The Cartographer (11 page)

I spent the rest of the day reading the Manual, and I was so absorbed that I forgot all about the murderer and the kidnapper. As I read I began to see the world in a different light. It turned out that it was the Manual, and not the Bible, as the Sevvies who came to our door claimed, that was the Greatest Story Ever Told. What it lacked in the smiting and begetting department it made up for in sheer ingenuity. It solved every mapping problem I had ever had, and heaps I'd never thought of. It would help me strengthen the map's main function: to give me a clear view of those parts of town where bad things had happened. I knew that, despite its beauty and richness — it was jam-packed with facts — it could never have
protected me from the horrible things I had seen
in
those places. Obviously, the trick was to
avoid
those sorts of localities (a word I learnt from the Manual) in the first place.

As for all the horrible things that had happened to me, I guessed that they were tests of some kind. Every detective and explorer has to pass certain tests; so does every superhero. These had been mine, and I had passed — well, at least that was the view I took. I had not been rewarded with the Treasure of the Lost Tomb, or solved the mystery of some uncharted island. But I had obtained the Manual, and it was now teaching me the secrets of my craft, which I would use to create a world in which I could walk around without getting frightened half to death every five minutes. It was almost as if I was protected by a secret identity.

When the thought struck, it struck like a lightning bolt. It hit me in the head, travelled down my back and almost blew my feet off, the way Mr Wallace's feet had been blown off when his crane touched the overhead wires. It was such a wonderful thought that it came with its own smell, a bit like a cross between Dad's armpit, an old gumboot and Charles's electric train set. If I could have put that thought in a bottle, I'd uncork it on special occasions, and have the tiniest whiff. Dunnett could stick his EST up his arse — 'scuse the French. I had my own electric shock therapy.

My thought was to harness the power I had been using to turn myself into Tom to instead turn myself into a brand-new super identity, far more powerful than both of us together. I had noticed that the Manual referred to the person who used it as ‘the cartographer'.
Then let it be so
, I thought. Henceforth, I would go out into the world to explore, not as the exhausted remnant of what had once been the greatest twinship the
street, or for that matter the school, had ever known, but as:
The Cartographer
!

 

I should have said the Cartographer and his Dog. For Mum and Granddad had agreed (with old man Dunnett) that I should have a dog, as I seemed to be in need of a replacement for Tom. I had in fact been a bit out of touch with my friends, except those in the Commandos. I missed them, of course, but the murderer was out there somewhere, possibly even dragging kids with straight hair to his secret opium den and torturing them for information about the treasure, so I was trying to lie low. So when the idea of a dog came up I thought:
why not
?

This new dog of mine was pretty fierce. He could bark, growl and scratch doors. He looked as though he would bite, but no one had been game enough to find out. He was a Labrador, which is a breed of watchdog famous for tearing the limbs off escaped criminals and howling in the night like a banshee, the worst kind of ghost on earth. Again, I had not heard Biscuit —
well? —
actually howl; however, I expected him to do all the right things on the day. Watchdogs can climb walls, even tear through them if necessary, and, as the Phantom's dog, Devil — not a dog at all but a wolf — shows all the time, they can bring down a man who is escaping on a horse. Also, watchdogs are not afraid of fire. In fact, the fire brigade uses them to put out fires in buildings. And during the war they used them to stamp out fires in burning Lancaster bombers. It is also a well-known fact that a Labrador can beat the shit out of any dog except a German Shepherd, and they are as scarce as hen's teeth since the Germans lost the war. In nothing flat I had trained Biscuit to kill on command, but had been forbidden by Mum from
ordering him to actually kill anyone. But then, Mum didn't know about the murderer. One thing everyone in my town knew was that if you wanted to live to see your next birthday, you kept your mouth shut. It was bad enough that Biscuit's tongue was always hanging out; mine never would.

So there I was, in my new identity: the Cartographer, the man of maps, the man of mystery, who must complete his mission before he returns to his Home World with the information needed to save it from certain destruction. As the Cartographer I would be the saviour of my people.

Best of all, I would be practically indestructible.

I took a final look around my room and one more peek inside my bag to make sure the map was there. I had changed my
modus operandi
. No more aimless wandering. Instead I would pick out a street that was on my map and go to it, to some house or place with which I was familiar, visiting only places that were no t too mysterious. My mission was simply to collect information and to map it.

As for the murderer, I wasn't half as worried as I had been — the advantage of being a superhero. If I saw him, I would take appropriate action. In the back of my mind was the idea that eventually I would find Dad and see if he was all right. As well as making maps, the Cartographer was in the business of helping people. And just to be on the safe side I swore on a skull to fulfil my mission, as the Phantom had done before me. Actually, I swore on a cat's skull I'd found (no, not Abbotsford's). It was small, but it did the job.

I set out at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning using the map to guide me down a route that had led to me becoming the Cartographer, to the gate in Kipling Lane. I went back not looking for trouble — when had I? — but in search of genuine information for the map. The Cartographer's needs are simple.

Because I had become a new person, I expected the place itself to be different. However, when I went through the back gate of the Murder House I found that everything was
exactly as I had left it. The back yard was still a jungle, one that smelt sweet and lemony and oniony and peppery and woody. I gave that smell a good rating — five or six. The torture chamber was undisturbed and seemed no longer to be a threat. I noted my calmness and sense of confidence. That's the way the Cartographer faces danger: he laughs. I would have laughed, but I was too busy checking Biscuit to see if he had detected any other dogs. Had he done so we would have been out of there in nothing flat, to save them from being torn to shreds. If there's one thing people hate, it's when their dog gets beaten up, especially in their own back yard. That would've been hard to explain. But Biscuit had taken to being the Cartographer's dog and was being about as sniffy as a watchdog can be without drying out his nose — Mum once told me that if a dog's nose gets dry it drops dead, and it's a terrible thing to see.

When we got to the back of the house where the murder had taken place, there was no ladder to be seen, so I walked around the side to see what
could
be seen. Just a back door, closed, which Biscuit showed no interest in. I went to the other side of the house, and there was another back door. It looked the same, but there was a little path around this side.

Now the Cartographer prefers to stay off the beaten track, and to go where vital information, or intelligence as we superheroes call it, can be gathered, so I hesitated to go that way, and besides, I knew from a lifetime in the area that the path probably led to the next street over. But I had not found anything new, so I went a little way along the path. I could see that it was heading around the front, but I could also see that the front yard had a fence made of iron spikes. I had been right: that
had
been a torture chamber, probably for
spies. Lucky for me I was now in the map-making business. But those spikes made me shiver, so I turned to go, and almost walked smack into a man with no blood in his face.

He was looking at me through glasses with no edges, and not smiling at all, not that I expected him to. He seemed to know Biscuit, because he was patting him as he looked at me, and Biscuit seemed to know him because he had not even warned me. I had been betrayed, and now I was going to be dragged off to the torture chamber, like the Boy From Down the Drain, the boy who had been turned into a human torch, like one of the torches on the wall of a torture chamber, only alive. As I looked at the Face With no Blood, I heard the boy's screams, and felt myself begin to shake. Life had dealt me a crummy hand, just like Robert Mitchum in
Thunder Road
. The Face With No Blood finally spoke, and his voice was pure evil.

‘Hello, I'm Mr Sanderson. I'm sorry about the new fence. Was this one of your short cuts?'

I hadn't struck this particular interrogation technique before, but I saw a way out, in the truth.

‘Yes, it was,' I said. ‘We … I always go this way to visit my nanna.' This was partly true, in that Tom and I always walked past Kipling Street on the way to Nanna Blayney's house, and that was where we'd been the day Tom died. But I wished I hadn't said it straight out like that. The truth always has a sickly ring to it.

‘I see. Well, the gate will be closed most of the time from now on, so I suppose you'll have to go around the long way. What's your name?'

For a moment it crossed my mind to tell him what the Sarge said to the Jerries who captured him, just before he killed
them all: ‘You can all go to hell!' Instead, however, I decided to give him the story I had prepared in case of capture and interrogation.

‘I'm Jack Sterling, and this is my dog, Shadow.'

‘I see. Well, you and Shadow had better come inside and have some lemonade and biscuits.' When he heard this, Biscuit nearly jumped out of his skin with excitement.

‘Well, he knows what that means, doesn't he, Jack?' said my interrogator.

I don't know who I was more ashamed of in that moment: Biscuit, for his weakness, or myself. I didn't know how to say no to this man without letting on that I knew a secret about the house, so I decided to hand him a white lie, which is always okay.

‘Thank you, Mr Sanderson, but I'm not sure if my mother would let me.'

‘Well, that's possible, of course,' he said. ‘After all she doesn't know us. Or could there be some other reason?' he added, as if it wasn't really all that important.

‘Oh well, she did know the lady who lived here,' I said, getting the hang of it. ‘Sometimes she'd meet her at the bookshop, or she'd drop in here.'

‘Of course!' he said with a soft voice. ‘And did you know her too?'

‘No, not very well,' I said.

As he looked at me I could see that his face was turning a bit pink, so there went my bloodless theory.

‘Well, the lady was my sister,' he said, ‘and she was staying here while we were away. Now, we've come back to stay. Would you like to come in? I'm sure my wife would also like to meet you.'

I was cornered, so I nodded. Besides, it was a chance to get first-class information for the map, though I was getting it at much closer quarters than I would have liked.

Mrs Sanderson was a lollopy lady, a bit like the Lady With the Fork, but she was wearing proper clothes, a dress with flowers all over it. And there were other differences: her hair did not hang down but was neat, and she did not smell of poor people but of something else which I decided was make-up. On a side table in the hall just inside the door were gloves and a bag, and Mrs Sanderson was in fact busy taking off a hat that had a huge pin in it. I thought that if she wanted to stab me with the pin, not even Biscuit would be quick enough to tear her arm off, though that could not happen anyway, because he was outside, preferring to watch while lying down, to save his strength.

It was very difficult not to like Mrs Sanderson, as she seemed to be one of those grown-ups who liked kids, which told me that she had never had any herself. She too asked me if I minded coming into the house, and I pretended I didn't know what she was talking about, but of course I did: there was an old torture chamber in the back yard, and there had been a murder, both hard to explain away, so I decided not to mention them at all, but I saw the way the Sandersons looked at each other. I did consider the possibility that the Sandersons had no idea what had gone on in the house, and probably had been going on for hundreds of years, but I thought this was pretty unlikely. Also there was something suspicious about these two: a little thin man with glasses and not much blood in his face, and a big lollopy woman with a floral dress. I decided to play my cards close to my chest, as Larry Kent would have done. He never trusted dames, and Mrs Sanderson looked like she might have been a dame: she was certainly built like one.

 

The lemonade and biscuits were not poisoned; in fact, they hit the spot. There's nothing the Cartographer likes better after a stressful morning gathering facts than Marchants lemonade and a brace of Brockhoff's cream biscuits. For some reason, the Sandersons insisted that I take a tour of the house. I have no idea why they might have done that unless it was because I told them that I had visited parts of the house before.

It must have been the lemonade: I was feeling good. We went up the stairs to the room with the typewriter and I saw that it was still there, and so were all the books; in fact, there were more books than ever. I went to the window that I had peeked in when I was on the ladder, and looked out. I could clearly see the torture chamber over the tops of the jungle foliage, and the back gate and the lane beyond. I knew that one of the roofs in the distance belonged to my house, and I strained to spot it, not because I was interested in seeing my home, but because a view of it would be more information for the map.

‘Looking for your house?' asked Mr Sanderson.

Not so fast
, I thought.
I didn't come down in the last shower.

I didn't answer but looked around for the ladder. It was definitely gone. Back inside the room, Mr Sanderson was tidying up a stack of papers. I went over to the typewriter and took a look at it. It was the first one I had seen up close, and I thought it quite beautiful, for a machine. ‘Remington', it said. A likely story.

‘Want to have a go? 'Spect you've used one lots of times,' said Mr Sanderson.

‘Sure I have,' I said. The Cartographer is not like other superheroes: he does not always tell the truth. He has a gift, the gift of self-preservation.

‘Okay then,' says Mr Sanderson, and quick as a flash he shoves a sheet of paper in the top and twiddles a wheel on the side, and the paper gets sucked in, goes around the roller and back out again.

‘There you are — I'll leave you to it,' he says, and disappears out of the room and up the stairs.

I sat down and put my fingers on the typewriter. It was cold and smooth. It was a great opportunity to write something for my map. I looked around the room and out of the window, and listened for the Sandersons, but could hear nothing. I began to look at the typewriter buttons, then began pressing them. The sound made me think of that tune ‘The Typewriter' and I wondered how the people on the record could possibly type that fast. They weren't making maps, I told myself. They were just messing around. The Cartographer never messes around.

I sat back and looked at what I had typed. Not counting mistakes, it said:

It was the new oath I was going to take on the cat skull when I got home, and halfway through it I decided to change the League's name. But I had reached the end of the line and did not know how to get back to the beginning of the next line. I grabbed the knob and turned it until the sheet of paper almost came out of the typewriter, then I pulled at the lever on the side. Who'd have thought it could be that simple? I finished
my typing and rolled the sheet of paper out and folded it up. It would go into the map. I heard the front door close. For a moment there was no further sound, then there was the sound of the front gate opening and clanging shut — a gate of iron bars with lethal points on top. I was a prisoner!

I walked out of the room, creeping along as if I was expecting trouble — because I was — and inched along the upstairs hall to the front of the house, where there was a window overlooking Kipling Street. Down below I saw Mrs Sanderson talking to another lady with a floral dress. She was outside with her old friend and I was stuck in a murder house. I had fallen for the oldest trick in the world: the Typewriter Trick, and I felt my face go red and hot. I wondered if they knew there was a back door into the jungle, and decided that they probably didn't. That's how I would get out. They would never in a thousand years expect me to head out past the torture chamber. But before I left I would take a little souvenir with me — the Cartographer is always taking souvenirs, usually shiny ones.

Well, the murder room upstairs had had a lot of shiny things in it, so that was where I went. I opened the door a little, and looked into the room and saw myself at the window, on the ladder, staring into the room the way I must have the last time I was here. But the room was different. It had been cleaned up and all the shiny things had been removed from the dressing table. It looked like no one had ever been there, let alone been killed there. And the smell that I had scored so highly was now a mixture of White King and Rinso, and you can smell that in every second house in Richmond … okay, every third house.

I left the doorway, and crept further down the hall, passing two closed doors, making a mental note to find out what
diabolical secrets they hid: a fabulous treasure, a monster, the postie's dead body — who knows? At the end of this hall was another window overlooking Kipling Street. When I looked down, I got that horrible feeling in my legs as if I was going to fall, and clutched the windowsill for support. This was about as high as I had ever been, and it seemed even higher than the ladder, probably because the ladder had the tree tops next to it, and that somehow felt comforting. If I fell from
this
window, I realised, I would be skewered on the pointy tops of the new iron gate, right in front of the meeting of the Floral Ladies League.

I looked down Kipling Street to the right and saw something that gave me another fright: Rooney Park. If I'd known, I would never have looked. Well, that was going to be the last time. That's what the map was for. This was only the second time I'd seen the park since the day Tom died, and I had seen it by accident. The first time was when I had gone back for Tom's hat. The day after Tom died, I found on his bed the things he'd had with him in the park. They'd been brought home by Dad. There was his shanghai, which I was surprised to see, as Mum had only let us keep them after we promised never to take them out of the back yard. There was his pocketknife, which had a pearl handle, while my old one had a sort of shell-coloured handle. Still, I liked it. And there was some money, three and six. Our Tom was a bit of a man of mystery, thought I, to have so much money in his pocket when I rarely had more than two bob on me in those days. But there was no hat, and I had to have it.