The Tooth Fairy Part 29

'Horror-kill,' said Alice. 'Horror-cull . . . Wh.o.r.e-call . . .'

'If you were a fruit,' the Tooth Fairy said to Alice, 'what fruit would you be?'

Sam blinked. He'd distinctly seen the Tooth Fairy sitting upright, grinning at Alice. But now it was Clive asking the question and not the Tooth Fairy at all.

'Huh?'

'It's a game. What fruit? You?'

Words were slipping away from them, unravelling on the tongue, becoming redundant. Paradoxically, communication seemed easier, richly telepathic. Sam suddenly felt hot. His anxiety was mounting. Then he saw the Tooth Fairy putting the same question. 'If Sam was a fruit, what . . . ?' But before the question was completed, the Tooth Fairy had become Terry. '. . . what fruit would you be?'

Sam counted his companions again. Still five in total.

'Sam would be a lime.' Someone chortled.

Sam's skin greened over. His body inflated to roughly spherical form. A thick, protective rind formed over his skin, and he sensed the rich, pulpy effervescence of his internal ma.s.s. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the bitter-sweet tang of his own citrus. He pressed his skin, and a fine zest burst forth, falling in a light, fragrant shower around them.

Laughter from the others brought Sam back. He extended his body and returned to normal.

'Getting strange, isn't it?' said the Tooth Fairy.

'You're not helping,' said Sam.

'Who's not helping?' Alice wanted to know.

'Alice would be an orange,' said the Clive Fairy.

Or the Tooth Terry.

Sam shook his head vigorously. His grasp of events was falling apart. He seemed unable to hang on to a thought for more than a moment. One second Terry and Clive seemed to be only inches away, the next moment they were blasted a hundred yards across the field. He desperately wanted to hug Alice, to find infant comfort at her breast. But every time he crept towards her, he seemed accidentally to telegraph his intentions, and Terry would inch closer in compet.i.tion. Then it occurred to him that Alice was manipulating them all so that they would fight over her. A dirty wave of hatred washed over him, and yet he simultaneously found himself wincing at the corrupt depth of this emotion.

'Don't panic,' said the Tooth Terry.

Sam pointed his finger. 'Paranoia.'

The Tooth Fairy smiled but didn't disappear.

'Paranoia,' Sam tried again.

The Tooth Fairy shook its head. It was mutating now from its female to its male aspect. Its face had a poisoned, blue sheen. ' 'Fraid I tricked you on that little paranoia number. Won't work here.'

Sam felt a hot flush rising, and then a hand stroked the scruff of his neck, grabbing his hair and tugging it. It was naked fear. 'Leave us alone. Just leave us.'

'Sam,' said Alice. She too was having problems with her words. It was all she could say. 'Sam.'

'Good idea of yours,' said the Tooth Fairy, 'to name your kid sister after Linda and Alice. Fair trade.'

'Don't be jealous. There's no need for you to be jealous.'

'I told you the kid was for me, didn't I? Well, you win some and you lose some. I've already had some payback from Linda. Now it's time to give Alice a taste.'

The Tooth Fairy sprang over to Alice, put its mouth close to hers and breathed hard in her face. She leapt back.

Sam's words were gone. He found he could use telepathy to talk to her. 'It's the Tooth Fairy I told you about.'

Clive and Terry still seemed to be deeply engaged in conversation a hundred yards away. Alice spoke back telepathically. Her lips shaped different words to the ones he was hearing, like a film soundtrack out of synch. 'My G.o.d. Is this what you see? I never realized.'

'Now you know.'

'You see this all the time? But it's so ugly! It's ugly!'

'You'll pay for that.' The Tooth Fairy grimaced. 'I owe you one.'

'Paranoia,' Sam tried again.

'I told you already I only let you think that would work on me. Just remember. This is my dream, not yours.'

'So ugly,' Alice repeated.

'If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?'

Alice recovered her ability to speak normally. 'I'm an orange,' she said. 'I'm an orange.'

The Tooth Fairy reached for a rusting razor blade embedded in a tree. 'Know thyself. Peel thyself.'

Sam gasped, feeling himself zoomed hundreds of yards away from where Alice sat. Then the clouds aligned in a menacing pattern of wicked chevrons, and the sky was filled with screaming, like the shrieking of a thousand strange birds, their wings interlocked to comprise the sky itself. And Sam realized that the screaming was coming from his own throat.

41.

Aftermath Sam, Clive and Terry spent the next three days trying to piece together the events of that afternoon: why Alice did what she did; when the ambulance arrived; who summoned it. Police wanted to know. Doctors wanted to know. Parents wanted to know.

The difficulty was that they were all so far out of their heads at the time, they found it difficult to distinguish real, horrific events from the three hours of hallucinatory nightmares which followed. It emerged that Terry had almost killed himself by sprinting to the road and leaping out in front of a car. Babbling incomprehensibly, he'd managed to terrify some family who were out for a Sunday drive, but they'd understood enough from him to call an ambulance.

To the squeal of the ambulance siren was added the migraine-flash of the police car's blue light. Sam was still vomiting from the sight of so much blood when the uniformed officers arrived. Clive was shocked into a state of paralysis, while Terry tried to make a run for it. He would have made it too but, having reached the safety of the woods, some impulse of surrender made him abandon the idea of escape, and he turned back to share the fate of his friends.

Once the ambulance crew had dragged out of them information about what Alice had taken and in what quant.i.ty, they left the young men to the police. Still hallucinating wildly as the ambulance sped away, the three were driven to a police station in Coventry. There they were isolated, interviewed and examined by a doctor.

'Any history of mental illness?' Sam was asked, and the question made him laugh hysterically. When he recovered he told the doctor about his contact with Skelton, about the Nightmare Interceptor, about Skelton's whisky demon, about Skelton's secretary Mrs Marsh, about neuro-physiology and- 'I'm going to give you a sedative. Is that acceptable?'

'Yes.'

Sam was quizzed over and over about exactly where he'd obtained the psychedelics. The 'stranger-in-a-pub' routine angered the interrogating officers, but he stuck with it because he knew Terry and Clive would do the same. This was only a bust if he could just keep his head. Eventually the sedative smoothed the edge off the hallucinations. By midnight the effects of the drug had almost worn off. A police officer cheerfully informed him that Drugs Squad officers had been dispatched to each of their homes to search for more drugs. Sam despaired.

It was in the early hours of the morning when he was taken to a room already occupied by Terry and his Uncle Charlie, Clive and Eric and Betty Rogers, and his own father.

When he walked through that door, his father gave him the look. Sam had been relegated from the status of insect. Now he was some species of insect larva.

The recriminations were endless. None of their parents actually banned them from seeing each other, but any hint that they might so do produced reactions of astonis.h.i.+ng vitriol. All contact was out of the question. Telephone calls were proscribed. His own parents, and he suspected the same would be true of the others', swung wildly between viewing him as the villain of the piece and the innocent lamb led astray by the influence of vile friends.

Worse still, they couldn't seem to get any information about the fate of Alice. Finally it got too much for Sam, and he plucked up the courage to go to her house.

Alice's mother answered the door, wearing a threadbare housecoat, her hair in curlers. She'd taken her dentures out. Her mouth puckered and she looked confused when she saw Sam. For a moment he thought she'd failed to recognize him. Her face, bruised with alcohol, was streaked with juniper-coloured shadows.

'I came to ask how Alice is. Is it possible to see her?'

Alice's mother made a gargling noise at the back of her throat. She twisted her head from side to side. Then she came at Sam like a hissing snake. 'How dare you show up at this door! How dare you! It's unspeakable that you should show your face at this door! Unspeakable!'

'I just want to know how she is!'

Alice's mother jabbed a nicotine-stained finger in his face. 'I TRUSTED YOU!' she shrieked. 'All of you! I gave you your freedom, and this is how you pay me back. I TRUSTED YOU!'

Sam was taken aback by her vehemence. He retreated, but after taking only a single step some instinct made him face her again. 'You're wrong. You didn't trust anyone. You just didn't give a d.a.m.n. You didn't even care about her and that boyfriend of yours. That's not the same as trust.'

'MONSTER!' she screamed. She hurtled down the path in her carpet slippers, launching herself at him, her arms flailing wildly. 'YOU MONSTER!'

Sam dodged to safety and jogged away from the house. Even after he'd put two hundred yards between them he could still hear her screaming. He walked back through the fields, hot tears of indignation stinging his eyes.

Only yards from the place where it had all happened, Sam saw Linda leaning against the fence. She was out walking t.i.tch, their whippet-cross. t.i.tch barked in recognition, and Linda turned.

'Sam!'

Reluctantly he crossed over to her. He didn't know whether she blamed him, like all the other adults.

'You look a lot better, Linda.' It was true, Linda was recovering, but there was a flintiness to her now. Tiny chips of ice in her eyes suggested that the sweet provincial girl would not be seen hereabouts again.

'Never mind me: what about you? You look terrible.'

'Alice's mother won't let me see her. She blames me. They all blame me.'

'Terry feels the same. He asked me why everything he touches turns to s.h.i.+t.'

'Why does it, Linda? What's wrong with us?'

She took his arm and stroked it, her face suffused with sympathy. She could see a boy who needed to cry but who couldn't break the taboo. 'It's not like that. Look at me. Am I any better? Didn't I f.u.c.k things up too?'

'Sure. But then you're also a Redstone Moodie.'

'Am I? I never thought I was in.'

'No, Linda. In fact, you were the original Moodie.'

Linda laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. 'See? We can cheer each other up, can't we?' Sam hung his head. She rested her cool fingers against his cheek, and he remembered another time when she'd done the very same thing. 'I'll go to Alice's this evening. Her mother won't chase me away. I'll find out how she is and I'll let you know.' She linked arms with him. 'Come on, walk down with me.'

42.

Farewell Moodies Blame, like water, levels out. The police failed to prosecute, having found no evidence on which to do so, their midnight searches notwithstanding, though all involved were officially cautioned. After the summer had pa.s.sed, they had their final exams to think about. If Sam and Clive got their heads down to study that year, it was all in deference to Alice.

Because of her self-inflicted injuries, Alice missed her exams, so she was set back a year to re-sit them at the same time as Clive and Sam sat theirs. Her wounds healed with time, but they didn't look pretty. At least, the brutal stepladder series of gashes on her left forearm and over the left side of her rib-cage could be covered up most of the time. The point was that Sam and Clive somehow felt that they should initiate a mood of serious study to help Alice through.

It worked because they all pa.s.sed their A-levels with more than respectable grades. It was a relief all round that something had finally worked out for them. Though it had never been in any doubt, Clive was going to Oxford to study microbiology. Sam was on his way to university in London to study astrophysics if he could abandon his young sister to fate. Alice had suspended her academic career for a while, even though she had secured a place at a teacher-training college in Sheffield. She talked frequently of taking some time off to travel.

Terry didn't make it as a professional footballer, slipping off the books of both Coventry City and Aston Villa, but he was remarkably sanguine about the business. He enjoyed the feeling of having money in his pocket from his paint-shop job and was generous when it came to buying rounds at the Gate Hangs Well Blues and Folk club. Ian Blythe was the only adult who never actually condemned them for what had happened, though he did proffer some advice one night as they stacked chairs after closing up the club.

Befuddled himself from several pints of Guinness, he a.s.sembled the four of them. 'Listen,' he said. 'Listen. Look at me. Most drugs make most people stupid. That's it.' Then he nodded judiciously, absolutely in concurrence with this opinion of his, burped and staggered to the toilet.

What was to be the last summer in Redstone pa.s.sed in a haze and a heatwave. The four of them went on holiday together, to a caravan in Norfolk, scrupulously to ignore Blythe's edict about drugs. Clive wanted to try some of the stuff that had caused all the trouble.

'Just to find out what went wrong,' he said when Alice was out of the caravan.

Sam and Terry answered with hostile glares.

'OK,' said Clive. 'Just a thought.'

Sometimes Sam genuinely didn't know if he was dreaming the Tooth Fairy or if she was, as she claimed, dreaming him.

'Do you still think about killing yourself ?'

'Yes,' said Sam. 'Because it would kill you. And in doing so, it would protect other people. Now I've seen how you do it. You talk people into destroying themselves. You probably told Terry's father to kill himself and his family. You told Derek to kill himself. You told Alice, and she would have done if the ambulance hadn't arrived.'

'You're wrong. You were responsible for what happened to Alice, not me. You handed her the blade.'

'That's a lie,' Sam whined. 'I saw you give her the blade.'

'But I only act on your directions,' said the Tooth Fairy. 'Right then you hated Alice. She made you jealous. I responded to that. Look back at all the times I came to you when you were angry, or afraid, or hurt.'

Sam was looking back. 'You feed on these things? Like you feed on a lost tooth?'

'It's a trade-off. You always get something in return. But it's an unfair partners.h.i.+p, Sam. You never give of yourself. That's why it often goes wrong.'

'What? What exactly am I supposed to give?'

The Tooth Fairy shrugged. 'Teeth. Soul. Love.'