Frozen in Time (4 page)

Rachel shrieked. So did Ben. Then they hitched in their shocked gasps, holding their hands to their mouths, and listened with eyes wide and glassy.

‘YOU ARE ENTERING A SECURE ZONE,’ warned a stern male voice. ‘IF YOU ARE CONTAMINATED TURN BACK NOW.’

They gasped and clutched at each other. Who could be down here? Who was this man?

‘YOU ARE ENTERING A SECURE ZONE,’ repeated the man. ‘IF YOU ARE CONTAMINATED, TURN BACK NOW.’

When he said it for the third time, Ben’s hammering heart at last began to slow down. ‘It’s OK,’ he whispered to Rachel. ‘It’s just a recording.’ And he reached out and pushed open the door, embarrassed that he’d been so scared. ‘It must have been triggered by the door unlocking. Come on!’ Now he pushed open the door and light flooded out. Inside was a chamber, about the size of their living room, stacked with floor to ceiling shelving, which was filled with all kinds of boxes and tins and bottles and packets. As the stern man continued to warn them off, Rachel stared around in a daze. She saw OMO and VIM and Brown & Polson, and other names which didn’t mean much to her, in old-fashioned writing. The floor was covered in a green swirly carpet and there was an old-fashioned leather sofa and two armchairs, grouped around a table—and between the sofa and armchair was the source of the voice. An old-fashioned reel to reel tape recorder was turning, a small pale cloud of dust rising from it.

Ben wandered across to the machine and pressed a clunky STOP button on its surface. At last the voice stopped, plunging them into an eerie silence, under which ran the soft hum of some kind of power generator, Ben guessed. He noticed that the air seemed a little fresher too—perhaps it was some kind of air conditioner.

‘Ben—look—it goes on,’ whispered Rachel, standing transfixed in the middle of the room, pointing to another door in the opposite wall. This one was an ordinary door, painted white, with an ordinary handle. Rachel was already opening it and Ben hurried across to stop her going through.

‘Wait!’ he breathed. ‘Me first—remember? I’m the eldest!’ She let him go willingly enough and he realized she was as scared as he was.

The door opened normally, and beyond it lay another room, also lit by the orange lamps set on the walls. There was more shelving ahead, filled with more curious stuff, on one wall, and two sets of metal bunk beds, complete with mattresses and dark grey folded up blankets, lined the walls on either side of the door. Another door led off to their left. They walked to it as if mesmerized and pushed it open. Now another room—a kitchen, with small units painted cream and blue, slanted glass doors on the cabinets above them, filled with floral-patterned china. A low white sink with metal taps shaped like carrots was set into a pale blue work surface, decorated with little grey specs. ‘Formica,’ Ben mouthed. He opened one of the base cabinets and saw pots and pans.

Rachel pulled open a cupboard set into a wall and found more packets and tins and bottles. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Heinz! It can’t be
that
long ago …’ She pulled out a tin and the familiar Heinz label glimmered in the orange light—although Ben could see that it was an old-fashioned design on dull paper. He walked over and looked into the cupboard and saw stack upon stack of square tins with SPAM on them. The label carried the promise ‘REAL MEAT FOR YOUR MONEY’ in old style letters.

‘Come on—we should keep going,’ he said, quietly, as if he might wake ghosts hiding among the stacks of tins.

‘Wait! Look—sweets!’ Rachel scooped a waxed paper tube out of the cupboard. It was orange with yellow stripes and apparently cost 3d. ‘Spangles,’ murmured Rachel, turning the square tube in her palm. ‘Deliciously fruity—excitingly new …’ she turned to a new side of the tube. ‘The sweet way to go gay.’ She giggled and Ben snorted.

‘Oh-kay,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave the fruity excitement alone … there’s another door.’

The next room was a bathroom, with black and white tiles on the floor and green paint on the walls. There was a bath and a toilet with its cistern high up, and a wall-mounted sink on iron brackets, with a lozenge-shaped mirror over it—and a corner shelving unit filled with stack upon stack of toilet paper in boxes. ‘IZAL,’ read Ben. ‘Must be about three hundred boxes of it! Blimey! Either they were planning to stay a long time or they used to eat some really mean curry.’

Rachel looked disgusted. ‘It’s the stuff that Gran used to have—do you remember? It smells funny and feels like sandpaper!’

There was soap on the sink, in a dimple of ceramic between the metal taps. It was dark red and looked almost fossilized under its light layer of dust.

‘What was all this
for
?’ wondered Rachel. ‘Why would anybody want to live underground?’

‘Another door,’ said Ben, nodding off into the corner of the bathroom where a square of mottled glass was lit from behind. It made the hairs prickle on his neck again—because this light was different. It wasn’t the regulation orange that they’d grown used to over the past few minutes—but a soft, blue-white glow. ‘Come on.’

The temperature dipped noticeably as they stepped into the next room. The last room, Rachel realized, as soon as the door had swung shut behind them. It was painted white and no more doors led on from it. One wall was filled with machinery—a kind of huge metal console with knobs and levers and buttons and three small screens, dead and showing nothing. From the top of the console three channels of tubes and wires and ducting pipes led up, across the ceiling and down into the centre of the room. Each group of pipes and wires descended to a large torpedo-shaped thing, which was bolted to the floor. The three torpedo things were lightly covered in dust and stood like small monoliths, silent and odd.

‘What
is
it?’ whispered Rachel, shivering with more than just the cold.

Ben looked all around and up and down and still found it really hard to take even one step forward. He felt terrified and didn’t want to speak, because Rachel would hear it in his voice. His stammer was sitting in his clenched throat like an impatient cricket, waiting to mess up his words and drive a blush up his cheeks. He noticed that there was a kind of desk area protruding to one side of the console, and heaped upon it were books and notepads and even a couple of pencils, under a thin layer of dust. In fact, he thought, the dust wasn’t nearly as heavy as you’d expect, if this place had been here as long as the furniture and the tins of food suggested. Probably because it was underground and there wasn’t much down here to
make
dust. At last he found his feet and stepped towards the console. He cleared the dust off the open pages and saw spidery handwriting compressed into the narrow lines of the paper. There were figures and diagrams and words that he could barely read. It looked scientific, which was not surprising. This was a laboratory of some kind, surely.

Rachel had gone over to one of the torpedo things. ‘You don’t think …’ she breathed, ‘that it could be a bomb …? Do you?’

Ben shrugged. ‘C-could be, I suppose.’ She gulped. ‘But I don’t see why it would be bolted to the floor, if it was.’

She reached out and gently wiped away the thin skin of dust. The torpedo thing gave up some dimly gleaming grey metal, reflecting the white orb-shaped light that hung above it. She took a spare floor cloth out of her pocket and gave it a more thorough wipe and then let out a shout of surprise. ‘It’s—look—it’s glass!’ Ben spun around and stepped over to see. ‘Or plastic or something,’ she went on. ‘Look!’ Set into the smooth curve of the torpedo was a glass window. It wasn’t a bomb—it was a chamber of some kind.

‘It’s like a—you know—a diving bell thingy,’ said Rachel, who had been to a sea life centre recently and seen a display of old diving equipment.

Beneath the glass lay nothing except what looked like a cushioned leather base to the torpedo. It certainly did look a bit like a diving bell … sort of. ‘Does it open?’ he asked, and they began to wipe more dust away and run their hands over the chamber, trying to find buttons or levers or any clue at all to how they might get into it. But they found nothing other than a fine seam around the base of the torpedo, too narrow to even get a fingernail into.

‘Weird,’ said Ben, leaning back against the neighbouring torpedo, his arm wiping a track through the dust on its curved glass window. ‘Really weird.’ He felt suddenly exhausted by the excitement and fear. ‘Maybe we should get Uncle J down to have a look.’

‘He’d
love
all this!’ agreed Rachel. ‘It’s so weird! Amazing.’ She too, leaned on the second torpedo thing, resting her cheek on her palm, her elbow on the bit that Ben had just dusted. Then she opened her eyes wide. And then her mouth.

And began to scream.

Ben had heard his sister scream quite a lot. She was a girl, after all. But he had never, in twelve years, heard her scream like
this.
He jumped violently and grabbed at her and saw that her eyes were bulging with shock and horror. She was pointing and screaming: ‘A body! Oh, Ben! It’s a dead body!’

Ben stared into the glass and saw a face. Eyes closed, pale pink lips very slightly open, revealing milk-white teeth. Dark hair curled across an alabaster forehead. It was a girl—about the same age as Rachel. It made him think of Snow White in her glass coffin. A shudder of fear went through him, making his heart thud and his legs feel weak. Rachel had stopped screaming now, and was holding her hands across her mouth, her eyes shut, shaking and crying. They should get out of here—now! And yet, something inside him couldn’t let him walk away, just as it had barely allowed him to walk
in
a few minutes earlier. This girl … this cool, still, sleeping girl …

‘She doesn’t look dead,’ he said, finally, still holding on to Rachel’s shoulder. ‘Maybe they had a way of p-preserving them. You know—embalming— like they did with Lenin and Eva P-Peron …’

Rachel stared at him. ‘What are you
talking
about?’ she gasped.

‘I just mean—that she looks … pretty good for a dead person.’

‘Oh—my—God …’ said Rachel. ‘You fancy a corpse!’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said, with an exasperated click of the tongue, and suddenly he realized he wasn’t really
that
scared any more. He was more fascinated— as if he’d stumbled into Tutankhamun’s cave. ‘Come on—we can’t go back now. We have to know …’

Rachel gave a little shriek as he vigorously wiped the top of the last torpedo chamber. Ben caught his breath in shock, even though he’d been half expecting it this time. Another face lay beneath the curved glass window. Also dark haired. His eyes, too, were closed, and his features were similar to the girl’s. Perhaps they were related. He seemed, thought Ben, to be smiling. As if he was having a bit of a joke. At any moment his eyes might spring open and he might shout ‘SURPRISE!!!’

‘He looks like her,’ breathed Rachel, who had overcome her fear to move around to lean on Ben’s shoulder. ‘A bit older. He’s probably her brother. Maybe this is some weird kind of mausoleum … you know … like when they buried Egyptian kings and put all the stuff they’d need in with them, to take them into the afterlife.’ Ben nodded—he’d been thinking similar thoughts.

‘But if someone took this much care over burying their kids,’ he pondered, ‘you’d think they’d’ve put up a headstone or something … wouldn’t you?’

‘It’s creepy,’ shivered Rachel. ‘I can’t believe I’m still standing here.’

‘Well, they’re hardly going to spring up and bite you, are they?’ said Ben. ‘They must have been dead for decades. I wonder what killed them … and who they were … Maybe …’ He walked back to the console, ducking past the pipes and wires that went into the top of the torpedo chambers. ‘Maybe there’s something about who they were in these notebooks.’

Rachel hurried after him. She did
not
want to be standing on her own between two dead bodies, no matter how healthy they looked. Ben was flipping through the notebook, coughing now and then as the dust from it caught in his throat. She glanced at the other books, but they looked like textbooks—the kind of stuff she hoped never to have to get down off the shelf in maths class. She studied the console with all its old buttons and levers. Everything looked as dead as the boy and girl in the torpedoes. As if it had lain there for centuries. She could probably press all the buttons and flick all the levers without anything happening but a bit of a dust storm. Although the square plastic or glass one down on the left looked as though it might do something. There was a very faint red glow about it—but that was probably just a reflection of the red top she was wearing. She flicked it idly and, of course, nothing happened.