Organ Music (5 page)

‘Shut up!' said Winnie Finney. ‘I'm on the phone.'

‘Snarlarium! Fang-Fang!' yelled David, inventing desperately. Bullets! Yes! He was certainly firing those words out into the room and once he had turned them loose, Quinta had the power – a sort of ghost power – to use them as actual weapons. He certainly wouldn't have been able to invent words, let alone fire them, if he had drunk that drugged coffee. He glanced at the pot plant and saw that the poor thing had collapsed and tumbled out of its pot. Meanwhile Harley was struggling to stay awake. But then Harley met his eyes and made a clumsy gesture. Clumsy or not he was trying to point to the door. Within himself, David heard music – the same music that had haunted the corridor outside.

‘Fire the words!' Quinta ordered him. ‘Send them through me. I'll give them dominance – I'll give them substance. I'm nothing but a dream now ... a sort of dream ... but I'm a dream set free, and free dreams have power.'

‘Yes! Yes! Call a team together!' Winnie Finney was saying, but he was starting to stammer a little. ‘Call a ... call ... call ... ' Then he stiffened, dropped the phone, and swung around to stare at David.

David immediately began trying to remember all the fierce words he knew. ‘Avenge! Avengalatum!' he shouted – remembering, then inventing.

Winnie Finney took a step towards him.

‘Avengalatum!' hissed Quinta, an echo that only David could hear, and the word flew from her like a bullet from a gun.

Winnie Finney stopped and stood staring at David, swaying as if he had been struck. Behind him, Harley seemed to revive a little, sitting up in his chair, then standing unsteadily.

‘Devastation! Bashaboutabit!' screamed David, and felt Quinta seize his words and fire them at Winnie Finney, whose knees began to tremble. The words were knocking him about. Harley looked just as unsteady on his feet, but David could tell at once that Harley had a plan. He must keep Winnie Finney from turning around.

‘What are you trying to say?' Winnie Finney demanded. ‘Speak clearly!'

‘I am a master of words,' David was thinking fast. ‘Destructosaurus!' He began to chant:

Destructosaurus!

Ichthyosaurus

Tyrannosaurus
Rex!

Harley was almost at the door, staggering but silent.

‘Oh no!' Winnie Finney said softly, staring from side to side as if voices came from all directions.

Harley!
thought David. Harley, even drugged and stumbling, was joining in the crazy chant, and the ghostly Quinta was using it to absorb all Winnie Finney's attention. Perhaps there were other voices, too, that David couldn't hear, though the room seemed to ring with echoes. People might have died in this room, but now David's words were bringing some part of them to life again, and those voices from the past were growing powerful.

Behind Winnie Finney, Harley struggled to turn the key in the lock.

‘Dastardly! Diabolical!' cried David. ‘Snarlopendous! Gnashgnash! Gnashgnash!' He hissed these words ferociously, and Quinta seemed to spin, arms wide, gathering the words and gaining strength from them. Winnie Finney threw up one arm as if defending himself from a blow.

Then two things happened: Harley pushed the door wide, stumbling then falling through it, and Winnie Finney's face grew pale, the colour of uncooked pastry.

‘You!' he shouted. ‘You're dead. Don't you look at me like that! My little girl was worth a hundred of you. You know very well that since she died, I've
helped
humanity – those that deserved it. I've only used villains and useless wretches of the world. Humanity's garbage!'

Quinta was looking at him fixedly. David could only see the red stubble on the back of her head – a skull sprinkled with cayenne pepper.

‘You're being paid though, aren't you?' she said to Winnie Finney. ‘You don't give our parts away. You've made a fortune.' She tilted her glasses so that she and Winnie Finney stood, apparently, eye to eye.

Winnie Finney screamed like a tormented man.

Fool! Stupid fool!
thought David.
Go on! Set us free!
‘Fall down!' he shouted aloud. ‘Roll over!' Winnie Finney dropped obediently to his knees.

‘Come on!' Harley was scrambling unsteadily onto his hands and knees. He called in a strange, thick voice, ‘Now!'

David leaped between Quinta and Winnie Finney toward the door.

‘Funny, though! I can see right through you!' Quinta was saying, laughing a little as she spoke. ‘These boys here – I'm using their energy, their
force
, their
words
as weapons. I'm working through them.'

Winnie Finney screamed again.

David paused in the open doorway. He couldn't help it. He had to know what would happen next.

‘Come
on
!' yelled Harley, already trying to turn the door handle.

As David watched, a slow, dark slug undulated over the curve of Quinta's cheek. As if she were about to speak to him, she turned her head slowly towards him. Light struck the slug, showing it a rich, thick red colour. With her dark glasses still tilted up on her forehead, she looked directly at him.

Quinta had no eyes. They had been cut out of her head. Below those two ragged caves her smile was horrifying.

‘Rubbish off the street!' screamed Winnie Finney, rolling on the floor at her feet. He had wriggled back against his desk. ‘I gave your eyes to someone who uses them properly – a wonderful artist.'

Quinta laughed. ‘I don't hold it against you,' she said. ‘How can I? After all, you have my heart. Frozen!' She let the top of her coat fall open. Her bare chest was revealed, like some sort of winter seed pod, cracked open and empty. ‘My heart and more besides.' She wrenched the coat wide. The whole body it had concealed seemed to split open, tumbling tubes and pieces that nobody could use – that nobody had wanted – on to the floor between them.

Winnie Finney writhed and struggled, collapsing still further, as if air were escaping from him.

‘Oh, what a piece of work is man,' said Quinta. ‘Woman, too!'

‘Come on!' yelled Harley from the doorway.

Winnie Finney began gasping as if he would never get air into his lungs again. His heels beat up and down on the floor, kicking over his rubbish basket. Crumpled paper spilled out as if it were anxious to be free. His hands slapped the polished boards in desperation. His gasping gave way to a kind of wet, dirty gurgling. At last he lay still.

Quinta carelessly patted her dark glasses back into place. Smoke was rising behind her. David thought it was part of her ghostliness – a special effect with dry ice, perhaps.

‘He could have done with a better heart himself, couldn't he?' she remarked. ‘I don't suppose I
was
much, back when I was alive, and probably the people who wound up with my eyes, my liver, my kidneys – all my bits – made better use of them than I would have. But I reckon you ought to offer your own eyes before you start volunteering other people's, don't you? I was determined to get him. But until you two walked in and I found someone who could believe in ghosts, nothing worked. I really pulled myself together when you two came along. And Scag, that guy with the tats, Fabrice and Finney did the same thing to him that they did to me – turned him into a desirable product hooked up to machinery so they could use pieces of him when they needed to. But they're both dead themselves now. And now I'm off. I don't know what comes next, and I don't care. Whatever it is, it'll be a good change.'

As David stared, Quinta grew transparent. She became nothing but patches of colour in the air. Her dark glasses, hiding the empty eye sockets, hung on for a little, staring out at the world. Then she vanished.

‘Come
on
!' yelled Harley again. His voice was thick and strange. ‘I'm going to go to sleep if I don't move. Come now!'

Suddenly David realized that papers on the floor were blazing. Winnie Finney had kicked the contents of the rubbish basket into his heater. The basket itself was on fire, and the desk was starting to burn. The room began to fill with smoke, along with a nasty smell of melting plastic. David coughed and spluttered as he turned and ran, smoke following. Behind him the flames leapt higher.

We'll never get out
, thought David, but suddenly, like blessings from above, overhead sprinklers came on. David toppled himself forward, falling beside Harley. Smoke was curled after him.

‘This way,' mumbled Harley. ‘Ground floor.' But he just stood there, doing nothing.

‘Don't go to sleep!' yelled David, getting back onto his feet and shaking him. ‘Not now! You can't! You didn't drink all that coffee. You spilled a lot of it.'

Smoke shifted in the air around them. It almost seemed as if Winnie Finney's ghost was moving in the air around them, anxious to escape. Then David, peering past Harley, made out a shape blurred with darkness, just ahead of them.

‘There's someone waiting there,' he coughed. ‘Someone huge!' David's heart seemed to stop beating for a moment, but then he remembered. ‘It's that statue!' he cried. ‘The door must be somewhere over there.'

And it was. Moments later they were out of the great white spaceship-building, standing on a street. People were running towards them.

‘Where can we hide?' hissed Harley, but these people were not interested in them. It was the smoke billowing through overhead windows, the flicker of flames inside the building that had caught their attention. One man saw them, slowed down and stopped.

‘What's going on? What have you done?' he asked.

‘We haven't done anything,' said David, and for that moment, at least, it seemed quite true. An enormous relief was taking hold of him. It began in the pit of his stomach and moved up through him as if coals inside him were giving out black smoke like the smoke billowing through the second floor windows. Harley fell on his knees and then lay on the ground, and David, feeling the outside world blur and close in on him, tumbled down beside him. Somewhere out in the distance a robot wolf began howling – and then another one. Fire engines must be on the way.

‘Dr Finney – that man Winnie Finney – wasn't a medical doctor,' said David's mother, perching on the side of his bed. ‘He was some sort of engineer specializing in very sophisticated automated machines for use in forestry operations. Unfortunately, something terrible happened to him. He was a widower with one child – a daughter whom he adored – and this poor girl had a faulty heart. She was on a waiting list for a transplant operation, but while she was waiting she died, and apparently her death pushed Dr Finney over the edge, as they say.'

‘Anyhow,' said David's father, ‘when that overseas conglomerate bought a share of the Willesden Forest Research Centre, he made contact with some rather peculiar people and, to cut a long story short, began running a very unpleasant business inside the Willesden Research Centre. They operated –'

David cried out as if the word suddenly horrified him.

‘– I mean they really did operate – sometimes here, sometimes in Australia or Singapore. They had several bases. The medical teams came into the country as tourists, and would wind up at the Willesden Forest Research Centre. Meanwhile, Winnie Finney developed his strange car, and he and Dr Fabrice collected people off the street.'

‘When can we get out of hospital?' asked Harley. ‘Not that I'm in a hurry,' he added quickly. His big sister had been to see him once, but his father had not been in at all. David thought Harley must be feeling deserted.

‘You both seem well recovered from the drug Winnie Finney gave you in the coffee, but they want to keep an eye on you for one more night. We'll collect you both tomorrow,' said David's father. He hesitated, then glanced at his watch. ‘Actually Harley, your mother is flying in from Melbourne at this very moment.'

There was a short silence.

‘What's she coming for?' Harley muttered at last.

‘She was dreadfully upset when she heard about your adventure,' said David's father. ‘I know it won't be easy for you, but I think you should try hard – very hard – to be nice to her. And we've arranged for you to stay with us for a few days. I understand your father is having a hard time at work – at least, he's too busy to look after you properly.'

‘Ha!' said Harley. ‘He's sick of me. He wants a different sort of kid.' David could see he was struggling not to cry. ‘I'd like to come, though,' he added quickly. ‘And – and it'll be okay, seeing Mum again, I mean.'

‘It's because of her you knew about that organ music,' said David. ‘And that music was partly what made Winnie Finney see Quinta.'

‘Quinta?' asked his father. David and Harley looked at one another and fell silent. The two brain-dead young men had been found in the room off the mortuary, but there had been no sign of any other victims. For some reason Quinta was a secret that could not be talked about – except between themselves.

‘David ... ' Harley said when David's parents had gone, after hugging both boys and promising to collect them as soon as possible. Harley almost never used David's name. Usually he just said, ‘Hey you!'

David looked over at him.

‘She ... she sort of saved our lives twice over, didn't she?' Harley said. ‘Quinta, I mean.'

‘Suppose so,' said David. ‘I think if we'd got into those beds and gone to sleep ... well, we wouldn't ever have woken up again. First she stopped Dr Fabrice and then she stopped Winnie Finney.'

‘She sure did,' said Harley, shuddering.

‘Lucky for us the firemen were true forestry people – nothing to do with any international syndicate,' said David.

‘Lucky for us they called the police,' Harley exclaimed, but he was not really thinking about their escape. ‘I know all that. But listen! Before Quinta frightened Winnie Finney to death she said she could only be seen because we believed in ghosts, didn't she? She somehow worked through us. And we worked through her. You sort of slung words ... like, powerful words ... at Winnie Finney and she – she somehow gave the words extra power – ghost power. They hit him like bullets.'

‘I don't believe in ghosts,' sighed David. ‘I keep on telling you that. Well, I suppose I just might believe in them in a sort of way from now on, but I didn't believe in them last night. I've never believed in them.'

Harley sighed as well. ‘I do,' he said simply. ‘I always have. I pretended I didn't, because people, you know, my father and sister and other people – you too – always slung off at me.'

David thought about this.

‘Well,' he said at last, speaking rather drowsily, ‘you believe in ghosts and I read about them. It's part of the same thing, I suppose.'

But Harley did not answer. He had fallen asleep with his hair sticking up like the crest of a startled cockatoo.

And within another minute David had fallen asleep, too, and as he slept, his strong heart beat regularly, and his good lungs breathed smoothly. Every bit of him was working perfectly. And he was so tired that no terrible dreams disturbed his sleeping. He would dream, of course – dream forever – but the dreams would come later.