The Remarkables (The Remarkable Owen Johnson, part 1) (11 page)

11

Owen moved his arms to shield his eyes from his inevitable fate, but as he moved his arm upwards his right hand caught hold of something. Instinctively he tightened his grip and swung forward, reaching out with his left hand as well. This grabbed hold of something solid and rock-like, so Owen repeated the process until he was facing the wall of the house on the opposite side of the street.

Upwards he
climbed; mimicking his ascent up the sports hall on the previous day, ignoring the more obvious hand holds that the design of the house would have offered an ordinary climber.

Reaching the top, a hand grabbed his wrist
and hauled him onto the roof.

“
Characteristically ungainly,” was Mrs Argyle’s assessment, although she did look relieved that she wasn’t peeling him off the pavement.

Looking back across the street, the man in the suit was flanked by the two police officers they had encountered earlier, his hands on his hips and what could
have been a smile on his face (although Owen didn’t think that would have been his reaction if the roles were reversed).

“Come on,” Mrs Argyle
encouraged, and led them across the roof and down the spiral, metal staircase at the back of the house. At the bottom they ran down the length of the garden towards a high wall at the far end. Mrs Argyle leapt in the air and vaulted over the wall, and Owen climbed over, utilising his powers now without hesitation.

On the other side they landed on a deserted pavement and hurried towards a crowd of people walking
across the street at the end. They joined the procession of tourists and shoppers and headed in the direction that they were leading, Mrs Argyle commenting that she preferred the anonymity that the crowd offered them over deciding on an actual escape route.

“What was that all about
back there?!” Owen cried out.

“
Shhh!” Mrs Argyle admonished him, looking about to ensure no-one had shown any further interest in them. Satisfied their anonymity was intact, she continued: “Keep your voice down. What are you referring to exactly?”

“Us legging it from the police!
Are you on the run or something?”

“Of course not!
I’ve never so much as dropped litter.”

“You
sneaked onto a train without a ticket,” Owen corrected her.

“Oh there’s that I suppose.
But no, I somehow doubt that particular misdemeanour is on those officers’ radar.”

“So why did you knock that plain clothes one flying back then
, when we were in the hallway of that house?  He recognised you: he knew your name. And he called you Captain!” Owen added, remembering how she was addressed.

Mrs Argyle frowned and pulled Owen into a recess at the front of a building where a fire escape exit emerged. “I didn’t know him; never clapped
my eyes on him before. But I know who he works for.”

“The police?”

“No, not the police. Do you remember my brother and me telling you how we joined the military at the beginning of the war?” Owen nodded; it was only a few hours ago after all. “Well, towards the end of the war, when victory was looking more likely, certain…” Mrs Argyle thought for a moment, as if struggling to find the words to describe someone. “….individuals decided that the gifts that I and the others possessed could be used for purposes beyond fighting the enemy.

“
Sometimes it would be laudable causes like providing water for drought stricken areas, something that Ken actually did in North Africa at one point. And before you ask, that’s a story for him to tell you, not me.

“But the
various powers that others in our group possessed weren’t always as elemental as my brother’s and mine. We simply open small portals into other worlds and tap into our respected elements of choice. Wind for me, water for Ken. Others could actually travel into other worlds, just like you do.”

“Like me?” Owen asked, confused.

“When you reach out and hold onto whatever it is that you grasp, the object lies in another world. You may not see your hands disappear, but for brief microseconds at a time you alternate between this world and another.”

Mrs Argyle studied Owen’s face and asked whether he was following.

“I think so.”

“Good.
So after the war, we were encouraged to fight for new causes. Some of us didn’t agree with the new ambitions that our masters were embracing, so we left. Others stayed.”

“They just let you go?”

Mrs Argyle smiled. “They had little choice.  Some of us they could keep under lock and key for ever, but that wouldn’t be of any use to them as they wanted us out in the field. We’re like caged animals when kept in captivity: we may look docile, but we would never hesitate in biting our keepers’ hands.” Mrs Argyle’s smile turned sinister briefly, before settling back to her usual demeanour. “And there were those amongst us who they could never keep imprisoned, however hard they tried.

“So the likes of Ken
and I were free to live out our lives in relative anonymity, so long as we didn’t misbehave or try to offer our services to our former employer’s competitors. But we were reminded now and again that our contract with them would last for as long as we did.

“That note
that your father drew in your house would seem to be one such reminder.” Mrs Argyle showed him the note again, the letter ‘p’ (or ‘rho’ as she had corrected him earlier) in a circle being the most prominent part.

“That was on the man’s badge!” Owen exclaimed.

“Indeed it was,” Mrs Argyle said, returning the note to her pocket, “another reminder no doubt. And as I wasn’t in the mood to have my memory jogged, I felt it appropriate to let him know my stance on the issue.”

Owen made a mental note to not irritate his neighbour, lest h
e receive a similar punishment. “So how many of you decided to leave your platoon?”

“Platoon?
” Mrs Argyle asked quizzically. “We never referred to ourselves as that, or company, or brigade or such.”

“What were you called then?”

“I told you before. ‘The Remarkables’.”

“The Remarkables?
  That’s what Ken described me as. Why?”

“The Remarkables,
” Mrs Argyle explained, “were named after what the good Colonel offered as his assessment of each of our powers when he saw them in action:

“
Remarkable.
”

12

The Remarkables.

To Owen it seemed both old-fashioned and too understated to be a fitting description of his,
Ken’s and Mrs Argyle’s powers. But he had to admit, the name did have an air of mystery about it, which no doubt would have been valuable in war time.

Mrs Argyle by now had continued their journey across London, heading down the busy Oxford Street shopping area.

“Whose house was that back there? Clive’s?” Owen asked, remembering to keep his voice low this time.

“That’s right, Clive,”
Mrs Argyle answered, sidestepping past a group of lost looking tourists.

“Was he in The Remarkables too?”

“Yes, he was discovered just before we were. Caught trying to rob a bank, the scallywag.”

“What did he do, blow the doors off?” Owen asked, imaging how Mrs Argyle could easily blast her way into a vault.

“Oh nothing that dramatic. Clive walked in, helped himself to the contents of the vault, and then walked out again. It was sheer bad luck that he was spotted by someone from the War Office.”

“How did he walk in? W
as the door left open?”

“Oh no.
Clive’s a sneaky one: he can walk into a building undetected by the human eye; through doors, walls and whatever other obstacles that have been constructed to keep unwanted people out.”

“How does he do that?” Owen asked, slightly jealous of this ability.

“He can walk in other worlds. So he strolled into the bank in our world, figured out the distance to the vault, continued that far in another land, and then returned here in the vault. And vice versa.”

“So what ar
e the worlds like he goes to?” Owen asked, even more in awe at what he saw to be an upgraded version of his own abilities, and being able to actually see the myriad versions of Earth, rather than just grope bits of them.

“He would never say.
But he doesn’t like going there, that’s for sure, and only ever for short distances.” Mrs Argyle stopped and pulled Owen into a shop doorway. She peered out from behind the doorway.  “Blast.  They’re here already.”

Owen bent down slightly and looked out from behind M
rs Argyle, his head below hers. He could see a group of police officers about one hundred metres down the street. They had formed a semi-circle around someone or something, each with their backs towards Owen and Mrs Argyle.

“Well they don’t seem to know we’re
here,” Mrs Argyle assessed, “so let’s risk getting a bit closer.”

She casually walked out from their reconnaissance position, and crossed the street between the steady
flow of black taxis and red buses. When they were ten metres away from the gathered police on the opposite side of the street, she stopped and beckoned Owen to join her beside a street map that she was pretending to study.

“They’ve got a photo of Clive,” Mrs Argyle observed.
Owen looked across and saw that in the centre of the dozen or so officers stood the man in the pin striped suit. In his hands was a magazine sized photo of a man in his late twenties who resembled a matinee idol from the 1940s (Owen had briefly joined the film club at school due to Katie also being a member, but had to quit due to it clashing with swimming practice).

Owen sensed Mrs Argyle’s attention
had focused elsewhere, and looking up he followed her line of sight and saw a familiar figure in a wide brimmed hat further down the street: Trilby.

He was about forty metres away on the same side of the road which he was just starting to cross.

“There’s Clive!” Mrs Argyle
observed, and grasping Owen’s wrist led him down the street. Owen scanned both sides of the road and saw a man adopting a similar hiding position to their own earlier, favouring the entrance to Oxford Circus underground station as his refuge. Owen immediately recognised the man from the picture that the police were brandishing, and he was concentrating upon the police, in front of him. Apparently unbeknownst to him, Trilby was now about ten metres behind Clive, with the station entrance between them.

The police officers dispersed and a small group headed toward Clive
, and as they approached they spotted him.

Clive span around and
froze, the only reason for which, as Owen could see, was that he had seen Trilby. In an instant he darted down the station’s steps, going so quick his movements were a blur to Owen.

“Come on!”
Mrs Argyle encouraged and they ran across the street in pursuit. Ahead of them Trilby disappearing down the steps after Clive.

They ran down the s
teps into the busy ticket hall. There was no sign of Clive, but they saw Trilby passing through the barriers behind another commuter, unnoticed by the station staff. Mrs Argyle slowed down to a brisk walk and put her hand on Owen’s chest to adjust his speed accordingly.

“Running about in public places does tend to garner unwanted attention, trust me,”
Mrs Argyle advised. They passed through the barriers with the passes that they had bought earlier, and headed toward the escalator. Mrs Argyle skipped down the steps past the people who were content with the slow speed that the steps was moving.

At the bottom they were confronted with a choi
ce of Tube lines. “Which way?” Owen asked as Mrs Argyle paused to study them.

“I don’t know.  My gut says north, yours?”

Owen was unsure how he could possibly know which way Clive and presumably Trilby had headed, but north did seem to somehow resonate as being the correct direction. Like the air after a lightning storm, that particular passageway had a certain charged atmosphere to it that he could not explain.

“No
rth,” Owen stated in agreement. They made their way down the small passageway, joining the platform where a train was waiting with its doors open.

“Look!” Owen pointed to where Trilby could be seen entering the front carriage through the second set of double doors.  Mrs Argyle
sprinted a short way back into the passageway and down a side corridor that ran adjacent to the platform. Emerging back onto the platform with the front most door of the train before them, they managed to get onto it just as the doors were closing.

To their right was Trilby, walking awa
y from them down the carriage. Beyond him was Clive, who was backing away, closing in on the emergency door between the carriages.

Then in a bl
ink of an eye, Clive vanished.

An instant later
he reappeared on the other side of the door. Trilby made an audible hiss and strode after him, pulling the door open and filling the carriage with the noise and wind from the tunnel.

Mrs Argyle and Owen followed them into the next carriage, which unlike the one they had just
exited had a few passengers sitting within. They saw Clive vanish and reappear between the doors again, as Trilby sped up his pursuit.

One of the passengers went to pull the emergency
lever, but Mrs Argyle stopped her with a reassurance that she was an undercover officer and would deal with all of this mischief. Despite a look of incredulity that the police force would have serving officers of such advanced years, she sat back down as per “Sergeant Argyle of the Yard’s” instructions.

The chase
continued through the eight carriages until they ran out of train, Mrs Argyle having to reassure several more members of the public that she was going to arrest the two men that were causing such a commotion.

As Trilby entered the last carriage, the train
was reaching the next station. It almost looked as if one of the passengers was going to challenge him, but Trilby said something to him which resulted in the man going deathly white and fleeing the carriage, colliding with Mrs Argyle and Owen as he staggered towards the front of the train.

They could see that Clive was now almost at the back of the train, standing in the area just beyond the rearmost doubl
e doors. Trilby had stopped a short distance in front of him next to the doors and seemed to be doing something with his hands, and speaking in a slow voice. As the train came to a stop, Owen saw that Clive had closed his eyes, as if he was resigned to whatever fate Trilby had planned for him.

The b
right light that Owen had seen Trilby create the day before was beginning to fill the carriage. However, whereas that light carried with it a bitter coldness, this light radiated heat, so much so that the posters lining the walls of the carriage started to blister and peal, and the seats started to smoulder.

Mrs Argyle motioned with her hand for Owen to sta
y put, and crept toward Trilby. As the train came to halt and the doors slid open, Mrs Argyle pounced, leaping forward and sending Trilby blasting towards the back of the train, his foot colliding with Clive who in turn was knocked over, his head making a loud thud against a handrail.

At once the light was extinguished, and Trilby hit the
wall of the carriage with a louder noise than Clive had suffered, collapsing headfirst in the corner of the carriage.

Mrs Argyle directed her hands towards the c
ombusting seats and blew out the small foundations of flame that were forming.

Calling for Owen to follow her, Mrs Argyle rushed for
ward and grabbed hold of Clive. They both managed to drag him off the train just before the doors closed, and without the young couple who entered the train through the next set of doors noticing. Moving the semi-conscious Clive to a bench on the platform as the train departed, Mrs Argyle crouched on the floor in front of him and said his name softly a few times, but quickly decided a hefty slap across the face was called for instead.

Clive
opened his eyes suddenly and stared wildly about him. Coming to his senses he noticed the two figures in front of him. Focusing on Mrs Argyle, a wry smile came across his youthful features, and rubbed his face where she had struck him. He spoke with an American accent that matched his Hollywood-esque good looks.

“Celia,” he
purred. “It’s like our wedding day all over again”