Starcross (21 page)
Authors: Philip Reeve
‘I am sure it didn’t,’ I promised her. ‘Indeed, it
saved
me from being mesmerised, for there was a hat in the closet in
our sitting room, and I would have put it on had not that creature on the balcony said “Moob” when it did.’
‘
Moob
,’ mused Mother. ‘Whatever can that mean?’
‘Perhaps it is their name,’ I ventured. ‘Perhaps they are Moobs.’
The Moobs (if that is what they were) were gathering together like blobs of black mercury, combining to form a larger pool. Mother stood beneath them, frowning upward.
‘One of these creatures has been controlling Sir Launcelot for a long time,’ she said. ‘It caused him to bring my old engine here. But for what purpose? What do they hope to achieve? I think they mean to use the machine to open a pathway to their own time … A stable pathway, through which an invading army of Moobs will swarm!’
The black Moob-pool on the cavern roof quivered, as if it heard and understood.
‘But you cannot make the machine do what you want, can you, poor Moobs?’ she went on. ‘And so you caused me to be brought here, thinking that you could make me do what you could not. But I won’t help you, you know. I like all my worlds the way they are. I do not think the various races of the Sun would be half so interesting if they all wore top hats and did what they were told.’
From the darkness of the Moob-pool, a dozen pairs of eyes gleamed down at her. A ripple ran across it, and, all of a sudden, it came unstuck from the cavern roof and fell. Mother flung up her arms to protect her head, but the Moobs came down on her like a douche of oil, and she fell to the floor engulfed in slithering blackness.
‘Mother!’ I shouted, leaping forward.
Colonel Quivering held me back. ‘Steady, Art! Your mother is more than a match for those devils. Remember what Sir Launcelot said? They have no effect on her. Too strong-willed, I reckon, to give herself up to their mesmeric powers …’
But he was wrong. One single Moob had not been enough to enslave Mother, but she was at the mercy of a dozen now, and soon her struggles ceased. She rose upright, clad in Moobs. Moobs on her hands like long black gloves, a Moob about her throat like a black choker, a gown of Moobs covering up her nightdress, a Moob upon her head stretching itself into a hat. Twelve pairs of Moobish eyes glinted like seed pearls amid the blackness. For a moment, as she stared at me, I saw a ghost of her old self behind her eyes. Then it was gone; she looked as lifeless as her own waxwork.
She rose upright, clad in Moobs.
‘Moob!’ she murmured.
‘Mother!’ I howled, running to her, but she swatted me aside, and knocked aside the colonel too when he ran to my aid. She strode to the old engine, and her black-gloved hands seized the controls.
‘Stop her, someone!’ cried Mr Munkulus. But my Moobclad mother had eyes quite literally on the back of her head; when Mr Spinnaker and the colonel ran to wrest her from the controls, she kicked them to the floor without even looking round from her work. Exultant little black hands reached out of the caul of blackness that enwrapped her, tickling and pinching Mr Grindle until he shrieked for mercy.
The cavern was filling with a weird music as the ancient engine began to work. I saw the strange spheres and pyramids and various nameless shapes which make up its workings begin to turn and shimmy and do the other unlikely things they do when it is working. Waves of dizziness spilled through the cavern, and Sir Launcelot clutched his hands over his ears and fell grovelling on the floor with his bottom in the air. I wish I had taken the opportunity to give it the kick which it so heartily deserved, but I was distracted at that moment by a most disagreeable sight.
In the air above the machine, without so much as a puff
of smoke or any fuss or bother, a Moob appeared. It hung quivering there, as if surprised, and then, quick as a flash, dived down and settled on the head of Colonel Quivering, who was closest to the point where it had sprung into being. In its place appeared another, and another, and suddenly a black geyser of the creatures seemed to be pouring into the chamber, whirling about like black leaves in a tempest.
I saw one leap upon Mrs Spinnaker’s back and swarm up on to her head, transforming itself into a topper as it went. Mr Spinnaker lunged at it, but his wife caught him by both hands and held him tight while Colonel Quivering came up behind him and set a hungry hat upon his head. The two of them turned upon Sir Launcelot, who took aim at the colonel with a revolver, crying, ‘Keep away, you devil, d’you hear?’
‘Oh, you mustn’t shoot the colonel!’ shouted Mr Munkulus, dashing the revolver from Sir Launcelot’s hand, and a moment later a Moob had each of them; they struggled for a moment, and then turned, blank-eyed, on those of us who had not yet been possessed.
Mr Grindle snatched up the fallen revolver, using it to put a bullet neatly through the middle of Colonel Quivering’s hypnotic hat.
‘Good gracious!’ said the old soldier, as the dying Moob dropped limply from his head. ‘The cheeky blighters! They had me again! I trust I did nothing regrettable while I was under their influence?’
The pistol rang out again, again, and for a time it looked as though we might yet win, for old Grindle was a splendid shot and hats toppled from the heads of our hypnotised friends like targets in a shooting gallery. But the Moobs were too many and, one by one, each of our friends was caught again, and that sleep-walking look came back into their faces as they fell once more under the influence of those dreadful living hats, and at last poor Grindle was behatted, too.
Through the midst of the fray came my own mother, white-faced and clad in Moobs, looking like a wicked witch
in a fairy tale. She reached for me, and I saw Moob eyes glittering on the palms of her hands, but I whisked past her and dived into the shadows under the machine.
It felt almost homely there. If I ignored the fading sounds of the battle in the cavern I could imagine myself back at Larklight in the old days. Yet I knew it would be only moments before a Moob found me.
A half-glimpsed black shape on the floor made me cry out in horror, but it was only Sir Launcelot Sprigg’s hat, which had been knocked off the table in the fighting and rolled under the machine. A perfectly normal, respectable hat, made in dear old London …
A sudden hope came to me. I put the hat on and squeezed my way back out into the cavern.
‘There is the Mumby boy,’ said Mrs Spinnaker, not in her own jolly voice but in a sort of ghostly sigh, a voice from the unimaginable future of
the Moobs.
‘Are all accounted for?’ asked my mother, and it was horrible, horrible to hear her speaking Moobish thoughts in that flat, Moobish voice.
‘Not all,’ said Colonel Quivering flatly. ‘The girl, Myrtle, and the Frenchwoman and her companion, and the Honourable Mr Flint are still at large.’
‘They will be found and controlled.’
‘We must begin the next stage of the plan,’ announced Mr Munkulus.
‘Starcross has returned to 1851. The train will be ready. The first batch must be delivered to Modesty at once.’
In the midst of this terrible council I stood with Sir Launcelot’s too-big hat upon my head, hoping that the others wouldn’t spot that it was not a Moob, praying that they would not see how I shook and quaked and doing my utmost to maintain a look of dull indifference. And when they began to move, when they started marching up the metal stairs to go and find Myrtle and Jack and Miss Beauregard and subject them to the same strange transformation, there was nothing I could do but go with them.
Mother did not even glance at me; she was intent upon
the machine and already unscrewing the bolts which held its inspection panels in place. I passed her by and climbed the stairs with all the others.
Oh, how I wanted to look back at her when I reached the top! But I knew a Moob would not look back, and if I had, and she had happened to glance up, she would have seen the tears which were running freely down my cheeks!
So I stepped through that door and left her there, not knowing if I would ever see her again. The others spread out through the hotel, calling in their ghostly Moobish voices, ‘Myrtle! Myrtle! Miss Beauregard! Mr Flint!’ Even the hoverhogs now wore top hats and had left off their truffling after crumbs to glide about grunting, ‘Moob, moob!’ and peeking into corners for some sign of the fugitives. I hoped for a moment that Jack might spring out and save us all. But the hope was in vain; the Moobs got no answer to their calls, nor did Jack appear. And so I went out through the front door and down to the promenade, and ran.
For, you see, I did not think I had any hope of saving Myrtle from those Moobs. I could but pray that she was hiding somewhere they would not find her, and that, if they should, they would not make her do anything unladylike
which might cause her embarrassment when she found out about it later.
As for myself, the only thing that I could do was to find my way to Modesty, and trust that I might alert the authorities there to the coming storm.
I ran through the night, feeling very fearful that Starcross might return to ancient Mars at any moment and leave me with no means of escape. But it did not; the sky remained the sky of 1851, jet black and polkadotted with asteroids, and I reached the railway station without incident. The train from Modesty had come in, and
had already been unloaded and refuelled and turned about, ready to make its long return trip. The railway automata who had done all the work were nowhere to be seen, having presumably beetled off to refuel themselves. I crossed the rails in front of the idling locomotive, and saw ahead of me, on a siding, the hand-car which I had noticed on the night we arrived.
I wonder if you have ever seen a hand-car? They are used by railwaymen who have to go out to check the line, or search for lost trains. They generally resemble a flat railway wagon, with a sort of see-saw arrangement in the middle that has a handle on each end in place of seats. Two men may stand on either side of this contraption and, by pumping it up and down, propel the vehicle along the rails at a fair speed. Naturally, being adapted for use in the open aether, the hand-car I was preparing to steal had a glass cabin with its own air supply and a small gravity generator, but in all other respects it was the image of an earthly one.