Gabriel had been driven back to Checkpoint Zero.
The guards had bundled him out of the van and pushed him towards a corrugated iron shed. ‘“Palmieri”, don’t forget,’ said one of the guards, laughing. He shoved a piece of paper in front of Gabriel. ‘This is your pass to get you out of here whenever you want to go. Just like Palmieri. Keep it safe!’ They all burst out laughing again.
‘Do you laugh at me?’ said Gabriel.
There was silence. The guards looked uncomfortable, then angry. They had all been recruited from the Scrappers, and because they had been treated so badly all their lives, all they liked to do was to make other people feel worse than themselves.
‘Beat him up,’ said one of the guards.
‘No, don’t bother,’ said another. ‘He’s free to go whenever he likes, after all.’ There was another burst of laughter. ‘Just get in there, you little weirdo, will you?’
‘What be here?’ asked Gabriel, looking at the shed.
‘Go and see for yerself,’ said the guard, ‘and when you’ve had a good look around, you’re free to go!’
They yanked open the shed door. A terrible searing wind blew out, and the guards had to struggle against it to stand up to it. With all their might, they threw Gabriel into the shed. The shed had no floor. Gabriel fell and fell, falling down the wind, and into a blacked-out world. With a terrible thump he landed on something very soft, something that half choked him as he tried to get up.
‘Who is it come here?’ said a Voice, in a whisper that was sharper and higher than the rush of wind around him.
‘One like us,’ said another Voice. ‘It must be.’
‘Pull him up!’
‘No, let him slip!’
Gabriel had ears that could hear everything; he had been born and bred underground and his ears were keen as an animal’s that lives in a burrow.
He had eyes that could see in the dark too, but in all his life he had never seen darkness like this. It was thick as a hood. He held up his hand in front of his face. Nothing.
He reasoned that whatever lived underground here had ears and no eyes.
Better keep quiet.
‘Does he know what time it is?’ There was the Voice again. ‘I want to know what time it is.’
‘He’s lost his twin. He’ll never see her again. Poor sonny! Ha ha ha.’
Gabriel didn’t like the sound of this. He had to get out. He tried to pull himself up, and found that he couldn’t move. At least, he couldn’t move upwards. He could move down wards, and that was where the force of the wind wanted him to go; downwards.
‘Let’s get him!’
Gabriel panicked, terrified. Memories of being chased, memories of being beaten, memories of running with Goliath through the dark low tunnels, the Devils shouting from behind, their glowing bodies red, their faces blank and cruel. He wouldn’t be sent to Bedlam. He wouldn’t be chained like his father.
Frantically he dug his square spade hands into the soft stuff to try and get a grip, and that is how they found him. Two lassos grasped his hands. Two more lassos grasped his feet, and he was being pulled down, suffocating, into the soft blackness.
‘Gotcha now, sonny! Ha ha ha! Let’s feel what he is.’
There was a horrible wet slithering sound as Gabriel was felt all over.
‘Two arms, yes, two legs, yes, head, hands and feet, and, AND, funny ears. Ha ha ha.’
‘Do you laugh at me?’ said Gabriel.
There was a silence. There was no answer. Gabriel heard rapid whispering. Anger made him bold.
‘You feel what I be, now I feel what you be,’ he said, plunging forward and touching the nearest shape.
It was horrible. The shape was long and thin, but not flat. The shape was round and pulpy, like warm spaghetti, like a fat worm, and its longness and thinness never seemed to end. Gabriel was coiling the body like a rope over his arm.
‘Where be thine end?’ he said, his boldness gone.
‘No end,’ said the Voice. ‘Soon enough it will happen to you, sonny. This is what happens here. You are not sucked down enough yet. But you will be by night, ha ha ha.’
Night? How could anything be darker than this?
‘What be this place?’
‘Black Hole.’
‘That be its name? Black Hole?’
‘Did they throw you down here like the rest?’
Gabriel told them about the shed, but the Voices knew nothing of that. They said they had been thrown down the hospital chute after the Time Transfusions.
‘Hospital?’ said Gabriel. ‘Bedlam Hospital?’
‘The hospital is called Bethlehem,’ said the Voice.
‘We’ve got the Time,’ said the other Voice. ‘We’ve got the Time, ha ha ha – that’s what their doctors say – but they haven’t got the Time, WE got it, and they take it off us and sell it to other people, and then they throw us down here. Half of us, anyway. We’re all twins. One twin escapes, the other gets thrown down here, sonny. Your twin has escaped, ha ha ha.’
Gabriel was glad Silver had escaped, even if she wasn’t his twin.
The Voices told him quickly and harshly about life in the hospital. The hospital only took twins, and for six months they treated you well, and fed you and looked after you, and made you healthy and strong, and then they started the experiments.
So many people in the world were short of time, and that’s what the hospital took – Time. The best years were carefully removed and transfused in discrete packets of a year each, to whoever could pay for them.
The twins aged rapidly. Forty-nine years was the maximum taken from any one body, but, by using twins, the hospital had discovered that they could take ninety-eight compatible years and sell them as a healthy screened package to families, or to companies who wanted to extend the working life of their top executives.
Transfusions were taken at thirteen years old.
‘Orphans,’ said the Voice. ‘Orphans or mothers who will sell their children. You get good money for selling your children.’
‘What be your fate?’ asked Gabriel.
‘When they’ve finished the experiments, and they don’t always work, you get sick and old. A boy of thirteen looks sixty when they’ve finished, and he can’t walk. Sometimes they take too many years off him, and he dies straight away – the nurses take extra for illegal sale. You can get cut-price Time off the Time Touts, but a lot of it is no good. They don’t give you a guarantee and you can’t complain to anyone if you pay the money and the stuff is rubbish.
‘Well, even if they stick to the rules, and they only take what the law allows, the boy soon gets sick anyway, and the weak ones they throw down here. There’s no Time in a Black Hole, sonny, no Time at all. Time stops, and it stops because there’s so much gravity down here that it pulls everything in with it, even light. Even light can’t escape this place. No Time, no light, just what they call the Stretch.’
‘The stretch?’ Gabriel was nervous.
‘Gravity down here will stretch you like spaghetti. That’s what we are now – human spaghetti.’
‘Let me go,’ pleaded Gabriel.
‘Can’t do that, sonny. No one leaves a Black Hole because no one can travel faster than the speed of light, and that’s what you’d need to do to get out. You’ll be sucked down, and you’ll start to be spaghetti. Ha ha ha.’
The speed of light. Gabriel didn’t know much about light, because he lived underground, and he had never heard of light having a speed. He was a good runner though.
‘How fast must light travel?’
‘300,000 kilometres a second. Beat that – ha ha ha.’
Gabriel’s heart sank. It was as if he was already giving in to the gravity of the Black Hole and being pulled down and down.
‘They were bright stars once, these Black Holes,’ said the Voice. ‘Think of that.’
‘Why do they imprison you here?’ said Gabriel.
‘Only one of us,’ answered the Voice. ‘The other is for the experiment. You see, if there’s no Time down here, and there isn’t, we can’t actually die. We should be crushed to death by the force of gravity, but that hasn’t happened, we just stretch and stretch and stretch. My feet are a thousand miles away, easy. While we live in limbo here, our twin can’t die either. Who knows why not? Then they use us for more of their experiments.’
‘What are their experiments? Tell me,’ said Gabriel.
‘Can’t tell you, sonny. Know about the Time Transfusions, don’t know about the rest – teleporting, they say, but why you need twins for that, I don’t know. Just know that here we are without light, without Time, slowly stretching through this dark dead star.’ The Voice fell silent.
Gabriel felt the wind tugging at him, and the sensation of being pulled outwards and downwards. He couldn’t hold on with his strong hands, because there was nothing around him but blackness.
He tried to hold on with his mind. He would send Silver a Mind Message. She wasn’t very good at reading them, but if he could only reach her as he had when they were both spinning through the Time Tornado. He had felt a cord connecting them then, and he had only ever felt that with his own kind.
He concentrated. ‘Silver, Silver …’ But he sensed a cloudiness, a vagueness, not her bright smile or her clear eyes. He tried to imagine her, but it was like looking at a photograph that is fading. ‘Silver, Silver.’ He closed his eyes, even though it was so dark, and he made his picture of her stronger. Now she was coming into outline a little bit. He realised with fear that she too must be in danger.
‘Never know,’ said the Voice. ‘Never know where she is now, sonny.’
‘I shall know!’ he shouted, above the wind that was increasing.
‘Too late, you’re slipping already. Can’t you feel it?’
He could feel it. He could feel his sturdy compact body moving away from itself. He was being broken up by the huge force of gravity in the Black Hole. Well, all right. If this was the end, he would use all his last will and strength to hold on to Silver. He would be like Goliath and dig his legs firm and make his muscles work for him one last time. He would wake Silver from her sleep. He would shape her again and she would remember who she was.
The wind was on his body. The Voices had gone. He was alone.
Deep under the earth, in London, on the Thames, the Throwbacks were sitting in a circle holding hands.
‘Steady him,’ said Micah. ‘He is in Hell. Steady him.’
No one spoke. A wind began to rise in the Chamber. The wind whipped up the pots and pans and blew them against the walls. The ponies whinnied and shivered, and Goliath could be heard roaring in his tunnel.
‘Hold against the wind,’ shouted Micah. ‘It is the wind at the End of Time, it is the wind of the Dead, it is the wind of Nothingness and Void, hold hold!’
With all their might they grasped each other and remained seated as they were, using every ounce of their power to hold Gabriel in their sights.
And Gabriel in his turn held Silver in his sights. He did not think of himself at all, he thought of her only, and he drew a silver line round her body and when it wavered he strengthened it, and when she faded he blew his own breath through the raging wind, as though he were breathing life back into her.
His mind was going dark. He dared not move at all for fear of slipping down the soft scree into the windy formless emptiness below.
He had one chance perhaps to hold on for longer. Fiddling in his pockets he took out the wire and clips he had scavenged from the scrap heaps, and he bound his feet to his waist, and then wrapped his arms round his chest. If he could make himself as compact as possible, he would be harder to break up.
‘Help me, Micah,’ he said. ‘Help us both.’
On the Star Road, the little girl lay in a heap. No one took any notice of her or tried to help her as they passed up and down. She was another of the outcasts. It was common for refugees to die by the road. The Van would come and take her body away tonight or tomorrow.
It was cold on the road. The child was numb and quiet, like a sleeping thing in the snow. Then, faintly, so faintly, like a piano heard in the distance, the child’s spreading and dissolving mind heard a note it recognised from another place, another life.
‘Hold,’ said the note.
The note came again, stronger, the same, distinct this time.
‘Hold.’
Or was it just the wind in the trees?