The Cockatrice Boys

  “Ah well, there are some natures, Colonel, who strongly dislike crossing running water, specially in wide channels, and will go out of their way to avoid it.”

  The train suddenly jerked to a halt.

  Bellswinger’s voice came over the intercom.

  “Basilisk attack, sir.”

  “Are the men at action stations?”

  “Yessir.”

  Colonel Clipspeak hurried off to the observation platform, from which the sky looked like Guy Fawkes being celebrated on Le Quatorze Juillet, as the flaming Basilisks hurtled in to attack, and then bore off again into the darkness with the agility of gulls and the ferocity of eagles. Luckily the Cockatrice Corps had picked up a number of tips in Basilisk warfare as they travelled through the Border Country; this bleak, hilly territory, once ravaged by border raiders, was now the perching place for aerial predators and the natives had learned various canny ways of confronting them. Or, rather, conbacking them.

  “Ye should never, never face a Basilisk heid on,” an aged Ettrick shepherd instructed Bellswinger. “They are like the Mirkindoles in that respect. Ye should aye gang at him tersy-versy. Shoot at the fearsome beast over your shoulder.”

  “But suppose that two come at you, from opposite directions, at the same time?”

  “Och, ye’ll juist hae tae deal wi’ them in a parabolical manner.”

  Lieutenant Upfold, who had cousins in Australia and had visited that land, partly solved this problem by constructing boomerang-rockets, fired by curving projectile pistols. These missiles, flying round in circles, achieved considerable damage among flocks of Basilisks, and were by far the best weapons yet devised for dealing with the unpleasant antagonists.

  During the current attack, when the Basilisks were flying low and keeping in close formation, the boomerang-rockets had marked success, knocking down at least seventy-five per cent of the attacking force, and causing the rest to sheer off south-westwards and take refuge in the Pentland Hills.

  The train had to halt while the battle raged. A protective screen had to be lowered over the windshield, and it took time to lower and then raise it again. When calm finally succeeded the crackle of pistol-fire and the menacing shrieks, hisses and whistles of the Basilisks, the colonel gave the order to get under way without delay. But while wind-power was still being mustered, a desolate cry from alongside the track caused Sergeant Bellswinger to hesitate.

  “Beg pardon, Colonel, sir, but—was that a call for assistance?”

  “Help me—oh, please, help me! Help! Help!”

  “Can it be one of our men, snatched off by a Basilisk?” asked the colonel, frowning. “Light a flare, if you please, Sergeant.”

  In the greenish light of the flare, they saw a man feebly crawling up the embankment towards the track. He was covered in mud.

  “I don’t think it’s one of ours, sir,” said the sergeant. “All ours are accounted for. No serious casualties this time, I’m happy to say. But this fellow looks to be in a poor way. Something about the cut of his jib seems familiar. Clinch and Mollisk, go down and give him a hand.”

  The injured man seemed unable to walk. He had to be carried.

  A ferocious growl from Uli, the Gridelin hound, could be heard as the sufferer was carried aboard, which soon gave a clue as to his identity.

  “Good gracious, sir,” said Sergeant Bellswinger. “Why, it’s our bad penny turned up again. It’s Tom Flint.”

  * * *

  Sauna’s feeling of utter terror, as she lifted the latch of the cottage door and walked in, was not at all diminished by the smell that met her from the interior. It was quite disgusting: sour, stuffy, a mix of dirty, decaying food, and something sweetish and chemical which reminded her of the flat in Manchester. An armpit kind of smell, she thought, peering ahead, trying to think how Dr. Wren would have described it. The sort of stuff that people smear over themselves or pour down a drain to try and drown something horrible that’s underneath.

  The interior was almost entirely dark to anyone coming from out of doors, so she stood still for a moment, until her eyes grew more accustomed. On her left there was a dim glow, and a mild warmth at floor level, and a faint scent, one of the better components of the engulfing odour of the house. This was familiar, and took Sauna back to those summer holidays with Mam and Dad—it was the smell of a peat fire.

  “Hallo?” she said hoarsely. The effort it took to open her mouth and speak was enormous. “Is—is anybody here?”

  And the answer she received shocked her so badly that her legs almost gave way beneath her.

  “Sauna? Is that my little Sauna?”

  It was the voice she had heard twice on the train: the faint, shrill, wailing travesty of Auntie Floss’s voice.

  Now, at the far end of the room, she began to make out the shape of a daybed or cot; and on this somebody, some person, was lying, wrapped in shadowy draperies and coverings.

  When Sauna, sick with fright and dislike, stepped nearer, she saw twin sparks of light—eyes—fixed on her.

  “Is—is—can that be you, Aunt Florence?” she managed to say.

  The person on the couch giggled—an eerie, wholly unexpected sound. It seemed as if not one but several people had all laughed together.

  “Who else would it be, dearie? So you got here at last! And a precious long time it took you! And your poor Auntie Flo waiting here for you, so patiently—so-o-o patiently. What kept you?”

  “Well—I—”

  “It wasn’t nice of you—no, it wasn’t—to stay away such a long, long time when your auntie wanted you so bad—your auntie that took you into her own place and was always so kind…”

  “Aunt Florence,” said Sauna desperately. “How did you ever get here?”

  This was a daft conversation. How could that—that thing on the bed be her Aunt Florence? She could still see nothing more than a shadowy shape with twin points of pale light set close together at one end.

  “How did I get here, dearie? Why, my—my friends brought me.”

  “From the flat? From Brylcreme Court? From Manchester?”

  “Of course!” sang out the voice, much amused, and again it was as if not one but several voices all spoke together. “My friends brought me!”

  Friends! thought Sauna. But Aunt Florence never had any friends. Nobody ever came to her flat except for readings. And she never went out to play whist or bingo, or to coffee-mornings. There were no friends. Aunt Floss used to talk to herself. Or to the kettle, in that spooky way. Never to neighbours.

  “But didn’t they bring you, lovey?” the shrill voice persisted. “My friends? Didn’t they bring you here? Where are they now? Why don’t they come in? They know, they know how much I want to see them again?”

  “Who?”

  “My friends, my friends!” whined the voice, and ran up to a hysterical scream. “Why won’t they come in?”

  Sauna thought about the pair who had driven her in the carriage. If there were two of them.

  “Two men fetched me—” she began cautiously.

  “Where are they now?”

  Sauna began to shiver.

  “I don’t know. They threw me out of the carriage. It turned and drove off, I suppose. And—and a tree fell—you can’t go back that way now—”

  “Oh-oh-oh!” the voice wailed. “Why wouldn’t they stay? Friends ought to stay together.”

  There was something horribly wrong about the voice—about the figure and shape altogether—as if some foreigner with only the vaguest conception of what Aunt Florence had been like were trying to act the part of Florence in a play written by somebody else who had never seen her. Sauna began to think she might easily go stark-staring mad herself if she did not instantly take some sensible, practical action. By now her eyes were accustomed to the gloom in the room. Apart from the truckle-bed there was no furniture, save a couple of stools by the fireside and a large cardboard carton under the window.

  Sauna moved to the fire, blew on it, and laid on anothe
r hunk of peat from a pile she found heaped against the wall.

  “I’m cold and hungry, Aunt Florence,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could manage. “Is there anything to eat?”

  “Food in the box. Food in the box. Food in the box.” The answer came in a toneless gabble, as if from a machine.

  A small flare of light from the new lump of peat on the fire revealed that the box was sealed shut with parcel-tape, had never been opened.

  “Are there any tools here: scissors, knives, forks?”

  “Tools? I don’t know what you mean—”

  Sauna wondered if the sort of things she needed might be found in the back room. A doorway at the foot of the bed opened on to darkness. For various reasons she felt very reluctant to walk on into that black place. Something in the other room seemed to be rustling … She would just as soon not know what it was.

  She approached the carton, delving rather hopelessly in her pockets as she did so for anything—a paper-clip, bent pin, hair-grip, rusty nail—that might help to slit through the thick tape. The first thing her fingers encountered was a tangle of rope, the rope that had tied her wrists. Under that was something unfamiliar and with an odd, complicated shape. What could it be? Withdrawing her hand she realized that what she held was the pair of tiny dolls, fastened together by the outsize kilt-pin.

  She had left the dolls on the shelf over Mrs. Churt’s kitchen range, and after they were dry she had picked them up and put them in her pocket. That was when she and Dakin were running to and fro, carrying out trays of blackberry tea to the men on the line.

  Well, the dolls were quite dry now. Carefully, Sauna pulled out the pin. Its point would be just the thing to score through the sticky tape.

  From the bed at the end of the room came a hoarse gasp.

  “Oh! the pain, the pain! What are you doing?”

  “Opening the box,” replied Sauna, scoring the point of the pin across the tape and prising up the flaps.

  The box proved to be full of paper-wrapped bags and packets, jammed solidly close together. Some felt like flour, or cheese, or macaroni. Others like raisins or biscuits. There were tins and jars as well. All right, so long as there’s a tin-opener somewhere, thought Sauna.

  With the point of the pin she tore open a packet of biscuits and nibbled one. It tasted of ginger. Faintly, distantly, as if from another life she remembered that her Aunt Florence had been very fond of ginger biscuits and always had a couple of packets in the flat.

  “Would you like a ginger biscuit, Aunt Florence?”

  “Oh!” cried the sharp thin voice. “How can you offer me food to eat when I suffer such pain? I can’t eat—I can’t eat—never any more—I am far too ill.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  Though dear knows where I’ll find one, thought Sauna.

  “Drink. Drink. Thirst … Mug on floor…”

  Overcoming her extreme distaste, Sauna approached the bed (where the smell was even more powerful, thick, like mephitic gas) and found a clumsy china mug on the ground.

  “Water barrel by door.”

  Sauna remembered with horror that grotesque, spooky figure, all made of willow wands, standing just outside the cottage door. Was it still there? Or had it got up and walked silently away, once Sauna had passed by?

  But the water barrel proved to be inside the door, not outside. She dipped out a mugful of water and took it back to the figure on the bed, who received it in two hands skinny as bunches of twigs—skinny as that creature’s hands.

  The cup was raised, but Aunt Florence (if it was she) did not drink. Instead two brilliant pale eyes stared at Sauna over the rim of the mug. The face behind the mug was still in shadow.

  “So long to wait. Waiting. Wanting. In cold, in dark.”

  The whisper was like the telephone message in Colonel Clipspeak’s office. It echoed from all around, from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Like a rustle of snakes uncoiling.

  Sauna said desperately, “Who are you? You are not really my Aunt Florence, are you? Who are you really?”

  The hands opened and let the china mug crash to the floor.

  “I am the Queen, Hel. Hela. The Queen of Air and Darkness. All the powers of the air are my servants.”

  Then the figure lay flat back on the bed—like a cardhouse that has fallen down—and neither spoke nor moved any more.

  Sauna fled to the door, opened it and ran outside.

  But by now the blizzard had risen to full force; a gust of sleet lashed her in the face like a cat-o’-nine tails, the force of the wind made her stagger. Despairingly she realized that she had not the remotest chance of surviving a journey of unknown length and direction, shoeless, through strange woods and mountains, in such weather.

  But the alternative—a night passed in that gruesome little house … with that grisly, mummy-like replica of Aunt Florence—how could she possibly endure it?

  I’ve got to endure it, thought Sauna slowly. Remember those chaps on the Cockatrice Belle—remember what they’ve got to put up with. Snarks, Kelpies, Basilisks, Trolls. They never even know what’s coming next. If they can keep going, I can too.

  Squaring her shoulders, she walked back into the house and piled another handful of peat-lumps on the fire. Then she helped herself to a few more ginger biscuits and munched them slowly. The smell in the house had killed her hunger, but she knew it was important to eat something. The mug had smashed, but she still had one shoe. She filled it out of the barrel and drank a few mouthfuls of stale-tasting water from the heel.

  Then, pulling the kilt-pin from her pocket, she sat down beside the fire with her back against the wall, clutching the pin in her right hand. She had no other weapon; and it was better than nothing.

  After a while her left hand stole back to her pocket and came out with the two dolls. I’m glad I found them, she thought drowsily. They were part of the old life with Mam and Dad. Perhaps they’ll bring me luck. Dr. Wren said something about them. He told a story … what was it?

  Her head drooped forward on to her knees. She slept.

  Chapter eight

  As soon as Tom Flint had been dragged on board, the Cockatrice Belle shot off again at top speed.

  They were now running along the coastal plain, where the Forth narrows from firth to river; the track was in better condition here than in the hilly country they had left, and this was an advantage as the principal adversaries in this region were the slow-moving Kelpies, who unless they climbed up on to the rails, had little chance of doing much damage. To prevent their invading the way ahead of the train, Major Scanty had evolved a stellar-powered ray-dart which proved an excellent deterrent; it did not kill, but shocked and winded them, so that they scrambled back off the embankment, wailing with rage and distaste.

  “All very well, Scanty, in its way,” grumbled the colonel, “but our job is to get rid of the brutes once and for all, not just give ’em a twinge in their backsides.”

  “Our task, as I understand it, Colonel,” said Scanty mildly, “is to proceed northwards to the neighbourhood of the Kingdom of Fife at all possible speed, and there to await orders as to the general conduct of the campaign.”

  “Hmn, well, yes, that’s so, certainly. But what I ask myself is, supposin’ we get there and can’t make contact with Gladiolus, then what?”

  During the last week it had proved impossible to get through to army headquarters in Leicester Square.

  “If only we hadn’t mislaid that gal!” fretted the colonel. “What a crass bit of mismanagement that was!”

  “It certainly was,” sighed the archbishop. “But still I have not lost hope of picking up the trail of her abductors. We must not despair.”

  Indeed they did pick up the trail at Falkirk, but lost it again directly.

  The battle with the Basilisks at Linlithgow had caused a good deal of structural damage to the train’s roof and windows. The colonel decreed that repairs were to be carried out while the train was in motion; there was no time t
o be lost. All the crew were at work—the men were just as anxious as the officers to rescue Sauna.

  Meanwhile the care of Tom Flint was left to Mrs. Churt and Dakin; principally to Dakin.

  The injured man had been taken to a tiny cabin directly behind the engine. It was hot, noisy, and cramped. Brag and Minch, the two men who first occupied it, had moved out and taken over the quarters of Forby and Wintless, who had been killed in a night skirmish with Trolls outside Newcastle.

  The cabin was so hot and airless that nobody wanted it.

  Dakin was in very low spirits, touchy, miserable, and forlorn. He missed Sauna all the time, and was desperately worried about her; what could be happening to her? Where had she been taken? Was she still alive, even?

  He felt very badly about not having been able to prevent her abduction. Though it was not his fault—the birds had prevented him—he felt that people who were not on the scene must blame him for not having done something more active, or yelled for help sooner.

  He went about his duties glumly and talked to nobody, not realizing how many people felt sorry for him.

  And—worse than all the rest—the Gridelin hound, Uli, was in a state of utter dejection. Dakin had always had a notion that Uli loved Sauna best of everyone on the train; now he was sure. The great hound crept mournfully about with ears and tail dangling so low that they swept the ground, collecting dust; he ate next to nothing, whined outside the door of Sauna’s cabin, and lay for hours with his chin resting on her skipping-rope. Only at Hawick, Peebles, and Falkirk, where it was momentarily possible to pick up the scent of her abductors, did he show any signs of life or interest. He did, it was true, growl furiously when Tom Flint was brought on board at Linlithgow, and outside the door of his sick-bay if he chanced to pass it, but this animosity never lasted long; he returned miserably to the galley and lay on Mrs. Churt’s cross-stitch, getting horribly in her way.

  “What’s the matter with that fellow Flint, anyway?” she asked, giving Dakin a cup of hot wintergreen tea for the sick man. “I never did fancy that feller above half—why does Dr. Wren say he mustn’t be left alone? A skimpy stick of liquorice in britches, he is, if you ask me! And he hasn’t been bit by a Basilisk or anything, has he?”