Ribblestrop (11 page)

It was the white rabbit that alerted her to the possibility that things were not really in control anymore. She only saw it for a few seconds, but it was definitely a white rabbit. It looked at her. It seemed about to smile or speak—but instead it turned and bobbed away.

When she saw the metal door, she knew the rabbit must have emerged from whatever room that door guarded. Her mouth was dry, but she tiptoed to the doorway and peered inside.

“Excuse me?” she whispered.

The hallway was small. The walls were lined with old wooden shelves, and the shelves were laden with jars and bottles; there was a smell of must mingled with bleach. There was one neon light and it flickered on and off. It was some kind of passage, used for storage, therefore it ought not to have been frightening. Chemistry lab bottles with heavy glass stoppers. Fat jars, thin jars, sugars and powders, liquids and crystals. Some of the glass had been scribbled on, in what might have been chalk. Some were thick with dust and some were clean. She moved past them and came to a metal sink into which a tap was dripping. The water dripped over what looked like a soup bowl, and something slimy seemed to be curled up inside, stinking—Millie caught the odor and turned her face away fast.

She saw a mirror. Reflected in that mirror was a pair of double doors. She turned, licking her lips, which had become painfully
dry. Through the doors she could see bright yellow light, and there was a soft humming and an electronic bleep. She tiptoed forward, feeling unsteady. Something had dripped on the floor and it was sticky. She peered through the doors, and—convinced the room was empty—slipped between them, praying for a staircase. There were more shelves, everywhere, on every wall. There was a metal table and steel counters, and a small trolley, laden with bottles.

As she stared around, she realized she was being watched.

She gulped, then heard herself whimper. She was not alone! Around her were a hundred little eyes. From the bottles and jars helpless faces peered—were they animals or fish? She went closer, and backed away again—did she want to know or not? Eyes and mouths were floating in murky liquids, and some had little hands or paws, and some of the faces looked so wise. Oh God, they were rats and rabbits and creatures curled up so tight she couldn't recognize them, and some had mouths that were yawning, with teeth bared. She could see teeth straining, she could see wide eyes! And, in one particular jar above the eyes, what had happened to the skull? She shied away but she couldn't not look: the sad little creature held her gaze, and Millie saw that the head had been cut clean through. Its brain was visible, soft and bulbous. Next to that, a creature without fur—a piglet perhaps—its limbs twisted round itself, its eyes shut tight, and its snout lifted. Once again, side on, the head had been cut and the brain was . . . balancing there. It wasn't a dream, she was looking at broken heads.

As she snapped her eyes shut, something whirred behind her and she spun round with a cry. It was an animal cage, she saw it in a moment, and something was racing on a metal wheel, racing suddenly as if for its life. There were wires and dials coming from it, coming from its head. An animal cried out behind her, parrotlike, monkeylike, and Millie spun round again, and there was a bigger cage, with something cat-size, rocking backward and forward staring into her eyes . . . She felt
vibrations in the floor. Its skull . . . the creature's head—there was something wrong, but she'd managed not to see, and now her hands were over her eyes and her mouth was full of bitter vomit. Was the whole room really shaking, or was it just her own sickness? Glass was rattling, the animals were screeching, and it was as if an underground train was coming, getting closer all the time. The sound became a hammering of metal and some of the glass started to rattle. The monkey cries got louder and Millie was panicking. She turned to the doors, she turned back. The noise was all around her and as she staggered there was the smashing of glass—her hand had caught one of the flasks on the trolley, and a powder fine as salt spread over the floor and her shoes. She was on her knees in the broken glass, her hands in the powder.

Then, up—up at all costs, because she had to hide. She could see a concertinad metal door at the far end of the room, and that was where the noise was coming from. It was the door to a lift and that was the noise; there was a row of lights flickering above it, and she knew the lift was coming down. The animals were frantic, as if they knew too.

She hunted for a corner—how lucky for her that years of hiding from teachers had given her the reflexes of a panther so, as the noise built to a crescendo, Millie leaped sideways and slid between a rack of shelves and some kind of fridge. She was in a corner where a couple of freezers stood, lids wide open. In seconds she had rolled into the first like a soldier trained for such maneuvers: it was wet and stank of bleach, but there could be no better hiding place. She pulled the lid down over her head, careful to let it rest open by a few centimeters. Her fingers were burning, her heart was racing, and her mouth was achingly dry.

“To me!” said a voice.

She was safe. She could breathe easily and she could still see out. She crouched there, trying to calm down. Yes, the lift door was open now, and she heard the metal grille slam into itself. Two figures. At first, they were shapeless—one in green, one in black.
They were bent over something, and wrestling with it. It was heavy and they were grunting.

“Careful!” said one. “Get your end up!”

Deep, panting voices—Millie strained to see more. Whatever they held was dead weight. She fought to remain calm and silent—her fingers were burning, and she must have touched her lip because her mouth was hurting too. She heard the second voice, filled with impatience: “It's stuck your end!” The men were irritable. “It's caught on the wretched door,” said the first one. “Your end down!”

“Lift it! Ow!”

“Shut the damn door! Shut the damn door!”

The animals were quiet. The men were unloading something, but Millie couldn't make out what it was, it was still wrapped in plastic. It was big and black, with what looked like a crane attachment bolted to its top, all rods and levers.

They were both panting, but calming down. They had dragged the thing into the middle of the floor and were leaning on it, getting their breath back. A radio crackled and Millie saw that the man in black was in uniform. He wore a cap, and the cap was trimmed in a line of all-too-familiar check. The man was a policeman and Millie went cold with fear and closed her eyes.

“Basement one,” he said, into his radio. “Elevator's with us, just unloading, over.”

“Where's he want it?”

“Didn't say,” said the policeman. Millie was watching again. “Just said leave it on one. But he did say plug it in . . . Hey.”

“What?”

“Where's the rabbit?”

“What d'you mean?”

The policeman was standing still, looking around him, hat in his hand. He wasn't young, and she could see big, fat, red hands. He went to one of the cages and lifted it. “It's open,” he said. The voice had a northern twang.

“He said he's finished with all this anyway,” said the other
man. “Didn't he? He said clear all this. We should have come the other way.”

“We need the cylinders in as well. Look, he might not need any of this but rabbits don't open their own cages. Look at this poor soul . . .”

She was watching, mesmerized, wondering what on earth she'd stepped into. The man farthest away had a knife, and was cutting and stripping, ripping through the cord and plastic that swathed the delivery. Oh, she could see what the thing was now, and it made her even colder. How many times had she seen just that kind of object? It was a dentist's chair. It even had the tray that sits close to your chest, where they hang the little drills. There was a face mask on a hook, and tubes looped from it upward, out of sight. There were stirrups where you put your feet, and—worst of all—on the arm rests, where your wrists would go, there were straps. So it couldn't be a dentist's chair . . . nobody got
restrained
in a dentist's chair, strapped in for treatment—that just didn't happen.

As Millie stared, the lamp came on. The man had thrown a switch and the inspection lamp was shining, bright and brutal. The chair yawned backward, waiting—hungry for a patient.

“Let's do the freezers and go.”

The policeman was beside her; she hadn't noticed his approach. He was millimeters from her nose and she ducked backward instinctively. As she did so, the lid slammed above her head.

“Do what to the freezers?” The voice was muffled now.

“Turn them on. It's on his list.”

Millie was in darkness. The lid had shut with a deep, rubbery thud, as if there was a tight seal. She closed her eyes and it made no difference: darkness had never been so close, or so black.

Seconds passed. The pain of her burning skin was forgotten because she needed to think fast. She should hammer on the side.
Be quick!
she told herself. A motor came to life underneath her and the freezer started to shake.

She pushed at the roof and it didn't move. It
would
move, if she
got her shoulder to it. She would lie on her back and kick it open—no freezer locked, they were built to be safe so accidents couldn't happen. They had emergency release levers on the inside; there was probably a law about it, especially in a school, if this
was
part of the school. Millie pushed again, and the lid moved not one millimeter.

Don't panic
, she said to herself.
Keep calm.
Millie had been in many dangerous situations, and the worst thing you could ever do was panic. Every situation you walked into could be walked out of, if you held your nerve. Freezers
didn't
lock.

A film of sweat broke over her. There was another sound there, too, and it mixed into the engine underneath her. It might have been the lift departing, or it might have been more freezer mechanisms, Millie didn't know. What she did know was that the temperature was already dropping. Her little store of black air felt stale already, the walls felt closer. She rolled onto her back and got her knees up over her chest. She put her feet against the lid and pushed with every atom of her strength. She brought her feet down and kicked. Once, twice, three times—three heavy kicks.

She had exhausted herself. She was gulping air way too quickly. The freezer was shaking, but it was the motor only—the seals hadn't budged.

She strained until the tears came and all her strength was gone. Still the lid didn't move. Then she screamed and started to hammer on the walls. To be so helpless and to know with such certainty that there was no way out, and that you were trapped in darkness and airless cold—the knowledge was so monstrous she simply screamed and screamed. She drummed her fists. She writhed back onto her knees and tried to force her fingertips into the little gap she could feel, where the rubber was compressed. It was too narrow, but she might get some leverage if she pressed—there might be that catch, the emergency catch for just this kind of accident . . . With all her strength she pressed, and then she gasped as her fingernails lifted from her flesh, though the lid itself refused to budge.

Too late, she realized she had used the air around her. Mouth open, unable to believe how things could end, unable to believe how unfair it all was, she suddenly understood that she was going to die.

She put her fists together and used them to beat hammer blows on the side of the freezer. She was sobbing now and howling, and that was how the last of the oxygen was wasted.

A science teacher could have helped her with the equation: lung capacity—4.5 liters, absorbing 25 percent of available oxygen; 20 breaths a minute in a 264-liter freezer. That becomes:

Millie was unconscious in less than six minutes.

But Millie didn't die.

She awoke some time later, possibly from thirst. Her mouth was sore and her gums dryer than they'd ever been before. Her head was on a duck-down pillow and she was wrapped in a duvet. Her eyes felt puffy, and blinking seemed only to let in a hazy, smoky light. As soon as she'd blinked five times the throbbing of her head kicked in; then she became aware of her broken fingernails.

She sat up with a cry and saw at once that while she could breathe and reach out—while she was definitely alive—the nightmare hadn't ended. The freezer was gone, but somehow she'd been capsized back into the long curving tunnels of the previous day, and she was stretched out on sheets laid over a sandy floor, under some kind of shaft that went up. There was a breeze, there was a little light, and there was a duvet round her. Somebody really had saved her. She had been carried outside, she'd been deposited—by one of the men in lab coats? She'd been left like a parcel and they'd moved on, without saying a word. Her fingers were bandaged.