They’d heard the sound of footsteps heading towards them. Clumping footsteps, and the jangle of a chain or a key ring. And the sound of someone whistling. To be precise, someone whistling, ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’.
Fizz’s first thought was the same as Wystan’s first thought: Admiral Spratt-Haddock!
Their matching second thoughts were: Run the other way!
Putting the plan in action straight away, they ran back the way they’d come, as quietly as they could but also as quickly, down the pink corridor. They darted down the first opening they saw into yet another corridor, this time filled with the shimmering green light that reflected off shimmering green fish. And there they skidded to a halt for a second time. They weren’t alone. Ten feet in front of them was a man.
In that moment Fizz’s heart couldn’t decide whether to freeze solid or jump out of his chest and run off by itself. Instead it fluttered like a bird behind his ribs. They were caught!
But no, he saw, it wasn’t quite so bad. They’d not been seen. His heart breathed a sigh of relief. They weren’t safe yet, but it could be worse.
The figure had its back to them. It was crouched in the middle of the corridor, dressed all in black, with a long coat that hung to the ground, and seemed to be manhandling something into an inside pocket. There was a puddle of water around its feet and a long pole with a net by its side.
Behind them the footsteps were still slowly heading in their direction (whoever it was hadn’t heard them running, or they’d be hurrying faster), and the whistling was growing louder.
The mysterious stranger in front of them suddenly looked over his shoulder. Fizz couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a black balaclava (which is a bit like a badly knitted woolly hat), but the two peering red eyes that burned out from the woollen blank blackness made him gulp in fear.
‘You?’ the figure hissed, keeping his voice down and looking around him. ‘What on earth are you doing here? Did he send you?’
Fizzlebert didn’t know what to say. His dad had asked him not to talk to strangers, and this man looked pretty strange. His coat was flapping, as if there were something writhing around inside it and water was dripping from it to the floor.
‘Pah,’ the man spat, when Fizz couldn’t muster an answer, and waved his hand dismissively. ‘I don’t care. You’re on your own, kids. Better you get caught than me, eh? I’m outta here.’
The voice rasped in the damp aquarium air and if Fizz hadn’t been standing beside Wystan he might’ve given a little squeak of fear at the unkindness, the venom, the distaste the words seemed filled with.
The stranger turned on his heels and ran, away from the boys and from the approaching footsteps and jingling keys. In a second he was gone, vanished round the next corner.
‘What was that all about?’ Wystan asked in a low voice.
‘I don’t know,’ Fizz replied, thoroughly unnerved by the episode.
The whistling footsteps sounded like they were just about to come round the corner behind them.
Wystan grabbed Fizz’s arm and hissed a hurried, ‘Run!’
They set off down the corridor themselves, following the stranger, needing to run to get away from the footsteps behind them, but not wanting to run so fast that they caught up with the weird man in front. It made the whole experience even more scary. Two ways to get caught, and which would be worse?
Just before they reached the corner the masked man had nipped round twenty seconds earlier, Fizz spotted a door on their left labelled Keep Out.
‘Here!’ he whispered urgently, skidding to a halt.
He yanked the door open and they both bundled in, closing it as quickly, but as quietly, as they could behind them.
The two boys huddled together in the dark, holding their breaths as the sound of the whistling continued to draw closer and closer until it was almost upon them, just like the end of the chapter.
Chapter Eight
In which a night-watchman is met and in which a sandwich is inconvenienced
Fizz and Wystan looked around the room.
In one corner a TV was showing a programme about aquariums. It was shot in fuzzy black and white and showed corridor after corridor of fish tanks. It flicked between them, always from the same high angle, which meant you could hardly see any fish. It seemed, for the few seconds Fizz watched it, a very odd and probably boring programme. (But then again, he had hardly ever watched television, being too busy circussing, so he didn’t know if this was as good as it got, or if there were better programmes available.)
The glow from the TV lit the room with a flickering grey light. There was a desk. On it was a sandwich, still wrapped in cling-film, and a steaming cup of coffee. It looked like someone was due back any minute. By the side of the desk a kettle rested precariously on top of a pile of magazines.
There was a revolving chair and in the corner of the room, beside a filing cabinet, sat a bucket with half a dozen upended mops leant in it. A coat hung on a hook and a calendar hung on a different hook. It had a picture of a shark (a grey one), jaws open, lurching out of the water at a cameraman. The caption said, ‘Smile, please!’
What the room lacked, importantly, was another door. Fizz counted twice just to be sure.
‘One.’
‘One.’
And, just to be clear, the door he counted was the door they’d just come in through. The one with the whistling outside it.
The door handle rattled as whoever was out in the corridor took hold of it.
The boys looked around again, desperately hoping to spot a hiding place they hadn’t noticed the first time they’d looked round desperately.
Under the desk? What if the person outside sat down to eat their sandwich?
Behind the mops? There wasn’t much room. Even half a dozen mops are quite thin.
Under the coat? Not only would your legs stick out, but Wystan’s beard would poke round the edges.
In the telly? That was just stupid.
There must be somewhere. There must be, there must be, Fizz thought.
The boys watched, eyes glued in fear, as the door handle started to turn. They were caught. They were done for. They’d be made to walk the plank, fed to the fish, or at the very least have the police phoned on them. And then . . .
And then a telephone rang. On the other side of the door.
The handle sprang back up to its closed position as the person outside let go. The phone stopped ringing and a woman’s voice answered it.
‘I’m at work, honey. You shouldn’t . . . They’re in the cupboard by the microwave. . . . No, not the blue bottle, that’s . . . Just take two, and then . . .’ and so on.
When the telephone call ended, the speaker finally opened the door, switched on the light and stepped into a cosy little room. She looked around and saw it was filled with a TV and a desk and a sandwich and a coat and a cup of coffee and a calendar and some mops and absolutely no boys at all.
Mrs Darling took her hat off and hung it on the coat-rack above her coat. It was the peaked hat of a security guard and she wore the white shirt, dark blue jacket and trousers to match.
She had short blonde hair, shaped just the same as her hat until she ran her hand through it, after which it looked like what her mother had used to call ‘a mess’. But it was short, and messy short hair is neater than uncombed long hair, so she was still smart enough to not look out of place in her uniform. Her eyes were brown and big, always on the lookout, and her nose interrupted the spatter of freckles that covered her cheeks. She was tall and not what you’d call thin. She wasn’t fat either, but muscle-y. Not as muscle-y as Fizz’s dad, of course, but she lifted small weights in her spare time. There was a tattoo of an oyster on her left bicep. (She’d asked for a mussel, but the tattooist didn’t know his shellfish very well.)
As she sat down at the desk she yawned widely. Although it was almost nine o’clock at night it was still early in the day for her. She worked the night shift at
the Aquarium and, like those purple Australian fish, her day was all upside down.
She glanced at the TV monitor. The screen showed her what was happening elsewhere in the building. Every few seconds it flicked to a different camera in one of the many Aquarium corridors. She’d be spending most of the night sat looking at it. Sometimes she’d go out and walk around. Then she’d come back and look at the screen a bit more. That was her job. Guarding the fish. And do you know what?
Nothing ever happened.
Well, not until a week ago. After a whole year of sitting up at night watching nothing but fish bobbing about in their tanks, finally something had started going on. She felt a mix of excitement and embarrassment at the thought of it.
The fish had started going missing. They were being stolen from under her very nose. The pattern was the same, every night. One of the cameras would stop working, and by the time she’d found out which corridor it was and gone to check it out the thief would be gone, along with some of the Admiral’s prized fish.
What made it all the more embarrassing for her was that she couldn’t work out how the burglar was getting in. The main doors were always locked when she checked them, and she never found a broken window or door anywhere else. It was a mystery.
But on the previous nights the robberies had happened well after midnight. She looked at her watch. Right now it wasn’t even nine o’clock. She had some time to kill. So she reached under the desk and pulled a thick book out of her bag. It was a murder mystery with a gruesome cover and well-thumbed pages. (Maybe, she thought, if she paid close enough attention to the policeman in the book, she might get some tips for putting an end to the fish-napping.)
Putting her feet up on the desk and taking one last look at the TV screen, she leant back in her chair, opened her book, tucked the bookmark away in her inside pocket and began to read.
After a minute she reached out and picked up her coffee cup. Took a sip. Put it back down. She didn’t take her eyes off the book. It was just getting to a good bit. She turned the page. Drank some more coffee. Turned another page.
She came to the end of a chapter and put the bookmark in its place and put the book down. She yawned again and reached out for her sandwich.
Her fingers touched the cling-film and she stopped. There was something wrong. She’d made herself a big sandwich, full of salad and ham and pickle and cheese. What her fingers were touching didn’t quite feel right, so she did what any highly trained security guard (she had a certificate and everything) would do in such a situation: she looked at the sandwich. What she saw surprised her so much she said a word I’m not going to share.
Her sandwich had been trodden on.
Let’s rewind five minutes.
You know when Wystan and Fizzlebert wanted to hide and there didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide? Well, here’s what happened . . .
‘We’re stuck,’ Wystan whispered. ‘The game’s up.’
Fizz could hear his heart beating in his chest. It was thumping too loud. It was going too fast.
He felt like he was trapped in one of those dreams where you’re in a small office-cum-broom cupboard in an Aquarium you’re not meant to be in and someone’s about to open the door and find you. Almost exactly like that dream.
He ran his hand through his unruly hair and then, to his joy and surprise, spotted something.
‘Look at that,’ he said, grabbing Wystan’s sleeve.
They looked at the ceiling. They hadn’t looked at it before. Why would they? It was just a ceiling. But it was made of those rectangular panels, resting on a sort of metal grid. The panels were made of, what? Foam board or something? They weren’t heavy, Fizz could guess that much.
He got Wystan to stand on the desk, and in a flash he was up on Wystan’s shoulders pushing a tile up and to the side.
He poked his head through the hole and looked around.
In amongst the wires and pipes and dust, there was a metal walkway. It ran above the fish tanks. He grabbed hold of the struts and, with a little jiggling, pulled himself up and onto it.
Wystan, with one acrobatic leap, grab and flip, wasn’t far behind him.
‘The panel,’ Fizz hissed, pointing.
Wystan quickly shoved the rectangular piece of board back into the hole and the boys were left sitting still and safe in the dark.
Below them they heard the door open and close and then a click as the person switched on the light.
Had the ceiling tile slotted back into place properly the boys would have been sat safe and snug in the dark, but in their hurry it had ended up at a slightly skew angle. A shaft of light from the office, like the beam of a torch or a spotlight in the circus ring, pushed up into the darkness.
They didn’t dare move. Even shifting to get comfortable set the metal walkway they were lying on rattling and creaking.
The two boys were safe, they felt, but they were still trapped. They just had to hope that whoever was down there didn’t decide to look up.
A long minute went by.
Mrs Darling looked up.
She immediately noticed the out-of-place roof tile, because she was specially trained to be observant of things that were out of place.
‘At last,’ she said to herself under her breath, ‘I’ve got you.’
She slid open the desk drawer as quietly as she could and pulled out a torch that was attached to a length of elastic. She put it on her head, like you would a hat, and switched the torch on. She looked around the room and everywhere she looked she saw the circle of torchlight ahead of her.
Then, moving as carefully as she could, she climbed onto her desk herself, taking care not to tread on her sandwich, because the imprint of the culprit’s shoe might be important evidence later on.
She pushed the panel out of the way and stood up.
She wasn’t sure what it was she was seeing at first.
Her first impression was that there were two boys up on the walkway, but then she thought there was a man and a boy. Then it struck her that if it was a man it was a short one, so maybe a boy and a dwarf. And then she thought, if one of them’s a dwarf, maybe they’re both dwarfs. And then she thought, I’d best just get them because whoever they are or whatever they are, they’ve been nicking the Admiral’s fish.
She reached out and grabbed hold of one of their ankles.
She hoped that would be enough to stop them, but it wasn’t. Whoever’s ankle she’d grabbed kicked her loose and the two trespassers began running.
She hauled herself up and gave chase.
Chapter Nine
In which a chase is made and in which a boy gets wet
Fizzlebert ran like his life depended on it, as if there were a tiger behind him (or a shark (with legs)). He didn’t know where he was running, but he ran there anyway. Behind him he could hear Wystan doing the same.
The metal walkway was narrow and they ran in single file. It wobbled and clanged with every step, the sound echoing strangely off the water below them. Fizz had been furthest from the security guard when she’d made a grab for them and so he was the one leading the way.
They were running across the tops of the fish tanks. Off to his left he could see a sea of ceiling tiles and bundles of wires and pipes running this way and that, but beneath the walkway the tops of the fish tanks were all open to the air. Water lapped and light from the corridor beyond the tanks’ glass rippled up through the water, casting an eerie light across the concrete ceiling above his head.
If he’d had time to pause, lean on the railing and look down for a minute he would have seen the little faces of fish poke out of the water wondering what all the commotion in the sky was. But he didn’t have time to stop and look.
Up ahead both the rattling walkway and the row of tanks seemed to stop: there was a brick wall and, just before that, the top rungs of a ladder leading down to who knew where. He slowed down. He didn’t want to run full pelt and jump off the end into the unknown. Wystan probably would’ve, he thought, but
Wystan was an acrobat, he did that sort of thing. Fizz stuck his head in a lion’s mouth. That was a useful skill, he was sure, but it didn’t prepare you for a chase like this and a jump like that.
The thumping footsteps behind him grew faster, the rattling louder. His heart was pounding in his chest and his lungs were straining with all the pumping in and out he was asking them to do.
As he slowed down he felt Wystan close behind him, and heard him shout, ‘Faster!’
Fizz realised that Wystan couldn’t see the end coming and didn’t know why he needed to slow down. So he half-turned, meaning to shout an explanation over his shoulder, and Wystan banged into him and they both tripped over one another’s feet and went tumbling.
Fizz hit the wet floor beyond the end of the fish tanks with a hard crump. There was a great deep splash behind him and a spray of water, like a heavy but incredibly short indoor rainstorm, landed on him and on the floor around him.
A second went by before Fizz tried moving. He hadn’t hurt himself: his thick Ringmaster’s coat had absorbed the fall and he’d covered his head with his arms. Nothing was broken, all his limbs were working and though he’d have some bruises to show come the morning, he was able to stand up and move about.
Above him he heard shouting and splashing.
Wystan must have rolled to the side when he tripped, slipped under the railings and fallen off the walkway into the last of the fish tanks. Fizz didn’t know if Wystan could swim or not, but the tanks weren’t that deep or big, and with a beard like that, surely he’d float face upwards?
Fizz had to make a choice. He could go back up the ladder and get caught with his friend. Or he could run through the door in the wall in front of him, while the guard was busy dealing with Wystan’s brilliant, self-sacrificing distraction.
Fizz looked up at the ladder, up at the ceiling where the weird watery light played in rippling ribbons, and hoped that his friend would understand.
When he got the chance, he’d come back for Wystan. He’d see if he could rescue Fish and Wystan both, although he didn’t know how he could do it.
The Boy Who Cried Fish Page 6