The Ministry of SUITs (23 page)

“Somewhere totally useless. Think!” Trudy stamped her foot.

And then it occurred to Jack. “The P.E. teacher's office!” he yelled. “At the end of the changing rooms there's a P.E. teacher's office. But P.E. teachers never mark homework, or prepare lesson plans, or set tests…”

“And so…?”

“Well, what is a P.E. teacher's office actually for? It doesn't make any sense. So it's a pointless room. Unless of course…”

Trudy finished his thought for him. “… unless of course that's where the entrance to an underground tunnel is.”

“Precisely,” said Jack, feeling slightly smug.

His smugness lasted about ten seconds and then Trudy spoke. “And that would make even more sense as that's where the odds and ends of the missing kids' P.E. kits are found. In the box of spares.”

“I would have figured that out if you'd given me time,” Jack grumbled.

It was halfway through the last class when Jack stuck his head around the door of the P.E. changing rooms. “It's empty,” he let Trudy know.

“What is that smell?” asked Trudy as she walked into the changing rooms.

Jack barely even noticed the changing-room smell anymore. “Yeah, it's a bit of an acquired taste, isn't it? And it always seems to be here. No matter how many times the place is washed, cleaned, or has deodorant sprayed around it, that smell remains.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“No, it doesn't. Dawkins says that he thinks that it's a ghost fart. You know, a fart that died years ago. And now it lingers in the air forever like a ghostly presence.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“A lot of what Dawkins says doesn't make any sense.”
63

Trudy and Jack crept through the changing rooms until they reached the P.E. teacher's office at the back. The door had a pane of clouded glass in it. Jack reached out and pushed the door gently, leaping backward when it squeaked open. There was no one inside the office. Jack assumed Mr. Rackham was outside somewhere tormenting some boys who weren't any good at playing cricket by scratching his fingernails down his blackboard every time a batsman missed a ball.

The office was hardly an office at all, perhaps nine or ten feet square. There was no natural light and no windows, so it smelled musty and felt claustrophobic. Hundreds of leaflets were piled up on the floor in stacks. They offered advice on how to avoid diseases like gout, leprosy, and polio. Jack was convinced that many of these diseases were out of date and didn't exist; however, the school rarely spent money on new pamphlets to try and improve pupils' health.

Jack had a theory that the school was never that keen on P.E. or anything that helped pupils become healthier. They wanted pupils to be unhealthy. The teachers' favorite pupils were generally pale, weedy, and slightly anemic looking. Jack thought the reason for this was that unhealthy pupils were less likely to run around the place causing trouble. An unhealthy, unfit pupil could be put in a chair at the start of a lesson and you could rely on them being lazy enough to still be there at the end of the class. Healthy children got into all sorts of trouble, and therefore health was discouraged. Jack knew this to be true as it was impossible to stay fit while eating the kinds of lunches they served in the school canteen.

Each of the piles of pamphlets had an object on top of it, pinning it down like a paperweight. Of course, none of the paperweights were actually paperweights. Rather, it seemed as if Mr. Rackham had used whatever object had been nearest at hand. One pile was pinned down with a hockey stick, another was pinned down with an old globe, and yet another was kept in place with a set of dumbbells.

In one corner there was a small desk, an old rickety chair that none of the proper teachers had wanted, and a series of posters of sports stars of the 1950s.

“What's stickball?” asked Trudy, looking at one of the posters.

“I'm not sure,” said Jack. “I imagine it's a game where you hit a ball with a stick … or perhaps a game where you hit a stick with a ball. Either way I'm fairly sure that both a stick and a ball are involved.”

Jack recoiled with a shudder when he saw the box of spare P.E. kits. He pointed it out to Trudy. “Maybe something of David's will be in there.” Jack moved toward the box, mentally steeling himself to rummage around in the cardboard cube of despair.

“I wouldn't bother,” said Trudy. “Those clothes are only going to be from kids who went missing in gym class. As far as we know David went missing after school at some stage.”

There was no obvious tunnel in the room and the only door was the one they had used to come in. Trudy looked around the tiny room. “There's a passage here somewhere.”

“Why are you so sure?”

Trudy lifted up a hockey stick from on top of the pile of leaflets. “This is a small room. There are no windows. So why are all these leaflets weighted down with random objects?”

Jack didn't quite get Trudy's meaning. “To keep them in place?”

“Yes, but why do they need to be kept in place? Only one door and no windows. That means there can't be any drafts. No air blowing through the room. Unless, of course, there's another door that we can't see.”

Jack and Trudy examined the walls, moved leaflets, and even turned the desk upside down. They found nothing. Jack tried kicking at the floor in the corner, hoping a trapdoor would reveal itself, but he only managed to scuff his shoe.

“What we need to find is something that is out of place. Something you wouldn't expect a P.E. teacher to…” Before Trudy had finished speaking Jack had grabbed the globe off a pile of leaflets. “The globe! Why would a P.E. teacher have a globe?”

Trudy grabbed the globe from Jack. “Great! Even geography teachers don't have globes these days.”

It was an old-style globe with vast blue oceans and small green continents. They spun it around and looked at it intently. The oceans on the globe were marked with pictures of small sailing ships with billowing sails.

“Umm, is there a country called
Button
?” asked Trudy.

“I don't think so.”

Trudy showed Jack what she was looking at. In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, there was a small roundish, green country that had been labeled
Button
.

“Worth a try,” said Trudy as she pressed the island labeled
Button
.

For a few seconds there was silence; then a sound of grinding metal filled the air as if an enormous set of gears was moving into action.

“I think that may have done the trick,” said Jack.

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

UNDERGROUND PASSAGES

H
OW
TO
L
OCATE
T
HEM

Frequently in the course of an adventure a Ministry operative will need to locate a hidden passage. When thinking about where to hide these passages, villains always think,
Let's hide it in the last place anyone would look.

Therefore, the quickest way to locate such a passage is to make a list of all the places you are going to search. Then skip all of the list except the very last item on it.
64

*   *   *

One day villains will figure out that they should hide their underground passages in places where no one
will ever
look. When that happens we will all be in trouble.

 

34

THE TUNNEL

 

The floor under Trudy's and Jack's feet started slowly moving and sloping down. At the same time the wall at the far end of the office lifted up slightly, and they found themselves standing at the entrance to a long tunnel. Jack wasn't sure whether to be excited or terrified. He was sure the tunnel would lead them to finding David. However, he was equally sure it would lead them into some kind of horrible danger.

The walls of the tunnel were dusty, gray concrete. Large luminous electric lights hung at shoulder height on either side of the passageway. Apart from Trudy and Jack there was nothing in the passageway to cast a shadow, and yet for some reason it felt sinister. It looked like a medical laboratory where ghastly experiments would be carried out. And for all Jack knew, maybe that was exactly what was going on.

“So what do we do now?”

“David's down there,” said Jack. “We go and get him.”

Trudy nodded. “You're ready for whatever might be down there?”

In the past few days Jack had been attacked by a bear, fought werecreatures in a museum, and met a squid-headed being of almost unbelievable evil power. “You know, I'm almost certainly not ready for this. But I'm still going to do it anyway.”

A smile almost split Trudy's face in two. “That's exactly how I feel.”

Jack and Trudy marched down the tunnel side by side.

After the first fifty feet the concrete walls of the tunnel gave way to a soil passageway. The sides were braced at intervals with black metal beams.

“Do you think this is safe?” asked Jack.

“Almost certainly not. Remember the collapsed rugby pitch?”

“Mmm. Any thoughts on what we should do if we're crushed to death?”

Trudy shrugged. “If we're crushed to death, we won't really have to try and do anything much. Just lie still and try to look unappetizing to worms.”

Jack looked up at the ceiling. Once they had moved on from the concrete tunnel, the regularly spaced lights had ceased. Now, there were a series of bulbs that flickered and sputtered. It felt more like candlelight than electric bulbs. Whatever was powering them seemed to be rather weak and worked only intermittently.

Although the bright white light had seemed frightening and sinister, the flickering light was infinitely worse. Occasionally the lights would pop out entirely for a few seconds. When this happened Jack found himself turning around so that he was looking over his shoulder when the lights came on. If horror movies had taught him anything, it was that when a light flickered out for a few seconds, it was only so that a large man could appear suddenly behind you, holding a large hooklike device normally seen only in a slaughterhouse.

Luckily this didn't seem to happen in real life. Jack swore if he survived the tunnel he would never watch another scary movie as long as he lived. Of course it was a promise he broke. He watched many horror movies in the future, but after going through everything he had, they just didn't seem that scary anymore.

“Look at that!” cried Trudy, pointing at one of the flickering bulbs.

“It's a lightbulb,” said Jack. “They're very common. If we get out of this, I'll buy you one of your own.”

Trudy ignored Jack. “Look at what it's connected to.”

The lightbulb was connected to a strip of carpet that seemed to be hanging down from the ceiling.

“What on earth? Is that the same carpet that Chapeau Noir put down in the school?”

“Exactly.”

“But what does that mean?” asked Jack.

Trudy had figured out that the reason the light was flickering was because the supply wasn't steady. The school was above them and strips of the carpet were hanging down from the carpeted corridors. The kids had been given new polyester uniforms because they helped hold a static electricity charge. Which was why Dawkins had been able to pretend to be the hero Static.

“So they're using the polyester carpet and uniforms to generate power to run these lights?”

“Precisely,” said Trudy. “That's why the strips of carpet come through the ceiling and the static charges light the bulbs. Carpets in a school wouldn't make sense otherwise.”

“But…” Jack hesitated. “That doesn't really make sense. If they're using kids to generate static electricity, why do they need the wind turbines?”

“That's the point. The carpet is used to generate power because the wind turbines aren't going to be used for that purpose at all. They're going to be used for something more sinister.”

“Like what?”

Trudy took a deep breath. “I don't know … yet. But I've got a feeling that when we figure that out we'll know what Chapeau Noir Enterprises and Mr. Teach are up to. Think about it. They replaced the boiler with solar panels. Why would they do that if the wind turbines really worked?”

Jack had a feeling that they were very close to the solution to all the mysteries. He was just about to say this to Trudy; however, his breath was taken away when they turned the corner.

The floor dropped away in front of Jack and Trudy. If Jack had taken another step, he would have plunged fifty feet straight down. They had walked into a giant cavern that seemed to be endless.

Across the floor of the cavern were hundreds of tiny figures—digging, operating machinery, slowly enlarging the cavern.

Hundreds of figures, some of them young, some of them older. All of them in ragged school uniforms and looking slightly hopeless. Many of them seemed to be wearing chains around their necks or their ankles. They were being supervised in their work by a group of rough-looking men. There was something unusual about the men. They all had crutches, eye patches … some even had prosthetic arms. Digging must be dangerous work.

“I think we've found the missing schoolchildren,” whispered Trudy.

“At least they're still alive.”

“I know, but look at them. Some of them must have been here for thirty years.”

“And what are they digging all this for? Why dig a huge hole under Northern Ireland?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Trudy stood at the edge of the fifty-foot drop.

“How are you planning to get down?” asked Jack.

Trudy's eyes seem to go slightly moist and Jack realized she was conjuring up sad thoughts in her head. Jack wondered what sad thoughts Trudy used to conjure up the negative emotions necessary to use The Speed. He got the impression that her thoughts were considerably sadder than the ones he used. She was certainly faster than he was.