Pastworld (25 page)

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Chapter 50

Abel Buckland sat in part of the Buckland Corp. headquarters that was very strictly off limits to all but himself and his personal security staff. It was a high-ceilinged room on one of the upper floors. One wall was lit up with a bank of a hundred or so live monitor screens and feeds. Buckland had earlier launched an Espion camera to follow Sgt Catchpole, and Catchpole was no longer alone. With him was William Leighton’s accomplice Japhet McCreddie. Buckland kept the camera moving just behind them. They had found their way to one of the old, boarded-up entrances to St Paul’s Underground station and they appeared to be making a forced entry into the disused station itself. They vanished suddenly into the darkness one after the other. The Espion camera lingered on the blank, open entrance way, hovered there as capering Gawkers and children with balloons streamed past, heading for the fireworks display and the demolition. Buckland shut off the live feed and turned to Inspector Prinsep.

‘We will take my private airship, Prinsep. Lestrade is off on his own agenda, he has a job to do, he will brook no arguments. You and I have someone to rescue. We must go now. Time is of the essence.’

‘But, Mr Buckland, sir,’ said Prinsep, ‘the celebrations start in just one hour.’

‘The fools will have to wait if necessary,’ Buckland replied, getting to his feet. ‘This is a matter of life and death. It is something we have to do.’

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Chapter 51

The Fantom guided Eve in her velvet gown up a further stationary escalator. They walked into a large room at the top of the rusted steps. A man was tied to a chair, watched over by a ragged man with a rifle. He leaped to his feet at the sight of the Fantom. The figure in the chair was suddenly bolt upright too, as if he had just been woken up.

‘Ah, look,’ said the Fantom, ‘they were dozing up here, not enough excitement. Perhaps I can change all of that right now. Come with me, my dear, and meet a very special person in both of our lives. Come on now, don’t be shy.’

Eve and the Fantom stood before Lucius Brown, who looked up at them and then immediately closed his eyes and lowered his head.

‘I’ve met this man before,’ Eve said in surprise. ‘I know him. I made tea for him at home once. He is “the smart visitor”, an old friend of Jack’s.’

‘Yes,’ said the Fantom, ‘that’s right, an old, old friend of Jack’s.’

Lucius looked up at the Fantom. ‘Let me speak to you alone, just for a minute, please.’

The Fantom let go of Eve’s arm and he pulled at the sleeve of Lucius’s coat, tugging it up to reveal the neat little bar code on his inner wrist.

‘Look there,’ he said, ‘the mark of Cain. Dr Jack had one just like it, for security, you see. Now he wants to talk to me in secret. Forgive me, but I will hear him out. Wait for me, dear Eve.’

He gestured to the ragged man.

‘Take her over there and keep her with you for a moment.’

‘Well?’ he said to Lucius when Eve was out of earshot.

‘Is there any way that I can appeal to any part of your better nature to simply let her walk away and vanish again?’

‘My better nature?’ The Fantom laughed. ‘How funny that you of all people, my designer, my maker, my only true father, should enquire as to my
better nature
. You would know my nature better than anyone else.
You
tell
me.
Do I have a better nature?’

‘You might have developed one quite naturally since your freedom. It’s been a long time.’

‘Really, has it? It seems like only yesterday that you and Jack tried to burn me alive, my own dear surrogate parents. Boring, was I? Not enough for you?’

‘Please, there really is no need to harm the poor girl. Surely you have had your fill of killing by now?’

‘She wants me to kill her. It is what she was made for. It will be my apotheosis to kill her over and over again. The odd thing is that each time I kill it is so very different from the time before. The sensation is different, and not only that, it is also very hard to recall. Oh, I can remember the general feeling, but not that precise exquisite moment of the soul’s release. I am told it’s a little like the crisis in the human act of love, but then I wouldn’t know about that, would I?’

‘Love – now that is the word,
love
,’ said Lucius. ‘Hold on to that word, that idea. Eve is in essence your own sister. You should protect her, you should love her, not destroy her.’

From the other side of the ticket hall Eve watched the exchange between the two men, focusing on their mouths as their lips moved. Whispers echoed in little intangible susurrations and flutterings from the tiled surfaces of the old station. Watching their lips every word was as clear to her as if it had been printed on a page. She went cold inside; she felt that she was in a waking dream. Nothing that they said made sense to her and yet all of it did. Then as suddenly she was snapped out of the dream. She thought of Bible J. She saw his smiling face, his crinkly eyes. ‘Love’, the man had just said. That was it. She loved Bible J. It was clear to her now. She must get away and find him.

‘Oh, but I do love her,’ said the Fantom. ‘I have been looking for her these past years, looking and waiting, for that brave, lovely girl that you so cleverly designed for me,
Father
.’

‘I didn’t design her. I merely enabled her, just as I enabled you. I am not her maker, nor your maker, Adam. God made you and her, just as he made me. You have a soul somewhere inside you, a ghost in your machine, I know it. There is good in you despite what you have done, what you might be planning to do.’

‘Oh, Father, it is so touching that you imagine there might be some good in me after all.’ He laid his hand on Lucius’s head. ‘Your other son now, my brother, I wonder where he is tonight as the city celebrates its birthday. Is he at the big party? Will he enjoy the fireworks, do you think? It would be quite something to meet him but so far he has eluded me. What greater present could I have been given though, on this anniversary, than to find her at last, my victim, my true bride in death, my Eve?’

‘She does not need to be your victim. You have a choice, you have free will.’

‘Do I really? Strange then that I feel predestined to please her and she wants me to be her killer. You made sure of that, you and Dr Jack, didn’t you?’

Eve had been watching their mouths. She turned to the ragged man next to her. Her mind was clear now, like a freshly washed pane of glass. She raised her arm in its black velvet sleeve and smashed the ragged man very fast and very hard in the face with her elbow. The ragged man reeled and fell silently to the ground and everything slowed down in front of her, just as the raindrops had suddenly slowed in the forest. There was a shout, but the voice of the Fantom was distorted, was low and slow. She ran away back down the escalator, her feet barely touching the grills of rusted metal. To the Fantom in the ticket hall she had appeared as a dark streak, a whisper, a blur of sudden movement.

‘What did you do to her?’ said the Fantom, caught off guard by the sudden shift in Eve from complacent victim . . . to what, he couldn’t tell.

He put his hands around Lucius’s throat, his face a mask of rage, his eyes burning bright, cold greenish blue. ‘What the hell did you do to her? Why has she run off like that?’

Then he let go.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said in a small voice. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, but how could that happen?’

‘It may be that Jack put something extra in her programming, during all that time they had together,’ Lucius coughed out.

‘She has been dancing high on ropes, for God’s sake,’ said the Fantom, ‘the circus. Thirty feet in the air and never fallen once.
Someone
did something special for her.’

‘I have no idea what Jack might have done,’ said Lucius, ‘and it’s too late now to ask him, you’ve seen to that.’

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Chapter 52

Caleb stood in a still space outside the old Underground station. The ragged man he had been following had vanished here a few moments ago. Crowds of Gawkers pushed past on their way to the fireworks. This was surely the place. He pulled the phone out of his pocket, turned it on and pressed one. A Gawker stopped and looked at him.

‘Look at that. How much have we paid for all this authentic immersion and in the street right in front of us there’s some bastard kid using a damn mobile phone?’

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘I kid you not. Look at him – large as life and twice as ugly.’

Caleb listened desperately to the ringing, over and over in his ear, but there was no reply from Mr Leighton.

He looked up in time to see two large Gawkers coming towards him, about to carry out a citizen’s arrest on authenticity grounds. Time to go. He ducked under the hoarding and fell into a dark space. He rolled down some hard steps, dropping the phone. Then he hit a stone floor and lay there waiting for a moment.

No one followed him down.

He sat up and looked around, his eyes gradually growing accustomed to the dark. He was on level ground, at least. He heard a faint voice crackling from the phone somewhere near him in the dark. He scrabbled around and found it.

‘Hello.’

‘Caleb?’

‘Here.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Underground. An old station, I think.’

‘Can you see anyone?’

‘No, but I can see a staircase going down.’

It was an escalator, only it wasn’t moving. He could see light coming faintly from somewhere below. He stood up and walked to the top and looked down. The steel stairs fell away sharply to another floor way below, and down there was where the light was coming from, a very dim light.

‘I’ll walk down,’ he said.

‘The signal will go,’ Leighton said.

‘I know, but I can’t help that. I must go down,’ Caleb replied.

Caleb started to walk down carefully, his free hand resting on the grip of a pistol just in case. On the next level the phone went dead. He was on his own now. Down here the light was better and he could see through a curved archway to another conventional staircase. He walked down the next set of stairs and found himself on the platform. He had arived at the aftermath of a fierce battle. Smoke was still drifting in a haze over the lights that were strung along the walls of the platform and then further on into the tunnel itself. The station tiles had recently been shattered with rounds of bullets and grenades. Dead ragged men were lying in heaps across the rails at the mouth of the tunnel. The platform was streaked with smears of blood. He could hardly look at the bloodied, twisted men on the tracks. He sat down on the edge of the platform and took a gun out of its holster ready and then waited. He could hear quiet scuttling noises from among the old rails and track systems below his dangling feet: rats arriving among the bodies, and they were not mech ones either.

He sat for a moment trying to make sense of what might have just happened, listening for any sound, anything other than the rats. The rails stretched in both directions beyond the platform into darkness. After a moment or two he heard voices from the tunnel to his right. He stood up and raised the revolver, remembering what Bible J had said, and he held the gun out straight with both hands, his finger lightly on the trigger. He stood at the edge of the platform and waited for what might come out of the tunnel.

Eve dashed on through dark tunnels and passageways. She came to a set of stairs and she took them three steps at a time, racing down as sure-footed as a deer and as lightly as a feather. She found that she could see as clearly as if all the lamps had been full on. She ran fast with no hesitation all the way down another escalator and arrived at an area which opened down on to the train platform.

A boy stood with his back to her, his arms extended, holding a gun towards the tunnel entrance.

‘Caleb,’ she said.

Caleb turned and saw Eve in a black dress standing framed in the platform entrance.

Her eyes shone as if they were lit from within.

‘Eve,’ he said. ‘But how did you get here?’

Before she could answer him a shot rang out from somewhere down the tunnel. Shots came at them from the darkness. Caleb couldn’t see who was shooting and didn’t wait to find out. He ran towards Eve, still holding the gun in both hands. Another salvo of bullets came from the tunnel. Eve reached out, grabbed Caleb and pulled him away into a side tunnel. He stuck the revolver back in the holster and they went back down a short corridor away from the ricocheting bullets.

‘Oh, Caleb, I am so glad to see you. Is Bible J all right? They hit him and left him for dead with Jago.’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him today.’

‘I have so much to tell you,’ Eve said, ‘but there is no time. The Fantom is very close to us and he means me harm, and you too, and yet I . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Oh nothing,’ she said. ‘Come on.’ She ran with him, tried to pull him along at her new speed, but he slowed her almost back to normal. When they reached the top of the escalator, Caleb was propelled by the force of her speed across the floor of the ticket hall. She pulled him up to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I just thought we should move fast.’

‘How do you do that?’ Caleb asked, brushing himself down.

‘I don’t know,’ said Eve. ‘I just can.’

A voice rang out from above them.

‘Don’t move, either of you. It would be a mistake. You see I am holding a very sharp blade to the throat of a very important person, isn’t that right, Eve? Unless I miss my guess, that boy you are with is Caleb Brown, our brother. Perhaps you should tell him who it is I am holding.’

The Fantom walked down the escalator towards them into what little light there was. Caleb saw his father in front of him, with a knife held at his throat.

‘Dad,’ he said involuntarily.

His father could say nothing, but his eyes widened with panic.

‘Yes,’ said the Fantom, ‘it’s Papa, our dada, our father, our pater, clever, clever old Lucius Brown.’ The Fantom reached the final step.

‘I see that you are armed, young Caleb, and authentically armed too, with a fine looking Remington revolver. I wonder where you got that. Not that it matters, because it is time to throw it down now, go on. You, Eve, will not move as much as an eyelash or I will slit this throat here, with some sadness admittedly, but also with some pleasure. Imagine that hot geyser of the familial blood that will wash over us all, will wash us in the blood of the lamb. The gun, Mr Brown, the gun.’

Caleb threw the revolver and it skittered across the tiled floor.

The blade of the knife at Lucius’s throat caught in the light with a dull glint.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’ Caleb said.

Lucius lowered his eyes.

‘Step forward, young Caleb. Let me get a good look at you,’ said the Fantom.

‘I can see resemblances between us all, isn’t this nice? We are a little family and all together at last. I am sure you are puzzled by what I mean. You see, Caleb, your clever father here –’ the Fantom pulled up Lucius’s head so that his throat showed white – ‘
our
clever father, made me, and he made the lovely Eve here too; he made us one for the other. Isn’t that right? Nod, Daddy. Tell him the real truth.’

Lucius nodded his head.

Caleb could make no sense of this; his head swam. His father had a second family, had children; Eve was apparently his own sister; this other figure, the Fantom, was his brother? What did it mean? His father had never said anything about such a thing, even after Caleb’s mother had died. All Caleb could say was, ‘You’re the Fantom?’

The Fantom flipped his free hand back up to his face and it was suddenly covered once again in the black full face mask.

‘I am now,’ he replied.

Eve said, ‘You talk of family, Adam. Well, I have a family already. My family is Jago the harlequin, who rescued me, and Rose the bearded lady and Bible J. I don’t know that man you’re threatening at all. I’ve only met him once when I made him a cup of Assam tea. You seem to have some strange power over me, but you are not my family. Let that poor man go.’

‘You are meant for me, Eve, and for me alone. You raised my hands to your own throat. You know you want me to take your life, to complete the circle. It is built into us, preordained.’

Eve took her chance. She lunged forward suddenly, a black velvet blur, and pulled the knife away from Lucius’s throat. She threw it hard so that it clattered across the floor. Caleb dropped down and rolled along the ground. He got hold of the revolver. He sat up, eyes closed in terror, and pointed the gun to where he imagined the Fantom would be . . . But when he opened his eyes, the Fantom had gone and so had Lucius.

‘He went up to the street,’ said Eve. ‘Come on, Caleb. We will save your father. Our father.’ She smiled her open smile at him and reached for his hand.

There it was again, ‘our father’, he thought. He looked at Eve’s face, her eyes were like his – she really could be his sister – but the Fantom his brother? His father had nodded, had agreed, but then he had had a knife at his throat. Caleb took Eve’s hand and they dashed together up the stairs, Eve’s hand tight in his.