Starcross

by Philip Reeve

  Naturally I shrieked, and dropped Delphine’s pistol. The horrid goblins leered and chuckled, surrounding Jack and I with their carbines raised, and prodding us with the muzzles. Delphine just stood laughing at my discomfort.

  ‘Oh, Miss Mumby,’ she said, ‘your face is a perfect picture! Did you really think that the French Intelligence Service would send me here without the means to defend myself, or take Starcross by force if it seemed needful? Do please take care to keep your hands raised, and to make no sudden movements. You are a prisoner of the Legion D’Outre Espace.’

  Chapter Eleven

  In Which Myrtle Explores a Long-Lost Wreck and Is Not Much Encouraged by What She Finds.

  Here I must ask Mr Wyatt to provide you with a sketch or etching of some sort (overleaf), for I can barely describe in words the ugly faces and squat, lumpish persons of our captors, nor the strands of multi-coloured wool which protruded, for some reason, from every flap and pocket of their knapsacks!

  I had thought from the first that Mrs Grinder seemed an odd sort of person, and I believed her odder still when I saw how many footprints she left upon the sea-sand, but I should never have guessed that she was made up of quite so many dwarfish legionnaires. Impertinent little beasts they were too; I suppose they were weary of being so long contained inside that black bombazine dress, and felt inclined to make the most of their new freedom to dance about making fun of people’s bathing costumes and prodding the inflatable parts thereof with their bayonets in the hope of popping them. Fortunately, the Nereid proved more than a match for French steel! 14

  At last the duplicitous Delphine called them to heel, and drew our attention back to that ancient ship, which lay there in the canyon looking as silent and derelict as some ruined castle, with ghost-jellies drifting in and out of its various holes and hatches, and Martian ivy growing in dense clumps about its hull and upperworks.

  ‘The USSS Liberty!’ said Delphine, gazing in such a rapt way at it that she looked quite transfigured, like a saint in a picture. No doubt it had sentimental value for her, having once belonged to her grandfather. I remembered how touchy Jack Havock had been on the subject of his own tatty old aether-ship, so I refrained from making any comment about the Liberty’s condition, and followed meekly as Delphine and her goblin soldiers hurried through the knee-deep sand towards her hatch.

  Even if it had been locked, we should have had no trouble gaining access, for dozens of gaping, splinter-fringed holes pierced the old ship’s planking, where broadsides had smashed into her during the Battle of the Asteroids. And yet Delphine’s soldiers hesitated before we went aboard.

  ‘Looks haunted,’ said one.

  ‘Sure to be,’ agreed another.

  ‘Ghosties and goblins and Tebbits,’ muttered a third.

  Delphine looked vexed, as any young woman might who found her servants so reluctant to perform a simple chore. She set her hands upon her hips and scowled at them and said, ‘There are no such things as ghosts, and you are goblins yourselves, so I don’t see how they can frighten you. And whatever is a Tebbit?’

  ‘Ooh,’ muttered her soldiers all together. ‘Ooh, a terrible thing, Miss …’

  ‘A haunter of caves.’

  ‘A night-hopper!’

  ‘Big as an armchair!’

  ‘Smells like damp corduroy!’

  ‘Bite your head off soon as look at you!’

  ‘And it eats wool! Nibbles and nobbles it! Unpicks and unstitches!’

  Delphine gave a cry of irritation. ‘Ach! So that is all that troubles you, is it? Well, if a Tebbit does lurk within this ship (which strikes me as most unlikely) I shall more than recompense you for any wool it nibbles. Indeed, I shall offer an extra fifty yards to the first man to follow me aboard!’

  At which the goblins gave her a rousing cheer, and began fighting among themselves to be the first through the hatch behind her.

  In their haste they forgot Jack, and it was left to me to help him climb in after them. I suppose you will say that we should have taken the opportunity to escape, but neither of us thought of doing so. I think we both felt drawn to that ship, old and filthy and shattered as she was; in all the worlds of the Sun she was the only artefact yet built by human hands; she was as out-of-place in that era as ourselves, and we felt that we belonged aboard her.

  ‘But I do hope Wild Will Melville and his crew are not waiting to pounce upon us,’ I said, as we climbed inside.

  ‘I reckon they’re long dead,’ said Jack.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I exclaimed. ‘Then I hope we shall not find skeletons! I am always exceedingly alarmed by skeletons!’

  ‘Dead bones can’t harm us, Myrtle,’ Jack said boldly, and went limping ahead of me into a great cabin filled with the voices of Delphine’s legionnaires.

  The light poking through the shot-holes in the hull filled the place with the most confusing shadows. Delphine’s goblins charged about, overturning baskets and opening lockers, searching, I suppose, for treasure. One found an old spaceman’s jersey, and held it aloft with a hoot of triumph, crying, ‘By the flashing needles of Grodqol the Mighty!’15 Another, upon opening a trunk to find nothing but a few frayed strands of greasy wool and a papery mass of moth pupae, stamped his foot and let out dreadful curses, crying, ‘Tis like the Nibbling in there!’16 Delphine ignored their ill-discipline, and glided serenely past them, gazing about her at the interior of her grandpa’s ship, and Jack and I went after her, up a stairway which opened on to the main gun deck.

  It was deserted. An upturned bucket rolled across the planking, squat space cannon sat watch at every gunport and ramrods stood like winter bulrushes in racks beside them … but there were none of the dead men I had feared.

  ‘It was quite a feat of aether-faring, bringing her all that way in such a wretched state,’ said Jack, in a hushed and reverent tone. ‘She must have had a good captain and a sturdy crew.’

  ‘But where are they?’ I wondered. ‘What has become of them?’

  We moved on through tight passageways, looking sometimes into the cabins which opened off them. In several we saw men’s clothes laid out upon the bunks and hammocks, as if ready for them to put on when they rose from their sleep – but the men themselves were nowhere to be seen.

  We looked into the galley, where a cauldron of stew had dried and solidified. ‘Well, they did not starve,’ said Jack, jabbing his pistol at a heap of lemons in a bowl, shrivelled to hard, brown shells like outsized walnuts. ‘And wherever they’ve gone, I’d say they left in a hurry.’

  Something moved, startling me and making Delphine whirl round with pistol raised, but it was only a shadow slipping across a bulkhead. I was pleased that I was not the only one to be afraid of my own shadow!

  ‘Moooob,’ sighed the rising wind, muttering through chinks in the planking, stirring the ropes of a mouldy old hammock.

  We crept on, whispering like visitors in a cathedral, until at last we found our way into the captain’s cabin at the stern. The wall of windows, which must once have looked out over the Liberty’s wake, was gone, and the ragged gash where they had been was patched with timber and sheets of taut tarpaulin. A heap of clothes lay on the bunk. An upturned tea chest made a table. There was a candlestick set upright on it, but the candle had burned out long ago, leaving nothing but ribbons and puddles of wax. On a pewter plate beside it sat a half-eaten hunk of bread and a glass with an inch or so of red dust in its bottom, which might once have been wine. A thick book lay open on the floor beside an upturned chair. A fallen inkwell had let out a splash of ink across the whitewashed deck.

  ‘Oh, what happened here?’ I whispered, and I’m ashamed to say my voice sounded exceeding shrill and fearful.

  Delphine circled the room, opening doors that led off into other cabins, but finding nothing there.

  ‘Will Melville was eating his supper, and writing up his logbook,’ Jack reasoned, studying the dusty tableau before us. ‘And something happened that made him leap up. He knocked the chair over.
The logbook fell, knocking over the ink pot … He ran from the cabin …’

  ‘And he never came back,’ I said. I picked up the book. Page after page of neat entries, in an old-fashioned, swirling hand. Then something written more urgently, underlined with an inky splatter … But what it said I could not see, for all over that page had been stamped what looked like tiny, sooty handprints.

  ‘Sacre bleu!’ said Delphine suddenly, (which I believe is something rather blasphemous in French). She was staring at the heap of garments which lay thrown across the bunk. ‘It’s just like the clothes in the other cabins. Look!’

  I had sensed that there was something strange about those mounds of clothes we’d glimpsed all through the ship. Now I saw what it was. If Wild Will Melville had just thrown down his clothes before changing into his night attire, why would he have taken the trouble to stuff his shirt inside his tunic, or tie a stock around his shirt collar? Why would his stockings still be trailing from the tops of his boots? Why would his glove be wrapped like that around the hilt of his sword, which lay in the shadows beneath the bunk?

  ‘He vanished from inside his garments!’ I cried. ‘They all of them did! They disappeared, and there is nothing left of them but the clothes which they stood up in!’

  ‘That is not possible,’ said Jack. ‘What could cause such a thing?’

  I looked at the book, at that frantic pattern of tiny handprints. I rubbed at one with the tip of my finger and it smudged. I rubbed harder, using the side of my hand and the cuff of my bathing costume, and soon wore a gap through which I might just make out the words scrawled upon the page: the final entry in the Liberty’s log, which those strange little prints had all but obliterated.

  They are aboard the ship!

  They are at the door!

  THE MOOBS! THE MOOBS ARE COMING!

  Heavens, is it not almost unbearably exciting? Yet I do find Myrtle can become quite trying after a few pages, so I shall return you to my own narrative for a time, and we shall worry about her later — A.M.

  Chapter Twelve

  In Which Mother and I, All Unaware of the Perils Which Face Poor Myrtle in Pre-History, Pay a Visit to the Boiler Room, There to Meet with the Author of Our Misfortunes!

  I awoke rather pleasantly, with my head in Mother’s lap, while she sang to me one of her ancient Martian lullabies, which sound like a tuneful breeze sighing across an unusually musical sand dune. For what seemed a long time I lay in that delicious, drowsy state, not quite dreaming and yet not properly awake. And then I started to realise that the strange sensation I could feel at my wrists and ankles was the bite of cords which bound me hand and foot, and that the odd, ebbing scent I could smell was that of medicinal chloroform, and all my memories of our abduction came flooding back to me.

  I struggled upright with some difficulty, and Mother said, ‘Please, don’t be alarmed, Art.’

  She was bound as I was, and sitting on a hard floor of reddish stone, with her back against a wall of the same unpromising material.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said, my mouth dry and full of the taste of chloroform.

  ‘I have not long been awake myself,’ said Mother, ‘but I suspect we are in the boiler room beneath the hotel.’

  ‘And Myrtle?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Was she not chloroformed along with us?’

  ‘I do hope not; she would doubtless have thought it most unladylike. I have not seen her since I regained consciousness, so perhaps she escaped safely.’

  ‘But why have they brought us here?’

  ‘I imagine they are going to ask for my help with their boiler,’ said Mother. ‘It looks somewhat familiar, don’t you think?’

  I had been looking at her face till then, and could see nothing besides but more red rock, where two walls came together behind her to make a corner. At her words I twisted myself about so that I could see what manner of place we had been dragged to.

  It was large and shadowy, more cavern than basement, and I recalled that Starcross had once been the site of many mines, and guessed that the hotel had stood above one of them. In one place a flight of metal stairs went up steeply to a door, which I supposed must lead into the hotel itself. In another, a lesser cavern opened out, sealed off from the one in which we sat by thick glass doors. It held tables and workbenches cluttered with a great many brass microscopes and other instruments, and many retorts and stoppered flasks in which mosses and seedlings appeared to be growing. And in the centre of the cavern stood a veritable mountain of machinery. My eyes crept over it, struggling to understand what it might do. I saw wheels and flanges, pipes and ducts and cables, mysterious upside-down pyramids and strange hanging spheres … And slowly, as I took it all in, I started to realise that it was familiar.

  ‘Heavens above!’ I exclaimed. ‘It is our old gravity generator from Larklight!’17

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Mother. ‘Naughty Sir Waverley! He assured me he had destroyed it, but it seems he simply removed it secretly to Starcross and rebuilt it. Or tried to rebuild it. He has made rather a mess of it. Clearly Mr Titfer has found a way to make it convey us through time.’

  ‘Then your people knew the secret of travel in the fourth dimension?’ I asked. ‘Larklight was a time machine?’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ said Mother. ‘I don’t believe Shapers ever tried to travel in time, particularly. It’s rather a complicated business, and can be quite dangerous. But gravity and space and time are all connected, you know. I suppose the poor old engine still wants to move, and since I disabled the parts that make it move through space, it moves through time instead. That must be the cause of these strange temporal effects: the sudden appearance of pre-historic bits of seaside, the hauntings, etc.’

  ‘But those occurred long before the machine was set here!’

  ‘Yes, Art, but the machine was still the cause. When it was switched on the surge of energy shattered time, like a spike driven through a mirror. Now there are all manner of rents and passageways drifting about this part of space, leading into all sorts of eras. No doubt most are very tiny, and perhaps stay open only for a second or so, but others, such as the one which transports this hotel into the Martian past, are both stable and sizeable …’

  Footsteps echoed among the aisles and cloisters of the ancient device, and our captors appeared.

  ‘Those villains!’ I cried angrily.

  ‘Well, at least they are properly dressed,’ said Mother.

  ‘But Grindle and Nipper and Mr Munkulus! I thought they were our friends!’

  ‘Don’t feel too betrayed, Art,’ Mother said. ‘They cannot help themselves. I believe there is something very strange about those hats.’

  ‘Yes!’ I gasped, remembering. ‘There was one in my closet! It tried to leap on me!’

  Mother looked concerned. ‘Oh, Art! You must have been terribly frightened!’

  ‘Not a bit,’ I said bravely. ‘I had forgotten it, what with being chloroformed and kidnapped and all.’

  They were almost upon us, and Mrs Spinnaker was with them now, also wearing one of the black top hats, and looking every bit as blank and glazed as the others. It was clear that what my mother said was true; they were not in control of their own thoughts or actions.

  The only hat present which looked like the work of a decent, earthly hatter sat on the head of Mortimer Titfer. He walked ahead of the rest, with a sort of triumphant smirk upon his fat red face, and as the others stopped he stepped forward, removed his topper, and sketched a satirical bow.

  ‘Mrs Mumby!’ he said, in a voice full of false friendliness, his black ’tache and whiskers bristling with self-satisfaction. ‘And Master Art!’

  ‘Mr Titfer!’ said Mother, sounding as old and cold as space itself. ‘Where is my daughter, sir?’

  ‘Myrtle slipped away somehow, along with that villain who calls himself Ignatius Flint,’ said Titfer. ‘But they shall be tracked down by my machines.’ He tossed his hat aside and hooked his thumbs i
n the pockets of his waistcoat. ‘Of course,’ he went on conversationally, ‘Titfer is not my real name. I have had to sail under false colours to set up this place, and to distribute my hypnotic hats to those I wished to influence. Why, even my whiskers are but a cunning disguise. Observe!’

  So saying, he tore off his black whiskers to reveal a smaller, more gingery set beneath. Mother and I looked blankly at him, for he clearly felt he had performed an amazing transformation, yet we neither of us had the faintest idea who he was.

  ‘What?’ he cried. ‘Don’t you know me? Well, perhaps not. I haven’t had my picture in The Times or any other journal these past few years, thanks to your friend Havock. My name is Sprigg. Sir Launcelot Sprigg, former head of the Royal Xenological Institute!’

  ‘That villain who wanted to dissect Jack, and Ssil, and the Tentacle Twins!’ I exclaimed.18

  ‘The very same,’ said Sir Launcelot. ‘And a deal of trouble it would have saved everyone if I had been allowed to go ahead and do it. But never mind. Soon I shall be the most powerful man in the Empire, and then we shall see some fun, eh? Then those fools in Government will tremble, and regret dismissing me from my position, and letting that mongrel sky-pirate Havock make a laughing stock of me!’

  ‘And was it in your time at the Royal Xenological Institute that you came across these mysterious living hats?’ asked Mother sweetly.

  ‘Oh, the RXS knows nothing of them,’ chuckled Sir Launcelot. ‘A small colony was found here on Starcross a few years ago, when my family were shutting down the mines. I was able to hush up their discovery. Thought they’d come in useful, and so they have. They disguise themselves as headgear so that they can sit on the heads of higher animals and feed upon the electrical impulses generated by their brainwaves. It appears to do the host no lasting harm, but while the hypno-hat is feeding they are in a state of trance, and terribly suggestible. Watch this.’