by Scot Gardner
My little foot had the right idea. It bailed out in a panic and flipped between the lift and the wall. It spun down through the gloom towards the concrete, twenty-five storeys below.
‘Not again!’ I cursed.
At least it was heading in the direction I was planning to go. I finally decided to join my little foot when I spotted shiny shoes and legs clad in black vinyl through the clear lift doors. I tucked into dive position and plunged through the space between the lift and the wall.
My body bounced and crumpled, sending limbs wheeling off in every direction. I rained down onto the rats’ nest at the base of the lift shaft.
The smell was worse than I remembered. The rottencabbage pong of a too-well-used public convenience. My head could taste it. My body came together at breakneck speed but when my head was home on top of my shoulders, I realised one of my hands was missing.
‘Righty?’ I called. ‘Where are you, Righty?’
A squealing sound was the only reply. I turned to see my hand galloping across the nest. It was riding on the back of a remarkably fat rat. The rat was bucking and twisting but Righty hung on like a miniature rodeo rider.
I pounced on my hand and lifted the squealing rat off the floor. I brought my hand to my head, as if the rat was some sort of telephone and I was about to make a call.
In a sense, I was.
‘Hello? Ratty?’ I thought.
‘Oh my goodness, this is it, I’m surely going to die. The thing has me. It’s going to eat me! It’s going to eat me. Sorry, Auntie Floss, for eating all your jewellery.’
‘It’s okay. I’m not going to eat you. My religion bans the eating of rat guts on certain days of the week.’
‘Really? That’s a relief. Will you let me go, then?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘In a minute. I need your help.’
‘Help?’
I flicked through the rat’s memory. I found the rat’s family tree, which was more like a thicket of blackberries than a tree, with branches in every direction. I found the branch labelled ‘Argus’ and could see that this rat was Argus’ nephew.
‘Nobby Bill Blinkalot,’ I thought.
‘You know my name?’
‘Yes, I met your uncle Argus. Now, Nobby Bill, I wonder if you could tell me everything you know about Titania.’
The rat shivered. ‘It lives next door. I’ve never seen it. Nobody really has. We only hear it. Oh, and the smell.’
‘Next door? How do I get there?’
‘You don’t understand. You don’t want to get there. Nobody wants to go there.’
‘But I do. One of my best friends is heading there right now and I have to get her out. Please help me.’
The rat sighed. ‘High up on the wall behind you is where the smell comes from.’
I thanked Nobby Bill and set him on the nest at my feet. He scampered off at the speed of light.
The fan wasn’t exactly high on the wall, unless you were a rat. I could reach the ledge and a single chin-up put me in the path of the putrid exhaust. I held my breath.
I searched around in the nest for something to stop the fan from turning. A rock or a brick perhaps. I did find a stick. A stout stick with little ratty tooth marks all over one end. I threw the wood into the fan. There was a loud clatter, an electrical hum and the sound of grinding metal.
It stopped turning.
I heaved myself onto the ledge and crawled between the blades of the fan, still effortlessly holding my breath. I crept along a short tunnel to a metal grille and peered through the gaps into the room beyond.
The light was dull. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. I could hear what sounded like a beehive, but as I listened harder I realised it was snoring. Not just one person, but a whole apartment block of snores. Little snuffy ones and diesel-engine snores that made the air rattle about my ears. It did sound a little like a beehive and when I finally realised what I was looking at, my eyes almost popped out.
The room beyond the grille was like a wide corridor that stretched into shadow in both directions and slumped along its length was a Thing. A monstrous Thing. A collection of limbs – arms and legs and heads and bottoms and hands and feet – all attached to each other higgledy-piggledy. There was no order to the arrangement at all. Feet poked into the air and bottoms perched beside faces in one long, pulsing mass. There was no way that thing could move. It would be like a game of stacks-on-the-mill walking across the room. Impossible.
This was Titania.
If the place really was called the Hive then I was looking at the Queen Bee.
And that explained the smell, too. Hundreds of unwashed bodies all slumped together in the one mass. Half the detachable people in the world must have been in that room.
I realised, in a moment of horror, that one of the faces snoring in my direction was actually a bottom.
‘Crystal?’ I whispered at the grille. Had that mess swallowed her already? Surely not.
Using Ravi’s granddad’s old penknife, I levered the grille away from the wall, just enough to lower my body through. I quietly hung my feet into the room and slipped down the concrete.
My feet didn’t touch the floor. There was no rats’ nest on this side of the wall to bunk me up and I was hanging there when an announcement came over the Hive’s intercom.
‘Ahem, is this working?’ said a very familiar Indian boy’s voice. ‘Yes? Good. This is your captain speaking. Ahem. As a gesture of our goodwill and the kindness of our hearts, I would like to inform you that your cell doors have all been automatically unlocked. Please feel free to exit the building in an orderly manner. Thank you for your involvement in this program. Have a nice day.’
I was still hanging there when the lights in the room came on.
‘Goodness me,’ came a voice. ‘Do you see that boy hanging on the wall there, Cyril?’
‘Is he wearing orange socks?’ said another.
‘I do believe he is,’ said the first.
‘Boy! Help us, please!’ they said together.
When a siren began to wail, my wrists detached and I slumped to the floor. My hands fell on top of my head and jammed over my ears. It wasn’t a siren I’d heard; it was the sound of a hundred heads howling for help.
Men in vinyl poured into the room. They were carrying electric prods – the kind used to zap a stubborn cow.
I crouched low and ran to the far end of the room, across a slippery floor. The air was thicker away from the broken fan and I was glad I’d chosen to hold my breath.
‘John?’ squeaked a familiar voice.
‘Crystal?’
It took me a minute to find her head amongst the body parts. A hairy arm hung from beside her ear and as I stepped close, it grabbed at me.
I recoiled and the arm missed. ‘Crystal? Is it really you?’
‘Help me, please John. Help me.’
‘Yes, John,’ another head said. ‘Help us.’
‘But I . . .’
‘Over here!’ shouted a guard.
The hairy arm grabbed at me again, only this time it connected and clung to my jacket. I tried to back away but the hand held tight. Men in vinyl were bearing down on me from both sides of the room and my struggle turned frantic. I heaved and the hairy arm was torn from Titania’s side. It let go and flopped to the slimy floor.
The guards closed in, cattle prods at the ready.
I had no weapon. I looked around, hesitated then grabbed the arm off the floor. I flung it at the closest guard.
The arm sailed through the air like a fleshy boomerang and knocked the guard off his feet and sent him tumbling into Titania. Hands and legs hooked around him and held him tight.
I tore a foot from the mass beside me and pitched it at another guard but the guard ducked and the foot bounced uselessly off the wall. I ran and weaved and managed to slip past three more guards before four hands closed on my shoulders and I was lifted off the ground.
The Head had caught me.
I kicked and squi
rmed but only succeeded in dislodging my little foot. It hit the floor with a soft splash and began flapping like a fish in a boat.
The Head lifted me higher. I felt like a minnow caught by a shark. I stopped struggling.
The Head laughed his sinister laugh and it drained the last of the hope from my body.
‘Interesting,’ the Head said, looking at my flipping foot. ‘Seems there’s a big dose of trouble in that little body. We can soon shake that out of you.’
The Head rattled me hard enough for the change to jingle in my jeans. I felt my head coming loose, but I willed it to stay on. Willed it with all my might. My hand bumped against my jacket and something cracked on my knuckle.
Ravi’s cigarette lighter.
I pulled the lighter from my pocket and an idea exploded into my head.
The air in Titania’s chamber was rotten, thick with the gases exuded by all the bodies trapped there. Heavy with the extremely flammable gases given off by those bodies, even more concentrated now the fan was broken.
A smile formed on my lips. The Head saw what was in my hand and as it dawned on him what was about to happen, the smile (along with all the colour) drained from his face.
I flicked the cigarette lighter.
CHAPTER 26
THE EXPLOSION MADE my ears ring. It made my toes ring and my teeth ring. It also blew all but one of the lights in Titania’s cell, and caused Titania to detach, to break into hundreds of pieces. On the floor, where the huge single body had once been was a writhing tumble of naked limbs. It was the world’s largest ever game of Nude Twister, only nobody really wanted to play. Detachable people of all ages and all nations politely felt through the pile, feet looking for legs, hands looking for their arms, arms hunting for torsos that were trying to find their heads. All the individuals trapped in the pile that was Titania were pulling themselves together.
All the guards had been stunned and burned; their vinyl suits were not much more than molten blobs on the floor of the cell. They were just as broken and vulnerable as the bodies in pieces. The Head had dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and I had slumped on top but quickly re-formed myself. I marvelled at the mess I’d made, put the lighter back in my pocket and took the opportunity to heave the Head’s head deep into the quagmire of limbs. It wouldn’t be the end of him but it would be a while before he was trouble again.
I began wading through the limbs, hunting for my friend.
‘Crystal?’
The only reply was a low hum of voices. ‘Excuse me . . . sorry . . . pardon me . . . my arm! I found my arm.’
‘CRYSTAL!’ I hollered above the drone.
‘John?’
I found her slumped against the wall in the gloom. She seemed to be intact. I handed her my jacket.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Mostly,’ she said. ‘I need to get my clothes from the room across the hall. And I can’t find my big foot.’
‘Your big foot?’
She nodded shyly. ‘I have odd-sized feet.’
‘Me too!’ I sang. I detached my little foot and handed it to her. ‘Use this. Go and find your clothes. I’ll look for your foot. It must be here somewhere.’
Crystal hesitantly took my runner with my foot inside. She pulled the sock over the stump of her leg and the ankle joined with surprising ease. She limped a couple of gentle steps then called back. ‘Hey, this foot is really comfortable. If you can’t find mine, I think I’ll steal this one!’
I laughed, not very convincingly. My little foot might have been the scourge of my life but I was still quite fond of it.
In the dull light around me, people continued to pull themselves together. There was excitement in the air, as well as the smell of unwashed bodies and slightly singed hair, and tears of joy flowed freely. It was like a family reunion at the airport, only people weren’t being reunited with their long-lost cousins but their long-lost hands and legs. It was like family. You’d never steal someone else’s mother and you’d never steal someone else’s legs, either, even if they were more beautiful or stronger than your own. Body parts sought each other out and whole people rose from the pile and filed next door to collect their clothes. The guards got to their feet but they were quickly disarmed and pinned to the mucky floor. They struggled and complained but there was nothing they could do to stop the tide of souls.
I sighed. Finding your own body was one thing, but finding someone else’s foot amongst that mess would take a miracle.
And then, the miracle happened.
I spotted Crystal’s foot.
I heard a fanfare but it may have been inside my head. There was the music and the foot seemed to glow in the low light. It wasn’t like spotting your friend’s foot. It wasn’t like spotting your favourite T-shirt in a pile of washing or your bag amongst the fifty unloaded from the tour bus. Crystal’s foot was a vision and, in a single heartbeat, I fell deeply in love with it.
I tried to look away but it was as if my eyes were fused to it. I limped towards it. The moment I touched that foot, I knew why I was so drawn to it.
It wasn’t Crystal’s foot I cradled; it was my own.
I held the thing against the stump of my leg and it attached with such grace and ease that it brought a tear to my eye.
‘John?’ Crystal said. She was dressed and held a spare shoe in one hand and Ravi Carter in the other. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes! Um . . . of course . . . I just . . . it’s . . .’
Ravi looked at Crystal. ‘Was that supposed to be a sentence?’
There was a commotion and the room was suddenly filled with bright lights. More men in vinyl carrying torches and cattle prods were forcing their way into the cell.
‘Where did they come from?’ I cursed.
Ravi raised his hand. ‘Sorry. That was me. They chased me down from the control room.’
Crystal looked at my bare foot – the one that had been her own big foot – and handed me her empty shoe.
‘I think you’ll need this. We’d better get out of here.’
I pulled the shoe on. I led my friends away from the door, across the dwindling pile of body parts to the spot where I’d entered the room. I hurriedly bunked Crystal through the gap and lifted Ravi so she could take his hands. Together, the two of them could just lift me and I pulled the grille closed behind us.
‘Aha!’ Ravi said. ‘The old escape-by-ventilation-shaft routine. I love it when the bad guys play by the rules!’
‘John?’ Crystal said. ‘What do we do about those people? We can’t just leave them.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I have an idea.’
I didn’t really. The idea was actually to say ‘I have an idea,’ which is an excellent thing to say when the whole world seems to have fallen apart and you know it’s mostly your fault. I led my friends past the broken fan into the lift shaft where the air was noticeably cleaner though still slightly rat-flavoured. The lift moved up and down above us and for a moment, I felt as though I was inside a set of bellows.
Then I really did have an idea.
I ushered my friends to the pipe that joined the lift shaft to the central vent. Ravi slid along the pipe effortlessly, assisted by the air being forced through by the descending lift.
‘I’ll never fit through there!’ Crystal shrieked.
‘Yes you will.’
‘No way!’
‘Just go head-first.’
‘The pipe’s too small.’
‘No, I mean literally. Bowl your head through. Hurry.’
Crystal stood there for an awkward moment. She was so used to pretending that she was Normal, I think the thought of me seeing her detached made her squirm inside.
‘Come on,’ I urged.
‘All right, but don’t look.’
I rolled my eyes then turned away. As soon as I heard her head complaining from the pipe, I turned and guided her fumbling body through the hole. She was so thin that two of her would have fitted in the pipe and so long th
at her hands were through to the central vent before her feet had left the lift shaft.
I pulled out the cigarette lighter from my pocket again and lit the tinder-dry rats’ nest at my feet.
‘Sorry, rats,’ I said. ‘It’s time for everybody to get out of here.’
The lift was on the move again and the air surging into the shaft fanned the fire. I hurriedly bailed through the pipe and reassembled in the smoky vent.
‘Fantastic!’ Ravi said, and coughed. ‘We’re free, aren’t we, John?’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘We still have a bit of a climb.’
Crystal moaned. ‘There’s no way I’m climbing up there. It’s just not possible. My body wasn’t built for that sort of . . .’
A squeaking sound made her stop and listen.
‘What’s that? A rat?’ Crystal climbed. By the count of ten she was already three floors above us, climbing like a monkey on fast-forward.
We managed to stay a floor or two above the escaping rats but the smoke gnawed at our lungs and I had to carry Ravi on my back the last ten floors. In her rat-powered panic, Crystal had found the strength to pop the concrete lid off the top of the vent by herself. She ran a way off into the desert and collapsed onto her back. She was still puffing when we slumped beside her.
‘Now we’ve made it, haven’t we, John?’ Ravi asked.
‘Yes, Ravi, we’re out.’
Rats and smoke poured from the vent shaft in the distance.
Crystal sat up, suddenly alert. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘I could really go one of those burgers from that . . .’
Smoke and people were tumbling out of the shed behind the diner. There wasn’t much to burn inside the Hive, I realised, but lighting a fire in the vent had effectively smoked everybody out. All the rats. All the prisoners, all the guards and all the bodies that had made up Titania. I hoped those poor souls who’d had their limbs sold off found them again. That could be a life-long search. As we watched, fire trucks and police cars arrived with their sirens blaring.