Soul Seekers (5 page)
Siren and Emily whirled and dashed toward the nearer of the two crowds. The cattle seller had fallen silent and all eyes were now on the gallows as a row of six prisoners were shuffled into position and their heads shoved through the nooses.
Cas saw his father, standing with his back straight and his head held high, staring down at the crowd with an uncompromising glare as he faced his own death. Old Kip stood with his head hung low as though his long grey beard was too heavy to hold up. Cas hurried across toward the cattle pens with his lantern as the town mayor called out across the crowds.
‘You are here this day of our Lord to witness the capital judgement of spies, thieves and traitors against Queen and Country. Each of these criminals has been found guilty of the following crimes; Kip Hardy, the theft of apples from the grove of Lord Thomas O’Donnell; Adam Harris, treachery; Paul Harper, treachery; Joshua Ryan, treachery; Mary Sangar, blasphemy.’ The mayor stood back from the victims. ‘May God have mercy upon your souls.’
Cas shoved his way through the crowd to the edge of the cattle pen just as a farmer standing nearby realised what he was about to do.
‘You there, stop!’
Cas swung the lantern hard over his shoulder, the flickering flame within blustering as the lantern flew over the cattle pen fence and smashed into the pillar. The glass panels shattered in a tinkling of glass as the oil in the lantern spilled onto the hay bales and the flame ignited it.
‘Fire!’ the farmer bellowed in horror.
Two hundred heads turned to see flames rush across the hay bales with a whoosh like wind through a half-closed door. The cattle began baying in fear as they instinctively stampeded away from the writhing flames.
The hangman looked up from his big lever as Cas yelled out. ‘Now!’
Siren and Emily hauled the rope latch off the main gate of the pens, and in a deafening thunder of hooves the cattle plunged toward the open gate.
A rush of screams and shouts filled the air as a hundred people crashed through each other as they desperately tried to avoid the stampeding herd. Cas sprinted around the northern end of the pens toward the gallows where the prisoners had turned to witness the spectacle in amazement.
In an instant Cas saw his father lock his gaze onto him and his eyes fly wide with surprise.
‘Cas?!’
‘Dad!’
A Hessian officer on horseback turned his mount toward Cas, drew his sword and pointed it directly at him as he kicked the horse into a gallop. The magnificent stallion had made only three paces when the flood of people fleeing the stampede caused it to rear up and collapse onto its side, hurling its rider to the ground and sending his sabre spinning through the air.
‘Dad!’ Cas yelled again as he ran toward the gallows.
Cas reached the platform and hauled himself up as the hangman turned to confront him. Joshua kicked out with one leg, his boot thumping into the back of the hangman’s legs and sending him sprawling to the ground.
Cas dashed toward his father and reached out for the bonds tying his wrists.
One hand touched the coarse, dry rope. And then everything went white.
The roaring crowd and baying animals vanished.
Whorls of colour swirled through the white like rainbows and then Cas landed with a thump on his backside.
He blinked. Four soldiers rushed up to him and aimed their weapons at him, but they were dressed in camouflaged fatigues. Cas focused and saw the laboratory at Hanscomb Air Force Base around him. He saw Siren, Jude and Emily sitting on the floor, blinking like him as though they had awoken from a dream.
Behind them, the overhead ventilation shaft in which they had hidden crashed to the ground.
One of the soldiers glared down at Cas.
‘Don’t you move boy, not an inch!’
* * *
Cas stared up at the soldiers, the ugly black barrels of their M-16s pointing accusingly at him.
The laboratory was filled with a haze of blue smoke and all of the computer terminals were smouldering as sparks flew in bright orange arcs to scatter like burning rain across the floor. The ball of energy was gone and in its place was a body sprawled on the floor.
‘Dad!’
Cas leaped to his feet and dashed across to his father’s side. He had almost got there when strong hands grabbed him.
‘Let me go!’ Cas yelled as a soldier struggled to pull him away from Joshua’s body.
Cas stretched out and grasped for his father. His hand dropped down to touch Joshua’s chest, but to his horror his hand passed straight through his father’s body as though it were no more than mist.
Cas stared in disbelief as he was lifted away from his father by the soldier, who dropped him back onto his feet nearby. A deep voice rumbled across the facility.
‘You have just cost this country years of research and millions of dollars.’ General Winchester glared down at them, trembling with fury as he turned to his soldiers. ‘Arrest them and have them detained below ground!’
‘Dad?!’ Siren wailed in disbelief.
‘Silence!’ the general thundered at her, his features twisted with a kind of anger Cas had never seen before. Out of control. Fearsome. His own father had never looked that way, and it scared Cas as much as it scared Siren.
‘My God, what’s happened?!’
Everybody whirled as Doctor Harrison staggered into the facility, his hair in disarray and his white coat smudged with ash and dirt.
‘There was a power surge,’ General Winchester explained. ‘We don’t know what caused it. The device overloaded and we couldn’t shut it down. Then these four idiots showed up.’
Doctor Harrison slowed as he looked down at the children. ‘Are you all okay?’
‘We’re tired,’ Cas replied. ‘It was a long night.’
Doctor Harrison stared at him. ‘A long
night
?’
‘That’s enough,’ General Winchester growled. ‘Get them out of here.’
Cas shouted at the general before he had even thought about it.
‘We saw them alive in Boston! What have you done to them?! What have you…-’
‘Silence!’ the general bellowed again loudly enough to hurt Cas’s ears.
Siren stepped toward her father. ‘Cas’ is right, we saw them in the past and…’
Siren’s voice trailed off into silence. The general had said nothing but he was glaring down at his daughter as though he were about to kill her himself. Cas was amazed to see Siren bow her head in silence, staring at her feet.
Doctor Harrison looked at the general. ‘What are they talking about? Did they enter the energy field?’
‘They fell through it, nothing more,’ the general snapped back.
‘We were gone for almost twenty-four hours!’ Emily wailed in protest.
‘Rubbish,’ Winchester snapped. ‘You never left this facility.’
‘He’s lying,’ Cas said to Doctor Harrison.
‘Yeah,’ Jude agreed. ‘If he’d let Captain Ryan help us sooner this would never have happened.’
‘If you hadn’t been in the ventilation shaft,’ Winchester rumbled, ‘
none of this
would have happened.’
‘The general’s right,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘We couldn’t control the energy field.’
Doctor Harrison walked up to the general. ‘Sir, show me the footage of the event.’
The general glared down at Doctor Harrison for a long moment, and then he pointed at one of the soldiers and clicked his fingers. The soldier hurried up to the main control panel and pressed a few buttons. On a large screen at the back of the facility, a video began playing.
Cas saw the glowing ball of energy, and his father standing before it with his colleagues as they tried to control it. Then the ventilation shaft above the energy ball collapsed, Cas and his friends dangling just above the sphere as Joshua tried to reach them.
Joshua fell into the ball of energy, which glowed brighter and expanded to swallow Cas and his friends.
Then quite suddenly the ball of energy exploded in a blaze of light. As the light faded, Cas saw himself, Jude, Emily and Siren sitting on the floor blinking as though coming awake from a dream. Behind them lay Joshua.
‘That’s not possible!’ Emily wailed.
‘As you can see, Doctor,’ the general said, ‘they went nowhere. Agreed?’
Doctor Harrison stared at the screen as though he were noticing things that the general had not, but then he nodded slowly. The general turned to his men.
‘This is a quarantined area,’ he snapped. ‘Seal it off.’
‘What about these four?’ one of the soldiers asked, gesturing to the children.
General Winchester’s fearsome gaze burned through each of them in turn.
‘Do not return them to the school. Then rest of the children and their principal have been accounted for, correct?’ When the soldier nodded, the general gestured with a flick of his head and looked down at them. ‘Have them sent home. If they whisper a word of this to anybody then it will be their parents who pay the price. Understood?’
Cas, Emily and Jude nodded like robots, unable to think of anything to say.
Siren walked up to the general. ‘Please tell me, what happened here?’ she asked.
The general stared down at her and then flicked his head to one side.
‘Get out of here. I don’t want to see any of you in here ever again.’
Moments later they were ushered out of the facility and a set of huge steel doors slammed shut behind them.
* * *
‘Oh my God, Cas are you okay?’
Cas’s mother, Karen, wrapped him up in her arms the moment he was dropped off by the military police car. For a brief moment, all of the horrors Cas had witnessed melted away as he felt her warmth against him and smelled the familiar scent of her perfume and her hair.
‘I’m okay mom,’ he replied, closing his eyes.
The two military policemen who had marched him up to the front door saluted smartly and turned away. Karen called after them.
‘Hey, where’s Joshua? Where’s my husband?’
The two soldiers climbed into their vehicle and drove off as though Cas’s mother no longer existed. Cas peered at them as they drove away, hatred seething through him and competing with the confusion permeating his brain: the sun was warm and it was still morning. No time seemed to have passed. He didn’t feel hungry and more, he had no injuries and his watch was still on his wrist. Only one thing has changed: his watch had stopped at 09.57am, the time that they had fallen into the energy field.
‘There was an accident,’ he said before he could stop himself. ‘They won’t tell anybody about it and they say that we’re liars.’
‘I want to know what happened,’ Karen said as she stood back from him and looked him up and down, ‘everything.’
Karen hurried him inside before he could reply and led him by the hand up to the bathroom where she began running some warm water.
‘We heard an explosion,’ she said, ‘that damned near shook the house apart. Fire trucks and the police went screaming through the town but the base has been shut down. Did you see what happened?’
Cas thought about the general’s warning had said about his father and the other parents being held responsible for anything that was said, and bit back his words.
‘There was a fire,’ he said. ‘But we didn’t see anything.’
‘Why did you say they were calling you liars?’ she asked him as she began dabbing at his brow with warm, soapy water. ‘And what won’t they tell anybody about?’
Cas’s tired brain struggled to find an answer.
‘We thought we saw a secret part of the base,’ he replied finally. ‘That they say isn’t there.’
Karen looked at him for a few moments. ‘Cas’, where’s your father?’
Cas struggled to keep a straight face but the tears came before he could stop them and he crumpled into his mother’s arms. ‘I don’t know. They took him away.’
Cas didn’t say anything after that. Not a word. His mom let him go and he went into his bedroom and shut the door. She brought him toast and jam, cups of coffee and even some Coca Cola, but he said nothing.
He could hear her though, on the telephone to the base and to the school, trying to find out what had happened. When Principal Brownstone called to visit that afternoon, Cas had leaned against his bedroom door, hoping against hope that she would reveal something. But the principal had spoken in a flat, monotone voice, as though she were reciting from a script.
‘Nothing occurred at the base this morning that could have harmed the children, Mrs Ryan. There was an explosion of aviation fuel on the opposite side of the airfield which scared the children a great deal and the tour was cut short as a precaution, but the base commander has assured me that everything has been dealt with. Cas’s father was sent to deal with the problem. I hope that Cas is well enough to attend school tomorrow morning.’
There was no word from Joshua, and by late in the evening Cas knew that whatever had happened to his father it had not yet been resolved. General Winchester’s determination to maintain security around his mysterious experiment meant that he would have sent Joshua home as soon as he was well enough, for no other reason than to allay his family’s fears and prevent any further escalation of the crisis.
Cas’s father must still be in hospital.
He was staring out of his window at the darkening night sky, thinking about Boston Common, when he heard his mother coming up the stairs. Quickly Cas climbed into bed and pretended to be asleep. His mother slipped into his room with a glass of water for his bedside, placing it on a nearby table before she leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead.
He waited until she had left the room and closed the door behind her before he got back out of bed and walked across to the window. In the distance he could just about make out the runway lights of the airbase. His father was there, somewhere, and Cas could not even be sure if he was alive or dead.
It wasn’t fair. Joshua was his dad and the military had no right to keep him from seeing his family or refusing to reveal what had happened. His mother knew nothing of what his father had endured, the faceless people on the other end of the telephone repeatedly assuring her that Joshua was well and hard at work.
He might be
dead
. Cas wanted to tell her everything and it wasn’t really General Winchester’s threats that prevented him from saying anything. Rather, it was the thought of how upset she would be that scared Cas more, the grief and the tears. He didn’t like to see his mother like that.
He sighed and took one last glance at the airbase and the street outside. Everything was silent. The streetlights glowed in pools of light, the moon glistened between high clouds and a steam train made its way down the street toward…
Cas’s heart skipped a beat in his chest as he stared in disbelief. There was no train line in the middle of Lincoln. The nearest station was a mile to the south west.
A sudden screeching of the train’s whistle shattered the night air. Cas took a step back from the window as the huge steam train thundered down the street outside, a towering funnel of billowing smoke pouring from its exhaust stack as its wheels pounded the road. The massive engine crashed past the house, carriage after carriage racing by as the ground shook with a rhythmic
boom-boom-thump, boom-boom-thump
.
Cas watched as the speeding engine hammered its way toward the houses at the end of the street and then it smashed through them. Cas cried out in horror as he watched the entire train and carriages thunder through the house and vanish from sight, only the screeching whistle still audible as it slowly faded away onto the night air. Above, the billowing clouds of steam dispersed and vanished.
The house at the end of the street still stood in silence as though nothing had happened.
Cas’s heart pounded in his chest and he rubbed his eyes. He had only slept a few hours in the past twenty-four, but even so he could not believe he had witnessed such a bizarre hallucination. Maybe General Winchester had been right after all, and the accident at the base had shaken them all up more than he had first thought.
Cas walked back across his room, slumped down onto his bed and reached out for his glass of water.
His hand drifted straight through the glass as though he were a ghost.
Cas sat bolt upright as his heart quickened again in his chest. He stared furtively at the glass for a moment and then reached out for it again. This time, his hand settled around the glass as normal.
Cas lifted the glass carefully and took a long drink from it before setting it back down. Suddenly he felt so weary, and he lay down on the bed.
But despite being so tired it was a long time before he fell asleep.
* * *