The Fallen (47 page)

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Ollie, ‘I was wondering. That thing on your back … is it alive?’

‘Hey,’ said Trio, with mock offence. ‘That
thing
on our back is not a thing, it’s a
person
. He’s Mister Three. And he is very much alive.’

‘Yeah, sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Trey. ‘To tell you the truth, he’s a pain in the arse. Literally.’

‘He sleeps his life away,’ said Trio. ‘Wakes up every few days, looks around, has a moan and then nods off again. Most of the time he doesn’t bother us, but sometimes, God give me strength and slap me down for thinking bad of the poor little deformed thing, I wish we could slice him off. He keeps us awake for days.’

‘This is all too much for me to take in,’ said Ollie. ‘Too much has happened. Your rule of three thing, I’m not sure I get it.’

‘Just look around you,’ said Trey, excited. ‘We’re three of us in one, me and Trio and Mister Three. Yeah? And how many of us Twisted Kids came with you? If you count us as one, as three in one, there’s us and Fish-Face and singing Skinner. Sitting on his trolley. Three. How many trolleys in all?’

‘Three,’ said Ollie.

‘Three is right. The church? That was significant. So there will be three churches.’

‘How do you mean? Where will they be?’

‘
In your story
. It’s like, where are we going?’

‘To the Natural History Museum.’

‘There’s going to be three museums then. And where have we been?’

‘Your warehouse.’

‘So three warehouses as well. You’ll see. There’ll be three of them – three warehouses, three museums, three churches, three roads walked, three friends lost, three friends found, three little kids rescued. They’ll all be important in your life.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Trio. ‘As I said, it’s all crap.’

It may be crap, Ollie thought, but at least it was distracting crap. So that he didn’t have to think too much about the long walk back to safety. All those miles stretching out ahead of them, with the chance of being attacked anywhere along the way. Down the motorway and on into London, over the broken bridge – the Hammersmith flyover, through the dead streets of town.

To bring back three trolleys of drugs and a huge load of bad news.

And then what?

83

Monkey-Boy was climbing. It was how he’d got his nickname. He was always climbing things. He was small and so skinny he hardly weighed anything and he crawled up like a lizard, fingers spread, gripping with his knees.

He was scaling one of the stone supports at the side of the main hall to get to the gallery on the floor above. Ella was sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching him, gnawing on a biscuit. The museum kids made them from flour and water; they were hard and dry and didn’t taste of anything except salt, but they helped keep the hunger away. Ella had collected a small store of them that she kept in her pocket to chew on whenever the hunger chewed at her.

She’d offered Monkey-Boy one if he could get right to the top. He was doing well. It looked like she was going to have to give one of her biscuits up. Never mind. She liked Monkey-Boy. He was probably the best friend she had left of all the kids who’d come out of Holloway. He reminded her a little bit of her brother, Sam …

She gave a little shiver and sniffed. She tried not to think about Sam. It made her too sad. At first, after they’d left Waitrose, she’d hoped he might still be alive somehow, that he might escape from the grown-ups who’d captured him
and come back to her. He’d always promised he’d look after her. And he always had – even though he was smaller than her. That was the thing about Sam: he was older by nearly two years, but he’d always been tiny. Dad had called him ‘shrimp’, which he hated. To Ella he hadn’t been a shrimp, he’d been her hero. He’d been gone for days and days now, though, and she knew that she was never going to see him again.

He was gone forever.

She had to forget him or his memory would always make her sad. Like a ghost hanging around. When she pictured him he was trapped in the car park at Waitrose, stuck in a corner with grown-ups coming in at him from all around. What use was a memory like that? She roughly wiped away a tear with her sleeve. Bad thoughts didn’t help anything.

‘I’m up!’ Monkey-Boy called down triumphantly, waving his hands and whooping, his long fair hair hanging down in his face.

‘Well done.’

‘So do I get my biscuit now?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But you said!’

‘I’m joking you.’

‘Not funny.’

‘You’re funny.’

‘I’m the Monkey Man.’ He was singing now, as if it was a nursery rhyme. ‘No one else can climb as high as I can. Come up here.’

Ella wriggled to her feet and walked quickly over to the stairs where the statue of the granddad sitting in his chair watched over the hall. It was nice in the day, when they
could run around in this part of the museum and explore and play. They didn’t have to worry about any grown-ups, or the spider man, or the slenderman, or whatever it was.

It was different at night. At night they all came out, all the crawling fears, but then Ella and the others stayed safely locked behind the iron bars of the minerals gallery. She couldn’t think of this place as home yet, not like Waitrose had been. Any more scares here at the museum and she wasn’t sure she could cope. She would run away. Maybe back to Buckingham Palace. It had been safer there, even if David, the boy in charge, had been bossy and weird. The most important thing was to be
safe
. To have food and water and not be attacked by grown-ups. Nothing else really mattered.

When she got up to the next level she found Monkey-Boy looking at the human exhibits: models of cavemen and Neanderthals and old skeletons were all mixed up with stuffed apes. Ella didn’t like the models. They were too realistic. They had clever, sneaky eyes and she feared they’d come alive. Monkey-Boy was making faces at one of them.

‘I can climb higher than any of these losers,’ he said.

‘That’s because they’re dead,’ said Ella. ‘Dead and stuffed. They’re creepy.’

‘The dead can’t hurt us,’ said Monkey-Boy.

Ella looked at the figures standing there, waiting forever. The orange hairy face of an orang-utan, the friendly face of a chimp, the glass eyes of a caveman, and a pale face, with dark-rimmed eyes, white skin, black hair, at the back, behind the other exhibits, in the darkness.

That blinked.

Ella opened her mouth, wanting to scream, but could
make no sound come out. Her breath was tangled inside her. Frozen.

She grabbed Monkey-Boy’s arm. So tight he yelped and pulled away sharply.

‘Be careful,’ he said, and then he saw her face. Panic came into his eyes. He searched around wildly, trying to see what it was that had spooked her. Finally Ella pointed, waving her arm … at nothing. Only shadows.

The face had gone.

She
had
seen it, though. She was
sure
she had seen it. Something alive. The slenderman. The spider. The thing. There was movement to their right, coming fast round the end of the cabinets, and finally she screamed, long and high and shrill, and Monkey-Boy saw it too. A person. A boy. Tall. Dressed all in black, his clothes shiny and filthy, with dark stains all over, and in his hands a knife, raised and ready.

Again Ella screamed. And she ran and Monkey-Boy ran and the black figure ran after them. And Ella got trapped among the cabinets. Could go no further. Monkey-Boy with her. Trembling. There had to be a way out, but in her panicked confusion the cabinets had made a wall around her, the apes and cavemen grinning at her.

And then she heard voices. People were coming out of the minerals gallery at the far end of the balcony, behind the slenderman.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ It was Maeve, running ahead of the others, unarmed but unafraid.

‘What is it?’ she repeated. The only answer Ella could give was another scream.

The slenderman made a grab for Monkey-Boy, who somehow managed to duck and wriggle away from him. He slashed at thin air with his bright and shiny knife, but
Monkey-Boy jumped up on to the stone railing, then swung out and round and up on to one of the stone columns that supported the great arches above them. He scampered up, got clear and disappeared from sight.

That left only Ella. She crouched down, trying to make herself small.

At last Maeve had realized what was going on.

‘You get away from her!’ she screamed.

The slenderman turned to face the bigger kids, saw that there were too many and left Ella behind. Made a dash for the stairs. More people were coming up from below.

‘Watch out!’ Ella shouted as he got near to them. ‘He’s got a knife.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s him! It’s him!’

The slenderman reached the top of the stairs at the same time as the first of the kids. He barged into them, knocking two of them back down on top of their friends, and then he howled and carried on around towards the tree room at the back of the hall.

Maeve put out her arms and scooped up Ella, hugging her close to her body. Ella so wanted it to be over, but didn’t know if the slenderman had got away or not. She could hear running, shouting, the sounds swallowed up and echoing away around the building. She looked into Maeve’s face.

‘Will they get him?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Maeve. ‘They’ll get him. You come with me. I’ll take you back to the minerals gallery.’

‘Don’t ever let me go,’ said Ella.

‘I won’t, darling,’ said Maeve. ‘You’re safe now.’

Ella closed her eyes, enjoying for a moment the lies that
Maeve had told her. Dreaming that in another world they were true. The world that Sam lived in. She knew that they wouldn’t catch the thing. She knew that she wasn’t safe and that Maeve would let her go. Sometime. She’d have to. She couldn’t hold on to her forever.

84

Maxie was ready for him this time. She stood in the centre of the hall, close to the diplodocus, her feet planted wide apart, tensed, knees slightly bent, katana held high, up behind her head. She would get him this time. Whatever his problem was – and right now she didn’t really care – he wasn’t going to do any more damage.

She’d watched him push past the other kids and go round the upper level into the tree room at the back, and out into the west gallery. And there he was, at the top of the flight of stairs that went up the left-hand side. Down he came, jumping three steps at a time, four, his long legs pumping away, arms flailing, knife waving in the air.

‘Over here, dickhead,’ she shouted as he reached the bottom. ‘Come and get it.’

He skidded to a halt, hesitated, weighing up his chances, trembling. Close enough for Maxie to see the sweat pouring from his forehead. His red, feverish eyes. His teeth yellow against his bone-white skin.

He tilted his head back and howled like a trapped animal and Maxie ran at him, ready to swing, ready to take his bloody head off. Roaring.

He wasn’t going to fight, though. Instead he turned and
bolted towards the green zone, Maxie hard behind him, calling to the other kids to come with her.

As she ran, she was aware of footsteps. Turned to see Boggle and the big-nosed boy who’d come with them from the palace. What was his name? He’d been guarding David’s sick-bay.

Andy?

She was pretty sure he was called Andy.

Only three of them then. But they had the upper hand: Paul was on the run; Maxie had her sword. He was racing ahead of them, into the dark maze of galleries and passageways at the back of the green zone. Maxie didn’t fully know her way around here yet, wasn’t so confident away from the main hall. They ran round behind the insect and bird galleries and then Maxie realized she’d lost sight of him. She pulled out her torch and flicked it on. No sign of him.

‘Stop!’ she called out. The other two stuttered to a halt. ‘What?’ said Boggle.

‘Be quiet … Listen … We’ve lost him. Can you hear him at all?’

‘No.’

Nothing.

Just the sound of their own breathing. Voices behind them in the main hall. No hurrying footsteps. Maxie knew there was a way through here to the other section of the museum. The red zone. The doors were usually kept closed and locked, but Paul had keys.