The Castle (9 page)

EIGHTEEN

S
he pushed the door shut behind me, put her cheek to it and listened. I waited, heart racing, blood singing. She turned back briefly with her finger to her lips again, and I nodded.
Got the message. Not exactly going to draw attention to myself here.

We crouched in the near-darkness, catching our breath. The hidden space wasn't as pitch-black as I had thought. A shaft of light from somewhere further along the passage made it possible to see that we were in a low, narrow tunnel, cut into the super-thick castle walls.

Before I had time to think, the girl set off down the tunnel at speed and I had trouble keeping up with her. The ceiling
was so low I had to crouch. On either side of me, the damp walls brushed my shoulders and banged my elbows, while the ceiling kept scraping the top of my back. Sometimes it was easier to crawl, but the rough ground cut and scratched my knees.

The girl kept going, and I was glad to get as far away from Max as possible, even like this. It was never entirely dark, and never entirely light. The air smelled of dirt and mould. The ground under us was a mixture of earth and stone, and small, hard, knobbly things that felt a lot like mouse poo. And possibly rat poo. And things that crunched underfoot like dead bugs. There were spiders, by the way,
everywhere.

I didn't dare ask where we were going, and I didn't think she would answer anyway. Whenever two paths met, she knew instantly which one to take and I just had to follow. On we continued, launching ourselves down narrow spiral stairs. This was where the light was coming from: there was a window high in the stairwell, several floors up. After several more passages and another staircase, she eventually stopped next to a door-shaped crack of light in the wall. She felt for a handle and pulled it hard, and we were through.

We were in a large room with a ceiling of vaulted stone, like a church. No windows. It felt as though we were underground. At either end, there were two huge stone fireplaces, big enough to roast an ox. This place was unreal! Honestly, you could stick a school tour in here and tell them it was from the Middle Ages and they'd definitely believe you. However, these kitchens also had a bank of modern, steel ovens in the middle, lots of steel worktops round the edge, and several men in white jackets stomping around, swearing loudly.

While they were busy with steaming pots and spitting pans, the girl grabbed my hand and pulled me quickly past them, out through the nearest door and into a cold, damp corridor. She went so fast we almost ran into someone.

‘Mannaggia!'

A man bustled past us in chef's whites, carrying a pyramid of buns topped with spun sugar. I paused for a moment to admire it. A
croquembouche –
a speciality of the chef at the Smugglers' Inn. Mum had one as her wedding cake. But the girl yanked me out of my mini-reverie, bowing low and mumbling apologies.

A moment later, she brought me to a cold room lit only by a small window high up in the thick stone wall. In the middle was a wooden table, and on its surface something large and delicate glistened in the dim light.

It was a boat. A pale and ghostly boat, as tall as me, and made of ice. It looked as though it should have been a pirate ship or a galleon, but actually it was a big, modern yacht. I checked out the many decks, the graceful shape. Then I did a double-take. There, at the front, was my old cabin on the
Princess Nazia
, with the balcony outside it. They had reproduced the whole boat, perfectly, in ice.

The little girl saw the wonder on my face and nodded gravely. Then her face became a question. She pointed at the ice boat, then at me.

‘Yes,' I whispered, nodding. ‘That's how I got here.'

She held out her hand, not pulling me this time.

‘English girl.
Ayo
. Come.'

I followed her down a series of passages lined with little storage rooms. The further we went, the more damp and dirty the rooms became. Some were full of kitchen supplies like tinned food and bags of potatoes. Others held mops and
tools. A couple contained people dressed in tattered clothes, working under the harsh light of bare bulbs, or resting on mattresses on the floor. It felt a million miles away from the bedrooms upstairs.

In the furthest room, at the end of the longest passage, a teenage boy sat cross-legged on a mat, sewing a pair of trousers. Reaching his open door, the girl stopped and waited on the threshold. The room was about half the size of the bathroom on the yacht, with bare walls covered in rough plaster. The boy looked up from his task and his face dropped in shock at the sight of me. So did his needle.

‘You!' He scrambled to his feet, staring at me as if I was primed to explode. ‘You!'

He had the voice I recognised from those phone calls, and Max's bedroom upstairs. He was thin and scraggy, with wild black hair and dark eyes. He was dressed in a threadbare pair of shorts, which were practically falling apart. His skin was scarred. He looked as if he'd never been fed properly in his life, or told to comb his hair. He looked like the most pitiable, unloved creature in the world.

As the girl shut the door behind us, his face broke into a pillarbox smile, showing all his teeth.

‘Welcome to my castle, Peta Jones!'

NINETEEN

‘
Y
ou? You?' I couldn't help echoing his original words. ‘You're the boy?'

I stood there, staring.

‘Come in, please. Sit. I beg you.' He indicated the filthy mat as if it was a sofa at Buckingham Palace. His smile had returned. He looked surprised, but pleased to see me – delighted, even.

I was in shock.

‘You
are
the boy. The one who helped me . . . But how did you know it was me?'

‘From your computer picture,' he said. ‘I do not understand why you are here. But it is good to see you.'

‘It's good to see you too,' I lied.

It would have been so good to see him if he'd been the boy in the swimming pool. If he'd been the fit, powerful one, acting as if he owned the place. True, this boy also acted as if he owned the place, but he
so
didn't.

All this time – in the furniture van, on the boat, in the rose-scented bedroom – I'd been relying on Max, the son of the family, to get me out of trouble. He was my secret weapon, my back-up plan. And all this time, the truth was that Max was an evil bully who made my flesh crawl, and my only ‘friend' lived in a filthy cellar room lit by a single bulb. I thought Max would save me, but this boy and girl looked as if they needed saving more than I did.

I sank down on to his ragged old mat, and stared hard at the floor.

‘Don't cry, Peta Jones. You have only just arrived!'

‘I'm not crying. I'm just . . . It's been a long journey.'

‘I'm sure you are tired. I am sorry; where are my manners? Have you eaten? Have you had anything to drink?'

I shook my head. The boy barked orders to the little girl, who quickly left the room.

‘My sister will come back soon. Don't worry.'

I looked up and he smiled again. Generous. Relaxed. Or, rather, almost relaxed. He had the face of a happy boy, but the wrinkled eyes of a tired old man.

‘Amina is your sister?' I asked.

‘Ah, you know her name!' he said softly. ‘Yes, she is my Amina.'

‘How old is she?'

‘She is young. Only twelve, I think.'

‘You
think
?'

A shadow of embarrassment fell across his face. Why
didn't he know?

‘She looks younger,' I said.

He dipped his head. ‘Yes. She is still a child.' The wrinkles around his eyes deepened and he looked really ancient, suddenly, although he couldn't have been that much older than me. But he shook himself out of it. ‘How did you get here, Peta Jones?' he asked. ‘Why did you come? Did I not tell you to hide?'

‘I didn't know “here” existed,' I said hotly. ‘And I didn't exactly mean to come.'

I explained about going to the house in Eaton Square, and the van, and finding myself on the boat. His eyes widened with surprise, but the more I explained, the more laughter started to flicker there. ‘Bad things' happening to me were funny, it seemed. In fact, he was exactly how I'd imagined him all this time. Or his face was, anyway: bright and confident. His thin, ragged body told a totally different story.

A few minutes later, Amina returned, clutching her dark skirt up to her chest and revealing a pair of old black trousers underneath. She knelt carefully on the floor and laid the skirt down. Out of it tumbled pears, grapes, a bag of soft white balls that looked like marshmallows, more nuts (I smiled grate fully at these, like everything else, but to be honest I was a bit sick of nuts), and a couple of fat, glistening pastry cones. She also held a cup of pink liquid, which she handed ceremoniously to me. I took a big gulp. My mouth filled with a sharp, bitter taste. Then something sweet: sugar. I stared at the glass again: it was pink lemonade.

After everything that had just happened, the shock of its loveliness was almost overwhelming. I wanted to cry again. I wanted to hug her. I wasn't sure how she'd take it, though, so
I settled for a shaky grin.

‘Peta,' I said, pointing at myself. ‘Peta Jones. Thank you.'

‘Amina,' she said with a shy smile, bowing. I bowed back. Then I turned to her brother.

‘I don't know your name,' I said, feeling rude for not asking before. And guilty for not caring before. But any boy who can summon up pink lemonade at a moment's notice needs a proper introduction.

‘Karim.'

‘Thank you too, Karim.'

He shrugged, as if providing food and drink to strange girls who showed up out of nowhere was all in a day's work for ‘his' castle.

‘Carry on, please,' he said, once we were all sitting down again. ‘You were telling me the interesting story of your adventures on the new vessel. It is a vessel, yes?'

‘I think so.' Were yachts vessels? His grasp of vocab was better than mine.

‘Very good. Continue. You had got to the part where you went looking for food.'

Soon I was deep into the story of my adventures behind the bar. Amina gasped at all the scary bits and grinned at all the good bits. Despite her unwillingness to speak it, she understood English as perfectly as her brother. I told them about how I hid as Yasmin and her father argued about the birthday party.

‘They don't seem a very happy family,' I said.

‘No,' Karim agreed. ‘They are not.'

‘Mr Wahool kept talking about his
own
father,' I said. ‘Like he was in charge.'

Karim looked surprised at this. ‘The master's father is dead.'

‘But . . . but, he kept saying “the Grandfather”.'

Brother and sister exchanged glances and giggled nervously.

‘The Grandfather is what we call the great leader,' he explained. ‘The President of Marvalia. He was our ruler for many, many years, until a bad thing happened.'

‘D'you mean the Blue Revolution? That was a good thing, wasn't it?'

‘Not for the Grandfather,' Karim said flatly. ‘He was a rich man. A powerful man. He lived in the Great Palace. It had a thousand rooms. His throne was made of copper.'

‘He had a
throne
?'

Amina joined in. ‘In the Great Palace, all the floors were made of copper, polished to shine like gold. He had a hundred slaves to shine them.'

‘Why copper?' I asked. ‘There was lots of copper on the
Princess Nazia
too.'

‘It is the metal of Marvalia,' Karim explained. ‘There are many copper mines. Mr Johnson told me that nowadays everyone in the world needs copper for electricity. Copper is very valuable. It is why the Grandfather is so rich. And the master too. He owned many of the copper mines. He is very angry to see them used by the people now, with nobody paying him taxes.'

‘I bet he is,' I grunted.

Wait. The other thing. Amina had said something odd. Or had I misunderstood?

‘The Grandfather had
slaves
? They still had them in Marvalia?'

Amina cast her eyes down. Karim swallowed, before nodding silently.

Something began to dawn on me.

‘And . . . Mr Wahool – he had slaves too?'

No answer.

‘And . . . you?'

They didn't need to say anything. I'd heard that slap on Amina's cheek. I saw how these people lived.

I hadn't found Dad. I'd found slave children, living in squalor under a massive castle filled with spoiled and psychotic teenagers and patrolled by armed guards. And there was nothing, nothing I could do.

I smiled weakly. They smiled weakly back. An awkward silence hung in the stuffy room, like hope dying.

A bell jingled outside and suddenly the corridor was filled with the sound of running footsteps. Karim announced that he and Amina must go too. They were needed by the family. Just like that, they were gone. I was alone.

I looked down at what Amina had brought for me. She might be a slave, but she had provided the best selection of food I'd seen in days. While she and her brother were away, I worked my way ravenously through everything, including the nuts. It turned out the small white lumps were soft, fresh cheese. The pastries were stale, but full of vanilla cream. Some of the fruit was old and turning brown, but I was so hungry that it all tasted good.

Karim came back, clutching some things in a bundle of cloth, just as I was finishing the last pastry. He moved a couple of loose stones out of the wall and tucked the bundle away in a secret hiding place.

‘Usually, we are very busy in the evening,' he said. ‘There is always a celebration of some sort, but tonight it is on the vessel. And we are not invited to the vessel!'

He was clearly thrilled
not
to be going aboard the
Princess
Nazia
, and given the way he and his sister were treated by the family, I could understand it.

‘I expect you are worried about the prisoner,' he added, suddenly serious. ‘Mr Allud. You are concerned for him, yes?'

I caught my breath.
Yes!
I'd been so shocked and confused that I'd forgotten, for a moment, that it was Karim who had given me Dad's message.

‘Of course! Where is he?'

‘In a place beneath the kitchens. He is very . . . You are crying again, Peta Jones. You really are a tearful girl. I did not expect this. Because you are also brave – you have come to find him. Do not cry. It is all right. Really. It is all right.'

‘I'm sorry.' Dad was here! He really was. My tears were pure relief. ‘And who . . . who is looking after him?'

‘I am, Peta Jones. And sometimes my sister. We bring the prisoners food. We tend to their wounds when they are not cared for by the guards. It is not a healthy place down there. They are dirty. They get diseases. And . . . other things.'

There were other prisoners? And
wounds
? There was so much I needed to know, and could hardly bear to ask. ‘But . . . Mr Allud . . . What do you know about him?'

Karim sighed and came over to sit near me.

‘He came here many months ago. One day I saw the guards dragging him from his computer. They took him to a special room and asked him questions. They did not . . . look after him. For a long time, he stayed in that place. Then they moved him to the dungeons.'

‘This place has dungeons?'

‘Yes. He was there for a long time. But recently they took him back to . . . the room where they do these things. The master asked Mr Allud about ‘the power of Peta' but he did not reply. Then they told him they were sending some people
to go and get the kid – which was you – and when they brought you here, they would kill you.'

‘Kill me?' I whispered. ‘You said “kill” me? Can they do that?'

‘Yes, they can.' He shrugged, as if that was a fairly typical conversation here at the castle. ‘After that, Mr Allud asked me to telephone you and give you the message. Later,' he went on, ‘I heard Marco and Ingrid boasting to their friends that they would bring you back on the super-boat, and they would get a free ride.' He seemed very proud of himself. ‘That is how I knew how long you must hide.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I see.' My voice was shaky. My brain was still processing
kill you
, and
Yes, they can
.

‘That message . . .' Karim went on. ‘I still do not understand. Mr Allud said you have a power. The master said so too. What is your power, Peta Jones?'

‘I don't have one. It's just my name.'

‘Please?'

Really? I had to go into this now?
Really?
But Karim looked so curious and confused.

‘Peta means ten to the power of fifteen,' I sighed.

He frowned at me, puzzled. ‘That is all? It is a big number? Ten times fifteen?'

‘Not ten
times
fifteen. Ten times ten, fifteen times over. It's called a quadrillion sometimes.'

‘That is a very big number,' he said, nodding gravely. ‘But I do not understand why the master should want to know it.'

I agreed. Overall, Karim seemed disappointed by my answer, and so was I.

Silence. That awkward silence again. He broke it with a smile: ‘Well, now you know everything about Mr Allud.'

He was wrong.

I still didn't really know anything about this man with a name I didn't recognise – except that he had suffered and suffered while they ‘didn't look after him' in ‘the room where they do these things', and that for some reason connected to him, a bunch of strangers now wanted me dead. I knew he cared about me, though, and of course my heart told me he was Dad, Dad, Dad.