‘Well, I’m coming, anyway,’ Becky said, as if that settled the argument.
‘Your friend is so prickly,’ Mr October said to me. ‘She tests my infinite patience.’
‘She’d test anyone’s patience,’ I agreed, flinching when Becky’s elbow found my ribs.
We parked in front of the yellow stone wall on Lawn Road. The Vigilants had broken through the security gate there, and beyond the gate a night frost glittered across the forecourt under a cloudy moon.
The house lights were out, the windows boarded, the front door smashed in. The bronze sculpture was missing from the forecourt. I’d been here only two days before, but the place looked long abandoned. It was as if Luther Vileheart had never been here at all.
‘Flashlights,’ Mr October said, starting up the steps and indoors.
A tangle of beams – ours, and those of another team in front – searched the walls as we crossed the entrance hall, picking out shadow-spaces where pictures had hung. There wasn’t much left here – no priceless paintings, sculptures or statues. The few remaining tables and chairs were draped with white cotton sheets and skulked in the great rooms like crouching ghosts. One sheet covered the sofa where Vileheart’s accomplice Dr Rosewood had treated me. A pale rectangular shape marked the wall above the fireplace where the mirror had hung. At the back of the building the swimming pool was drained and dry, and around its tiled floor insects foraged through dead leaves blown in through the open doors.
Moving out to the garden, we were met by a sickly sweet-sour scent. I recognised it, and recoiled, holding my breath. An orange-yellow fire flickered on the far side of the stream. The hulking figures of Vigilants were filing from the maze, carrying armfuls of vegetation, which they dumped into the flames before returning inside again.
‘It’s all right, they’re making it safe,’ Mr October said. ‘The maze has been lined with cacti from Abhorra, which would put us at a great disadvantage. The Vigilants have been here for hours clearing a path.’
‘Won’t it make them sick?’ Becky said.
‘They don’t possess gifts like yours, so the toxin has no affect on them,’ Mr October said. Crossing the stream, he called to a Vigilant offloading another handful into the fire. ‘What’s the status?’
The guard dusted his hands and saluted. He was one of the pair who’d arrested me at Halloween, the traitor’s partner. He recognised me too, but there was no resentment in his eyes. Unlike McManaman, he didn’t hold a grudge.
‘We’re giving it one last sweep, sir,’ he reported. ‘But as we expected, Shifters are watching the maze, and there’s something else in there we don’t understand, something that messes with your eyes. It’s like a hall of mirrors. Some of our men have made it to the square but others are still lost along the way.’
Mr October nodded. ‘Thank you, Heller.’
The last group of guards were leaving the maze empty-handed. One of them spoke briefly to Heller, who signalled Mr October with an all clear.
‘Very well,’ said Mr October. ‘Stay close together, you three. We can’t be sure how they’ll come at us once we’re inside, but come at us they will.’
We started through the entrance, pausing to check the map on the noticeboard. The plan looked subtly different from the last time I’d seen it and seemed to be changing even as we looked, its network of pathways squirming and spreading in new directions. We could easily lose our bearings in here.
‘It’s like snakes and ladders,’ Becky remarked. ‘One wrong move and you’re back to square one.’
The sound of Vigilant-enemy combat near and far rocked the night air as we set off, the rifle shots visible in the darkness as sparks of light. Lu and Mr October strode ahead, following a path that ran straight for twenty metres before curving sharply right. A little way short of the bend, Lu stopped dead to flag us down.
‘Something’s coming,’ she called, and she and Mr October backtracked until the four of us were bunched together, watching and waiting.
At first I only felt what was heading our way – a malign presence like the cloud in Abney Park Cemetery. Becky whimpered, sensing its hostile mood an instant before the shape came into view. The dark mass spreading across the ground, rounding the curve on the path, looked like an enormous shadow. I glanced up at the sky, wondering what could be casting it – but this wasn’t a shadow. It wasn’t even a single large mass but thousands of smaller ones, parts of the whole, black eyes glinting and pink tails twirling in our flashlight beams.
‘Oh God, anything but this,’ Becky groaned.
‘Shifters,’ said Lu.
‘Rattus norvegicus shiftus,’ said Mr October, who had time, just, to flash out a hand and unload a fireball before they were on us.
The wave nearly carried us off our feet. Becky fell sideways and would have plunged headlong into the quivering swarm if Lu hadn’t held her up. In no time the pathway was heaving with slick-bodied creatures – not rats, I had to remind myself, but Shifters in rat form. They came in all sizes, some as large as terriers, others small enough to burrow up inside trouser legs. They scrambled about us, biting and clawing and flowing up our limbs, clinging to coat-tails and cuffs as we fought them off. I howled as one closed its incisors on the back of my thigh just before someone – Lu or Mr October, I couldn’t be sure which – tore it away.
Becky screamed, dragging one from her hair and tossing it back to the crowd. At the same time Lu waded forward, stamping her feet and swishing the invisible blade she gripped with both hands.
The shrill shrieks of the rattus norvegicus shiftus were as unbearable as their bites. The sound needled into my head, and when I went to cover my ears I found one dangling from my sleeve by its teeth. Its legs beat the air as I took it by the tail and slung it aside, and Lu flicked a hand at it – swish-swish – lopping it in two in mid-air.
But even lethal weapons like hers couldn’t cope with this many, and now they were overrunning the path behind us, cutting us off both ways. I tried to hold on to Becky, who was yelling and shaking and covered to the waist, but the numbers under and around our feet were pulling us further apart. Even Lu was screaming, finding three of them writhing inside her jacket, slippery and plump, and another smaller one poking from her sleeve.
Because Lu was screaming, because Mr October unleashed a second fireball at that moment, and because of the piercing shrieks of the attackers as they thrashed and burned and cooked, I could only just make out the quiet voice that spoke to me then.
‘Ben. . .’
I turned to see who’d spoken. The fireball’s light had imprinted itself behind my eyes, but through the afterglow I saw Mr October’s silhouette drawing something from his coat, something flat and rectangular and far too large to cart around in a pocket.
‘Ben,’ he repeated. ‘Ben, do you see this, the frame I’m holding?’
You couldn’t really miss it. The empty picture frame was at least half a metre tall and twice as wide. I winced at a stabbing sensation behind my knee, and for a moment the pain was all I could think of. I could only nod but I couldn’t reply.
‘I need you to fill this empty space,’ Mr October said. ‘Forget the pain, work your way through it, and think of Abhorra.’
‘I don’t . . . I don’t know what you want.’
‘The comic,’ Mr October reminded me. ‘The story of the Great and Dangerous. See it again now, piece it together in your mind and project it right here.’
I couldn’t imagine why he’d want that, but when Mr October asked you to do something you had to do it in trust. Closing my eyes, trying to recall, I couldn’t see anything but a blank canvas. It was hard to focus at the best of times but with an army of rats scrabbling around you it was almost impossible. Nothing there. Nothing at all.
‘Don’t think,’ Mr October called. ‘Just do it.’
Yes, I thought. See it, don’t think it. Easier said than done.
But something was stirring, fading in out of the grainy dark. Inside the empty
space of the picture frame a scene was taking shape: a red sky and red landscape, two demons sitting on the beach of bones and the beach bathed red under twin crimson moons.
Abhorra, home to Luther Vileheart and the Lords of Sundown. Home to the enemy. Home to the Shifters.
The rectangular frame burned such a bright hole in the dark I had to squint to see anything. It might have been the open door of a furnace, aglow with orange and scarlet and black. A wave broke on the beach like a tide of blood, washing up a deposit of bones. As the bones stirred and turned in the ebb and flow, the frantic squeals and bites of the attackers tailed off and stopped.
The ones clinging to the girls sprang away to the floor, as did one which had found its way to the small of my back. Lu and Becky were as mystified as I was, clueless as to what they were seeing. Only Mr October knew.
The fiery vision held the attackers in its spell. Losing their taste for flesh, the rattus norvegicus shiftus now saw nothing else. They ran to the shoreline as they’d come at us, in a squabbling, squirming mass. There must be something irresistible about the scene, I thought, as the first of them leapt into the red beyond. Another Shifter-rat followed, then another, tails twirling, and Mr October held the frame low to the ground as they scrambled towards it. The exodus to their homeland had begun.
‘Step right up,’ Mr October said, cracking his voice like a ringmaster’s whip, adding a few words of ancientspeak, unworldly sounds in Ministry dialect. ‘Back where you belong.’
The ground was clearing at both ends of the pathway. All but a few of the Shifters raced for the frame, and those that didn’t had other ideas, fleeing the way they’d come, changing shape as they went.
One moment they were rat formed, the next they were more like rat shadows, then shapeless, low-flying clouds of black vapour. At the bend in the path they left the ground, flocking high above the maze walls, then swooping down to burrow inside the hedgerows.
‘Shifters in their natural state,’ Mr October said, watching the last rat-shaped entity leap into the hellscape. ‘Shifters as living shadows – shadows cast many centuries ago by the most hideous of Abhorra’s inhabitants. They’re darkness incarnate, darkness itself. And now the survivors have gone to regroup. They’ll be back in another form, no doubt. It seems some are more resourceful than others. They weren’t all taken in by this old Pied Piper party trick.’
With a wiggle of his magician’s fingers, Mr October folded the bright landscape picture in half as if snapping an open briefcase shut. The light vanished at once. The rest of us watched in amazement as he folded the frame again and again until all that remained was a small cubic shape about the size of a dice between his thumb and forefinger.
The dice was shiny and jet black with silver-grey runic symbols on all six sides. With a spring-loaded thumb Mr October flicked it high in the air – a long moment passed when it seemed it would never come down – and then caught it in one outstretched hand and tucked it inside his coat.
‘How’s everyone holding up?’ he said. He looked around at us: ripped and torn and bloody, numb with shock, but we’d survive. ‘I’ve seen worse, but we’ll get you patched up as soon as this is over. Let’s continue.’
He started out again, striding on along the pathway and around the bend, turning a sharp left onto another path and left again, then right. We fell into line behind him, wincing from our injuries. The maze wound deeper. The crackle of firearms sounded nearer. We took another right, then another, and at the next turn Mr October came to a standstill.
‘Oh bother,’ he said. ‘Who would’ve thunk it?’
We were back at the start of the maze again, in front of the noticeboard map.
Snakes and ladders. One wrong move. I could’ve screamed. We’d come all this way, we’d gone absolutely nowhere and now all we could do was start over again.
‘Double back and double quick,’ Lu said.
‘One moment,’ Mr October said. Training his flashlight on the map, he pushed back his hat and scratched his brow.
Becky shrugged her shoulders and looked at me as if to say, ‘What is he doing?’ It wasn’t like Mr October to waste time, but I could feel the seconds draining. We had to turn back now, and I’d go alone if I had to. What I couldn’t do was wait.
‘Wait,’ said Mr October, inspecting the map. ‘This is what the Vigilant – Heller – was talking about. I believe I see what Vileheart did with this plan. Quite ingenious, but I should’ve spotted it sooner.’
‘I don’t care how ingenious it is,’ I said. ‘We need to move.’
‘And move we will. But you see, the map is deceptively simple. It’s ninety-nine per cent misdirection. There are so many criss-crossing routes and dead ends and loops it’s nearly impossible to see, especially with this op art design boggling your eyes.’
‘What’s there to see?’ I asked. ‘What do you see?’
‘We’re still on course. It’s a straight line all the way to the centre,’ Mr October said. ‘The whole maze, like the map, is a series of optical illusions. Its strange perspectives make walls seem to appear where there are no walls, paths where are there are no paths. And I have to say this is a good one. It even fooled me.’
I was puzzling over what Mr October meant when he suddenly stepped towards the noticeboard and marched straight through it, vanishing from sight. The map rippled in the air like a reflection on water.
The three of us looked at each other, slack-jawed. In front of us the map was still settling, its pathways warping, and Mr October was still invisible when we heard his voice somewhere on the far side of it.
‘Step this way. It’s a visual trick. See?’ Now his face reappeared, growing out of space, out of the map as he peered back from wherever he was standing. ‘It’s only one of many such tricks. Follow me, and don’t let yourselves be sidetracked as you go. If you see hedgerows blocking the way, close your eyes and keep going. They’re not what they seem.’
Becky ran her light up and down the map and over Mr October’s disembodied face. ‘You’re telling us there’s nothing there, no noticeboard or map or anything?’
‘Absolutely,’ Mr October said. ‘Your eyes are telling you one thing, I’m telling you another. Now hurry.’
He turned away, again disappearing, leaving behind the wavering map that wasn’t there.
‘Well,’ Lu said. ‘If we can go through a brick wall to Eventide Street we can go through this.’
She took a couple of tentative steps forward, then broke into a run, dissolving into space as Mr October had done. With a nervous flutter I started after Lu. The map parted around me like a cinema projection, and I felt a brief rush of cold as I felt my way forward. An instant later I was back on the path, falling in behind Lu and Mr October while Becky stumbled along after me. Behind Becky there was no sign of the noticeboard at all.
The pathway we were taking continued uninterrupted for a while but gradually narrowed, the leafy walls closing in from both sides until they were brushing our shoulders. They seemed to converge ten metres or so further on.
‘But they don’t converge,’ Mr October said. ‘They run parallel all the way. It’s the maze playing games with your eyes. Do as you did before, disregard what your eyes tell you and feel your way through.’
Passing through this next illusion, I shut my eyes and shielded my face, expecting the hedges to scratch and claw, but I didn’t feel a thing. When I looked again we were still on the unbroken path, wider than before, and the hedgerows were rustling as if something quick and agile were moving through them. Another sequence of shots rang out, sparking like fireflies, but I couldn’t gauge how far off they were.
‘Twenty or thirty seconds away by my calculation,’ keen-eared Mr October said. ‘Less if we pick up our pace.’
He’d only just spoken when something whirled past me in the dark, throwing cool air across my cheek. I flipped a light towards where I thought it had gone but saw nothing except darkness. Probably only a breeze, I supposed, with a stronger wi
nd getting up behind it – that had to be why the maze walls were shaking.
Then Becky cried out behind me, and I swung the flashlight around.
‘What the heck’s that?’ she said, swatting the air in front of her face.
‘They’re here again,’ Mr October said. ‘Look sharp, you three, don’t even blink.’
All I could make out was the same inky dark, the same leaping and darting shadows that covered everything else. But that was exactly what Mr October meant. He meant the shadows themselves. The Shifters had entered the hedgerows at one point in the maze, and now they were emerging in another. They hadn’t changed shape in between.
They could have taken any form, rat or rattlesnake, pterodactyl or wolf, but as shadows they somehow seemed at their worst. As shadows they were faceless, hiding worse things inside them than anything we could see. They soared up from the maze, swirling and hovering about our heads, merging for a second into one larger mass, then splitting apart and separating into four, then eight, then sixteen – and then they attacked.
‘Down!’ Mr October called.
Becky hit the deck first, dropping as if she’d been shot. Lu, meanwhile, held her ground as if to prove she had nothing to fear. Her hand fluttered at her side and I heard the swish of the blade. In another moment she would have used it, but suddenly her head and shoulders vanished as the darkness covered her like a cape.
It flowed over and down her until only her legs were visible. She looked to have been sliced in two at the waist. Suddenly other Shifters were on her too, flapping and rushing about her in a terrible feeding frenzy. They seemed to have forgotten the rest of us. Maybe one catch, one prize, was enough.
‘Take her legs,’ Mr October said as Lu’s feet left the ground.
She kicked out frantically as I grabbed her left ankle, Becky her right. If Lu was yelling and screaming up there I didn’t hear a thing. The darkness muffled every sound. I felt its great force drawing her in as I strained to pull her back, and for a second I thought we might be lifted up too. Then Mr October drew another few choice phrases from Ancientspeak Unexpurgated and spat them into the heart of the shadows.
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