The Turnarounders and the Arbuckle Rescue (3 page)

At the end of the day, he went to the school library. He’d intended to start his homework but found himself drawn to the computers and, before he could talk himself out of it, he’d searched the baby’s name. The results came up and he blinked in surprise.

TRAGIC DEATH OF BABY GIRL

Georgia Hayward, 4 months, was crushed in her pram when a lorry skidded off the road in Brook Street this morning…

He nearly laughed. She didn’t die! What were they on about? How could they have got it so wrong?

He looked for the name of the paper but his eye caught something else and for a second he thought that he might be sick. The date on the article was September 5th 1963. Exactly the same thing had happened, on the same day, in the same place, fifty years before.

Coincidence? Ralf didn’t think so. In the middle of the article was a photo of the same huge eyed, curly haired baby who’d gazed up at him the previous day. He scanned the article. Everything was identical except that in 1963 Georgia Hayward hadn’t been so lucky. Of course she hadn’t. Ralf could almost feel the blood draining from his face. In 1963, he hadn’t been there to save her.

He felt a presence at his shoulder. He quickly hit the back button and looked up to see the dark haired boy from the day before regarding him curiously.

‘How did you know?’ the boy asked.

Ralf knew exactly what he was getting at. ‘I heard it coming.’

‘You were on the other side of the road!’

‘I heard it.’ Ralf looked directly into the tall boy’s eyes, willing him to believe. He shrugged. ‘And I happened to be looking the right way.’

The boy’s face was curious but there was something else there too – something that he was trying hard not to show. ‘Okay, so you heard it. How did you know there was anything wrong? The paper says the lorry’s brakes failed. You were running before he even tried to stop.’

‘I heard it, okay? The engine sounded funny.’

The tall boy’s mouth twisted. ‘Yeah. Right.’

‘Right.’ Ralf got up, slammed his books into his bag and headed for the door. On the way he worked out the look on the boy’s face. It was the kind of expression you get when you open a cupboard to find something inside that’s rotten – or dead. It wasn’t surprise – it was a kind of fascinated disgust.

That night Ralf dreamt about clocks. There were lots of clocks in the nightmare and they were extremely scary. They had pale, blank faces, waving hands and accusing murmurs. They invaded the dark in ticking armies and made Ralf shudder.

They were a warning.

They noted the seconds and marked the hours of time that was fast running out.

CHAPTER TWO

The Waking of Ralf Osborne

The horrifying death from which he’d saved little Georgia Hayward didn’t play on Ralf’s mind as long as you might expect. After only a few days, the memory had faded until he almost believed it had happened to someone else. Besides, he very quickly had other things to worry about.

School was a problem – a big problem – and he rarely went. He tried, he really did, but each day as he attempted to leave Gloria invented something for him to do. He spent hours playing chess with her, reading aloud from dull history books or sitting politely while she reminisced about a war she couldn’t be old enough to remember. When he did eventually get in to school he got in to trouble for truanting (Gloria never wrote him a note) or was given detention for being late.

He also had the pupils to contend with. The other kids thought he was a freak. Everyone knew where he lived and to whom he was related.

‘See that kid?’

‘With the mutant hair?’

‘Yeah. He lives with that mad woman. You know, from the Heath?’

‘Gaga Gloria? My Dad says she ought to be in a Home.’

‘
He
ought to be in a home. If he’s related to her, he’s got to be a nutter.’

Ralf pretended not to hear. He couldn’t blame them, though. Gloria was a standing joke. She wandered aimlessly up and down the High Street, singing to herself. She picked up people’s litter and followed them in order to give it back. She didn’t just feed the pigeons; she wrung their necks then took them home to cook for tea.

She was also dead set against having other children in the house, so on the two occasions Ralf did hit it off with someone he was faced with the prospect of telling them not to come round (looked weird) or sneaking them in (looked even weirder). By the end of his first term though, other people’s opinions of Gloria were the least of his worries. He was starting to think they might be right – about him.

He got home one evening and was halfway to the kitchen, in search of a snack when he heard voices. Gloria was in there and, surprisingly, had company. Ralf could hear her talking to someone and, though he knew he shouldn’t, he tiptoed to the door to listen.

‘I’m not even sure it’s him,’ she snapped.

The voice that answered belonged to a man but it was faint and Ralf couldn’t hear his reply.

‘Oh, he looks similar, I’ll grant you that. Apart from the eye.’ Gloria continued. The man responded. Ralf pressed his ear to the door but Gloria was talking again. ‘He found the photograph…Yes, of course I intended him to… I shan’t tell him a thing. If it’s him, he should be able to work it out for himself!’ There was another murmur and a kind of static crackle like a radio not tuned in properly.

‘Yes, I’ve seen them too! Romans in the garden! Cavaliers on The Common! There was even a Mammoth by The Ponds on Friday. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s in any immediate danger.’

Danger? What on earth was she talking about? Ralf still couldn’t hear the other person, but Gloria obviously could and she was getting annoyed.

‘Things were different then and you know it!’ she said waspishly. ‘He had no idea what he was doing when he made that promise! None of them did. And how will that make it any better?’ There was more static.

‘You think he’ll be happier knowing the truth about Scathferox? Better off remembering the slaughter? Content to know he’s cursed?’

Scathferox? Ralf’s brain jangled as he tried to make a long dead connection. Slaughter? Curse? He strained to hear the man’s reply but it was no use. The next person he heard was Gloria again.

‘Power? I’ve seen precious little evidence of that! He’s completely different from how I remember. He spends all his time inside with his head in a book. He’s so pale he looks like a ghost!’

It was only then that Ralf realised something he should have worked out minutes earlier. They were talking about him! Flushed with indignation he yanked on the door handle and strode into the kitchen.

His head swept from left to right, searching the room for the visitor but there was no one there. The back door was closed and bolted. Something flickered in Gloria’s eyes but then she brandished a half plucked mallard at him. ‘Duck for supper?’ she sang.

Confused, Ralf stared at the sway
ing webbed feet. ‘Oh, sorry, I...’ Face chalky, he backed away. ‘Duck. Er – thanks, Gloria.’

He hung on to the doorframe as he left, knees weak. Gloria must have been talking to herself. Even as he thought it, he couldn’t quite believe it. He had heard someone. He was sure of it. A terrifying suspicion grabbed him as he stumbled back upstairs; what if he was going mad too? It wasn’t like it didn’t run in the family.

When Ralf had gone, Gloria slammed the duck back on to the table and stared pointedly into the corner of the room.

‘See?’ she hissed. ‘He can’t even see you!’

On the first day of the Spring Term things got worse. Ralf suddenly, and for no apparent reason, forgot how to speak. Well that’s not quite true, actually he could speak. It was just that, sometimes, what came out of his mouth was complete gibberish. He was in the lunch queue at school, his mind wandering, when suddenly he realised everyone was staring at him. The dinner lady, holding a large spoon and an empty plate, looked baffled because Ralf had asked for ‘taten ha wy’. He had no idea what these words meant, if indeed they meant anything at all, and clearly neither did the dinner lady.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

‘No – er – sorry. Egg and chips, please.’ Ralf’s cheeks flushed scarlet.

There was sniggering from behind him in the queue. ‘Loser,’ someone snorted. Ralf hurried off with a plate of food he no longer felt like eating.

The issue with his own mother tongue was not, however, Ralf’s only problem. There was also the constant feeling of having done stuff before. He’d open a book or look at a picture and an odd feeling of familiarity would fling itself up at him. In January, he went to central London on a school trip, a place he’d never been before in his life, but there were big sections of the city he recognised. Not the kind of recognition you get from pictures or having seen places on TV but the full blown knowledge of having walked down a road before. He knew where there were alleyways and side streets and was even able to direct his teacher out of The Tower of London when she got lost.

Then there were the people – the people on the street that he recognised, smiled at, then embarrassingly realised he didn’t know. There was one excruciating moment on the High Street when he caught sight of a barrel-bellied man with a black moustache looking in an antique shop window.

Filled with an unexpected feeling of intense joy, Ralf dashed over.

‘It’s me, sir!’

The man turned to face him, eyes twinkling.

‘Yes?’ The man’s face lacked recognition of any kind. He didn’t know Ralf. But what was worse, Ralf suddenly realised, he didn’t know the man either. He mumbled an apology and then pink with embarrassment, stumbled away. No one saw. He was thankful for that, at least. But he was doing such things more and more often and it was scaring him.

The nightmares scared him too. They came every night and every night they were the same. He told no one about them for the same reason he didn’t discuss the ‘Knowing’, the problems he had speaking or the voice he heard talking to Gloria. Who would he tell?

Because he was permanently exhausted and couldn’t trust his own mouth to do what he wanted it to, Ralf spent as much time as possible away from other people. He bought a cheap calendar and, every morning, crossed the day off in thick pen. He drew a big red box around his birthday at the start of July and on the calendar and in his head, began a sort of count down. He was waiting for something. He did not know what he was waiting for and he was not one hundred per cent sure it would happen the day he turned twelve, but he had a classic case of impending doom.

All of this was ominous and unnerving but it was nothing compared to what happened next. February half-term brought snow, ice and an episode of ‘Knowing’ that chilled Ralf to the bone.

He was reading at home one night when he got a familiar prickle on the back of his neck. The image of a local restaurant, ‘Pizza Piazza’, popped into his head, along with the smell of burning and he knew he’d never get there on time. He sprinted to a phone box and called in an anonymous warning. He was still wondering whether they’d believed him or not as he ran towards the High Street. Then he heard the explosion. There were thirty-two people in the restaurant that night but Ralf knew that five of them would have died if he’d done nothing.

The thought squirmed in his stomach as he watched them milling about in the road, the lights from the police cars making their faces a ghostly blue. Who would it have been, the man with the jolly face and little steam trains on his tie? Or the family talking to the policewoman, their faces grim with shock? Or the little girl still clutching her free pencils and colouring sheet?

Bile rose into Ralf’s throat and he turned away, catching a glimpse of a dark, man-shaped shadow beneath an old oak on the corner. He stared. No one else appeared to have seen but there was definitely someone there. Someone tall. Someone cloaked. Their face concealed under a voluminous hood. Electricity crawled across Ralf’s neck. Who
was
that? What were they doing there? He stepped out to take a closer look but by the time he’d crossed the street, The Hooded Man was gone.

That night Ralf’s nightmares were worse. He woke sweating. His heart seemed to pound in his ears and his breath was unnaturally loud in the silent room. He lay on his back, crippled with fear; his eyes wide open, straining to see something in the thick, suffocating darkness.

He thought of the time when, as a small boy, he had wakened his mother with screams, convinced there was an ogre in the room, only to discover when the light went on that it was his own dressing gown, hanging on the back of the bedroom door.

His mother could not help him now, though. With supreme effort he forced himself to move, to break out of the spell that held him but, for reasons he would not have been able to explain, he made this move seem relaxed and natural, as if done in sleep. He turned on his side with an exaggerated sigh for the benefit of the audience he knew was not there.  His arm protruded over the side of the bed slightly, suspended over nothingness. He drew it in to stop the shadows grabbing it.

It took him a long time to go back to sleep.

As the months passed, his premonitions grew. There was the storm in March that he knew about the week before it hit; the embarrassing day in April when he’d thrown a woman’s dessert on a café floor because he was certain eating it would have killed her. How had he known she had a nut allergy? He didn’t know the answer to this question. And, in May, he didn’t know what made him so sure the boy at The Ponds would have drowned if he’d gone swimming. Pinning the poor kid to the floor had been extreme, but Ralf knew it had saved his life.

By June, Ralf was beginning to jump at shadows. Everything around him held the possibility of accident or disaster and his eyes constantly scanned crowds looking for signs of danger.  Ralf’s frame of mind, gloomy at the best of times, wasn’t improved by the constant bombardment he was suffering at school from the snooty boy he’d met on the first day

The boy’s name was Julian Kingston-Hawke and as well as being clever, sporty and popular, he headed a particularly nasty gang, which included a gargantuan, mindless hulk of a boy called George Tatchell. Along with their friends, they took great delight in tormenting anyone they perceived as vulnerable and it rapidly became clear that Ralf was top of their target list. For weeks, Ralf bore their taunts in silence but on the day before his birthday at the start of July, things got physical.

It was half past three and there was the usual crush on the main school stairs as everyone tried to get out as quickly as possible. Ralf was about half way down when he heard a snide voice behind him.

‘Saw your Aunt this morning, Osborne,’ said Julian. ‘She was on the heath – talking to a tree!’ There was laughter and a smattering of applause. ‘Honestly Osborne, it’s tragic. You should put her out of her misery.’ Julian sniggered. ‘If she was in my family, I’d put poison in her tea.’

Ralf knew he should ignore it, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t turn but raised his voice just loud enough to carry.

‘Julian, if she was in your family, she’d drink it!’

There were cheers and catcalls but Ralf didn’t have an opportunity to savour them. A sharp thump on his rucksack made him lurch forward, grabbing at nothingness. His head cracked sharply on the banisters and he tumbled down the stairs.

By the time he got home from school, the side of his face was swollen and he had a raging headache but from the look of horror on Gloria’s face you would have thought Ralf had, at the very least, cut off his own ear.

‘What have you done?’ she cried, wrenching at her hair and making it stand out in surprised orange tufts. Gnarled fingers clawed each side of his face and she stared into his eyes. Abruptly, her mood changed.

‘I thought, for a moment…your eye.’ She sighed dramatically but then seemed to get hold of herself, pushing Ralf aside so she could spoon jam into a mixing bowl. Head throbbing, Ralf watched as she dropped the spoon with a clatter and marched back into the pantry.