Pastworld (28 page)

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Chapter 58

Eve picked herself up and stood tall. She breathed in deeply and opened her eyes. Buckland’s little airship had moved off now and was hovering away from the building. Her mate, her would-be killer, her Adam, had gone too, vanished in an instant in his black cape somewhere over the edge. Her love, her Bible J, lay at her feet in a spreading pool of blood. The other man was getting up.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘I am here to help you. We must get down to safety.’

Eve crouched down next to Bible J. She kissed his forehead. It was warm. She felt his pulse. There was a faint fluttering movement.

‘Save yourself, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘I will save Bible J.’

‘The building will be blown at any moment,’ said Catchpole.

Another siren sounded.

‘There’s the warning,’ he said.

Eve put her arms under Bible J’s warm back. She picked him straight up from the roof in her delicate black velvet arms as if he weighed no more than a feather. She walked forward to the very edge of the building. The big Buckland Corp. passenger airship still hovered, some yards from the tower. The anchor wire was stretched tight. It swayed in the wind but no more and no worse than the high rope she was used to.

‘Where are you going?’ Catchpole called out.

‘Wait and I will come back for you.’

She looked across at the airship, at the word
Buckland
written along the side. She held her Bible J between her arms. He was her life, her balance. She stepped out over the abyss towards the wire and put one foot forward.

Her feet were firm on the swaying anchor wire. Some of the crowd gathered below could see what was happening, and they called out. She did not falter. She walked forward as if she were carrying poor Bible J along a wide road, just as Jago had taught her. She moved fast, but time seemed to slow down for her. All of her movements were careful and deliberate, but to anyone looking on she resembled a black streak, a blur of speed.

The cadet piloting the airship opened the door of the passenger gondola in disbelief at what he was seeing. Eve laid Bible J out on a sofa in the gondola. She went back across the wire in a blur of speed for Sgt Catchpole. He protested and made to run for the staircase but then the final siren blew. She held her arms out to him. There was no time to argue. He allowed himself to fall back into her arms. She stepped out on to the wire with a six-foot-tall police sergeant balanced across her arms and carried him too across the chasm.

The cadet cast off and the airship moved back and away just as the first explosions split the night and Tower 42 shuddered on its foundations. The crowd cheered.

The building slowly toppled and sank to the ground in a great cloud of dust and shattered debris. Caleb watched it all from the safety of the street. The collapsing building reminded him of the way poor Jack had fallen when the knife had entered his heart.

When the dust had settled and the crowds had dwindled his father managed to hail a hansom cab. They set off for Fournier Street. Caleb watched and thought about Eve as the horse’s grey hooves flew over the wet cobbles.

‘I must just tell you one thing, Caleb. You are not as them. You are my natural son, the son of your dear mother. They are, well, they are genetically linked to you, and no more. Their DNA was based on ours – but modified of course.’

‘Later, Dad, not now. Just tell me one thing. Did you tell me to run when you were down on the ground that night?’

‘Of course I did, Caleb. I wanted you to save yourself. Any father would.’

Caleb closed his eyes and rested his head for a moment on the seat of the cab in relief. They ordered the cab to stop near the great church. Before it had even come to a complete stop, Caleb threw the door open and jumped down. He skidded across the damp cobbles and slid to a stop, gesturing back for his father to follow and for the cab to wait. Then he ran across Fournier Street. With his father behind him, he opened the door of Number 31 with the key.

Mr Leighton stood in the dark hallway bristling with guns. He had a rifle raised ready on his shoulder.

‘Oh, it’s you, Caleb,’ he said, lowering his rifle. ‘Thank God, I thought that the Fantom had finally come for me.’

‘I doubt that will happen now,’ said Caleb. ‘This is my father. We found him.’

‘Both of you together.’ He smiled. ‘Now I can claim my enormous reward from a grateful Corporation.’

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Epilogue

FROM EVE’S JOURNAL

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The leaves are full and green. It is summer again and I am writing this under one of my favourite trees. It has a soft moss waistcoat creeping up from the roots. There are more flowers now, white with a yellow centre, all scattered among the grass, the soft grass which tickles my bare feet when the breeze stirs it. Jago says it will be a long hot summer for me. Brother Caleb came out to see me a few days ago. Jago brought him. And here I am writing once more in that very book he so kindly kept for me.

A red admiral butterfly has just landed on my hand and I have waited, paused in my writing. I let it just sit and dry its wings. I have plenty of time now. No one has seen the Fantom, my mad, sad brother, Adam, since his jump. He has disappeared, the cadets tried to follow his cab but effectively he has vanished. That doesn’t mean he has gone away for ever but I feel safe here. I think that I could resist him now. Knowing exactly who I am has helped me to understand everything. Mr Brown told me that my memory was cleared and locked by Jack after the fire. He told me that my speed and abilities had surely been put there by Jack to protect me. He says that when time appeared to slow down for me it was just that I was going so fast. In a way I am lucky. I am, I suppose, the first of a new step in evolution. I have been engineered, assisted. I try not to overuse my skills and I am certainly lying low here in the forest far away from everyone and everything. Caleb says that Mr Buckland has been charged under the Misuse of Genetic Science Act and that Lucius Brown will give evidence at the trial about the nature of the Prometheus project. Inspector Lestrade has been retired and Sgt Catchpole has been promoted into his position at Old Scotland Yard.

Sgt, sorry, Chief Inspector Catchpole, will write an official account to set things straight. I will be living quietly among the beautiful trees here in the forest for a long while yet, well at least until the baby is born. What kind of a child will he or she be, I wonder. What new gifts will they bring?

I want to find the perfect name for this blessing, our child, this new and doubly welcome entry into Jago’s broad family. I have two favourites if it is either a boy or a girl, and so can’t decide. I will have to let my darling choose, my dear funny Bible J, who lies comfortably resting and restored in the hammock above me, his dear face patterned and shaded by dappled leaf shadow. He will have the last word on that matter.

M

Excerpt taken from the Little Planet Guide to Pastworld
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TM
London

M

All in all, Pastworld London lives up to all the stereotypical images that the traveller may have of that very old and literary place. A city of twisted streets and quaint old buildings. A city of mystery, a city of shadow and fog. A city like no other.

Perhaps it will first work its recreated magic on you when you turn a corner into a side road near the murky river and see the cranes and wharves, and hear Big Ben strike the hour over the bustle of river traffic. Perhaps it will come over you the moment you step aboard a horse-drawn hansom cab and feel the floor dip as your weight springs the supports. Perhaps it will happen when you slam shut the heavy door of a railway carriage and catch the intoxicating smell of the steam smuts and the hot oiled metal of the engine. Or might it be the moment when a respectable-looking gentleman in an opera cloak tips the brim of his evening hat to you as you pass him, his face shadowed under a gaslight, and a shiver of apprehension goes through you, and your senses quicken to the thrill of possible adventure . . .

M

© Little Planet Guide. All rights reserved.

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Acknowledgements

I should like to thank my agent, Hilary Delamere, for believing in, and encouraging me to write, this story. Valerie Brathwaite and Sarah Odedina of Bloomsbury Children’s Books listened to my original idea with enthusiasm, and then waited for the book to be finished with an equal, and almost monumental, patience. I should also like to thank various friends and family who listened to my ideas or read and commented on the various drafts of this book, including David Fickling, Juliet Trewellard and Lily Beck.

No book is ever the work of the author alone and I must especially thank my marvellous editor, Margaret Miller of Bloomsbury USA, who suggested so many ways to shape and improve my muddled drafts and ideas, and for whom no praise is high enough, and also Isabel Ford who fine-tuned the result with such care and attention to detail.

Pastworld
is a work of fiction, although I have borrowed, for the purposes of the story, my good friend Rodney Archer’s house and secretly lent it to the roguish Mr William Leighton. Any errors of fact and geography among the murky underground railway lines and the ruined platforms are the fault of the Buckland Corporation and any complaints should be addressed to them.

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Ian Beck

2009

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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY

Text copyright © Ian Beck 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted

This electronic edition published in August 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 1191 7

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