Seven Sorcerers (4 page)

The kitchen door opened and Right Madam appeared, clutching the jackets they had been wearing when they came in. She moved cautiously towards the space under the stairs, holding the coats ready to throw on their hooks.

Skerridge grinned to himself. He let out a soft, slow hiss. Right Madam stopped. Her eyes got very wide and she took a deep breath.

Skerridge let his own eyes glow a little brighter. She wouldn’t see them, but she would feel him watching.

Right Madam stayed still, her gaze searching the shadows, her breath coming in short huffs. Any minute now, thought Skerridge, she’s gonna cry.

Then, in one jerky movement, she stepped forward and plonked the jackets right over him. Skerridge blinked in the sudden darkness. He hissed again – this time not for Right Madam’s benefit. Usually Skerridge liked to terrorise a kid for at least a month before snatching them, but this one wasn’t being half as much fun as usual.

‘Pah!’ he muttered to the lining of the jacket. ‘Playin’ games, are we? We’ll see about that!’

Perhaps it was time to move things along.

When the house was dark, Skerridge got to work. Because he had a lot to do he moved at superspeed whenever he could – so fast that he was just a blur.

First he took out a thin, sharp spindle. Skerridge had made it himself from a stray bone he had found in the House. It was etched with tiny shapes and swirls and had taken him ages to do.

Using the spindle skilfully, he began to draw all memory of Right Madam out of her mother’s head. When he had done that, spinning the threads into a tight ball, he went on to her grandmother, her grandfather and her best friend.

The nature of the universe was such that once he had removed all trace of the girl from the minds of those who loved her most, anyone else who simply liked her, knew her or happened to bump into her from time to time, forgot about her too.

This was the part of his job that Skerridge enjoyed most. It took skill not to break the thread and to catch every last strand of it. He loved the way it spun into a bright, shining ball like a pearl full of strange colours. Once it was done he tucked the ball carefully into the small bag made of spider silk that he carried in a secret pocket hidden in his waistcoat, and moved on to the next task.

After all, there was no point erasing the girl from memory if he left bits of her lying around all over the
place. There were her clothes to get rid of, not to mention her books, toiletries and other personal items. Photographs too, and postcards, school projects, all manner of things scattered about the house, the town and even the country.

This time he used the spindle in a different way, turning it widdershins instead of clockwise. As he did so, all the physical things that Right Madam had left around became less and less THERE, until they quietly and completely evaporated from existence. The only personal things left would be the ones she was wearing or holding. All Skerridge would have to do was a little tidying up afterwards to make sure the gaps didn’t show. Like filling empty wardrobes with somebody else’s old jackets, that kind of thing.

Of course, even magic wasn’t perfect and sometimes, very, very rarely, an item would get missed. It never mattered, because even if some much worn jumper or grinning photo image did slip through, one thing alone was never enough to unlock a memory pearl. People just thought, ‘I wonder where that came from?’ and threw it in the bin.

At last, when night was creeping into the early hours of Wednesday morning, it was time for the girl herself. To his surprise, Skerridge was feeling nervous about this one.

She was asleep, judging by the bump in the bed. Skerridge dug out his sack and drew a deep breath. He was going to wake her with a scream. Simple but effective. It
would have her instantly confused and terrified, and easy to pop into the waiting sack before she had time to realise what was going on.

A second before he let rip, Skerridge noticed that the bump in the bed wasn’t breathing.

Shock slammed into him like an Intercity at full speed. He, of all creatures, could not possibly be caught by the old pillow under the covers trick!

A sound behind him made him spin around. Armed with a hairbrush, Right Madam stepped out from her hiding place between the chest of drawers and the wardrobe. She glared at him.

Skerridge hissed.

Right Madam pointed a wobbly finger.

‘You,’ she hissed back, ‘you stole my brother!’

‘You,’ hissed Nin at the Thing on her bedroom rug, ‘you stole my brother!’

It bared a set of crazily jagged teeth at her and flicked the sack it was holding so that it fell open. Then it tensed.

Nin looked around wildly. To get out of the room she would have to get past the Thing and that didn’t look like an easy job. Not to mention the fact that she was nearly paralysed with fright. Her legs felt like rubber, and if she tried to run for it she would probably end up on her face.

The Thing looked like it was going to pounce on her.
Now seemed like a good time to use the hairbrush she was holding, in case she needed to hit anything, so she threw it. The hairbrush caught the Thing right in the middle of its forehead. Bristles-side out.

The Thing yelped and looked surprised.

Nin took her chance and ran.

The Thing leapt.

Nin screamed as the sack scraped her head, the rough cloth nearly covering her. She twisted sharply, slithering forward. The Thing gave a snarling hiss, the sack slipped off her and she was free.

She wasn’t sure how she got to the stairs. Once there she half ran, half fell down them. It might have been more sensible to go the other way, towards her mother’s room, but instinct told her to head for the front door.

Glancing back, Nin gave a shocked gasp. The Thing wasn’t bothering with the stairs. It was scurrying down the wall and along the lower hall ceiling on all fours, looking like some huge, awkward spider. She screamed again.

A door sprang open and Lena Redstone appeared in the upstairs hall. She flicked on the light.

The Thing on the ceiling froze, then dropped on to the floor just in front of Nin. It glared up at the woman in her pyjamas, her hair in a tousled mess.

Nin felt a wave of relief as her mother hurried down the stairs. It was all over now. Mum would sort it.

Lena came to a stop right next to the Thing, which crouched back against the wall. She was even standing
on a corner of the sack, but she was looking only at Nin. For her, the Thing wasn’t there at all.

Open-mouthed, Nin looked at it. It smirked at her.

And then something even more horrible happened.

Lena Redstone stared at her daughter, her face stern.

‘Who are you,’ she said, ‘and what are you doing in my house?’

Nin didn’t stop to argue. She’d seen what had happened with Toby, how completely he had been removed from her mother’s mind. There was no point hanging around trying to make her remember.

She ran for the front door and her hand found the latch just as the Thing tried to go after her. It jolted to a halt with a bump and a squawk. It was still hanging on to the sack, which was anchored to the floor by her mother’s foot.

The door flew open on to night air and the empty road. Nin fell through it.

‘You’re lucky I haven’t called the police!’ yelled her mother after her and then the door was shut and Nin was running up the path, out on to the street and down the hill.

She hadn’t gone far when she bumped into somebody.

‘Not so fast!’

She shrieked and tried to pull back, but whoever it was
had her firmly by the arms. She lowered her head to bite, but then he said something that got her attention.

‘It’ll come after you, y’know.’

Nin stopped struggling and looked up. It was the boy she had seen around town a few times. The rough one in the black coat and the red scarf. He was tall and looked like he hadn’t eaten properly for a long time. His eyes were grey and not unkind, and his greasy hair might have been blonde if it had been washed. He smiled.

‘Time for introductions later.’ he said. ‘Follow me, right?’

He led her quickly down the hill. Nin followed in a daze.

‘Number 27,’ said the boy over his shoulder. ‘It was burnt to a shell about four years ago, remember?’

Nin nodded. Number 27 was mostly hidden behind a high wall and all anyone walking past it could see were the boarded-up top-floor windows and the broken roof.

‘Y’know what everyone says about it?’

‘Um … yeah,’ she croaked, hurrying to keep up with him. ‘People died in the fire and at night, like, you can hear them dragging themselves about.’

Down by the side of number 27 was a path that went nowhere except to a locked side gate. Fired by nerves, Nin’s imagination must have been running riot, because as they hurried down it she was sure she heard something dragging itself about inside the ruined house, scratching at the walls like it wanted to get at her. The
boy kept going and Nin went after him, thinking she must be mad. Still, since her life had shot down a side alley from normality anyway, she figured she might as well. Right now she didn’t have a better plan.

So she followed him down the path that went nowhere and ended up someplace else.

verything went dark. Everything.