Barry Hutchison - Mr Mumbles

HarperCollins Children’s Books

First published in paperback in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Children’s Books 2010

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

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Text copyright © Barry Hutchison 2009

Barry Hutchison reserves the right to be identified as the author of the work.

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Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007358274

Version 2018-06-27

To Fiona. My best friend (real, not imagined).

Will you marry me?

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Thirty-Four Days Earlier…

Chapter One — Jingle Hell

Chapter Two — A Forgotten Friend

Chapter Three — Ghosts of The Past

Chapter Four — The Return

Chapter Five — A New Friend

Chapter Six — Trapped Like Rats

Chapter Seven — The Best Form of Defence

Chapter Eight — Moving The Donkey

Chapter Nine — The Darkest Corners

Chapter Ten — The First Meeting

Chapter Eleven — The Boy in Blue

Chapter Twelve — The Get Away

Chapter Thirteen — A Note from The Past

Chapter Fourteen — Revelations

Chapter Fifteen — The Truth

Chapter Sixteen — Where It All Began

Chapter Seventeen — Water Water Everywhere

Chapter Eighteen — Faith

Chapter Nineteen — A Fight to The Death

Chapter Twenty — Not The End

About the Publisher

What had I expected to see? I wasn’t sure. An empty street. One or two late-night wanderers, maybe.

But not this. Never this.

There were hundreds of them. Thousands. They scuttled and scurried through the darkness, swarming over the village like an infection; relentless and unstoppable.

I leaned closer to the window and looked down at the front of the hospital. One of the larger creatures was tearing through the fence, its claws slicing through the wrought-iron bars as if they were cardboard. My breath fogged the glass and the monster vanished behind a cloud of condensation. By the time the pane cleared the thing would be inside the hospital. It would be up the stairs in moments. Everyone in here was as good as dead.

The distant thunder of gunfire ricocheted from somewhere near the village centre. A scream followed – short and sharp, then suddenly silenced. There were no more gunshots after that, just the triumphant roar of something sickening and grotesque.

I heard Ameena take a step closer behind me. I didn’t need to look at her reflection in the window to know how terrified she was. The crack in her voice said it all.

‘It’s the same everywhere,’ she whispered.

I nodded, slowly. ‘The town as well?’

She hesitated long enough for me to realise what she meant. I turned away from the devastation outside. ‘Wait…You really mean everywhere, don’t you?’

Her only reply was a single nod of her head.

‘Liar!’ I snapped. It couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be happening.

She stooped and picked up the TV remote from the day-room coffee table. It shook in her hand as she held it out to me.

‘See for yourself.’

Hesitantly, I took the remote. ‘What channel?’

She glanced at the ceiling, steadying her voice. ‘Any of them.’

The old television set gave a faint clunk as I switched it on. In a few seconds, an all-too-familiar scene appeared.

Hundreds of the creatures. Cars and buildings ablaze. People screaming. People running. People dying.

Hell on Earth.

‘That’s New York,’ she said.

Click. Another channel, but the footage was almost identical.

‘London.’

Click.

‘I’m…I’m not sure. Somewhere in Japan. Tokyo, maybe?’

It could have been Tokyo, but then again it could have been anywhere. I clicked through half a dozen more channels, but the images were always the same.

‘It happened,’ I gasped. ‘It actually happened.’

I turned back to the window and gazed out. The clouds above the next town were tinged with orange and red. It was already burning. They were destroying everything, just like he’d told me they would.

This was it.

The world was ending.

Armageddon.

And it was all my fault.

If Nan had made the joke about the frosted glass once, she’d made it a hundred times. It wasn’t even very funny the first time round.

‘Look, Kyle,’ she’d say between tracks of the cheesy Christmas hits CD she was inflicting on me, ‘the glass in the windows is more frosted up than the frosted glass in the door!’

The first few times I laughed. The next few I smiled and nodded. By the seventh time I’d taken to ignoring her completely. It was the only way she was going to learn.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I don’t like my nan. She’s actually pretty cool most of the time. For a seventy-four-year-old with two plastic hips, anyway. It’s just that her mind plays tricks on her sometimes.

Up until I was about six or seven, Nan used to stay here in the house with us. It was Nan, Mum and me, all living together and getting along fine.

Then one day Nan forgot her name. It just popped right out of her head one morning, and she had to ask Mum what it was. The whole thing seemed hilarious to me at the time, though Nan and Mum didn’t see the funny side.

Everything was OK again for a while, then Nan started to get more and more confused. She’d wake up in the night and not know where she was. Some days she’d believe she was a little girl again, dodging the bombs in the Second World War.

One time she thought I’d vanished. For three whole days she couldn’t see or hear me, even when I was standing right in front of her, waving my arms and shouting. It freaked Mum out. After that, the doctor said it was best if she didn’t live with us any more.

The home Mum found for her seemed quite nice. Everyone there was friendly, and Nan seemed happy enough. She still spends every Christmas Day with us, but I don’t get to see her much apart from that. The doctor says she’s getting more and more confused with every day that passes, so she’s pretty much confined to the home all year round. She doesn’t seem to mind.

Her ‘confusion’ was why she kept repeating the joke about the frosted glass over and over. Well, that and the fact she’d had four sherries in forty minutes.

When Nan wasn’t making wisecracks about the temperature she was grinning like a maniac, and watching me play with the action figures she’d given me. Every year I try to explain that I haven’t played with action figures since I was five. Every year she buys me more.