was so sudden that Chester sat up and blinked like a nervous rabbit, stirred from his anxious torpor.
Another policeman emerged from a side room and hurried over to the brass pipes. There he glanced at a panel of antiquated dials from which a cascade of twisted wires spiraled down to a wooden box. Then he opened a hatch in one of the pipes, prying out a bullet-shaped cylinder the size of a small rolling pin. Unscrewing a cap from one end of it, he extracted a scroll of paper that crackled as he straightened it out to read it.
' Styx on their way,' he said gruffly, striding over to the counter and opening up a large ledger, not once looking in the boys' direction. He also had an orange-gold star stitched onto his jacket, and although his appearance was much like that of the other officer, he was younger and his head was covered with a neatly cut stubble of white hair.
' Chester,' Will whispered. When his friend didn't react, he stretched over to nudge him. In a flash, a truncheon lashed out, smacking sharply across his knuckles.
'Desist!' the policeman next to them barked.
'Ouch!' Will jumped up from the bench, his fists clenched. 'You fat…,' he shouted, his body trembling, trying to control himself. Chester reached out and grabbed hold of his arm.
'Be quiet, Will!'
Will angrily shook off Chester 's hand and stared into the policeman's cold eyes. 'I want to know why we're being held,' he demanded.
For a horrible moment they thought the policeman's face was going to explode, it turned such a livid red. But then his huge shoulders began to heave, and a low, grating laugh rumbled up, which grew louder and louder. Will threw a sidelong glance at Chester, who was eyeing the policeman with alarm.
'ENOUGH!' the voice of the man behind the counter cracked like a whip as he looked up from the ledger, his gaze falling on the laughing policeman, who immediately fell silent. 'YOU!' The man glowered at Will. 'SIT DOWN!' His voice held such authority that Will didn't hesitate for a second, quickly taking his place next to Chester again. 'I,' the man continued, puffing out his barrel chest self-importantly, 'am the First Officer. You are already acquainted with the Second Officer.' He nodded in the direction of the policeman standing by them.
The First Officer looked down at the roll of paper from the message tube. 'You are hereby charged with unlawful entry and trespass into the Quarter under Statute Twelve, Subsection Two,' he read in a monotone.
'But…' Will began meekly.
The First Officer ignored him and read on. 'Furthermore, you did uninvited enter a property with the intent to pilfer, contrary to Statute Six, Subsection Six,' he continued matter-of-factly. 'Do you understand these charges?' he asked.
Will and Chester exchanged confused looks, and Will was about to reply when the First Officer cut him off.
'Now what have we here?' he said, opening their backpacks and emptying the contents onto the counter. He picked up the foil-wrapped sandwiches Will had prepared and, not bothering to open them, merely sniffed at them. 'Ah, swine,' he said with a flicker of a smile. And from the way he briefly licked his lips and slid it to one side, Will knew he'd seen the last of his packed lunch.
Then the First Officer turned his attention to the other items, working his way through them methodically. He lingered on the compass but was more taken by the Swiss Army knife, levering out each of its blades in turn and squeezing the little scissors with his thick fingers before he finally put it down. Casually rolling one of the balls of string on the countertop with one hand, he used the other to flick open open the dog-eared geological map that had been in Will's bag, giving it a cursory inspection. Finally, he leaned over and smelled the map, wrinkling his face with a look of distaste, before moving on to the camera.
'Hmmm,' he muttered thoughtfully, turning it in his banana-like fingers to consider it from several angles.
'That's mine,' Will said.
The First Officer completely ignored him and, putting down the camera, picked up a pen and dipped it in an inkwell set into the counter. With the pen poised over a page of the open ledger, he cleared his throat.
'NAME!' he bellowed, throwing a glance in Chester 's direction.
'It's er, Chester… Chester Rawls,' the boy stammered.
The First Officer wrote in the ledger. The scratching of he nib on the page was the only sound in the room, and Will suddenly felt helpless, as if the entry in the ledger was setting in motion an irreversible process, the workings of which were quite beyond his understanding.
'AND YOU?' he snapped at Will.
'He told me my father was here,' Will said, bravely stabbing his finger in the direction of the Second Officer. 'Where is he? I want to see him now!'
The First Officer looked across at his colleague and then back to Will. 'You won't be seeing anyone unless you do as you are told.' He shot another glance at the Second Officer and frowned with barely disguised disapproval. The Second Officer averted his gaze and shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
'NAME!'
'Will Burrows,' Will answered slowly.
The First Officer picked up the scroll and consulted it again. 'That is not the name I have here,' he said, shaking his head and then fixing Will with his steely eyes.
'I don't care what it says. I know my own name.'
There was a deafening silence as the First Officer continued to stare at Will. Then he abruptly slammed the ledger shut with a loud slap, causing a cloud of dust to billow up from the counter's surface.
'GET THEM TO THE HOLD!' he barked apoplectically.
They were dragged to their feet and, just as they were being pushed roughly through a large oak door at the end of the reception area, they heard another long hiss followed by a dull clunk as a further message arrived in the pipe system.
The connecting corridor of the Hold was about fifteen feet long and dimly lit by a single globe at the far end, beneath which stood a small wooden desk and chair. A blank wall ran along the right-hand side, and on the wall opposite were four dull iron doors set deep into solid brick surrounds. The boys were pushed along to the farthest door, on which the number four was marked in Roman numerals.
The Second Officer opened it with his keys and it swung back silently on its well-greased hinges. He stepped aside. Looking at the boys, he inclined his head toward the cell and as they hovered uncertainly on the threshold, he lost patience and shoved them in with his large hands, slamming the door behind them.
Inside the cell, the clang of he door reverberated sickeningly off the walls, and their stomachs turned as the key twisted in the lock. They tried to make out the details of the dark and dank cell by feeling their way around, Chester managing to send a bucket clattering over as he went. They discovered there was a three-foot-wide, lead- covered ledge along the length of the wall that directly faced the door, and, without a word to each other, both sat down on it. They felt its rough surface, cold and clammy, under their palms as their eyes gradually adjusted to the only source of light in the cell, the meager illumination that filtered through an observation hatch in the door. Finally Chester broke the silence with a loud sniff.
'Oh, man, what
'I'm not sure,' said Will as he, too, sniffed. 'Puke? Sweat? Then he sniffed again and pronounced, with the air of a connoisseur, 'Carbolic acid and…' Sniffing once more, he added, 'Is that sulfur?'
'Huh?' his friend muttered.
'No, cabbage! Boiled cabbage!'
'I don't care what it is, it stinks,' Chester said, making a face. 'This place is just gross.' He turned to look at his friend in the gloom. 'How are we going to get out of here, Will?'
Will drew his knees up under his chin and rested his feet on the edge of the ledge. He scratched his calf but said nothing. He was quietly furious with himself, and didn't want his friend to pick up any sense of what he was feeling. Maybe Chester, with his cautious approach and his frequent warnings, had been right all along. He clenched his teeth and balled his fists in the darkness. Stupid, stupid, stupid! They had blundered in like a couple of amateurs. He'd allowed himself to get totally carried away. And how was he ever going to find his father now?
'I've got the most awful feeling about all this,' Chester continued, now looking desolately at the floor. 'We're never going to see home again, are we?'
'Look, don't you worry. We found a way in here, and we're dead straight going to find a way out again,' Will
