A Box of Nothing Read online

  It had a tremendous black swirling trunk and at the top the branches came snaking out like trails of fireworks. All along the branches grew the seeds. The seeds were stars. The Burra had picked up some good bright colours on the beach, so the stars blazed and glittered in the dark tornado of the treetop. It would be by far the best picture anybody had done for Mrs. Last, if he could only get home with it. He would have to think of a seed, of course. A seed for a star tree.

  He was still putting in stars, not really noticing, when he had a new idea about getting home.

  “I think we’d better go and find out what’s wrong with the Dump,” he said.

  “Eeaaaay?” said the Burra’s head, just like a donkey braying.

  “You keep saying the Dump’s gone wrong. Let’s go and find out why. It’s better than staying here.”

  The Burra’s arms picked up the head and placed it on the shoulders. The leg came clumping across and joined the body.

  “You do not like it here?” said the Burra.

  “I didn’t mean that. I like you a lot. But I want to go home.”

  “Yes, we suppose so,” said the Burra.

  “I’ve thought of building a boat, but the wind and the waves would keep pushing it back, so that’s no good. The reason why everything here is the way it is, is because the Dump’s gone wrong, right?”

  “We think so.”

  “So if we found out why it had gone wrong we might be able to put it right and then that horrible sea would turn back into a fence and I could go home.”

  “Difficult,” said the Burra.

  “You don’t know till you’ve tried.”

  “That is the difficulty. We suppose you cannot help thinking that this bit here”—the green arm tapped the sailor suit—“this bit here is us, but it is not. It is only some of us.”

  “You mean you’ve all got to go? Cookers and everything?”

  “Well, not all. No. Not really all. But quite a lot of us, to be any good.”

  “Oh.”

  “We have to admit we have been thinking about this before you came. We have had a vague feeling we ought to be doing something.”

  “Can’t you think of a way? You’re terribly clever.”

  “Not clever enough. If only … ah, well.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  The Burra stood up. It seemed gloomy and unwilling, but it led the way up the cavern to the end where most of the supplies were. An old wooden box stood against the wall. Usually boxes and things opened themselves when the Burra approached, but this time it lifted the lid itself and peered doubtfully in, with its head cocked to one side.

  James looked, expecting to see something dreadful, but it was only the control box of a laptop computer that somebody must have thrown out. You could see why, too. All over the keyboard and down one side yucky pink paint had been spilled, the colour of the sort of ice cream that is pretending to be made of raspberries when it’s really come out of a chemical factory.

  “Does it work?” said James. “Terry at school—his dad’s got one like that.”

  The Burra didn’t answer, but continued to stare gloomily into the box.

  “You really think we ought to go and find out what is wrong with the Dump?” it said at last.

  “I don’t know about ought. I just want to. In fact I’ve got to. If you don’t want to come, I’ll have to go by myself. If I can.”

  “You see,” said the Burra, “we think this will be a very difficult member. When we first asked it to join it was not at all cooperative. Very withdrawn and ill tempered. We need a member like this if we are going to move around, but … ah, well, we suppose we will have to give it a try. Be kind enough to carry it over to the table for us, will you?”

  Under the loop of light the paint splash looked even yuckier. The Burra put out its green arm and then pulled it back.

  “You know,” it said, “even our pocket calculator tried to boss us around when it first joined us. That is no good. We have to keep a balance. That is why we chose this head—it does not get ideas above itself.”

  The worn old ears twitched, like a dog’s do when it knows it’s being talked about. The whole cavern seemed to go still. The Burra laid its green fingertips gently on the computer casing. Nothing happened.

  “Very withdrawn,” said the Burra. “Perhaps we had better...”

  There was a click. The “on” light glowed. The Burra’s ears stood bolt upright, as if it were having an electric shock. The TV switched itself on and started playing a video game at twenty times the proper speed. The Burra’s jaw gaped and its voice came out as a high twitter, like a tape on fast forward.

  This lasted just a few seconds. Then it all got worse. The TV screen was covered with jagged bright shapes, and its sound track came on full volume, all bangs and crashes and screechings. The Burra’s arms and legs jerked around like one of the twins in a tantrum, but far worse, so that James could see it was going to flog itself to bits. He had to do something to stop it, but the moment he tried to reach out and grab the green arm off the computer, something hit him. Not in one place, all over, like a ball being hit by a tennis racket.

  The blow slung him across the cavern and sprawled him onto his bed. As soon as he touched it the mattress rose up at each end and gripped him. He kicked and wriggled, but the blankets coiled themselves around his legs and tightened fast. The noise in the cavern was deafening, not just the TV, but everything else rumbling around, clattering and whirring, and the Burra’s high agonizing twitter on top of it all. The tube light flickered on and off, sometimes too bright to look at so that the wriggling shape stayed glaring on James’s eyeballs through the next patch of dark.

  His arm was pinned across his body so tight that it hurt, but when he tried to ease it the mattress squeezed tighter. The movement pushed his hand against something hard. His box of nothing in the pocket of his anorak, which he’d left lying on the bed. Now he could just slither his fingertips into the pocket and coax the box out. The mattress seemed to notice the movement and squeezed tighter, but it was too late. James shoved a corner of the box against it. At the first touch it flopped loose. He prodded the box against the blankets and they fell away. He stood up.

  The light came coiling down at him from the ceiling like a fiery snake. All the stuff in the cavern rushed toward him, but it wasn’t quick enough. He ran to the table, holding the box in front of him. The light darkened and arched out of his way. He banged the box down hard on the “off” key of the computer.

  Silence. The TV switched off. The light tube dimmed to orange and dragged itself back to the ceiling. The Burra gave a violent shudder, gripped the edge of the table, and stood swaying and shaking its head.

  “We think we had better have a little rest,” it said, and flopped into the chair. Slowly the rest of the stuff in the cavern rumbled back to its places. The light grew brighter. The Burra twitched and muttered.

  “Are you all right?” said James.

  “A very unpleasant experience,” said the Burra.

  “Everything seemed to go mad,” said James. “My bed joined in …”

  “Mad? Deranged, certainly.”

  “But you’re better now.”

  “Yes, thank you. The problem, you see, is this. Most of our new members have something wrong with them when they join. That is why people threw them away in the first place. We can help them to mend themselves, but only if they cooperate. We do not see how we can begin to cooperate with a member who insists on taking complete control of the rest of us.”

  James stared at the computer. The paint was an especially nasty colour, he thought, and an especially nasty shape too.

  “I think I’d go a bit mad if I had something yucky like that dribbling around in my brain,” he said.

  The Burra cocked its head to one side and stared at the computer.

 
“You may be right,” it said. “Perhaps it is worth another try. Stand by with that box of yours.”

  James held the box close above the “off” key while the Burra reached out with one green finger and gently touched the paint. Nothing happened.

  “Best we can do,” said the Burra. “You cannot expect quick responses from spilled paint. Very low degree of organization there.”

  The Burra was still wary of touching the computer, so James carried it back up the cavern and put it in its chest. Before he went to bed he had a look and saw that the paint seemed to have become soft and was gathering into a blob. Some of it was dribbling down the side of the casing.

  Next morning, first thing, he went to look again. The Burra didn’t seem to be around, but the chest opened itself as James approached. The computer had switched itself on and was humming quietly. All the paint had flowed off the top and down the side, where it had set into a fat, pink, heart-shaped bulge, just like the heart on the greeting card James had bought for Gran’s last birthday.

  Chapter 8: Going Exploring

  Things started happening while James was still having his breakfast. Piles of copper pipes and nylon curtain rods and lengths of old electric cable unstacked themselves and began a sort of dance on a clear bit of floor, weaving in and out of each other incredibly fast. It reminded James of something. He couldn’t think what for a moment, then he realized it was a bit like Mum knitting. If you could imagine a giant doing a bit of knitting, only the giant and the knitting needles were invisible, and the knitting process was happening in several places at once. Soon James could see a shape beginning to grow, a long, narrow, canoe-shaped giant sort of basket.

  Just beyond that something different was happening. He took his Rice Krispies up there so that he could watch. Half a dozen old lawn mowers had trundled together into a group and were taking themselves to bits, groaning and creaking a bit, like old gentlemen complaining about their hips. A couple of oil cans hopped among them, easing the rusty nuts, like metal hummingbirds. The pieces began to build themselves into a new engine.

  Next door to that a jumble of electrical oddments was sorting itself into what seemed to be three separate gadgets, which James didn’t understand at all. A soldering iron strutted among the web of wires. As soon as they were joined up they coiled themselves away into three blue milk crates. Close by, two large saucepan lids were gently easing themselves into dish shapes.

  The funny thing was that all this was going on while the walking-and-talking part of the Burra wasn’t there. Usually when that happened the cavern went almost to sleep, but now it was busier than James had ever seen it. Suddenly he had a thought. Perhaps the computer had taken over. It had got rid of James’s friend in the night, taken it to bits, thrown it out, forced it to become just rubbish again.

  Trying not to show he was worried, James strolled across to the window. The slit opened for him in the usual friendly way, and he gazed out. Something extraordinary was happening down on the shore, a sort of bright-coloured whirlwind moving along close to the sea’s edge. At the foot of it walked the familiar shape of the Burra. It was collecting plastic bags. Thousands of them, and more and more flapping up to join the funnel-shaped whirling column that followed the Burra along the line of rubbish. If a rat patrol came along now, James thought, it would have something to shoot at.

  Not just the whirlwind, either. Something was happening down by Soup Lake, but he couldn’t see what. Some sort of engine was pumping away, and a lot of tubes were wandering around on top of the surface. Wherever a hummock grew they darted over and sucked the gas in. It was fascinating to watch, a bit like a video game.

  The Burra was coming back up the slope now, with its whirlwind still following it. A huge ball came bouncing up beside it. As soon as they all reached the slope below the cliff the whirlwind flopped down and the thousands of plastic bags flummocked around, sorting themselves into sizes. The ball turned out to be an enormous roll of coarse cord.

  The Burra itself came in and laid a friendly green hand on the computer, which answered with a lot of quick bleeps, almost like a song.

  “Is it all right now?” said James.

  “Fully recovered and eager to join in.”

  “That’s brilliant. What are you going to do if a rat patrol comes along?”

  “There will be time to hide. We have put sensors out. The computer has greatly extended our range for that sort of thing.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Ho, ho.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “We want it to be a surprise. Ho, ho.”

  All afternoon the cavern got busier and busier. The bustle was still going on when James went to bed. He found it difficult to sleep. He kept half waking, half opening his eyes, half seeing something new being done, half dreaming he’d seen it, and by that time he was half asleep again. For instance, he saw, or dreamed, that the plastic bags were slithering around the floor, melting into each other and making an enormous patchwork sheet, which rolled itself up at one end as it was joined together. Later he dreamed that Mum was pushing the twins’ buggy across the floor of the cavern, then woke enough to see that the basket thing had finished knitting itself and had been joined by two sets of buggy wheels that it was trying out. One of them twittered, just like the twins’.

  The engine started up. It made an incredible racket and a foul smell, far worse than petrol. Whatever it was using must be made from the gas in Soup Lake, somehow. Luckily it only ran for a minute, then trundled itself over to the basket thing, which tipped sideways to help it climb in. The whole contraption wheeled away and squeezed itself out down the stairs.

  Next time James woke he saw the huge ball of string rolling to and fro across the floor, knotting itself into a kind of net, a bit like the string bag Gran used for groceries, only big enough to hold twenty elephants. James watched for a bit and fell asleep again. Next thing he knew, his mattress had tipped him out onto the floor. It had done it on purpose. The Burra was standing there looking down at him.

  “Ho, ho,” it said.

  “Very funny,” said James. “What’s the big idea? Where’s everything, anyway?”

  The cavern had become very quiet, and all the things that had been clattering around before had disappeared.

  “The sensors report movement up the mountain. We think the rats have sent out a night patrol.”

  “They must have spotted something going on this afternoon.”

  “Probably. But we are ready to go, in any case.”

  Shivering, James dressed. His clothes weren’t part of the Burra so they didn’t do things for themselves. As soon as he’d got his anorak on, one of his blankets wriggled up and wrapped itself around his shoulders like a cloak. He patted his mattress goodbye and followed the Burra to the stairs. The cavern seemed to have gone fast asleep, as though almost all the “life” that had kept it humming and twitching had left.

  He was glad of the blanket when they got outside. It was bitter cold, with a black sky full of sharp little stars. Down by the lake he could hear a pump still chugging, but everything else seemed still. The Burra took his elbow to guide him down the path. When they got to the trip wire a faint light shone so that he could see to step over it. Now he could hear the plop and suck of bubbles rising in the lake and smell the stinking gas.

  At the lake’s edge the light shone again, just enough for James to see the edge of the basket thing.

  “In we get,” said the Burra.

  James climbed over and picked his way through a jumble of things from the cavern to a clear space. The basket creaked at every step, and something else answered with fainter creaks above him. When he had settled he looked up, but could see nothing but blackness. No stars, even. Something huge was blotting out the sky, stirring a little as the breeze off the sea shifted it to and fro, and creaking as the immense net of knots and cords that held it in place too
k the strain.

  The pump stopped. With a series of plops the tubes fell clear. Rustling whispers began as ropes untied themselves all around. In a sudden patch of quiet James heard scurryings from up the path, the clink of metal on rock, a squeak of challenge.

  The last ropes fell free, timing it almost perfectly, so that the basket scarcely swayed as the Burra’s homemade airship floated silently up through the night.

  Chapter 9: Over the Mountains

  The wind blew steadily from the sea, pushing the airship inland. James could see the peaks ahead by the jagged line where the stars ended and there was only blackness below them.

  It became colder as the airship rose. He shivered, and immediately another blanket came slithering along and wrapped itself around him. When he moved, the basketwork beneath him changed shape to make him comfortable. He had been wrong about the airship being home-made, he realized. It was home-grown, more like. It was all alive, the way the cavern had been alive. Somehow the Burra had managed to become an airship in order to go exploring.

  “When are you going to start your engine?” he said.

  “Not until we have to.”

  “What does it run on?”

  “Fractionated by-products formed in the extraction of hydrogen from sewage gas.”

  “How did you know how?”

  “We thought it up with our computer.”

  “That’s brilliant. Have you brought the computer with you?”

  “Of course. The whole trip would be impossible without it.”

  “What will happen when the gulls see us?”

  “It will be all right.”

  As the airship climbed, the mountains climbed too. It was difficult to see with everything so black, but sometimes James felt that the harsh slope was only just below them, although a moment before they had seemed to be floating miles above it. There was almost no wind. Or rather the airship was moving with the wind, so though it might be rushing along, the air around it seemed still.