House of the Lost

CHAPTER TWO

If one of Matthew’s painted worlds ever did turn out to be real, he would like it to be the cool green-field one, with silvery rivers and nice houses with flower gardens. In that world, the people were rich and happy; they could go into the towns and buy whatever they wanted in the big shops. Very occasionally his father talked about a place like that, although Matthew did not know if it was somewhere Father had once lived, or just somewhere he had read about.

Occasionally Father went away for a night or two, returning with a sick white look, with dark shadows under his eyes. Wilma said it was nothing to worry about; it would be some business matter. ‘Gentlemen have to deal with business matters, and he’ll be back late tonight or early tomorrow. Best not to talk about it though, not to anyone.’ She did not look up from the stove where she was cooking supper when she said this, but when she said it was best not to talk about it, her voice changed, and Matthew instantly began to worry that the place his father went to was the Black House.

The Black House was the most frightening place in the world. If anyone ever said its name, people looked uneasy and glanced over their shoulders as if afraid of being overheard. It stood a little way out of the village – it might be about half an hour’s walk always supposing anyone had ever wanted to walk to it – and it was at the end of a narrow lane with thick old trees growing up all round it. You could not see it from the road, but Matthew could see it from his bedroom at the top of the house. The windows looked out across huge expanses of open countryside, and he could see the Black House, which was like a smudgy bruise on the horizon.

Sometimes he sat on the window seat before going to bed, resting his chin on his hand, staring at this horrid crouching silhouette, seeing the occasional light glinting in its depths, wondering what kind of people lived there and made those lights. The house got into his dreams occasionally, and he would find himself wandering through dreadful stone corridors with people locked away in cells, crying and beating on the bars to get out.

Matthew’s friend Mara knew about the Black House and she knew about the cold-eyed men as well. She sometimes talked about the men when she and Matthew walked to school, speaking quietly, partly so no one would hear but also because her small brother walked to school with them and she did not want to frighten him.

Mara thought the cold-eyed men might live in the Black House but Matthew was not so sure. It was most likely empty, he said, trying not to remember the pinpoints of light he sometimes saw from his window.

‘But there are gates,’ said Mara, stubbornly. ‘Huge gates with padlocks, and you wouldn’t have gates and padlocks unless you had secrets to hide.’

‘How do you know there are gates? I’ll bet you’ve never even been there.’

‘My grandmother said so. She’s lived here all her life and she knows everything about this place. She says there are a lot of secrets here.’

‘What kind of secrets?’

Mara glanced back at her brother and lowered her voice. ‘Things people don’t want to be known. Things about your father,’ she said, and Matthew forgot about not letting Mara’s brother hear them and stopped in the middle of the path and stared at her.

‘What things about my father? What d’you mean?’

But Mara was already looking frightened and walked on very fast. Matthew almost had to run to keep up with her.

‘It’s only that people sometimes say things,’ she said. ‘That there’s a secret. Only it’s better not to talk about it, that’s what they say.’

‘A secret about my father?’ Matthew’s heart skipped a beat. It’s about him going away and coming back looking ill and dark-eyed, he thought. That’s what she means.

‘I don’t know anything,’ said Mara, and pushed her small brother into the infants’ part of the school building, then dived into the girls’ cloakroom, banging the door.

Most of Mara’s secrets came from her grandmother’s stories and Matthew did not pay much attention to them, but he wanted to know what people said about his father so he shouted through the cloakroom door for her to come out and tell him. But she would not, and the bell went for lessons so in the end Matthew went off to his own classroom where it turned out to be the day for arithmetic which he hated.

When he got home his father was away on one of his mysterious trips. Things happened like that, Matthew had often noticed it. You talked about something or you remembered something, and there it was. But it wasn’t until he was going up to his bedroom to do his homework that he realized the house was sliding down into its frozen silence. His heart gave a thump of fear, and although he tried to tell himself it was just the dark afternoon – it was November and bitterly cold – he knew, deep down, the men were here because the house’s dark stillness was unmistakable. He ran the rest of the way up the stairs and shut his bedroom door with a bang. Through the main window he could see the crouching shape of the Black House, dark and ugly and remote, but there was a little side window that looked down into the lane that led to this house. Summoning all his courage he looked out of this window and fear closed over him.

The men were here. They had driven along the lane and parked their big noisy car, and they were sitting in it looking at the house. The car had bulbous headlights like frog’s eyes that would be able to swivel round and find you no matter where you hid. There were three men – they never came singly, there were usually three of them and quite often four. Matthew had the feeling they were talking to one another about what they would do and say when they got inside the house. As he watched, they got out and walked up to the door, their shoes rapping out on the ground like claws. They were always very smartly dressed. Wilma once said it was as well not to ask where they got the money to dress so smartly, then clapped a fat hand over her mouth as if to push the words back in before anyone could hear them.

The men hardly ever knocked because Wilma always heard their car pull up and panted up from the kitchen to let them in so they would not be kept waiting. Once she had not heard them and they had just walked in and gone across the hall and opened the study door without waiting to be invited. Matthew hated this. In the world he would one day escape to it would be possible to lock doors and not open them if you did not want to, no matter who knocked.

The men did not go into the study today, as if they knew Matthew’s father was not there. They came up the stairs – up the first set of stairs and then up the little twisty stair that led to Matthew’s own room. This had never happened before and Matthew turned to his bedroom door in panic, listening to the cloppety-clopping steps on the bare oak. It sounded as if there were two of them. They would not come in here of course: they would not even know he was in the house… They would know, though. They knew everything that went on and they would know what time school ended and how long it took the children to get back to their various homes.

He glanced round the room then darted across to the cupboard behind his bed and squeezed inside it. If the men opened the door they would just see a dark room with no one there and they might go away. It was not a proper cupboard, more a gap between the wall and the roof, and it was hot with a stuffy smell from the old wood. Matthew would normally be worried about spiders or beetles, but at the moment he would rather face a hundred spiders than the men. Would they come in here – would they? And if they did, what would they do?

The footsteps were coming along the landing and fear came up all over again. Matthew huddled as far back as possible, trying not to make any sound. Mara said if you prayed really hard God always helped you; Sister Teresa at school had told them that. So Matthew tried to pray in his head but the words jumbled themselves up and God could not have heard or not have understood, because the bedroom door was opening and the men were stepping inside.

They switched on the light – it came into the cupboard through the cracks in the cupboard door – and moved round the room. Matthew, hardly daring to breathe, thought they were looking at his books which were stacked on the windowsill and leafing through the drawings he had left on the table. Through the terror he was aware of a sudden surge of anger because how dared they look at his things, his most private paintings he did not show anyone, not even his father or Mara.

Without any warning the cupboard door was pulled open and one of the men stood looking down at him, starting to smile. This was the most frightening thing yet: Mara always said the men’s smiles would be the worst part – they would have teeth like the jagged-edged saws Wilma’s cousin used when he mended people’s windowsills or roofs. The man’s teeth were not like the jagged saw, but the smile was still frightening.

He said, ‘Matthew.’ He did not make it a question, he made it a statement as if he knew quite well who Matthew was. ‘Come out of there. There’s no need to hide. We aren’t going to hurt you. We just want to talk to you.’

They stood in the centre of the room and although there were only two of them they seemed to fill up all the space.

They gestured to him to sit on the edge of the bed and talked to him. They did not shout or make their voices sharp in the way grown-ups and teachers at school sometimes did, but their voices were so cold that if you had been able to see their words, they would have looked like icicles, white and cold, with horrid sneering faces in the ice and long, dripping-icicle fingernails like pictures of Jack Frost.

At first Matthew did not understand what they wanted. Then he thought he sort of understood but he could not see the point. It sounded as if they wanted him to listen and watch everything that went on in the village and tell them about it every time they came to this house.

‘Nothing much happens here,’ he said. ‘Hardly ever. Nothing worth telling. It’s—’ He had been going to say it was a boring place, but that might sound rude so he said, ‘It’s very quiet.’ Greatly daring, he added, ‘It’s why my father likes living here. He likes to be quiet for his work.’

The men glanced at one another, then the one Matthew thought of as the leader said, ‘We like quiet places as well, Matthew. But we need to know about the people who live here, you see. That’s the law.’

Matthew did not really understand about laws, but he knew the men could march into houses without being asked and that they could rap out questions in their icicle-voices and people had to answer them.

‘Most of all,’ said the man, and now there was a tiny change in his voice, so tiny that Matthew thought if he had not been listening extra-specially hard he would not have noticed it, ‘most of all we need to know about your father.’

When the man said this, Matthew realized they were not really interested in the village at all: they were only interested in his father. This was starting to be very scary indeed. Trying hard to keep his voice smooth and ordinary, he said, ‘What do you mean? What do you need to know about him?’

‘Oh, about his writing.’

‘He writes books,’ said Matthew, feeling on safer ground. ‘He always says there isn’t much to say about it. You just sit down and do it, that’s what he says.’

‘We know about the books. But he writes other things as well, doesn’t he?’ said the man and moved nearer. ‘Things he sends to other countries.’

‘Articles,’ said the other one. ‘You know what articles are, don’t you, Matthew?’

‘Um, things in newspapers. Yes, he writes stuff for newspapers sometimes.’ It surely could not hurt to say this. It was something his father occasionally joked about, saying the newspaper work did not provide their bread and butter, but did provide a bit of jam to spread on the bread.

‘It’s the newspaper articles we’re interested in,’ said the first man.

‘But you could read them, couldn’t you?’ said Matthew, puzzled. ‘You’d just have to buy a newspaper. None of it’s secret or anything.’

Secret. Neither of the men moved, but it was as if something invisible pounced triumphantly on the word.

‘That’s just it,’ said the man. ‘We think there might be secret things your father writes.’

‘What kind of secret things?’

‘Things that might not be printed in the newspapers. Things that aren’t articles.’

‘D’you mean letters? Stuff like that?’

‘It might be letters, yes. Or even diaries. He goes away sometimes, doesn’t he? He’s away now, isn’t he?’

‘It’s just, um, business things he goes to,’ said Matthew. ‘I ’spect it’s about his work.’

‘Don’t you know where he goes? Doesn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Does he keep a book with appointments written in?’

‘No.’

‘We’d really like to know where he goes, Matthew,’ said the man, ‘on those trips he makes two or three times a year. It’s quite important to us to know.’

‘Why?’ It came out quite bravely, even though Matthew was not feeling in the least bit brave.

The men looked at one another. Then the leader said, ‘Do you know what a traitor is, Matthew?’

A traitor. The word dropped into the quiet room like a stone. Traitors were very bad people indeed. Matthew knew that because they had history at school on Wednesday afternoons, and the lessons told about traitors. Traitors were liars and cheats; they were sly and secretive and everyone hated them.

(‘There are lots of secrets,’ Mara had said. ‘Only it’s better not to talk about it, that’s what they say.’)

In wars, enemies wanted to know where soldiers and armies would be so they could send their own soldiers sneaking in, so traitors were given money for finding this out and telling it to the enemies. But they were dangerous and wicked people and at times they even killed, which was the worst thing anyone could do in the whole world. These things were all very clear in Matthew’s mind, but what was also clear was that terrible things were done to traitors if they were found out. They were put in prison and usually they were shot or had their heads cut off. Matthew sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the two men, who were watching him, and tried to imagine how it would be if his father were to have his head chopped off or if he were propped up against a wall and shot through the heart.

At last he said, ‘My father isn’t a traitor. I know he isn’t.’

‘We don’t think he is either, not really,’ said the man, ‘but some people do think it, that’s the difficulty. Important people think it. So we have to make sure. We have to – to prove his innocence. Do you understand what that means? Yes, I thought you would, you’re such an intelligent boy.’

‘I’m sure you can help us,’ said the second man. ‘Let’s see, you’re nine years old, aren’t you? You recently had a birthday, in fact. So I expect at nine, you can read and write pretty well.’

‘Yes.’

‘You could read what your father writes and tell us about it,’ said the first man. ‘And you could find out when he’s next going to be away. Could you do that?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Matthew, staring at him.

‘I think you could. You’d have to do it without him knowing, of course.’

‘Then once we knew for certain, we’d be able to – what’s called “clear his name”,’ said the man, ‘with the people who suspect him.’

‘Haven’t you asked him?’ said Matthew. ‘I ’spect he’d tell you where he goes. And he’d show you the things he writes. You’d know it was all right, then.’

‘Oh, we’ve done that, of course,’ said the second man at once. ‘But your father is very clever, Matthew. He says he hardly ever goes away, but when he does it’s to see people about his books and articles. But we aren’t sure about it. And we can’t be sure he isn’t posting things off we don’t know about.’

Posting things off. It provides ‘jam to spread on the bread’, his father had said, with the little sideways smile, sealing his articles into envelopes and going off to post them.

‘So you see,’ said the man, ‘you’d be helping your father by doing this.’

A tiny voice was whispering inside Matthew’s head that this was all wrong, these men did not want him to help his father and they did not want to prove his father’s innocence. They wanted to prove that he really was a traitor. They wanted him to be a traitor.

He was trying to find a polite way of saying he could not do any of this and wondering if they would believe him if he said he was not allowed in the study or that it was locked when his father was out of the house, when the first man said, ‘I expect you’ve got a lot of friends, a boy like you. I expect you’re very fond of them, those friends. You’d want to help them all you could.’

‘There are all kinds of ways of helping friends,’ said the other one. ‘One way is to make sure they stay safe.’

Their voices sounded different when they said this, and Matthew began to feel more frightened than ever. He had no idea how to reply, so he hunched a shoulder and stared determinedly through the window so he would not have to look at either of them.

‘Well, Matthew?’ said the leader after a moment, and although his voice was smiley and nice again, Matthew could still hear what he had said earlier: ‘You’d want to help them… to make sure they stay safe.’ Did they mean friends like Mara?

But if these men could say his father was a traitor, he would be taken away and put in prison – perhaps for years. Or he would die because they would shoot him or chop off his head.

‘I won’t do it,’ said Matthew, looking the man straight in the eyes. And then, because his father said he must be polite to everyone no matter who they might be, he said again, ‘I’m very sorry indeed, but I won’t do it.’

He had expected them to return, but they did not, and after a while he began to think he might be safe. Life was ordinary again. Matthew went to school each day and Wilma cooked the meals, and his father worked in the study. Sometimes he went into the town to buy paper or ink, or post one of the large envelopes he said contained an article. If it was a Saturday Matthew could go with him on these trips, which he liked because of seeing shops and people. It was quite a long journey to make, so they nearly always had lunch while they were out. Matthew liked this as well, because it was different and interesting.

It was on one of these trips that his father said, ‘Matthew, I know there’s something troubling you – I can sense there is – and I won’t pry because everyone’s allowed a few secrets. But I hope you know you can always talk to me about things. I’d never be shocked or upset by anything, and I might be able to make things right for you.’ He paused, then said, ‘Your mother could always make things right for people – it was a gift she had. I don’t have her gift, but I can try.’

His father hardly ever mentioned Matthew’s mother, but when he did it always sounded as if the words were being scraped out of some deep hurting place inside him. Matthew could not remember his mother at all, but he could not bear hearing this scraping pain in his father’s voice. He had been drinking lemonade which was served in a frosty glass, and he kept his eyes on the glass so he would not have to see the pain in his father’s eyes. ‘There’s nothing wrong,’ he said in an awkward mumble. ‘Well, only school things, I s’pose.’

‘School things?’ Was there a note of relief in his father’s voice?

Matthew hunched a shoulder. ‘Arithmetic.’ He risked a glance at his father and saw his face break into the rare, sweet smile he loved, but which he sometimes found painful without understanding why.

‘Oh God, figures,’ said his father. ‘I hated them at school, as well. I used to make up stories about how the figures were in a conspiracy – that’s a plot – to confuse me. How the eight times table was in league with the fractions, and how the multiplication hid inside the square roots, waiting to pounce.’ He laid his hand over his son’s in a brief gesture of affection or sympathy, Matthew was not sure which. ‘Boring arithmetic,’ he said.

‘Flummery and moonshine?’ suggested Matthew hopefully, because this was one of his father’s expressions, and he liked saying it.

His father’s smile broadened, but he said, ‘Well, not exactly that, because you need to know about some of it. But there are other things in life as well as maths. Just do the best you can and I’ll help you with your homework. Remember, figures aren’t everyone’s strength and you’ve got a lot of other strengths.’ He withdrew his hand, as if embarrassed by his own display of emotion. ‘Let’s have some lunch,’ he said. ‘I see they’ve got chocolate pudding today.’

Matthew did not write stories about arithmetic like his father had done, but he drew pictures of all the figures laying plots, giving them secret faces and swirly cloaks like villains in stories, making them seem to be dodging in and out of the columns. He showed them to his father who laughed and said Matthew was a genius, and how about them trying to write a comic-cartoon strip together – like you saw in newspapers? He would write the stories and Matthew could illustrate them. They might try to sell the whole thing to a newspaper or a children’s comic. This was a wonderful plan and what was even better was that his father thought Matthew’s sketches were good enough.

‘It will probably help the arithmetic as well,’ said his father, smiling.

It helped with arithmetic, but it did not help with the cold-eyed men when they came to the house. Each evening, as Matthew drew his pictures or did homework or read a book, he waited for the house to plunge into its frozen state of fear that meant the bulbous-eyed car had driven up the lane. He listened almost all the time for the sounds of their footsteps outside the house.