The Cartographer (24 page)

At that point, there was another tunnel, without tramlines, branching off to the right, back in the direction of the river. On the wall beside it was a sign:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
. I walked through its bluestone mouth and let its gloom swallow me. With excitement in my chest I followed it back along the river and up some steps, and came out at the same padlocked gate I'd seen a few weeks before. I did a bit more padlock snapping with my pinch bar, as that had been my intention when I'd first seen it, then returned through the tunnel to the tramline, which was whispering my name. At least I could congratulate myself on one thing: I had discovered another entrance to the underground tramlines.

After a few hundred yards, broken only by my passing another dark tunnel entrance to my right with the same wall sign as before, I heard a tram overhead, and it struck me that
I was probably beneath Wonder Woman's house. With that thought my head was filled with a completely different view of Melbourne, a map that had ups and downs, and underneaths and on-top-ofs; and I knew that moment would be with me forever.

The rest of the tunnel was long and straight, and took me to an underground railway yard for little trains, one of which was parked there. The train — I call it a train even though it ran on tramlines — had no roof and the locomotive was only big enough for the driver to sit in, like the one at Albert Park. Behind it was a set of cars with nothing in them but little seats. Behind
them
was a vast chamber with more carriages, two cranes and a mountain of spare parts and old tools. In the back of the chamber was another lift with rails in it, and, at one side, a set of stairs that went around as they went up. A feeling rose in my chest as if I was full of burning air. I had struck not gold but trains! And according to the Finders Keepers rule, they were now mine, as they'd been left just sitting there in the dark. I ran my hand over the locomotive and felt its cold green armour. It was the most jump-in-able train I'd ever seen. And it had its own underground train shed. But there was more exploring to do.

On the far side of the chamber, branching to the left and right, were railway tunnels that went round bends and disappeared. I cased the joint as best I could, switching the torch on for short bursts, as it was starting to lose its get up and go, and decided to tackle the twisting stairs. I was met at the top by a solid iron door. This time the door had no padlock, and when I loosened it a bit with my pinch bar, it opened. On the other side was a long room, about the size of my street, full of wooden boxes of all shapes and sizes that looked and
smelt brand new. On their sides were letters and numbers; the numbers were different, but all of the boxes had the same two letters in black:
US
. The boxes were not padlocked but only nailed down, so I opened one of the biggest ones with my trusty pinch bar. It's either us or them, Barney says. And that box had us written all over it.

The box was full of books, maps, charts, letters, notes and stacks of paper tied together with khaki ribbon. Those papers and books reminded me of the back of the shop where I had found the Manual, and I immediately felt warm and happy. As for the maps, they were not like any of the maps I had ever seen, and were mostly covered in wobbly circles and Chinese-sounding words. But they were maps, so I grabbed one that had English words on it, and shoved it into my bag. Its title was
Port Moresby
, which sounded like part of Australia. I was pretty worried about the torch batteries now, so I ran up the other end of the room and had a quick look in one of the smaller boxes. It was full of straw, and inside the straw, held down by long wooden clamps with wooden wingnuts at the ends, were rows of hand grenades, the kind used by Rock Murdock in
Marines in Action
.

I closed the box and swallowed a few times to get my throat going again, and looked around. I was at the bottom of a set of ordinary wooden stairs with a set of double doors at the top. Onwards and upwards, I thought. With a little encouragement from the pinch bar the two doors parted in the middle and swung away from each other with a gentle click. The pinch bar is man's greatest invention after the pocketknife, which edges it out by a short half-head.

This room was filled with junk. However, in one corner light was creeping in from a window that had a sheet of plywood
balanced in front of it. I moved it, and the room was suddenly illuminated. The window was low enough for me to look through, and what I saw surprised me half to death: a large lawn spread out down below, a huge park stretching out into the distance, and on the other side the railway, and one of the new blue trains going past. I pressed my face to the window and looked to the left and saw a set of stone steps. To the right I saw the river, except that now I was on the other side of it. I turned around to replace the sheet of wood and noticed that it was actually a sign, and it said:
CITY BOYS HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL FETE
. I was in a school with a cellar full of grenades.

Unable to resist the temptation, one that was tailor-made for the Cartographer, I went to the door at the other end of the room and opened it. I found myself in a large office with desks and typewriters all over the place. This office had windows and they looked the other way, not towards the railway, but towards Chapel Street and, further over, to Como Park, where Dad and I used to watch the model aeroplanes on Sundays. I had penetrated the everyday above-ground world. Outside was the school's main corridor with lots of light, containing the stairs at the centre of the school, which led down to the front doors. I had seen those doors from the train many times. It was so peaceful that I felt I could have happily explored there every day. But a sudden noise from the bottom of the main stairs made me first freeze, then run.

It was only a short time before I was back in the railway tunnel, having carefully closed all the doors behind me and taking care to shove a souvenir hand grenade into my bag. At this point I was losing torch power so fast that the Cartographer knew he would have to return if he wanted to investigate the little train, the tunnel, the lot.

After getting me safely to the edge of the tunnel that would take me back to the island, the torch batteries finally gave up the ghost, and I sat down on the floor to change them. I had no sooner made myself comfortable when the door at the top of the twisty staircase opened with a bang that echoed around the tunnels like a gunshot, and someone with a powerful torch started running down the stairs towards me.

All I could do was duck into the tunnel and run, knowing with the instinct of a kid whose luck has run out many times that I was not going to outrun an angry man with a torch. Though I could hardly run under the weight of my explorer's bag of goodies, I went like hell.

‘I'll get you, you bastard — there's no way out.'

I thought my legs were going to fold up under me when I heard this, not because it was true — it wasn't, of course — but because it was the voice of Bob the Butcher.

It was the first time he had spoken to me, though I was sure that he had no way of knowing who I was, only that I had disturbed him. As I ran I kept my hand close to the wall, yet I did not feel the water that would have told me that I was crossing the river. After a few minutes I stopped, and took stock of things. Bob had gone the wrong way. So had I. If I retraced my steps I would find the way out. If Bob retraced
his
steps, he might bump into me, recognise me, and it would all come back to him. I could still hear his footsteps, even if they weren't directly behind me, so I decided to push on for a while, to increase the distance between us.

Suddenly, I found the tunnel was broken by a turn to the left. It was the new tunnel I'd found, the one that led to the door that had been padlocked. I took it, still keeping my hand on the wall, and almost immediately felt the wetness of the
leaking river above me. I hurried on until I had crossed the river. This time I had an idea where I was. When I came to the bottom of the steps, I sat down to assess my options. I could go back to the railway, and follow the tunnel to the island, a fairly long and now dangerous trip, or I could go up the stairs and exit through the dungeon door. The Cartographer knows when to let the darkness be his friend, but he also knows when enough is enough.

I dragged myself up the cool steps, and let myself out into the main stormwater drain. A minute later I was sitting on the lip of the drain, looking at the river and waiting for my energy to come back. The Cartographer had cheated death twice: he had denied Bob the Butcher that opportunity to throttle him, and he had escaped being buried alive. If I had been stuck down there I probably would have had to chew my hands off to survive, though I did have a couple of musk sticks and a packet of Juicy Fruit, and they could keep you going for a hell of a long time.

As I replaced the batteries in my torch, I wondered how the murderer could possibly have been down there at the same time as me. There was no reason at all why he should have thought it was me down there, and there was something about the way he yelled that told me that he would have yelled the same way at any intruder. The only conclusion I could draw was that he had found the tunnels himself. After all, he was on the run. He needed a place to hide, had investigated the school basement, and … That was it! The school! His way into the tunnels was the school and he thought I'd used the same route. And that meant my island was safe. And, what was more important, my drains.

A few minutes later I was back in the drain and looking for the entrance to the kidnapper's hideout, as I planned to leave
my pinch bar at that junction for safekeeping. Then I was heading north. Despite having been chased, I felt much safer in the dark stormwater drains than in the railway tunnels, which were getting to be a bit like Bourke Street during the rush hour.

I headed straight up the drain towards the tip, knowing that I could exit at several points and still be able to get to a safe place, the one I had in mind being the Sandersons'. As I passed the exit to Kipling Street I realised that I was now beneath Rooney Park, where Tom had died, close to the spot he had lain. I felt thankful that I had the drain and didn't have to walk past the park and see the thing that had killed him. I hated it. Yet I had not drawn it on the map as I tended to do with things I hated.

Thinking about those things up there took me back to that day. When I realised I couldn't help Tom in any way at all I got up and looked across the road to the houses sitting there waiting to see what I'd do next. I had to go to one of them, but that would mean leaving Tom. I hesitated. Tom had stopped struggling. I had no choice but to run. And I ran to the wrong house.

I bashed on the door until it was opened by an old geezer wearing a pair of striped pyjamas that looked like they hadn't been taken off since April. His lower eyelids were droopy and bloodshot, like a couple of bits of tomato skin you might find in your stew if you were having dinner around at our place. I told him I needed help to lift the bar off Tom, and he told me to bugger off.
Fair enough
, I thought.
You'll keep, mate
.

The next house didn't even produce a man in pyjamas. And meanwhile, the seconds were ticking away, and I could feel myself losing control, and losing Tom. The third door
was opened by an Italian lady, who pulled me in and started screaming out to her husband. He comes out, a big bloke built like a brick shithouse, and runs across to the park with me in tow. He lifts the monkey bar off Tom with an ease that causes a shock of guilt to my guts — it's still there: Father Hagen says, ‘
Ego te absolvo
', and I think,
Yeah, pull the other one
. So then he rushes Tom, who is now a big rag doll, back into the house, yelling for his wife — it could have been Maria — to keep us all in the living room. The kids appear — there are about fifty-seven of them — and I see that one of them is Tony Capra, who I know from school. The family stares at me as if I am the Jack the Ripper diorama at the museum, and I become aware that I am less than an inch away from going troppo right there in the living room, in front of Pope Pius XII, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour and a very old man who, it turned out, was not a picture.

When I thought I was closest to that spot I stopped for a moment, out of respect for Tom, the way the nuns told us to stop as we passed the part of the church where the tabernacle was — not that we did, as we soon worked out that if you tried to run and stop at the same time you were liable to break something. For a moment, in the near pitch dark, I was with Tom again. I could hear him singing his favourite nursery rhyme,
Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son …

I could hear his funny laugh, which everyone said was the same as mine, but wasn't because it was Tom's laugh and it was a little louder, a little wilder.

‘Tom, that nursery rhyme is dumb.'

‘Come on then, let's hear yours.'

There was just me in the dark, in the drain, saying both parts of the argument we'd had heaps of times. I had to laugh.

At that moment I knew that this was my talking-to-Tom place, and that I could come back any time and find him here, even though he was really buried at Parkville, on the other side of Woop-Woop. It was funny how things above the ground were usually all mucked up, but down below, if you didn't count the kidnappers and murderers, everything was usually apples.

I emerged well past the rubbish tip, at the top of the drain, at a place where it suddenly became a whole lot of smaller drains heading in different directions, none of them big enough to walk in, except for one big drain that went straight up, and had a ladder in the side. I climbed up the ladder and found myself in a drain with a sign in the wall:
EDEN PARK
, which meant I was close to the Eden Park railway station, which was inside a steep hill, and actually under the ground. The way to catch a train after you bought your ticket was to go down about thirty-five flights of steps until you were halfway to China. Dad and Tom and I always caught the train there whenever we went to see the Mighty Swans play the Hawks at Glenferrie Oval, which was where Hawthorn played, though this year we didn't go. It was also the nearest station if you wanted to catch a train to my Aunty Jem's place in Burwood Road. It hit me that I'd started out wanting to go south, but I'd gone in every other direction, and since leaving the fort I'd been travelling north instead. I thought:
What the hell, I'll just keep heading north
.

I plodded up the drain, having to use my torch every now and then, but not really worried as it had fresh batteries in it. After a while the drain began to slope downwards a little and also became big enough to stand up in without banging my head against the top. I was as hungry as hell, and thirsty because of all the stuff I was carrying, so I decided that as
soon as I came to something interesting, or to some light, I would stop and have some water. Well, what I came to was an open space that was about the size of St Felix's Church.

It was empty, except for a whole stack of railway sleepers and some bits of track. To the right, there was more tunnel, and to the left I could see a curve disappearing into the darkness. I decided to go right, and followed the hard dirt floor for a long distance until I came to an underground pond that was wider than the torch's light would reach. The water's surface was slimy and smelt of grease. Well, that explained what happened to the tunnel. I headed back to where I had seen the railway lines, and I was just down the tunnel a little way when there was a sudden cool breeze that quickly turned into a gale-force wind that nearly blew me over. I was pondering this when the whole place started to roar and shake and I copped a shower of dust from the ceiling. For a second I was paralysed with terror. I was in a tunnel and I could hear a train coming.

I ran to the wall and pressed myself against its cold hardness, but the train never came my way. Instead it squealed to a halt somewhere out of sight and the tunnel breathed a puff of brake-dust at me.

Cautiously, I went around the bend and saw a long line of lights that told me I had reached the main tunnel, and probably Eden Park Station. On the right, as I walked along, I saw several little dark rooms, some of which had windows. I investigated a few of these and found that they were underground offices, though why they were under the ground and not on the station was a mystery. Nevertheless, I memorised their location, size and number, just as Kim would have done. When I came to the fork that should have gone north, back to the station, all I saw was another tunnel, but this one had two sets of rails in it.
I knew the station was here somewhere because I had heard the train stop and start again, but I couldn't see it. I walked along the tunnel, keeping to the wall, just in case, and listened as trains came and went. Just as I was about to give up and go back, I came to the station; only I had a feeling it was not the station I had been looking for. This station had four platforms, each with a row of signs at one end that said
WHITE
, and a row at the other end that said
BLACK
, and instead of big round signs in the middle announcing that the name of the station was Eden Park, long rectangular signs announced a completely different name:
KANSAS
.

As there were some lights on, I sat down on a bench on the platform called
A
, and had a musk stick. Until that moment, ever since going to my very first movie,
The Wizard of Oz,
I had thought that Kansas was in America. Now I realised, with some embarrassment, that I had been mistaken, and probably should look it up in my atlas as soon as I got home. Clearly, movies were not as trustworthy as radio and TV. After swinging my legs and singing ‘Everything's up to Date in Kansas City' for a while, I think I knew how that bloke felt when he sang:
‘
They've gone about as far as they can go'. But I felt that I couldn't give up until I found out where the real station was, so I got up and started walking along the platform in the dim light. I came to a sliding door, which I opened, and found myself looking at a staircase that went up and down. The sign pointing down said:
PLATFORMS E
,
F
,
G
,
H
(
EDEN PARK STATION
), and the sign pointing up said
SWAN STREET
. I walked down the stairs, and found myself looking through a heavily barred door, like a prison door, right at the end of a platform, and as I looked, a train came along. As it pulled up, the guard's door drew level with me, and as he swung out to look down
to the station bloke, the guard's eyes connected with mine and told me what I already knew: that I was up to no good. Then he smiled in a way that reminded me of Luigi Esposito's father, and the train was on its way to the next station, and everything was apples again.

The gate was locked, but that didn't worry me: I knew I could get onto the station just by walking back where the railway line branched, in the direction of East Richmond Station. And that is just what I did. Once I was in Eden Park I was free to explore, and had resumed my above-ground identity as the Cartographer. I didn't feel like taking the drain home so I thought that after my adventure was over — it was still early days — I would take a tram, as it was pretty much a straight run home. My aim, as usual, was to find a place that would be easy to get in and out of, that looked big enough to have places to hide and eavesdrop, and that didn't look as if anything nasty could happen.
Sounds easy
, as I had told myself a few times already.
What could possibly go wrong?
I asked myself.
The more information I get, the safer I will be
, said a little voice.

But this time I was prepared to break all my own rules. I checked my Spirax notebook, and confirmed that I was quite close to one of the addresses I had found on Granddad's phone pad, so off I went. As usual, I went for the lane approach; it had stood the test of time.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it
, Dad says.

The house I arrived at was old and very large. It was perfect, even though I didn't pick it at random. Around the back it had had an extra bit added on, and even that was run down and had busted bits. It was like a little bit of house that no one cared about any more. Perfect: that would be my way in – a few things stacked up against the window and Bob's your
uncle. Once inside the add-on I opened the door into the main part of the house; the key was conveniently in the lock.
Open Sesame!
— I was inside.