Candleman (8 page)

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked.

‘If we keep going then we might find another way out – that they don’t expect!’ Theo said, making hopeful eyes at Chloe. She put her finger on her lips and they both waited in silence for sounds of pursuit. They could hear none – so far.

‘They don’t realise we headed down here,’ Chloe whispered, ‘because any sensible people would have looked for the quickest, ground-level exit.’

‘Exactly!’ replied Theo brightly. Chloe sighed and kept walking onwards. They soon arrived at two thick metal doors. Theo pushed on one and it opened easily. They were at the entrance of a vast, dimly lit chamber.

‘All right, we’ll try it your way, but remember – I’m in charge!’ Chloe snapped, following him into the shadows. Then she stopped. She choked on the reeking air inside and pinched her nose.

‘Wow!’ she gasped. ‘This place stinks!’

‘Even worse than the Dodo!’ said Theo, treading cautiously ahead.

‘I wish you’d stop saying that name,’ said Chloe. ‘Sir Peregrine Arbogast can’t possibly –’

Whack!
There was a sound ahead like someone banging a stick on metal. They stopped. All they could hear was their own breathing.

Cuk-aaaark!
They both jumped out of their skin as a weird, piercing cry shrilled through the air. It was followed by a muffled but heavy stomping that stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

They crept forward, their eyes getting adjusted to the eerie light provided by a blue electric strip in the ceiling far above. Rows and rows of elaborate enclosures loomed up on either side.

‘Cages!’ breathed Chloe. ‘What on earth …?’

Theo stopped at the first one to look at a strange misshapen tree inside. Chloe came to join him. Theo peered through the bars and realised they were not looking at a mass of leaves, but feathers. The tree suddenly moved and waddled jerkily into the shadows of its pen, an enormous beaked head turned away from them.

‘An elephant bird!’ said Theo. ‘Mr Nicely told me I’d never see one!’

Chloe gulped. ‘They’re extinct,’ she said.

Holding their breath, they arrived at the next cage. At first it appeared empty, but Theo drew Chloe’s attention to a slumped, bony creature at the back of the pen. The moth-eaten, scraggy great cat was slumbering next to a pile of its own dung.

‘Caspian Tiger,’ said Theo, ‘figure seven, page three,
Woolcombe’s Bestiary of Post-Diluvian Extinctions
.’

‘Very appropriate. Because he’s extinct too,’ said Chloe again.

Now Theo was picking up pace. He beat Chloe to the next enclosure, an enormous walled pit. His eyes aglow, Theo gazed at the outlandish striped giraffe standing silently within.

‘Sivatherium!’ he whispered. ‘Look at those antlers! I’m glad he made it on the ark!’

‘OK, OK, I get it!’ Chloe hissed. ‘Sir Peregrine is a descendant of the original criminal zoologist known by some as the Dodo – he’s inherited this insane zoo of illegally hoarded rare animals –’

‘Illegally?’ Theo echoed. It had an odd sound coming from Chloe.

She ran up to the next pit and stared down at a serpentine head rising from an inky, stagnant pool. She looked back and forth as if committing everything to memory.

‘Err, Chloe … what do you call those things with wings?’ Theo asked.

Chloe stopped in her tracks. She walked over to join Theo, who had now reached the far end of the chamber.

‘Do you mean the garghoul?’ she asked.

‘Well, there’s a statue of one here,’ Theo replied.

Chloe rushed over and joined him at a thick concrete parapet that overlooked a bleak stone pit. Iron bars and a fine steel mesh partially blocked their view, but crouched in an alcove under the far wall was a grey, man-like figure, apparently made of stone. It had pointed horns curling up from its brow and a pair of bat-like wings folded behind its back. Its eyes were lost in shadow. A large hooked nose dominated its face, with a glimpse of a thin-lipped, expressionless mouth. Chloe gulped again.

‘You idiot!’ she breathed to Theo. ‘This isn’t a statue of a garghoul. It
is
a garghoul. It appears to be in its stone dream – a kind of trance they use instead of sleep. Mr Norrowmore told me about them.’

She gazed in awed silence.

‘I’ve never seen one before. I suppose I never really believed …’ her voice trailed away.

‘Sam said one of them helped me in the escape,’ said Theo. ‘But I never saw anything. It all happened too fast.’

‘We have to get away and report this,’ Chloe said. ‘Lots of little things are adding up. Come on, let’s find your mythical hidden exit! Maybe the garghoul nips out the back way to go shopping.’

Theo smiled. That was more like the Chloe he knew. But now they could hear the distant thunder of footsteps in the stairwell. Chloe pulled at Theo’s coat and they explored the far wall of the chamber. Theo’s heart sank. There was no doorway here, just a strange circular plaque set into the wall. Chloe stood frozen before it as if she had seen a ghost.

In the corridor beyond the chamber, voices were echoing.

‘Well, I say it
is
possible!’ an angry voice shouted. ‘No one has yet seen them leave, so I say they could be down here!’

Theo joined Chloe to peer closely at the plaque. In the centre of the circle, in jet on an ivory background was a queer representation of a black stream. ‘The sign of the River Styx! The way through the underworld,’ she said, her voice hushed with excitement. ‘This is the symbol they used to mark an entrance to the network!’

She knocked lightly on the symbol,
tip-tap-tip,
and a thin circle of light appeared in the wall. The fine line of brightness widened, and a perfectly circular section of wall withdrew slowly backwards, allowing them entrance to a secret passage beyond.

‘It works!’ Chloe grinned. ‘We’re saved!’

As they vanished through the doorway, a stone head turned slowly and a pair of wings flickered with life.

M
r Nicely collapsed to his knees. He had tried not to scream at first, but after a while he had warmed to the idea. It gave him something to do rather than just wait for more pain.

Remember, they aren’t torturing you,
Dr Saint had explained kindly.
They are simply doing their best with a rather experimental mind-reading machine. The agonising pain is a by-product of Lord Dove’s truth-seeking process.

‘I don’t know where she is!’ Mr Nicely cried, his voice becoming hoarse.

Again the questions came, seeming to appear in the depths of his mind, and his brain felt like someone was pouring liquid fire into it.

‘No – Clarice and me were never close! I didn’t turn a blind eye to anything! I never wanted us to lose Theo!’

Just speaking that name took Mr Nicely back to a better time. He had been happy then. He had enjoyed the pretence of everything being wonderful. He had realised at an early age, in one of the Society of Good Works’ orphanages, that life couldn’t really be nice, but you could pretend. And it was in the perfection of the pretence that you found your happiness.

With Theo around, it had been nice to have someone to look after, someone completely in your power. It had been fun to see the disappointment on his little face when his hopes and plans were crushed on a daily basis. Misery brought out a nice side in people, Dr Saint was right about that.

‘How could you not have known – not
smelled
that Clarice was a spy? The two of you worked side by side for years!’ Lord Dove was screaming at him now.

And he had hit a nerve. There
had
been something about a smell. One day Clarice had surprised him by wearing a really chic perfume – the kind of scent a very elegant lady would wear, not a dull little maid. But he had only noticed the smell once, never again. That wasn’t worth mentioning.

Mr Nicely was in such a state of exhaustion and distress now, he was flat out on the floor, his clothes soaked in sweat. His head was singing with pain from where those robbers had struck him two days ago, and it felt like it was about to explode.

He came back to his senses and found Lord Dove looking down on him, holding the headset and electric leads that had been attached to the butler moments before. Mr Nicely gazed up at his tormentor with well-concealed loathing. The soft lavender-coloured gloves, the white suits, the affectation of a monocle. Dr Saint would never dress in such a vain fashion.

‘That was most unpleasant!’ Lord Dove complained. ‘You said you wouldn’t scream. Not in the tradition of the regiment, indeed. You nearly popped my ears, you big baby.’

The butler sat up. His head was spinning. For an instant he recalled Theo staggering out of the Mercy Tube. Perhaps this was how Theo had felt too, every day of his life.

‘You have Dr Saint to thank for curtailing the process. He said you would have blabbed by now if you were hiding anything,’ Lord Dove said, turning away to accept a cup of chilled kiwi juice from Masters, his own servant.

Mr Nicely rose to his feet and took a deep breath. He hadn’t been hiding anything before, but he might do so one day – under the right circumstances.

Dr Saint was in Theo’s old room, which in the space of the last twenty-four hours had been turned into a laboratory. The Mercy Tube was now connected by several wires to a control panel the butler had never seen before, and all around there were computers and monitors. The master of Empire Hall had set up a workstation in the middle of all this technological clutter.

‘Where’s my tea?’ Dr Saint asked abruptly, without looking up from a screen he was studying.

‘I shall fetch it straight away, sir,’ said Mr Nicely, who had recovered enough to resume his duties. ‘The new girl, Veracity, didn’t have the kettle on. She doesn’t – you know – anticipate things like – like the other one did.’ The butler suddenly had a distinct feeling of having said the wrong thing.

‘Oh, the
other
one anticipated things, all right!’ replied Dr Saint. ‘The coming Liberation, for instance, the fulfilment of my plans … and she tried to destroy everything you and I have worked for our whole lives,’ he added bitterly. ‘So it is generous of you, Mr Nicely – exceptionally generous – to have fond recollections of her tea-making ability!’

‘Yes, sir.’ The butler turned to leave but his employer called him back.

‘I suppose you’re sulking because Lord Dove was kind enough to spare some of his time to eliminate you from suspicion, Mr Nicely?’ Dr Saint peered at the butler over his reading glasses.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Nicely. ‘I mean no,’ he added. ‘I mean whatever you mean, sir,’ he concluded brightly.

‘Can’t you see?’ railed his employer. ‘We failed – abominably – in our task to protect the Vessel. We became complacent!’ He got up, put an arm round Mr Nicely and turned the butler to face the window. Dr Saint pointed out into the thick grey fog with a shaking finger.

‘There is another society out there! The Society of Unrelenting Vigilance! Doesn’t that name chill your blood? For decades these fanatics have been watching us, spying on all our good works. But over the years, quietly, and with great care, we have been shutting down that organisation, eroding its funds, discouraging its membership, even freeing some of its workers from their earthly worries.’ He gave Mr Nicely a meaningful look.

‘Killing them,’ said Mr Nicely.

‘With kindness!’ insisted Dr Saint. ‘But this broken, old, crumbling Society produced one final flicker of life. It actually managed to capture the Vessel.’

Mr Nicely grunted. He still didn’t like that expression. Dr Saint beckoned his butler over to study the monitor he had linked to the Mercy Tube.

‘But it’s all here,’ Dr Saint said excitedly. ‘In the Tube! Burned into its memory. Every day of the Vessel’s life, every detail of the changes in his body. All the energy that was regulated, siphoned off and studied!’ Dr Saint lowered his voice to a faint, excited tremble. ‘I think we may not actually need the Vessel any more.’

Dr Saint flicked a switch and an outline of Theo’s body appeared on the monitor, with waves of energy cascading through it. Mr Nicely looked away.

‘The Vessel is out there now,’ Dr Saint said, nodding towards the window. ‘Contaminated. If we don’t repossess our property quickly, it – he – will become so poisoned by other people’s thoughts that he may actually become dangerous to us. There might soon be a time when it will be better for the Society to free the Vessel from that contamination – from all his mortal worries, in fact – than to allow him to stay alive. When that time comes, will you be ready, Mr Nicely?’

‘I’ll be ready, Dr Saint,’ mumbled the butler quietly.

‘Good man,’ said his employer. ‘Now let’s see about that tea.’

‘H
ow do you feel now?’ asked Chloe. Theo was leaning, red-faced and weak, on the gate at the back of the Condemned Cemetery.

‘Sick, but better,’ panted Theo. The trip through the network had been as quick as only Chloe’s expert knowledge could make it, but the air down there had been clogged with the dirty vapour that was now spreading throughout every nook and cranny of the city.

‘What does it mean,’ Theo asked, ‘Sir Peregrine having access to the network?’ His face was resuming its usual pale hue, his dark hair was matted and curled by sweat and dirty fog.

‘That your theory is right!’ Chloe replied. ‘He
must
be the Dodo. But he was a weird villain from the Victorian days. How can he still be alive?’ Chloe looked exasperated.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Theo replied. ‘But I’ve seen an old picture of him – it’s not the sort of thing you forget!’

‘The trouble is,’ Chloe said, ‘Mr Norrowmore always tried to keep me in the dark about the old days, the old characters. He wanted me to be
Modern Vigilance
– an up-to-date agent only interested in how to stop the Society of Good Works here and now.’ Chloe glanced back, anxious.

‘Speaking of the here and now,’ she added, ‘we’d better move on!’ Chloe shoved open the rusty gate and plunged into the woods that surrounded the sprawling graveyard.