Alexander's Army

  “Freya —?”

  “Okay, let’s get busy.” She pirouetted and moved to the back of the store, then slipped behind the counter and dropped out of sight, rustling around like a mouse in a wastepaper basket. I checked the time. Five minutes since we’d seen AJ leave. For now, at least, we were safe.

  “Nothing much here,” Freya reported. “Just paperwork and an old banana skin. Ow!” As she stood up, she bumped her head on the counter. It was then I saw the Tommy doll. It was sitting against the cash register, lit by a spot from the rear window, its cone-shaped head lolling off to one side. Suddenly, an arm sprang sideways.

  I gasped so loudly, even Freya squealed a little. “What?”

  “The doll. It moved.”

  She picked it up and played with the limbs. “Don’t be dumb. It was me, banging the counter. AJ’s not here, remember?” She tapped the doll’s head and put it back.

  I still shuddered. “It gives me the creeps, that thing. Look, leave our comic on the counter and let’s just —” My words dried up and the sentence fell away. I tried to swallow, but it seemed as if my tongue had grown to the size of a small pillow.

  In the stairwell, a light had clicked on.

  “He’s here,” I whispered.

  “How?” said Freya.

  “A back entrance. I don’t know. Let’s go.”

  “Chill out,” she shushed, stepping away from the counter. “I’d sense him if he was here. It’s probably one of those movement detector things.” And before I could stop her, she’d gone to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, “HELLO?!”

  No response.

  As she turned back to me, the light clicked off. “See?”

  I wasn’t convinced. I looked at the Tommy doll. It had slipped into a floppy heap of limbs. “This is too weird,” I said.

  “Well, man up, ’cause it’s gonna get worse.” She took a coin from her pocket. “Heads or tails?”

  “What are we flipping for?”

  “Who stands guard and who goes upstairs.”

  “No, Freya! We’ve done what we needed to do. Let’s just go.”

  “And tell Klimt what? That you had the chance to go up a floor but didn’t?”

  She flipped the coin and trapped it on the counter.

  “Heads,” I said reluctantly.

  She lifted her hand. “Typical. Heads. Your choice.”

  I picked the upstairs, mainly because I didn’t trust her not to disturb stuff. The basic agreement was this: She would stand outside the store and keep watch, with my number cued up on her phone. If AJ appeared, all she had to do was set my phone ringing and I would have time to hurry downstairs. Then one of us would tell him we’d found the door open and we hoped he didn’t mind but we’d put our competition entry on the counter.

  Then we’d leave.

  Simple.

  The light clicked on as I took the first step. The stairs were wide and bowing with age. Both sides were lined with stacks of old comics, the layers slipping against each other like a glacier making its way to the sea. Halfway up was a small square landing where the stairs doglegged away to the right. At the top of the steps was a poky bathroom with an old-fashioned toilet with a tank high up on the wall, painted green. It didn’t smell good. Water was dripping onto the floor, eating a sagging hole in the boards. Even here, there were posters of comic book heroes. I turned away, pinching my nose. It would have taken something heroic to cure that smell.

  Opposite the bathroom was a single-bed room, messy with clothes and unwashed dishes. Yet more comics were spilled around the floor. A wardrobe with a broken hinge stood next to a door that seemed to lead out to a fire escape. AJ’s trademark bow ties were arranged around an arched mirror propped against the wall, clipped to its edges like sleeping butterflies. I passed by that room as well and crept along a landing, into the room that would be over the shop. Like the bedroom, it was small and untidy, bursting with dusty storage boxes and comics piled up in ceiling-high columns. There were makeshift shelves full of figurines, too, and an old kitchen cabinet stuffed with rolled-up posters. I was about to turn away and go back to Freya, when I caught a glint of a metal stair between the boxes. It led to an open hatch in the ceiling. Another room. An attic.

  By now, I was thinking I had done enough. How much farther did I want to go? The answer, of course, just knocked and knocked. Up, Michael. If there’s anything to find, it will be in the attic.

  But I couldn’t stop thinking of scary movies I’d watched with Dad. How we’d loved to shout at the screen together. “Don’t go out into the garden!” “Don’t turn that handle!” “Don’t push that button!”

  Don’t go up those stairs.

  But I did.

  Using the light from my phone to guide me, I climbed the ladder and eased through the hatch. The roof space was high enough to comfortably stand up in. It could not have been more different from the rooms below. No clutter. No damp. No nasty smells. Although the rafters were visible, the joists were boarded. They led, like a catwalk, to a table against the gable wall. An office chair stood in front of it, an aluminum wastebasket just to one side, half-full of scrunched-up paper. On the table was a sloping board, the kind of thing an artist or designer might use. It was lit by a bent-over halogen light. On it was a drawing of a faceless soldier. He was holding a flamethrower.

  On the wall behind the table was a huge bulletin board covered with spreads from a comic book in development. Each spread was labeled with a page number and the title Alexander’s Army. It told, in graphic form, the story AJ had left under my door. There was his father, throwing plates at walls, beating the dog, shouting at his cowering son to stand up straight and act like a man, the face drawn so grotesquely close that it was possible to count the drops of spit flying off the man’s tongue.

  There was more. The story continued, beyond the part AJ had sent me. It showed how his teacher, Mrs. Roop, had found Alexander in a corner of the classroom with his head hunched over a notebook, drawing.

  Is that a soldier? she asked. It was one of the faceless Tommies, its trousers cut off at the midpoint of the shin, held up by a pair of suspenders. A coil of rope was slung around one of its shoulders, its booted feet splayed wide apart.

  Why does it have no features? she asked. She looked concerned. Her hand was partly covering her mouth.

  Alexander kept on drawing.

  In the next frame, Mrs. Roop asked another worried question: Is everything all right at home, dear?

  And Alexander replied, Dog’s got fleas. The next frame showed him pulling up his trouser leg to reveal a bite mark, red and blotchy.

  Are you treating him? the teacher said. Spraying him with anything?

  There the drawings ended. But next to them was a paragraph of printed text:

  Alexander shrugged. He thought about fleas and their horrible little bites. They itched. They kept him awake at night. They made him rub his shin with the heel of his shoe. Then his trousers got dirty and Mother would shout. Fleas were bad, Alexander decided. Fleas were a problem that needed to be sprayed. He looked at his drawing, at the gap between the soldier’s trousers and boots. He made a mark on the bare skin with his pencil. Gave the man a flea bite. There, it was done. Now the army had the enemy, too. And the army would know what to do about it. For a second or two, the pencil twirled in Alexander’s fingers. Then he bent forward and drew what he thought would be a gun in the soldier’s hands, a gun with tiny bullets for shooting fleas. But when he sat back and looked at the razzle-dazzle lines jumping out of the barrel, he knew it was something better than bullets. It was FIRE. He closed his book and put away his pencils. No more fleas in the house tonight.

  I stood away, panting in fright. But the story was nothing nearly as bad as what I saw next.

  On the far side of the bulletin board were some newspaper clippings bunched together in a rough kind of collage. I froze as I saw a familiar headline:

  BOY IN THRILLING CLIFF-TOP RESCUE

  It was a clipping from
the Holton Post, telling the story of how I’d saved Rafferty Nolan’s dog from falling off the cliffs on Berry Head. I lifted it aside and there I was, pictured holding the dog in my arms. Michael Malone. Schoolboy hero. AJ had known me even before I entered the shop.

  I riffled through the rest of the clippings, taking closer note of them now. There was stuff about Rafferty from a different newspaper, and a whole bunch of articles about weird goings-on with crows, including the incident at the garden center. And buried deep among them, yellowed with age, was one that chilled me rigid.

  LOCAL MAN DISAPPEARS IN MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

  Dad. There was an article on Dad. Why was AJ collecting info on my father?

  I backed away again, catching the arm of the halogen lamp. As the light shuddered around the rafters, I saw a glint of something where the angle of the roof met the wall of the building. An eye. A small dark eye.

  A crow.

  I thought at first it was her, Freya. But Freya would have had no reason to attack. The bird flew out of the eaves, straight at me. I flapped and beat it away with my forearm. It opened its beak but didn’t produce a sound as it veered off into the shadows again. That was it. I’d seen enough. Boy, I wanted to be out of that place. From now on, Klimt could deal with it.

  But I only got halfway back to the hatch.

  “Hello, Michael,” said a voice. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  Standing there in his boots and white coat and oversize glasses, arms angled out to his sides, was the Boffin.

  Before I could scream or run or attack him, a piece of wood flew across the space between us, struck me on the forehead, and dropped me to my knees. As I folded, too dizzy to resist, the wire from a TV aerial ripped away from its pins on a rafter and wrapped itself around one wrist. Something pulled my arms behind my back and tied my wrists together with the wire. All this time, the Boffin hadn’t moved. But as I started to pant and my panic level rose to a point where I knew I might make a reality shift, he crouched down in front of me and said, “Don’t. I know what you are. Trust me, it would be the last thing you did. The girl would die and you’d never get to hear what I know about your father.”

  Even then, half-dazed, I tried to play the game. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “One word: Bulldog,” he whispered.

  I dribbled some saliva, which instantly annoyed him. “Company, clear that up!” he barked, aiming his words into the space beside us. I thought I heard a patter of booted feet and what sounded like a ladder being erected. Right before my eyes, a tissue jumped out of a box on the desk and skittered across the boards. It dabbed at the spill, then scrunched itself up and flew away into the darkness. “Litter!” he shouted. Adding weirdly, “It does matter, Hodges! Ten laps. The lot of you. I’ve told you before, discipline is everything. Dissent will not go unpunished.”

  And the whole attic drummed to the eerie sound of running.

  The Boffin grabbed my chin. Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes swam like fish in a bowl. “You must at least be intrigued, Michael? Grimper! Lift your feet or you’ll go ten more!”

  “What do you want?” I panted.

  “Revenge,” he said plainly.

  “Why, what have I done?”

  “You, nothing. And if you do as I say, you won’t be harmed. It’s him I want, your boss, the top dog. I thought the girl would be my ticket. But I was wrong; you’re the real prize, aren’t you?”

  “If you’ve hurt her, I’ll …”

  “Company, HALT!”

  With a quick chuk-chuk of boots, the invisible army stopped running.

  The Boffin released his grip on my chin. “Find his phone. Quickly.”

  He blinked his eyes once. With great force, my jeans pocket was ripped from its seams. My phone tumbled out, along with some coins. He picked up the phone and started tapping the screen. “Why don’t we call her? She must be getting cold outside. And look, it’s beginning to rain.” He snapped his fingers and a blind rattled back on a sloping skylight. Heavy spots of water were crowning the glass. “Or perhaps we’ll send Charlie to keep her company?” He held out an arm and made clicking noises. The crow fluttered onto his wrist, teetering as it landed. “What do you say, Michael? Shall we invite the Amazing Crow Girl to our party?”

  “You’re crazy,” I snapped.

  He smiled again. “So would you be if you knew what they’d made me do.”

  “Who?”

  “Michael, Michael,” he tutted. He tapped the phone again and brought up an avatar of Chantelle, a pic I’d taken when she wasn’t looking. “This is one of their agents. Pretty, isn’t she? Wouldn’t show Freya if I were you.”

  “Let me go. Freya will come looking for me any minute.”

  With a spare finger, he stroked the crow’s wing. The bird tried to caw as it strutted restlessly along his arm. “Hear that, Charlie? She’s going to come looking. Your beloved mistress. Your dark crow queen. The half human you’ve been spying on for me. What is it, eh? What’s making you hop? Are you sensing her now? On the stairs, perhaps? Perhaps she’s hiding in the bathroom, ready to spring.”

  “FREYA!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “FREYA, HE’S GOT ME! RUN!”

  No response. No shout back or sound of retreat.

  The Boffin smiled, but this was no friendly chewing-gum grin. There was no sign of the bow-tied AJ on this side of his split personality. “No cavalry,” he said. “So what’s upsetting Charlie boy, eh?”

  He pushed his arm forward.

  “No!” I cried, thrashing around as the bird flew at me.

  “Company, hold him,” the Boffin growled.

  Instantly, the invisible army pulled me down flat, almost trapping the crow beneath my arm.

  “BE CAREFUL!” he thundered as Charlie spread his wings. “That bird’s worth more than twenty of you. What was that, Dobbs? You horrible little man. You break one feather off that tail and I’ll put you in a hole so deep the sky will be reduced to a single dot.”

  I felt the pinch of claws on my shoulder. “Get it off me!” I yelled as the beak jabbed my neck, close to the area where Freya had scratched me. Charlie nipped twice at the bandage, then ripped it off, exposing the wound beneath. I yelped as he pecked the scar. A warm wet trail ran under my collar.

  “Enough,” said the Boffin, flapping Charlie away. He pressed a thumb to the skin beside the cut. “Tainted you, hasn’t she? Darkened your blood. Perhaps she wants you to join her, Michael? So you can rule the crows together. Or am I being too romantic?”

  “What do you want?” I screamed. Why couldn’t I cause a shift and put him in a hole? But in a small and diminishing part of my mind, I already knew the answer to that. He was holding me at bay with a thread of hope, just as Klimt and the Bulldog had done. He clearly knew about UNICORNE. And that meant there was a chance he was telling the truth, that he really did know something about Dad.

  He stood up and walked to the desk. “You’re going to help me get to the Bulldog. In a moment, you’ll call them and say you’ve accelerated your reality, defeated Alexander, and the army is destroyed. Shut up, Hodges. It’s a ploy, you fool. They do know about the army, I take it? I’ve left enough clues by now.”

  “What do you mean, ‘accelerated my reality’?”

  He sighed deeply. “Grimper, give him a reminder of what we can do.”

  “Agh!” I felt a sudden pain in my calf. “Grimper” was pulling the hairs from my legs. I let him take three before I cried, “Enough!”

  “Stand down,” the Boffin muttered.

  “Ow!” Another hair went.

  “Grimper, STAND DOWN! Or it’s solitary again!”

  Fighting my wrist ties, I squirmed around and looked at the Boffin. A bead of sweat was glistening on his brow. Was it my imagination, or was the part of his mind that commanded the army becoming difficult to control? “All right. I know about the reality shifts. I’ve just never heard anyone say ‘accelerated’ before.”

  ?
??Interesting. Not part of the DNA program yet but still a Talen to be reckoned with. Your father trained you, then? Chip off the old block and all that?”

  “What do you know about my dad?!”

  He moved his head to one side, cracking a bone in the back of his neck. “Quick reminder of the rules here, Michael. When I ask a question, you answer me. Grimper …”

  “NO!” I pulled up my legs. “Dad didn’t teach me the reality shifts. It just happens. I … I can’t control it. Please tell me what you know. How do you even know about the Bulldog?”

  Too late. A wild flapping in the darkness claimed his attention.

  And then I heard what Charlie had sensed: Freya, in the rooms below, calling.

  “Michael? Where are you? What are you doing? It’s nearly time. And I’m sure I can sense him.” She was close, somewhere near the storage room.

  “FREYA, RUN!” I screamed as loudly as I could.

  “Company!” the Boffin roared. He clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut.

  I heard a squeal and a door slammed below, followed by thumping and Freya’s muffled shouts.

  The Boffin relaxed. He staggered a little as though the effort had proved too much. “Now she’s where she should be — caged,” he said.

  From the rough direction of her calls, I guessed he’d trapped her in the stinking bathroom.

  “No more talk,” he said, bringing the phone to my ear. “Make the call, just as I said, or I introduce the girl to my latest recruit.” He nodded at the flame-throwing soldier on the board. “Private Keeble is keen to demonstrate his loyalty — unlike some I could mention! In case you don’t know already, Michael, there’s only one thing the undead fear: fire.”

  “No …”

  “Number,” he growled. “Which of these bogus contacts is him?”