Fire and Hemlock (7 page)

“I wouldn’t be much use as an assistant if I did that,” the boy retorts. “I’ve come miles from Middleton to be your trainee, Tan Coul, and I’m not going away now.”

“My name is Piper really,” Mr Piper says.

“I keep a hardware shope. Is that why you keep calling me Can Tool?”

“Not Can Tool, Tan Coul, stupid!” says the boy. “The great hero-”

But at this moment the giant moves. The blur Mr Piper can see produces a yard-long bent strip of white, unpleasantly like a glaoting grin. Something huge softly advances on them. Mr Piper claps his glasses on his nose and sees an immense hand with a cut on its thumb reaching out to grab them. Illusion or not, he and the boy dive out of its way. The hand, with terrible speed, snatches after them. The boy dodges behind a zig-zag of loose shelves. Mr Piper is left out in the open and only a pool of washing-up liquid saves him. He slides in it, falls flat on his back, and loses his glasses. Somehow the boy pulls him behind the shelves too. They crouch there, panting, while the giant, as far as Mr Piper can tell, lumbers about the shop on his hands and knees. The giant is too big to see all in one piece, even if he had not lost his glasses. There are crashes, rendings and sliding sounds.

“What’s he doing?” pants Mr Piper.

“Pushing some freezers and the cash desks across the hole in the window,” says the boy.

“Now he’s put another freezer across the door at the back.”

“Oh,” says Mr Piper unhappily.

The giant begind to roar again. His voice is almost too loud to hear, but Mr Piper distinctly catches the words “fresh warm meat on legs!” and possibly something about Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum too. He does his best not to believe that he is trapped in a supermarket with a hungry giant. But the shelf they are hiding behind tips and begins to move. Four enormous fingers with dirty nails seem to be gripping it by one end. The boy and Mr Piper get up and tiptoe hurriedly behind the next lot of shelves, skipping over smashed pickle jars and trying not to crunch in cornflakes. Mr Piper has to do this by smell and instinct, since he can hardly see the floor.

“Kill him!” the boy whispers as they tiptoe. “You’re a hero. You
can’t
be a coward!”

“Oh, can’t I just!” Mr Piper whispers back. The shelf they are now behind gegins to move too. They tiptoe on, through tins of dogfood and mushy peas. “There are no such things as giants,” Mr Piper explains as they go. “This is some kind of illusion.” The latest shelf moves, and they scuttle behind another.

Now a low rumbling begins, getting gradually louder. If Mr Piper were not doing his best to know better, he would swear it was the giant laughing with triumph, because the giant is moving his prey shelf by shelf into a corner where the upended freezers spill out squashed butter and squinched cartons of yoghurt. They will be trapped in that corner.

The boy sighs. “Do me a favour, Tan Cou – er – Mr Piper. Pretend there
is
a giant. Pretend we’ll be dead in a minute unless you do something.”

Mr Piper’s foot slips in yoghurt. He goes down with one knee in a pound of butter. The giant’s rumbles becomes a roar. The boy’s advice suddenly seems excellent. Mr Piper swings his axe round in threatening circles as he kneels.

The laughter stops. The blurred shape of the giant, on all fours against the windows, looks at them with its bushy head tipped on one side. Then a vast arm stretches. Mr Piper scrambles round on his knees and chops desperately at the huge hand reaching out at him.

“Throw tins at his face!” he gasps to the boy. “Get him to stand up!”

“Good idea,” says the boy. He picks up a tin and hurls it, and another. His aim is good, but he is not strong enough to worry the giant, who just comes crawling towards them.

Mr Piper throws a tin himself and chops again with his axe at the reaching hand. The giant gives a roar that buzzes the windows. They snatch up tim after tin and bombard the giant’s head. The giant, kneeling hugely opposite, keeps on grabbing at them. Mr Piper chops at his fingers every time he does, keeping him at bay. He feels hopeless now. He can only see the reaching fingers when they are almost too close. He cannot see properly to aim tins. The boy keeps hitting, but this does not worry the giant at all. On the rare occasions when Mr Piper’s tins hit, they make him rear up and bump his head on the ceiling.

“What’s up there?” pants the boy. “Anything that might help?”

As far as Mr Piper knows, there is the supermarket manager’s flat up above. He is hoping that there are iron girders in the ceiling, on which the giant might be induced to brain himself. But they run out of tins just then. Mr Piper scrambles backwards to the nearest shelf and seizes a packet off it at random. Beside him, the boy hurls a large cheese. It misses, because the giant moves his bushy head aside. He moves it into line with the packet Mr Piper has just thrown.

It turns out to be a packet of flour. It succeeds beyond Mr Piper’s wildest hopes. It hits the giant in the eye and bursts all over his face. The giant howls, so loud it hurts their ears. He claps both fists to his face and, most unwisely, rears up on his knees. The great, bushy head goes straight through the ceiling. The giant howls again and falls over backwards, smashing two sets of shelves underneath him. And things begin to rain down on the giant through the hole in the ceiling. First comes a large sofa, then a television, followed by a squad of armchairs. While the giant is gasping from these, there is a pause, full of sliding noises. Then a kitchen table falls on him, followed by a washing machine, a big refrigerator, a dishwasher, and finally a heavy gas oven. The gas oven hits the giant in the stomach and knocks the breath out of him with a
WHOOF
that blows all the tiolet paper into the air. Mr Piper picks his way among the fluttering streamers of it until he is so close that even he can see he is standing by a steep, bushy hill of head, beside a monstrous ear. He takes careful aim, swings the axe with all his great strength, and hits the giant with the flat of it, just behind that enormous ear.

Everything goes quiet. In the qiet Mr Piper becomes aware of
sirnes
– sorry! – sirens, and neenawing and whooping. Flashing lights are arriving outside the window.

The boy appears at Mr Piper’s elbow again.

“You didn’t kill him,” he says reproachfully. This is a very bloodthirsty child, Mr Piper thinks. Does she-sorry!-he want me to cut the giant into joints and pack him in the freezers? He does not like to admit that he cannot even kill flies. He replies with dignity, “I never kill a helpless enemy. Haven’t you heard of chivalry? What’s your name, by the way?”

“P – er – Hero,” says the boy. “There are police cars and fire engines outside. What shall we tell them?”

“Nothing,” says Mr Piper. “We’ll go out of the back door. I’ll move that freezer as soon as I’ve found my glasses.”

“Here they are,” Hero says, and puts the glasses into Mr Piper’s hand. As Mr Piper fumbles them on to his nose, Hero explains, “I picked them up and kept them. I knew you’d manage better if you didn’t have to keep explaining you weren’t really seeing a giant.”

Mr Piper looks from the boy to the giant. It is indeed, monstrously and hugely, a giant, snoring peacefully among the litter. He feels rather sick.

They leave the supermarket the back way as the police come through the front. Edna, by this time, has taken her curlers out, put on her best dressing gown, and arrived at the shop door. She is watching when the police make the mistake of asking the fire brigade to hose the giant’s face to revive him for questioning. The giant hates this. He has had enough anyway.

Edna sees him burst out of the supermarket, shoving a police car one way and a fire engine the other. After which he rises to his full height of forty feet or so and runs away, shaking the ground as he goes. Edna is so amazed at this sight that she not only forgets to scold her brother for being covered with flour and yoghurt; she forgets to forbid him to take on a smart new boy assistant.

In this manner Mr Thomas Piper and his assistant Hero began their careers as trainee-heroes. At least, I hope you agree that this
is
how it was.

With best wishes to my assistant trainee-hero,

Thomas G. Lynn

P.S. I seem to remember that all heroes have a special weapon of some kind. Don’t I need to find a sword? And what about a horse? I tried to be faithful to your description of Edna. Did I get her right?

Polly put the letter down with a sigh. She thought the giant ought to have been killed too.

“Finished?” Nina said rather sourly. She was standing by the window. “If you can spare the time, come over here and look.”

“Why?” said Polly, still seeing broken supermarket in her mind’s eye.

“Because,” Nina said with awful patience, “one of the people following me is standing across the road.”

That fetched Polly across the room. Funny thing, she thought, as she pressed her forehead against the window in order to see into the dark outside, real life trumps made-up things every time – if this
is
real, of course. “Where? I don’t see anyone.”

“Under that person opposite’s big bush. There,” said Nina.

Polly could see the figure now. It looked like a boy humped in an anorak. While she looked, the person shifted, stamped feet, and began walking up and down. He must have been cold standing out there in the dark. He stopped before he got to the streetlight and turned again, but at that end of his walk there was enough light to show he had neat hair and a scornful set to his smooth face. And Polly had sharp eyes. Her heart thudded rather. She said, “He’s called Seb. He was at the funeral.”

“Why is he following me?” Nina whispered. “I’m scared, Polly.”

Polly asked, feeling rather shrewd and detective-like, “Did the man following you have two sort of black lumps under his eyes?”

Nina nodded. “He’s the scary one. He sits in his car and stares.”

“He’s Seb’s father,” said Polly. “Mr Morton Leroy. Is he here now?”

“I told you!” Nina said irritably. “They take it in turns. But
why
?”

Polly had just been reading Mr Lynn’s letter. Mr Lynn obviously thought she was bold and bloodthirsty, and she wanted to prove he was right. “Let’s go out and ask him,” she said.

Nina replied with a shocked giggle. She could not believe Polly meant it. “Never speak to strange men,” she said. “Your Granny said.”

“He’s not strange – I know his name,” Polly said. “He’s not even a man.”

“He’s big, though,” Nina objected.

At this, Polly took great pleasure in saying, “Nina Carrington, stop being such a scaredy-cat or I won’t be your friend any more.” It worked too. As Polly marched to the door and downstairs, she heard Nina come stumbling after her, fighting her way into her coat to disguise her lack of courage. They went out of the front door and crossed the street together.

As they went towards him, Seb backed away into the shadow under the bush. Probably he did not credit that they were actually on their way to speak to him. By the time they reached him, he was flattened against the wall beneath the bush. He stared at them, and they stared at him. He was a good foot taller than they were. If it had not been for Mr Lynn’s letter, Polly thought she might have run away.

“What are you spying on Nina for?” she said.

Seb’s face turned from one to the other. “Which of you is Nina?”

“Me,” Nina said in a scared, throaty way.

“Then I’m not,” said Seb. “It’s you with the fair hair I’m supposed to watch. Now get lost, both of you.”

“Why?” Polly said. And Nina was indignant enough to add, “And we’re not going till you tell us!”

Seb hunched his shoulders against the wall and slid his feet forward across the pavement. He laughed at the way they backed away from his feet as they slid. It brought his face nearly down to their level, giving them a full blast of the scorn and dislike in it. “I’ve a good mind to tell you,” he said. “Yes, why not?” He nodded his chin at Polly. “You,” he said, “took something when you came to our house, didn’t you?”

“It was
given
me!” said Polly.

“So what? You took it,” said Seb.

“I am not a thief!” Polly said angrily. “I didn’t even break and enter. The door was open and I went in.”

“Shut up,” said Seb. “Listen. You didn’t eat and you didn’t drink, and you worked the Nowhere vases round first. Don’t deny it. I saw you working them. And I haven’t told my father that – yet. You owe me for that.”

“I don’t understand a word of this!” Nina said. “And it
was
me you were following, not Polly.”

“You shut up too,” Seb said, jerking his chin at Nina. “You only come into it because the two of you act like Siamese twins, trotting to her house, trotting to your house, trotting to school together. I didn’t know even little girls could be that boring!”

“We’re not boring,” said Polly.

“Yes you are – boring as hell,” Seb retorted disagreeably.

“Hell’s not boring,” Nina said smartly. She hated not being the centre of attention. “There’s devils with forks and flames, and thousands of sinners. You won’t have a dull moment when you go there.”

“I’m not planning to go there,” Seb said. “I told you to shut up. I’m planning
not
to,” he said to Polly, “and I told you, you owe me.”