by Nick Green
He told them about the face-off with Mum, the memory rising as a physical pain, a cramp like needles down his arm. ‘And now I can’t do it. The one time I tried pashki after that, there was nothing there.’
‘What do you mean, “nothing there”?’ Yusuf said shakily.
‘The Mau body, or whatever you want to call it. It’s gone. I can remember the moves but it’s like, I don’t know, trying to write with your left hand. It doesn’t feel right.’
‘You’re just out of practice,’ said Daniel.
‘It makes no difference. The point is, you think I can lead you on some crazy rescue mission when I can’t. You think I’m a cat warrior with superhuman powers, and I hate to disappoint you, but I am Ben Gallagher, a thirteen-year-old pinball addict with a headache, and I am not leaping any chasms tonight, tomorrow, or ever again!’
He stood, miserably defiant, in the middle of the studio. Tiffany might be in desperate danger but he couldn’t help her. Nothing they said to him could make him feel more guilty than he already did.
‘You know what I think?’ said Yusuf at length.
Ben shrugged.
‘I think you’re afraid.’
‘Really? Why would that be?’ Ben exploded. ‘Those men are insane. They don’t care how much pain they cause anyone else. Yes, Yusuf, of course I’m afraid.’
‘No.’ Cecile looked at him in a strange way, as if seeing things no-one else could. ‘Ben, he’s right. We’re all frightened of those men. But you’re afraid of something else.’
‘Like what? Spiders?’
‘Of what you can do. Of pashki. Your Mau body hasn’t disappeared. It’s just that you’re keeping it locked up. Ben—’
He shut his eyes. ‘Do you really believe I wouldn’t help Tiffany if I could?’
‘Fine,’ said Susie. ‘We’ll go without you.’
‘You won’t come back,’ said Ben softly.
For a moment he thought he’d got through to them.
‘Maybe,’ Yusuf answered at last. ‘But I nearly didn’t come back from that day in the woods. And Tiffany saved me. So if you don’t mind, Ben, I’ll do my best to return the favour.’
Opening the window Yusuf peered into the night. Olly hesitantly tapped his shoulder.
‘Er, Yusuf?’ he said. ‘Maybe we’d better take the stairs. Just…until we’ve warmed up.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Think about this!’ Ben pleaded. Yusuf ignored him, herding the others into the hallway.
‘We may score only one out of ten as heroes, Benny,’ he remarked. ‘But that’s way better than zero. Oh—one more thing. You might feed the cat while we’re gone.’
The door slammed behind him. Ben was alone in Mrs Powell’s flat. He sighed. They would come slinking back. As soon as they understood what they were dealing with.
A spider-web tingle settled upon his neck. As if he were being watched. He whipped around. Jim padded into the studio and considered him in a bored, oh-it’s-you sort of way. Ben let out his breath. He followed the cat into the kitchen and poured dried food into its bowl. Jim jumped onto the draining board to lap the tap.
He bit his lip till it bled. There was nothing he could do.
Aimless wandering took him into a small lounge, with a magazine table, a television and a lonely sofa. He picked up a newspaper but it was several days old. And it was hard to read the smaller text because… because the curtains were drawn and the room was pitch black. He grabbed at the lamp and light filled the room, revealing sofa, television, table. He froze. Had he just imagined seeing the words before the light came on? He must have. He couldn’t have been reading in the dark.
His watch told him it was after ten. Mum and Dad would be worrying. He switched on the television.
‘…in St George’s, Bermuda, where hurricane Dianne continues to wreak devastation,’ said a newsreader.
She wouldn’t be on again. It wasn’t a big story, one vanished girl. And what if this had nothing to do with Stanford and Cobb? Perhaps Tiffany really had walked out of a family argument and hidden at a friend’s house. She was probably back at home this very minute, with hugs and tears and cocoa.
‘East London police are widening their search for the missing schoolgirl Tiffany Maine,’ said the newsreader. ‘This afternoon her family made another emotional appeal for her return.’
Ben’s finger trembled over the off switch. A young boy, chubby around the face, sat in a wheelchair. He gazed glassily out of the screen.
‘I want, er, to ask anyone who knows where my sister is,’ said the boy, ‘to please tell someone. Tiffany. If you’re watching…please come home. I’m sorry about what happened. I’ll stop taking that medicine if that’s what you want.
‘I miss you. Mum and Dad miss you. If you come home you can have all my playing cards—’
Ben stabbed the power switch so hard that the television toppled and crashed to the floor. There was a yowl of terror. Jim, who had been lurking unnoticed in the corner, sped past him, brushing his calf. A violent shock thumped up his leg, as if he had touched an electric fence. The cat vanished into the hall. Ben knelt, rubbing the feeling back into his thigh.
Tiffany. Tiffany had been kidnapped. She was in mortal danger. What in the name of Anubis was he doing here?
He ran into the empty studio. The last of Olly’s pashki uniforms lay in a heap. He pulled it on, heedless of where he flung his own clothes. He glimpsed his phantom reflection in the window. Something was missing.
Opening the last closed door he found Mrs Powell’s bedroom. The single bed was an unmade mess. In her wardrobe he found a face-print he had not seen before, shaped like a cat’s head, carved from a single chunk of ebony and set with yellow stones. He daubed the velvet pads with paints from the dressing table and pressed the mould on, wondering at the almost perfect fit. A picture hung above the mirror. Pasht, the Egyptian cat goddess, flanked by hieroglyphics. Ben could not read them but he knew what they said.
I heed no words nor walls...
He eased the print off his skin. Contours of black and red writhed on his cheekbones, drawn into the Mau pattern like flames up a chimney. He felt the rhythm of the words like a distant drum.
Through darkness I walk in day…
He lowered the ebony mask and a feline face stared out of the mirror, its eyes glowing with a dim amber light.
And I do not fear the tyrant.
NO WAY IN
How much time had he wasted? If something happened to Tiffany because of him…Pashki skills he thought he had lost forever were returning fast, his legs and arms re-learning each movement of their own accord, but anger at himself spurred him on even faster. Only when he skidded down a sloping roof and nearly plunged off the edge did he force himself to slow down.
The factory lurked beyond the fever-glow of streetlamps, a scab of darkness festering on the skyline. As he sprang from gutter to gutter his muscles complained like kids in September, pressed back into work after weeks of idleness. He took another spill on a patch of loose tiles, for one terrifying moment Ben again, an ordinary boy, messing around on a rooftop for some lunatic reason that his grieving family would never discover. Then his Mau body flickered back on, catching him like a safety harness.
Soon only a trace of human heaviness remained. It felt the same as when Dad had refitted his old bike with racing suspension. Barely fifteen minutes after he had leapt out of Mrs Powell’s window, he was scaling the chain-link fence where his home had once been.
The crane stood sentry like an evil bird. Four tiny figures were just visible against the factory’s dark screen. A fifth ran from the shadows.
‘No luck?’ Yusuf’s voice.
Daniel shook his head. ‘This place is a fortress. It’d be easier to get in to watch Arsenal. I dunno…maybe Ben was right.’
‘Maybe he was talking gunk, as usual.’ Ben stepped into the midst of them, feeling his face redden with shame under the paint. Instantly he was mobbed with slaps on the back and some
one let out a soft cheer, sounding strange in that grim place. He shooed them off, shaking his head in mute apology.
‘So what’s happening?’ he asked. ‘Are we going in after her or what?’
‘That depends,’ said Yusuf. ‘Look.’
He’d never asked the most obvious question. How would they get inside? All the factory’s windows were boarded over, some of them with brand-new planks. Daniel had already scouted all around the building for hidden entrances—there were none. Even the fire escape that he and Tiffany had used was now firmly locked. It was as if the occupants were determined to shut out every last glimmer of light.
‘And no handy ventilation shafts,’ Yusuf added, ‘before you ask.’
‘But there’s got to be a door,’ said Ben. ‘How do they get in and out?’
‘They have these new-fangled inventions called “keys”,’ said Olly.
Ben felt more powerless than ever. Could they really be thwarted by just a few feet of brick? Rumbling city silence pooled around them, a voice that whispered It’s no good. Give up. Go home. The high walls mocked him and the building site seemed to join in, a JCB laughing at their plight with frozen jaws, the crane’s wrecking ball hanging motionless overhead like the pendulum of a stopped clock.
Tiffany licked her arm where the needle mark still smarted. This time it hadn’t been a sedative; Cobb had taken a blood sample, though she’d managed to take one from him in return while he struggled to hold her still. With his good right hand now wrapped in a bandage, the scientist had become so fractious that even the dogs were giving him a wide berth. He had set up a microscope at the far end of his office and was now peering at slides, mixing liquids and dripping her blood onto bits of paper and acetate.
‘How long are you going to take with that?’ Stanford, eyes raw from lack of sleep, prowled back and forth.
‘As long as is necessary.’
‘Sorry I asked.’
‘There are particular substances, certain triphosphates, that one only finds in feline blood,’ Cobb explained, as if he thought Stanford would be interested. ‘If the girl has them, I must keep her for future study.’
‘And if not?’
‘Then she’s no use to me,’ said Cobb. ‘So we can do it your way.’
Tiffany clutched the bars of her cage, using all her strength to see if they might bend. Some hope—they’d been designed to imprison jungle cats. Of her two impending fates she couldn’t tell which would be worse: to be executed, or to live on as Philip Cobb’s laboratory animal. A sudden, chilling vision of herself, years from now, a full-grown woman, wasted away in this very same cage, riddled with wires and tubes, hit her so vividly that her stomach convulsed. There was nothing to bring up. Since that flimsy sandwich she hadn’t eaten at all.
Escape, she had to escape. But it was impossible. Beyond Cobb’s private space the factory was still crawling with those green-suited guards, and she couldn’t even get out of this metal box. She covered her face and wept. Mum and Dad would never know what had happened to her. Stuart would grow up thinking it was all his fault. That was the worst thing of all.
Memories tormented her. Visiting her brother in Lion Ward, the joyful weeks he spent at home, cheering him up with silly talk when he had to go back. All the family together touring Battersea Dogs’ Home to find a cat, immediately choosing Rufus. Rufus going mental inside his new cat carrier, scrabbling his forepaws through the grill and actually dragging the whole thing along the floor, making her parents roar with laughter…
Suddenly Tiffany was staring across the office. At the desk where Cobb usually stowed his keys. It was maybe fifteen feet away. No more.
Could she?
Tiffany made sure no-one was watching. Hardly daring to try, she stretched both arms through the bars of her cage. One by one she summoned her catras, running through the sequence faster and faster, pouring her will into her fingertips. She got a grip on the floor and heaved. Her hands stayed fixed. Her forehead and shoulders pressed against the bars. She pulled until her temples throbbed.
The cage moved two inches.
Tiffany lay still, shattered. All that effort for so little. She’d never make it as far as the desk, never even get close. Wearily she let her eyes wander around. No-one was paying her any attention. Cobb was bent over his microscope and Stanford was singing tunelessly to himself. They would have to peer over boxes to see her.
Just two inches. But that meant two inches less to travel. With nothing better to do, she tried again. Clawing at the ground for another agonising minute, she dragged the cage another inch. On her next attempt she hit a smoother patch of floor and managed to move her prison the length of her forearm.
Suddenly the desk looked closer. Suddenly she didn’t feel so spent. In her mind’s eye she saw the key to her cage, snug in the desk drawer. She saw herself sneaking it out, fumbling it into the lock. And then… She would do it, she decided. She would do it or drop dead from exhaustion.
‘Surely that’s inconceivable…’ Cobb was whispering to himself. ‘So the change isn’t physical.’
‘Progress?’ Stanford gloomily inquired. Tiffany threaded her arms back into the cage and pretended to sleep.
‘Quite the opposite. It appears,’ Cobb stroked his chin, ‘that there’s nothing to find. Her blood is ordinary. Human, type B positive as it happens, but quite normal. She’s no more cat than you are.’
He strode to his filing cabinet.
‘And I was so hopeful. Well. So be it.’ Out came his handgun. He slapped a fresh cartridge into the grip. For Tiffany the world went grey, like rain and fog, with only the jet black gun piercingly sharp at its dead centre.
‘We’re finished with her, John. Care to do the honours?’ Cobb glanced at Stanford in an amused way. ‘Ah, you’d rather not. Don’t have the courage of your convictions, that’s your trouble.’
He approached the cage. Tiffany stared up at him, unable to move or think. No, this wasn’t right. She’d been going to escape. This couldn’t happen.
‘You were a funny thing, weren’t you?’ said Cobb. He cocked the gun’s hammer.
‘No,’ whispered Tiffany. ‘P-please. Doctor Cobb, don’t do this. You don’t have to.’
‘It’s not personal,’ said Cobb. ‘It’s common sense.’
‘Philip, please! Why are you doing this?’ Tiffany wailed, as the gun barrel seemed to swell and swallow her like a tunnel. ‘I know what happened to you. I know how horrible it must have been. It doesn’t have to make you do things like, like, oh, please, James, James, don’t kill me!’
‘Do shut up,’ said Cobb.
There was a deafening bang.
CAT AND MOUSE
Cobb stared upwards as the noise shook the factory, the gun still clutched, unfired, in his bandaged hand.
‘What was that?’
‘Thunder maybe…’ It was clear from Stanford’s face that he knew it wasn’t. For a start, thunder wouldn’t have sent a cloud of brown dust drifting down at the far end of the hall. His dogs leapt to their feet.
An insane wave of hope surged over Tiffany, making her head swim. Cobb rounded on her and his gaze was pure poison. ‘I’ll deal with you later.’ He shouted at the top of his lungs. ‘Frank! Round up the men. Protect the equipment. She wasn’t alone!’
Dropping through the hole in the roof, Ben twisted to see the crane’s wrecking ball rebound into the night in a puff of twinkling glass and plaster. He rolled aside to let Yusuf, Susie and Cecile jump through the caved-in skylight. The crane’s slender boom tilted away, as if in salute, the steel ball swinging like a conker.
‘Get clear of the hole,’ Yusuf panted, as a slate fell close to him.
Ben scrambled across the rafters, feeling cobwebs brush his face. Fate, it seemed, had a weird sense of humour. It wasn’t just that Daniel’s father had driven the crane that destroyed Ben’s home. Or that, having sat beside his father many times in the cab, Daniel had a fair idea of how the machine worked. It was that Daniel knew the
combination for the door of the builders’ mobile cabin—and that in the cabin was the key for the crane.
‘Do you think they heard us come in?’ murmured Susie sarcastically.
Cecile laughed shakily in the darkness. ‘Well, we tried knocking.’
Yusuf waved through the hole. The two figures in the crane’s cab gave thumbs-up signs. Olly had decided that Daniel needed someone to keep him company, and had quickly volunteered (‘I’m not an avenging angel. I’m a graphic designer.’)
‘Ugh.’ Ben peeled a web out of his hair. ‘I knew there’d be spiders.’
What kind of room had they broken into? He could only have described it as a kind of loft. On either side were great water tanks, sitting askew in a mesh of mangled piping. The air smelled of decay, the rafters of the floor sagging ominously. Ben almost put his foot through a fissure and glimpsed a metal walkway below.
Cecile took a sharp breath. ‘Someone’s coming.’
‘More than someone.’ Yusuf lay flat to peer through the hole in the floor. Running boots clanked. ‘Below us. Three or four of them.’
‘Everybody hide.’
‘No, Ben, they’ll trap us. We’ll have to rush them.’
‘Where’s a wrecking ball when you need one?’
The footsteps slowed, very close.
‘We know you’re up there!’ shouted a voice. ‘Down! Or there’ll be trouble.’
‘They’re bigger,’ said Yusuf, ‘but we’re faster. We’ll distract them. You try and slip through.’
‘That’s not fair on you—’
‘Argue about it later, Ben!’
Yusuf jumped with all his weight on a gap between two rafters and the flimsy plaster broke. He plunged, tearing a hole, and Susie dropped after him. Holding his breath, Ben stamped hard on a wide crack. For a moment all was choking dust. Arms wrapped around his head, he struck the metal walkway sooner than expected and the shock made his spine go numb. He crumpled, coughing out grit.
