Department 19 - 3 Book Collection

Van Helsing let go of Stoker, who immediately grabbed his arm with his hand and looked at the old doctor with a look of pure terror.

“What is underneath this building?” Van Helsing asked.

“I do not know,” whispered the night manager, still clutching his arm.

“Perhaps it is time you found out. Take us to the orchestra pit, quickly now.”

“It’s this way,” Stoker said, his voice still low and full of fear and pain, and led them into the bowels of the theatre.

Their second journey through the backstage of the Lyceum was silent.

The night manager led them through corridors of dressing rooms, past a large door separate from the others upon which was written Mr H. Irving in elegant script, past doors marked MAKEUP, ATELIER, BRASS, WIND, PERCUSSION and PRIVATE, down a narrow staircase and finally through a door that opened into the rear of the orchestra pit. Van Helsing placed a hand on Stoker’s shoulder and entered the pit first, walking quickly through the neat arrangement of chairs and stands, up two shallow wooden steps to the entrance to the conductor’s box. He stayed on the top step, not entering. The valet and the night manager stood behind him on the floor of the pit.

In the box was a circular red rug that covered the floor, an ornate music stand holding the score for The Tempest, and nothing else. Van Helsing ordered Stoker and the valet to stand back. He reached in and gripped the edge of the red rug and then pulled it violently out of the box.

“Sir, I must protest!” cried Stoker. “This is most—”

“Come up here,” interrupted Van Helsing. “And see if your objection still holds.”

Stoker and the valet stepped up into the conductor’s box. In the middle of the floor was a heavy wooden trapdoor.

Van Helsing turned to the night manager and the valet.

“Be very, very careful from here on,” he said.

Chapter 7

IT’S HARD TO BREATHE WITH A HAND AROUND YOUR THROAT

The lighting in the dormitory switched to a purple ultraviolet as the alarm hammered into Jamie’s skull. Frankenstein pulled a radio from his belt and keyed in three numbers. He held the radio to one ear, placed a giant hand over the other, and listened.

“What’s going on?” Jamie yelled. Frankenstein held a hand out towards him and turned away, his ear hunched into his shoulder, trying to hear what was being said on the radio.

Jamie looked around. There was a door in the wall to his left, and he ran towards it, desperate to get away from the noise that was making his head swim and his stomach churn, desperate to get away from this place and find his mother. Frankenstein reached out and grabbed for him but Jamie saw it coming, slipped around the outstretched fingers, shoved the door open and ran through it.

He had just enough time to register that he was in a long grey corridor before something crashed into him and he sprawled across the smooth floor. His head cracked the ground hard, and he saw stars as a voice shouted at him, and he sat up.

“What the hell are you playing at?” A short, overweight man in a white doctor’s coat was standing over him with a look of extreme annoyance on his face. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m Jamie Carpenter,” he shouted. “Can you tell me where I am? Please?”

“What did you say your name was?” the doctor yelled, his eyes wide.

Jamie repeated it.

“Christ. Oh Christ.” The doctor looked around, as if he hoped there would be someone to tell him what to do. “You’d better come with me,” he eventually yelled, extending a hand towards Jamie. “Seward’ll skin me alive if anything happens to you. Come on, on your feet.”

Jamie hauled himself upright.

“Where are we going?” he yelled.

“Arrivals,” the doctor yelled back. “Something’s inbound, so it’s the safest place for you to be.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s where the guns are.”

Jamie ran down endless corridors, his head ringing with the relentless wail of the alarm and the thumping strobe of the purple lights. The doctor was short and round but he ran with a grim determination, his jaw clenched, his eyes staring into the middle distance, and Jamie found himself sprinting just to keep up.

The doctor finally stopped running in front of a wide lift platform, little more than a steel frame striped black and yellow. Jamie stepped on to it, the doctor pushed a button set into one of the metal columns, machinery far above them ground into life, and the platform began to ascend. Its passengers doubled over, hands on their knees, trying to catch their breath.

Jamie pulled air into his lungs and stood up straight. As he did so, they passed a cavernous open floor, in the middle of which hulked a vast angular shape, purple track lighting on the walls and floor illuminating tantalising details: three huge sets of wheels, a dark triangular fuselage, and two wide wings that stretched almost to the walls. Jamie crouched down as they rose towards the ceiling, but the shape disappeared below him as the lift continued its ascent.

“What was that?” Jamie asked.

“Don’t you worry about that,” wheezed the scientist in reply. “You keep your eyes in this lift.”

Jamie looked at him, then shrugged and turned away.

Fat idiot. Don’t tell me where I can’t look.

Gears crunched above his head and the lift started to slow. They were rising through a dull grey shaft, which suddenly opened out into a wide room, full of movement and noise.

One whole side of the vast semi-circular room was open on to a wide tarmac area that led out to the middle of the long, brightly lit runway. Inside, two lines of black-clad figures, eight wide, were stood facing the huge open doors, submachine guns set against their shoulder, pointing out into the darkness. A chill ran up Jamie’s spine when he saw them.

I’ve seen people like this before. They look like soldiers, they look like the men who—

He couldn’t let himself finish the thought. He looked away from the dark figures, and saw the round crest he had seen in the white corridor, stencilled high on the huge hangar wall. The same three Latin words were stamped below it, running almost the entire length of the vast surface.

Lux E Tenebris

Behind the rows of soldiers, dozens of white-coated men and women bustled across the vast concrete floor of the room – hangar, it’s ahangar, they don’t make rooms this big – shuttling stretcher trolleys and IV drips back and forth, shouting instructions and questions to one another. A steel shutter door slid upwards to Jamie’s right and four figures in full biochemical hazard suits pushed a pair of metal trolleys covered in plastic oxygen tents into the hangar.

In the distance, Jamie heard the heavy thud-thud-thud of an engine.

“Incoming!” yelled one of the soldiers.

“How much time?” asked a tall, skeletally thin man stood behind a portable computer array on a heavy steel trolley.

“Ninety seconds!”

The activity in the hangar accelerated, doctors and scientists and soldiers running in every direction, the heels of their shoes and boots drumming on the concrete floor.

A huge crash boomed out to Jamie’s left, and he jumped. A heavy metal door had thumped open, slamming against the wall with a deafening clang. Frankenstein thundered through the door, his huge head surveying the room. His eyes locked on Jamie’s; he smiled a smile with absolutely no humour in it, and came towards him.

Jamie stood frozen to the spot as Frankenstein crossed the hangar in a dozen of his giant strides, grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt and lowered his enormous head down so they were face to face. His mouth was set in a spirit-level-straight line, his jaw clenched, deep breaths blasting out of cavernous nostrils and blowing the hair from Jamie’s forehead.

It’s trying hard not to kill me. Really, really hard.