On the night Zane first saw the giant, the summer moon was almost full. A figure approached Miri’s house slowly and fearfully, keeping well within the shadows and ducking behind anything nearby whenever the clouds parted. The visitor crept up to the house and paused, looking carefully at both ground floor windows several times before finally making a choice. Standing on tiptoe, he cast one more fearful look around the shadowed square before tapping insistently on the glass.
After a few moments, Zane opened the window as quietly as he could, held up a lit candle and peered down with sleepy eyes.
The trespasser bounced on his tiptoes. “Hullo!” he whispered.
Zane smiled at the Bloomsbury Boy standing in front of him. “Hi Dev, what’s wrong? It must be the middle of the night.” The candlelight shone off Dev’s teeth revealing the large gap between the front two. Even though it was only illuminated by one candle, Dev’s shock of unruly hair was clearly bright ginger.
“Come with me,” he whispered. Dev was shaking, as if scared as well as excited. The Bloomsbury Boys’ territory was only five minutes to the west from Miri’s garden, in Russell Square, but Dev rarely came over at night.
“But it’s dark!” Zane said, looking past Dev. The garden in the square, so familiar in the daylight, looked forbidding. His mother never let him go out alone once the sun had set, and that had never bothered him at all. The routine was always the same; packing up tools half an hour before sunset, then filling three buckets of water from the pump in the garden. Once everything was safely inside, she had taught Zane to go to every door and window in the house, locking and checking each one, before lighting candles in the kitchen and living room. It was then Zane’s responsibility to ensure that all of the curtains were closed perfectly, lest the candlelight shone out of a gap into the darkness. He had never asked why, it was just the way things were. Unlocking the window to talk to Dev had been bad enough, the thought of climbing out and into the moonlit garden was just … absurd.
“But you got to come with me! I seen sommat … sommat weird …”
Dev’s apparent agitation stopped Zane from sending him away. “What do you mean by ‘weird’?”
“A light … in one of the windows, high up. I saw it. Was like it was movin’ too.”
Zane was fully awake in an instant. “A fire!”
“No, not fire. I know what that looks like, an’ it weren’t that. It weren’t like nothin’ I ever seen before. Weird light … we got to check it out, might be sommat important, we got to keep you and Miri safe. An’ I don’t wanna wake Jay up, in case it’s sommat … stupid.” Dev hung his head, recalling the last time that had happened. “You’re clever. I thought you should come look-see too. Jay’d be dead chuffed if you did.”
Zane considered this carefully. Within the Bloomsbury Boys, a strict hierarchy was in place. Jay, at the top, was the biggest, the one who had lived the longest and the one who had survived most fights with the Gardners. He could also be charming when he needed to be. Miri had once said he had Irish blood in him but Zane looked carefully the next time Jay was cut and his blood looked just like everyone else’s.
The only ways that a boy could impress Jay were to either fight a Gardner up close and win, or get a Token, a physical trophy to prove a Boy’s ability to steal from the enemy in their own territory and get away afterwards. Tokens earned a Boy status within the gang: the more Tokens, the more respect and the better claim to food, the ultimate Token being the black tie of a dead Gardner.
Dev, approaching fourteen (a guess, as none of the Boys knew when they were born and didn’t mark birthdays), didn’t have the dexterity or coordination to survive close combat with a Gardner and mercifully knew that fact. Unfortunately, he also didn’t have the luck or the wits to be able to obtain any other Token, and every day had to watch Boys much younger and smaller rise higher in Jay’s estimations. Jay was the axis upon which Dev’s world turned and Miri had patched Dev up several times after varied attempts to win his favour.
Zane frowned. “If there is something weird there, it might be dangerous.” He took a deep breath. “I suppose it’s up to us to make sure this isn’t a threat, right?”
Dev beamed at him. “Too right!”
Zane and Dev stood outside of the hospital at the far corner of the square. His house couldn’t be seen from here, the line of sight intersected by the dark garden.
Zane shook his head. “I’m not going in there.”
Dev, a good six inches shorter, looked up at him with large hazel eyes. “Go on, honest-like it’ll be worth it, you ain’t seen nothin’ like what I saw, you wanna see it too. Your Mum won’t know; she’s asleep.”
Zane tensed as pride tugged at a string in his stomach. “It isn’t my Mum I’m worried about,” he lied.
In Zane’s life, the rule to Never Go Into Hospitals was as fundamental as Don’t Touch The Fire and Wash Your Hands Before You Clean The Wound. Miri had instilled him with not only a respect for nature, but also a pathological fear of the dark concrete buildings that lined the square. It hadn’t taken much; only a few cautionary warnings, a tearful reprimand when she had found him entering the lobby to look for fuel on a bitterly cold day, but the Never Go Into Hospitals rule was proving hard to break.
“Then you must be scared,” Dev stuck out his chin as a clear challenge.
Zane thrust his shaking hands into his pockets and stood straighter as Dev pulled his favourite woolly hat out of his pocket and jabbed his hair under it. The ginger fuzz defiantly poked out of several holes across the crown as Dev meticulously tucked in wayward strands away from his forehead and ears. Everything that Dev wore had holes, like all of the other Bloomsbury Boys. The skill of the well-dressed Boy was to make sure that each thin layer had its holes in different places. Lots of layers not only kept out the cold, but also made them look stouter than they were. It no longer worked on Zane as he and Miri had dressed too many wounds on their scrawny arms and legs to be fooled by such a simple trick.
Dev took a deep breath, drew himself up to his full height as he faced the double doors and strode towards them.
Zane’s clammy hands clenched deep in his pockets. The old glass of the doors was filthy and cracked, beyond them the hospital was as black as the inside of a poppy. He read the words on the faded blue sign hanging lopsidedly over the door. “National Hospital for Nee-ur-ology and Nee-ur-osurgery,” he sounded out softly as Miri had taught him.
Dev, trying to seem braver than his clever and more handsome friend, reached out with shaking hands and pushed the doors open. He and Zane wrinkled their noses at the stale air that wafted out, carrying a fine dust on it that made Dev cough slightly.
Inside the lobby fingers of moonlight began to tentatively pick their way across the floor. A thick layer of dust covered everything in sight with gentle undulations immediately recognisable from some of the alleyways between the garden and the Boys’ square. Bones.
Zane swallowed hard, not noticing that both he and Dev were holding their breath. Their eyes darted around the space, taking in the strange looking doors, how so many things were broken. Internal windows and doors had been smashed and many were hanging off their hinges. Strange wheeled beds were further in, some blocking a corridor in their haphazard arrangement. There were many things neither of them had seen before: signs, symbols on the walls, fire extinguishers, faded and grubby posters from the time before It happened.
A large, rotting staircase was at the farthest point ahead of them, but it was blocked by several pieces of furniture that had been used as some kind of makeshift barricade. Two pillars that were once white stretched up to the ceiling, now grey and streaked with dirt. To the right was a large reception desk, the wood intact, thanks to Miri keeping the Boys out of the hospitals too. Any other building and it would have been scavenged and burnt a long time ago. To the far right, Zane caught a glimpse of an attractive woman with short blonde hair looking out from a painting. He stared at her for a long moment, until Dev finally moved forward, taking a step inside.
Zane followed close behind him, both still enraptured by the alien space but also the sheer sense of adventure. He jumped as the door began to swing closed behind them, and paused to brace it open with an old clipboard he found on the floor near his feet.
“We need the light,” Zane whispered.
Dev frowned. “We need to find another way up,” he whispered back, with a slight tremor in his voice. “Them stairs are no good.”
Zane looked around for another way out of the lobby and saw a sign reading “Stairs to upper floors” with an arrow pointing to the right.
“This way.”
Zane pointed at the sign and began to move forward. His illiterate friend shrugged and fell in behind him, stepping where Zane stepped as Jay had taught him to do when exploring new places.
They clambered over the bones and wreckage, taking care not to touch anything unless they absolutely needed to do so. The corridor to the right was extremely dark; the moonlight could only penetrate so far in, and at several points they could only progress by touch alone. It was only by chance that Zane leant against a door out of the corridor that swung open to reveal a stairwell, lit by moonlight streaming weakly through a skylight high above them. It was sufficient to sketch out the shape of the stairs stretching up above them and the door to the first floor.
“It were four windows up, where I saw it, and on the other side,” Dev whispered. Zane nodded in response, gritting his teeth to stop them chattering. It meant that the light would be impossible to see from the garden or their house.
As carefully and as quietly as possible, they both began to climb the steps. It was slow work, as the steps were also blanketed by the awful grey dust and many of them were littered with bones and skulls. They were careful not to send any crashing down the stairwell. Both boys were used to seeing remains bleached by the sun on the roads that hadn’t been cleared by Miri or the Bloomsbury Boys, but somehow the darkness and the knowledge that they really shouldn’t be inside this place conspired to make it scary to step over them here.
Zane counted the doors as they went up and thankfully the dim blue-grey light got slightly stronger the further up they went. Finally, he stopped outside the door to the third floor. A small round window was set into it and he stood on his tiptoes to peer through. A long corridor with many doors leading off it on both sides could just be made out through the filthy glass. It was also very dark.
He turned back to Dev. “Can’t see anything.”
“It’ll be further along, the window was in the middle.”
There was an awkward pause. “Shall we go and have a look?”
Dev nodded. “Come this far …”
He stepped in front of Zane and slowly pushed the door open. It creaked as if it hadn’t been opened for years and they both froze.
Nothing happened.
Dev let out the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and stepped through. A large murky window at the far end of the corridor let in enough moonlight for them to progress. Their shoulders hunched with tension, they both began to creep down the silent corridor, their footsteps muffled by the thick carpet of dust. Thankfully, there seemed to be fewer bones up here.
The clouds outside cleared and the grey-blue light strengthened into silver, describing the streaks of dirt on the window as it reached through. In that moment, Zane saw something that made him grab Dev’s shoulder, half to stop him but half out of fear. With a shaking hand, he pointed out the large footprints in the dust that lay from a door at the other end of the corridor and led up to one of the doors just to their left. Only one set. Whoever had made them was still in that room.
In that moment, they both heard a strange rasping sound, like someone struggling to breathe in the winter after running in the cold. Only it wasn’t entirely like that; it was slow and it had an edge to it. There was something odd about the exact regularity of the breaths and a slight click that sounded as it changed from intake to out breath. It came from the same room that the footprints led up to.
As they both turned to the door, the crack beneath it was suddenly illuminated by a bright yellow light that spilled out from underneath and into the corridor to fall over their shoes. Zane and Dev clutched at each other wildly, but the light faded just as quickly as it had appeared. They finally began to relax but froze again when the the light returned and the door handle started to turn.
A footfall with a heavy metallic clang made them both jump, the shock spurring both of them to back away from the door as it swung open. Both boys gasped at the figure emerging from the room. He was huge, at least seven feet tall, but what drained the colour from their faces was the shape of the Giant’s head. It was as wide as his shoulders, like a huge square sat on top of his frame. The Giant lurched out of the room as if his feet were made of iron and turned to face the boys. Before they could make out any features on his huge face the bright yellow light swung around to shine on them. Dazzled, they both shrieked in terror and sprinted down the corridor back to the stairwell.
They hurtled through the door and raced down the first flight of steps as the heavy footfalls approached and the yellow light burst through the round window above their heads. They listened to the bizarre breathing as the Giant approached. He stopped on the other side of the door and both boys held their breath, hoping desperately that he wouldn’t come into the stairwell after them. After agonised seconds of tense listening to the regular, horrible wheeze, they both sagged as they heard him walk away in the opposite direction. The steady, slow, clanking footsteps grew quieter as the light swept away from their door.