Embassy of the dead hang.., p.6
Embassy of the Dead: Hangman's Crossing, page 6
Jake had needed a plan to get away from Sab for an hour or so while at the expo so he and Cora could go and find Errol’s snooker club. But nothing he came up with seemed to convince Sab.
“I think I’ll watch another panel instead of the WarCry3 one,” Jake had said on the train down, faking a thoughtful expression as he looked through the program.
Sab looked at Jake incredulously. “What could be better than the WarCry3 launch?”
Jake hadn’t thought that far ahead. He cursed inwardly and casually glanced at the page of events that he had open in front of him. There was only one that clashed with WarCry3.
“Pony Club Manager?” he tried.
Sab laughed. “Haha, very funny!”
Cora’s head poked through the seat and she rolled her eyes at Jake. “That was terrible.”
The fake pooping was plan B. Jake knew the crowds for the WarCry3 launch would be huge. His plan was to sit in the bathroom for so long that Sab would be forced to go in without him. Then Jake would tell him it was too full and he’d watch it from the back and meet Sab after. That would give Jake one hour exactly to do what he needed to do and be back for lunch. It was foolproof.
Right on time, his phone beeped. It was Sab.
Where are you? It’s warcry3 time!!!! I’m inside. Front left. It’s packed!
Jake tapped out his reply.
I’m still in line. I’ll find a space at the back. See you after at the burger stand
K
And just like that—the plan was in action.
He pulled his pants up and opened the stall door. He’d better get a move on. Cora did not enjoy being trapped in her trophy. He snuck out of the bathroom, checking left and right to make sure the coast was clear, and then he pulled his hood up over his head and snuck off toward the exit, Zorro trotting along at his heels.
Like he’d said—foolproof!
It was hard to believe how much a city could change after just a few stops on the Underground.
The stop for the games expo had been clean and corporate. A teeming crowd of gamers old and young had surged from the train and up a shining escalator to be shepherded by flashing signs and polo-shirted guides straight into the massive entrance of the Expo Center for a sensory overload of lights and sounds. The Shabwell Docks stop was very different. Jake was the only one to disembark, and there were no escalators, just a short flight of dirty stairs, through the ticket barriers, and out onto a street shadowed by large brick warehouses. As Jake walked along the road, he caught occasional glimpses of the huge, murky river that snaked through the city. It felt exciting to be here in this vast, anonymous place, so different from the sleepy little village he called home.
He went through a mental checklist of his achievements so far:
He’d figured out how to Undo Errol Clay.
He’d gotten to London on his own.
He’d snuck out of the expo unseen by Sab.
Everything was going according to plan. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad Undoer after all? A few hundred feet later, he checked his phone and realized he’d been walking in completely the wrong direction.
He turned around and went back the way he’d come. After he passed the Tube stop again, he double-checked his phone and turned into an alley. Walking a safe distance from the entrance, he squatted down and opened his bag. Then he carefully lifted the lid of Cora’s trophy, replacing the piece of string he kept taped to the inside of the lid in order to make sure it stayed open.
He looked around for her.
Cora was nowhere to be seen. “Cora?” he hissed. “Where are you?”
“Boo!” He felt a hard hockey-stick-like prod in his back and he tumbled forward from his squatting position onto his knees on the wet ground.
“Really? Is that appropriate behavior for an Undoer’s assistant?”
Cora was leaning on her stick, chuckling. “Undoer’s partner. If anything, as the older and more educated one of the team, I should really be in charge.”
She looked down at Jake, sprawled in the gutter. “I’m not sure you’ve got the leadership qualities, to be frank.”
Jake considered closing the lid of her trophy again, but instead he stood up and pulled on his backpack. Then, flicking dirt from his pants, he started walking down the alleyway. He waved his phone at her.
“Unfortunately for you, I’ve got the map. So I guess I’m the one in the lead.”
The map led Jake and Cora away from the alley they were in and down another one that opened up onto the banks of the river. In the distance, Jake could see the gleaming towers and shiny skyscrapers of the city. The district they were in was quite different. An almost deserted path, wet with rain, followed the river for a while, then bent away from it to make room for a row of huge brick warehouses butted up against the water.
They turned into another alleyway that led them between the warehouses and to a small square. Around the square were small workshops. Inside one of them—a garage—a mechanic was looking into the open hood of a car. His eyes followed Jake as he walked across the square.
There, on the other side, was the former site of Clay’s Snooker Club. Now it seemed it was being used as some kind of storage facility. It also seemed to be completely closed. Definitely not the sort of place you would walk up to the front door of and ring the bell.
“Let’s see if there’s a side entrance,” said Jake, eager to get away from the mechanic’s watchful gaze. They headed down the footpath that ran alongside the warehouse.
The mechanic watched Jake go. It was unusual to see a child on their own in this part of Shabwell. He could’ve sworn that just for a split second he’d seen a girl, too, with some funny-looking dog slinking around her ankles, but when he’d looked back they had both disappeared, and it was just the boy, alone. He scratched his head. Must be seeing things.
The mechanic tried to carry on with his work, but something kept drawing his eyes back to the deserted old snooker club. He blinked as again something strange flickered into view—a face looking out from one of the tiny grimy windows of the warehouse, pressed up against the glass; a scowling, brooding face staring murder out over the square. The mechanic blinked again and the face was gone. He rubbed his eyes and opened them again. No, nothing there. It must have been a trick of the light. He chuckled to himself as he picked up his tools and got back to work again.
“Definitely seeing things . . .” he muttered.
Having a friend that can push her face through solid brick walls has its advantages.
Sometimes.
“I can’t see anything. It’s pitch-black in there.”
They were standing by some garbage cans on a footpath that led alongside the old snooker club, next to a rusty iron fire escape that climbed three stories to a metal door. Zorro was rooting around quite happily behind the garbage cans. Jake and Cora stood at the bottom of the steps, looking up. It didn’t look like the staircase had been used in a long time. In fact, several treads were missing and the whole structure seemed to be pulling away from the wall.
“We’ll have to try around the back,” said Jake. “I’m not climbing that. It looks like it was built in the Stone Age!”
Cora sighed and pushed past him. “Unfunny and factually inaccurate—if it was built in the Stone Age, it would have been made of stone and these stairs are clearly made out of metal.”
She stomped soundlessly up the stairs, skipping over a missed step and pausing halfway up to pirouette gracefully. She took an overly dramatic bow.
“It’s perfectly safe, Precious!”
“It’s all right for you. You’re already dead!” Jake put his foot on the first step and felt the entire structure wobble. “And ghosts probably don’t weigh anything.”
Jake slowly began to ascend the stairs, sure with every step that the whole structure would collapse. But to his relief, it held together. At the top, the stairs opened out onto a small landing and a door leading back into the building.
The door, of course, was locked, but Cora walked through it anyway.
Jake heard a bang and the door swung open. Cora was standing on the other side, holding up her hockey stick triumphantly.
“A fire door, thankfully! I just pushed on the bar with my hockey stick, and it opened!”
Jake stepped inside. A corridor ran left and right. He looked at Cora. “Which way should we go?”
Cora looked back at him. “We?” she said, seating herself smugly on the steps.
Jake frowned for a second, then remembered why Undoers were always the living, not the dead. According to Bad Penny, the presence of an Undoer’s ghost makes the Undoing that much more difficult. What was it she had said? Something about how other ghosts’ “energies” confused things.
“Right then,” sighed Jake. “I guess I’m on my own.” He had started walking off when Cora called him back.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked.
He blinked, then realized he still had his backpack on, with Cora’s trophy in it. He took it off and placed it on the steps next to her.
Cora shook her head. “So ironic that the cowardly one has to do all the scary stuff.”
Jake looked left then right down the corridor. Right looked slightly less forbidding. “I choose right.”
“Good luck, Precious. I’ll wait for you here.”
It wasn’t the first time Jake had been alone in an empty building looking for a ghost, but if he was honest, it was the sort of thing he’d never get totally used to. He could feel his heart thumping, and the familiar fear crept through his body with every step he took into the darkness.
The corridor turned to the right. Now the ceiling was punctuated with skylights and Jake could see his feet making prints in the thick layer of dust. He pulled his hoodie up over his nose, conscious of not wanting to breathe it in.
At the end of the corridor, he reached a door and slowly pushed it open. Suddenly he was on an open metal walkway running over the cavernous warehouse space below. Looking down, he could see it was filled with neat avenues of wooden crates. He wondered where all the snooker tables were now. With every step he took, the walkway creaked under his feet, echoing around the empty space. His heart pumped faster as he made his way toward the door at the end of the walkway, trying to keep his movements as quiet as possible.
He didn’t even know why he was heading for this door in particular, but something seemed to be guiding his steps. Despite the pounding of his heart, he didn’t doubt where he was going. One step at a time, he made his way along the walkway until he reached the door at the other side of the building. He pushed it open gingerly and stepped through into a messy office—papers littering a desk and a half-finished cup of coffee, all lit up by light streaming through a large dirty window that overlooked the river.
“Hello?” he said, hearing his voice break with nerves. “Mr. Clay?”
There was no answer. He felt silly now. Did he expect that the ghost would just come at his call?
He looked around the office. It seemed fairly unremarkable, except for the mess and the fact that it could do with a good coat of paint. For some reason, Jake’s eyes settled on some dark, rust-colored spots on the wall below the window, just above an old-fashioned radiator. He felt a chill go through him, though he was unsure why.
He wandered over to the spots on the wall and crouched down to inspect them—one larger and two smaller ones. To many people, they would just appear to be damp spots, perhaps, or dismissed as ancient stains. To Jake, though, they were something else, something much more sinister. He pressed his thumb onto the larger spot and stretched his fingers to reach the two smaller ones. They fell short, but it was enough to convince him—these were fingerprints, and they were made from blood.
A sudden pain shot through his head, and he shut his eyes. In his mind, he could see the office. But now it was tidy. Now it was someone else’s office. Someone else’s office from a long time ago. A brighter sun shone through a cleaner window. He spun around as the door opened and a man with a shaved head stumbled through. One hand was holding a brown leather bag, and the other was pressed to his side, stemming the flow of blood that was seeping from an open wound, staining his white shirt crimson. He had no awareness that Jake was in the room, and Jake realized that this was because he wasn’t. He was watching something that had happened years ago. He’d had this type of vision once before, when he’d witnessed the murder of Zorro’s owner. When it had happened then, he was hardly aware it was a vision. This time he knew he was seeing something that wasn’t there. Something that had happened a long time ago.
The man grimaced in pain and swung the door shut behind him. He staggered toward Jake and knelt by the wall, reaching behind the radiator for something. He moved his other hand from his wound, steadying himself against the wall, his bloodied fingers leaving the marks that time would soon fade to three small brown blotches. There was a click, and a floorboard moved enough to allow the man to get his fingers underneath. Lifting it, he shifted the leather bag into the gap beneath the floorboards, then shoved the bag down and away from the hole before replacing the floorboard. Then he stood up, a grim smile on his face. Leaning over his desk, he scrabbled for the drawer at the front, and it was half open when shouting came from outside. Shouting from a distant time. “You might as well give up, Clay! Come quietly so no one else gets hurt.”
The man looked up from the desk, shut the half-open drawer, and sighed. Jake could see a look of anguish on his face. Tears poured from his eyes. He pulled himself up straight and, beating his chest with his hands, he lifted his head and roared like a cornered beast.
Jake’s eyes flicked open. He was on the floor of the messy office, lying on his back, blinking up at the ceiling.
“So this is where it happened,” he muttered to himself.
A voice spoke. “Yeah, it is. And what are you doing lying on my carpet?”
Jake sat up. Sitting on the office desk was the semitransparent form of the man with the shaved head from Jake’s vision—his head set low on huge shoulders, his white shirt still stained with the blood from his fatal wound.
It was the ghost of Errol Clay.
“Dunno what the world’s comin’ to when even kids come lookin’ for my loot.”
Errol Clay cracked his knuckles.
Jake remembered the book review . . .
The stolen loot was never recovered.
He scratched his head. The thought of retrieving the money for himself hadn’t even crossed his mind. Darn.
Errol Clay shrugged. “Takes all sorts, I suppose.”
“I-I’m not here for your money,” said Jake.
Clay’s eyes narrowed. “Can you see me then, boy?” he snarled. “Is that it? You one of those sensitive types?” The ghost of Errol Clay knelt beside Jake and pressed his big face right up against Jake’s until Jake felt the coldness of the man’s semitransparent nose overlapping with his own. “Can you give me a reason why I shouldn’t throw you out the window?”
“Yes, I can,” said Jake as confidently as he could muster. His hand gripped his phone. Saved on the screen was the newspaper article. The article that would Undo Errol Clay. He cleared his throat. “I’m from the Embassy of the Dead,” he said, “and I’m here to Undo you.”
Errol Clay laughed. He looked around the room as though he expected others to be there.
“Can’t believe they sent a kid! Where’s the lady?”
Jake paused. “Portentia?”
Errol Clay nodded. “That’s the one. She’s a bit easier on the eyes than you, that’s for sure.”
Jake frowned. It seemed odd that Portentia would have met Errol Clay before. Surely she would have Undone him herself.
“I’m handling your case now.” Jake was surprised by the calmness of his own voice.
Errol Clay looked out of the window across the Thames. He sounded suspicious. “If an adult can’t help me, then how can a kid? Portentia said it was impossible. Barely even tried.”
“Well”—Jake swallowed, suddenly nervous—“I have information here that will allow you to pass to the Afterworld.”
“There is nothing on God’s earth that will let me pass,” growled Clay. He spun around angrily. “You ever been betrayed? By your own flesh and blood? I ain’t got time for this.” His lip curled into a snarl. “Ain’t nothing that can heal this broken heart. ’Cause that’s what’s keeping me here.” He banged a massive fist against his chest. “It’s the only thing I can feel through the pain of the longings.”
Jake held up his phone, determined to help him.
“That’s the thing. You weren’t betrayed by your brother . . . It’s all here.”
Errol Clay’s eyes narrowed.
“Show me,” he croaked, reaching out for the phone. But as he started reading, he seemed to change his mind. “No. I . . . I can’t; it’s too much . . . You read it to me,” he said, shoving the phone at Jake and shutting his eyes tight against tears.
Jake took back his phone and, swallowing an uncomfortable lump in his throat, slowly began to read the article out loud.
“Undercover cop Jonah ‘The Whale’ Franks rose to the rank of a trusted confidant of the brothers, until”—Jake looked up at Errol, who was wiping away tears as Jake said the words that he hoped would Undo him—“finally betraying them in the botched heist that became known as the Shabwell Square Job.”
Errol Clay opened his eyes wide, then blinked. At first, he seemed incredulous. “He was a cop?” He frowned and shook his head in disbelief. “Why, I’d have ripped his arms off if I’d known—” He fell silent.
Jake looked at him and Clay looked back.
“Oh, Ethan,” Clay said, his voice beginning to crack again. His hand reached out toward Jake, as though Jake were his brother. “I’m sorry, Ethan . . .”
