Dogfighters: Under the Hill Read online

  He took the phone from its socket in the hall and went upstairs to change into dry, dark clothing. Phyllis answered after two rings.

  “How d’you feel about being an accomplice to robbery?” he asked, and she laughed. He could hear her drawing her chair up to her telephone table, pulling out notebook and pen.

  “Fire away. Oh, and by the way, Stan came to me yesterday with a new device he’d rigged up on your say-so. I took him back up to the Nine Ladies last night to test it out, and we may have something for you. I’ll bring it with me to show you. I’m guessing you don’t want me to rope him in for this?”

  “You’re quite right. I’m not having Stan involved in anything illegal. If he’s really found something to help, that’s more than enough. You can call Grace, though, if you like. Here’s the plan…”

  Ben mopped the pool of water from the room’s black, reflective floor with his brief moment of certainty dissolved into a swirl of dismay. He moved into the large central chamber of Arran’s rooms and pulled his finery over his head. The suit, in which he had been pulled through the earth into Faerie, had been laundered and repaired, not a trace of dirt on it and all the rents and tatters sewn up so finely they looked like they’d almost grown back together. He had found it when he returned, folded neatly on one of the firm cushions used for reclining by the fire pit on winter nights. Now he put it back on with a feeling of revulsion that he wasn’t sure was his own. Such drab garments! Was he really giving up on the idea of a kingdom of his own in order to run back to a world where he had never fitted? What made that place so attractive now, other than habit and sentiment?

  He tried not to allow the question to come into focus in his mind. Better not to think about that. Better not to be pushed around by creatures he didn’t trust and understood only far enough to know their actions were motivated by their own agenda, not his. At least on earth he knew what other humans thought.

  Or did he? How often had he felt the eternal outsider? All his life. And now he knew why. Because he had been living in an alien world, in exile. Had his differences, his heritage, always shown through? Would he always be as homeless there as he was here? Here at least he could storm his country and force them to recognise him. Back on earth…

  He tied his tie carefully and smoothed it down. There was still no sign of Arran, so he could put the all-concealing cloak over everything and slip out into the nobles’ quarter unobserved. His heritage didn’t want him, after all, and he’d found a ragtag bunch of eccentrics at home who did. That was something to hold on to. Just because Chris couldn’t bring himself to say the words—because he would be taking up with his old mate as if nothing had happened—did not mean there wasn’t someone out there for Ben. This crumpling, tight feeling in his chest would wear off in time, he was sure.

  He walked boldly through the evening crowd and down into the queen’s undercity. Sumala and Geoff looked up at him with more desperate eyes this time, sharper faces, and he wondered if anyone had remembered to feed them, since no one but the queen knew they were here.

  “We have to get you out. Does either of you know how to work this?” He brought the ivory wand out of his pocket and showed it to them.

  “I do.” Sumala extended her hand through the wire, and he dropped the thing into it just as footsteps sounded on the stairs outside, the heavy slither of something dragging down each riser.

  “Shit,” said Ben. “Chris thinks he can open the gate. Quick! Get out, you’ve got to come with me.”

  The light of torches had begun to spill around the corner, and the soft footfalls grew closer. Sumala looked at the door, bit her lip and then shook her head, passing the wand to Geoff. “Hide it. Not now.”

  “We must! There’s three of us, we can knock them down and run.”

  Geoff thrust the wand into one of his many pockets. The door creaked farther open. Oonagh stood in the doorway, wearing body armour and a long split skirt of leather. She had a trident in one hand and in the other a crown. She looked at them all through eyes that were currently as purple as violets and tilted her head a little to the side. Even to himself, Ben’s companions looked suspicious, like conspirators caught plotting.

  Oonagh could hardly have missed Geoff wiping the sweat from his hands on his trousers or the fountainlike tinkle of Sumala’s bells that betrayed her trembling. But she only said, “Ah, Karshni, well met. When I did not find you at your lodgings, I thought you must be here. It was your custom, when you visited us before, to go riding before sleep. I have sent Arran away for the moment because I desired to know you better myself, and I thought perhaps you would consent to accompany me instead?”

  She watched his gaze be snagged by the crown and held it out with a little flourish as if offering cake to a child. It was indeed a beautiful thing, the silver circlet was narrow as a fingertip and carved all down its length with a design of two horses facing one another, their front legs interlaced. A single white gem in the centre shone of its own light like a star, and light floated between her fingers as she offered it to him, like tendrils of blood in water.

  “It is fitting that a prince should wear a crown. I will not have anyone say of me that I do not know how to rightly honour my guests. Take it, and wear it so that my own people will know to do you reverence.”

  Ben looked from the jewel, not liking the sheen of it, up into her face. Who could tell what was going on behind those changeable eyes? He thought about how much he’d assumed, taken for granted. What was she really? She put on shapes and took them off as another person might change clothes. He’d been assuming he understood her, but why had he ever thought that?

  She watched him hesitate, and those Disney heroine eyes narrowed in an expression no big film cartoon character could ever replicate. He had a strange flash of Arran, and that moment in the man’s chambers where he had felt his flesh shift like water under his fingers. He shivered. No, he understood nothing. So this was the point to lash out? To fight? He could try to get the jump on her before she could use the trident that gleamed with sharpness in her right hand. Knock her out, take the others and run.

  And have all of Faerieland on his tail? No, better play for time, play along and retain the freedom he’d been given thus far. “Thank you,” he said, and took the thing.

  It even felt shiny in his fingers. Light welled up and overspilled his hands. He raised the circlet and set it on his head, and the last thing he saw was Oonagh smiling, Sumala rattling the bars and yelling “No!” before a blinding flash of revelation struck him and all his problems and doubts fell away. It was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he wished it had happened a thousand years before.

  “There’s a rescue plan,” he said, laughing internally at the unfinished, raw-edged shape of it. How could anyone expect such a thing to work? He ignored the furious silence from the cage, Geoff’s poisonous glare and thinned lips. “There’s a man coming to rescue me. He’ll open the portal in a matter of hours.”

  Oonagh tilted her head and looked at him, curious, wary. “That’s not possible. Only a queen of Faerie can open the way between worlds, and that way has been shut for years. You and this one here are the only travellers who have been through since my foremothers’ days.”

  “Maybe he’s found a way you don’t know about,” Geoff put in, as if driven beyond caution by the need to defend his friend. “He’s the other one in your prophecy, after all. The pilot. You know about as much about what he’s capable of as you do about me.”

  It was bombast, pure and simple, Ben thought, not worthy of a response. But Oonagh took off the long string of diamonds that dangled from her throat and knotted it into a ball that flickered with pale colours between her fingers. She unknotted it again, and he understood that she had unknotted her thoughts, made a decision. “We will go and see him then, this pilot. At last, all the strands are coming together. The river speeds towards the waterfall, and what will be left of us, after the drop?”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing th
is,” Grace whispered as she rounded the strut of the wheel, flicking the asperge to make a spray of holy water spatter the undercarriage of the plane.

  “Shh!” Phyllis whispered back from where she had pulled away the chocks. In the dim red light of their infrared lantern, she looked up at Chris in the cockpit and gave a thumbs-up. The three of them were all but invisible in black coats and dark trousers, though the implement in Grace’s hand glittered and the spray of holy water twinkled even in the midnight gloom.

  “We’re going to be put away for years.” Finishing her blessing, Grace capped the flask in which she’d brought the water, tucked it away and grabbed one of the carbon-fibre ropes they had clipped to the plane. Chris jumped down from the wing and joined them at the ropes. With all three of them pulling, the replica de Havilland Mosquito began to roll silently forwards towards the doors. They passed the crowbar Grace had left lying in the centre of the path, the plane following, silently, rolling forward like a great ghostly moth.

  Grace nudged Chris’s elbow and said, again, “Are you sure about this?”

  “If I can’t do it in this, I can’t do it at all.” He looked at the girls and wondered why they seemed so grim. This part was the fun part, and he felt reckless and gleeful as he hadn’t felt for years. Just like that time he’d tried to roll the Lanc to touch the steeple of Ely cathedral with the tip of one wing. High stakes just made it better.

  “I hate to mention it, but it’s not a Lancaster.” Phil dropped out for a moment’s rest as they passed the drowsing trainers and began to circle to bring the plane beneath the airfield’s fuel bowser.

  Chris looked up at the sleek and beautiful shape behind him, twin propellers at head height, the pilot’s nacelle set between them, so the lucky man got to sit between two buzz-saw-like blades and hope like hell that nothing went wrong. “I know. There’s no way we could have got the Battle of Britain Lanc, and I couldn’t have flown it on my own if we had. I’d need my crew.”

  A clear, cold night, and the smell of dope and aviation fuel brought it all back, tightened it around his throat like a noose. On a night like this, it was as though he could step from one time to another. They were so close he could almost hear their voices. “I wish…I wish the boys were here. I’d feel a hell of a lot more confident with them at my back.”

  The skin along his spine prickled with chill and yearning and eeriness, and he shrugged it off with some impatience. “But I’m sure they’re looking down on me now and wishing me well. Without them, this is my better option. Love the Lanc like a brother, but this? Nothing like it in the world, at the time. Still isn’t, for me.”

  Getting the fuel in the plane called for a great deal more climbing than he’d done in years, and the girls stood around at the bottom of the tower, stealing glances towards the security guard’s office. He was fast asleep thanks to one of Phil’s tranquillisers slipped into his tea, but none of them knew who might be coming to check on him or when his shift changed.

  “Go,” Chris said, clambering down to ground level once more. “Go now and get long gone before I start this thing up. There’ll be an almighty racket, and you don’t want to be seen leaving the premises at that point.”

  “Hold your horses.” Phil fumbled in her haversack and brought out a sandwich bag full of dirt. She tipped it out onto her palm and let the wind sieve the dry earth away. What emerged, slowly, was a blink of gold and then a glitter. A curved side embellished with tiny dots. When she shook the last of the dirt off, the thing made a low, dim tinkle, and he saw it was a tiny bell, scrunched up to close its singing mouth.

  Phil handed it to him as though it was as delicate as a snowflake. “This is what Stan and I found. It was buried deep down in a rabbit’s burrow, but you should have seen how it lit up the detector. Like a…like a fusion reactor of magic, or so Stan said. There’s a coarse dust inside it. One or two flecks escaped and even they were like little galaxies. We don’t know what it does, but we’re sure it does something that takes a lot of magic to do.”

  Chris looked down on it—a fragile and beautiful thing. A thing of power. Tipping the dust into his palm, he rubbed it along the nose, propellers and wings of his plane. He had no idea what he was playing with, but it could hardly hurt his chances.

  Let’s face it, the whole venture was a bloody stupid idea, and in all likelihood tonight would be the last night of his life. A couple of hours flying before he was nose-diving into a field, and he’d know then, one way or another, whether any of this worked. That…didn’t feel at all bad, now he came down to it. It felt blue-white like a master searchlight when the blaze seemed to consume you and strip your flesh from your bones, leaving you naked.

  He rubbed the back of his neck where the wool of his old jacket was proving that it had hardened and gone brittle sharp over the last fifteen years. What did you say? It was easy on ops because you were taking the chaps with you, because routine dulled the edge of it and everyone knew what the words were that had been left unspoken. He wasn’t sure the silent intercom was working for these two. “Well, wish me luck.”

  “You don’t even know what you’re doing.” That was Grace, looking ferocious in her balaclava, but with terrified eyes. “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “Then it’ll be your job to stop them, I’m afraid. So buck up and get moving.”

  They both looked at their feet. He hoped they weren’t going to say something sentimental. But the seconds ticked in silence and eventually Phil offered him her hand and a wrought-iron smile. “See you on the other side.”

  “Good luck, Chris.”

  “Thank you. Okay then, I’ll give you ten minutes to get away. Starting now.”

  He watched them go with a kind of shameful relief. Good. All that awkwardness set his teeth on edge. There was time to smoke a single cigarette and look up at the stars. Propping himself against the wing, he smoked quietly, watched the curlicues of vapour wind up into the high, light cloud, and thought about the boys gone before him into the dark. Perhaps some of their ghosts would be riding with him tonight. The thought gave him an ache of nostalgia and some comfort.

  Yielding to the whimsy of the moment, he ducked his head and whispered, soft as the exhale of blue smoke into his palm. “If you’re there, chaps, if you’re listening, I could do with some help. Hop aboard, and I’ll give you the ride of your deaths.”

  He ground out the cigarette on its case and tucked the butt into his pocket for fear of leaving DNA evidence. With a final sigh, he swung up through the entry dock and thence into the cockpit. It smelled perfect, and all the dials were as he remembered, painted in phosphorescent paint. Just as well, as the street lighting seemed to have gone out. The lights of every house around the aerodrome had switched off as though all their occupants had decided to flee the witching hour together. Beneath the wheels of the plane, a soup of darkness moved, eddying and billowing to its own breeze.

  Chris’s skin prickled again—the thought of ghosts no longer quite so amusing. Swallowing down fear like an ice cube, he went through his preflight checks methodically. The engines coughed and spluttered, jets of fire licking from the exhausts. Then they caught and burst into a solid euphonious roar. He applied full brake and throttled the engines up to max. A jolt went through the airframe just as if, once again, someone had pulled away the chocks, and when he looked down he saw a blue uniformed figure with only half a face. With a salute, the ghostly erk melted back into the dissipating burst of start-up smoke.

  Chris wondered for a moment if it was raining, if water was fogging the Perspex, but no, it was tears, tears he was scarcely aware of shedding as he let go the breaks and the little plane hurtled into the sky, its fuselage humming like a pipe organ. The bone-shaking rattle and roar down the runway and then she kissed off the ground and was climbing, undercarriage folding away, and it was sweet and weightless and exultant, and he had to press his eyes into the inside of his elbow to wipe the tears away long enough to see.

  God, they’d heard him! Al
l this time—after all this time—and they’d come because he needed them.

  “Who’s with me, then?”

  “All of us, Skipper.” He’d brought his helmet too, plugged it into the intercom during preflight checks out of habit. He choked now on his own sob as the whisper sounded in his ear. The faint dry tang of the Yank’s voice.

  “Did you piss on the wheels for luck?” That sounded like Red in the rear gun turret. God, he’d forgotten how much he missed that little, ambiguous hint of mockery in the smooth tones, as though Red had cocked the inevitable snook at death and was very pleased with himself as a result.

  “Couldn’t in front of the ladies,” he whispered back, and the phantom voice chuckled.

  “We’re doomed… Oh, wait. Old news, right?”

  In the absence of a navigator, Chris picked up the line of a motorway on the ground below, silver as a stream in the light of a bomber’s moon. There was an Arctic chill running down his back and his mouth tasted of tin, but it was better to have these things out, straightaway. “Have you come to collect me?”

  “You’re not allowed to ask things like that,” said Tolly’s adenoidal voice, sounding desperately young.

  “He’s allowed to ask, we’re not allowed to answer,” Red corrected.

  “Are you really there, or am I imagining this?”

  “That one too.”

  “Unhelpful as you ever were, I see.” Chris flew through cloud, and in the sudden pitch dark, he thought he saw them for a moment, glimmers like lines of phosphorescence in the air. But then the Mosquito climbed above the vapour and the moon shone bright into an empty cabin. Though his heart felt light as froth, he still shivered. “Less chitchat, then. Let’s do this.”

  Chris flew low, hugging the ground. It was highly unlikely that any of the local air-traffic radar stations would pick him up—the Mosquito’s wooden construction made it less likely to detect. But low flying minimised that risk even further, as well as reducing the chance of collision with something shuttling along the unknown network of commercial flights stacked up through the stratosphere above him. It also allowed him to see where he was going—to navigate by landmarks as he’d done in the old days. And just as importantly, it was more fun this way. If this was his last flight, it might as well be a good one. If it wasn’t—if by some strange miracle he survived—then the repercussions from a joyride in a stolen plane were likely to be the least of his problems.