The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop (2 page)

It was the same cat Lily had seen outside, she was sure of it: those were the same strange, narrow eyes, green and hard as chips of emerald; the same tartan collar and silver bell.

“Good grief,” said Dad. “I think that’s my great-uncle Pierre.”

Oz read the writing underneath the picture. “Pierre and Demerara, 1929.”

“Demerara—that’s an odd name for a cat,” said Mum. “He must have named her after demerara sugar. She’s the same sort of color. Wow—Bruce, look at the size of this place!”

She had lost interest in the cat, craning her neck to look up the staircase.

Lily moved closer to the picture. The cat in Pierre’s arms couldn’t be the same cat she had stroked outside—but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that it had been Demerara. Did cats have ghosts?

The house part of 18 Skittle Street was big—very big, compared to their tiny three-bedroom row house in Washford Common. On the upper floors were a sitting room and six bedrooms. On the ground floor, behind the workshop, was a large kitchen with an antique stove, and an overgrown, weedy yard.

Bruce and Emily Spoffard started trooping up and down the stairs, measuring the rooms and calling excitedly to each other.

“Bruce—there’s a lovely room for us, with a room next door for the baby!”

“Emily—the yard is gigantic!”

Lily quickly got bored with looking at an empty
house and returned to the hall to gaze at the picture of Demerara.

Oz came down the stairs to join her. “I thought they were going to sell this place. Now they’re talking as if they want to live here.”

“I don’t think I’d mind.” Lily was still looking at Demerara. “Would you?”

“I’d like it,” said Oz. “It would be great to live in a house as big as this, and it’s a lot closer to my music lessons—I wouldn’t have to spend half my time on trains. And the yard’s big enough for a basketball hoop.” He’d wanted one for his birthday, but there hadn’t been anywhere to put it in their yard in Washford Common.

“But I feel a stirring at the marrow of my bones,” Lily said. “There’s something weird about this place.”

“You think something’s weird everywhere.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t feel it too.”

“It’s a strange old house, that’s all,” Oz said. “Do you want them to send us back into therapy?”

Lily was cross. “That was when we were two. You know this is different. Did you really not see that cat outside?”

“No.”

“I’m going to look at the workshop.” Lily went out into the passage and tried the door of the workshop, where the Spoffard Brothers had made their chocolate.
It was not locked, so very cautiously, she pushed it open a few centimeters. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

“We’re here now.” Oz pushed her aside, taking a step into the confusion of black and gray shadows. He spotted a light switch on the wall and flipped it, and the room sprang shockingly to life.

For a long moment, Oz and Lily gazed in silence.

“This is fantastic,” said Oz.

Lily murmured, “This is—magic.”

For a long moment they stood in silence, gazing around a large room that looked like a dusty cave crammed with extraordinary objects. It was dominated by a large, deep fireplace with a grill like a barbecue. A big metal cylinder, festooned with cobwebs, loomed in one corner and in the middle of the room was a long bench with a marble top. On top of this stood a flat, smooth stone with an ashy grate underneath it. Saucepans of every size, from an egg cup to a small boat, hung on the walls and from the ceiling. One wall was taken up by an immense rack of knives and tools, and there was a stack of shelves piled high with hollow metal shapes.

“I thought it would be more like a sort of kitchen,” Oz said. He went over to the tools and picked up a silver knife with a rounded blade.

Lily blew the dust off a large metal shape about twenty-five centimeters long. It was shaped like half a
Father Christmas, carrying half a sack of toys. “Oh, I get it—it’s a chocolate mold—see? Here’s the other half for the other side. You line it with chocolate, and when it gets hard you stick them together to make a whole one.”

Oz stopped fingering the oddly shaped knives and came over. “These bowl things are molds for Easter eggs—the biggest is huge.” He touched the side of it with one finger and wrote “OZ” in the dust. “Imagine getting an egg this big—it’d last you the whole summer!”

Lily held up the two halves of the Father Christmas mold. “Isn’t this beautiful? I don’t think I could bear to eat it.”

“Kids!” Dad yelled, somewhere above them. “Come here a minute!”

They left the workshop, remembering to switch off the light.

“Funny that the electricity’s still on,” Oz said. “I wonder who’s been paying the bills.”

Their parents were in the empty sitting room upstairs.

“We’ve made a big decision,” Dad said excitedly. “We’ve decided to sell the house in Washford Common and move here.”

“It’s in amazingly good condition.” Mum’s eyes shone. “And this is the perfect time to move, with you two about to change schools, and the baby coming.”

“And it’s only a short bus ride to college,” Dad said (he worked at a college in the middle of the city). “I know the old saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but this house is looking better every minute.”

“Of course, it will mean a bit of an upheaval,” Mum said. “Lily, I’m afraid we can’t travel all the way to Sandra’s every week. We’ll have to find you a new tutor.”

“What—we can fire Sandra?” Lily cried joyfully. “When?”

“Not so fast,” said Dad. “Are you two absolutely sure you like this house?”

“It’s great,” Oz said. “Can I have a basketball hoop?”

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Lily. “I’m pretty sure it’s haunted, and I’ve always wanted to live in a haunted house.”

“Of course it’s not haunted!” Dad folded his arms, a sign that he was about to say something important. “This is a family that does NOT believe in ghosts! If I hear one more word about ghosts or ghouls or long-legged beasties, we’re going straight back to Washford Common—is that clear, Miss Nutella?” (Nutella was his nickname for Lily when he thought she was being particularly nutty.)

Lily shrugged. “Suit yourself. At least I tried to warn you.”

That night, Lily’s bedtime rituals took longer than usual.

No matter how tired she was, there were certain things she always had to do.

She took off her clothes, folding them neatly and placing them on the chair beside the desk, and proceeded to put on her pajamas; then she took the bed toys off the bed and put them on the desk with the desk toys. She didn’t like walking between the light switch and the bed in the dark, so she made stepping-stones across the floor with old picture books and annuals. She adjusted the funny little net that was supposed to catch bad dreams (it didn’t work). Finally, she switched off the overhead light. She had hung up six strings of colored fairy lights (Dad fretted that they would burn the house down, and sometimes crept into her bedroom and switched them off when she was asleep, which made her furious), and the little room was bathed in their magical glow.

In the tiny bedroom next door, Oz was playing his violin. The wall was paper-thin, but Lily didn’t mind the constant music. He played very well, and the sound made her feel safe and peaceful, as if she were hearing a sweet voice she had heard before she was born.

She would miss this bedroom. It was stuffed from floor to ceiling with toys, clothes, paints, books and makeup, and every single object was arranged with
extreme neatness. Lily was famously fussy about her bedroom. All her old soft toys were strictly arranged according to color and size. Her colored pens and pencils lay in neat rows in their original boxes and her collection of makeup was set out across the top of the chest of drawers.

But I don’t mind leaving, she thought—not if I can see Demerara again. If they won’t let me have a real cat, a ghost cat has got to be the next best thing.

She fell asleep thinking about Demerara, and had a ridiculous dream about that magnificent cat being caught in the dream catcher and shouting, “What is this LOATHSOME contraption?”

The Spoffards moved into 18 Skittle Street in the third week of the summer holidays. Once most of the beds, chairs, tables and boxes of clutter had been put in the right rooms, Bruce Spoffard told his children to sort out their new bedrooms.

For Oz, this was an easy matter. He put his duvet on the bed (it looked very small in this big room), set up his desk, computer and music stand and left everything else inside the boxes—he wanted plenty of floor space for the giant toy car track he was planning.

In the room next door, Lily was in one of her states.

“It’s too big!” Oz heard her wailing. “My things don’t look right anymore! The wallpaper’s staring at me!”

Oz sighed to himself; poor old Lily, she hated change.

Mum was trying to comfort her. “Darling, don’t be silly,” Oz heard her say. “How can yellow roses stare at you?”

“They look like evil faces!”

“Lily, do get a grip—moving house is stressful for everyone. You’ll soon settle down.”

Oz decided not to get involved. He went downstairs to help Dad with the towering heaps of cardboard boxes on the pavement.

“Blimey, who knew we had so much stuff?” Dad groaned. “It’s incredible our old house didn’t explode! Oz—take all the boxes with question marks on them into the workshop, until I’ve figured out what to do with them.”

Oz used one of the boxes to prop open the workshop door and switched on the light.

Something moved on the floor. Oz’s heart jumped with shock.

It was a thin, dirty, gray-brown rat.

Oz wasn’t too scared of rats in general, but this rat was different—it was smoking. It sat on its haunches with the stub of a cigarette clutched in one skinny paw while its mouth, with its horrid single fang, puffed out a cloud of disgusting smoke.

This is not normal, Oz thought dazedly.

The rat stared at Oz. It suddenly let out a series of squeaks—“Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!”—which were just like a particularly revolting smoker’s cough—and bolted out the workshop door.

Oz put down the box he was holding and took a deep breath. Lily kept saying this house was weird, but she
thought all sorts of places were weird, so he hadn’t really listened to her. A smoking rat, however, was weird in anybody’s book. What should he do?

If he told his parents, would they believe him? Probably not, he decided—especially if he told them about the smoking. He didn’t know much about the habits of rats, but he was pretty sure they didn’t smoke. If he told Lily—who hated both rats and smoking—she would go berserk.

I might have imagined it, he thought; it’ll be a lot easier if I pretend it didn’t happen; no, of course it didn’t happen.

But there was a lingering smell of old smoke, and when Oz went back into the street to fetch more boxes, he saw a crumpled cigarette end smoldering beside the drain.

When the moving van had gone and Lily had stopped crying, Dad went to the cafe and bought fish and chips for supper, which they ate at the kitchen table.

“It looks tiny in this big kitchen,” Mum said. “We’ll have to get a bigger one.”

“No!” Lily blurted out. “I want this one—this table is a bit of home!”

Her parents looked at each other wearily.

“You haven’t lost your home,” Mum said. “You’ve only moved to a new one.”

“It smells all wrong.”

“Come on, Nutella,” said Dad. “Your wallpaper will soon stop plotting against you.”

“Stop it, Bruce,” Mum said. “Teasing her won’t help. We’ve come to an agreement. Lily’s going to have the picture of Pierre in her bedroom.”

“Great,” said Dad, his mouth full of chips, “I was wondering what to do with that ugly thing.”

He and Oz had managed to set up the television in the upstairs sitting room, and after supper, everyone except Lily settled down to watch
Dr. Who
. Lily went back to working in the scary, rose-infested chaos of her room. This was not home. It couldn’t be anything like home until the bags and boxes were unpacked and the soft toys set out in tidy, color-coded rows on the shelves. She wouldn’t have agreed to sleep here at all if Mum hadn’t given her the picture of Pierre and his cat.