An extract from ‘A
GUARDIAN WHAT?’
‘Hari!’ I said, angrily. ‘Stop playing stupid games. You didn’t scare me one bit, so don’t think you did, OK? I flung open the door, furious with her, and with me, for being fooled.
It wasn’t Hari. My brain said, Shut the door again, quick, Tali! But my bits, the bits that shut doors on command, weren’t listening. I just stood there, waiting to be sucked down into ~ wherever it was the late-night movie kid went.
When I’d rummaged for my school skirt that morning, the wardrobe had been just as usual. Untidy. On the shelf over the top of the clothes-rail were jigsaw puzzles, tennis rackets, piles of sheet music and Tecwyn Ted, the bear I grew out ages ago ~ honest ~ but I don’t want to throw him away because I still need him sometimes, OK? The floor was a jumble of shoes, a bit smelly it’s true, but nothing like the terrible, awful smell that was coming out of the wardrobe now. And that wasn’t all. There were also clouds of thick, yellowish fog drifting out, filling the room.
It wasn’t smoke: it smelled cold and damp, as if things were going mouldy. It reminded me of the time I climbed up a hill near Cricieth. One minute there was bright sunshine with a little, bitty cloud in the distance. Next minute I was completely surrounded by the little bitty cloud, which had got bigger and thicker while I wasn’t looking, and turned into a real fog. I had to stay where I was, my teeth chattering with cold, until the little bitty cloud decided to move on and annoy someone else. It now seemed to have taken up residence in my wardrobe…
Fog poured out ~ fog with a personal freshness problem!
I heard the scraping, shuffling sound again. My body came to life at last and scuttled backward, deciding that cowardice was a Very Good Idea.
Something moved far back in the fog, coming towards me as if
the wardrobe was not one metre deep but four hundred, as if someone ~ no,
something ~ was coming from a long, long way away. And then, IT arrived.