Dead Romantic (8 page)

‘Wow, this is nice,' I said, beginning the painful walk across the gravel.

Zoe didn't even blink. ‘No, it's not. We inherited this place from my grandfather. He was into antiques. We're not.'

Everything went silent except for the distant whooping. There was a river flowing alongside the driveway, and by the light of the moon I could see its shimmering path through the garden. She handed me the dog's head and unlocked the front door. ‘Mind the step.'

‘Why? What's it going to do?' I jumped, grimacing as I looked at my hand, which was now thickly covered with blood.

The hallway was dark and smelled like my dad's old war books. Zoe lit a big candlestick thing on a small marble table next to a big pile of unopened letters with red writing all over them. When my eyes got used to the light the first thing I saw was this massive stuffed blueygreeny lizard in a glass case on the shelf. The walls were
high and red and the carpet was mossy green. All around were stuffed animals in glass cases. And when I looked again, I saw some of them weren't any old stuffed animals. A goat had huge white swan wings coming out of its back. There was a cat with duck feet. A crab-like creature with a mouse's head. A two-headed piglet with a tortoise's shell.

‘Blimey O'Riley,' I said, as under-my-breath as I could. ‘What kinds of animals are these?'

Zoe looked at me as though she couldn't fathom what I was so shocked about. ‘My mother was a taxidermist. She used to experiment with some of the specimens my father . . . didn't get quite right.'

‘She used to?' I asked. ‘What does she do now?' But Zoe didn't answer and I was too unnerved by the goat, which I was sure had just winked at me, to press her on it.

All the cases were numbered. In a corner of the hall stood a large stuffed polar bear with deer-like legs, its front paws holding out a dusty tray of drinks. He had a number seven pinned to his ear.

‘Wow,' I said, whispering like I do in museums. ‘Your parents must have been really clever. My mum can't even sew up a turkey's arse to keep the stuffing in at Christmas.'

Zoe led me up an endless Hogwartsy staircase by the light of her many-candled candlestick, passing glass cases full of china dolls with scratchy faces and toys from the olden days and butterflies pinned to boards, all covered in cobwebs. There were horrible faded green velvet curtains at the windows and every single stair was piled up at one end with a stack of paperback books.

‘So you live with your Aunt Gwen?' I whispered,
shrinking away so the velvet curtains didn't infect me with their velvetiness.

‘Yes,' said Zoe. ‘She moved in just after my father . . .' She stopped talking.

‘Went away?' I said, thinking maybe it was hard for her to talk about him going into an asylum – if that's where he was.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I can't bear the woman but she keeps the under-age squad at Social Services happy.'

I was more than a bit relieved to hear about the lack of dad. I never liked meeting people's dads anyway, cos they're always a bit weird, but mad dads who stored people's body parts and lived in trees I especially didn't want to meet tonight.

Zoe went and knocked lightly on the door of one of the bedrooms. She poked her head around it. A grandfather clock chimed midnight on the landing. Zoe closed the door. ‘She's asleep. Good. That'll keep her out of our hair for the night.'

‘What are we going to do?' I asked. She held up the puppy's headless body. ‘Oh right, yeah,' I laughed, looking at the head. ‘Pin the head on the doggy.'

It was so dark in Zoe's room my eyes again had to strain to see. She lit some more candles and slowly it all started to come to life. It looked like a museum. There was a bookshelf covering a whole wall, and more shelves with cases of smaller stuffed animals on it. Dotted here and there were glass bottles with labels with long science words I couldn't pronounce on them, and what looked like pickled-onion jars, except they had little skulls in them
not onions. A sign on the back of her door read ‘
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education
– Albert Einstein.'

‘I like your room,' I told her.

She laid the two-part puppy carefully on her desk next to all kinds of instruments and knives and stuff I'd only ever seen at the dentist's. She lit lots more candles and set them down beside her patient.

‘Don't you have electricity?' I said.

‘We're trying to keep costs down,' she said, washing her hands in a little basin in the corner and snapping on a pair of disposable gloves from a small cardboard box. ‘Aunt Gwen only has her pension. Times are hard and it's an expensive place to run.' She sat down at the desk and reached for the headlight she'd been wearing the night in the graveyard and put it on her head, then took the end of a little tube dangling from a hanging packet of blood and inserted a needle into the end of it.

‘The credit crunchy thing.' I nodded. ‘Yeah, my dad's all, “If it's brown, flush it down; if it's yellow, let it mellow.” And my mum's started buying value washing-up liquid. It's well depressing.' I picked up the anatomy model from the end of a bookshelf and tried to prise out the heart. ‘She used to do mobile nail art but she had to give it up. She had to do like a thousand nails a week just to pay for the petrol for the van so it wasn't worth it in the end. We've still got the van though.'

The beam from Zoe's headlight flickered as her hand moved back and forth with a needle and thread. Slowly but surely, the puppy's head began to join its body.

‘Are you on Facebook?' I asked her.

‘No.'

‘Oh. You should join, then we could chat. Look for me. I'm Camille Omnomnom Mabb at the moment. That's not my real name though. Last week I was Camille Hufflepuff Mabb and the week before that I was Camille EverybodyLovesaParty Mabb. It's just something me, Lynx and Poppy are trying out.'

‘But not any more,' said Zoe.

‘No,' I said. ‘Guess I'll always be Omnomnom now. Damian's on Facebook too. He's got all these pictures of himself in front of mirrors. One of his photo albums is just of his six-pack. I can't help fancyng him though, even though I know it's wrong. Why am I still in love with someone who's such a . . . ?'

‘Runt?'

‘No. Someone who treats me so badly?'

Zoe stopped sewing and turned to me. ‘People in love, or in your case lust, go slightly insane for a time. It's scientific fact.'

‘Are you saying I'm mad?' I asked, fumbling with the model and organ bits.

‘Yes, in a manner of speaking. Love or lust makes one so. I don't have any truck with it. Can't take the risk of suffering such intellectual impairment. My father always kept me away from boys when I was home-schooled.'

‘Wow, I've never met anyone who was home-schooled,' I said, still fumbling with the model's plastic heart, until my hand slipped and the organs burst out over the floor. Zoe didn't stop working. I scrabbled round the carpet,
collecting them up. ‘I bet you know the names of all these organs, don't you?'

‘Yes,' she said.

I stood up and replaced the model on the bookshelf, not really sure if I had everything back in correctly. I was pretty sure nothing was supposed to stick out. ‘Is that easy to do?' I asked her, leaning over the desk.

‘Fairly easy,' she said, repositioning the dog. ‘In the grand scheme of things, the head's the most straightforward part to attach.'

‘And then you inject the blue stuff and it sticks everything together, right? Like you did with the hamsters?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Glad you were paying attention.' She tapped the hanging blood packet. ‘I'm giving him a transfusion as he's lost some blood in transit.'

‘Where did you get the blood from?' I asked, but she didn't answer.

I was looking around her room, and on the shelves above her desk, in amidst all the science books and jars of pickled bones, there was a photograph in a wooden frame of a man with a baby. The baby looked like Zoe. And the man had Zoe's eyes. Not in a jar or anything, just his eyes looked like hers.

‘Is that your dad?' I asked, picking up the frame.

Zoe looked up. ‘Yes.'

‘He looks like you.'

She stopped working. It was then I realised just how silent it was at the house. There were no cars going past, no seagulls squawking like they do at all hours at our place. Only the distant grandfather clock
clonked
on the landing.
Outside in the trees, a little bird twittered for all he was worth. What was a bird doing twittering at night? Birds didn't twitter at night. It sounded like he was going for a world record. I wondered if Mad Dad was up there too, squeezing the tweets out of him.

‘Black pouch. There,' said Zoe, pointing at a small black zip-up bag on the end of her bed. The same small black bag she'd had with her in Biology. I handed it to her. Inside were seven syringes bundled up with an elastic band. They were all filled with the blue liquid Zoe had called ‘the serum'. She took one of them out and aimed it over the puppy's heart.

‘So you're going to inject him with that one now, yeah?' I checked.

Zoe rolled her eyes and plunged down five millilitres into the little dog.

We waited. Nothing happened.

‘Nothing's happening,' I said.

She looked at me. ‘You don't say. What was the next thing I did with the hamsters, do you remember?'

‘You put clips on their paws. And you electrified them!' I cried, remembering.

‘Electrocuted them, yes. Pass me the clips,' she said, pointing at four black leads, also laid out on the end of her bed.

Zoe attached two clips to the puppy's front paws and two to the flesh on his back legs. She then clipped the other ends to a battery block at the back of the desk. She flicked a switch and the puppy's feet jumped. His whole body juddered and his tail shook and went all pointy like
a ballerina's leg, and then loose and wavy like a skipping rope. A nose twitch. A whisker flutter . . . An eye opened.

‘Oh my God, you did it! He's alive!' I cried, hugging her. ‘He's alive!'

The puppy looked up. Zoe pulled out the blood tube and put a little plaster over the hole. ‘Welcome back, little one,' she said, tickling his chin. His eyes narrowed with glee. She picked him up off the desk and handed him to me.

He immediately licked my face. ‘Ha ha, silly boy, silly boy.' I felt all around his neck. Smooth. Bloody, but smooth. ‘There's no join,' I said. ‘There's actually no join where it was cut! You'd never know! How did you . . . ?'

‘The serum,' she said, scribbling down some notes on her notepad. ‘It's the world's best-kept secret. They thought my father was a deranged madman. And who listens to the mutterings of the deranged? Only the deranged.'

‘Shall I give him a bath?' I said, seeing as the puppy was at that moment a brown and red Jack Russell, rather than a brown and white one.

‘Yes, could do,' she said, tapping her pen. ‘You can keep him if you want.'

‘REALLY?' I cried. I cuddled him close and he licked my neck, which was weird but sort of enjoyable. ‘Wow, oh thanks, Zoe! What shall we call you?' He licked my neck again like he was so relieved to see me and I wanted to cry. I already knew I loved him more than anything. ‘I'm going to call him Pee Wee, because he's so small. And because of Pee Wee Peppermints.'

‘Fine,' said Zoe. ‘He'll need looking after. He might be
out of sorts for a while.'

‘Oh yes, yes, I'll look after him and train him and everything!' I said, squeezing him tightly, but not too tightly in case his head came off again. ‘I can teach him some tricks and give him lots of cuddles.'

‘Yes, that kind of thing,' said Zoe, slowly starting to collect up her instruments from the bloody desk. That wasn't swearing. I mean, the desk had blood all over it.

‘You don't seem very excited,' I said, putting Pee Wee down on the floor. He immediately darted under the bed. ‘You've just brought a puppy back to life. A headless puppy! That's incredible. Aren't you happy?'

‘It's not the first time I've done this, Camille,' she said, removing a tiny bone-shaped biscuit from a drawer and putting it on the floor. Pee Wee ran out, scoffed it and darted back under the bed. ‘I watched my father many times. I learned from him. I owe everything to him. You saw the animals in the hallway. Some of his prototypes. Failures and false starts. Now it's my turn. I've perfected the serum now, so no more zombie mice, or squirrels that climb trees backwards, or cannibalistic cats. I'm going to find a way to really prove to them just how important my father's work is.'

‘Who's them?'

The authorities who . . . took him away.'

‘I'm sure it was a misunderstanding. Your dad is a brilliant scientist.' Pee Wee trotted out again with a tartan slipper in his mouth and swiftly began tearing it to pieces. ‘He must be.'

‘Yes,' she replied, more calmly. ‘And once I prove that
the serum works on more substantial creatures, they'll
have
to acknowledge that. He'll be vindicated a thousand times over.'

‘What do you mean? You want to try it on a bigger dog or something?' I said.

‘Hmm, maybe,' she pondered. ‘Maybe bigger.'

‘A cow?'

‘Maybe not. We've always found that the serum works better on male specimens for some reason.'

‘A man cow then?'

‘A bull.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Not substantial enough.'

‘A rhino?'

‘Where would I get a rhino from?'

I shrugged. ‘The zoo?'

‘Don't be ridiculous.' Zoe walked over to the window and I joined her and we looked down at the town. It was raining. The town was still all lit up. The pier was still open and little ant-sized people were still walking along the seafront towards it. It all looked so pretty from a distance, even though it had been the scene of such hideousness earlier that night. ‘No, I need to go one step further. Do something no one's ever tried before.'