The Impossible Boy Read online

  Barney stared at the sock. His face started to colour.

  ‘Good trick, eh?’ said the face in the tree.

  ‘Have you lost your mind, Gabby?’ he all but screamed at her. ‘You could have really hurt Nick. He nearly suffocated.’ He pointed at the football pitch. ‘Look at those boys. They’re really scared! This is like some horrible nightmare! Why are you doing this?’

  Gabby looked shocked. ‘I never meant actually to hurt anyone,’ she protested. ‘It was only supposed to be a bit of mucking about.’ The disembodied hand appeared again and waved at the football pitch. The air surrounding it seemed to shimmer like a summer heat haze. ‘There. I’ve unbent the pitch. They’re free to go.’

  Barney paced about, shaking his head, toying with the sock in his hands. ‘This isn’t like you, Gab. And I don’t just mean being inside a tree. What are you doing? The Gabby Grayling I know wouldn’t harm someone else just for a cheap laugh. I don’t understand it.’

  Gabby sighed. ‘No surprise there, then.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you’re a nice lad and everything, Barney mate, but everything always comes as such a surprise to you.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Barney.

  ‘The power of the fourth dimension that Chas has shown me is awesome, literally awesome. I feel like I could reach out and hold the entire Earth in the palm of my hand. And I understand it! The maths and physics behind all this is real – and I understand it! But you could never do that. I like you, but you’re really the football-and-computer-games type rather than the intellectual adventurer, aren’t you? What I’m doing here is way beyond your level. Maybe you don’t really belong in Geek Inc. if your mind is that small and closed? I’m just saying.’

  ‘Stop it!’ said Barney. There were tears in his eyes. ‘I like being in Geek Inc. with you. I like finding things out with you. I learn things from just hanging out with you.’

  Gabby sniffed. ‘Well, you certainly do have a lot to learn.’

  ‘This is Chas, isn’t it? He’s messed with your mind somehow.’

  ‘Don’t say nasty things about Chas,’ said Gabby sternly. ‘He’s so incredible. I’m going to help him get home. We’ve got a plan and the energy we need is right on the doorstep. Did you know he’s asked me to visit him in his own universe, Barney? To see things no human being could ever conceive of? And I’m going. Oh yes. I might even stay. Doesn’t look like I could cope with Blue Hills after what I’ve seen and done today. I need somewhere bigger.’

  ‘You’re losing it, Gabby,’ said Barney softly. ‘Listen to yourself. You’re losing your mind.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Gabby. ‘I’m gaining one. A four-dimensional one. Oh – and by the way . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, you moron! He. Does. Not. Exist.’

  The face in the tree giggled and then vanished.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE AGED HELP

  Barney knocked hard on the door. After a short while there came from within the familiar creaking sound of Gill’s walking frame. The door swung open.

  ‘I need your help. It’s important. Really, really important. Really, really, really important.’

  Gill Abbott took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the evening air. ‘I suppose you’d better come in then.’

  She led him to the kitchen. Dave was sitting at the table, peeling another apple. Gill filled the kettle. This gave Barney a mild sensation of déjà vu. He sat down opposite Dave.

  ‘Thomas! Or is it Rufus? Bernard?’

  ‘Barney.’

  ‘Barney! Of course! Hello, son. How’s things?’

  ‘Not good, Dave. Not good at all.’

  ‘Oh, dear!’

  Gill looked at him with a concerned expression. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Barney took a deep breath. ‘I need help. Quite badly. And I think you’re the only people who will understand.’

  ‘How’s that, Barney?’ asked Dave. ‘If there’s anything we can do to help, of course we will.’

  Barney looked at Gill. ‘I’ve got a problem. A very odd problem. In fact, you could call it a highly unusual problem.’

  Gill stared back. Her face was impossible to read.

  ‘Highly unusual, eh?’ said Dave. ‘That used to be right up our street once. A long time ago.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Gill. ‘Can’t be all that unusual, I’m sure.’ She was trying to keep her voice light but Barney could detect a tremor of worry in it.

  Barney stared at his hands. ‘Please don’t get upset at what I’m going to say. I’m not out to cause you any pain or rake up any bad memories. But it involves something seriously weird – a creature from another universe.’

  He heard Gill’s walking frame rattle violently. He looked up, expecting to find her looking angry or tearful again, but instead she was propelling herself towards the table as fast as she could. She sat down beside him and took his hand.

  ‘Tell us about it.’

  ‘My friend Gabby, the one I’m in Geek Inc. with, has met this boy. She says he’s from the fourth dimension and somehow he’s trapped in our world. He can do incredible things and now she can too. But she was being really horrible to me and saying things that I know she wouldn’t normally. I think the power she has is driving her crazy. I don’t know what to do. You were the only people I could think of who would understand.’ He turned to Dave. ‘I found some of the documents from your Society of Highly Unusual Things in the stuff I was sorting through. I know you used to investigate stuff like this. And that you gave it up after your daughter vanished.’

  ‘Good lord,’ said Dave, staring into the distance. ‘I haven’t thought of Fleur, really thought of her in —’ he paused, the half-peeled apple in his hands, ‘— twenty years or more. That’s quite ridiculous, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think of her every day,’ said Gill quietly. ‘Every morning when I wake up. Sometimes I think you’re lucky to be losing your memory.’

  ‘This four-dimensional stuff,’ said Barney gently, ‘do you know anything about it?’

  Gill nodded. ‘All too well! This is how we lost Fleur. Opening doors to different universes. Doors open and people vanish through them. Forever. Stay well away, Barney. Have nothing to do with it.’

  ‘But Gabby’s my friend!’ protested Barney. ‘I can’t sit back and watch this happen to her! She says she’s going back with Chas once she helps him escape. What if she vanishes forever too?’

  ‘A 4-D creature trapped in our world, eh?’ said Dave, putting his apple down. ‘How fascinating! Just the kind of thing we would have loved back in the day. How’s your friend planning to help it escape?’

  ‘I don’t know. She said something about having the energy close by.’

  Dave snapped his fingers. ‘That’s right. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to open a gateway to another universe. There’s only one place in Britain that could provide it.’

  ‘And where’s that?’ asked Barney.

  ‘The new experimental fusion reactor at Sanderling Ridge. It’s only about twenty miles from Blue Hills. Pound to a penny that’s where your friend is headed.’

  ‘I need to get there,’ said Barney. ‘I need to speak to her. Make her see sense.’

  ‘Take me with you,’ said Dave. ‘I can help.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ spat Gill sourly. ‘“Take me with you” indeed! You can’t even remember where the front door is, Dave! What use are you?’

  ‘We were investigating four-dimensional gateways when Fleur disappeared,’ said Dave. ‘We know about them. We can help the lad.’

  Gill stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Huh. I’d be astonished if you remember anything at all about them, Brain of Britain.’

  Dave picked up his apple and threw it at the washing-up rack next to the sink with the force of a cricket fielder. A neat line of flowery plates and mugs drying on the rack exploded into thick white-edged shards that c
lattered into the sink and on to the floor.

  ‘Dave! What’s got into you? Look at the plates!’ Gill yelled.

  ‘Stop treating me like I’m some sort of dribbling fool!’ Dave exploded. ‘The boy needs help, and you and I can give it to him. I am in the unusual position for the first time in thirty-odd years of being useful to someone – and you’re not going to stop me!’

  ‘But Dave, you can’t—’

  ‘No, Gill. We gave up the Society of Highly Unusual Things because we were afraid of causing harm. But here’s an opportunity to use that knowledge to do some good!’

  ‘Dave, you’re shouting at me . . .’

  ‘I FEEL like shouting!’ bellowed Dave. ‘For the first time in ages I feel like shouting and running about and using my brain! Anything except mouldering away in this kitchen eating ruddy apples! Are we going to help the boy or what?’

  Gill stared at her husband for a long time. ‘Yes,’ she said finally, in a quiet voice. ‘Yes, you’re right, darling. We’ve got to help Barney. Of course we have.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Barney, feeling relieved to have someone on his side. ‘So. What do we do? You mentioned this fusion plant, Dave?’

  Dave nodded. ‘Produces huge quantities of energy. It’s what this 4-D beast will be after. Could be very dangerous if that energy is released suddenly.’

  ‘How dangerous?’

  ‘You ever hear of a couple of places called Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’

  Barney nodded grimly. ‘Pretty dangerous, then. Great. Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘There is, as it happens,’ said Gill. ‘A few weeks before Fleur vanished, back in nineteen seventy-six, Dave and I had been researching reports of inter-dimensional rifts throughout history. It seems that in various places and various times, pathways have opened up between our world and different universes. There’s a famous story from seventeen seventy-four about the chemist Joseph Priestley seeing a coach and horses vanish in a flash of light along Oxford Street in London. And lots of people have reported seeing things that can’t really be there, which might be the same phenomenon. From what we could tell, a lot of these pathways were opened up by special objects – boxes, bits of furniture, books sometimes, but more often than not they were in lockets that people wore around the neck.’

  ‘We found information on several of these lockets,’ said Dave, hauling himself from his chair and picking up the chunks of broken pottery. Barney went to help him. ‘They were called angel lockets because people thought they opened up doors to heaven. Needless to say, they were extremely rare. But the idea sort of took hold of us. We became obsessed with finding one.’

  ‘We’d buy any old lockets from junk shops,’ said Gill. ‘Bought dozens of them. But of course they were just old lockets. Nothing more. The last one I found I couldn’t open. It drove me mad because I could tell there was some simple knack to the clasp that held the two halves together. I fiddled with that damn locket for two solid days. Then when I did open it—’

  ‘It was at the park, wasn’t it?’ Barney cut in. ‘When the mayor was unveiling that statue?’

  Gill nodded. ‘The locket opened. There was a white light. And Fleur vanished.’

  ‘And that was when the statue got reversed, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Some force from the fourth dimension nudged the statue,’ said Dave, ‘rotating it about a 4-D axis, turning it into its own mirror image.’

  ‘But how could it do that?’ asked Barney.

  Dave held up a plate, one of the few on the draining board that was still in one piece. Painted on it was a picture of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. ‘See this plate? See the picture on it?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Dave turned the plate over in his hands. ‘Well, I can rotate the plate two ways – forwards and backwards, and from side to side. When it’s upside down it looks different, doesn’t it? But it’s still the same plate.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously. But there’s another way I could rotate the plate if I were able to. Through the fourth dimension. It’s not a direction we humans have access to normally, but if I did, I would be able to rotate the plate so that when we looked at it we saw it as a mirror image of itself. Do you see?’

  ‘And that’s what happened to the statue?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Shall I stick the plate away in the cupboard now? I don’t think it actually belongs in the cutlery drawer where you’re putting it.’

  Dave chuckled. ‘Thank you, Barney.’

  ‘If we gave the locket to the four-dimensional creature,’ reasoned Gill, ‘it could use it to go home without having to absorb the energy of the fusion reactor. And if we were very careful, no one need get hurt at all.’ She put a hand to her throat and lifted a thin silver chain from around her neck. Dangling from it was a small silvery shape. She handed it to Barney.

  ‘You’ve still got the locket?’ Barney stared at it in awe. He felt like he was holding a very small but immensely powerful bomb.

  ‘Couldn’t get rid of it, risk someone else vanishing into it. Far too dangerous. And it reminds me of Fleur. Maybe it can do some good today for once.’

  ‘We should get going,’ said Dave. ‘We can’t afford to hang about. Too much is at stake.’

  ‘How are we going to get there?’ asked Barney. ‘It’s twenty miles away.’

  ‘We’ve got our bus passes,’ said Gill. ‘Have you got enough money for the fare, Barney?’

  ‘What?’ He looked at her, momentarily dumbfounded. ‘Uh, yeah. I guess. But isn’t there any quicker way of—’

  Gill and Dave looked at one another and suddenly burst out laughing. Slowly and painfully, Gill rose to her feet. She hobbled with her walking frame over to a kitchen cupboard and fished out a key from a bowl. She held it up for Barney to see.

  ‘This is the key to a nineteen seventy-three Ford Cortina XLE. She hasn’t been out of our garage for nearly fifteen years, but every weekend we give her a polish and start her up just to hear the engine.’

  ‘Her name’s Daisy,’ explained Dave.

  ‘And you haven’t driven her for fifteen years?’

  ‘We’ve never had anywhere to go,’ said Dave.

  ‘Until now,’ said Gill. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re both up to it?’ asked Barney, eyeing them uncertainly. ‘I mean, I don’t mean to be rude or anything but neither of you are as young as you once were . . .’

  Gill kicked over her walking frame violently. It clattered to the kitchen floor. ‘Time’s a-wasting,’ she said. ‘Let’s hit the road. Geek Inc. and the Society of Highly Unusual Things have a problem to solve.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SANDERLING RIDGE

  It was a clear, chilly evening and the two massive cooling towers stood silent and brooding like twin giants surveying the vast stretch of barren countryside that formed their kingdom. They rose amidst a complex of buildings – boxy control rooms, pipe-sprouting reprocessing facilities, vast cathedral-sized turbine halls and an enormous hexagonal-patterned reactor dome resembling a gigantic golf ball half buried in the earth.

  High in a plush office in one of the buildings, working late for the fourth night in a row, Julia Goosefoot, the general manager of Sanderling Ridge (formerly Cherrycroft Mount, formerly Lark Meadows, formerly Dandelion Grove) sat at a desk and stared lovingly at a framed photograph of a handsome man and two extremely cute kids. The man wasn’t her husband and the kids weren’t hers – in fact it was a photograph she had cut out of an advert for biscuits in the magazine that came with her Sunday paper. But she loved the photograph anyway because it made visitors to her office think she was normal. And when people thought she was normal that gave her an advantage over them – because in reality there was very little that was normal about Julia Goosefoot. She was, to pick just three things at random, abnormally cruel, abnormally single-minded and abnormally ambitious.

  At the age of four, Julia had attached roller skate
s to her sleeping grandmother’s garden chair and sent the old woman trundling down a hill towards a busy road, just so she could steal her grandmother’s last slice of toast. Fortunately, a neighbour had managed to intercept the runaway chair seconds before it entered traffic and returned it safely to the Goosefoot family’s garden before the old woman had even woken up.

  When she was seven, she climbed into an enclosure at Chester Zoo and threw a baby porcupine at a teacher who had told her off for speaking with her mouth full.

  When she was twelve, she filled a friend’s aquarium with coffee to make the fish swim faster – they had, apparently, been swimming far too slowly for her liking. Her parents had to buy replacements for all the fish she poisoned.

  When she was twenty, she was banned from her local library for hollowing out a set of encyclopaedias and filling them with worms as a practical joke. The first person to open one of these doctored encyclopaedias – a retired hat salesman from Stockport – had fainted clean away when he had tried to look up the capital of Peru and found a mass of wriggling worms inside the book.

  A year later, serving a six-month stretch in prison for spraying milkshake at the guards outside Buckingham Palace, she came to the attention of the owners of a new nuclear power plant called Dandelion Grove near the small north-west town of Blue Hills. There had recently been a series of radiation leaks at the plant which had resulted in an awful lot of bad publicity, the changing of the plant’s name several times to distract the public, and the sacking of the plant’s general manager. The owners were now looking for someone to take over. The only qualification necessary was that the new manager be as nasty and horrible a human being as they could possibly find – in order to scare the workforce into working harder and more safely, and to scare the press into not asking too many probing questions about the plant. When they read in the newspaper about Julia Goosefoot and her history of appalling wrongdoing, they offered her the job immediately on her leaving prison, and were delighted to find that she was very good at it indeed.

  Julia adjusted the photograph on her desk so that she could see the bland smiling faces a little better. Had these people actually been her family, she thought, they would be proud of her.