The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis (16 page)

Read The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis Online

Authors: Michael de Larrabeiti

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic

BOOK: The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis
2.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The Borribles reached for their catapults but there was no chance of defending themselves. Horny hands held their arms, so tightly that it hurt. A harsh voice cackled and then shouted, ‘All right,’ and on came a light, a simple bulb on a long flex, high in the arch, swaying as the trains went by.
‘Bloody Nora,’ said Napoleon, and he stopped struggling. Never had the Adventurers, in all their days, witnessed anything so terrifying.
They were in a huge cave of a place. High above their heads the railway arch rose and fell in a grand sweep; its bricks were dark and damp. Water dripped everywhere; long streaks and stains of musty fungus and mildew ran down the walls. All this was bad enough but it was what the cavern contained that struck a hopeless chill into the hearts of the Borribles.
Close by them were a dozen men, but such men as hardly deserved the name. They looked scarcely human. Their faces were bloated, crimson and purple and blue, a criss-cross of broken veins on the surface of a dead skin, and that skin had black cracks and holes in it, cracks full of a soft grime and holes gouged deep by the action of poisonous alcohol and fiery spirits. Their teeth were isolated black stumps set loosely in spongy gums and their eyes wept in red-rimmed sockets; eyelids corroded, turned inside out, hanging halfway down the cheek, the muscles eaten away. For clothes they wore the bits and pieces they had salvaged from the dustbins and rubbish tips where prouder tramps threw their clothes away. The hands that held the Borribles were ingrained with the dirt of years and the breath of the men’s lungs was warm and fetid.
‘They’re meffos,’ said Knocker, stunned.
The Borribles gasped. Knocker was right. They had fallen among some of the most dangerous men and women in London, the drinkers of methylated spirits. These were people who would stop at nothing, whose minds had decayed, whose brains had been eaten alive by booze and drugs. Meffos had no sense of good or bad. They would die
without a thought to obtain a bottle of gin, and they would murder anyone just as readily if that would bring them the money to buy a can of beer.
Napoleon swore again. The horror was not over. In front of the Borribles were more meffos, both men and women, dozens of them. Some were resting on the floor under newspapers, crammed together for warmth so closely that there was hardly room to step between them; others sat on beer crates, their hands joined, their heads bowed; and there were yet more who gazed into the distance, their eyes unblinking as the light came on.
The Borribles stared at the rear of the arch, and further, to what seemed to be the entrance of more arches. There were meffos as far as they could see; lying, standing, drinking, eating, peeing against the wall. Most seemed alive, some were perhaps dead. They looked like zombies only half revived. This was the great smell the Borribles had smelt.
All at once there came a great clamour from a doorway to the left of the cavern and a broad-shouldered man appeared with a bottle in his fist. ‘Aha!’ he bellowed. He waved the bottle above his head and laughed, throwing his head backwards to show a wide wound of a mouth with two or three large teeth in it. He came towards the captives, staggering this way and that, kicking men and women from his path, kicking them hard.
The Borribles huddled closer together. A meffo swivelled an iron bar into position and so locked the cavern doors. Hands fumbled and pawed at the Adventurers. Their knives and catapults were taken away and their rucksacks were ripped from their shoulders.
The shouting man shouted louder and redoubled his kicking. ‘Leave the rucksacks,’ he yelled, and his face went dark with an instant anger. ‘Throw them rucksacks on the floor in a pile; I’ll slit the man’s throat as dinna. Fair shares for all, you hear. There’ll be things in there as is worth money and money is booze and booze is life. Right, pal?’
Still kicking and shouting the man continued his advance until at last he stood before the group of Borribles and the men who held them prisoner. Reluctantly the meffos threw the rucksacks to the floor.
‘That’s better,’ said the man, and he took a swig from his bottle. ‘Any one of youse Saxons care to take me on, eh? Any one of youse Saxons wanna take on Hughie MacMungall face to face, eh? Answer me. Face to face, man to man, eh?’
The men shuffled their feet and looked down at the heads of their captives.
‘I thought not,’ shouted MacMungall. He staggered again. ‘He who mocks the kilt must feel the dirk!’ With this MacMungall drew a bread knife from his belt and pointed it at the nearest meffo. ‘And don’t you forget it, pal,’ he roared, making the word ‘pal’ sound like the vilest insult. ‘I’ll slit yer throat as soon as spit in yer eye, by God I will.’ He staggered once more and stared unsteadily in front of him, trying to focus on the Borribles.
‘Aye, lads,’ he went on, lowering his voice a little, ‘you’ve done well here. Seems to me these bairns might have a few bob on ’em. Things of value in these rucksacks. Share and share alike, pal. Half for you and half for me, that’s the way of the clans.’ MacMungall took another swig on his bottle. ‘Ah,’ he said when the liquid hit his stomach. ‘Right, lads, go through their pockets, tip out their bags, but remember, anyone trying to slip the goods into their own pockets will have me to deal with.’
At the end of this speech MacMungall swayed backwards and collapsed on to a beer crate that, luckily for him, was waiting in exactly the right position to receive his buttocks as he sat. He shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it, drank again from his bottle and slid his knife out of sight under his coat.
Knocker studied MacMungall with care. He was certainly nowhere near as tough as he pretended but he was still big and brawny, having massive shoulders and long strong arms with hands as big as earth movers at the end of them. He was probably the strongest meffo in the cavern and that was why the others obeyed him so readily, but like them MacMungall was in poor physical shape. His eyes, like theirs, looked like tattered bullet holes shot fresh through his head that morning. His lips were loose, his skin had the texture of a mouldy steak, and for all his brave speech his hands trembled when he raised his bottle so that half of every mouthful he took ran down his chin and neck and disappeared under a filthy old football scarf of green and white.
Knocker also observed that as far as the rest of MacMungall’s clothes were concerned they were not one bit better than those of his cronies. He wore a blue anorak stained with oil and ripped at the pockets, and several pairs of trousers to keep out the cold. He had no socks on but sported two odd shoes with the welts gaping away from what was left of the soles, giving a good view of dirty feet, and on his head was jammed a Scottish football fan’s tartan trilby. Altogether, thought Knocker, he was a fearsome sight, a coward with no conscience.
But Knocker’s time for reflection was over. Without warning, the Borribles were thrust forward. There was a flurry of excitement as the prisoners were searched and their rucksacks upended on the floor. Most of the recumbent meffos got to their feet now and began to press nearer, moaning and shoving at each other with their elbows. All were ragged and dirty, women and men, their clothes torn and tied together. Their eyes were dull with a blank madness relieved only by a glint of greed. Perhaps these children had money, money for drink.
The meffos fought to get near the Borribles, jostling them, tearing at their arms and legs, feeling their bodies and ripping at their clothes to find if money was secreted there. The rucksacks were inspected again, the contents picked up and thrown down, and gradually the meffos grew more and more angry as their disappointment rose. There was no money.
‘Hand it over,’ they shouted, and those next to the Borribles began to beat them about the head as hard as they could. ‘Hand it over, you brats, or we’ll rip yer skin off and eat yer alive.’
Sheer weight of numbers separated the Borribles from each other and one by one they were borne to the floor and the meffos came down with them and punched and scratched and spat and bit, and although each Adventurer fought as well as he or she could it made no difference. It seemed likely that they would all perish there, dismembered in that dismal archway behind King’s Cross. There was no controlling the meffos any more. MacMungall was drunk and like the Borribles had been pushed to the ground and submerged under a ton or two of mindless flesh.
Suddenly there came a scream which climbed above the tumult of the meffos and even pierced the noise of the trains. The clutching
hands dropped away and the offensive smell retreated. The Borribles scrambled to their feet, closed ranks and backhanded the blood from their eyes.
The scream came again and the scream was words. ‘Get off,’ it cried. ‘Get off.’ The meffos retreated further, the passion leaving their faces just as quickly as it had come. They stumbled away in haste; some to squat against a wall, most to throw themselves flat upon the ground, all of them surrendering to a deep and habitual despair.
In the middle of the sea of bodies stood a woman, a meffo like the others, but taller and grander though just as dirty and just as savage. She was clothed in a strange and ancient finery, the booty from some suitcase found or stolen in one of the nearby railway stations. It was a long dress she wore, layered pink and silver in taffeta, a dress that had once been the Saturday night adornment of a bronze medallist in ballroom dancing. Now it was stained and torn, ripped at the bosom. Under its tattered skirt were khaki trousers and on the woman’s feet was a pair of scuffed, once high-heeled shoes from both of which the heels had been broken. The shoes were blue.
Around her shoulders the woman had slung two or three knitted shawls of black wool, and she held these in place with broad, strong hands. Her face was flat and vulgar, but it was not weak; the nose was a button with open nostrils, the cheeks were pudgy, the chin was round and the mouth a deep slit. Her straw-coloured hair was streaked with black and grey and stood up around her skull like a starched halo. She looked like a witch who had wanted to change herself into a pig and then hesitated halfway. It was immediately obvious to the Borribles that everyone in the cavern went in dread of her.
‘Bring them kids over here,’ said the woman with a jerk of her head. ‘You fools. There might be a reward out for this lot, a big reward, and all you can do is kill ’em. Bring ’em ’ere.’
As soon as he could Hughie MacMungall heaved himself upright, rearranged the trilby on his head and shoved the Borribles across the cavern, eager to claim the glory of capturing such important prisoners. ‘Bet their parents would pay a fortune to ’ave ’em back home, eh Madge?’ he said, and he looked out craftily from under his eyebrows like a water rat from under a river bank, to make sure he was saying the right thing.
The Borribles could now see that by the doorway from which MacMungall had appeared earlier there stood a rickety table and a couple of plastic-covered armchairs. Madge leant against the table and ran a hand through her stiff hair. She studied the Borribles’ faces one by one and as she did so she took MacMungall’s bottle from him and poured some of its contents into her slit of a mouth.
Ninch stepped towards her; he was shaking with fright and temper.
‘You can’t keep me here,’ he shouted. ‘There’s a law against abduction. I’ll call the police. I warn you, I’m a—’
Madge’s head jerked forward on an arched neck like a snake striking. ‘You’re nothing here, sonny,’ she said, ‘but I’m life and death. If I ‘adn’t woken up just now them animals would have ripped yer to pieces and then eaten yer. They get so drunk they don’t know the difference between fish and chips and human flesh. Times is hard, sonny, and cannibals ain’t unknown round the back of King’s Cross, I can tell yer … So now, what are you doing here? The truth I want, or I’ll beat it out of yer.’
‘We ran away from a home,’ said Bingo, who had always been good at lying to adults, ‘a foster home.’
‘Bloody lot of yer for one home,’ said Madge, not convinced.
‘It was a big place,’ said Bingo, whining and wheedling. ‘We decided to run away, together, that’s why we ain’t got any money. We never had any to start with, otherwise we’d give it yer, honest.’
‘Honest,’ cried Madge, and she spat at the Borribles’ feet. ‘Honest ain’t invented.’
‘Throw ’em out,’ came a voice from the gloom. ‘Let’s get some sleep.’ A bottle smashed against the wall.
‘Shuddup,’ roared MacMungall, swaying on his feet, ‘or you’ll feel my fist, pal. I’m the boss here.’
‘You’re the what, where?’ Madge slowly turned her attention from the Borribles, placed her hands on her hips and glowered at her consort. ‘You couldn’t scratch yer arse without a book of instructions. Who found this place, eh? Answer me that, you bleeding’ haggis. Who keeps the coppers sweet so they turns a blind eye, eh? Answer me that.’
MacMungall evaded the woman’s gaze and sank into one of the armchairs. ‘Aw, Madge,’ he said, ‘go easy.’
As MacMungall and Madge began to quarrel the meffos who stood near the Borribles began to lose interest in the captives and shambled away to stretch themselves out on the floor with their mates. This gave the Adventurers a chance to look about them.
For his part Knocker turned his attention to the huge double doors that blocked the exit. A heavy iron bar held them firmly closed. That was not all; between the way out and the place where the Borribles now stood lay row after row of meffos. If the Borribles attempted to make a run for it they would be grabbed by leg or arm before they got anywhere. It would be best to do nothing for the time being; maybe Madge could be persuaded into setting them free.

Other books

The Sound of Seas by Gillian Anderson, Jeff Rovin
Do Not Disturb by Christie Ridgway
Andrea Kane by My Hearts Desire
Equinox by Lara Morgan
Jeremy Stone by Lesley Choyce
The Stone Wife by Peter Lovesey
The Leaving Season by Cat Jordan