City of the Falling Sky (34 page)

They approached the door and Vance gave a
firm rap.

“
Leave me alone! Haven’t you
had enough fun throwing bricks through my window?”

The three of them looked at each other.

“
We haven’t thrown any
bricks,” Seckry said innocently.

“
You wretched kids have
tormented me for long enough! Just leave me be!”

“
We’re not here to torment
you,” said Vance. “We just want to ask some questions.”

A grille on the door slid open and a pair of
bloodshot eyes peered at them with intensity.

“
What do you want?” came the
muffled voice.

“
We’re looking for Coronius
Hindglubber,” said Vance.

There was a momentary pause.

“
You’re looking in the wrong
place!” and with that, the grille slammed shut.

“
Professor Hindglubber, we
desperately need to speak to you,” Vance said
forcefully.

The grille shot open again and Seckry and
Eiya both jumped a little.

“
Dr Hindglubber is dead!
That’s all you need to know.”

“
Please,” Eiya begged. “I
woke up inside the Endrin compound with no memory before that
point. I need to know who I am. And I need to know what they were
doing to me. We know Endrin visited you and we know they were
interested in your theory of illusional time. We think you may be
able to help us.”

There was a long silence, and then –

“
You woke up inside the
compound?”

“
Yes,” Eiya said. “In an
area known as the cultivation unit. I was lying on a bed of earth
that was alive with glowing red worms.”

There was another silence, for so long that
Seckry was about to knock again, but then came the sound of bolts
being unlocked and chains being lifted.

The three of them gave each other a quick
glance of hope.

The door opened inwards slowly, and a heap of
masonry and dust dropped from the door frame.

Coronius Hindglubber was short and thin and
looked terrible. His dank grey hair hung sodden with sweat and
clung to his pockmarked skin while his white vest was stained with
brown streaks and littered with frayed holes. The smell of the
house hit the group immediately. It was a mix of root vegetables
and rot.

“
Come inside.” Hindglubber
said. “Hurry.”

“
What did Endrin say to you
when they came here?” Vance asked. They were seated around the
living room, which was scattered with bottles of whiskey and wet
patches of carpet.

“
They told me they wanted my
work. My diagrams, my illustrations, my papers,
everything.”

Hindglubber shook his head, lost in his
memory.

“
I told them no and they
laughed. They said that if Endrin wants something, it’s not a
matter that’s up for discussion. When they realised I wasn’t just
going to give up all of my work they tied me to this chair and
packed it all into their bags as I watched.

“
I couldn’t understand it.
‘What on earth are you going to do with my work?’ I said to them.
That’s when the one with black, greasy hair told the others to
leave.

“
He said to me with an
excited smile, ‘Is it true? Is this all true, this illusional
time?’ and I said, ‘Of course it’s true.’ He smiled and there was
something dark, something deep and dark behind those eyes,
something menacing. He said, ‘If time is just an illusion, then it
would be possible, would it not, to bring something out of this
illusional past and bring it into the illusional
present?’

“
But I told him he was
wrong. Something that is within the confines of the illusion cannot
alter the illusion itself. There is nothing in the world so
powerful that it can manipulate the illusion. ‘Oh I wouldn’t be so
sure about that,’ he said to me.

“
It was then that the
gravity of the situation fully hit me. If Endrin had, indeed, found
something powerful enough to manipulate the illusion, the
consequences of them doing so would be completely
unknown.

“
You have no idea what you
are meddling in,’ I said to him. ‘Reality doesn’t work in such
linear ways. You cannot bring something out of the past and place
it in the present. The whole fabric of the universe would be ripped
apart. Who knows what would happen?’

“
But he just smiled. ‘Don’t
bother contacting the Patrol,’ he said. ‘They won’t be interested.’
And he threw me a knife to cut myself free before
leaving.”

“
Endrin can’t just break in
and steal a lifetime of work,” said Eiya. “Why did he say the
Patrol wouldn’t be interested? I’m sick of Endrin thinking they’re
above the law.”

“
Well,” Hindglubber said
grimly. “Endrin
are
above the law. The first thing I did was
phone the head office of the Skyfall Patrol.”

“
What did they say?” Eiya
asked.

“
They told me to forget it.
Forget everything. To go away and never come back. They told me
they weren’t going to help me and if I tried to take this any
further I would be dealt with accordingly.”

“
The Patrol? Are you
serious?” Seckry said in disbelief.

“
I had nowhere to go. I
couldn’t run away. I shut my door and vowed never to open it
again.”

“
I bet they’re paying the
Patrol to keep quiet,” Eiya said. “The filthy pigs.”

“
What do they want to bring
out of the past and into the present?” asked Vance.

“
I don’t know,” Hindglubber
said. “But they are fools. They cannot just bring something out of
the past, no matter how they think they can do it. Time doesn’t
work like that.”

“
Dr Hindglubber,” Vance
said. “I think Endrin may have found something powerful enough to
manipulate time. It’s called helitonium.”

Hindglubber reeled in fear and shock. “Hel .
. . helitonium?” he said.

“
The white chips they gave
everybody? They were scanners, scanning people for traces of
helitonium. It sounds like they found people with helitonium inside
them, and they’re going to extract it.”

“
But helitonium is just . .
. a myth.”

Vance breathed out slowly. “Dr Hindglubber,
you can spare us the act. You know just as well as we do that
helitonium exists, don’t you?”

Hindglubber’s lips trembled for a moment.
“Yes. Of course it exists, though I’ve never come across it. You
say Endrin have access to helitonic particles?”

“
We believe so,” said
Vance.

“
Then . . . Gedin help us
all.”

After Vance had dropped Seckry and Eiya off
at Kerik Square, they both sat on their beds talking for a
while.

Seckry couldn’t remember falling asleep, but
he must have done at some point, as he woke up to the sound of
ruffling carpet. He lay there with his eyes closed for a moment.
Eiya must have got up to use the bathroom.

But there was some other sound.

Was it breathing? It didn’t sound like
Eiya.

He began to sit up and opened his eyes
sleepily.

He froze.

Absolute fear engulfed Seckry’s body and he
mouthed, “Eiya!” slowly, desperately, and silently.

Eiya was grasped firmly in the arms of the
hugest man Seckry had ever seen, her eyes streaming silent
tears.

“
Gedin, no. Please. No.”
Seckry shook his head as he saw the symbol on the man’s
forehead.

A cracked, deformed scar, red and
painful.

In the shape of a rabbit.

“
Please!” Seckry begged.
“Let her go!”

The Rabbit Man snarled as Eiya tried to shake
herself free.

“
No!” Seckry shouted. “What
do you want? Anything! Anything! Just let her go,
please!”

The Rabbit Man held on firmly to Eiya with
one hand and reached into his pocket with the other. He pulled out
a compact knife and flicked the blade open.

“
Eiya!” Seckry
screamed.

The Rabbit Man pressed the knife against
Eiya’s throat.

But then something in his face changed.

He suddenly dropped the knife and let Eiya
go.

Eiya ran to Seckry and grabbed a hold of him,
squeezing him as tight as she could and burying her face into his
chest.

Seckry was frozen, his mouth half open in mid
sentence, as the huge beast of a man looked towards the window. His
facial expression was slowly changing from pure malice and hatred
to something of curiosity and confusion.

In the silence, all that could be heard was
the faint sound of Mrs Plum outside, singing her lullaby as eerily
as ever.

The Rabbit Man made his way over to the
window slowly, dragging his huge frame like some kind of mythical
stone golem.

Seckry was paralysed, wondering what on earth
was going to happen to them, and Eiya was shaking uncontrollably in
his arms.

But the Rabbit Man had lost all interest in
them. It seemed as though he was . . . listening to the song.

His eyes were so bloodshot and puffed up that
Seckry couldn’t be sure, but it almost seemed as though they were
welling up with water.

With a cracked voice, the Rabbit Man said,
“
Mum?
”

There was a howl of agony from the Rabbit
Man, and the skin on his arms and legs suddenly flashed bright
blue, radiating neon light as though there were bulbs inside his
flesh.

“
Mum?
” he said,
louder this time, before roaring in pain once again as his skin
flashed blue for the second time.

He fell to the floor next to Seckry’s window,
shaking.

Seckry and Eiya were motionless, almost too
petrified with fear to even think about what was going on. But one
single thought was boring away at Seckry’s mind through the
fear.

Was this
Danney Plum?

“
Danney?” Seckry said
uncertainly.

The Rabbit Man turned his head and looked at
Seckry as though for the first time, his eyes wide with innocent
curiosity.

With a third flash of ultra blue, the Rabbit
Man seized up and arched his back in agony. This time the light was
stronger. It seemed to be crippling him, electrocuting him. His
gargled screams stopped dead as the light cut off, and his head hit
the floor.

He was motionless.

All Seckry and Eiya could hear now was their
own trembling breathing and the oblivious tune of Mrs Plum’s
lullaby. Danney’s lullaby.

Then something happened that made Seckry
squeeze Eiya as close to him as he could.

The Rabbit Man’s limp body began moving,
sliding, as though being dragged by an invisible force across his
bedroom floor. He slid through the door and reached up a heavy arm,
grasping at thin air, and was then dragged around the corner and
out of sight. They heard the front door open quickly and the
movement of people. Then a van door slamming shut and the furious
roar of an engine speeding away.

Seckry and Eiya both stood shaking for longer
than either of them could remember.

The first thing Seckry said was, “He’s
gone.”

“
Seckry . . . I thought that
was it. I thought it was going to end there.” Eiya’s nerves finally
seemed to let her emotions through and she began crying into his
chest, her tears soaking his t-shirt.

They sat, holding each other all night until
neither of them could stay upright any longer.

After a brief, troubled sleep, Seckry awoke
to find Eiya already up.

“
How could he have got in?”
Eiya said. “There’s no damage to the door. I’ve checked. Seckry, he
had a
key.
”

“
There’s only one set of
people that have keys to everybody’s homes apart from the owners,”
Seckry said. “And that’s the Skyfall Patrol.”

“
The Patrol . . .” Eiya
said. “The force that are fighting against the Rabbit Man? Who are
doing everything they can to track him down and stop him from
killing again? They haven’t been trying to track him down, have
they? They’ve been giving him access. The Patrol gave the Rabbit
Man the key.”

Seckry said nothing for a moment.

“
Eiya . . . I think the
Rabbit Man is Mrs Plum’s son.”

Eiya nodded softly. “He’s still alive. And
she has no idea. And he’s . . . a mass murderer.”

“
He looked like a monster,”
Seckry said. “Whatever they’ve done to him, they’ve turned him into
this.”

“
Seckry. It’s time for
answers isn’t it?”

“
It’s time we stopped this.
The Divinita Project, the Rabbit Man murders,
everything.”

“
Well, Seckry, look at this
. . . I noticed it this morning. I don’t think that music we heard
in the old power reactor was living in the memory of the metal. I
think it was coming from beneath us.”

“
What do you
mean?”

Eiya held out her mobile phone, displaying
one of the photographs she had taken of the glowflies on the night
of the ball.

Seckry peered closer. It was a photo of a
swarm of them on the wall, just above the rusted, closed door.
Seckry hadn’t noticed it while they had been there, but it seemed
as though the pattern they were forming resembled something they
had both been looking for for a long time.