Cogwheel kept the engine running as Cal and Mark hopped out of the portholes to either side and approached the glazed door. Cal tried the door handle.
‘Locked!’
Cal motioned to Mark to stand back, then smashed the central door panel with the butt of the Minimi and knocked out the fragments of glass so they could squeeze through.
Inside there was a single five-by-five yard room filled with the usual bottles and miscellany you would expect of a small pharmacy.
‘Hello! Anybody here?’ Cal shouted into the murky interior.
There was no reply.
Mark nodded towards a door set into a recess to their left. Cal rapped against the wood with the butt of the machine-gun. ‘I’ll give you ten seconds to come out of there before I empty the gun through the door.’
There was a furtive rustling before the door chinked open. A small, rotund face peered out at them.
‘C’mon,’ Cal yanked the man out into the open. ‘We have somebody with burns. We need dressings and painkillers.’
The pharmacist scurried about his shelves and produced some paraffin tulle dressings, bandages, and a bottle of pills.
As they were leaving, Mark asked Cal to go ahead without him. Then he examined the mind of the chemist through his oraculum. It confirmed exactly what he had been thinking since first entering the shop.
He placed a finger against the man’s bald sweating brow and administered the equivalent of a knockout blow, mind-to-mind, leaving the unconscious body prostrate on the floor.
‘What was that about?’ Cal asked him, when Mark rejoined him in the already accelerating Pig.
‘Arsehole was praying in the cupboard. That was how I knew he was in there.’
‘Praying for what?’
‘Not what – who! He was praying to Grimstone’s master.’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘Might also explain Farmer Giles down the road.’
Tajh muttered: ‘Let’s not get paranoid.’
Sharkey whistled. ‘Maybe we’re not quite paranoid enough.’
Cal said: ‘What do you mean?’
‘Might explain why the place is so untouched.’
Cal took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘I feel like going back and putting a belt full into the head of Farmer Giles. But we don’t have the time. We head northwest. Get us out of here fast as you can, Cogwheel. We’re probably no more than forty miles from where we need to be, but we’re going to have to travel twice that distance to avoid towns, major junctions. We can’t afford mistakes and we can’t afford any more stops.’
Escape
You gotta think it through, Gully thought. Strewth – it was such a big decision! Maybe I’m wrong?
He was squatting down in the lead gutter inside the edge of the roof of the hall, studying the sky again. He had been looking for what felt like a very long time and had seen nothing. Could be he had imagined it, that light in the sky? If only Penny was here to talk about it. He missed her so much, even though they never did nothing but argue. What would she say? He knew exactly what Penny would say . . .
Stop, look, listen!
He stopped his ruminating, he looked up into the sky and he listened . . .
‘Noffink.’
He stood up, stretched his cramped legs, squatted down again. The worry of it was driving him nuts. All the same he knew he had seen that light in the sky. He had seen it twice. Maybe he should warn them folks down there in the barns? Maybe he should warn old Pinky Ponky? But they might take it bad if I do. I’d ’ave to tell ’em wot I been up to. Wot’re they gonna fink? They gonna fink I’ll run. They’d lock me up. That’s all them people ever do with the likes of me. They’d lock me up so I couldn’t run.
Gully couldn’t take that chance. No way, bleedin’ Jose!
Trouble was he didn’t rightly know what to do for the best. He didn’t want to see nobody getting hurt.
Wot you fink, Penny?
He heard her voice clear as a bell inside of his head: ‘Is Our Place Safe?’
‘No, it bleedin’ ain’t.’
There ain’t no Our Place no more. You put a stop to that, Penny, when you went and killed the Skull. An’ this old farm ain’t safe neither. That’s the problem driving me crazy. I seen it, gel. I know I’m right about that light in the sky.
He hurried back down to take another look at the Raleigh racer. He just looked at it in the penlight for a moment or two, the girly red of the frame, the silvery chrome of the mudguards and the handlebars. He prodded the flat tyres, took the pump off from under the bar and cleaned it with his spit. Hah! Will ya look at that! Even the pump was chrome. But it didn’t connect direct to the tyres. Of course it don’t – idiot! Poking around in the saddlebag, he found what he was looking for: a nozzle that connected the pump to the valve. He tried blowing through the nozzle, but he couldn’t. He spat the dirt out of his mouth, then looked at the nozzle, but even with the penlight it was too dark to see inside the tiny hole. He found an orange stick in right pocket 1. He poked the orange stick into the hole, then tried blowing through it again. Still bleedin’ blocked.
Shit, ya idiot Gully – maybe it’s supposed to be blocked?
Only way to test it was to connect it to the pump. He did so, then operated the pump with the nozzle in his mouth. He felt the blast of air puffing out his cheeks. Pump workin’ okay. He stood up, his hand clasping the black leather saddle for several undecided seconds.
Got to be sure!
He left the bike and hurried back up to the roof again, got the binoculars out of his pocket and stared around that same area of sky.
Maybe the light wasn’t always in the same place? He moved around the roof, keeping to a crouch so he wouldn’t be seen by the folks below. He went around all over the place peering up into the sky. His right eye began to twitch. It was no good. You got to make a decision, Gully – or pack it in, mate! He sighed, and then he saw it out of the corner of his eye: the same light again. Only it was in a different place to before. He could easy have missed it since it just flicked on a second or two and then blinked out. He pulled the binoculars up from around his neck and searched the spot, his heart pounding all the while. Then he saw it – a small dark shape hovering like a raptor with a single bluish eye that winked on for a second or two and winked off again. He’d been right all along.
Got to be one of them drones.
‘Yeah – yeah!’
You really got to warn ’em, Gully.
‘No way!’ He couldn’t to get himself locked up. Not now. Not when he knew he had to get out of here.
*
Gully sneaked out of there through the ‘walking gate’. That was what Pinky Ponky called it. He didn’t know if there was a guard or not on the main gate, but he didn’t want to risk it. The old bolt on the walking gate was stiff with rust, but he hit it with a stone, keeping the sound down with a snot rag. Then he wheeled the Raleigh racer out through the opened gate and closed it behind him. You got to hope the snow won’t start up again. But right there at the gate the first flakes began to fall. He swore up into the night sky.
At least he’d had a bit of time to get ready; he’d Cellotaped his torch to the handlebars and stuck his goodbye message on the back door before he left. He’d warned them all that they’d got to get away.
You done your best Gully!
Now he tested the bigger torch, covering the light with his closed fist. All A-OK. Not that he was going to switch it on yet, not even when he was cycling away. Better the creepy dark than being hauled straight back.
Hey, Penny – I wish I wasn’t so scared. But it ain’t half as frightening as the thought of going back there to London.
Now, cycling a little unsteadily into the darkness, he thought about the small bottle of gin he had nicked.
Gully didn’t like alcohol. He had tried the
occasional beer and stuff with other kids but he had never tasted spirits, so he had nicked a cupful of gin, which he had poured into a small screw-cap bottle stuffed into his backpack. Now he paused about a hundred yards down the lane, took out the bottle, untwisted the cap and swigged it.
‘Ugghh!’ Tasted like shit.
He grimaced, then twisted the cap back onto the bottle, stuffed it back in the pack.
You got to man up, Gully!
Whatever that was supposed to mean . . . As he pushed off with the bike again, he couldn’t help recalling when he had last seen Penny. He had followed Mark and the others down them wooden steps into the pit where the lunatics was killing one another with swords in the sawdust. Gully had heard Mark roaring a name into the air, with the black triangle in his brow blazing blue-black lightning. Gully himself had been encased in the lightning – it hadn’t hurt him, but it had sure wasted just about everything else. It had torn along the tiers of seats, erupting through them Skulls like a fury. Then something had arrived, screeching through the air, and a battleaxe, covered in weird lightning, had landed in Mark’s left hand. Gully had never seen noffink like it before in his life. But it didn’t stop him chasing after Mark as he battered through the Skulls, all the way down to the rostrum above the arena.
‘No!’
Gully’s mind was filled with the shout of the woman, Nan, who’d carried the same black triangle in her head. A bolt of lightning had come out of her triangle and shaken the arena like a cyclone. Them flame-throwers was blown clean out as the men holding them was blasted inside of the pit.
There had been some geezer ahead, with a sword held above his head. The blade of the sword had poured out a tempest, which had risen to join the clouds in the sky above. Gully’s mouth had fallen open as he looked beyond the figure with the sword to two smaller figures: an old guy in a black robe with his arm around a girl . . . And then he’d seen who it was.
‘Penny!’
His voice had been drowned out by the thunderclap of power that filled the arena.
His heartbeat had come up into his throat as he’d followed Mark, who was smashing down through the final tiers. Then they were standing in the sawdust and snow while Mark battled towards some half dead old geezer who was soaked in petrol. Mark called out the name Padraig. At the same time the lunatics had been trying to set fire to the old geezer. Then the Mamma Pig had burst through the wooden tiers and the air was filled with the crackle of a machine gun turned on the Skulls by a giant with a shaved head.
Mark was caught up in a blazing confrontation with the figure with the sword and Gully was running after him, heading for the edge of the stage. The old guy with his arm around Penny was just yards away, looking down at Gully. Gully had seen the smile at the corners of his lips. He had seen that the man’s eyes was as black as a robin’s. All the while he had felt a growing panic inside him. He was shouting at Penny: ‘Penny, gel!’
He’d seen the expression on her face as she stared back down at him. He’d heard her answering cry, ‘Run, Gully. Run from the City Below!’
He’d run all right. He’d run from there like a frightened rabbit. In his mind he was still running. But he couldn’t keep running forever. Penny had been taken from him and somehow he had to get her back. That was why he was heading back to London. He was going to find Penny and save her from the City Below.
Cycling on now, getting into a rhythm of pedalling, his thoughts just went round and round inside his head. Sometimes he’d use the torchlight momentarily, keeping tabs when the lanes twisted and turned, but not too often. He just kept on cycling, even as the snow thickened so it was sticking in his hair. He stopped a moment and turned the bike round, with the torch illuminated, so he could look behind him at his own tracks.
Whoo-ooo!
‘Shit – just a bleedin’ owl!’ It had frightened him half to death hooting at him. The owl was somewhere in the dark up ahead. Its hooting was enough to stop him dead, his heart hammering in his chest. He hesitated, the bike still beneath him, waiting for the bird to hoot again. It humoured him.
Who – who – whoooooo!
His heart lifted. That old owl hooting at him made him feel better inside. He imagined the bulky shape of it, all shoulders and eyes and claws. Perfick!
‘Hey, Penny! Wot a lark it would be to keep an owl for a pet! Set it up in a box in some branch of a tree. Pick some place where they’d be plenty of mice. Honest, I could just sit and watch it, all night long.’
Penny’s Dilemma
The voice was that of Jeremiah. Penny was unable to resist it. She opened her eyes to discover that she was alone in a very strange place. She wasn’t standing, or sitting, or lying down. She was hovering weightlessly in space, looking out onto a vision.
Stop, look, listen . . .
She did so. Closing her eyes for a moment, she opened them fully again and looked around. The images were three-dimensional, like a storm of the most extraordinary confetti. It was difficult to maintain full concentration because the metamorphosing images made her feel dizzy. There was no particular sound. Worse! There appeared to be a complete absence of sound. When she searched for it her ears registered an electronic static.
‘Where am I?’
The Akkharu – the weavers of stardust! The idea that she could enter the minds of those extraordinary slug beasts frightened her as much as it thrilled her. She looked anew at the flickering patterns of shape and colour. There were stars, floral shapes, radial symmetries with natural curves, like an object she had seen somewhere; a miracle captured in glass, called millefiori.
‘Are they dreaming?’
‘They create . . .?’
‘What instructions?’
The voice was silent.
How could she possibly instruct the Akkharu? A shiver went through Penny at that possibility. Was she getting closer to Jeremiah’s plans for her? But not yet close enough to fully understand? ‘But I don’t know what . . . Please tell me what you really expect of me.’
*
It was midsummer, and she was exploring the wilderness of the family garden chasing after butterflies. She had already ticked off the commonplace cabbage whites as well as red admirals, the huge dusky-backed peacocks, the blues, fritillaries, commas, tortoiseshells . . . the painted ladies. She loved their names. She loved the delicacy of them, their lightness when she captured one, breathed on it and then let it go. It was hard to believe that hard-headed entomologists had given them such exotic names. It was as if even the naturalists had allowed themselves to be entranced by them, entranced by their magic. So they gave them names as magical as the evanescent creatures themselves.
Emily the butterfly
Does a dance
As she flutters by
But something was wrong. This didn’t feel like a dream. It felt too real to be a dream. Suddenly she was wheeling amid vast flocks of gorgeous butterflies.
‘It’s you, Jeremiah. You’re controlling my dream.’
As ever, his words puzzled her.
‘Why?’
Penny hesitated. ‘Why would you do that?’
Could it be that he needed to understand her every bit as much as she needed to understand him? ‘But why are you interested in me? You know so much more than I do. You are so powerful. Do you remember, when we first met, you already knew my name? I asked you how you kn
ew my name.’
‘Because . . . Because you could read my mind?’
‘Why did you bother to find me?’
‘But that’s not possible.’
She hesitated, pondered his words. ‘But why meet me then?’
Penny remembered. ‘The cloud thing with all the faces!’
Just to think about it caused her heartbeat to rise. ‘It terrified me. I don’t want to remember it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who are you? What are you really?’
Penny hesitated again, thinking of what he had just said to her, wondering what his words might mean.
‘Are you . . . evil?’
The Return of the Arinn Page 9