The London Pride (15 page)

She scratched behind his ears and his tail gave a couple of tentative wags.

‘He’s Filax,’ said Tragedy. ‘Brave old hound, he is. Saved my bacon.’

‘I can see that,’ she said, looking into the dog’s eyes. ‘I can see he’s a brave one. You’re a beauty, and you’re among friends here.’

Filax’s tail lashed the ground and he sat happily between the two cats, as if he understood exactly what she had said to him. Only when he looked at the three statues lined up next to each other did Will see the niggling thing he had been missing about the cheetahs. He looked at Guy the Gorilla, and saw it too. Or rather, he didn’t see it in any of them.

‘Their eyes,’ he said. ‘They’re not shining with blue light like the other animal statues.’

‘No,’ said Happy, leaning back against the comforting bulk of the gorilla.

The rain had stopped, and now the main sound of the city was quiet, mixed with dripping gutters and burbling drains.

‘The others have had a bad spell put on them. Or a curse.’

‘But not these ones?’ said Will.

Now he was – gloriously and unexpectedly – NOT about to be killed, he was back to wanting to understand everything.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think they felt the spell too. But a spell? Or even a curse?’ She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘That’s just magic.’

Will looked back out into the street, seeing all the blue-lit figures of frozen people dripping rainwater onto the pavement.

‘Well, “just magic” is doing a pretty good job of messing things up around here, I’d say. It seems it’s pretty strong stuff.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re right. But it’s not as strong as what binds us together. Me to them. Them to me …’

‘You have stronger magic?’ he said.

She laughed again and shook her head. ‘No. We have love. Love is the one thing stronger than anything. Love defeats everything in the end.’

‘The animals love her,’ said Tragedy. ‘Always have.’

‘And I love them,’ she said.

‘But …’ began Will.

She closed him down with a smile.

‘I can’t explain it. It’s just how I am. How I was made. I’m lucky! I was made with love, to show love.’

‘And she’s right, Will,’ said Tragedy. ‘Nothing all girly and weak about love when you look at it like that, is there?’

Will looked at the gorilla and the way it stood protectively around the small girl. Immovable. Like a rock. He nodded. He got it. This was strength.

‘I sent the cats out to keep you away from the others,’ said Happy, looking at Tragedy. ‘Ariel flew by and told us what was happening, just before all the other animals went funny and started drifting towards the museum.’

‘Thanks,’ grinned Tragedy. ‘You nearly killed us with your kindness though, cos we was about to have bleedin’ ’eart attacks with all that running.’

‘Thank you,’ said Will. ‘Can you help us get to Coram’s Fields?’

‘Of course,’ said Happy a bit hesitantly. ‘But why?’

‘Because there’s something else there that might be stronger than all this blue magic too,’ said Will.

‘But maybe you should stay with us. It’s safe,’ she said. ‘No one would attack Guy or anyone he was protecting. Not even a lion.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘My sister’s there.’

‘Sister?’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Yep. At least I hope she is.’

‘You have a sister?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And we swore we wouldn’t get split up again, but we did. And my mum too, though she’s frozen.’

‘Family,’ she said, suddenly looking both serious beyond her years, and, as a result, exactly six years old.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Family is important.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘Family is love too,’ she said. ‘Guy will go with you to protect you all. If that’s OK?’

He grinned back at her.

‘It’s better than OK. It’s brilliant.’

He was grinning because now he knew they had a chance …

Jo and Ariel had no chance.

Jo knew this with the certainty of the freshly doomed. They were deep below the city, running through a network of tunnels with a torch that was beginning to dim and sputter, and the darkness around them was full of not just more darkness but a wakening tide of black-coated rats, rats that were audibly on the move.

They could hear the scrabbling of claws and the rising chitter of the approaching wave of rodents behind them.

‘I hate rats,’ gasped Ariel. ‘I see them at night when they come out on the street.’

‘I hate them too,’ panted Jo.

‘Perhaps they’re just panicked,’ said Ariel. ‘Maybe if we get out of their way they’ll just run past us and leave us alone.’

Jo risked a fast look backwards.

She really wished she hadn’t. The approaching tide had eyes. In fact, all she could really see were eyes. It wasn’t hard, because the eyes were all blazing a horribly familiar frosty blue.

‘No,’ she panted through gritted teeth. ‘Not going to leave us alone. Hunting us.’

There had been a lot of eyes, enough so that the snatched look had left her with the horrible image of a rippling wave of blue lights flowing after them like floodwater down a sewer pipe.

Drowning was a nasty enough thought when it was in water. Drowning in rats was a whole deeper level of horrible nightmarishness.

The torch was definitely losing power. The bobbling halo it cast round them as they sprinted down the ribbed tunnel was getting dimmer with every step.

‘This is bad!’ puffed Ariel. ‘Running is bad. Rats are bad. The dark is bad …’

Jo wanted to say wasting your breath is bad too, but she didn’t. She had too much of a stitch and needed every cubic centimetre of air her lungs could suck in just to keep her legs pounding along the unforgiving rail-bed.

The tunnel made an endless curve. It straightened out with no welcoming rectangle of a station in view, and then arched in the other direction, making another blind curve that seemed to have no end.

Jo grimaced and risked another fast look back.

The wave of blue eyes had very nearly caught up with them. It was close enough for the backwash of light from her torch to pick out the undulating black fur of the running rats as well as the blue eyes. Filling in the detail of the wave made it worse.

‘Come ON!’ she gasped at Ariel. ‘Faster!’

‘I can’t!’ Ariel gasped. ‘I just wasn’t made to run …’

Jo grabbed her arm and shoved her forwards.

‘You weren’t made to give up either,’ she choked. ‘RUN!’

There were lights ahead. For a moment Jo thought they might have a chance of escape if only they could keep on running before they burst or collapsed. But then she saw they were not the welcoming white lights of a platform. These were halogen work lights, and they were aimed at a section of yellow scaffolding tower that stood in the middle of the tracks like a roadblock. Hard-hatted workmen in high-vis yellow jackets were grouped around a supervisor who was pointing at something on a blueprint taped to the wall with a hand that also held a big ring of keys like a janitor would carry.

Jo thought if her heart sank any further it would need its own diving bell: there was no station platform visible beyond the scaffolding tower that they could possibly reach before the rat-tide at their heels engulfed them. And then she saw that the scaffolding extended further than the arched roof of the tube tunnel.

It was an air shaft. And air shafts went upwards.

Just as she saw that, a rat jumped and clawed onto the back of her shoe. She dug in and ran faster, fired by the anticipated nip of a rat bite on her Achilles tendon, but the bite never came as the rat was jarred off by the pounding of her feet.

She saw the ladder on the side of the scaffolding and leapt for it. Ariel was right behind her. They clawed upwards as fast as they could, panting and gasping with the effort, and then they allowed themselves to look down.

The wave of blazing blue-eyed rats surged past the foot of the scaffolding, propelled by an unstoppable forward momentum. The frozen workmen stood unmoving like rocks in a stream as the tide parted on either side of them. At the foot of the ladder there was a bobbling disturbance in the rat river, a kind of rodent eddy as the ones who had been at the forefront of the wave attempted to stop, maintain their footing against the unstoppable tide and get up the ladder after Jo and Ariel. The mass of rats behind them had not seen where their prey had gone, and only this hard core of front runners were attempting to follow them upwards. Luckily the ladder was metal and so gave them poor grip, and the pressure of the rat torrent pounding past them dragged them away.

Ariel and Jo exchanged a grin.

‘Close …’ was all Jo managed to say before going back to the serious business of sucking oxygen into her starved lungs.

After at least a minute of recovery, Ariel nodded. ‘Too close,’ she managed.

Jo could feel a breeze. It was cool and welcome, and coming from above, and when she looked she saw strips of daylight, where the air shaft ended above ground in a series of louvred grilles. She jerked upwards with her thumb.

‘Out,’ she said.

‘You bet,’ said Ariel, and they swarmed up the ladder, heading for the light.

Hope gave them second wind, and they got to the top quickly. The air shaft emerged into a rectangular tower with metal louvres that overlooked a rain-drenched section of the Euston Road. It was jammed with unmoving traffic and frozen people, and in the grey light of dawn it was colourless and lifeless and utterly without any redeeming beauty.

Jo stared at it through the metal strips and thought she had never seen anything so wonderful in her whole life.

‘There’s a door,’ said Ariel behind her.

‘Good,’ she said, enjoying the sharp wetness of the breeze on her face.

‘No,’ said Ariel. ‘It’s locked.’

It was. Definitely, immovably and extraordinarily frustratingly locked solid. And it was metal. And unbreakable.

‘Seriously?’ Jo asked the universe. The universe didn’t reply. Nor did it open the door.

‘Jo,’ said Ariel. She pointed down.

Jo followed the direction of her finger.

The tide of rats had stopped. Unfortunately it had not gone. It had just stopped moving. And in place of the flow there were hundreds of tiny blue eyes blinking back up at them. It was like looking down on a crowded starscape, and in any other circumstances might even have been a bit pretty. Jo didn’t see it like that. She felt the weight of the rat that had attached itself briefly to her leg, and then multiplied it by the number of pairs of eyes staring at her, and that imagined weight terrified her so much it made her want to be sick. Just thinking about falling into that horde made her whole skin itch on the inside, from the nape of her neck to the bottoms of her feet.

‘There are keys down there,’ she said, wishing she hadn’t noticed them. ‘The man pointing at the plan had a big ring of them in his hand.’

Ariel tested her weight on a length of safety harness that had been clipped to the top of the scaffolding, and used it to lean far back out over the central void of the shaft. She squinted down.

‘I can see it,’ she said. ‘Lots of keys.’

‘Maybe …’ began Jo.

‘I know,’ said Ariel. ‘But we’d have to go back down there. With them.’

‘Maybe they’ll get bored and go away,’ said Jo hopefully.

‘Rats don’t get bored,’ said Ariel. ‘I watch them. They’re very tenacious. And resourceful. In fact, they’re good at everything, except giving up.’

The sea of waiting eyes looked back up at them, as if to confirm this.

It was a dilemma. The keys were there. The door meant freedom. But getting the keys meant going down among the bewitched rat army. And – as Jo’s dad would say – there was no way that would end up with everyone going home for tea and medals.

Jo thought about it. One of them would have to go. Then she thought some more.

‘Ariel,’ she said. ‘Let go of that safety strap.’

‘Why?’ said Ariel. ‘I’ll fall.’

‘No, you won’t,’ said Jo. ‘You’re above ground now, aren’t you?’

Ariel’s smile was like a slow sunrise.

She opened her hands and did not fall. Instead she drifted back into the centre of the shaft. She giggled and twirled a bit.

‘I am,’ she laughed. ‘I am myself again! A spirit of air and grace and beauty.’

‘Yeah, well, hold on for a minute and stay focused,’ said Jo. ‘Because we’re going to have to work out how low you can go before the flying gets to be a problem again.’

‘Why?’ said Ariel.

‘Because I have a plan. And it really needs you not to drop me,’ said Jo. ‘Do you think you can stay focused?’

Ariel’s laughter pealed round the air shaft.

‘I can do anything!’ she said, suddenly her old theatrical self again. ‘I am Ariel!

‘I come

To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

on the curl’d clouds—
’

‘Yeah,’ interrupted Jo. ‘Calm down. We don’t need any fire-diving or cloud-riding. I really just need you not to let go of the strap.’

Ariel got serious again as she lowered herself down the shaft to the point where her ability to fly stopped. Jo then joined her with the safety strap and lowered it to make sure it reached from that point to the supervisor. As the strap got close to the bottom, the rats took an interest and the bolder among them hurled themselves up at it. One even got a claw-hold for an instant before Jo cracked the strap like a whip and sent it tumbling back down into the chittering mass below.

‘OK,’ said Jo. ‘When I shout “Up”, get me out of there fast, because I don’t want to be taking on any passengers.’

The thought of hanging on the end of the strap festooned with angry rats really increased the itchiness under her skin.

Ariel watched her attach the safety harness and the strap, and then wound the outer end of the strap tightly round her wrists and nodded at Jo.

‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘Rather you than me.’

‘Trust me,’ grimaced Jo. ‘If I could fly I wouldn’t be the one on this end of the string.’

Ariel let her climb down the ladder until the strap was taut, and then she flew out into the centre of the shaft.