The Great and Dangerous

by Chris Westwood

  ‘No, something else. One of them.’ She sniffed and wiped her moistening eyes. ‘And it spoke to me, I heard its voice – it was as close to me as you are. It sounded like someone gargling marbles, if that makes any sense, but I couldn’t understand a word. It reminded me of those lyrics, you know, the songs they play in the waiting room.’

  ‘Ancientspeak.’

  ‘Yeah. Not the same but similar, like in the wind at Abney Park. Then it used a language I did know. It spoke my name. And it spoke yours.’

  I dry-swallowed and reached for my drink. ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Hold on, I’m telling you. It was more like a thought in my head than a real voice, because I heard it clearly even with everything crashing around me and stuff flying everywhere. It said, “We come from the place of two suns to settle a score. Abhorra is in mourning because of your actions, and you will repay the Lords of Sundown in kind.” Something like that. And then it went on, “The outer dark will become your inner dark. Gateways will open, and you will know the meaning of loss when bedlam brings down your house.”’

  Becky looked at me squarely, picked up a chip and nibbled it.

  ‘Then it let go,’ she said. ‘And I fell like a sack of spuds. Gashed my knees and all the air went out of me, but when I looked up it was leaving, it was over. And somewhere in the house Mum was screaming.’

  ‘Synister,’ I said, gazing out at the market stalls. I’d heard that gargling voice too not long ago.

  ‘Huh?’ Becky said.

  ‘Nathan Synister, the scarecrow, second in command to Lord Randall Cadaverus. He attacked me that day by the canal, remember?’ My fingers absently brushed the scar on my cheek, a pattern of symbols Synister’s claw had etched across the skin. It was a scar only the gifted could see, invisible to others, and its message declared war on the enemy’s enemy, which meant anyone who dared side against the Lords of Sundown, which meant us.

  ‘Yeah, I remember,’ Becky said.

  ‘Sounds a lot like him.’ I said. ‘Nobody talks like that. I mean, “When bedlam brings down your house.” Mr October calls him pompous.’

  ‘Scared the life out of me, all the same.’

  ‘And he means every word. Those aren’t empty threats. I’ve been expecting him.’

  Becky looked away, suddenly pensive. ‘There’s another thing, Ben, something else that thing said. Something I left out from what I just told you. I’m not sure I should tell it, though.’

  ‘Well, now you’ve said that, you have to tell it.’

  ‘But it’s hard.’ She was toying with her food, prodding it with her fork but not eating. ‘Promise if I tell you, you won’t go off on one.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘I knew you’d say that.’

  ‘Look, what’s this about?’

  ‘It’s about your dad.’

  A nervous knot tightened in my gut. ‘Oh?’

  ‘And about the East Coast rail crash.’ She shifted uneasily on her seat. ‘Brace yourself, Ben. According to the voice I heard, the crash that killed your father wasn’t an accident.’

  The beginnings of a migraine lunged at me as Becky continued. She didn’t have to explain, though. The rest was only detail. Whichever way you looked at it, the outcome was the same.

  Dad hadn’t just died four years ago. It was worse than that.

  While he sat in coach C of the 11:30 a.m. Edinburgh to King’s Cross train, watching the country rush by on his way home to Mum and me, Nathan Synister’s agents were on a sabotage mission. If the line-side signalling hadn’t been sabotaged, if the minds of both drivers hadn’t been occupied by the enemy, causing them to ignore repeated warnings to stop, the disaster might have been averted.

  I pictured Dad in the window seat, turning over in his mind all that he’d say, the apologies he’d make, how the scene would play out from start to finish when we opened the door at the house in Swanley to find him standing there. They never gave him that chance.

  Seconds later the two speeding trains were welded together by a white-hot ball of flame, a funeral pyre visible for miles, while Synister’s minions went cherry-picking souls from the burning wreckage. But somehow in the chaos Dad’s soul had escaped.

  Everything hurt. The diner’s electric lights seemed to dim. A ball of pressure was growing inside me, radiating outwards. I wasn’t aware of the plates and cutlery rattling on the table between us or the crack snaking up the wall by Becky’s shoulder. For the next few seconds I didn’t know she was there. I was seeing red, only one thought in my mind.

  They murdered him. They murdered them all that day.

  ‘Ben!’

  Becky’s cry brought me back. She came swimming into focus, along with the rest of the diner and the owner and waitress staring anxiously across from the counter. There was a thin trickle of red below Becky’s left nostril, a nosebleed. Feeling it at her upper lip, she took up a napkin and dabbed away at it, studying me with an expression somewhere between pity and fear.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Did I do that? I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘I’m sorry too, Ben. I shouldn’t have told you.’

  ‘But if that’s how it was, I had to know.’

  ‘Suppose so,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t always control it, but you need to learn. You have to turn your hurt against them, not against the ones who care about you. Sometimes you worry me.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I didn’t have this gift. I wish I could wish it away.’

  ‘But you can’t. It’s part of you.’ The bleeding had stopped and she folded the napkin, hiding the red splotches. ‘For a second I thought the tornado was coming again. Everything was shaking. Didn’t you feel it?’

  I didn’t. A blank spot. A missing puzzle piece.

  Becky pushed her plate away. ‘Don’t think I can eat this now. Shall we just pay and go?’

  ‘Yeah, let’s.’

  This news had killed my appetite too. While we fumbled for change at the counter Becky shot me a look. I knew that look well and I knew what she was about to say even before she spoke.

  ‘Now we have to tell Mr October.’

  8

  ROGUE’S GALLERY

  ecky gave her account in the personnel office, a dingy grey room with filing cabinets along one wall and a steel table at which we sat with Mr October. Three plain Manila folders from the cabinets were spread out on the table before us.

  Mr October listened closely while Becky talked, his features skipping between three personalities, one shocked, one sympathetic, one wise and all-knowing. His face steadied and below the black hat’s brim his frown lines resembled a capital Y.

  ‘These are trying times,’ he said, ‘but I have to admit I’m not surprised. At least your family is safe, Becky, and you know your father escaped from them, Ben, which is some small consolation. But this is another kettle of worms entirely.’

  Mr October drew the files towards himself but didn’t open them yet.

  ‘You’ve seen and heard the enemy screaming and yelling,’ he said, ‘doing the blood and thunder thing – you’ve witnessed them doing their worst. What you haven’t seen is the enemy doing its best. Believe me, they can be very crafty, very persuasive.’

  ‘You mean how they feed thoughts into people’s minds,’ I said, ‘like the girl at the tube station yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, exactly like that.’

  ‘Well, if that method works so well, why would they do it any other way?’ Becky said.

  Mr October said, ‘As long as they’re yelling and smashing things in front of you, you won’t hear them sneaking up from behind. The real damage is done in small ways while you’re preoccupied with the bigger events.’

  ‘Like the Whisperer,’ Becky said. Seeing Mr October’s vacant look she added, ‘A new boy in our class. He’s kind of suspicious.’

  ‘Hmm. I haven’t heard about him. So they’re infiltrating the schools now, are they? Keep me posted.’ He turned to the files. ‘In light of this new inf
ormation and the intel reports we’re receiving, it’s time you both saw this.’

  He opened the first folder, fanning its mess of papers across the table. Among the piles of memos, notes and report sheets were photos and artists’ impressions of a variety of faces.

  ‘Ethan Hill,’ Mr October said. ‘A mole inside the Ministry until ten years ago. Leaked vital information which led to the deaths of Lu’s entire family in a 66231 at a level crossing, and an accomplice of another low life – we’ll get to him presently. Lu wears her sadness well and rarely speaks of it, but her pain runs deep. Because of Hill’s actions we were unable to save her family. They’re still lost in the great In-Between.’

  Some of the mug shots showed a weasel-faced man with spectacles, others a monstrous white-eyed demon with a screaming mouth of jagged teeth. Still others pictured a withered gaunt man with Rasputin beard and hair.

  ‘So many faces,’ Becky marvelled. ‘And all of them his?’

  Mr October returned the documents to their folder. ‘Yes, and no doubt there are others not on record. Next. . .’

  He opened the second file. More of the same, except that here the majority of the faces were almost human, and were all the more disturbing for that. In one, the long-faced subject’s eyes, their pupils vertically slitted like a cat’s, radiated pure dark malice. This, I thought with a shudder, was the real face of the enemy.

  ‘Meet Luther Vileheart,’ Mr October said. ‘Like Ethan Hill, a former Ministry employee. He deserted us even more recently, four years ago. His activities weren’t uncovered until the damage was done, and Becky’s story confirms what we’ve long suspected.’ He laid a hand on my forearm, briefly becoming the kindly grey-eyed old man, the empathiser. ‘Ben, we believe Luther Vileheart supervised the fatal accident which took your father. Yes, he was acting on orders, but only after stealing the list of crash victims from these premises and trading them for a place in the enemy ranks. In return for those names they gave him a position of great power and standing.’

  Mr October paused, allowing me to swallow this bombshell. Then he said, ‘You should know this because what we’d feared and expected is happening now. The war is becoming more personal.’

  ‘It’s already personal for me,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t let it be. Try not to let it be. With grief comes anger, which is only natural and normal and no bad thing, but you mustn’t let the anger control you. If you do, the enemy will consider it a weakness and try to exploit it.’

  I glared at Vileheart’s faces until Mr October hastily covered them and put them away.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Becky watched me worriedly but not with the fear she’d shown earlier. Her nosebleed hadn’t started again.

  ‘I will be. I’m still taking it in.’

  Mr October said, ‘You must remember that nothing you do can bring him back. Your mother is your priority now.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Good, then let’s move on. Last file. There are many more where these came from but these are our three Most Wanted, and here’s our number one,’ he said, opening the third folder. ‘A nasty little specimen. We go further back in time with him – he fled from the Ministry in the late 1960s, and like the other two he’s still at large. This is Professor Adolphus Rictus.’

  Now we were looking at a feral being with a clenched ratty face, beady dark eyes and a chilling grin that stretched from ear to ear. In some of his file photos, in demon form, he looked oddly similar but with shiny reptilian skin and the creepy grin widening further.

  ‘A slippery little oik,’ Mr October said. ‘Rarely seen but always present. Worked undercover for the enemy here, and for six decades went undetected. He was on our medical team. There were times when the books became unbalanced and the numbers of departeds didn’t match the names on our lists, and no one knew why. After Rictus defected, the numbers came back into alignment. We discovered he’d been fashioning a surgical method, right here under our noses using our own facilities, to extract living souls and transport them to the dark territories known as Abhorra. He’s since shared this dangerous medical knowledge with others – the Mawbreed, for example, although their ways are even cruder than his. Some of our own employees were among his many victims.’

  With a sigh Mr October put away this last pile of paperwork. ‘Read the dossiers in your own time, learn how these scoundrels work – familiarise yourselves with their ways and disguises.’ Finally he turned to me. ‘And just because they’re making this a personal issue doesn’t mean we will. We can’t allow anything to undermine our good work.’

  I nodded but didn’t reply.

  ‘You’re gifted with considerable powers, young man, powers you’re still coming to terms with. They’re not to be used for revenge – the Ministry doesn’t condone it. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But it wouldn’t be easy, knowing what I knew now about the order Nathan Synister had given and Luther Vileheart had carried out. It wouldn’t be easy at all.

  Mr October was watching my hands, which were drawn into pale-knuckled fists on the table. Slowly I unclenched them and sat back and breathed out.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, looking up at a knock on the door. The door opened a crack and Sukie peered cautiously in.

  ‘Sorry to disturb,’ she said, ‘but the telegraph’s going crazy, right off the map. Whatever’s going on, I think we’ll need extra hands.’

  ‘We’ll be right along,’ Mr October said. Leaving the three Most Wanted files on the table, he stood to follow Sukie out.

  The day hadn’t begun well, what with the cone-head tornado all but flattening Becky’s house and then the revelation about Dad’s fatal crash. You wouldn’t have imagined things could get worse, but it was all downhill from there.

  As we entered receipts the telegraph greeted us with a terrific smack-bang. Sparks and spurts of blue flame leapt around its metal housing, which had gained several new scorch marks. The printed list it was delivering curled all the way to the floor. We kept our distance, expecting another blast, but the machine let out a mournful whale groan and stopped.

  ‘Needs oiling,’ Mr October said. ‘Ben, when you have a free moment, check the User’s Quick-Start Guide and get that sorted.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Collecting the printout, he unrolled it in front of him like a scroll, and his face clouded over as he skip-read the details. The ever-present wailing wind rose and fell and the candle flame that lit the office began to twitch wildly.

  ‘Oh no,’ Mr October sighed. ‘Oh dear.’

  While Sukie prepared the cards, rolling the first into the typewriter, he turned the list around for us to see.

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  ‘What’s it mean?’ Becky said.

  ‘Why?’ said Mr October.

  The first few printed blocks on the list were strictly routine, not particularly eye-catching. A natural causes, non-specific, in Forest Hill. Another 3624 on the Northern line at Clapham South. A second natural causes across the common on Lavender Hill.

  What followed was highly irregular – more than twenty names and reference numbers crammed together in tightly spaced blocks, a large number to arrive all at once even during peak hours. While the telegraph told us three things about most cases – who and how and where – there were other things it couldn’t tell. It couldn’t predict exactly when a soon-departed’s time would come, how many minutes or hours they had to spare, and it couldn’t answer Mr October’s question.

  Why?

  It was a question I had to ask too as I scanned the list again. It wasn’t just the length of the list that left me speechless, but the connection between the soon-departeds it named. All of them – every one – were at the same address.

  9

  BAD SATURDAY

  he wind wailed on. The candlelight sent eerie patterns scurrying around our faces. The question still hung in the air.

  Why?

  Why were so many called at once?

&nb
sp; Why would anyone want this?

  Every number at that address was a 4914667, a bad number in anyone’s book. The telegraph never lied, and if it spat out a 4914667 then that’s what we had to face.

  About the time we were standing in receipts, digesting the new list, a man in his early twenties was stepping off an overland train in Stratford, cutting a path through the crowds between the station and the shopping centre and heading for quieter streets.

  The lone figure moved with a long, loping stride, head down, a purposeful look on his well-groomed face. He may have slowed a moment to take in the big sky, the tall buildings and towering cranes. A fine morning, he may have thought, blue and bright, not a typical grey November morning at all.

  The sky over Stratford was marked by aircraft trails and a passing cloud threw a shadow across the man’s face. Hitching up his weighty backpack, he continued on, crossing a car park to the entrance of a four-storey apartment block where he touched a key fob to the security panel by the door.

  Inside the lobby, baskets of flowers hung at the windows and yucca plants stood tall in corners. To the left were two steel lift doors polished to a shine, and at the far end a door led to the stairwell. The man called the first lift and studied his reflection in the door while he waited.

  Far across the city, Big Ben was about to strike one.

  In the receipts room, the telegraph machine had just finished pushing out its long curling list. In the same moment Mr October collected it from the floor and straightened up to read it, the apartment building in Stratford exploded.

  ‘Why?’ Mr October repeated, but no one spoke. The enormity of it had stolen our voices, and no one spoke at all until we were on the road with Lu tearing the Mustang through a sequence of red lights on Hackney Road.

  ‘Oh my. . .’ Mr October groaned. ‘How long before the rickshaw comes back from service, Lu?’

  ‘Two days or so. Maybe three.’

  ‘Ah, that’s good.’

  ‘You don’t like my driving?’ she said, nearly rear-ending the 48 bus she was overtaking.

  ‘It’s improving,’ he said generously. ‘But do try not to draw attention.’