The Black Room

We’ll take her straight into the woods, ROBERT HAD SAID when they were making their plans. And then we’ll try and contact Lorn. But how could they do that with Mr. Armstrong after them? If they stopped, they’d be caught.

They pelted through the pedestrian mall at top speed, with the cart bumping along and swerving around corners. Tom was pushing it, and whenever they went through a patch of light, he could see the girl huddled up in the bottom, with her eyes wide open. One hand was twirling her hair, and the other was around the bars of the cart, gripping them tightly.

Someone was coming after them. But it didn’t sound like Mr. Armstrong. It was someone lighter and quicker. So Mr. Armstrong’s still driving the car, Tom thought. He could be coming around the other way to cut us off.

Robert had realized that, too. As they reached the end of the mall, he bent over to mutter to Tom. “We’ve got to split up. You and Emma go on with the cart, and I’ll take her and go a different way.”

“Not if we can get to the park before they do. Use the flashlight a bit, to keep them following.” Robert bent over the cart and put his arms around the girl’s tense, frightened body. “Come on, you,” he said.

Robert shook his head and hauled the girl out of the cart. “Just run, Tosh. Don’t waste time fussing.”

“Dohfuss. Dohfuss,” the girl said lightly. She leaned sideways against Robert and closed her eyes. Her face was pale and she looked very tired.

“Take her home, Rob,” Emma said. “Then you’ll have Mom and Dad if you need them.”

Emma took off her backpack and dumped it into the cart. Then she and Tom shot out of the pedestrian mall. The empty cart rattled and jumped, and its wheels sounded loud and hard on the pavement. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw Mr. Armstrong’s car coming along the side of the square, not quite near enough to stop them.

They raced down the slope and around the corner. The big, ornamental park gates were locked at dusk, but that was just for show. There was no fence along the side of the park to keep people out at night. Just a hedge with lots of openings, and the woods at the far end. As soon as they were past the gates, Tom swerved left, off the pavement and into the trees.

They were heading straight down the park, toward the woods. When they were halfway there, Tom glanced back over his shoulder and saw Mr. Armstrong coming after them. He moved in a strange, lumbering way, but it was faster than Tom would have expected. And he hadn’t been running for nearly as long as they had. Emma was starting to fail now. Tom could hear her breath coming in great tearing gasps, and she had one hand pressed against her side.

“Not far now,” he said, raising his voice above the rattle of the cart. “Keep it up, Em.”

Emma made a last, heroic effort, and they reached the end of the park and went through the hedge, into the woods. After that, it was easy. There were dozens and dozens of little, twisting paths, and Tom knew every one of them. Every patch of brambles and every muddy ditch. He’d pulled Helga out of all of them at least once.

He found the driest ditch for Emma and left her there with a clump of dead bracken trampled across to cover her. Then he enjoyed himself rattling up and down the paths, well away from anything important like Emma and the hedge bank.

Once or twice Mr. Armstrong tried to cut across and head him off, but his feet were heavy and clumsy, and he was starting to breathe hard. Tom just grinned to himself and changed direction. There was no way that anything like that was going to work in these woods. This was his maze.

When it began to get boring—and Robert had had enough time to reach home safely—Tom worked his way gradually to the very edge of the woods. Lifting Emma’s backpack onto his shoulder, he stepped out onto the pavement and gave the cart one last, huge push.

It rattled down the road, and he ducked sideways into a clump of rhododendrons, watching Mr. Armstrong charge past him and run after it. It didn’t take him more than a few moments to realize that he had been tricked. He turned around and began to walk back along the pavement.

As he passed the bushes where Tom was hiding, the light from a streetlamp caught his face full on. It was still completely without expression. He didn’t even look out of breath. Only his eyes moved, looking left and right as he went. Deep in the rhododendrons, Tom shuddered and kept very still.

A few moments later, he heard the car drive away. But he waited for a good quarter of an hour after that, just to be sure that it wasn’t some kind of trap. Then he slipped out of the bushes and went to find Emma.

She was lying exactly where he had left her, very still and quiet. But he must have been even quieter. As he padded up to the ditch, he heard a faint, stifled sniff.

“If you make noises like that, someone’s going to come and catch you,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

Tom sat down on the edge of the ditch. “What’s up?” he said. “Were you scared?”

“Of course not.” Emma could still manage a touch of scorn. “What could he do to us? We can call the police if things get really tough. But that girl—”

Tom didn’t need it spelled out for him. “Maybe she’ll get better. Now that she’s out of that hole.”

“Maybe,” Emma said. But she didn’t sound convinced. She scrambled out of the ditch and started brushing bracken off her clothes. “I’m absolutely freezing.”

“Are you joking?” Emma said. “Mom would be downstairs as soon as I turned on the pot. She’s a really light sleeper. It took us hours to get out of the house tonight without waking her.”

“I’ll make you a drink on the way home then. My mom sleeps as if she’s hibernating.” Tom didn’t really expect her to say yes, but she nodded briskly.

WHEN THEY WERE THERE, SITTING IN THE KITCHEN, TOM realized that she was deliberately wasting time. She drank her coffee as slowly as she could, cupping her hands around the mug and peering into it. And when Helga came nosing around her ankles, she stopped drinking and bent down to pat her head and talk to her.

“It’s no use,” Tom said at last. “You’ve got to be back before your mom wakes up.”

“I know.” Emma looked up and gave him a rueful grin. “But nothing’s ever going to be the same, is it? Whatever happens.”

“I guess not.” Tom picked up his jacket. “Come on. I’ll walk you back.” Helga perked up her ears and wagged her tail, and he shook his head at her. “Not you, silly dog.”

But he should have known that that wasn’t good enough. Not when it was almost morning and she was expecting a walk anyway. She wagged her tail and gave a short, high-pitched bark.

But Helga just barked again, sounding slightly injured, and he saw that they would have to take her if they wanted her to be quiet. He clipped on her leash and opened the back door.

Outside, it was still dark, but there was slightly more traffic about. They walked quickly past the park and across the road to Robert and Emma’s house.

As she pushed it open, Robert appeared suddenly, whispering through the dark. “Where have you been? I thought you were never coming.”

Robert shook his head. “I couldn’t risk her waking Mom. She’s in there.” He pointed at the little shed where he and Emma kept their bicycles.

“Of course she is,” Robert muttered. “As all right as she’ll ever be.” He went over and pushed the shed door open. “Where’s the flashlight? Take a look at her.”

Hope was huddled in the corner, fast asleep in a pile of blankets. She had a banana in one hand, half-eaten, and her face was smeared with squashed banana pulp. All the plaits on her head were twisted together into one matted mess, and her wet clothes were starting to smell. Helga pushed her head around Tom’s legs and sniffed curiously at the air inside the shed.

Looking down at Hope, Tom was suddenly so angry that he could hardly speak. Because he knew she couldn’t ever recover from what had been done to her. Not in the normal course of things. She would never be all right unless this loopy idea of Robert’s worked.

“When are we going to take her across to the park?” he said. “Any reason why we shouldn’t go now?”

There was an odd, unaccountable pause. Then Robert said, “I don’t think we ought to do that.” His voice was tight and miserable. “I’m going to phone the police and hand her over.”

Tom was stunned. “So why did we go through all that performance tonight? We could have made a phone call in the first place. You were the one who insisted on doing it the hard way—because you said she was Lorn. Are you telling me that’s all nonsense?”

“Oh no,” Robert said. “It’s not nonsense. She’s Lorn all right. I knew it as soon as I saw her winding that string into her hair.”

There was no mistaking the misery now. He sounded utterly wretched. Hope stirred and turned her head, wiping banana into her hair, and Robert’s face twisted as if he couldn’t bear to see it.

“So why have you changed your mind?” Tom was very angry now. If he’d known what to do, he would have scooped Hope up and taken her to the park himself. “What’s different?”

“Suppose we take her to the park,” Robert said slowly, “and she—and the same thing happens that happened to me. Suppose she and Lorn go back to being one person.”

“I thought that was the point.” Tom glanced at Emma, wondering if he’d missed something. But she was looking baffled, too. “I thought that was what you wanted. One person.”

“Only if it’s Lorn!” Robert said fiercely. “But we don’t know, do we? Suppose it isn’t Lorn. Suppose it’s her. Hope. She won’t be any better off then, will she? And Lorn will be gone. Vanished. She won’t exist anywhere. I’ll really have lost her then. How can I risk that?”

Tom was looking at Hope again. At her pale skin and her matted hair and the fine—too fine—bones of her head. There was a bruise on her right cheek, in the place where her fist landed when she punished herself for making a noise, and the palms of her hands were dark with ingrained dirt.