Walking Through Albert Page 3

  She gives me a really dirty look. Her face is as white as a grub that’s lived under a log all its life. ‘Out of Emma’s quintillion sisters, you mean?’

  I sort of grin, and kick at the ground.

  ‘And you’re Emma’s friend Rennie, from next door,’ she says.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ she says in a truly nasty voice. I look at her in surprise, then get even more surprised when she kind of snatches her face away. Her eyes are full of tears!

  ‘Hey, are you okay?’ I’m totally confused.

  ‘Just naff off, would you?’

  Emma’s in the kitchen, waiting for a jug of water to boil.

  ‘Your sister’s crying out there,’ I tell her quietly. ‘Did she—you know—too?’

  ‘Nah. She and Dad’ve been having an argument.’

  ‘What about?’ I sit on the big old kitchen table and swing my legs.

  ‘Oh, the wedding—flowers or something. He and Mum want things to look nice and Fia doesn’t. And the invitation list. Because she wants to invite sixty zillion friends or something, but they reckon all this family has to come as well, and it costs, you know, umpteen dollars a head. It’s all really stupid, if you ask me.’ The jug clicks off and Emma pours water into a mug with a teabag in it.

  ‘She doesn’t look like someone who’s getting married.’

  ‘Oh, she’s never very smiley, especially when she comes here lately, especially without Chris. She’s quite different when he’s around, all fake charming. She even pretends to get on with me, which is a big phoney act. I don’t know what’s worse, that or all this shouting and sulking.’

  ‘So how’s your dad?’

  ‘You mean, besides being on crutches and needing a strong cup of tea?’ She grins, then grins even more. ‘He thinks there’s something wrong with his brain.’

  ‘What, the balance thing?’

  She shakes her head. ‘They’re going to scan his head, just like they scanned his ankle, to see if there’s anything broken in there. He’s very depressed about it.’ She chuckles quite kindly.

  ‘He just can’t believe his own ears, that’s his problem,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve been thinking.’ Emma jiggles the teabag in the water. ‘Maybe he tried to get away in the middle of it.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, didn’t you feel like you were kind of trapped there, when it was happening to you? Like you had to sit through the whole video, right to the end?’

  ‘Except I didn’t see anything, yeah.’

  ‘Whatever. Felt. Experienced. Maybe if you try and ... and force yourself away—and my dad probably would try ...’ She thinks about it. ‘Anyway, maybe bad things happen then. Maybe you get hurt.’

  ‘Do you think you should warn him, then? And your Mum, maybe?’

  She laughs. ‘Can you think of a way of telling them that won’t make them want to have my head scanned? I can’t.’ She drops the spoon into the sink. ‘Let’s go into my room, out of the way of old Misery-Guts out there. I’ll just take Dad’s tea up.’

  I go around to her veranda room to wait. I get Lee’s bit of newspaper out of my pocket, and when Emma comes back I give it to her.

  ‘ “Protection, assistance, the sight”—oh, cool!’ She starts to laugh. ‘Your local witch? Get real!’ She goes to hand the paper back, then looks again, laughs again. ‘ “Andy”! Like a witch’d be called Andy!’

  ‘It must be short for something else. Andrea. And—riana.’

  ‘Andromeda.’

  ‘Yeah, something witchier. Why don’t you give her a call and find out?’

  Emma snorts.

  Then there’s a clatter out in the hall, and Fia swears loudly, and goes on swearing. We charge out. She’s sitting on the floor, holding her head, crying and swearing. ‘Just what I frocking-well need!’

  ‘What happened?’ says Emma. Not that she needs to ask: the air’s full of that floating sweetness, those drifting echoes of non-sound.

  ‘Fell over and practically cracked my skull on the phone table, didn’t I? Oh! Ow!’ She looks pretty terrible—I can’t imagine anyone wanting to marry her. She’s all teary, and red-faced angry.

  Then she takes her hands off her forehead. Emma and I both gasp. ‘Holey-moley!’ I say. ‘It’s like someone stuck an egg in your forehead!’

  ‘A sort of greenish-purplish egg,’ says Emma with a sick look. ‘Shiny. Oh, Fia, it’s gross!’

  ‘It’s going to burst open! Oh, it hurts so much! I must be concussed, a thump like that!’

  ‘Concussed people don’t yell and swear,’ says Emma. ‘They go all quiet and woozy.’

  ‘I do feel really weird. Sick in my stomach, and my head aches all over, not just where I whacked it—’ She gets up and staggers down the hall to the lounge-room.

  ‘You want an aspirin?’ I call after her.

  Emma looks at me. ‘D’you get a funny feeling we’ve done this before?’

  ‘She was too cranky to sit through the video, you mean?’

  ‘This is crazy! Is this going to happen every day? Someone’ll get killed!’

  ‘ “Protection, assistance, the sight,” ’ I quote. ‘ “Spells cast, amulets assembled”—what are amulets?’

  ‘Lucky things, like charms, I think.’ Emma glances around the hall, puts out her hands to feel the air, but all the echoes have faded now. ‘Or things you use against things, like garlic against vampires. I don’t know.’

  ‘Let’s find out,’ I say. ‘Let’s ring our local witch and ask.’

  6

  Witchery

  The witch lives in an ugly block of flats next to the highway, between a caryard and a row of vacant shops. The door opens a crack and a pale, reddened eye appears, very high up.

  ‘Hello. Andy?’ says Emma over the traffic noise roaring up the stairwell. ‘I’m Emma. I rang before ...’

  Andy—and it’s Andrew, not Andromeda—lets the door swing open and walks away down the hall.

  We follow him—he’s like a tall, black skeleton—past two empty rooms to a kitchen, bare except for two tatty orange plastic chairs and a chipboard table. There’s a smell that reminds me of when Lee and I played Early Settlers once, and built a little camp-fire and roasted two dead mice Mum had thrown on the compost. I’m not sure which was more sickening, pushing the roasting-sticks through the mice or the smell when their fur started burning.

  The witch looks half-dead himself. He sits on one chair and Emma takes the other—I stand beside her like some kind of watch-dog. This guy is weird; he looks all smudgy and unwell. His cranky greeny-white face has got pillow-creases all down one side—we must have woken him up. Around his neck on a piece of black string hang a silver cross and a small chunk of purple crystal; apart from that, he’s wearing an old black T-shirt and jeans.

  Emma finishes telling him everything and he squirms a bit more upright in his seat, swallowing a yawn. ‘So, just the four manifestations?’ He sips a glass of cloudy-looking water.

  The four what?

  ‘Um ... so far, yes,’ says Emma. ‘And two of them involved people getting hurt, so I was hoping you could help us.’

  The witch frowns and chews the edge of one of his fingernails. ‘Some people just resist,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t do them any good. You seem pretty receptive, though. Kids often are.’ He looks out the window.

  ‘Well ... ’ says Emma, ‘do you think ... is there any way we can get rid of them—the ... infestations? We’re supposed to be having a wedding in the house in November, so if the thing could be gone by then—’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ snaps the witch. ‘I’m not some kind of supernatural pest exterminator. I’m into understanding. My art’s about the whole ... flow of nature, you know? The whole cycle, and how all the elements mingle together.’

  There’s a silence. In it, I hear my dad’s voice: What a dork! What a prize wally!

  ‘Oh,’ says Emma politely. ‘Wh
at should we do, then?’

  ‘Seek insight,’ says the witch with a secretive, satisfied smile. ‘Listen and learn. Hey, look, I’d really like to witness these manifestations myself, really get a handle on them. When can I come around?”

  ‘Oh, my dad works at home,’ says Emma quickly. ‘I’m afraid you can’t—I mean, I can’t get you in there without him asking awkward questions.’ She just doesn’t want this guy in her house, I can tell—and I can see why. Just to look at him makes you feel kind of itchy and grotty.

  The witch stares at her and sniffs. ‘Okay, have it your way,’ he says flatly. ‘I’ll make up something for you, if you want to try that.’ He unfolds all his bones from the chair and goes out, into the back room of the flat. Under the traffic noise we can hear him in there, rummaging and clinking and rustling things.

  Eventually he comes back. ‘Here you go.’ He hands Emma a grubby envelope. ‘Amulet. Bury it under the house. Do it in secret or it won’t work—in a week or so, when the moon’s on the wane. And it might be a good idea to do it on a Wednesday; that’s a good healing day. Then—’ he gives her a tiny cloth bag ‘—make a little fire, of resinous wood—’ He stifles a yawn. ‘Throw that on the coals, all of it, every crumb. It’ll cleanse the place. ‘Kay?’

  ‘Great,’ says Emma. ‘Thanks. Do we owe you any money for this?’

  The witch smiles rather slyly, then seems to change his mind and shakes his head. ‘No, I can’t take money from children. That’s one of the rules.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ I say, ‘because we don’t have any.’ He doesn’t even look at me. ‘One other thing—’ I feel stupid, but I have to know. ‘How can you be a witch if you’re a bloke?’

  His look says, Oh, that dumb question again.

  ‘Oh, Ren,’ says Emma nervously. ‘That’s like saying, “How can you be a plumber if you’re a woman?” ’

  ‘Is it? Is it the same?’ I ask the witch.

  He gives me a very pitying look. ‘You can find the way out, can’t you?’

  Going downstairs, we’re silent. Then, outside, the traffic’s too loud to talk over. It’s not until we’re halfway home, crossing Grossman Park, that we look at each other.

  ‘Well, what do you reckon?’ I ask Emma.

  She gives a big embarrassed shrug. ‘I don’t know what I expected ... what did you think?’

  ‘Was he for real, d’you reckon?’ I ask quietly, as if he might still overhear us.

  ‘Who knows? I mean, how are we supposed to know?’ She shrugs again.

  ‘Maybe that’s just the sort of witch who advertises in the local paper. Maybe there’s another kind.’

  ‘You mean, an old lady with a cat and a bubbling cauldron? Who cackles? And calls us “my pretties”?’

  ‘I mean, maybe the good ones are more secret.’

  Emma shrugs again. ‘Who knows he’s not the best witch in town? That’s a pine-tree there, isn’t it? That’s resinous wood.’

  ‘Yeah? I’m glad you know.’

  We collect some dead pine sticks and a few wads of dried pine-needles. ‘How’m I going to do this?’ Emma says, stuffing the needles in the pocket of her school blazer.

  ‘Well, half the floor’s still torn up in the dining-room—it shouldn’t be too hard to get in there and bury something.’

  ‘But a fire? Do you realise how paranoid my mum is about house fires? I only have to rattle a matchbox and she comes running.’

  ‘You’ll have to wait till they’re dead asleep—like, two o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, great—I don’t suppose you’ll be helping me do this bit?’

  ‘Well, I do need my beauty sleep, you know.’ I flutter my eyelashes at her.

  She cracks up. ‘Yeah, right. As if.’

  I decide to tell Lee—I don’t know why. That night in bed I just find myself saying, ‘We went and saw that witch of yours today.’

  ‘Yeah? Dead set?’ There’s some scrabbling noise down there, and then Lee’s head pops up at the foot-end of my bed.

  So I have to tell him the whole bizzo, about Emma’s dad’s foot and Fia’s bump on the head, and what a witch looks like, and how he’s a he, and where he lives and stuff.

  ‘So what is an amulet?’ says Lee.

  ‘Like a little bunch of ... well, there’s a feather in it, and a little bit of green stone tied with leather, and this long, dried-out leaf, and a piece of stuff like liquorice, only harder. All tied together with red string. And the thing to put on the fire was just leaves and dust that smelt like some kind of—of serious poison.’

  ‘Cool nurse. So Emma’s really going to do this? Burn it, and bury the amulet?’

  ‘Next Wednesday. We looked it up on the calendar—it’s the time of the waning moon.’

  Lee shivers. ‘Oh, good.’ He scrambles down off my bed. When he finally stops earthquaking himself into the bottom bunk, he says, ‘Well, I’m glad she’s doing something. Actually, I’m just glad somebody else knows.’

  ‘Yeah, now we’re not the only loonies on the planet.’

  7

  Night terrors

  Wednesday, the middle of the night: I wake up really suddenly, really completely, as if someone in a panic whispered ‘Ren!’ in my ear. No one’s there, though—just Lee snoring down below. The room’s about as dark as it gets, and stiller than usual—if the wardrobe could breathe, it’d be holding its breath.

  I climb down out of bed. I seem to be able to move without making a sound—either that, or my ears are still asleep. Out I go along the hall, hooking open the back door so it won’t slam, settling the screen door closed behind me.

  Once I’m outside it’s easy. I go silently across the back yard, round the bindii patch and up over the tree. I hop down Emma’s side and run around the stables to her house. The moon blinks across one of the windows as I hurry up to it and stop just short of the veranda. My ears aren’t asleep now—none of me is, not one tiny cell of me.

  If you didn’t know, you’d never think there’d been a fire here—if you hadn’t seen the old clapped-out baking tray leaning against the laundry with a black smudge in its middle; if you hadn’t peered into the grass there and seen the scattered black ash; if you didn’t smell, as you stood there, something a bit nasty and sour: the burnt-mouse-fur smell that was in the witch’s flat.

  I see and smell all that, really really clearly, as if my eyes and ears, nose and brain are all switched to the ‘HI’ setting. I feel as if the moon is actually leaning on my shoulder, pointing things out, as if the house is inviting me in, beckoning me with one old crooked woody finger.

  I look at the back door-handle—will it make a racket if I try and turn it? Will it squeak as soon as I start to open it? And what the heck am I going to say if it does, and Mr and Mrs Welsh come running down the stairs with the family shotgun all cocked and ready, or waving the Boer War sword? It’s only me, Ren, having a sleepwalk.

  I put my hand on the knob and turn—one tiny squeak and then it turns silently. The hinges don’t make a noise, either—pretty good for an old haunted house.

  Inside, I stop and listen. Maybe Emma did her spells hours ago and now she’s dead asleep. I think I can hear something moving in Emma’s veranda room—or am I just making myself hear what I want to hear?

  I get as far as the bottom of the stairs. Then I have this terrible feeling, that everything around me is melting—the post I reach for at the bottom of the stairs, the stairs themselves, the floor underneath me, the air that’s holding me up. Everything wobbles and sags.

  From cool spring evening, the weather changes to baked summer noon-time heat. Ghost-light explodes in at the front door, so bright that it seems to have eaten away the figure standing there, the person who’s just spoken, the man.

  The guy that spooked Lee and me goes through his thing—he turns, straightens up, cries out. I’m just congratulating myself on not standing where he’s standing when someone rustles down the stairs behind me, and runs through me.

  My he
ad feels as if it’s spinning on a stick. Gooseflesh boils up all over me for a second, and then disappears out the top of my head like a cat let out of a box. I hang on to the stair-post as if it’s going to save my life, and try not to yell out. The hall’s full of other voices, ghost voices, calling, exclaiming, echoing.

  A figure about my height appears in the side hallway, and looks at me.

  ‘Go away!’ I whimper at it. ‘Just leave me alone!’

  ‘It’s me.’ It’s Emma, in flannel PJs like me, plus slippers.

  ‘Oh. I—I just got—’

  ‘I know. I can smell it,’ she says.

  I can, too—the thick, sweet perfume of sun-cooked flowers. We stare at each other through the echoes.

  ‘So you did the fire thing?’ I whisper.

  ‘Yeah, I did that first.’

  ‘And you buried the amulets?’

  ‘Just there.’ She points into the dining-room. In a window-shaped patch of moonlight I see the clear print of her slippers where she stamped the dirt flat.

  ‘Well ... it didn’t work, did it?’

  ‘Maybe it made it worse,’ she hisses back. Her eyes are the size of car headlights. ‘I’ve never been haunted at night before—have you?’

  ‘I’ve never been over here at night before. I only came because—because I was awake.’ And because Glenorchie beckoned me with its wizardy wooden finger—brrr!

  ‘Here, come into my room. I want you to listen to something.’

  We creep around to her veranda room. She puts a finger to her lips, and tiptoes in really slowly. I go in a little way after her, wondering—is she going to pounce on me or trick me somehow, make me shout out and wake the whole house up?

  A board creaks under my foot and she makes desperate keep-quiet faces, looking all around at the floor. I look around too, but all I see are old veranda boards.

  We stand there for ages—every time I twitch, Emma signals for me to stay quiet and still. Then I hear it—a tapping, soft and not regular, from under the floorboards. It sounds like a very shy person knocking nervously on someone’s door.

  I look at Emma, who’s watching me.