The Paradise Trap (24 page)

‘Open up!’ Sterling banged on the door with both fists. ‘Let us in, for God’s sake!’

Click
went the latch. The door swung open. But it wasn’t Jake who’d unlocked it; Edison was the one who stumbled out, sobbing and rubbing his left wrist.

‘She came – she came – I didn’t . . .’ he hiccoughed. Behind him, Jake was grappling with something long and thin that seemed to be emerging from (or disappearing down) the toilet.

‘Oh my
God
,’ Holly croaked.

Coco released Newt so she could grab Edison. ‘Are you all right, sweetie? Are you okay?’ Coco quavered. Edison promptly buried his face in her slightly damp towelling robe.

Jake turned
his
face towards Sterling. ‘Help! Quick! Don’t let her get away!’ Jake pleaded breathlessly. That was when Marcus realised who was trying to escape down the S-bend.

‘Miss
Molpe
?’ he squeaked.

It was Miss Molpe, all right – and yet it wasn’t. The writhing, slippery shape being hauled out of the plumbing looked longer and bonier than Miss Molpe, with scalier skin and a much bigger nose. Marcus hadn’t noticed it before, but Miss Molpe had only four talon-tipped digits on each hand and a spur on each elbow. There weren’t any bumps where her ears should have been, and her neck was as long as a heron’s. Around her little black eyes the skin was creased and grey, like an elephant’s.

Bit by bit, as she was dragged into view, her flat-tened hair fluffed up and her limbs unfolded.

‘Someone
grab her
!’ yelled Jake, who was finding it difficult to keep a firm grip on the slimier parts of Miss Molpe’s thrashing body. Sterling immediately dashed into the cubicle, with Holly at his heels. By now there were so many people crammed into the tiny space that Marcus couldn’t follow his mother.

Newt pulled a face and retreated. ‘Eww!’ she said. ‘Gross.’

‘Heave!’ Jake had braced one foot against the porcelain pan. ‘Okay, all together now,
heave
!’ There was a slurping sound, followed by a wet kind of
pop –
and all at once Miss Molpe was sprawled on the tiled floor, half inside and half outside the cubicle, with Jake sitting on her back.

She tried to talk, but she was coughing too hard.

‘Who’s got a belt?’ Jake barked. ‘Everyone take off their belts! We need to tie her up!’ He began to pluck at the rope that was wrapped around his own waist. ‘I can use this. It’s from the real world. Who else has something?’

Sterling began to unbuckle his belt. Marcus wasn’t wearing one.

‘Come and sit on her while I tie her hands,’ Jake told Holly, whose momentary hesitation annoyed him. ‘What’s wrong? She’s not a little old lady – she’s some kind of
creature
. Can’t you see?’

‘She came up the pipe,’ Edison volunteered, his voice thin and breathless. ‘She tried to drag me down with her . . .’ He broke off, shuddering.

‘I didn’t try to drag him down; I simply didn’t want to drown!’ Miss Molpe croaked. She was trying to sing, but her voice sounded like an old hen’s.

She looked a bit like an old hen too, Marcus thought. Or an evil, ancient vulture . . .

‘Ow!’ Jake reared back suddenly, clutching his forearm. ‘Goddammit, she’s got
spurs
! On her
wrists
!’ he exclaimed. Sure enough, Marcus spotted a trickle of blood oozing out from beneath Jake’s hand.

‘I can’t breathe, I can’t see; I’m fainting; I’m dying! What can I say to prove I’m not lying?’ Miss Molpe lamented.

‘Shut up,’ said Jake, then appealed to Sterling. ‘Put your knee on her neck, okay? Holly can sit on her legs.’

‘Oh God . . .’ Holly didn’t like any of this. Marcus could tell. But she kept Miss Molpe pinned down until Jake had finished tying the siren’s leathery, claw-like hands. Only when he needed access to Miss Molpe’s feet did Holly rise again.

The siren, meanwhile, was pleading tunefully. ‘You’re monsters! You’re heartless! I’m old and I’m ill! I was drowning in there, not trying to kill!’

‘For God’s sake, somebody gag her!’ Jake snapped, yanking hard at a knot to make sure that it was tight enough. Everyone else exchanged questioning glances.

‘With what?’ asked Holly.

‘I don’t know! A sock?’

‘A
sock
?’

‘Just
do
it, okay?’

Coco sighed. ‘We’ll need a big sock,’ she said to Sterling, who obediently kicked off his shoe.

Miss Molpe began to keen like a mourner. ‘
Please
no, I beg of you, not as a gag! Don’t stuff my mouth with that filthy rag!’ she warbled. Her tone was piteous, but when Marcus caught her eye, it was cold and bright and hard.

He felt a shiver run down his spine.

‘Maybe she
was
drowning . . .’ Holly fretted, as Sterling wrestled to tie his sock around Miss Molpe’s mouth. It wasn’t easy, though; the siren’s small, bony head kept lashing from side to side, and her nose was so big and sharp that it was hard to find her mouth underneath it.

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Jake spoke through his teeth. ‘She just can’t resist little kids. But she’s too much of a wimp to pick ’em off unless they’re alone and unprotected. So she sets up a big, complicated trap like this one.’ Sitting back on his heels, he surveyed his handiwork with fierce satisfaction. ‘
Now
we’ve got her, though,’ he concluded. ‘Now we’ve got her just where we want her.’

‘So what?’ Newt growled. ‘What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like we can believe anything she says.’

‘That’s true.’ Coco began to nod. ‘Newt’s right. We might as well flush her back down the toilet, for all the use she is.’

But Jake hadn’t finished.

‘No,’ he reasoned, ‘you don’t understand. It’s not her advice we need. That’s just rubbish. We know that now. What we need . . .’ He clamped a wiry brown hand around her brittle arm. ‘. . . what we
need
is one of her fingers.’

51

‘I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT
AIRPORTS . . .’

M
ISS
M
OLPE GAVE A HISS THROUGH HER GAG
. ‘M
MMH
! Mmmm-mmmnn . . .’ she protested.

‘One of her
fingers
?’ Holly echoed, aghast. But Marcus knew what Jake was getting at. He knew that Jake wasn’t suggesting that they lop any digits off.

‘You mean for the buttons? In the lift?’ said Marcus.

Jake nodded. ‘That lift’s gotta be here somewhere,’ he pointed out. ‘If
she
presses the buttons, it’ll have to move.’

There was a moment’s silence as everyone tried to think of a likely location for the lift. Marcus was stumped; the only possibility that occurred to him was the men’s room, but they were already inside the men’s room.

At last Jake observed, ‘If this is your nightmare holiday, Holly, then it’s your call. Where would you really hate to go?’

Holly’s brow puckered. She seemed preoccupied with the bound captive gurgling away under Sterling’s knee.

‘Oh – ah – gosh . . . I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I hate everything about airports. There isn’t a specific place.’

‘There must be,’ Jake insisted. ‘Think hard.’

‘A cleaning closet?’ was Coco’s suggestion. ‘A transit lounge?’

‘Out on the tarmac in a howling sub-zero wind?’ Sterling asked, shivering like a man familiar with such an experience. Holly shook her head, frowning. Then she blinked and sucked air through her teeth.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, her eyes widening. ‘I know!’

‘What?’ said Marcus.

‘It was at Bangkok Airport, years ago,’ Holly recalled. ‘When I spotted it, I remember thinking, “That must be hell on earth—”’

‘
What
was?’ Newt interrupted. ‘Hurry up and tell us!’

‘It was the smoking room.’ Holly looked from face to face, her own face creased into an expression of pure disgust. ‘It was a glassed-in box where all the smokers had to go if they wanted to light up a cigarette. I swear, you could hardly see them through the pall of smoke and the nicotine stains on the glass—’

‘That’s it, then.’ Newt cut her off. ‘We have to find the smoking room. Any ideas?’

Jake shrugged. ‘We’ll just follow the signs,’ he said. Then he elbowed Sterling out of his way, hooked an arm around Miss Molpe, heaved himself upright with a grunt and threw her over his shoulder like a bag of wet washing.

When she growled deep in her throat, the rumble seemed to reverberate right through the floor.

‘Oh, Jake!’ Holly protested. ‘Be careful!’

‘It’s okay.’ He staggered slightly. ‘I can manage.’

‘You’ll hurt yourself!’

‘Naah. She doesn’t weigh a thing.’ Jake’s voice was gruff and his eyes were bulging with the effort of keeping his balance. ‘So are we going or not?’

‘I-I guess so . . .’ Holly draped her arm around Marcus’s shoulders. Then she looked at Coco, who looked at Sterling, who climbed to his feet and took Edison’s hand. Together they made their way out of the men’s room into the larger, brighter, emptier, more exposed space beyond it.

The hallway seemed endless. The numbered departure gates stretched on to infinity, or so it appeared; between each gate, acres of window held back snow flurries that were swallowed up, again and again, by a dense, enveloping darkness. The flurries made odd shapes.
Very
odd shapes.

Marcus felt his heart skip a beat as he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. Was it . . . ? Could it be . . . ?

Was that an
open hand
sliding down the glass?

‘I hate these stupid signs that have pictures on them,’ Newt complained, with a hysterical edge to her voice. She was staring up at an information sign that was covered in arrows and icons: the symbol for male and female toilets, showing a universal man and a universal woman standing side by side; the symbol for food service, showing a stylised knife and fork; the symbol for a lift, with two universal men wedged into a square.

‘That won’t be the lift
we
want,’ Holly decided, as Jake staggered again. He was hunched over by now, gasping and red in the face. But when Sterling offered to help, Jake simply snapped at Miss Molpe.

‘Oi! You! I know what you’re up to and if you make yourself any heavier, I’ll drag you along by the
hair
! Got it?’

Miss Molpe didn’t reply, of course. She couldn’t. But Marcus figured that she must have got it, because after a few seconds Jake straightened up and said, ‘That’s better.’

‘What do you think the one at the end means?’ Coco asked. She’d been squinting at the sign above her, trying to interpret some of the more obscure icons displayed there. ‘Is it a thermometer or a baby’s bottle? I can’t tell.’

‘Me neither,’ Sterling confessed. ‘But that one means a telephone, and that means a luggage trolley . . .’

‘What about that one?’ Newt pointed to a white horizontal line with a black tip. ‘That looks like a cigarette, don’t you think?’

‘Yeah, but so does that,’ said Marcus, drawing her attention to a straight, black, horizontal line with a wiggly vertical line attached to one end. ‘That looks like a
smoking
cigarette.’

‘And that looks like a cigarette lighter.’ Jake nodded at a leaf shape on top of a rectangle.

Holly, who had been nervously eyeing Miss Molpe’s beaky, malevolent face, cut a quick glance at the sign and observed, ‘They’re all in the same direction. Why don’t we just see what they are when we reach them?’

‘Yeah,’ Jake agreed. ‘Good idea.’ He then set off at an unsteady trot, clearly anxious to find the smoking room before his back gave out.

Marcus hurried after him, trying not to look at the windows. The view from these windows was beginning to disturb Marcus. He wanted to ask the others if they’d spotted a face emerging from the snow flurries, its eyes shadowed and its mouth hanging open in a yawn or a scream, but he was afraid that the answer might be ‘yes’. So he kept his gaze fixed firmly on the overhead signs as Holly and the Huckstepps caught up with him.

‘You know what? I’ve had an idea,’ Sterling announced, puffing a little. ‘It’s about your phone, Holly.’

‘My phone doesn’t work,’ Holly reminded Sterling. ‘Whoever answered my call wasn’t real. He was . . .’ She flapped her hand. ‘He was in this world somewhere.’

‘Exactly. That’s what I mean. You got through to another part of this . . . whatever it is. Program. Scenario.’ Sterling increased his pace to match Holly’s. ‘What I’m saying is that Prot has a Bluetooth function – and so does your phone. If he’s not far away, I can make contact with him.’

‘Really?’ Marcus stopped in his tracks just as Jake, who was a metre or two in front of him, exclaimed, ‘Here it is! Here’s the first one!’

They had drawn level with a purple door set into a featureless stretch of pale-blue wall. The door had a symbol on it: two lines, one straight and horizontal, the other wiggly and vertical.

‘It’s that smoking cigarette sign,’ said Marcus.

Coco promptly stepped forward. ‘Let’s have a look, then,’ she remarked, before pushing open the door.

There was no smoke. That was the first thing Marcus noticed. Though the room beyond the threshold was dim and reeking, it didn’t stink of smoke. Marcus was trying to work out what it
did
smell like when a whip lashed out of the darkness and wrapped itself around Coco’s wrist.

She screamed like a gibbon.

52

THE SEARCH FOR THE
SMOKING ROOM

S
TERLING GRABBED
C
OCO JUST IN TIME
. A
SUDDEN TUG ON
the whip nearly jerked her off her feet; it would have yanked her over the threshold if Sterling hadn’t caught her.

Miss Molpe chuckled deep in her throat, her black eyes glittering.

‘Cut it! Cut the cord!’ Sterling yelled.

‘With what?’ wailed Newt. No one had any knives or scissors. Edison began to cry as Marcus groped around in his pockets.

Luckily, Holly knew just what to do. She pushed past Sterling and slammed the door shut with such force that the whip was severed.
Snap!
Sterling and Coco reeled backwards, bumping into Jake – who nearly dropped Miss Molpe. The siren bucked and twisted, trying to dig her spurs into his neck.