The Great and Dangerous Read online

  ‘Sorry, that’s taken.’

  Becky flinched. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It’s taken,’ said Kelly.

  The others exchanged a knowing look and a nod. Becky stood there, stranded, unsure which way to turn. After a long moment she headed for my desk and sank down, flustered, while Miss Neal began calling the register.

  ‘What was that about?’ I said.

  Someone – I believe it was snot-nosed Tommy Farley – shushed me.

  Becky shrugged, opened her bag and slapped her books and pens loudly on the desk.

  Someone else shushed her.

  ‘Raymond . . . Michael . . . Fay. . . ’ Miss Neal read in a lifeless monotone, not looking up from the register. ‘Tommy . . . David . . . Liam. . .’

  Becky muttered something under her breath which I didn’t catch, and looked at me with worried green eyes.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not supposed to say, but what Sukie told me earlier – she wasn’t kidding.’

  ‘Not now. . .’ I said.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Miss Neal smacked her desk with a flattened palm. ‘You two – yes, you two. Since whatever you’re discussing is clearly so important it cannot wait, you might like to explain it in detail. Not here and now but in a thousand-word essay you will write after school during detention. My detention.’

  Becky sighed and shook her head.

  ‘Aw, Miss. . .’ I groaned, feeling every smug look and triumphant grin in the room bearing down on me. Since starting here in September I’d never been made all that welcome by 8C – I’d always been an outsider but never an outcast. Apparently we were both outcasts now.

  ‘With your permission, I’ll move on,’ Miss Neal said. ‘Now, everyone, are you paying attention?’

  ‘Yes, Miss,’ answered every voice in the class except ours and Fay’s.

  ‘Good. Then I’d like you to welcome a new face to 8C. This is Simon Decker’s first day at Mercy Road, and I’m sure most of you know how it feels to be in a new place surrounded by strangers, so make your new classmate feel at home by saying hello.’

  ‘Hello Simon,’ the class chimed as one.

  He was sitting alone at the back by the window, a small boy with straight-combed hair as black as ravens’ wings, a pale narrow-chinned face and the coldest blue eyes. His thin lips quivered as if he were muttering to himself. First day nerves, I supposed. He answered the class’s greeting with a shy nod of his head.

  ‘And I hope, Simon, you’ve taken note of the kind of behaviour that is and isn’t acceptable here.’ Miss Neal’s piggy eyes fixed on me. ‘At Mercy Road we have rules like any other school, and if you abide by those rules you’ll do well. Now I’m sure the rest of the class would like to welcome you properly during the break, but first let’s proceed with our lesson.’

  The lesson was Maths. Probabilities. For instance, the probability of a six-sided dice throwing an even or odd number, or a two-sided coin coming down heads or tails. Not my subject. It never had been. But I couldn’t help thinking, and what’s the probability of twenty-six students and one teacher switching personalities overnight? What are the odds of that?

  For the next forty minutes all you could hear were the pages of exercise books being turned and scribbled on. At the back, Simon Decker mouthed silently, and every so often Miss Neal gave me dark looks. At one point Raymond Blight flicked a paper ball at my neck, but no one noticed or commented on that. Had the whole class been brainwashed or what?

  It came as a relief when the bell went, breaking the spell. The lesson ended, books were bagged, and the scramble for the door began. When I looked to the front Miss Neal had gone from her desk, but on the board she’d left a reminder:

  B. Sanborne & B. Harvester, 8C, 3.15 p.m. 1,000 words.

  Half the class lingered behind, not pressing for the door but towards the desk where Simon Decker sat peering out the window at the yard. Two girls closed around him, Mel Kimble perching on his desk, Sarah Knox sliding onto a chair beside him.

  ‘Wassup, Simon? I’m Mel. Pleased to meetcha.’

  ‘I’m Sarah. Welcome aboard.’

  Others, even Becky’s old gang, flocked round like autograph hunters, and through the crush I saw something that both irritated and unnerved me. Decker turned from the window, and his lips stopped moving long enough to form the semblance of a smile as he looked straight at me.

  That look reminded me of something else, a warning the enemy had sent me last month, posting it on the graffiti wall across from our place on Middleton Road. We can get to you and yours anywhere any time, the message had said. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but just then Simon Decker’s eyes seemed to say the same thing.

  4

  STRANGE AIR

  very lesson that day had the same strange air, the same orderly well-behaved class, and teachers who, for some reason, had all decided to clamp down on us. Even English with Mr Glover and PSHE with the usually pleasant but horsey Miss Whittaker went the same way. For the most part we were walking on glass.

  ‘It’s like a virus,’ Becky said after school, following the corridor that smelt of stale varnish to Miss Neal’s room. ‘Something that’s making everyone nuts, including the teachers.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, only half-listening, still shaking off Simon Decker’s look. ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘Not sure, but I don’t like the way it’s all aimed at us. Did you see how my old mates treated me?’

  She tailed off, again stalling at Miss Neal’s door as if she expected something to leap out from behind it. I pushed it open and led the way in, and Becky reluctantly followed. Miss Neal wasn’t here yet and the room felt lighter, airy and safe.

  ‘I’ve never had detention before,’ Becky said, looking around the empty space.

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘We’ll be late for our shift.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Suppose that’s their plan?’ Becky said. ‘Suppose that’s what Sukie was getting at?’

  Earlier, at the crypt tea rooms where we spent most breaks, Becky had finally had a chance to explain her morning exchange with Sukie. Walking to school on Richmond Road, she’d spotted Sukie with a 3624 who’d jumped in front of a midnight tube train at Old Street. The young woman’s departed soul had wandered the streets all night and could have been lost forever if a field agent hadn’t called Sukie to assist. Sukie, whose mind-scanning capabilities made her an expert tracker, was consoling the weeping woman on Holly Street when Becky turned up.

  ‘Word of warning,’ Sukie said. ‘This 3624 swears blind she didn’t mean to do it. She’s never given a thought to suicide in her life. She just got engaged, for crying out loud. Someone on that platform popped the idea of jumping into her head before the train came in. Something’s changing. Seems they’re using different tactics now. Be careful, keep your ears to the ground.’

  ‘Different tactics. . .’ Becky mused as we settled at a desk near the front. ‘Are they smart enough to mess with people’s minds? Make them behave differently? Make them jump under trains?’

  ‘I suppose they must be that smart. Otherwise they wouldn’t be much of an enemy, would they, and the war would’ve been over ages ago.’

  She looked at the detention notice on the board. ‘Do you think Miss Neal’s one of them? Or one of them did something to change her?’

  ‘It wasn’t just her. It was all the kids and staff, even the principal. When I saw him coming downstairs after lunch, the look he gave me made me want to dig a hole to hide in.’

  She opened her bag and took out a pen and exercise book. ‘What will we write? A thousand words about what we weren’t talking about?’

  ‘We can’t do that.’

  ‘We’ll have to make something up.’

  ‘What else can we do?’

  ‘Shush.’

  There were footsteps outside, but they quickly passed along the corridor. Another fifteen minutes went by before Miss Neal appeared, crossing to her
desk without a word. I expected her to start yelling again, but her look was placid as she sat, folding her pudgy pink hands together in front of her.

  ‘There seems to have been a misunderstanding,’ Miss Neal said. ‘I believe I owe you both an apology.’

  ‘Excuse me, Miss?’ Becky said through a cough.

  ‘I wasn’t quite myself this morning,’ Miss Neal said. ‘When I called you here for detention, I think I was overreacting to your little confab. Consider your thousand words written and your sentence already served.’

  She forced a smile. I exchanged a quick glance with Becky.

  ‘If you’re sure, Miss,’ I said.

  ‘I am, and that’s the end of it.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Aren’t the lights in here awful? They give me such headaches. I had an unusually bad one first thing today, a migraine.’

  ‘I get those too sometimes,’ I said, trying to be conversational.

  ‘I think this old building brings it on. It’s so dark in places, and the fluorescent lights are so harsh in others. And some parts of the school are colder than others, have you noticed? Sometimes I think I’m seeing things.’

  ‘Sometimes we see things too,’ Becky said, blurting it out without thinking. A look from me sealed her lips.

  ‘Really, what kind of things?’ Miss Neal said.

  ‘Just shadows,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Yeah, shadows,’ Becky agreed.

  Miss Neal looked out at the fading sky. ‘Anyway, if you suffer from migraines as I do, Ben, you’ll understand. They can make you snap at the slightest thing, as I snapped this morning. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK, Miss. Good you’re feeling better now, anyway.’

  ‘Thank you, much better.’

  This was more like the Miss Neal we knew, but she still seemed distracted, or perhaps she was just embarrassed by a dramatic mood swing she couldn’t explain. Rising from her chair, she wiped our names from the board and started for the door.

  ‘You’re free to go, by the way,’ she said as she went.

  ‘Well, that was bizarre,’ Becky said, returning up the corridor a minute later. ‘Really bizarre. She’s right about the cold spots, though. Miss Whatever’s room for one.’

  She meant Miss Whittaker’s, where I’d first seen the stranded fire children, and where, for the first time since his death – although I hadn’t known it was him at the time – I’d seen Dad.

  ‘Yeah, it is colder in there,’ I said.

  ‘And here.’ Becky stopped where the two main corridors intersected close to the centre of school. ‘See this?’

  She exhaled a pale mist on the air. I put out a hand and felt the temperature plummet. The cold spot, about a metre across, had to be ten degrees cooler than where we’d just come from.

  ‘Miss Neal’s was even colder first thing,’ Becky went on. ‘But that was a different kind of cold. And I’ll tell you something else for free. Whatever came over her this morning, it wasn’t a migraine, no way.’

  I nudged her along. We had to make up time. ‘What else could it be?’

  ‘The new kid. The whisperer. Decker turning everyone against us, even my mates.’

  ‘Now you’re sounding paranoid.’

  ‘You saw what I saw. Anyway, I’m keeping my eye on him.’

  Leaving the gloomy building for the deepening dusk outside, we crossed the yard, searching our pockets for gloves. A raven called in the darkness above us and crossed Mercy Road to land on a TV aerial. We were at the school gates when another, more violent sound made us both stop – a shriek of car tyres to our right – and a sudden blast of headlights whited everything out.

  The vehicle, travelling at high speed, swung to the curb, bumped up and over it onto the pavement and did an emergency stop in front of us, sliding to a halt under a streetlight.

  It took me a long moment to recover from the shock, and then I had my first clear view of the car. It was just about the most gorgeous vehicle I’d ever seen, an early 1960s Ford Mustang convertible with its black top down, a long sleek cream body and red leather interiors. Lu sat behind the wheel, her hair unravelled by the wind from its normal tight bob and plastered about her face.

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ she said. ‘You’re late. They sent me to get you.’

  While Becky squeezed into the back, I took the passenger seat. ‘What happened to the rickshaw, Lu?’

  ‘Annual service. This is the best they could come up with to keep us going.’

  ‘Not a bad loaner.’

  She frowned, crashing gears, working the accelerator until the engine boomed like a jet’s. ‘It’s not bad. I’m still getting used to it. Put on your belts, though. It doesn’t corner too well and I don’t have a driver’s licence.’

  ‘Ah.’

  This snippet of information was still sinking in when she whipped the Mustang off the curb and went serpentining up the street with the speedometer nudging sixty. I found my belt and hurriedly clipped it on.

  Two blocks along we went into a kangaroo hop, and Lu had to fight the steering wheel to avoid ploughing through the red phone box on the junction. Nearer the top of Mercy Road she again mounted the pavement, the Mustang’s near-side demolishing a grocer’s fruit and vegetable stand, scattering red apples and green bananas. The top end of Mercy Road was quiet, there wasn’t much more damage Lu could do there, but I worried about what might happen when we hit the busier Islington streets closer to headquarters.

  ‘Have you driven a car before?’ Becky called from the back. ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘I’ve driven lots of things,’ Lu said. ‘But no, nothing like this. I’ll get the hang of it soon enough, just you watch.’

  ‘You couldn’t slow down, could you?’ I called above the engine.

  ‘Slow . . . down?’ The thought had never occurred to her. ‘Too busy. No time, and you have an important meeting before we start the rounds.’

  ‘Me? A meeting with who? What about?’

  ‘Something about the incursion last month. They didn’t explain. They just said to bring you double-quick.’

  ‘That’s all you know?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  It didn’t sound good. The incursion, the night the enemy stormed headquarters, had been all my fault, and if the meeting had anything to do with that I’d rather not go at all. Maybe I’d hop out as soon as we stopped for traffic lights.

  But Lu didn’t stop for any lights. After jumping three reds in a row along City Road, she tore through a crossing on Upper Street, sending pedestrians running and diving for cover. Other drivers worked their headlights and horns as she overtook a Parcelforce van into the face of oncoming traffic, fitted the Mustang into the tightest of gaps between two buses, and swung out to overtake again. I was wondering how she’d ever squeeze this thing through the hair’s breadth entrance to headquarters – if we made it there alive – when Lu floored the brakes, took a sharp right and brought the Mustang to a screeching halt below a pub called the York.

  ‘Like I said, I need more practice,’ Lu said, killing the engine. ‘Soon I’ll take us all the way, but for now it’s best if we leave it here.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said.

  We peeled ourselves from the car like dizzy roller coaster survivors. My hands were shaky, but not as shaky as Becky’s legs when she tried to stand.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Sort of.’

  Along Duncan Street, shadows stretched from the walls like long spindly fingers, shrinking back when a people carrier’s headlights bobbed up the slope. As it passed, a colourless face pressed itself to the passenger side window, staring out with vacant eyes – another of the unnamed hitching a ride, a companion the driver didn’t know he had.

  Becky shivered, feeling the presence, and after watching the vehicle’s tail lights turn off at the junction, we set off for Pandemonium House.

  5

  THE OVERSEERS

  part from a few stragglers and passe
rs-by, Camden Passage was quiet, and no one saw us step aside between two shops to enter the hairline crack in the wall that led to HQ.

  A regular drip of water echoed along the unlit space, a space so narrow we had to edge through it sideways, shoes scraping over the gritty floor. At the far end a chink of light signalled the exit to Eventide Street, home to the Ministry’s headquarters. The gap widened and brightened as we moved towards it, and one by one we tumbled out, into a starlit alleyway.

  It was night in the alley – it was always night-time here. Two gas-burning streetlights by the steps below headquarters washed the cobbled ground with amber, and the old brick building stood half in shadow, half in light, with shuttered windows and upper floors so dark they seemed to merge with the sky.

  Taking the steps and heading indoors, we passed through a dim entrance hall and climbed a rickety staircase to the main operations floor. An eerie wind whistled around the upstairs and candles flickered in alcoves between the closed offices on both sides of the hallway.

  ‘Your meeting won’t last long,’ Lu said. ‘We’ll be in the waiting room when you’re done.’

  ‘And where do I go?’

  ‘The conference room. Where else?’

  My heart slumped. I’d been nervous before, but now I felt close to panic.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Becky tried to reassure me as the girls headed off. ‘Something and nothing, most likely.’

  As an apprentice I’d only seen a small part of Pandemonium House: the receipts office where I transcribed the lists of soon-departeds as the telegraph delivered them, the ever-expanding records room where all numbers and names were filed, the dispatch office where girls wearing heavy headsets chattered into desktop microphones relaying calls to the field day and night.