Lost Worlds

by Andrew Lane

  Still there? The text appeared suddenly. It almost seemed to be mocking her.

  She reached out to the keyboard to type a response.

  Like a stone gargoyle, Gecko crouched on the parapet that ran round the edge of a block of offices near the river. It was the highest roof he could get to by free-running. Free-runners were honour-bound to only use physical means of getting from place to place. Lifts and escalators were forbidden, and even stairs were frowned upon.

  He supposed that he could actually climb up the sides of buildings, like a rock-climber, and get to higher roofs, but it would be risky – he might fall and kill himself. Yet it wasn’t the risk that stopped him accessing the higher roofs; it was the fact that climbing slowly up the side of a building like a cockroach wasn’t beautiful. Free-running was an art form. The running, the leaping, the rolling, the sliding and the controlled falling that ended in legs compressing like steel springs – they were like moves in a tennis match, or brush strokes in a painting. Each one had to be fluid and beautiful in its own right, simplicity hiding strength and complexity, but, also, they had to fit together into something greater than themselves. Climbing up a wall, fingers and toes scrabbling for cracks to hold on to, that had no beauty, no style.

  His gaze scanned the distant horizon: a mishmash of buildings in different architectural styles, all of which went together to make up the London skyline. On his right there was a clutch of new tower blocks that had sprung up in the few years since he had moved to London: the Shard at London Bridge; the Strata apartment block at Elephant and Castle, with three wind turbines set into its roof; and the office block on the site of the old Baltic Exchange that was known as ‘the Gherkin’ because of its strangely bulbous shape. Gecko could think of other names for it.

  He sighed. He knew that he was just trying to distract himself. He needed to make a decision: should he agree to work for the Eastern European criminals who wanted him to be their sneak-thief or should he just pack his few possessions and disappear, move to another flat in another area?

  The problem was that if he just moved a little way away, they’d find him again, and next time they wouldn’t be so polite. He supposed he could move out into the suburbs, or even to another part of England, but how would he be able to practise free-running then? He’d seen the outskirts of London – places like Pinner, or Nine Elms: rows and rows of two-storey houses like Lego blocks. Where was the challenge there? He supposed he could move to a different city, like Liverpool or Manchester – they had a whole set of different-sized buildings with their own different challenges – but they also had their own criminal gangs, and pretty soon there would be someone else looking down at him, making gun-shapes with their fingers. He could find somewhere smaller – a town or a village – but he’d probably be able to get from one side to the other via the rooftops in ten minutes. Where was the challenge? Where was the art?

  He shook his head. Good sense told him that if he wanted to keep on free-running then he had to stay in Central London, and that meant he had no choice but to become a thief.

  Could he? Was he really capable of sneaking around in people’s bedrooms, riffling through their private possessions for something his Eastern European masters could sell for a quick profit? What would happen if he got caught? He’d be locked up in a cell two metres square. No chance of free-running there. He’d go insane.

  Two options, neither of which ended well for him. One impossible choice.

  Abruptly, he stood up. He needed to run. He needed to feel the wind whistling past his ears and see the ground flashing past far below his feet.

  He raced left, towards the edge of the roof. There was a route in that direction he’d rehearsed before, one that was challenging enough to take his mind off his problems for a while.

  Reaching the edge of the building he jumped on to the parapet and used his momentum to carry him out into empty space.

  He fell: feet first and arms extended, wind pulling his hair back into a comet’s tail behind his head. His target was a small patch of tiled roof two metres away vertically and four metres away horizontally. He hit it, the impact taking his breath away and sending shockwaves up through his chest. He let his legs take the strain of landing. His forward motion continued, and he rolled head over heels, scraping his spine on the hard tiles but coming out of the roll in a pumping run. The next building abutted this one, separated by a metal railing. He vaulted the railing. The metal was cold beneath his fingers. He kept running, diverting round a central vent without breaking stride, taking huge gulps of air to keep his blood oxygenated.

  A three-metre gap separated this building from the next one. It was just too far to jump – maybe if it had been lower he’d have managed it, but it was on the same level as the roof he was pounding across. Workmen had put a girder across the gap at some stage in the past. Cables hung beneath it, secured by plastic ties. Gecko leaped on to the girder and ran across the gap like a man on a tightrope.

  This roof was a crazy paving of flat sections, sloping sections, sunken skylights and sudden vertiginous drops that formed ventilation shafts. Gecko jumped and dodged his way across the various obstacles, on the verge of over-balancing several times, and darted round a central pyramidal section of glass that topped a lobby far below. The next building was higher than this one – no chance of landing on the roof this time. Instead he let his eyes scan the face of the building as he raced towards the edge. A nanosecond before the last safe moment to stop he saw that the window straight ahead and one storey down was empty of glass. It had been like that for as long as Gecko could remember.

  He leaped into empty space.

  His trajectory carried him in a perfect parabolic curve. He brought his legs up to his chest and curled his arms round his knees as the wall of the building opposite zoomed towards him. Brick . . . more brick . . . and then the open window! His curled-up body fitted perfectly through the space. As the frame passed his face he explosively uncurled. His feet hit the windowsill so hard that spikes of pain jolted up to his hips. His thigh-muscles absorbed the impact and rebounded like springs, projecting him in a flat dive along the central corridor of the deserted building. He extended his hands in front of him. His palms hit the wooden floor, and he let momentum carry him in a series of flips past empty doorways and graffiti-covered walls. Maybe a shocked face – red-rimmed eyes and a straggly beard – gazed at him from one of the empty doorways, perhaps not. He was past too quickly to say for sure. He came out of the flips in a run, grabbed a banister at the end of the corridor and yanked himself sideways into a stairwell, nearly dislocating his shoulder in the process.

  The sound of his feet pounding the stairs echoed like thunder through the building and through his skull. He descended two levels, then emerged on to a lower floor and raced back down the corridor, heading towards the building he’d just come from, but diverting halfway along into a room with a door hanging drunkenly from its hinges. A stained, torn mattress shoved into a corner and a burnt area of floorboards, as if someone had been cooking in the centre of the room, were the only two things he noticed as his feet carried him racing across the space towards the lone window. Like the one two floors up, it was bereft of glass. He jumped through the space like a hurdler, knowing (because he’d done that run so many times before, each time getting slightly further than the last) that the building got narrower as it went up and that the ceiling of the floor below formed a balcony-like roof outside the window through which he’d just jumped. He raced to the edge of the roof and jumped again, this time over the gap between the derelict building and a warehouse next door.

  The warehouse roof was tiled, and it sloped from one side to the other. This was the furthest he’d got by free-running before, and he stopped to catch his breath and to work out what his next move would be – either this time or next time he did the run.

  The tiled roof was punctuated by a series of rectangular skylights made of frosted glass. The glass was patterned with a grid of wires, presumably to
make it stronger. Each skylight had a metal pipe projecting up from beside it, and each pipe was capped with something that looked like an upside-down flower pot. Something to do with ventilation, Gecko assumed.

  He leaned on one of the pipes while he took a series of deep breaths. He could feel the burn of the lactic acid build-up in his muscles.

  The trouble was it didn’t matter how far he ran – his dilemma had no problem keeping up with him. The same question still loomed large in his mind – what should he do about the Eastern European gangsters who wanted him to become their pet burglar?

  No. Push that to one side. Worry about that later. Now was for free-running.

  Gecko was just in the process of straightening up and looking around to see what was accessible from where he was standing when an electronic voice spoke right next to his ear. ‘Warning! Warning! Intruder detected!’

  The shock made him step back inadvertently. His heel caught against the lip of the nearest skylight. He fell backwards, hands desperately clawing at the air, and crashed through the skylight, the slivers of flying glass rising above him like a swarm of glittering insects.

  Calum had said goodbye to Professor Livingstone and her daughter, Natalie. Now he sat in the darkened living area of his warehouse apartment, holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand and sipping occasionally. It came from a bottling plant in Mexico, and he had it shipped across the Atlantic especially for him. The Mexican production process used cane-sugar sweetener, rather than the lower cost high-fructose corn syrup that was used to sweeten Coke everywhere else in the world. He found the taste cleaner and sweeter. It was something that made his life more bearable, which he could afford, so he bought it. And it was healthier. Either Professor Livingstone didn’t know about his little extravagance or she was letting him get away with it. At least it wasn’t a Ferrari Testarossa.

  His arms ached. He wasn’t used to moving around the apartment as much as he had for the past hour or so, while Professor Livingstone and her daughter had been present. He’d also been conscious of swinging around like a monkey in front of a girl who was about his own age and stunningly beautiful, if overly made-up and dressed like a Barbie doll. He’d tried to make the swinging look effortless and controlled, and had ended up pulling a muscle or something. He definitely had a pain running down his ribs that hadn’t been there before.

  He swilled the Coke in the bottle and took another sip. Professor Livingstone’s visit had disturbed him. He didn’t see his guardian that often; when she did visit it was usually on the back of a conference or seminar that she was attending in London. She would pop in, check that he looked healthy and that the place was tidy, ask what he’d been up to and then leave. He knew she had the power to check his use of the bank accounts that had been set up for him and to veto any unusual payments, but he was careful not to abuse the financial freedom he’d been given. The two of them had a reasonably good relationship – not like mother and son, but more like aunt and nephew. He only vaguely remembered her from before the accident, but he knew that she had been a good friend of his mother and father, and he knew that she felt as if she was paying tribute to their memory by looking after him – she and his great-aunt between them. He just wished she wouldn’t. He was perfectly capable of looking after himself.

  And why had she brought her daughter with her? Calum had never met Natalie before, and wasn’t sure that he ever wanted to again. She was obviously more used to a sunny Californian shopping-mall environment than a rainy London street and a warehouse that dated back several hundred years and which still smelt of rum and tobacco and the other things that had been shipped out along the Thames from its loading docks. He’d spotted her looking around with barely disguised distaste; glancing at the bare brick walls and the wooden floorboards that had absorbed all kinds of spills from various cargoes in the past.

  It was probably a good thing that she hadn’t gone down to the ground floor, where Calum stored a lot of the stuff that had been passed through generations of the Challenger family to Calum’s great-grandfather, Professor George Challenger.

  Now there was a man who wasn’t frightened of arranging speculative scientific expeditions to exotic foreign countries in search of specimens of things that nobody else believed still existed. Calum had heard stories from his father that George Challenger had, back in the 1880s, mounted an expedition to South America which had uncovered evidence that some prehistoric reptiles still existed, in numbers large enough to sustain a stable population. The stories told of Professor Challenger bringing back a live pterodactyl and displaying it in London, to the disbelief of the scientific and journalistic establishments. Calum had trawled through as many old newspapers from the time as he could locate, however, and had not found any reference to Professor Challenger or live pterodactyls. You would have thought that live pterodactyls would have rated at least some mention.

  It was because of Professor George Challenger, and the stories that his father had told him, that Calum was obsessed with the possibility of extinct animals still alive in the world. Not just prehistoric reptiles, but mammals, insects, fish . . . anything. That’s why his website was called The Lost Worlds – paying homage to the book The Lost World that the writer Arthur Conan Doyle had written about his great-grandfather’s South American expedition – although most people took it to be a work of fiction rather than what it was: a near-journalistic piece of non-fiction.

  His fingers clenched on the bottle as his memory flashed up a picture of the cover of the book The Lost World by Michael Crichton – a more recent piece of fiction, sequel to Crichton’s previous novel Jurassic Park. Both had been made into films, which meant, as far as Calum was concerned, that his great-grandfather’s memory was being eroded away, bit by precious bit.

  Which brought Calum back to the ground-floor storage area in the warehouse, where his great-grandfather’s boxes were stored. Hundreds of crates, left over from the various adventures that Professor George Challenger had undertaken. Who knew what was down there? Dinosaur skulls? Giant eggs? Calum dreamed of going down there one day with a crowbar and opening up as many crates as he could, just to see what was inside, but the ground floor wasn’t set up for his particular means of moving around, and he refused to get into a wheelchair to do it. That would be like giving up.

  He took another sip of his Coke, frowning when he realized that he’d finished the bottle. He put it down with a sigh and levered himself off the sofa with his arms, reaching up to the nearest leather strap and swinging across to the kitchen area to get another one.

  An artificial voice suddenly blared out through the apartment, jolting him. He nearly missed the next strap, which would have sent him sprawling to the floor.

  ‘Warning! Warning! Intruder detected!’

  Something crashed through the skylight overhead.

  Calum twisted round, staring in shock as a body plunged downward and hit the sofa where he’d been sitting, sending a cloud of dust mushrooming through the apartment. Fragments of glass followed it, raining down like a meteor storm.

  CHAPTER

  three

  Calum quickly cancelled the alarm and swung across to look at the person who had fallen through the skylight. He was worried that they would be dead from the impact, or the shock, but the boy on the sofa was still breathing. He looked about the same age as Calum. A burglar, obviously, but one taking a cleverer route than most of the other people who tried to break into the warehouse.

  Calum fished his mobile phone out of his jeans. He had the local police station on speed dial.

  He stared down at the boy on the sofa. Maybe he ought to call for an ambulance. Uncharacteristically, Calum wasn’t sure what to do.

  ‘Meu cabeca dói!’ the boy slurred. He was smaller than Calum, with coffee-coloured skin and black hair. He was slight, but Calum could see the muscle development in his arms and legs.

  ‘You were breaking into my apartment,’ Calum said, wondering if the boy could understand English.

&nb
sp; ‘I was not breaking in.’

  ‘You were on the roof.’

  ‘Roofs are common property. They are like pavements.’ The boy’s voice was getting stronger, and he was staring around the apartment.

  ‘No.’ Calum was firm on this point. ‘Roofs are private property, and if you climb on them then you’re trespassing,’

  The boy frowned. ‘I was just passing across. Using your place as a staging post, you know. Then your alarm went off and I fell through the skylight. I ought to sue you!’

  Calum looked him up and down. The muscular development, the tight clothes that wouldn’t restrict movement, the expensive high-end trainers . . . He thought he knew what this boy was doing.

  ‘Parkour?’ he asked. He’d heard of the discipline before.

  The boy looked up at him with a frown. ‘Hey, parkour is serious, hardcore stuff,’ he said. ‘I am a free-runner.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Parkour is all about efficiency. It is about finding the lowest-energy route around obstacles. Free-running is about the art, and about self-development. If it is not beautiful, it’s not free-running.’ The boy raised an eyebrow. ‘You obviously know a bit about this stuff.’

  Calum shrugged. ‘I’ve seen it in films, and played computer games with it in.’ He cocked his head to one side, gazing at the boy, evaluating him. His face was open and honest, although it was currently screwed up into a pained scowl, and he was making no moves to conceal his identity, escape or threaten him. Calum didn’t think he was a thief.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Calum asked.

  The boy struggled to a sitting position. ‘You can call me Gecko.’

  ‘Have you got a real name?’

  ‘What – so you can report me to the police?’

  Calum just remained silent, and waited.