Hollow Earth (5 page)

She dropped back down into the kitchen. The twins were gone.

Frantic, Sandie scrambled off the table. ‘Matt! Em!’

‘Under here!’

For a second, Sandie was so relieved to see the twins safely huddled under the table that it took her an extra beat to observe that they’d spread their pens on the floor and were drawing on a sketchpad between them. She hauled Em out from under the table and scrambled on to the table with her.

‘No,’ screamed Em, stiffening her body and digging her heels in. ‘I need to help!’

Em’s backpack and flailing limbs were making it impossible for Sandie to make any progress.

Stop fighting, Em. I think I can finish it myself.

But what if you can’t?

I can climb faster than you anyway.

In an instant, Em stopped resisting and climbed willingly on to the chair. No sooner had Sandie joined her than their would-be captors were at the door to the flat.

‘It’ll be much easier on everyone, Sandie, if you open this door,’ came a voice.

‘Use my hands as a step, Em,’ Sandie ordered.

When Em’s foot was in place, Sandie hoisted her up and out through the skylight on to the roof.

‘Don’t move!’

Em sat on the roof and stared in through the skylight as Sandie backed down on to the table again.

A bloodcurdling scream exploded from the door. The noise was so full of pain and horror, Em screamed in response: ‘Oh God, Mum, they’ve got Matt!’

But Matt was climbing up on the table next to Sandie. Shocked and relieved, Sandie hauled him up on to the kitchen chair, preparing to hoist him outside with his sister. The entire flat was shaking with each terrible thump from the men at the door. Then Sandie noticed.

The wall was trembling. Not the door.

She tore the sketchbook from Matt’s hand. When she looked at it, she couldn’t help herself. She burst into laughter. Matt grinned at her.

The twins had sketched the apartment’s front wall without a door, trapping the visitors out in the hall with no access to the flat. The intruders were pounding furiously on a wall where the door should have been.

‘Mum, we should go,’ urged Matt.

Sandie cupped her hands and hefted Matt out on to the roof to join Em.

Another searing howl of pain filled the house. Before climbing after her children, Sandie stared at the wall more closely. Her laughter died in her throat. Sticking through the middle of the plaster where the door should have been was a man’s left hand and forearm. The fingers were limp, and the hand was already turning a mottled blue-grey.

Feeling sick, Sandie heaved herself outside. Ushering the children forward on their hands and knees, she leaned back in, pushed the chair off the table and dropped the skylight closed behind them.

The howls of the man trapped in the wall followed them across the roof.

NINE

W
hen Matt and Em were safely on the cobbled courtyard in front of the mews, with only minor scrapes on their hands and knees to show for their escape, Sandie shredded the drawing from Matt’s sketchpad into little pieces, tossing them into a neighbour’s rubbish bin.

‘What are you doing?’ said Matt, trying to stop her. ‘Ripping it up will make the wall go back to normal!’

‘We can’t leave Violet and Anthea’s wall like that, Mattie, it wouldn’t be right.’
To say nothing of freeing the man whose arm was trapped,
Sandie added to herself. She trusted his injury would slow the hunt down.

‘When we’re far enough away, our drawings stop working anyway,’ added Em without thinking.

‘Shut up, Em!’ hissed Matt.

‘Exactly how many times have you done something like this?’ Sandie demanded.

Em looked sheepish; Matt was still scowling. Sandie collapsed on the neighbour’s garden wall. Oh, she really didn’t want to know the answer to that question. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed by how much Matt and Em needed to learn about who they were. She was paralysed by how truly unprepared she was to teach them.

In her head, she’d rehearsed over and over again what she’d say when the time came. She’d even started to explain to them about their special abilities – their supernatural powers – when they were only toddlers and their dad was still a part of their lives. The lesson hadn’t gone as planned. Sandie hadn’t been able to bring herself to use the word
Animare
: the ancient and more accurate term that defined them.

‘When you’re older,’ she had started, as the twins had scribbled at the Abbey’s long kitchen table, ‘your imaginations, your drawings, will be able to alter reality. You’ll have the power to change things in the real world.’

‘Can you hear yourself?’ Malcolm had chided. ‘They’re just babies. They don’t have a clue what you’re saying to them.’

He had then reached across to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter and grabbed an orange.

‘What are you doing?’ Sandie had asked.

‘An experiment. Something harmless.’

Malcolm had placed the orange on the roll of paper in front of the twins. ‘Em, Mattie, can you draw Daddy a picture of this orange?’

‘They’re too young, Malcolm,’ Sandie had said. ‘Most of us can’t animate until we’re close to nine or ten.’

At first nothing had happened. The children hadn’t moved, and the orange had remained an orange. Then Em had begun to draw. She had drawn an orange that looked like a square with legs, and Matt’s orange, although mostly round, had a pointy top and a tail.

The real orange had remained a real orange.

Until, that is, Em had grabbed her chewed pink crayon and begun to colour Matt’s pointy orange thing, and Matt, not liking what Em was doing to his creation, had snatched the pink crayon from her and begun to scribble across all the parts that Em had coloured.

Within seconds, the orange had exploded, showering wet slivers of pulp all over the twins.

Sandie stared in exhaustion at her two children standing anxiously in the mews courtyard in front of her. Matt was wearing a frayed concert T-shirt – the only thing of Malcolm’s that she’d kept. He’d been wearing it for most of the year. His black hair was too long and curled loosely at his neck, and his blue eyes challenged her at every opportunity. Em was a softer version of her brother, with the same colouring. The twins were both of average height for their age, although Matt was a little taller than his sister after a spring growth spurt.

Sandie pulled out her phone and made another call. The news on the other end made her gasp.

‘Okay,’ she said, whirling back to the twins. ‘We need to leave London, but I have something I must do before we go. Can you please promise me some co-operation?’ She eyed them both. ‘And no more drawing?’

‘We promise,’ answered Em.

Matt grabbed his sketchbook and shoved it deep into his backpack.

That’ll have to do for now
, thought Sandie.

They jogged out of the courtyard to the far end of Raphael Terrace. Looking behind them as they ran, Matt and Em noted the big black car still blocking one side of the street in front of the Kitten house, and a police car with flashing lights blocking the other side. A small crowd of curious neighbours mingled on the pavement.

When the three of them were away from Raphael Terrace and far enough along Kensington High Street, they slowed to a smart walk, trying not to call attention to themselves as they headed to the Underground.

‘Why didn’t we just take Violet and Anthea’s car?’ asked Matt.

‘They’d have expected that. We’ll be safer on the Tube. If there are lots of people, they won’t try to hurt us.’

‘But why do they want to hurt us?’ asked Em.

‘Because you two are very special children—’

‘Every mum says her children are special,’ Matt interrupted, stubbornly ignoring the extraordinary differences between them and other children.

The high street was a cacophony of city noises – angry car horns, screaming brakes from buses, a construction crew drilling the pavement, music blaring from a bustling boutique, a troubled musician on a saxophone, and the all-encompassing din of afternoon shoppers and curious tourists. Sandie let the sounds of the city mask her mumbled and inadequate response to her son. Explanations, rehearsed or not, would have to wait a little longer.

She manoeuvred the twins through the traffic to the entrance of the station.

‘Where are you taking us?’ growled Matt.

‘We’re going to Scotland to stay with your grandfather.’

Matt stopped dead in the middle of the rush of people charging up and down the stairs to the Tube. Em looked at her mum in shock.

‘
Grandfather?
’ said Matt furiously. ‘What grandfather?’

TEN

T
he man with the tattered brown doctor’s satchel sat under a canopy at a café in the heart of Covent Garden. The surrounding tables teemed with office workers toasting Friday, while the surrounding cobbled square and narrow lanes swarmed with tourists and teenagers enjoying the pleasures of the West End. A bedraggled busker in a porkpie hat, carrying a small instrument resembling a violin, passed near the man’s table, pausing at the one next to it to offer his services to a couple having lunch.

Doffing his hat and bowing slightly when the couple turned down his musical talents, the busker shuffled across the stones with a barely perceptible glance back at the man with the brown satchel.

Vaughn Grant had noticed the hurdy-gurdy player’s surreptitious glance. He kept his eye on the musician as he shuffled across the bustling square. Working for Sir Charles Wren meant Vaughn’s ever-present paranoia had ratcheted up a few notches since the events at the National Gallery that morning. The Council of Guardians had learned quickly of the incident with the twins and now Arthur Summers’ brutal murder was all over the news. Vaughn knew this meant Sandie and the twins were fleeing once again.

Vaughn wanted to be sure they could get away from the city safely. When the hurdy-gurdy man accepted a request from a family eating at the restaurant across the way, Vaughn let himself relax a little. The old busker was pretty good, the playful circus sounds of his instrument drawing a crowd of enthusiastic revellers.

Vaughn nudged the satchel further under the table, making sure it was hidden, clamping it firmly between his feet. If something were to happen to the satchel after all these years, he thought, the results would be unimaginable. He smiled ironically to himself. Given who he was waiting for, perhaps not so unimaginable.

Vaughn signalled to his waitress for a refill of his cider. When she brought it, he smiled and flirted with her for a while, trying to inject a little normality into his situation. He’d prepared himself for this day for years, ever since Sandie and Malcolm had announced Sandie was expecting twins.

Vaughn sipped his drink and allowed himself to wallow in a moment of regret and recollection. It seemed so long ago, that summer after university when he and his best friends Malcolm and Simon had gone to Scotland to live at the Abbey. Sandie and her friend Mara had already been there. Vaughn sipped his cider, remembering how close they all had been, and how quickly all that had changed with the birth of the twins. If only he’d dealt with Malcolm back then when he’d had the chance. Sandie might have been able to make different choices in her life.

If only.

The sounds of the hurdy-gurdy drifted across the square. Vaughn let its childish melody fill his head. He reminded himself how lucky he was to be in a position to help Sandie and her children, and he intended to do just that.

He roused himself from his self-pity when he spotted the three of them hurrying towards the café from the direction of Covent Garden Tube station. Rather than join the line of customers waiting to be seated, Sandie and the twins ducked under the velvet rope bordering the café’s perimeter.

Vaughn stood and greeted Sandie with a warm embrace, holding her in his arms. The twins dropped their backpacks on to the ground and perched on a couple of empty chairs.

‘Em, Matt, say hi to Vaughn. You won’t remember him, but he was … is an old friend of your dad’s and mine.’

Before Em had a chance to say anything, Matt blurted out, ‘Do you still see my dad then?’