John shrugged, but he did not meet my eye. 'I guess Galder knows me pretty well.'
The air crackled at this. Suddenly the room had the colour sucked from it, and the light that was left was flickering somehow. I could feel Galder nearby.
And Galder was there. You couldn't say that he appeared out of thin air, exactly. It was more a question of being there all the time, and choosing only now to let his thereness show. 'Right enough,' he said, as his body seeped into space like an ink blot. 'Always listening, always attentive to your will, young Master John.'
'See?' said John to me. He seemed to think he had proved a point. 'But I'd like a rest now, Galder. Lay off with the friends for a bit.'
'Of course,' agreed Galder with a quick bow. 'Just as soon as you've seen your last visitor.'
'No, Galder. That's enough. I don't want any more.'
'But your visitor is already here, young master. In the house. You surely don't want to turn away your oldest and dearest friend? The companion of your youth? The first you ever loved?' Galder smiled a fatherly smile.
Now John was puzzled. So was I. 'Who do you mean? What friend?' he demanded. 'Someone else from my nursery, is it? Not Sharyn May, the girl with the hair like a bell rope?'
'What's wrong with Sharyn May?' I asked. John looked so horrified I almost laughed.
'We got engaged under the art table when we were nearly four. I don't think I ever called it off!'
'Don't be ridiculous. Sharyn will have forgotten all about you by now,' I said. But something in that smile of Galder's was making my stomach curdle.
'You need not worry on that score, Master John,' said Galder. 'Your sister's right-the human heart is fickle. But you're neglecting someone else. A friend who has waited faithfully all these years.'
Was it my imagination? Or did I hear a small mewing sigh at that moment? A muffled pawing of cloth on wood, just outside the door?
I looked at John. He seemed uneasy and confused. But he guessed the truth before I did.
'Louis�'
Galder swept his arm towards the bedroom door with a stately motion. That gesture brought a wind in its wake that pushed the door wide open. We could all see onto the landing. And the thing on the landing, the little figure with felt eyes and coathanger fingers, standing with the airing cupboard door open behind it - that thing could see us too.
'Want play!' it said.
It spoke with a voice I had not heard for seven years. It took a moment to place it. Then I knew it was John's voice, as it had been long ago, even before his engagement to Sharyn May. King Arthur had been no more than a name in those days. The Turbo Heroes had yet to face the Mitron Troopers for the first time. John's world had been bounded by Mum and Dad and me. And good old Louis Patooey.
'Want play!' said Louis Patooey. 'Now!'
Louis was small. Not small enough to fit in John's satchel, the way he'd done in the old days, but I don't think he came higher than John's waist. He seemed to be wearing a pair of John's pyjamas, with the trousers rolled up clumsily. I'd never seen anyone so bizarre-yet he was familiar too, in unexpected ways. His lime-coloured face, his hands the colour of ripe plums, the strange mottled texture of his feet and mouth-even the faint scent that drifted from him reminded me of-of-what? Pine woods? Green, resiny needles? Where had I smelt that before? His face was smooth and blank, as if all the life and movement in it had been pressed out through years of clothy stillness. His eyes were just sewn-on patches of black felt. Only his mouth was mobile, with thin dry lips that pursed and swagged as the words came yet again. 'Want play! Now!'
A scar, barely visible before, twitched and throbbed in his face as he spoke. From the side of the throat and diagonally up across his face it ran, curling like a question-mark around one ear. It was horrible.
John was terrified. Too terrified even to back away from Louis Patooey when he started walking towards him, lisping: 'Play! Play!'
I grabbed at Louis as he passed, but let go at once. The touch of his skin was repellent. That mottled skin was not skin at all, but cloth-dry and yielding and cotton soft, but with a fibrous strength. And that smell-I had it now-was Mum's Pine Glade fabric conditioner. The throbbing scar was no more than the seam of a pillow, inside-out, with the loose stitches showing.
'Galder!' I yelled, as Louis Patooey padded towards John. 'Get rid of it! Now!'
'Not without the young master's say so,' said Galder. 'I wouldn't presume.'
Until this point Louis's movements had been slow, a little clumsy--but now with a sudden agility he ran forward and embraced John's knees in obvious rapture. Seven years' desire to play with John were concentrated in that gesture.
'Johnny! Johnny play Louis now!'
John was too frightened to speak. He kept looking around for help from Galder. But Galder was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
'John, you have to talk to him!'
John made a great effort. 'Yes, Louis,' he said, gasping between each word. 'Yes, we'll play. That's what you want? What game would you like?'
Louis's cloth face went a deeper shade of lime. His mouth swagged in a foolish grin.
'Twain!' he lisped tenderly. 'Choo twain!'
With that he took a leap, and, with a power I would never have expected from his doughy legs, sprang towards John's throat. John ducked, but in a flash Louis Patooey's arms were locked around his neck, with Louis himself riding piggy-back and lisping joyously: 'Twain! Louis wide! Choo, choo!'
The whistle of a steam train blew eerily from his mouth.
'Stop-it!' gasped John, staggering forward on his cast. 'I--can't breathe!'
'Louis wide on twain!' hooted Louis Patooey, jiggling on John's back. Somehow he managed to keep his grip on John's throat with one hand, while with the other he waved happily to me, each finger tipped with a nail of curved coathanger wire. 'Wide Johnny!'
John said through gritted teeth: 'Get--off!'
'Wide Johnny now!' cried Louis Patooey, and tightened his cotton-polyester grip.
'Play with him, for goodness' sake, John! Be a train! Go chug-a-chug-a-chug!'
John chugged. Splutteringly. He jog-hobbled around the room, half bent under the weight of Louis Patooey (who must have been far heavier than he looked), and flailing his arms in desperate imitation of a piston.
Louis, at any rate, was delighted. 'Fast! Make twain fast!'
'I can't go any faster!' yelped John. Then he added cunningly, 'Let's swap places now. Louis Patooey be train and Johnny ride! It'll be fun!'
But Louis wasn't having any of it. Something told me that when he and John played together in the old days John would have bagged all the best parts for himself. Louis was making up for it now.
'Louis wide twain fast!' he declared. And he looped his fabric-soft arm still tighter round John's neck, smiling broadly.
I wish I'd never seen that smile. It wasn't that Louis's teeth were so very sharp. But who expects to see a set of plastic clothes pegs filling someone's mouth? Mum had left them in the airing cupboard, I suppose. Now his mouth was a red, green, yellow, blue and purple grin, and along the centre of each tooth shone a horizontal wire from the spring of the peg, gleaming like Juanita's brace.
No wonder the kid had trouble with his 'r's. It made him look kind of sad and homemade, as well as scary-like a craft project gone wrong. But that didn't stop him twisting his limbs round and round on themselves as if he was being wrung out, until they were tight as muscles, choking the breath from John.
John was going purple now. I rushed to pull at Louis, desperately trying to prise his pad-like hand from John's throat.
'Get off, you! Bad! Bad boy!'
'Twain,' lisped Louis Patooey relentlessly, grinning his rainbow grin. And he turned and spat a green clothes peg into my eye. It really hurt.
I blinked away the pain. I had to get Louis off John's throat. Looking around I found John's Star Wars light saber near at hand, on the bed. I brought it down--thwump!--on Louis Patooey's polyester-cotton head.
He didn't take the slightest notice. He just clung on to John with his soft mottled fingers. His wire nails curved like talons into John's neck. John had collapsed. A few more seconds and he'd be unconscious. His eyes met mine, then moved to the light saber, and flickered weakly.
At once I heard a whoof sound beside me, as if a gas jet had just ignited. The light saber was glowing! Not with the shoddy twenty-watt glow it used to have before the battery inside went flat. This was the full works. John had wished it into reality.
'All right,' I said to Louis Patooey. 'Chew on this!'
I slashed at Louis's head. And through it. And out the other side. The room was instantly filled with the smell of burnt polyester-cotton sheets.
I was looking down at the ruins of Mum's laundry. Where my saber had sliced, the edge of the material still smoked. A scatter of plastic clothes pegs lay about the floor. I tossed the light saber back onto the bed. Already it was no more than a cheap toy from Woolworth's once again.
'Are you okay, John?' I asked.
'I think so,' he spluttered.
'You ought to choose your friends more carefully,' I said as he got his breath back. I wasn't talking about Louis Patooey.
You've got to hand it to John. Most kids in that situation would have been blubbing with fear. I felt like crying myself, now the danger was past. My hand was shaking. But John was up at once, and a minute later he was shouting. 'Galder! Show yourself right now!'
'John, calm down!' I said.
'I know you're there, Galder. I know you can hear me!'
I started to kick the pile of charred bedsheets that had been Louis Patooey under the bed. It was ridiculous, but in the state I was in I could think of nothing at that moment but that Mum might come in and blame me for the mess.
