by Joan Lennon
‘Oh, don’t be stupid!’ snapped Madlen. ‘We have to wait!’
‘We have to wait!’ he mimicked. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist.’ He made a rude face at her.
There was an unhappy silence for another long while, and then Bryn and Cam became aware of a strange sound in the air. It was a sinister, unearthly sort of buzz, apparently without source. They looked at each other in alarm. The sound went away and then returned. It scuttled. It grated.
They peered about anxiously. Then they noticed something odd. Madlen wasn’t reacting. She was showing no sign of worry, as if she weren’t even aware of the sound. She was just standing there, staring gloomily at her feet, and rocking back and forth a little.
Unnoticed, they moved closer to her and exchanged puzzled looks. Could the noise really be…?
Bryn reached out and tapped her suddenly on the shoulder.
Madlen shrieked – and the strange sound stopped.
‘What did you do that for?’ she yelled. ‘You scared me half to death!’
‘Yeah?’ said Bryn. ‘Well, you scared us! What kind of awful noise do you think you were making?! We thought it was a monster or something!’
Madlen looked horrified.
‘Oh no,’ she said, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘Was I humming?’
‘Is that what you call it?’ muttered Cam.
‘Look… I… I’m sorry’ said Madlen. ‘I only do that when I’m nervous. I… I’m…’ Astonishingly, she seemed about to cry.
‘OK, OK, don’t go squishy,’ Bryn said brusquely. ‘So you’ve got the voice from hell – just keep it to yourself, will you?!’
Madlen didn’t answer, but now her silence was making him uncomfortable.
‘Look – I don’t care. Do what you like. I don’t know what you’re getting so obsessed about. It can’t be that important, whether you can do anything as arty-farty as sing. You don’t do that at your precious school, I bet.’
Madlen bristled. ‘We’re not learning pretty little tunes, you moron. Harmonics is practically maths – but why should I expect you to know anything, being educated in some stone outhouse someplace where they don’t even know what the Tube is –’ She turned her back.
‘It is not music as we know it,’ interrupted Cam in a spooky voice.
Bryn stared.
‘No, really’ it continued. ‘They study Frequencies, Patterns of Vibration, Auditory Energy, that sort of thing.’
Madlen turned round, mouth open.
‘I did an essay on it once.’ Cam shrugged. ‘It was a punishment assignment for goofing off in choir practice.’
‘Phew! That’s tough!’ whistled Bryn. ‘When I goof off in choir practice I just get strapped.’
‘I’m Holder,’ said Cam. ‘They’re hardly going to strap me…’
There was a little pause, in which it listened to its words and, for the first time, realized how they might sound. Ivory would never have said something like that. She would have thought it without a blink, but she never would have said it. She’d have had everything smooth as milk, everyone acting as if they’d been friends all their lives.
Instead of family.
It’d be a lot better if it were Ivory here and not me, Cam thought.
Anybody but me.
‘So you can both sing?’ said Madlen, trying to appear casual about it. ‘I guess it fits for you, Cam, but Bryn’s supposed to be training as a soldier…’
Bryn grinned, and broke into a rousing marching song with some extremely doubtful lyrics.
And that’s just the official version,’ he said. ‘You should hear what we sing in the dorm at night. Or –’ he gave them a sideways look and leered – ‘or maybe you shouldn’t. Got to protect my sibs’ delicate ears.’
Madlen snorted, and Cam stuck out its tongue.
‘Go on!’ it said. ‘I dare you!’
‘You’re on!’ said Bryn, and drew a breath.
‘Stop!’ interrupted Madlen.
Bryn looked smug and started to say, ‘Can’t take it?’ when the Trentorian shushed him again.
‘Listen,’ she hissed. ‘I think… it’s a train coming!’
At last,’ grumbled Cam, but there was a quaver in its voice.
Bryn gulped.
The noise grew, an echoey rumbling. A tide of stale air came on before it, so that their hair lifted and grit got in their eyes. Cam and Bryn covered their ears. It was hard to believe the din could possibly get louder – and then it stopped.
The train had arrived.
14
The Train Now Standing at Platform Nine
And it wasn’t empty.
Through the greasy windows they could see that grey figures filled each of the carriages, heads down, reading newspapers or books, or dozing, or staring at the floor.
The doors slid open with a phush of air. No one got out. The three children had no desire whatsoever to get on the train, but it was as if they had no choice, as if someone were physically pushing them forward.
They got on.
They stood by the doors, clustered awkwardly around a pole. The doors slid shut and, with a lurch, the train began to move. It was very rattly, too noisy to talk. The carriage was even older and more decrepit than the ones Madlen remembered – not that she went out of school much. All the colour seemed to have been leached out of this train, and the upholstery was well past repair.
It was strange how quickly the swaying and the stuffiness and the greyness began to feel like being in a trance. The London House had been weird, but there was always something happening there. This was different. Here it was as if nothing could happen, almost as if they were between times, all of them, all of them neither here nor there, just in between…
Madlen stared at the map of the Underground over the door. It looked as if water had got to it somehow, because it was too blurred to read. It was so blurred, in fact, that she began to feel a little seasick just staring at it. It didn’t make sense to think it was moving, but that was exactly what it seemed to be doing.
Less of a map and more of an amoeba. Madlen smiled thinly to herself. You’re cracking up, she thought. Quietly, tidily, definitely, you’re losing the thread. She looked away.
Beside the central doors there was a feeble-looking hatchet in a glass cabinet, with the notice ‘In Case of Emergency, Kindly Break the Glass’. Madlen wondered idly if there was any kind way of breaking glass.
She let her eyes drift to the nearest window. There was an impression of slimy black walls beyond as the train trundled through the tunnel. There was the reflection of the three of them, standing in the lit carriage. What an unlikely lot! she thought. What a bizarre family. The angle of the window must be really odd, though, because I can’t see the other passengers reflected in it. Just Cam, Bryn and me.
She shifted a little, but there were still only the three of them. Some kind of optical illusion? She leaned forward, peering at the glass.
A trickle of sweat ran down her back.
They were clearly there, three unlikely companions, reflected in the window. But no matter where she looked, she couldn’t see anybody else.
Cam noticed her uneasiness and leaned over.
‘What’s up?’ it said into her ear.
Without taking her eyes off the window, Madlen hissed back, ‘Something’s wrong. Look. See the other passengers – they’re not there.’ Her voice began to rise in pitch. ‘We have a reflection, but THEY’RE NOT THERE!’
For a long moment, Cam looked at the window, and then suddenly turned and looked straight at the other passengers.
‘Don’t do that!’ cried Madlen. She was horrified, and frightened, and she didn’t know why. ‘You mustn’t look at them!’
Cam turned back to her in surprise, but it was too late.
All over the carriage, newspapers were lowered. Books were closed. Slumped figures straightened. One after another, the passengers stood up.
A small part of Madlen’s brain noticed that their
clothes were all shades of grey, and baggy and oversized, as if the wearers had all been ill for a long time and had wasted away inside them. Their skin and hair were dull. There was no colour anywhere, nothing to distinguish one passenger from the next, hardly even woman from man. That small part of her mind was screaming, Why? What’s the matter with them?
The rest of her brain was just screaming. Because that was the part that had noticed their eyes.
They didn’t have any.
15
Nightmare Below Ground.
Where their eyes should have been, there was only a dead, black blankness.
‘We’ve got trouble,’ came Bryn’s voice above the train’s rattling. Madlen looked over her shoulder at him and felt sick. The passengers from that end of the carriage were starting to lurch towards them. Cam grabbed her arm – the ones from the other end were also on the move.
‘What do we do? What do they want?’ Cam yelled. ‘What are they?’
The passengers made no sound that could be heard above the clattering of the train. They didn’t speak, or cry out, and there was no expression on their faces that Madlen could read. They just came closer, and closer, and they had their hands held out towards the children like muffled claws.
‘Stay back!’ Bryn squealed. ‘I’m warning you!’
The sound of his voice was swallowed up, and the grey people kept on coming. They didn’t attack – there was no hitting or kicking or scratching – instead they pawed at the three, patting, patting, little touches that didn’t stop. It was horrible, like being suffocated in a dream. Cam brushed their hands away again and again, batting at them as if they were insistent cobwebs or a swarm of insects. Bryn seemed paralysed now, unable to do anything. Madlen could tell from his face how helpless he was feeling. Nothing he’d learned at the Castle would have taught him about fighting this kind of battle. He had his back to the wall and was beginning to disappear behind a slow inexorable wave of…
… zombies.
Madlen went cold as the memory of a forbidden book flared in her mind. The girl who’d smuggled it into school was removed not long after, but not before everyone in Madlen’s year had had a good long illegal look.
That was what they were. They were grey, blank-eyed zombies, and everybody knows what zombies want –
Something else tripped inside her head, a switch that opened out a whole section of herself she hadn’t even known was there. This wasn’t a logic thing. There weren’t any rules and there weren’t any right answers. It was just about family –
Nobody’s going to suck the life out of my family!
That’s what the hero in the book had said…
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ she screamed from out of this new place inside her, but it had no effect. Desperately she looked about, for something, anything…
Her eyes lit on the cabinet on the wall.
‘Get back!’ she hollered, wrenching it open and pulling the hatchet away from its fixtures. There was a strange buzz as her hand met the handle, like an electric shock. It was heavier than she’d expected too and she almost lost her footing as the train leaned around a curve.
She staggered again, and instinctively flung out the arm with the hatchet to rebalance herself.
‘Hey!’ screamed Bryn, as the blade almost connected with his head. ‘Watch it!’
But the effect on the grey figure behind him was even more dramatic. It reared back and let out a thin wail. Its eyes began to flicker: one second, black and blank – the next, real eyes with pupils and irises and whites – then blank again.
The train lurched back the other way and Madlen stumbled forward. As the hatchet flailed about near the zombies, the flickering of their eyes increased. They fell back from Bryn. Madlen swirled and thrust the blade near Cam. The grey people flinched away, like animals near fire, and their eyes juddered and flicked.
The real eyes were blue and brown and green – real colours – and they seemed to be frantic, in those seconds when Madlen could see them, as if they were calling out to her without a voice.
‘What does it mean?!’ she screamed. ‘I don’t understand!’
‘I can see a light ahead!’ yelled Cam, who was now pressed against the window. ‘The tunnel curves – there’s a station coming!’ Its voice went up to an even shriller pitch. ‘Why aren’t we slowing down?’
Madlen didn’t stop to think. With her free hand she lunged for the emergency cord overhead – and pulled.
Metal shrieked against metal; there was a horrible burning smell; the carriage strained and jerked from side to side as if it were trying to escape the rails. Bodies staggered about. Madlen slammed into the others, dropping the hatchet as she tried to find something to hold on to, something to save herself.
Then everything was still. They had stopped at the station.
Madlen could hear Bryn and Cam panting, and her own ragged breath, and the creaking of metal adjusting. She dragged herself to her feet. The grey people were all standing again, but the flickering of their eyes had died away. Only the black blankness remained. Cam and Bryn got up and stood beside her, desperate to make their escape, but nothing happened.
‘Why don’t the doors open?’ grated Bryn through clenched teeth. ‘Why don’t they open?’
Raggedly, the grey people began their advance on the children again. Madlen stumbled back, and her foot struck something on the floor. The hatchet. Instinctively, she reached down for it, and a long collective sigh issued from the grey people’s mouths.
Madlen looked down at the hatchet in her hands, then around at the grey faces. The yearning, living eyes were there again, there and gone and there. It was clear a battle was raging inside them, and the hatchet she held was in some strange way a weapon in the war.
She came to a decision. She stuck out her jaw.
‘Kindly Break the Glass…’ she muttered. ‘Madlen, do as you’re told.’
‘What?’ said Bryn.
‘Duck!’ yelled Cam.
‘YAAAA!’ Madlen screamed. She spun on her heel and swung the hatchet up, and over, and down.
The glass in the door exploded. She struck again and again. Her technique was terrible, but she made up for it with a ferocious energy she didn’t know she had. She slammed and gouged with the blade until the doors were in tatters, and then –
‘Look out!’ yelled Cam and Bryn together.
Madlen just had time to turn before the tide hit her – grey people pushing and shoving and clawing to get out. Each of them had living eyes again, filled with expressions of frantic urgency. Still clutching the hatchet, Madlen managed to squeeze back against the window as the grey people scrabbled their way out of the carriage and on to the platform. It was hard to believe there had been so many in the carriage, for the stream of bodies seemed to go on and on. But then, suddenly, they were gone.
The three Questors staggered out of the train.
They were alone.
‘Uh, nice one,’ said Bryn to Madlen, very carefully, since she was still holding the hatchet and looking wild-eyed. ‘Er, would you like me to carry that for a while?’
‘I’m fine,’ croaked Madlen. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Of course you are,’ said Cam soothingly It turned to Bryn and continued quietly, ‘Let’s get out of here.’
There was only one door. It was marked ‘Exit’ and led to a flight of stairs. It was the route the grey people had taken, but given the choice between following them and getting back on the train, there was only one answer.
Up.
Nobody spoke as they climbed the stairs. It seemed to take forever. Then, suddenly, Madlen began to laugh.
Cam and Bryn exchanged worried glances.
‘Swithin Street Station!’ wheezed Madlen, pointing to a sign at the top of the stairs. ‘I can’t believe it! All that, and we’ve ended up at Swithin Street Station! Of all the –’
She shook her head, panting.
‘So?’ said Bryn.
Madlen tried to get a grip.
‘Swithin Street is where my school is,’ she managed. ‘I only left yesterday! Don’t you see? We go through all this craziness and where do I end up? Back at school in time for tea!’ She grinned weakly at the other two. ‘Come on, and I’ll sign you in as visiting family members.’
The three ran out into the daylight and Madlen looked about for the familiar bustling streets and buildings.
She looked, but they weren’t there.
16
… and Above
Bryn and Cam looked around them. This was not what they’d been expecting.
‘But…’ stammered Madlen. ‘It was all right yesterday!’
Her knees gave way and she sat down suddenly on the kerb. She looked half horrified – and half apologetic.
‘It’s ten years into the Future, remember,’ said Bryn carefully. ‘A lot can happen in that length of time.’
Madlen didn’t hear him. This wasn’t the World she’d left. Even in the poor parts, the Servers’ sectors, there would never have been anything like this neglect, this ruination.
‘What happened?’ breathed Madlen. And the people – all the people – where are they?’
‘I don’t know. But whatever it was, all this didn’t happen this morning,’ said Bryn again. ‘Or last week either. It’s been going on for a good long while.’ He looked about, scratching his head. ‘It’s like everybody just gave up or something, and it’s all been falling apart ever since.’
‘I want to see my school,’ said Madlen suddenly. She pulled herself up. ‘Now.’
She headed off shakily, and the other two trailed after her.
‘It doesn’t have to be the Future,’ said Cam, who was worried about the colour Madlen’s face had turned. ‘It could just be a Future. Ten years into a Future. Nobody said anything about this stuff being fixed. I mean, that’s what we’re all about, isn’t it, putting things right…’
It was talking to itself. Madlen was beyond listening and Bryn… Bryn was deep in thoughts of his own.
There was danger here. It didn’t take a lot of brain to see that bad things had happened, and there was no reason to believe they were over. And there was no way of getting around the fact that he was the boy. As far as you could tell… though now he’d decided Cam probably would be female. He’d heard it cry at least once, and those clothes weren’t exactly butch. On the other hand, it definitely packed a punch when riled, and it didn’t walk like a girl – but anyway that was all beside the point. No matter what Cam ended up being, he was and would be the oldest boy. It was his job to protect the women and children.