‘Anyway, you need to get that looked at,’ Lu said, frowning at my buckled finger. ‘Soon as we’re out of here, we’ll run you to the clinic.’
An empty platform came into view through the window, a station stop without a name.
‘We’re under the river,’ Mr October said. ‘It’s an unscheduled stop, but it’ll do for us. We have a bit of a walk to the Embankment, though. Do you think you can manage that, Mrs Harvester?’
Mum hadn’t much of a voice yet, but she nodded, and at last her eyes found me.
‘Darlin’?’ she said.
She still knew me. Nothing else mattered.
Looking at Becky with her arm around Mum, I began to see what she’d been all along – as much an empathiser as Mr October’s old man persona, the caring soul I’d first seen in Highgate. The one who took the pain away.
The journey was ending. The doors hissed open, and we spilled together onto a cold and gloomy platform. The Shuffleheads were waiting there. They’d dispensed with the guards’ heads and uniforms and their fuzzy, rapidly changing masks were restored.
‘Don’t stand too close to the doors,’ Mr October said, but Becky hung back anyway to let Mum through to me.
Mum didn’t say anything as she clung to me, but I felt her love and the warmth of her tears on my neck. I must have been crying too, because when I looked up Becky seemed to sparkle and glow. She had a kind of aura, too, one filled with shimmering lights.
‘Love you, son,’ Mum whispered.
‘Me too,’ I said awkwardly.
We stood trembling on the chilly platform, and the anger – an anger that frightened me as much as it frightened Kirk Berserker – slowly lifted, and all I felt then was relief and gratitude.
Finally Mum relaxed and let me go, and Mr October passed her a handkerchief while I looked over at Becky. ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed, and she smiled as if to say, ‘Oh, that’s OK.’
She was still smiling when the fuzzy dark shape flitted past the open doors behind her. She was standing too close, altogether too close to the train. There was no time to warn her, to call her away.
It was on her before anyone could react. In the blink of an eye the shadow took physical form, snaking one of its hands around Becky’s mouth and hauling her back inside the train.
The doors slid shut at once. The engine boomed and revved. Becky’s hands pressed the glass as she stared out with stunned, confused eyes, and behind her was another face – a different, altered face from the last one I’d seen, but I knew without a thought whose it was.
The suddenness of what had happened threw everyone into shock. Before Mr October could call the order – ‘Stop this thing! It mustn’t leave!’ – the train was moving, gathering speed along the platform.
I sprinted alongside it, screaming, hammering the windows and doors where Becky was trapped. Her breath misted the glass between us. Luther Vileheart’s leer at her shoulder, a victorious grin, wasn’t even the worst thing about what I saw then. The worst thing was the look on Becky’s face in the instant before the train carried her into the tunnel, a look I’d never forget. It wasn’t even a look of terror, but one of resignation that seemed to say, ‘Sorry. Ben, I’m so sorry. My fault.’
Then the darkness took her. The train hurtled on. There was a tremendous crash further back on the platform when Kirk Berserker ripped away a pair of sliding doors with his bare hands. But the train was travelling too fast and furiously even for him. Thrown off balance, he keeled over and fell back on the concrete with the two severed doors skidding away either side of him.
The train’s lights shrank into the tunnel, and all that remained was its throbbing sound. Seconds later that faded too, leaving only a memory of the train and its echo, and after that only silence.
I looked frantically up the platform. Every face was pale with shock. I started back towards the others, numb to the bone and empty inside, as if a large part of me had been torn out and taken with the train.
‘Please,’ I said to Mr October. ‘Tell me . . . what do we do now?’
And for once Mr October, who knew everything, had no answer. Instead, he threw back his head and emptied his lungs with a grief-stricken cry.
More than a few times I’d heard the enemy mourning its losses, sending out heartbroken wails like cats in the night, but I’d never heard a sound as chilling or terrible as the one Mr October was making now.
26
A DISPATCH FROM THE MINISTRY
ays later I can still hear Mr October’s cry inside the wind at Pandemonium House. I’m back at the desk in receipts, bringing my account up to date on the old Olivetti typewriter, and the candlelight shivers and the wind fills with mournful voices.
The place is in a state of shock. The Ministry is missing one of its own and I’m missing my friend. The apologetic look on Becky’s face just before the train took her – I can’t get it out of my head. I see it all the time, whether I’m wide awake or dreaming, and I see it again now as I sit typing.
That night, as we were leaving the platform under the river to begin the long walk to the Embankment, Kirk Berserker took me aside, resting a heavy hand on my shoulder.
‘Never give up, kid,’ he said. ‘Never stop hoping. Hope’s one thing that can bring her back, and believe you me the Ministry will not rest until she’s safe. Others have been where she’s going, some have even returned. I was there once, and look at me – I made it back.’
If that was supposed to make me feel better it didn’t really help, partly because of the haunted look that came into his eyes when he spoke of it. He’d been to the dark territories and seen things I couldn’t even imagine.
Later at HQ, while I was in the clinic, Mr October spent an hour with Mum in a private room on the same floor. They were joined by Tabitha, also known as Polly, the woman in the houndstooth coat whose real name wasn’t Polly or Tabitha.
Mum didn’t look any different after their meeting, but she’d forgotten all she’d seen. I quizzed her about it on the way home – we took a taxi while Lu ran Mr October to a 3618 in Waterloo – and she recalled very little after her last days in the Canaries. She’d never heard again from Tom Sutherland, she said. A typical holiday romance, she said.
And the first thing she said when we got home was, ‘Darlin’, where’s Dad’s picture?’ Surprised to find it hidden in a drawer full of bills and receipts, she kissed the photo and returned it to its rightful place on the shelf.
At the weekend we wrapped up in warm clothing and took a flask of coffee to Dad’s bench in London Fields. I opened my sketch pad and drew Mum in profile while we spoke of better days, the memories we had of Dad when we were all together as a family. After half an hour a spiky rain began falling and as we left Mum smiled sadly and said, ‘You know, I’ll never love anyone else like I loved him.’
Her health could be better. She’s back to square one – snakes and ladders – where she’d been before her holiday. The clinics continue, the nurses give her encouraging reports, but I still worry, not just because of her illness but because the enemy haven’t finished with us yet.
The Ministry’s twenty-four-hour watch on Middleton Road continues. The Shuffleheads are never far away.
At school the lockdown has been lifted, the notices torn down. Simon Decker is finally settling in, and while we never have much to say he doesn’t blame me for anything, probably because like the rest of 8C he remembers nothing. Raymond Blight will never change – one more smart remark and I swear I’ll swing for him – but Becky’s old gang keep asking after her, genuinely concerned. They don’t hold our friendship against me now, they just want to know, but all I can do is shrug and say I haven’t heard from her lately.
Meanwhile the Sanbornes’ house is under reconstruction. The insurers came through after all and Parkholme Road was crawling with hard hats the last time I saw it. But the place will feel so empty if Becky’s folks move back there without her. I’ve tried to work up the courage to meet them, to explain what happen
ed, but I wouldn’t know where to start. It seems unfair not to tell them anything, but I wonder if it’s better to know nothing than to know a truth like this one.
The other night, after attending an 8847 on Tottenham Court Road, I stopped outside a TV showroom window. Every TV in the bright display was tuned to the same news channel with the same scrolling red ticker tape. The newsreader looked solemn and heavy-eyed, and the image cut suddenly to a black-and-white still of Becky – Becky looking aloof, lips pursed, the soft lights in her eyes shaped like four-leaf clovers.
Not the most flattering picture of her but probably the most recent, I’m seeing it everywhere lately, on news-stands and ‘Missing’ posters all over town. On the poster are the words Have you seen me? and when I took a closer look at one outside the park I realised the head and shoulders image – the one her folks must have given the police and the media – was the portrait I’d done of Becky in Mr Redfern’s class before we were friends.
Break times at the crypt tea rooms aren’t the same without her. I sit at our table in an alcove near the steps leading up to the exit, stirring my coffee and watching the money bubbles, then I look up quickly in the hope she’ll be there. But she never is.
In school I sometimes hang about on the corridor near the cold spot. There’s no sign of the ghost Becky saw there that time, and no matter how hard I listen I never hear anything of the soul train. It may run again a week from now or it may not run for another generation. There’s no intel at headquarters to suggest when the next one will be. All I know is that one day or night, sooner or later, it will run again.
‘Don’t even think of it,’ Sukie said yesterday, simultaneously reading my mind and typing another batch of cards. ‘Even if you could, people don’t come back from there. OK, maybe one or two have been known to, but in general they just don’t.’
‘Kirk Berserker did.’
‘Yeah, but he’s Kirk Berserker. You’re not. He’s crazy and you’re not. And you’d have to be crazy to even try.’
Still, the idea is never far from my mind.
The small tin box containing the four-leaf clover chain sits on the desk by the typewriter. It’s a kind of talisman. I’m keeping it close this week. The lid is open and inside the box the clover chain remains healthy, which Mr October says is a sign of my own health too. As long as it lives there’s still hope and faith and love and luck, all the things Luther Vileheart came to steal away.
Earlier, Kate Stone stopped in at receipts to say how bad she felt after hearing about Becky. If there was anything she could do, she said, I only had to ask, and I thanked her and apologised for the way I’d behaved that time in the clinic. It was the first chance I’d had to say sorry.
She smiled and said no problem. We’d all been under so much pressure it was no surprise mistakes had been made. Then she spotted the clover chain, her eyes widening when she saw it for what it was, and I explained what it meant as Becky had once explained it to me.
‘Wherever she is now, she’s fine,’ Kate said. ‘No idea how I know, I just do. And anyway, she isn’t on the list.’
But that’s the thing. There are always more lists. Soon there’ll be another, and another after that. If we knew what they were about to bring it wouldn’t be so bad, but no one ever knows what’s incoming.
Tonight there’s a strange calm about Pandemonium House. The wind warbles on, and on the floor outside receipts there’s barely a murmur, just a faint motorised hum: Mr October in old man form getting the hang of the mobility scooter he detests. It thumps lightly against a wall, then moves along, its drone fading down the hallway.
Meanwhile the telegraph machine is silent. It’s never silent for long, and it’s never possible to sit here with an easy mind – there’s never any real peace even when it’s quiet – but this is the job.
The job is waiting and watching. It’s knowing that somewhere out there new names and numbers are floating through space and eventually they’ll find their way to this room. When they do, the telegraph will creak and groan into action again, and then all you can do is hope the names it gives out won’t belong to anyone you know.
The war goes on, and I’m still waiting.
Chris Westwood was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the son of a coal miner and a school teacher. His first published writing was for the London music paper Record Mirror, where he worked as a staff reporter for three years. His first children’s book, A Light In The Black, was a runner-up for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. His second, Calling All Monsters, was optioned for film three times by Steven Spielberg. After a break from writing, spending seven years caring full-time for his father, Chris returned with Ministry of Pandemonium, the first in a series of novels set in a secret, alternative London. He now lives part of the time in East London, and the rest of the time in a world of his own.
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