Mort (2 page)

They'd made it!

As the ferry tied up at Unk's ancient wooden jetty, Nigel barged the crewman aside and leapt ashore, crying hysterically. He dropped to his knees and hugged one of the rain-soaked jetty bollards as if it were a long lost relative.

He was safe! Safe! He was never – NEVER – setting foot on that blasted rust bucket again! He would just have to live on Unk Island for the rest of his life. Nothing on earth would persuade him to repeat that horrific voyage.

Behind him, Trish stepped carefully from the wet gangplank. She adjusted the skirt of her neat office suit and checked she had everything. Despite the wind, her hair didn't seem to move. She fished out a telescopic umbrella from her bag and clicked it open.

‘You are funny, Nige,' she said, glancing at Nigel. ‘But it's time you stopped fooling around. We're here on official business, remember? It's not a holiday. What would Mr Skelly say?'

Burns, the bearded captain of the ferry, leaned out of his wheelhouse. ‘I'll be back around four,' he said, his eyes scanning the great black cliffs of Unk, the tops of which were lost in the thick mist. ‘We have to stop at Thunk, Chunk and Munk islands and I won't be hanging around this place for long. If you ain't here, we're pushing off, got it?'

Trish smiled brightly. ‘We'll be here, Captain,' she said. ‘Have no fear.'

Captain Burns didn't reply. He exchanged
a glance with Roy, the ferry's only crew member, who had already unhooked the ropes and hopped back aboard. ‘Oh, we ain't feared, Miss. Not now we's cast off. Remember, four o'clock. On the dot. Don't forget it's the eclipse this afternoon.'

‘Eclipse?' said Nigel. ‘What eclipse?'

Trish cut across his question. ‘Very well, Captain. See you then. And,' she added, ‘it's Ms Molyneux, thank you very much.'

Trish turned and, with heels clacking on the jetty boards, set off towards the steps that wound up the cliffs. There were rather a lot of them, and Trish wasn't at all sure she'd worn the right shoes, but she wasn't going to let Nigel know that. ‘Come on, Nigel,' she said. ‘This shouldn't take too long.'

Behind her, Nigel staggered to his feet and tottered after her, his briefcase held above his head to shield himself against the rain. As he ran he could hear something screeching somewhere up in the mist above him. It was
impossible, but Nigel could have sworn they were the harsh cries of pterodactyls. Not that he'd ever heard a pterodactyl of course, but he had seen the
Jurassic Park
movies and that's exactly what this sounded like.

‘Wait for me!' he yelled and sprinted after his boss.

Agnetha DeVere waved goodbye to William Shakespeare, closed the gate to his cottage behind her and got back into the golf buggy. She pulled down the plastic window sheeting against the rain and pressed the accelerator. As the cart splashed along the service road towards the main Festering building, Agnetha's brow puckered in a Grade A frown.

She was going to kick that little swine Mort hard in the shins the next time she saw him.

He'd done it again.

It was the third time this week.

Agnetha liked to check on her prized collection every morning in their compounds to make sure they were their usual sunny selves – as all writers are – and see that they had everything they needed. Most of them spent their days peacefully writing, which meant that much of Agnetha's morning was taken up checking that their supplies of ink, paper, pens, printer ink and the like didn't run out.

Most of them were very productive. Shakespeare alone had completed nine hundred and forty-two plays and a screenplay for a zombie movie in the past four hundred years. If it weren't for Willy's recent addiction to playing Call of Duty on the Xbox, Agnetha was sure he'd have done even more.

It was no wonder her collection was so productive, as each writer had his or her own compound designed perfectly to suit their needs. Charles Dickens had a large red-brick
Victorian house complete with walled garden. Agatha Christie lived in a spooky vicarage on a mysterious island in the middle of a lake. Roald Dahl worked in an exact copy of the shed at the bottom of his garden.

Needless to say, Agnetha tried very hard to conceal from her collection the fact that the compounds were surrounded by electrified fences. It was as much for the writers' own safety as anything else, but it didn't do for them to start thinking too much. There had been that unfortunate incident with the Enid Blyton escape attempt …

But now, Agnetha's mind was on one thing and one thing only.

One of her writers was missing.

The others were all there: Willy, Agatha, Roald, Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, Ian Fleming and Lewis Carroll.

But of Herbert George Wells, H.G. for short, there wasn't a trace.

What made it all the more infuriating
was that Agnetha had a pretty good idea of exactly where the blasted little man was. She gunned the golf buggy and headed for the service lifts. The door opened and Agnetha drove inside.

‘Basement level six,' she said, activating the mechanism. The doors hummed closed and the lift dropped as quickly as Agnetha's mood, the rain running off the golf buggy and pooling on the floor.

Once at level six, Agnetha didn't take long to find her destination.

At a small door marked ‘Inspection' she stopped, looked up and down the corridor and produced a plastic card. She inserted this into the lock and the door sprang open. Agnetha slipped inside and closed it silently behind her.

She was in a dimly lit service shaft running at right angles to the corridor where she'd left the buggy. The shaft echoed and hummed with the noises that kept Festering running.
It was like being inside the guts of some huge animal. After fifty metres or so, she stopped. There were other noises here, coming from the other side of the wall. Voices.

Agnetha stood on her toes and slid back a small hatch with a wire mesh across it. She was just tall enough to be able to look down at the space from where the voices came.

Below her was Mort's secret laboratory.

‘Secret', she thought. That was a laugh. She'd known about the place since it had been built. Did Mort think she wouldn't notice the drilling, the construction, the mess? The thing had taken almost two years.

Mort was standing near what looked very much like the lunar module that had landed on the moon in 1969 and, for a moment, Agnetha wondered if that was what it was. Mort did have a bit of a thing for spaceships.

Agnetha turned her attention to the men in the laboratory. The one with the white beard and cloak was Leonardo da Vinci. The
tall gloomy-looking one wearing glasses and dressed in a grey suit and tie was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

And lastly, dressed smartly as always, and with a bushy moustache sitting under his nose like a sleeping ferret, was the third man looking at the plans: her very own Herbert George ‘H.G.' Wells.

‘I knew it!' muttered Agnetha. This was the third time this week that H.G. hadn't been safely writing away when she'd called.

The big question was what could Mort possibly want one of her pet writers for? He wasn't an engineer, a scientist or an inventor.

While Agnetha sucked her lip and searched for an answer, Mort turned in the direction of a muffled bark from outside the lab door, allowing Agnetha to glimpse the countdown clock on the screen of the computer.

Suddenly, as Mort opened the laboratory door and Werner, Festering's incredibly stupid bloodhound, came lolloping in, the reason
why Mort had been borrowing H.G. hit her like a slap in the face.

This was worse than she'd imagined. Much worse.

Werner had brought Mort a gift.

A soggy, half-chewed envelope poked out from between his slobbering jaws. He looked up at Mort and wagged his tail frantically.

Mort took the envelope between finger and thumb and wiped off as much of Werner's drool as he could on the back of his sleeve.

‘How long have you had this?' asked Mort. Werner didn't reply.

Mort peered at the postmark. ‘This came more than a week ago, Werner!' He glared at
the dog. ‘What have I told you about hiding mail?'

Once again Werner said nothing. Instead he gave da Vinci's groin a sniff before lying down on the laboratory floor and licking his own bottom.

Mort turned his attention back to the envelope. Although it was addressed to his parents, he had no hesitation in ripping it open, his logic being that since they had left Festering before there was even a postal system in operation, anything addressed to them had to be a mistake. He took out
the single sheet of cheap white office paper that was inside. Despite being in Werner's mouth, the contents were clear enough, and what colour there had been in Mort's pale face drained clean away.

This was a disaster.

‘I have to go,' said Mort. He looked at his team. Of all days!

‘Bad news?' said H.G. ‘A problem?'

Mort stuffed the letter into his pocket and nodded. ‘Nothing I can't handle.' He turned on his heel and headed for the door.

‘Should we abandon the countdown?' said Oppenheimer.

There was, Mort couldn't help noticing, a tiny undercurrent of glee in his voice. ‘No!' yelled Mort over his shoulder. ‘Keep the preparations on target. I'll deal with this and be back before you know it.' The door slid shut and Mort disappeared.

Ten minutes later he was in his bedroom at the very top of the North Tower, a rickety-
looking finger of stone that jutted straight up from Festering's main building.

He picked up a pair of powerful binoculars lying on a side table and looked out to sea. If the letter was correct, the first sign would be the Unk ferry turning into Unk Island's only harbour. Mort glanced at his watch. Almost time.

The leaky old tub hardly ever came into shore unless there was mail or – and this was as rare a happening as Halley's comet – a visitor.

Mort slowly scanned the ocean. A thick curtain of rain lay like a shroud over the south. After a few moments the rain lessened slightly and Mort brought the binoculars to an abrupt stop. He leaned forward, adjusted the focus and watched as the Unk ferry came into view before slowly, but definitely, turning towards the island.

‘Well, well,' murmured Mort. Despite the importance of the day he felt a stirring of
excitement in his chest. The letter hadn't been lying.

An enemy was approaching.

On any other day, Mort would have relished the battle but today, with the launch being scheduled after two hundred years of preparation, it was a problem that needed a quick fix. There was only one person for the job.

Khan.

Mort lowered the binoculars and tugged a velvet rope that hung from the ceiling.

From deep in the bowels of Festering Hall came the rumbling boom of the ancient servant bell. The vibrations were still shaking the ornaments on the mantle when Khan appeared at Mort's shoulder, silent as an assassin's knife in the back.

‘I do wish you'd stop creeping up on me, Genghis,' said Mort.

Khan shrugged. ‘Vot you vont?' he said in a voice like distant thunder, turning his heavy-
lidded eyes towards Mort. His expression was that of a barefoot man who has stood on fresh dog poo.

‘What's the matter?' said Mort. ‘You always look so miserable.'

‘I laughing on inside.'

The Mongolian warlord was dressed from head to toe in scabby-looking fur, his eyes set wide apart in an olive-skinned face, most of which was taken up by a waxed black moustache and beard. He was huge and, had it not been for the steel shock collar around his neck, controlled by Mort from a wrist-mounted remote control unit, he would happily have torn Mort apart with his bare hands.

‘I need you to take care of a little problem for me, okay?'

By way of answer, Khan spat noisily out of the window. Unfortunately it wasn't open.

Mort shook his head. You could take the man out of Mongolia but you couldn't take Mongolia out of the man.

‘It looks very much like we'll be having a visitor,' said Mort. ‘A woman is about to step off the ferry and she is not welcome on the island, particularly not today.'

Khan cocked his head.

‘Voman?'

‘Yes Khan, voman, I mean woman.'

‘And you vont me kill her?' said Khan. ‘Is no problem. I kill many many vomens before. One day I kills seven hundred before lunch. And many many many mens. Iss easy.'

‘No, Khan, I do not want her killed. Not yet, at any rate. I just want you to … dissuade her. Scare her off the island. But do not kill, do I make myself clear?'

Khan frowned.

‘Just break bone?'

‘No, no breaking bones, Khan. Just get rid of her! I'll monitor events from here.' He moved forward and pressed a button concealed beneath the walnut panelling, which slid back to reveal a shining pole.

Khan wrapped a great hairy hand around it and dropped down through the North Tower.

‘And remember,' shouted Mort, looking down the shaft as Khan disappeared, ‘no killing!'