner where some air could accidentally get in.

  Mrs Robinson was nicely settled near this modest glow of warmth. She was on her belly, but with her head held high. At her side was a tiny pedestal table on which was balanced a tall glass half-full of milk, with two straws in it.

  “I have some questions,” said Dhikilo.

  “Always a good thing,” said the Professor, leaning forward as though he could see her.

  “I was at your funeral today...” she began.

  “Ah, that,” he said, clapping his bony fingers together in a nervous gesture. “Not a good effort. All done in a hurry, no chance to think it through. And what weather!”

  “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Well, yes, if you’re inclined to be a stickler for the rules. But it seems rather harsh.”

  “And also,” said Dhikilo, “those men who carried the coffin. The men in black...”

  “Black is customary, I believe.”

  “I followed them out of the graveyard...”

  “Miss Bentley, Miss Bentley!” said the Professor, leaning back in his armchair so abruptly that one of his slippers fell off. “All this talk of graveyards, coffins, death and funerals! Most inappropriate in a girl of your age. You ought to be talking about...ah...whatever it is girls your age talk about. Cheerful topics. The latest fashions? Beautiful young millionaires who sing of love? I confess I am ignorant, but willing to be enlightened. Tell me, Miss Bentley, what’s your impression of the world in general since I retired?”

  Dhikilo was getting fed up. She’d come here for answers and the Professor was doing his best not to give them. In a minute he would send her away and she would walk home in the pouring rain.

  “The D is gone,” she said. “The D is gone from everything and nobody admits it. They just pretend it hasn’t happened.” It was only as the words were leaving her mouth that she realized the Professor’s speech was normal. Well, not exactly normal; it was rather mad—but at least it had all the Ds in.

  The Professor leapt up from his chair. Dhikilo, still squatting on the carpet, was so startled that she fell over backwards. But he wasn’t about to assault her; instead, he fumbled all around his armchair for his walking stick. The dog had disappeared; Dhikilo hadn’t even noticed her leave.

  “Miss Bentley, forgive me,” he muttered. “All this time I’ve kept you here without offering you a cup of tea. Or what is it that young girls drink? Not coffee, surely? I’m almost sure I have some lemonade somewhere. Does it improve with age, like wine? I confess I may have had it for quite some years...”

  “Charlsss!”

  Dhikilo froze in fright. It was the strange voice she’d heard at the door, coming out of nowhere. “Charles, you are wasssting time and wasssting what has come to usss. This girl is the one who will do what you and I cannot.”

  The Professor stopped rummaging about, stood up straight for a moment, then slowly lowered himself back into his armchair. The exertion had made his cheeks and nose very red and brought a twinkle of sweat to his wrinkled forehead.

  “This girl? You really think so?” he murmured, turning towards the empty space by the hearth where his dog had been. “Hmm, yes... I suppose...”

  “Your brain
is ssslower than it once was, Charles,” the voice from nowhere whooshed again.

  The Professor folded his arms and sulked.

  “There’s no need to get personal.” He was still addressing the hearth.

  Suddenly the empty space beside the little pedestal began to shimmer. Dhikilo’s view of the fireplace and the smouldering logs grew hazy and the air wobbled and shook. Even the glass of milk trembled and the straws in it moved around. Then the hazy parts of the air took shape and began to fill up with the outlines of a large creature.

  In moments, it was all there. First, the head and neck of a woman, with a great thick mane of golden curls. Then the body, legs and paws of a very large cat—not as big and bulky as a lion, maybe the size of a cheetah, but without spots, and tawny in colour. Lastly, a tail that stuck up in the air and swayed around, with a tiny forked tongue flicking in and out of the tip, because it was actually a snake. The woman-face lifted its chin, blinked its violet eyes and opened its thin lips.

  “Don’t be afraid,” it told Dhikilo. “I’m... I am... I do not know the word.”

  “Tame?” guessed the Professor.

  “Yesss,” said the creature. “Tame.” But in making the sound of the word, it opened its mouth a little wider, and Dhikilo saw that its teeth were sharp as spikes.

  Ectoplasmic Helpers

  Dhikilo gratefully accepted the cup of tea handed to her by the Professor. The saucer had quite a lot of tea spilled in it, as the Professor had stumbled on the edge of one of the Persian carpets on his way back from the kitchen. But a couple of sips of hot drink really helped with the fright.

  Was there anything to be frightened of, truly? Nobody was threatening to harm her. Nobody was waving a weapon. Outside the house, she could hear the sound of small children laughing quite near by. That was comforting: it helped her push away the feeling that she was trapped in a strange dream. The world outside was normal (well, sort of normal, apart from the missing Ds), so the world inside this room must be normal, too. She was simply (she told herself) sitting in an old house in an ordinary street, drinking tea, and the rain had stopped, the sun was peeking through the tiny gap in the curtains, and no doubt she would soon be out there, waiting for a bus.

  Until then, she was simply visiting an old teacher of hers called Professor Dodderfield, who had maybe gone a little bit mad in his extreme old age, but was almost certainly harmless. And it was also quite possible that the creature with the human face, body of a large feline and tail of a snake was an optical illusion. Like those times when you think you see a spooky monster in a tree but it turns out to be a plastic bag caught in the branches.

  Or maybe the creature was just an ordinary young woman in fancy dress. Or even if she wasn’t, she—it—was quite busy right now licking its paws and flanks with its long tongue, shaking its luxurious hair away from its face every few seconds. A creature calmly licking itself was surely nothing to be afraid of?

  “Nelly is a sphinx,” said the Professor, feeling his way back into his armchair. “You’ll remember sphinxes from Egyptian history, I trust? That’s if you were paying attention in class, of course.”

  Dhikilo drank some more tea. One of the children playing outside let out a shriek. It didn’t sound like harmless play any more.

  “She isn’t unfriendly, really,” the Professor went on. “She can’t help the voice, it’s just the way sphinxes are made. She is, in fact, rather a treasure. You’ll get to know her a lot better when you travel with her.”

  Dhikilo lifted a soggy macaroon out of the wet saucer and pretended to be perfectly calm. “Am I going somewhere?” she said.

  “Oh, I hope so, Miss Bentley, I do hope so.”

  “How soon?” asked Dhikilo, wondering how far she would get if she made a dash for the front door. The sphinx’s claws looked terribly sharp, especially now that it had them stretched all the way out to lick the furry spaces between them.

  The Professor frowned, obviously in deep thought. Absent-mindedly he looked down at his wrist, which had not had a watch on it since he’d gone blind ages ago, so he grunted in annoyance, and thought some more. At last he said, “When do the shops close?”

  “Sorry?” said Dhikilo, caught by surprise with her mouth full of macaroon.

  “Miss Bentley: for your journey, you’ll need to be much more warmly dressed than you are now.”

  Dhikilo was so taken aback she forgot that it’s not polite to remind blind people they’re blind. “How do you know how warmly dressed I am?”

  “Well...” said the Professor. “Are you dressed for snowy weather? Woolly hat? Fur-lined boots? Mittens?”

  “No,” admitted Dhikilo. She was getting that trapped-in-a-dream feeling again, and she couldn’t hear the children’s voices any more, either, which was a bit worrying.

  “So, when do the shops close?” repeated the Professor.

  “Uh...” struggled Dhikilo, too nervous to think straight.

  “Half passst five,” came the unearthly voice of the sphinx. “Or sssometimes sssix.” A pause. “Sssupermarkets, later.”

  The Professor swivelled round in his chair and laid his hand on the sphinx’s hair in obvious appreciation, though the creature’s face remained impassive.

  “Nelly does all my shopping, you see,” he explained.

  “I’ve never seen her in town,” said Dhikilo.

  “She stays in the shadows.”

  “There aren’t any shadows in Tesco’s.”

  “She sends in her little helpers. Well, not so little. The tall, silent men. You saw them at the funeral. They all come from Nelly.”

  “Come from Nelly?”

  “She...ah...hmm, how best to explain this? I suppose you could say she makes them. Except they’re only temporary. Like...ah...human-shaped balloons. Balloons without the skins. They’re made of ectoplasm.”

  “Ectoplasm?” Dhikilo had never heard of it. It sounded like plastic but stickier and squishier.

  “It’s the same stuff ghosts are made of,” the Professor explained, as though ghosts were as normal and everyday as grass. “Partly solid, partly not. A highly versatile substance. Or do I mean volatile?”

  The sphinx drew a deep breath, as if fed up with the old man’s prattle.

  “Anyway, Nelly can do six of them, if she has to. Six ectoplasmic helpers. But if she makes six, they’re shorter and weaker. Two is optimal. Then they can run around fetching the baked beans and the tea and the milk and so on.”

  Dhikilo thought of Mrs Plummer down the street, who was blind and didn’t need supernatural assistance to get her shopping done, just a friendly staff member willing to leave off stacking shelves for ten minutes.

  “You could shop by yourself, if you’d rather,” said Dhikilo. “The people working in the shop would help you.”

  The Professor did that thing with his eyebrows and neck that grown-ups do when they’re thinking, That’s an excellent suggestion and would certainly solve my problem except that I’ve already decided it is something I’m never going to do, ever.

  “It wouldn’t be...ah...advisable for me to be seen in public,” he said. “Now that I’m supposed to be in my grave.”

  “But what about before?”

  “Well, to be wholly frank with you, Miss Bentley, it wasn’t so advisable then, either. You see, I’ve been rather...what’s the word? Naughty. Yes, naughty.” He grinned, not looking the least bit sorry.

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, I probably shouldn’t have applied to work at Cawber School for Girls. It was a return to employment after I’d...ah...retired from another career quite some years previously—1870, to be precise.”

  He scratched his beard and looked towards the fireplace, his blind eyes glittering. The sphinx had turned back into a Labrador. Dhikilo wondered which was the real Mrs Robinson and which was the thing Mrs Robinson sometimes turn
ed into.

  “I tried for many decades,” the Professor went on, “to adjust to my new life of idleness. I read a great many books, went to the theatre, developed a taste for new-fangled entertainments like the cinema. Then I went blind and had to find something else to do.” He stared down at his tartan slippers, as though the answer had originally revealed itself there. Mrs Robinson let out a deep doggy sigh.

  “Teaching a schoolful of girls History seemed as good a way as any,” he said, “to keep me out of mischief.”

  Dhikilo remembered the uninhabited appearance of the building in which the Professor’s flat was hidden, and Mrs Robinson’s attempts to frighten her away, and the creature’s reference to some mysterious thing the Professor and Mrs Robinson couldn’t do which needed doing.

  “Are you in trouble?” Dhikilo asked.

  “Oh, yes, I should think so,” said the Professor, and pointed vaguely towards the outside world. “If I dare to step outside that door, I’m a dead man.”

  Before Dhikilo could ask another question, the Professor clapped his gnarly hands and declared, “But enough lugubrious talk! There are important things to be achieved, and an adventure to be embarked upon, and I think Nelly is quite right to have identified you as the person to fulfil this mission. Of course, it will mean taking some time off school, which, strictly, is against the law, but I really think an exception should be made in the circumstances, and I speak as an ex-teacher. Also, we should not deny that there is some degree of hazard. As in, you may get yourself killed. But you’ve always struck me as a sensible and resourceful girl, and I’m sure you’ll do your very best to stay alive.” The Professor began to search the pockets of his coat and trousers, humphing and huffing. “And don’t skimp on the boots! Proper snow boots, with fur lining and tough soles!”

  After another few seconds of searching, he pulled out a battered old wallet, from which he extracted a wad of banknotes.

  “Here,” he said, offering them to Dhikilo with his bony arm outstretched. “I cannot see the denominations. Is this enough?”