‘I need fresh meat.’
‘Well. What’s stopping you, darling?’
‘Nothing.’
Paul sat up and licked his dry lips. He could hear Boney-M still shouting, but couldn’t see him, and it wasn’t only him: there were other voices, distant and small, hundreds of them, thousands, yammering, buzzing like bees, humming bees, jabbering out their nonsense.
He wished they would all just go away and leave him alone.
‘SHUT UP!’
He lifted his knife and slashed at the stale air, stabbing ghosts. He looked at the blade, flashing and shimmering. Held it close to his face. Sniffed it, taking in the sick smell of death. There was a faint red smear on the steel; he licked it off, tasting the harsh, metallic tang of the knife and the warm, electric jolt of iron in the blood sizzling through his tongue. Electric. Plugging him back in. Ready for action.
He moved slowly and carefully, out of the tower room, down the stairs and out across the roof. He crossed over the blue-grey expanse of tiles, loping along, stopping now and then to squint through the dirty windows, to catch sight of one of them – down there. Fresh meat.
He was a hunter. And if he didn’t kill he wouldn’t live.
82
‘We are the Twisted Kids. Twisted gits, the gifted twits!
We are the screwed-up, twisted kids.
Our life’s a joke, our legs are crap,
We try to walk but slip and slap.
You wouldn’t want to ask us round for tea …’
Skinner was up on the trolley, singing at the top of his voice.
They’d sat Lettis next to him. She wouldn’t walk, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t react to anything. She just sat there, with that hopeless stare. Since she’d climbed down from the tower they’d had no other response out of her. She hadn’t even blinked when she’d seen Skinner and his friends from the warehouse, Trinity and Fish-Face. And now Skinner was trying to cheer her up.
It didn’t seem to be helping.
Skinner was enjoying himself, though. His voice rang out and was the only thing any of them could hear as they plodded along the wide expanse of the M4.
At first Ollie had wished he would be quiet. They needed to be able to listen for any signs of danger, to know if anything, or anyone, was nearby. And Skinner’s out-of-tune singing would be heard by every living thing for miles around. But he’d got used to it, and was quite enjoying it now. At least Skinner’s singing meant they were still alive. Not beaten. Despite losing half their number.
God. What would the others say when they got back? Would they understand? It was worse for the museum crew, of course. They’d lost a lot of friends. Ollie had hardly known them really. And he hadn’t really been that close to Big Mick and Jake either, when it came down to it. They were with Blue. They’d only all linked up a couple of weeks ago. And …
Ollie grunted. Told himself not to be such a jerk. He knew what he was doing: trying to distance himself from what had happened so that it didn’t hurt so much.
He was walking along with Fish-Face and Trinity. Now and then Trinity mumbled a few words of the song and chuckled, but Fish-Face was as silent as Lettis. Ollie didn’t know what to make of her. She seemed so distant; her peculiar face was like a mask. Ollie couldn’t read her. Didn’t know if she was sad or happy, bored or what. Trinity seemed chatty enough, though.
Ollie had found out that Trinity actually had several names. As a whole, ‘they’ were called Trinity, but the boy part called himself Trey and the girl part called herself Trio. Three names. That was fitting. Ollie didn’t ask if the thing on their back had a name.
Trinity had four legs, two normal-sized ones and two short ones that they kept tucked up under their belly. The bodies were joined down the side, and as far as Ollie could tell they only had three arms. Trey and Trio bickered with each other the whole time and Ollie couldn’t imagine what it must be like being permanently joined to someone like that. They worked efficiently enough, though.
Skinner was standing up now, the better to sing.
‘He always this noisy?’ Ollie asked as Skinner launched into a new verse.
‘Yeah,’ said the girl, Trio. ‘He gets bursts of, like, happiness, and then he gets long periods of being, like, down. And when he’s happy he sings. He’s not being disrespectful.’
‘We’re not used to other people,’ said the boy, Trey. ‘We never mixed. Never met anyone outside of our group. So we … well, we probably don’t feel about other people as deeply as we should. We’re quite turned in on ourselves. Only care about each other.’
‘Yeah,’ said Trio. ‘It’s like we know it was a bummer what happened to your friends, but … well, we’re free at least.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Ollie. ‘I hardly knew them, to be honest. Doesn’t really make it any better, though.’
‘Was it bad in there?’ said Trio.
‘Some of the worst I’ve seen,’ said Ollie. ‘We should have been there for them. Gonna have nightmares about this one long term. It was like falling. Out of control. I nearly lost it. Three times. I was attacked three times. Three times I nearly died. I was stupid.’
‘You’ll be safe now then,’ said Trey.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s the rule, haven’t you heard? The rule of three. Everything happens in threes. That’s how the universe rolls.’
‘Yeah? Not sure I’ve heard that one.’
‘He talks a lot of bollocks,’ said Trio. ‘He made the rule up. As a way of explaining how we got like this. Like we’re important somehow. Part of God’s plan. Yeah, right, good one. Special. Massive cock-up more like.’
Ollie glanced down at Trinity’s legs, was impressed at how they worked together, not tripping over each other, in step. The two kids fitted round each other very well. If they even were an ‘each other’ and not one person …
‘We’re not a cock-up,’ said Trey. ‘We’re part of a grand tradition. The three wise men, the three musketeers, three blind mice, the three bears, the three little pigs, and us – the holy Trinity.’
‘Oh, stop there,’ said Trio. ‘You’re getting embarrassing, my little appendage. We have never even begun to be holy. Don’t ever say that, Trey. And don’t say that either.’
‘Say what?’
‘What you were just thinking. That was a well stupid thing to think.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Trey is full of it,’ said Trio. ‘But he’s right in one thing. We’ve spent too long by ourselves. We’ve had too long to think about stuff and now he’s making up mystical hogwash like it’s his own stupid religion. The mighty rule of three.’
‘I won’t be the only one to make up a religion,’ said Trey. ‘You’ll see. There’ll be three of us. Always comes in threes.’
‘He’s just saying that, you know,’ said Trio. ‘He’s got no actual proof.’
‘Don’t listen to her,’ Trey protested. ‘It’s the God’s own. I’ve observed it, and you will too. Everything works in threes. One-two-three O’Leary. So today is your lucky day. Three is your magic number. Three times you fell into the fire and three times you were rescued from the flames. So, because you’ve nearly died three times, it can’t happen again.’
‘Yeah,’ said Trio. ‘Next time you’ll actually die.’
‘Cheers, that’s a nice thought,’ said Ollie.
‘Oh my gosh. This is awkward. That came out all wrong. I am blushing,’ said Trio. ‘Didn’t mean that. Sounded harsh.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Ollie. ‘We all do it. Make dark jokes. It’s that or flip out.’
‘Don’t you flip out on us,’ said Trey. ‘You are supposed to be taking us to a better place.’
‘I’ll do my best. But I’m not looking forward to trying to go to sleep tonight. I know when I close my eyes …’
‘We’ve all got bad films in our heads,’ said Trio. ‘Don’t think about it.’
‘I’m trying. So tell me, how does it work then?’ Ollie asked Trey.
‘Your rule of three?’
‘There’s three of everything in the world,’ said Trey. ‘Like the three of us.’
‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Ollie, ‘I was wondering. That thing on your back … is it alive?’
‘Hey,’ said Trio, with mock offence. ‘That thing on our back is not a thing, it’s a person. He’s Mister Three. And he is very much alive.’
‘Yeah, sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Trey. ‘To tell you the truth, he’s a pain in the arse. Literally.’
‘He sleeps his life away,’ said Trio. ‘Wakes up every few days, looks around, has a moan and then nods off again. Most of the time he doesn’t bother us, but sometimes, God give me strength and slap me down for thinking bad of the poor little deformed thing, I wish we could slice him off. He keeps us awake for days.’
‘This is all too much for me to take in,’ said Ollie. ‘Too much has happened. Your rule of three thing, I’m not sure I get it.’
‘Just look around you,’ said Trey, excited. ‘We’re three of us in one, me and Trio and Mister Three. Yeah? And how many of us Twisted Kids came with you? If you count us as one, as three in one, there’s us and Fish-Face and singing Skinner. Sitting on his trolley. Three. How many trolleys in all?’
‘Three,’ said Ollie.
‘Three is right. The church? That was significant. So there will be three churches.’
‘How do you mean? Where will they be?’
‘In your story. It’s like, where are we going?’
‘To the Natural History Museum.’
‘There’s going to be three museums then. And where have we been?’
‘Your warehouse.’
‘So three warehouses as well. You’ll see. There’ll be three of them – three warehouses, three museums, three churches, three roads walked, three friends lost, three friends found, three little kids rescued. They’ll all be important in your life.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Trio. ‘As I said, it’s all crap.’
It may be crap, Ollie thought, but at least it was distracting crap. So that he didn’t have to think too much about the long walk back to safety. All those miles stretching out ahead of them, with the chance of being attacked anywhere along the way. Down the motorway and on into London, over the broken bridge – the Hammersmith flyover, through the dead streets of town.
To bring back three trolleys of drugs and a huge load of bad news.
And then what?
83
Monkey-Boy was climbing. It was how he’d got his nickname. He was always climbing things. He was small and so skinny he hardly weighed anything and he crawled up like a lizard, fingers spread, gripping with his knees.
He was scaling one of the stone supports at the side of the main hall to get to the gallery on the floor above. Ella was sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching him, gnawing on a biscuit. The museum kids made them from flour and water; they were hard and dry and didn’t taste of anything except salt, but they helped keep the hunger away. Ella had collected a small store of them that she kept in her pocket to chew on whenever the hunger chewed at her.
She’d offered Monkey-Boy one if he could get right to the top. He was doing well. It looked like she was going to have to give one of her biscuits up. Never mind. She liked Monkey-Boy. He was probably the best friend she had left of all the kids who’d come out of Holloway. He reminded her a little bit of her brother, Sam …
She gave a little shiver and sniffed. She tried not to think about Sam. It made her too sad. At first, after they’d left Waitrose, she’d hoped he might still be alive somehow, that he might escape from the grown-ups who’d captured him and come back to her. He’d always promised he’d look after her. And he always had – even though he was smaller than her. That was the thing about Sam: he was older by nearly two years, but he’d always been tiny. Dad had called him ‘shrimp’, which he hated. To Ella he hadn’t been a shrimp, he’d been her hero. He’d been gone for days and days now, though, and she knew that she was never going to see him again.
He was gone forever.
She had to forget him or his memory would always make her sad. Like a ghost hanging around. When she pictured him he was trapped in the car park at Waitrose, stuck in a corner with grown-ups coming in at him from all around. What use was a memory like that? She roughly wiped away a tear with her sleeve. Bad thoughts didn’t help anything.
‘I’m up!’ Monkey-Boy called down triumphantly, waving his hands and whooping, his long fair hair hanging down in his face.
‘Well done.’
‘So do I get my biscuit now?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But you said!’
‘I’m joking you.’
‘Not funny.’
‘You’re funny.’
‘I’m the Monkey Man.’ He was singing now, as if it was a nursery rhyme. ‘No one else can climb as high as I can. Come up here.’
Ella wriggled to her feet and walked quickly over to the stairs where the statue of the granddad sitting in his chair watched over the hall. It was nice in the day, when they could run around in this part of the museum and explore and play. They didn’t have to worry about any grown-ups, or the spider man, or the slenderman, or whatever it was.
It was different at night. At night they all came out, all the crawling fears, but then Ella and the others stayed safely locked behind the iron bars of the minerals gallery. She couldn’t think of this place as home yet, not like Waitrose had been. Any more scares here at the museum and she wasn’t sure she could cope. She would run away. Maybe back to Buckingham Palace. It had been safer there, even if David, the boy in charge, had been bossy and weird. The most important thing was to be safe. To have food and water and not be attacked by grown-ups. Nothing else really mattered.
When she got up to the next level she found Monkey-Boy looking at the human exhibits: models of cavemen and Neanderthals and old skeletons were all mixed up with stuffed apes. Ella didn’t like the models. They were too realistic. They had clever, sneaky eyes and she feared they’d come alive. Monkey-Boy was making faces at one of them.
‘I can climb higher than any of these losers,’ he said.
‘That’s because they’re dead,’ said Ella. ‘Dead and stuffed. They’re creepy.’
‘The dead can’t hurt us,’ said Monkey-Boy.
Ella looked at the figures standing there, waiting forever. The orange hairy face of an orang-utan, the friendly face of a chimp, the glass eyes of a caveman, and a pale face, with dark-rimmed eyes, white skin, black hair, at the back, behind the other exhibits, in the darkness.
That blinked.
Ella opened her mouth, wanting to scream, but could make no sound come out. Her breath was tangled inside her. Frozen.
She grabbed Monkey-Boy’s arm. So tight he yelped and pulled away sharply.
‘Be careful,’ he said, and then he saw her face. Panic came into his eyes. He searched around wildly, trying to see what it was that had spooked her. Finally Ella pointed, waving her arm … at nothing. Only shadows.
The face had gone.
She had seen it, though. She was sure she had seen it. Something alive. The slenderman. The spider. The thing. There was movement to their right, coming fast round the end of the cabinets, and finally she screamed, long and high and shrill, and Monkey-Boy saw it too. A person. A boy. Tall. Dressed all in black, his clothes shiny and filthy, with dark stains all over, and in his hands a knife, raised and ready.
Again Ella screamed. And she ran and Monkey-Boy ran and the black figure ran after them. And Ella got trapped among the cabinets. Could go no further. Monkey-Boy with her. Trembling. There had to be a way out, but in her panicked confusion the cabinets had made a wall around her, the apes and cavemen grinning at her.
And then she heard voices. People were coming out of the minerals gallery at the far end of the balcony, behind the slenderman.
‘What i
s it? What’s the matter?’ It was Maeve, running ahead of the others, unarmed but unafraid.
‘What is it?’ she repeated. The only answer Ella could give was another scream.
The slenderman made a grab for Monkey-Boy, who somehow managed to duck and wriggle away from him. He slashed at thin air with his bright and shiny knife, but Monkey-Boy jumped up on to the stone railing, then swung out and round and up on to one of the stone columns that supported the great arches above them. He scampered up, got clear and disappeared from sight.
That left only Ella. She crouched down, trying to make herself small.
At last Maeve had realized what was going on.
‘You get away from her!’ she screamed.
The slenderman turned to face the bigger kids, saw that there were too many and left Ella behind. Made a dash for the stairs. More people were coming up from below.
‘Watch out!’ Ella shouted as he got near to them. ‘He’s got a knife.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s him! It’s him!’
The slenderman reached the top of the stairs at the same time as the first of the kids. He barged into them, knocking two of them back down on top of their friends, and then he howled and carried on around towards the tree room at the back of the hall.
Maeve put out her arms and scooped up Ella, hugging her close to her body. Ella so wanted it to be over, but didn’t know if the slenderman had got away or not. She could hear running, shouting, the sounds swallowed up and echoing away around the building. She looked into Maeve’s face.
‘Will they get him?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Maeve. ‘They’ll get him. You come with me. I’ll take you back to the minerals gallery.’
‘Don’t ever let me go,’ said Ella.
‘I won’t, darling,’ said Maeve. ‘You’re safe now.’
Ella closed her eyes, enjoying for a moment the lies that Maeve had told her. Dreaming that in another world they were true. The world that Sam lived in. She knew that they wouldn’t catch the thing. She knew that she wasn’t safe and that Maeve would let her go. Sometime. She’d have to. She couldn’t hold on to her forever.