The Impossible Boy Read online

  Fiona Cress waved a hand at the rows of pottery creatures. Chunky bangles rattled on her wrist. ‘Binturongs are beautiful, amiable creatures of the forest canopy, much loved by the Orang Asli people of Malaysia. And I’ve just made five hundred of them in ceramic. Had a big order from a chain of Malaysian restaurants. I take it you’re not here to collect them, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Barney, eager to move the conversation away from binturongs. ‘We came here to ask you something.’

  Fiona Cress narrowed her eyes. ‘Oh really? What do you want? I’m a busy woman.’

  ‘We want to know about the backwards robot,’ said Gabby. ‘We understand you had something to do with it.’

  The lines on Fiona Cress’s face momentarily vanished as a look of astonishment swept over her features. ‘The robot? Good lord. I’ve haven’t thought about all that business in decades. Who are you anyway? Why do you want to know about it?’

  ‘It was odd, apparently,’ said Barney. ‘And we like things that are odd. Can you tell us about it?’

  Fiona Cress lifted a long, oddly-striped, fur coat off a nearby peg and slipped it on. Barney wondered what obscure creatures had contributed to its manufacture.

  ‘I can do better than that,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  The park was silent and still in the twilight. Fiona marched towards some distant trees, her long coat flapping behind her. Gabby and Barney followed, struggling to keep up.She seemed to have very long legs and a stride like a giraffe’s.

  ‘You have to appreciate,’ Fiona was saying, ‘it all happened a very long time ago. Thirty – forty years, for heaven’s sake. So forgive me if my memory is a little dimmed by the ravages of time. They were opening a new playground here in the park – slides, roundabouts, you get the picture. And the mayor – a frightful bore of a man – asked me to produce a statue to commemorate the opening. Seems some TV company had told him they’d pay for it as long as the statue promoted one of their kids’ programmes. It was a show called The Robin and the Robot. Did you ever see it?’

  Gabby shook her head. ‘Umm, probably a bit before our time.’

  Fiona smiled politely. ‘Of course, darling. Ah. Here, look.’

  They had arrived at a tall clump of youngish trees and bushes.

  ‘What are we looking at?’ asked Gabby cautiously. She was suddenly aware that she had let this strange woman lead her and Barney into a dark and isolated corner of the park just as night was falling. Everything she’d ever been told about stranger danger was now flashing through her mind.

  ‘The mayor was going to fence this area off, but rather than pay for a fence to be built he just moved a load of bushes and trees to hide it,’ said Fiona. ‘What you want is through here. Follow me.’ She advanced into the undergrowth, pushing her way through the bushes, her striped fur coat disappearing amidst the tangle of stems and branches.

  Barney stood aside, gesturing for Gabby to go first. ‘Ladies first.’

  ‘Cheers,’ muttered Gabby. She pulled the zip of her parka up to her chin and strode into the dark bushes, arms raised to protect her face from the sharp branches. Barney followed closely behind.

  Suddenly feeling concrete underfoot, they emerged into a small circular clearing. Fiona was standing at its centre, arms folded, wearing a strange, faraway expression. Around her they saw a child’s slide made of stained and tarnished metal, a small roundabout covered in flaking paint, and a sorry-looking swing hanging lopsidedly from a single rusty chain. The bases of all three were choked with thick tufts of long weeds that had sprouted through cracks in the concrete. Fiona was gesturing towards a fourth object in the clearing.

  ‘There she is.Or rather they are. Mustn’t forget Bobby Robin, must we?’

  Barney and Gabby saw a smallish granite statue – a chipped and rain-dirtied thing, its base also obscured by weeds. It depicted a weird human-shaped robot in a long coat and hat standing with its foot on a large rectangular sign, one hand raised in a friendly wave. On the other hand, like something from a Christmas card, sat a fat little robin, the end of its tail apparently long since snapped off and lost. There was something almost overpoweringly sad about the statue, it seemed to Barney, as if the two characters had come to this clearing many years ago during some game of hide-and-seek and were still waiting patiently to be discovered.

  Gabby knelt down in front of the statue to inspect the words inscribed into the sign. With the sleeve of her coat she wiped away some dried mud.

  ‘It says “The Robin and the Robot”. But the writing’s backwards.’

  ‘The whole thing’s backwards,’ said Fiona. ‘When I carved the statue the robot Cluedroid was holding Bobby Robin in its left hand. Now he’s in its right.’

  ‘So how did it get reversed?’

  ‘No one knows,’ said Fiona Cress. ‘There was some odd gas explosion when the statue was unveiled, but there’s no way an explosion can turn something into a mirror image of itself, is there? I thought maybe I was going mad and had carved it backwards all along and maybe I was seeing everything reversed. But when I saw some photos I’d taken of the half-completed statue it proved the writing had been the correct way around when I was making it.’

  Gabby ran her finger along the backwards words on the sign. ‘Wowsers,’ she said softly. ‘That’s a real mystery.’

  ‘No one cares about it, though,’ said Fiona, a tired and sombre note in her voice. ‘A young girl went missing at the time the statue was unveiled. Terrible business – and a much more important mystery than some silly statue. It was in all the papers for a while. She never was found and nobody wanted to use this playground after that. It was awful – poor little Fleur Abbott. Her parents still live in Blue Hills. I see them in the street sometimes. You can see in their faces the sadness has never left them.’

  Barney gave a sudden gasp. He turned to Fiona. ‘Did you say her name was Fleur Abbott?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fiona Cress. ‘Why?’

  ‘Do you know what her parents are called?’

  ‘I do. They’re called—’

  ‘Dave and Gill,’ Barney finished for her. ‘They’re called Dave and Gill, aren’t they?’

  Fiona Cress nodded. The wooden fish on her earrings danced and swayed like hanged men.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SOCIETY OF HIGHLY UNUSUAL THINGS

  Gabby lay in bed, somewhere between sleep and waking, weird chains of thoughts streaming and tumbling through her mind. Outside, she could hear the fractured music of the dawn chorus. Around her the duvet felt soft and enveloping as steam, her limbs as heavy as stone.

  She thought about Chas Hinton, how he had impossibly jumped inside his own schoolbag and vanished. She thought of the doves soaring out of the paper bag, of Barney’s EGG dropping into his waiting hands, and of the look of amazement and joy on her friend’s face at having his game returned to him.

  Last night Gabby had posted a message on an Internet forum she sometimes frequented, a place where school kids swapped advice and tried to help with one another’s problems. She uploaded a photo of Chas that Laura had taken with her mobile phone and asked if anyone knew of this strange kid and his magical gifts. Maybe someone out there might have a little information about him. He had to have come from somewhere. In the photo Chas had been wearing a small, knowing smile, making him look a bit like a male Mona Lisa. Chas’s smile now swam before her mind’s eye, Cheshire Cat-like, hinting at some strange and incredible secret.

  Next she thought about Fiona Cress and her weird army of pottery binturongs, of the chill that had entered the woman’s voice when she talked of the missing girl, Fleur Abbott, and of the look of astonishment on Barney’s face when he realised the elderly couple he had been visiting must be Fleur’s parents.

  Thinking about the missing girl brought Gabby’s thoughts round to her dad. It was six months since he had vanished without a single word to her or her mother. The Ministry of Defence where he worked had offered no clue to his whereabouts. Neither had the Blue
Hills police, who seemed at a loss as to how to track him down.Some time ago she had realised that her best bet for finding her father would be her own investigations, but so far she had found out nothing. She thought of a man called Orville McIntyre, a colleague of her dad’s with whom she and Barney had dealt during that strange business with Gloria Pickles last year. He had been extremely friendly and helpful at first but then revealed a somewhat darker, more ruthless side to his character when events had turned serious. In a far corner of her mind, a vague suspicion nagged that he knew more about her dad’s disappearance than he was letting on.

  An image of the statue in the park now appeared in her mind. In the vision, the robin and the robot came alive, the rain-streaked mottled granite turning to vibrant living colours, the robot’s face a gleaming silver, the robin’s breast a vivid orange-red. The little bird fluttered off the robot’s palm and seemed to alight on Gabby’s shoulder. It pressed its tiny beak to her ear.

  ‘It’s OK, Gab,’ it whispered, ‘we’re here now.’

  Before she could ponder this statement, a shrill buzzing noise obliterated all thoughts from her mind. With a jolt, her eyes snapped open. Thin streaks of dim morning light were piercing the cracks in her curtains, crisscrossing her duvet with silvery lines. She rolled over and clapped a hand to the snooze button of her clock radio. The buzzing noise ceased. She scooped her glasses and mobile phone off the bedside table and settled comfortably back against her pillows. Thumbs working busily, she used her phone to log on to the advice forum, hoping someone had replied to her request for info on Chas.

  She gave a soft squeal of surprise.

  RE: DO YOU KNOW THIS BOY? 329 REPLIES

  Yes, I know him! He’s just started at our school, Beaverbrook Comprehensive in Tattenhall. He’s a bit of a freak to be honest! He does these weird magic tricks . . .

  I kno this boi. He is called Charles Hinton and gos too Orange Tree Grammar. He is very wierd . . .

  The kid in your photo has recently enrolled at the King’s School, Chester. He appears to be a talented conjuror who enjoys . . .

  Gabby scrolled down the list of responses, slowly shaking her head. There were over three hundred sightings of Chas from kids all over the British Isles – all saying he had just started at their own schools.This was properly, impossibly weird. How on earth could one boy simultaneously attend all these different schools?

  Crazy theories began to jostle for position in Gabby’s mind. First, that the multiple Chases were alien invaders who had copied the appearance of a single Earth boy to blend into human society. Then, they were all in fact the same person – a boy who could move impossibly quickly and attend three hundred and twenty-nine different schools on the same day. Then they were actually an army of clones bred by the government for – what, though? Magic tricks? She giggled. Whatever the explanation for this was, she couldn’t wait to start investigating.

  Barney’s arms were on fire.

  That’s what it felt like, anyway. Never had he experienced pain so acute and so all-encompassing. His legs didn’t seem to be in much better condition, either. Or his back. He placed the cardboard box down on the musty bed and sat down beside it, panting like a dog on a hot day. With the back of his hand, he wiped a thick smear of sweat from his forehead.

  He looked at his watch. One forty-five. He had only been shifting boxes for fifteen minutes. He heaved a long, hissing sigh. Were they trying to kill him?

  When he arrived at the Abbotts’ house that afternoon he had been worried that Gill would be in the same foul mood that he had left her in at the end of his last visit. But today she was cheerful, greeting him like a favourite grandson. Dave was having a check-up at the local hospital today and in his absence Gill had made a long list of chores for Barney to do. The first item on it was to move a number of cardboard boxes out of their spare room and empty the contents into the various recycling bins in the garden.

  The boxes were so heavy and awkward that at first he thought they must contain old engine parts or bathroom tiles. But when he opened the first box at the bottom of the Abbotts’ garden he realised it was filled with nothing heavier than bits of old paper. He was stunned at how heavy a box filled with paper could actually be. Awarding himself a five-minute break, Barney idly prised open the flaps of the cardboard box sitting next to him and drew out the top sheet of paper. It was dog-eared and thinning with age almost to the point of translucency. The words on it had been neatly and densely typed on an old-fashioned typewriter.

  FRIDAY 6th AUGUST 1976 (CONT’D)

  eventually found one of the type described by Roderick Branwen in a junk shop in Kings Street, Mold, North Wales. The locket is inscribed with pictures of angels and so far proving as hard to open as any found by Branwen himself. There appears to be some secret to the locking mechanism, almost certainly some quite simple trick, which I have not yet been able to fathom. I am convinced that if I work at this problem for a few more hours I shall have discovered its

  Barney put the page aside and drew out a handful more. One had wider line spacing, making it easier to read, and appeared to be the title page of a document. It read:

  THE SOCIETY OF HIGHLY UNUSUAL THINGS AGENDA FOR MEETING – MAY 1976

  1) Minutes of previous meeting

  2) St Martin’s Church poltergeist

  3) Invisible milkman?

  4) Microscopic dragons

  5) Time-travelling tourist in Boots the Chemist

  6) Yeti sighting in Derbyshire Peaks

  7) DJ on Blue Hills FM is reincarnation of Sir Isaac Newton

  8) Can herons predict the stock market?

  Barney stifled a gasp. He reached into the box and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper. Taking a sheet at random from the middle of the pile he studied it, his mouth slowly sagging open in surprise.

  13th FEBRUARY 1971 (CONT’D)

  seems likely the creature menacing the Thompsons’ gift shop is indeed a cockatrice. The tracks are definitely those of a two-legged creature and the presence of chicken feathers confirm

  ‘I thought I told you to throw those away.’

  Gill’s voice cut through Barney like a sword.

  ‘I’m – I’m sorry,’ he stammered, heart pounding. ‘I was just taking a break. My arms are tired.’ He clambered off the bed hurriedly.

  Gill took the sheet of paper from his hand and squinted at it. She snorted and crumpled it in her wrinkled fist. ‘Should have thrown out this rubbish a long time ago.’ She tossed the ball of paper into the cardboard box.

  ‘What’s the Society of Highly Unusual Things?’ asked Barney.

  ‘Nothing to concern you,’ said Gill. ‘A lot of nonsense from a very long time ago, that’s all. Now come on, there’s plenty more of these boxes to shift.’

  ‘Did you investigate weird things that happened in Blue Hills? Is that what the society did?’

  ‘Forget it,’ snapped Gill. All friendliness had drained from her voice. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Now move. Work to do.’

  ‘It’s just that me and my friend Gabby do exactly the same thing!’ Barney pressed on excitedly. ‘We have a club called Geek Inc. We love investigating strange happenings. Are all the things written down here true? Can I show the papers to Gabby? She’d love to see them.’

  ‘No. Just throw everything out.’ Gill turned her back to him, the walker rattling in her hands. ‘Can’t have this old junk cluttering up the house.’

  ‘We spoke to Fiona Cress,’ said Barney. ‘She told us about the backwards robot. And about . . . Fleur. Was that why you started investigating strange occurrences?’

  Gill’s legs suddenly buckled and she clutched at her walking frame for support, her whole body trembling. Barney rushed to help her. Her mouth had puckered into a grimace and big shiny tears began to form at the corners of her eyes.In that instant Barney thought she looked more like a little girl than a woman in her seventies.

  ‘Gill? Are you OK? Come and sit down.’ He led her quickly to the bed and
sat her down.

  ‘Leave me alone.’ Gill pushed him away. She was surprisingly strong. ‘Why did you speak to that woman?’ she sobbed. ‘Why would you want to drag up all that pain from so long ago?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Barney. ‘We just like finding out things, that’s all. It was curiosity.’

  ‘Curiosity!’ spat Gill. ‘That’s what tore our lives apart. Our own stupid, selfish curiosity. We loved mysteries. Highly unusual things, we called them. Loved investigating them. Fancied ourselves as a right little Holmes-and-Watson team. So many weird things in this town to investigate too. It’s like a toyshop for the curious. We had a fine old time. Well, I’ll tell you, Barney – it was our curiosity that cost us our daughter. I think I unleashed something that afternoon in 1976 – some force. And it took Fleur from us. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. There was only one mystery in our lives from then on. How to live without our daughter. And no number of cockatrices or invisible men was ever going to hold our interest for a second after that. We gave up our investigations.’

  Barney spoke softly. ‘But didn’t you want to investigate what happened to Fleur?’

  She looked him in the eye. ‘It was our dabblings that lost us our daughter, Barney. I was determined that whatever took her away wouldn’t happen again and take someone else’s child. We’d discovered some miraculous, mind-blowing things, but in the end I decided the best thing was to shut the society down. Curiosity was just too expensive a pastime.’

  ‘What about Dave?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘The stuff in these boxes. They’re his memories, too.’

  Gill rose slowly and painfully to her feet, knuckles whitening as she gripped her walking frame. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, Barney,’ she said quietly, ‘but my husband has no use for memories any more.’ She shuffled out of the room, the walking frame squeaking and rattling, and closed the door behind her.