Sapphire and Steel Page 5

  If Rob could have tapped the atmosphere, or the mind-waves, or had the insight and the power to avoid looking the subconscious in the eye, he might have got away with it.

  ‘I sent no message.’ Steel’s voice moved freely and clearly inside Sapphire’s head. ‘I didn’t think you had.’ She sent the answer back to him, using the same smooth, silent process. Showing nothing, she poured milk for Helen and smiled at the child as the effortless communication took place.

  In contrast, Rob made hard work out of sitting down nonchalantly at the table as Sapphire walked to the door. Once there, she turned back to look at Rob.

  ‘First a wall. Then a room,’ she said. It was like a quiet warning. ‘You have to trust us, Rob.’

  ‘But I do trust you.’ Rob looked at her quickly, then, as a diversion, he reached for the tea pot. He heard the door close, then looked up quickly. He waited until Sapphire had moved along the hall, until he could hear her climbing the first flight of stairs, then he got up quickly from the table and reached out for Helen’s dressing-gown which was flung over the back of her chair.

  ‘Put this on,’ he said, quietly but urgently, as he draped the gown across Helen’s shoulders.

  Helen shrugged the dressing-gown off. ‘But I don’t want it on.’

  Rob grabbed the garment before it fell to the floor. This time he took Helen’s free hand and shoved it through the sleeve of the gown. ‘I said put it on. Quickly.’

  ‘I’m eating my breakfast.’

  Rob took her other arm and Helen transferred the spoon from one hand to the next, still eating her egg as her brother tugged her arm through the sleeve and pulled the gown over her shoulders. He then moved quickly to the window and looked out. There was nothing to be seen yet from this level. But Rob could hear the steady sound of the approaching police car. He hurried back to the table and snatched the spoon from Helen’s hand.

  ‘No!’ Helen raised her voice but Rob put his finger to his lips.

  ‘Please, Helen,’ he pleaded, ‘We’ve got to be ready.’

  Still managing to eat her toast, she looked at him, wide-eyed. ‘Ready?’

  Rob nodded as he lifted her from the chair. ‘We’re leaving.’

  Still staring at him, Helen crunched on her toast. And Rob knelt down to straighten and button her dressing-gown. ‘Constable Daly’s coming,’ he whispered conspiratorially, seeing his sister’s eyes widen even more. ‘He’s coming here, to the house.’

  ‘Are we going with him, Rob?’ asked Helen, still munching toast.

  ‘Yes. So hurry.’

  The sound of the car outside was much closer now as it drove slowly and steadily along the rough dirt track.

  Rob took Helen’s hand and led her to the door.

  ‘Did you tell Sapphire?’ Helen asked, putting the last of the toast into her mouth.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Rob and reached for the handle of the door.

  ‘But she’ll be cross.’

  Rob opened the kitchen door very carefully.

  ‘You should have told her,’ Helen insisted.

  Rob peered out into the hallway. There was no-one in the hall or on the stairs. Outside, the car could be heard as it shuddered over the cattle-grid.

  Rob looked down at the small figure of his sister. ‘They’re nailing up the door of your room, Helen,’ he told her, but she simply stared back up at him without understanding. ‘Nailing it up good and solid. So that no-one can get in and no-one can get out. Is that the right way to bring Mum and Dad back?’

  Helen was still staring up at him. But his last words had got through to her. She began to cry quietly and Rob put his arm about her as he opened wide the kitchen door.

  ‘It’s alright. The policeman’s here,’ said Rob, as he led his sister out into the hallway.

  Steel and Sapphire had stood at the top landing window and watched the approach of the police car.

  ‘I’m sorry, but the boy just doesn’t trust you,’ said Sapphire, as she looked out at the long, narrow strip of road.

  Steel was unconcerned as he asked, ‘Does he trust you?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Only you’re supposed to be the diplomat, aren’t you?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yes...’

  ‘The one who’s supposed to sweet-talk kids like that.’ Steel gazed at the small, blue and white car as it bumped its way along the rough track road. ‘Reassure them. Win them over. So that we can get on with this job. Fight this battle.’

  Sapphire said nothing. She watched the sunlight flash from the white roof of the car as it dipped and rose again over a bump in the road. As the car clattered over the cattle-grid, Steel pointed at the nailed-up bedroom door. ‘Because this is a bad one. It’s strong and it’s dangerous, and this time it’s trying to reason things out, in its own way.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ Sapphire glanced towards the door.

  ‘Methods.’

  Sapphire looked at him. Outside, the car could be heard slowing as it drew near to the house.

  ‘Go and listen,’ said Steel, nodding towards the boarded-up door.

  Sapphire walked to the door, put her ear as close to it as she could and listened. Through the door, somewhere in the room, a voice was speaking. It was a flat, monotonous whisper that did not change in pitch, so that what was said sounded almost mechanical.

  The flat, dull voice was chanting ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses, Ring-a-ring o’ roses, Ring-a-ring o’ roses.’ Exactly the same words, using the same inflections said over and over again. It was like a looped tape, like a record that had stuck.

  Sapphire turned to look at Steel, but he was still gazing out and down from the window. ‘That’s Time marking Time,’ he said, without changing his position at the window.

  Down below, outside the house, there was the sound of a car door slamming. ‘So the last thing we need right now is someone coming here.’ Steel commented. ‘Someone who doesn’t know, being helped, in turn, by someone who doesn’t understand.’

  He listened to, but did not seem perturbed by, the sound of footsteps approaching the house. ‘Think you can handle that policeman?’ he asked, as he turned from the window.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sapphire, confidently, and followed Steel down the attic stairs.

  Rob could hear the slow, measured footsteps of Constable Daly walking towards the front door of the house. The policeman walked on gravel. Soon he would reach the flagstones and it was then only ten or twelve yards to the front door itself.

  The top bolt had been easy to slide back. The lower one, though, was proving difficult. Rob wanted to open the door without being heard from inside the house. He then planned to bundle Helen outside as quickly as possible. Just run to the policeman, that was all they had to do. Then Constable Daly could ask his questions, making sure that he got straightforward, sensible answers. Steel and Sapphire would have to explain things. After all, they were only people. They weren’t the police. Once they saw that uniform and the notebook, they would have to stop doing things their way. In fact, Rob was quite looking forward to seeing how the cool, immovable Steel would react when he was confronted by proper authority.

  Rob tugged at the bolt. It slid back with what seemed a loud, grating sound.

  He looked up and round, but there was no-one on the stairs. There was only Helen, standing waiting with him at the door. Outside, the footsteps were now treading the flagstones. Rob was reaching for the door-catch when he saw Helen looking towards the first staircase. He turned quickly.

  Sapphire and Steel were standing on the stair. They seemed quite calm and relaxed as they watched Rob and Helen.

  ‘I — I have to do it.’ Rob found himself already apologising.

  ‘Then do it,’ said Sapphire.

  Rob stared at her. He expected some kind of panic. A struggle even. Not this degree of calmness. ‘It’s my home. I live here. I have to do it, have to tell — someone else.’

  The footsteps scraped to a halt at the other side of the front
door.

  ‘Are you speaking for both of you?’ asked Sapphire.

  ‘Of course I am.’ As Rob spoke, there was a loud knocking on the door. And a quick thought passed through Rob’s mind. The thought was that he was hearing an irregular knock. An everyday knock. A normal one.

  ‘I don’t think you can speak for both of you.’ Sapphire smiled the bright smile and reached out a hand. ‘Come on, Helen.’

  Helen looked at Rob only once. She then walked straight to the staircase. As the door was knocked upon a second time, Helen climbed the first two steps and held out her hand to take Sapphire’s.

  Rob felt a little hurt and betrayed. But then, Helen was six, she could be easily influenced. He reached out for the door-catch. ‘I’m still going to do it. I’m going to tell him everything.’

  ‘And do you think he’ll listen?’

  ‘Of course he’ll listen. That policeman knows me.’

  Sapphire was still smiling. ‘Go on, then. Try to tell him.’

  Rob reached forward quickly while the decision was still his to make. He unlocked the door-catch. For a split second, as he did this, he somehow sensed something, as if from the corner of his mind. It seemed as if there was a quick surge of brightness and blueness from the direction of the stairs, from where Sapphire’s eyes would be.

  Rob dragged the door open wide.

  Constable Daly was young and friendly, pleasant and reliable. He took off his peaked cap as he stepped through the doorway. ‘Hallo, Rob,’ he said, as he entered.

  Then, as Rob found himself opening the door yet again, Daly was taking off his cap once more and stepping through the doorway. ‘Hallo, Rob,’ he said, and entered the house a second time.

  Then the whole procedure happened a third time. When it happened the fourth time, Rob found that he was somehow set back from the doorway. He could actually see himself opening the door.

  ‘Hallo, Rob.’ Daly was still removing his cap and stepping through the doorway.

  ‘I can make that happen for as long as necessary.’

  Rob turned at the sound of Sapphire’s voice, even though this other version of him, this image, continued to open the door to the constable. ‘Hallo, Rob.’ And yet again. ‘Hallo, Rob.’

  ‘For as long as it takes to prevent you from talking to him,’ Sapphire added, still smiling. ‘And that could be ages. So be fair. I’m sure the poor man has better things to do.’

  ‘Hallo, Rob.’ It was perpetual. Like a dummy figure in an amusement arcade, that uttered the same words, smiled the same fixed smile and made the same predictable moves, over and over forever, or until the machinery was worn out.

  After the eighth or ninth cycle had been completed, Constable Daly no longer resembled a human being, let alone a candidate for sanity and authority.

  ‘Hallo, Rob.’

  ‘But how did you do it?’

  Rob and Helen were back in the kitchen again with Sapphire. Constable Daly had driven back to Scars Edge. He looked slightly puzzled, in the way that people do when they feel that they have been somewhere, or done something before, perhaps in a dream. But he had left feeling satisfied. Rob had watched, without being able to say a word, as Steel moved into action. He had literally stepped into Daly’s arrival at the door, like a fair-owner stepping on to a moving roundabout. Therefore it became Steel, not Rob, who had opened the door, Steel who had asked Daly what he wanted, who told the policeman that everything was alright at that house, and that he, Steel, was a friend of the family who was visiting, in the hope of some peace and quiet in the country.

  When the front door had been closed again and Daly was on his way back to the car, Rob had threatened to climb out of a window and run after him. But Sapphire’s counter-threat had made him change his mind. She had said that if he did that, she would make sure that he spent the next few hours climbing through the window, over and over again, but getting nowhere.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter how I did it,’ said Sapphire, setting out a newly cooked egg for Helen.

  ‘It does,’ insisted Rob. ‘If you can make Time go backwards...’

  ‘Who said I can?’

  ‘You just did it. Out in the hall. And last night, when you kept changing into different clothes.’

  ‘The changing of clothes was an illusion,’ she told him. ‘They were things I’d worn in the past. I was projecting an image for you, that’s all.’

  ‘But out there in the hall...’ Rob followed her as she crossed the room and began to straighten the larder cupboard. ‘That wasn’t an illusion was it?’

  ‘No.’ And that was all she seemed prepared to say as she closed the larder door and moved back to Helen and the table.

  Rob pursued it. ‘That was Time. You were making Time go back.’

  Sapphire said nothing as she began to clear the kitchen table.

  ‘So why can’t you make it go back twenty-four hours? Why can’t you take it back to just before yesterday? To when our parents were still here?’

  Sapphire looked up slowly from the table. ‘Don’t you think I would have done that already,’ she asked, ‘If I was able to?’

  Rob thought about it. He remembered the sick fear that he had felt in the attic bedroom, and the tense, serious faces of Sapphire and Steel as they fought and held back whatever it was that had invaded that room.

  Sapphire appeared to have interpreted his thoughts yet again. ‘First a wall. Then a room,’ she said. ‘What next? A house? A road? A village? A town? Then what?’

  Rob stared at her.

  ‘Look, I haven’t the power to take Time back twenty-four hours.’ Having read his thoughts, Sapphire now seemed prepared to give some explanations. ‘I cannot take it back that far.’ She demonstrated with her hand. ‘Imagine a rubber ball bounced on the floor here.’

  Helen moved her head up and down, as if watching an invisible ball.

  ‘The ball hitting the floor the first time is the incident. The bouncing that follows is the echo. The momentum. I’m just able to keep that momentum going for a little while longer, that’s all.’

  Sapphire then gave Rob a quick glint of the smile as she turned and began to remove the cloth from the kitchen table.

  ‘Does anyone have the power to take Time back further?’ Rob had to know.

  Sapphire began to shake and fold the table-cloth. ‘Something does, in a way yes.’

  ‘Something? Not someone?’

  Sapphire nodded. ‘In its own way, yes.’

  ‘You mean whatever’s in that corridor? Whatever it was that came into Helen’s room? That came and...?’

  And he stopped because Sapphire had turned to look at him. Her face was serious. There was no hint of the smile there. ‘It has access to all kinds of power,’ she said, ‘When it’s encouraged.’

  Rob waited for her to say more. But Sapphire had turned away. She reached down and lifted Helen from the chair.

  Rob walked idly to the door and out into the hallway. There was no point in running, he thought. He might just as well try running on the spot.

  He moved to the window, rested his elbows upon the ledge and looked out. He could not see much from this viewpoint. There was a dip in the terrain, a hundred yards or so past the cattle-grid, which cut off the view to Deadman’s Point and the bay. A string of decayed, wooden fences crossed the skyline. Whenever the wind blew at something near gale force, the loose fencing would rattle violently and break away. Rob had heard one piece bowling along the rough track road one night, making a noise like a football rattle. And Rob remembered, now, how his father was always planning to go out with an axe and a barrow and chop down all the fencing to use for firewood.

  Rob moved from the window and wandered along to the foot of the stairs. He looked up at the staircase that was now bright with cold sunlight. Thinking of the nailed-up door, he tried to see if he could imagine the strange light and the images now, during the daytime. He found that he could and the thought made him shiver slightly.

  Still looking up a
t the stairs, he remembered Sapphire’s last words to him: ‘when it’s encouraged,’ and wondered what she had meant by that.

  Chapter Seven

  Steel appeared during the evening. He had spent most of the day examining both the inside and the outside of the house.

  Helen had fallen asleep on the couch in the sitting room. Sapphire covered her with a blanket and decided to leave her there for the time being.

  With the blustery darkness outside and the lamplight and shadows within the house, Rob was anxious to stay in the kitchen where it was bright and warm. He was hurrying along the hallway, towards the kitchen, when Steel loomed out from the open cellar doorway, startling Rob in the process.

  ‘Would you happen to know which room in the house is the youngest?’ Steel asked as he closed the cellar door.

  When Rob had eventually worked out what Steel had meant, he told the man that his father had had the small office extension, that adjoined the kitchen, built the year before.

  Sapphire and Steel examined just about every item in the office, he with his eyes, she with her hands. Sapphire touched pieces of furniture, ornaments and items of office equipment. Each time she touched, she ‘sensed’ and gave approximate dates of manufacture. Even if the object was new, she could determine the age of any recycled elements that were part of the structure of that object.

  Rob watched them, fascinated. The ‘youngest’ room in the house! Rob smiled to himself as he thought. Here these two were, conducting the kind of inventory that would put any book-keeper or accountant to shame, and Steel had to use the wrong word, ask which room was the ‘youngest’.

  ‘We’re clearing the lot.’

  Rob was jolted out of his thoughts by Steel’s voice.

  ‘Put it all in the cellar. I need an empty room to work from.’

  Steel began to shift the contents of the office into the small lobby that divided the office from the kitchen. Rob was left with the hardest job, humping each piece from the kitchen and down into the cellar. After his third cellar trip, Rob stopped in the kitchen for a moment to get his breath back.

  Steel appeared in the office lobby with an upright chair.