Skulk (21 page)

I shook off the vision of groceries piling up at the back door over the next few days, of milk going sour in the fridge, and Mum’s answerphone filling up with anxious calls from members of government. I tried to concentrate on what was in front of my nose.

The rat scent was coming from the bottom of the steps. It was strong and fresh, full of scrabbling and nibbling creatures – and oddly, a blast of strong, fruity perfume.

My heart lifted. Perhaps the Horde were all right. Perhaps they’d have answers for me, perhaps even somewhere safe for me to rest.

“Hello?” I called down. There was no answer from the darkness, so I started to gingerly climb down the incredibly steep iron stairs. There was barely room for me to stand on each step. Tall windows loomed up over me, with white-painted bars bolted to them. At the foot of the steps there was a tiny corridor, strewn with leaves and bits of old newspaper. It was barely wide enough for a person to stand in, but at the far end there was a little hollow arch, and at the base of the arch...

A rat hole and a pile of clothes.

I leapt at the clothes, almost burying my head in them. Jeans, a white shirt that carried a clinical, hospital kind of smell. A bra, knickers, socks rolled up carefully inside bright blue crocs. She’d been here recently, and... yes, there was a fresh, female rat smell leading into the hole.

One of the Horde was here. Right now.

I pushed my head inside the hole, careless in my excitement, and got a face full of pure blackness. My heart hammered and I tried not to think about what would happen if I got stuck. I had to try. I started to crawl inside. My shoulder-blades hit the top of the tunnel every time I reached out with my front paws, and my belly scraped along the floor. I was all the way inside, stretched out to my full length, my head in utter darkness, when I pushed forward a little and a tiny, bright point of light appeared to my left. The tunnel curved gently around and down, and thank goodness, it started to open up.

When I pushed myself out, blinking in the bright electric light, I found myself in a dusty broom cupboard, stacked with teetering piles of paint-stained buckets and old mops.

The lights were all on. Was that normal? This place was supposed to be deserted.

I heard something skitter, like claws on tile, and I froze and then spun around, my own claws clattering.

“Hello? Hello! I’m from the Skulk, I just want to talk,” I said. There was no reply, and no more sound.

Had I imagined it? Maybe it was mice, or just some ordinary London rat. It wasn’t as if the Underground didn’t have its fair share.

I stood, frozen, for a few more minutes. But there was nothing.

I stepped out of the open cupboard door, into a deserted corridor just like any other one in the Tube. Except it was completely empty.

You almost never get an entire corridor to yourself, in the London Underground, and even if you do, you can sense the working station all around you. There are sounds of other people’s feet coming up in front of you or behind, of trains clattering through the tunnels or escalators humming. You get warm breezes off the tracks, smells of yesterday’s chips, and the far-off echo of buskers strumming guitars. In the Underground, even if you’re by yourself, you’re never quite alone.

Here, the curved corridor was silent, apart from the sound of my paws padding along the concrete floor, following the rat trail to the top of the spiral staircase. I could smell only rats and dust and the flow of electricity through the thick black cables that ran along the ceiling.

I couldn’t see how far down the staircase it went – it curved around a thick, tiled column so I couldn’t even see around the next corner. But I remembered it being a long climb down, and feeling much longer on the way back up to the surface.

I hesitated there for a little while, listening for any hint of movement. But the scent went this way, and I couldn’t do anything but follow it, to the end.

I lost count after about seventy-five steps and stopped for a moment, pressing my back to the cool tiles, waiting for the tremble in my limbs to subside. The staircase was utterly silent except for the loud rasp of my own breath. I felt the urge to stifle it, so as not to disturb the dusty nothingness. Grime and brick dust crept into my nose and I let out a sneeze that echoed for what seemed like eternity.

I counted another eighty-two steps, hugging the outside of the curve and trying not to think about anything but counting and not tripping over my own feet or the little pieces of debris that littered the stairs, before a flat patch of concrete finally came up to meet me. I’d hit the bottom, at last. I sank down onto it and lay there, panting, for a few seconds.

The corridors down here were brightly lit, too. Coloured signs and Thirties advertising were pasted to the walls, presumably props from the last time the station had been made up for filming. The walls curved up over my head, almost perfectly round.

The silence was even more oppressive when my breathing had calmed. The loneliness of it, the knowledge that I was so far down under the earth with nobody to see or hear me made me shudder.

Even the rat scent seemed to be fading out in all directions. The corridor led off at least four different ways, and there were two barred alcoves in front of me in total shadow, looking like prison cells for the darkness.

Something skittered.

I twisted around, looking for the source of the sound, but there was nothing there.

Then, again – a scuttling, claws-on-concrete kind of sound. It seemed to circle all around me, like a ghost, right behind me and gone as soon as I turned around, building to a rattling crescendo. I whipped about, faster and faster, twisting my head up and down, and still I couldn’t smell or see the source.

And then, suddenly, there were rats all around me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I stumbled, dizzy, bracing my paws on the concrete, and just about managed to focus on the sharp teeth of the one in front of me as they snapped at my nose. I jerked away. The rat reared up, its pink tail whipping out behind it, and raked its claws down over my muzzle. It was a stinging pain, like a bad paper cut, and it made my eyes water.

“Invader!” the rat snarled. “Trespasser! Tell us what the Skulk sent you for, and we might let you live.”

“The Skulk didn’t… I mean – I’m from the Skulk, but...” I tried to turn my head, to count how many rats there were around me. The one who’d spoken, a big grey female with a glossy coat, was flanked by a black-furred male and a smaller female. This was the one I’d followed down from the surface. I could still scent the faintest hint of medical soap on her. I was pretty sure there were three more behind me. The entire Horde.

“Answer her,” the male chittered.

“I came to... I...”

I didn’t know where to begin. It hadn’t occurred to me to work out what to say, if I actually
met
the Horde.

“It’s about the stones,” I blurted, before the lead rat could give me another swipe with her sharp little claws.

She narrowed her eyes to gleaming black slits, and the female beside her bared her teeth.

“How dare you?” the leader growled. Her whole body seemed to vibrate. “Filthy Skulk, breaking into our territory to accuse us of being thieves.”

“I – no, I wasn’t.” I tried to look around at the other three, but the male leapt, snapping his teeth close to my left eye.

“Face front when Amanda is speaking to you.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of stealing our stone!” I barked. “I just want to know if you’ve got yours.”

“Well if you were planning on stealing it, you’re out of luck, honey,” said one of the rats behind me, another female.

“No,” I whined. “Listen, there’s a sorceress, and she’s killing people for their stones, and I have a blue stone that I found – it’s hidden, safe for now, and I want to know whose it is so I can give it back, that’s why I came here.”

“She’s lying,” said the black male beside Amanda. “Just like the Skulk to make up some farfetched nonsense about a sorceress to get us to let our guard down.”

“Get out,” said Amanda, rubbing her front paws over her whiskers. “And don’t come back here.”

My heart sank. “You can’t throw me out,” I said. “Not without giving me a chance to explain!”

“Orion,” Amanda snapped, and pain blistered across my tail. I yelled and tore my tail away from the teeth of the rat she’d called Orion, and lashed out, without thinking. My claws weren’t drawn, but I caught him hard on the side of the head and he tumbled through the air and skidded up against the wall of the tunnel. He was on his feet again in seconds, but it was too late. I felt claws digging into my back as one of the rats jumped and clung on.

“Leave Orion alone! You’ll pay for that, Skulk vermin,” she growled. It was the little female. Her teeth clamped down on the scruff of my neck and I bucked and twisted, trying to shake her off.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I growled. In hindsight, probably a mistake. The rats piled on, biting and scratching. They were pulling their punches, trying to teach me a lesson rather than kill me – if they’d gone for my eyes and throat, I realised, I would be a goner. As it was I could barely move and my skin was stinging all over, bleeding from thousands of tiny punctures.

“Let me go,” I finally shrieked, “I’ll go, just let me go!”

“Back,” Amanda’s voice commanded. The weight lifted and I staggered over to the foot of the spiral steps. I turned back to see all six rats advancing on me, their little razor-sharp teeth bared and snapping at me. “Get out, and tell the Skulk if we see you here again we’ll bite to kill,” she growled.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I whined.

The rats lunged, their jaws snapping. I turned and hurtled up the stairs as fast as my tired legs could carry me.

I had no idea how close I was to the surface when my legs gave out and I lay, gasping, my head drooping onto my paws.

At least they weren’t all dead. It was better than finding them dead. And the stone couldn’t be theirs, could it? I racked my brain for any rat that’d pricked up its ears or seemed interested when I’d mentioned that it was a sapphire. None of them had.

So this was good. I’d learned something. And perhaps the Skulk and the Horde could reconcile, in time.

I just had to keep telling myself that.

A scuttling noise sent me leaping to my paws, swaying madly in a rising cloud of brick dust, and a second later a wriggling rat’s nose appeared around the corner of the central column.

“Oi, Skulk girl,” said the rat. I shied away, crouching to run – or to spring and sink my teeth into its mangy little neck.

That’s hardly going to help Horde-Skulk relations, is it?

Save it for Victoria.

“I’m going!” I growled at the rat. “Give me a minute, for God’s sake.”

“Shh, do you want them to hear you?” the rat hissed, clambering up over the step and into view, fixing me with a glittering black stare. It was large and brown, and male. It was the other one that’d been behind me, with Orion and the female that called me honey.

This one hadn’t spoken.

“I just want to give you a message,” he said.

“From Amanda?”

“In a way.” He sniffed at the air, glancing up and down the stairs, and then took a couple of steps closer. “The Horde and the Skulk have been at war for decades and it’s ridiculous. You don’t know what the Skulk did.
I
don’t even know, nor does Amanda or Ryan.”

“So this is like... you offering a truce?”

“If you like,” said the rat. “I’m offering you information. You want it, or not?”

I nodded.

“The blue stone’s not ours, ours is black. That’s all I can tell you about that.”

“Fine,” I rasped, glad of the confirmation, though I felt far from fine.

“You been to the Cluster and the Rabble yet?”

“I’ve been to the Cluster. Four of them are dead – for days, at least. And I have no idea where the new ones are, or if they even know.”

The rat hesitated, blinking his black eyes at me. He washed his ears. “That’s... unfortunate.”

I just looked at him blearily.
Unfortunate. Right. My whole life is unfortunate right now.

“But I can tell you where to find the Rabble.”

“I already know,” I muttered. “They meet in Kew Gardens, right?”

“Well yeah, but you don’t wanna go up the Gardens at this time of night. You won’t find anything. You want to go round their leader’s house. She’ll talk to you.”

I felt a yawn crawling up my throat and tried to strangle it. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Nearly four,” said the rat.

“And the Rabble leader will let a strange fox into her house at 4am?”

“I think so. She’s a bit like that.” There was a scrabbling sound. I tensed, and the rat sat up on its haunches like a meerkat and peered down the stairs. “They’re coming up. I said I had to get off home. Let’s not be here, eh? You want Susanne Dirden, 42 Pacific Road, Acton. Got it? Repeat it to me.”

“Susanne Dirden, 42 Pacific Road, Acton. 42 Pacific Road.”

“Right,” said the rat, and vanished up the stairs like a mangy, furry rocket. I gathered my strength – though it felt like it was about enough to fill a small teacup – and scrambled after him.

This time, the feeling of twisted déjà-vu kicked in when I was still a long way from my destination. Here I was, passing through Acton in fox form, at 4am, again. It was like the world was mocking me by sending me back here. How long had it been since that first night, when the night had opened up in front of me, promising freedom, a wide open world where I’d never have to answer to anyone? It couldn’t have been long, but when I tried to think back, I realised I couldn’t even think what day it was today.

Last time I was here, the night had been full of excitement and adventure, and I’d been full of nervous energy, looking forward to seeing E3’s masterpiece. I hadn’t been cold. Now, that deep bone-chill was catching up to me, curling around my joints, pulling my muscles tight so I couldn’t even bring myself to move quickly to work up some heat.

I trudged past
Batman with Rainbow
, hardly looking at it, and didn’t even think about trying to go back to the
Arabian Dragons
. I just had to get this done. If I survived tonight, I’d find some clothes and I’d find the time and I would go back to the dragons. I would.