The Flask. Nicky Singer
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Название: The Flask
Автор: Nicky Singer
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9780007455102
isbn:
I also see, in the mirror, the flask. It has fallen over, it’s lying on its side on the desk.
No. No!
I scoot off the bed.
Please don’t be cracked, please don’t be broken.
The flask has only just entered my life and yet, I realise suddenly, I feel very powerfully about it. Connected, even. I find myself lurching forwards, grabbing for it. But it isn’t my beautiful, breathing flask, it is just a bottle. Something you might dig up in any old back garden. It isn’t broken, but it might just as well be, because the colours are gone and so are the patterns. No, that’s not true, there are whorls on the surface of the glass still, but they aren’t moving any more, and the bubbles, my little seed fish, they aren’t swimming. And there is nothing – nothing – inside.
I feel a kind of fury, as though somebody has given me something very precious and then just snatched it away again. I realise I already had plans for that flask. I was going to remove the cork and…
The cork – where is the cork?
It isn’t in the bottle. I scan the desk. It isn’t on the desk. But how can it be anywhere but in the bottle or on the desk? Did I imagine a cork? No, I saw it: a hard, discoloured thing, lodged in the throat of the flask. I look into the empty bottle, as if the cork might just miraculously appear. But it doesn’t. The smell of the bottle is of cold and dust. There can’t have been anything in that bottle.
And yet there was.
There was something crouched inside that glass, waiting.
No, not crouched, that makes it sound like an animal. And the thing didn’t have that sort of form, it was just something moving, stirring. Then I see it, the cork. Look! There on the floor. It’s not close to the flask, not just fallen out and lying on the desk, but a full metre away. Maybe more. To carry the cork that far something big, something powerful, must have come out of the flask, burst from it.
So where is that thing now?
It’s on the window sill.
What I thought was a patch of sunlight isn’t sunlight at all. It’s bright like sunlight, but it doesn’t fall right, doesn’t cast the right shadows. Light coming through a windowpane starts at the sun and travels for millions of miles in dead straight lines. You learn that in year 6. Light from the sun is not curved, or lit from inside, or suddenly iridescent as a soap bubble or milky as a pearl. It doesn’t expand and pulse and move. It doesn’t breathe. Whatever is on the window sill, it isn’t light from the sun.
I go towards it. It would be a lie to say I’m not frightened. I am frightened, terrified even, but I’m also drawn. I can’t help myself. I remember my old maths teacher, Mr Brand, breaking off from equations one day and going to stand at the window where there was a slanted sunbeam. He cupped his hands in the beam and looked at the light he held – and didn’t hold.
“You can’t have it,” he said. “You can’t ever have it.”
And all of the class laughed at him. Except me. I knew what he meant because I’ve tried to capture sunbeams too.
And now I want the thing on the window sill, because it is strange and beautiful and I don’t want to lose it again. I don’t want to feel what I felt when I saw that the flask was empty, which is sick and hollow, my stomach clutching just like in the moment when Mum told me Aunt Edie was dead.
So I move very slowly and quietly, as though the thing is an animal after all and might take fright. And it does seem to be vibrating – or trembling, I can’t tell which – as though it is aware of me, watching me, though something without eyes cannot watch.
“It’s all right,” I find myself saying. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”
I won’t hurt it! What about it hurting me?
My room’s not big, as I’ve said, but it takes an age to cross. I am just a hand-stretch away from the pearly, pulsing light when there is a sudden whoosh, like a wind got up from nowhere, and I feel a rush and panic, but I don’t know if it is my rush and panic or that of the thing which seems to whip and curl past my head and pour itself back into the flask.
Back into the flask!
Quick as a flash, I put my thumb over the opening and I hold it down tight as I scrabble in the desk for my sticky tape. I pull at the tape, bite some off, jam it over the open throat of the flask and then wind it again and again around the neck, so the thing cannot escape.
I have it captured.
Captured!
Then I feel like one of those boys you read about in books that pull the wings off flies: violent, cruel. But here’s the question: if you had something in your bedroom that flew and breathed and didn’t obey the laws of science, would you want it at liberty?
There you are then.
When my heart calms down, I feel I owe the flask (or the thing inside it) an explanation. I think I should tell the truth, about the fear as well as the excitement. But I don’t know who or what I’m dealing with, so I also feel I shouldn’t give too much away. I should be cautious. Si’s always saying that: a man of science proceeds with care. Or If you’re going to mix chemicals, Jess, put your goggles on.
I’m not sure what sort of goggles I need to deal with the thing in the flask, but I think the least I can try is an apology.
“I’m sorry about the sticky tape,” I say.
I’m not really expecting a reply and I don’t get one, but the movement inside the flask does seem to become a little less frantic, so I have the feeling the thing is listening.
“I guess you must have been in that flask a long time,” I say next.
Where does that remark come from? From the cold and the dust I smelt in the bottle? Or from some story-book knowledge of things in bottles, genies in lamps? What am I imagining, that the thing is some trapped spirit cursed to remain in the flask for a thousand years until – until what? Until Jessica Walton arrives with her father’s ill-fitting slide rule? They say (correction: Si says) if you put a sane person in a lunatic asylum for any length of time they become as mad as the inmates. Me? I’m talking to a thing in a flask.
I’m calling it you.
The word you implies that the thing I’m talking to is alive. I mean you don’t say you to a box of tissues, do you? Or to a hairbrush or a necklace or a mobile phone. So I am making a definite assumption about the thing being alive. Mr Pugh, our biology teacher, says that only things that carry out all seven of the life processes can be said to be alive. Pug calls this Mrs Nerg.
M – for movement
R – for reproduction
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