Emily's Penny Dreadful (7 page)

woman looked puzzled. Had she heard
something or had she not? . . . that was what Miley guessed Bacon
was thinking.

 
Bacon seemed to
stand there for ages but at last she went away. Miley heard her
opening the door of the boys’ dormitory and then closing it
again.

 
What a lucky escape,
thought Miley. If only they had been able to escape the factory as
well as elude Bacon. Then she fell asleep and had a
dream.

  “
You’ve given up,”
she said to Ned in the dream. “But I’ll never give up.”

  “
Those are heroic
words,” said Ned. “But that’s all they are. Words.”

  “
Words matter,” said
Miley.

 
Ned grunted in
Miley’s dream. (He never grunted much in real life.) “You can’t eat
words,” he said. “They don’t help you sleep. You can’t make a rope
out of words and climb out of a window with them. Words are a waste
of time in a place like this. See what good

they’ve done Pork Pie. There aren’t any
Ancient Greek

heroes in match factories either. And even
if there was one, he’d have been shot in the heel by a poisonous
arrow by now.”

And in her dream Ned
sneezed and his sneeze sounded suspiciously like “Ahhh -
chilles!”

 
Maybe Ned was right,
Miley dreamed. Maybe there was no escape from this place. Maybe
they were all trapped here.

 
Counting and packing
matchsticks.

 
Those hateful,
loathsome, little Devil’s matchsticks.

 
Forever.

PART THREE

WRITER’S BLOCK

Chapter Seven

Another long week had gone by. Emily had
written a lot of her dreadful story, but she hadn’t yet reached the
end of it. Problems were looming. Endings, as she had found out in
the past, were always the hardest things to write.

 
At least Uncle
Raymond hadn’t asked for his Penny Dreadful back. That was one good
thing. The old magazine was providing Emily with plenty of
ideas.

 
Right now, Uncle
Raymond was sitting at the little desk in Emily’s room, staring at
the screen of his big new computer, paid for by the
insurance.

 
Emily, passing by,
noticed and said: “You’re too big for my desk, Uncle Raymond. And
for my chair. But I

don’t mind you using them, as long as you
don’t break

the chair, like Goldilocks did in the Bears’
house.”

  “
Hmm,” said Uncle
Raymond. “In reply I could say

that the desk and the chair are both too
small for me

and that they, in the end, might combine to
break me.”

  “
They aren’t too
small for me,” said Emily.

  “
Indubitably,” said
Uncle Raymond.

  “
In
what?”

“
Indubitably. It means
without a doubt. You’re the right size for both.”

“
I’m big for my age,” said
Emily. “That’s what Mum and Dad always say.”

“
So am I,” said Uncle
Raymond. “At least, that’s what you say.”

“
Is it a good one?” asked
Emily, quickly changing the subject of size. She didn’t want Uncle
Raymond to scream at her, like he had at Sibbie when she had bashed
away at her drums in the garage.

“
If you mean the desk or
the chair, the answer in each case is ‘no’, but I shall just have
to make the best of them.”

“
I meant
the
computer
. I
wish I had one of my own. Mum and Dad have said I can have a tablet
with a separate keyboard when I turn ten,” said
Emily.

“
Sibbie could have had one
when she turned ten but

she wanted drums instead. It takes ages
writing stories by hand.”

  “
Why don’t you use
the family computer?”

  “
I do use it for
homework but not a lot for writing stories. Sibbie always comes and
looks over my shoulder and I hate that. She even does it when I
write with a pen but then I can hide better what I’m writing. Last
time I hurt my shoulder, though.”

  “
Hmm,” said Uncle
Raymond. “It’s true. Writers prefer to perfect their craft in
secret, much like magicians.”

  “
Your computer looks
really flash,” said Emily. “Dad said it was the latest model, so it
must be good.”  

“
It’s a machine,” said
Uncle Raymond. “It does what I tell it to. Usually.”

  “
What’s it doing
now?” Emily asked.

  “
Nothing,” said
Uncle Raymond.

  “
I see,” said Emily.
“What are you doing then, Uncle

Raymond?”

Uncle Raymond didn’t answer straightaway. He
closed his eyes. Emily wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  “
Are you writing a
new story?” she asked.

  “
Yes,” said Uncle
Raymond shortly.

  “
That’s great!” said
Emily. “You must have had an idea. What’s it about?”

 
Uncle Raymond opened
his eyes. He carried on looking at the screen. His fingers didn’t
touch the keyboard. He didn’t answer Emily’s question.

  “
I once stared and
stared at a computer screen until my eyes went funny and then the
screen seemed to almost disappear,” said Emily. “It was like a
magic trick. Wasn’t that funny?”

  “
No,” said Uncle
Raymond.

  “
Do you want me to
show you how I did it?” said Emily. “I could stare and stare at
your computer screen and you could watch my eyes go
funny.”

  “
No,” Uncle Raymond
said again. “Thank you, all the same.”

  “
You said writers
are like magicians. Do you know any magic tricks, Uncle
Raymond?”

 
Uncle Raymond
paused. “I know one,” he said. “I

learnt it when I was very young. It was a
very useful trick.”

  “
What trick is
it?”

  “
I can make you
disappear.”

  “
You can’t!” said
Emily.

 
She came up closer,
stretching to look over Uncle Raymond’s shoulder.

  “
There’s nothing on
the screen,” she said.

“
Why is it that you don’t
like your sister looking over your shoulder but you have no
compunction whatsoever about looking over mine?”

 
Emily didn’t answer
Uncle Raymond’s question. Fair’s fair. He didn’t always answer
hers.

  “
There should be
lots of words,” she said, instead. “They’re what I use when I write
stories.”

  “
Maybe I write my
stories in my head first,” said Uncle Raymond.

  “
I do that too,
sometimes,” said Emily. “Is that what you’re doing now?”

  “
Perhaps it is. Until you interrupted me, of course,” said
Uncle Raymond. “What
are
you doing here, by the way?”

  “
I live here,” said
Emily. “This used to be my room.

Remember?”

  “
Oh yes, of course.
It slipped my mind.”

  “
Because you were
writing in your head?”

  “
Perhaps,” repeated
Uncle Raymond.

  “
Writers have odd
minds,” said Emily.

  “
Do they? And how
did you reach that conclusion?”

  “
It’s what Dad
sometimes says,” Emily explained. “He said your mind was very
odd.”

 
Uncle Raymond pulled
one of his faces.

  “
A paid-up member of
the Grammar Police and odd. When did he say that?” he
asked.

  “
After he’d finished reading
Ghost
under the stairs
,” said Emily. “He said to
Mum, ‘That brother of yours has a very odd
mind.’”  

  “
Hmm,” said Uncle
Raymond.

  “
Do I have an odd
mind?” asked Emily.

  “
How would I
know?”

  “
Well, you write
stories and I write stories.”

Uncle Raymond thought about
this. “Put that way I would say yes, you probably do have an odd
mind.”

  “
Good,” said Emily.
“Why don’t you try writing a juvenile?”

Uncle Raymond turned back to the computer.
“Because I can’t,” he said.

  “
Why
not?”

  “
It’s too
difficult,” Uncle Raymond said.

  “
Why?”

  “
Because children
ask too many questions,” Uncle Raymond explained, “and I don’t have
all the answers.”

  “
You said writers
know everything,” Emily reminded him. “Or, if they don’t, they find
out or make things up.”

  “
Do you, or do you
not, want me to show you my one and only magic trick?” asked Uncle
Raymond

  “
You can’t make me
disappear,” Emily insisted. “It’s impossible.”

  “
To the contrary. I
can. Quite easily.”

  “
Prove it,” said
Emily.

 
Uncle Raymond closed
his eyes again. “You’ve disappeared,” he said.

Chapter 14

“
When I’m asleep it’s like
I’ve escaped from the

Devil’s Element,” Miley told Ned.

  “
Huh,” said Ned.
“Except you haven’t.”

  “
And if I close my
eyes during the day, the match factory disappears,” Miley
added.

  “
And then you lose
count of your matches,” Ned said.

  “
I can still count
them, in my head,” Miley insisted.

 
But she couldn’t.
With her eyes closed, she kept going off into happy little dreams
of Hippo Banks, parapluies and Mama’s story nights and she lost
count of her matches, quick smart.  

 
Dreams are like
stories, thought dreamy Miley, and stories are words; words that
follow one another in a crocodile file, like children going to soap
or sweet factories on school outings.

 
Sometimes words are
like water, flowing, cool and refreshing. Other times they’re like
stepping-stones over a stream, but they can’t always take you
across dangerous spaces and get you home safely, no matter how many
words there are.

  “
Keep counting!”
Bacon suddenly yelled, right in Miley’s left ear.

 
All the words in
Miley’s head were instantly flooded away.

Chapter Eight

Emily went into the room she was sharing
with Sibbie and found her sister face down on the bed, reading.

She wasn’t reading Uncle
Raymond’s Penny Dreadful. Sibbie wasn’t reading one of her silly
girlfriend-boyfriend books, either. She had started reading Emily’s
story!

  “
You’re a thief!”
Emily screamed. “A nasty, nosey, obnoxious, horrible
thief.”

  “
It takes one to
know one,” said Sibbie, “so chill out, sis. If you didn’t want
anyone to read your stupid story you shouldn’t have left it lying
around in such an obvious place. Beside, all I’ve read is the first
chapter which, if you want my opinion, is far too short, even
though it’s more than long enough for me.  To tell the truth,
I was going to stop reading at exactly the same moment as you
started raging.”

 
Emily’s anger
subsided. “Honestly?”

  “
Cross my heart and
hope to die,” said Sibbie. “I thought it might have gotten better
after the first line, but it didn’t.”

 
If Sibbie was
telling the truth, Emily was glad. Very

glad. Because chapter two mentioned the
fight between Miley and her older sister and Sibbie was bound to
think the older sister was meant to be her. (It was. She was also
the bad-tempered, match-flicking Bibsie, too, later on in the
story, but Emily wasn’t going to tell Sibbie that. It would only
cause a fight, one that Emily was bound to lose.)

  “
Did you like
Miley?” Emily asked.

  “
I’ve hardly got to know her,’ said Sibbie. “And why do you
pronounce her name Millie? You mean
Miley
, don’t you? It’s just Emily,
with the letters scrambled.”

  “
Maybe,” said Emily. “But it’s said
Millie
, not
Mile
-
y
.”

  “
Miley can’t be said
Millie. If you put an s in front of her name you’d say Smiley. Not
Smillie.”

  “
That’s my
business,” said Emily.

  “
I’m right, you’re
wrong,” said Sibbie. “Have you finished the whole thing?” she
asked, handing the exercise book back to Emily.

  “
No,” said Emily.
“Miley’s been kidnapped, sort of. Not like Ned exactly but it come
to the same thing.”

  “
Who’s
Ned?”

  “
A boy Miley
meets.”

  “
Her boyfriend?”
Sibbie suddenly looked a lot more interested.

  “
No!” said Emily. “Miley doesn’t have time for
boyfriends
.’