Arthur Quinn and Hell's Keeper

by Alan Early

  Looking up, he saw the girl watching him curiously. ‘I just realised I don’t know your name,’ he said, offering her his free hand. ‘I’m Arthur, Arthur Quinn.’

  ‘Orla, Orla Doyle,’ she said, smiling. ‘Nice to meet you Arthur Arthur Quinn.’

  ‘And you, Orla Orla.’

  She took the filthy jeans back and left with a grin. As soon as she was gone, Arthur unclasped his hand and looked down at the crust. He turned it slowly around in his fingers. At the memory of the people locked up in the camp, a wave of sadness surged through him. He thought of Nurse Ann, who’d offered him the leftover and who had helped him escape, and remembered the kindness in her eyes despite the situation they had found themselves in.

  With a sudden and urgent sense of resolution, Arthur put the crust on top of the stack of clothes. He dipped the soap into the water in the basin and scrubbed his face, hands, torso and legs. Then he patted himself as dry as he could with the small rag, before pulling on the fresh clothing. He slid his feet into the shoes and laced them up. Finally, he stuffed the crust into his jeans pocket and strode out of the cell. The new jeans were stiff and he could feel the crust pressing into his right thigh. It was as if it was pushing him forward, urging him to make a difference, convincing him to save everyone.

  As he walked along the upper gangway, he looked over the edge, taking in the whole impressive room. The gaol was even livelier than it had been the previous evening. People were hustling to and fro. Some were carrying baskets or bags of dirty laundry and taking them into the outer corridor. Others were eating breakfast huddled on the dusty floor or crouched on steps or lying across mattresses or even sitting on a couple of long benches that he hadn’t noticed the night before. There was a short queue leading into one of the cells. It was the same cell he’d smelt the aroma of cooking from when he’d first arrived. And, though he couldn’t see into the cell now thanks to the line of waiting people, he could still catch the scent of toast, which made his stomach rumble loudly.

  Arthur made his way straight down the stairwell and joined the end of the breakfast queue. As the line moved forward – more quickly than he expected – he kept an eye out for Ash or Orla or even Donal. But he didn’t spot them anywhere among all the unfamiliar faces. Some of the faces looked back at him suspiciously, wary of the newbie. They glanced away when he caught them staring.

  After a few minutes, he reached the front of the line. This cell was about twice the size of the others and a long counter had been set up in it, splitting it in two. Tins of fruit, vegetables and lots of beans and peas were piled high on the counter. Next to them was a large pot filled with steaming porridge. A boy wearing an apron, who looked about ten, was behind the counter, busy ladling the sticky gloop into plastic bowls and then handing them to the queue. Arthur took one.

  ‘There’s honey and jam and sugar over there,’ the boy told him, pointing next to the stacks of tins. ‘And water and orange juice behind you. If you want toast or bread, Katie will have some ready in a bit.’

  Arthur helped himself to a glass of juice and heaped two spoonfuls of sugar onto the porridge, then looked behind the counter. In the far corner of the cell there was a toaster, a little gas-powered hob with the flame glowing blue and even something called the Breadmaster Supreme. Arthur guessed that these all came from looting raids and he was starting to wonder how the electrical ones were powered when he noticed the cables running from an extension lead to an exercise bike in the next cell. A boy who looked a couple of years younger than him was pedalling furiously, generating electricity. It looked like one of Ash’s inventions, Arthur thought. He turned back to the girl, Katie, who was busy slicing freshly baked bread and popping the slices into the toaster. When they were browned enough, she dropped two slices onto a plastic plate and handed them to Arthur. He slathered them in butter and had swallowed half a slice before he had even left the cell.

  He sat by himself, leaning his back against the wall, and wolfed down the food so quickly that his stomach growled angrily afterwards. But that didn’t stop him going back for seconds and even thirds. He felt so bloated when he was done that for a moment he couldn’t move. As the feeling finally wore off, he brought the used dishes back into the kitchen cell. Breakfast serving had finished and Katie and the porridge-boy were now busying themselves preparing the ingredients for more bread. When the boy saw him coming with the dishes, he nodded to a basin of sudsy water on the floor. All the cleaned plates and bowls were stacked next to it on a tray, dripping dry. He washed his own dishes and left them with the rest.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, getting up to go. ‘But have you seen Ash anywhere this morning?’

  ‘She and the others have gone for more supplies,’ Katie told him, squinting at a measuring scale as she tipped flour into it.

  ‘Any idea when they’ll be back?’

  ‘Not till this evening some time, I reckon.’

  He left the cell and looked around. Most people were working: cleaning up after breakfast or sweeping the floor or carting more mattresses from the corridor. One girl was even in the process of hanging an old landscape painting that she’d found somewhere. He watched with quiet fascination as she hammered a nail into a wooden lath attached to the wall. She stood back proudly and admired her work. A couple of passers-by patted her on the back, telling her what a good job it was. And though the painting did little to counteract the harsh, stony surroundings, Arthur had to admit that it did make the place seem more homely somehow. And of course, that’s what they were doing, he realised as he looked on: they were making this place their home.

  He felt like he should help them, especially after the hospitality and food they’d shared with him. So, when he noticed a tired-looking broom leaning against one wall, he took it and proceeded to sweep the floor. The dust rose about his shins in little clouds, smudging his new jeans, but he didn’t mind. He just concentrated on the work, moving around the floor, in and out of each cell, and after a couple of hours he had several little hillocks of dust piled on each storey. He found a scrap of a cereal box in one bin and used it as a little shovel to scoop up the dirt. When he was done with that, noticing that Ash still hadn’t come back, he looked for something else to do.

  A young boy came speeding out of one of the cells and bumped right into Arthur’s leg. He fell backwards onto the floor and looked up at Arthur with fear in his eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Arthur said, giving him a hand up.

  ‘Th-there’s a huge spider in there.’ He pointed an accusing thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the cell he’d bolted from.

  ‘You don’t like spiders?’

  The boy simply shook his head, turning red.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,’ said Arthur, thrusting the broom forward dynamically. ‘Lots of people are afraid of spiders. Luckily I’m not one of them. I’ll take care of it with my trusty broom!’

  The boy waited by the door as Arthur went in. A flimsy web had been strung across one corner of the cell and a tiny grey spider was scuttling up a thread towards it. In one swift arc, Arthur swept the broom across the wall, taking the web and the spider with it, and flicked them out the door.

  ‘All gone,’ he exclaimed, turning back to the boy, whose face was beaming with an appreciative smile.

  ‘Thanks!’ the boy said as he ventured back in again. ‘There’s loads of spiders everywhere.’

  ‘Well maybe I’ll just clean them all up,’ Arthur said, heading out.

  ‘You’re him who was at the camp, aren’t you?’

  Arthur stopped in his tracks, looked back at the boy and nodded. The boy dug around in his pocket and eventually took out a crumpled passport photo. He handed it to Arthur. It showed a man in his early twenties who had the same hazel eyes as the boy.

  ‘That’s my brother. He took care of me. But then we got separated during the flood.’

  ‘Oh.’ Arthur didn’t know what else to say as he looked at the photo, holding the
wrinkled paper carefully between his fingers.

  ‘Did you see him there? At the camp?’

  ‘Oh,’ Arthur said again. He looked directly at the young boy. ‘No. No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ the boy said dejectedly. He put out his hand for the photo and Arthur gave it to him. ‘I just thought you might have.’

  The boy turned away, putting the photo back in his pocket for safekeeping. Arthur wanted to tell him that it’d be all right, that they’d get his brother back, that they’d get them all back. But that might not be true; it could all be a lie. He would definitely try to get them back. And he knew there might be comfort in telling the boy that, but he couldn’t lie to him. At the end of the day, there would be no comfort in lies.

  Arthur spent the next while rounding up all the spiders in the main area and taking them out to the candlelit corridor. It was the one promise he could keep to the boy.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  Ash was standing in the doorway to his cell, leaning against the jamb. She was still wearing the many-pocketed coat that she’d had on the day before. Her hair was tied back but tendrils of it had escaped and she looked a tired mess.

  After spending a couple of hours spider-hunting, Arthur had found a box with paperback books in one storage cell. He borrowed one and returned to his mattress. It was a fairly straightforward murder mystery and he’d read half of it already, although he hadn’t been concentrating on the words. He wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on much besides the most menial tasks, but at least the very act of reading seemed to make the time move quicker. He hadn’t even heard any kerfuffle down below to let him know that Ash and the others had returned.

  ‘I slept great, thanks.’ He shut the book and left it on the ground next to him, then nodded to her dishevelled appearance. ‘You guys have trouble out there?’

  ‘Not much,’ she said, coming into the room to sit on the end of the mattress. She twanged the loose spring with a finger. ‘We just had to make a quick get-away and then came the long way home so no Wolfsguard would follow us. But we got a good haul.’

  ‘Great.’ He sat up and tucked his feet underneath him. He knew he needed to talk to Ash. He hadn’t been here long, but every hour he stayed quiet was another hour that his dad and his friends could be tortured by Loki. He’d been planning what he would say, while his eyes had read about a private detective and the dame that walked into his life. But now that Ash was here, giving him her time, the words got stuck in his throat.

  ‘Listen, Ash,’ he started finally. ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And what have you been thinking about?’

  ‘It’s just that …’ He took a breath. ‘How long can life go on like this?’

  She raised her eyebrows but Arthur continued before she could say anything.

  ‘Taking what you need and moving from place to place when the wolves come … I mean, eventually you’re going to run out of places to go and stashes of food.’

  ‘So what do you suggest, Arthur?’ She crossed her arms, almost petulantly. ‘That we stop moving? That we give up?’

  ‘No! Of course not.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Well …’ Here goes. ‘Attack.’

  ‘Attack?’

  ‘Attack Loki.’

  ‘Are you serious, Arthur?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She stood up, looking at him as if he was nuts. ‘We can’t attack him! We can’t attack any of them!’

  ‘But we have to!’ Arthur got to his feet. ‘We can’t just sit here, barely getting by, living from day to day. The only thing that will ever change is that our luck will run out. It’s inevitable. But there’s one way to make things better. And that’s to stop Loki.’

  ‘Arthur, we’re just a bunch of kids. We’re not an army. Any attempt to take on Loki will get us all killed.’

  ‘We stopped him before.’

  ‘You keep saying that, but it’s not true, Arthur. It’s not true! And the sooner you realise that, the better. He’s a god, an all-powerful magical being. If he couldn’t be stopped by the army, what chance do we have? I don’t even think a god can be stopped by mere mortals.’ She spat the last two words out in disgust. ‘If you think I’m going to help you in some hare-brained scheme that could lead him here and bring his anger down on all of us, on all of them,’ she gestured violently out the door, ‘then maybe you’d better leave.’ She turned and stormed out of his cell, almost running along the gangway. Arthur followed. He grabbed her shoulder and swivelled her around to face him.

  ‘What happened to you, Ash? When I knew you before you were so brave, so full of courage–’

  Angrily she brushed his hand from her shoulder, cutting him off mid-sentence. ‘There’s a difference between courage and stupidity, Arthur, and what you’re talking about is stupidity.’

  ‘Ash, you have no idea–’

  ‘No! You have no idea. You have no idea what it feels like to be me,’ she said in a low, breaking voice. ‘To be the one who started all of this. To be the one left behind. To know that your family are locked up somewhere because of you. To know that all these people – all the people down there – rely on me. To know that I have to make it better for them. I can’t fail in that, Arthur, and I won’t.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t know what it’s like. I can guess, though. I can guess because, in another world, I was the one who freed the serpent. And it all fell on my shoulders. But that time, we got through it together: you and me. And we can do it again. We just have to–’

  ‘We’re safe here, Arthur.’ She waved her arm over the people below. They’d already started queuing for supper. ‘We’re alive here. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘But for how long?’

  Ash gave a loud, exasperated sigh and strode off.

  ‘The girl I knew wouldn’t be afraid!’ Arthur called after her. ‘The girl I knew wouldn’t give up. The girl I knew would do whatever it takes to save those people in the camps.’ He knew what he was about to say and he knew how it would push Ash’s buttons, how it would hurt her to hear the words. But he had to say it; it was the only way he might get through to her. ‘The girl I knew and loved wouldn’t abandon her family to who-knows-what cruelty! To the agony that a god can inflict!’

  She stopped suddenly, caught by his callous words. Red-hot guilt surged through Arthur and he instantly regretted what he’d said. The words had carried more of a sting than he’d imagined.

  Ash turned on him, her face red with rage and tears pouring down her cheeks. She stomped back to him and, before he could react, slapped him across the face, hard. The smack echoed throughout the cavernous room and a sudden silence fell. They looked at each other, both equally shocked. Arthur found he couldn’t move, not even to rub the red welt he felt rising on his cheek; and neither, it seemed, could Ash.

  As Arthur opened his mouth to apologise, the earth suddenly started to shake. The whole building shuddered: metal grinding against metal, stone crunching against stone. Screams rose from the ground floor as the children below clung on to anything they could find. When they realised that nothing was stable, they just held on to each other. One teenage girl toppled down the stairs, tumbling head over heels down the narrow steps.

  All over the city, buildings quaked. The waters of the flood churned and boiled, smashing against the sides of the structures, then receding like an angry sea, revealing cars and vehicles underneath. And beyond the city, beyond even the country, the world shook, quaking to its very core. In every corner of the Earth, frightened people huddled, clinging on to each other, certain that the end had finally come, that Loki had decided to destroy the world completely.

  The gangway Arthur and Ash were standing on had been constructed in sections. When the quake had started, Ash had been thrown backwards onto a different section and, as Arthur hugged the railing for dear life, he realised with horror that the bol
ts holding Ash’s section to the ceiling were coming loose. As the earthquake continued, a single end of her section came away from the ceiling completely. It swivelled outwards and one side was now hanging over the terrible drop to the ground floor. Arthur watched with dread as she lost her footing and slid towards the precipice. Quick as he could, he reached out to her, about to yell her name when–

  The tree Yggdrasill is dying. The rot has spread over its bark, from the root to the tip. The wind lashes its side, tearing weaker branches as if they are as insubstantial as the wing of a moth. With a groan heard in all the worlds, the tree splits in two, straight down the middle, exposing–

  ‘Ash!’ Arthur shook his head to clear it, blinking the vision out of his eye and concentrating on his friend. Sliding rapidly towards the edge she looked up at him, saw his outstretched hand and grabbed it just as–

  –sick timber within. It is not the healthy, creamy colour that a tree should be, but rather a noxious blue. The timber is soft and crumbling, not strong and unyielding as it should be. The left half of Yggdrasill falls away, over the cliff edge, while the other half, miraculously, stays standing. But it cannot last much longer–

  The section Ash was on fell away completely, crashing to the ground, narrowly missing a huddled and terrified group of girls. As Ash swung below him, Arthur tightened his grip on her hand, almost cutting off the circulation to her fingertips. He leaned over, wrapped his second hand around her arm and heaved upwards with all his might, hooking his feet into the railings to get some extra purchase. As he pulled her up, Ash grabbed the edge of his section with her other hand and helped heave herself onto it. With one last lurch, Arthur dragged her up over the edge of the section and the two of them collapsed backwards, gasping for breath.

  ‘It’s stopped,’ Arthur murmured, noticing that the world wasn’t shaking any more. He could hear the water outside, still crashing against the walls, and the sounds of frightened sobbing from the ground floor.