Pastworld (8 page)

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Chapter 12

Lucius Brown claimed that he carried with him a natural sense of direction, an inner awareness of where he ought to be going, but it was soon clear to Caleb that his father had a very odd idea of where they ought to be going. Once outside the station his father turned to face in what he said he knew was certainly ‘the right direction’. They walked on; Caleb dragged his feet a little way behind his father. They were walking down a long and strangely empty road, which seemed a perverse choice. Caleb was uneasy. He didn’t like the look of the street. It was underlit, with the gas lamps spaced very far apart. It looked as if no one was expected to walk down it in the first place, as if it was an undesignated route.

He felt distinctly nervous away from all the bustling crowds, just the two of them, walking among dark wet shadows. He was not sure whether it was the loneliness of the route, or the darkness, the idea of Halloween, or the growing wisps and tatters of fog all around them, that made him so uneasy.

‘Halloween is an imported festival,’ his father said suddenly, turning back to Caleb. ‘It has been emphasised here falsely in my view. It is an American celebration, grafted on to our past here. For all their boasts of authenticity the Corporation do get things fundamentally wrong sometimes. I once sent a memo about it to Mr Buckland, told him exactly what I thought. Stick to Guy Fawkes, I said. I sometimes doubt that my memos were ever read.’ He turned and walked on. ‘I sense in a real old street like this one an essence or memory of the past. The chaos and pain of past lives which has somehow been pressed, and moulded over the years into these very bricks and stones.’ He stopped and tapped at the wet wall beside them. ‘And I suppose that is one of the main points about the success of Pastworld, of this whole place, the saving of the ghosts of the past.’

They walked side by side now. Caleb had allowed himself to catch up. He wondered if his father did not also feel the threat that he sensed all around them in the murk and the shadows. Lucius turned to Caleb and stopped him. He held on to his arm and said almost in a whisper, ‘I know that I have seen complex sophisticated machines which most certainly possessed a soul, and which had more than an inkling of their own existence.’ Caleb frowned; he thought that this was a strange thing for his father to say.

‘Somewhere a long way beneath our feet is a whole other city, very different to this one full of machinery and systems for controlling the fogs and so on,’ Lucius continued.

It was obvious he was distracted and Caleb thought it was no wonder his father was taking them on such a strange route. ‘Are you sure this is the right way? This road seems so dark and empty,’ Caleb said.

‘Bear with me for a moment, Caleb. I have my own reasons for going this way,’ his father said.

The sinister road curved now round the arches and the looming Byzantine brickwork embankments that supported the railway lines. Seen from this angle the foundations of the railway station looked like some newly discovered ruin. They were the freshly revealed archaeological layers of another city and civilisation even more ancient and bleak. The walls were covered over in a seemingly haphazard jumble of thickly lettered posters. One advertised stout, others warned pedestrians to stay on designated routes only. Lucius seemed to be wilfully ignoring that advice.

They passed a signpost. Old Battersea was indicated by a pointing hand, back down the same long, bleak, empty road along which they had just walked. Caleb stopped his father and pointed to the sign.

‘It says here that Old Battersea is back that way?’

‘I know what I am doing, Caleb.’

Caleb noticed with a jolt, as he turned to look back once more in exasperation, that a single and very raggedly dressed man was following some way behind them part hidden by the mist.

They walked up the hill on a narrow pavement and then they turned into a wider street and at once found themselves heading against an onward pressure of people. Crowds of the huddled and wet natives of Pastworld streamed past, all going home after the factories and shops and offices had closed, making their way back down the hill towards the railway station. To Caleb they looked like ragged prisoners of war. Some children held begging bowls out to them. Caleb and his father were jostled too by various ruffians, some of whom looked official, some however seemed to Caleb to be more real and more definitely sinister.

His father hesitated and stood still. He looked around him in distraction and frustration and then he pulled out his gazetteer map and appeared to be studying it, but it seemed to Caleb that he was waiting and looking for something else, something not on any map.

They waited at a junction for the traffic to pass. Caleb watched the crowds of people as they passed him, pushing on over to the other side of the road. It was then that the ragged man stepped out suddenly from behind a curtained carriage. Caleb thought to tell his father they were being followed, but before he could say anything Lucius had set off across the road and headed further up the hill. Caleb set off after him but noticed with a rising panic that the beggar followed closer behind them now.

Caleb heard excited voices somewhere behind him calling out ‘Trick or Treat’. They passed a greengrocer’s shop, and he noticed the earthy banks of raw beetroots and turnips and carved pumpkin heads and tumbled orange squashes and other vegetables, which were all piled up in racks and wooden crates outside.

Two children and their mother passed in front of him. There were two little girls, and they were giggling together. They wore Halloween masks and little tattered black witch’s costumes and they carried bags for collecting treats. The mother held them both by the shoulders as she anxiously guided them along the crowded pavement. Caleb, in a moment of mischief, pulled the skull mask out of his pocket and put it on over his face. One of the little girls caught sight of him and screamed happily, nudging the other, and they carried on up the hill giggling together and looking back at Caleb. The ragged man still kept a steady pace behind them. Caleb was more and more uneasy, the ragged man definitely seemed to be keeping them in his sights. Caleb, his mask still on his face, finally stopped his father.

‘We’re being followed,’ he mumbled through the mask. ‘Look.’ He pointed back down the street.

His father turned and looked back briefly into the heaving crowd. He looked at the ragged man for a moment and then closed his eyes and covered them with his hand, ‘Oh no, no,’ he muttered but then he snapped to, turned and fussed with the map, checked the direction and appeared not to really take in what Caleb had said.

After walking for another few yards his father suddenly said, ‘Caleb, I have important business, I am going on ahead for a moment. I will be back after I have consulted someone. It’s very important but only to me, don’t worry. You must stay here, Caleb, keep out of the wet. I won’t be long, I promise.’ His father went on further up the hill, and was then lost to sight in the fog and crowd.

Caleb, puzzled, stood sheltered in a shop doorway for a while. A strange sight he made, the young man with the skull head standing lost in the shadows of the doorway. He watched the passing people huddled into their coat collars or under their umbrellas. He thought that his father had just behaved very oddly once again, and again it was completely out of his normal character; something was up. He was rattled by something. Perhaps it was that letter. Caleb decided that he would wait no longer. He went after his father instead.

He walked on up the hill into a denser bank of drifting fog. Two people stood together in the murk at a minor road junction on the rise. One was a broad young man, his face partly hidden by an old, tattered umbrella, and the other a scruffily dressed older man with a stick and thick glasses, not yet perhaps a beggar but he didn’t look far off it.

Caleb noticed then that the older man was blind or at least nearly blind, and that the younger man was holding on lightly to the sleeve of his coat. As Caleb passed he could see that the older man looked very agitated. The young man beside him lifted his umbrella and Caleb saw his face for a moment too and thought that he looked feral and dangerous. He had a down turned mouth and a shadowed scowl. He was surely just the kind of illicit non-accredited beggar they had all been warned about during their Pastworld induction lessons. The young man spotted him staring and jutted his chin forward and called, ‘Got any silver, young skull face? Coins, dosh, come on, you can spare it.’

He held out a ragged mittened hand. Caleb, thinking hurriedly of his induction lessons and not even here in the fogs of the past being able to be impolite, stopped and turned to answer him.

‘I am very sorry,’ he said, haltingly repeating the official line. ‘I have already given out my recommended beggar’s allowance for today.’

The blind man fixed his sightless pale eyes in the direction of Caleb’s voice. He shuffled himself forward, and at the same time the tough young man let go of the blind man’s arm. The young man, as a parting shot, called out ‘Skull-faced skinflint bloody Gawker’ to Caleb in a coarse rasping voice. Then he stepped back just a little but stayed near, waited and watched them from a shadowy doorway.

‘Help,’ the blind man said quietly under his breath, ‘help me then.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I can –’ Caleb replied. But the blind man quickly interrupted him.

‘You could help,’ he whispered. ‘I’m meant to meet someone important, you see, and it’s urgent, and I mean real life and death urgent. You can take me to them perhaps . . . Take me away from here at least; I should be somewhere else instead. You can see, and I can only just about manage; I can hardly see anything at all now. Come on, you can do it as a Christian act. It’s somewhere just near here.’

‘Sorry,’ said Caleb, ‘I don’t know this area I’m afraid.’

‘Take me,
please,
come on, come on. You can see all right, can’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Caleb replied, ‘I can, but I don’t even know where we are. I wish I could help.’ He saw that the skin on the back of the man’s hand and wrist was scarred and thickened where it had once perhaps been badly burned. Suddenly Caleb’s father appeared out of the fog. He was out of breath, as if he had been running. ‘There you are at last. I missed you in this damn fog,’ he said to the blind man. Then he stopped and took in exactly what was happening in front of him, ‘Oh, it’s you, Caleb,’ he said, and he reached his hand out and latched on to the blind man’s arm.

The blind man rolled his pale eyes. ‘Well, well,’ he growled. ‘At last. I think I know
that
voice, don’t I? We need to talk.’

‘Leave us for just a moment, Caleb,’ his father blustered, while his eyes darted to the young man in the doorway.

Caleb could make no sense of this.

‘Come on, it must be after six o’clock,’ the blind man lowered his voice. ‘Let’s go.’

Caleb’s father replied calmly. ‘I know what you want,’ he said, ‘but where are you trying to get to?’

‘Someone is waiting for us, with a message from Eve,’ the blind man whispered in his rasping voice, staring straight ahead. ‘Come on,’ said the blind man, ‘or he’ll get me. He’ll leave me to rot with my throat cut, and worse, you have no idea.’

‘Eve,’ Caleb’s father said quietly.

‘Yes, Eve, and double yes, Eve, the lovely Eve. She’s gone, run off – why else would I risk writing? – she’s out there somewhere in this place.’

Caleb watched all this from a few feet away, not far from the feral young beggar.

‘They are close behind me now, and there’s more than one of them, and they come from him, from hell.’ Then the blind man flipped up the face of a rusted-looking pocket watch, which was slung on a dirty string around his neck. Caleb saw that the dial was open, that there was no glass cover over the hands, and that touching them with his trembling fingers only seemed to confirm the blind man’s panic further.

‘It’s half past now. She’s probably been waiting there for me since six. You don’t know how dangerous this is. She won’t wait for ever. Come on, come on, it’s your chance too. I must get the message. You must save Eve,’ the blind man said, and turned his face away, his gums working, chewing and mashing.

It was then that Caleb saw the other beggar, the one who had been tracking them all the way from the station. He stood on the other side of the road watching them, then gave a shrill whistle to someone further off in the crowd. The feral young man with the umbrella moved away from the doorway.

‘Come on then, take my arm and, please,’ said Lucius, ‘be careful near the traffic. Why not let my son take the other arm, and we will take you, to where this woman is?’

The three stood for a moment near the kerbside, as the traffic rattled past. Caleb shivered. Something hovered near him at eye level, something metallic, like an insect or a thin silver needle, and it buzzed around his head for a moment. He looked straight at it and it suddenly dipped out of sight and vanished into the swirls of fog.

The other ragged man crossed the road towards them. He was light on his feet and dodged and skipped between all the carriages and wagons. The younger beggar reached them first and grabbed at the blind man.

‘Did you just touch me?’ said the blind man. ‘What was that?’

Three or more ragged men were suddenly among them like a pack of fierce dogs. Caleb’s father moved closer and turned to him, his mouth open, as if to call out. The blind man was struck with something that flashed bright and silver and he crumpled downwards into his overcoat just where he stood, as if he were a building that had been suddenly demolished. The beggar who had been following Caleb and his father threw something in the air over to Caleb. Instinctively Caleb caught it. He felt something warm and sticky. He looked down and saw red all over his hand and a blood-stained knife. He dropped the knife. The blind man went down on to the wet cobbles near the clattering wheels of the passing carriages; and all without a sound. Caleb instinctively reached out to him, and his bloodied hand closed round the pocket watch on the string, which ripped away from the blind man’s neck.