The Tooth Fairy Page 5

  ‘Do you think it’s still there?’ Sam wanted to know.

  Terry stared into the water. Luminous green duckweed stippled the dark, mirror-like surface of the water. ‘Getting fatter and bigger every year.’

  Sam saw Terry’s face reflected there. Suddenly, looming out of the depths alongside Terry’s reflection was another face. Familiar and frightening, squinting back at him, the pink tongue working back and forth, reminding him. Sam jumped back from the side of the pond.

  ‘What is it?’ shouted Terry.

  ‘Tonight,’ Sam gasped.

  ‘What about tonight?’ Terry closed his penknife and stood up.

  ‘Television. We’ve got a television.’

  ‘You told me that already.’

  ‘You’ve got to come and watch it. Tonight.’

  Terry smiled. ‘Great.’

  ‘No! You’ve got to stay over! You’ve got to stay at our house. You can sleep in my room.’

  Terry was puzzled but flattered by Sam’s urgency. ‘My mum won’t let me.’

  ‘She will. She’s got to. My mum will tell her.’ Sam was up and running.

  Terry darted a glance back at the black waters of the pond. Then he ran to catch up with Sam.

  *

  ‘It’s practically next door,’ said Connie when Sam asked her if Terry could stay overnight. ‘Why?’

  ‘Television!’ was all Sam could think of saying.

  ‘So, he can watch television, and then he can go home.’

  ‘No! He’s got to stay. First television night!’

  Connie looked at her boy. His eyes were moist, his fists were clenched. He was normally such an undemanding child. She couldn’t understand why he was so insistent. Terry hung back, knowing when to stay out of an argument; Connie looked at him and was flushed with a wave of sympathy for her neighbour’s son. She’d spent the afternoon baking apple pies; she’d iced cakes. Maybe it was a special day. ‘I’ll see what Mrs Morris has to say about it.’

  Nev had fixed the TV aerial, approximately. He, Connie, Sam and Terry watched the screen that Saturday evening in awed and almost spiritual silence. They watched, through a moderate blizzard dogged by a screen ghost, an early episode of Doctor Who and the Daleks. So astonished were they by what they’d seen, the two boys were convinced the world outside must surely be a changed place. They were also amazed that Sam’s mother had the courage to venture all the way to Terry’s caravan to have a word with Mrs Morris about his staying overnight. When she returned, bearing his pyjamas and a toothbrush, the boys made joyful fists at each other.

  ‘Cut it with a knife,’ Sam overheard his mother say to Nev. The boys were permitted to stay up to watch a game show and half of an incomprehensible drama before being packed off to bed. Finally they were settled, head-to-toe in Sam’s bed, before the light was switched off. Muffled voices and signature tunes from the television carried to the bedroom. It was a new and comforting sound.

  Sam woke at about one o’clock in the morning. The window was ajar and the room was cold. He lifted his head from the pillow. At first he thought a Dalek might have come into his room, metal gleaming, death-ray levelled at his head. Blinking back sleep he saw it was the Tooth Fairy. Somewhere in the night, not far away, he heard two very loud bangs. He looked into the Tooth Fairy’s eyes.

  The Tooth Fairy was somehow diminished. His coal-black hair was wet and matted, and his face was a pale, dirty ivory. He was shivering and hugging himself. Then there was a third bang. And a fourth.

  The Tooth Fairy nodded his head slowly at Sam. He seemed to be crying. Then he faded.

  ‘Terry! Terry!’

  Terry woke up. His eyelashes flickered. ‘It’s cold in here.’

  Sam closed the window. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He was here!’ Sam had never previously mentioned the Tooth Fairy to either Terry or Clive. He was highly excited that the fairy had made an appearance in the presence of Terry. Because Terry didn’t see him, it didn’t mean that he couldn’t.

  They heard someone get up. The bangs had also disturbed Sam’s father. Nev put his head round the door. ‘Go back to sleep, you boys.’

  ‘I heard some bangs.’

  ‘A car backfiring. Go back to sleep.’

  In the morning, while the boys were having their breakfast, Nev came in and shouted for Connie. He cast a glance at Terry as Connie came hurrying down the stairs. Something in his father’s eye frightened Sam. Nev ushered Connie through to the lounge and closed the door.

  When they came out, Nev said, ‘Get your coat on, Terry. I’m taking you up to your Aunt Dot’s house.’

  ‘Why?’

  Nev floundered for words. He looked ghastly. ‘Because it’s a good idea right now.’

  Sam went to the window. A police car had parked outside the gateway to the cottage behind which Terry’s caravan was sited. As he watched, an ambulance arrived and turned into the yard. It was followed by a second police car.

  Connie got Terry’s coat and buttoned it on for him. Her lips clamped tight together. Sam could see her fingers trembling on Terry’s buttons. She hugged Terry before Nev took him by the hand and led him away.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Connie after they’d gone. ‘Oh, my God.’ She was crying now. There was to be no Sunday school that morning, she told Sam. Then she hugged him and with unnecessary severity ordered him upstairs to tidy his bedroom.

  9

  The Nightmare Interceptor

  It was three weeks before Sam went near the Morris’s caravan. When he finally did so, he approached it from behind, via the apron of wasteland to the rear, so that the old man who lived in the cottage wouldn’t spot him. It wasn’t that he was afraid of the old man, an amiable, shuffling octogenarian with whom he’d spoken many times: it was that he was ashamed of becoming a ghoul.

  There had been many ghouls poking around the caravan during the first two weeks: hatchet-faced photographers from newspapers; brittle journalists who had knocked on his door; casual sightseers loitering. Sam knew they were ghouls because that’s what his father had called them. They looked like ordinary people, with overcoats and polished shoes, but Sam knew that beneath the human disguise these ghouls leaked luminous grey slime from ear and nostril. He didn’t want to become a ghoul, but the caravan summoned him.

  It called to him.

  Terry had been spirited away, by his Aunt Dot, to another aunt’s house in Cromer on the east coast and hadn’t yet returned. This had precipitated a debate in the Southall household about whether the right or the wrong thing had been done by Terry.

  ‘Isn’t right,’ Connie declared. ‘That boy should have been here.’

  ‘What good would it do?’ Nev argued. ‘Why put him through more of it? Poor little sod’s had enough.’

  ‘He should-a been here to see it through. She was his mother and he was his father, whatever happened. He should-a been at that funeral to see it, end to end. Now it’ll always weigh.’

  ‘I don’t know, love. I don’t know.’

  Connie had sniffed. She knew.

  The curtains at the caravan windows were drawn. By climbing on the coupling bar Sam was able to squint through a chink in one of the sets of curtains, and he could see that the interior had been scrubbed and cleared. All surfaces had been wiped clean. He jumped down from the bar. A lot of the Morris’s property still littered the yard: Terry’s bike; his cricket bat propped against the apple tree, russet fallers putrefying around it; the wasp-trap jamjar, its victims shrivelled to dried beads inside the glass.

  The door to Morris’s workshop was securely padlocked. Between the side of the garage and an adjacent privet hedge there was a twelve-inch gap. Sam squeezed into the gap, working his way to a cobwebbed window. Terry had once demonstrated to him how the entire window frame swung outwards. He tested it now. Putting his eye to the glass, Sam could see that the workshop lay untouched since he’d been present on the afternoon before Morris had done the deed. It was waiting
to be cleared. Presumably no one knew what to do with all the paraphernalia Morris had amassed. Sam swung the window frame open and climbed inside.

  Morris’s masculine smell pervaded the workshop: traces of tobacco flake, whisky or beer, hair-oil and an indefinable locker-room odour Sam always associated with the gusto of Morris’s mind working at speed. It was there whenever Morris was agitated or aroused, a warning discharge, a dangerous leak. It was there now.

  Sam paused in the shadows, his heart hammering. The workshop was still vibrating with the shock of what had happened. He had no purpose in being there. He’d simply been propelled to get inside the workshop in order to listen to the echo of events. With the caravan locked, the garage had offered the next best thing. Sunlight filtering through the leaves outside the window cast spangled light over the floor and across Morris’s desk. A tiny red mite was making an epic journey across Sam’s hand. His own blood sported in his veins. Then the thumping of his heart began to level off, and he breathed.

  He stood in the shadows, motionless as a gargoyle, absorbing the silence, until he felt the garage had forgiven his intrusion. No one had told him what, or how, or why, but he’d managed to absorb enough kaleidoscopic information to construct a picture. It was also easy to assemble Morris’s ghost out of hair-oil and tobacco odours, until the man himself sat there before Sam, labouring at his workshop desk, measuring minuscule distances with a micro-rule, shaking his head, muttering incomprehensibly.

  The kaleidoscope slipped.

  Somehow the light had changed outside. Day was night; the sun had been transmuted into a left-hand cup of moon tilted at a dread angle, and Sam knew that his own corporeal body was asleep a few houses away, sharing a bed, head-totoe, with Terry, and that the time was out of joint.

  ‘It won’t work. It won’t work,’ whispered Morris, laying down his micro-rule with exhausted finality. He pushed back his chair, got up and turned away from the desk. For a moment he seemed to see Sam staring at him. Running a mechanical hand across his hair, he looked directly through the boy.

  Then Morris was gone, and the light had changed back again. The sun angled through the window, flooding the desk. Sam approached, touching the swivel chair where moments earlier Morris’s ghost had been sitting. Everything was in place just as the tidy-minded inventor had left it on his final evening, jars of pens and pin-sharp pencils, pots of paintbrushes, blades and scissors.

  The crate where Morris had junked his failed inventions was overspilling. Sam moved some wooden blocks and pulleys aside, shifted a set of greased, interlocking cogs and saw the discarded tape-recorder, the device Morris had called the Mechanical Butler. He instinctively wanted to steal the tape-machine. It was too highly conceived to abandon to some uncaring person charged with the task of clearing out Morris’s shed. He considered taking it but knew there was no way he could hide it from his parents. They would find it and make him return it. His eyes fell instead on the Nightmare Interceptor, the modest electrical clock trailing wires. It was small enough to be secreted in his bedroom, he reasoned, and not likely to be considered valuable by anyone who ever found it. He reached into the box and grabbed the clock. The trailing wires snagged on something deep in the junk. He tugged again, but the wires wouldn’t release.

  Sam reached down into the high crate, inching his fingers along the length of the wire, trying to find the crocodile-clip-sensor he knew to be located at the cables’ extremity. His footing slipped, and he felt his hand twist beneath the stacked weight of heavy metal objects. The wire looped around his wrist. He jerked his hand back and felt a sharp pain as the wire bit into his flesh.

  He tugged again. His glasses came loose, and he fumbled at them with his free hand, winding the thin metal frame around his ear. He yanked his arm again, hard, his breathing coming short. He was ensnared. He realized he was stuck, with no possibility of calling for help. There was a moment when his stomach dropped away. He panicked. He couldn’t pull his hand free.

  Something quivered in the crate. Objects shivered and tumbled aside. Some black, unpleasantly warm, hairy thing brushed against his hand, sweeping along his arm. He wrenched back violently, wincing at the pain to his wrist, kicking out at the crate. It was useless. The black furry thing inched further up his arm.

  Even as it moved, the black thing seemed to take its shape and form from the box of objects itself. Black trailing wires resolved themselves into hair. Interlocking cogs became a face. Pieces of wood, cardboard and metal accreted to the thing as it shook itself free of the other objects in the box, until spitting and snarling, still gripping his wrist in a handcuff of wire, was the Tooth Fairy.

  ‘Stop kicking! Stop fucking struggling!’

  The Tooth Fairy climbed out of the crate, his arms and legs for a moment assembling themselves from bits of tape-recorder and metal cubes and pipes, and from pulleys and cog-wheels and cardboard off cuts, until they resolved themselves into the Tooth Fairy’s normal, terrifying form. His face looked dirty, greasy, angry. He shook himself, and he roared, as if in pain.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ Sam whimpered.

  ‘Hurting? Hurting?’ The Tooth Fairy wound the wire tighter, pulling the boy towards him, thrusting his face in Sam’s, grabbing Sam’s hair. Want to know what pisses me off ?’

  Sam got a full face of the Tooth Fairy’s breath. It was a sweet rot, a decay like the putrefaction of apples, of mouldering grass, of cabbage, of drains.

  ‘You hear me, four-eyes? See them fucking goggles you got? They make you look dumb, boy. Ugly and dumb. A freak. Half-boy, half-frog. You want to know what pisses me off about you? You’re always looking at things. Always looking at things you shouldn’t be looking at! You gunna stop? You gunna stop looking at things you shoont be looking at? Gunna stop seeing things, you google-eyed fuck?’

  Sam winced in pain. His hair was being ripped away at the scalp. The smell of the Tooth Fairy’s breath made him faint. At last the Tooth Fairy released the wires and pushed Sam crashing back against the garage wall. Then he spat, fully. The thick gob of phlegm hung from the side of Sam’s head.

  ‘You hear what I say? You hear? Stop seeing, you little shit. You hear me?’

  Sam could hardly form an answer. ‘Yes . . . yes.’

  The Tooth Fairy staggered before the workshop desk, leaning against the wall as if exhausted. He buried his head in his hands. ‘I’ve got to think this out,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve just got to think this through.’

  Sam was still holding the Nightmare Interceptor, its leads and crocodile clip trailing at his feet. He wanted to get out. The Tooth Fairy seemed preoccupied. Sam made a break for it, swinging open the window and trying to cock a leg over the sill.

  ‘Not so fast!’ bellowed the Tooth Fairy, springing forward to grab Sam by the foot. Sam wailed and kicked. He was half in and half out of the garage. Lashing out with his leg he caught the Tooth Fairy under the chin with his boot. The blow lacked the force to dislodge the Tooth Fairy’s grip; Sam grabbed his opponent’s hair and pulled hard. The Fairy swore, releasing the leg only to snatch at Sam’s hand. In the struggle the window slammed back and the glass pane broke, half of it falling inside the garage.

  ‘Remember me with this,’ the Tooth Fairy said, twisting Sam’s arm up at the broken glass and searing it along the exposed edge. The jagged glass bit deep into flesh. Sam screamed and fell backwards out of the garage. Still screaming, and still clutching the Nightmare Interceptor, he ran home, with the vile taunts of the Tooth Fairy ringing in his ears.

  10

  Vandals

  ‘How long does it take?’ Terry wanted to know.

  ‘How long is a piece of string?’ said Clive. It was a smart answer he’d picked up from one of his teachers at the new school.

  ‘It’s getting a bit sore,’ Sam complained.

  ‘Just keep at it,’ Clive coaxed helpfully.

  The pond had been infilled to half its original size and the surrounding land bulldozed to make way for a football pitch. The Head
s-Looked-At Boys sat on the newly created mud-bank of the reduced pond with an inarticulated sense of grievance. A yellow JCB digger with caterpillar tracks lodged in the damp clay at a prodigious angle, like a casualty of war, along with a dumper truck, both abandoned for the Saturday afternoon.

  A few small perch and tench floated on the scummy surface of the water. There had been the usual speculation about the whereabouts of the pike. It was conceded that he’d still got plenty of water to swim in and that there was still time to catch him. But favourite trees had been felled, bushes had been uprooted and a sheltered, hidden bank had been collapsed into the pond. For Terry, a keen footballer struggling against some loss of balance since losing his two toes, the change to the landscape was regrettable but inevitable; footballing opportunities would open up, and in one sense the infill of the pond was a blow against the ravening pike. To Sam and Clive, however, who felt that things would never be the same again, it was an unforgivable violation.

  It had been two years since the appalling Morris incident, when Terry was sent away to the east coast, and when Sam had his arm sliced by broken glass. Sam still bore the scar. When he’d returned home that day, bleeding profusely, he’d been rushed to the hospital for tetanus inoculations and deep interrogation. Everything about the Tooth Fairy had come blubbering incomprehensibly out of him, the entire history, all the early encounters and the violent grapple resulting in the slashed arm. Connie had been shocked and had discussed with doctors – within earshot of Sam – the need for him to ‘have his head looked at’.

  Connie was genuinely worried, and after three months when Sam had persisted with his monstrous stories, Connie dragged him to the local GP, who in turn arranged for Sam to see a specialist. Oddly, during this period Sam lost sight of the Tooth Fairy, except for one occasion, his birthday, when it suddenly appeared, naked, sitting on the corner of his bed, warning darkly against his saying any more to anyone.