After tea Oliver slipped down to the cellar. Mrs Wright had bought a lot of plums and she was planning to make jam. He’d offered to go down and find new jam jars for her. It was a good move because he wanted to have a good look round, but he didn’t want to make her suspicious.
As he went past Dr Verney’s door he heard raised voices. His mother was in there, talking to him, and she sounded annoyed. “I can assure you, Dr Verney,” she was saying irritably, “there is nothing like that in this house, and, if there were, Mrs McDougall has a cat. Now you really must stop worrying like this …” He must be going on about rats and mice again, Oliver decided. He was nuts. He felt rather uncomfortable as he made his way down the cellar steps. If only Dr Verney knew what he and Tracey Bell were hatching up between them.
If Uncle Len did produce a rat for them, it would have to go in the cellar of Number Nine. It wouldn’t mind the dark, and Oliver was planning to put the cage against the front wall, where there was an iron grating, and where you could peer through a little cobwebby window and look up into the street. The thing was to keep it a secret from his mother. If the rat behaved itself, and they got on well with the project, the time may come when he could risk telling her. But even though she hardly ever came down to the cellar it was vital to keep the rat out of sight.
Fortunately that would be fairly easy. There was rubbish of all kinds heaped up round him, boxes and crates, and discarded doors, and sagging piles of yellow newspapers. And since the cellar was much too damp to be of any practical use, it was just a place for jam jars and paint cans, for large hairy spiders and now … rats.
It was large, occupying as much floor space as the house above. Oliver crept about in the dim light, trying not to bump into things. He couldn’t spend too long down here, he’d only come for jam jars, and if he didn’t go upstairs soon his mother would appear and fetch him out. She didn’t like his habit of grubbing around.
He ran his fingers over the damp walls, under the flaky white paint; they were all knobbled and bumpy. It didn’t feel like bricks at all, more like big pebbles, all flung together. His father had told him that this part of the house was centuries old, that there’d been at least two houses built and pulled down on top of it. He couldn’t get down here any more, because of his bad hip.
Oliver wandered about, putting dusty jars in a box, and trying to decide on the best place for the rat. Then he saw them, not skulls or rolled-up documents or heaps of gold coins, but cracks, dozens of little cracks running down the wall from top to bottom, on the left side of the iron grating.
He stared hard, put his face close to the greenish, cheese-smelling wall, and examined them carefully, sticking a finger in. They were new, he could see bits of plaster on the floor, plaster that must have fallen out of the cracks. So his mother was right after all. She’d been up in arms from the beginning about the lorries from the building site rumbling past the house at all hours, and about the huge trailers dragging heavy equipment. She’d said it would shake the old house to its foundations, and it had. These cracks were living proof.
She’d be pleased about the damage in one way, at least these cracks proved she’d been right to complain. A couple of them were quite big, almost big enough to get your hand in. He leaned forward cautiously, and sniffed. A cold sooty smell came out of the holes but he couldn’t see anything. Next time he was down here he’d bring his torch and examine everything properly.
“Oliver? Oliver!” He scuttled round, putting a few more jam jars into his cardboard box, and wedged it under one arm. He needed a free hand to negotiate those stone steps, he’d really hurt himself if he fell backwards, with a load of broken glass on top of him. “OLIVER!!” His mother wasn’t very patient, she’d finished sorting out Dr Verney and now she wanted to make a start on her plum jam.
But her high, piercing voice was suddenly drowned by a terrific noise up in the street; a great yellow machine was being dragged past, on its way to the building site. He could hear the rumble of enormous wheels and an orange light was flashing through the bars of the grating. As it rolled past, the house over his head seemed to rock slightly, the naked light bulb shook on its flex, and a lump of plaster suddenly detached itself from the sagging ceiling, hitting him on the shoulder as it fell to the floor.
“OLIVER!!” She was getting really angry now, but the boy took no notice. He put his box at the foot of the cellar steps and made his way back towards the grating, groping as he crossed the dusty floor. The dangling bulb seemed much dimmer, in fact he could hardly see, and the sun wasn’t filtering down through the grating. It had gone quite dark outside.
He stood quite still, with his hands in his pockets, one little finger playing with the hole in his stone, the stone with the marks on that Geoff had given him. Slowly he ran his eyes over the ceiling; now he looked more carefully he could see several places where large pieces had fallen off, and there was rubble on the floor, and on the bundles of News Chronicles.
Oliver listened. At least his mother had stopped yelling. She’d have gone up to their flat to look for him. But someone was in the hall – or was it outside? He could hear a voice, rather faint, but getting clearer, a woman’s voice, gentle and young, and she was crying.
He glanced up through the grating but there was nobody in the street outside. Then he turned round; whoever it was must surely be standing very close to him. But there was nobody there. Oliver’s stomach lurched, and a cold icy feeling swept over him. Every inch of his scalp tingled, as if he’d been stripped naked and plunged into freezing water.
Slowly, unable to stop one foot moving ahead of the other, he moved steadily towards the grating. Then he found himself gliding sideways towards those long dark streaks in the wall, and one of them was opening up, like the earth cracking, like a huge mouth. Out of it came a roaring, terrible blackness, sweeping round him and over him, stopping his breath.
And Oliver let himself be taken, soundlessly, without struggle; the only noise in the cellar was the woman’s voice, that desperate, anguished weeping that went on and on, losing its gentleness and turning strident and hard until, at last, it became one ear-splitting agonized scream.
Oliver passed into nothing. It was as though his own head had grown huge and split open silently, and as if all the darkness inside had flowed out like a great river choking him, and swallowing him up.
He was looking out of a dirty window, down into a street, standing on tiptoe because his chin barely reached the sill. He wore a greasy brown tunic with a leather belt round the middle. His feet were bare and, between his toes, he could feel grit and dirt from the wooden floor.
It was suffocatingly hot and the small square of sky outside was a flat, hard blue. But worse than the heat was the overpowering smell, and Oliver was trying to snatch quick light breaths of air. If he took proper lungfuls he knew he’d be sick. He tried to analyse the smell but he couldn’t. One minute it reminded him of meat that had gone bad, the next of a huge manure heap. But farm smells could be quite pleasant in a funny sort of way. This wasn’t, it was a smell of rot and decay, not just hanging in the air he breathed but somehow in his own body.
He looked down. His hands and feet seemed curiously small and they were filthy, every inch of skin uniformly grey. His mouth tasted foul, his teeth sticky, as if he’d not brushed them for years and years.
He pushed his face up against the window, rubbed a little hole in the dirt, and looked through again. There were houses opposite, half-timbered with sagging tiled roofs, and with upper storeys that stuck out over a cobbled street. They were so close he could have leaned out and shaken hands with someone opposite, if there’d been anyone at home. But the house looked shut up and deserted, so did the houses to the right and left, and up through the egg-shaped cobbles he could see grass growing in little tufts.
He