The Paradise Trap

  ‘But I can’t see a lift.’ Newt had pressed her nose against the glass wall of the box, beyond which lay a swirling grey cloud. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘There must be some pretty heavy smokers inside,’ said Marcus. Coco wasn’t persuaded, though.

  ‘That’s an awful lot of smoke to be coming out of a few smokers,’ was her opinion. ‘Maybe it’s a fire. Maybe we shouldn’t go in.’

  ‘Oh, we’re going in. We’re not backing off now.’ Jake’s tone was hard and firm. Though his knees were trembling with the effort of supporting Miss Molpe, he barged straight through the door of the smoking room.

  Then he started to cough.

  ‘Aw, Jeez – huck-huck – I can’t see a thing – huck-huck-huck . . .’

  ‘I’m coming, Jake! I’ll help you!’ Holly pursued him into the smoke, which immediately swallowed her up. Marcus couldn’t see her anymore.

  He could hear her, though. She was coughing her lungs out.

  ‘Jake – cough-cough – where are you?’

  ‘They’ll suffocate in there,’ Coco muttered. Then she raised her voice. ‘Jake! Holly! Come out before you die of smoke inhalation!’

  By this time smoke was billowing into the hallway; Marcus couldn’t believe how much of it there was. He too began to cough – and to wonder what would happen if they opened a window. Would something nasty try to get in?

  Suddenly a loud ping made his heart leap.

  ‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s the lift! It’s arrived!’

  ‘Come on.’ Sterling seized his hand. ‘We have to go in.’

  ‘Everybody hold hands so we don’t lose each other!’ Coco instructed. ‘Newt! Take Eddie’s hand, please!’

  Together they formed a chain, with Sterling at its head. As they crossed the smoke-blurred threshold, choking and gasping, Marcus heard his mother’s cracked voice drifting out of the grey haze. ‘I found a – cough-cough – wall!’ she was saying. ‘Jake? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here!’ Jake’s response was muffled. ‘This place is so – huck-huck-huck – big!’

  ‘Wait! Listen!’ cried Holly. Straining his ears, Marcus caught the rattle of a metal sliding door, before the noise was drowned by a fit of coughing.

  ‘I hear it!’ Jake rasped. ‘It’s just over there!’

  ‘Hurry, before it closes again!’ croaked Sterling. The smoke was so thick that Marcus could barely see him, even though the two of them were holding hands. It was impossible to tell which way they were facing or how far away the glass door was.

  Marcus felt sick and dizzy. He couldn’t breathe. The siren is doing this somehow, he concluded. She’s trying to stop us from finding her lift. His knees were beginning to buckle when Jake suddenly screeched, ‘I’ve got it! I found it!’ After that, there was total confusion.

  Marcus was vaguely aware of a thump and a swish. His vision seemed to be darkening at the edges – or was that just the smoke closing in? He nearly lost his balance as he was tugged forward; then someone bumped into him and said, ‘Ooof!’ Newt and Sterling both let him go.

  All at once Marcus staggered into a wall. It was a familiar wall. It was, in fact, the back wall of the lift.

  Looking around with watery eyes, he realised that the dense haze was lifting. He could see Coco, Sterling, Newt, Jake, Miss Molpe, Holly and . . .

  ‘Edison? Where’s Edison?’ Coco demanded.

  ‘Here,’ squawked Edison.

  ‘So everybody’s present and accounted for? Yes?’ Satisfied, Sterling started jabbing at Holly’s phone again as Jake, who had been leaning against the lift door, stepped aside and let it rumble shut. Holly was almost sobbing with gratitude.

  ‘Jake, you’re a – cough-cough – genius!’ she spluttered. ‘I couldn’t see a thing! How on earth did you find your way in here?’

  ‘Simple,’ Jake replied gruffly. ‘This stupid old cow led me straight to it. The heavier she got, the closer I was.’

  With a shrug and a grunt he let Miss Molpe slide off his back, so that she landed heavily on the floor. Thump! Everyone else shrank against the walls in a general movement of revulsion.

  Only Sterling seemed oblivious to Miss Molpe. He was on the phone, addressing his robot. ‘Hello? Prot?’ he said. ‘You can pick up that phone again. Yes, please. And then you can key in the same number . . .’

  After delivering his instructions, he signed off. ‘We won’t have long to wait,’ he announced.

  He was right, too. Because about ten seconds later, the lift gave a sudden lurch – and dropped like a stone.

  54

  PAPER CHASE

  ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!’

  A chorus of screams rang out. Marcus was thrown against a wall. For about two seconds he thought that he was going to die.

  But when Sterling fell on top of Miss Molpe, the lift stopped abruptly. There was no devastating crash, though some of the passengers did bump their heads and bruise their elbows. Most of them ended up on the floor in a muddled heap.

  As they slowly disentangled themselves, the door opened.

  ‘Prot!’ Coco exclaimed. ‘Hold that door! Don’t let it close!’

  The sight of Prot was a welcome one. Framed in the doorway against a familiar backdrop of display shelves, the robot jerked to a halt before obediently wedging one steel hand against the lift door. Prot’s other (detached) hand was probably still inside Jake’s suitcase, which sat right in front of them on the shabby beige carpet of Siren Song Travel.

  ‘Oh my God! Look at that!’ Holly quavered. ‘It’s your bag, Jake! How on earth did it end up here?’

  Jake didn’t reply; he was wincing and rubbing his knee. Miss Molpe also failed to respond – perhaps because she was buried under Sterling’s massive stomach.

  It was Marcus who said, ‘Maybe the dangerous stuff always ends up here. So Miss Molpe can chuck it back into the real world.’ Adjusting his glasses, which had nearly been knocked off his face, he studied the closed door that stood a few metres away across the room. ‘Maybe this is where she normally hangs out,’ he concluded, ‘and the real world’s beyond that door at the top of the cellar stairs.’

  ‘God, I hope so,’ Newt whimpered. She had climbed stiffly to her feet. ‘But who’s going to open the damn door and find out?’

  ‘Prot will.’ Sterling was struggling to raise himself. ‘Not yet, though.’

  ‘No. Not yet,’ said Jake. ‘Before we do anything else, we need to lock up our friend here.’ He spat out the word ‘friend’ like a mouthful of sour milk. ‘Then we can take her with us and decide what to do with her later.’

  Marcus had no objection to this plan. Even Holly didn’t kick up a fuss; on the contrary, she was eyeing the siren’s slightly flattened shape with the sort of nervous disgust she usually reserved for slugs and cockroaches.

  Lying on the floor, all damp and bent and angular, with her scaly blue limbs and wisps of feathery hair, Miss Molpe looked like plucked roadkill.

  ‘Can’t we just leave her?’ Coco asked in a plaintive voice. But Jake shook his head.

  ‘Not until we’re absolutely sure that we’re home,’ he insisted. Then he turned to address Holly. ‘Can you go get my suitcase? I’d do it myself if I didn’t have to keep an eye on this sneaky pile of—’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Newt volunteered, cutting him off mid-insult. Before anyone could object, she stepped out of the lift and moved towards Jake’s suitcase.

  That was when the brochures on the shelves began to rustle as if they were caught in a strong breeze. At the same time, the door to the cellar remained tightly shut. So where, Marcus wondered, could the breeze be coming from?

  ‘She’s moving, Jake!’ Holly spoke sharply, her gaze on Miss Molpe – who seemed to be shivering or clucking. It was hard to tell, because the siren’s face was hidden. By now almost everyone was upright, including Sterling.

  Out in the office, brochures were fluttering from their shelves like butterflies, flapping and snapping their
colourful pages.

  ‘Ow!’ yelped Newt. A flying brochure had just grazed her cheek. She slapped at it, then bent to pick up Jake’s suitcase. But more brochures were swooping from their perches like a flock of angry birds. ‘Yeow!’ she cried. ‘Get off!’

  ‘Oh, jeez,’ said Jake. He sounded distinctly rattled.

  Marcus, however, was encouraged by the sight of so many whirling, spiralling paper aeroplanes. ‘This is good,’ was his view. ‘It means that someone’s protecting that door over there.’

  ‘Because it leads to the outside world?’ Holly inquired.

  Marcus shrugged. Though he couldn’t be sure, it certainly looked that way.

  ‘Ouch!’ As Newt ran back towards the lift, suitcase in hand, she was pelted by dive-bombing brochures. When she swung at them with the suitcase, they swirled aside and attacked her from another angle.

  But they didn’t follow her into the lift. The moment she crossed the threshold, nearly tripping over Prot as she did so, the brochures seemed to lose interest. They banked and turned and headed straight back into the room, where they tumbled about in mid-air, like a giant cloud of confetti.

  ‘Gimme that.’ Jake wrenched the suitcase from Newt and slammed it onto the floor. Then he flung it open, struggling with Miss Molpe at the same time. She was screeching like a banshee – like a circular saw – like a chorus of fire alarms – and the noise was excruciating. It was like a needle in the brain. Marcus had to clap his hands over his ears. Everyone else did the same thing, except Jake. Both of his hands were busy, so he had to grit his teeth, sweating and grimacing, as he turned his head away from her.

  The gag wasn’t enough to stifle her wordless shriek.

  ‘Somebody take the stuff outta my case!’ Jake barked hoarsely. ‘Now! Quick!’ To Sterling he shouted, ‘We’ve gotta lift her! On the count of three . . .’

  While Marcus and Edison squatted down to scoop all Jake’s old supplies out of the suitcase, Jake and Sterling tried to lift Miss Molpe. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t budge. No matter how much the straining men heaved and grunted – no matter how firmly they grasped her writhing, squirming, howling shape – she was too heavy for them. At last Jake called a halt to the attempt.

  ‘What’s in that suitcase?’ he roared over the noise.

  ‘Um . . .’ Edison surveyed his booty, his little face creased with discomfort. ‘There’s Prot’s hand, and a fishing line, and pens, and a cigarette lighter, and a packet of chewing gum—’

  ‘Pass me the cigarette lighter,’ Jake interrupted grimly. ‘I’ll make her talk.’

  Miss Molpe abruptly stopped screaming. In the sudden silence, Holly’s gasp of horror was clearly audible, but before she could protest Sterling exclaimed, ‘It’s all right! She’s losing weight! I can lift her now!’

  Miss Molpe, in fact, had suddenly become so light that Sterling almost overbalanced as he yanked at her legs; he wasn’t expecting her to slide across the floor as easily as she did.

  ‘How are we going to get out of here, though?’ Holly demanded. She was peering at the flurry of brochures that hovered between the lift and the door to the cellar. ‘We’ll be cut to bits!’

  ‘A paper cut never killed anybody,’ Jake rejoined. He had stooped to pick up Miss Molpe’s shoulders, leaving her feet to Sterling. When the two men swung her towards Jake’s suitcase, however, her tongue whipped out like a long blue serpent.

  Jake dropped his end. ‘Jesus!’ he squawked.

  ‘Get her in! Just get her in!’ cried Coco. She had flattened herself against a wall in abject terror. Marcus was also paralysed; like Edison, he stood rooted to the spot, spellbound at the siren’s transformation into a coiling, wriggling, hissing, boneless thing. Only Holly and Newt darted forward.

  Miss Molpe tried to peck at them with her nose. She tried to cut them with her spurs. Thanks to the combined efforts of Newt, Holly, Jake and Sterling, however, she was finally overcome. They managed to thrust her into the suitcase.

  Then Jake slammed the lid shut and Holly sat on it.

  ‘Okay!’ Jake was breathless and damp with sweat. ‘Now we send Prot ahead to open the other door. When he’s done that, we’ll make a run for it. Agreed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Marcus was dubious. ‘One paper cut can really hurt. Imagine having fifty of them!’

  ‘I don’t like paper cuts,’ Edison whined.

  ‘Okay, I tell you what.’ Jake tried again. ‘How about we get Prot to hold open that other door and then we send one person to fetch blankets or tarpaulins or something from the outside world, which the rest of us can use to shield ourselves when we leave. How about that?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ said Sterling. Marcus gave Jake a thumbs-up sign. His mother nodded. Coco made an approving noise as Edison relaxed against her.

  Only Newt objected.

  ‘Wait!’ she shrilled. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ When everyone stared at her blankly, she added, ‘What about the little white dog?’

  55

  INFERNO

  ‘WE’RE NOT GOING BACK FOR THAT DOG,’ COCO DECLARED.

  ‘But we have to!’ cried Newt. ‘It’s our fault the poor thing’s trapped!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘We could send Prot,’ Marcus meekly suggested. ‘We could give him the flight number for Lysitte Run, and he could key it into the lift.’

  When Coco hesitated, Jake put his foot down. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘First things first. We need Prot to open that door.’ Stooping, he addressed the robot. ‘Open that door, Prot,’ he said, pointing through the snowstorm of brochures. ‘And hold it open. Understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ Prot droned in response. ‘I must open that door and hold it open.’

  ‘Correct.’ Jake turned to face the others as Prot trundled off to execute his command. ‘When the door’s open, I’m going out to get blankets.’

  ‘No. Not you.’ Holly grabbed Jake’s wrist. ‘You don’t even know where my blankets are.’

  ‘So why don’t you tell me?’ He sounded impatient. Holly wouldn’t yield, though; she shook her head.

  ‘With any luck, it’s my caravan out there,’ she replied. ‘And if it is, then I know just where to look for things. Wait here and let me do it. I’ll be back in three seconds.’

  ‘But Mum,’ Marcus protested, ‘have you seen what you’ll be walking into?’ He himself had been watching the robot plough through a whirlwind of bombarding brochures, which were hitting Prot’s metal hide with such force that they made clinking noises as they bounced off it. ‘Those things are really going to hurt!’

  Holly simply smiled. ‘I’ve had a root canal, Marcus. Nothing else will ever come close to that,’ she assured him.

  Prot, meanwhile, had reached the other side of the room – and had pulled open the door, as instructed. When a sudden gust of fresh air blew a path through the paper, Holly saw her chance. ‘Off I go!’ she cried, darting forward. But she was wasn’t quick enough. By the time she reached the desk, she was almost invisible; hundreds of brochures were swarming around her like bees. To protect her eyes, she had to fold her arms across her face.

  Then she veered off course because she couldn’t see where she was going.

  ‘Mum! No!’ Marcus shouted. Jake didn’t think twice. He plunged straight after her, with Marcus close behind him. There was an immediate reaction from the brochures, which descended on Marcus so thickly that he soon found it hard to breathe. They plastered themselves over his nose and mouth. They became tangled in his hair. No matter how many he pulled off or batted away, more and more kept coming.

  ‘Newt! Stop!’ Coco screamed. There was a flash of light and a smell of smoke. Jake gave Marcus a push, bawling, ‘Get out! That way! Quick!’

  All at once Marcus found himself stumbling past Prot into a familiar, brick-walled, stone-floored cellar.

  ‘Oh!’ He turned around. ‘Mum! Look! We’re home!’

  But Holly wasn’t
listening. She was too busy dodging the brochures, some of which were now on fire. They careened over her head, singeing the paint and igniting other brochures, until they dropped, blackened and shrivelled, onto the office carpet. There they lay, smouldering like cigarette butts, while Coco shrieked and Prot made a high-pitched fire-alarm noise.

  Squinting through the chaos, Marcus could just make out that Newt was holding the cigarette lighter.

  ‘Christ!’ Jake roared at her. ‘Did you set fire to the pamphlets?’

  Holly, meanwhile, was crawling across the carpet, which had already begun to send up little plumes of smoke.

  ‘Well, somebody had to do something!’ Though Newt defended herself loudly and fervently, no one paid any attention. Her father was trying to lift Jake’s suitcase, which had suddenly become much heavier. Jake had doubled back to help him. Holly was now on her feet, staggering towards the exit with her head down.

  ‘Here, Mum!’ called Marcus. ‘It’s safe in here!’

  He reached out and grabbed her sleeve, guiding her over the threshold. None of the burning brochures followed her; they seemed unable to. They were stuck inside the office, like fiery flecks inside a snow globe.

  Beyond them, in the lift, Coco was hanging back. She’d wrapped a fold of her robe around Edison and was staring, aghast, at the flames that were licking along the carpet near one of the display shelves.

  ‘I’ll get water!’ Holly cried. ‘Water and blankets!’ She whirled around and raced up the cellar stairs, just ahead of Marcus.

  ‘Wait! Mum!’ he protested. ‘Be careful! It might not be our caravan!’

  But it was. Marcus knew it was. Because on finally emerging from the open banquette seat, he found that he could smell sweaty gym clothes.

  His mother was already pulling blankets out from under the bed. ‘Here!’ she exclaimed, throwing them at Marcus. ‘Take these down! I’ll get some water!’