Johnny and the Dead Page 11

Johnny lay in bed, watching the stricken shuttle turning gently in the moonlight.

  It had been quite busy after the meeting. Someone from the Blackbury Guardian had talked to him, and then Mid-Midlands TV had filmed him, and people had shaken his hand, and he hadn’t got home until nearly eleven.

  There hadn’t been any trouble over that, at least. His mum hadn’t come in yet and Grandad was watching a programme about bicycle racing in Germany.

  He kept thinking about the Pals. They’d come all the way from France. Yet the dead in the cemetery were so frightened of moving. But they were all the same type of people, really. There had to be a reason for that.

  The dead in the cemetery just hung around. Why? The Pals had marched from France, because it was the right thing to do. You didn’t have to stay where you were put.

  ‘New York, New York.’

  ‘Why did they name it twice?’

  ‘Well, they ARE Americans. I suppose they wanted to be sure.’

  ‘The lights are extremely plentiful. What’s that?’

  ‘The Statue of Liberty.’

  ‘Looks a bit like you, Sylvia.’

  ‘Sauce!’

  ‘Is everyone keeping a look out for those Ghost-breakers?’

  ‘I think that was just cinematography, William.’

  ‘How long to morning?’

  ‘Hours, yet! Follow me, everyone! Let’s get a better view!’

  No one ever did work out why all the elevators in the Empire State Building went up and down all by themselves for almost an hour . . .

  October the 31st dawned foggy. Johnny wondered about having a one-day illness in preparation for what he suspected was going to be a busy evening, but decided to go to school instead. They always felt happier if you dropped in sometimes.

  He went via the cemetery.

  There wasn’t a living soul. He hated it when it was like this. It was like the bits in the film when you were waiting for the aliens to jump out.

  Somehow, they were always more dreadful than the bits with the fangs in.

  Then he found Mr Grimm. Anyone else walking along the towpath would have just seen the busted set. But Johnny saw the little man in his neat suit, watching the ghost of the television.

  ‘Ah, boy,’ he said. ‘You have been causing trouble, have you?’ He pointed to the screen.

  Johnny gasped. There was Mr Atterbury, very calmly talking to a lady on a sofa. There was also one of the people from United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. And he was having some difficulty, was the Consolidated man. He’d come along with some prepared things to say and he was having problems getting his mind round the idea that they weren’t working any more.

  Mr Grimm turned up the volume control.

  ‘—at every stage, fully sensitive to public opinion in this matter, I can assure you, but there is no doubt that we entered into a proper and legal contract with the relevant Authority.’

  ‘But the Blackbury Volunteers say too much was decided behind closed doors,’ said the lady, who looked as though she was enjoying herself. ‘They say things were never fully discussed and that no one listened to the local people.’

  ‘Of course, this is not the fault of United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings,’ said Mr Atterbury, smiling benevolently. ‘They have an enviable record of civic service and co-operation with the public. I think what we have here is a mistake rather than any near-criminal activity, and we in the Volunteers would be more than happy to assist them in any constructive way and, indeed, possibly even compensate them.’

  Probably no one else but Johnny and the Consolidated man noticed Mr Atterbury take a ten-pence piece out of his pocket. He turned it over and over in his fingers. The man from the company watched it like a mouse might watch a cat.

  He’s going to offer him double his money back, Johnny thought. Right there on television.

  He didn’t. He just kept turning the coin over and over, so that the man could see it.

  ‘That seems a very diplomatic offer,’ said the interviewer. ‘Tell me, Mr – er—’

  ‘A spokesman,’ said the Consolidated man. He looked quite ill. There was a glint as light flashed off the coin.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Spokesman . . . what is it that United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings actually does?’

  Mr Atterbury would probably have been a good man in the Spanish Inquisition, Johnny told himself.

  Mr Grimm turned the sound down again.

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Haven’t come back,’ said Mr Grimm, with horrible satisfaction. ‘Their graves haven’t been slept in. That’s what happens when people don’t listen. And do you know what’s going to happen to them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’re going to fade away. Oh, yes. You’ve put ideas in their heads. They think they can go gadding about. But people who go gadding about and not staying where they’re put . . . they don’t come back. And that’s an end to it. It could be Judgement Day tomorrow, and they won’t be here. Hah! Serves them right.’

  There was something about Mr Grimm that made Johnny want to hit him, except that it wouldn’t work anyway and, besides, hitting him would be like hitting mud. You’d get dirtier for doing it.

  ‘I don’t know where they’ve gone,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think anything bad’s happened to them.’

  ‘Think what you like,’ said Mr Grimm, turning back to the television.

  ‘Did you know it’s Halloween?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Is it?’ said Mr Grimm, watching an advert for chocolate. ‘I shall have to be careful tonight, then.’

  When Johnny reached the bridge he looked back. Mr Grimm was still there, all alone.

  *

  The dead rode a radio signal over Wyoming . . . They were already changing. They were still recognizable, but only when they thought about it.

  ‘You see, I told you it was possible,’ said the person who was occasionally Mr Fletcher. ‘We don’t need wires!’

  They ran into an electric storm high over the Rocky Mountains. That was fun.

  And then they surfed down the radio waves to California.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Midnight!’

  Johnny was a sort of hero in school. The Blackbury Guardian had a front page story headed: COUNCIL SLAMMED IN CEMETERY SALE RUMPUS. The Guardian often used words like ‘slammed’ and ‘rumpus’; you wondered how the editor talked at home.

  Johnny was in the story with his name spelled wrong, and there was a quote which ran: ‘War hero Arthur Atterbury, president of the newly formed “Blackbury Volunteers”, told the Guardian: “There are young people in this town with more sense of history in their little fingers than some adults have in their entire committee-bound bodies”. This is thought to be a reference to Cllr Miss Ethel Liberty, who was not available for comment last night.’

  Even one or two of the teachers mentioned it; it was unusual for people from the school to appear in the paper; except very close to headlines like TWO FINED AFTER JOYRIDE ESCAPADE.

  Even the History master asked him about the Blackbury Pals. And then Johnny found himself telling the class about the Alderman and William Stickers and Mrs Sylvia Liberty, although he said he’d got the information out of the library. One of the girls said she was definitely going to do a project on Mrs Liberty, Champion of Women’s Rights, and Wobbler said, yes, champion of women’s right to get things wrong, and that started a good argument which lasted until the end of the lesson.

  Even the headmaster took an interest – probably out of aforesaid relief that Johnny wasn’t involved in one of those YOUTH GANG FINED FOR SHOPLIFTING stories. Johnny had to find his way to his office. The recommended method was to tie one end of a piece of string to somewhere you knew and get your friends to come and look for you if you were away more than two days. He got a short speech about ‘social awareness’, and was out again a minute later.

  He met the other three in the lunch break.

  ‘Come
on,’ he said.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The cemetery. I think something’s gone wrong.’

  ‘I haven’t had my lunch yet,’ said Wobbler. ‘It’s very important for me to have regular meals. Otherwise my stomach acid plays up.’ ‘Oh, shut up.’

  By the time they raced one another across the heart of Australia, they didn’t even need the radio. The dawn dragged its slow way across the Pacific after them, but they were running free. ‘Do we ever need to stop?’ ‘No!’ ‘I always wanted to see the world before I died!’ ‘Well, then, it was just a matter of timing.’ ‘What time is it?’ ‘Midnight!’

  The cemetery wasn’t empty now. There were a couple of photographers there, for one thing, including one from a Sunday newspaper. There was a film crew from Mid-Midlands Television. And the dog-walking people had been joined by others, just walking around and looking.

  In a neglected corner, Mrs Tachyon was industriously Vim-ing a gravestone ‘Never seen so many people here,’ said Johnny. He added, ‘At least, ones who’re breathing.’

  Yo-less wandered over from where he’d been talking to a couple of enthusiastic people in woolly bobble hats, who were peering through the huge thicket behind Mrs Liberty’s grave.

  ‘They say we’ve not only got environment and ecology, but some habitat as well,’ he said. ‘They think they’ve seen a rare Scandinavian thrush.’

  ‘Yeah, full of life, this place,’ said Bigmac.

  A Council lorry had driven a little way up the towpath. Some men in donkey jackets were harvesting the old mattresses. The zombie television had already gone. Mr Grimm was nowhere to be seen, even by Johnny.

  And a police car was parked just outside the gates. Sergeant Comely was working on the general assumption that where you got lots of people gathered together, something illegal was bound to happen sooner or later.

  The cemetery was alive.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ said Johnny. ‘I can feel them . . . not here.’

  The other three found that, quite by accident, they’d all moved closer together.

  A rare Scandinavian thrush, unless it was a rook, cawed in the elms.

  ‘Gone where?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ said Wobbler. ‘His eyes’ll start to glow any minute, you watch. You’ve let ‘em out! There’ll be lurchin’ goin’ on before this day’s over, you wait and see!’

  ‘Mr Grimm said that if they’re away too long, they . . . they forget who they were . . .’ said Johnny, uncertainly.

  ‘See? See?’ said Wobbler. ‘You laughed at me! Maybe they’re OK when they’re remembering who they were, but once they forget . . .’

  ‘Night of the Killer Zombies?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘We’ve been through all that,’ said Johnny. ‘They’re not zombies!’

  ‘Yeah, but maybe they’ve been eating voodoo fish and chips,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘They’re just not here.’

  ‘Then where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘And it’s Halloween, too,’ moaned Wobbler.

  Johnny walked over to the fence around the old boot works. There were quite a few cars parked there. He could see the tall thin figure of Mr Atterbury, talking to a group of men in grey suits.

  ‘I wanted to tell them,’ he said. ‘I mean, we might win. Now. People are here. There’s TV and everything. Last week it looked hopeless and now there’s just a chance and last night I wanted to tell them and now they’ve gone! And this was their home!’

  ‘Perhaps all these people have frightened them away,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Day of the Living,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘I should have had my lunch!’ said Wobbler. ‘My stomach’s definitely playing up!’

  ‘They’re probably waiting under your bed,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘I’m not scared,’ said Wobbler. ‘I’ve just got a stomach upset.’

  ‘We ought to be getting back,’ said Yo-less. ‘I’ve got to do a project on projects.’

  ‘What?’ said Johnny.

  ‘It’s for Maths,’ said Yo-less. ‘How many people in the school are doing projects. That kind of stuff. Statistics.’

  ‘I’m going to look for them,’ said Johnny.

  ‘You’ll get into trouble when they do the register.’

  ‘I’ll say I’ve been doing something . . . social. That’ll probably work. Anyone coming with me?’

  Wobbler looked at his feet, or where his feet would be if Wobbler wasn’t in the way.

  ‘What about you, Bigmac? You’ve got your Everlasting Note, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s going a bit yellow now . . .’

  No one knew when it had been written. Rumour had it that it had been handed down through the generations in Bigmac’s family. It was in three pieces. But it generally worked. Although Bigmac kept tropical fish and generally out of trouble, there was something about the way he looked and the way he lived in the Joshua N’Clement block that saw to it no teacher ever questioned the Note, which excused him from doing everything.

  ‘Anyway, they could be anywhere,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I can’t look for ’em, can I? Anyway, they’re probably just inside your head.’

  ‘You heard them on the radio!’

  ‘I heard voices. That’s what radio’s for, innit?’

  It occurred to Johnny, not for the first time, that the human mind, of which each of his friends was in possession of one almost standard sample, was like a compass. No matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it’d carry on pointing the same way. If three-metre-tall green Martians landed on the shopping mall, bought some greetings cards and a bag of sugar cookies and then took off again, within a day or two people would believe it never happened.

  ‘Not even Mr Grimm’s here, and he’s always here,’ said Johnny.

  He looked at Mr Vicenti’s ornate grave. Some people were taking photographs of it.

  ‘Always here,’ he said.

  ‘He’s gone weird again,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘You all go back,’ said Johnny, quietly. ‘I just thought of something.’

  They all looked round. Their brains don’t believe in the dead, Johnny thought, but they keep getting outvoted by all the rest of them.

  ‘I’m OK,’ said Johnny. ‘You go on back. I’ll see you at Wobbler’s party tonight, all right?’

  ‘Remember not to bring any . . . you know . . . friends,’ said Wobbler, as the three of them left.

  Johnny wandered down North Drive.

  He’d never tried to talk to the dead. He’d said things when he knew they were listening, and sometimes they’d been clearly visible, but apart from that first time, when he’d knocked on the door of the Alderman’s mausoleum for a joke . . .

  ‘Will you look at this?’

  One of the people who’d been examining the grave had picked up the radio, which had been lodged behind a tuft of grass.

  ‘Honestly, people have no respect.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  It didn’t. A couple of days of damp grass had done for the batteries.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Give it to the men dumping the rubbish on the lorry, then.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Johnny.

  He hurried off with it, keeping a lookout, trying to find one dead person among the living.

  ‘Ah, Johnny.’

  It was Mr Atterbury, leaning over the wall of the old boot works. ‘Exciting day, isn’t it? You started something, eh?’

  ‘Didn’t mean to,’ said Johnny, automatically. Things were generally his fault.

  ‘It could go either way,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘The old railway site isn’t so good, but . . . things look promising, I do know that. People have woken up.’

  ‘That’s true. A lot of people.’

  ‘United Consolidated don’t like fuss. The District Auditor is here, and a man from the Development Commission. It could go very we
ll.’

  ‘Good. Um.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I saw you on television,’ said Johnny. ‘You called United Consolidated public-spirited and cooperative.’

  ‘Well, they might be. If they’ve got no choice. They’re a bit shifty but we might win through. It’s amazing what you can do with a kind word.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Well, then . . . I’ve got to go and find someone, if you don’t mind . . .’

  There was no sign of Mr Grimm anywhere. Or any of the others. Johnny hung around for hours, with the birdwatchers and the people from the Blackbury Wildlife Trust, who’d found a fox’s den behind William Stickers’ memorial, and some Japanese tourists. No one quite knew why the Japanese tourists were there, but Mrs Liberty’s grave was getting very well photographed.

  Eventually, though, even Japanese tourists run out of film. They took one last shot of themselves in front of William Stickers’ monument, and headed back towards their coach.

  The cemetery emptied. The sun began to set over the carpet warehouse.

  Mrs Tachyon went past with her loaded shopping trolley to wherever it was she spent her nights.

  The cars left the old boot works, and only the bulldozers were left, like prehistoric monsters surprised by a sudden cold snap.

  Johnny sidled up to the forlorn little stone under the trees.

  ‘I know you’re here,’ he whispered. ‘You can’t leave like the others. You have to stay. Because you’re a ghost. A real ghost. You’re still here, Mr Grimm. You’re not just hanging around like the rest of them. You’re haunting.’

  There was no sound.

  ‘What did you do? Were you a murderer or something?’

  There was still no sound. In fact, there was even more silence than before.

  ‘Sorry about the television,’ said Johnny nervously.

  More silence, so heavy and deep it could have stuffed mattresses.

  He walked away, as fast as he dared.

  Chapter 9

  ‘This fuss over the cemetery’s certainly breathed a bit of life into this town,’ said his mother. ‘Go and give your grandad his tray, will you? And tell him about it. You know he takes an interest.’

  Grandad was watching the News in Hindi. He didn’t want to. But the thingy for controlling the set had got lost and everyone had forgotten how to change channels without it.