The Five Gates of Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

do?’
    â€˜You really don’t know?’
    Jed shook his head.
    Mr Garbett handed him a white plastic box on the end of a wire. ‘Say something.’
    Jed couldn’t think of anything.
    â€˜Sit down here.’ Mr Garbett patted his own knee. ‘Easier to think of something sitting down.’
    Jed sat on his knee. Mr Garbett smelt like casinos when you walk past their open doors first thing in the morning. Drink and smoke and money that’s been through too many hands.
    â€˜Now,’ Mr Garbett said, ‘say something.’
    Jed watched him turn a fat white switch. The eyes on the top of the machine began to revolve. A green light glowed.
    â€˜Don’t know what to say,’ Jed muttered.
    â€˜That’ll do it.’ The eyes spun back the other way, stopped, then began to revolve again. Mr Garbett put a hand on Jed’s hip. ‘Now,’ he whispered, ‘listen.’
    A gritty roaring sound, like the ocean dragging pebbles.
    â€˜Hear that?’ Mr Garbett said. ‘That’s the room.’
    Jed looked around to see where the roar was coming from, then he heard a small, sullen voice: ‘Don’t know what to say.’
    â€˜What do you think of that?’ Mr Garbett said.
    Jed knew exactly what he thought. ‘That’s even better than a radio,’ he said, and watched as Mr Garbett’s hands fumbled at the buttons on his jeans.
    He felt he was spreading outwards, moving outwards fast, like ink being soaked up by a piece of blotting paper. He had no centre and no edges and he was moving outwards smoothly, and there was nothing in his head.
    Some time later he heard a voice say, ‘Did you like that?’ and the voice was disembodied, as if it had come out of the tape recorder.
    He opened his eyes. The room had shrunk and turned yellow, but it was piled high with junk he recognised. ‘Yes,’ he said.
    â€˜Really?’
    â€˜It was nice.’
    â€˜Well,’ Mr Garbett said, ‘if you don’t say nothing about it, maybe it’ll happen again.’
    â€˜A secret?’
    â€˜That’s it. A secret.’
    Jed nodded and slipped off Mr Garbett’s knee. He knew all about secrets. Most of his radios were secrets. One secret more or less didn’t make any difference.
    â€˜You forgot something,’ Mr Garbett said.
    Jed turned in the doorway.
    Mr Garbett pointed at the tape recorder on the table, but Jed still didn’t understand.
    â€˜You can have it,’ Mr Garbett said.
    Jed wasn’t used to being given things. ‘The tape recorder?’
    Mr Garbett smiled. ‘I’ve got hundreds.’
    Jed lifted the machine off the table and stood with it in his arms and couldn’t think what to say, so he repeated what he’d said before, only with more intensity this time. ‘It’s better than a radio.’ And then he had a moment of clairvoyance. ‘It sort of makes my radios dead.’
    Mr Garbett nodded. ‘Maybe.’ He walked Jed to the front of the shop. ‘Say you got it from a scrapyard.’ He looked around. ‘It’s the truth, really.’
    But Jed never had to say anything. He sneaked it in through his bedroom window, the same way he’d sneaked all his radios in. He hid it under the bed, wrapped in an old curtain.
    And then, no more than a couple of weeks later, he came home from school one afternoon to find the radios gone. Every single one of them. A deft glance under the bed told him that she’d missed the tape recorder. That was something. But still. Over one hundred radios. He turned cold inside and something tightened in his head.
    â€˜They were garbage, Jed. Most of them didn’t even work.’
    She had come up behind him, while he’d been staring at the emptiness in his room. He turned slowly. She was fixing her hair up in a soft knot with both hands, so she looked like some kind of vase. If he’d been big enough he