The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (26 page)

‘Out!’
shouted Rune, grabbing Mr Craik by the scruff of the neck and hoisting him into
the corridor.

‘Oooooh!’
went Cornelius, crashing through the top of the wardrobe.

‘Oooooh!’
went Tuppe, joining him.

‘Me
bum’s on fire! Me
all’s
on fire!’ howled Norman, thrashing about amidst
the chaos.

‘The whole top floor’s
going up,’ cried Thelma. ‘Stay in gear, you stupid car, and stop lurching about
like that.’

‘Get out of the way. Get
out of the way,’ yelled a fire-fighter, leaning from his cab and flapping his
hands at the cars in front.

The
cars in front were weaving all over the road.

The
cars in front had no drivers in them.

‘Get us out of here,
Cornelius.’ Tuppe drummed on the inside of the wardrobe door. ‘We’ll be burned
to our deaths.’

‘You’re
all right then, not hurt?’

‘Yes
I’m fine thanks.’

‘Glad
to hear it. I’m fine too, in case you were thinking to ask.’

‘I
wasn’t. But I’m glad you are. Get us out. Get us out.’

‘Best
go out the way we came in, I’ll give you a lift up.’

‘Thanks,
I…
Aaaaagh!’
went Tuppe.

‘What’s
happened? What’s wrong?’

‘There’s
a dead man in the wardrobe with us, Cornelius. It’s Mr Showstein.’

‘Oh
God!’ Cornelius put his shoulder to the wardrobe door and burst out into the
flaming hell that had once been the KEV-LYN suite. ‘Let’s get out of here, come
on.

‘I’m
with you there. Oh no. Aaaaagh again.’

‘What
is it now? Come on, we’ve got to go.

‘There’s
a kid on fire, Cornelius. We’ve got to help him.’

Cornelius
flapped his hands about amongst the smoke and flames. Alarming cracking sounds
issued from the floor beneath him, the curtains roared; the heat was reaching
critical.

‘There’s
no-one here but us; you’re hallucinating, Tuppe.’

‘I’m
not. He’s right there.’

‘Oh,
oh, oh,’ went Norman, hopping about and patting at his charred overall. ‘Oh,
oh, oh.’

‘Come
with us quickly,’ called Tuppe.

‘Eh?
Hello. Are you Cornelius Murphy? Oh, oh, oh.’

‘No,
I’m Tuppe. Come with us before you get burned alive.’
Crash!
and
Whoomph!
went falling timbers. Creak and rock, went the floor.

‘Come
on, Tuppe,’ Cornelius snatched up the small man and made a grab at the door
handle.

And the
door handle vanished all away.

And
then there was only wall.

‘Get out of the way,’
bawled the fire-fighter. ‘Aw shit, what are they doing now? They’re backing up.
They’re going to ram us.

‘Get out of this car,’
ordered Hugo Rune aiming his revolver at Thelma.

‘We can’t get out,’ wailed
Tuppe. ‘We’re all gonna die.’

‘What’s
the trouble?’ Norman asked.

‘The
door’s vanished,’ shouted Tuppe. ‘Hugo Rune’s magicked it away.

‘Yes I
know
that,’
shouted Cornelius.

‘I
wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to this lad.’

‘There
isn’t any lad.’

‘Yes
there is, he’s here. No he’s not.’ And Norman wasn’t.

‘Drive,’ ordered Hugo
Rune.

‘Yes,
sir,’ wimped Mr Craik of the very, very, very wild eyes.

‘Help!’ shouted Cornelius.

Crash
went further lumps of flaming roof.

‘Help
me too!’ shouted Tuppe.

‘Take the coast road,’
ordered Rune. ‘And slow down, there’s no need to drive so fast.’

‘It’s
not
me
driving fast, it’s the car, and it doesn’t want to take the coast
road.’

‘I don’t want to die,’
blubbered Tuppe, now clinging to a Murphy trouser leg. ‘Do something,
Cornelius, save us.

Cornelius
clawed at the wall, in search of the vanished door handle.

The
flames licked up about them.

And
then the floor collapsed.

Peep, Peep, Peep and Honk,
went the mad cars, buffeting into the fire engine.

‘Steer this damn car, you
fool,’ hollered Rune as the Cadillac did a spectacular U-turn on the promenade,
scattering the rubber-neckers who were flocking to the Grande.

‘There you go,’ said
Norman, grinning in from the corridor through the now-open doorway. ‘It didn’t
fool me and
I
managed to open it. Here, where have you gone?’

‘Down
here.’ Tuppe still clung to the Murphy trouser leg. Cornelius was clinging to
the door handle.

And
swinging wildly about. Amongst the flames and chaos. And everything.

‘Pull
us up,’ called Tuppe. ‘I’m trying,’ called Cornelius. ‘I didn’t mean
you,
I
meant
him.’

‘
Don’t start that again I .. Norman tugged and Cornelius strained.
And Tuppe clung on.

And
flames rushed up from beneath and out through other doorways into the corridor.
And chunks of ceiling came down and UPVC windows buckled and exploded.

And the fire-engine
shunted mad cars aside and ploughed into the private car-park, causing
on-lookers to cheer and hotel guests, some in nought but skimpy night attire,
to duck this way and that as mad cars mounted the pavements and growled after
the speeding appliance.

Cornelius, Tuppe and
Norman scuffled down the corridor to the fire-escape, coughing smoke and
gasping like good’ns.

Thelma
and Louise saw Tuppe and Cornelius emerge from the blazing building and begin
their rapid descent of the outside cast-iron fire-escape. They set up a bit of
a cheer, but soon took to running from a rogue BMW.

Several
floors down now, and relatively safe from the conflagration, Tuppe and
Cornelius stopped short to catch their breath.

‘Look
at that lot,’ gasped Tuppe, viewing the mayhem below. ‘And look at that.’
Cornelius pointed towards the Cadillac, skimming along the promenade road.

‘It’s
Rune,’ gagged Tuppe. ‘And Boris is in the back.’

‘And
look at
that!’

The Cadillac suddenly left
the promenade road, banged up onto the pavement and swerved towards the
entrance to the east pier.

‘Apply
the brakes, you oaf!’ Rune thumped Mr Craik about the ear. ‘I am! I am. Oh
God!’ The Cadillac mashed into the turnstile, smashing it aside and reducing
the little ticket box to mangled matchwood, lurched onto the pier proper and
tore along it.

‘What’s
his driver think he’s doing?’ Tuppe clung once more to the leg of Cornelius.

‘I
don’t think it’s his driver. I think it’s the car. Oh no!’

The
Cadillac had been accelerating like a dragster on a Santa Pod quarter-mile.
Which was exactly the length of the east pier.

The
record at Santa Pod is 6.7 seconds.

Though
who gives a toss who holds it.

The
Cadillac was doing well over one hundred and twenty miles an hour by the time
it ran out of pier.

There
was no way on Earth anyone could have leapt clear and had any hope of living so
to tell.

With a
terrible rending of metal the Cadillac Eldorado passed through the decorative
Victorian railing work and plunged down into the sea.

And
cars don’t, of course, explode when they hit water.

They
sink.

And
very fast if they’re open-topped and have done the full cartwheel.

Very
fast indeed.

Flaming bits and bobs now
showered down on the fire-escapees. Fire roared above, cars growled below.

‘Let’s
find the girls,’ said Murphy. ‘And let’s get.’

‘So there you have it,’
said Jack Bradshaw, who had started earlier and now was finishing. ‘What do you
think then, mate?’

‘I
think I’ll choose
sprout,’
said the dismal and deceased Mr Showstein.
‘But before I commit myself, describe this controller of yours to me once
again. He sounds most familiar.’

30

Cornelius Murphy woke,
yawned, stretched and then went, ‘Aaaaagh!’

Tuppe
jumped up from the Land of Nod and went ‘Aaaaagh!’ too, but then he asked,
‘Aaaaagh!
What?’

‘Aaaaagh!
Last night,’ Cornelius explained.

‘Oh yes.
Aaaaagh! to
that
all right.’ Tuppe rubbed at his arms and stamped his
little feet. ‘I’m cold.’

‘Me
too.’ Cornelius raised himself onto his knees and strained morning dew from his
hair.

He and
Tuppe had slept out rough on the crest of Druid’s Tor. And they had not done it
alone. Around and about them lay other sleepers and other wakers. The Tor was a
regular refugee camp. Thousands of people strewn across it.

And
somewhere amongst them, Cornelius hoped, were Thelma and Louise.

It had
not been a night of holiday fun-time at Skelington Bay. The mad cars had spread
their madness through the parked ranks of their automotive brethren. At a pace.
The fire-engine had been amongst the first to succumb. The fire at the Grande
had gone unchecked. Much of the town that lay down wind of it was now also
smouldering ruination.

Not
good.

There
had been panic and exodus.

Much
panic, but not without some spirited resistance.

Cornelius
and Tuppe had been in the thick of that, helping to raise barricades across the
roads leading from the stricken town.

The
cars had tried to ram these barricades, many destroying themselves in the
so-doing. Much flaming wreckage. Mangled scrap. Nice big barricades now.

‘This
is pretty dire.’ Tuppe looked down to the town below. Cars were doing chicken
runs along the promenade. They weren’t swerving aside at the last moment. ‘The
meteor did it, you know.’

‘Did
what?’

‘That
down there. The cars. There was a Stephen King movie about this meteor and big
lorries coming alive.’

‘Was
Kyle McKintock in that one?’ Cornelius asked.

‘That’s
not funny. He was dead in the wardrobe. And Boris is probably dead too.’

‘I’m
sorry. But it wasn’t the meteor. The word going about is that Lola the waitress
overheard two scientists talking and it’s a secret government germ-warfare
project that’s got out of control. Apparently the local estate agent invented
the virus.’

‘That
would be the man you saved from being burnt at the stake.’

‘Mr
Rodway, yes. He did promise to pay me a large sum of money for saving him. But
I never saw him again.’

‘Perhaps
he’ll post it to you.’

‘Yes,
I’m sure he will.’

‘Hey
wotcha, fellas,’ said Norman, ambling up. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for
you.’

‘Hello.’
Tuppe grinned at the lad in the charred overalls. ‘We lost you in all the
confusion. Thanks for getting us out of the hotel room.

‘What
are you talking about?’ asked Cornelius.

‘This
is the lad who saved us by opening the door, Cornelius. What is the matter with
you?’

‘There
is no lad,’ said the Murphy. ‘What is the matter with
you?’

‘Eh?’
went Tuppe.

‘He
can’t see me.’ Norman scratched his ruddy barnet. ‘That’s not right. It’s him
I’m supposed to be talking to.’

‘About
what?’

‘What
about what?’ Cornelius asked.

‘I’m
not asking you about what, I’m asking the lad about what.’

‘It
isn’t funny, Tuppe. Turn it in.’

‘Oh
come off it, Cornelius. This is the lad who pulled us out of the burning room,
who opened the door. You do remember
that,
don’t you?’

‘I
remember something weird.’

‘It was
me,’ said Norman.

‘See?’
said Tuppe.

‘See
what?’

‘Oh
no!’ Tuppe took on deadly white shade of the face. ‘Stay away from me,’ he
said.

‘Why?’
asked Cornelius.

‘Not
you,
him.’

‘Just
stop it, will you?’

‘It’s
in your pocket, get it out.’