A Whisper of Horses

by Zillah Bethell

  “It won’t make any difference,” I shouted. “I’ll still say the same thing in the morning. So don’t bother asking.”

  The door squeaked shut behind him and I was left on my own in the room.

  * * *

  When the guard pushed me back into cell number 7, the Professor rushed over to me.

  “Are you alright, my dear? What was that all about?”

  For the splittest of seconds I thought about telling him. I didn’t want another big squirmy secret rusting away in me. But then I stopped myself. It wasn’t right. Wasn’t right for the Professor to know that betraying him was the key to my freedom.

  “Oh,” I muttered. “Nothing for you to worry about, Professor. Nothing at all. Just a mistake.”

  “If you say so, my dear.” He smiled, though his eyes were saying something different again.

  chapter 14

  ESCAPING

  SOMETIME AROUND THE middle of the day we were brought dinner pills and water. Tab snapped his pill in two and gave half to the dog—who gobbled it up in a nanosecond—then vamooshed back behind the wardrobe.

  “What’s the point?” I half grumbled to myself, crunching into a square of what I now knew to be fizz, chalk dust and dried milk powder. “We’re going to be locked away in a prison camp for the rest of our lives. Breaking up rocks. We’re never going to get outside. We’re never going to find any horses.” I was nattering now to distract myself from what the Minister might have in store. If I didn’t betray the Professor what would he do to me? “All we’re ever going to see now is a strip of Lahn Dan sectioned off with a razor-wire fence. Nothing more.”

  The Professor patted my arm. “Don’t despair. Until the very moment you stop breathing, don’t despair. There might still be a way.”

  “Mouse! Come on, boy. Mouse. Come on,” Tab called. The dozing rat-thing spiked to attention and scuttled off the bed and behind the wardrobe, from where his master’s voice had come.

  Then silence. The Professor and I looked at each other.

  “What’s going on?”

  We both got up and peered around the back of the wardrobe. Both Tab and the dog had gone.

  “What on earth…?”

  Then I saw it. A door in the wall, half open. I could feel a cold draft coming out of it.

  “He’s found a tunnel!” I cried.

  “A tunnel. Of course.” We both pushed the wardrobe a little farther forward so that we could fit behind it. “The kings and queens would have had escape tunnels built all over this place. In case enemies tried to capture them. Clever boy.”

  I pulled the thin wooden door farther open. It was covered with the same wallpaper as the rest of the room so that people wouldn’t know it was even there. Beyond it was a dull blackness where the air felt chilly. In the distance I could just make out the shady outlines of Tab and Mouse—one feeling his way along the tunnel, the other tip-tapping his tiny claws just behind.

  “Tab, my boy!” the Professor shouted. “Wait for us.”

  * * *

  In a way, I was more annoyed by Tab finding the tunnel than I was by his rudeness beforehand. The Professor seemed to be impressed by him—clever boy and all that—and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sickening feeling of jealousy. How dare he come along and interfere like this? I felt all tipsy-topsy.

  The tunnel wasn’t as dark or narrow as it first appeared. But it did smell. It was obvious that nobody had been down it for a long time so it had a bit of a soggy whiff about it. The walls were made of lumpy stone and the floor was gritty and uneven. Little slits of light shone out from other unopened doors in other rooms.

  After a bit of scrabbling about, we caught up with Tab and his scrubbing brush dog.

  “Wha you doin?” He turned and hissed at us. “Go away.”

  “We’re coming with you.”

  “Go away. Leave us alone.” The dog started to sniff at the Professor’s feet.

  “But you might need our help.” The Professor bent over and stroked the ball of fleas on its head. “We can help you escape.”

  “I don’t need no one to help me escape. I can do it on me own.” He continued slowly making his way along the corridor. After a few feet, the passageway twisted to the left and Tab disappeared once again. We raced around the corner and caught up with him.

  “Look,” I said, in a brick of a voice, “we’re coming with you. Like it or not.”

  He stopped moving and stared me straight in the face. “You wanna come with me cos you can’t escape on yer own.” He smirked. “That’s right, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, shut up. You’re just an idiot.” I wanted to scream.

  The Professor poked me with his finger. “You’re right, Tab. We don’t know our way out of here. Whereas you do.” At that, the boy seemed to swagger. “It’s very impressive.”

  “Yeah. Well. Been ere before, ain’t I? Knew there’d be a secret door somewhere.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Oh yeah. Undreds of times. It’s like a game.”

  The Professor and I looked at each other.

  “And you’ve escaped? Hundreds of times?”

  “They catch me. I escape. Cat an mouse, ain’t it? Fing is, they ain’t worked out all the tunnels yet.”

  “So what happens now?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t have an answer.

  “Depends where this partiklar tunnel takes us. But what I do know is”—he looked around to check nobody was listening, even though there was nobody in the tunnel with us—“that we got to get out before any of the guards goes and notices we’re gone.”

  With that he scampered off, virtually on tippy-toe. The Professor gave me a mischievous little wink.

  * * *

  As it happened, the passageway led to the underground modpod parking area. We found ourselves looking out at the rows and rows of transporter pods through a grille in the wall. They reminded me of Mr. Tumbril’s bees—big, fat, metallic bumblebees. A couple of police men strolled past us, but nobody noticed the three faces—four, I suppose, if you counted the scruffy mutt—peeking through the slits in the duct.

  “Oddly quiet.” The Professor adjusted his spectacles on the tip of his nose. “Not many of the guards around.”

  “Watch it,” Tab warned. “Might be a trap.” He started pulling at the grille, but the Professor tapped him on the wrist to stop him.

  “I’m sorry, Tab. But how are we supposed to get out of Bucknam Place from here? Isn’t there some other tunnel that might lead us outside? If we go back and retrace our steps, mightn’t we find such a tunnel?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Tab scowled at the Professor like he was badly drawn or something. “Are you a spy?”

  “What? Oh, goodness me, no. What makes you think I’m a spy?”

  “You talk like one. All sort of…” He waited for the right word to land on the platform of his brain. “Fancy. Like you don’t understand.”

  “Stop being ridiculous,” I cut in. “Just how are we meant to get out of here?”

  Tab pointed at one of the modpods.

  “What? A modpod?”

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  The Professor shook his head. “But I can’t drive one of those things.”

  “No,” said Tab. “But I can.”

  * * *

  Tab and the Professor heaved the large metal vent out of the way and we scuttled as silently as three human beings and one dog possibly can across a cavernous old car park. When we came alongside the modpod, Tab tried one of its doors. It was unlocked so we all climbed in, Tab positioning himself in the driver’s seat.

  “Pass me that.”

  “What?”

  “The hat. Give it to me. You lot better keep low.”

  I picked up the hat that was hanging from a hook by the door and threw it onto his head.

  “Very fetching.”

  “Hmmph.” He pulled it down properly and straightened it in the mirror. “You oughta hold Mouse. Keep im quiet.” He grabbed Mouse and sho
ved him onto my lap. It wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t want to hold the stupid dog, and it didn’t want to be held by me. But I did it anyway because the thought of the awful thing starting to bark and getting us caught was worse than the smell and the roughness and the fleas rolled into one. I tried patting it on the head but it wasn’t having any of it.

  Tab pushed a button and the vehicle roared into existence.

  “Keep down. And keep quiet.”

  He lowered a lever and pushed some pedals with his feet and the modpod eased itself away. Crouched low in the seat, Tab looked ridiculous dressed in the oversized hat, manhandling the far-too-big-for-such-small-hands wheel. But—I had to admit—he looked as though he knew what he was doing. He spun the wheel around in one direction then the other, and I felt the modpod going up a long ramp. A few seconds later, it started to slow, and Tab made one of the darkened glass windows slide down.

  “What’s up?” a voice from outside asked.

  “Buncha dissidents down in Full Ham. Aincha heard?” Tab put a bit of a growl in his voice to make himself sound older than he was. “Gotta go scoop ’em up.”

  A moment passed before the modpod lurched forward again and Tab tossed the hat off his head.

  “S’alright now. We’re out. You can get up.”

  The Professor and I stretched ourselves. We were whooshing along the Mall, police men wandering by not paying the slightest chunk of attention to us.

  It was amazering.

  * * *

  Tab was only just about long enough to reach the pedals, but he seemed to be driving along like a professional. He slowed when he thought it sensible, and accelerated when he thought it possible. And Mouse seemed to realize that his master was doing something good so started yapping and barely let up all the way along the flyover that led out to the west.

  That ride in the modpod was one of the most strangely joyous things that I’d ever experienced in my life up to that point. It was also one of the scariest. All the time we were zipping along the roads, getting farther and farther away from our captors, I was worried that we might get pulled over or chased by the real police pods. But nobody did pull us over and nothing did chase us. Instead we just made our way out from the center of Lahn Dan to the endless suburban wastelands of the west. Slowly, steadily, surely. To the wall.

  The modpod was not fast. It tittered along, but not at any great rate. Perhaps it hadn’t been fully charged up, I don’t know. But I found myself kicking my legs to try to make it go faster.

  It took a surprisingly long time for us to get out towards the wall, and as we passed Hee Throw the sun behind the dull purplish sky was lowering itself as if it was too tired to fly so high. Like a withered, wrinkling balloon fed up with being played with.

  “So,” the Professor asked. “How do we get beyond the Emm Twenty-five Wall? Is there a hole that you know of?”

  “Ain’t no holes in the Emm Twenty-five.” Tab concentrated hard on the road ahead. “The Minister and his men wouldn’t allow it. Coupla gates here and there, but no one can get through them.” He swiveled the stick thing between the seats. “Not normal people, anyway. Minister’s not stupid enough to leave gaps in the wall.”

  The Professor and I gave each other a look. We were both thinking of Miss Caritas.

  “So how do we get across it then?” I asked. “If there are no gaps?”

  Tab tapped the side of his nose. “That’s for me to nose and for you to find out. Firstly”—he grabbed the wheel with both of his tiny hands—“we come off this main road.”

  The wheel spun hard and the pod lurched off the deserted old motorway and onto a weed-riddled side road. I struggled to hold on to Mouse as we bounced our way down the derelict tarmac.

  “Steady on.” Nimbus held on to his specs, just catching them before they shattered on the floor of the van.

  “Hold on to yer bones, old fella.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” I cried at the boy with the too-small hands and too-short legs. “You’re just making it all up as you go along.”

  “Got you outta Bucknam Place, dint I?” He sounded hurt. “Wern complainin then, were yer? Happy to come along then, eh?”

  Tab yanked the wheel to the right one more time and we found ourselves pottling along an even narrower, bumpier piece of road. Empty houses, long since abandoned, stood guard either side of us, but there was not a single sole soul to be spotted.

  “There it is.”

  About half a mile ahead of us we could just about see the wall, blocking out the rest of the world. The night seemed to be charging in now and in the murky gloom it was hard to pick out any detail from such a distance. Tab killed all the lights in the cabin and we rolled slowly onwards. After a few hold-your-breath minutes he eased the pod to a standstill and switched the buttons off. We all sat there for some seconds, just waiting and watching. Mouse jerked his head from Tab to me to the Professor and back again, wondering what was going on.

  Suddenly Tab leapt up and opened the side door with a hiss. Mouse had skittered out before the Professor and I knew what was happening.

  “Come on,” I whispered and virtually dragged the Professor with me.

  The air outside was still, perfectly still. Not even the teeniest slice of wind blowing across the dead of the evening. And it all seemed so quiet. Eerily quiet. Too quiet. My mind skipped back to the night before. It had been too quiet last night too, and Miss Caritas had spooked out of the darkness to scare us. It felt so familiar. Was it going to happen again? Were the police going to blaze us all senseless with their bright lights and frighten us into standing statue still?

  We all kept to the side of the road, tucking ourselves against walls and tripping over risen-up paving stones. We turned left then right then right again, Tab leading the way. He had the look of someone who knew where he was heading.

  Suddenly, a beam of light shot out over us from some distance behind. It was a police modpod. Its moany rolley siren started up and the flashy red light on top turned round and round.

  “Quick!” Tab shot off like a peashooter, sweeping Mouse up in his arms. “They’ve spotted us. Run!”

  * * *

  Tab led us down a lane. The houses were thinning out; pretty soon we were going to be in open ground where the police would find us easy pickerings and start popping us off one by one with their long-distance rifles.

  “Where are we going, Tab?” the Professor gasped.

  “Here.” Tab stopped in front of some rusted and run-down vehicles from the olden days. He slid his way past one and pointed towards the ground. “This is our way out. And if we act quick enuff they’ll never suspect a fing.”

  It was one of those circular metal doors in the road that you see everywhere but nobody ever uses. A manhole cover, the Professor said they’re called.

  “The sewers,” Nimbus muttered to himself.

  Tab bent over and started tugging on the small metal hooks. He managed to strain it a centimeter or so out of its hole. “Givvas a and.” He squinched up at us. “I carn do it on me own.” I grabbed on to the hooks with my fingers and the Professor helped push the thing out of the way with his foot.

  Looking down into the hole, I could see the top of a ladder that seemed to taper away into the blackness beyond.

  “It’s a bit dark down there,” I said nervously.

  “Lucky I brought this then.” Tab reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stick. He clicked a button and a light shot out of the end of it. He switched it off again as quickly as he could, worried that it might just give the game away. “This partiklar tunnel goes about a mile the other side of the stupid wall. We can climb out there and get well away fore the stupid coppers have stopped scratchin their stupid heads wonderin where we all got to.”

  “You’ve used this tunnel before?” I found myself asking.

  “Undreds of times,” he said, grinning. “Undreds and undreds of times.”

  With one arm holding on to Mouse—who had been s
urprisingly quiet since we’d all got out of the modpod—and the other holding the rungs of the ladder, Tab lowered himself down into the shaft of darkness. “Last one down pull the cover back over,” he ordered, before disappearing into the gloom below.

  “You go next, Professor,” I urged.

  Nimbus stood still and straight and looked me in the eye. “I’m not going, Serendipity.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The Professor stepped forward and grabbed me by the shoulders. “My dear. I’ve come to realize that my work here is not finished. In fact, I now see that it has barely started.”

  “But the police…” I looked behind Nimbus but no one was coming; the lane was as empty and dead as it was a minute or two before. “If they catch you they’ll throw you into one of the camps. Or kill you. You won’t be able to get away.”

  The Professor smiled. “You underestimate this bag of bones, Serendipity.” His hands squeezed my shoulders and I wanted him to say that he was only joking and that he was coming with me and that we were going to escape together. But he didn’t. “We storytellers are a tight bunch, you know. I have many friends who will protect me and together we might just be able to show people the truth. Open their eyes to the things that they see every day but are too afraid to notice. The lies, the deceptions. I owe it to all the Grys and Brackens that grace this city. Every single one of them deserves to know the truth.” He hugged me and I hugged him back.

  “Be careful, Professor,” I said, remembering what the Minister had asked of me.

  Nimbus slipped his hand into his coat pocket and brought out a heavy round lump of metal. He pushed it into my hand. “Take this.”

  I looked at it. It was the compass. “But—”

  “It may prove useful. Keep the dial pointing to the N and walk towards the W. That’s the general direction. Follow the Emm Four—but whatever you do, keep off the road. You will be too exposed on the road itself.” He sighed. “I do not know what is outside of these walls. I cannot help you once you get out there. But I’m sure Tab will help. I can tell he has a good heart.”