The Great and Dangerous Read online

  ‘Suitably horrifying creations . . . are balanced by a well-crafted sense of place and excellent characterisation.’ – Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A marvellously well-written thriller.’–Literary Review

  ‘What makes this story stand head and shoulders above most horror for kids is the sheer quality of the writing. I could not stop reading and I hold Westwood responsible for many hours of lost sleep. This has to be the first book of the series . . . And I, to my surprise, can’t wait for the next instalment.’ – Mary Hoffman, Guardian

  ‘Ministry of Pandemonium . . . is pretty special itself: an engrossing modern gothic story.’ – Telegraph

  Text copyright © Chris Westwood 2012

  The right of Chris Westwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 (United Kingdom).

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 4 Torriano Mews,

  Torriano Avenue, London NW5 2RZ

  www.franceslincoln.com

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electrical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-84780-249-1

  eISBN 978-1-78101-077-8

  Set in Palatino

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY in January 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Jackie Leven

  1950-2011

  CONTENTS

  1 THE DRIVE-BY

  2 THE UNNAMED

  3 THE WHISPERER

  4 STRANGE AIR

  5 THE OVERSEERS

  6 77772

  7 EYES OF THE STORM

  8 ROGUE’S GALLERY

  9 BAD SATURDAY

  10 MISS WEBSTER

  11 DONNA HARVESTER

  12 THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER

  13 THE GREAT GIG IN THE SKY

  14 THE SCREENING

  15 STILL LIFE

  16 FEVER

  17 THE GREAT AND DANGEROUS

  18 MAGIC AND LOSS

  19 THE BUTCHER AND THE SHUFFLEHEADS

  20 CONVALESCENCE

  21 THE BRIEFING

  22 THE LAST BERSERKER

  23 SUKIE

  24 LUTHER VILEHEART’S MAZE

  25 PANDEMONIUM EXPRESS

  26 A DISPATCH FROM THE MINISTRY

  1

  THE DRIVE-BY

  ur last call on the after-school shift was a 32374 in Stoke Newington. Alice Edritch never knew what hit her.

  The shots were fired on a cold and rainy November afternoon as she left a newsagent’s in Shacklewell, stuffing packets of Quavers and Twiglets into her bag. When she stepped outside, Alice was twelve years old. Now she’d be twelve forever. Even before she hit the ground, her ghost was tearing across town, becoming more lost and confused with every silent step.

  Four hours later, the street corner was ablaze with colour – sprays of crimson and bright yellow flowers stacked high against the dim brick walls. A white chrysanthemum cross lay on the newsagent’s step and tacked to the wall above it was a photograph of Alice, a thin-faced girl with straw-coloured hair and an easy, buck-toothed smile.

  The newsagent’s door was locked and bolted and iron shutters covered its windows. The lights were on at a twenty-four-hour grocery store and the laundrette next door, but the rest of the street was deserted. The only sounds were those of the rickshaw’s wheels trundling through puddles and potholes as our teammate Lu steered us along.

  Watching from the passenger seat, Becky Sanborne gave a heartfelt sigh. ‘That poor kid. She wasn’t any older than us.’

  As new recruits to the Ministry of Pandemonium’s subdepartments of registration and salvage, we’d already faced many strange and terrible sights, and sometimes there were sights that made me want to turn away and weep. This was one of those times.

  ‘So this is a 32374?’ Becky said. ‘Can’t say I know all the numbers yet but I suppose that’s what it means – gunshots.’

  ‘Yes, a drive-by,’ I said. It was the second I’d personally seen. ‘Probably gang-related. The girl was an innocent bystander, hit by accident.’

  ‘That’s dreadful.’

  ‘All the numbers are dreadful.’

  Before our shift began, the 32374 had arrived on a list with five other names and numbers in the receipts office at Pandemonium House, our secret headquarters off Camden Passage. The lists may as well have been written in stone. The telegraph that churned them out had no opinions. It simply told us how it would be, and we were powerless to save those it named – the soon-departed – from what was coming. Our mission was to guide them afterwards, before anything worse could happen.

  Because worse things could happen. We all knew that. The enemy wanted those lost souls too.

  Lu hauled the rickshaw north, her heels sending up a misty trail from the wet road. A dedicated, stern-eyed girl in her late teens, she was responsible for transport on our team, but transport wasn’t her only area of expertise. In combat she was fearless, and I’d once seen her decapitate a reptilian demon with a flick of her wrist. In the heat of battle you’d want Luna San Lao – we only ever called her Lu – on your side.

  She turned off the high street onto a narrow courtyard, pulling up outside the main entrance to Abney Park Cemetery, where Alice had last been sighted by an off-duty Ministry field agent. Becky rolled off the seat and ran to the gates, peering into the dark.

  ‘She’s here,’ she said through a shiver. ‘I just know she is.’

  Starting inside, we snapped on our Ministry-issue flashlights. Becky flinched when hers found a hooded figure crouching by the path, but it was only an arch-shaped headstone. Mine fell on a stone angel which stood on a towering plinth. The angel’s face was peaceful, its lips on the edge of a smile. For some reason the smile made me nervous, so I flipped the beam away to where the path began to fork. The shadows of trees and monuments crawled along both overgrown routes.

  ‘Which way, right or left?’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ the girls both said at once, and we set off in search of Alice Edritch.

  The afternoon rain had turned the fallen winter leaves to mush on the path. Sliding and squelching along, we whipped our flashlights around at every slight sound, a rustle of tree branches, a scuttling of bugs over mossy green headstones. As the path wound deeper inside the cemetery, the high street noise faded and I began to notice another sound almost hidden by the breeze, a whisper of voices chanting in a weird, reverse-sounding language, like a backwards-playing tape.

  ‘What’re they’re saying?’ I said.

  Lu wasn’t sure. ‘It’s enemy speak. I don’t know the lingo but I’d guess they’re warning us to stay away.’

  Becky seemed to have picked up something else. ‘Hear that? Careful now. Alice is close, but she isn’t alone.’

  Another path took us past a black marble cenotaph and a man-sized stone eagle with outspread wings. The trees were less thickly tangled here and the path gradually curved towards a clearing where the whispers were closer. Closer still was another sound, the one Becky had been tracing from the start: a muted sobbing.

  Past the trees the outline of an old chapel loomed in front of us, its spire piercing the sky like a blade. The pl
ace was in ruins, had been for years. All its entrances were barred and padlocked, and the building’s gutted innards blossomed out of the dark when we turned all three flashlights on it.

  On the floor just inside the bars a hooded dwarf statue stood with its back towards us. Further inside, another figure cowered in a pool of shadows among the rubble, its knees drawn to its chin. The figure was moving but it wasn’t alive.

  ‘Alice?’ I said.

  The girl turned her head to the light, lifting a hand to shield her eyes. Her pale face was as darkly smudged as her school uniform, a bloodstained blue blazer and grey pleated skirt.

  ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘Alice,’ I repeated.

  ‘And who’re you?’

  ‘I’m Ben, and these are my friends. We heard you were in trouble and came to help.’

  ‘You’re not the first,’ Alice said. ‘The ones before you said they’d take care of me. But I didn’t like the look of them and I didn’t trust them.’

  ‘You did right,’ Becky said. ‘They’re liars, and the last thing they want is to take care of you.’

  Alice’s ghost mulled this over, saying nothing.

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’ I said.

  ‘Some of it, but it’s fuzzy. It was on my way home from school, I think.’

  ‘That’s right. You went into a shop. . .’

  ‘Yeah, and . . . and someone ducked inside past me as I came out. I didn’t see his face, but he seemed scared and in a rush. I thought I heard a car backfiring, and then it was like I’d been punched, here and here.’ Her fingers hovered near but didn’t touch the dark wounds about her neck and chest. ‘I went cold. I’m still cold. And the next thing I knew I was running, but how did I get from there to here?’ She looked around. ‘I don’t know this place at all.’

  The breeze stiffened, the whispers inside it becoming busier, louder. We had to act quickly. The enemy were never far away at these times.

  ‘Listen, Alice,’ I said, offering my hand. ‘We can’t take back what happened to you, we can’t undo it. But we can take you somewhere safe. Will you step out and come with us?’

  She sat there listening to the breeze, sucking her thumb, unsure what to do, but then her face cleared and she scrambled to her feet and came forward, lifting her fingers to mine.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Yes, I will.’

  A kind of electric charge passed between us when we touched. Sparks of silvery light fizzed about our fingers and wrists, and Alice stared fascinated at the magic show, taking another step to the bars. As she did, a great wrenching and crashing sound came from the trees as if something huge had toppled or torn itself up from the earth, and the earth rumbled and shook underfoot.

  ‘We’re out of time,’ Lu said. ‘Quick, before it gets here!’

  But whatever it was, it was already here.

  It came into view above the chapel in the same instant Alice slid outside, a raging, smoky, black cloud that seeped from the heights of the trees. It had no clear shape, or rather, its shape was changing all the time, whirling and unfolding in all directions. At its centre were two foggy red points of light that glowed like Chinese lanterns. By the time it reached the spire, blotting it out against the sky, we were running, retracing the path through the trees, Becky leading and Lu urging us along from behind.

  ‘Faster,’ Lu called. ‘No, faster!’

  As we ran I had to keep checking Alice was still there – her grip on my hand was so faint – and her eyes were tearful and wide with fear. The cloud was already at our backs, a cold wave careering through overhanging branches, showering us with dead wood and droplets of rain. An earthy, decaying scent filled the air.

  Becky stumbled ahead, gesturing wildly at something she’d sighted. ‘There. . .’ she cried. ‘There, and there!’

  There was an explosion of soil and leaves close by. My flashlight swept past something like tendrils or long fingers shooting out of the earth. Further on, another larger shape was surfacing near an ivy-choked cross, head and shoulders scattering mulch, dead eyes peering from a face that was mostly moss and mud. It was happening everywhere, little bursts and sprays of earth as others dragged themselves up from the depths.

  ‘That cloud-thing,’ Lu said, her usually calm voice cracking. ‘It’s bringing them out!’

  Alice whimpered as I bundled her along and, in front of us, Becky let out a squeal of surprise and vanished from sight as the ground suddenly swallowed her up.

  Something had ripped itself up from the path, opening a deep rectangular gash across it. Sprinting ahead, Becky had seen it too late. The flashlight fell from her grasp, struck the edge and went out before rolling down into space.

  Becky tumbled in straight after it.

  ‘Becky?’ I put on the brakes, managing to stop just short of the drop, at the same time releasing Alice’s hand. ‘Here, Lu!’

  Lu was at her side in a flash, guiding Alice around the grave-like opening, then pausing to peer down inside it.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Lu said, then added less certainly, ‘Is she gone?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  I turned a flashlight around the moist walls, which quivered with worm and bug activity. There was no reply, only another soggy eruption of soil behind us, and another, nearer to where we stood. Away to my left, a nimble dark shape flashed through the undergrowth. I was still staring after it when a slippery hand shot out of the earth to close on my ankle.

  The shock nearly drove me out of my body. A scream stuck fast in my throat, and I only just heard the small voice in the darkness below me.

  ‘Damn it, I knew there’d be nights like this.’

  Forgetting Alice Edritch, forgetting everything else for the time being, I dropped to my knees and reached with both hands to bring Becky slithering clear of the hole and back to solid ground.

  ‘You all right?’ I said.

  ‘Do I look all right?’ Her face was a mud-slicked mask. Taking a moment to catch her breath, she was wiping a dollop of dirt from her chin when her eyes widened at something past my shoulder. ‘Oh no. . . What the hell?’

  They were swarming the path behind us, a risen army of walkers. Called into being by that cloud-thing in the trees, they were already too many to count and others were still rising to join them. The majority were almost human in shape, but were blighted with missing or decaying limbs and wagging misshapen heads, while some lacked heads altogether. All of them were coming our way, and they weren’t exactly dawdling.

  ‘Do something,’ Becky moaned.

  ‘Do what?’ I said, too numb to think.

  ‘Whatever it is you do. Picture it. Imagine it.’ She spat out a mouthful of dirt. ‘Just make it happen and soon, OK?’

  She meant the gift, a gift I hadn’t known I had until Mr October explained it a few short months ago. It was a sign, he’d said, of my developing skills. I still didn’t really understand it, I couldn’t switch it on or off at will, and I couldn’t find it now.

  ‘Run!’ I said.

  Becky looked daggers at me. ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  Alice stopped whimpering and started to bawl.

  ‘Shut up and move,’ Lu said, yanking her on.

  We took off in pursuit, skirting around the gaping hole. There was a flurry of movement in the trees as we rejoined the path, and a spindly figure tore out of the dark, looping its arms around my chest and neck. I strained and twisted and clawed to break loose, but its strength was tremendous, crushing air from my lungs.

  Becky had meanwhile stopped and doubled back, flinging herself at the attacker, pounding her fists against the rotting mask that passed for its face, but the thing swung a heavy paw, toppling her off her feet.

  I never saw her hit the ground. If she was hurt I couldn’t tell how badly. A clammy hand had closed over my eyes, blanking out what little light there was, and a stream of grave breath washed into my face as the walker spoke.

  ‘We’ve warned you, Harvester. We d
on’t give ultimatums. You’ve crossed us once too often – and now you’re coming with us.’

  No chance, I thought. I’m staying where I am. But you – you’re going back where you came from, you’re going empty-handed, and you’re going there right now.

  Perhaps that was all it took, the simple, crystal-clear thought Becky had asked for, because the thing suddenly yowled in pain and shuddered as if it had been shot, loosening its hold and shrinking away, and then Becky was on her feet again grabbing my wrist.

  ‘Come on,’ she hissed. ‘No dawdling!’

  The ground heaved. There was a hollow roar followed by the stunning white blast of an explosion, which sprayed fragments of stone and dirt from the chasm. A fountain of light poured upwards, flooding the path, covering everything. Trapped in its brightness, the walkers wailed in ear-splitting voices and flapped at the air like vampires in the sunlight. And there was something else inside the light, a swirling and gathering of specks of darker light that seemed to take physical form, reaching like hands to draw the enemy into itself and down inside the gash. The one that had attacked me went first.

  I looked on, awestruck, unable to budge. At least ten had fallen screaming below before Becky dragged me away. A chilling howl followed us on the night air as we ran, the mournful cry of the enemy counting its losses. They must’ve thought they’d had this 32374 in the bag, but we’d stolen it from under their noses.

  We slithered on up the path, not daring to look back. Soon there was light and traffic noise ahead and then the welcome sight of the rickshaw at the gates with Lu settling Alice onto the seat under its red and gold canopy. Above and behind us, the angry cloud backed off into the trees, the red lights inside it fading out one by one.

  Hearing us nearing the top of the path, Lu turned and faced us impatiently, hands on hips.

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she said. ‘We don’t have all night.’

  A train clattered overhead on the bridge as Lu stopped the rickshaw by London Fields station. Helping Alice off the seat, I took her hand again, and again she marvelled at the show of lights when our fingers met.