by Robin Jarvis
The two men stared, open-mouthed, and waited for the echoes, that were bouncing through every room and vibrating the broken glass in the window frames, to ebb away.
Then Jezza’s sweating, ghostly-white face appeared over the banister above and he laughed softly.
“Dear God!” Howie gasped, pointing at the great shape that had crunched into the wood of the half-panelled wall. “What the hell is that?”
Chapter 6
And when the Dawn Prince was in exile, he sent neither message nor sign back to his Kingdom. So, whilst the Ismus and his subjects waited, they filled their days with merrymaking and happy pleasures. But every party has to end when the revellers grow weary, yet still the throne remained empty and no word came to Mooncaster… O how they longed for tidings.
“I’VE HAD MY identity stolen!” Carol yelled at Martin Baxter as soon as he opened the front door.
“Who are you now then?” he asked.
“Some scumbag has been using my credit card details to get flights to Barcelona, a huge flat-screen TV, a tumble dryer and God knows what else in Comet – and a massive shopping spree in Homebase. The best part of four grand they’ve rinsed me for!”
“Hello to you too,” he greeted her.
“I’m furious!” she seethed, brandishing a statement she’d printed out from her online banking.
“And I’m Martin. Shall I go out and come in again?”
The woman glared at him for a moment, then wilted and managed a smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m covered anyway, so I’ve not really lost that money. It’s so bloody annoying though. I was on the phone for over an hour trying to sort it out. Can you believe these people? How dare they?”
“There’s a lot of scum in the world,” he said. “It’s mad, isn’t it? You’ve got to shred every trace of who you are on every letter, bill and envelope before you throw them away, otherwise they’ll have you. Destroying yourself before someone else does. You wouldn’t believe my day, by the way. Where’s Paul?”
She pointed upstairs.
“Daft question really,” Martin said.
Carol went over to him and welcomed him home properly, with a hug and a kiss. “I’ve already heard a bit about your day,” she said. “Got a call from my mum who’d heard all from some neighbour or other. Sounded bad.”
“It was! Good job you picked Paul up today to take him to Gerald’s. It was mental.”
“I was just going to get changed. My shift starts at nine. We left you some lasagne. I’ll nuke it for you.”
“Thanks – I am starved.”
He took his jacket off and hung it in the narrow hallway before following her into the kitchen. Carol Thornbury was a pretty woman, seven years his junior, with dark brown hair and a feisty personality. If there was one word to describe her, it would be ‘capable’. But then, as a nurse, she’d have to be. Whatever life threw at her, she dealt with it in her usual efficient manner. She might have a bit of a rant to begin with, but she quickly applied her common sense to whatever the problem might be, without any unnecessary fuss or drama. When her husband had walked out on both her and their five-year-old son, she had been as organised at sorting out that mess as with everything else in her life. She had managed perfectly well without a man for several years until her path crossed Martin’s. Sometimes he felt that she had even organised getting the two of them together. If she had, he was thankful.
“You got a parcel today,” she said, waiting for the microwave to ping. “I think I see more of that postman than I do you. Wouldn’t mind if he was remotely dishy, but he looks like Fungus the Bogeyman’s uglier brother.”
Martin’s face lit up and he hurried into the lounge where a medium-sized parcel stood on the coffee table.
“Bless you, eBay!” he cried, snatching the package and dashing upstairs with it.
“What about the lasagne?” Carol called.
“In a bit!” he answered. “First things first.”
Carol rolled her eyes. “We’re going to need an extension at this rate,” she told herself.
It was a three-bedroom semi, but only two of those were ever slept in. Whenever guests came to stay, they were compelled to sleep on the sofa downstairs. The third bedroom was Martin’s own private sanctuary. Somewhere he could escape the grinding rigours of teaching at a modern High School and the Emma Taylors of this world. A place filled with things that his pupils would hang him out to dry for if they ever found out about them.
“Paul!” he shouted, knocking on the box-room door as he passed by. “It’s here!”
The maths teacher took a shallow breath before entering his own ‘inner sanctum’. Then strode inside.
The few visitors who were ever privileged to be ushered in here were always lost for words. There was too much to see, too much to take in straight away to be able to formulate any coherent sentence, so they always made the same sort of exclamations.
“Oh, wow!”
“Amazing!”
“Blimey!”
Only Carol’s mother had ever been practically minded enough to come out with, “How do you dust it all?”
Martin Baxter, the cynical, down-to-earth maths teacher who took no nonsense from any of his students, was a monumental, dyed-in-the-wool, sci-fi and fantasy geek – with a capital G.
His special room was crammed from floor to ceiling with all manner of merchandise: DVDs, costumes, props, limited-edition prints, toys, action figures, models, replicas, books, comics, magazines and framed photographs of himself meeting the stars of his favourite films and television shows. There were busts of just about every character in the Lord of the Rings movies and daleks of every dimension, from the tiny ‘Rolykins’ version up to life-size (a particularly extravagant, pre-Carol present to himself). Spaceships from diverse universes flew in formation from the ceiling – followed incongruously by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There were Star Fleet uniforms, complete with a selection of various comm badges and tricorders, and even a genuine phaser from the first season of the Next Generation (another expensive present to himself in his bachelor days).
A preposterously long, multicoloured scarf festooned a hatstand, an Alien egg with the face-hugger just crawling out of it, a bottle of Tru:Blood, a prop business card used in the 1957 movie Night of the Demon by the black magician Julian Karswell – with the silver warning written on it – the Clangers, together with the Soup Dragon, Iron Chicken and froglets, a lamp housed within the golden head of C-3PO, several magic wands in display cases, a chunk of Kryptonite that glowed in the dark, a top-of-the-range lightsaber which made movie-accurate sound effects and many more objects which had taken Martin years to accumulate. One of his most prized acquisitions, however, was also one of the smallest – an actual authentic Liberator teleport bracelet from Blake’s Seven. Now that had been expensive!
Even with his mathematical skill, Martin had given up trying to calculate how much it had all cost him, but he knew it was far, far more than the sum Carol’s identity thieves had stolen from her account.
He set the parcel on his crowded desk and began tearing off the packaging. A young face appeared around the door behind him.
“Let’s see!” Paul cried.
Paul Thornbury was eleven. He had curly, fair hair and was small and slight for his age. He shared Martin’s love of fantasy though and the two of them could spend hours together glued to a DVD or poring over comics or discussing the latest monster in Martin’s all-time favourite show. Was it as good as the Zygons, or was it as dismal as the Myrka? During such conversations they spoke in a language that Carol, quite frankly, didn’t understand. She had no use for science fiction and fantasy. She preferred real life, but was more than delighted to leave them to it, while she sat in front of Casualty or House with a glass of white wine. Martin could never understand why she watched those programmes. Didn’t she have enough of that at work? Carol would always nod, but added that she enjoyed laughing at the mistakes.
Paul stood beside Martin and watched him
pull the bubble wrap and newspaper out of the adapted cardboard box. He had found this for Martin. He had entered it as a special search in eBay and had been checking it for the past seven months, without success. Then, a few weeks ago, one had come up and now here it was.
Martin tore the last piece of packing from it and turned the glass object in his hands so that it caught the light. It was a fresnel lens. Quite hard to come by nowadays, but essential if Martin was going to build the full-size Police Box he had always wanted. It would be nothing without the lamp on top.
“Mum’ll go spare,” Paul chuckled.
This was their big conspiracy. They had been keeping it a secret from her for ages, ever since they discovered a website giving instructions on how to build one. When they had moved in, Carol had consigned all of Martin’s ‘toys’ to the one room and not even the mugs or fridge magnets were allowed in the rest of the house. If so much as an X-Files coaster appeared anywhere, it was swiftly returned to the inner sanctum with a Post-it note attached, on which she’d drawn an exclamation mark.
“We’ll just have to outvote her,” Martin said. “How good will one of these be in the garden?”
“Most excellent!” Paul agreed.
Martin rubbed his hands together gleefully then hid the lens inside an accommodating R2-D2.
“She’ll come round,” he said hopefully. “We’ll get it started one weekend when she’s working and she won’t be able to stop us.”
“What happened after school?” Paul asked. “I heard Mum talking on the phone.”
“Good job you had your piano lesson and weren’t there,” Martin told him. “Two very nasty fights. The Head is furious.”
“Wish I’d seen it,” the boy said, disappointed. Then he added, “She put too much salt in the lasagne again.”
Martin returned downstairs and discovered that for himself. Back in his own room, Paul surveyed the beginnings of his own crazy collection. His shelves were already full of fantasy figures and graphic novels. He was glad his mum had found and teamed up with Martin.
An email alert sounded from his computer and Paul hardly heard Carol shouting goodnight to him as she left for work. It was going to be a very busy, traumatic night in the hospital.
Paul frowned at the email. He didn’t recognise the sender. It was just a number, 7734, but it didn’t appear to be an advert for Viagra or a phoney bank scam and there weren’t any dodgy attachments.
“Tonight at Nine!” read the title.
He opened it.
Flash mob at the Landguard – tonight at nine. It’ll be a blast! Great sounds! Mystery A-list celeb! Bring your mates! Bring a bottle – or ten! Be a part of this awesome happening. It’s gonna be on the news. We’re going for a record!!!!!!!!!
“Weird,” Paul said. He had no idea who would send him anything like that. It wasn’t any of his Facebook friends. Not even Anthony Maskel or Graeme Parker, his closest friends at school, would have sent him something like that. Usually they sent him links to daft things they’d found on YouTube.
He thought about the Landguard for a moment. It was the huge old fortress down on the peninsula, dating back hundreds of years. It always struck him as strange that such a historic building should be slap bang next to the modern, industrial container port.
Paul rushed downstairs to tell Martin. The man laughed. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in something like a flash mob and had looked forward to a quiet night of escapism in front of a DVD.
“But it’ll be huge!” Paul said. “Cameras and famous people. The email said so!”
Martin sighed. “You know,” he said. “The Internet is fantastic for stuff like eBay, but I think I preferred the world when it was simpler. When I was your age, the most new-fangled piece of kit we had was a pocket calculator and…”
“This isn’t the breast thing, is it?”
“Have I said this before?”
“You and your friends,” the boy recited wearily, “used to key in the number 5318008, then turn the calculator upside down and snigger.”
Martin chuckled. “Happy days,” he said.
“Ummm… whatever,” Paul muttered with a baffled grimace. He liked Martin, but sometimes he really did say some daft things for a forty-three-year-old maths teacher.
“Oh, go get your coat on,” the man told him. “I can watch the universe being saved again tomorrow night.”
Paul was already in the hallway zipping up his fleece.
“There’ll be no one else there, you know,” Martin said. “We’ll be stood there like two trainspotters without a station.”
In Felixstowe that evening, every young person under the age of twenty received that very same email. Afterwards, when the tragedy was being investigated, nobody could ever trace where it had originated.
The first part of the harrowing diversion was being created.
Chapter 7
Where are the Exiled Prince’s sheep so rare, their fleeces of finest gold? Dead and dying from lack of care and frozen by the cold. Shun the Bad Shepherd, drive him from your sight. Where was he when the lambs did stumble and bleated in their plight?
EMMA TAYLOR THREW her hair straighteners across her bedroom and yelled an angry stream of filth. She had only finished half of her hair when they had sparked and smoke started to pour out of them.
“What do I look like?” she screamed at her reflection. “Britney Spears in meltdown mode!”
Stuffing her unfinished hair under a baseball cap, she stormed out of the house, without a word to her parents, and strode furiously down the street towards Ashleigh’s.
Taking out her mobile, she punched up her friend’s number aggressively and waited for her to pick up.
“What you gawking at?” she snapped at a group of teenage lads on bicycles, giving them the finger as she clomped by.
In her ear Ashleigh’s tinny voice answered. She was squealing with excitement.
“Ohhhh, myyyy God!” she cried. “You will not believe the email I just had!”
“I need to use your straighteners!” Emma demanded, ignoring her. “Life or death emergency. My crappy ones have exploded – thank you so much, Dad, you cheapskate. Nearly burned my eyebrows off! Seriously though – I was well terrified, no word of a lie.”
“Shut up and listen!” Ashleigh retorted and she read her the email about the flash mob.
Several minutes later Emma was sitting on her friend’s bed, frantically finishing off the other side of her hair while Ashleigh was trying to decide what jacket to wear. They had called Keeley, and discovered that she too had received the same email and arranged to meet her in fifteen minutes so they could go together.
“I bet the sly tart wasn’t going to tell us,” Emma said. “Bet she was going to go on her own.”
“She’d push anyone out of the way to get what she wants,” Ashleigh agreed, rifling through the wardrobe and pulling out possibles.
Emma grunted and peered around the room, making faces at what she considered to be minging tat.
“I love your room,” she lied.
“Can you believe it?” her friend blurted. “Something finally happening in this dead town! What if the celeb is a rock star or a footballer or someone off telly or films? What if we get papped? This could be the best night of my life! The start of something really big! Fame, Emma – proper fame!”
Emma looked at her own clothes. She hadn’t dressed for something so potentially glitzy. All she had anticipated was a typical Friday night hanging round on the beach outside a bar, cadging Breezers off the lads. She watched as Ashleigh selected her best leather jacket, a cheap copy of something Beyonce had worn once, and then started to apply her Saturday-Night-in-Ipswich face so she could pass for seventeen or eighteen.
“I’m not going in this,” Emma declared decisively. “I’m not gonna be the ugly one next to you and Keeley in your glad rags and prozzy paint that make you look better than you are. I’m going back home and changing.”
“You look fine!” A
shleigh commented, hardly looking.
“I don’t want to look ‘fine’!” Emma screeched back at her. “‘Fine’ isn’t going to get me in Hello, or a snog off a millionaire footballer so I can sell my story to the News of the bleedin’ World, is it?”
“You don’t have time to change. We’ve got to go if we’re gonna be there on time.”
“Then we’ll have to be late! I am NOT going like this! I haven’t even got my clubbing bra on!”
Ashleigh pouted her freshly glossed lips in the mirror. “I’m not waiting,” she said flatly. “There’s no way I’m missing a minute of this and Keeley won’t neither. These celebs don’t hang about. They do their appearance then jump back in their limos – it says so on Popbitch.”
“Fine!” Emma shrieked, flinging the word back at her. “Some mate you are! You go with Keeley and I’ll get a lift of my own. Selfish cow! And by the way, no amount of concealer is going to cover up those zits and you should’ve shaved your tache!”
She slammed the door and returned to her own house. The boys she had passed earlier jeered as they cycled by. They too had heard the news and were already heading to the Landguard Fort.
Emma sat in front of her small dressing table and worked quickly. She was about to phone around and beg a lift off someone when a text beeped in. It was an unknown and impossibly short number, but that fact was lost on her.
From: 7734
Get out of the house Emma!
The cops r coming 4 u!!!!!!
The girl swore, swept up her bag and coat and tore from the bedroom. Tottering down the road in her heels, she hurried as fast as she could and cut down the first turning to get off her street. She wondered if Ashleigh and Keeley had received similar texts. If this was about Sandra Dixon, the police would want to talk to them as well. She reached into her bag to call them. Then, remembering Ashleigh’s attitude, spitefully decided to let the girl find out for herself. It would be hilarious if a visit from the law caused Ashleigh to miss out on the biggest event to hit Felixstowe for years. Serve Keeley right as well.
