Black Maria. Diana Wynne Jones

The big house was all among trees, but we thought there must be a road beyond it, so we climbed a sort of mound-thing at the bottom of the field to see where the road was. The mound was all grown over with whippy little bushes that were budding big pale buds and there were little trampled paths leading in and out all over. I remember thinking that it looked a good place to play in. Children obviously played here. Then we got to the top of the hill and we could see the children.

      They were in the garden of the big house. It was a boring red-brick house that looked as if it might be a school. The garden, which we could look down into across a wall, was a boring school-type garden, too, just grass and round beds with evergreens in them. The children were all playing in it, very quietly and sedately. It was unnatural. I mean, how can forty kids make almost no noise at all? The ones who were playing never shouted once. Most of them were just walking about, in rows of four or five. If they were girls, they walked arm in arm. The boys just strolled in a line. And they all looked alike. They weren’t alike. All the girls had different little plaid dresses on, and all the boys had different coloured sweaters. Some had fair hair, some brown hair, and four or five of the kids were black. Their faces weren’t the same. But they were, if you see what I mean. They all moved the same way and had the same expressions on their different faces. We stared. We were both amazed.

      “They’re clones,” said Chris. “They have to be.”

      “But wouldn’t clones be like twins?” I said.

      “They’re part of a secret experiment to make clones look different,” Chris said. “They’ve managed to make their bodies not look alike, but their minds are still the same. You can see they are.”

      It was one of those jokes you almost mean. I wished Chris hadn’t said it. I didn’t think the children could hear him from where we were, but a man came up beside me from the bushes while Chris was talking, and I knew the man could hear. Luckily at that moment, a lady, dressed a bit like a nurse, came out into the garden.

      “Come along, children,” she called. “It’s getting cold and dark. Inside, all of you.”

      The lady was one of the Mrs Urs. As the children all obediently walked towards her, I remembered she was Phyllis Forbes. I was going to tell Chris, but I looked at the man first because it was embarrassing with him standing there. He seemed to have gone. So I looked at Chris to tell him and Chris’s face was a white staring blur, gazing at me.

      “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!” I said.

      “I have,” he said. “The ghost from my room. He was standing right beside you a second ago.”

      I ran then. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. I went tearing my way through the bushes all across and down the little hill and then out into a field of some kind and then into another field after that. I remember a wire fence twanging and a hedge which scraped me all over, and a huge black and white beast suddenly looming at me out of the twilight. It was a cow, I think. I did a mad sideways swerve round it and ran on. I wanted to scream, but I was so frightened that all I could make was a little whimpering sound.

      After a while I could hear Chris pelting after me, calling out, “Cool it, Mig! Wait! He’s not frightening at all really!” I wanted to shout back, “Then why did you look so scared?” but I could still only make that stupid mewing noise. “Hm-hm-hm!” I said to Chris and rushed on. I don’t know where I went at all, with Chris rushing after me telling me to stop. It was getting darker all the time. But I think some of where I ran must have been allotments along the back of Cranbury, because it was all cold and cloggy and I kept treading on big clammy plants that went crunch and gave out a fierce smell of cabbage. My feet got heavier and heavier like they do in nightmares. I could see town lights twinkling to one side and orange street light shining steadily ahead, and I raced for the orange light with my huge heavy feet, and my chest hurt and I kept going “hm-hm-hm!” until Chris caught me up and I suddenly ran out of breath.

      “Honestly!” he said. He was disgusted.

      We were beside an iron fence just outside the station car park, with dew hanging off it and glittering on all the cars in the orange light. A train was just coming rattling into the station. I had a stitch and I could hardly breathe. I lifted first one foot then the other into the light. They were both giant-sized with earth and smelt of cabbage. We looked at them and we laughed. Chris leant on the fence and squealed with laughter. I hiccuped and panted and my eyes watered.

      “It wasn’t really the ghost,” I said when I could speak, “was it?”

      “I just said it to frighten you,” said Chris. “The result was spectacular. Get some of that mud off. Aunt Maria will be telling everyone we’re drowned and Elaine will be giving Mum hell for letting Auntie get so worried.”

      Now I’m writing it down, I can see Chris was lying to make me feel better. I didn’t realise then and I did feel better. I stood on one leg and took my shoes off in turn and scraped them on the iron fence. Chris scraped his a bit, but he wasn’t anything like as muddy. He had looked where he was going.

      While we were doing it, the train had stopped and all the people from it began to come out of the station. They came one after another along past the fence under the light. They didn’t look at us. They were all staring straight ahead and walking in the same brisk way, looking kind of dull and tired. “Rush-hour crowd,” Chris said. “Funny to have it out here too. I wonder where they all commute to.”

      “They look like zombies,” I said. Most of them were men and they mostly wore city suits. About half the line marched out through the gate at the end of the car park. We could hear their feet marching twunka twunka twunka down the road into Cranbury. The other half, in the same unseeing way, walked to cars in the car park. The space was suddenly full of headlights coming on and starters whining. “Zombies tired after work,” I said.

      “All the husbands of the Mrs Urs,” said Chris. “The Mrs Urs take their souls away and then send them out as zombies to earn money.”

      “But the Mr Urs don’t realise,” I said. “They’ve all been zombies for years without anyone knowing.” The cars were all zooming out of the car park by then, crunchle crunchle as they came past us on the gravel, flaring headlights over us. The zombies in each car looked straight ahead and didn’t notice us staring over the fence. Car after car. It was giving me a mesmerised feeling, until one crunched by that was blue, with one headlight dimmer than the other and dents in well-known places. “Hey!” I cried out. I hung on to the fence so that my hands hurt. “Chris, that was—!”

      “No, it wasn’t,” Chris said. He was hanging on the fence too. “It had the wrong number. I thought it was our car too for a moment, but it wasn’t, Mig. Truly.”

      You can rely on Chris where numbers are concerned. He’s always right. “It was awfully like ours,” I said.

      “Creepily like,” Chris agreed. “I really did wonder if they’d dried it out and mended the door and sold it to someone – for a second, till I looked at the number plate.”

      By the time all the cars had driven away, the porter in sea boots was padding about in front of the station, closing it for the night by the look of it. We climbed over the fence and trotted out through the car park gates.

      “We’d better not tell Mum,” I said.

      “No,” said Chris. “We can tell her we’ve seen clones and zombies, but not about the car.”

      In the end, we didn’t tell Mum anything much. We were in trouble – both of us for being so late and me about the state my clothes were in. Aunt Maria was really put out about my clothes. “So thoughtless, dear. I can’t take you to the Meeting looking like that.”

      “I thought your meeting was this afternoon,” Chris said.

      Mum shushed him. She was in a frenzy. The Mrs Urs had been there all afternoon having their Circle of Healing and wolfing cake, and now Aunt Maria had announced that there was a Meeting at Cranbury Town Hall she had to go