The threat, heartfelt as it was, was slightly diminished by the fact that Matthew had now formed a starfish shape in the doorway which the guards were trying to break by tickling him, giving him the appearance of a dog who didn’t want to go in the bath.
‘Yes,’ Kyte said calmly. ‘The boy. He trusts you, doesn’t he?’ He stood silently for a moment more, before turning back to the desk. ‘Let him go,’ he ordered the guards.
The guards stopped tickling him. Matthew looked up in surprise.
‘What?’ he gasped.
‘What?’ gasped Mike and Duncan.
‘Mr Price has convinced me that he should remain here as our guest,’ said Kyte, sitting back down in his chair. ‘Which unfortunately means that we have to lose some unnecessary weight elsewhere.’
His eyes quickly set on Duncan. Kyte pointed a finger at him.
‘Throw him out instead,’ he snapped.
Duncan’s eyes filled with horror.
‘Wha––?’ he wailed.
‘Try to make sure he lands on something soft,’ Kyte added gently. The guards started dragging Duncan out of the door.
‘Mike, do something!’ he cried.
‘Shut up, Duncan,’ muttered Mike.
Duncan was dragged kicking and screaming out the room. All eyes slowly settled back on Kyte. He was staring out the window, his eyes fixed on the green beam of light that stretched out from the base, searching the horizon. There it was again – the sense that something about him was changing. He spun back round and pressed the button again.
‘What speed now?’ he barked.
‘Thirty-two,’ came the crackly reply. ‘We … we seem to be carrying more weight than we thought, sir.’
There was a knock at the door and everyone turned round. A guard stood in the doorway, looking slightly shaken.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘We, er … we’ve found another stowaway.’
Matthew looked up in shock. Kyte glanced around the room and nodded.
‘Bring them in,’ he said.
A number of guards led in the prisoner. They were wincing with the bruises they had clearly received in the process of capturing her. Kyte looked blankly at the furious girl standing opposite him.
‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘You’re after the boy as well.’
‘Heesh got my teesh,’ lisped Martha. Kyte nodded.
‘His friend,’ he said. ‘I see.’
Kyte pointed at Mike.
‘Guards, throw him out too,’ he said.
Kyte waited until Mike’s wails had disappeared down the corridor, and the soft shoomp of a window opening and closing had passed, before pressing the button on the desk again.
‘Now?’ he said.
There was a pause. ‘Thirty-five,’ came the voice.
Kyte nodded, his face set in thought.
‘Sounds like we’re carrying a lot of dead weight, doesn’t it?’
Kyte seemed to be in some pain. After a moment he turned back to the guards.
‘Strip the zeppelin,’ he ordered. ‘Strip everything that isn’t needed and throw it out. We’ve got a long way to go.’
The guards saluted and without another word started ripping the wood panelling from the walls around them. Kyte leaned over the desk, his back curled and his mouth gaping open in a ravenous yawn. Matthew looked at Kyte, at his body that even now appeared to be stretching in front of him, and suddenly realised what was so different about him. It seemed almost mad to even think it.
Kyte’s teeth had somehow become sharper.
17
Alex woke with a start.
‘Dad,’ he gasped.
He scrambled up, looking around him. The sun was setting on his second day in the desert, and already a coolness had begun to settle across the dunes. There was no one else in sight: no other dogs, certainly not his father. All was sand. Alex groaned. He’d had the dream again.
He threw the jumper off his face, gasping for breath. He was completely bathed in sweat. Sleeping in a desert with only a jumper for a sunscreen was easier said than done.
‘Hey,’ said Alex drily, shaking the figure lying beside him. ‘Wake up, you.’
The dog with the black patch slowly stirred and poked his head out from under the sand.
‘It’s time,’ said Alex. ‘We’ve got to get going.’
The dog needed no more encouragement. It shook itself and leaped to its feet.
Alex got up painfully and watched the dog disappear into the distance. It had stayed with him the whole night, walking when he walked, sleeping when he slept. The other dogs were still too far ahead. Alex could only guess they, too, were heading towards the light, drawn like all dogs to the power of the centre. He squinted his eyes against the setting sun. It was too bright to see it yet.
‘Where are you?’ Alex muttered, scanning the horizon.
Far ahead, the dog barked. It had stopped in the sand and was glancing back at him. Alex sighed and started walking.
‘All right, all right!’ he shouted. ‘I’m coming.’
The dog turned back round and scampered up the dunes. Alex watched it run away. He wrapped the jumper around his head with a sigh. He still couldn’t understand how he could go so long without needing food. Nothing made any sense here. He glanced up, to the horizon of sand spanning the world before him.
‘He’s somewhere out there,’ he muttered under his breath, heaving his feet through the sand. ‘He must be.’
The night after his father had run away from home the second time, Davidus Kyte appeared at the house.
He came round just before dinner, a security guard either side of him. He sat in the kitchen with Alex’s mum and told her that Alex’s father had been caught at the boundary again, shrieking like a wounded animal. But this time, he said, they weren’t going to let him come back home. They were going to keep him at the Cusp for questioning until they found out why he was doing it.
Alex was still only five years old and he was too frightened to walk in the room, even though it was time for dinner and he was starving hungry and didn’t understand why his dad had run away again. He’d sat outside the door and waited, getting hungrier and hungrier.
The argument went on until long after dinner time. Alex remembered looking through the crack in the door and seeing Kyte’s face as his mother cried. Eventually, Kyte got up and started opening cupboards, and when he had finally found a plate and a big butcher’s knife he sat back down at the table and helped himself to a slice of the cake that had sat there all night, untouched.
Alex had thrown the rest away. He didn’t want cake after that.
Alex marched onwards, his feet sinking through the mounds of cool sand. The desert was slipping into darkness around him. In the farthest distance, a glow was appearing.
‘The centre,’ Alex whispered.
He had no choice. He kept walking.
The years after that were the years when everything changed.
They were the years when Alex started noticing people on the street pointing and whispering about him. About the boy with the mad father, the one who thought he was a dog. And each time Alex’s dad broke out of jail and they found him at the Cusp, trying to get back in, Kyte would turn up on their doorstep, a pair of security guards beside him. And Alex would have to go upstairs to his room while his mum was asked questions that seemed to go on for hours, and there would always be more shouting.
His old room seemed far away now, farther away than it had ever been. He’d only had one photo of his dad on his wall. It was taken before Alex was born, and it was of his dad sitting in a kennel surrounded by a pack of enormous dogs. Alex’s mother told him they had pulled the sledge on his Expedition, and that Alex’s father had become very close to them and that was why he had started acting so strangely around people. Why the garden was still littered with patches of torn grass and soil from where he had spent days digging endless holes.
In the photo, his father had his arm around the biggest of the dogs, an Alsatia
n, and looked happier than Alex had ever seen him before. And Alex had thought it was no surprise his dad had run away, when there was so much shouting around the house all the time.
That was when Alex started collecting pictures of dogs.
Alex trudged onwards across the sand, his eyes set on the distant glow, watching nothing else.
‘He’s out there somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘He must be.’
Alex learned a lot over those next few years.
He learned that you couldn’t always believe what people said. He learned that even when people told you that they loved you, and that they only wanted you to be happy, it didn’t stop them from hurting you.
He learned that sometimes, when bad things happen at home, it makes home stop feeling like home at all. And the worst part is that once it happens you can never go back to it.
He learned that sometimes, once enough people start treating you like you’re less of a person, then you start believing them.
When he was eight years old, Alex’s mother told him that the bullying at school had gone on long enough, and that maybe he should try going to a boarding school for a while, one that was far away, and Alex didn’t argue.
The desert was soon at its coldest. Bleak light was appearing at the edge of the world again. The glow became harder and harder to see. Alex stopped. There was no sign of his father. They had gone far enough.
‘Hey,’ he cried out to the distant figure of the dog. ‘Stop. We have to stop.’
They both crouched in the shelter of a dune, a tiny fire of bush scrub kindling before them. Alex shivered and pulled the jumper back over him. He turned to the dog.
‘I hate to say this,’ he muttered, ‘but I don’t think we’re getting any closer.’
The dog was silent. It looked idly at the fire, watching the stray sparks as they popped from the dry wood. Alex sat silently for some time. Far away, the edge of the sun appeared over the desert.
‘I have this dream,’ he said eventually.
The dog looked up at him. Alex paused and kicked at the embers.
‘In the dream,’ said Alex, ‘I’m pressed up against a wall so I can’t move. And my chest is hurting really badly. So I look down and I see there’s this pole poking right into me, right where my heart is, so hard that it’s hurting me and keeping me pinned to the wall and I can’t move. And I look along the pole, it’s miles long so it takes me ages to see where the end is, and I see that it’s my dad holding the pole. He’s so far away that I can hardly see him.’
The fire briefly swelled in a small gust of desert wind, like a chest rising.
‘And I shout out for him to let go of the pole, so I can move and it’ll stop hurting me, and he says that he can’t, that he has to hold it there. And so we’re stuck like that until my chest hurts more and more and I can barely stand it. And then I realise that I’m not pressed against the wall at all, I’m being pressed against the ceiling. And my dad is holding me up there with the pole, not able to let go or move because the second he does I’ll fall.’
Alex looked at the dog. It was lying down now, gazing into the fire.
‘And in the dream he lets go,’ he said, ‘because he can’t hold on any longer, and I come crashing down, right down on top of him, and he’s holding his hands out to try and catch me and just before I hit him, I …’
Alex stopped himself. The fire was dying. He looked up. The thick blanket of stars was disappearing as another day began to break above them. Alex blinked, drowsily. His legs ached, and his head ached. He lay down and slumped his head in the sand. His eyes flickered.
He was in his old bedroom, the dog photos covering the wall where the old mirror stood. And beyond that his dorm room at school, and his cupboard filled with dog magazines and every present his mum had ever sent him.
He grumbled. None of those things could be here. It was the Forbidden Land again. Nothing made any sense here.
‘They can’t be here,’ Alex murmured, ‘because I’m completely alone.’
Slowly, the dog sat up and turned to him, giving Alex a smile.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ said the dog, ‘I never really knew my father either.’
Alex smiled. I must be dreaming, he thought, because dogs don’t talk.
‘Night, dog,’ said Alex, turning away and falling asleep.
The dog sighed.
‘Goodnight, Alex,’ said the dog. ‘Sweet dreams.’
18
‘Hello?’
Far away at the perimeter of the base, a new day was dawning and the night watchman’s shift was almost over. Kyte’s ship had been gone for nearly two days now, and all was silent.
Almost silent.
The night watchman scanned the horizon with an unflinching gaze and slowly ate a biscuit.
‘Who’s there?’ he mumbled.
He looked out across the turf lining the boundary, or what was left of it. It couldn’t accurately be called turf now. What hadn’t been trampled flat by those piling in for the ceremony had been torn apart by those charging out afterwards, and what was left of that had been churned to mud by trucks following incidents in the nearby town. Some troublemakers at Cloisters calling themselves the Wolf-Tiger Fighter Jet Squadron had started looting the local shops and declaring civil war on all mankind.
The night watchman sighed. It had been a difficult few days for him. The one benefit of the week’s disasters was that every competent member of staff had been promoted and sent to deal with the riots, so the night watchman had been allowed to keep his job. He brushed the biscuit crumbs off his shirt and leaned forwards over the desk.
‘Who’s there?’ he called out again. ‘I can hear you, you know!’
Outside, all was silent. Bent floodlights flickered on and off across the mud. The night watchman listened. He was certain he had just heard things moving out there. Lots of things.
Suddenly the phone rang beside him. The night watchman’s eyes scanned the darkness outside. He lifted the receiver.
‘Security,’ he said into the phone.
‘Er …’ came a quavering voice. ‘Hello.’
The night watchman frowned. ‘Who is this?’ he said.
‘Who is this?’ said the voice. It had suddenly become a lot deeper. ‘What do you mean, who is this? I’m your superior officer! Officer … er …’
The night watchman paused. ‘… Officer Barker?’
‘Yes,’ said the voice. ‘Officer Barker.’
‘You sound different, sir,’ said the night watchman suspiciously.
‘Never you mind how I sound!’ the voice roared. ‘If you must know, which you shouldn’t in my opinion, I have contracted a terrible case of diarrhoea which has affected my vocal chords.’
The night watchman shifted awkwardly on his chair. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he muttered. ‘That sounds terrible.’
‘It is!’ said the voice. ‘But more importantly, you must now listen to me and do everything I say. I am about to entrust to you a task so secret that anyone within at least forty feet of you will have to be killed, just in case. Are you listening?’
The night watchman had broken out in a light nervous sweat. ‘Yes, sir!’ he boomed. He was very grateful that no one else was near him at the base. He didn’t want to kill anyone. Despite the seriousness of the situation, however, the night watchman couldn’t shake the feeling that Officer Barker was trying as hard as he could not to laugh whenever he spoke.
‘Good!’ the voice squeaked. ‘First of all, I want you to punch yourself in the face.’
The night watchman paused. ‘… Sir?’
There was the sound of a heated argument on the other end of the line.
‘All right, all right,’ muttered the voice, apparently disappointed. ‘Forget that. Listen here – the entire Royal Family is on its way to the base for a top-secret meeting. In a minute, probably less.’
‘The Royal Family!’ gasped the night watchman. ‘Why, sir?’
‘Er … I’m not sure,’ sai
d the voice. ‘Probably something to do with, er … taxes. But you’re not to inform any other guards about this! All you need to do is open the gates the second you see the convoy arrive, in about half a minute, and close them again afterwards. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the night watchman. ‘The secret’s safe with me.’
‘That’s a good lad,’ said the voice. ‘It’ll be there in twenty-five seconds. No, wait, twenty. I should also add that in the interest of keeping a low profile the Royal convoy will be cunningly disguised as a light burgundy Citroën C5.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the night watchman.
‘Make that ten seconds,’ corrected the voice nervously. ‘It should be easy to spot because all the windows have been smashed out. In fact if I were you I’d open the gates right now.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the night watchman. ‘When exactly did you say …’
A light burgundy Citroën C5 suddenly shot past the security booth at high speed and with the sound of failing brakes on liquid mud careered straight into the gates.
‘Oh no!’ gasped the night watchman. He flew out of the booth, shedding crumbs. ‘Your Majesty!’
The scene that greeted him outside was horrific. The Citroën had buckled the security gates and was now almost completely upright, its back wheels still whirring at high speed and spraying the surrounding area with brown sludge. As mentioned, all its windows had been smashed in by what looked suspiciously like bullets. A crown had been painted onto the bonnet. The Queen was dragging herself out of the wreckage in a floor-length turquoise ballgown and long white gloves, whacking the driver round the head with her crown.
‘You pillock, Dennis!’ she screamed. ‘Call that driving? That was easily our coolest car!’
‘Sorry, Laurence,’ muttered the driver.
The night watchman sprinted across the mud towards them. ‘Don’t worry, Your Highness, I’ll …!’
Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door Page 13
