Neighbours by Colin Thompson Page A

Mother,’ Mordonna shouted down at the grave. There was silence for a moment. ‘Oh, all right, Mother.’
    Turning back to LeDouche, she added, ‘Sorry I had to shout. Mother’s a bit deaf. She wants to shake your hand.’
    â€˜Of course she does,’ said the sergeant and walked over to the grave side.
    The ground opened and a skinny skeleton arm appeared.
    â€˜Mother says just shake her hand. She only lets wizards kiss it.’
    The sergeant fainted.
    When Forty-Two, three large ambulance men and a doctor arrived five minutes later, Sergeant LeDouche was lying on the couch in the Floods’ lounge room. He was mumbling to himself and dribbling into his walkie-talkie.

    â€˜I’m terribly sorry about all this, madam,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s the strain of the job.’
    â€˜I understand,’ said Mordonna from behind her dark glasses.
    Satanella made pretend happy little yappy dog noises as one of the ambulance men tickled hertummy. The doctor gave the sergeant a powerful sedative and then they took him away to the mad house in a straightjacket. His wife and children decided they’d be happier with Forty-Two, who had just been promoted and didn’t look like the sort of man who would have other girlfriends.
    Sergeant LeDouche spent a very long time resting and being given large doses of strange medicine and electric shock treatment at the Sunshine Home for the Really Stressed before getting a pension and going off to live all alone by the sea in a small damp flat with no waterfront views. Now and then over the following years, there were nights when he would wake up screaming, because he knew what he had heard and seen had not been in his imagination. And he knew without a doubt that the Floods had killed Tracylene, and probably Dickie, and thatthey had cut off his brilliant career long before it had reached its peak.
    Thoughts of revenge grew dark and evil in his heart. Somehow, somewhere, he would pay them back.

A couple of months after the sergeant had been taken away, Mrs Dent went into Tracylene’s old bedroom and remembered that she’d once had a daughter. Mr Dent had already filled Dickie’s old room with bits of old motorbike, some buckets of grease and twelve hundred and twenty-seven empty beer cans. But apart from taking Tracylene’s budgie, Adolf, down to the kitchen – where he got fatter and fatter and fatter on a diet of pizza crusts and kept telling Mr Dent he needed more lipstick – neither parent had been in her room since.
    I wonder what happened to Tracylene , Mrs Dent thought, and then she remembered the red shoes.
    She rang the police station, but since the sergeant had been taken away they had decided on a new policy and that was to pretend the Dents did not exist. The whole family had just been in the sick sergeant’s imagination.
    â€˜I’m sorry, madam,’ they said to Mrs Dent. ‘The case is closed.’
    â€˜But my daughter,’ said Mrs Dent. ‘She’s missing.’
    â€˜Congratulations,’ said the policeman and put the phone down.
    Mrs Dent wasn’t that bothered – she was more interested in finding out if there was a fattest budgie in the world category in the Guinness World Records TV show – but that night when most of the world was asleep, she forced herself through the hole in the fence into the Floods’ back garden.
    It was as quiet as the grave, which wasn’t really surprising considering how many people were buried there. Incredibly, the red shoes were still there. Mrs Dent took off her slippers and put them on. She would have thought about the story of Cinderella,except ‘Cinderella’ was much too big a word to fit inside her head.
    Upstairs in one of the back bedrooms, Winchflat, the family’s computer genius, was doing what he did most nights: following strange people around the world on the internet. As midnight fell in one chat room,