The Power of Five Oblivion (48 page)

He was right. My head touched the pillow and that was that. I didn’t so much fall asleep as plummet.

When I opened my eyes, Jamie was already up and grey light was streaming in through the windows. I looked out and saw the riverbank moving slowly past, drab and muddy with just a few tufts of grass. It might once have been beautiful, only it wasn’t now. The weather was bad and the water was so very black. I didn’t have any idea what time it was. If I’d been in the village, I’d have been in the orchard by now or else I’d have heard it from Mr Bantoft, and that was my first thought that morning. I’d never hear a word from the farm manager again. Not from any of them. That was over.

I got up and made my way through the boat, making sure not to hit my head on the pots and pans that hung down from the ceiling. Everything was very low and very narrow – like a miniature house, where everything has been squeezed together. Jamie was on deck with the Traveller, the two of them standing together by the tiller.

“So you’ve finally made it!” the Traveller muttered. “You’ve missed breakfast but you’re just in time for lunch.”

Lunch? Had I really slept that long? I looked around me at the unfamiliar surroundings – fields stretching out on one side, with a thick mist hanging over the grass and a few stunted trees twisting up, and a scrubby hillside on the other. It wasn’t much of a view but for me it was new – the first time my eyes had had something new to see in fifteen years. I imagined that people coming out of prison would feel the same.

“What is for lunch?” I asked.

“Tinned salmon. Tinned tomatoes. Tinned beans. Tinned stew. It’s really whatever tin you want to open.”

We’d run out of tins in the village ages ago so the Traveller could have been describing a whole banquet as far as I was concerned.

“Are you OK, Holly?” Jamie asked.

I nodded. I should have been feeling worse but the sleep had helped – that and the distance we had come. I had managed to leave some of the nightmares behind me.

We came to a humpback bridge with a lane crossing the river and the Traveller lowered our speed and pulled in so that the old brickwork covered our heads. He seemed to know what he was doing, which was just as well because I had no idea where we were heading or what we would do when we got there.

“Take the ropes, Jamie…”

We tied up under the bridge so that if one of the helicopters happened to pass, we would be out of sight. The Traveller turned off the engine and we all went down to the galley, crowding around the table – me and Jamie on one side, the Traveller on the other. He opened various tins and also boiled the kettle and made real coffee out of a jar, which was only the second time I had ever drunk it, although I’m sorry to say I didn’t much like the taste. The salmon was amazing though; soft and juicy and filling. It made my head spin to think that the river might once have been teeming with fish like this.

So there we were, the three of us, sitting in that cramped but cosy living space, hidden under the bridge, perhaps forty or fifty miles from the village. I waited for the Traveller to speak and eventually he did.

“My name is Graham,” he said. “You can call me that, if you like. I was talking to Jamie last night. I’m with an organization – you might call it a secret society – that wants to help him.” That made sense. I had never met anyone who looked more secretive than the Traveller. Those dark eyes of his had never given anything away. “The society is called the Nexus. Jamie knows about it and he knows he can trust me.”

I was sensible enough not to say anything just yet. Anyway, my mouth was full. It had been full more or less from the moment I had sat down.

“The Nexus are waiting for us,” he said. “We just have to get to the Sheerwall Tunnel, which is on the edge of London – and this is the best way. As I said to Jamie last night, the canals have always been hidden away. They were almost forgotten, even ten years ago. And the good news is that the police don’t know we’re on a boat … otherwise, they’d have been after us already.”

“So what’s the bad news?” I asked.

“It’ll still take us three days to get there. Three days and three nights, travelling non-stop. We’re going to have to take turns at the tiller. You did a good job last night, Holly. First we have to get off the river and into the canal system. We’re about a mile from the Four Ways lock.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I came this way seven years ago. Of course, it was all very different then. Things were bad but they quickly got a lot worse as the food stocks ran out and the seeds stopped growing. The lock may have been vandalized. It may not be working. If that’s the case, we’ll have to abandon the boat and continue on foot.”

He reached down and to my surprise he produced two guns – heavy pistols – which he laid down on the table with a clunk. They looked completely bizarre, sitting there, next to the plates of food. One was for Jamie, one for me.

“We can’t let anybody stop us,” the Traveller continued. “If anyone sees the boat moving or hears the engine, they’ll know we have fuel. There was a time when people might have helped us. Not any more. We have to assume that everybody is our enemy and that they’ll kill us for what we have. So if I tell you to shoot, you mustn’t hesitate. Holly, you know I wanted to leave you behind and I’m not going to apologize for that. My job is to get Jamie to London and that’s all that matters.”

He’d certainly made that clear the night before. I remembered him turning to me in the village with all the police running amok, killing anyone they came across, and saying, “Find somewhere to hide.” Until someone came and cut my head off or set me on fire. That was as much as he cared about me.

“Where are we going in London?” Jamie asked.

I wanted to know too. Part of me had always wanted to see the capital but at the same time I dreaded it. Miss Keyland had occasionally talked about London. She had shown us pictures of red buses and Piccadilly Circus and the Houses of Parliament. We all knew about the ninth of May, when the terror came. But she had never shown us what had happened next. It was as if she didn’t want us to know what remained.

“You’ll see when you get there,” the Traveller replied. “Don’t expect me to talk about it.”

“St Meredith’s is surrounded,” Jamie said. “And the door isn’t even working.”

“How do you know that?”

“Matt told me. Can the Nexus get me there?”

“Yes.”

“All right. But I’m the one who’s going to tell you when we break in.”

The Traveller looked at Jamie with something close to a scowl. “And how will you know when’s the right time?” he asked.

“I just will.”

The Traveller was going to argue but then he thought better of it. “All right. You’re the boss.”

Was he? I wasn’t actually sure who was in charge. It was the Traveller’s boat. He was the one who had made all the calls so far. He had decided where to stop and even what we were going to eat. But there was something about Jamie that I hadn’t noticed before. Somehow, he seemed stronger than ever. The Traveller was twice his size and probably twice his age. But he was only here for Jamie. We both were, really. He and the Five … that was all that mattered.

We cleared the stuff away and set off again. The Traveller turned a key to start the
Lady Jane
‘s engine and he must have looked after it well during all those years as it kicked in at once. Jamie and I untied the ropes. We had to push the boat out and then jump on without falling into the river – not as easy as it sounded what with the banks being so uneven.

The landscape opened out on the other side of the bridge, which wasn’t such good news because suddenly the
Lady Jane
stuck out … you could have seen it for miles. The fog had lifted too. I could see a few scattered buildings, old barns and sheds that might once have belonged to farms but there was nothing moving; no animals, no people. We passed a tractor, rusting, with grass sprouting out of the wheels, then a tangle of barbed wire, then a wall of old tyres. In the books that I had read when I was growing up, the English countryside was somewhere beautiful to visit and to have adventures. You got the impression that the sun was always shining. Well, it wasn’t now. Everything looked hostile and abandoned.

“There it is!” the Traveller called out and pointed and, about a quarter of a mile away, I saw the lock that would take us off the river and into the canals that would in turn lead to London. Again, I’d seen locks in books but I never thought I’d go through one. The canal led between two narrow walls. There was a gate at each end, which had to be opened and closed. The one on our side was open so we would be able to cruise in to what was effectively a deep, rectangular box. Close the gate, fill the inside with water and we would slowly float up. There was a flat surface with a dilapidated house that must have once belonged to the lock keeper, and once we were level with it and the gates were opened we would be able to motor out again, heading south. I did wonder why the lock was called Four Ways, though. You could go left or right along the river or you could head off up the canal. But there was also a track leading across the fields, so maybe that was the fourth direction they had in mind.

The Traveller had wondered whether the lock would still be working. I hoped so. I didn’t like the idea of walking all the way to London. Shouldn’t this secret society, the Nexus, have been looking after the canals? After all, it had always been part of the plan to use them.

“Look…!” This time it was Jamie who had spoken and there was an edge to his voice that told me straight away that he wasn’t going to point out a pretty tree or flowers. He was looking up and, with a sense of unease, I tried to work out what it was that he had seen.

There was nothing. I certainly couldn’t see any helicopters heading our way – anyway, I’d have heard them first. The sky was empty except for a dark cloud, which made me think it was going to rain. But Jamie had definitely seen something. As we cruised down the river with the lock still a good hundred metres away, he stared up and his face was filled with fear.

“What is it?” I asked.

He said nothing. And then I noticed something strange. There was hardly any breeze but the storm cloud was moving very quickly, heading our way. In fact, as I stared at it, I realized it wasn’t a cloud at all. It was changing shape, one minute flat and oblong like a huge pancake, the next twisting itself so that it resembled a snake.

“What is it?” I asked a second time.

“Fly-soldiers,” Jamie replied.

Jamie had talked about fly-soldiers when he was describing the first battle with the Old Ones, ten thousand years before. I knew what they were but I couldn’t believe that I was actually seeing them for myself, in my own world, now. What I was looking at was thousands, maybe millions of insects, making their way towards us in a vast swarm. In the air, they were separate. But when they landed, they would mould themselves into human form and at that moment they would become solid. Fly-soldiers could kill you with a sword made up of flies – yet strike out at them and they would separate and your own weapon would pass through them. Jamie had told me all this. And here they were!

“The lock,” Jamie said. “We have to get into the lock. Maybe they won’t see us…”

“We can’t go any faster,” the Traveller said.

I guessed that the cloud of fly-soldiers was about half a mile away but getting closer all the time. Were they searching for us – or were they simply heading for the village that we had left the day before? And did they have ears? Could they hear us? Suddenly it seemed to me that the
Lady Jane
‘s engines were making far too much noise. With the countryside so empty, they would be heard as far away as the horizon and the red and green paint simply screamed out: “Here I am!” Why had the Traveller never thought to have the boat camouflaged?

We were still moving painfully slowly. At the same time, the flies seemed to have spread out, filling the sky. The Traveller was standing in front of me, his face set, his hands gripping the tiller. Jamie and I were next to him. I resisted the temptation to crawl back inside the cabin and hide, even though the three of us were obvious targets, standing on the flat platform with the bulk of the boat stretching out in front of us. I could see the entrance to the lock. The high walls would hem us in, concealing us … if only we could reach them in time. The fly-cloud had become an arrow. In a few seconds it would be directly overhead.

The Traveller pulled the tiller. The
Lady Jane
twisted round and entered the lock. Suddenly there were tall, slimy walls on both sides. I could smell damp and decay. In front of us, water splattered through the gap where the gates met. I heard the engine roar and realized that the Traveller had pulled the throttle into reverse. Even so, we were moving too quickly. There was a loud crash and I was almost thrown off my feet as the bow of the boat hit the gate. Without being asked, Jamie reached forward and twisted the key, turning the engine off.

It seemed like we were in an oversized grave. Water splashed and trickled down all around us. The walls, with their dark brickwork, rose up nine or ten metres and I was sure they would conceal us from anything … provided it didn’t come too close. None of us spoke, not so much as a whisper. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and knew that this was a different sort of fear from anything I had ever felt. My world had been invaded by something that couldn’t possibly exist. I took a deep breath, then looked up. The little slot of sky that I could see was clear. The fly-soldiers seemed to have wheeled off in another direction. We hadn’t been seen.

We didn’t move for a few minutes. Then Jamie climbed onto the roof and up a ladder set in the side of the lock. I followed him. We had to close the gates behind us, fill the lock with water, then open the gates ahead. I looked back in the direction we had come and saw the cloud of flies, already half a mile or more away, disappearing into the distance.

“That was close,” I said.

Jamie nodded. “They’ll be back.”

And London was still miles away.