Lionboy (26 page)

Inside it was dark, and the water in there was smelly and scummy—plastic bottles bobbed and Charlie could tell from the smell that there was litter and dirty caked-up foam. That meant that the water stopped somewhere up ahead of them—moving water would not smell this bad. If only the path would continue . . .

It did. Twenty yards inside the tunnel, the ledge suddenly widened out into a stone quay like the ones by the Canal St. Martin, and the water came to an end. Charlie could just make out what looked like a big, round pipe sticking out of the wall ahead of them, dripping weed and smelling disgusting. Drains, Charlie thought. Sewage, maybe. Old, old drains.

An open doorway led into the wall behind the quay. Again, the stonework was old and finely made, but by the look of it, nobody ever came here.

“Stay here a moment,” Charlie whispered to the lions. “I’ll go and see where it leads.” He hoped that the lionesses would catch up to them while they stopped. Catch up and say that the splash was just someone falling in, that the scream was just a scream of getting wet.

Wrinkling their noses and flaring their whiskers at the smell, the lions prepared to wait.

Concentrate, thought Charlie. Be grateful—if he’s in the canal, or if they’ve wounded him, he won’t be following, at least not so quickly . . .

“I’ll be as fast as I can,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Elsina, whose little nose was as wrinkled up as a prune. She lay down on the stone pavement and buried it in her paws.

Through the door was a staircase, cut into the stone.

Up the staircase was another doorway. Through that doorway was a chamber. Charlie silently peered through to see what was there.

It was mostly dark, but there was a dim light coming from somewhere, just enough to show him that the chamber was smallish, grubby, and absolutely filled with trash. But it was not just a dump. It was organized. Three supermarket carts stood in a row, full of bits of old-fashioned wires and plugs and the insides of electrical devices. One corner was piled high with big black plastic bags, some of which spilled pieces of cloth. Also, there was a small, low folding table with a mug on it, and some cushions put there as if two or three people might sit on them to talk to one another. And there was what could have been a bed.

And on that bed was what could have been a person.

And what could have been a person rolled over, and snored deeply, and flung out an arm, which knocked over a tall, ornate glass water pipe. The top fell off and some of the water spilled, and some last embers of tobacco fell out on the floor, sending the aromatic smell of apple tobacco out into the room, and reminding Charlie of the Arab cafés in London, and the delicious pastries made of nuts and honey . . .

Concentrate!

Across the room was a metal gate. Beyond it, the night sky, with the huge road beneath it.

Whoever brings this stuff in here must bring it in from somewhere; must have access to the outside. Access on foot—something other than the overpass, which no one could walk on.

Charlie turned back down the stairs. Maybe the mothers would be there. Maybe they’d have caught up.

They weren’t. They hadn’t.

He said to the lions: “Come on. There’s someone up there, but he’s asleep. Wait in the doorway and I’ll see if I can open the gate to the outside.”

His heart was beating fast as he led the lions back up the stairs. They coiled themselves in the doorway, just out of the light, and silently waited for him, their eyes lazy but their whiskers alert. As he stepped out into the dim, grubby room, Charlie felt very strongly his responsibility to them.

It was difficult to cross that room in silence. There were things all over the floor, and there were dark corners and curious shadows, and there was the scary snoring figure, and there was very little light. It wasn’t really Charlie’s fault that he stepped on an old rollerskate, then fell into a pile of scrap metal and hit his head, and yelled, and that the sleeping man woke up screeching. And it certainly wasn’t Charlie’s fault that the lions glanced at one another, and then leaped as one from the doorway to the man’s bedside, where they surrounded him, staring down at him, their claws out, their eyes intent, their fang-filled jaws hanging open, growling, ready to pounce.

“Stop it!” yelled Charlie.

The poor man shrieked and shrieked. The oldest lion put his paw on the man’s chest and roared. It worked. He stopped shrieking and started gibbering instead, but this was at least quieter.

“Stop it,” said Charlie. “Please.”

The lions looked around.

“You’re scaring—” He had meant to say “You’re scaring him.” It came out as “You’re scaring me.”

Elsina looked at him sideways.

The oldest lion flicked his whiskers.

“Sorry,” said the young lion.

Charlie thought quickly.

Then he went over to the mangy bed.

“Taisez-vous,”
he said. It means shut up, but he hoped by putting in the polite form of
“Taisez-vous”
instead of
“Tais-toi,”
the man might realize that he didn’t mean to be rude.

How silly. There with three lions on his chest, the man would not be worrying about manners.

“We are a nightmare,” he said. “You mustn’t tell anyone about us. Do you want to get rid of us? Tell us where the road is. Then we can go there. How do we get to the bridge?”

The man, who was not very old, and had a pleasant face as far as could be seen beneath his abject terror, could not speak. He tried to—he seemed to want to, but though his mouth moved and his tongue flapped, no noise emerged.

“Lions,” murmured Charlie, “perhaps you should get off him for a bit.”

The lions withdrew, and lay like a circle of sphinxes a few feet from the man.

He looked up at Charlie and blinked and swallowed.

“Take your time,” said Charlie. “But not too long. We’re in a hurry.”

The man looked back at the lions. And back at Charlie. When he spoke, finally, it was in Arabic.

“But they’re Moroccan!” he shouted.

“Indeed,” said Charlie, a little surprised that the man should know such a thing. “So what?”

“So am I!” shouted the man. Having regained his voice, he now seemed unable to control it. Fear does funny things to people.

“Salaam alecum,”
said Charlie. “Now how do we get to the bridge?”

“Left out of here, up the staircase, and it’s on the left,” the man said, staring and clutching his blanket to him. “The gate is open.”

“Thank you,” said Charlie in Arabic. “
Alif Shukr.
A thousand thanks.”

“One is enough,” said the man, wild-eyed, as the lions trooped past him, out onto the deserted, silent, midnight riverbank.

Charlie had hoped that if anybody saw them, they’d think they were a trick of the light, a cat, an urban fox. “That cat looked
huge,
” they might say. “Did you see it?” But the cat would be gone, and the night would be still again. Yet from the shadows at the top of the staircase, they could see that it was still too busy for them to cross the bridge on the pavement.

On the outside of the bridge’s wall, there was a ledge. It was much the same width as the ledge alongside the river, and it was several hundred feet up in the air.

“We can use that,” said the oldest lion.

Charlie looked at it. If he fell, he would tumble into the cold river, or bash his head on the white stone bridge, or drown, or have a heart attack.

The lions made themselves as flat as flatfish and slithered over the wall. Charlie just held his tongue between his teeth and repeated the words “I have no choice, I have no choice.”

Just in time he realized that of course he did have a choice. The lions, it was true, couldn’t be seen wandering the place without being picked up and taken back, but nobody would question a boy crossing a bridge. Why should they?

“See you on the other side!” he hissed, and ran and jumped across the bridge, doing cartwheels and backflips, just because he could, and because he was so scared, he would do anything to pretend that he was not.

CHAPTER 18

T
he Chief Executive smiled at them. He was short. He had springy hair and pinkish gray skin and a very clean white shirt. He looked extremely ordinary.

He’d had all their bindings removed. “No need for that kind of thing,” he’d said in a voice that suggested he was surprised they had been used at all.

“Now,” he said. His desk was very big. “You know why you’re here.”

“No, we don’t,” said Magdalen. She wasn’t feeling too well.

“To work with us!” cried the Chief Executive.

“We don’t want to,” said Aneba.

“You don’t want to complete research on your asthma cure in a calm and happy environment, with all the money and help you need, and the promise of plenty of investment in the future?”

“Oh!” said Aneba. “Is that what you’re offering? And there we were thinking you’d kidnapped us and brought us here bound, gagged, and threatened because you know full well we wouldn’t cooperate with a bunch of crooks like you.”

The Chief Executive looked hurt. “Doctor,” he said, “the Corporacy works for the advancement of mankind! What could be more marvelous than a cure for this dreadful scourge of asthma, which torments our children and blights their futures? We have for years been making the drugs that treat asthma and give the little ones some relief—but how much better to cancel out asthma forever!”

Magdalen gave a low, nasty laugh.

“Tell me,” she said, looking up suddenly. “How much money do you make each year from asthma drugs?”

The Chief Executive made his hurt look again, but she kept talking. “And how much do you expect to make from a cure? Which would be better for your profits—a one-off cure, or continuing to sell medicine for the rest of time? Do you want to use our cure? Or do you just want to make sure nobody else does?”

She started coughing.

The Chief Executive veiled his eyes. “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it,” he murmured.

Magdalen threw up.

The Chief Executive raised one eyebrow and lifted the telephone.

“Miss Barakat?” he said. “The professor and the doctor seem to be ill. May I suggest a visit to the Wellness Unit? They don’t seem to be very well at all. But nothing we can’t sort out, I’m sure. Nothing a couple of weeks of treatment won’t solve.”

He put the phone down and smiled.

“I’ll see you in a couple of weeks then,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to working with you!”

The lionesses easily, swiftly followed the scent the others had left. They negotiated the ledge and terrified the Moroccan, and they were just about to set out on the ledge across the river when something extremely peculiar happened.

At that moment, Charlie and the lions were at the other end of the bridge. They only needed to cross a small square, Place Valhubert, and the station would be just there to the left. But as they hesitated at the far side of the bridge, waiting for a quiet moment to cross, they heard it too.