Shrinking Ralph Perfect (8 page)

Penny stood up slowly, crossing her arms like a mummified pharaoh. ‘Where are we?’ she whispered, in a voice filled with confusion and fear.

Tom moved forward and held her by the shoulders. ‘You’re in Miniville,’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘You’re in the parlour at the front of the house Jack’s…renovating.’

Penny backed away, shaking her head. She looked around at the bare grey walls; at the threadbare rug, too ditched and dirty to reveal any pattern; at the broken pelmets above the high stately windows, once sturdy enough to take four or five metres of heavy drapes; at the huge stone fireplace, sooted and dead; at the ceiling rose and its unlit chandelier; and then again at Tom: sympathetic, kind, but utterly helpless.

‘It is me,’ he whispered, ‘underneath all this.’ He ran his hands around twenty days of stubble. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been miniaturised, just like the rest of us.’

Penny lurched forward, trying not to vomit.

‘It’s OK,’ Tom said, not letting her fall. ‘Breathe slowly and deeply. The dizziness soon passes.’

‘Ralph?’ she gasped, struggling to look for him.

‘I’m here, Mum,’ he said. He was over by a tall bay window, looking out. Beyond its broken panes of glass, through the wall of the ‘aquarium’ in which the house sat, he could see Jack’s monstrous, gloating face, distorted like a curved reflection in a door knob. In a rolling thunder that shook the light fittings, the house shuddered and rocked to the builder’s laughter.

He had them.

Ralph and Penny.

Miniones.

‘Let us out!’ cried Ralph. He beat a loose pane, causing it to crash into jags at his feet.

His mother squealed and covered her ears.

‘It’s no good, Ralph,’ said Tom, calming Penny again. ‘You’re too small; he can’t hear you. Don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you upset.’

‘But we can escape. I can climb through this window.’

‘Yes, and you can walk out of the front door any time you like. But you won’t get over the walls of the tank. They’re too high and too smooth. Trust me, we’ve tried.’

‘We?’ Ralph said. The sound of hurrying feet made him turn towards the door. Three more mini-people burst into the parlour: a middle-aged man with thick, black glasses and a ginger beard, wearing a pale-brown
carpenter’s apron; a much younger, spiky-haired fellow in tracksuit bottoms and a plaster-splattered sweatshirt; and behind them, catching up fast…Kyle Salter!

‘You,’ Kyle spat.

‘You,’ Ralph echoed. He sounded flippant, but he didn’t mean to be. In truth, he was dreadfully scared. He’d suspected all along that Kyle’s disappearance was connected with Jack. And here was the living proof – in miniature. All the things he’d imagined were coming true. It was a horrible, dark, unsettling feeling.

‘You caused this, didn’t you?’ Kyle said, and charged towards Ralph as if he, and he alone, were responsible for their entire predicament.

‘Hey,’ Tom shouted, catching Kyle’s arm and spinning him off-balance. ‘That’s enough of that. We’re all in this together. You know the rules. No in-fighting.’

‘He’s a nerd,’ Kyle said. ‘I
knew
he’d turn up.’

‘Yeah, it’s a small world, Kyle. Now behave.’ Tom pushed him back towards the grim-faced carpenter, who spoke in a softened Yorkshire accent.

‘We heard t’glass breaking. Wondered what were up?’

‘New arrivals,’ said Tom.

The carpenter tugged his beard. ‘They’ll not be labourers, surely?’

‘Please,’ implored Penny, fingers fluttering against her
temples, ‘will someone explain to me
what
is going on?’

Tom guided her away from the window, away from the cartoon figure of Jack. The builder was watching through a magnifying glass. A
magnifying
glass. Ralph kicked himself, remembering how he’d seen it sitting by the fish tank. All the clues were there, all along.

‘Come upstairs,’ Tom said quietly to Penny. ‘It’s warmer. There’s food. We’ll explain the whole story, when you’ve met the others.’

‘How many people has he captured?’ gulped Ralph.

‘Thirteen, with you two,’ the plasterer said, just as a dreadful moaning sound came floating through the air like a fire alarm siren.

‘Duck!’ Tom shouted, forcing Penny down.

The carpenter quickly grabbed hold of Ralph’s collar and almost dragged him into the fireplace. A millisecond later, a small section of metal piping flew across the room and smashed into the wall behind Ralph’s head, making a clank that rang throughout the house.

‘Correction: fourteen,’ the plasterer said.

Ralph looked in the direction from which the piping had come. There was no one there.

‘That were Miriam,’ said the carpenter.

‘Our ghost,’ said Kyle.

Ralph shuddered, remembering the house was haunted. ‘M-Miriam?’ he said.

Tom nodded, tight-lipped. ‘Another minor complication. Watch out for her. She likes to throw things about. She’s what you might call a ‘restless spirit’.’

With that, he led them out of the parlour through a bleak, grey hall and onto the sweep of a winding staircase. At the foot of the stairs, a dumpy little man in grubby, white overalls was staring doggedly up at the wall.

‘How’s it going?’ Tom asked.

‘Champion,’ said the man, watching with pride as a strip of paper peeled neatly off the wall and hung in place like a scroll of butter. ‘Had to water the paste mix down a touch. Cracked it now, though. Breath of wind touches the seam, it peels.’

‘Well done,’ said Tom, giving him a pat.

Well done? thought Ralph. He’d never seen such a useless decorator; the bloke couldn’t make a postage stamp stick.

He was about to say something about it when Tom clamped a hand against his shoulder and said, ‘Careful where you’re putting your feet.’ He diverted Ralph from a jagged hole in a loosely-tacked step. Puzzled, Ralph
altered course. The stairs were terrible, worse than the wallpaper. There were dents and holes and cracks all over. Insects were boring into the handrail. Every step squeaked or dipped or groaned. Ralph stood on one board that creaked so much he thought his knee joints had prised apart. This was weird. Peeling paper. Creaking boards. He looked at the tools on the carpenter’s belt and saw hammers and a saw and a bag of old nails. He couldn’t help but ask, ‘You’re a carpenter, aren’t you? Can’t you make the stairs a bit safer?’

A red flush grew under the ginger beard. ‘Neville Gibbons,’ said the man, shaking Ralph’s hand. ‘Thirty-seven years’ experience in wood. Never thought I’d have to do a job like this.’ He dug a dagger-shaped splinter out of a step. ‘I’m not s’posed to
improve
t’stairs, lad. I’m s’posed to make ’em wonky as jelly. Just like Tom makes t’plumbing buggle, and Wally here – our plasterer and electrician – makes all t’lighting flicker. Sam, who you just saw larruping paste, has to make sure t’paper only half sticks agen’ the walls.’

‘But why?’ asked Ralph, as they stepped onto a landing about as straight as a pasta twist. Feeling giddy, he grabbed for the banister. It broke in his hands, sending him windmilling towards the stairwell.

Once again, his shirt collar acted as his saviour. Only
this time, his rescuer was Kyle Salter. ‘You can’t trust nothing in Miniville,’ said Kyle. ‘Everything here is topsy-turvy,
rearranged
, just like your face is gonna be when we get out of here.’ He glowered at Tom, then pulled Ralph to safety.

‘We’ll explain when you’re settled,’ Tom said, relieved. ‘Kyle’s right, though. You have to be careful here. The place is ramshackle, falling apart. Nothing is quite what it seems. Come on.’

Again he led them on, down a maze of corridors that dipped first one way, then the other. To either side, they passed rooms with little or no furnishings: a broken chair here, a leaning wardrobe there. In one room stood an old Victorian bath, with a tap that appeared to be dripping blood. Ralph was relieved to see another decorator pop up behind it, wielding a brush and a tin of red paint. What
was
going on here? He caught up with Tom and was about to pose the question when he heard a spooky rattle of chains. He stopped with a jolt. Tom and the others, too.

‘What was that?’ asked Penny, lifting her gaze.

The rattle came again, followed by the transiting thud of feet across a ceiling that barely seemed able to support them. Then a wail broke out and a man’s voice cried: ‘Melt the heater!’

Or something like it. That was the best fit Ralph could manage. The voice was far away and woefully distressed. ‘Is that another g-ghost?’ he asked.

‘We’re not sure,’ said Tom, drawing them further down the corridor, until they paused beside a rounded wall. In the centre of the wall was a heavy wooden door. It was smaller than average and arched at its peak. Arm-width bands of rusting metal, each with an iron stud at their centre, criss-crossed over its four main panels. Ralph took it as a sign that he shouldn’t enter and was quietly relieved when Tom said, ‘It’s locked. We don’t have a key. It leads to the tower room, we think. At night, from outside, we can see a candle burning. So there’s definitely someone – or something – in there. Mrs Spink, one of the people you’ll meet in a minute, thinks it might be Miriam’s ‘partner’. She has what she calls ‘psychic intuitions’.’

Penny shuddered. The movement kept a small amount of colour in her face.

‘I reckon it’s a madman,’ Kyle muttered, narrowing his eyes as the manic screech of a madman’s laughter seeped through the door and jangled their bones.

‘Pelt the preacher!’ the crazed voice moaned.

Or something close that rhymed with that. Ralph couldn’t guess and he didn’t want to think. He didn’t
like this place. If his guts weren’t happily twisting with terror, his brain was kicking his stomach into touch. He slumped against the far wall, dizzy with fright, suffering the instantaneous nausea that only a certain kind of dread can bring: the fear of the imagined, the nameless unknown. Darkness swept over him like a cloak. Within five seconds, the surge of panic had become too much, and before Tom could steady him, he’d completely blacked out.

When he came to, he was lying on a mattress underneath a pair of rough cotton sheets. At least, that’s what it felt like at first. A quick dig revealed that the ‘sheets’ were actually tissue paper and the ‘mattress’ was one of the sponge-backed scouring pads Jack had cadged out of Penny’s kitchen cupboards, both shrunk down to a size appropriate for mini-people to sleep on. Looking round, Ralph could see lots of other mini ‘beds’, laid out like graves around the walls of the room. It reminded him of scout camp – the horror film version. Welcome to Miniville, Master Perfect.

He was in a high-ceilinged, rectangular room. Directly above him, a broken chandelier hung down at an angle from a plaster rose. It was cold and the air was ugly with damp. The tall balcony windows were closed, but a draught from a broken pane was clashing with the flames of a small log fire, burning smokily in the large Gothic fireplace. Several miniones were hunkering in front of it, including Tom, Neville and Penny. Ralph sat upright, preparing to call to them, when a younger figure stepped in front of him.

‘Fancy a bite to eat,
Rafe
?’ It was Kyle Salter. He broke what looked like the shell of a candy sweet and skimmed it into the middle of Ralph’s chest. ‘Get used to it,
old bean
. Menu’s kind of limited.’

Ralph let it bounce and refused to pick it up. He hated being picked on, and he hated it even more when people made fun of any part of his name. The first day he’d met young Kyle Howard Salter, the bully had said, ‘Your name’s
Perfect
? Well get you, snooty.’ And that was bad enough. But when Kyle had then found out that ‘Rafe’ (pronounced to rhyme with ‘waif’) was a trendy contraction of ‘Ralph’, he’d teased and jeered and never stopped saying it. Ralph could have happily put a fist in Kyle’s mouth. But where would that have got him? In hospital, not Miniville.

‘Mum,’ he shouted.

Penny hurried over. ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ She kissed his head, loudly.

‘Pathetic,’ Kyle muttered, and walked away laughing.

Ralph stood up, candy shell breaking underfoot. As it happened, he
did
feel dreadfully hungry and was about to ask his mum if there was anything to eat when he saw, in one corner, what he thought at first was a stack of small gas cylinders. They were multicoloured and ranging in size from torpedo-shaped to large round
footballs. It was only when Kyle took a stick to one and cracked off a lump and started to eat it that Ralph twigged what the objects really were: not cylinders, but sugar beads – from Mum’s loaned tub of hundreds and thousands.

Food for the fishes. It made him want to yak.

‘Everyone,’ said Tom, calling for attention. ‘This is Ralph, Penny’s son. They came from next door.’

Ralph shuddered and suddenly felt weak behind his knees. He didn’t like the tense that Tom had used:
came
from next door. Were they destined to stay here in Miniville for ever?

People muttered their ‘hellos’ or offered their sympathies. Most were workmen of one kind or another. As well as Tom, Neville and Wally – plumber, carpenter, electrician – there was a stocky Irish roofer called Spud O’Hare; a green-wellied gardener called Mrs Spink, who for some reason stood twice as tall and twice as skinny as the rest of the captives; and a well-spoken architect named Rodney Coiffure. And beside the fire, looking as if she’d cried all of Cinderella’s tears, was a ragged, grim-faced Jemima Culvery, the only girl in the Salter gang. She scowled at Ralph, then returned her stare to the crackling fire, as if she’d like to be the next log on it.

Tom gave Ralph a drink of water in a can. ‘No mugs,’
he explained. ‘We have to make do with what we can find and what Jack chooses to send our way. It’s a pretty miserable existence, I’m afraid.’ He crouched in front of Penny, who was holding Ralph’s hand. ‘We’ve got lighting and some running water; Jack miniaturised in a generator and pump, but they’re for the house use, not for us. In the room next door there’s an old, cracked sink I plumbed into the system. You can wash in it but I wouldn’t advise drinking from the taps; Jack made me fur them up with algae.’

Ralph grimaced and pulled his mouth back from his can. ‘Why is everything so disgusting?’

‘I’ll explain in a minute,’ Tom replied. ‘The water you’re drinking is clean, we think. There’s a barrel over there in the corner by the door. Two tins per day, no more. That’s the rule. Fresh water is precious here.’

‘How do you get it?’ asked Penny.

‘You’ll see,’ Kyle sniffed.

Tom ignored him and said, ‘There are no showers or baths. It’s a standing agreement that we don’t swap complaints about body odour. We all accept we stink like polecats.’

Penny blushed and looked away.

‘There’s a toilet facility on the ground floor. It flushes – just – if you pull the chain hard. The waste
goes into a septic tank that Neville and I dug in the shallow strip of earth around the outside of the house. It’s makeshift and not at all pleasant. We keep it clean so the flies don’t come.’

‘Flies?’ Ralph took a gulp of air.

‘Big furry buzzy things,’ Kyle said (buzzing). ‘Any good with a spear,
Rafe
?’ He pointed to a cluster of sharpened stakes, stacked beside a bundle of home-made torches. Ralph took a shaky sip of water. Flies? They’d be half the size of Tom.

‘You’re free to sleep where you like,’ Tom said, ‘but so far we’ve all stayed together for support. As you can see, the bedding’s not ideal. If you have trouble sleeping, there are one or two tasselled cushions lying about. They’re as old and dusty as the house itself, but a little more comfortable than the cotton wool bud-tips Jack expects us to lay our weary heads on.’

Penny forced her fingers through her curly brown hair, clipping it back above the level of her ears. ‘Why’s he
doing
this? Why is Jack keeping you here?’

‘We’re his workforce,’ said Neville.

‘His miniones,’ said Ralph.

‘He must have bragged to you about his inventions?’ said Wally, rubbing at the smoke burns on his face. Ralph wondered with a gulp just how ‘bad’ Wally had to
be at his job. Judging by the spikes in his short, blond hair he’d suffered an electrical shock or two. He offered Penny a piece of sugar bead.

She smiled and shook her head. ‘He said something about this house being his ‘prize exhibit’.’

‘It’s the feature of his seaside show,’ said Tom. ‘It’s the house we talked about that morning in your kitchen, the one that went missing from the Yorkshire Dales. He didn’t take it apart; he shrank it down so he could put it on display on the end of a pier.’

Penny shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. When people see it they’ll recognise it, won’t they?’

‘Not if their minds can’t believe it,’ said Tom. ‘He wants Wally to wire up a sign above the door: MINIVILLE: THE TINY HOUSE OF HORROR.’

Penny shuddered and clutched at her arms.

Tom reached forward and boldly touched her hand. Ralph watched his mum’s thumb curl over the plumber’s work-hardened fingers and was glad she had someone strong to protect her. ‘Before he miniaturised me,’ Tom said quietly, ‘he told me how Miniville’s supposed to work. When we’ve finished building, he plans to set the house inside a sealed glass dome, a bit like a giant snow-shaker.’

‘And shake us up and down?’ Ralph reeled in terror.
He didn’t fancy being a squash ball against these ceilings.

‘Rafe, shut up and listen,’ Kyle snarled, whittling away at the end of a spear.

Tom went on, ‘In the glass around the dome, he’s going to install a number of prisms. The idea’s pretty basic: when you put your eye to one, you’ll see a distorted view of the house – the corner of a room, a seat-cushion, the bath. There’ll be hearing points, too. And smelling holes, we think.’

‘To what end?’ asked Penny, looping her hair.

Neville stepped forward, puffing at a pipe. ‘Greed, Mrs Perfect: Jack reckons folks’ll pay a pretty penny to watch th’antics of t’Miniville ghosts.’

On cue in the distance, the crazed voice shouted, ‘Help the teacher!’ (or something like that). Miriam wailed an angry response. The resulting blast of air blew out Neville’s pipe and bounced the door right back against the wall, springing a screw from its straining hinges.

Penny and Ralph both yelped in shock. But as the door knob dropped off and rolled down the landing, Tom merely said, ‘You’ve done well there, Nev.’

‘Aye,’ Neville said, relighting his pipe. ‘Just a matter of adjusting tension in t’hinges.’

‘Done well?’ Ralph queried. The door was hanging like a broken wing.

Tom laughed, a welcome relief in the gloom. ‘You haven’t quite got it yet, have you, Ralph? Jack’s not using us to do the house up; it’s the opposite he wants: for us to do the house
down
. He’s using expert craftsmen – and women – to make stairs creak and have lights flicker—’

‘And curtains billow,’ Mrs Spink chipped in, going past with a length of neatly-ripped voile.

‘—he wants the place to look and sound as spooky as possible. We’re creating—’

‘
Noah’s Ark,
’ muttered Penny.

Several people looked her way.

Neville moved a pencil stub from one ear to the other.

‘I know what Mum means,’ said Ralph. ‘When I was eight, we went on holiday to Blackpool. There was this boat near the pier called
Noah’s Ark.
When you walked through it, weird things happened: skulls appeared, or air would blow up your trouser leg, or you’d go through a hall of mirrors or something.’

‘Like a ghost train,’ Jemima muttered.

‘Yes,’ Ralph said. This house was like a living ghost train.

Penny looked around the room, at the mouse holes in the skirtings and the black mould peppering the ageing walls. ‘And when you’ve finished ‘building’, what happens then?’ She checked the faces. All were blank.

‘We’re not sure,’ said Tom. ‘We’re hoping – praying – he’ll let us go.’

Kyle snorted and flopped out onto a mattress. ‘He’s a loony,’ he muttered. ‘He’ll never let us go.’

‘Not with an attitude like that,’ Tom said. ‘If we work together, we
will
get out.’

‘Sure. And when we do, we’ll be dog meat.
Magic.
’

Ralph looked anxiously at Tom and Neville.

‘Best tell him,’ said Neville.

Tom rubbed his brow.

This is bad,
thought Ralph.
Even Tom’s scared.
Helplessness gripped him as the plumber explained: ‘The device Jack uses to miniaturise things keeps a record in a binary database. It logs the coordinates of each object shrivelled.’

‘You mean he always knows where we are?’ asked Penny.

‘Worse than that,’ said Kyle. ‘The devil dog’s got a tracker on its collar. If we run and Jack lets Knocker come after us,
schlup
—’

‘Don’t,’ said Jemima, pressing her fists to her ears. ‘I
don’t want to hear this.’ A tear streaked down the valley of her nose. Penny went across and put an arm around her. ‘I want my mum,’ Jemima sobbed.

‘We all do,’ said Kyle, and in his eyes Ralph could see that the bully truly meant it.

‘What happens if you don’t do the work?’ he asked.

Kyle drew a breath as sharp as a spear point. He pointed to a tall blue vase on the mantelpiece. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary piece of pottery, but when Ralph squinted closely he could see a boy’s face mixed up in the glaze. It was Luke Baker, one of the gang.

‘Luke wouldn’t do what he was told,’ said Kyle, ‘so Jack mixed him up with the particles of the pot. And when Sylvia tried to stand up for him…’ he cocked his head at Mrs Spink, ‘…he stretched her out like chewing gum. He can do anything with that thing: shrink you, move you, take you apart.’

‘That’s how you got into the hedge,’ Ralph muttered, remembering back to Jack’s clash with the gang. ‘He ‘beamed’ you into it, like on
Star Trek.
’

‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me, Rafe,
old chap.
’

‘Oh, will you leave him alone?’ Penny growled.

Salter just laughed and clicked his tongue.

Ralph shied away, anxious and hurt. The prospect of
spending the rest of his life on the bully’s patch was almost as frightening as the thought of becoming a human vase or of being haunted by Miriam. He drew in his shoulders, sensing her presence nearby again. It was odd. He thought he’d detected her the first time Kyle had called him ‘Rafe’, as though he’d attracted her to him somehow and now she was circling, waiting, watching.

But why? Why would she want to haunt
him
?

‘We’re working on escape plans all the time,’ said Tom.

Ralph snapped to attention, eager to hear them. But before any minione could speak of breaking out, the light in the room was partially eclipsed and every tiny face turned quickly to the windows.

A giant hand was closing in fast.