What Abigail Did Tha Summer, Ben Aaronovitch [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt] 📗

some of Goth Boy, but behind that another face. Gaunt, pale, big eyes. Younger, like eight or nine.

‘It’s nice to have friends,’ he says.

‘So what is it you want with me?’ I say. ‘Why me?’

‘Because you’re so full of everything,’ says Charles.

‘Everything,’ I say, feeling behind me for the knife.

‘Love, anger, curiosity, passion, stubbornness,’ he says. ‘You’re like a Christmas pudding. You’re my second favourite thing.’

Second, I think. Story of my life.

I feel the hilt of the knife beneath my palm and grab it. I hold it out in front of me – point towards Charles. Or the manifestation of the House . . . or maybe something worse? Christmas pudding – what if this house eats kids?

Charles looks at the tip of the knife and then back at me.

‘I say,’ he says. ‘What are you planning to do with that?’

‘Something you won’t like,’ I say, and cut my arm.

Or at least I try to.

There was a girl in my class who used to do this regularly until she got a couple of good rounds of CBT,24 and she said to use the upper part of your arm so you don’t accidentally slash an artery or sever a tendon.

What she didn’t say was how hard it is to actually make your hand press the blade down. In the end I have to look away and slice blindly. There’s a line of fire across the top of my arm and I gasp with pain.

When I look, I see there’s like a tiny pink line – not even any blood.

But Charles has taken a step back.

The second cut is easier but slightly more painful.

‘Why would you do that?’ asks Charles, sounding suitably prang – I want him to think I’m wavy.

I raise the knife again and Charles retreats into the narrow corridor they must have knocked out when they made the granny flat. There’s blood now. I can feel it dripping down my arm and smell it in the air.

I follow him out, thinking that I must be pretty clever to hold myself hostage because Charles starts retreating up the stairs. I follow him step by step until we’re halfway up and the knife fades away.

‘Let’s go and see the Hungarians,’ he says.

‘Let’s not,’ I say, and slap myself in the upper arm.

It hurts. It hurts a lot. But there’s something about the pain that sort of anchors me in a weird way. Makes me feel more solid. More like me.

Charles’s multiple face crumples like he’s going to cry, but I slap myself again and he backs up the stairs all the way to the hallway.

Now I’m standing inside the bit of the hallway with the coat rack and the cracked green tiles that I reckon date all the way back. The front door is just behind me, but I can feel the Hungarian refugees pressing at my back. Charles is standing less than a metre in front of me – looking unhappy.

The deformed dog he’s holding looks at me with big eyes and says nothing.

I almost hesitate, but I’m at the limit of my heroics and my arm is killing me.

‘Sorry,’ I say to the deformed dog.

And, yanking the front door open, I run out into the . . .

*

Night. The skip and the piles of builders’ materials are shadows on either side. But it’s a straight line to the exit, and if the door won’t open I’m ready to smash right through it.

It opens. I’m out.

And suddenly face to face with a slightly overstuffed stab vest.

It’s Mr Fed from the long, long ago time of last week.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Where did you spring from?’

‘From the house,’ I say. ‘But never mind that. You need to take me to a place of safety, preferably Holmes Road nick. And then interview me in the presence of an appropriate adult.’

Surprisingly, he doesn’t argue with me but instead leads me over to a clapped-out navy-blue Hyundai parked along the road like an advert for Kwik Fit motors. As we go past a tree I see someone’s stuck a flyer to it with MISSING and a picture of a girl I recognise as Jessica, mainly because it’s the same picture the Feds showed me that first day. Looks handmade. There’s one on the next tree too, and on the next.

Nothing with me on it, you notice.

24 Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – in my day one was told to pull oneself together and, if that failed, thrashed by a prefect. I think the modern approach is better but part of me can’t help but be sad that a young person like Abigail has to know about these things.

31

Achieving Best Abigail

I am sitting in the Achieving Best Evidence suite in Holmes Road police station. Simon’s mum is glaring at me from one direction and DC Jonquiere is glaring at me from the other. Both of them are convinced that if the current rash of youth mispers isn’t directly my fault then I am, at the very least, indirectly responsible. Who knows . . . it might even be true.

‘He’s inside the house,’ I say.

‘Nobody is inside that house,’ says DC Jonquiere. ‘We’ve searched it.’

‘That’s the real ting house,’ I say, and then I almost add, Your mispers are trapped in the folds of a tertiary subspace manifold. But with olds you’ve got to lead them gently where you want them to go. ‘It’s a Falcon effect.’

Falcon is the code word the police use when they need to talk about magic but don’t want to say it out loud. Peter says most police only know it as meaning ‘weird bollocks, bad news, send for the specialists’ – him and Nightingale being the specialists. He says as you go up the pay grades, people either know more or have access to certain files.

DC Jonquiere frowns so I’m guessing she knows something.

Simon’s mum looks really unhappy, which means I’m right and she knows bare more.

‘I’d like to have a private conversation with this young lady,’ she says without turning around.

DC Jonquiere hesitates.

‘I’m afraid—’ she starts, but