Pastworld

by Ian Beck

  Caleb noticed with a jolt, as he turned to look back once more in exasperation, that a single and very raggedly dressed man was following some way behind them part hidden by the mist.

  They walked up the hill on a narrow pavement and then they turned into a wider street and at once found themselves heading against an onward pressure of people. Crowds of the huddled and wet natives of Pastworld streamed past, all going home after the factories and shops and offices had closed, making their way back down the hill towards the railway station. To Caleb they looked like ragged prisoners of war. Some children held begging bowls out to them. Caleb and his father were jostled too by various ruffians, some of whom looked official, some however seemed to Caleb to be more real and more definitely sinister.

  His father hesitated and stood still. He looked around him in distraction and frustration and then he pulled out his gazetteer map and appeared to be studying it, but it seemed to Caleb that he was waiting and looking for something else, something not on any map.

  They waited at a junction for the traffic to pass. Caleb watched the crowds of people as they passed him, pushing on over to the other side of the road. It was then that the ragged man stepped out suddenly from behind a curtained carriage. Caleb thought to tell his father they were being followed, but before he could say anything Lucius had set off across the road and headed further up the hill. Caleb set off after him but noticed with a rising panic that the beggar followed closer behind them now.

  Caleb heard excited voices somewhere behind him calling out ‘Trick or Treat’. They passed a greengrocer’s shop, and he noticed the earthy banks of raw beetroots and turnips and carved pumpkin heads and tumbled orange squashes and other vegetables, which were all piled up in racks and wooden crates outside.

  Two children and their mother passed in front of him. There were two little girls, and they were giggling together. They wore Halloween masks and little tattered black witch’s costumes and they carried bags for collecting treats. The mother held them both by the shoulders as she anxiously guided them along the crowded pavement. Caleb, in a moment of mischief, pulled the skull mask out of his pocket and put it on over his face. One of the little girls caught sight of him and screamed happily, nudging the other, and they carried on up the hill giggling together and looking back at Caleb. The ragged man still kept a steady pace behind them. Caleb was more and more uneasy, the ragged man definitely seemed to be keeping them in his sights. Caleb, his mask still on his face, finally stopped his father.

  ‘We’re being followed,’ he mumbled through the mask. ‘Look.’ He pointed back down the street.

  His father turned and looked back briefly into the heaving crowd. He looked at the ragged man for a moment and then closed his eyes and covered them with his hand, ‘Oh no, no,’ he muttered but then he snapped to, turned and fussed with the map, checked the direction and appeared not to really take in what Caleb had said.

  After walking for another few yards his father suddenly said, ‘Caleb, I have important business, I am going on ahead for a moment. I will be back after I have consulted someone. It’s very important but only to me, don’t worry. You must stay here, Caleb, keep out of the wet. I won’t be long, I promise.’ His father went on further up the hill, and was then lost to sight in the fog and crowd.

  Caleb, puzzled, stood sheltered in a shop doorway for a while. A strange sight he made, the young man with the skull head standing lost in the shadows of the doorway. He watched the passing people huddled into their coat collars or under their umbrellas. He thought that his father had just behaved very oddly once again, and again it was completely out of his normal character; something was up. He was rattled by something. Perhaps it was that letter. Caleb decided that he would wait no longer. He went after his father instead.

  He walked on up the hill into a denser bank of drifting fog. Two people stood together in the murk at a minor road junction on the rise. One was a broad young man, his face partly hidden by an old, tattered umbrella, and the other a scruffily dressed older man with a stick and thick glasses, not yet perhaps a beggar but he didn’t look far off it.

  Caleb noticed then that the older man was blind or at least nearly blind, and that the younger man was holding on lightly to the sleeve of his coat. As Caleb passed he could see that the older man looked very agitated. The young man beside him lifted his umbrella and Caleb saw his face for a moment too and thought that he looked feral and dangerous. He had a down turned mouth and a shadowed scowl. He was surely just the kind of illicit non-accredited beggar they had all been warned about during their Pastworld induction lessons. The young man spotted him staring and jutted his chin forward and called, ‘Got any silver, young skull face? Coins, dosh, come on, you can spare it.’

  He held out a ragged mittened hand. Caleb, thinking hurriedly of his induction lessons and not even here in the fogs of the past being able to be impolite, stopped and turned to answer him.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ he said, haltingly repeating the official line. ‘I have already given out my recommended beggar’s allowance for today.’

  The blind man fixed his sightless pale eyes in the direction of Caleb’s voice. He shuffled himself forward, and at the same time the tough young man let go of the blind man’s arm. The young man, as a parting shot, called out ‘Skull-faced skinflint bloody Gawker’ to Caleb in a coarse rasping voice. Then he stepped back just a little but stayed near, waited and watched them from a shadowy doorway.

  ‘Help,’ the blind man said quietly under his breath, ‘help me then.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I can –’ Caleb replied. But the blind man quickly interrupted him.

  ‘You could help,’ he whispered. ‘I’m meant to meet someone important, you see, and it’s urgent, and I mean real life and death urgent. You can take me to them perhaps . . . Take me away from here at least; I should be somewhere else instead. You can see, and I can only just about manage; I can hardly see anything at all now. Come on, you can do it as a Christian act. It’s somewhere just near here.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Caleb, ‘I don’t know this area I’m afraid.’

  ‘Take me, please, come on, come on. You can see all right, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Caleb replied, ‘I can, but I don’t even know where we are. I wish I could help.’ He saw that the skin on the back of the man’s hand and wrist was scarred and thickened where it had once perhaps been badly burned. Suddenly Caleb’s father appeared out of the fog. He was out of breath, as if he had been running. ‘There you are at last. I missed you in this damn fog,’ he said to the blind man. Then he stopped and took in exactly what was happening in front of him, ‘Oh, it’s you, Caleb,’ he said, and he reached his hand out and latched on to the blind man’s arm.

  The blind man rolled his pale eyes. ‘Well, well,’ he growled. ‘At last. I think I know that voice, don’t I? We need to talk.’

  ‘Leave us for just a moment, Caleb,’ his father blustered, while his eyes darted to the young man in the doorway.

  Caleb could make no sense of this.

  ‘Come on, it must be after six o’clock,’ the blind man lowered his voice. ‘Let’s go.’

  Caleb’s father replied calmly. ‘I know what you want,’ he said, ‘but where are you trying to get to?’

  ‘Someone is waiting for us, with a message from Eve,’ the blind man whispered in his rasping voice, staring straight ahead. ‘Come on,’ said the blind man, ‘or he’ll get me. He’ll leave me to rot with my throat cut, and worse, you have no idea.’

  ‘Eve,’ Caleb’s father said quietly.

  ‘Yes, Eve, and double yes, Eve, the lovely Eve. She’s gone, run off – why else would I risk writing? – she’s out there somewhere in this place.’

  Caleb watched all this from a few feet away, not far from the feral young beggar.

  ‘They are close behind me now, and there’s more than one of them, and they come from him, from hell.’ Then the blind man flipped up the face of a rusted-looking pocket watch
, which was slung on a dirty string around his neck. Caleb saw that the dial was open, that there was no glass cover over the hands, and that touching them with his trembling fingers only seemed to confirm the blind man’s panic further.

  ‘It’s half past now. She’s probably been waiting there for me since six. You don’t know how dangerous this is. She won’t wait for ever. Come on, come on, it’s your chance too. I must get the message. You must save Eve,’ the blind man said, and turned his face away, his gums working, chewing and mashing.

  It was then that Caleb saw the other beggar, the one who had been tracking them all the way from the station. He stood on the other side of the road watching them, then gave a shrill whistle to someone further off in the crowd. The feral young man with the umbrella moved away from the doorway.

  ‘Come on then, take my arm and, please,’ said Lucius, ‘be careful near the traffic. Why not let my son take the other arm, and we will take you, to where this woman is?’

  The three stood for a moment near the kerbside, as the traffic rattled past. Caleb shivered. Something hovered near him at eye level, something metallic, like an insect or a thin silver needle, and it buzzed around his head for a moment. He looked straight at it and it suddenly dipped out of sight and vanished into the swirls of fog.

  The other ragged man crossed the road towards them. He was light on his feet and dodged and skipped between all the carriages and wagons. The younger beggar reached them first and grabbed at the blind man.

  ‘Did you just touch me?’ said the blind man. ‘What was that?’

  Three or more ragged men were suddenly among them like a pack of fierce dogs. Caleb’s father moved closer and turned to him, his mouth open, as if to call out. The blind man was struck with something that flashed bright and silver and he crumpled downwards into his overcoat just where he stood, as if he were a building that had been suddenly demolished. The beggar who had been following Caleb and his father threw something in the air over to Caleb. Instinctively Caleb caught it. He felt something warm and sticky. He looked down and saw red all over his hand and a blood-stained knife. He dropped the knife. The blind man went down on to the wet cobbles near the clattering wheels of the passing carriages; and all without a sound. Caleb instinctively reached out to him, and his bloodied hand closed round the pocket watch on the string, which ripped away from the blind man’s neck.

  Someone held Caleb now, tight from behind.

  ‘Murder!’ shouted a coarse voice. ‘Look what he’s done.’

  Caleb struggled while someone wrenched Caleb’s mask from his head. He could not believe what had just happened. Now he watched as his father was punched hard too and fell straight down in the dirt and wet.

  The cold rain streamed in Caleb’s eyes. He struggled against whoever held him, not knowing what else to do. Someone screamed. Caleb saw the shiny silver blade on the ground at his feet. He saw the ground and the blind man’s spilled blood, mingling with the rainwater. He saw his father in his pathetic skeleton-printed suit sprawled in a puddle. A ragged man bent down to Caleb’s father, and lifted him up in a headlock. Then pointed an accusing finger at Caleb. ‘Trick or treat tonight, and this young blighter’s killed ’em both,’ he called out to whoever would listen among the crowd.

  Caleb was trapped.

  A carriage stopped and then another. Confused voices shouted, ‘Blood! Look someone’s really hurt here.’ Caleb struggled harder against the arms that held him. He whipped his head wildly from side to side. He looked for some support among the crowd of people that had gathered round. Then his father shouted out, ‘Run,’ and got smashed in the face for it. His father lifted his head to Caleb again. ‘Run,’ he croaked again. ‘Run, boy, run while you can.’

  The broad young man with the umbrella struck his father again and harder this time. In that instant Caleb decided. He swung his boot back hard and it connected with the shadowy figure who was holding him. The figure yelped and for a moment his grip loosened; it was enough. Caleb took his chance. He ran straight out and across the busy road, between all the carriages. He ran fast, sliding and dodging the wheels and horses, and he kept looking straight ahead.

  .

  Chapter 13

  OBSERVATION ROOM 1,

  BUCKLAND CORP. COMMS CENTRE 10.37 P.M.

  .

  DI Hudson watched the recording of the whole incident as it unfolded in repeat on the Espion feed screens. There was only the one camera, so it was a confused set of images. Once the camera pulled further back from the boy he had a clearer view. Hudson replayed the stabbing part, back and forth, studying the blind man’s collapse, looking for the moment the blow was struck and exactly who had struck it. He enlarged and resolved that section of the image in greater detail. Finally he saw the ragged man dig the knife point hard into the blind man’s chest. ‘Ouch,’ he said aloud to the screen. He watched the Gawker being struck in the face, knocked down and held in the arms of the young tough behind him. Then he watched the skull mask ripped from the youth’s face, watched him kick out and run off across the road and into the crowd and there the camera lost him. Three of the ragged men ran off after him, two stayed with the body, two more dragged the man in the skeleton suit back along the pavement. The Espion camera had been kept on track until they reached a waiting hansom cab with closed curtains. The door of the cab opened, and the slumped figure of the man in the suit was pushed inside. Hudson glimpsed a masked face through the open door. He froze the image and stored it, one more piece of evidence for the Inspector. One of the ragged men turned and noticed the needle-sized Espion camera. His hand reached out and for a second it filled the bank of screens, and then the image dissolved in a fizzing snow of white and green sparks; the camera was down. The screen went black.

  Hudson alerted Charlie Catchpole and when he arrived showed him the attack.

  ‘I already ran a check on the two victims. The man we presume kidnapped is Lucius Brown. Turns out he’s on the big A list, an original Buckland imagineer, once a real Corporation bigwig. The knife victim, who looks as if he’s blind, we have no match for, not so far anyway. There’s no connection we can find. The boy witness, the one you can see running away just there, is Caleb Brown, age seventeen, son of Lucius. Both came in here on personal invitation – Buckland freedom passes, the works.’

  ‘Has anyone picked up the body of the victim yet?’

  ‘Well, about ten minutes ago a cab ambulance arrived at the scene,’ Hudson said, ‘and I quote: “The body has gone,” and we know what that means.’

  ‘Sold to a bootleg murder tour,’ Catchpole said.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Hudson, ‘and of course no sign of the boy. He’s gone to ground if he has any sense. Anyway, this is the bit you have to see.’ He rolled the sequence with the cab and paused at the glimpse of the masked figure inside.

  ‘Add that to yesterday’s incident, the tower leap, the severed head, the missing heart?’

  ‘What would the Fantom’s interest be in this man Brown though?’ Catchpole said.

  ‘One of us, and maybe, if I’m unlucky again, two of us, may soon have the job of finding out,’ said Hudson. ‘Time to visit Lestrade and show him what we’ve got.’ He fingered his neck, already imagining the stiff collar, the hard stud at the throat, the constricting waistcoat.

  .

  Chapter 14

  FROM EVE’S JORNAL

  .

  ‘You’ve never heard of the Fantom?’ Jago asked me.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I replied, but inside an odd memory had stirred. It was of Jack muttering the word ‘phantom’ as he read, bent close over the newspaper.

  ‘The Fantom comes and goes like a shadow,’ said Jago. ‘He’s our local Pastworld bogeyman, a really terrifying figure. He either travels up high among the roofs and chimneys, or he somehow moves out of sight underground. He’s an odd mixture, an old-time, daring show-off master criminal. He wears a mask and he’s as agile as a cat. Now he’s a throat cutter, a disemboweller, a tearer-out
of hearts, a decapitator as well. They say he controls all the unofficial begging, and much worse that goes on in the city. He’s the Roi des pauvres, king of the ragged men and of the wider criminal underclass. He’s too clever to get caught, he’s the very best at what he does. They even sell ballad sheets about him in the markets.’

  I sat listening to Jago in horror, imagining someone tearing out a heart, a human heart. Jago clicked the horse into action, and we were off again. ‘There are big rewards out for him but no one has ever claimed them, no one has ever turned him in – he’s that elusive. The poor look up to him in a strange sort of way. They have invested him with this legendary folklore status and now even with supernatural powers. He jumps from buildings and high places. He does what in the last century would have been called ‘base jumping’. He once fell during a rooftop pursuit and floated down to the ground on a scarlet parachute.’

  We were near the river, surrounded by a series of warehouses and wharf buildings which rose up like bad teeth on either side of us. Jago slowed the horse, and the wagon came to a halt.

  ‘We’re going to meet up tomorrow with the rest of our family,’ Jago said.

  ‘Family,’ I said, trying the sound of the word in my mouth. It was a word I had hardly used before. At least it felt that way.

  ‘We call them our family. They are a tribe of ragtag and bobtails really. Street entertainers like ourselves, a loose collection, Gypsies, poor young runaways, all sorts. We’re a very broad family, we don’t ask questions and we don’t discriminate.’

  ‘Runaways like me,’ I said.

  ‘Runaways just like you,’ he said. ‘You are welcome to stay with us, Eve. We can protect you, if you feel that you need it, and looking at you I think you do.’ He looked me over, as if inspecting me for the first time. I felt his eyes all over me. ‘Do you know we might even make something of you, if you’d like us to. You have a dancer’s physique – you could be useful. We could train you and you could earn your keep while you’re with us,’ said Jago. ‘Or of course I could just take you back to where you came from if you’d prefer.’ He reached over and gave me a squeeze on the wrist. His thin hand was cold, but felt very strong.