‘It’s trying to get in!’ shouted Jo. ‘Move!’
Will shouldered the swing doors that led to the stairwell and held them open as she ducked under
his arm.
She was almost as fast going down stairs as he was, using the rail as a kind of slide. They went down two flights with no problem and then she bounced off a hefty unmoving woman frozen in the act of hauling herself up the steps. She would have fallen badly had Will not snapped his arm out and caught her.
‘Thanks’ she gulped.
They slowed as they squeezed past the wide-hipped human roadblock, ears pricked, listening to the floors above them. It was silent. All they could hear was themselves panting for breath.
‘Hear anything?’ he said.
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Maybe it wasn’t chasing us?’ he said, hopefully.
‘Yep,’ she replied, biting her lip. ‘We both know this is mad, right?’
‘Sure,’ he nodded. ‘But it’s real.’
‘That’s the maddest bit,’ she said. ‘That’s the worst.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The worst is Mum. Mum’s outside.’
Jo looked at him.
‘Feeding the meter. Out there with that thing.’
There was another crash and a scraping sound above them.
‘No,’ said Jo. ‘That thing’s inside. With us!’
The fear took over again and had them in motion before they knew where they were going. They helter-skeltered downwards until they passed the ground floor and only stopped when they hit an unlit landing and a door marked NO ENTRY.
It wouldn’t open.
‘Jo!’ said Will.
He felt her hand grab his leg, then find his shoulder.
‘Up one floor,’ he panted. ‘We’re in the basement . . .’
They ran upwards again into the light and out onto the ground floor corridor. They could see the reception desk at the far end, with an unmoving wedge of people clustered around it. They got halfway towards the frozen crowd when Will stopped, halted by a glimpse of the street beyond.
‘Maybe the basement’s a good idea,’ he said slowly. Going outside didn’t seem like such a good plan after all. She cannoned into his back.
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Maybe it’s safe? Like a bomb shelter or something . . .’
There was a smash behind them as the doors to the stairs blew open and a ripple of gold blitzed through them. For a moment Will thought it was dragon’s flame, and then his eyes sort of twisted in his head to make sense of the unbelievable thing that had followed them.
It wasn’t a dragon.
It was a girl.
A golden girl, like a ballet dancer made of shining yellow from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. She spun across the floor like a gilded whirlwind. She was clothed (or at least almost clothed) in a swirl of golden drapery held against her body by nothing more than a breeze that seemed to ripple around her at all times.
The golden girl looked at them. Her face shone. Her smile did something to Will’s stomach, making it do a kind of hiccup.
‘A boy!’ she laughed in surprise. ‘I thought I saw a boy.’
She looked at Jo.
‘And a girl . . .’
She didn’t sound quite so happy to see her.
‘. . . a hobbling girl.’
‘Who are you?’ said Will.
‘What are you?’ said Jo.
‘I am Ariel,’ laughed the girl. ‘I am a nimble spirit of air and grace. I expect I am the loveliest, lightest thing you have ever seen . . .’
‘You look like a statue,’ said Jo.
‘I am indeed a statue,’ said Ariel. ‘I am a very important statue. I live on top of the Bank of England, and if there is a more important roof in the city I should like to know it!’
‘Palace,’ said Jo. Will could tell she didn’t like this Ariel. ‘Buckingham Palace.’
‘Palaces are for kings and queens’ said Ariel dismissively. ‘They come and go. Money is forever. Why aren’t you two all still and lifeless like all the other people?’
She looked genuinely perplexed.
“Don’t know,’ said Will. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing,’ laughed Ariel. ‘London is full of nothing happening everywhere! I mean not to Regular people like you. No one is moving at all . . .’
She pointed down the hall at the crowd of unmoving people who filled the space like a 3D freeze-frame, some smiling, some looking worried, some looking like sleepwalkers as they were frozen mid-blink with their eyes shut, like a bad photograph.
‘Everyone is still. Except you. Why is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Will.
‘What about the dragon?’ said Jo.
‘Which one?’ said Ariel. ‘The one that saw you upstairs, or all the other ones.’
Her smile, when aimed at Jo, was not quite nasty, but not quite nice either.
‘Other ones?’ said Will. He didn’t like the sound of other ones. One was bad enough. ‘There are other ones?’
‘Oh, boy!’ laughed Ariel. ‘How funny you are. London is full of dragons. Why every important road that leads into the Square Mile at the centre is guarded by at least one dragon. Haven’t you seen them? And they’ll all try and grab you if they see you moving about now . . .’
‘Why?’ said Jo.
‘What should we do?’ said Will. That seemed the more important question. ‘Why’ could wait.
Ariel looked at them both and smiled.
‘“What?” is run, “what?” is hide. “Why?” is something else entirely. “Why?” is magic. Bad magic. Something bad is happening. It is very exciting. I haven’t been quite so not bored for ages!’
‘OK,’ said Jo, suddenly sounding exhausted. ‘I’m out. Seriously. This is absolutely a dream, pinching or no pinching. I’m talking to a statue and it’s telling me everything’s magic. Wake me up when it’s over.’
And she slumped down on one of the seats lining the wall and closed her eyes.
‘Silly little girl,’ said Ariel. ‘The dragon saw you. It knows you’re here. It will come for you. I came to warn you but I shouldn’t have bothered, I can see.’
And as if to punctuate what she said something passed the window, blotting out the light for a moment as it did so. Ariel looked at Will.
‘Go now. Run.’
‘Where?’ Said Will panic rising in his throat.
‘Silly boy. When there’s a dragon at your front door, leave by the back door. Any fool can work that out,’ laughed Ariel. ‘Don’t try and follow me. You can’t fly . . .’
And with a slow pirouette she turned and flew back the way she had come, her feet not touching the ground as she passed into the stairwell and out of sight.
‘Jo,’ hissed Will.
She was already on her feet.
‘Back door. I heard.’
There was a scraping, thumping noise from the front door. A silver and red dragon’s head rammed itself through the revolving door, but got no further as the spiny wings jammed up in the narrow gap.
Just the head and neck were bad enough: the dragon’s eyes tracked furiously right and left, looking for a target, the more it tried to wedge itself through the impossible gap, the angrier it looked as it snuffled and choked with the effort. The head thrashed from side to side on the end of a long muscular neck, which made the thick red tongue flail madly back and forth between its fangs, splashing thick dragon-drool across the shiny floor, leaving gobbets hanging off the unmoving faces of the frozen people close to the exit.
Its wicked little eyes found Jo and Will, and seemed to zero in on them: Will felt like he was caught on the wrong end of a sniper’s telescopic sight, trapped in the crosshairs.
Dead meat.
And then Jo’s hand grabbed his collar and he was yanked through a doorway and into another long corridor.
He heard the dragon roar in frustration and was sure he felt the heat of its breath on his back as
they ran.
3
Back door to a nightmare
They sprinted down the labyrinth of hallways, swerving left and right where the corners took them, but always trying to keep their bearings and head towards the back of the building.
They jinked past hospital trolleys and nurses and tea-ladies.
They sidestepped doctors and patients.
Will slipped through the narrow gap between a man stuck in the act of getting out of a wheelchair and the wheelchair itself.
Jo hopped, skipped and jumped round it.
They banged through swing door after swing door, being twisted and turned by the strange layout of the old building, always trying to keep heading away from the front.
‘It’s like a maze,’ gasped Jo.
She was slowing down. She looked in pain. He could see her running was becoming much more jerky and lopsided. The strange thing was it made him angry with her, because now he was going to have to do something he didn’t really want to, but he did it anyway, because that’s what you do when your sister’s hurt and it might be your fault even though it obviously isn’t.
‘Wait,’ he said, and spun round, running back the way they’d just come.
‘Will!!!’ she shouted. ‘You’re nuts! Where are you going?!’
She stood staring back at the swinging door, and then heard ominous banging as something came back towards her at speed. The door flew open to reveal Will pushing the wheelchair.
‘Turn round!’ he yelled. She did, just as he reached her, dropping into the seat almost without him having to stop. She stuck her good leg out in front of her, and they booted through the next two sets of doors without stopping, using it like a battering ram.
Then suddenly there was nothing in front of them but a blank door with EMERGENCY EXIT written across it.
‘This is definitely an emergency!’ said Will, heading straight for it.
Jo kicked the release bar as they hit it. The door clunked open, and then they were out in the sunlight bumping down a short flight of concrete steps into the street beyond.
Jo yelped and gripped the armrests to stop flying off, while Will threw himself backwards and tried to stop their forward progress with his bodyweight. He leaned too far back though, and as they hit the pavement he managed to tip the whole chair back on himself. The sharp edge of the last step whacked him in the kidneys, and he lay there trying to get his breath, winded by the impact.
‘You OK?’ said Jo, craning round.
‘No,’ he gasped. Of course he wasn’t OK. He was hurting and she was squashing him, her and the chair.
‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘But at least we’re out of there.’
She scrabbled to her feet and pulled the chair off Will.
‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘We should get as far from here as we can. As fast as we can’
He unfolded back onto his feet.
‘Ouch,’ he said.
‘Shhh . . .’ she replied, holding her finger to her lips and looking round.
‘What?’ he whispered. ‘What can you hear?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s so creepy.’
He listened. The city was silent. And that was definitely very creepy. London is never silent. There was no background growl of traffic. No street noise, no sirens in the distance, no slap of feet on the pavements, no laughing, no talking, no anything.
Just a blanket of silence, the kind of silence you get in the middle of the night after a heavy snow fall. The world was . . .
‘Asleep,’ said Jo. ‘It’s like the world has just . . . gone to sleep.’
‘We’re not dreaming,’ Will said. It was so real and yet so creepily un-real that he wished they were.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It all hurts too much. Much worse than pinching. If we were dreaming I’d definitely have woken up by now.’
The road in front of them was a back street with just a van on it. A motorcycle dispatch rider had pulled his bike onto the pavement and was frozen in the act of taking a package out of the box on the back of his bike. His helmet was balanced on the seat. Will picked it up. It was easier to do something, to keep moving than it was to just sit there and think about what a weird place they found themselves in.
‘What are you doing?’ said Jo.
‘Put it on, get back in the chair,’ said Will. ‘We’re going to go fast. Like you said.’
Jo looked at him for a beat, then nodded, put the helmet on and sat back on the chair. Will got behind it and started to push, slow at first, then faster and faster, until he got up to running speed.
‘Where are we going?’ shouted Jo, her voice muffled by the visor on the helmet.
‘Find Mum,’ he said. ‘Where she put the car. By that park.’
As he ran he tried to get his bearings. They had left the car by a park called Coram’s Fields. It was a short walk from the hospital and he knew its name because they used to have their sandwiches there and Mum had told them the story of the park and why it was for kids and their parents or guardians – but no one else. It was the only park you couldn’t go into without a kid. Coram had been a rich man who’d left all his money to orphans a long time ago. Mum liked old stories and told them all about it the first time they went there.
That first time they’d come to one of these appointments she had tried to dress it up like a treat: they’d gone to a museum in the morning, done some sightseeing and after the appointment they’d been to see a musical at the theatre. Will hadn’t found the museum very interesting and it was too full of other kids on school-trips to really see anything, and going to see a musical was more for Jo than him.
The bit he’d enjoyed most had been rummaging through an antique shop close to the museum that had a lot of swords and spears and things, but he had not been allowed to touch them, let alone buy one. All they’d been able to afford was three old beads that Jo had chosen from a bowl full of random things. They looked like little coffee beans, but the shop owner, who looked almost as bored as Will had felt, said they were ancient beads.
‘Ancient beads made in China last month,’ his friend Jack had said when he saw it. ‘Ancient people didn’t have coffee anyway.’
The bead did look like a sort of coffee bean, though the man in the shop had said it was an Ancient Egyptian sacred beetle, a scarab. Will had it on a friendship bracelet that Jo had plaited when they got home. She wore the matching one. Her mum had the third bead, but she had it on her key ring instead. Jo said it was for luck, so he had not taken it off for nearly a year. It was meant to fall off naturally. He’d got used to it. Secretly he hoped that when it fell off he might stop feeling angry and guilty about being a coward and a liar. He looked down at Jo’s hand gripping the arm of the chair: her bead was almost invisible, hidden in a
whole bunch of bracelets jiggling on her wrist as the wheels bounced across the uneven paving stones.
He ran up a residential street with old brick Georgian houses on one side and a concrete and glass council estate on the other. He nearly tipped the chair over again as he had to clump it off the kerb into the street to avoid a crocodile of primary school kids road-blocking the pavement. Jo just held onwithout a squeak of protest, and he kept going, even though his arms and legs were beginning to burn with the effort.
Jo looked at the kids as he pushed her past them: they looked normal, red-cheeked, bright-eyed, just like what they were – people. The only difference was that they weren’t moving. On reflex Jo put her hand out to touch one as they passed.
‘What are you doing?’ shouted Will.
Her hand smacked into the teacher’s arm. From the brief moment of contact Jo could feel that she was warm, and soft, just as if she was normal and alive but her body was also, strangely, as unmoving as a slab of stone. Their forward momentum wrenched Jo’s arm painfully backwards.
‘Ouch,’ she grunted.
‘Stop mucking about!’ said Will breathlessly. ‘Or you’ll have us both over.’
He turn
ed a corner and then another, and then there it was: Coram’s Fields – one of those sudden open green spaces that London hides in the tangle of its streets. It was surrounded by railings and dotted with huge old trees with thick nubbled trunks that disappeared into bushy explosions of leaves that overhung the grassy space beneath. And there they saw their car, like an old friend parked opposite.
And even better, between them and it, frozen in motion as she jogged across the street towards them was the familiar figure of their mother, disconcerting in its stillness, her coat whipped backwards, her wallet still open in her hand.
Jo got out of the chair as they approached and tugged at her mother’s sleeve. She didn’t react. Her brow was furrowed and she looked worried. The lack of life in the familiar face was horrible.
They stared at her.
‘It’s like she’s, you know . . .’ said Jo.
She didn’t need to finish. Will could see it.
‘She looks like she’s just about to move again,’ he said. ‘Any minute . . .’
Jo suddenly hugged her and kept tight hold.
‘No,’ she choked, her voice muffled in the folds of her mother’s coat. ‘She looks like dead people must look.’
Will didn’t know what to do. He stared round the street, full of still cars and people like statues. No one was looking. There were no dragons on the rooftops. It was like the still world was a true picture and Jo and he were the mistake, the only moving things in it. He felt a nasty lurch of aloneness. He put his arms round his mother and Jo and squeezed.
‘She’s still warm,’ he said. His voice sounded rough. He cleared his throat. ‘She’s soft and warm. Like always. Not like she’s dead.’
Jo pulled at her. She didn’t move a bit.
‘Can’t move her,’ she said. ‘We can’t leave her here. If things start moving she might get hit by a car. She’s in the middle of the road . . .’
Will tugged at her, but there was no doubt. She wouldn’t move. He looked round at the cars on the street. Their mother was clearly jinking her way through the traffic in her hurry to get back to them. It didn’t look like she was about to get hit, and she was usually quite nimble. But she did seem very exposed. He tried, as he often did, to think what his dad would do. He wouldn’t just stand around wondering; he was always moving, always doing something.
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