Susie and the Snow-it-alls Read online

  What the hell? It was a game. It was only a game. “Okay,” she said.

  “First we need to form a magi circle,” said Mr E.

  “Excuse we!” indignated Miss Chief. “Excuse we, Mr E ! If there is circling to be formed, it is we whom gives the comma to form it.”

  But it had already been formed.

  “Hold hands,” said Mr E. “That’s it. Now we incant the magi words. Repeat after me: ‘You can dream and I can dream …’”

  Susie and the Sufrogs said the words.

  “‘And we can dream together,

  And if we dream togetherly …’

  Again Susie and her Sufrogs repeated the words.

  “‘Our dreams will come together.’”

  Suddenly, whoosh, they were off. In a whoosh.

  Flying now through Susie’s window, now above her roof. Flying up, uP, UP. Whooshing. Whooshing towards the clouds.

  Whooshed togetherly, but separately cocooned in their own thoughts, by their own sense of the majesty below and of the dauntingness above; by their separate sense of history’s vastness and the broadness of this, their history-yet-to-be.

  Whoosh.

  “Wooooooooooooooooow!” said Susie.

  “Wooooooooooooooooow!” the Sufrogs wowed beside her.

  Susie prised open her eyes, eyes which in the onrush of wind would open only a slit. Still they were whooshing, still Susie’s hair jet-streamed behind her.

  She forced herself to gaze beneath her: There was her home, sheening in the bright moonlight, their home, getting smaller below her.

  Smaller and smaller.

  Now just a dot in a forest of roofs and television aerials, a forest tiara’d by a zillion amber diamonds that were the street lights. And there were trees, far more trees than she ever remembered noticing on the ground. Trees sashed with the silver of the moon. Sashed and slashed with that silver.

  Whoosh.

  Her house was a house no more; no more than a slice of silvered grey; – whoosh – a comma, no more, in the encyclopaedia of the village and of the nearby town.

  Whoosh.

  Now Susie’s street was not even a slice. A sliver now. In the hurly-burly, the whirly-burly of so many greys and blacks and different browns and oranges and yellows; and of more green, and greens, than Susie could ever have imagined the night-light yielding; all whirly-gigging around, curly-gigging around, all kaleidoscoping in a random patchwork of colour and density and texture; all getting smaller and less definedly smaller as the clouds got nearer and nearer. As each of them was whooshed closer to those clouds. Ever closer.

  Whoosh.

  Out of the darkness into the light.

  An iridescent light. The light of haloes. A bright light, but a comforting light.

  Whoosh.

  When suddenly they weren’t going there any more. They were there.

  Whooshed.

  Chapter 7

  KER-BUMP! KER-THWACK! OW! That hurt! Wow, that hurt! Wow-ow; ow-wow-wow! That, yes – WOW –, that HURT.

  Clouds, Susie’s bottom told her, were not as soft as their downy appearance vaunted them. She scraped, she thudded, she slid and bounced and she bumped and she thwacked. And finally she slew to a ramshackly halt in a ramshackly heap with the rest of the Sufrogs.

  But they had arrived. And it didn’t take them long to realise they had arrived, to extricate themselves from the excitement of the whoosh, and from the chaos of the landing, and to look around them.

  “Fantastic,” said O’Nestly. “Is that or is that not the business?”

  “Too blueming much!” said Bluemerang.

  “Magnifique!” said Nespa.

  “Right!” said Mimimi.

  “Seriously, it’s the business,” O’Nestly whispered to himself, replying to his own question.

  “No red carpet, we notice,” hoity-toitied Miss Chief.

  “Obviously, Miss Chief,” said Mr E, “they couldn’t have known you were coming.”

  Susie gaped. She had never seen anything quite like this.

  They’d landed in some sort of valley. Around them enormously steep, enormously enormous mountains clawed at the sky with jagged talons; their faces fleeced with powdery snow and varicosed by a thousand sparkling rivulets.

  The white was so bright it was almost blinding. It distorted perspective, brought some features much closer together than they actually were, miraged distance between others; it de-featured the features, jigsawed them into one solitary whitescape where even the lines between the pieces disappeared.

  The scene was of a beauty and spectacle that Susie had never dreamt possible. It was, she imagined, like looking at a pearl from the inside out. She wasn’t sure that it was real.

  She dropped Mr E’s hand and walked a few steps further into the core of this pearl. And then she started to run. And to dance. And then she stopped. Pirouetted slowly on the spot, taking in the whole vista, absorbing it, allowing it to absorb her.

  It was beautiful, yes, but it was also strange. Really strange. Shouldn’t it be cold, for instance?

  Oh, it was nippy, that much was true. But with this much snow, the sparkling of about a zillion rhinestones presumably of ice, it should, shouldn’t it, be ice-cold? Arcticly cold?

  A powerful smell pervaded the whole place, but she couldn’t for the life of her recognise what it was. Not for quite some time. When it dawned on her it came as a shock: The place smelt of nothing. That simple. It smelt of absolutely nothing. And that was eerie.

  It was silent too. All around her a thousand different noiselessnesses whistled their subtle tunes into a concerto of silence – into an entire symphony of silence.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she sighed, elongating the ‘eau’ of ‘beautiful’ as if it were a length of chewing gum she was pulling through her teeth. “So beautiful, Mr E. Isn’t it?”

  But answer came there none.

  She looked around. There were her frogs – her Sufrogs, as Mr E had called them – lying inanimate on the ground.

  She panicked.

  They couldn’t be dead. Dear God, they couldn’t be dead. Please don’t let them be dead.

  And then another thought struck: What on Earth would happen to her if they were dead? What on ‘Earth’? She wasn’t on Earth. How would she get back to Earth?

  “Stop horsing around, hey, guys,” she said quaveringly and quiveringly.

  But they showed no signs of moving.

  What had happened to them? They could scarcely have frozen to death. Not in this un-arcticness. Not in that length of time. Had they been caught by some poisonous vapour or something? If she went too close to them, would she too be killed by that same vapour?

  “Mr E?” she tremuloused, her voice half concern and half terror. “O’Nestly? Mimimi?” She inched towards them. “Miss Chief? Nespa? Bluemerang?” Every inch she half expected one of them to leap out at her and shout “surprise!” or “April fool!” or something. And the other half dreaded that they wouldn’t.

  Nothing. Not so much as a wink.

  She was going to die. Like them. Here in Grammarcloud. There would not even be anyone here to dig her grave – or to grieve at her graveside.

  Tears started to well in her eyes. Tears of sadness at the demise of her new-found friends. But tears too for herself and her own imminent demise. A death that was not only a death, but a lonely and grizzly death. In a grizzled and barren tundra.

  So absorbed was she by her grief that she failed to notice a figure vrrooom lightningly above her in the sky. The sound not of an engine, but of a supersonic arrow sickling through the air: a thwm of a vrrooom.

  Still she was inching towards the lifeless frogs. Her movements, though, had become robotic. Her eyes had become almost as blinkless as the Sufrogs’.

  She arrived at the sorry circle. She bent down to arrange Mr E’s limbs in a more dignified position. She touched his arm.

  “Don’t …” said Mr E, who said no more. With a yelp, Susie had let go of him again. And then
she remembered: She had to be touching one of them. How could she have been so stupid? For the Sufrogs to stay animate, she now remembered Mr E telling her, she had to be in contact with one of them.

  She lifted Mr E up. Sure enough, the other five came to life as well. “Don’t ever,” said Mr E, “do that again.”

  “I have to be touching one of you,” Susie confirmed with him.

  “You have to be touching one of us,” Mr E enunciated slowly, “or we all, don’t you know, revert to lifelessness.”

  “But as soon as I touch you,” Susie said confidently, “you come back to life again.”

  “And if night should fall in the interim?” asked Mr E.

  Susie felt her confidence ebb like a tide which magically plummeted. Her smile stuttered on her lips. “I don’t know,” she confessed.

  “Then, don’t you know,” said Mr E, “you have to kiss one of us.”

  “Okay,” said Susie. “Kiss you. Okay. Have you already told me that?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Mr E.

  “Okay,” Susie said again, unsure what to feel.

  Again, above them, the form vrrooomed past. It was – again – too fast to distinguish anything beyond the vrrooom itself. None of them paid it much attention.

  “Me, I think it might be an idea,” said Bluemerang, “if one of us stays in her pocket all the blueming time. It might help prevent … accidents.”

  “I’ll do the first stint,” said Mr E. With which he hopped straight into Susie’s pocket.

  “Excuse we,” indignated Miss Chief vociferously. “Excuse we, Bluemerang. We, might we remind you, am the leader here. Therefore if anyone is to be suggestive it should be we. And why, Mr E, did no-one know we was coming? We am, after all, not only a celerity in our own right, but we am also an amphibassador from Earth. Why, Mr E?”

  Mr E was peeking out of the top of the pocket in the bib of Susie’s dungarees. “Maybe,” he suggested, “no-one told them.”

  “Well, it’s a thing,” hrrmphed Miss Chief, her hoity-toitiness making a pit-stop for fresh juice. “A poor thing indeed. Mr E, that was, Mr E, very demist.”

  “I think,” O’Nestly volunteered, “the word, Miss Chief, you might be groping for is ‘remiss’.”

  “You make such a fuss about words, O’Nestly!” tutted Miss Chief. She obviously saw no hope for anyone thus afflicted.

  “Whereas, for the juices gastric, there is no fuss made at all,” complained Nespa. “Moi, I am trés, trés … how you say? … starving.”

  “You’re quite right, dog,” Miss Chief concurred. She turned to Susie. “You, child. Have you no manners? We are in need of feeding.”

  “Excuse me!” Susie exclaimed, and prepared to launch into a diatribe about manners and politeness and all that other good stuff. At one fell stroke, however, her intention was thwarted. Brought to a premature conclusion … by the hugest, by the most blood-curdling

  R O A O A O A O A O A R R R R R R ever, in the whole history of the universe.

  Susie and the Sufrogs ran for cover.

  Chapter 8

  “ROAOAOAOAOARRRRRR!” the roar roared again.

  Susie had found a small escarpment. The protection it afforded was sparse. But it looked like the best on offer.

  “ROAOAOAOAOARRRRRR!” again. It was, the roar, that of ten man-eating lions chorusing their tooth-ache. It was a roar that could not only awaken the dead, but which would also terrify their ghosts.

  “What is it?” Susie hisspered to Mr E.

  “How should I know?” he testily hisspered back. “It’s also, don’t you know, my first visit to Grammarcloud.”

  “ROAOAOAOAOARRRRRR!”

  And then Susie saw them. Lumbering into view. A pigeon-toed almost reel. But one of immense power. Muscles rippled lithely beneath a coat that was creamy and straggly and … magnificent. Polar bears.

  Well, sort of polar bears. One had a light blue streak the length of its spine, the other a dark blue one. That wasn’t polar-bear like. Both had what appeared to be black patches on all four knees. That wasn’t polar-bear-like either.

  “ROAOAOAOAOARRRRRR!”

  The roarer had its mouth open. It was roaring up to Heaven. Susie could count about ten zillion teeth, all of them sharper than a shark’s.

  “ROAOAOAOAOARRRRRR!” the other one now roared. Same amount of teeth, same sharpness. And then mid-roar it stopped. It stopped and smelled the air. It had caught a whiff.

  To Susie it seemed ominously like the whiff they had caught was a whiff of Susie.

  They seemed to look at each other, seemed almost to confer. They smelled the air again – two gourmets about to savour a particularly fine Crêpe Susiette.

  They again seemed to confer. And they started lumbering, almost tipsilly – slowly, steadily, deadlily – towards her.

  They stopped. Smelled the air again, as if to check their compass bearing. Continued on their way. Towards her.

  Susie huddled into herself, first into a foetus, then into a ball. Smaller and smaller she huddled herself.

  Now she could smell them. A sort of … oh, God … fish-piey sort of smell. She could feel their shadow now masking the sun from her. Could see the drops of their saliva as they sizzled into the snow before her.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to witness her own death. Squeezed them just as tightly as they would go.

  “ROAOAOAOAOARRRRRR!”

  “Our Father, Who art in Heaven …”

  Suddenly there was nothing.

  Oh, the shadow was still there. The smell of fish-pie, that was still there. But there was no roaring now. Just the sound of a lapping breathing. The odd ‘pff’ of spit hitting snow.

  So tentatively it was twentytatively, Susie opened her left eye.

  There was a giant white face inches from her own. To the other side of her eye, there was another. Almost jet black and tiny eyes drilled into hers.

  “Are we frightening you?” asked one.

  “You’re terrifying me,” Susie admitted.

  “Hey,” said the second, “de wid it!” And the two of them high-fived and danced a little whoop of celebration. “It’s sears yince,” the second bear continued, “we frightened anyone.”

  “Well, it’s not nice, frightening people,” Susie said in her best teacherese. “It’s downright un-nice, point of fact.”

  “Yes,” said the first, po-facedly – or, maybe, polar-facedly – “we’re very sorry.”

  “Are you?” Susie asked, glad to see that her reprimand had reached its target. “Are you really?”

  “No,” they chorused and laughed again.

  “I’m Ox, by the way,” said the bear with the dark blue stripe.

  “And she’s Cam. Welcome to the Iffies-Andes-Orbutties. That’s the part of Grammarcloud where you landed. They’re known as the IAO.”

  “Dow ho you do?” said Cam.

  Susie presumed this was a local greeting, and thought better of asking for a translation.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” Ox told her. “We’re jolly glad you came. Syllabylly told us you’d be coming.”

  “Syllabylly?” Susie asked, and looked also to Mr E. He shrugged that he was as clueless as she.

  “Grammarcloud’s oracle,” said Cam. “Honestly, yon’t dou know anything?”

  “You know who we are, I presume,” asked Ox.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Susie noticed that the other Sufrogs were emerging from their various hidey-holes, and were twentytativing a very slow path towards them.

  “You’re polar bears, of course,” she replied with a brashness she was regretting even as the words were spilling from her mouth.

  “Polar bears!” the two bears roared – this time with laughter. “Bolar pears!” Cam repeated, and they both wept with laughter.

  “We are polo-bears,” Ox corrected her. “Or, rather, I’m a polo-bear. Cam, on the other hand, is a polo-bearly. On account of the fact she’s bearly understandable. … Barely un
derstandable, get it?” Susie nodded wanly that she had. “Or, as we say round here,” Ox continued, “barely tundrastandable.” Again he roared with laughter. Cam, Susie noticed, didn’t. “Barely tundrastandable because she’s barely arcticulate!”

  “Ox, on the other hand,” said Cam, “for all his jawful okes, should be severely punished!”

  Above them vrrooomed the same figure as before.

  “Blooming aerorabbits!” Ox complained. “Blooming Conscut!”

  “He’s no soisy, Conscut,” Cam sighed and tutted. Then she added breezily, “Would you tike lo hear our anthem?”

  “Well, we’re a bit pushed for time, just at the moment …” Susie started to say.

  “That’s good,” said Ox. “Music, maestro, please.”

  Cam sang a note. Ox sang a note. Not the same note. The anthem was sung in not the same notes.

  ‘We are the polo-bears,

  Fairly scary polo-bears,

  We go places none else dares,

  No-go spaces are our lairs.

  We are the polo-bears,

  Fair-and-squarely polo-bears.’

  “Well, that’s the formalities done,” said Ox. “Now to business.”

  “Business?” asked Susie.

  “It seans meriousness,” explained Cam. Susie wanted to protest that she knew the meaning of the word, but then she thought it probably wasn’t worth it.

  “Life can’t be just one long picnic, you know,” said Ox, “hanging around, listening to songs all day long. We’ve got serious things to do and get done. Oh, are these the other Sufrogs?” Without awaiting a reply, he continued, “Yes, Syllabylly said you’d be escorted. We’ve got a game of polo to organise. We’re not called the polo-bears for nothing, you know. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I don’t know how to play polo,” Susie told them.

  “You don’t have to know. It’s us playing,” ‘explained’ Ox. Susie was no wiser than if Cam had done so. “We’ve got the polo-mallards – quack you very much,” Ox ‘joked’. “And, as you see, we’ve got knees.”

  “Knees?” Susie asked.

  “Well, Syllabylly said, as we couldn’t get ponies, maybe polar-knees would do. Polar-knees is just a long version, after all, of po-knees.”