Walking Dead (18 page)

“OK,” said Plantain, “he leave you 'lone now, but he put this on you. You stay here. If any of these fellows try get loose, you strap him tight again. One hour gone, you find all the keys, you go roun' all the huts, you tell the people how the Khandhars been here, set them all free. You do all that, an
he
leave you 'lone. Right?”

The man looked as though he would have fallen to the floor but for the support of the counter, but he nodded, trembling.

“C'mon, Doc,” said Plantain.

In the upstairs room where Foxe and Captain Angiah had threshed out the contract for the experiment they caught the guard-sergeant, naked, leaning his gross buttocks on the edge of the table and smoking a small cigar. A scrawny girl, also naked, lay panting on a mattress by the wall. They were both believers. Though the girl was clearly a prisoner, Plantain insisted on having her tied up like the men, saying that you couldn't tell what she might do if she were left loose.

They climbed the tower stairs to the starlit battlements, where they split into two parties to tackle the men who manned the machine guns. Below them the castle courtyard lay empty under the unchanging flood-light. The windows of the prison huts were dark. The place was like a stage, waiting for the first actors to saunter on and tell each other necessary bits of plot. On the other side of the wall the quays were floodlit too, and just as silent, the cranes still, the ships unworked. Presumably even twenty-four-hour shifts stopped to let the guards attend Carnival. Maroons banged in the distance. A speckle of coloured stars showed in the sky above the cliff-top, and died. The sea, black as the pupil of an eye and flecked with a few quick glimmers, shuffled against rocks and wharves. A man came striding along the battlement walkway.

“You bloody slow,” he said angrily, and then with a sudden change of tone, “Who that?”

“The Sunday Dwarf,” croaked Foxe's other voice.

The man started violently, but made no attempt to avoid Foxe raising Quentin close between their faces. The breath must have gone right up his nostrils. He gave a moaning gasp, and half collapsed against the crenellation behind him.

“Stand up. Wait there,” whispered Foxe, and strode quickly on. The other guard was still in the little wooden gun-post, bending down and collecting equipment. The tin roof made it too dark for him to see properly till he came grumbling out into the open.

“Look at me,” whispered Foxe.

The man dropped his load with a tinkle and a clatter, and the reek of rum swam into the air, but the man himself was unentranced and almost had his pistol out of its holster when Ginger hit him across the back of the neck with a clubbed rifle. The night silence closed quickly in.

“It sometimes doesn't work,” muttered Foxe to himself, in a vague daze.

“Maybe he wearing a good amulet,” said Ginger, bending. “Dead. Broke my gun, too. Finish here, OK?”

They walked back along the wall and found the first man still in the precise pose in which they'd left him.

“You go on, Doc,” said Ginger. “Plantain wanting you for that sentry.”

Before Foxe reached the tower he heard behind him a scraping rustle, followed by a second's silence before the thud rose from the cobbles below. He didn't look round. Plantain was waiting for him at the top of the tower stairs.

“OK?” he asked.

“Both dead,” muttered Foxe. “One of them had an amulet or something.”

A minute later he was stepping through the little wicket in the main gate, head bowed to leave his face completely in shadow. The creature with the will-power seemed to have withdrawn, and Foxe went through the motions of enchantment with a sort of fumbling incredulity, much as he had when he'd first tried it on Louis in the guard-cell. But it didn't seem to make any difference. The sentry was trance-held even before Foxe blew at him. He was a believer all right.

8

T
hey moved along the quay in three parties, each with its apparent guards and apparent gang of work-slaves. They trundled four barrows, two holding weapons, one the body of Vine and one Cocoa Bean, conscious now but very feeble. They moved from dark to glare to dark, because the floodlighting on the quays was not uniform, and they made no special attempt at stealth except for Mace and Manioc, scouting ahead among the warehouses. There were no other movements on the quays, and few lights showing among the huddled shanties on the cliff—all the life of the harbour had been sucked up into the glitter and rush of Carnival in the town above. Only the long windows of the palace laid great golden bars of light along the rock and were reflected almost as steadily from the water.

“We might get Doctor O just now,” murmured someone.

“Gone,” said someone else. “Up in town.”

“Old Woman too—she never missing a Carnival.”

“I didn't see any helicopters on the airstrip,” said Foxe.

“Hear what Doc say?”

The last phrase was more than acceptance of rational corroborative evidence—it was a statement of creed. What Foxe said, while the power was in him, was true. Anything else was heresy. He saw several eyes glance at the breast pocket of his uniform jacket, which had been stitched to take bulky packets like maps, and where Quentin now perched with his front paws and head poking over the rim, peering ahead with his deceptively bright eyes. Even Foxe, who was used to the near-sightedness of rats, found it hard not to think of this pose as alertness for hidden dangers, as though Quentin were the true guide and leader of the escape.

Foxe was aware that this sort of feeling was a response to deep shock. His own ego was barely in control; his own mind seemed to go through phases of watching the whole episode from without, like a spectator—not an amused observer, but one forced to sit apart and endure and shudder while the ruthless farce enacted itself—a mind terrified not just for the safety of Foxe's body, the bullets slamming out of the dark before the sentry's challenge had ended, but for what it had seen. Had caused. At the same time this Foxe, this spectator, trembled with the exhilaration of the adventure, with the sense of approaching triumph that seemed to run like a current through the Khandhars. But then, as the spectator could see with ugly clarity but with no power to intervene, there was this other Foxe, this croaking magician, a puff of whose breath could lock men into obedience, into slaughter. The spectator Foxe said several times that this other being was a schizoid product, a thing from the inner deeps summoned by the smell of blood, invented after the first batch of deaths to take the guilt and let the ego stand aside, washing and washing its hands.

These doppelganger phases came and went like waves of fever, but even when he was whole for a while he found he still acknowledged a power, locating it now not inside himself but in Quentin. For all the ego might insist that the rat was just a lucky mascot, a comforter for a scared scientist, other parts of Foxe's consciousness continued to believe that he carried a power as real as a magnetic field or an X-ray beam. He teased himself with an image he had barely thought of all the time he was in the Pit, Ladyblossom dead and grinning on his laboratory floor. She had believed in the power, had accepted—had died by it? Foxe also knew that the mind that was thinking these thoughts, the helpless spectator, was no more real than the magician; it too was a construct, a mechanism for attempting to grapple together the centrifugal chunks of his whirling being. The only real thing was the body, walking on whimpering crêpe across oily or gritty stone, tense for the next instant when action would focus all the blurred elements of himself back into a solid-seeming man.

A jut of cliff narrowed the quay and created a wedge of deep shadow in which they could safely halt. Only fifty yards ahead stood the main unloading-shed, with a single ship moored alongside. There was a longish pause, broken by the crackle of maroons and very distant wafts of cheering and chanting, before Manioc came out of the shed. Plantain whistled. Manioc floated across the floodlit quay and into the shadow.

“One fellow on the ship,” he said. “Sailor I guess. Let him be.”

“Where Mace go?”

“Trying the train-tunnel,” said Manioc.

“OK,” said Plantain. “Pass round all the weapons—see everybody got a gun.”

The process took a little time, enough for Foxe to become aware of a change of mood among the Khandhars—not the expected surge of purpose as they transformed themselves into a fighting unit, but a slight diminution of that feeling, a hesitancy, as though on the edge of escape they had for the first time accepted the possibility of failure, or as though the touch of individual weapons made them aware of themselves each as a spirit apart, no longer a cell in the single, hive-like will they had seemed while they were in the Pit. One man close to Foxe didn't move.

“Aren't you going to get yourself a gun?” whispered Foxe.

“Not me. Don' know nothing about guns,” muttered Mr Trotter.

“I'm glad you decided to come,” said Foxe, as though welcoming a fastidious guest to a potentially tiresome party.

“Couldn't do nothing different.”

Now came a change, no more than a rustle and a panted whisper on the other side of the group, but somehow to tense senses the sounds had the accent of bad news. Foxe moved towards them, half-conscious of Mr Trotter still at his side.

“Where's Doc?” said Plantain. “Uh, Mace been up the tunnel, Doc. Big steel doors across the top, shut solid. What do you think?”

Foxe shrugged. You're a rat in a maze and you meet a blank wall, so what do you do? Turn round, go back, look for some other way out.

“There must be somewhere we can climb the cliffs,” he said.

“There ain't,” said someone. Other voices agreed. It was a known fact.

“Could hijack the ship there,” suggested a voice.

“Who know how you drive a bastard like that?”

“Doc O get his planes out, bomb us to scraps.”

Now, even more strongly, Foxe felt that something which had kept the Khandhars together was loosing its hold, that like his own their personality was falling apart, leaving an undisciplined gang of rebels arguing in the dark about a hopeless chance. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath.

“The engine,” said his other voice. “Send it up the tunnel. It will be strong enough to get the doors open.”

The Khandhars stood in silence.

“Sure,” said Plantain at last. “Anybody knowing how to make her go? We been in the Pit all along, Doc.”

Again there was a silence.

“I been running her,” whispered a new voice. Like Foxe's, though to a much lesser extent, it seemed shocked at the sound of itself.

“You?” said Plantain.

“Sure,” said Mr Trotter, more confident now. “I been stoking her, but I guess I can drive her. She'll have fire up, too, for of being an old bastard when she cold. Somebody got to stoke for me. Yeh, I'll do that for you, Denver.”

This time the silence was of a different sort, almost a chill of social outrage at Mr Trotter using the name which Plantain had discarded when he was reborn on the mountain. Foxe thought Mr Trotter had said it on purpose, and with a bit of swagger, as though to show his too-dominant cousin that he also was master of something. Plantain snorted a small laugh.

“Thanks,” he said. “Coffee, you go stoke for him.”

“Wait,” said Foxe in his ordinary voice. “Captain Angiah told me that you couldn't use the tunnel while the engine was working or you'd suffocate to death.”

“He get it wrong, then,” said Mr Trotter. “Ain't much room there while the engine going through, but I heard story about a soldier was caught there, and he lay flat on his face against the wall, and all he suffer is a hole burnt in his pants where a spark lit.”

“OK,” said Plantain, in total command once more. “We go up first, 'cept for a rearguard, lie against the wall, run out when the engine break the doors. Four five soldiers up there, maybe—everybody else at Carnival. Got to come out shooting, for of they'll hear the engine and perhaps be ready for us. Pine, your men stay down behind, case of somebody coming from the palace …”

“Engine throw sparks way up,” interrupted Mr Trotter.

“Yeh. How long you take to start her moving?”

“Ten minutes. Uh, bit more 'n that.”

“OK. Let's go. Mace, you got that lamp? You first, then me and Doc.”

Foxe had envisaged their groping their way up the tunnel in solid dark, stumbling on loose rocks with a constant clatter of dropped weapons. In fact three large torches had been looted from the castle, so they could move in light enough to pick out the individual ties that held the triple track in place, and to use them as the awkwardly spaced steps of a shallow stair. The tunnel was less regular than the one that led to the Pit, with one or two stretches widening into caverns and others so narrow it was difficult to believe the engine had room to pass; its walls and roof were jet black with caked soot that gave off streaks of tarry glitter where the torchlight caught it; the side-rails had the dull shine of worn iron, and the cog-rack between them raised its endless rank of teeth like the spine of a vast lizard. Foxe's heart began to thud with the climb—it might be shallow by the standard of stairs, but it would have been steep on a hill—and his breath came in shorter and deeper gasps until he was genuinely panting. He knew that the Khandhars, still feeble from their long starvation, must be finding it even stiffer that he was, but he seemed to himself to be making more noise than any of them. Again he felt trapped. A picture kept forming in his mind of the burning gases of the volcano rushing through this place, with himself being whirled along, charred but still screaming, in the middle of them.

“Getting near,” whispered Mace.

“Shine your light at me,” said Plantain, and turning he halted his followers with an upstretched arm, like a prophet announcing the doom of cities.

“OK, Mace, I take the lamp. You get back down the line, tell 'em to find place to lay, tight along the wall, tell 'em to cut bits of shirt to tie across their face, against the smoke. Doc, you and me best look at this door.”

Foxe followed him on. The tunnel floor seemed to level out a bit, but otherwise there was no change. It took him several paces to see that the blackness before them, the wall of dark they'd followed all the way up the tunnel, was now no longer retreating but had grown solid, was in fact the surface of two soot-encrusted doors which filled the whole arch. Plantain was picking with his knife-tip at the crust.

“Yeh, that be iron,” he whispered. “Like down at the Pit.”

“These ones are hinged,” said Foxe. “That's something. Look, you can see there's a sort of rail to take the weight. Sliding doors would have been tougher. Still, I wonder if that engine's strong enough—it's pretty elderly.”

“You tell us she do OK,” said Plantain.

“Of course it won't be pulling any trucks,” said Foxe, determined not to take any responsibility for the magician inside him. “It'll have power to spare.”

“Hark at that,” said Plantain suddenly. “She started.”

Foxe had heard nothing, but at the next instant an enormously deep soft sound, like a giant throat being tactfully cleared, soughed up the tunnel, followed almost at once by a movement of sooty air that seemed to pad against the closed doors and fall back. The next throat-clearing reached them just as the air-puff died.

“She be in the tunnel,” said Plantain. “Got to find us a place to lie.”

“Not right up here,” said Foxe. “In case the boiler bursts or something.”

“Sure,” said Plantain, uninterested.

Twenty yards down, the tunnel was lined on each side as if with a neat row of corpses, head to toe, looking as though they had been stacked there for some purpose to do with the mechanics of the railway. There seemed to be no gaps on either side.

“I won't be much use up here,” said Foxe. “I haven't got a gun. I'll go down to the back.”

“Might need you here,” said Plantain, not with any sternness at what seemed to Foxe to be his obvious cowardice, but more as stating a practical fact. Sulkily Foxe knelt and settled, straining away from the rails. In his memory the engine seemed to work with many flailing parts projecting beyond its carriage. The floor was a tacky mess of tar and oil, much the sort of mixture that is painted onto the shaved backs of rats in cancer tests. He tied his handkerchief across his face and eased his body up against the wall, trying to make sure that Quentin, who seemed to have gone to sleep, wasn't under any pressure.

The engine took an age to come. Each gasp of its progress was indistinguishable from the last, but the tone and duration of the pulses changed imperceptibly, building up the grudging rhythm of approach, menacing and mindless, so that suddenly he was back in the skin of childhood, enduring the old nightmare of hiding from the steamroller driven by the two brass dragons, crouched in an apparently safe cranny, and yet the passing monster stops, the dragons climb down and with echoing footsteps come straight towards the place … Under his left breast Foxe felt a stir and struggle like the palpitations of an external heart, hoicking him back into now. Evidently in the memory of nightmare he had been straining against the rock in a way which had trapped Quentin's paw or tail: he eased his shoulder up, put his hand into his pocket and gently lifted the rat out.

“Sorry, mate,” he mumbled through the handkerchief, teasing the fur behind the ear with his thumb. “Where'll you be comfortable? You won't be able to breathe out here. Try right inside. Make yourself at home.”

He could feel that Quentin was jittery, feel too the slight easing of nerves as the rat slid under his collar, hesitated and began to rove around, sniffing the mixture of Foxe-smell and Louis-smell, as if looking for the extra nipple which witches carry in order to feed their familiars. Foxe had a large mole under his left armpit—Margaret used to say that she'd use it to identify him by when his dismembered body was found in packages in a Railway Left Luggage Office.