by Zizou Corder
“We should go in,” said the young lion. “It might lead somewhere, and anywhere is better than here.”
“Okay,” said Charlie, glad that someone else had made the decision. He called back to the others what they were going to do, and then took the lion’s tail again as they plunged into the darkness of this tiny riverside tunnel. It led directly into the bank.
Inside it was dark, and the water in there was smelly and scummy—plastic bottles bobbed and Charlie could tell from the smell that there was litter and dirty caked-up foam. That meant that the water stopped somewhere up ahead of them—moving water would not smell this bad. If only the path would continue . . .
It did. Twenty yards inside the tunnel, the ledge suddenly widened out into a stone quay like the ones by the Canal St. Martin, and the water came to an end. Charlie could just make out what looked like a big, round pipe sticking out of the wall ahead of them, dripping weed and smelling disgusting. Drains, Charlie thought. Sewage, maybe. Old, old drains.
An open doorway led into the wall behind the quay. Again, the stonework was old and finely made, but by the look of it, nobody ever came here.
“Stay here a moment,” Charlie whispered to the lions. “I’ll go and see where it leads.” He hoped that the lionesses would catch up to them while they stopped. Catch up and say that the splash was just someone falling in, that the scream was just a scream of getting wet.
Wrinkling their noses and flaring their whiskers at the smell, the lions prepared to wait.
Concentrate, thought Charlie. Be grateful—if he’s in the canal, or if they’ve wounded him, he won’t be following, at least not so quickly . . .
“I’ll be as fast as I can,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Elsina, whose little nose was as wrinkled up as a prune. She lay down on the stone pavement and buried it in her paws.
Through the door was a staircase, cut into the stone.
Up the staircase was another doorway. Through that doorway was a chamber. Charlie silently peered through to see what was there.
It was mostly dark, but there was a dim light coming from somewhere, just enough to show him that the chamber was smallish, grubby, and absolutely filled with trash. But it was not just a dump. It was organized. Three supermarket carts stood in a row, full of bits of old-fashioned wires and plugs and the insides of electrical devices. One corner was piled high with big black plastic bags, some of which spilled pieces of cloth. Also, there was a small, low folding table with a mug on it, and some cushions put there as if two or three people might sit on them to talk to one another. And there was what could have been a bed.
And on that bed was what could have been a person.
And what could have been a person rolled over, and snored deeply, and flung out an arm, which knocked over a tall, ornate glass water pipe. The top fell off and some of the water spilled, and some last embers of tobacco fell out on the floor, sending the aromatic smell of apple tobacco out into the room, and reminding Charlie of the Arab cafés in London, and the delicious pastries made of nuts and honey . . .
Concentrate!
Across the room was a metal gate. Beyond it, the night sky, with the huge road beneath it.
Whoever brings this stuff in here must bring it in from somewhere; must have access to the outside. Access on foot—something other than the overpass, which no one could walk on.
Charlie turned back down the stairs. Maybe the mothers would be there. Maybe they’d have caught up.
They weren’t. They hadn’t.
He said to the lions: “Come on. There’s someone up there, but he’s asleep. Wait in the doorway and I’ll see if I can open the gate to the outside.”
His heart was beating fast as he led the lions back up the stairs. They coiled themselves in the doorway, just out of the light, and silently waited for him, their eyes lazy but their whiskers alert. As he stepped out into the dim, grubby room, Charlie felt very strongly his responsibility to them.
It was difficult to cross that room in silence. There were things all over the floor, and there were dark corners and curious shadows, and there was the scary snoring figure, and there was very little light. It wasn’t really Charlie’s fault that he stepped on an old rollerskate, then fell into a pile of scrap metal and hit his head, and yelled, and that the sleeping man woke up screeching. And it certainly wasn’t Charlie’s fault that the lions glanced at one another, and then leaped as one from the doorway to the man’s bedside, where they surrounded him, staring down at him, their claws out, their eyes intent, their fang-filled jaws hanging open, growling, ready to pounce.
“Stop it!” yelled Charlie.
The poor man shrieked and shrieked. The oldest lion put his paw on the man’s chest and roared. It worked. He stopped shrieking and started gibbering instead, but this was at least quieter.
“Stop it,” said Charlie. “Please.”
The lions looked around.
“You’re scaring—” He had meant to say “You’re scaring him.” It came out as “You’re scaring me.”
Elsina looked at him sideways.
The oldest lion flicked his whiskers.
“Sorry,” said the young lion.
Charlie thought quickly.
Then he went over to the mangy bed.
“Taisez-vous,” he said. It means shut up, but he hoped by putting in the polite form of “Taisez-vous” instead of “Tais-toi,” the man might realize that he didn’t mean to be rude.
How silly. There with three lions on his chest, the man would not be worrying about manners.
“We are a nightmare,” he said. “You mustn’t tell anyone about us. Do you want to get rid of us? Tell us where the road is. Then we can go there. How do we get to the bridge?”
The man, who was not very old, and had a pleasant face as far as could be seen beneath his abject terror, could not speak. He tried to—he seemed to want to, but though his mouth moved and his tongue flapped, no noise emerged.
“Lions,” murmured Charlie, “perhaps you should get off him for a bit.”
The lions withdrew, and lay like a circle of sphinxes a few feet from the man.
He looked up at Charlie and blinked and swallowed.
“Take your time,” said Charlie. “But not too long. We’re in a hurry.”
The man looked back at the lions. And back at Charlie. When he spoke, finally, it was in Arabic.
“But they’re Moroccan!” he shouted.
“Indeed,” said Charlie, a little surprised that the man should know such a thing. “So what?”
“So am I!” shouted the man. Having regained his voice, he now seemed unable to control it. Fear does funny things to people.
“Salaam alecum,” said Charlie. “Now how do we get to the bridge?”
“Left out of here, up the staircase, and it’s on the left,” the man said, staring and clutching his blanket to him. “The gate is open.”
“Thank you,” said Charlie in Arabic. “Alif Shukr. A thousand thanks.”
“One is enough,” said the man, wild-eyed, as the lions trooped past him, out onto the deserted, silent, midnight riverbank.
Charlie had hoped that if anybody saw them, they’d think they were a trick of the light, a cat, an urban fox. “That cat looked huge,” they might say. “Did you see it?” But the cat would be gone, and the night would be still again. Yet from the shadows at the top of the staircase, they could see that it was still too busy for them to cross the bridge on the pavement.
On the outside of the bridge’s wall, there was a ledge. It was much the same width as the ledge alongside the river, and it was several hundred feet up in the air.
“We can use that,” said the oldest lion.
Charlie looked at it. If he fell, he would tumble into the cold river, or bash his head on the white stone bridge, or drown, or have a heart attack.
The lions made themselves as flat as flatfish and slithered over the wall. Charlie just held his tongue between his teeth and repeated the words
“I have no choice, I have no choice.”
Just in time he realized that of course he did have a choice. The lions, it was true, couldn’t be seen wandering the place without being picked up and taken back, but nobody would question a boy crossing a bridge. Why should they?
“See you on the other side!” he hissed, and ran and jumped across the bridge, doing cartwheels and backflips, just because he could, and because he was so scared, he would do anything to pretend that he was not.
CHAPTER 18
The Chief Executive smiled at them. He was short. He had springy hair and pinkish gray skin and a very clean white shirt. He looked extremely ordinary.
He’d had all their bindings removed. “No need for that kind of thing,” he’d said in a voice that suggested he was surprised they had been used at all.
“Now,” he said. His desk was very big. “You know why you’re here.”
“No, we don’t,” said Magdalen. She wasn’t feeling too well.
“To work with us!” cried the Chief Executive.
“We don’t want to,” said Aneba.
“You don’t want to complete research on your asthma cure in a calm and happy environment, with all the money and help you need, and the promise of plenty of investment in the future?”
“Oh!” said Aneba. “Is that what you’re offering? And there we were thinking you’d kidnapped us and brought us here bound, gagged, and threatened because you know full well we wouldn’t cooperate with a bunch of crooks like you.”
The Chief Executive looked hurt. “Doctor,” he said, “the Corporacy works for the advancement of mankind! What could be more marvelous than a cure for this dreadful scourge of asthma, which torments our children and blights their futures? We have for years been making the drugs that treat asthma and give the little ones some relief—but how much better to cancel out asthma forever!”
Magdalen gave a low, nasty laugh.
“Tell me,” she said, looking up suddenly. “How much money do you make each year from asthma drugs?”
The Chief Executive made his hurt look again, but she kept talking. “And how much do you expect to make from a cure? Which would be better for your profits—a one-off cure, or continuing to sell medicine for the rest of time? Do you want to use our cure? Or do you just want to make sure nobody else does?”
She started coughing.
The Chief Executive veiled his eyes. “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it,” he murmured.
Magdalen threw up.
The Chief Executive raised one eyebrow and lifted the telephone.
“Miss Barakat?” he said. “The professor and the doctor seem to be ill. May I suggest a visit to the Wellness Unit? They don’t seem to be very well at all. But nothing we can’t sort out, I’m sure. Nothing a couple of weeks of treatment won’t solve.”
He put the phone down and smiled.
“I’ll see you in a couple of weeks then,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to working with you!”
The lionesses easily, swiftly followed the scent the others had left. They negotiated the ledge and terrified the Moroccan, and they were just about to set out on the ledge across the river when something extremely peculiar happened.
At that moment, Charlie and the lions were at the other end of the bridge. They only needed to cross a small square, Place Valhubert, and the station would be just there to the left. But as they hesitated at the far side of the bridge, waiting for a quiet moment to cross, they heard it too.
It was a howl. It was a howl of such intensity, loneliness, and longing that Charlie’s hair stood on end. It sounded like the end of the world, like losing your mother, like looking in the mirror and not knowing your own face. It sounded like the loss of all you held dear. Tears came to Charlie’s eyes, and terror to his heart, at the sound of it. What could make so sad a noise? Who could be that sorrowful?
But if Charlie was shocked by the sound, the lions were more so.
The lionesses stopped stark still and listened. The three lions with Charlie stopped dead, dropped low to the ground, and turned their heads in the direction it was coming from—across the square to the right. They were baring their teeth and wrinkling their noses; their whiskers were quivering, alert to every vibration. The young lion started to growl, a low, mean, motionless sound that Charlie had never heard before. They were all terrifying.
Charlie desperately wanted to say something, to calm them, to change the situation. He’d calmed them in the Moroccan’s chamber, perhaps he could now too . . . He started to speak, but the oldest lion flashed his eyes and gave a tiny, authoritative twitch of his ear that left Charlie in no doubt that he was to do nothing, say nothing, and probably even think nothing.
Up by the bridge, the lionesses began to run.
The howl came again—lower than the first one, but longer, and if anything, sadder and more piercing. The lions’ ears twitched. Charlie knew that lions can judge distances from noise, and if two noises come from the same direction, they can tell which comes from nearer and which from farther away. Were they doing that now?
Their faces showed total concentration. As they were now, free, desperate and united, he could imagine them in the wild, hunting in a pack, alert to every movement on the African plain, hearing things he couldn’t hear, running faster than he could ever run, leaping and slaughtering.
The young lion was looking to the oldest lion. The oldest lion held his concentration, thinking, considering. Finally he blinked.
He turned to the young lion and said, “You stay and guard our friend and your sister—”
At this the young lion’s eyes flashed green and furious, and he tried to contradict his father, but the oldest lion raised his head the tiniest amount and gave his son a look of such haughty scorn that the young lion immediately fell back and turned his head a little to one side . . . but you could see he didn’t like it.
Charlie said: “Sir—what is it?”
The oldest lion didn’t reply. He merely twitched his ear again, and then he was gone, his tail hanging on the air behind him as he picked up speed, bounding like an uncoiling spring into the darkness toward the direction of the noise. For a moment he waited for a gap in the traffic, then he flashed across the road and across the bridge, a quick shadow in the night, a streak of darkness.
Charlie went to the edge of the bridge. The young lion and Elsina had hidden themselves—only a low growl called him to where they were lurking in a tiny patch of park on the corner. He sat down against the wall, suddenly exhausted. What was this thing? Why were the lions so upset about it? And how long was it going to take? They didn’t have that long to find the train, and find a way on.
The night was cool, and the ground was cold beneath him. Maybe there was a change in the weather coming. He shivered.
Elsina prowled over and arranged herself beside him. She felt warm and comforting, and he was pleased to be able to be near her without having to hide their friendship from Maccomo or anyone else. The young lion still stood, his face in the direction of the howl—alert, mysterious, both scared and scary.
“What’s down there?” asked Elsina quietly.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Charlie. “I thought you knew—the way you all reacted.”
“I don’t mean what’s making the noise,” she explained. “I mean what thing, or place, is there. You’ve been looking at maps—you know where things are.”
Charlie ran his mind back. “The Jardin des Plantes is down there,” he said. “It’s a park. And the museums of natural history and so on, and—and the zoo.”
“The zoo,” she said softly.
“But that wasn’t—that wasn’t just an animal, was it?”
“I don’t know what it was,” she said.
Charlie wanted to call the young lion. He wanted to know what he thought. But the young lion was a million miles away from him—not in space, but in spirit. He was pure animal at that moment, pure watching animal. Charlie felt that he wouldn’t even
hear him if he called.
“Do you have an idea?” Charlie asked. “You must have an idea. Why did it upset you all so much?”
“It upset you too,” said Elsina.
“Yes,” said Charlie, and he shivered again as he thought of the belly-curdling, tear-making cry. “But not as much.”
“Because it’s not your—” She broke off.
“My what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
She laid her chin on her folded paws and lay still, eyes open, no longer available for conversation. Charlie felt very alone.
Several minutes passed.
We’re going to miss the train, Charlie thought, and a great fear and worry came over him. But anyway, how could they take it without the mothers? Why had the oldest lion gone rushing off without explanation? Had Charlie been wrong to trust them? He could hardly believe so . . . they were all in this together. But why hadn’t the lion explained before he left? Charlie didn’t like it when the grown-ups who were meant to be with him just went off without saying where or why. Even if they didn’t mean to.
Charlie turned over sadly, and found himself snuggled up with Elsina. She didn’t mind; she patted him absentmindedly with her tail. But she, like her brother, was fully occupied, silently watching and waiting.
After another few minutes, Charlie lost his patience.
He jumped to his feet.
“Everybody else seems to have forgotten,” he said, “but we have a train to catch, and if we don’t catch it, then who knows what’s going to become of us, and I for one don’t want to risk it, so would you please, one of you, go and get the grown-ups so we can get a move on?”
The two lions turned and stared at him—but whatever they were going to say in response will never be known, because at that moment the howl came again, much, much nearer, and an immense form came bounding out of the darkness toward them, from the direction of the Jardin des Plantes. Behind it, looking small in comparison, low and slinking against the river wall, came four lions.