The Homeward Bounders (2 page)

That was all I noticed, not being artistic, because by that time I could see a stone building up among the trees at the wide end of the park. I went there, very softly, hiding among the trees and bushes. My back was still creeping, but I'd got used to that by then.

When I got there, I found it was quite a big building, like a small castle, built out of pinkish gray stone. It was triangular, like the park. The part I was looking at was the pointed end. It had battlements along the top, and some quite big windows in the ground floor. You could see it had been modernized. I slithered round until I could look in one of the big windows. I couldn't get close, because there was a neat gravel terrace running round it under the windows. So what I did see was sort of smeary and dark, with the reflections of trees over it. I thought that was because I was ten feet away. I know better now.

I saw a fellow inside who seemed to be wearing a sort of cloak. Anyway, it was long and grayish and flowing, and it had a hood. The hood was not up. It was bunched back round his neck, but even so I couldn't see much of his face. You never do see
Their
faces. I thought it was just the reflections in the window then, and I craned forward to see. He was leaning over a sort of slope covered with winking lights and buttons. I knew it was a machine of some sort. I might have been ignorant, but I had climbed up into the signal box on the railway under the canal arch, and I had been shown the printing press in the court up the street, so I knew it must be a kind of machine I didn't know, but a bit like both and a lot smoother-looking. As I looked, the fellow put out a hand and very firmly and deliberately punched several buttons on the machine. Then he turned and seemed to say something across his bunched hood. Another fellow in the same sort of cloak came into sight.
They
stood with
Their
backs to me, watching something on the machine. Watching like anything. There was a terrible intentness to the way
They
stood.

It made me hold my breath. I nearly burst before one of
Them
nodded, then the other.
They
moved off then, in a cheerful busy way, to somewhere out of sight of the window. I wished I could see. I knew
They
were going to do something important. But I never saw. I only felt. The ground suddenly trembled, and the trees, and the triangular castle. They sort of shook, the way hot air does. I trembled too, and felt a peculiar twitch, as if I'd been pulled to one side all over. Then the feeling stopped. Nothing more happened.

After a moment, I crept away, until I came to the wall round the park. I was scared—yes—but I was furiously interested too. I kept wondering what made that twitch, and why everything had trembled.

As soon as I was over the wall again, it was as if my ears had popped. I could hear trains clanking and traffic rumbling—almost a roar of city noise—and that made me more interested than ever. I dropped down into the side street beyond the wall and went along to the busy street where the front of the castle was. On this side the castle was blackerlooking and guarded from the pavement by an iron paling like a row of harpoons. Behind the railings, the windows were all shuttered, in dark steel shutters. The upper windows were just slits, but they had harpoons across them too.

I looked up and I thought, No way to get in here. Yes, I was thinking of getting in from the moment I felt that twitch. I had to know what strange silent thing was going on inside. I went along the railings to the front door. It was shut, and black, and not very big. But I could tell, somehow, that it was massively heavy. There was an engraved plate screwed to the middle of the door. I didn't dare go up the four steps to the door, but I could see the plate quite well from the pavement. It was done in gold, on black, and it said:

And underneath was the stamped-out shape of a ship's anchor. That was all. It had me almost dancing with interest and frustration.

I had to go home then, or my mother would have known I was out. She never did like me to hang around in the streets. Of course I couldn't tell her where I'd been, but I was so curious that I did ask a few casual questions.

“I was reading a book today,” I said to her. “And there was something in it I didn't know. What's Masters of the Real and Ancient Game?”

“Sounds like deer hunting to me,” my mother said, pouring out the tea. “Take this cup through to your father in the shop.”

I took the tea through and asked my father. He had a different theory. “Sounds like one of those secret societies,” he said. My hair began to prickle and try to stand up. “You know—silly stuff,” my father said. “Grown men swearing oaths and acting daft mumbo-jumbo.”

“This one's at the Old Fort,” I said.

“Where's that?” said my father. “Never heard of it.”

Mumbo-jumbo, I thought. Well, those cloaks were that all right, but it doesn't explain the machines and the twitch. Next morning, for a wonder, I went straight to school and asked my teacher before lessons. He didn't know either. I could tell he didn't, because he gave me a long talk, until the bell went, all about how
real
meant
royal
and that could apply both to tennis and to deer hunting, and how the old kings kept whole lumps of country to themselves to hunt deer in, and then on about Freemasons, in case that was what it meant. When the bell went, I asked him quickly about the Old Fort. And he had never heard of it, but he told me to go and ask at the Public Library, if I was interested.

I went to the Library on the way home from school. The Librarian there might have been my teacher's twin. He wore the same sort of beard and half-moon spectacles and went on and on in the same way. And he didn't know either. He gave me a book on chess and another on tennis and another on hunting—none of them the slightest use—and one called
Buildings of Note
. That was not much use either. It actually had a picture of the Old Fort, one of those beautifully neat gray drawings of the front of it, harpoons and all. Underneath that, someone had spilt ink all over what it said.

I was so annoyed that, like a fool, I took it and showed it to the Librarian. And he thought I'd done it. That's the worst of being a boy. You get blamed for everything. I still haven't got used to it. He howled and he raved and he ordered me out. And I had to go. It made me more determined than ever to find out about the Old Fort. I was so annoyed.

That ink was no accident. I thought that even then. There was no ink anywhere else on the book.
They
don't want people to know. It would have looked odd if there had been nothing about the Old Fort. Someone would have tried to find out. So
They
let it get into the book and then made sure no one could read it. That's the way
They
do things.

“You think you've put me off, don't you?” I said to
Them
in the street outside the Library. “Well, you're wrong.”

I went home. It was order day. In the shop, my father was packing piles of groceries in cardboard boxes to take round to customers. Rob usually took them. As I told you, Rob liked all things to do with the shop. But I was there, so I was roped in too. For once, that was just what I wanted. Rob was annoyed. He was afraid I was going to want to ride the tricycle. Rob loved that thing, and so did my father—I can't think why. It weighed about a ton, and it had a solid metal box in front to put the cardboard boxes in. Once you had even one box of groceries aboard, your legs creaked just getting the trike moving, and the only way you could go was either in a straight line forward, or round in a tight circle. I let Rob have it. I took up the nearest box and carried it off. As soon as I was out of sight of Rob, I threw away the note on top which said
Mrs. Macready
and carried the box, groceries and all, down to the Old Fort.

Not a bad idea, I thought, as I went up the steps to the thick shut front door. I rang at the brass bell beside it and heard it go
clang clang clang
in the silence deep inside. My heart seemed to be clanging too, so hard that it hurt. Then I waited. When one of
Them
came, I was going to say, “Your groceries, sir. Like me to put them in the kitchen for you?” Not a bad idea.

I waited. And I waited. The stamped-out anchor was on the part of the door plate level with my eyes, and now, while I waited, I stared at it and saw that there was a crown over the end of it—the part they call the shank. And, after a while, my heart stopped clanging and I began to get annoyed. I rang again. And a third time. By that time I was hating that crowned anchor personally—but nothing like I did later. I've come upon pubs and inns all over the place called The Crown and Anchor. No matter how desperate I am, I can't ever bring myself to go into them. I always suspect that
They
are waiting inside.

Around five o'clock, I saw that it was no good. This is ridiculous! I thought. What do they do for groceries? Don't they eat? But really what I thought was that five o'clock was after office hours, and that the fellows had probably taken off their gray cloaks and gone home.

Well, there was an easy answer to that one. Go and take a look. What a fool I was!

So round the corner to the side street goes this fool, carrying his box of groceries, along to the best place to climb the wall. I put the box down in the street and used it to tread on to get a leg up. There was an awful squishy crunching as I took off from it—eggs probably—but I took no notice and got on top of the wall. Maybe I was more scared than I would admit. I did stay on top of that wall a minute or so. I discovered that if I put my head right over, the noise from the city went, just like that. Then if I moved my head back again—pop!—the noises were back. I did that several times before I finally swung down into the silence among the trees. Then furious curiosity took hold again. I refused to be beat. I crept to the place where I could look in that window again.

And
They
were there. Both of
Them
, lounging in a sort of chatty way beside
Their
machine, half hidden from me by the milky reflections of trees.

That settled it.
They
must have heard the bell and hadn't bothered to answer. Obviously it was very secret, what
They
did. So it stood to reason that it was worth finding out about. It also stood to reason that this park, or garden, where I was, was
Their
private one, and
They
must come out and walk in it from time to time. Which meant there had to be a door round on the other wall of the triangular fort, the wall I hadn't seen.

I went round there, through the bushes. And, sure enough, there was a door, in the middle of that side. A much more easy and approachable-looking door than that front door. It was made of flat glass, with a handle in the glass. I looked carefully, but it seemed dark behind the glass. All I could see were the reflections of the park in it and the reflection of the canal too. Its arches were right above me on that side. But what I didn't see was my own reflection in that door as I dashed across the gravel. I should have thought about that. But I didn't. It was probably too late by then anyway.

The door opened on to a sort of humming vagueness. I was inside before I knew it.
They
both turned round to look at me. Of course I saw what a fool I'd been then. The building was triangular. There was no room for the door to open anywhere except into the room with the machines. I had assumed that it didn't, because I hadn't been able to see it through the glass door. There were the machines in front of me now, a triangular patch of them, winking and blinking, and I ought to have been able to see them just as clearly through that door.