The sound alerted the other kids who spun round to see a good twenty or so sickos spread out across the road. The adults had been shadowing them, attracted by the sounds of the battle and the smell of fresh blood.
Olivia was too frightened to shout ‘Run’ – the word froze in her throat – but DogNut shouted it for her.
‘Run! Get the hell out of here!’
18
One thing the older kids had learnt was that if they pushed themselves they could always outrun a sicko. The problem was Olivia. She was smaller than the rest of them, slower, and had less stamina. As a group, they could only move as fast as the slowest member. At first none of them was thinking about anything other than getting away. They all headed in the same direction, with DogNut in the lead, working on animal instinct, simply trying to survive.
As he ran, though, and recovered from the initial shock, DogNut realized it wasn’t as simple as that. He had brought these kids here. He was responsible for all of them. If he was going to return to the Tower as a hero and kick Leo’s ghost into touch, he was going to have to act like a hero.
But heroes in books weren’t tied down by ten-year-old girls, were they?
He looked back. Olivia was three or four metres behind them, her face ugly with fear. A thought flashed through DogNut’s mind. If they left Olivia behind, they would be much more likely to get away. Should he sacrifice her for the good of the rest of them?
Felix saw him looking.
‘Leave her,’ he grunted.
‘No!’ DogNut yelled it much louder than he had intended. So the decision had been made for him then. He ran back to Olivia and grabbed her hand, jerked her off her feet as he pulled her along. The nearest sickos were almost close enough to touch.
Olivia was screaming.
‘Shut up!’ DogNut shouted at her, and miraculously she fell silent. ‘Save your breath. I ain’t leaving you.’
Her little skinny legs were bouncing and skittering as her feet tried to get a grip on the road. Marco saw what was happening and pushed past Felix to help, taking hold of Olivia’s other hand.
He had heard what Felix had said and he gave him a dirty look as they drew level.
‘Wanker …’
The main road was full of sickos, so they veered off and ran down the side of Harrods where in the fading light they could just make out that the way ahead was mercifully clear. DogNut saw Courtney up at the front, in the lead now, pounding along. She was one powerful girl and moved fast despite her size. Finn was between Felix and Courtney. DogNut, Marco and Olivia were at the back, dropping steadily behind the others.
‘Try and catch up!’ DogNut gasped, and the three of them accelerated.
They were quickly in a more residential area, where they bombed round a corner into a terraced street of grand, white-painted houses.
‘I gotta stop,’ said Finn, and he doubled over, clutching his chest. ‘I can’t run properly with my arm like this. Stitch.’
The rest of them slowed, then also stopped. They stood in a loose group, their eyes constantly searching for any movement in both directions. At this time of the evening, as the last of the light drained from the sky, it was easy to see things in the shadows. They all felt jittery, panicked. DogNut sent Felix back to the corner to keep watch.
‘We need to get off the street,’ Courtney panted. ‘Keep under cover for a bit. Wait for them to go away. If we stay out here, we’ll just attract more of them.’
‘Over here!’ Olivia was shouting and pointing at one of the houses. ‘There’s people in there. Kids. I seen them.’
‘Are you sure?’ Marco looked where she was pointing.
‘I seen them. Sitting at a table. One of them waved at me.’
DogNut trotted over to the pavement. The building was set back from the road behind railings. He peered in through the windows and could just make out in the gloom three kids sitting at a kitchen table that looked like it was covered with plates of food. One of the kids did indeed have his arm raised.
‘They’re coming!’ Felix hissed from the corner, then ran back to join his mates.
‘Inside. Quick,’ said DogNut. ‘Come on. All of you.’ The front door was open a crack, the lock dangling uselessly. Maybe the kids had just broken in. DogNut tutted. He’d need to teach them a thing or two about security.
There was a bad smell in the house, but they were all used to bad smells. Hardly anyone washed regularly or changed their clothes. Toilets and showers didn’t tend to work any more. Without refrigeration food quickly went off.
The hallway was filled with heaps of magazines and newspapers, stacked up on either side so that there was only a narrow corridor running down the middle.
Finn remembered how the newspapers used to pile up at home before someone cracked and left a big stack out for the recycling.
Well, Jesus, someone needed to take this lot out something bad.
Felix was the last one in. He quietly pushed the door shut then noticed that there was a heavy stone bust of Shakespeare standing on the floor, with scrape marks leading across the floorboards. It must have been put there to keep the door closed. It wouldn’t stand up to much force, but it would at least stop the door from blowing open. He slid it over and jammed it up against the door.
He wondered why the kids in the kitchen hadn’t put it back in place.
There were other questions nagging at him, but he was too panicked and desperate for this to be a place of safety to think about them too closely. He followed the others down the hallway into the kitchen.
The first thing he noticed was that the room was totally rammed with junk. There were teetering piles of saucepans and frying pans and dirty plates, bin bags bursting, overflowing with rotten food, as well as toasters, microwaves, scales, deep-fat fryers, mixers, juicers … Every appliance you could imagine was stuffed in here, like a junkyard. And not just kitchen equipment – there were things that shouldn’t have been in a kitchen: Hoovers, TVs, bicycles, footballs, golf clubs, clothes, musical instruments, books and magazines, garden tools. It was as if someone had taken the contents of every house on the street and emptied them all into this room. You could barely move.
The next thing Felix noticed was that the three kids at the kitchen table were dead. And worse. Mutilated. One of them, the boy who had appeared to be waving at them, had been torn in half, so that his body was missing from the waist down, and he had been plonked in the chair on the bloody stump of his torso. The waving arm didn’t belong to him at all, but had been ripped from one of the other kids, a girl, and stuck upright in a heavy milk jug on the table. Felix’s brain started turning fast. There were no signs of decay, which meant they hadn’t been dead long, which meant that whoever had done this to them might still be around.
Felix clamped his hand to his mouth to prevent himself from gagging and spoke through his fingers.
‘Oh, man, this is whack,’ he moaned. ‘We got to get out of here.’
‘We can’t.’ Courtney was at the window, crouched down and staring out. As the others saw her, they instinctively ducked down also.
‘They’ve come. There’s loads of them in the street.’
DogNut crept over to join her, walking bent double.
‘Shit. D’you think they know we’re in here?’
‘I don’t think so. Not yet.’
DogNut could just see what was going on outside. There were indeed about thirty sickos there, spread out and shambling aimlessly around. One or two had their heads tilted back as they sniffed the air.
‘D’you reckon they can smell us?’ he whispered.
‘With this stink in here? Who knows?’
‘There must be a back way out,’ said Felix. ‘A posh place like this will have a garden of some sort. Must do.’
‘Yeah.’ DogNut and Courtney moved away from the window and joined the others. They were all trying not to look at the dark shapes of the dead kids at the table.
They moved back into the hallway and headed toward
s the back of the house. Olivia was sobbing and snivelling, making little whispering noises. Marco pulled Felix aside and punched him in the arm.
‘You was gonna leave her,’ he hissed, letting the others go ahead.
‘Shut up,’ Felix replied.
‘No, you shut up. We stick together. We’re a team. We look out for one another. We all got to know that. Or none of us is gonna feel safe.’
‘Yeah, dickface, cos, like, I feel really safe right now,’ said Felix sarcastically. ‘We’re in some kind of house of horrors here with an army of sickos outside and it’s night time, and I can’t see a sodding thing, so, yeah, safe!’
‘Shut up.’
‘No, you shut up.’
They soon discovered that the garden at the rear of the house was lower than the street level. One floor down.
‘There’ll be a back door downstairs, probably,’ said Finn.
‘Yeah, and what else is down there?’ said Felix.
‘Shut up, Felix.’
‘You shut up, Marco.’
The stairs leading down to the basement were dark. DogNut fished a torch out of his pocket. He reckoned he could risk switching it on as it wouldn’t be visible from the street back here. Even so, he shielded the beam as he pressed the button and then moved quickly to the top of the stairs. They could see straight away that there was an even worse jumble of stuff in the basement than there was up here; even the stairs were piled with junk.
The torch beam was dancing about all over the place and DogNut realized he was shaking badly.
‘Come on,’ he said, trying to hold his voice steady.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Courtney. ‘Someone messed up those kids in the kitchen. What if they’re down there?’
DogNut hauled out his sword. It would be hard to use it in these cramped conditions, but it gave him confidence.
‘Any sicko down there is gonna get owned,’ he said, and set off, the rest of them crowding behind him.
The chaos at the bottom was unbelievable. Like the hallway, there were books and magazines and old newspapers piled right up to the ceiling, leaving only a narrow tunnel between them, giving the effect of being in a maze. DogNut crept cautiously ahead and as he turned the first corner he fully expected to see some kind of monster waiting for them. All he found, though, was another short length of tunnel, and another corner to turn.
There were black smears along the walls where someone had repeatedly passed by. Someone large and dirty.
DogNut took a deep breath through his mouth and pressed on.
As they explored further, they discovered that there were little pockets of space carved out of the stacks, like rooms within rooms. One was obviously used as a toilet, the floor was thick with excrement and filthy shredded paper. Another had piles of bones and half-eaten body parts in it, another was, weirdly, full of toy cars. Hundreds of them. One room contained hundreds of CDs and DVDs.
Felix was getting hysterical. This house was crazy.
‘I didn’t think anyone collected CDs any more,’ he giggled. ‘I thought everyone downloaded everything these days.’
‘Shut up, Felix,’ said Marco, though he was laughing too.
They realized that the maze extended under several houses, where holes had been knocked through the walls, and they soon lost all idea of where they were. The likelihood of finding a back door was getting ever more remote. Finally they reached the end of the maze where they discovered a sort of den, with a greasy sofa that had long since collapsed, a huge flat-screen TV and a desk with several computers on it. There were no windows, though, or doors, no way out other than back the way they had come. The kids were so disorientated now they had no idea which way the garden might even be, so there was no point in attempting the dangerous work of burrowing through one of the precarious walls of paper.
‘I guess we’ll have to go back upstairs and climb down into the garden,’ said Marco. ‘I don’t fancy being stuck in this maze when whoever lives here comes home.’
‘I hate this,’ said Olivia.
DogNut had to stop himself from snapping at her, telling her it was her fault they had come in here in the first place. It wasn’t her fault, really, was it? He was in charge. He was a kid, though – kids always tried to blame someone else. His torch beam was zigzagging more wildly than ever, skittering over the details in the den. Landing now on the black stain on the sofa, now on a small human hand underneath the television, now on the broken remains of a Scalextric set, now on an empty bottle of whisky.
The image of the sicko, sitting down here, watching the blank TV and drinking whisky was ridiculous. Ridiculous and creepy.
He clamped his elbow against his side to try to stop his hand from shaking. He hated showing fear in front of the others, but he knew they were all feeling the same. The smell and the lack of air down here was awful.
‘I want to go,’ said Olivia, and she spoke for all of them.
‘We’re going.’
They set off, retracing their steps. At least they knew what to expect on the way out. They hurried through the maze, trying to avoid the filth on the floor.
A few minutes later they came to the top of the stairs and DogNut had to switch the torch off or risk being seen from the street. It must be totally dark outside now. No light came through the frosted glass in the front door.
He went to the back window. It was locked and barred. Of course it was. In his hurry DogNut hadn’t registered it before when he’d looked out. This was a very rich part of town and the houses were plastered with security to keep burglars out.
‘This is no good,’ said Felix, joining him. ‘All the other windows is gonna be the same.’
‘We could try and break the locks,’ said Marco.
‘Too much noise, dumb-ass,’ said Felix. ‘They’ll hear us out there and break in before we could get this lot even half off.’
‘You got a better idea, wasteman?’
‘Why ain’t it so dark out the back?’ DogNut interrupted before they could get into another one of their pointless arguments.
‘What d’you mean?’ asked Felix.
‘There’s more light here than at the front.’
‘Shut up,’ said Courtney.
‘I’m only saying –’
‘Shut up and listen!’
‘What?’
‘Just shut up, will you!’
They all fell silent. It was then that they became aware of a strange rasping, gurgling sound, like some old piece of machinery ticking over.
‘What is it?’ said Olivia. She had to get out of here. She was going to faint. She knew she was. She was so frightened she was going to throw up any second now.
‘Central heating maybe?’ said Marco. ‘A boiler or something.’
‘How could anyone be running a boiler, you moron?’ said Felix.
‘I don’t know …’
‘It seems to be coming from over by the front door,’ said Courtney.
They listened again. The sound was closer than they had first thought.
Or else it had moved closer.
‘There’s something there,’ said Felix.
‘I don’t want to see it,’ Olivia wailed.
‘Put your torch back on, man,’ said Marco.
‘I can’t risk it,’ said DogNut.
‘We have to see what that is,’ said Courtney, in such a way that DogNut knew he had no choice.
He took out his torch again. His hand was shaking so uncontrollably that he was worried he might drop it. He held his breath and snapped the light back on.
For a moment the kids couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing.
And then DogNut understood that it hadn’t grown completely dark out the front. There was someone in the hallway, blocking the light.
Someone huge.
A man.
He completely filled the gap between the piles of newspaper and was staring at them with yellow-rimmed eyes.
He was monstrously fat, with two great naked
legs like tree trunks. He was wearing a pair of shorts with no shoes or socks and the remains of a vast sweatshirt that was ripped and full of holes. Barely able to contain his obscene bulk, the sweatshirt cut into his body like the string round a trussed-up chicken ready for roasting. Fat bulged out of the holes and his vast belly hung down over the top of his shorts.
He had great pendulous breasts and his hair was long and matted, with bits of food stuck in it. If it wasn’t for the straggly beard that framed his bulbous, sweating face they might have mistaken him for a woman. His skin was so dirty it looked black; his eyes stared out brightly, like the eyes of a coal-miner. There was snot streaming from his nose and into his half-open mouth. The noise they had heard was his breath rattling in his throat.
‘Stuff …’ he said. ‘Stuff …’
19
Courtney psyched herself up and ran at the giant with a roar, her spear aimed at his juddering belly, but he swatted it aside and the point stuck fast in the wall of newspaper. Courtney swore and abandoned it. As the man advanced on her she thumped him with her forearm. The blow bounced harmlessly off him, sending a ripple through his upper body.
‘Stuff …’ he said again, his voice squeezed into a wheezy high-pitched croak. He looked to be in his late twenties and he stank powerfully. He didn’t look badly diseased. There were a few spots on his face, but no major boils or sores. There was green mould growing on him, though, in all the folds and creases of his exposed flesh.
‘Stuff …’
As he moved along the hallway his sides rubbed against the walls of newspaper, making a rustling sound. Felix darted past Courtney and clumsily jabbed at him with his sword, but the blow was lost in the layers of fat.
DogNut ran through their choices. Stay here and try to fight the monster, try to push past him towards the front door, retreat into the basement with its maze of newsprint, or go upstairs. This last option seemed the safest choice, even though they had no idea what might be up there.
The giant plodded on, slow and steady, repeating the same word over and over.