“Something tells me,” Quentin said faintly, “that you may be Erskine.”
Chapter Thirteen
The Goon nodded. He looked as savage as he had looked glaring in the sewer. They saw he was very angry indeed.
“Wh—what’s wrong?” Awful said.
“Ask Venturus,” said Erskine. He said it with utter contempt. And while they were still wondering why, he looked over their heads and said, “Got the place ready?”
Someone said, “Yes.” They found they were surrounded by cheerful men and women in yellow coveralls and hats who all seemed to be wearing large white gloves. And cheerful though these people were, the way they grinned put Howard in mind of Hind’s gang.
“Put them in it,” said Erskine, and turned away.
Large white gloves seized them from every side. Someone said, “Better come along quietly,” and they found themselves being pulled across the concrete platform. Nasty liquid squirted out of the top of Howard’s left boot with every step he was pulled.
“But I don’t understand!” Quentin protested. “What is this about?”
There was a fierce Goon shout from behind them. “Stop!” Everyone stopped and turned around. Erskine stretched out a long arm with that knife of his at the end of it. The knife beckoned. Howard was brought back, sploshing nasty liquid as he came. “Your dad,” said Erskine with his hands on his hips, leaning down to glare at Howard, “said Archer hadn’t a clue. Tell him he hasn’t. Him and his talk! But someone has. Haven’t they? Stay locked up till someone comes clean.” This was a joke. A wave of hearty laughter went around the crowd in yellow coveralls.
“Yes, but why are you so angry?” Howard said.
For a moment he thought Erskine was going to throw his knife at him. But he said angrily instead, “How would you like to spend thirty years in a sewer? Know it’s been that long. Rest of them think it’s thirteen years. Know it’s been done twice now! Flaming muddle or flaming fraud. Don’t care which. You lot stay here till I find out how. Send a van to get your mum later.” He clicked his fingers, and Howard was bundled away again. Scared as he was, Howard was interested to hear that Erskine still spoke in the same way. Evidently he had not had to do much pretending to be the Goon. A great Goon roar followed him, above the sploshing of his boot. “Write me some words! Or stay and rot!”
They were bundled on, to a hole in one of the odd-shaped mounds. They were pushed up an earthy passage inside, where the way was half-blocked by a new-looking metal door. Here they were each given a sharp shove, so that they stumbled on into the space beyond. And the metal door was shut behind them with an easy, oiled, grating sound followed by a booming click. The door had no handle on the inside.
Howard sat down on the nearest pile of rubble and emptied out his boot. It was obsessing him by then. The space they were in was bare except for piles of stone and earth which had been made by the walls of the place collapsing. One mound of rubble sloped nearly up to the roof. At the top of it was a small gray space of daylight. Howard twisted around to look up at it as he shook the last drops from his boot. It was blocked by a rusty iron grating. The ceiling above was made of old cobbles and slightly arched.
“Yucky!” said Awful. “That boot smells foul!” It did. It was the same smell that had come off the Goon in whiffs when he first arrived.
“I think this is part of the old castle,” Quentin said, looking around. “Possibly even the dungeons. Do you think our friend means us to stay here forever? I suppose we shall find out.” He and Awful sat on piles of rubble, too. Nobody said anything else for quite a time. Nothing happened. The damp earthiness seeped into them, and they all shivered.
“Howard,” said Quentin at last, “have you any idea what’s made him so angry? I thought we treated him quite well, considering.”
Howard considered, as slowly and dismally as ever the Goon had. “Some of it has to be about Fifi, I think. And he thinks we know what your words do to keep them here. And he seems to have worked out that it’s Venturus doing it. But I still don’t see what’s made him so mad.”
“I did notice,” Quentin said glumly, “that he always kept out of the way when Archer was around. I thought it was respect or something. But now I see that he didn’t want Archer to know he was sitting in our house, making his own investigations all this time.”
“Archer knew, stupid!” Awful said. “He watched through the light bulbs. The Goon didn’t want Archer to come in and say, ‘Hello, Erskine’ and let us know. He’s mean and sneaky! I hate him now!”
Howard knew exactly how Awful felt. He felt cheated and betrayed. It was worse than Dillian. The Goon had seemed to want them to like him, and he had ended up almost being a friend. And all the time he had been so helpfully taking Howard and Awful and Quentin to see the other members of his family, he had been simply using them to find who was doing what. No wonder he did not want Shine to get hold of them. He wanted them himself. “He stinks!” Howard said angrily. That made Awful laugh. “Well, he does!” said Howard. “Let’s see if we can shift this grating.”
With a good deal of sliding and scrambling, he managed to get near enough to the top of the mound of rubble to get a hand on the grating. He shook it. As he had rather feared, it was set so solidly into the earthy wall that he could not even rattle it. Awful, of course, would not believe him. She came scrambling up the rubble to shake the grating for herself. Since she was lighter than Howard, she could get right up to the bars. But they would not budge for her either. As for Quentin, he did not even bother to look.
Dad’s being a passenger again! Howard thought angrily, standing halfway up the mound, looking down on the bowed shoulders of the red and black checked coat. It really annoyed him sometimes, the way Quentin let life carry him along. Fancy running up a twenty-three-thousand-pound bill for taxes. Fancy writing those words all those years without bothering to find out why! At that moment Howard almost understood why Erskine was so angry. It didn’t seem possible! Yet Howard knew that with Quentin it was both possible and true. Provided Quentin was comfortable, provided he could sit at his typewriter in peace, he did not let things bother him. He could even talk about himself as a taxpayer and not notice that he wasn’t. Selfish, Howard thought. It almost made him glad that Quentin was not really his father.
That was a thought. Howard slithered down the mound to Quentin. “Why didn’t you ever tell me I was adopted?” he said.
Quentin looked up, so obviously unaware of Howard’s angry thoughts that Howard felt mean. “Stupid, wasn’t it?” he said. “Because we like to think of you as ours, I suppose. It was so extraordinary finding you.”
Awful came back down the mound in a sliding rush of cobblestones. “There’s a guard outside up there,” she interrupted. “I can see his feet.”
“Bound to be,” said Quentin. “Erskine won’t leave much to chance. Looking back over what I know about him, I can see he’s a persistent sort of chap, probably as obstinate as I am.” He sighed heavily and looked gloomily at the earthy floor between his Wellingtons. “It worries me that he intends to fetch Catriona here,” he said. “She’s in one of her ill spells.”
“He’s a bit afraid of her,” said Howard. “He may put it off.”
“Do you think that Goon is really afraid of anything?” asked Quentin.
“Yes,” said Awful. “Archer and Shine and Mum.”
“Tell me about how you found me,” said Howard.
“Ah, yes,” said Quentin. “It passes the time. It was snowing, you see. I remember this coat of mine was new then. I’d bought it with my first money from teaching at the Poly. I’d started teaching there to make ends meet because we were in a really bad patch, me with writer’s block and unable to write and Catriona without a proper job. We both were miserable. Catriona wanted children, and we didn’t seem to be able to have any. Anyway, I was crossing the Poly forecourt to get to Zed Alley, hurrying because of the snow, when I heard this feeble cawing noise off to one side. I always wonder what would hav
e happened if I hadn’t stopped to look. It was you. A baby. I’d never seen a baby so thin and blue and feeble. The doctor we rushed you to said you were barely a day old and must be really tough to have survived at all. I picked you up. You were frozen. I wrapped you in this coat and ran home with you to Catriona. She told me I was a fool not to have gone straight to the doctor, but I think she was glad to have a hand in it, too. She fell for you on the spot, you see. Something about your face, she said, and the shape of the back of your neck. You were in the hospital all the next month, and she visited you every day. And she said all along that we’d adopt you if nobody came forward to claim you—which nobody did. So we adopted you.”
Quentin looked up at Howard earnestly, even though he was smiling, too. “That’s it really. Honestly, Howard, we’ve never regretted it. It wasn’t just that everything started to go right after we found you—I met Mountjoy and started being able to write again, and Catriona got the ideal job—we enjoyed you. You seemed to teach us how to be happy. Do believe that. You found out last night, when you came in looking so upset, didn’t you? Did Hathaway tell you?”
“He keeps records and archives,” Howard said. “It’s one of the things he farms.” He was not sure that Quentin’s telling him this had made him feel much better. Worse, maybe, because parents who leave you outside the Poly in the snow cannot be very nice people.
“Tell me about how you adopted me now,” said Awful.
“I can’t,” said Quentin, “because we didn’t. You were born in the usual way. I don’t know what we did to deserve you.”
Awful knew this, of course, but she had hoped all the same. “It’s not fair!” she said. “I want to be adopted, too. Not boring and ordinary.”
“I’ll give you away willingly,” said Quentin. “Particularly if you’re going to sulk.”
This did not amuse Awful at all. Even when Howard pointed out that this meant she really did descend from Hathaway, she was still annoyed. She went scrambling crossly up the pile of rubble to the grating again, where she relieved her feelings by calling the guard names. “Stinky-poo!” Howard heard her call. “Your feet smell like sewers! The rest of you is brown and sticky all over!”
The guard responded with natural annoyance. The earthy room went dark as he knelt down and put his face to the grating. “If you don’t shut up,” he said, “you know what I’ll do? I’ll take this grating out and get you!”
Awful said, “What are you doing here?”
Howard took off and was halfway up the mound before the guard had finished speaking. He scrambled up beside Awful as she turned around and called, “It’s not a guard! It’s Ginger Hind!”
“I know,” said Howard. And he called through the grating to Ginger, “Did Shine tell you we were here?”
To his disappointment Ginger Hind said, “Don’t be daft! How could she? Followed the bus on my own feet, didn’t I?” So that meant there was no way of playing Shine off against Erskine that Howard could see. On the other hand, Ginger seemed ready to talk, as if he wanted to impress Howard after the disgust Howard had shown last night. He said, “Saw you go down that hole. It stood to reason it was a sewer and came out here, so I came over here and listened till I heard you. What are you doing down there?”
Howard took a risk and said, “Erskine locked us up.”
Ginger Hind roared with laughter. Then he sat down comfortably with his back to the grating. “Good for Erskine!” he said. Then he said, “Who is this Erskine anyway? Shine talks as if Erskine scares her, and Shine doesn’t scare easy.”
“You’ve met him,” said Howard. “The Goon. Huge, with a little head.”
There was a flurry of light and dark as Ginger hastily threw himself flat outside, with his face close to the grating. “Thanks for the warning!” he said sarcastically, but he said it almost in a whisper. Then he said, “Hey, I thought he was a friend of yours! What’s he doing locking you up?”
“He turns out to be Shine’s brother,” Howard explained. “They hate each other.” He was getting somewhere with Ginger; he knew he was. “There are seven of them running this town—”
“And each one is more pernicious than the last!” Quentin called out. He had scrambled halfway up the mound, too, where he proceeded to undo all Howard’s good work by making an impassioned speech to Ginger. “You listen to me, my boy. If these seven maniacs are allowed to go on, they’ll take over the world before long. They have to be stopped. I ask you, as a citizen of the world—”
“Do shut up, Dad,” said Howard. But Quentin paid no attention. He went on and on. Ginger’s nose and his black eye pressed against the grating, so that he could stare down at Quentin with sarcastic wonderment. Then he yawned. Howard knew he was going to go away out of sheer boredom any minute, and their only chance of getting out of here would be gone. “Shut up, Dad!” he bellowed.
Quentin noticed that Howard really meant it. He stopped. “Your old man likes the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he?” Ginger said. “See here. What you said last night about Shine. It bothers me. I do what she says because I respect her—or I thought I did, till you went and said that! You didn’t mean she tried to put a hex on your mind, did you?” He said it coaxingly. He wanted Howard to say it was just one of those things you said. It had obviously been worrying him a lot.
“Sorry,” said Howard. He felt as mean to Ginger as he had just been to Dad. “She did. It was like arm wrestling, sort of.” And he did his best to describe the almost indescribable way thoughts from Shine had come flooding through his head and beating down his resistance.
He was helped in describing it because Ginger evidently knew exactly what he was talking about. Before he had got very far, Ginger’s head was nodding angrily and his face was turning bitter and disgusted. “The fat cow!” he said. It was hard to tell whether he despised himself or Shine more. “Yes, you’re right. That was it. That’s just it. Only with me there was a lot about how marvelous Shine was. Worship Shine. Fat cow! I hate being used! OK. Want me to get you out of there?”
“Please!” all three of them called up, and Howard at least felt meaner still, because they were using Ginger now.
“Hang on while I find something to heave on this grating with,” Ginger said. His face moved out of sight, and the rest of him, very cautiously, slid away.
The next few minutes were nerve-racking. It could be that Ginger did not intend to come back. It could be that Erskine would spot him. And where they had been convinced before that Erskine was not going to come near them for hours yet, they now expected him to come bursting through the metal door any second. Quentin labored his way to the top of the mound, and they all three stood under the grating, jittering.
“Do you think he’s not going to come back?” Quentin whispered more than once.
Ginger came back with a long iron bar and a stout old can to pivot the bar on. “Make it a proper lever,” he explained to Howard as he wedged the bar among the holes of the grating.
“Yeah. Good thinking.” Howard agreed, because it was.
Ginger actually shot him a sort of bruised smile as he crawled away to the other end of the bar. Then, to judge by the grunt and the squawk of metal, Ginger threw his weight, stomach down, over the other end of the bar. The can crunched, slowly. Metal chippings, rust, and earth spit down on Howard, Awful, and Quentin. The grating juddered as Ginger jiggled it. The earthy walls around it heaved. Ginger swore and grunted again. And the grating came out, together with a lump of wall that would have brained Quentin if Howard had not pulled him out of the way.
Howard blinked stuff out of his eyes and heaved Awful out of the ragged hole left by the grating. He scrambled out. But it took him and Ginger, each kneeling and hauling on an arm, to get Quentin squeezed through the space.
“Keep down!” Ginger panted as they dragged.
Howard ducked in a hurry. He knew now why Ginger had been crawling or lying flat. The mound they had been in was low on this side. He could see the incinerator and the meta
l sheds with the lines of rubbish vans if he knelt upright. There were people in yellow coveralls wandering about near the vans. He kept his head down and pulled.
Quentin came out with a rubbly rending and without most of the back of his red-and-black checked coat.
“Come on. Run for it!” said Ginger.
They scrambled up, bending over, and ran, out across the weedy field of bricks, toward the nearest khaki shed. Howard’s left boot was still wet. He could hear his feet go splart-thump, splart-thump, as he ran, with the occasional splunch when he jumped a pile of bricks or slid down a sloping place. He could hear his father gasping like a dying whale. And horribly soon, he could hear faint shouts behind, followed by the grumbling of heavy engines.
Their heads all turned at the sound. Two rubbish vans and a big yellow sewage tanker were on the move, drawing out of the lines and turning to come after them. Yellow-clad people were racing to jump on the backs of the vans. They put their heads down and pelted on across the field. Quentin’s gasps filled the air.
By the time they reached the nearest shed the vans and the tanker were a third of the way across the field and Quentin was finished. There was no hiding place in the shed. Vandals had smashed enough doors and windows to show them it was bare inside. They hurried on around the shed, where Quentin simply stopped. He leaned one hand on the khaki wall and fought to breathe. His face was white and wet. Awful’s face was scarlet, and she was clutching a stitch in her chest.
Ginger and Howard looked at each other. “What do we do?” said Ginger. “Your old man’s had it for running.”
Howard looked about. On the side nearest the road the sheds stood in a muddled cluster. On the other side they were spaced out, with weedy gaps in between. He pointed away from the road. “I’ll go that way and draw them off. You take Dad and Awful and hide near the road until they’ve gone after me. I’ll come find you when I’ve lost them. Where will you be?”