Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain (29 page)

“Moot indeed. Still no sign of Hamish X.”

“Sadly no. I believe the King was indeed telling the truth when he said the asset was not here. What shall we do?”

Mr. Candy thought for a moment. “I think we can make Hamish X come to us.”

“How, Mr. Candy?”

“I think the destruction of the Hollow Mountain will be a clear message to Hamish X. He'll know we have these pathetic children, his
friends
”—Mr. Candy spat the word out as if it burned his tongue—“and he will come to take them back, Mr. Sweet. Is the charge in place? Shall we get out of this miserable mountain?”

“Indeed, Mr. Candy. Indeed on both counts.”

Mr. Sweet and Mr. Candy fired their packs and set off in the direction of the tunnel.

PARVEEN KNEW
he had no chance of getting out of the cargo pod with his sister without being caught. He resigned himself to travelling in the cargo pod to its final destination, hoping there would be some opportunity for escape along the way. He huddled up close to his sister, throwing his arms around her inert body and hugging her tightly.

“Don't worry, Noor. We won't be parted again.” The cargo pod door squealed as it rose. With a clang, it slammed shut, plunging Parveen and Noor into darkness.

AN HOUR LATER
, Mr. Candy and Mr. Sweet stood on the mountainside, a helicopter idling nearby. Cold rain pelted down in the grey dawn.

“Many have escaped, Mr. Candy,” Mr. Sweet said. “There are far too few children in the cargo pods.”

“There are enough. They will serve us well during the integration. When the portal opens, it won't matter any more.”

“Yes, Mr. Candy,” Mr. Sweet nodded. “Shall we send Hamish X a message?”

Mr. Candy turned to Mr. Sweet and did something very odd for an agent: he smiled, showing yellow, discoloured teeth. Mr. Sweet smiled back, his teeth also ghastly and yellow-grey. Mr. Sweet held out a black box with a single red button in the centre. Mr. Candy plunged a long gloved finger down onto the button.

A deep rumble shook the mountainside. Beneath the earth, a detonation occurred that smashed through sheets of bedrock, bursting the crust of the earth like a pimple and releasing molten rock from deep within the root of the Hollow Mountain. Boiling red lava percolated up through the strata and began to fill Heinrich's Cavern in a rising red tide.

By the time the flow erupted out of the tunnel, sweeping down the mountainside like a river, the helicopter was long gone, winging its way across the lightening Swiss countryside. The Swiss people woke to the news that there'd been a volcanic eruption in the Alps for the first time in modern history.

“I do love an eruption, Mr. Sweet.”

“It's very bracing, Mr. Candy.”

Earlier, when they had climbed into their helicopter and lifted off, neither of them noticed the raccoon watching them from behind a rock. The creature blinked its black eyes. With a flick of its tail, it turned and headed south.

EPILOGUE

Hamish X did not, unfortunately, hear the news about the bizarre eruption. He had managed to run through the night, feeding on the amazing stamina his boots provided. He kept to the back roads and smaller highways, resting in the daytime on a moving freight train and running at night. He headed south.

After three days of travel he arrived in the Greek city of Athens in the early evening. The ruins of the Acropolis were framed in the orange glow of the setting sun as he jogged through the narrow streets through the busy traffic. A trip to the train station and he had the contents of the locker in his backpack: money, and several passports from different countries with several different identities.

It was dark when he arrived at the shores of the Mediterranean at the port of Piraeus, the shipping centre for Athens. In the blackest part of the night he trotted along the wharves, looking for a vessel that would suit his purposes. He wanted to get to Africa, and these fishing vessels plied the waters off the North African coast. At last, he saw a rusted, leaky tub of a ship and decided it would do.

Climbing the anchor chain, he slipped over the rail and onto the deck. No one was about. He padded along the deck until he came to a broad hatch. Hamish X lowered himself down into the hold.

The stench of fish was overwhelming, but he breathed deeply to inure himself to the horrible smell. “It may be bad,” he whispered to himself, “but it can't beat Caribou Blue.” The thought of the horrible cheese filled him once more with a sense of loneliness that he hadn't known since before he came to Windcity and met Parveen and Mimi. “I hope they're all right,” he murmured to himself as he curled behind a pile of rope, hidden from sight. “I'll find the Professor and come right back. I'll see them again in no time.” On that happy thought, he closed his eyes and let the gentle rocking of the ship send him off to sleep.

He was having a dream about Mimi and Parveen, smiling and murmuring in his sleep when, hours later, he woke with a knife pressed to his throat.

He opened his eyes and looked up to see a girl with dark, filthy hair and bright blue eyes leaning over him.

“One move and you die,” she hissed.

“Fine. I won't move. Who are you and what's the big idea?”

“My name is Maggie,” the girl grinned fiercely. “And we're taking over this ship.”

¹
     It sounds odd, but some people do read things they don't like. Roman schoolboys were forced to read extremely boring stories and memorize them in an effort to harden themselves against the boredom they would experience as adults. I knew a man who read nothing but phone bills. People are just odd that way.

²
     A sabbatical is a trip one takes to learn new things about one's profession. Teachers go on sabbaticals to learn better how to teach or to research things for a textbook they might be writing. The only profession that doesn't really take sabbaticals is that of travel agent, because they go on trips anyway and it would be a waste of time.

³
     The term
cliffhanger
comes from the Otaqua tribe who lived near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The Otaquans took storytelling very seriously, and if they found a storyteller's work boring they would threaten to toss him or her off a cliff into the Canyon. This usually improved the storytellers' skills immensely and led to some of the most exciting and engaging stories. Hanging from a cliff does tend to inspire the imagination.

⁴
     Except when dealing with the homeless and the hungry. One should always leave them wanting less.

⁵
     The second lesson is Never Let Dolphins Drive. Certainly, it's irrelevant as far as narration is concerned, but prudent in everyday life. Dolphins are quite intelligent, but instead of hands they have flippers, which are prone to slip on the steering wheel, leading to many automotive accidents. Also, their skin must be kept moist, and this tends to ruin most upholstery. They have a very good sense of direction, however, so always let the dolphin hold the map.

⁶
     Oh, Mr. Nieuwendyke! Still dressed as a cat. Will he ever learn?

⁷
     Organic and orgamic are two very different things indeed.
Organic
means living or using materials found in nature.
Orgamic
pertains to things made using the Japanese paper-folding art of origami. Orgamic machines are not very efficient because their component parts tend to unfold after repeated use. A Japanese company attempted to build robots out of folded paper, but the prototypes disintegrated in a rainstorm and the project was abandoned.

⁸
     
Uncanny
is a word that means “too strange or unlikely to be natural or human.” It comes from ancient Persia, where people who were believed to be witches were placed in a large can and dropped in a deep pool. If they escaped the can and didn't drown, they were assumed to be magical and were given a special hat made of pita bread and a beard made of leaves. The Persians were strange people.

⁹
     Parveen is correct. Without giving anything away, I can guarantee that the plans of the ODA are evil indeed. They would certainly win an award for Most Evil Plan of the Century at the Evil Plan Awards. Of course, having such awards would be counterproductive for those making evil plans, as the attendant publicity would lead to the discovery of the evil plans in question and so lead to those plans being foiled. Still, what a red carpet event that would be: all the greatest evil minds together in one gala night of evil. But I digress.

¹⁰
   The Chameleon whale has a hide that is capable of taking on the colour of its surroundings, making it very difficult to hunt. Unfortunately, the whales are extremely friendly, loving nothing better than to frolic in the wake of ships and wave their flippers at humans, thus negating their native chameleon capability. The Chameleon whale is believed to be extinct, but every once in a while there are unsubstantiated sightings, the most recent off the beach in Santa Barbara, California, where one was reported to have been masquerading as a group of chubby German tourists.

¹¹
   Not so. The saddest, most hopeless place of all time was an ice cream parlour called Nahid's Num Nums. It opened in the middle of the Sahara Desert in 1754, two hundred years before reliable refrigeration was available in the region.

¹²
   In this way rabbits are similar to the orphans of the world, but far furrier in most cases. Granted, there are bald rabbits and hairy orphans, but those cases are rare.

¹³
   You say you've never heard the shout of a rabbit? It is very difficult to discern in the wild, being similar to the rustling of leaves. Isolated in a laboratory, recorded and slowed down, it sounds very much like a small child licking a banana.

¹⁴
   The Alpine Puking Rabbit, or
Lapina vomitus alpina,
is famous for this bizarre survival adaptation. When frightened, it vomits and falls unconscious, hoping that the predator will find its behaviour so nauseating as to refuse to eat it.

¹⁵
   Rabbits rarely behave in a reasonable fashion, as jumping to conclusions is their natural inclination … jumping, I mean. They can't help it. They have thick, strong legs.

¹⁶
   
Binoculars
is from the Latin meaning “two eyes” because of the two eyepieces the binoculars employ, one for each eye. The German company Eigenglass marketed a pair of trinoculars for a brief period after the Second World War, but the rarity of three-eyed individuals led to the item being discontinued. Trinoculars were, however, very popular among Tibetan monks, who believe they have a spiritual third eye in their foreheads. The trinoculars allowed them to see not only into the spirit world but really, really far into the spirit world.

¹⁷
   
Impromptu
is a word that means unplanned or improvised. Being impromptu can be a lot of fun in the right circumstances. An impromptu birthday party is a good thing. An impromptu brain surgery, not so good.

¹⁸
   
Bailiwick
is an old word that originates from Old French or Middle English. A bailiff was an official charged with keeping the public peace. His wick was his area of jurisdiction. This is the accepted definition, although I believe the word has its origin in the strange habit of a man in sixteenth-century Manchester, England, named Dan Bailey. He was very jealous of his candles and built a wicker wall around them to keep them safe against candle thieves. People passing by would ask, “What's that thing?” And they would be told, “Bailey's wicker candle castle.” Over time it was shortened to Bailey's Wicker Thing and then further to Bailey's Wick. Then Bailiwick. I tend to believe the latter because it's weird enough to be true.

¹⁹
   Which it isn't. The mind is more like an electric toothbrush or one of those shoe polishers one finds in the finer hotels around the world.

²⁰
   
Galley
is the word for “kitchen” on a sailing ship. Strangely, many things have different names when they're on a ship as opposed to on land. The bathroom is called the “head.” A wall is called a “bulkhead” and shoes are called “David.” Sailors are odd people.

²¹
   A
balaclava
is a sort of woollen cap named for the place in the Crimean Peninsula where it originated. It can be rolled down to cover the face to protect it from the cold or to hide one's identity. Not to be confused with baklava, which is a Middle Eastern dessert made from pistachios, honey, and many layers of delicate, flaky pastry. It would hardly be effective as a ski mask, I think you'd agree. Although, if someone came at me wearing a load of flaky pastry on their face, I doubt I could identify them to the authorities. It might keep their face warm, too.