by Greg James
‘So, ah, why … why have you brought me to prison, please?’ Murph felt this was a good time for an explanation. To his relief, Miss Flint seemed to agree, because she stopped beside the doors and turned to face him.
‘Shivering Sands, as I told you, is probably the most secure prison on the planet,’ she began. ‘And right in the middle of it is the most secure cell of all. It was built to hold the most dangerous enemy we have ever faced.’
Murph’s legs sparkled with apprehension, and his relief ebbed away as quickly as it had arrived. He emitted a tiny, nervous neigh. ‘The most … most dangerous?’ he asked in a voice the size of an under-developed molecule.
‘Indeed. The worst nightmare of everyone in the Heroes’ Alliance …’ continued Miss Flint ‘… apart from you.’
Murph felt as if a phone had started ringing in a dusty room somewhere in the back of his brain. This all sounded strangely familiar.
‘His name,’ said Miss Flint quietly, ‘is Magpie.’
And suddenly Murph remembered. It had been in a CT lesson with Mr Drench last year. The weedy, drably dressed little man had spoken bitterly about being sent into battle as bait many years ago – a battle in which he’d had some of his super-hearing Capability taken away from him.
My hearing has never been quite as exceptional since that day … he had said. That’s what happened to anyone who came up against … him.
‘Yeah, Magpie,’ repeated Murph, in awe, ‘I've heard about him.’
Miss Flint looked surprised. ‘Really?’ she asked sharply. ‘That’s highly irregular. Most Heroes don’t talk about him – they prefer to pretend he never existed. The battle to bring him to justice was … extremely painful. A dark day.’ Her face clouded over.
‘And he can steal Capabilities?’ Murph asked. The head of the Alliance answered him with a curt nod. ‘So none of you can get close to him without risking losing your powers,’ Murph continued, finally understanding where he fitted into all of this.
‘No member of the Alliance has entered his cell for thirty years,’ Miss Flint answered. ‘And even if they had risked doing so, it would have been of no use to anyone. He has refused to say a word since he was imprisoned. But now, for the first time in decades, he has indicated that he is ready to talk.’
‘And he wants to talk to …’ Murph trailed off.
‘He wants to talk to you, Kid Normal,’ Miss Flint concluded, placing her hand on the control panel beside the double doors. They hissed open to the salt-spray smell of the sea and the cry of the gulls.
Stretching away ahead of them was a slim metal bridge. It led to the central tower at the heart of the complex.
Miss Flint stepped out smartly into the wind and began marching away from him. Murph followed a little uncertainly. The drop to the waves far below was dizzying. And to make it worse, the bridge was swinging gently.
Murph fixed his eyes on Miss Flint’s back and kept going. After all, the alternative was to stay out there on the crazy-high swingy bridge. But he couldn’t help thinking that this wasn’t how he’d been expecting his evening to go at all. It was supposed to contain a great deal more pepperoni and much less blind terror. Murph swallowed thickly. Only an hour or so ago he’d been weighing up whether to get cheesy garlic bread or dough balls to go with his pizza. He looked back on that moment now with a warm, sentimental glow. Life had been so much simpler then.
Murph wished he was a nice, warm dough ball, about to plunge his bready face into a refreshing tub of butter. Dough balls wouldn’t be forced to go to a prison in the sea to visit supervillains.
‘Dough balls have it easy,’ Murph muttered to himself.
‘What was that?’ Miss Flint asked him.
‘Nothing,’ said Murph quickly.
A couple of rather breathless minutes later, Miss Flint was activating yet another control panel, and yet another smooth-sliding door was admitting them to the middle tower. They were faced with five very burly guards, who snapped to attention as they entered.
‘Carry on,’ Miss Flint told them, ‘I’m just passing through. All quiet?’
‘All quiet,’ confirmed the nearest guard, glancing down the long, wide corridor that led to the heart of the tower.
Miss Flint nodded in a satisfied fashion and proceeded to lead the way, but not before giving Murph a final warning. ‘Keep towards the centre. We have to pass through the rest of the facility before we get to the cell where Magpie is held.’
The passageway was lined with large, strong-looking doors. Each had a grilled panel set in the middle. It was a cell block, Murph realised with a cold spill of excitement and fright that wound its way down his back.
‘This is the lower-security area,’ Miss Flint was saying over her shoulder. ‘The nearer you get to the centre, the more high-risk the inmates become.’
Murph looked from side to side as they walked. Occasionally, he caught a glimpse of a curious face peering out from behind bars. Once he was startled by a loud howling. A thin, fierce face was gazing out at him from behind strands of matted hair.
‘Yellow Dog,’ said Miss Flint dismissively. ‘Don’t be alarmed.’
‘Is his bark worse than his bite?’ joked Murph in a rather strained voice.
‘Not particularly,’ she deadpanned. ‘Right, this is the higher-security zone.’
They had come to another curved wall. The passageway was leading them towards the centre of the prison like a spoke on a bicycle wheel, Murph realised.
Miss Flint opened the doors and they stepped through.
Here, the cells were even more closely guarded. Black-clad figures were stationed at intervals along the way, their keen eyes checking for any hint of trouble.
There was a sudden banging from away to one side.
‘Hey!’ called a high, guttural voice. ‘Hey hey hey!’
With a slight sigh, Miss Flint stopped. Murph looked for the source of the noise, and was a little disturbed to see an enormous white face pressed up against the bars of a cell that seemed much larger than the others.
‘Did you bring someone to party with me?’ The face moved slightly, bringing a huge red nose into view, along with a patch of massive, red-lined mouth. ‘I like to party, you know.’
Murph realised that he was looking at a clown – but not your normal-sized clown. This was a bumper clown. A jumbo-sized, economy-pack, mega clown. A really, really big clown, is what we’re trying to get across here. And although Murph was OK with heights, clowns really did freak him out.
‘Party Animal,’ explained Miss Flint in an undertone. ‘He ran his own circus for people with Capes, but they travelled from town to town creating chaos. Robberies, attacks, disappearances … He gave us quite a lot of trouble for a few years.’
Murph thought back to the first time he’d been called to Mr Souperman’s office. There had been a picture on the wall of the head back in his days as a Hero, standing next to a gigantic unconscious clown. ‘Until Captain Alpha finished him off,’ he said.
Miss Flint cocked an approving eyebrow. ‘Yes, Souperman was the one to bring him in. You don’t miss much, do you?’
But sadly, neither did Party Animal.
‘Captain Alpha!’ he hooted at enormous volume. ‘Captain Alpha! Oh, just you wait. One day I’ll be out of here, and then he’d better watch out. He may have stopped my little carnival for a while, but I’ll be back. And when I am … well, let’s just say I’ll invite the captain to a little party. Party party party,’ he muttered, turning his back on the door and wandering away from them.
‘Let’s move on, shall we?’ suggested Miss Flint, spinning on her heel.
More faces peered out at Murph as they carried on towards the centre of the tower, and at one point he heard one of the prisoners making an odd series of beeping and booping noises. He looked to one side, intrigued, and as he did so a thin, toneless voice cried out, ‘Oooooh, look, an expected item in the bagging area.’
‘That’s Consumo,’ Miss Flint told him. ‘Trie
d to hold the whole country to ransom a few years back by releasing a virus into all supermarket self-service checkouts. He was demanding billions of pounds, threatening to stop anyone shopping for food. He has very advanced tele-tech and his virus was incredibly sophisticated. It turned many of the checkouts evil. They actually became self-aware, and took delight in annoying shoppers. We still haven’t managed to completely eradicate his software, to be honest.’
‘In there is Goldfish,’ she went on, waving her hand towards another cell and apparently starting to enjoy her role as super-prison tour guide. ‘He has one of the most brilliant criminal minds in all the world, but with one huge drawback: he has a memory that’s only three seconds long. So he’s capable of concocting spectacularly evil plans but then forgets them moments later.’
Murph was straining to see through the bars and catch a glimpse of Goldfish, but he could see nothing except a bath full of water. It was like that frustrating moment at the zoo when all the pandas are in bed.
‘The last time he was caught,’ explained Miss Flint, ‘he had made his way to the main vault underneath the Bank of England. He’d written all the security codes to get inside on a bit of paper, but then put it somewhere for safekeeping and promptly forgot where it was. If he wasn’t so evil, you might just feel sorry for him.’
‘So, how many – what did you call them – Rogues? How many Rogues are in this place?’ Murph wanted to know.
‘Dozens and dozens,’ she replied. ‘Anyone who is too dangerous to be out in the world. The Gremlin, Monsieur Trois, Colonel Vegetables …’ She turned to Murph and looked even more serious than usual, if that were possible. If there was a Beaufort scale of serious expressions, she had just ramped up from ‘stiff breeze’ to ‘hurricane’. ‘And, of course, Magpie …’
And with that, she gestured towards a final set of doors. Murph had seen a lot of doors that day – which tends to happen when you visit a prison. But this pair were, not to put too fine a point on it, the door daddies. They were curved and incredibly heavily fortified, reinforced with bands of greyish metal – the sort of doors that make other doors lie awake at night feeling inadequate. Stencilled across them in scarlet lettering were the words: MAXIMUM-SECURITY AREA. NO ADMITTANCE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TO ANYBODY.
Underneath that was a warning sign like the ones you see near power stations, which show a cartoon man being struck by lightning. But in this case, the little stick figure was crouched down, clutching its head in agony while bolts of spiked, purplish energy swarmed around it. Beside it was written in stark black lettering: CAPABILITY LOSS ZONE AHEAD.
Miss Flint touched a final control panel.
The enormous doors clanked into life.
8
One for Sorrow
‘This is where I must leave you,’ explained Miss Flint. ‘But before I do, listen to these instructions very carefully. They could save your life.’
Murph decided, for the only time in his life so far, to pay attention to some instructions.
‘First, I must ask you to hand over your HALO unit. As you’ll see, Magpie’s cell is designed so that he won’t be able to get close to you, but he still has all of the Capes he has stolen over the years at his disposal, and there are a great many of them, believe me. We can’t risk Alliance equipment getting into his hands.’
Murph reluctantly pulled the HALO unit out of his pocket and handed it over.
‘Now, here is my most important instruction to you,’ continued Miss Flint. ‘Whatever Magpie says to you, whatever he promises – do not get too close to him. I’ll be watching, ready to extract you if anything goes wrong. But stay on the top level at all times. You’ll understand when you get down there.’
Murph nodded silently. He had no intention of getting any nearer to the planet’s most dangerous supervillain than he absolutely had to.
‘And finally,’ said Miss Flint, ‘here’s something you’ll need.’ She reached into her pocket.
At last, thought Murph. This is where she gives me a really cool weapon that I can use to protect myself if this all goes bad.
But all Miss Flint produced was some paper and a very blunt, stubby pencil. ‘Magpie says he wants to talk. So, find out what he wants to say to us. Note down anything significant,’ she told him. ‘No electronics can be risked down there, obviously, or anything pointy.’
Hence the blunt pencil, Murph realised as he pocketed it.
With that, Miss Flint went back through the doors, leaving him alone at the very centre of the prison tower.
So, armed only with his blunt pencil and paper, Murph stepped forward into the smallish, circular room ahead of him. It was lit by dim reddish lights. In the centre was a tall, round cage made of glass and strong metal mesh.
‘Please enter the lift,’ said the remote, metallic voice of Miss Flint, apparently now coming from a hidden speaker somewhere. ‘It will convey you to the maximum-security area of our facility.’
With no other options available to him, Murph Cooper shrugged and stepped into the tube. It snapped closed and dropped sharply down into darkness.
Murph was able to take most things in his stride. Giant clowns were one exception, as we’ve recently discovered. But he’d also never been the biggest fan of lifts. Not since he was seven years old, anyway, and had got trapped in one during a holiday in Spain.
It had been very old and very clunky, and it had suddenly clanked to a halt somewhere between levels on the way up to their apartment. He’d sat on the floor staring at an old, faded poster for a bullfight that had been tacked to one wall while his mum had tried to use her basic grasp of Spanish to call for help.
‘Assistance, thank you!’ she had actually been shouting. ‘We is on the escalator!’ Eventually someone had heard them and fetched help, but ever since then, Murph had preferred to take the stairs when possible.
It’s not possible today, he thought to himself, as his ears popped and the image of that old bullfight poster swam in his memory.
The lift filled with greenish light as it continued to sink – and Murph realised with a start that he must be dropping deep underneath the sea, falling like a stone down through one of the wide metal legs that supported the huge central tower of Shivering Sands. His ears began to ache with the pressure and he swallowed nervously to try and clear them.
This had just started to work when the lift slowed to a halt. The door swung open and Murph stepped out into the most secure prison in existence. The area that, for thirty years now, had been the home of the single most dangerous individual who had ever lived. It smelled surprisingly nice, considering.
‘You have reached Sub Level One,’ Miss Flint’s disembodied voice crackled out of another speaker.
‘I thought it would smell worse,’ said Murph, who had a habit of saying the first thing that came into his head when he was nervous.
‘The air is filtered and we add a mild lemon scent,’ replied Miss Flint, who usually had an answer for everything.
Kid Normal took in his surroundings. Sub Level One was a single huge, round room built on to the seabed. Its walls were made of thick glass, which gave the whole place a weird, otherworldly greenish glow. The lift came down at the outer edge of the circle – he could dimly make out the metal lift shaft stretching above him into the watery gloom. The floor was carved from cold, damp stone, and it fell away from him in row upon row of huge steps. Murph edged forward cautiously to take a better look: it was a gigantic stone amphitheatre.
In the middle, on the very lowest level, Murph could make out a lone figure moving across the stone floor. There was a large white circle drawn in the centre of this lowest level, and the prisoner was walking slowly, around and around, just inside the line.
Gradually, Murph became aware of a constant whirring and whining noise coming from above. He looked up. Arranged at intervals on the glass ceiling were countless cameras. The sound he could hear was their constant tracking and refocusing as they watched Magpie, following his every move as
he paced his circular domain like a restless zoo animal.
The Heroes’ Alliance had imprisoned its most deadly foe where he could be watched from every angle. He had nowhere to hide.
Murph was at the very top of the stone steps, and remembered Miss Flint’s instruction to him to go no further. He could see the prisoner clearly now: an old man, bent forward with his hands clasped behind his back underneath a long, tatty black coat. With his large, beaky nose and stalking gait, he actually did resemble a large bird of some kind. His face, hands and bare feet were incredibly pale – perhaps bleached from decades without sight of the sun. His hair was long and raggedy, mainly black but shot through with streaks of white. Finally he stopped and cocked his head to look directly up at his first visitor in thirty years.
As Magpie turned his gaze upon him, Murph felt a curious and uncomfortable sensation. It was as if wings of thin metal were beating the air all around him, just barely brushing his skin. It was creepy – and oddly embarrassing somehow. He felt exposed, as if his every secret was being laid bare.
‘It’s true, then,’ rasped Magpie. Even though he was some distance away, his voice carried perfectly clearly through the unnerving undersea silence. ‘A Capeless child who rubs shoulders with Heroes.’
‘Kid Normal,’ nodded Murph uncertainly, squaring his shoulders and trying to shake off the feeling that Magpie was able to see inside him. His hairline prickled as the man in black moved to one side to reveal those very words scratched on to the stone floor. BRING KID NORMAL TO ME, the uneven writing read.
‘Welcome, Kid Normal. Sit. Take a look around. Can you work out how my very special prison cell has succeeded in keeping me locked up for so long?’ asked Magpie curiously.
