James Munkers (17 page)

I smile ruefully. ‘So you're resting the fate of the world on a scrawny teenager who can't even fight off a school bully? That's desperate, Kit.'

‘Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but we are desperate,' she says seriously. ‘The last time I checked into the Twelfth they only had a few hours of energy left. That equates to a couple of years here.'

Jeepers. A couple of years. I wonder if I'll ever get old enough to drink legally.

This concept is too much for me to think about right now, so I ask, ‘How do you get to another dimension?'

Kit shrugs. ‘It's a bit like turning a corner no one else can see.'

‘And when you check in there, how long are you gone?'

‘For me, it's only a few minutes. For anyone in the human dimensions, it can be weeks, sometimes months.'

‘Poor Will.'

‘Poor everyone. It's a crappy situation.' She leans forward and rubs my arm. ‘I do realise how much we've screwed up your life, Jimmy, but we need your help. Will you help us?'

I'm silent for a minute. A hero would agree straight away, but I've got one more question to ask.

‘Mr Grayson said that I was going to get lost in his mind,' I say slowly. ‘That if I'd stayed there another few seconds, I wouldn't have been able to get back out again.' I look over at the small girl sitting next to me, and a lump rises in my throat that almost stops me saying the next words. ‘Is that what's happened to Mum and Michael and Garth?'

Tears fill her eyes as she takes both my hands in hers. I couldn't live without my family, just like she couldn't live without hers. We have a moment of recognition for this common factor between us, before she answers.

‘No, sweetheart, it's not the same at all,' she says firmly. ‘He drew you into his mind to destroy yours; what he's doing to them is deadening their senses so he can control their actions. Their minds are completely intact, just asleep.' She squeezes my hands. ‘And we're going to wake them up.'

‘Then I'll help you,' I say, and the room dissolves as I cry into the tabletop in relief and fear and fatigue and sickness and confusion and guilt for a good ten minutes. Kit runs her fingers through my hair and lets me. Then Claire comes in and takes me back to bed.

I wake up some time the next morning to an empty room. Feeling completely devoid of content and structure, like most of my English essays, I get shakily to my feet and wander over to the window.

The street outside, the hedgerows on the other side of the street, and the fields beyond the hedgerows have all been covered with a healthy blanket of snow, which continues to fall quietly from the sky, icing the tops of cars and fence posts. It's also covered the tops of two Hoarders I can see standing on the other side of the road.

Just looking at them makes me feel cold. I shiver and pull a blanket off the bed to wrap around myself, like a human burrito, and shove my freezing feet into my sneakers, which I find lurking under the bed. Then I shuffle out to discover what my makeshift family's up to.

Most of them are sitting around the lounge room, talking and eating porridge for breakfast. Winifred spots me first, and jumps off Peter's lap to come hurtling at me. She almost knocks me over, and I feel my empty stomach jolt around dangerously.

‘Hail the conquering hero,' Pippa greets me. ‘How are you feeling today?'

‘Better,' I reply, shuffling past her and falling backwards into the space she and Peter have made for me on the couch. Win loses interest in me and races off to the corner of the room to tie some ribbons onto Gwen's tail. Gwen sighs deeply but lets her. This must not be the first time she's done it. ‘Did we know there were bad guys outside?' I ask the others.

‘Yes,' everyone choruses.

‘Oh. So what's going on?'

‘Just planning our next move,' Mr Lancer says. ‘We knew that something big was happening because of all the power the Hoarders have been using, but Will says that if Grayson's stepped up, it's something extra big. Apparently he usually likes to run everything in secret.'

‘So Will knows Grayson pretty well, then?' I say. ‘Why didn't he warn us that he was a Hoarder?'

‘Well, he knows Grayson, but didn't know he was the local headmaster. Apparently he doesn't read the weekly school newsletter.'

‘Oh.'

‘Anyway,' Mr Lancer continues, ‘at the rate Grayson's building his forces we're fairly certain he's going to try something before Christmas, and we want as much information as we can get about it, so we can stop it in its tracks.'

‘Isn't Christmas the day after tomorrow?' I ask.

‘Yes,' everyone says again.

‘Oh. Right.' There's a pause. ‘Any thoughts?' I ask.

‘Many,' he says, scraping his porridge bowl with his spoon noisily. ‘That's the problem. We need some good hard evidence so we can narrow it down. The problem is getting the evidence. I could have snooped around if I was still just the maths teacher, but now I've outed myself, it gets a little bit trickier.'

‘That's my fault, isn't it?' I mutter shamefully.

‘I choose to blame Mr Grayson myself.'

‘Well, isn't there anyone else who can snoop about for us?' I ask. ‘The place is lousy with Hoarders; aren't there more Guardians too?'

‘There are,' he says, ‘but we seem to be experiencing a communication problem.'

‘Come again?'

‘You know our mind-talking ability?' Pippa says.

‘Yeah.'

‘Well, someone or something is blocking us. It's like there's an impenetrable dome around the flat – we can't sense any Guardians outside it, and chances are they can't sense us either. They might not even know where we are. In any case, they won't make a move to either rescue us or attack Grayson without express orders from Kit.'

‘Which she can't give.'

‘Exactly.'

I look around helplessly. ‘Telephone?' I suggest.

‘They've cut us off,' Peter says.

‘Mobile?'

Claire shakes her head. ‘Only mine, and the battery ran out three days ago.'

I frown. ‘So in the next few days we have to work out what Grayson's up to, escape from the Hoarders outside and then stop him, without any outside information or back-up?'

‘Correct,' Pippa says.

‘So, what do we do?' Jem asks from the piano stool.

Mr Lancer looks around. ‘We? Who is this “we”?'

‘Us,' Peter clarifies. ‘All of us – we want to help in any way we can.'

‘Yes, I had a feeling you might,' Mr Lancer says with a sigh, ‘but I'm not sure we want to drag you all into this.'

‘Our parents and brother are being paraded around like mindless puppets by an evil headmaster,' Peter says flatly. ‘Consider us already dragged.'

‘And I'm going to get slaughtered by my parents anyway for disappearing for days on end,' Jem says, ‘so I've got nothing to lose. Besides, Jim's in it whether he wants to be or not, and we're not just going to stand on the touchline and cheer him on. They have sissy girls for that.'

‘Hey, watch it,' Pippa and Claire say together.

‘I said
sissy
girls,' he defends himself. ‘With pompoms.'

‘Yeah, where are Kit and Will?' I ask.

Pippa stares at me incredulously. ‘We're talking about sissy girls with pompoms, and this reminds you of Kit and Will?' she asks.

‘No, Jem was talking about sissy girls with pompoms, and his point was that they are nobody in the room, and
that
reminds me of Kit and Will because they're not in the room either,' I explain. ‘See?'

‘No,' she says. ‘And they're asleep.'

‘Oh.'

‘Swinging on back to the point,' Peter says, ‘we want to help.'

‘Well, offer taken, and thank you very much,' Mr Lancer says, ‘but I still can't hand out artillery and security codes until we have a battle plan.'

‘Which you can't work out, because you don't know what Grayson's doing?' I ask.

‘Right.'

‘Because you don't have any evidence?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Evidence that might be in his office?' I suggest.

He peers at me. ‘Maybe,' he says slowly.

‘Something that's important to him?'

He stares at me, looking much deeper than he should.

‘Just asking,' I say with a shrug.

Mr Lancer starts to smile. ‘You were in his mind,' he says.

I wish I hadn't brought that up now. ‘It was just a vague feeling,' I say, trying to back-pedal. ‘There was just a hint of a plan and something that was important to him, and it was somewhere in the office. I was also being hit with a thousand and one other terrible thoughts, plus Mum was smashing my face in and I was confused and tired –'

‘James,' Mr Lancer says, leaning forward and putting his empty bowl down on the coffee table, ‘this thing, this object in the room – are you sure it was particularly important to him?'

I hesitate, then nod. ‘I'm sure. But I don't know what it was. I don't think I got a good think at it.'

‘That might not matter,' Mr Lancer says. He taps his dirty spoon on the coffee table a couple of times, which Will would have twenty thousand fits about if he were here, then stands up abruptly. ‘I think I'll go wake Kit up.'

‘You can't,' Pippa says quickly. ‘They're asleep.'

‘Yes,' Mr Lancer says, confused, ‘hence the waking up.'

‘Yes, but they're…
sleeping
.'

Mr Lancer's huge eyebrows rise. ‘Oh,' he says, and sits back down.

What?

Oh.

Once Will and Kit are… awake, Mr Lancer talks to her for quite a while in the kitchen, using a whole lot of words I don't understand when I just happen to be passing the doorway. Kit turns and asks, ‘Did you want something, James?' on my fifth passing, so I go and play chopsticks on the piano before Will throws me off.

There's nothing like hanging around in a tiny apartment with nothing to do to disenchant you with the other eight people you're sharing it with. Claire's hair is all over the place, Winifred's losing interest in Gwen's tail and getting squally, Peter keeps talking about all the appliances he could fix around the house if he had the right tools, Pippa's back to staring at me with a vague expression on her face, and Jem keeps showing off with his weapons. It's not that they didn't always do these things, it's just that it's intensified.

Only Will's mood has improved. Despite the horde of people mucking up his flat, he's spending his time pottering about with a silly smile on his face. And he keeps whistling, even when he's doing the dishes. I don't think I've ever seen him so content. It's freaking me out.

I almost bound out of the room when Mr Lancer says they want to talk to me. I calm down a bit when I see how serious they look.

‘Listen, James,' Mr Lancer says. Uh-oh. This can't be good. ‘I know you've had more than your fill of intrusions into your brain of late, but you've got some information in there that we need.'

‘I know,' I say apologetically, ‘but I can't make it clear. I've tried, but I don't know what it means.'

‘We know,' Kit says. ‘It's okay, Jim. It's not your memory, and we don't expect you to be able to tell us any more than you already have. You're not supposed to understand what it means. But we think we might be able to. In any case, we have to try; we don't have anything else to go on at this point, and we're running out of time.'

I look at her uncertainly. ‘So you want me to explain it again, so you can figure out what it means?' I ask.

She takes a deep breath, and looks to Mr Lancer for support. ‘We don't think that's going to be enough, I'm afraid. We think we might have to, ah, go in and retrieve it for ourselves, in a manner of speaking.'

‘You mean… you're going to go into my mind?'

‘I'm going to try, yes.'

‘But…' I don't understand this. ‘But you said it was dangerous to do that. You said you'd get all lost and go insane if you do that.'

‘I know I said that, but I was talking about you diving in the deep end of Pippa's brain. I'm going to be a little bit more sophisticated than that.'

‘Oh, fine, in you hop then, help yourself, wade around in my simplified, dumb-arse brain, why don't you?'

Oh, man, I'm a mug. She doesn't even have to look stern for me to be filled with shame.

‘I'm sorry,' I say. ‘I just really, really don't want you going insane right now.'

‘I appreciate your protectiveness, honey, but it's a bit different this time.'

‘Because you're a Guardian?' I ask.

‘It's more than that,' Mr Lancer says. ‘The reason Kit's going in and not me is because she has a constant link with someone else who can anchor her to the outside world, and reel her back into it, if necessary.'

‘Oh,' I say in comprehension. They're talking about Pippa.

‘And if Warwick can focus your mind on that particular memory, I shouldn't need to go around searching for it,' Kit continues. ‘It's not a question of whether I can get in and out. It's a question of whether you're willing to let us make you concentrate on a memory you'd probably rather not relive.'

They both look at me, Mr Lancer uncertain, Kit comically hopeful.

‘That's fine,' I tell them.

Kit looks somewhat surprised. ‘You're sure?' she asks.

‘Do you need it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then do it. I trust you not to screw me up any more than you already have.'

Kit stands up. ‘Good lad. Come on then.'

We go back into the lounge room and Kit shoos Peter and Will off the armchairs. Then she drags one of them so it's facing the other one, about a yard in front of it, while Will complains about the state of his polished wooden floor. Kit tells him he's a nitpickety old housewife, and he chases her around the room.

‘Right, moving on,' she says after she's been caught a bit (yuck). ‘Jim, sit there.'

I sit down in one of the chairs, and she sits in the other. Pippa climbs into the chair behind Kit and hugs her around her middle.

‘Is that part of it?' Claire asks, bemused.

‘Yes. It's essential,' Pippa replies seriously.

Claire pauses a moment, then climbs in behind me and clasps her arms around my chest. Kit grins happily at me. ‘Aren't sisters nice?'

‘Adorable,' I gasp. Claire loosens her grip a bit.

‘Okay,' Kit says, business-like again. ‘Jim, try to relax. I know, but just try, okay?' I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Nice attempt,' she says. ‘Okay, Warwick, start her up.'

My vision blurs a bit, and I can see two of everything in front of me. Then I feel Mr Lancer's mind, sturdy and strong, taking one of those visions and rewinding it, while the other stays steady. I'm whizzed through the last few days in the flat, the escape from my parents at home, and the race through the school. Then it slows down as we enter Mr Grayson's office again. I'm looking at Mum, I'm on the floor, I'm in Grayson's mind looking at Mr Lancer.

And then I feel it again – a consciousness of something important in the room with us.
There
, I tell Mr Lancer.
Slow it down there
.

The video of my memory pauses and once again I feel the agony of that moment, clinging desperately to the edges of Grayson's mind to stop myself from falling. My physical body starts to shake and sweat springs up on my brow. Then I feel Claire's arms tightening around me, and I find I can take steadying breaths again.

All of a sudden Kit's mind is with me, calm and deep and monstrously brilliant. Who knew she was that clever? She doesn't show it that much.

Shut your face
, she tells me.

You're the one who's opening it all over the place.

Then I feel her leaving my memory a little, probing into what I can't understand in it, like a surgeon delving into organs I have and use, but have no idea how they work. She works quickly and efficiently, sifting through the thoughts of both myself and Grayson, before she stops suddenly. I can feel her confusion, but can't tell what it's about.