Johnny and the Dead Read online

  And then there were none.

  Real night flowed back in. The sounds of the town, the distant hum of the traffic, filled the space taken up by the silence.

  Johnny walked back along the gravel path.

  ‘Wobbler?’ he whispered. ‘Wobbler?’

  He found him crouched behind a gravestone with his eyes shut.

  ‘Come on,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Look, I—’

  ‘Everything’s OK.’

  ‘It was fireworks, right?’ said Wobbler. His Count Dracula make-up was streaked and smudged, and he’d lost his fangs. ‘Someone was letting some fireworks off, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Of course, I wasn’t scared.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But those things can be dangerous . . .’

  ‘Oh, that’s right.’

  They turned as a rattling sound started up behind them. Mrs Tachyon appeared, pushing her shopping trolley; the wheels bounced and skidded on the gravel.

  She ignored both of them. They stepped aside hurriedly as the trolley, one wheel squeaking, vanished into the gloom.

  Then they walked home, through the morning mists.

  Chapter 11

  As Tommy Atkins had once said, things aren’t necessarily over just because they’ve stopped.

  There was Bigmac, for a start. Yo-less had gone home with him, and Bigmac’s brother had been waiting up and had started on at him and Bigmac had looked at him strangely for a few seconds and then hit him so hard that he knocked him out. Yo-less said, with awe in his voice, that it’d been so hard that the word ‘TAH’ was printed in Biro on the brother’s chin. And then he’d growled at Clint and the dog had hid under the sofa. So Yo-less had to get his mother out of bed to bring her car round to carry Bigmac’s suitcase, three tropical fish tanks and two hundred copies of Guns and Ammo back to her spare room.

  And there was the generous donation to the Blackbury Volunteers by United Amalagamated Consolidated Holdings. As Mr Atterbury said, it’s amazing what you can do with a kind word, provided you’ve also got a big stick.

  The cemetery was already looking more lived-in. There were endless arguments between the Volunteers who wanted it to be habitat and the ones who wanted it to be ecology and a middle group who just wanted it to be clean and tidy, but at least it was wanted, which seemed to Johnny to be the most important thing.

  It took Johnny a week to find what he wanted, and when he found it he took it along to the cemetery after school, when no one was about. There was frost on the ground.

  ‘Mr Grimm?’

  He found him by the canal, sitting staring at the water.

  ‘Mr Grimm?’

  ‘Go away. You’re dangerous.’

  ‘I thought you’d be a bit . . . lonely. So I bought you this.’

  He opened the bag.

  ‘Mr Atterbury helped,’ he said. ‘He phoned around some of his friends who’ve got electrical shops. It’s been repaired. It’ll work until the batteries die, and then I thought maybe it’d work on ghost batteries.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A very small television,’ said Johnny. ‘I thought I could put it right in a bush or somewhere and no one’ll know it’s there except you.’

  ‘What are you doing this for?’ said Mr Grimm, suspiciously.

  ‘Because I looked you up in the newspaper. May the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven. There wasn’t very much. Just the bit about them finding . . . you in the canal, and the coroner’s inquest.’

  ‘Oh? Poking around, eh? And what do you think you know about anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t have to explain.’

  ‘Is that why you couldn’t leave with the others?’

  ‘What? I can leave whenever I like,’ said the ghost of Mr Grimm, very quickly. ‘If I’m staying here, it’s because I want to be here. I know my place. I know how to do the right thing. I could leave whenever I want. But I’ve got more pride than that. People like you don’t understand that. You don’t take life seriously.’

  It hadn’t been a long report in the paper. Mr Vicenti was right. In those days, some things didn’t get a lot of reporting. Mr Grimm had been a respectable citizen, keeping his head down, a man at the back of the crowd, and then his business had failed and there’d been some other trouble involving money, and then there’d been the canal. Mr Grimm had taken life very seriously, starting with his own.

  People didn’t talk much about that sort of thing in those days. Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.

  Mr Grimm sat with his hands clasped around his knees.

  Johnny realized that he could think of nothing to say, so he said nothing.

  Instead, he wedged the little pocket television deep in a bush, where no one, not even the keenest birdwatcher, would find it.

  ‘Can you turn it on with your mind?’ he said.

  ‘Who says I shall want to?’

  The picture came on, and there was the faint tinkly sound of the familiar signature tune.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Johnny. ‘You’ve missed a week . . . Mrs Swede has just found out Janine didn’t go to the party . . . Mr Hatt has sacked Jason from the shop because he thinks he took the money . . . and . . .’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So . . . I’ll be off, then, shall I?’

  ‘Right.’

  Johnny backed away.

  ‘I’m sure the hours’ll just fly by.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So . . . cheerio, then.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Mr Grimm?’ Johnny wanted to say: you can leave any time you want. But there seemed to be no point.

  ‘Right.’

  Johnny watched for a while, and then turned and walked away. The other three were waiting for him by the phone box.

  ‘Was he there?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Watching television,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I expect ghosts do that a lot,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘’Spect so.’

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Just thinking about the difference between heaven and hell.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like “all right” to me.’

  Johnny blinked. And looked around at the world. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, wonderful. Which wasn’t the same as nice. It wasn’t even the same as good. But it was full of . . . stuff. You’d never get to the end of it. It was always springing new things on you . . .

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘All right. What shall we do now?’

  Author’s Note

  I’ve bent history a little bit. There really were such things as Pals’ Battalions, just as described here, and they really were a horribly innocent device for wiping out a whole generation of young men from one particular area with one cannon shell. But the practice died out by the summer of 1916, when the first Battle of the Somme took place. Nineteen thousand British soldiers died on the first day of the battle.

  ‘Thomas Atkins’ really was the name used on documents in the British Army in the way that people would now use ‘A. N. Other’, and ‘Tommy Atkins’ did become a nickname for the British soldier.

  There were certainly a number of real Tommy Atkinses in the war. This book is dedicated to them – wherever they are.

  Read On

  If you enjoyed JOHNNY AND THE DEAD, you’ll love JOHNNY AND THE BOMB, the next adventure starring Johnny Maxwell.

  Here’s the first chapter to get you started . . .

  Chapter 1

  After the Bombs

  It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.

  It was dark, with occasional light from the full moon behind streamers of worn-out cloud. The wind was from the south-west and there had been anoth
er thunderstorm, which freshened the air and made the cobbles slippery.

  A policeman moved, very slowly and sedately, along the street.

  Here and there, if someone was very close, they might have seen the faintest line of light around a blacked-out window. From within came the quiet sounds of people living their lives – the muffled notes of a piano as someone practised scales, over and over again, and the murmur and occasional burst of laughter from the wireless.

  Some of the shop windows had sandbags piled in front of them. A poster outside one shop urged people to Dig For Victory, as if it were some kind of turnip.

  On the horizon, in the direction of Slate, the thin beams of searchlights tried to pry bombers out of the clouds.

  The policeman turned the corner, and walked up the next street, his boots seeming very loud in the stillness.

  The beat took him up as far as the Methodist chapel, and in theory would then take him down Paradise Street, but it didn’t do that tonight because there was no Paradise Street any more. Not since last night.

  There was a lorry parked by the chapel. Light leaked out from the tarpaulin that covered the back.

  He banged on it.

  ‘You can’t park that ’ere, gents,’ he said. ‘I fine you one mug of tea and we shall say no more about it, eh?’

  The tarpaulin was pushed back and a soldier jumped out. There was a brief vision of the interior – a warm tent of orange light, with a few soldiers sitting around a little stove, and the air thick with cigarette smoke.

  The soldier grinned.

  ‘Gi’us a mug and a wad for the sergeant,’ he said, to someone in the lorry.

  A tin mug of scalding black tea and a brick-thick sandwich were handed out.

  ‘Much obliged,’ said the policeman, taking them. He leaned against the lorry. ‘How’s it going, then?’ he said. ‘Haven’t heard a bang.’

  ‘It’s a 25-pounder,’ said the soldier. ‘Went right down through the cellar floor. You lot took a real pounding last night, eh? Want a look?’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘’Course not,’ said the soldier cheerfully. ‘That’s why we’re here, right? Come on.’ He pinched out his cigarette and put it behind his ear.

  ‘I thought you lot’d be guarding it,’ said the policeman.

  ‘It’s two in the morning and it’s been pissing down,’ said the soldier. ‘Who’s going to steal an unexploded bomb?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ The sergeant looked in the direction of the ruined street.

  There was the sound of bricks sliding.

  ‘Someone is, by the sound of it,’ he said.

  ‘What? We’ve got warning signs up!’ said the soldier. ‘We only knocked off for a brew-up! Oi!’

  Their boots crunched on the rubble that had been strewn across the road.

  ‘It is safe, isn’t it?’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Not if someone drops a dirty great heap of bricks on it, no! Oi! You!’

  The moon came out from behind the clouds. They could make out a figure at the other end of what remained of the street, near the wall of the pickle factory.

  The sergeant skidded to a halt.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Mrs Tachyon.’

  The soldier stared at the small figure that was dragging some sort of cart through the rubble.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Let’s just take it quietly, shall we?’ said the policeman, grabbing his arm.

  He shone his torch and set his face into a sort of mad friendly grin.

  ‘That you, Mrs Tachyon?’ he said. ‘It’s me, Sergeant Bourke. Bit chilly to be out at this time of night, eh? Got a nice warm cell back at the station, yes? I daresay there could be a big hot mug of cocoa for you if you just come along with me, how about that?’

  ‘Can’t she read all them warning signs? Is she mental?’ said the soldier, under his breath. ‘She’s right by the house with the bomb in the cellar!’

  ‘Yes … no … she’s just different,’ said the sergeant. ‘Bit … touched.’ He raised his voice. ‘You just stay where you are, love, and we’ll come and get you. Don’t want you hurting yourself on all this junk, do we?’

  ‘Here, has she been looting?’ said the soldier. ‘She could get shot for that, pinching stuff from bombed-out houses!’

  ‘No one’s going to shoot Mrs Tachyon,’ said the sergeant. ‘We know her, see? She was in the cells the other night.’

  ‘What’d she done?’

  ‘Nothing. We let her kip in a spare cell in the station if it’s a nippy night. I gave her a tanner and pair of ole boots what belong to me mum only yesterday. Well, look at her. She’s old enough to be your granny, poor old biddy.’

  Mrs Tachyon stood and watched them owlishly as they walked, very cautiously, towards her.

  The soldier saw a wizened little woman wearing what looked like a party dress with layers of other clothes on top, and a woolly hat with a bobble on it. She was pushing a wire cart on wheels. It had a metal label on it.

  ‘Tes-co,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Dunno where she gets half her stuff,’ muttered the sergeant.

  The trolley seemed to be full of black bags. But there were other things, which glittered in the moonlight.

  ‘I know where she got that stuff,’ muttered the soldier. ‘That’s been pinched from the pickle factory!’

  ‘Oh, half the town was in there this morning,’ said the sergeant. ‘A few jars of gherkins won’t hurt.’

  ‘Yeah, but you can’t have this sort of thing. ‘Ere, you! Missus! You just let me have a look at—’

  He reached towards the trolley.

  Some sort of demon, all teeth and glowing eyes, erupted from it and clawed the skin off the back of his hand.

  ‘Blast! ’Ere, help me get hold of—’

  But the sergeant had backed away. ‘That’s Guilty, that is,’ he said. ‘I should come away if I was you!’

  Mrs Tachyon cackled.

  ‘Thunderbirds Are Go!’ she chortled. ‘Wot, no bananas? That’s what you think, my old dollypot!’

  She hauled the trolley round and trotted off, dragging it behind her.

  ‘Hey, don’t go in there—’ the soldier shouted.

  The old woman hauled the trolley over a pile of bricks. A piece of wall collapsed behind her.

  The last brick hit something far below, which went boink.

  The soldier and the policeman froze in mid-run.

  The moon went behind a cloud again.

  In the darkness, there was a ticking sound. It was far off, and a bit muffled, but in that pool of silence both men heard it all the way up their spines.

  The sergeant’s foot, which had been in the air, came down slowly.

  ‘How long’ve you got if it starts to tick?’ he whispered.

  There was no one there. The soldier was accelerating away.

  The policeman ran after him and was halfway up the ruins of Paradise Street before the world behind him suddenly became full of excitement.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.

  In the window of the electrical shop, nine TVs showed the same picture. Nine televisions projected their flickering screens at the empty air.

  A newspaper blew along the deserted pavement until it wrapped around the stalks in an ornamental flowerbed. The wind caught an empty lager can and bowled it across the pavement until it hit a drain.

  The High Street was what Blackbury District Council called a Pedestrian Precinct and Amenity Area, although no one was quite sure what the amenities were, or even what an amenity was. Perhaps it was the benches, cunningly designed so that people wouldn’t sit on them for too long and make the place untidy. Or maybe it was the flowerbeds, which sprouted a regular crop of the hardy perennial Crisp Packet. It couldn’t have been the ornamental trees. They’d looked quite big and leafy on the original drawings a few years ago, but what with cutbacks and one thing and another, no one had actually got around to plan
ting any.

  The sodium lights made the night cold as ice.

  The newspaper blew on again, and wrapped itself around a yellow litter bin in the shape of a fat dog with its mouth open.

  Something landed in an alleyway and groaned.

  ‘Tick tick tick! Tickety Boo! Ow! National … Health … Service …’

  The interesting thing about worrying about things, thought Johnny Maxwell, was the way there was always something new to worry about.

  His friend Kirsty said it was because he was a natural worrier, but that was because she didn’t worry about anything. She got angry instead, and did things about it, whatever it was. He really envied the way she decided what it was and knew exactly what to do about it almost instantly. Currently she was saving the planet most evenings, and foxes at weekends.

  Johnny just worried. Usually they were the same old worries – school, money, whether you could get AIDS from watching television, and so on. But occasionally one would come out of nowhere like a Christmas Number One and knock all the others down a whole division.

  Right now, it was his mind.

  ‘It’s not exactly the same as being ill,’ said Yo-less, who’d read all the way through his mother’s medical encyclopedia.

  ‘It’s not being ill at all. If lots of bad things have happened to you it’s healthy to be depressed,’ said Johnny. ‘That’s sense, isn’t it? What with the business going down the drain, and Dad pushing off, and Mum just sitting around smoking all the time and everything. I mean, going around smiling and saying, “Oh, it’s not so bad” – that would be mental.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Yo-less, who’d read a bit about psychology as well.

  ‘My gran went mental,’ said Bigmac. ‘She— ow!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Yo-less. ‘I wasn’t looking where I put my foot but, fair’s fair, you weren’t either.’

  ‘It’s just dreams,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s nothing mad.’

  Although, he had to admit, it was dreams during the day, too. Dreams so real that they filled his eyes and ears.

  The planes …

  The bombs …

  And the fossil fly. Why that? There’d be these nightmares, and in the middle of it, there’d be the fly. It was a tiny one, in a piece of amber. He’d saved up for it and done a science project on it. But it wasn’t even scary-looking. It was just a fly from millions of years ago. Why was that in a nightmare?