Miss Molpe began to keen like a mourner. ‘Please no, I beg of you, not as a gag! Don’t stuff my mouth with that filthy rag!’ she warbled. Her tone was piteous, but when Marcus caught her eye, it was cold and bright and hard.
He felt a shiver run down his spine.
‘Maybe she was drowning . . .’ Holly fretted, as Sterling wrestled to tie his sock around Miss Molpe’s mouth. It wasn’t easy, though; the siren’s small, bony head kept lashing from side to side, and her nose was so big and sharp that it was hard to find her mouth underneath it.
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Jake spoke through his teeth. ‘She just can’t resist little kids. But she’s too much of a wimp to pick ’em off unless they’re alone and unprotected. So she sets up a big, complicated trap like this one.’ Sitting back on his heels, he surveyed his handiwork with fierce satisfaction. ‘Now we’ve got her, though,’ he concluded. ‘Now we’ve got her just where we want her.’
‘So what?’ Newt growled. ‘What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like we can believe anything she says.’
‘That’s true.’ Coco began to nod. ‘Newt’s right. We might as well flush her back down the toilet, for all the use she is.’
But Jake hadn’t finished.
‘No,’ he reasoned, ‘you don’t understand. It’s not her advice we need. That’s just rubbish. We know that now. What we need . . .’ He clamped a wiry brown hand around her brittle arm. ‘. . . what we need is one of her fingers.’
51
‘I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT
AIRPORTS . . .’
MISS MOLPE GAVE A HISS THROUGH HER GAG. ‘MMMH! Mmmm-mmmnn . . .’ she protested.
‘One of her fingers?’ Holly echoed, aghast. But Marcus knew what Jake was getting at. He knew that Jake wasn’t suggesting that they lop any digits off.
‘You mean for the buttons? In the lift?’ said Marcus.
Jake nodded. ‘That lift’s gotta be here somewhere,’ he pointed out. ‘If she presses the buttons, it’ll have to move.’
There was a moment’s silence as everyone tried to think of a likely location for the lift. Marcus was stumped; the only possibility that occurred to him was the men’s room, but they were already inside the men’s room.
At last Jake observed, ‘If this is your nightmare holiday, Holly, then it’s your call. Where would you really hate to go?’
Holly’s brow puckered. She seemed preoccupied with the bound captive gurgling away under Sterling’s knee.
‘Oh – ah – gosh . . . I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I hate everything about airports. There isn’t a specific place.’
‘There must be,’ Jake insisted. ‘Think hard.’
‘A cleaning closet?’ was Coco’s suggestion. ‘A transit lounge?’
‘Out on the tarmac in a howling sub-zero wind?’ Sterling asked, shivering like a man familiar with such an experience. Holly shook her head, frowning. Then she blinked and sucked air through her teeth.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, her eyes widening. ‘I know!’
‘What?’ said Marcus.
‘It was at Bangkok Airport, years ago,’ Holly recalled. ‘When I spotted it, I remember thinking, “That must be hell on earth—”’
‘What was?’ Newt interrupted. ‘Hurry up and tell us!’
‘It was the smoking room.’ Holly looked from face to face, her own face creased into an expression of pure disgust. ‘It was a glassed-in box where all the smokers had to go if they wanted to light up a cigarette. I swear, you could hardly see them through the pall of smoke and the nicotine stains on the glass—’
‘That’s it, then.’ Newt cut her off. ‘We have to find the smoking room. Any ideas?’
Jake shrugged. ‘We’ll just follow the signs,’ he said. Then he elbowed Sterling out of his way, hooked an arm around Miss Molpe, heaved himself upright with a grunt and threw her over his shoulder like a bag of wet washing.
When she growled deep in her throat, the rumble seemed to reverberate right through the floor.
‘Oh, Jake!’ Holly protested. ‘Be careful!’
‘It’s okay.’ He staggered slightly. ‘I can manage.’
‘You’ll hurt yourself!’
‘Naah. She doesn’t weigh a thing.’ Jake’s voice was gruff and his eyes were bulging with the effort of keeping his balance. ‘So are we going or not?’
‘I-I guess so . . .’ Holly draped her arm around Marcus’s shoulders. Then she looked at Coco, who looked at Sterling, who climbed to his feet and took Edison’s hand. Together they made their way out of the men’s room into the larger, brighter, emptier, more exposed space beyond it.
The hallway seemed endless. The numbered departure gates stretched on to infinity, or so it appeared; between each gate, acres of window held back snow flurries that were swallowed up, again and again, by a dense, enveloping darkness. The flurries made odd shapes. Very odd shapes.
Marcus felt his heart skip a beat as he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. Was it . . . ? Could it be . . . ?
Was that an open hand sliding down the glass?
‘I hate these stupid signs that have pictures on them,’ Newt complained, with a hysterical edge to her voice. She was staring up at an information sign that was covered in arrows and icons: the symbol for male and female toilets, showing a universal man and a universal woman standing side by side; the symbol for food service, showing a stylised knife and fork; the symbol for a lift, with two universal men wedged into a square.
‘That won’t be the lift we want,’ Holly decided, as Jake staggered again. He was hunched over by now, gasping and red in the face. But when Sterling offered to help, Jake simply snapped at Miss Molpe.
‘Oi! You! I know what you’re up to and if you make yourself any heavier, I’ll drag you along by the hair! Got it?’
Miss Molpe didn’t reply, of course. She couldn’t. But Marcus figured that she must have got it, because after a few seconds Jake straightened up and said, ‘That’s better.’
‘What do you think the one at the end means?’ Coco asked. She’d been squinting at the sign above her, trying to interpret some of the more obscure icons displayed there. ‘Is it a thermometer or a baby’s bottle? I can’t tell.’
‘Me neither,’ Sterling confessed. ‘But that one means a telephone, and that means a luggage trolley . . .’
‘What about that one?’ Newt pointed to a white horizontal line with a black tip. ‘That looks like a cigarette, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, but so does that,’ said Marcus, drawing her attention to a straight, black, horizontal line with a wiggly vertical line attached to one end. ‘That looks like a smoking cigarette.’
‘And that looks like a cigarette lighter.’ Jake nodded at a leaf shape on top of a rectangle.
Holly, who had been nervously eyeing Miss Molpe’s beaky, malevolent face, cut a quick glance at the sign and observed, ‘They’re all in the same direction. Why don’t we just see what they are when we reach them?’
‘Yeah,’ Jake agreed. ‘Good idea.’ He then set off at an unsteady trot, clearly anxious to find the smoking room before his back gave out.
Marcus hurried after him, trying not to look at the windows. The view from these windows was beginning to disturb Marcus. He wanted to ask the others if they’d spotted a face emerging from the snow flurries, its eyes shadowed and its mouth hanging open in a yawn or a scream, but he was afraid that the answer might be ‘yes’. So he kept his gaze fixed firmly on the overhead signs as Holly and the Huckstepps caught up with him.
‘You know what? I’ve had an idea,’ Sterling announced, puffing a little. ‘It’s about your phone, Holly.’
‘My phone doesn’t work,’ Holly reminded Sterling. ‘Whoever answered my call wasn’t real. He was . . .’ She flapped her hand. ‘He was in this world somewhere.’
‘Exactly. That’s what I mean. You got through to another part of this . . . whatever it is. Program. Scenario.’ Sterling increased his pace to match Holly’s.
‘What I’m saying is that Prot has a Bluetooth function – and so does your phone. If he’s not far away, I can make contact with him.’
‘Really?’ Marcus stopped in his tracks just as Jake, who was a metre or two in front of him, exclaimed, ‘Here it is! Here’s the first one!’
They had drawn level with a purple door set into a featureless stretch of pale-blue wall. The door had a symbol on it: two lines, one straight and horizontal, the other wiggly and vertical.
‘It’s that smoking cigarette sign,’ said Marcus.
Coco promptly stepped forward. ‘Let’s have a look, then,’ she remarked, before pushing open the door.
There was no smoke. That was the first thing Marcus noticed. Though the room beyond the threshold was dim and reeking, it didn’t stink of smoke. Marcus was trying to work out what it did smell like when a whip lashed out of the darkness and wrapped itself around Coco’s wrist.
She screamed like a gibbon.
52
THE SEARCH FOR THE
SMOKING ROOM
STERLING GRABBED COCO JUST IN TIME. A SUDDEN TUG ON the whip nearly jerked her off her feet; it would have yanked her over the threshold if Sterling hadn’t caught her.
Miss Molpe chuckled deep in her throat, her black eyes glittering.
‘Cut it! Cut the cord!’ Sterling yelled.
‘With what?’ wailed Newt. No one had any knives or scissors. Edison began to cry as Marcus groped around in his pockets.
Luckily, Holly knew just what to do. She pushed past Sterling and slammed the door shut with such force that the whip was severed. Snap! Sterling and Coco reeled backwards, bumping into Jake – who nearly dropped Miss Molpe. The siren bucked and twisted, trying to dig her spurs into his neck.
Jake had to squeeze her tightly until she squeaked and stopped thrashing about. For a few seconds, there was no sound except the rasp of people catching their breath.
‘Sorry,’ Marcus said at last. ‘I guess it’s a whip sign, not a smoking cigarette sign.’
‘A whip? A whip?’ Newt screeched. ‘Why the hell would there be a whip room at an airport?’
No one replied. Coco was too busy tearing the leather strap off her wrist, which was now disfigured by a raised, reddish welt. Sterling was trying to calm her down. Edison was sucking his thumb for comfort and Marcus couldn’t think of a sensible answer.
But when Miss Molpe tried to hum a little tune, Jake turned to Newt and growled, ‘Just punch her in the face for me, will you? I can’t reach around that far.’
The humming immediately stopped.
‘Jake, don’t,’ Holly chided. Then she took a deep breath. ‘Okay, we’re all in one piece and everything’s fine. Obviously that’s not the smoking room, so we’d better keep moving.’
‘I’m not opening any more doors,’ whimpered Coco. ‘In fact I don’t think anyone should.’
‘We have to,’ said Marcus. He was about to go on when Jake suddenly announced, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll open the doors. In fact I might even use this evil old bag as a battering ram.’
Holly clicked her tongue. ‘Jake—’
‘Or as a shield, perhaps. If anything comes at me, it’ll hit her first.’
‘Uh – before you do that,’ Sterling interjected, ‘maybe I should try calling Prot. For all we know, he’s in this terminal somewhere. And if he is, he can open some doors for us.’
Since no one could find a flaw in this plan, Holly gave Sterling her mobile phone. And as they all trudged along, past gate after gate, Sterling busily tapped codes and commands into its keypad.
‘Look,’ Edison suddenly remarked. ‘There’s that cigarette.’ He’d been clinging to Newt with both hands. Now he raised one of them to point at a familiar symbol: the white line with the black tip. ‘Except that it might not even be a cigarette . . .’ he had to admit.
Everyone slowed, then halted in front of another purple door. Sterling, meanwhile, had connected with Prot. ‘Prot?’ he said. ‘Where are you?’ There was a brief pause. ‘Really? You are?’ Sterling covered the mouthpiece of Holly’s phone. ‘Prot’s at Siren Song Travel!’ he exclaimed. ‘He took the lift back there!’
‘Oh, wow.’ Marcus brightened. ‘That’s fantastic!’ But when he beamed at his mother, he saw that she was wrinkling her brow and chewing on her bottom lip. The others wore the same troubled look; they were either too tired, too stunned or too stupid to grasp the importance of what Sterling had just told them.
‘It might not be the real Siren Song Travel,’ was Coco’s immediate concern.
‘It has to be,’ Marcus insisted. ‘Prot’s a robot. Robots don’t have dreams or nightmares.’ To Sterling he said, ‘Ask if there’s an airport brochure.’
‘Good thinking!’ Sterling proceeded to interrogate Prot. ‘Prot? Is there a brochure for an airport? An airport . . .’
Jake, by this time, had come to a decision. ‘I’m going to take a look,’ he declared, adjusting the weight on his shoulder. Then he strode forward and reached for the purple door.
‘Be careful, Jake,’ warned Holly, as he turned the handle. Everyone else retreated a step – except Sterling, who was still doggedly questioning his robot.
‘Have you searched the whole room?’ he asked. ‘What about the desk? Yes, I want you to check all the drawers in that desk . . .’
‘Yuk!’ cried Newt, slapping a hand over her nose. The smell was overwhelming; it seemed to engulf them like a tidal wave before Jake could shut the door again. He gagged and coughed and gasped. So did Holly and Coco. Marcus felt dizzy. Staggering backwards, he nearly fell.
‘Read it to me. Okay. And the next one?’ When the stench hit Sterling, he was cut off in mid-sentence. ‘Oohh . . . arrgh . . . gaak!’ he choked.
Around him his family were scattering in every direction, fleeing from the smell as if it were poison gas. Even Jake moved away once the door had been shut. It took a while for the noxious fumes to dissipate – and even longer for Jake to find his voice again.
‘Maggots,’ he wheezed.
‘Hnnn?’ Holly’s eyes were brimming with tears. She was holding her breath and couldn’t speak.
‘Giant maggots. In there.’ Jake jabbed a finger at the door. ‘White body . . . black head . . .’ Propped against a wall, he was doubled over beneath Miss Molpe’s oddly misshapen frame, with its stalk-like neck and small, bobbing skull. ‘That picture wasn’t a cigarette.
It was a maggot.’
Miss Molpe snickered.
‘A maggot room. Great.’ Newt was holding her nose. ‘No way should we be opening any more doors! Not unless we know what’s on the other side!’
‘But we have to,’ Marcus objected. And Sterling backed him up.
‘That’s right, because Prot – hack-hack – Prot’s found a drawer full of – hack-hack-hack . . .’
When her father dissolved into a fit of coughing, Newt cried, ‘Prot’s found a drawer full of what?’
‘Ahh . . . ahh . . . a drawer full of files,’ Sterling croaked at last. ‘Each one’s got a number and each one deals with a specific complaint.’
‘Complaint?’ Holly echoed hoarsely. ‘What kind of complaint?’
‘A complaint about a disastrous holiday.’ After clearing his throat and wiping his eyes, Sterling continued. ‘According to Prot, there’s a sunken-ship complaint, and a vampire-infested camp complaint—’
‘And a delayed-flight complaint?’ Marcus interrupted breathlessly.
Sterling gave a nod. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘Which has to be the file for this airport.’
‘And it’s got a number? Is that what you said?’ asked Holly.
‘A file number. Yes.’
‘Which Prot can key into the office phone!’ Marcus seized Sterling’s arm. ‘Then he can program the lift to come straight down here!’
‘But he shouldn’t come down here with it.’ Sterling seemed to be thinking aloud. ‘He’s to send the lift to us, and when we get into it, I’ll call him—’
‘—and
he can use the office phone again,’ Marcus finished, ‘which means the lift will go back there to pick him up!’
‘Exactly.’ Sterling and Marcus surveyed each other for a moment, full of mutual respect and mounting excitement. Then Sterling put the phone to his ear again. ‘Prot?’ he said. ‘Listen carefully. I want you to lift that phone receiver . . .’
Marcus was thrilled. This time, he thought, I know it’s going to work. When he looked around, however, he was surprised to see no answering gleam of anticipation in the eyes of those people who had the most cause to celebrate. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he demanded. ‘The lift’s coming! It means we can go!’
Newt sniffed. ‘We’re not going anywhere unless we can find the damn thing,’ she spat. ‘Which is not going to happen if we can’t find the smoking room.’ She obviously wanted to pick a fight, but as she folded her arms defensively her brother suddenly pointed.
‘You mean that smoking room?’ he asked.
53
CHOKING
STERLING WAS STILL ON THE PHONE TO PROT.
‘You have? Excellent. Then wait right there until I call you.’ With a beep he hung up. ‘The lift’s coming!’ he cried, before he realised that everyone else was staring down the hallway. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Look.’ Coco drew his attention to a distant glass box about half the size of a single-car garage. It was tucked into a corner between a wall and a window. ‘We think that might be the smoking room.’
‘That’s definitely the smoking room,’ Marcus decreed. He could just make out the sign on the glass box, which showed a universal hand holding a black stick between two fingers. ‘Apart from anything else, it’s full of smoke.’
‘Is it?’ Holly squinted. ‘You mean that isn’t frosted glass?’
‘We’ll soon find out,’ said Jake, marching ahead briskly. Soon, however, he began to slow down – and by the time he’d reached his destination, the others had caught up with him. ‘This is it, all right,’ he announced, panting and sweating. ‘Because old ferret-face here has decided to stack on the kilos again.’