by Tom Becker
“Perhaps I should make myself clear,” he said slowly. “My name is Hector Pitt. You will refer to me as ‘Mr Pitt’, or ‘sir’. Failure to do so will not be tolerated. I’m a fair man, but one has to draw the line somewhere. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes . . . I mean, yes, sir.”
“Ah! A fast learner.” Mr Pitt smiled, revealing a row of stained yellow teeth. “Now, let us try again. Name?”
“Adam Wilson, sir.”
Mr Pitt rifled through the stack of files, eventually pulling out one near the bottom. He began to scan its contents.
“Sir?” Adam ventured, halting Mr Pitt in the action of lighting another cigarette. He plunged on, as politely as possible. “Could you please tell me what I’m doing here? It’s just that, one minute I was walking home, and then these men jumped me, and now I’m. . .” Adam faltered. “Well, I don’t know where I am, or who you are, or what I’m doing here. Sir.”
Mr Pitt paused, and then surprised Adam by breaking out into a raspy chuckle.
“Of course, Wilson.” He struck up a match and lit his cigarette, before taking a deep drag. “No doubt you are finding this a most disorienting time. Let me try to explain things for you. Now then, you will be aware of your acquaintance Danny Lyons?”
Adam nodded dumbly.
“Good. And you’ll also be aware that five days ago you betrayed him?”
“I didn’t betray him!” Adam began. “You don’t understand, sir. . .”
Mr Pitt held up a hand.
“It’s all here in black and white,” he said, looking down at his file. “Last Monday evening Lyons caught you kissing his girlfriend . . . at a skate park, it says here, not that the location is material to this matter. Understandably upset by the actions of his supposed best friend, the next day Lyons takes his frustration out on a chemistry laboratory at your school. He is summarily expelled.” Mr Pitt snapped the file shut. “You, on the other hand, appear to get off scot free. . .”
“It wasn’t like that!” Adam protested. “Danny and Carey had had a fight that night – I was just trying to cheer her up! I shouldn’t have tried to kiss her, it was a big mistake, but it only lasted a second!”
“It’s too late for excuses, Wilson. The powers that be – my employers – have already placed you on trial, on a charge of Low Treachery. Needless to say, you were found guilty. A unanimous verdict.”
“What trial?” Adam exclaimed. “No one told me anything about a trial! My parents would have got me a lawyer!”
“Lawyer, sir,” corrected Mr Pitt sharply. “Let’s not fall out. Whether you knew about the trial or not is immaterial, Wilson. You know you betrayed Lyons, and we know you betrayed Lyons. No amount of legal tomfoolery could have helped you wriggle out of it.”
He stared unblinking at Adam, daring him to protest again. The guilty silence was interrupted by the door to the Control Room sliding open. A young man poked his head into the lounge. In the cockpit behind him, Adam could see a team of crewmen busily working the zeppelin’s controls.
The man gave Mr Pitt a crisp salute. “Sorry to interrupt you, sir, but I thought you should know – we’ve passed through the warphole and have returned to no-time, but the weather’s pretty hairy out here. Might be a bumpy journey back.”
Above the growl of the airship’s engines, Adam could hear the wind flinging handfuls of raindrops against the windows. The floor wobbled slightly as the Quisling sought to navigate a path through the growing storm.
“I’ve been through worse than this,” Mr Pitt said, after a dismissive glance outside. “Let me know when the Dial’s in sight.”
The crewman nodded and slid the door shut again. Adam’s head was bursting with so many questions that it was hard to know where to begin.
“Excuse me, sir, but what is the Dial?”
Mr Pitt nodded. “Fair question, Wilson. The Dial is the prison where you’ll serve out your sentence.”
“Prison?” Adam gasped. “For how long?”
Mr Pitt consulted the file.
“Let me see . . . ah, here we are: two hundred and seventy-four years.”
“Two hundred and seventy-four years?” Adam echoed incredulously. “Are you nuts?”
He barely saw Mr Pitt move. There was a flash of light, and Adam’s temple exploded with pain once again. He reeled away from the table, his head spinning. Mr Pitt rose up out of his chair, calmly wiping the blood from his sovereign rings with a handkerchief. After tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket, he shoved Adam to the floor and aimed two sharp kicks to his body. Adam would have shouted out, but the air had been buffeted from his lungs, and he found himself mouthing silent words of agony.
“You will call me SIR!” Mr Pitt screamed, drenching Adam in saliva and the stench of cigarettes. “Every day, for two hundred and seventy-four years, you will call me SIR! A good, solid stretch for a particularly vile young man who will learn the meaning of manners, if I have to tattoo it on his skin in bruises!”
As Mr Pitt clenched his fist and prepared to bring the rings down on Adam again, there was a loud bang, and the Quisling lurched sickeningly to one side.
The sudden tilt caught Mr Pitt unawares; with a startled yell, he went sprawling across the lounge. Bottles tumbled down from the bar on to the floor, smashing into pieces. The lights blinked on and off, as though surprised.
As the Quisling lurched back on to an even keel, Adam curled up into a ball, tears streaming from his eyes. His lungs were fighting for breath, and his forehead was sticky with blood. Mr Pitt had struggled to his feet and was now screaming in the direction of the Control Room. The young crewman reappeared in the doorway, his face ashen.
“This wind’s too strong, sir!” he shouted. “One of the starboard engines has backfired, and I don’t know how much longer the others can hold out for. I’m not sure we’ll make the Dial!”
“Of course we’ll make the Dial, you idiot!” roared Mr Pitt. “Get out of my way!”
He stepped over Adam’s prone body and strode into the Control Room, barking out a series of commands. The Quisling banked sharply again, forcing Adam to roll out of the way as a chair toppled over next to him. He hauled himself upright, still clutching his stomach. As he looked for somewhere safe to hide, his eye was drawn back to the Control Room door, which remained invitingly ajar. Despite the pain, he couldn’t resist it. Adam stole over to the door and looked inside.
On a calm, sunlit afternoon the Control Room of the Quisling must have afforded a panoramic view of a journey through the skies. But now the prow windows were black and drenched in sheets of rain, and the gondola was shaking like a leaf in the gale-force winds. Navigators wrestled with the steering controls, frantically consulting a complex panel of dials and gauges. As they shouted at one another, it seemed to Adam that they weren’t speaking in English but a numerical language of coordinates and bearings. Mr Pitt paced up and down the raised bridge at the back of the cabin, exhorting the ship to go faster and faster. Engrossed as they were by their efforts, none of the men noticed Adam watching them.
The Quisling stuttered again, and a navigator looked up nervously from one of his instruments. Even from the back of the room, Adam could see the needle sinking towards the bottom of the gauge.
“We’ve lost a port engine now too, sir!”
“Dammit!” Mr Pitt crashed his fist down upon the metal railing at the edge of the bridge. “Keep her steady now!”
As the airship hurtled down through the cloud cover, Adam could make out a barren expanse of wasteland stretching out beneath them. It seemed to go on for ever, miles and miles of stony ground untouched by vegetation or wildlife. Then the Quisling banked again, and the flat horizon was brutally shattered by a soaring crag that rose like a clenched fist hundreds of metres into the air. Agelessly forbidding, composed of jagged rocks of black granite, the bluff looked as though it could
support the weight of planets on its shoulders with disdainful ease. At the crag’s summit, a cluster of buildings huddled behind a high, circular perimeter wall. Adam shivered. It was a sight bleak enough to chill his heart.
“The Dial’s in sight, sir!” the navigator called out.
As they tried to plot a course towards a building on the north-eastern edge of the complex, it felt like the wounded Quisling was now entirely at the mercy of the elements. The airship barely crested the Dial’s outer perimeter wall before sinking with alarming speed to a concrete-paved airstrip beyond.
“Thirty seconds until landing!” one of the crew called out.
“Set her down carefully!” said Mr Pitt, through clenched teeth. “Too hard and the fuel tanks will go up, and we’ll all be burned to a crisp.”
He remained standing as the navigators hastily strapped themselves into their seats, his sole concession to the approaching landing a one-handed grip upon the railing in front of him. As Mr Pitt braced himself, he caught sight of Adam out of the corner of his eye.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” he screamed. “Get out!”
Adam bolted out of the doorway and ran back into the lounge, scrambling beneath a table that was bolted to the floor. There was a final, pained splutter, and he heard a panicky voice shout: “All the engines are out!” They were in free fall now; brick walls raced past the windows as they plummeted towards the ground. Adam threw his arms over his head and whispered a quick prayer.
The Quisling hit the ground with a thunderous crash, scraping along the concrete with a high-pitched squeal of metal. The lights went out in the lounge, leaving Adam blindly covering his head as fittings rained down on the table above him. Just as he wondered, through gritted teeth, how much further the airship could slide across the ground, it came to a sudden halt. With a groan the gondola teetered to one side, threatening to topple over completely, before rocking back and coming to a precarious rest on the landing strip.
Adam emerged from beneath the battered table, panting heavily and picking fragments of plaster out of his hair. The lounge – which only minutes earlier had been a study in airborne elegance – now looked like a bomb site. Adam picked out a path through the broken furniture and headed over to the smashed port windows. Careful to avoid the shards of glass protruding from the sill, he hauled himself through one of the windows and dropped the short distance to the concrete below.
The landing strip was shrouded in darkness, hemmed in by high prison walls dotted with blacked-out windows. The only source of light was an orange beam emanating from a tower over to Adam’s right. Craning his neck, Adam followed the beam as it traced an arc through the sky, broadening into a large whirling vortex of air tinged with sparks. When the beam of light abruptly winked off, the vortex collapsed, shrinking to a tiny orange dot before disappearing completely, leaving the sky a flat pond of midnight.
There was a loud clunk and a whirring, and then a battery of searchlights blazed into life around the landing strip, forcing Adam to shield his eyes. Suddenly the air was alive with shouts and whining sirens. “Attention! Attention!” a voice called out, over a crackling loudspeaker. “The vortex has been closed. Power has been returned to the Dial. All emergency crews to the Docking Port immediately!”
In the piercing glare, Adam saw two airmen awkwardly disembarking from the Quisling through a hatch in the Control Room floor; one propped up on the other, his right leg dragging uselessly behind him. Mr Pitt was already halfway across the landing strip, briskly brushing the dust from his jacket as he strode towards a gabled building. Men were running past him in the opposite direction, fire hoses looped over their shoulders and folded stretchers in their hands.
There was movement towards the rear of the gondola, and a door banged open. A small column of children stumbled off the airship, shock etched on tear-streaked faces. As they were herded across the landing area by the guards, Adam caught a glimpse of red hair, and saw Carstairs urging a crying girl away from the Quisling.
“Oi!”
Adam turned round to see a burly man yelling at him.
“What are you doing over there? The fuel tanks could blow at any time! Go with the others!”
Adam’s muscles tensed, urging him to make a run for it. But run where? He was surrounded by sheer walls, and there was nowhere to hide on the flat expanse of the strip. The only way out appeared to be through the gabled building at the edge of the concrete. Adam hesitantly joined the procession of prisoners, rough adult hands shoving him on his way. He passed through a high arched doorway and entered a crowded room alive with the sounds of distress and bewilderment. A hard-faced woman in uniform stood on top of an upturned box and clapped her hands together for attention.
“Listen up!” she called out. “New inmates will present themselves to the guards in the Registration Area next door, where you will receive a regulation prison uniform. You will shower and hand in your current clothes, which we will return to you on your departure from the Dial. You have twenty minutes before transportation to the inmates’ quarters takes place – not a second more. Unless you want to find yourself standing outside in your underwear, I’d advise you not to dally.”
The new prisoners filed through to the Registration Area, forming snaking queues in the hall as they waited to give their names to the guards sitting behind a row of tables. After shuffling forward for a few minutes, Adam was wordlessly ticked off in a register, and he was handed a blue uniform. He was then directed beyond the tables and through into the boys’ showers, where others stood shivering under the icy jets of water. No one spoke. The air was heavy with shock. Adam washed himself mechanically, cleaning the dried blood from his forehead, and slipped on the blue uniform, the coarse fabric instantly making his skin itch.
Gathering his old clothes up into a bundle, Adam walked through into the next room, where more inmates with yellow armbands – trustees, Carstairs had called them – were standing behind the counter of what looked like a giant cloakroom, the back wall covered in a honeycomb of lockers. Adam went up to the nearest trustee, a tall girl his age, her face obscured by long lengths of mousey brown hair, and handed her his clothes. She reached up and placed them in one of the lockers before turning the key and handing it to Adam.
“Take care of it,” she said quietly. “There aren’t any spares.”
Adam looked down at the key in his hand. “Will my stuff be safe in there?”
The girl nodded. “Not that it matters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Unless you’re really lucky, by the time you’ve finished your sentence, all your clothes will have rotted away anyway.”
Adam was still trying to digest that fact when Mr Pitt loomed up behind the girl. She flinched as the guard leaned over her, beckoning Adam forward with a long, bony finger.
“Listen here, Wilson,” he whispered, hissing into Adam’s ear like a cobra. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you. I can see I’m going to have to keep my eye on you. You even think about getting up to any monkey business, and I’ll be on to you faster than you can say ‘infirmary ward’. Understand?”
Adam nodded.
“Good. Now hop it.”
As Mr Pitt turned on his heel, the girl trustee gave Adam a cryptic look. Behind her long curtain of hair she had a pretty face, albeit one shadowed with sadness. Feeling Adam’s gaze upon her, the girl quickly called the next inmate forward. A guard pushed Adam on before he could say anything more.
Outside, in the freezing air, he stopped and stared at the scene before him. The Dial was a brooding complex of buildings – Adam counted twelve in total – arranged in a circle around a yawning black chasm. Adam shivered as he looked down into the bottomless abyss. Although a perimeter wall, reinforced at regular intervals by high watchtowers, ran around the back of the buildings, the only way to cross from one part of the Dial to another appeared to be over the c
hasm along a walkway, which separated into two independent parts at a circular stone platform in the centre of the abyss.
The new inmates were milling around a small patch of land in front of the gabled building, penned in behind a tightly meshed wire fence. There was a gate in the heart of the fence, above which a sign read: “Wing I: Docking Port”.
Reappearing at the head of the crowd, the hard-faced female guard opened a metal box attached to the gate and played with a mechanism inside. There was a loud grating sound, and to Adam’s amazement the two sections of the walkway pivoted around the stone platform, one branch stopping by the Docking Port’s gate as another moved round to the large building to their immediate left. The female guard opened the gate, allowing the children to shuffle tentatively up on to the walkway, peering down over the chasm as they went. They passed over the circular platform and followed the second branch of the walkway to the new building, passing beneath a sign that read “Wing II: Prisoners’ Quarters” as they stepped back down on to solid ground.
A male guard was waiting for them in the doorway to the quarters, passing a powerful torch beam over the prisoners’ faces as they approached.
“Boys will follow me up to floors one and two,” the man called out, gesturing at the building behind him. “Girls will continue upstairs with Miss Roderick.”
The guard marched inside the building, up a flight of stairs and down a narrow corridor, reeling off names from a clipboard as he passed certain rooms: “Davies, you’re in 7a – Roberts and Wilkinson, next door.” Bewildered by the labyrinth of corridors and backstairs, Adam quickly lost count of the number of rooms they passed. Eventually the guard barked, “In there, Wilson!” and pointed at a doorway.
Adam hurried inside the room, which turned out to be a long dormitory filled with rows of bunk beds. Boys were huddling beneath their blankets in the darkness. Every-one appeared to be asleep. The odour of farts and smelly feet was overpowering. There was only one empty bed for him: a bottom bunk in the far corner of the room. Adam threaded his way soundlessly over to it and lay down.
