‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Benedict finally. ‘The tiny magic people?’
‘Yes,’ said Edie firmly, and Benedict merely nodded and didn’t ask any more questions. She wondered for a brief moment if she could find him a Peter Pan T-shirt.
As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they could just make out more passageways leading off from the platform, and right down at the far end something was glowing.
‘Why is there a light?’ whispered Benedict. ‘Birds don’t have lights. This is spooky.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Wilde Street platform
T
he light spilled out through an archway and just beyond it they could see an old signal box. Slowly, carefully, they crept along the wall and peered round the arch. It opened out into a large hallway where passengers must once have flooded down the stairs from the ticket hall above.
The interior was lit like a stage in a theatre. Two bike lamps dangled from hooks and in the shadows behind them there must have been fifty magpins perched on cables and ledges, roosting. The lamps were angled like miniature spotlights on a semicircle of old wooden tool crates, and the crates were filled to the brim with stolen goods. It was like a treasure haul that wreckers might have dragged up from the bottom of the River Thames.
‘Whoa!’ Benedict said.
Dozens of watches in gold and silver hung over the edges of one crate and rings with stones as big as boiled sweets lay scattered across the top of another. Underneath were strings of expensive beads, necklaces with pendants of blue sapphire and green jade, charm bracelets, handbags, watches and even a candlestick. In another crate embroidered purses, decorated boxes and spoons and even a spangled tiara sat piled up, glittering in the torch light. The magpins must have been thieving for weeks.
‘This is crazeee!’ Benedict whispered as they stood in the shadows, gawping. ‘Just wait until they hear about this at the LPO.’
One of the magpins opened its eye and cocked its head, listening.
‘Sssh!’ Edie whispered, and indicated they should all move back down the platform. As she turned she dropped her torch. It clattered to the floor and the magpin flapped off its perch, giving an alarm call. Then the fifty or so other magpins lifted into the air and the station was suddenly filled with birds flying back and forth, screeching and calling to one another that there were intruders.
At that moment Elfin and the small troupe of Vault flits, armed with needles and catapults, emerged from the tunnel. They fired cherry stones and waved their needles like sabres at the screeching mapgins. In return the magpins dive-bombed the Vault flits and flew to and fro, pecking and flapping at Edie, Benedict and Charlie. Speckle leapt from Edie’s pocket and took up a catapult and Impy made wild karate kicks, managing to catch a magpin under its beak and send it spinning.
Meanwhile, a sea of mice came swarming round the back of the signal box, dragging a long string of tin cans that clattered and banged around the station.
It was pandemonium.
‘Now!’ shouted Charlie. ‘Let’s bring out what we’ve got.’
Edie pulled a pack of super-sized sparklers out of her rucksack and gave one to Benedict.
‘Use this to confuse them,’ she said as she lit one of the sparklers, and she also handed him a badminton raquet. They walked out into the mayhem with Benedict’s arms windmilling round him as he tried to swat away the magpins. Cherry stones pinged off their heads and smoke from the sparklers began to waft about.
‘Owww!’ said Benedict as a cherry stone hit him hard on the eyebrow.
His badminton racquet caught some of the birds and sent them tumbling. With the other hand Benedict swished the lit sparkler furiously this way and that as if he was a Jedi knight holding a glowing lightsabre.
‘This is brilliant!’ he shouted, but the birds hated the sparks and fizzing light.
Edie dragged her luminous cape out of her rucksack. She switched off the bike lamps and flapped the cape in the gloom so that it billowed out in a soft phosphorescent green like a ghostly flag.
‘Get back!’ she shouted angrily, thinking of the damage the magpins had caused to the Lost Property Office and Dad’s reputation.
‘Get back!’ she shouted again, finding a strength in her voice that she never could at school. She flapped the cape at the dive-bombers, snapping the fabric like washing on a line in a gust of wind.
It was working. Several of the magpins began to retreat, circling into a tighter and tighter flock.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see Charlie bent over his rucksack. He pulled out the Prowler Owl from the garden shed and his skateboard. He held it up like a puppet over his hand, lighting the inside of its head with his torch. He started to lift the pole up and down so that its huge wings began to beat softly. The Prowler Owl’s shadow ran up the walls of the chamber and slowly Charlie turned its yellow eyes on the magpins. Lit from within, they looked like headlights.
‘Predator!’ said Edie softly to herself.
Charlie stepped onto his skateboard and made the owl swoop to and fro as he skated backwards and forwards. Then he held a toy megaphone up to his mouth and breathed into it a deep ghostly hoot.
The effect was brilliant and terrifying. It caused panic among the magpins, who were already herded towards the back of the station. They screeched to one another as they zigzagged this way and that, colliding with each other, and they withdrew further and further until they were in the corner of the hallway.
Even the mice were terrified by the Prowler Owl, and they darted in all directions, frantically scuttling into old tin cans or round in circles like tiny clockwork toys.
‘Get the net!’ shouted Charlie.
The flits swarmed into his rucksack, pulling a mosquito net that belonged to his mum out across the floor.
‘Benedict!’ cried Edie to get his attention, and each took a corner of the net, throwing it over the magpins, who were cowering in the corner. Then they wrapped them up in it so that they couldn’t escape.
For a moment there was an eerie silence.
‘That was truly crazeeee!’ said Benedict again.
A late-night train rattled past on the northbound side.
Benedict bent down and let the jewellery trickle through his fingers. ‘This is some haul.’ He took a small notebook out of his pocket and began to make a list, and as he laid each item down the mice scuttled to and fro, moving everything to the signal box for safety.
‘Jot?’ Impy shouted. ‘Are you here?’
There was a muffled reply from the last of the crates on the edge of the semicircle. It was sealed with a lid.
Impy flew over to it and peered through some mesh at the side. ‘I can see Jot!’ she cried.
‘Charlie!’ Edie said. ‘Help me lift the lid on this crate.’
Together they heaved it off and Edie shone her torch inside. There, huddled together in a circle at the bottom, was a group of about fifty flits blinking in the bright beam of light. Impy and Speckle dropped down beside them, running round the circle, until a flit with a heavily bandaged arm turned and threw her good arm round them, pressing them both to her.
‘Flum!’ Impy cried. They stayed folded in her good arm, buried in her neck, until Impy lifted her head. ‘What happened to your other arm?’
‘I broke it when I fell,’ said Flum.
‘Where’s the nut?’
‘I . . . I . . . don’t know,’ said Flum.
Speckle disentangled himself from Flum and hurled himself at a slightly taller flit with a quiff of hair. He hung onto him as if he would never let go. Edie knew that this had to be Jot. She recognised him from the picture. Elfin was down there too, clutching at her reunited family members.
‘Everyone should move to the signal box,’ Elfin said.
‘We can’t fly,’ said Jot. ‘They’ve put sticky stuff on our wings to stop us from escaping.’
‘Where’s Nid?’ Flum said suddenly.
Edie had been thinking ju
st the same.
‘We’ve not seen him,’ said Jot. ‘Isn’t he with you?’
‘He fell from the train this evening. Here at Wilde Street!’ cried Impy. ‘We thought he’d be here.’ She looked despairingly towards the train tracks.
‘We haven’t seen Nid . . . or the young flits and the unhatched nuts,’ Jot said. ‘Someone is using them. Training them to steal. We hear the songs they sing, but we don’t know where they’re being kept.’
At this the birds that were netted in the corner began to cackle and squawk. It was only bird language but it seemed to merge into a series of recognisable screeches.
‘Ss-crree-ch! Sss-crree-ch! Ss-cree-EECH!’
‘What are they saying?’ said Charlie.
‘It sounds like “Creech”,’ said Edie. ‘Vera Creech. I thought she had something to do with all this.’
At that moment a ball of feathers hurled itself at the crate from the top of the signal box. It knocked Elfin to the ground and pinned her down with a scaly claw. It was a particularly bold magpin that had escaped the net.
Jot caught the arm of a Vault flit. ‘Give me your needle!’ he hissed.
The Vault flit whipped it out of his belt and Jot ran towards the bird, prodding the needle hard at the base of the bird’s neck until it drew blood.
Elfin rolled herself clear of the bird’s claw, but the magpin lashed out at Jot, knocking him backwards. Several of the mice had found a pot of ‘wing stick’ and the Vault flits started to catapult globules of it at the magpin’s wings. It tried to flap them, but the sticky stuff had got into its feathers and was already beginning to harden.
Jot got up and forced the bird backwards, pointing the needle at its throat. He pushed it closer to the edge of the platform. The tracks began their tell-tale clicking to announce that a train was coming, and for the first time the magpin looked nervous as it could no longer fly away. The rattle of the train grew louder.
Jot glanced at the tunnel and the magpin darted to one side and snatched the needle out of his hand. Jot lunged after it, falling to the ground only centimetres from the edge of the platform, and the magpin stood over him, holding a scaly claw over his throat. Edie wanted to kick out at the magpin, but was terrified it would kill Jot if she or Charlie came too close.
‘Don’t move . . . anyone,’ Jot gasped.
The whoosh of air along the platform and the rumble in the tunnel told them all that the train was only seconds away. The ground began to shudder and Edie could feel vibrations running up and down her spine.
‘Let him GO!’ cried a small, high-pitched voice just beyond the magpin, and Speckle flung himself at the magpin’s neck, lassoing it with a silver chain from one of the crates. It began to choke the bird, and it twisted round, trying to nip Speckle and flap its sticky wings, but Speckle pulled it back so that it lifted its foot from Jot and staggered closer and closer to the edge of the platform.
The train roared into the station. Clackety-clack! Clackety-clack! Phwooshm!
‘Spe-ckle!’ croaked Jot, every muscle taut with anxiety as he ran to the edge of the platform. ‘Speckle!’ he cried again. He looked in horror down at the tracks, expecting to see both Speckle and the magpin crushed on the rails, but the train was gone and there was nothing there.
‘Jot!’ the same small voice called out. ‘Up here.’
Jot and all the assembled raiders turned to see Speckle standing on the top of the signal box, still holding the chain.
He flew down beside Jot and the two brothers held each other tight.
‘I got him,’ he said.
Edie guessed the magpin had been swept up and carried away with the train. But, best of all, Speckle had found his voice.
Chapter Forty
Wilde Street
A
fter the loss of the rogue magpin, the birds in the net had fallen silent, their eyes staring through the mesh, round and unblinking. Then one by one they started up their cries of ‘Ss-cre-eech! Sss-cree-eech!’ again, only less confidently.
Charlie and Benedict went back to secure the net and try to quieten them.
‘Is Vera here?’ said Impy.
‘I don’t know,’ said Edie. ‘Something’s not right. We still don’t know where the young flits are and the unhatched nut babies.’
‘And Nid,’ said Impy. She looked as if she might cry.
Edie walked down the station platform with Impy, far from all the others, and back towards the passageway that had led them here. She was searching for another tunnel or something that might lead them to Vera Creech. Her eyes drifted downwards and the beam of her head torch caught sight of a small figure bobbing along the platform wall – running, cartwheeling, jumping.
‘Nid!’ she cried. ‘You’re safe!’
She rested her hand on the platform and waited for Nid to somersault onto it.
Impy flung her arms round him and then beat her fists on Nid’s chest. ‘Why did you do that?’ she said. ‘I thought you were dead! I told you never to ride on top of the trains!’
Nid looked sheepish but proud all at the same time.
‘What happened after you fell?’ asked Edie.
‘I tumbled into the dark, and the clatter of the train’s wheels was so roaring loud that I thought I would be sucked under them,’ said Nid. ‘But then I was blown sideways, whoosh, and landed on the platform. I lay there for a long time trying to get my breath back and the bump was sore. I was scared then in the cold and dark. I called for Jot, but there was only quiet so I set off into that walkway behind me, feeling my way along the wall and –’
Nid was about to carry on when a large bird hopped out of the shadows. It made two more hop-jumps until it was only a metre or so away. It was Shadwell. The spy bird. Nid faltered and Edie could see that, despite his bold jump, the spy bird had really scared him. Shadwell darted forward and snatched him up in his beak, holding him like a splinter caught in a pair of tweezers.
‘No!’ cried Impy.
Nid’s mouth opened and shut in shock but no sound came out. The bird hopped into the shadowy passageway and set off at a lolloping run. There was no time to call the alarm or get the others. Edie knew that whatever happened, she and Impy mustn’t let the spy bird out of their sight or they might never see Nid again.
Shadwell turned into a new passageway beyond the stairs that they hadn’t seen. Edie followed, with Impy flying just in front of her, as the spy bird ran and hop-jumped ahead of them. Every now and then it would stretch its wings and fly a couple of metres and then resume its hop-jump.
The tunnel twisted and turned away from Wilde Street Station and at one point it split into two. A right turn took them to a siding where the train tracks led to a dead end.
Edie stepped out onto the small platform and gasped.
Strings of sparkling lights and jewelled decorations festooned the walls. Silvery paperchains zigzagged this way and that, and mirrored balls twinkled as they caught the light. It was a glittering cave and parked up against the buffers at the end of the platform was an old Tube train carriage painted a deep red with gold lettering on the side. London Transport.
On the tracks in front of the carriage were two small flatbed trucks loaded with bars of moulded gold, precious metals and sealed packages, which Edie expected contained jewellery.
That wasn’t all. At the far end, balanced on an old workbench, stood a giant painted birthday cake. Its three layers were decorated with elaborate baubles and gold leaf, and a huge candlestick sat on top. It was as if Edie and Impy had stumbled into a palace grotto.
A strange fiery glow shone at the windows of the train and the spy bird hopped through the doors with Nid. Edie and Impy ran to a window and saw Vera bent over a furnace pot wearing goggles, gloves and a large apron, and she was feeding it with the spoils of her pickpocketing. Her back was stooped and her face was drawn in concentration as she tipped the molten metal into a mould.
When she saw Shadwell she lifted her goggles and took off her gloves. The sp
y bird hopped onto her shoulder and dropped Nid onto her flattened hand and she closed her fist round him and pressed her eyeglass to her face.
Edie rushed into the carriage with Impy hidden in her plait. ‘Let him go!’ she said.
Vera Creech turned. The eyeglass dropped. ‘So, you found me, you wretch.’
The carriage was hot and felt over-bright. Most of the seats had been taken out and behind Vera was a long workbench. A lamp on a metal arm was angled over the top and a rack of tools held tiny pliers, tweezers and a soldering iron. Across the worktop were scattered pieces of broken jewellery, rings with precious stones and watch cogs and springs. Dozens of tiny figures were bent over their work – separating gemstones into piles – rubies, emeralds, pearls, chips of jade and diamonds. Some polished the items to a shine, while others were making new jewellery out of old. One flit was crafting tiny seed pearls and gemstones into flowers and filigree leaves to decorate a gold birdcage, and the jewelled bird from the pendant that Edie had spotted round Vera Creech’s neck was inside it.
‘Those are young flits,’ Impy whispered. ‘She’s got them working for her.’
A figure bobbed out from behind the tool rack and ran up and down, scattering watch cogs and gemstones. He was clutching a boiled sweet.
‘It’s Bead!’ whispered Impy sharply. ‘Miss Creech’s pet!’
Bead looked appalled when he saw them. ‘What are you doing here?’ he whispered nervously. ‘She won’t like it!’
‘Get back to work, Bead!’ said Vera.
‘Yes, everybody, come along. Come along!’ He clapped his hands together and turned on the big lamp. Vera lifted up the delicate birdcage and held it out to Edie.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you look? You were curious enough to poke around my office. Shadwell told me.’
Edie took the birdcage. It was beautiful. Delicate leaves and fruits that the flits had crafted were twisted round the cage bars like vines, and the songbird inside was made of silver and studded with green emeralds. Vera Creech turned a crank at the base of the cage and the bird sang a single mournful high note that descended into a cascade of watery trills. Edie was for a moment enchanted. She reached out her hand to open the cage and take out the bird.
Edie and the Box of Flits Page 14