Dead Push (Kiera Hudson Series Two#7) (6 page)

“Yes,” I mumbled, feeling confused
myself at that point. “But I don’t have any money.”   

‘“There is no charge,” the old man said with the sweetest smile I had ever seen.

‘“Thank you so much,” I said, taking the ticket he’d slid beneath the glass. With a frown, I noticed the ticket was blank on both sides. I looked back through the dirty glass at the ancient ticket seller and said, “There must be a mistake – this ticket is blank.”

‘“Have a safe and pleasant journey,” the old man winked at me.

As I sat and listened to Lilly tell her story, I knew I had just seen the very same thing happen to the cop who had wanted to travel to a place called Sydney.

“I was hustled away from the ticket office by the next dead person in line,” Lilly continued. “I made my way beneath ground. Other than me, platform 63 was deserted. It seemed like I was the only person who wanted to go to
Oz
-tralia that day. I didn’t have to wait long until a grand-looking steam train chugged into the platform, plumes of thick smoke pouring from its funnel. The train came to a halt, its pistons and brakes hissing and spitting. The carriages looked old, Victorian, and made of wood.

“‘All aboard!’” someone hollered from deep with the engine smoke, which had now shrouded the platform like fog.

“Reaching up, I opened a carriage door and climbed on board. Despite the ancient look of the carriages, the seats where soft and comfortable. I took my seat as the train started to slowly chug forward. I was asleep even before the train had cleared the platform,” Lilly explained.

“Where did you wake up?” I asked.

“Not in
Oz
-tralia or Australia, that’s for sure,” Lilly said, looking at me.

“Where then?”
Jack asked, staring at her, eyes wide.

“I was deep below ground. In a place with a person I had long since forgotten,” she said. Then looking at me, she added, “I was in place called The Hollows and watching
The Wizard of Oz
with my friend Jim Murphy.”

“Murphy,” I whispered, remembering how my friend had once told me that he had taken Lilly – Pen – deep into The Hollows to watch one of the many magical-moving pictures the Vampyrus named Burton had brought from above ground.

Before I’d had a chance to say anything, Lilly continued. “But it wasn’t like I was really there. It was like I was watching through a crack in the wall of The Hollows. And when me and Murphy went above ground and into the secret forest, it was like I was watching myself with Murphy through gaps in the branches of the trees. It was then I realised that I wasn’t really there somehow – I was like a ghost able to revisit my past life, to take another peek at it through cracks. But then I would wake up here again, in that comfy Victorian train carriage, down on platform 63 where I had started my journey. But I wanted to go back. I wanted to see and remember more. So I got in line and waited just like I had before.

Reaching the ticket booth, the old guy with the wrinkled face said, ‘“Let me guess, you’re going to
Oz
-tralia again?”

‘“Sure am,” I smiled at him through the dirty glass panel.

“He punched me out another blank ticket and I headed straight back to platform 63 again. The steam train drew into the station and I boarded it. Time and time again, I went back to what I now called
Oz
-tralia until I got to that time in my life where I was murdered by my lover Marc and his brother,” Lilly explained.

“But Murphy told me that they hadn’t really killed you,” I said frowning. “He said that you were only unconscious…”

“That’s what I told Murphy,” Lilly cut in. “I
was
murdered and I woke up here in this station like I’ve already explained. But every time I went back, those cracks got bigger until eventually I could touch and speak with Murphy again. I wanted to be with him again, but how could I even begin to explain that I was dead – that I’d come from nowhere – through a crack? Our time together was going to be short. We made a bed by placing my fur coat on the forest floor and then we made love. It was after this I made up my lie. I told him that Marc and his brother only believed that they had murdered me when in fact I was really alive. In my heart I didn’t know when I would next return from the station and if I would be able to reach out to Murphy again. I’d heard rumours that most people could only reach through the cracks once, others more, but for most it was only the one time. So sensing this was the one and only time I would ever have to touch or speak with him again, I told Murphy I had to go on the run and that’s when I created the name Lilly Blu. If I were ever able to reach for him through a crack again, I would leave him a message in a newspaper signed in my new name. But on my return to the station, I realised I was carrying Murphy’s children inside of me. Unable to return to Murphy myself, our children were taken back through the cracks where they belonged and left with their father. I didn’t run out on him or my daughters like Murphy has believed all this time. I loved Murphy and my daughters and still do. But why had I remembered him? Why had that word
Oz
appeared on the departure boards? It was like someone or something had pricked a hole in my death and my past life was shining through somehow,” Lilly said.

As she said this, I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Murphy on discovering him to be back in this
pushed
world. He had described this world as being like a sheet of tracing paper which had been laid over the world we had been
pushed
from. He said the love letters which I had sent to Sophie in my old life had shown up in this world because a hole had been made in the tracing paper and they had bled through.

Staring straight at Lilly, I said, “Murphy told me that the old world – before it got
pushed
– is starting to make holes in this world and it shouldn’t be. He said it was like a really bad thing to happen.”

“Murphy’s here?” Lilly said, leaping up from her seat. “He got
pushed
into this world, too?”

“Well, yeah,” I sighed, not knowing if I’d said the right thing or not. Probably not – knowing how often I opened my mouth and fucked things up.

“Did he get the message I left for him in the newspaper yet?” Lilly asked, wringing her slender hands together in her lap.

“What message?” I said, looking up at her. “What newspaper?”

“The piece of newspaper Sam has,” she said. “It’s on the back of that article Sam has about Kayla being murdered by her father, Doctor Hunt, in the mountains.”

I remembered Murphy showing me Kayla’s headstone in that graveyard and telling me how Hunt had murdered both her and Isidor in this world. He had believed them to be winged creatures from below ground. Murphy had suspected that Hunt had somehow remembered this from the world before it had been
pushed
. I now wondered if Murphy had been right in what he’d told me. Perhaps Hunt had started to remember? Perhaps cracks had started to appear in his life. Just like Lilly – Pen – had revisited Murphy by stepping through the cracks.

“Has Murphy seen the newspaper clipping?” Lilly asked again. 

“I don’t know anything about any newspaper clipping, and as far as I’m aware, neither does Murphy,” I sighed, desperately trying to fit together everything I’d learnt from Murphy and was now learning from Lilly. I knew all the pieces must fit together – but how? 

“Is that news clipping important?” Jack said, looking at me, then at Lilly.

“Probably,” Lilly breathed, slowly sitting down next to me again. She looked deeply shocked. Scared.

“Are you okay?” I asked, still not sure if I should have said anything about Murphy or not.

“Murphy was wrong,” she whispered, looking at me, her eyes wide and bright.

“About what?”
I asked.

“The holes he was talking about, although I call them cracks, they are a good thing,” she said.

“How do you know that?” I said, feeling confused. “Who told you?”

“The same person who carried my daughters in that cardboard box back to Murphy,” she said.

Both Jack and I stared at her blankly.

Lilly looked over her shoulder in both directions, as if fearing that some enemy might be eavesdropping. Then, leaning in close to me and Jack, she whispered, “The old guy in the ticket booth told me. He said if we want to
push
the world back, we have to make as many cracks as possible. We have to destroy this world.”

Jack

“How would a simple ticket seller know so much?” I asked, loosening the bandana about my neck. In fact, how did the old black guy with the wizened face and fuzz of white hair know anything? I’d been back in this world two hundred years or more and what Lilly was explaining was all new to me.

Lilly shot a glance over her shoulder back towards the ticket booth where the old guy continued to punch out tickets for the never ending stream of dead travellers who waited in line. The marble floor seemed to tremble beneath my feet as the sound of arriving and departing trains rumbled deep below ground. Lilly leant in close again, like a coach giving a halftime briefing, and said, “His name is Noah, and he’s not just a ticket seller – he is way more important than that. He knows pretty much all there is to know about the worlds being
pushed
– but not only that, he knows about this station and the others scattered about this world.”

Both
me and Potter shot a glance at the ticket booth and the old guy sitting happily behind the glass.

“So he’s like the Yoda of the railways?” Potter said, looking back at
Lilly and popping a cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

“Yoda?”
Lilly said with a curious stare. “I said Noah.”

Potter shook his head, and jetting st
reams of blue smoke from his nostrils, he said, “Forget it, sweetheart.”

Why did he always have to be such a fucking jerk? I wondered. I glared at him,
then turned my attention back to Lilly. “So how does he know so much?” I asked her.

Lilly looked back over both shoulders in turn again, then back at us. Just above a whisper, she said, “Noah is an Elder.”

“That would account for all the wrinkles,” Potter cracked, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

Growing ever more frustrated at Potter’s infantile attempts at humour, I hissed, “If you can’t keep your
fucking mouth shut, why don’t you do both me and Lilly a favour and fuck off…”

“Okay… okay,” Lilly breathed. “Let’s try and keep this nice, shall we?”

“Well, he’s starting to piss me off,” I scowled. “Why does he have to keep coming out with dumb fucking remarks the whole time…?”

“Who are you calling dumb?” Potter shot back at me. “I was just saying that what Lilly said made sense, as I’ve seen under those Elders’ hoods and their faces are so freaking wrinkled and old, they’ve had to be stitched back together.”

“You’re such a lying bas…” I started, but Lilly cut over me.

“And why do you think they look like that?” Lilly asked the both of us.

Potter shrugged and I remained silent. I didn’t know the reason.

“They are literally falling apart – they are dying,” Lilly started to explain.

“So what about the old dude in the glass box?” Potter said, grinding out his cigarette on the marble floor with the heel of his boot. “He looks ancient, but he isn’t quite falling apart – not yet, anyway.” 

“Noah isn’t like the other Elders,” Lilly said. “He has always been different from the others,
that’s why they eventually banished him. The four remaining Elders are cruel and full of pain. In fact, that’s how they feed – that’s how they survive and have done so since time began – by living off others’ fear, unhappiness, and pain.”

“But I always thought they had the different species – the humans, the Vampyrus’ – best interests at their very hearts,” I said.

“That’s what they’ve wanted you all to believe,” Lilly said.

“Their hearts are black and twisted like shrivelled prunes,” Potter said. “I saw those too under their robes when they brought me back.”

Potter spoke with a sudden seriousness as if something had clicked into place for him.

“You’re right, Potter,” Lilly said, looking at him. “There is no love in their hearts. Every decision they have taken since the beginning of time hasn’t been for the benefit of the humans or anyone else. The only people they have helped are themselves. Life was only created so they could feed off its misery and pain. They enjoyed the fact that the humans and the Vampyrus fought over the Earth.”

“So why separate the two species from each other? If what you are telling us is true, then wouldn’t they have got a kick out of us destroying ourselves?”

“And once both races were dead, what then?” Lilly said. “No, the Elders had to keep both races alive, but in misery and in pain. The Elders learnt that some mixing had taken place between the Vampyrus and humans, so they forbade it. They fed off the misery caused by separating those that had fallen in love. But in time, even those humans and Vampyrus who had once loved forgot each other and their hurt and pain grew weaker. So what then? How would the Elders survive if the two races forgot about one another? They needed to be reminded again. So a little boy named Elias Munn was chosen. Unbeknown to him, the Elders made sure the boy discovered a hole between the two worlds. And as the Elders hoped, Elias Munn fell deeply in love with a human. And when Elias was rejected by her, he tore out his lover’s heart and the Elders gorged themselves on his heartbreak and torment. They stood back in the shadows and watched Munn cause mayhem for hundreds of years as he slowly encouraged other Vampyrus above ground, where they infiltrated human cites and fed off those living there. Again, members of the two different species fell in love and had children – the half breeds. Again the Elders forbade those relations and fed off the pain that caused.”