Extraordinaires 1

by Michael Pryor

  Damona kept up a soft chant: ‘Easy now. Easy now.’

  He stripped off his gag. Bared his teeth. Growled a challenge from deep in his chest. His eyes darted to the dark hole in the floor. Before Damona could move he took a few steps and dived down it.

  Damona sat back on her haunches. She took a deep breath, thinking. She tossed the metal bar away. It rang on the concrete like a bell.

  She glanced at the bodies of the Spawn. ‘What were you two doing with him?’ She shuffled over and sifted their pockets, found nothing.

  Why would they want a wild boy?

  She sighed, climbed to her feet. ‘They can’t have him. I want him.’

  Kingsley ran with the single-mindedness of the jungle animals among which he’d been raised. His one impulse was to put distance between him and that creature, the one like the trolls who’d murdered Mrs Walters.

  At the bottom of the ladder, he was faced with a red-brick tunnel, large enough that he only had to stoop slightly. One way – to judge from the smell – led to the river. Hardly thinking, acting instinctively, he set off along the other. Twenty yards of scrambling and he came to a hole in a brick wall. He tumbled down a fall of loose masonry and timber. Unnerved by the closeness in which he’d found himself – the opposite of the freedom he’d been seeking – he jogged through another brick arched tunnel, darker than the first, panting heavily until he came to a spiral staircase leading down.

  He paused, one hand on the iron railing, his heart battering his ribs, then looked back along the tunnel.

  Echoes. Footsteps, slow but dogged.

  It was enough. He took to the stairs and, despite an animalistic recoiling from the prospect of close confines, hammered downward into the darkness, eager to flee.

  The time that passed was not measured in minutes and seconds, those arbitrary markers made by humanity. A distant, civilised part of Kingsley grasped for them but they slipped by, caught up as he was in the need to escape. Run, run! was a drumbeat behind his forehead as he took turns quickly, chose options after a quick sniff and listen, scrambled down shafts as they presented themselves.

  Run, make distance, then hide. Run, make distance, then hide.

  A long time later, Kingsley came to himself again. He was backed into a gap in a stone wall, a ragged hole that smelled of damp. It was large enough for him and no-one else.

  It was a bolthole.

  Through dim, strained light – grates? Drain holes? – he was looking out over a stretch of water that was undecided about which way it was moving. A shore of stones separated him from the ill-favoured water by a few yards, and on the other side another few yards of shingle ran up to the stone wall that curved up and over the water. He heard rumbling, the omnipresent noise of the city, but it didn’t sound as if were coming from his left or his right. Overhead?

  Kingsley shivered. He dropped his chin and realised, glumly, that he was a horrid mess. His trousers were spattered with mud. He’d lost his shoes. His jacket and tie were gone. One sleeve of his shirt flapped uselessly, his cuff link having torn away. He rolled it up over his elbow while he wondered what to do. He’d walked away from his job, his foster father was missing – possibly abducted – his housekeeper had been murdered and he was a fugitive.

  In some ways, he’d accomplished a great deal. The sad fact was that little of it was good.

  The scene in front of him was tranquil, but hardly welcoming. Drops fell into the water erratically, as if reluctant to join what he now knew – from the evidence of his sense of smell – to be little more than a drain.

  He was hungry.

  A rat the size of a small terrier poked its head into the hole. Kingsley reared back in alarm. He cried out not just at its size, but because of its three eyes. Two black and blinking eyes and one round, in the middle of its head above the other two.

  The rat wasn’t upset by his performance. It merely rocked its head to one side and scurried off.

  Kingsley passed a hand over his face. His trembling definitely wasn’t because of lack of food or cold. Strangeness was assaulting him on every side and it was testing his mettle.

  He clenched his teeth, hard. He clenched his hands into fists until his fingers hurt, then he relaxed. He took a deep breath, then another, until the trembling stopped, putting himself in the calm frame of mind he would if he were about to perform a dangerous escape.

  It helped.

  Kingsley had been sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms around them. He let go and swivelled his neck, stretching. He gazed out of his hole. He’d been in worse situations. The time when his foster father’s valet had reluctantly thrown the chained trunk into the canal, for instance, had been sheer terror where seconds stretched out in the rubbery way that crisis time had. Seconds moved like monoliths when one’s life was in the balance.

  Now, that had been a difficult situation. No matter how he’d practised, no matter how well he knew the theory, working on the chains and locks in the dark, while the water sluiced in through the cracks – cold and smelling of refuse – was a test of his skill and his bravery. Panic would have been the worst thing, for trembling and doubt would have been fatal.

  That time, he’d emerged, draped in slime, much to Brown’s relief. He’d proved to himself that he could escape from death’s clutches.

  He shook his head. He mightn’t be in death’s clutches right now, but he had no idea where he was. He was still shivering and uncertain, lost and hunted. He had enemies all around. He was being chased by a troll and by loathsome creatures impersonating policemen. He was suspected of murder. He was in danger and he was further away from finding his foster father than ever.

  He ran a hand over his face and shivered. Go and confront those creatures to see what connection they had with his foster father’s disappearance? Find a genuine law enforcement official? He shook his head. Who could he trust?

  Kingsley froze. That noise wasn’t natural. He groped for a weapon. He had lock picks still in his collar, and a thin length of metal sewn into the back of his shirt could be used as a slashing tool if he had the chance to retrieve it, but he scrabbled for a hand-sized rock as a better, more solid alternative. If he could get in a good blow, he might have a chance to scuttle out of his bolthole and escape.

  A face appeared just as Kingsley’s fingers found a rock. He restrained himself.

  ‘Found you.’ Evadne Stephens was wearing a brass headpiece with telescopic arrangements and goggles that made her visage insect-like. ‘And none too soon, from the looks of you.’ She tapped her chin. ‘As a project, you’re more complicated than I thought you’d be.’

  Kingsley’s sense of surprise had taken so many buffets that he didn’t express any incredulity when Evadne followed a large rat into a maze of underground tunnels and byways. Trailing behind her, bare-footed and wincing, he wondered if the rat weren’t familiar, but not being an aficionado of rats, one tended to look much like another. Given, it was the size of a terrier, but he assumed one terrier-sized rat was much like another terrier-sized rat. Given, it had three eyes, but three-eyed rats might be commonplace in this neck of the woods. So to speak. Kingsley’s weariness made the fact that Evadne talked to the rat – conferring when facing a choice of ways to go – merely an item of vague interest, to be considered later when he was able to muster enough energy.

  As they went, Evadne produced a slim electric light, the size and shape of a pencil. She chatted mildly about how she and Kipling had separated after the uproar at the police station and how difficult it had been to find Kingsley and how curious she was about his ending up in the Demimonde. She told him about how he’d ended up in one of the older sections of the Fleet River, one of London’s mostly forgotten subterranean waterways.

  Kingsley shrugged at this, too weary and too overwhelmed to be amazed. He tried to offer responses that made sense, but her question
s grew fewer and her glances at him more concerned until she patted him on the arm and told him not to worry.

  Which was useful advice, for Kingsley took the opportunity to fall asleep while he walked. He lapsed into one of those wonderful dreams where one knows one is dreaming, but is able simply to enjoy the experience. At least, that was the only explanation he could think of, drowsily, when Evadne and her rat helped him into a little boat the shape of a pea pod. Evadne crowded in beside him, delightfully, and a tiny man stood in the bow behind them. He was made mostly of angles and had the most enormous eyes Kingsley had ever seen, either in a dream or waking, and he poled the boat along while humming a tune that echoed from the corbels, cornerstones and colonnades of the subterranean watercourse he navigated.

  Evadne herded him through a series of doors to her refuge, the locks of which he would normally have been fascinated by. In his state, however, they were a blur. Inside, Evadne steered him to a room and ordered him to take a bath.

  Some time later, and somewhere closer to human, Kingsley relaxed and let the water come up to his chin. The bathroom in Evadne’s retreat was white-tiled from floor to ceiling. At the moment it was totally filled with steam and Kingsley’s gratitude.

  He tried to remember the last time he’d had a bath and, with a start, realised it was only a day ago, the morning of his disastrous debut. Idly, while he sought for the soap that was somewhere in the water, he wondered what Mr Bernadetti was doing. Hiring some more dog acts, most likely, to fill the gaps that Evadne and Kingsley had left.

  A stab of guilt took him. How could he be worrying about his stage career with all that had happened? His foster father’s abduction, in particular, and Mr Kipling’s hints about shadowy events and nearing doom. The world had become altogether darker and more complicated than it had been a day ago.

  The nature of his abductors, too, had shaken Kingsley. He flinched when he recalled their touch. Their skin was doughy, but their grip was steely. On top of that, the shock of what happened to them, the way they’d been dispatched by the brutish woman who had then advanced on him, had been enough to shake his wild self free.

  He was angry with himself. Twice in a single day his control had slipped and his wild side had run amok. In doing so, he’d forgotten all about his missing foster father and was no doubt still sought for the murder of poor Mrs Walters.

  Kingsley found the soap. He grimaced at its lavender fragrance, but stoically lathered up a wash cloth. He set to work on the sweat and grime of the most outrageous twenty-four hours in his life.

  Kingsley woke to the sound of a bell ringing. Not a church bell; it was far more insistent. It took his sleep-befuddled brain a moment to realise it was more like a fire bell and then he bolted out of the supremely soft bed Evadne had shepherded him to after his bath the previous day.

  For a moment, he was unsure exactly where he was and that disconcerted him. Bath, bed, he remembered, but his whereabouts beyond that eluded him. He liked knowing where he was. Their arrival was only a fuzzy memory, exhausted and mind-battered as he had been, and confused by his ridiculous dream of a boat voyage. He had vague recollections of heavy rain, crowds of people underneath a field of umbrellas, and another stair-enabled descent, but everything else was a jumble.

  He was still fumbling with his tie – clean and pressed like the rest of his clothes – when he found Evadne in a round room, twice as tall as it was wide. She was peering at one of a dozen or so oval windows that were set into the wall like a double row of plaques. Underneath them ran a long shelf with an array of switches, knobs and levers. She was wearing a long green leather coat over a dark blue dress that was piped with cream. She had a small hat, quite the opposite of the fashion, something like a top hat much reduced and much less masculine, probably due to the light blue feather stuck in the band.

  When he entered, she glanced at him. ‘Stay there!’ she ordered. ‘Don’t move!’

  She left the bank of glasses, disappeared through a door and emerged a moment later hefting a rifle that was a cousin of the pistol she’d used on the hapless police constable: black, sleek and deadly.

  ‘What is it?’

  She ignored him and ran past, disappearing through the door he’d entered by.

  A door banged, the bells continued to ring, and all Kingsley was left with was the scent of gardenia in the air.

  He went to the door opposite and peered inside. He was confronted by a workshop that looked like a university physics laboratory that had surrounded and taken over a foundry, with power cables strung willy-nilly from roof beams, a brace of workbenches heavily laden with impressive glassware and a row of metal cabinets that looked as if they could take a direct hit from an artillery shell without flinching. For a moment, he hesitated, but the urgency of the bells made him move. He grabbed a bullseye lantern and a shiny metal bar, then set off after Evadne.

  Kinsley counted five doors. All of them were open, the last still swinging. He hesitated, reluctant to leave the refuge unprotected, but angry cries echoed down the tunnel in front of him and set him running in that direction.

  A stutter of sharp, hard reports came to him, loud enough to hurt his ears. He lurched against the bricks of the tunnel, shivering as the noise of conflict set his wild side on edge. Should he ready to fight, or should he turn tail and run?

  Another hammering of gunfire and a chorus of unearthly wails made him bite down on his animal self. His head pounding with the effort, he staggered on, using the metal bar for support and bent over to avoid hitting his head on the roof of the tunnel. He held up the lantern just in time to avoid plunging over the edge where the tunnel gave out onto a shallow, precarious ledge.

  Light flashed and a rifle cracked. Echoes swallowed it, tumbled it up with shouts and screeching, a wicked brew of pain and anger. Kingsley swept the lantern and found he’d come to an open space with four or five drains emptying into it – one of which was choked with the rangy figures of those who’d abducted him from the police station.

  For an instant, Kingsley pulled back, recoiling from the horrible creatures. Then he crept forward, keeping himself concealed, unwilling to let them daunt him.

  The creatures were trapped in the tunnel mouth, pinned by Evadne’s rifle fire, but they weren’t defeated. They howled and shrieked and threw themselves out, tumbling one over another in a battle frenzy, plunging into the pool and floundering forward before Evadne struck them down.

  She stood on a small promontory that jutted into the pool, balanced on a pile of broken masonry, a silver-maned Fury. She fired again. The sound of ricochets added to the cacophony, but she didn’t stop. No doubt aided by her light-enhancing spectacles, she fired again, and again with accuracy that bordered on the phenomenal.

  She was crying.

  The light was poor, but Kingsley could just make out that she was sobbing as she worked the bolt of the rifle, gasping for breath in between tracking the Spawn as they sought her. She dashed tears away with the back of her hand but she held the rifle steady.

  Two Spawn threw themselves into the pool, rose roaring and were thrown backward by Evadne’s accurate fire.

  Kingsley rose from his crouch, squinting, trying to make out figures moving in the shifting shadows. There, on the other side of the pool – where Evadne had no hope of seeing them from her position out on the promontory of rubble.

  He abandoned the lamp. He leaped from the ledge and landed on a narrow, noisome shore. He ran, metal bar in one hand, skirting the pool, aware that if Evadne caught sight of him she could mistake him for one of the Spawn, but not hesitating for an instant – for he’d seen that the two vile creatures had emerged and were creeping up on her, well behind her field of vision.

  Kingsley hurdled over a broken wooden crate in time to see the first of these stealthy Spawn rear up behind her. She didn’t have a chance to move – it clawed her from her position. She fel
l and her spectacles flew from her head, glinting in the sparse light of Kingsley’s lonely lantern on the other side of the pool.

  Instantly, Kingsley was there. He swung the metal bar and the Spawn howled as it was driven back. Its companion wheeled on Kingsley in time to meet the bar coming the other way. It folded when the bar caught it across the midriff. Kingsley kicked and it toppled into the pool.

  The first Spawn staggered to its feet. This time Kingsley jabbed at it and took it in the throat. It gurgled and joined its partner in the mucky water.

  Kingsley reached Evadne. She was dazed and her head lolled from the Spawn’s blow. Panting, muscles burning, he scooped her up, threw her over his shoulder, tucked her rifle under his arm. ‘This is so undignified,’ she mumbled.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said. More Spawn were assembling at the tunnel mouth. He set off in the other direction, back towards Evadne’s refuge. ‘It seems practical.’

  Evadne didn’t reply. Kingsley cast around for her spectacles, couldn’t see them, then set his teeth and began to jog as fast as he could.

  He carried Evadne inside the refuge, following her ragged instructions for bolting each of the doors as they went, holding her in his arms so she could see. ‘The viewing room,’ she gasped over the relentless alarm bells. Her face was streaked with grime and looked different without the spectacles. Kingsley wouldn’t have dared say more vulnerable, but he was willing to wager someone else might have.

  ‘Push that switch up!’ she shouted over the bells.

  A dozen switches confronted him on the wall near the door. All of them were large and brass with rubber handles. ‘Which one?’ he shouted back.

  ‘The green one!’

  Kingsley had to use a knee, but he managed to slam the lever home. Instantly, the ringing cut off. She looked him in the eye. ‘You can put me down now.’

  She was hardly a burden. ‘Are you sure?’