Pastworld (26 page)

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Chapter 53

Once out on the street Eve and Caleb caught sight of the Fantom pulling Lucius through the crowd. They followed, one pair just behind the other, dodging and tucking into doorways, sometimes holding back, sometimes moving forward. The Fantom hurried up a rising street and veered off suddenly and Eve caught sight of the two locked figures stumbling down towards the side of a towering building. It was surrounded by hoardings which were plastered over with ‘Grand Demolition’ notices. There was a wide cordon sanitaire around the base of the building, where the Fantom had stopped. Eve held Caleb back in the shadows and they watched as the Fantom looked around, waited a moment and then prised open a door in the surrounding fence. Caleb looked down at his hand clasped in Eve’s. It felt right to be holding it, as if he were protecting her, like a sister, and she were protecting him. She turned to him and they looked up together to the top of the tower. The huge building loomed over them. Its iron bones showed dark black against the misted sky. There were two airships docked near the top.

After waiting for a moment they followed the Fantom in through the fencing and a gaping entrance way, then set off together up the wide staircase, which was in almost complete darkness. The darkness did not slow Eve down; indeed she seemed to welcome it as if it were her natural habitat. She seemed able to see everything as clearly as if it were daylight and she held Caleb tight as she ran upwards.

The sound of swift bootsteps echoed down from higher up, as the Fantom climbed somewhere above them.

The Fantom crossed a landing dragging Lucius with him. They reached the dark upper hallway. The floor was densely covered with dust and sharp fragments of old cement and plaster. The hall was lit with a series of low emergency lamps left by the workmen. Their light revealed boxes and huge explosive charges piled one on another, tools and trestles, huge metal barrels, sledge-hammers and damaged internal walls with more charges laid in the supporting pillars. Then the Fantom felt something by his feet, a flicker of movement. He looked down at the large brown sentinel rat, its eyes red, its tail swishing. ‘Restricted area,’ it said in its flat mechanical voice. ‘Restricted area.’ The Fantom lifted his foot and then hesitated. He thought of the man he was holding around the neck: had Lucius made him in the same way that someone had designed and made this mech rat? He looked at the rat up close. The mouth was open and working, its little jaws moved up and down, the voice repeated its mantra over and over. He looked closely into its red eyes and then he heard the sudden sound of someone clapping and the Fantom lifted his head. Abel Buckland stepped out of the shadows in front of them.

‘Nicely done, my dear special Gentleman,’ said Buckland. ‘You showed restraint. You could easily have crushed that poor sentinel of ours into oblivion as you usually do and have done before, but you are, I see, growing, becoming sympathetic. Don’t go too soft on us, will you? Of course you won’t. You are as impetuous and as reckless as ever,’ he went on. ‘We missed you recently. I wondered where you were, and then you dealt with that unfortunate ragged colleague of yours and left his head on top of the tower up here. This place is like a magnet for you. Come on now, Adam, and Lucius, my old friend, just come with me.’

The Fantom stared at him with his bright piercing eyes. ‘You’re here to finish me and my black-hearted father here,’ he said, holding Lucius closer to him, an arm thrown protectively around Lucius’s throat. ‘You are trying to keep me from Eve, have been all these years.’

‘No, I’m not,’ Buckland said with an attempt at a reassuring smile. ‘Far, far from it. I’ve found you. Aren’t you the least bit curious as to how I managed to be here waiting for you, my boy? You’re a very clever young man. I wonder how on earth you think I did it?’

‘I have no idea,’ said the Fantom, one hand now clamped firmly across Lucius’s mouth.

‘I have been following you since very early this morning using some of these,’ Buckland turned on a powerful torch and the bright beam picked out several needle-thin Espion cameras floating in among the dust motes and debris of the corridor.

‘You see, my boy, I try to keep watch over you just as a good godfather should. I am not as authentically of the past as I make out. Privately I use the new technologies when I have to, and I don’t mean steam power. I am your true father, Adam – you were always my idea. Lucius here contributed and poor Jack helped. They were your enablers, but I conceived the idea of you,’ said Buckland. ‘Come on, three more floors to the roof and safety for you both. I fear that the forces of reaction are biting at our heels. Lestrade is even now acting to destroy your ragged men. It is too late for them, but not for you two. Come on, both of you, now.’

Outside in the night sky two airships hovered near the roof, one a Buckland Corp. passenger vessel, the other a smaller security model. Both were tethered by taut anchor wires to the girders of the exposed roof. Buckland walked towards the edge of the building and raised his arms up. He turned to the Fantom and Lucius. ‘Soon one more of my dreams will be realised. There will be a double celebration. You have come back to us and this hideous building is to be finally destroyed, blown from beneath us in a huge fireball.’

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Chapter 54

Sgt Charles Catchpole and Bible J made their way through the dank tunnels towards Moorgate station. The police lamp lit their way effectively enough. It also lit up the wildlife, the scavenging rats, the skittering mice, even one or two feral cats who seemed to thrive in the musty disused spaces.

Catchpole spoke to Bible J quietly as they walked, weapons drawn. ‘I have learned something about this Fantom, something very disturbing,’ he said.

‘What, that he cuts people up and takes their hearts out? I could have told you that.’

‘No, about the real nature of him. The person himself.’

A shot rang out from the tunnel ahead of them. Catchpole turned out the lamp and dived down amid the filth between the tracks. A wavering light was coming from ahead, spilling over the curved vault of the tunnel. Distorted shadows soon followed, looming over the curved brickwork – armed men, several of them too, by the look of it.

‘Ragged men,’ said Catchpole. ‘Keep still, lie low.’

Three ragged men appeared at the turn of the curved tunnel. They slowed as they entered the straight stretch. They shone their lantern around and in a moment the beam picked out Bible J, who was still defiantly standing up, his two pistols raised straight out. The lantern moved away and then almost immediately swung back on to him, but from his position flat among the steel rails Catchpole took careful aim with his rifle at the lantern. He knocked it out in one clean shot and the tunnel was plunged into darkness again. Bible J fired wildly with his revolvers at where he thought the ragged men had stood. Answering fire followed; bullets ricocheted from the walls, one buzzing past Catchpole’s head like a wasp. The three ragged men retreated back down the tunnel. Catchpole laid down a barrage of fire with his rifle. The sound echoed and rolled deafeningly around the tunnel walls. They sounded like an army, especially when he stood and bowled a grenade further down the tunnel at where he supposed the ragged men were running. The explosion knocked him back among the tracks with compressed force; fragments of tiles and bricks clattered around them.

‘That’s it,’ said Catchpole. ‘He’ll know we’re coming now. Let’s move on. Are you all right, young man?’

‘I’m fine, ’cept I can’t hear any more.’

They moved further down the tunnel, picking their way through shrapnel and twisted rails.

They met no more opposition on the tracks, no stray ragged men anywhere further down the tunnel. Instead of gunfire there was now a sort of deafening and uncanny silence which seemed to fill the dark tunnels all around them. Then there was a warm wind and a roaring sound and the clattering of wheels. It sounded exactly like an underground train heading for them, but here the tracks were plainly unused and indeed had not been used for years. The clogged dust at their feet remained undisturbed. Catchpole hurried on ahead in case he had to head off some approaching danger. He arrived at the junction of two tunnels in time to see a line of brightly lit Underground train carriages rattling towards him, sparking on clean electrified tracks. He pressed himself against the walls of the tunnel and the train swung past him on the bend and rattled down the side tunnel which joined theirs. The carriages passed close by him and he was able to see the passengers inside. Policemen and Buckland Security. Dozens of them stuffed into the carriage like the rush hour. Some were bloodied and obviously wounded. There were bullet holes spattered and raked along the side of the carriages, and he could see grenade damage and some of the men were holding their weapons as they passed him by; they looked like weary soldiers returning from the front.

He scuttled back down the tunnel to where Bible J waited in the dark.

‘What was that?’ said Bible J. ‘I thought I heard a train.’

‘You did,’ said Catchpole, ‘a fully electric one too. Someone has got to them before us, someone official. Come on.’

They walked on down the disused tunnel past the section of clean and maintained track which led off to the side and vanished into the darkness. Their way was soon blocked by twisted rails and lumps of masonry, and then at the mouth of the tunnel there were the bodies and bits of the bodies of dead ragged men everywhere.

‘God,’ said Catchpole, ‘it’s a slaughterhouse.’

Bible J walked through the dark, bloodied mass, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

‘Who did this?’ he said, looking around the walls and the blood-washed station platform as they emerged into the half light.

‘Buckland Corp.,’ said Catchpole with disgust. ‘I saw an underground train full of police and cadets, it must have been them. This was an organised surgical strike. Someone in authority wanted the ragged men gone.’

‘Look over here,’ said Bible J. ‘It’s Ma Boulter, shot through the head. What’s she doing here?’

‘Reporting to her boss, the Fantom, of course,’ said a voice from the shadows, and Inspector Lestrade stepped out in front of them. ‘I hope those weapons are licensed. I am sorry you had to see “beneath our skirts”, so to speak, Sergeant Catchpole, but we have been forced to act, to cleanse the hive. This mess will all be gone by morning and few will be the wiser.’

‘Mess?’ said Catchpole. ‘They were people – men and women. Shouldn’t they have been brought to trial? It’s savagery, pure and simple.’

‘I thought you were a company man, Catchpole.’

‘I am a policeman, and I thought you were too, Lestrade, not a cold-blooded killer.’

‘They engaged us in battle. We had little choice, and there is still the head of the snake to attend to,’ Lestrade said, pointing above.

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Chapter 55

Eve and Caleb waited on the staircase. They could hear the voices on the floor above. Someone was there with the Fantom and Lucius. Eve pressed her finger to her lips. Then the voices stopped.

They crept up the last of the stairs, into the corridor, where a red-eyed mech rat tried to stop them. ‘Restricted area, restricted,’ it said. They ignored the rat and continued up a final set of temporary wooden steps which led out on to the roof of the tower.

Caleb went first. He put his head up into the wind and darkness. The noise of a crowd drifted up from far below. He could see three figures standing on a level surface among the exposed and dangerous girders of the tower top: his father, the Fantom and an older man he did not recognise. Two airships were tethered some way away, rotors idling, ready for business.

Caleb turned and gestured for Eve to come up. She joined Caleb on the roof girders. Her hair blew about her perfectly shaped face as she stood to her full height.

Eve strode forward across a narrow girder towards the temporary platform where the three men stood together.

Caleb tried to follow her across the broad steel beam, holding his revolver out as a balance weight but he stopped immediately in terror. He had taken one misguided look at the crowd six hundred feet below them and that was enough to make him freeze, to lock him solid.

‘Oh good, look who has joined us,’ said the Fantom.

‘Eve,’ said Buckland, ‘at last. Welcome. I am Abel Buckland, CEO of the Buckland Corporation. It is a long time since I have seen you, my dear, and I doubt that you would remember me at all. My, but you are certainly more beautiful now than I could have ever hoped or remembered. We met only the once and that was when Lucius and Jack and the rest of us were out celebrating your,’ he paused, ‘your
completion
, might be the word to use. We had a celebration, with fireworks, just like there will be tonight.’ He raised his arms as if to take in the whole of the artificial night sky. ‘Another celebration tonight, a demolition, the last building to leave us, and not before time. It seems so right and so appropriate that you should have been found now and reunited with your Adam. Now we can enter a whole new phase of special entertainment in Pastworld, and you and Adam will feature brightly at the centre of it.’

Lucius wrenched his mouth free from the Fantom’s hand.

‘It is wrong now, Buckland, and it was always wrong,’ he said. The Fantom clamped his hand back over Lucius’s mouth.

He turned to look at Caleb balanced some yards away, stuck on the high girder, unable to move forward or back.

‘Our father is becoming a bore, young master Brown. Shall I pitch him down to the ground? One shove from me and he will fall like a stone.’

‘Hush, Adam, calm yourself. Just keep hold of Lucius for now,’ Buckland said. He signalled with the device he was holding and the passenger airship moved further away from the tower and the anchor wire tightened. He made another adjustment, and the second smaller airship moved closer.

‘We will soon be ready for the fireworks,’ he said. He pressed the device in his hand once again and part of the gondola floor of the larger airship dropped open. Thousands of sheets of paper fell out and scattered in the air like giant wedding confetti; they spiralled slowly down to the grasping hands of the eager crowd gathered far below. The countdown had begun.