The Power of Five Oblivion (52 page)

Not that it mattered. We could stop and try to hide inside the tunnel. Or we could go on, in which case we’d be out the other end in about one minute. That was all the breathing space we had. The police would already be on their way to cut us off. We had come so far! We had managed to escape from Little Moulsford and we had travelled through the night. But it had all been for nothing.

And then I saw that the Traveller was already moving. He went over to Jamie and pushed up the throttle, cutting our speed by half. Then he flipped open a panel next to the tiller. I hadn’t even noticed it before. Inside there was a dial and a red button.

“We’ve got to move fast!” he shouted. “Leave everything behind. Go to the front of the boat. Get onto the roof.”

“What about the steering?” Jamie asked.

“It’s OK. It’s locked.” The Traveller turned the dial and pressed the red button. At once, a light began to flash inside the boat. I wondered what he had done. Was this a secret weapon, the surprise he had been talking about? “Move!” he shouted again. “We have to be on the roof!”

The canal boat was still moving – but at half the speed, so we had a little more time. Nobody had followed us into the tunnel. Everything was going black–white, black–white, so I could just make out what I was doing. We dropped our weapons, dashed through the galley and the sleeping area and scrambled up. The Traveller went first, then Jamie, then me, and there we were on our feet, not moving ourselves but still gliding forward with the curved ceiling of the tunnel so close to our heads that we could reach up and touch it. I felt moisture dripping onto my neck. It was very cold in the tunnel. We were already about halfway through.

“There’s a ladder!” the Traveller shouted. “Grab hold of it and swing yourself along. I’ll go first. Follow me!”

I saw it almost immediately. It was attached to the ceiling, running horizontally above the water. All we had to do was grab hold of it and wait while the top of the boat moved forward underneath our feet. As the
Lady Jane
continued, the steering locked, the speed constant, we would be left dangling in the darkness. What was the big idea? Were we supposed to hang there until everyone went away?

I transferred my weight to my hands and arms and began to walk forward along the roof of the boat, remaining in the same place. And then the
Lady Jane
had gone. My feet bumped over the edge and suddenly I was dangling there with only the dark water below me. The others were in front of me and I wondered how the Traveller could possibly find the strength to hang on after everything he had been through.

But he was grimly determined. “This way!” he shouted. He had his back to me of course but I saw him swing himself forward, moving from one rung to the next. It reminded me of when I was small, in the playground in my village. There had been a climbing frame and I’d often done exactly this. First the Traveller, then Jamie, then me … we clambered along the ladder and all the time the
Lady Jane
was getting further and further away in front of us. I reckoned it would be out in the light in about ten seconds.

And what would the policewoman do then, when she saw that nobody was on board? Would she assume that we had somehow drowned?

“Up!” the Traveller shouted.

I didn’t know what he meant by that but even as he spoke, I saw him disappear from sight and realized that there was a vertical shaft inside the tunnel, directly above his head. He’d swung himself as far as the opening and then across onto a second ladder that had taken him up. Jamie did the same. One minute he was in front of me, then it was just his feet. Then he had gone altogether. I was the last. Suddenly I was alone in the tunnel, dangling in space with my arms outstretched. I saw the second ladder in front of me. Jamie’s feet were above my head. But I couldn’t follow him. The
Lady Jane
had reached the tunnel exit and I had to see what happened next.

I watched as it slid into the open. I could actually see the tiller, the deck where we had just been standing, the name of the boat written in gold letters on the stern. There was no sign of the police or the fly-soldiers but I could imagine them, waiting to pounce. The boat was completely out of the tunnel now, framed by an O of light. I thought of the button that the Traveller had pressed and it was only then that I realized what was about to happen.

The
Lady Jane
blew up. The explosion was massive, not just tearing it apart but devouring it in a blazing red fireball. And as I stared, the flames rushed towards me, back through the tunnel. If the bomb had gone off a second earlier, I would have been killed instantly. I had about half a second to get out of there. Desperately, I threw myself onto the second ladder and pulled myself up even as a torpedo of burning air raced past. It must have missed me by less than an inch. I felt the heat on the soles of my feet and, looking down, everything was a dense, brilliant red. I looked up and saw Jamie’s face, also reflecting red, staring in horror. He was already climbing and I followed, putting as much space as I could between myself and the inferno below.

Ten rungs. Then we came to another opening and a horizontal passageway leading into inky blackness. We were above the water, still far underground. But I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on.

THIRTY-NINE

“This way.”

The Traveller’s voice, barely more than a whisper, came out of the darkness ahead of me and I shuffled forward on my hands and knees because there wasn’t enough room to stand up. I was in a narrow, dark tube, buried underground and suddenly I found myself on the edge of panic, fighting for breath. But then, about ten metres away, a square of electric light appeared and I realized that a door had been opened. A door into what? I didn’t care. Jamie was already on his way towards it and I followed.

The door opened into a square room, with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling and breezeblock walls. I thought I could hear the distant hum of machinery. There had to be a generator powering the light. Jamie and the Traveller were being greeted by two people, a man and a woman dressed in grey overalls, both of them in their forties. The woman had fair hair tied in a knot. Her face was filled with concern as she tried to examine the Traveller’s wound.

“You’ve been shot,” she was saying. “You should have told us. We have to get you to the doctor.”

“Not yet.” The Traveller shook his head. “I need to see that it worked.”

“Graham…” the man began. He looked remarkably like the Traveller, with black, curly hair, a lean face and lots of stubble. Like the woman, he was quite pale, like two prisoners who hadn’t seen much of the sun.

“I’m all right, Will. Honestly, I am.” The two of them stood facing each other for a moment, then suddenly embraced, and in that moment I guessed that they were actually brothers, that Will had been part of the family the Traveller had mentioned, and that they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for a long time. “It’s good to see you,” the Traveller said.

“I’ve missed you.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

They broke apart. The Traveller gestured at the two of us. “This is Jamie. And Holly – who was looking after him. I’ll tell you about it later. But now I want to get inside…”

There was a second door leading out. By now there were about a million questions I wanted to ask, starting with who these people were, what this place was and what we were doing here. But I was able to work out some of it for myself. The police would have seen the
Lady Jane
explode and hopefully they’d assume that we had still been on board, that we’d killed ourselves rather than fall into their hands. They’d look in the tunnel but they might not notice a ladder in the darkness above their heads and surely they would never suspect that there had been people waiting to meet us. At least, that was what I hoped.

We followed a long passageway with bare concrete walls and somehow I got the sense that we were being led further and further into the hillside. I could feel the weight of it pressing down on us. Then there was another doorway – all the light was coming from here – and as I turned the corner, I froze. I just stood there, gaping in astonishment.

We were standing on a raised metal platform above a huge room with at least twenty people looking up at us, applauding. They were all dressed in the same grey overalls as the two people who had met us, but they were every age – from twenty to about seventy. They were surrounded by equipment that I could vaguely remember from my childhood but that I had never seen working since then: electric lights, for a start, but also television screens, computers and telephones. There were other machines, too, banked up against the walls with cables everywhere. Even the air in the room was coming in through some sort of ventilation system. There were no windows.

The room was circular with a domed ceiling. A number of workstations had been arranged in a horseshoe shape in the middle and there was a proper kitchen with cupboards, fridges, ovens and a sink (did they really have running water?) to one side. Two wooden tables stretched out next to each other with different-coloured plastic chairs for meals and a short distance away, sofas had been arranged facing a widescreen TV. There were plants and flowers everywhere … in pots, vases and terracotta urns. Maybe that made them feel at home. Because this was definitely where they worked, ate and rested. I noticed more doors leading out, presumably to where they slept.

They were still applauding – but not me, of course. Jamie was the one they had all been waiting for and the Traveller had brought him here. They were the two heroes. I was just someone who had tagged along for the ride. But I still couldn’t help smiling. They were so glad to see us and, at the end of the day, if I hadn’t stood up for Jamie back in the village, he might never have made it. And even if the Traveller had wanted to leave me behind, I was part of the adventure too.

The Traveller held up a hand. The applause died away.

“My friends!” he exclaimed. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you all. I can’t believe I’m back. I’m so glad to see you … especially Sophie and Will.” He nodded at the man, who, I was sure, was his brother. “But the main thing is, all our work, everything we’ve suffered, hasn’t been in vain. I found the village and the door and finally it opened and one of the Five came through. This is Jamie Tyler. If there is any hope left in the world, it rests with him. He is here and we can help him take on the Old Ones and give mankind a second chance.”

At that, they all began to clap again. If I’d been in Jamie’s shoes, I wouldn’t have known whether to bow or make a speech or wave or what to do. But he just stood there, as if he had expected this sort of reception, and it seemed to me that in some ways I was seeing him for the first time. He wasn’t just another fifteen-year-old like me. He was a Gatekeeper. He was here to save the world.

The Traveller must have decided that this had gone on long enough because suddenly he was bounding down the stairs, making for the nearest workstation, where a TV monitor was flickering with a black-and-white image. Jamie and I followed. There was a young woman there, only a few years older than me. She was quite small with shaven hair.

“How are you, Linda?” the Traveller asked. “I hardly recognize you. You were only twelve when I left.” His eyes flickered to the screen. “Has it worked?”

She nodded. “I think so. They’re in the water but they’re looking in the wrong place.”

I looked at the television, fascinated to see the canal and the moving figures. The last time I had seen a TV I had been six years old, and that had been a long time ago. There must have been cameras concealed close to the canal because we could see everything. The fly-soldiers seemed to have gone but the police were still there, standing on the bank on the other side of the tunnel or wading through the water. The image changed and I saw what was left of the
Lady Jane
. Only the front section had survived in one piece and smoke was still billowing out. The rest was either floating on the water or scattered over the ground. The image changed again and I saw the policewoman in her long coat, watching pensively, her elbow resting on her hand. In front of her, one of the policemen was slipping into the canal.

“They’re going back into the tunnel,” Jamie said. “What happens if they find the ladder?”

“There’s nothing unusual about a ladder set in the ceiling,” the Traveller replied. “When the canals were built, there were no engines and the horses that pulled the barges couldn’t go through the tunnels. So the crew would lie on their backs on the roof of the boat and use their feet to propel it forward.”

“What about the shaft?”

“It’s already locked,” the girl – Linda – said. She gestured at a set of controls in front of her. “As soon as you climbed up, a panel slid across behind you. The second door is locked too. Even if they light up the entire tunnel, they’re not going to see anything.”

“You knew we were coming,” I said.

“We’ve been watching you for the last few miles.”

Watching us? How? There must have been more cameras concealed along the way. “Why didn’t you come and help us when we were being chased?” I asked.

“I can explain that, Holly.”

Another woman had appeared, this one older, with white hair, holding a thin cane. Her eyes were covered with black glasses and because I had never met anyone who was blind before, it took me a few seconds to realize that was exactly what she was.

Next to me, Jamie started. “Miss Ashwood!” he exclaimed.

“Jamie…”

“You know each other?” I asked.

“We met once, ten years ago.” The blind woman smiled. “At least, it was ten years for me. We’re safe, I think. The police won’t find anything and they’ll assume that you died in the boat. Don’t worry. We’ll keep an eye on things. What matters now is that the three of you get some breakfast. You need a shower, a change of clothes and some sleep. Then we can talk.”

“Miss Ashwood…” Jamie wasn’t moving. “What is this place? Is this the Nexus? Have you really done all this for me?”