The Promised One Read online

  That afternoon Clare had a couple of free periods and she came home early.

  ‘Good, you’re back,’ said Joanna when she saw her, ‘perhaps you can stay with Lucy while I go out for a few things?’

  When their mother had left, Lucy looked at Clare. Since the astonishing events of that morning she had thought long and hard about what to do and had decided against telling her mother who, she knew, would immediately start worrying that Lucy was suffering from some serious aftereffect of her accident. On the other hand, she felt she had to tell someone who would really listen and understand, so she had decided to confide in her older sister. They had always been very close despite the big difference in their ages – Clare was seventeen and Lucy eleven – and Lucy was confident that Clare would know what to do.

  ‘Clare,’ she began, ‘I really don’t know how to tell you this but please listen, and try to let me finish before you ask any questions.’ She then told Clare everything that had happened that day. Then, before Clare could speak, she said:

  ‘I’ve not tried this before but I have a feeling that Tibs will do anything I say. I am going to call her now and ask her to fetch me a tissue. Don’t say a word.’

  Clare, who by now was seriously worried about her sister, decided to humour her a little longer and sat with a look of tolerant disbelief on her face.

  Within a few seconds they heard the clunk of the cat-flap and Tibbles appeared. She went straight to Lucy and sat at her feet gazing up at her. To Clare’s eyes Lucy did nothing but look at the cat. Tibbles then got up and went into the kitchen. Clare heard her jump on to the kitchen worktop – something she was forbidden to do – and then a rustling sound. A moment later Tibbles appeared with a mouthful of tissues and laid them at Lucy’s feet. She sat back proudly, unaware that she had a small piece of torn tissue stuck to her chin which made her appear slightly ridiculous. Lucy glanced at Clare and said aloud:

  ‘We can’t have you looking silly when you’ve been such a clever pussy, Tibbles.’ Then she fell silent and stared once more at the cat. The cat immediately twisted herself so as to reach her chin with her hind-paw and removed the fragment of tissue.

  Clare was stupefied. It was simply not possible that what she had just seen could have happened purely by chance, and she knew it.

  ‘I don’t wish to feel I’m just using Tibbles,’ said Lucy, ‘but it’s important that you really believe me, so I’m going to ask her to do one more thing. You know how she always sits in her favourite tree next to the Bolands’ fence?’ Clare nodded, speechless. Tibbles always sat in a fork of this tree so she could keep an eye on both gardens. She never went to the tree on the other side of the garden because the Browns on that side had a dog, Jumble, who always got very excited at the sight of Tibbles.

  ‘I’m going to send her to say hello to Jumble,’ she said mischievously. She then turned her attention back to Tibbles, who had curled up and was beginning to close her eyes for a nap. The cat suddenly sprang to her feet and looked up at Lucy. She then turned, a little reluctantly, Clare thought – or was it her imagination? – and disappeared. Once more the cat-flap clunked and a few seconds later the girls, now at the French windows, saw Tibbles, who was putting on weight, scrambling with some effort up the tree, placing her front paws on the Browns’ fence and miaowing into their garden. Soon they heard Jumble barking frantically from next door and Tibbles withdrew from the fence into the safety of the tree. There was a long pause during which the sisters looked at each other. Clare had gone pale.

  ‘What on earth has happened to you?’ she eventually whispered, now utterly convinced of her sister’s powers as a result of what she had seen.

  ‘I dunno. It must be something to do with the accident or the operation. I feel perfectly OK.’

  ‘Have you told Mum or Grandma?’

  ‘No, Grandma and Grandpa left for home just after you went to school this morning and I daren’t tell Mum. She’ll think I’ve gone nuts and she’s got enough to worry about just now what with not hearing from Daddy.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Clare. ‘We mustn’t tell her – not yet anyway. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do. It’s happened. You know I want to be a vet and if the power lasts it’ll obviously be very useful. I would like to know more about it though, and Tibbles seems to think that some more intelligent animals – well, she didn’t say it quite like that, but it’s what she meant – may be able to tell me more.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Clare, ‘what a thing to say to people – it would be really cool to do things in front of everyone at school.’ She paused and then frowned. ‘I don’t know though. It might be a mistake to tell anyone else just yet. Maybe we should keep it secret for the time being.’

  Lucy nodded in agreement.

  ‘One thing I must do,’ she said, ‘is to find another animal to talk to. Do you think I can get to see an owl?’

  ‘Did Tibbles suggest an owl?’ said Clare, doubtfully.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Lucy, ‘but they’re meant to be wise, aren’t they?’

  Clare wasn’t sure if they were or not, but agreed it might be worth a try and then went off to attempt to do her homework. She had a lot of work to do in her final year at school, but it was difficult to concentrate when such exciting things were happening to Lucy. She tried to put these out of her mind and eventually opened her chemistry books and got started.

  That night Lucy woke up thirsty and decided to go down for a drink. She got out of bed and, tiptoeing past her mother’s room and Clare’s room, went downstairs. The kitchen door was ajar and as she got near she could hear ‘voices’ in the kitchen. In her mind’s eye they were tiny little sounds and Lucy was in no doubt that they came from the ‘scurripods’ that Tibbles had mentioned. Quiet as a scurripod herself, she crept nearer to the door and listened. To her astonishment she could understand every word.

  ‘Old Furriclaws came back with a limp tonight,’ one little voice said.

  ‘I think she must have hurt her paw chasing a hedgiquill,’ said another. ‘They’re getting slow now it’s time for their snowsleep, so they are about the only things she can chase with her weight problem. One of these days she’s going to get stuck in the flap-that-cut-off-Minnie’s-tail.’

  ‘Yes, well, don’t you get too clever,’ said one with an older voice. ‘She can still move quickly when you don’t expect it, as poor Babybel could tell you if she were still here.’ There was a sorrowful silence as the mice thought of their dead relative and Lucy wondered if the little tail Clare had found in Tibbles’s bowl, which she had told Lucy about while she was in hospital, had been the last earthly remains of a scurripod named after its favourite food. As the conversation started again Lucy suddenly realized that there was no reason for her to hide. Tentatively, she switched on her ‘beacon’. This was how she had come to think of what she did, but in reality it just meant that she opened her mind to the animal kingdom. The effect was dramatic. There was instant silence, then, after a very long pause, the eldest voice, trembling slightly in awe, began to speak.

  ‘Greetings, O Promised One. What dost thou desire?’

  Lucy opened the kitchen door and turned on the light. Several mice sat looking at her: three on the floor eating a fragment of boiled potato, two in a cupboard and one on the worktop in front of the breadbin near a little pile of crumbs – the remains of one of Clare’s late night snacks. Their eyes were wide with attention and their ears pricked up.

  ‘Greetings, O scurripods, I come not to harm you. Since I learnt to speak I have spoken only to Furriclaws, and wish now to speak to some other animals.’ As the mice exchanged nervous glances she added: ‘Fear not, Furriclaws has gone out again despite her sore paw. She went out of my window down the sloping roof.’ The mice visibly relaxed, but Lucy noticed that the three on the floor moved further away from the cat-flap in case the cat suddenly returned. She realized that she didn’t really know how to strike up a conversation with six mice so sh
e sat down on the floor to make them feel more comfortable. Food had to be a topic that would interest them.

  ‘What do you like best to eat?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Crunchy peanut butter and chocolate,’ said the plumpest mouse, without hesitation, and the others murmured in squeaky agreement.

  ‘Well,’ said Lucy, ‘I shall put some out for you in the little hole in the floorboards in the cupboard under the stairs every night, but you mustn’t go on the worktop or in the food cupboard. Oh,’ she added, ‘and from now on there are to be no poos anywhere my mother can see them.’

  ‘You are kind, O Promised One,’ said another mouse, ‘and it shall be done as you say; but,’ he hesitated, ‘could … could you sometimes leave out some cheese as well?’ Lucy laughed and they all jumped. The one on the worktop ran behind the breadbin, those in the cupboard disappeared behind a cornflake packet and the others cowered on the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lucy as she realized that they didn’t know what laughter was, ‘we Tailless Ones sometimes make that noise with a fierce face when we are happy – I didn’t mean to frighten you. Of course I will leave some cheese out if you wish.’

  Having relaxed at her reassuring words the mice suddenly became alert once more and looked in unison at the cat-flap as if they were all connected by some invisible wires. They could obviously hear something that Lucy couldn’t. She got up and went to the window. Putting her head between the curtains to shut out the light behind her, she peered out into the moonlit garden just in time to see a shadowy shape flit away from the dustbins, frightened by the movement of the curtains at the window.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Lucy, rearranging the curtain and returning to the mice. ‘It’s just a fox at the rubbish.’

  ‘The henbane comes every night,’ said the oldest mouse. ‘Sometimes he puts his nose through the flap-that-cut-off-Minnie’s-tail but he’s too big to get in.’ Then he added, with quiet satisfaction, ‘Furriclaws is very frightened of him.’

  Lucy decided it was time to get her water and go back to bed.

  ‘I must leave you now and return to my place of rest,’ she said, finding herself speaking in an old-fashioned way, just as they did. ‘My thanks to you all for talking to me and I shall speak to you again soon. Good night.’

  ‘Fare thee well,’ they all chorused in their tiny voices.

  Lucy filled her glass, put the light out and went into the hall, pulling the kitchen door almost shut behind her. She stood still for a moment, listening to the excited babble of high-pitched voices that broke out.

  ‘Can you believe it, She lives in our house!’

  ‘She must have been the Promised One all the time and we never knew!’

  ‘Trust Furriclaws to get to speak to Her first.’

  ‘Just wait till we tell next door. Having the Promised One in our house is mega-important compared with that silly secret hole into the biscuit cupboard they’re always boasting about!’

  ‘…and them down the road, with their nest in that posh doll’s house!’

  ‘Do you think She’ll leave some cheese out every night?’

  ‘Do you think She might shut Furriclaws out all night if we ask?’

  ‘You know that place they take Furriclaws when they go away on holiday? Maybe they could leave her there all the time.’

  ‘Sometimes I think they must like Furriclaws!’

  ‘Should we have asked Her to put a bell on Furriclaws’ collar?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck. Anyway, you’re the one that was saying she was too fat to move a few minutes ago.’

  Lucy wanted to stay and listen all night, but she felt slightly uneasy at using her power in this way and a little throb in her head and a shaky feeling in her legs reminded her that her full recovery was still a long way off. It was time to get back to bed.

  In the morning she told Clare what had happened.

  ‘Can you believe it!’ she said. ‘Mice in our kitchen actually joking about Tibbles getting fat. And they spoke in a funny mixture of modern and old-fashioned speech. The older ones said “thee” and the younger ones said “you”.’

  ‘What else did they say?’ asked Clare.

  ‘Well, I didn’t like to listen too long,’ said Lucy. ‘I felt I was – what’s the word? – eavesdropping.’

  ‘No,’ said Clare, ‘in this case the word is mousedropping.’

  ‘Is it really?’ asked Lucy looking suspiciously at her. She was never quite sure when her big sister was making one of her silly jokes.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare pretending to be serious, ‘and I also think that you shouldn’t be ratting on them like this.’ With this she burst out laughing and then had to duck as the Promised One threw a pair of dirty socks at her.

  The next morning, with her headmistress’s permission, Clare went to the hospital. She wanted to be a doctor and when she had been visiting Lucy in hospital she had become friendly with the young doctor looking after her sister, Christine Goodward. Christine had invited her to come back and look at the pictures they had taken of Lucy’s brain, as long as Lucy didn’t object.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Lucy had said when Clare asked her, adding with a grin, ‘It’ll be good for you to know what a perfect brain looks like before you go to medical school.’

  At the hospital Christine introduced Clare to Dr Pixel, the radiologist who had helped Professor Furrowhead with Lucy’s operation. He told her to call him Andy and she was fascinated when he showed her a picture of the arteries in Lucy’s brain.

  ‘The arteries are tubes that carry blood to the brain just like water pipes carry water in your house. This one,’ he pointed, ‘feeds Lucy’s pineal gland, which is a little structure the size of a pea right in the middle of her brain. The artery was damaged by the metal spike from the car but it’s OK now we’ve fixed it. In fact it’s the biggest artery I’ve ever seen just there so I’m quite sure she’ll be all right.’

  ‘Why is it big?’ said Clare. ‘And was it like that before the accident?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the doctor, ‘but it’s not important – that’s just how Lucy’s made. Everybody is a little bit different from everybody else on the inside, just as they are on the outside. She must have a very special pineal gland,’ he said, grinning, ‘just as I’ve got a very special nose.’ Clare looked at his rather large nose and all three of them laughed.

  As she returned to school Clare went over in her mind the events of the morning and her discussions with the doctors. She was particularly interested in the pineal gland, which she had never come across in her biology lessons. During lunch hour she went to the school library and got down some big books of anatomy and physiology to find out more about it. It was apparently about the size of a large pea and sat on a little stalk right in the middle of the brain. Its main function seemed to be to control the changes that occurred in the body in response to night and day, the circadian rhythm, but as she read on Clare got the feeling that it might also do things that scientists still didn’t fully understand. It certainly seemed to be a very old part of the body in terms of the human race and evolution. Clare didn’t know why but she felt curiously excited at the thought that Lucy had got an especially large artery going to her pineal gland and she wondered how certain Dr Pixel could have been when he said it wasn’t important. He didn’t, of course, know that Lucy could talk to animals. Was it possible that her accident had somehow changed the function of Lucy’s gland in a way that had uncovered a primitive ability now lost to all other humans? She was more determined than ever to become a doctor and one day find out much more about the human brain.

  While Clare was in the school library learning about the pineal gland, Lucy was having another chat with Tibbles. As she used her new faculty she was becoming more proficient in controlling it and she could talk to Tibbles even with the window open simply by shutting the other voices out. She could, she found, even pick out one of those voices to concentrate on if she wanted, and shut Tibbles out. There seemed to be
a receptor or receiver that she could shut off when she wanted, and a separate ‘transmitter’ or outward beacon that animals could detect. She remembered that Clare had been interested in what Tibbles thought about owls and asked the cat if she ever spoke to them, after first politely enquiring about her sore paw.

  ‘I have seen the nightbanes during sunsleep, hunting scurripods and coneybanes,’ Tibbles replied, ‘but I have never dared speak to them. They do not come here very often and I think you will have to go to the great woods.’ Lucy knew she couldn’t go alone to any woods so she started to hatch a plan for a family outing. She resolved to get Clare’s help in organizing it.

  That evening Clare brought home some homework from Mrs O’Grady, Lucy’s new form teacher.

  ‘Mrs O’Grady asked me to see her,’ she announced. ‘She said that while you are convalescing you should try and catch up a bit on the work you’ve missed. It’s mostly reading, apparently, but Miss Anther would like you to write up a topic for your course work.’ Sheila Anther taught biology – Lucy’s favourite subject. She looked through the file and found the biology page.