Riding Icarus Read Free

through the open windows; her knees were cold and they hurt. She reached up for the handle, the door swung inwards and she fell into the cabin.
    She’d been in there before, of course, playing at driving the trolleybus to exciting destinations. It made a good spaceship control room too. It was such a cosy little place, with its high leather seat, its rows of buttons and lights. Now lots of the lights were on, twinkling and flashing madly red and green and yellow. Rain flooded down the windscreen, and as she watched from behind the driver’s seat, leaves flattened themselves against the glass and then vanished with a hideous screech.
    The humming was louder in here. Brakes! thought Masha. Brakes, brakes, brakes. Where were they? She tried to remember her father driving their old battered car, years ago.
    The bouncy seat squeaked as if a fat driver were shifting his bottom in it. Masha thought she saw a boneless white hand glue itself to the outside of the windscreen. It stuck there like a bloodless, rubbery strand of seaweed, long enough for her to see the curling, knife-sharp painted nails. Then it slowly peeled off and disappeared.
    Masha screamed. She heard herself this time. Another lurch threw her forward, and lightning illuminated a row of pedals on the floor.
    “Brakes, brakes, oh,
please
let them be brakes,” Masha sobbed. She grabbed the nearest pedal and pushed it downwards as hard as she could.
    Icarus groaned and shuddered. The lightning vanished, and as the humming died away, the trolleybus faltered unhappily – and ground to a halt.
    It was so quiet! The rain had stopped; the trolleybus had stopped; the thunder and lightning had ceased as though they had never been. Outside something went
drip … drip … drip
extremely slowly, as if there were all the time in the world for a drop of water to loiter down to the ground.
    Masha stayed crouched beneath the driver’s seat like a tiny little mouse. She still leant all her weight on the pedal that had stopped the madness. She did not want to let go. She did not want to move. She couldn’t stop seeing the hand stuck to the windscreen. Now that she had halted the trolleybus’s headlong rush she wanted to carry on, further and further away from whatever lurked outside.
    It was thinking of Granny that made her move. Granny tumbling into the hollyhocks, not knowing where Masha and her home had driven off to. Maybe she’d hurt herself when she fell. She was very old, after all; no one knew exactly how old. She wasn’t even Masha’s grandmother really but her great-grandmother. Maybe she was still lying there on the cold ground.
    Slowly, carefully, Masha let go of the pedal. It eased itself upwards with an indulgent sigh, but Icarus remained motionless. The lights on the dashboard were slowly fading. It was not quite dark outside, and the view through the rain-blurred windscreen was reassuringly ordinary: bushes, grass, a scrap of fence. Masha tried to feel brave. She didn’t quite succeed, but she did manage to open the cabin door and pass through to the main door, still jammed open. She pulled aside the curtain and jumped out quickly before she had time to get too scared.
    The light was gentle and dim. She was standing in a meadow bordered by tall willow trees, through which water glimmered. To one side there seemed to be allotment fences made of the usual leafy willow wands interwoven with all sorts of odds and ends. She didn’t know exactly where she was but it looked familiar, as if it was a corner she’d often walked through but never really noticed before. When she looked up, the sky was already clearing to a blue so muted it was almost colourless. She thought she could even pick out a couple of the first evening stars. And Icarus was there behind her, fat and cream and red striped and looking as innocent and comforting as if the terrifying ride had never happened.
    No rubbery hands or screaming white faces. Nothing scary. Only she really couldn’t work