Archer's Goon

  Howard stopped there and waited for Ginger Hind. Ginger Hind stopped by a red cone six yards away. “Come on,” said Howard. “What are you waiting for?” Ginger Hind said nothing and did not move. He may have been afraid that the Goon was waiting in ambush down the passage, but Howard did not care. He walked toward him. They both were about the same height, and Ginger was older, but he was wiry where Howard was solid. There was still enough light to see to hit him by, and Howard knew he would win. But Ginger Hind shuffled away backward. “Like that, is it?” Howard said nastily. “Doesn’t it look so much fun without the rest of your gang?”

  Ginger Hind said defensively, “Shine said follow you but not hurt you.”

  “You couldn’t hurt me,” said Howard. “Not on your own.”

  He took another step forward. Ginger Hind backed again.

  “I’ve got my orders,” he said.

  There was a scared, undecided note to his voice which made Howard thoroughly disgusted. “Orders!” he said. “Shine put a hex on your mind. And you let her!”

  “Yeah?” said Ginger. “How do you think you know that?”

  Howard turned away. “Because,” he said over his shoulder, “she tried it on me, too. That’s how.” He left Ginger Hind standing by the red cone and jumped across the moat. He was, for some reason, so annoyed, disgusted, and agitated that he almost missed the side passage and jumped into the wall. He had to save himself with a sideways sort of scramble. Just as well he’d managed to, he thought as he strode rather unsteadily down the passage. Ginger Hind would have laughed like a drain if he’d fallen in the ditch. Funny the way Ginger Hind had gone from being a great threat to just seeming pathetic. Forgetting the wine, Howard thought that it was probably because he found out that Ginger Hind descended from Hathaway, too, and was only a relative like Auntie Mildred.

  Then, just outside the kitchen door, it hit Howard. Ginger Hind was no relative of his. Nobody was, as far as he knew. He did not know who he was. But surely, he thought as he opened the door, Mum and Dad would know.

  Catriona and Quentin were sitting facing each other across the purple heart on the kitchen table. Catriona did not have her earplugs in, although the television was blaring Viennese waltzes and the drums were distantly thumping below in the cellar. Quentin had his arms folded and his mouth set. The air was thick with the row they had been having.

  Too bad, Howard thought. “Mum …” he began.

  But just then the Goon came stooping in under the door to the hall. “Put her to bed,” he announced.

  Catriona murmured, “Oh, thank you,” rather absently, and Howard somehow changed what he had been going to say.

  “Mum,” he said, “Dad. I went and saw Hathaway. He didn’t send that letter about the taxes, but he says he’ll help find the money. And he’s going to stop digging up the road.”

  They all were looking at him, even the Goon, as if they were amazed. “Howard,” said Catriona, “what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” said Howard. “Hathaway’s OK. He really does live in the past, you know. About four hundred years ago. You descend from him, Mum. Dad may descend from him, too. He says we’ve got to get hold of Erskine. Erskine and Venturus may be covering up for Archer.”

  “Yes, but—” said Catriona.

  And Quentin said, “Now look, Howard—”

  Howard said, “Now I’m going to do my violin practice.” He pushed past the Goon and went away upstairs. There he disconnected his mind and scribbled tunes on the violin and thankfully went on an imaginary flight in his best spaceship, out beyond Sirius, toward the center of the Milky Way. The noise he made did not seem to disturb Awful at all. When, after about half an hour, the radiation from the packed stars got too intense, Howard came back from the center of the galaxy and went to have a look at Awful. She was fast asleep. He went downstairs to find that the Goon had borrowed them an armful of fish and chips from somewhere. Howard went upstairs again and asked Awful if she wanted any, but she just bit him and went to sleep again.

  Howard was helping the Goon eat Awful’s share of chips when Fifi put her head around the back door.

  “Want some?” the Goon said, hopefully holding his plateful out toward Fifi’s face.

  Fifi shook her head. She looked very happy and businesslike. “I’ve only looked in,” she said. “Archer’s outside in the car. We’re going to have supper at the Bishop’s Arms. I came to say I’m leaving.” The Goon stared at her, stunned. “I’ve decided to move in with Archer,” Fifi explained. “We’re getting married. Mrs. Sykes, is it all right if I come back and collect my things tomorrow morning?”

  “I … suppose so,” Catriona said, looking a little stunned, too.

  Fifi beamed. “Thanks,” she said happily. “’Bye, everyone.”

  Her head vanished. The back door shut. The Goon uttered a great howl and dashed out into the hall. He gave another howl there, and they heard him dash somewhere else. As Howard was picking up the chair the Goon had knocked over, there came a mighty bursting crash. Silence followed. The drums still boomed from the cellar, but the rest of Torquil’s music seemed to have stopped.

  Quentin said to Catriona, “That creature of yours seems to have destroyed our television.”

  “That creature of yours,” Catriona corrected him. “It was useless anyway.”

  “There is no way,” said Quentin, “we can possibly afford another.”

  “That,” said Catriona, “is entirely your fault.”

  This icy exchange was interrupted by the Goon, who came sliding in around the door, drooping guiltily. “Telly just got broken,” he said. “Came to pieces in my hands.”

  “Oh, really?” said Quentin. “It sounded more as if you’d thrown it.”

  “Flew across the room,” admitted the Goon. “Can’t think how.” He grinned placatingly. “Find you another one?” he suggested. “New one might get better programs.”

  “I’d prefer to go without,” Catriona said firmly.

  “Pay you back somehow?” pleaded the Goon.

  “Yes,” said Quentin. “You can. You can take us to see Erskine.”

  The Goon looked at Quentin, and Quentin looked back. The Goon seemed to be struggling with feelings rather too large for his brain. “Won’t like it,” he said at last.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” said Quentin, imposing his will on the Goon, the way he did with students. “Take us.”

  There was a long, grudging pause. Then the Goon sighed gustily. “Take you tomorrow.”

  “Why not now?” said Quentin.

  “Got reasons,” said the Goon. “Can’t say.”

  And there, it seemed, the Goon stuck. He would not explain, and he would not argue; but he would not take anyone to Erskine that night. He went and cleared up the broken television instead. “Well, I suppose it makes no difference when we go,” Quentin said.

  On Saturday morning Hathaway was as good as his word. His men woke them at dawn again, noisily filling in the moat and all the other holes in Upper Park Street. Awful howled with agony. She had a headache that morning and could not understand why. Catriona howled at the noise also, but more softly. She put her earplugs in and stayed in bed. But Awful got up and tried to make everyone else miserable, too.

  “I hate Mum, I hate Dad, I hate Howard. And the Goon,” she chanted. “Mum is cross, Dad is fat, Howard is stupid, the Goon is ugly. The only one I like is Hathaway.”

  “You used to like Fifi,” Howard said.

  “Fifi’s gone boring,” said Awful. “There’s something wrong with my tea. It tastes of drains.”

  “Nothing wrong with it,” said the Goon. He had made the tea. “You look wrong. Pale yellow. Hangover.”

  “You have hangover hair then,” said Awful. “Hangover butter. Hangover toast. Hangover sun. I think the world’s ill.”

  At this, Quentin said Awful must go back to bed. Awful refused. She had heard by then that the Goon was taking Quentin and Howard to see Erskine, and she wan
ted to go, too. Catriona was the one who stayed at home.

  Howard went up to see Catriona with a cup of the Goon’s tea. He was afraid she was staying in bed because she was so angry with Dad. But when he saw her, lying with her earplugs in, looking thin and white, with the noise of the road mending filling the room, he saw she really was sick. Catriona raised herself on an elbow to take the tea with a grateful smile. And she began to talk without remembering to take her earplugs out.

  “Oh, Howard, bless you! I don’t know what I’d do without you! Don’t look so worried. I’m just tired out. This has been the most dreadful week I’ve ever lived through. You’ll have to forgive my not coming to see Erskine. He’s probably just like Torquil, and I can’t face another! Besides, somebody ought to be here when Fifi moves her things out. And I suppose Awful’s going to insist on going, and your father’s going to give in to her as he always does! Howard, you’re to look after Awful. I trust you.”

  “You’re always telling me that. I do look after her,” Howard said, forgetting Catriona could not hear with the earplugs in.

  “Yes, I know you will,” Catriona said, smiling affectionately. “You’re very good with Awful. Just look after her. Don’t leave her on her own, there’s a dear. If I know you’re keeping her safe, I won’t worry.”

  “Yes, all right,” Howard said, sighing. He wanted to ask Catriona about how she came to adopt him, but it was no good if she could not hear him.

  The Goon looked rather put out when Howard came downstairs without Catriona. “She not coming?” When Howard had explained how tired Mum was, the Goon considered deeply. “No car,” he said. “Need money. Need to go by bus. Need boots, too. Need to go in the sewers.”

  At this news Quentin swiftly put on his red and black checked coat before the Goon could borrow it and turned out Catriona’s purse. By some miracle, there was a five-pound note tucked in the back of it. Howard and Awful hunted for boots in the hall cupboard.

  “My brain’s loose,” Awful grumbled. “It keeps rolling about when I bend.”

  “Shut up,” said Howard. “Put those boots on.” His own Wellingtons were on Quentin by then. Howard had to make do with the old pair that had a hole in the left foot. After that, to his surprise, they were ready to go. He had supposed the Goon would hang about in order to see Fifi again before she left. But Fifi had still not come to collect her things when they left the house.

  Ginger Hind, on the other hand, was already on duty. He slouched after them on the other side of the road, keeping his black eye warily on the Goon, and stood watching in a shop doorway while they waited for a bus in Park Street. Howard tried to ignore him. Even if Shine knew they were going to see Erskine, there was not much she could do about it with the Goon there. They waited for twenty minutes.

  “This day’s got a hangover,” Awful grumbled. Howard knew what she meant. It was a cold gray day, and the sun was only a yellow smear among the chimney pots. It depressed him. He wondered if he had a hangover, too. He refused to believe he might be having forebodings.

  After the second twenty minutes Quentin said, “I deplore the way Hathaway runs these buses. He’s quick enough to dig our road up, but otherwise, he simply doesn’t try.”

  “It must be quite hard to run things from hundreds of years in the past,” Howard protested.

  The Goon suggested, “Learn to drive?”

  “Never,” said Quentin. “My mission in life is to be a passenger.”

  Awful began chanting, “Hathaway, send a bus. Hathaway, send a bus.” After a while it was almost as if the chanting had worked. Two buses came along together. There was room for them all in the one behind, but not, to Howard’s pleasure, any room for Ginger Hind. He came sprinting up just as the bus started to move, only to be turned away when he got there.

  Lost him! Howard thought gleefully, and he enjoyed the slow bus ride much more than he would have done with Ginger among the passengers. He found he was quite excited at the thought of meeting Erskine at last.

  The bus took them right to the other end of town—the part on the map at school that had been marked “Industry”—and dropped them at the end of a row of little red houses that were all joined together. Beyond that the town just petered out into big khaki-colored sheds that looked like factories, although they did not seem to be working, or wide fields mostly made of weeds and half bricks.

  “Who farms industry?” Howard asked, thinking he or she did not seem to be doing a very good job.

  “Shine,” the Goon said after some thought. “Not interested.”

  “I can see that,” Quentin said impatiently. “Where to now?”

  The Goon bent down to a manhole cover in the road at their feet. He hooked his large fingers in it somehow, and somehow he tore it up, leaving a square dark hole with an iron ladder leading down into it. “Down here,” he said. “As good as any.”

  “Or as bad,” Quentin agreed. “Lead on then.”

  The Goon swung himself into the hole and went swarming down the ladder as easily as a baboon down a tree. Quentin followed slowly. “I think,” Quentin said to Howard with only his face sticking out of the ground, “that our friend has at last found his true home.” Then his face disappeared. Awful climbed into the hole, too. Her headache was going. Howard could hear her saying excitedly that she liked this place as he climbed into it after her. The ladder was screwed into slimy brick wall. The hole grew rapidly darker as Howard climbed down. There was a sound like a river rushing below and a growing putrid smell.

  “Isn’t it smelly!” Awful said cheerfully when Howard arrived beside her on a grayly seen brick platform. The rushing sound was very near and loud there, and Awful was right about the smell.

  The Goon picked up a large electric lantern from a niche in the brick wall. As he did so, there was a hollow clanging thump from above. Thick darkness fell.

  “The lid seems to have shut,” Quentin remarked, sounding a little nervous, out of the nearby thick dark.

  “Bound to,” said the Goon. He switched on the lantern. By its light they could see an arched brick passage, running to left and right, and black liquid decorated with yellow foamy blobs, also running from left to right. Howard quickly decided not to look too closely at that liquid. Things were being carried past in it that he would rather not know about.

  Luckily there was not much time for looking. The Goon set off quickly to the right, carrying the lantern, and they had to hurry after him in order to be able to see. The arched brick ceiling was rather low. The Goon had to walk doubled over, and his black figure ahead looked like a vast crab. Shadows and light slid off the damp bricks, and the rushing of the liquid was soon mixed with the sloshing of their four sets of feet. The smell was worse. They were stirring things up. Howard glumly felt cold nastiness seep in through the hole in his left boot. He was going to have to throw those boots away after this. Before long he and Quentin were having to bend over like the Goon because the roof became lower still. Uneasiness grew in Howard. He kept longing to straighten up, and the more he knew it was impossible, the more he longed.

  “Do you still like it?” he asked Awful, sloshing ahead of him.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  Quentin must have felt like Howard because he began to talk, almost nonstop, in a very hearty way. Bits and pieces of his talk came back down the tunnel to Howard, mixed with sloshing, light glinting, and the smell. “Sort of sameness to a sewer … seen one yard of it, you’ve seen it all … does Erskine stand this? … See Erskine as rather a small man, possibly a dwarf about the size of Awful.... Private, of course … way to solve family problems … problem family … only met Archer so far … Fifi and Archer. Fifi’s a nice girl, but … help seeing Fifi as the worst possible wife for Archer … Fifi clasping her hands and adoring … bound to make a man like Archer … even larger opinion of himself … Fifi in the ego-boosting line—”

  Howard was not wholly surprised when the Goon suddenly swung around, glaring light into their faces. “Shut up!” h
e said to Quentin. “Shut up about Fifi!” It was possibly just the light shining upward on his face that made it look so savage.

  Quentin shielded his eyes. “Don’t you like Fifi? Of course, I’ll shut up if you prefer. Please go on. I want to get out of here.” And when the Goon had turned around and gone sloshing on, Howard heard Quentin whispering to Awful to find out what had annoyed the Goon so.

  Howard sighed incredulously as he sploshed after them. It seemed impossible that his father had failed to notice the Goon’s huge devotion to Fifi. But he supposed that Dad had, after all, had rather a lot of other things to take up his attention.

  They sloshed for what seemed hours. Howard’s left boot was full and heavy when he suddenly found that the rushing liquid was parting company with the walkway. It went pouring thunderously away into the dark. The Goon’s light picked up a small metal ladder leading to a stout metal door. The Goon reached up and tore the metal door open, causing them all to blink in the wan gray daylight that came flooding in. In the greatest relief they all scrambled up the ladder and out the door. Beyond was a concrete platform looking over a vast pit full of earth, ashes, tumbled tin cans, and motor tires.

  “Here,” announced the Goon as the metal door thumped shut.

  They looked slowly around. To one side of the pit there were mounds and humps, some square and regular, some old and odd-shaped. On the other side there were new metal sheds with rows of yellow rubbish vans lined up outside them. Ahead was a vast modern-looking building, all gleaming pipes and faintly drifting smokes.

  “Rubbish incinerator,” the Goon said, pointing to the building. The sight seemed to please him.

  They looked behind them. There they saw the fields of weeds and bricks, the khaki sheds, and, at the edge of the view but still not very far off, the row of small red houses where they had got off the bus.

  “We could have walked here over those fields,” Quentin pointed out. “Why ever didn’t we?”

  “Only two ways I can cross the town boundary,” said the Goon. “Sewer or rubbish van.”

  Quentin, Howard, and Awful turned slowly back to stare up at him. They had to tip their heads to look at his face properly. It was looking down at them with a sarcastic grin, and it did not seem stupid at all.