Hello Darkness (15 page)

“Let’s move onto the guinea pigs. Where are they?”

“Inside a fat man.”

This time it was a punch. Luckily Bosola was a coward and knew that a punch to my eye socket or chin would hurt him, so it landed on my cheek. It wasn’t fun, but it didn’t do me any damage.

“The chickens?”

“That was a fox, dummy.”

“Someone cut the wire to let the fox in. That was you, wasn’t it?”

I shrugged. I was bored. My mind was elsewhere. I thought for a minute I might be able to imagine away Funt and Bosola, that maybe I was just having a rest here in the quiet of the sick bay, a refuge of calm from the sound and fury of school life.

But some things you can’t imagine away.

“He’s off again, boss,” said Funt. “Look at his eyes. Someone’s blown out his pilot light.”

“OK, that’s it. I’m going to get his attention. The chief said leave no marks, but screw that.”

From what felt like a long way away, I watched Bosola reach into his pocket and take out a gleaming brass knuckle-duster. It had a certain brutal beauty, like the obsidian knives the Aztecs used to cut the hearts from their victims. It caught and reflected the harsh light. Like … like a cat’s eye in the night.

“I’m going to punch you now, in the face. Not sure exactly where yet. If I go for your mouth, then I’m afraid those pretty teeth of yours are going to be embedded in the back of your skull. If I go for the jaw, then the bone’s gonna crumble like dried-up poodle shit.”

He pulled back his hand, like Robin Hood drawing his bow.

It was time to do something. I’d been working on my fetters, but my hands still weren’t free. I wrenched and twisted, but there was no way out.

I shut my eyes.

WHICH
meant that I missed the good bit.

Some part of my brain might just have registered the sound of the door opening. Dumb, really, of the two clowns not to have locked it. What my brain certainly registered was the sound of a goon being strangled. That and the fact that I wasn’t wearing an imprint of Bosola’s knuckle-duster on my face.

I opened my eyes. Bosola was going purple. There was a feathery scarf around his neck. The ends of it were in the finely manicured hands of Emma West, aka Dorothy, aka the Queen Mother. Two other Queens had a hold of Funt and were squeezing the juice out him. In slightly different circumstances he might have enjoyed it. Right now he wasn’t enjoying it one bit. In fact, there were tears rolling down his cheeks and he was making a sound like a dying buffalo.

One of the Queens doing the squeezing was a giant marshmallow that I knew by instinct must be my old friend Sophie. Sophie was big and pink, with fizz of curly blonde hair that also had bigness and pinkness in it. I was very glad that whatever it was she had been going to do to me back in the drama studio remained undone.

The other Queen was Hart, looking as effortlessly distant as ever.

Before Bosola passed out, Dorothy pushed him away, using the feather boa to spin him like a top. He rotated into a corner and slumped there like an oversized, pooper-scooped bag of dog waste.

“Well, sugar,” said Dorothy. “Looks like we arrived in the nick of time.”

“Another thirty seconds and I’d have been eating teeth. So, yeah, thanks.”

While I was speaking, Sophie and Hart were disentangling me from the chair and helping me up.

“Let’s get gone,” Dorothy said, looking with distaste at the resuscitation dummy and the two goons. “This place gives me the heebies. Reminds me too much of home.”

Leaving Funt and Bosola to nurse their wounds, we hit the corridor. Luckily the Shank was still safely in his room, waiting, no doubt for his Inquisitors’ report. But as we went past, the Principal’s door suddenly opened, and Mr Vole appeared, as crumpled and disoriented as ever. He looked successively at the three Queens and me, and seemed to have a new level of mystified bafflement for each one.

“Er … ah … urm…” he managed, before Dorothy swept up to him, air-kissed him with a loud
mwah
mwah
, added a quick, “Darling, adore the hair. Love to stay and chat but the last dress-rehearsal beckons” and then swept on, carrying us in her slipstream.

“I don’t mean to show a lack of gratitude,” I said as we strode along, “but, well, why?”

“Why help you? Isn’t it obvious? You were supposed to be tracking down whichever lowlife is putting our show at risk.”

“But I thought you suspected me?”

“Perhaps I did. But let’s just say you made a certain …
impression
at our last meeting.” She cast a sidelong glance at Sophie, who responded with a blush so deep you could sink a battleship in it. She looked down and twisted her hands together and screwed one toe into the floor.

“Sophie’s a little on the shy side,” Dorothy continued, arching one eyebrow in a way you’d have to say was pretty cool. “But she knows how to show a boy a good time. If you ever wanted some company…”

“I’ll take a rain check,” I said, a little too quickly, and then felt like a heel. So I gave Sophie a soft look and added, “I’ll buy you a coffee when this is all over.”

You’d have thought it impossible, but her blush took on an even greater intensity. Like on a U-boat hiding on the bottom from the patrolling destroyer, rivets were starting to pop.

Suddenly a thought struck me. Rat Zermatt, talking about “she” with that edge of terror in his voice… I’d always assumed that the “she” was Zofia, paying me back for hiding those guinea pigs.

“It was you, wasn’t it? The warning. About the hit…?”

Dorothy shrugged. “You were batting for us. I didn’t like the thought of that cute nose of yours getting all bent out of shape.” As she spoke, she reached out and touched my nose. It was my turn to blush.

“And besides,” she continued in a grimmer tone, devoid of all flirtation, “anything Paine and the Lardies were mixed up in had to be wrong.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I added.

So, I’d been wrong about Zofia. If I had a guardian angel, it was blowsy, loud-mouthed drama royalty, not my enigmatic emo. How many other things might I have been wrong about? Since I’d been born, we were probably up into the zillions. I was also thinking that since I’d stopped taking my pills things were getting clearer. I was seeing things that I missed before. Making connections.

“But,” I continued, “I don’t think the Lardies are at the bottom of this. Paine was on a commission. You got any idea who set it up? If we find that out, then we’ve got our guy.”

She shook her head.

“I had Hart here keep a look out for you. He heard nothing. But then a rumour came through the vine. I don’t know how it started… You got any leads?”

I thought again about the Dwarf and what he’d told me. Played it over in my head for the thousandth time.

“Just got a cryptic crossword clue, and I suck at crosswords.”

Emma West smiled. “Hart’s good at puzzles. Why not run it past him?”

I looked at Hart. He was looking at nothing.

“Well, it’s kinda goofy.”

“Look around you. It’s a goofy world we’re in.”

“OK.”

So I sort of chanted, trying to get a laugh:
“The higher power, the smiling god, the benevolent devil. The lost queen
.
Paracelsus in his laboratory.”

I was watching Hart as I spoke. As I’ve said, he wasn’t so much a closed book, as a book with nothing but blank pages. But I thought I saw something written there now. Just an indistinct pencil line, there for a second, and then erased. What was it that got him – the queen? The laboratory?

He made a little rippling movement with his shoulders, like an armless man trying to scratch the back of his neck.

“This isn’t like a crossword clue,” he said, “where you have all you need, and there’s only one answer. It’s just vague … ideas, suggestions. But, I don’t know, the higher power sounds like the Shank. And Paracelsus, well, he was a doctor and alchemist and that could sort of be Mrs Maurice, who’s the nearest thing to a lab junky I know.”

He was hiding something. He hadn’t mentioned the queen. I looked at Emma West again. Certainly a Queen. Was she mixed up in this in ways I couldn’t fathom? Was it some political power play? Was she using me, just like the others? It made no sense.

My thoughts never got anywhere because at that moment we had a pleasantly distracting bit of comic theatre. We were on the stairs by now. Suddenly Hart, who was ahead of us, let out an extraordinary scream-cum-yelp and leapt into the accommodating arms of Sophie. Sophie was strong enough to carry three Harts, but the shock made her stagger, causing her to miss the step. She began to topple backwards, still holding Hart in her arms like a doll. I braced myself and caught her. Even then we’d probably all have ended up in a broken heap at the bottom of the stairs had Dorothy not added her surprising strength to the battle. Sophie regained her balance, but Hart still wouldn’t climb down. He had his head burrowed in Sophie’s ample bosom.

“Bug,” he whimpered, “bug.”

And then we saw it: an admittedly quite impressive cockroach was scuttling back and forth on one of the stairs. Dorothy tutted and kicked it into the stairwell. She looked at me in an exaggeratedly world-weary way. “He’s such a cry-baby when it comes to creepy-crawlies.”

The cockroach was big enough for me to hear a faint click as it landed a couple of floors down. A faint click that rang an even fainter bell somewhere in the back of my mind.

“Got to go,” I said. “Something to check out.”

THE
link connected me back to the beginning of this whole mess, and the sound of chopsticks being dumped in the bin. But even as my brain made that connection, another thought hurtled in, and demanded, like a spoilt child, to be attended to first.

I ran out of the building and across the schoolyard. The chicken run stood empty and forlorn, like a memorial to some forgotten atrocity. I was praying that no one had been in there to clean up the mess yet, and for once my prayers were answered. The beak, open in silent accusation, was still there. The blood. The feathers.

I scanned the run. There were small, fluffy feathers everywhere, along with some of the longer, flight feathers from the chickens’ wings. Then I saw what I was looking for. I’d first seen it just before the mini-riot kicked off that morning, but didn’t take in its significance. It was a feather, but one that had never been attached to a chicken. I lay down on the ground and reached in through the hole cut in the wire. At full stretch my fingers found the feather. I slipped it into my wallet.

A few seconds later I heard the bell sound for the end of the day. I hadn’t realized the time.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls
, said the Dwarf. Today seemed to have both just begun and yet to have lasted a lifetime. I went to wait outside the school gates.

It wasn’t long before I saw her. She was with one friend, a girl called Jiao. Jiao was as plain as Ling Mei was beautiful, and she’d always thought I was a scumbag. Still, it could have been a lot worse. I really didn’t feel like fighting all of Chinatown right now.

Ling Mei gasped when I stepped out from the shadows.

“I just need a second.”

Jiao made a kind of screeching noise, and then began to curse me in Cantonese. I put my arms up in a soothing gesture, but it didn’t stop her from aiming a vicious kick at my shins. Then she ran off back towards the school. I reckoned I had two minutes before she came back with reinforcements.

“Please, Ling Mei – the day you lost your chopsticks, you said anyone could have stolen them. But my guess is, it was someone sitting behind you. It’s the easiest way. It’s what I’d do if I wanted to take something from your bag. So who was sitting in the row behind you that morning in registration?”

Ling Mei shook her head sadly. But I could tell she was trying to remember.

“Why don’t you just leave this, John? In fact, why don’t you just leave full stop? You need to start fresh somewhere. Somewhere without a history. Some place where everyone doesn’t hate you. Where they don’t know about your past, about the time you were ill.”

I won’t pretend those blows didn’t hurt. They were low, and they detonated like mortar bombs in my guts. But I could take a blow, even a low one.

“
Who
, Ling Mei,
who
?”

A sigh. And then, “Right behind me there’s Steve Sutcliffe. Behind to the left, it’s Paul Ehrlich. Behind to the right, Julia Walsh. Happy?”

No, I wasn’t. I was expecting another name. It showed on my face.

“Did they have to be behind?” Ling Mei asked, showing a flicker of interest.

“Yes … well … I don’t know. Which side was your bag on?”

“You forgot already. Is there anything you remember about me?” For the first time in a long time, the ghost of a smile.

“You’re left-handed. So it would be on the left side. Who sits next to you there?”

“Nicholas.”

“Nicholas? I don’t know a—”

“Hart. Nicholas Hart.”

Something made me look back towards the school. They were coming. Jimmy was leading the pack. Ling Mei saw them too.

“Run,” she said.

I had no control over what came next. If I
could
have controlled it then it wouldn’t have happened, because I knew it was dangerous for her.

I leant over and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips parted and she kissed me back. I could have stayed like that for the rest of my life, and I had the feeling that she felt the same way. Which is why I had to stop.

I whispered into her ear. “Push me away and slap me. Make it look like I forced you.”

“No.”

Her tears were on my cheek.

“Now, or I’ll wait here until they kill me.”

A sob clawed its way out of some deep cavern within her.

“Ling Mei, please…”

And then she slapped me, and fell to the ground. I wanted more than anything on Earth to stoop to help her, to hold her, to be with her. But to help her would be to damn her, and so, with the jeers and threats of Jimmy and his gang ringing in my ears, I fled like a coward into the dusk.