Dead End

by Tim O'Rourke

  Reaching the edge of town, Murphy looked up and across the valley. The sky was now split open in several places. The cracks looked like vast canyons which were full of nothing.

  “How far is this station?” Murphy asked Lilly. “Time is running out.”

  Thunderclaps broke in the distance and I’m sure I saw the sky shake and then crack some more.

  “It’s hard to say,” Lilly said. She pointed in the distance toward some hills. “I know it’s in that direction, but how far I’m not sure. It shifts. It moves.”

  Wrapping his arms around Lilly, Murphy said, “We’ll cover more distance if we fly.”

  Within seconds, he was racing away into the night, just feet above the ground. Lilly held onto him as if fearing for her life.

  “Ready?” Isidor asked Melody, snaking his arm about her waist.

  She nodded and they were gone, Isidor, whisking her away. Leaping into the air, the rest of my friends and I raced after them.

  We hadn’t even cleared the valley, when I heard Potter shout, “Kayla, behind you!”

  I shot a look back in time to see a Vampyrus grab for me. I spun over onto my back, the edges of my wings scraping over the rocky and jagged terrain. I pulled my leg back, shooting my foot out and driving it hard into the face of the Vampyrus that was trying to take hold of me. It lurched backwards, momentarily stunned. I flipped over and raced forward. I could feel a rush of air as the Vampyrus drew close again. Spreading their wings wide and using them like brakes, Potter and Meren slowed, letting the Vampyrus whoosh past them. Once it had, Potter and Meren shot forward again, grabbing one wing each in their claws. Peeling away in opposite directions, they tore the Vampyrus’ wings from its back. The creature screamed, nose-diving into the rocks below in a gush of blood.

  We dashed forward and over the hills that loomed up before us. I saw Lilly point into the distance, and I looked ahead. On the other side of the hills I could see what appeared to be a huge railway station. It had grey stone steps leading up to a giant set of wooden doors. There were white pillars out front. I had never seen such a grand looking station; not even the stations I had seen in London looked as spectacular as this. But as we drew closer, I could see what Lilly had meant when she said it shifted. The station looked as if it was moving – shimmering in the light that now seeped through the cracks in the sky above.

  “There it is,” Lilly said. “There’s the station.”

  “Watch out!” I heard Meren scream. Again I looked back to see that several Vampyrus had broken away from the battle in Snake Weed and had followed us. They raced out of the darkness.

  There was a road where the tarmac had broken and weeds grew out of the cracks. It led to the steps and the front of the railway station. We landed on it. Lilly sprang from Murphy’s arms.

  Potter looked at Kiera. “Go with Lilly into the station. Speak with this Noah and see if he can send Kayla back through the cracks.”

  “What about you?” Kiera asked him.

  “Me, Murphy, Isidor, and Meren will stop those Vampyrus from heading back to Snake Weed and telling the others where you’re at,” Potter said. “If they find out that you’re here, then this whole place will come under attack…”

  “But…” Kiera started.

  “No buts, Hudson!” Murphy barked at her, like she was a fresh-faced recruit again. “Go with Lilly, Kayla, and Melody. That’s an order!”

  Before she had a chance to protest further, Murphy, Potter, Meren and Isidor were soaring back into the sky to seek out and kill the Vampyrus who had followed us to the station.

  “Come on,” Lilly said, tugging at Kiera’s sleeve.

  She looked back one last time and up into the sky as Potter disappeared from view. Running as hard and as fast as we could, we raced up the remote and desolate road toward the shifting railway station.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Kiera

  The road that led to the front of the grand-looking railway station was nothing more than a strip of tarmac cutting across the fields and barren moorlands. It was like a small runway had been built for an airport that never existed. Just like the sky, it was cracked. There were no railway tracks that I could see, so how did trains arrive and depart from this remote station? I couldn’t hear the puffing and huffing of trains, or the clickety-clack of them racing over tracks.

  Reaching the end of the road, I looked up at the front of the station. It towered over us at the top of a set of wide stone steps. The station almost seemed to blink in and out of existence. Light was now shining through the cracks in the sky, illuminating the station in a blue beam. A thunderclap sounded like an explosion in the distance and the whole world shook. The four of us lurched forward, instinctively reaching for each to keep balance.

  Lilly looked up at the sky. “I don’t think we have very much time.”

  “Until what?” Melody asked, her eyes wide and fearful.

  “Until this world – the layers – all of them collapse and collide with each other.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Kayla said, setting off up the stone steps.

  We raced after her. At the top I looked back. The sky did look lighter now – almost opaque. In the distance I could see Potter, Murphy, Isidor, and Meren soaring back and forth through the air as they fought with the Vampyrus.

  I could hear a sound that was something close to a scream. I looked back to find Pen pushing open one of the towering wooden doors. I peered through the opening and could only see darkness. It was so black that even my eyes couldn’t penetrate it.

  Lilly looked back at us, as we stood on the top stair. “Ready?”

  Without answering, we followed her into the station. Almost at once

  there was a burst of light. Like a flashbulb going off. Blinking, I opened my eyes to find myself looking down onto a vast sprawling station. I was standing at the top of a set of escalators that led down onto the main concourse.

  “They’ve gone,” Melody whispered, looking back over her shoulder.

  “Who have?” I asked, following her stare.

  “The doors we just came through,” she said.

  Where the doors had once been was now just a wall and a poster. The poster was a picture of a black coloured steam train. Thick, grey clouds of smoke pumped from its funnel. The cowcatcher at the front of the steam train looked long and pointed, almost giving the machine an angry grin. Ride The Scorpion Steam – There is no other way to travel! was written across the bottom.

  I looked away to find Kayla halfway down the escalators already. Lilly was at her heels. Melody and I followed. The concourse was full of people. Some were sitting on seats as if waiting for their train to arrive. Others looked up at the row of luminous departure boards fixed to the far wall. Some purchased drinks and food from vending machines. Others were taking escalators which led down beneath the station. Was this where the trains arrived and departed from? I wondered. Were the platforms below ground just like the Tube in London? But none of these people seemed to be interacting with each other. They didn’t even glance up at one another as they crossed the concourse. It was like they didn’t exist to anyone other than themselves and whoever it was selling them tickets from a circular shaped office in the centre of the concourse. Fixed to the top of this ticket booth was a clock, but it had no hands so it was impossible to tell the time.

  Reaching the bottom of the escalators, I followed Lilly across the concourse and joined the line for the ticket booth. There was just two other travellers in front of us. Kayla stood on tiptoe, impatiently looking ahead to see how long the wait was going to be. She glanced up at the departure boards that were lit up with orange coloured writing. There were hundreds, perhaps even thousands of destinations you could travel to. I knew this to be the place that Potter had told me about. This was the station where Lilly had sent him and Jack back through the cracks. The people that rushed or lingered about the concourse were all dead, being sent back into the pushed world to remind themselves what the wor
ld was once like. But did we really need any more cracks? Weren’t there enough already? Outside the world looked fit to fall apart. Come crashing down all around us.

  We reached the end of the line. As a group we stepped up to the ticket booth. Inside sat a very old-looking black man. His face was aged with wrinkles that were so deep they looked like hundreds of claw marks. He had a fuzz of white hair that almost seemed to sprout from the sides of his head. But even though he looked older than time its self, his eyes twinkled blue. They were very much full of life.

  “What is your destination?” he smiled kindly at Kayla as if he somehow knew it was her that wanted to take a journey.

  “I need to go back,” Kayla said.

  “Back to where, exactly?” the old guy smiled again. On the counter beside him stood a bottle of Coke. The glass was dirty and the red and white label around the middle of it was faded and peeled back at the corners. He raised it to his puckered lips and took a sip.

  “I need to go to the beach,” Kayla said.

  “Ah, sun, sea, and sand,” the old man, who I now believed to be Noah, smiled. “Always such popular destinations.”

  “But what train do I need to take?” Kayla said, now impatiently strumming her fingers against the glass.

  “Why don’t you choose?” Noah said, glancing through the glass window of the ticket booth and up at the departure boards.

  “But which one? There are so many,” Kayla said, looking up at them.

  I looked too but couldn’t see any destinations named beach or anything else. Kayla stepped out of line, her eyes frantically roaming over the departure board. “Which one?” she whispered to herself. Then, with her eyes growing wide, she turned back to face the ticket booth and Noah.

  “I want to go to Camp Brook,” Kayla said with excitement.

  “Camp Brook?” Noah asked. “Are you sure about that?”

  “I’m not sure about anything,” Kayla said. “But it’s the only destination that has any meaning to me.”

  “We only have one shot at this,” I said to Kayla.

  “Sam and I had a camp hidden on the other side of the walls that surrounded Ravenwood School. It was next to a brook and Sam’s surname is Brook. It has to be the right place,” she explained.

  I couldn’t help but feel there was a sense of self-doubt in her voice and the explanation she gave was to convince herself more than it was to convince me. But before she had a chance to change her mind, Noah had stamped out a ticket for her. He slid it beneath the partition in the glass. Kayla picked it up, turning it over in her hands.

  “It’s blank,” she said. “There isn’t any writing on it.”

  “Have a safe and pleasant journey,” Noah smiled sweetly through the glass at her.

  Lilly glanced up at the departures board again. “If you’re gonna go, you better go now,” she said. “Your train leaves from platform seventy-three.”

  With the ticket gripped in her fist, Kayla set off across the platform to the escalators that led to platform 73. We all knew we couldn’t go with Kayla, but still we wanted to say goodbye, so we set off across the concourse after her.

  “Kiera Hudson,” I heard a voice call after me.

  I glanced back. It was Noah who had called out my name. “Yes?”

  “You have your own journey,” he said. “Or should I say a journey that you have been on that is close to reaching its destination.”

  I stopped to look at him. “And what might the name of that destination be?”

  “You choose,” he smiled at me through the glass.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Kayla

  I stepped onto the escalators and looked down into the well of darkness that awaited me. Lilly and Melody joined me. Where was Kiera? I looked back. She was standing before the ticket booth and looking at Noah through the glass. I wished she had come to say goodbye as I now feared that I might not come back. I’d been through the cracks once before and nearly didn’t make it back. If it hadn’t have been for Sam showing me the way before dying on that underground platform, then I might have died back there. And the very man who would have killed me on the other side of the cracks was the very man I was now going in search of. But if I could find him and kill him, then the cracks might close and my friends and I might be able to go home. I glanced back one last time at Kiera and hoped that I would complete the journey I was about to make so we could all take one last journey home together.

  Knowing that time was against me, I raced down the escalators. Melody and Lilly followed close behind, and I was glad they were there. Halfway down, the darkness grew lighter. Lanterns were fixed to the walls, the flames of their candles flickered. I looked back, up from where I had come, and the concourse was nothing more now than a pinprick of light. I turned and stepped off the bottom escalator. The platform was made from wooden planks of wood. It creaked beneath my boots. There was a small waiting room with flower baskets hanging just above the door. The flowers had wilted in the darkness and were now dead. The lantern light stretched our shadows up the station walls. They looked contorted and twisted out of shape. There was a noise, a chuff-chuff sound and a distant whistle. I faced the tunnel at the opposite end of the short platform to see a steam train chug out of it. With smoke pouring from its funnel and steam hissing up from its pistons, the train drew to a stop at the platform. There was only one carriage, it looked Victorian. The engine cab windows were black and mirrored so it was impossible to see who drove the train. From within the smoke that now clouded the small underground station I heard a voice cry out, “All aboard!” I couldn’t tell if the voice was male or female, but I got the creepy feeling it was the voice of a small child. I peered into the smoke, but all I could see was swirling shadows. I pulled open the carriage door, now just wanting to climb aboard and get my journey over with. If I ended up where I hoped I would, I would see Sam again. I would meet him on that beach, just like he said I had.

  As I was about to step up into the carriage, I felt a hand on my arm. It was Melody who had reached for me.

  “Be safe, Kayla,” she said, then hugged me.

  “Thanks, Melody,” I said. Over her shoulder I could see Lilly watching us. She had the collar of her white fur coat pulled up.

  “Remember, don’t change too much, only what you need to,” she said as if in warning.

  “Gotcha,” I said, turning and climbing into the carriage. Looking, I added, “Can you say goodbye to Kiera for me?”

  Closing the door, I slumped down into the seat. It was soft and so comfortable I could have easily curled up and fallen asleep. There was a screeching noise as the driver let off the brakes. The sound of the horn blasted as we slowly moved forward. I looked out of the window. Melody waved a hand at me and I waved back. Then they were both gone in a swirl of shifting smoke and steam. I sat back in my seat, eyes feeling suddenly heavy.

  I blinked, fighting hard to keep them open. Now wasn’t the time to sleep. Opening my eyes again, I shot out of my seat. There was something sharp sticking in my arse. “Ouch!” I cried.

  I reached round and pulled a thistle from the seat of my jeans. A thistle? Who left a freaking thistle on the seat? But I was no longer sitting on the soft cushions in the train carriage. I was sitting in the leaf-covered camp that Sam and I had once shared. But it was so overgrown and covered in wild ivy, bracken, and thorns that the arms of my hoodie had been ensnared by them. I bent forward, careful not to scratch my face, and yanked my arms free of the thorns that trapped me. Slowly, I crawled forward and out from the bushes. When I was clear of them, I stood up and brushed the dead leaves, twigs, and ivy from my clothes. Through the trees, I could see the granite wall that surrounded Ravenwood School. I was back – but was I in the right where and when?

  There was only one way to find out. Pulling my hood over my head, I shook my wings free and shot up into the sky. I noticed almost at once that there were no cracks in the sky and there definitely wasn’t any thunder. In fact, the sun was up and the day
was scorching hot. Even the wind that I raced through did little to cool me. The sky was cloudless too, and when I looked down I could see the sea sparkling beneath the summer sun. I could remember Sam telling me that the day his parents had vanished during that boat trip it had been very hot and the beach had been packed with sunbathers. Everything seemed to fit into place with what Sam had once described to me. As I swooped high above, I could see the beach below. I couldn’t afford to fly too low just yet for fear of being seen. If I was in the correct where and when, Vampyrus didn’t exist here. Luke had yet to unleash them from The Hollows.

  Peering from beneath my hood, I saw a jetty sticking out from a stretch of beach that looked to be packed with holiday makers. There was a boat moored against it. I swooped down and my heart raced with joy. I could see Sam! He was following Luke Bishop and Jessica Hudson, whom he had been led to believe were his parents, along the jetty and toward the boat.

  Now hovering high up in the sky, I watched them board the boat just like Sam had told me they had. I dropped further still and watched the boat cast off and head out to sea. Swooping out of the sky as my wings disappeared back inside me, I splashed down into the sea just feet from the shoreline. I dropped so fast that if anyone had even blinked they would have missed me. Seawater sloshed against my shins. I raised my head slightly, peering out from beneath my hood. Sam was standing at the aft end of the boat. He was staring at me.