A Mind of its Own Page 7

  Luckily for Tim, things were about to become just as problematic for Dee and Eisenstone as they were for him. When they arrived at the professor’s house, it was being ransacked. There were two police vans outside, scanner drones (like the one he’d seen in the alleyway) flying around the building, peering in through the windows, and even a helicopter hovering high above. Officers had kicked in the professor’s door. There were hundreds of them – one going through the bins, others searching the garden with sniffer dogs, some standing watch with guns pointed to the ground. Their uniforms caught Tim’s attention – they were all wearing identical grey body armour and dark grey helmets, with visors. They looked as much like soldiers as policemen.

  ‘Oh … dear,’ Eisenstone said. ‘What’s all this?’

  Instead of stopping at his house, alarmed by what he’d seen, the professor simply kept driving, off up the street and then round the corner. They parked in the basement floor of a quiet multistorey car park. It was comparatively dark in here and, although there was no visible water, somehow damp.

  ‘Why were they trashing your house?’ Tim wondered.

  They could still hear the helicopter somewhere out there, rumbling and thumping like a thousand drums.

  ‘Well, we have used some forged documents … but, but that isn’t bad enough to raid my house, surely.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Tim started. ‘Maybe—’

  ‘Uh oh, this is not good,’ Dee said, peering down at her phone.

  She held it up for Tim and Eisenstone to see. On the screen was a news website and the lead story’s headline simply read, ‘WANTED’ in big letters.

  Below that was, ‘UK police issue nationwide arrest warrant for dangerous fugitives.’

  And below that there were three photographs. One of Eisenstone’s face. One of Dee’s face. And one of Tim’s face.

  ‘Hey,’ Phil said, pouting and frowning. ‘What about me?’

  ‘All right, what the hell is going on?’ Tim said after a short silence.

  ‘It’s all your fault,’ Dee said, shaking her head. ‘Everything was just fine until you turned up. Now we’re wanted? Those were Grey Guards back there you know. They’re not messing about.’

  ‘Grey Guards?’ Tim asked. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Really? You don’t know?’ Dee said. She sounded surprised, almost as though he was being stupid.

  ‘I’m from an alternate reality – give me a break.’

  ‘The Grey Guards are basically …’ She thought for a moment. ‘They’re like the most serious police. They have guns and they do all sorts of secret shady stuff, all over the world. Keep everything in order. If they’re after you then, well, let’s say you are in big trouble.’

  ‘Oh … I see. And they’re called Grey Guards because of the uniform?’

  ‘That, and they’re all clones of a bloke called Dennis Grey,’ Dee said. ‘Think he was a war hero or something. He’s basically rock hard and really clever. Perfect blueprint.’

  Tim scrunched his eyes and rubbed them with his thumb and finger. ‘Clones?’ He sighed.

  ‘Yeah. You don’t have an elite police force made up of clones in your universe?’

  Tim slowly shook his head. However, not for the first time, he found himself genuinely curious about this world. It made sense, he thought, for Clarice to have an army of obedient officers she could send to do her bidding.

  ‘Can you think how and why they tracked us so quickly?’ the professor asked.

  ‘I suppose, if someone … Oh,’ Tim said, remembering what he’d seen as they left Hawk Peak Prison. ‘The doctor? Fredric’s psychiatrist – she was phoning someone as we left. Reporting us maybe?’

  ‘But, but why would she care?’ Eisenstone said.

  ‘Of course.’ Tim sighed. ‘They were probably on the lookout for us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Think about it,’ Tim explained. ‘I bet Clarice ensured that the doctor would let her know if anyone made contact with Fredric, and we did. So, now she knows that we’re on to her.’

  ‘Surely that’s a big problem?’ Dee said.

  But Tim was oddly relieved by this turn of events. ‘At least now we’re in the same boat,’ he said.

  ‘I still haven’t done anything wrong,’ Dee added. ‘I’m gonna turn myself in and—’

  ‘No,’ Tim interrupted her. ‘You can’t. None of us can. This woman is dangerous. Just think what she would do to keep her secret.’

  Phil was standing on the middle seat in the back of the car, looking left and right as they argued – it seemed he was enjoying the conversation.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Dee said. ‘So now the most powerful woman in the country – sorry, the world – is going to kill us because of what we know? This is just perfect, this is just— Why is your monkey smiling?’

  ‘Rainbows and dog eggs,’ Phil exclaimed, placing his tiny hand on his tiny chest. ‘I meant no offence. However, yes, your eyes deceive you not – I am taking no small portion of delight from this.’

  ‘Why?’ Dee said.

  ‘Yeah, why?’ Tim added. ‘Seriously, Phil, you’ve misjudged this whole thing – this is bad.’

  ‘Oh, Timothy, do not project your solemn worries on to me,’ the monkey said. ‘Think how enriched this experience will make us – what inspiration and nostalgia we shall feel in our hearts, in our souls.’

  ‘Are you not even a little bit concerned?’ Tim asked.

  ‘We have wiggled out of worse predicaments.’

  ‘No, Phil,’ Tim said. ‘No, we haven’t.’

  Having fully agreed that this really was problematic on an almost unthinkably large scale, Dee turned the conversation in the right direction.

  ‘Fine, it’s done, this is the situation,’ she said. ‘So, how can we fix it?’

  ‘I submit that we need somewhere to lie low,’ Phil suggested. ‘Somewhere familiar, and yet most inconspicuous.’ He stepped to the car door and peered up out of the window, towards the sky. ‘How far away is the moon?’

  ‘Too far,’ Dee said.

  ‘It’s a good idea though,’ Tim added. ‘Not the moon thing, that’s insane, but hiding out somewhere. And I think I know just the place.’

  Chapter 9

  Tim instructed Eisenstone to drive across town. As he pulled away, the monkey wobbled, lost his balance and fell flat on the middle car seat, then literally bounced into the air as the wheels rode over the peak of the exit ramp.

  On the way, they all switched off their mobile phones, in case they were traced. Another reason was that Dee’s mum, having seen the news, was understandably concerned and kept ringing, despite her daughter’s attempts at explaining.

  ‘I’ll probably be home later,’ Dee told her mother. ‘I’m safe, I’m with Granddad, this is all just a big misunderstanding.’

  Tim thought of Elisa and felt a sudden sadness – she would have called, if only she knew who he was.

  After a short drive they turned into a back alley, about a mile or so from the Dawn Star Hotel, and parked up near a large bin. They all clambered from the car – this seemed a reasonable place to ditch it. The professor retrieved the imagination box and slammed the boot shut.

  ‘Got everything?’ he said, a few pieces of litter rolling at his feet in the breeze. Strange crisp packets with strange logos – again, Tim felt like he was on holiday.

  Dee nodded, but Tim was distracted by a weed growing through a crack in the tarmac. It had a bright red flower, with yellow thorns up the stalk and tiny blue berries between the petals – so blue and glassy they looked like mini marbles. He had never seen anything like it before. Had Clarice created new plant life too? Standing upright, Tim turned back to the car.

  ‘Light bulb. Ding. Maybe,’ Phil said, his arms and head dangling from Tim’s top pocket, ‘maybe we ought to burn it?’

  ‘Burn what?’ Eisenstone asked. ‘Burn, burn the car you mean? No, no, no.’

  ‘If the authorities find it they will know we are close,’ Phil explaine
d. ‘If we are adopting the habits of felons, it seems most apt to go the, shall we say, full pig.’

  ‘Hog,’ Tim corrected him.

  ‘Quite,’ the monkey nodded. ‘Full hog pig.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Dee said. ‘People do do that when they’re on the run.’

  Tim could feel Phil against his chest, warm and wriggling with excitement – the monkey glanced back up to Eisenstone and blinked. ‘Please?’

  ‘I, well, I haven’t even got a lighter.’

  A moment later Tim was crouching behind the bin, wearing the imagination box reader. Hidden in a slightly larger cardboard box, the machine shuffled about on the alleyway floor – a ribbon of steam and the flashing blue light and it was done. From inside Eisenstone took a small bottle of petrol and a box of matches – each one was a different length and each head had a wonky red lump bulging on top. Tim said he rushed the creation – that’s why it was odd. But this was the second thing he’d made with accidental imperfections, just like Phil’s tail. Were his skills simply rusty, he wondered, or was it the chip in his neck interfering with his mind? At any rate, he would remember to concentrate hard from now on.

  After expressing a few more doubts – as most decent adults would – the professor agreed with the plan. He told them all to stand well back and then doused the seats with the fluid, stepped a few paces away and struck one of the longer matches.

  ‘It all smells wonderful,’ Phil said.

  ‘Actually,’ Dee whispered to Tim. ‘Burning it will probably attract more attention – it makes more sense just to replace the number plates.’

  ‘I thought that straight away,’ Tim said. ‘But I kind of want to do this option now.’

  ‘I concur,’ Phil added.

  ‘To be fair, me too,’ Dee said.

  A flat line of orange and blue flame crept along the tarmac, up the car’s door, over the window and – with a whoomphf of bass – erupted inside. As it burned, Phil made a frame with his fingers and thumbs and said he would like to draw the image. However, if he had to choose, Tim would have drawn that flower. He’d seen fire plenty of times before, but that plant was brand new. Generally, he preferred to draw things from his imagination, things which didn’t exist. And here was something both real and not real. The ultimate subject for a picture.

  Sadly they didn’t have time to stick around to draw or toast marshmallows, so they took a few backstreets and tried to stay out of sight. They were particularly careful to avoid the drones which flew and zipped and buzzed about overhead.

  ‘What are those things?’ Tim asked, squinting up at one of the round, hovering bots.

  Dee explained they were Grey Guard drones, which would usually just be out on patrol. But now they were almost certainly searching for them. In one wider alleyway, Tim looked up and counted at least five of the machines, balanced like small planets above the city. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, until they found the car.

  But, with tactical timing, they managed to stay out of sight of the surveying cameras and, after crossing two more side streets, a large industrial estate and another alleyway, they arrived at the rear car park of the Dawn Star Hotel. Led by Tim, who knew his way around this building instinctively, they crept inside through a back entrance.

  ‘Won’t they look for us here?’ Dee whispered as they arrived in the quiet hallway.

  ‘Not where we’re heading,’ Tim said.

  He guided them to the stairwell, knowing exactly where to walk to avoid the CCTV cameras, and headed up.

  The very highest floor in the Dawn Star Hotel wasn’t occupied, at least not by guests. In fact, it was used pretty much only for storage. Some of the rooms were packed, literally up to the door, with furniture and general bits and pieces – extra bedding, rugs, clocks, old mini fridges, boxes filled with cutlery and tablecloths and ornaments and even, in one room, an old bicycle. Most of it wasn’t good enough to use but, according to Elisa, was still too good to throw away.

  After trying a couple of doors – which Tim accessed with keys he’d quickly imagined, half of which came out as failures, made of things like Play-Doh and sand – they found the ideal room to set up base. Room ninety-eight was the perfect hiding place because it was only half filled with clutter. This meant they could get inside and then push all the storage containers and towers of chairs and whatnot right up against the doorway. So to access room ninety-eight you would have to lie down and crawl between the narrow legs of about six or seven stacks of chairs – like navigating a dwarf’s dark labyrinth. And, in the middle of the former guest suite, they had turned tables upright and arranged them like a line of screens, with one extra propped up against the window. If anyone came looking for them up here, they would be met with a seemingly solid wall of stuff and would assume the room was full to capacity.

  When they had finished, Tim squeezed in, crawled carefully on his stomach like a soldier through wooden chair legs, reached up, and locked the door behind them, then he shuffled back the way he came. He even blocked the tunnel with a plastic container filled with paperwork.

  ‘There,’ he said, as he heaved himself out and stood up straight. ‘We’re safe now.’ He brushed a dusty cobweb from his shirtsleeve, then wiggled the cartilage in his nose to keep from sneezing.

  ‘What a fabulous little den,’ Phil said.

  It was good, Tim thought, because if the Grey Guards had asked Elisa if she had seen him, she would have said yes – but then she would have told them that he’d run away from the hotel.

  ‘It is definitely … well, I suppose, cosy?’ the professor added. ‘Cosy indeed.’

  ‘Yep.’ Tim nodded. ‘En-suite bathroom is through there.’ He pointed to the door. ‘We have everything we need in here.’

  Creasing up her top lip, Dee looked around the remaining patch of thin carpet. ‘Apart from food, water, beds, soap, clean clothes, entertainment and a long list of other things,’ she said.

  Tim rolled his eyes, then tore the cardboard exterior away from the imagination box prototype. ‘You guys still really haven’t grasped what this thing can do,’ he said.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Tim, Dee, Eisenstone and Phil surrounded the contraption as though it was a campfire. It was being regarded, quite rightly, as their lifeline. A circuit board on the side was loose from transporting it, so the professor tightened some screws with a coin then used a bit of tape and an elastic band to hold it in place. Of course Tim knew it was a remarkable piece of technology, but seeing Eisenstone tweak it with such basic methods made him appreciate it all over again. He’d often taken it all for granted but, when he stopped to think, it really was amazing what human hands could build.

  Finally, the machine whirred back into life – all the little lights, the gentle electric humming of infinite potential.

  ‘So, what do you guys want?’ Tim asked, placing the reader on his head.

  Half an hour later, the small space had been completely transformed. Tim created fabric beanbags for them all, which he then filled with stuffing. He made three thick runner rugs which he rolled out on the floor. Then countless cushions and pillows of all shapes and sizes and, for some reason, a teddy bear (he just had soft things in his mind and got carried away). A lot of the new furniture had to be assembled, such is the challenge of using an imagination box only a little larger than a microwave. Another innovative method saw them tilting the contraption on its side and holding the lid open while Tim imagined a tall lamp. With careful pacing, Dee and the professor pulled the full length out – like retrieving impossible items from a magician’s hat.

  Everything, like everything else he’d made, had little faults and charms. Imperfections here, angles not quite right there, the odd kink in the rug or error in a pattern.

  But still, it was cosy, snug and, put simply, the most comfortable place Tim could imagine. Lit by candles with light so warm and multicoloured they would be better set in a fantasy. In fact the scene was, as Phil put it, ‘So ineffably beautiful that shou
ld you take a photograph, it would look like a dream spoken in the language of paint and few would believe it was real.’

  They ate dinner of their choices: Eisenstone went for a traditional roast with all the trimmings, Dee enjoyed a bowl of steaming noodles which were dark with soy sauce and made a bed for sweet and sour chicken, while Tim kept it simple with a cheeseburger and fries. The monkey, who often behaved as you would expect a monkey to behave, took great pleasure in his tiny banana milkshake.

  ‘I am also partial to climbing the occasional tree,’ Phil said, stirring with his straw.

  After this, Tim set up a little kitchen area in the corner, where he made them all tea (this was easier than creating multiple cups and teapots). He was holding a full teacup, balanced on a saucer, when the discussion turned – as it had done a lot over the last day – to the implications of imagining a new universe.

  ‘What strikes me is all the things that are the same,’ Tim said.

  ‘Indeed, I, I suppose it is the status quo unless imagined otherwise?’ Eisenstone suggested.

  ‘Maybe,’ Tim said, sipping from his tea. ‘That would make sense. Anyway, does anyone want dessert?’

  ‘High time we conjured up some chocolate,’ Phil said.

  ‘Top idea,’ Tim agreed, lifting his teacup.

  ‘What the hell is chocolate?’ Dee asked.

  Gasping, Tim dropped the cup and saucer he was holding, which shattered at his feet.

  ‘Clarice really has created a nightmare,’ the monkey added, staring at the wall. ‘We must unravel this madness, post haste.’

  Within ten minutes they were all lying, spreadeagled, on their own beanbags (Phil on his miniature one), lips and fingers still sticky, groaning and sighing. Some of the combinations Tim made tasted so good that he thought about going into business – toffee, dark, milk, white, raisins, caramel, nuts real and imagined, all arranged in incredible ways. And it proved, above all, the perfect way to introduce these poor souls to the delicious world of chocolate.

  Room ninety-eight soon felt like a true sanctuary – it seemed as though the world’s problems not only couldn’t get them in here, but simply did not exist outside these walls. As though if you were to zoom out and out and far away, you would view the room aglow in a black abyss of nothing – an oasis in an endless void, like something created for a computer game.