The Invisible Girl
Page 13
The more he thought about that Wall and this Wall and the boy and the pen, the more disturbed he became. He didn’t think much of people, but he didn’t want to be responsible for the harm that befell them either.
Bother! he thought. Bother!
“All right,” said The Professor to The Answer Hand. “Are you going to tell me where the girl belongs or are you going to sulk the rest of the night?”
The Answer Hand, who liked sulking but loved to display the fact that it had all the answers, told him. And when The Professor finally began to ask questions, the right questions, The Hand told him that much more.
The Professor sighed and put down the wine. He started to search his rooms—lifting books and cats and papers—till he unearthed the phone. Then, after finding the number he wanted in the phone book, he placed his call.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” said The Professor. “I believe I’ve just seen someone you might be looking for. And I think you might have something that belongs to me.”
Chapter 15
The Punk Invasion
SCARY MEN, SCARY MEN, THOUGHT Gurl as she and Bug left The Professor’s apartment. The only scary man that Gurl could think of was the rat man with the umbrella who had chased her that night, the one that came up from the subway. But The Professor said that they should take the subway!
Gurl gripped the Park Place subway pass so hard that the card bit into her fingers. What if The Professor himself was one of the men she should be worried about? Bug had said he was some sort of genius, but what if he was an evil genius (in addition to being a crazy drunk)?
At least The Professor had one good idea and that was hiding. There was no reason that she should hang around Hope House for the Homeless and Hopeless if she didn’t have to. Why, she could run away right now! But she didn’t have to leave the city, this huge and sparkling city with as many hidey-holes as a beehive. She could find somewhere to live. A homeless shelter maybe. Or an abandoned building. Or even stay in apartments where the people were on vacation. And she could get all her food from the backs of restaurants; she knew how to do it. Maybe she could even get a job somewhere. She could lie about her age. No one would care.
And she wouldn’t ever have to steal anything ever again.
But then there was Noodle. She would have to go back and get Noodle. Then she would run away for ever.
This decided, she looked at Bug, who plodded silently beside her. She had tried to take his hand when they first left the apartment so she could make them both invisible, but he had shaken her off. Now he had a horrible scowl on his face, making him look less like a bug and more like an owl. A furious, mutant owl.
“Bug,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“I’m sorry he couldn’t help you.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“I have to go back to Hope House.”
“Whatever.” Bug made a fist and punched the window of a café, startling the customers within. Wham!
“I have to get Noodle. And when I do, I’m leaving the orphanage. For good.”
Bug didn’t even look at her. “OK. Bye.”
“That’s the thing,” Gurl said. “I won’t be able to find her without you. I can’t open all the locks by myself.”
“Then I guess you’re out of luck.”
At this, Gurl got mad. “I’ve been a leadfoot all my life, but I never acted like such a jerk about it.”
“Good for you.”
Gurl punched him in the arm hard enough to knock him into the closest building. Wham!
That made him look. “Hey! What did you do that for?” he said, rubbing his arm.
She realised at that moment that he was just as much her friend as Noodle was. More, even. She felt like screaming: You’re supposed to want to help me. You’re supposed to want to come with me. But she didn’t say these things. What she said was: “You deserved it. And because you’re being a total rock head. You thought that you could fly because I made you invisible, right? But what if it wasn’t me at all? What if it was because of Noodle?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Bug, but she could see that he was considering this.
“Cats are rare, but The Professor had a hundred of them. He even had kittens popping out of his pockets. There has to be something about her. She must be special in some way.”
Bug nodded. “Could be.”
“So you’re going to help me find her, right?”
“Only if you don’t punch me again.”
“We have to hurry,” said Gurl. “I don’t want to spend another night at Hopeless House.”
Bug pointed to a subway entrance. “Do you want to try it? It will be faster than walking.”
“I don’t know,” Gurl said. “I’ve seen strange things come out of subways. Like rats.”
“So?” Bug said.
“Really big rats,” said Gurl and shivered. “With big teeth.”
“The old guy said the subway was safe.”
“Safe if we stay in the subway car.”
“Why wouldn’t we stay in the subway car?”
“All right, all right,” said Gurl. “We’ll take the subway. That is,” she added, “if Park Place here works like it’s supposed to.”
The two of them trudged towards the uptown subway entrance, down the steps and into a twisting concrete tunnel. Their footsteps echoed in the cavernous hallway, and a hot, humid wind blew, a wind that stank of fuel. Gurl heard a jingling sound coming from around the next corner.
“What’s that?” she whispered.
“Don’t know,” muttered Bug. “But whoever it is will hear our footsteps even if we’re invisible, so we better stay this way for a while.”
They rounded the corner. The source of the jingling was a skinny man sitting cross-legged on a flattened brown box. He wore a green quilt that he had belted around his waist with a length of rope, and a yellow canary perched on his head. In the man’s dirty hands was a tin can, which he shook vigorously so that the coins inside made a tinny jangle. “Spare some change?” he said in a wavering voice. As soon as he saw them, however, he barked, “Aw, you just little. Where your mom at?”
Bug and Gurl were too surprised to answer, but that didn’t seem to be a requirement.
“What she let you out so late for?” the man continued. “Where you going? Ain’t no little ones belong down here.” The man popped out his false teeth and sucked them back in his face just as quickly.
“We’ll be fine, Mister,” said Gurl, pushing at Bug’s back so that he would walk faster.
“Name’s not Mister, Missy. And you best watch out for them Punks.”
“Sure we will,” said Bug.
“I mean it,” the man called after them. “Punks is bad news. The city try to flush ‘em out, but it don’t work. Punks just makes more Punks. Big Punks, little Punks, everywhere a Punk Punk.”
“OK, thanks,” said Gurl as they hurried away from the man. They kept walking, passing a woman—short and round as a grapefruit—who stood in front of a table of souvenirs.
“Empire State Building?” the woman said, holding up a replica in her fat little hand. “Statue of Liberty?”
“No thanks,” said Bug.
“I can give you a great price on the Brooklyn Bridge,” the woman said. After they passed the table, she yelled at their backs: “Fine! I hope the gators get you!”
“Gators?” said Gurl. “What’s she talking about?”
“Wasn’t there some old story about alligators living in the sewers or something?”
“Yeah, but this isn’t the sewer. And that’s just an urban legend.”
They finally reached the gate to the tracks. “Let’s hope this works,” said Gurl as she swiped the Park Place card through the electronic reader.
“I’m beginning to think that it wouldn’t be bad if it didn’t work,” said Bug.
The gate clanked and the reader beeped. “It works,” said Gurl. “Your turn.”
They wandered over to the tracks and looked around. A few other passengers in rumpled clothes dotted the waiting area, reading newspapers, leaning against walls or wandering aimlessly back and forth, as if their batteries were running down. A thin, high-pitched whine cut through the air, the work of an apparently tone-deaf violinist who had set up shop by a trash bin. His violin case was open and one by one the passengers came to drop dollar bills into it, a group effort to make him stop. Gurl watched them walk over to the musician and realised that most of them were probably leadfeet (or close to it), that these tunnels beneath the city were made for people like her.
The hot wind that had assaulted Bug and Gurl in the hallways now blew up again and the passengers stood to attention. A distant rumble grew louder and louder until the train squealed into the station.
“This is us,” said Bug.
The car doors flew open and the two of them hopped inside, slipping into the orange bucket seats. As was traditional in the city, the other passengers did their very best to ignore the newcomers, holding their newspapers and magazines high so that they did not have to meet anyone’s eyes. One man, wearing an expensive business suit, sprawled across a length of seats and snored loudly.
The doors slid shut and the train left the station, building up speed. Bug and Gurl bounced along as the train wound through the concrete guts of the city. As if a mischievous child were playing with the switch, the lights in the car went on and off. Gurl counted the first couple of stops in her head, resisting the train’s attempts to lull her to sleep. At the third stop, the snoring man woke up, and he and the last of the other passengers disembarked, leaving the car to Bug and Gurl.
“Finally,” said Bug. He got up from his seat, grabbed one of the metal poles and swung around and around. “You should try this.”
“What? Being stupid?” she said.
“You know, the subway is OK,” Bug said, still swinging. “I don’t know why it has such a bad reputation.”
Just then the train’s wheels began to screech and the train ground to an abrupt halt. The engine died. The lights flickered, then went out.
Gurl squinted out of the blackened windows. “You were saying?”
“The engine will come on again in a minute,” said Bug, feeling his way back to his seat, “and we’ll be out of here.”
But it didn’t come on again in a minute, or two, or three. Bug and Gurl sat in a dark car in a dark tunnel and wondered what was going on.
“They should at least make an announcement,” said Bug, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.
“Why doesn’t it feel like there’s a ‘they’ around? Why does it seem like we’re the only two people on this train?” She grabbed for Bug’s hand and turned them both invisible.
“What are you doing?” said Bug. “You just said that we’re the only ones here. And it’s too dark for anyone to see us anyway.”
“Shhh,” she said. “I don’t like this.”
“You think I do?”
“Remember when I said that I saw rats coming out of the subway?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I wasn’t lying when I said they were big. Huge. Like the size of people kind of rats. One of them chased me.”
“What are you talking about? There are no people-sized rats!”
“No,” said Gurl, “but then again, bushes don’t scoot around on their roots and wooden horses don’t run. And I’m telling you, one of the rats chased me. It tried to get Noodle.”
Bug was quiet a moment while he took this in. “Why didn’t you tell me this before we got on the subway?”
“I did!”
“You did not say ‘rats the size of people’. If you had said ‘rats the size of people’, I would not have suggested we take the subway, OK?”
“It had filed its teeth to sharp points,” said Gurl.
“Oh, sure. That’s even better.”
As if to stop the bickering, the train came to life and the doors shot open.
“What now?” Gurl whispered.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Someone’s laughing.”
Sure enough, the sounds of laughter echoed dimly through the tunnels outside the car.
“Did your rat man laugh?” said Bug.
“No,” Gurl said. “Well, yeah. He kind of giggled.”
“Giggled,” Bug repeated. “Why not?”
At first the source of the sounds seemed far away and then the noise got louder and louder. It was clear that whoever—whatever—was laughing, it was coming closer. And there wasn’t just one. The laughter was all around them. Shrieks, giggles, cackles and grumbles.
“The Professor’s vampires?” murmured Bug in Gurl’s ear.
“I thought you didn’t believe in vampires,” Gurl murmured back.
In response Bug squeezed her hand, pulling her out of her seat and away from the centre of the car. If a bunch of giggling bloodsuckers or giant snickering rat men were on their way, it seemed wise to tuck into a corner. They huddled together and waited.
The laughter got louder still, interspersed with whoops and hollers and an odd hissing sound. Bug and Gurl stiffened as a black-leather-clad, maniacally pierced, Mohawk-sporting teenager jumped into their car. Corpse pale, his wild, glassy eyes smudged with black kohl and lips painted a bruised blue, the boy shook a can of spray paint and proceeded to decorate the seats and the walls with aimless scribbles. Other whooping, hollering, leather-clad creatures ran into the car, some wearing spiked dog collars, others wearing schoolgirl outfits with combat boots and ripped fishnet tights. Most had metal threaded through their ears, eyebrows, lips, noses and cheeks (and plenty of other places that Bug and Gurl couldn’t see). What was somewhat disturbing was that not all of the teenagers were…um…teenagers. Several were clearly in their forties or fifties and there were also a number of leather-wearing babies being toted around. But what was most disturbing was that none of their eyes seemed to have irises; yawning black pupils filled their sockets, making them look both blank and wolfish.
Gurl and Bug pressed themselves closer to the wall, not understanding who or what they were seeing. But they had been warned by the old beggar: “watch out for them Punks”. And if they had known the history of The Punks, they would have.
Once they were wily bands of street kids who found refuge in the brand-new subway systems of the early twentieth century but, over the generations, they evolved into something else. Something sneaky, nocturnal and not quite human. In the tunnels and caves under the city, they multiplied. And flourished.
Every ten years or so, the city would launch a programme to eradicate The Punks, sending in the Animal Protection Agency to round them up, tag them and send them off to Punk Reserves (mostly in England, for some reason). But The Punks always came back. And with them the people-menacing, purse-snatching, partying, begging and, of course, spray-painting.
“They tag us,” said one of The Punks, a girl who was entirely bald except for a fringe, “so we tag them.”
“Good one, Nancy!” said one of the boys.
“Right, Sid,” replied the girl.
But Bug and Gurl were not paying attention to Sid and Nancy—actually, all male Punks were called Sid and all female Punks were called Nancy—they were watching a tall, lean Punk, a teenager about seventeen or so, who had turned in their direction. Or rather, they were watching the man’s pet bat, which clung to a chain on the man’s leather jacket. The bat’s beady eyes rolled. It spread its leathery wings and let out an eerie squeal, a squeal that immediately quieted the rest of The Punks.
“The Vamp sees something,” the teen said. “Something over there.” He pointed at Bug and Gurl.
Vamp? thought Gurl.
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br /> Vamp? thought Bug.
The Punks dropped their spray cans and gathered around the boy, their queer, black mirror eyes searching.
The bat squealed again. “Yeah,” said Nancy (one of them, anyway). “Something there all right.”
“Too much light in here, though,” Sid (one of them) said. “Can’t see nothing.”
The bat-bearing teenager tilted his head, stooped and picked up one of the cans of spray paint. Before Gurl and Bug knew what was happening, he punched the nozzle and doused them both in electric purple.
“What the bloody hell are they?” said several Sids at once.
“Whatever they are,” said the Nancys, “we should tie them to the tracks and let the train dice them to ham salad.”
“After we tell Sweetcheeks,” said the man with the bat.
At the mention of the word “Sweetcheeks”, Bug’s hand tightened around Gurl’s.
“Yeah,” a Nancy said. “It might make him forget that we ain’t delivered his cut for a while. We tell Sweetcheeks first. Wait, why don’t we bring them to Sweetcheeks ourselves? Let Odd John take care of ‘em!”
Abruptly, Bug let go of Gurl, grabbed the metal pole in front of them and swung around it, punching each Punk in windmill fashion: Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Gurl snatched the paint can out of the boy’s hand and sprayed the Punks still standing, making them double over and cover their eyes. In unison, Bug and Gurl ducked out of the open doors of the car, running down the thin ribbon of concrete alongside the tracks. Dozens of screaming, half-blinded Punks gave chase but, luckily, they couldn’t fly either. Bug and Gurl ran until their lungs and legs burned, and then they ran some more. They ran and ran until the screams of The Punks faded and there was no sound but the echo of their own footsteps in the dark.