The Cockatrice Boys (10 page)

“I fear you may be right,” sighed the major.

But Lieutenant Upfold shook his head.

“Those voices were deuced queer, if you ask me. Gave me the shivering hab-dabs. There was something—” he searched for words—“something not at all
the thing
about those voices. Specially one of them. Not like anything I've ever heard in my life before. Nor,” he added after some thought, “anything like what I'd ever want to hear again.”

“Oh, go along with you both and leave me in peace,” growled the colonel. “If we are to leave for Lincoln this afternoon, there's a whole lot of paperwork to be done. Bellswinger!” he barked on the intercom.

“Yessir!”

“Send me Quartermaster Garble. And muster the men for embarkation. Make sure there's none of them left fossicking about on the station platforms. We depart at two sharp!”

“Yessir. What about the men's dinner, sir?”

“Mrs. Churt must serve it in transit.”

“Mrs. Churt won't say thank you for that,” remarked Bellswinger, when he had replaced the receiver. “You'd best stop polishing buttons, lovey, and go give her a hand.”

Nodding, Sauna laid a folded mess-jacket with brilliantly polished buttons on a pile of fifteen others and rose to her feet. As she did so, the phone rang again.

“
Now
what does His Nibs want?” mumbled Sergeant Bellswinger, snatching the instrument off its hook.

But this time it was not the colonel.

“Sauna, Sauna, I want to speak to my little Sauna!” came a high, strident, queerly disembodied wail from the mouthpiece. It seemed as if the phone itself were speaking, rather than a real, live human being far away.

“Bless my buttons, girl, whoever can that be?” grunted the sergeant, greatly astonished. “And how in the world come she's got on to our internal line?”

Sauna had turned white as pipe clay. Her teeth chattered.

“It—it sounds for all the world like my Auntie Floss!” she gulped. “B-b-but how
can
it be? She can't be on the train! Nobody knows what happened to her … I thought she was dead!”

“
Sauna! Sauna! Come to your loving auntie!
” wailed the phone.

“Shouldn't you better speak to her, girl? Ask her maybe where she is?” suggested Bellswinger, holding out the receiver. Sauna gave him a desperate look. The very last thing she wanted was to be back in touch with her Auntie Floss—but she could see that Bellswinger thought she ought to take the call, expected her to do so—and therefore, with great reluctance, she took a step forward, holding out her hand for the mouthpiece. But the instant before she reached it, the sergeant shuddered from head to foot with a violent jerking movement and dropped the receiver, which smashed to pieces on the metal floor. Oddly enough, even after the telephone had shattered sound continued to come out of it for several minutes—or perhaps the sound came not from the phone but from the wall and ceiling nearby.

“
Sauna! Sauna! I'm up in the north country. I want you so badly. So ba-a-a-dly! Come to your grandfather's house! At Glen Grief! Your great-great-great-great-grandfather's house. Come! Oh, come!
”

The voice rose to a frenzied shriek, then faded away.

“Blimey!” gasped Sergeant Bellswinger, picking himself off the floor where he had collapsed after the convulsion shook him. He flopped heavily on to a chair and blew out a long breath. “Blimey!” he said again. “That was an electric shock, that was. Like a bolt o' lightning. Did
you
feel it, gal?”

Sauna shook her head.

“No, but I saw you, Sergeant,” she said. “It was awful! I thought you was a goner, for certain sure!”

“
Was
that voice your Auntie Floss?” he demanded. “Or—or who? If not her,
who?
”

“I dunno, Sergeant! I suppose it could have been Auntie Floss—after all, I ain't got nobody else, but she never called me her little Sauna before. Never! She called me Gal, or You, Whatsyername, and she never in her whole life said she wanted me badly. She never wanted me at all! She only took me a'cos Mam and Dad were dead and there was no one else to take me. She often told me that. She said it was a right pain having to have me in her house. And,” said Sauna shivering, “if she wasn't killed by the Snark, where is she? In the north country? Where's that?”

“There's summat pesky rum about it all,” grunted the sergeant. “But, anyway, she's off the line now. And that's just as well. You don't have to answer her. You run to Mrs. Churt, gal, and on your way tell Corporal Nark to come along and repair this-ere phone.”

Sauna found Dakin with Mrs. Churt, helping to chop up spinach and sassafras which had been snatched from the marshes round Manchester under covering fire.

“It'll have to be soup for the boys' dinner,” Mrs. Churt was saying. “But
thick
soup, mind you, so it won't get all splashed about when the train picks up speed. It's lucky I've got plenty of lentils. Now, Sauna, what are you looking so down in the mouth for, all of a sudden?”

“I had a message from my Auntie Floss, what we thought was took by a Snark.”

“And she weren't after all? Where is she, then?”

“Up north, she said. She asked me to go to her—but she never gave an proper address. Except something about Grief. She sounded
ever
so queer.”

“Well, we are going up north, by all accounts,” said Mrs. Churt—for, of course, news of the troop movements had already flashed about the train like lightning—“so you needn't trouble your young head about that. Maybe she'll get in touch again. Nothing you can do about it till she does.”

“But, Mrs. Churt,” said Sauna, “I don't want to go back to her. I don't like her. I like it much better on this train.”

“She's your auntie, though,” pointed out Mrs. Churt. “She took you in. She didn't have to.”

“I wish she hadn't! I'd sooner have gone to an orphanage!”

“You can't prove that,” argued Dakin. “For you don't know what the orphanage might have been like.”

“Anyway, perhaps your auntie wasn't used to children,” suggested Mrs. Churt.

“I reckon she wasn't.”

“Yet she did put up with you. You gotta remember that.”

“Only just,” said Sauna. “And I can't think why she wants me back now. I'm not even sure if that really was her voice. It sounded so squeaky and queer.”

“Who else could it have been?” asked Mrs. Churt unanswerably. “Still and all, dearie, you don't have to live with her if you don't want to. Nobody can oblige you, not these days.” Sauna nodded in relief, and they got on with making the men's dinner. Then all of a sudden the
Cockatrice Belle,
which had been stationary for so long, gave herself a gentle twitch, a slow heave like a cat stretching and slipped off along the rails in a south-easterly direction.

“Oooo!” cried Sauna, enraptured. “We're moving! We're really moving!”

“Don't get your feathers in a twitch,” Dakin teased her. But he too was filled with excitement and joy at being on the go again after remaining in one spot for so long; and all along the train there were loud sounds of the soldiers' joy at the prospect of change and action. And new recruits who had come on board at Manchester to replace the men lost in battle were being told by their mates of the pleasures in store.

“We're rolling, we're rolling!”

“Huzza!”

“Ho, ho, jubilo!”

The whole train rang with shouts of enthusiasm as it came out of the underground station. And, overhead, the massed clouds of Snarks and Telepods, who had been circling aimlessly, began to concentrate their movements and to make vicious repeated dives at the snaky moving object. Sergeant Bellswinger bustled up and down the corridor briskly reminding the men that they were now much more at risk and must keep a sharp look-out every minute of the time in case a stray beak or talon or a razor-edged tusk or spine penetrated the train's outer armour.

Indeed a swarm of Flying Hammerheads carried off Ensign Peascape and Corporal Hunt when they leapt off the train to change the points at Buxton; this made a grim, if salutary reminder of the dangers that surrounded them. Chesterfield was an empty, ravaged city with not a soul to be seen in its grass-grown streets or among its battered houses; they hurried through without stopping. The bent church spire had been bent even more and a large Bycorn was to be seen, twined around it. This made the colonel so indignant that he had a trench mortar fired at it, but this merely dislodged a piece of the spire without dislodging the Bycorn.

*   *   *

Dusk had fallen by the time they reached Lincoln, and the
Cockatrice Belle
crept cautiously and quietly into the station, which had been fortified and made into a kind of castle. Some Snarks and Telepods had to be despatched before it was safe for the mayor and corporation to welcome Colonel Clipspeak and his troops, but Lincoln had not suffered so severely as Manchester and the citizens were in better shape. Stores were waiting ready to be loaded on board.

“We get supplies smuggled up canals from the coast,” explained the mayor, Sir Lionel Dritch. “Fish and seaweed. Only difficulty is, the smell of the seaweed attracts the Foot-monsters. That's what we suffer from worst, here. They fly upside down, you know, with their foot in the air; and their sense of smell is so sharp that one of 'em can locate a single rotten egg on Spurn Head light.”

The townspeople of Lincoln were so happy to be visited that they had arranged a gala reception in the station for the crew of the
Cockatrice Belle,
with smoked herring roes served on slices of dried turnip, candied salt beans, and a fearsomely potent drink made from distilled seaweed.

“Upon my word, that is stingo stuff!” said Colonel Clipspeak to Sir Lionel, and he issued an order on the spot that none of his crew were to take more than two glasses of it, and Driver Catchpole only one.

The party was a great success. There were more children in Lincoln than in many English cities, due to the fact that the Footmonsters, very short-sighted beasts, were unable to see any prey less that one and a half metres in height or forty-two kilos in weight. In London and Manchester it was rare to meet anybody under twelve, but in Lincoln Station there were forty pupils from a mixed junior school waiting to greet Dakin and Sauna, who had a fine time describing life on the train to an admiring audience.

Meanwhile Sir Lionel introduced Colonel Clipspeak to his new passenger, Dr. Wren, the Archbishop of Lincoln.

Archbishop Wren was a cheerful little round man (“More like a robin than a wren,” whispered Sauna to Dakin, looking along the station platform).

“Sad times we live in, sir,” said Colonel Clipspeak. “Sad times indeed. But we are delighted to have you as a passenger.”

“Oh, I don't know, Colonel,” said Dr. Wren cheerfully. “I think I'd call them
rousing
times. A challenge to us all. And how splendidly you are responding to it!” He cast a glance of admiration at the glittering train.

“But I understand you have lost a great many of your clergy, Archbishop?”

“That is true, Colonel, but it puts the others on their mettle, you know! I have some excellent young vicars in homemade Snark masks who venture about the countryside putting heart into the people. No, no, I feel this invasion of monsters is sent to test us, and I sincerely believe that we shall pass the test!”

He beamed at the colonel and took a large swig of seaweed toddy.

“Sir,” said Major Scanty anxiously, “I think we should be embarking. We ought to leave before midnight and—ahem—I fancy that some of the men have already exceeded their two-glass ration.”

“You are right, major. Bellswinger! Tell Catchpole to sound the recall.”

Sad farewells were exchanged, and Dakin carried the archbishop's luggage on board and deposited it in the cabin that Lieutenant Frisbeen had been obliged to vacate.

“Thank you, thank you, my boy,” said Dr. Wren, following him. Dakin observed that the archbishop had a round domed head, mostly bald, except for a fringe of brown hair, and bright brown eyes, and walked with a decided limp. This, as he explained to Dakin, was due to the poisoned sting of a Basilisk, which had cornered him in the cathedral close.

“How did you escape it, sir?” asked Dakin, dumping a heavy bag of books (all the archbishop's luggage seemed to consist of books).

“The very best way to elude the Basilisk, like the Mirkindole—they belong to the same family—is to turn round and stare hard at it over your shoulder. That generally does for them at once. It does require some resolution, however. And very often there isn't time,” sighed the archbishop. “The Mirkindole of course is far more dangerous. Thank you, thank you, my boy.” He offered Dakin a coin, but Dakin said, “Thank you, sir; we don't really have much use for money on the train. In fact, not at all. What I'd really like, sir—if it's not an impertinence—”

“What is that, then? Ask whatever you like?” said Dr. Wren kindly.

“Might I have a read of some of your books?”

“My dear boy! Of course you may,” said the archbishop, greatly touched. “I know how you feel, for I never travel anywhere without books. Here, have one now.” And he fished out
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“There! That should keep you going till our next stop.”

“Oh, sir! Thank you!”

Dakin went bounding off down the corridor as if his heels were on springs.

“Look what he's lent me!” he said to Sauna in the galley. “You can have a read of it too!”

“That's funny,” said Sauna, looking at the title page. “Now it comes back to me that when I used to get glimpses of you at Auntie Floss's place sometimes you were carrying a book like that under your arm.…”