Voices. Echoing up the tunnel that led from the rusty gate onto the sunken road. “I tell you, we’re nearly home. See? The floor, here? We’re nearly back to the garden gate.”
“I barely care.” A squeaky voice. “My feet are killing me. Like, I’ve got blisters on my blisters.”
“You can have a footbath when we get home, dearie.” A man, somewhat effeminate in the Bond’s disdainful opinion. “Keep moving. You’re sure you haven’t seen any sign of Eve?” He sounded worried: Interesting. Possibilities fanned out in the Bond’s mind, a flowchart of goal-directed options from theft and murder to hostage-taking and torture.
“Could she have gotten ahead of us?” asked Squeaky-Voice.
“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” said another, deeper male voice, roughened from smoking (or the damnable coal smog back in dream-time London town), “but I doubt it.” And so do I, gloated the Bond.
“Fucksake, let’s just get this over with,” groused a different woman. One of the lesbos from the cafe in the park, the Bond figured.
They were nearly in range, so he stepped out from the charnel room and raised his gun. “Good evening.” He smiled, the moonlight inking his eye sockets with shadow and turning his teeth the color of old ivory.
The short, squeaky-voiced guy screamed and clutched the arm of one of the other overgrown kids. They were barely out of their teens: sucked to be them. The girls stood shoulder to shoulder. The black one clutched a carpetbag against her chest, her chin aggressively tucked down as she glared at him: her special friend looked like she might be more of a problem from her posture—Some martial arts training there, the Bond thought—but was focussed on his gun. Good.
“You are going to give me the book,” he explained patiently. “Otherwise you will all die, and I will take it from you anyway.”
“How do we know you won’t kill us?”
The Bond resisted the impulse to roll his eyes: “Because I don’t fucking need to. Have you any idea how hard it is to find 9mm Parabellum in London these days?” (The answer: extremely hard, unless you had an end-user certificate and a licensed arms dealer at your beck and call who could have it shipped to your boss’s private island base and flown in on his VIP helicopter.) “Give me the book and I’ll let you live. I’ll shut the gate behind me when I go. You’re not stupid so you’ll sit tight and give me a fifteen-minute head start before you follow me because if I ever see you again I will kill you. Clear?”
He snapped his fingers. “Do. It. Now.”
“Give him the book,” said Squeaky-Voice, his tone dismal.
“Fuck.” The black woman sounded totally disgusted as she held up the carpetbag. “Really?”
“Do it,” hissed her girlfriend.
“Stop!” the Bond said tensely. “Put the bag down and open it. Slowly. Show me.” This was when they’d try something if they were stupid.
She put the bag down and then opened the top. One of the boys slowly reached for a pocket. “Flashlight,” he said.
“Very, very, slowly.” The Bond smiled again and the boy shook in his boots as he carefully removed a phone and tapped its screen.
The interior of the bag lit up, revealing a leatherbound volume.
“Kick it towards me,” said the Bond. “Now I want you to go back that way, all the way down the tunnel to the sunken road—” their impresario-ringleader startled, as if he hadn’t realized the Bond had known about it, how stupid was he?—“behind the gate. And then you wait fifteen minutes. Remember that. You got a stopwatch on that thing? Fifteen minutes, or maybe I shoot you. Do you understand?”
The Impresario nodded. “Worst game of hide and seek ever,” said the squeaky-voiced boy.
“You got it. Now piss off. Damn meddling kids.”
They backed away, looking bereft. Lost, maybe. Sucked to be them, utterly incapable of fighting back in a real man’s world. The Bond grabbed the bag with his free hand and hastily retreated to the crypt entrance. He holstered his gun, then shut and locked the cast-iron gate. Next, he pulled out a small double-barrelled syringe of quick-setting epoxy resin and squirted it into the keyhole. It’d be set hard in two or three minutes, although it’d take a day to cure to full strength. But that didn’t matter. It’d stop them picking the lock, and he’d hear the noise if they somehow smashed the gate while he was still in the vicinity. Once he was home, well, he had a couple of kilos of C4 in the boot of the Aston Martin: more than enough to drop the entire rotten Georgian town house on their heads before they found their way back from Neverland.
Whistling tunelessly to himself, the Bond jogged through misty streets towards the Starkey family mansion, and the portal back to the real world.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
“Shut it, Game Boy, I’m trying to think here.”
Game Boy rounded on Imp. “Since when are you in charge any more? You got us into this mess! Why didn’t you roll him? Or you, Doc—”
“I tried.” Doc massaged his temples. “My head hurts. He had a ward—”
“He also had a great big gun, and in case you hadn’t noticed there are no save points in real life,” Imp scolded Game Boy.
“I shouldn’t worry, though,” Wendy chipped in. “He’ll be dead soon enough.”
“Why—”
“Oh.” Game Boy smiled. “Oh. Oh!”
“Yes, oh indeed.” Del smiled back at him. It was not a friendly smile. “He’s fucked. That guy’s a dead man walking, he just doesn’t know it yet.”
“If Eve’s right about the curse,” Imp pointed out. “And if her boss didn’t send him as insurance, did that occur to you? And we need to get moving. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place. Like the wallpaper is falling off and there’s something rotten underneath.”
“Sit tight,” Wendy told him. “It’s only been a minute and he can murder the lot of us if we run into him before, the, the curse hits.”
