The Paradise Trap (23 page)

‘What the hell
is
all this?’ he demanded.

‘Haven’t you been on a plane before? I have.’ Marcus couldn’t help preening himself a little. ‘It was five years ago, but I can still remember it. I went to visit my dad.’

‘Don’t worry, Jake,’ Holly said. ‘We don’t have any bags, so it’ll be easy. Just walk through that gate and they’ll scan you for concealed weapons.’

Jake blinked. Then he peered down at his naked midriff, his bare feet and his ragged shorts. ‘Can’t they tell just by looking?’ he grumbled.

‘Jake! Holly!’ Coco was waving to them; she and her family had already passed through the screening process without tripping any alarms. ‘You have to take off your shoes!’ she warned. And when Holly glanced up at the rock-faced guard near the machine, he confirmed what Coco had just told her.

‘Please remove all shoes and metal items,’ he ground out.

Marcus was annoyed. He didn’t like having to take off his shoes. Holly, on the other hand, seemed resigned to the process.

By the time she and her son had been scanned and cleared to go, they were a long way behind Jake and the Huckstepps, who had wandered off down a wide, carpeted passage to stare at a bank of TV screens.

‘Departures,’ said Coco, when Holly and Marcus finally joined her. ‘Just departures. No arrivals.’

‘And there are so many . . .’ Even Newt was awestruck. ‘How come there are so many?’

Inspecting the TV screens, Marcus saw a very odd departure board. All the flights had the same destination – ‘Home’ – but they weren’t departing from Terminal One. Instead they were leaving from all kinds of weird places: Antarctica, the moon, Mount Everest, Atlantis, Toytown . . .

Suddenly Marcus had a flash of insight.

‘These are all dream holidays!’ he exclaimed. ‘They must be!’

‘And they’ve all been cancelled. Every one of them. Except ours.’ Sterling reached up to tap on a screen. ‘See that? Crystal Hibiscus Island, departing from gate one . . . and the flight number is the same as the original brochure code.’

‘Which means we must all have different flight numbers,’ said Holly.

‘Yeah, but we’re still leaving from the same gate at the same time,’ Sterling pointed out. ‘You know how the airlines often combine two different flights on the same plane? It must be like that.’

Marcus could see what Sterling meant. There was a flight from Diamond Beach, which had a number identical to the code on Jake’s brochure. There was also a flight from Crystal Hibiscus Island, another from Fairground Valley, another from Party Central, and another from . . .

‘Lysitte Run?’ Marcus read aloud. ‘Where on earth is that?’

49

WAITING

‘W
HY
, L
YSITTE
R
UN MIGHT BE
YOUR
DREAM HOLIDAY
, Marcus,’ Holly proposed. ‘Surely you must have one? Even if you’ve not been there yet . . .’

Marcus rubbed his chin and wrinkled his nose. ‘Lysitte Run?’ he said. ‘That doesn’t sound like the sort of place I’d want to go for a holiday.’

‘No. You’re right. Because it isn’t.’ Sterling had been comparing flight numbers; now he checked the ticket in Marcus’s hand. ‘Mmmph. I thought so.’

‘What?’ Marcus didn’t like Sterling’s frown. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing really. But look how the number on Coco’s boarding pass is identical to the one up there on the screen.’ Thrusting his wife’s ticket at Marcus, Sterling added, ‘Ed’s and Newt’s and Jake’s are the same. They match the numbers on the departure board. But that Lysitte Run number – it’s not on your pass. Or mine.’

‘Or mine,’ Holly weighed in, a little anxiously. ‘Mine hasn’t got a number at all. It just says “Flight Reserved”.’

‘So does mine.’ Marcus squinted through his glasses at Sterling. ‘Does that mean we can’t leave? Because we didn’t visit our own dream holidays?’

Jake hissed. Newt looked alarmed. But Holly refused to accept such an awful possibility.

‘Of course we can leave,’ she insisted. ‘We’re all on the same plane, remember?’

‘And we weren’t told that anyone would be left behind,’ Coco reminded Marcus. ‘At least, that’s not the impression
I
got.’

Marcus grunted.

‘So what about Lysitte Run, then?’ Newt asked Holly. ‘If it’s not your dream holiday, and it’s not Dad’s, and it’s not his . . .’ She jerked her chin at Marcus. ‘. . . then who wants to hang out at this Lysitte Run place?’

There was a brief silence as everyone gazed blankly at the TV screens. Finally Jake said, ‘I guess all the other flights have been cancelled because Miss Molpe killed the passengers.’

Holly flinched. ‘Some of those people might have escaped,’ she objected.

‘Maybe.’ Jake didn’t seem convinced. ‘But that Lysitte Run person is still here, because their flight’s only been delayed. If they were dead, or gone, it would have been cancelled.’

Suddenly Marcus had a brainwave.

‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘Lysitte Run! Get it?
Lie, sit, run!
’ He couldn’t help laughing. ‘It’s the little white dog!’

‘What little white dog?’ Sterling asked. Newt, however, understood instantly.

‘Oh, no!’ she exclaimed, her sulky expression changing to one of tenderness and concern. ‘Don’t tell me the little white dog is stuck in here somewhere?’

Marcus had to admit that it probably was. ‘I told you before, it’s in its own dream holiday,’ he said. ‘It went through a doggie door in the cellar.’

‘Poor thing!’ Newt began to plead with her father. ‘Can’t we rescue the dog, Dad? Can’t we get it out? Maybe it’s here at the airport . . .’

‘I think we should focus on getting ourselves out first,’ was Coco’s opinion – and only Newt disagreed with her. Even Edison was more concerned about finding the restrooms than he was about the little white dog.

‘I really need to pee,’ he announced in a strained voice. ‘I’m hungry, too, and there are snack machines near the toilets. That’s what the lady out the front said, anyway.’

‘She did, didn’t she?’ Coco glanced around. ‘Can anyone see the men’s?’

‘I think it might be down there,’ Holly replied, pointing.

So they all trudged down the wide, empty hallway towards gate number one, pausing briefly when they reached the restrooms. Sterling, Coco and Edison then peeled off from the main group to relieve themselves, while Newt collected change for the only vending machine in sight – which dispensed jelly beans and chocolate bars, but no salty snacks.

‘We’ve got just enough money for two chocolate bars,’ Newt grumbled. ‘I guess it’ll be chocolate for dinner, followed by a drink out of a bathroom tap.’

‘And they call this a first-class terminal!’ Holly wasn’t impressed. ‘It doesn’t look any different from a normal airport to me.’

Marcus grunted. He was feeling very tired, perhaps because of the stale air, fluorescent lights and late hour. The chairs at gate number one looked uninviting; made of hard blue plastic, they were grouped so that you couldn’t lie across them. Outside the windows, a few scattered, greenish lights made fitful appearances through a thick veil of snowflakes. Marcus couldn’t see any planes. He couldn’t see any people, either. There were no TV channels, no ceaseless announcements from the PA system. The only sign of life was another set of electronic screens displaying the computerised departure board.

‘Look,’ he said, as he gazed out the window. ‘It’s snowing.’

But Holly didn’t reply. She was talking to Jake, who had settled down beside her in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs. ‘Your parents will be so happy to see you, after all these years,’ she remarked. ‘You might have a bit of trouble finding them, but you can stay with us until you do.’

‘Thanks,’ Jake mumbled, staring down at his hands.

‘We’ll get you some clothes, because you can’t go around looking like that – not once you’ve left Diamond Beach.’ Holly was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Didn’t you have a couple of older brothers? I seem to recall they were always jumping on your back . . .’

Jake nodded. ‘Three,’ he answered.

‘Three!’ Holly gave a a low whistle. ‘Four boys! Wow! Your poor mother!’

Jake sniffed. ‘She didn’t worry about it,’ he retorted. ‘She just drank more booze and passed out.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t even know if I
want
to find my parents,’ Jake added darkly. ‘It’s not like they enjoyed having me around when I was actually there.’

‘I’m sure they did.’ Holly’s tone was encouraging. ‘It probably just felt like that sometimes because you were competing for their attention.’

With a grunt Jake fell silent. Marcus, meanwhile, was scanning the departure board. ‘You know what I can’t work out?’ he said. ‘I can’t work out why Jake’s nightmare holiday isn’t up there on the screen. Diamond Beach is, so why not all the other places we visited?’

‘Not to mention the ones we
didn’t
visit,’ Newt remarked. Having extracted two chocolate bars from the vending machine, she now threw herself onto a plastic seat and began to break each bar into small chunks. ‘Like
your
dream holiday, for instance,’ she said to Marcus. ‘What is it, anyway? You never told us.’

‘I dunno.’ Marcus pondered for a moment. ‘I guess . . . I guess it would be a holiday with my dad. Just the two of us. That would be great.’

Newt sniffed. ‘You think so?’ she said. ‘I don’t. Sounds like another nightmare holiday to me.’ Then she turned to Holly, who was staring at Marcus with a troubled expression on her face. ‘So what about
your
nightmare holiday? Jake’s was the ship. Marcus came up with that dumb Vampire Camp. What about you?’

Holly sighed. For one fleeting instant, Marcus thought that she was going to say ‘a holiday with my ex-husband’. He could almost see the words forming on her lips. But then she seemed to change her mind, making a choice that wouldn’t upset him.

‘My nightmare holiday would be getting stuck in a foreign airport terminal with small children for days on end, waiting for a flight that keeps getting delayed for some reason,’ she revealed. ‘I’d have no change of clothes, and no money, and hardly any food, and everyone would be grizzly and tired, and we couldn’t even go outside because of a hurricane or a snowstorm—’

Suddenly she stopped. Her eyes widened.

All four of them turned to gaze out the window.

‘Oh my God,’ Newt whispered. Jake groaned.

Marcus checked the departure board.

Sure enough, he saw that the word DELAYED had popped up next to every flight that hadn’t already been cancelled.

50

AMBUSHED

‘O
H
,
NUTS
.’ M
ARCUS WAS FILLED WITH DESPAIR
. ‘I
KNEW
it! Right from the start I was worried about Martiya, but then Shibilis was so convincing . . .’

He trailed off as Newt covered her eyes.

‘I don’t believe this,’ she whimpered. ‘Can you believe this?’

‘Believe what?’ asked her stepmother, who had finally rejoined them after freshening up in the ladies’ room. ‘What’s the matter?’

Without even looking at Coco, Holly explained dully, ‘We’ve been tricked again. This is just another nightmare holiday.’

‘
This
is?’ Coco gaped in disbelief. ‘How do you know?’

Jake suddenly jumped up and began to kick the nearest chair. ‘God
dammit
!’ he raged.

Coco ignored him. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, growing shriller with every word.

‘Neither do I.’ Marcus was trying to swallow the lump in his throat. ‘Why would Miss Molpe go to all this trouble? She could have left us in the lift – we’d never have got out. Why set up this whole thing with the phone call and the gypsies and the airline tickets—’

‘Are you kidding?’ Jake interrupted. ‘She wanted to disarm us! We’ve
checked in our luggage
, remember?’

Marcus caught his breath. ‘Oh, man . . .’

‘I still don’t get it,’ Coco complained. Meanwhile, Sterling had appeared behind her, wiping his hands on a paper towel.

Holly stared at him, horrified.

‘Where’s Edison?’ she demanded.

‘Eddie?’ Sterling was taken aback. ‘He hasn’t finished yet.’

‘You mean you left him
alone?
’ Jake yelped. Without waiting for an answer, he vaulted over several rows of seats before pushing past Sterling, who looked around in confusion.

‘What’s the big deal?’ Sterling wanted to know.

‘We’ve been suckered!’ wailed his daughter. And Coco added, ‘Holly says this is just another nightmare holiday . . .’

She was cut off by a muffled scream that came from inside the men’s room.

There was a moment’s pause. Then everyone stampeded after Jake, skidding around the nearest corner at top speed. In a tightly packed group they all burst through a door marked with a faceless, trousered silhouette. Even Holly didn’t think twice about invading the men’s room. She and Newt and Coco followed Marcus and Sterling; they all galloped past the hand dryers and threw themselves at the line of cubicles like a pack of ravening wolves. They nearly trampled Jake, who had arrived just ahead of them. He was trying to break down the only locked door, behind which Edison could be heard screaming for help.

‘On the count of three!’ Jake roared. ‘One, two—’

Wham!
Four shoulders hit the door simultaneously. When it didn’t budge, Jake spun around to address Sterling.

‘Gimme a leg-up!’ he ordered. As Sterling laced his fingers together, Coco cried, ‘Eddie! We’re coming! Hold on!’

Edison screamed again – and the sound seemed to pierce Marcus’s ribcage like a dagger. Newt dropped to her knees so that she could peer under the cubicle door, which was several centimetres off the ground.

‘I think I might be able to wriggle through there,’ she offered hoarsely. But Coco bent down to stop her.

‘No!’ Coco screeched. ‘Not you!’

By this time Jake had been hoisted to the top of the door. He flung a leg over it, yelled ‘
Jesus!
’, then rolled out of sight into the cubicle. There was a crash, followed by a squawk, followed by a thundering, ‘Gotcha!’