“What are we going to do?” Jeremy complained. It felt like he’d been walking forever. He was cold and his feet were aching.
“The night bus!” Nick spoke the words even as he saw the bus in question, parked at the far corner of the square, opposite the National Gallery.
“Where?”
“There!”
Nick pointed and there it was, an old-fashioned red bus with a hop-on, hop-off platform at the back and the magical word RICHMOND printed in white letters on the panel above the driver’s cabin. The bus was the 227B. Its other destinations were printed underneath: ST. MARK’S GROVE, PALLISER ROAD, FULHAM PALACE ROAD, LOWER MILL HILL ROAD, and CLIFFORD AVENUE. At least two of the names were familiar to Nick. The bus was heading west. And they had enough money for the fare.
“Come on!” Jeremy had already broken into a run, his vampire cloak billowing behind him. Nick tightened his grip on his pitchfork and ran after his younger brother, at the same time clinging on to his horns, which were slipping off his head.
They reached the bus, climbed on, and took a seat about halfway along the lower deck. It was only when they were sitting down that Nick became aware that there were no lights on the bus, no other passengers, no driver, and no conductor. With a sinking feeling he realized that this was one bus that wasn’t going anywhere—at least not in the near future. Next to him, Jeremy was sitting back panting with his eyes half-closed. He looked at his watch. Eleven fifty-nine and counting. Ten seconds to midnight. Maybe it would be better to try again for a taxi, he decided. A taxi would have to drive through Trafalgar Square sooner or later.
“Jerry . . .” he said.
And, at the same moment, the lights came on, the engine rumbled into life, the bell rang, and the bus lurched forward.
Nick looked up, slightly alarmed. The bus had been empty a few seconds ago, he was sure of it. But now he could see the hunched-over shoulders and dark hair of a driver, sitting in the cabin. And there was a conductor on the platform, dressed in a crumpled gray uniform that looked at least ten years out-of-date, feeding a paper spool into his ticket machine.
Nick and Jeremy were still the only passengers.
“Jerry . . . ?” he whispered.
“What?”
“Did you see the driver get on?”
“What driver?” Jeremy was half-asleep.
Nick looked out of the window as the bus turned up Haymarket and made its way toward Piccadilly Circus. They passed a second bus stop with a few people waiting, but the night bus didn’t stop. Nor did the people waiting seem to notice it going past. Nick felt the first prickles of unease. There was something dreamlike about this whole journey: the empty bus that wasn’t stopping, the driver and conductor appearing out of nowhere, even Jeremy and himself, wearing these ridiculous costumes, traveling through London in the middle of the night.
The conductor walked up the bus toward them. “Where to?” he demanded.
Now that Nick could see the man close up, he felt all the more uneasy. The conductor looked more dead than alive. His face was quite white, with sunken eyes and limp black hair hanging down. He was frighteningly thin. There seemed to be almost no flesh at all on his hands, which were clasped around the ticket machine; not one of the newfangled ones that worked electronically but an old-fashioned thing with a wheel that you had to crank to spit the tickets out. But then the whole bus was completely out-of-date: the pattern on the seats, the shape of the windows, the cord suspended from the ceiling that you pulled to ring the bell, even the posters on the walls advertising products he had never heard of.
“Where to?” the conductor asked. He had a voice that seemed to echo before it had even left his mouth.
“Two to Richmond,” Nick said.
The conductor looked at him more closely. “I haven’t seen you before,” he said.
“Well . . .” Nick wasn’t sure what to say. “We don’t go out this late very often.”
“You’re very young,” the conductor said. He glanced at Jeremy, who was now completely asleep. “Is he your brother?”
“Yes.”
“So how did you both go?”
“I’m sorry?”
“How did you depart? What was it that”—the conductor coughed politely—“. . . took you?”
“My dad’s car,” Nick replied, mystified.
“Tragic.” The conductor sighed and shook his head. “So where are you going?”
“Richmond, please.”
“Lower Grove Road, I suppose. All right . . .” The conductor ’s hand rattled around in a circle and a double ticket jerked out of the machine. He handed it to Nick. “That’ll be a dime.”
“I’m sorry?” Nick was mystified. He handed the conductor a dollar bill and the man squinted at it dis tastefully.
“New currency,” he muttered. “I still haven’t gotten used to it. All right . . .” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change, including several large pennies and even a threepenny piece. The last time Nick had seen one of those, it had been in an antiques shop. But he didn’t dare complain. Nor had he mentioned that they didn’t actually want to go to Lower Grove Road. He didn’t even know where it was. He didn’t say anything. The conductor walked back to the platform and left him on his own.
The bus drove around Hyde Park Corner, down through Knightsbridge, and on through South Kensington. At least Nick recognized the roads and knew they were heading in the right direction. But the bus hadn’t stopped; not once. Nobody had gotten on, not even when it was waiting at the red traffic light near Harrods. Jeremy was asleep, snoring lightly. Nick was sitting still, counting the minutes. He just wanted to be in Richmond. No matter how furious his parents would be when he finally arrived, he wanted to get back home.
And then, on the other side of Kensington, just past the Virgin Cinema on Fulham Road, the bus finally pulled in. “St. Mark’s Grove,” the conductor called out. Nick looked out of the window. There was a tall, black, metal grille on the other side of the road and a sign that he couldn’t quite read in the darkness. A group of people had been waiting just in front of it, and as he watched they crossed over the road and got onto the bus. The conductor pulled the cord twice and they moved off again.
Four men and three women had gotten on. They were all extremely well dressed, and Nick assumed they must have all come from the same dinner party. Or perhaps they’d been to the opera. Two of the men were wearing black ties with wing collars. One also had a white scarf and an ebony walking stick. The women were in long dresses, though they wore no jewelry. They were all fairly elderly, perhaps in their sixties—but then, just as the bus picked up speed, a fifth man suddenly ran to catch up with it, reached out a hand, and pulled himself onto the moving platform. Nick gasped. This was a much younger man, a motorcyclist still dressed in his leathers and carrying his helmet. But at some time he must have been involved in a terrible accident. There was a livid scar running down the side of his face and part of his head had crumpled inward like a punctured football. The man had staring eyes and a huge grin that had nothing to do with humor. The scar had wasted his flesh, pulling one side of his lip back to expose a row of heavy, yellowish teeth. He was also dirty and smelled; the sour smell of old, damp earth. Nick wanted to stare at him, but he forced himself to look away. The motorcyclist plopped himself down on a seat a few places behind him. Looking out of the corner of his eye, Nick could just make out his reflection in the glass of the window.
Curiously, the smartly dressed people seemed quite happy to have the motorcyclist in their midst.
“You almost missed it!” one of them exclaimed, nodding at the bus.
“Yeah.” The other side of his mouth twitched and for a moment the smile on his face looked almost natural. “I got up late.”
Got up late? Nick wondered what he meant. It was, after all, a quarter past twelve at night.
“Seven tickets to Queensmill Road,” one of the women told the conductor. The handle cranked around four times, spit
ting out a length of white ticket.
“Queensmill Road!” the motorcyclist exclaimed. “That’s near where I had my accident.” He touched his wounded head with his finger, although to Nick, watching all this in the reflection of the window, it looked as if he actually put his finger through the wound and into his head. “I collided with a bookmobile,” he explained.
“Did you get booked for bad driving?” the man with the silk scarf asked, and the entire company roared with laughter at the joke.
The bus stopped for a second time about five minutes later.
“Palliser Road,” the conductor called out.
At least a dozen people were waiting at the stop and they had clearly all been to the same Halloween party. They were in a lively mood as they got onto the night bus, chatting among themselves and wearing a bizarre assortment of costumes. Nick couldn’t help looking over his shoulder as they took the seats all around them. There were two women dressed in eerie green robes like ghosts. There were two skeletons. A boy only a few years older than Nick himself had a knife jutting out from between his shoulders and crimson blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. An older couple had chosen, for some reason, to wear Victorian dress complete with top hat and tails for the man and a flowing ball gown for the woman. Although it wasn’t raining outside, both of them were dripping wet. The man noticed Nick staring at him. “Last time I take a vacation on the Titanic!” he exclaimed. Nick looked the other way, embarrassed.
The people from the first bus stop soon fell into conversation with the people from the second stop and the atmosphere on the bus became quite partylike itself.
“Sir Oswald! I haven’t seen you for what . . . ? Thirty years? You look terrible!”
“Barbara, isn’t it? Barbara Bennett! How is your husband? Still alive? Oh—I am sorry to hear it.”
“Yes, I took the family skiing for Christmas. We had a marvelous time except unfortunately I had a massive heart attack . . .”
“Actually, I’m popping down to Putney to see the Fergusons. Lovely couple. Both blown up in the war . . .”
This went on for the next half hour. The other passengers ignored Nick and he was grateful for it. Although he was completely surrounded by them, he felt somehow different from them. He couldn’t quite explain how. Perhaps it was the fact that they all seemed to know one another. They just somehow had more in common.
The night bus stopped three more times. At Queensmill Road, where the seven partygoers got off. At Lower Mill Hill Road. And finally at Clifford Avenue. By the time it left this third stop, the bus was completely full, with people standing in the corridor and on the platform. The last person to get on was more peculiar than any of them. He seemed to have just escaped from a fire. His clothes were charred and in tatters. Smoke was drifting up from his armpits and he could only nod his head in apology as the conductor tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the “No Smoking“ sign.
If anything, the party atmosphere had intensified. All around Nick there were people talking so loudly that he could no longer hear the engine, while the passengers on the upper deck had broken into song, a chorus of “John Brown’s body lies a-mold’ring in the grave,” which seemed to cause them great merriment. Nick tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help himself. As the bus approached the shops on the outskirts of Richmond, a huge, fat woman dressed, bizarrely, in a green surgical gown and sitting next to a small, bald man suddenly turned around and blinked at him.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded.
“I wasn’t . . .” Nick was completely tongue-tied. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m very late. And my parents are going to kill me!”
“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Well, that’s your funeral. Your funeral!” The woman roared with laughter and nudged the bald man so hard that he fell off his seat.
Laughter echoed through the night bus. There was more singing upstairs. A man in a three-piece suit muttered a quiet “Excuse me” and brushed a maggot off his knee. The woman next to him held a handkerchief to her nose while the woman behind her appeared to pull her nose off and hold it to her handkerchief.
Nick had had enough. The bus was approaching the center of the town. He recognized the shops. It slowed down for a red light and that was when he decided. He grabbed hold of Jeremy, waking him up.
“Come on!” he hissed.
“What?”
“We’re here!”
Half dragging his brother, Nick got to his feet and began to push his way to the back of the bus. The light was still red, but he knew it would change any second now. The other passengers didn’t try to stop him, but they seemed surprised that he should be trying to get off.
“You can’t leave here!” one of them exclaimed.
“We’re not there yet!”
“What are you doing?”
“Come back!”
The light turned green. The bus moved forward.
“Stop!”
“Stop him!”
The conductor, standing at the back of the platform, lunged toward Nick, and for a second he felt fingers as cold as ice clamp around his arm. “Jump!” he shouted. Jeremy jumped off the moving bus and Nick, clinging to his brother with one hand, was pulled with him. The conductor cried out and released him. And then they were both sprawling on the road while the night bus thundered on, rattling down the high street and on into the shadows beyond.
“What was all that about?” Jeremy said, pulling himself to his feet.
“I don’t know,” Nick muttered. He knelt where he was, watching as the night bus turned a corner and disappeared, a last chorus of “John Brown” hanging like some invisible creature in the air before swooping away and racing after it.
“I’ve twisted my ankle,” Jeremy groaned.
“It doesn’t matter.” Nick got up and went over to his brother. “We’re home.”
“You are the most irresponsible, disobedient, selfish children I’ve ever met! Do you realize I was two inches away from calling the police about you? Your mother and I were sick with worry. This is the last time you go to a party on your own. In fact, it’s the last time you go to any party at all! I can’t believe you could be so stupid . . .”
It was Sunday morning, breakfast, and John Hancock was still in a rage. Of course he’d been waiting for the boys when they got home, cold and exhausted, at ten to one. That night he’d rationed himself to ten minutes’ shouting, but after a good night’s sleep it seemed he was going to rage on until lunch. In his heart, Nick couldn’t blame him. His parents had been scared—that was the truth of it. Admittedly, he was seventeen and could look after himself, but Jeremy was just twelve. And there were lots of weirdos out on the streets. Everyone knew that.
Weirdos . . .
“I want you to tell me more about how you got home,” his mother said. Rosemary Hancock was a quiet, sensible woman who was used to stepping in between the father and his sons when arguments flared . . . which they often did in the small, crowded household. She managed a bookshop in Richmond and Nick noticed she had two books with her now. One was a history of London. The other was a map book. She had brought them to the table along with the croissants and coffee.
“They already told us.” John scowled.
Rosemary ignored him. “You said you took the 227B bus,” she said. “An old-fashioned bus. Did it look like this?” She showed Nick a photograph in the book. It showed a bus just like the one he had been on.
“What does it matter what the bus looked like?” John said.
“Yes. It was just like that,” Jeremy interrupted. “With the open door at the back.”
“And the conductor gave you old coins?”
“Yes.” Nick had left the coins beside his bed. In the daylight they had looked more than old. Some of them were rusty and coated in some sort of slime. Just looking at them had made him shudder, although he couldn’t say quite why.
�
��Do you remember where the bus stopped?” Rosemary asked. She closed the book. “You said it went to Clifford Avenue and Lower Mill Hill Road.”
“Yes.” Nick thought back. “It stopped in Fulham first. St. Peter’s Grove or something. And then at Palliser Road. And then—”
“Would it have been Queensmill Road?” Rosemary asked.
Nick stared at her. “Yes. How do you know?”
“What are you going on about?” John demanded. “What does it matter what the bus looked like or where it went?”
“It’s just that there is no 227B bus,” Rosemary replied. “I called London Transport this morning while you were out getting the croissants. There is a bus that goes from Trafalgar Square to Richmond, but it’s the N9.” She tapped the book. “And the bus that the boys described, the one I showed them in the photograph . . . it’s an old Routemaster. They haven’t built buses like that for thirty years and there certainly aren’t any on the road.”
“Well then, how . . . ?” John turned to look at Nick.
But Nick’s eyes were fixed on his mother. The blood was draining from his face. He could actually feel it being sucked down his neck. “But you knew the route,” he said.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on here,” Rosemary began. “Either you two boys have made the whole thing up or . . . I don’t know . . . I suppose it must have been a practical joke or something.”
“Go on,” Nick said. He reached for his orange juice and took a sip. His mouth had gone dry.
“Well, it seems that last night you two did a tour of West London’s cemeteries.” She opened the map book and pointed. “St. Mark’s Grove, just off the Fulham Road . . .”
Nick remembered the tall metal grille and the sign.
“. . . that’s Brompton Cemetery. Hammersmith Cemetery is on Palliser Road. Fulham Cemetery . . . that’s on the Fulham Palace Road, but it’s opposite Queensmill Road. Putney Cemetery is on Lower Mill Hill Road, and Clifford Avenue, where you say you saw that man who seemed to be smoldering or on fire—well, that’s Mortlake Crematorium.”
Horowitz Horror Page 7
