Magrit Read online

  In her mind, Magrit saw a whole world filled with rooms attached to cemeteries attached to more rooms attached to a whole new set of cemeteries, stretching into as deep an infinity as her mind could understand: everyone in the whole world with a television and a window and a pair of curtains of their very own and a whole mountain of rubbish to eat and a Master Puppet to sit on a church roof and look after them as they grew.

  Magrit wondered if all the other Master Puppets were as grumpy and sarcastic as hers, and whether everyone in the world made Master Puppets to reflect their own personalities. Maybe hers was horrible because she was horrible. Maybe if she was nicer, he would be too.

  Magrit spat out her stick of grass and wiped her mouth. What if nobody made Master Puppets? What if Master Puppets lived first as thoughts that circled the minds of children until bodies were made to house them? Perhaps the people in the surrounding apartments were simply waiting for the right Master Puppet to come along and show them what body to build.

  Magrit didn’t know, and it had never bothered her before. She had built Master Puppet from her imagination and what she had learned from the skeletons she had discovered in the crypts. Without that knowledge, what Master Puppets were being built in the world outside the windows? What shapes were they taking? Whose voices did they use? Magrit had never considered such questions before.

  “You’ve never had someone else to look after before,” said a voice in her head. It wasn’t Magrit’s voice, or Master Puppet’s, but something lighter, higher pitched, as if a mind had measured the two tones and picked a spot halfway between them. Magrit’s eyes opened wide.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Don’t you recognise me?”

  “No.” Magrit glanced around in panic. “I don’t know you. Who are you?”

  “I’ve been here for a long time. Longer than you, my girl.”

  “No, you haven’t!”

  The new voice smiled inside her mind. “Just because you can’t see me, or hear me, doesn’t mean I’m not here.”

  “Then …” Magrit paused. The voice was opening up new questions, and she didn’t know which one to ask first. “Why … why can I hear you now?”

  “Oh, good question. Perhaps it’s because you’ve never doubted your past before. Or perhaps it’s because changes are coming, and you no longer believe your Master Puppet can protect you.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Well, I guess it’s all just a mystery.”

  Then the new voice was gone, and no matter how much Magrit demanded it come back and tell her what it meant, it was silent.

  Magrit stood, and looked all around her, but the cemetery was as it always was: quiet, peaceful and vacant. She could see Master Puppet in the distance, contemplating his tiny domain. Her gaze lingered on the chapel, moved almost of its own accord along the wall towards the rear corner, then jumped away to land on the nearby building as if burned. The blank windows that formed the walls of her world looked back at her with disinterest. Overhead, something grey fluttered out from behind a building, then fell across her vision until it landed on the other side of the cemetery. An empty bag, Magrit guessed, promising riches but giving nothing.

  Magrit laid her head back down. The sun was warm and mild. Bugrat snored gently at her feet. The grass spread out around her like a warm blanket, hiding her from view and muffling the sounds of the insects and tiny mammals that occupied the grounds. She had imagined the voice, she decided. Imagined it, or made it up to keep herself awake. Within seconds she was asleep, and dreaming of countless Master Puppets, enfolding her in bony, loving hugs.

  ONCE BUGRAT HAD TAKEN ONE step he wanted to take another, and another, and as many as he could manage before he fell over. In no time at all he was toddling about the cemetery as fast as his chubby legs could carry him. By the time summer began to warm the ground and fill the upper windows of the building with reflected light, Magrit had to scurry to keep up.

  Now he could walk, it seemed that all he wanted to do was step off the edge of things, or clamber up the crumbling crypt walls to a point where it was too high for him to get down, or run and trip and run and trip and run and trip until his pudgy knees were a mess of scabs and she had to croon made-up lullabies to stop him crying.

  Magrit invented new games to teach him the proper way to walk around the cemetery: Chase-and-Catch around the headstones and Upsey-Overs along the cracked and ruptured footpaths. She found a punctured football that was too flat to roll properly but bumbled and flolloped this way and that and brought a torrent of giggles from Bugrat as he chased it. Soon, all the private nooks and crannies and corners that she had thought were hers alone now belonged to both of them.

  There was no stopping Bugrat. He covered the ground in a determined waddle, his desire for exploration rewarded with a squeal of joy every time he discovered something new. Magrit followed along behind him, laughing with each revelation, smothering him in hugs with every shared experience, and only once holding him back and refusing entry to a part of the grounds.

  In the entire cemetery, the corner behind the chapel was the only place Magrit would not enter. It was a triangle of high grass maybe twenty steps in every direction: the rear of the chapel formed one side of the triangle; two buildings met to form the other two sides. A short iron fence joined the chapel wall to the buildings, except for a gap where a gate had once stood. Now it lay flat on the ground, its rotting wood providing a soft warning to go no further.

  Magrit would never do so. She didn’t like the corner. It wasn’t darker than any other spot in the cemetery, or colder, and the grass that grew wild and high there was no different to the grass that she enjoyed running through in all the other quarters. Still, there was something about this tiny area that caused dark clouds of worry and fear to gather in Magrit’s mind.

  Late at night, her dreams turned towards this part of the graveyard and sent her stumbling through the tall grass, her skin so hot she feared she might set the dry blades alight, until she screamed aloud and woke up, and spent the hours until dawn clutching her ragged blanket and vowing never to set foot inside that horrid triangle of empty ground.

  So she never squeezed through the gap during daylight hours and explored it. She simply turned her mind away and pretended it didn’t exist.

  Magrit was so good at forgetting about the corner that when she entered the crypt to wake Bugrat from his afternoon nap one day and found an empty nest of blanket scraps instead of a sleeping child, she did not even consider the idea that he might go there. She searched everywhere else, her footsteps growing ever quicker as he declined to appear in section after section of the cemetery.

  Bugrat wasn’t in the rotten vault, where all the walls had fallen in on each other and buried the stone sarcophagus at its centre, and where she sometimes played Hide-and-Find with him after eating. He wasn’t sitting between the tangled tomato plants where Magrit and he rested when it was hot, lying on their tummies in the shade and sucking the juice and seeds out of the fruits while they still hung on the branches. And he wasn’t running around the bag maze, skipping through the ranks of heavy unbroken garbage bags that Magrit had laid out ready to open and rummage through.

  By this time, Magrit was running from corner to corner and back again, searching under every headstone and through every head-high clump of grass, calling his name in a strangled, high-pitched whisper, afraid to shout too loudly in case she caught the attention of those in the apartments around her.

  “You’re looking in the wrong places.” The new voice was back, teasing, laughing. Magrit turned in a circle, her eyes wide in panic.

  “Where are you? Where is he?”

  “You’ll find him when you find yourself,” the voice said, and faded away.

  “What do you mean? Where is he?”

  But the voice was gone, and Bugrat was nowhere to be seen. And no matter how often she stopped and stood still, and bent her head just so, to try to catch a sound that didn’t belong and
might lead her to him, he was nowhere to be heard either.

  The shadows chased her across the cemetery, growing longer and longer as the sun fell behind the surrounding buildings, drowning their craggy edges in deep black until they resembled the smooth, rounded headstones they guarded. Finally, though she didn’t want to confess to having lost him, she stood before the chapel and peered up to where Master Puppet sat above her.

  “Can you help me?” she asked. “Can you help me find Bugrat?”

  Master Puppet stayed silent for the longest time. Magrit bit her lip. He had heard her question. He was just deciding which jibe would make her feel worst, which tone of voice would cut her feelings into the smallest pieces. Magrit felt her face tighten. She wasn’t going to cry, she decided. She was responsible. She was grown up. Not grown up like Master Puppet, but a different kind of grown up. One that didn’t cry in the face of Master Puppet.

  Then he spoke, and for half a second she didn’t know what to think. “Certainly,” he said, in his politest, most caring voice. “I know exactly where he is.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Magrit folded her hands in her lap and made sure to use her absolutely best manners. “Would you be so kind as to tell me where?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Master Puppet replied. “I saw him run down the side of my chapel an hour ago. He’s been playing behind me since then.”

  Rivers of cold ran through Magrit’s body. Goosebumps tickled her arms and chest, and her face and neck grew hot and spiky like she had been rubbing them with sharp grass.

  “He is where?”

  “You heard me.” Master Puppet’s voice had not changed, but now it was a fearful and terrible thing. “He’s playing behind us. Behind the chapel. You’ll have to go and get him.”

  “But … I can’t.” Magrit was caught in a sudden wave of terror. She wanted to run away, to hide at the bottom of the deepest, darkest corner of the graveyard, to put her hands over her eyes and pull rubbish over herself until nobody could ever find her again. Anywhere, anywhere but the corner that filled her heart with so much cold water. But her legs wouldn’t move, and all she could do was look from side to side and let tears bubble up and trickle down her cheeks. She wasn’t grown up any more, and Master Puppet could see her cry as much as he wanted, so long as he changed his answer. “I can’t.”

  “You have to.” He wasn’t going to let her back out; Magrit knew that. She was trapped between her fear and his disdain. Now she understood why he had been so nice. He didn’t have to shout at her or say nasty things in his superior grown-up voice. This was punishment enough. “If you want him back, you’ll have to go and get him.”

  “Please.” She bounced up and down. Energy filled her, but had nowhere to go, no way to escape. “Please don’t make me.”

  “Why?” And Master Puppet said the words she didn’t want to hear, and asked her the question she never, ever wanted to think about. “What are you afraid of?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried. At last, her legs moved. Her knees bent and lowered her to the cold concrete path, snuffling tears and runny snot, and blubbing out all the distress and fear she couldn’t keep inside any longer.

  Master Puppet waited until she was finished, until her sobbing ran down towards silence. Then his voice was inside her head, warm and slithery like an evil, smiling lizard. “You’ll have to go,” he said. “You don’t know if he’ll come out by himself.” His voice oozed with I-told-you-so smugness as he exposed her fear and gave it words. “Maybe he’ll stay there forever. He might never come out. And then where will you be? All alone again. Is that what you want? To be by yourself, with nobody to love you or remember you when you’re gone?” His voice slid around her denials, scraping at her thoughts with sharp, sharp nails. When she could stand it no longer she jumped up.

  “All right!” she snapped, as she rubbed the wetness from her face with a sleeve. “Leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Master Puppet said in his polite, friendly voice. “I was helping you, as you requested. I apologise if that upsets you.”

  Magrit’s eyes were hot. She glared up at her tormentor. “I hate you.”

  “Well, then,” he replied. “You’ll really want to go and get your little friend back, won’t you?”

  Magrit could think of nothing more to say. All she could do was stamp one foot, turn her back and stomp around the corner of the chapel, hoping that all the anger inside her would give her the power to march right up to Bugrat and pull him out before whatever caused her so much dread could find her.

  Her rage flew away as soon as she turned the bend and fear slipped in where it had been. Soon, she was sneaking along, gripping the stone wall with stiff fingers, the gap leading to the hidden garden getting closer, and closer, like a giant mouth just waiting to bite and chew and swallow her up.

  The walls of the chapel seemed to shrink as they approached the forbidden quadrant. Magrit kept her face pressed against them, afraid to look away in case the walls deserted her and gave her nothing to cling onto. The smooth surface near the front door gave way to pitted and ridged stones, which threw tiny shadows across themselves so that it appeared a million tiny eyes were observing her as she crept closer. Grass, tall and stiff, whispered strange truths as the wind stirred through it. The rotting metal fence leered at her with broken palings, the rusted gate hinges clicked in the breeze. The wall of the chapel ran out, until she found herself reluctantly wrapping her fingertips around its far edge, their white tips out of sight around the bend. She wanted to tilt her head to peek beyond the pitted grey stone, but there was no strength in her neck to do so.

  “Bugrat,” she whispered, hoping without hope that he might be right next to her, only just out of sight, and would come toddling around the corner in answer to her voice. “Bugrat.”

  Bugrat did not come. Magrit risked a louder call. “Bugrat. Bugrat!”

  And still she was alone, the side of her face pressed hard into the stone wall, eyes squeezed into squinty slits so she didn’t have to see the awful green and brown space before her. Her legs gave way, and she kneeled on her hands and knees, bunching her body into a ball so she took up the smallest amount of space possible.

  Slowly, she reached out one hand and placed it on the grass beyond the rear of the chapel.

  Nothing happened.

  Magrit opened one eye and examined her hand. It was where it always was: a thin, white, five-legged spider at the end of her wrist. She wriggled her fingers, feeling the grass tickle them. Nothing bit her or stung her exposed skin. Nobody leaned out of a nearby window to yell “Hey, you!” and bring her world to a standstill. No monsters appeared before her. Magrit swallowed and glanced around, feeling just the tiniest bit silly. She drew her hand back in, expecting the sky to fall in upon her. When nothing happened she dropped back against the stone wall and sat upright.

  There was nothing to fear. She knew it. She could see the grassed area if she leaned forwards and tilted her head in the right direction. It looked just like any other neglected corner of the cemetery: gritty brown walls surrounding a patch of yellow grass, with only the curtains inside the windows lending any colour at all. Small noises skittered through the grass stalks, and the weak sunlight bounced back and forth between the windowpanes until it seemed to shine from every direction at once. Whatever she was afraid of was inside her, not in this pathetic, empty angle of brick and stone.

  Bugrat was in there somewhere. She needed to find him and bring him home before the night grew too deep and she risked losing him until morning. She dragged herself to her feet, and stared at the thin gap between safety and the terrifying unknown beyond.

  “I can do this,” she said. “I can.”

  She shut her eyes and closed out the thoughts that swirled inside her head. She took one deep breath, and another, then stepped away from the safety of the wall and into the open space beyond.

  And collapsed.

  IT TOOK MAGRIT A LONG ti
me to wake up. There was a voice in her head, one she didn’t recognise. It was calling her name, over and over, as if searching for her among the long grass.

  Magrit opened her eyes. The sun had disappeared behind the buildings, and the shadows were crawling down the walls exactly the way they did just before night embraced the graveyard. She covered her ears with her hands, but the voice didn’t go away. It wasn’t Master Puppet. It wasn’t the hum of the surrounding buildings, drawn up into a single voice to finally talk to her directly. It sounded like a girl, with a voice just like Magrit’s but slightly deeper, slightly stronger and more confident in its own strength.

  Her words echoed around inside Magrit’s skull, making her want to cry out, to call “Here, Mummy!” and wave her hands until someone swept her up into a warm hug and carried her away to safety and love and things she couldn’t name but suddenly wanted more than anything else in the world. Magrit gasped as the pain of wanting pushed against the walls of her heart. The stranger’s words became clear, and all of Magrit’s desires melted away, leaving her body hollow and cold.

  She recognised the voice. It was the same one that had taunted her while she lay dreaming in the grass. And it was inside her head.

  “Who are you?” Magrit whispered. As soon as she said it, the voice stopped calling.

  “You know who I am,” it replied.

  “Are you …” For a second she didn’t know who it might be, so she said the only name for whom she could not find a voice. “Are you Bugrat?”

  “No.” The voice laughed, soft and sad. “He won’t have a voice until he has someone to speak to.”

  “What do you mean?” Magrit should have been angry, but she found herself fearful of the voice’s answer.