TIM, Defender of the Earth Read online

  ‘Now,’ said Miss Appleby, ‘has everyone got their partners? Has each pair got their clipboard? Great. I want you all to meet back here, without fail, in exactly an hour and a half’s time. And behave yourselves. All right? See you later.’

  The class scattered. In another moment, Chris Pitman and Anna Mallahide were the only ones left.

  They looked at each other.

  Chris Pitman was fourteen years and three months old. He was tall for his age, skinny, with black hair that had to be constantly and carefully tousled otherwise it would fall back into the neat side parting that his mum had imposed on him when he was four. His white shirt was carefully untucked, the tails sticking out under his school uniform blazer. He had two black wristbands on his right wrist and one on his left – not too many, he didn’t want to look like he was trying too hard. He blinked, slowly moving his jaws in a chewing motion even though he didn’t actually have any chewing gum – and said nothing.

  Anna Mallahide was fourteen years and one month old. Her pleated grey school skirt was regulation length – no rebellious shortening for her, she’d never seen the point. Her slightly lank mouse-brown hair was cut in a fringe across the front: deeply unstylish, but it kept it out of her glasses so what did she care?

  Anna – as she’d expected – was the one holding the clipboard. She’d also expected to be the last person left as a partner: Anna was used to things like that. Chris, plainly, was not.

  ‘So,’ said Anna.

  ‘So,’ said Chris.

  Chris was trying not to show it, but he felt awkward. He felt hurt – and surprised too. How come he was the one who was left to partner up with Anna Mallahide? He’d felt sure that one of the others, maybe Johnny Castle or Gwen Hadlock, would’ve picked him, but instead they’d just left him to be last. It had been embarrassing. He’d been made suddenly and uncomfortably aware that maybe he wasn’t as much a part of the right crowd as he’d thought: maybe they didn’t like him as much as he’d hoped they did. Worse yet, now with officially weird new girl Anna Mallahide as his partner, there’d be a reason for Gwen and Johnny to tease him. Chris had nothing against Anna personally, but there might be gossip; there might be speculation, no matter how little it was based on fact. Chris hated getting into any kind of situation that might make him a target like that.

  The silence lengthened. Anna sighed.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Top of the list here’ – she consulted the clipboard – ‘is the Ancient Egypt section. The whole class’ll be there right now, so I figure if we want to get ahead, we should answer some questions about another part of the museum – maybe the Etruscans. We deal with the Egyptians later, then we finish up early and go home.

  ‘But first,’ she added, ‘before we do anything, you’re going to have to make a choice.’

  Chris just looked at her.

  ‘Are you going to help me with this?’ Anna asked. ‘Or are you just going to go off and do whatever you “cool” people do and come back later to take the credit?’

  Chris blinked.

  ‘Frankly, I couldn’t care less,’ Anna added. ‘I just want to know up front. Well?’

  Chris pretended to chew gum some more while he considered this.

  If he went off after Johnny and Gwen right now, he might catch up with them, dodge any possible bad associations from being partnered with Anna, and get to hang out with them instead of doing the quiz Miss Appleby had assigned.

  But also – well . . . actually, he kind of liked the way Anna had said what she’d said. Maybe – just maybe – spending the next hour in her company wouldn’t be as potentially embarrassing as he’d expected. He was looking at her, still considering how to answer, when—

  ‘Fine,’ Anna told him. ‘See you later.’ She turned on her heel and set off for the Etruscan room.

  Chris found himself watching Anna’s departing back. She didn’t turn round – and he felt something he didn’t want to admit, even to himself: he wanted to go with her. But that would mean chasing after her, and Chris didn’t do things like that.

  He watched Anna until she turned a corner, then, shrugging, he set off in the direction he’d last seen Johnny and Gwen heading.

  Twenty minutes later he still hadn’t found them. He was beginning to doubt whether he was going to.

  The museum was very big, and it was filled with all kinds of old stuff. There were Egyptian mummies dating back seven thousand years. There were Stone Age spear points dating back forty thousand years – not that Chris cared about that. He gave up looking for Johnny and Gwen and started searching instead for somewhere he could sit down and listen to music until it was time to go back to the Great Court.

  Chris was listless. It still smarted that he hadn’t been picked for a partner – and he kept going over the conversation with Anna in his head.

  Anna Mallahide had only joined the school about a month before. She was the new girl: she hadn’t made any friends yet as far as he knew – people thought she was too clever, too weird. So, Chris wondered, why had she turned her back on him like that? She should have been happy to end up with him as a partner: that’s what Chris told himself. Yet strangely, he didn’t believe it.

  Chris had been surprised by what Anna had said: surprised and kind of impressed. But before he’d even got as far as thinking about getting to know her better, he’d found he’d missed his chance. The person he’d thought he’d been stuck with had somehow managed to turn him down – just like everyone else had done. Alone, annoyed at everything around him, Chris kept walking without any idea of where he was going.

  Then he found the strange room.

  It was in the basement of the museum – he was reasonably certain of that much because he’d gone down a lot of stairs. The room was at the end of a long corridor, there was a faint smell of damp in the air, and the exhibits – from what he saw of them – all looked sort of . . . odd. There were earrings and necklaces and some very ugly little figurines: people with fins instead of arms and things like squids instead of heads, that kind of stuff – gross. The objects’ labels, unlike those in the rest of the museum, were handwritten and almost impossible to read even if Chris had wanted to. But between two of the dusty glass cases was a chair. So Chris sat down, plugged in his headphones, and closed his eyes.

  I don’t care, he told himself.

  He didn’t care that nobody had picked him for a partner. He didn’t care about Anna, or Johnny and Gwen, or anyone else in the school. In fact (Chris told himself), he didn’t care about anything. Really: he was fine like this, fine by himself.

  I don’t care . . .

  Almost immediately he felt a touch on his knee. Then someone prodded his shoulder. Startled but trying not to show it, Chris looked up.

  A lady was standing over him. She was broad and thickset, with grey eyes and bristling crew-cut hair that was hennaed to an alarming colour. Her charcoal-grey uniform and badge marked her out as one of the museum guards, and – as Chris could tell from the way the loose flesh under her jaw was wobbling as she spoke – she was obviously very excited about something. But she wasn’t angry. She was smiling.

  Chris reached up and pulled his headphones from his ears. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s you!’ said the lady, still grinning at him delightedly. ‘I mean – you’re it! After all these years! It’s . . . amazing!’

  ‘Er . . . what did you say?’ asked Chris.

  ‘Of course you don’t understand,’ said the lady, clasping her hands in front of her. ‘How could you? You probably don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Well . . .’ said Chris.

  ‘But I’ve been waiting my entire life for you to come down here to me. And now . . .you’re here! At last!’ She beamed at him.

  For a moment Chris looked up at her uncomfortably. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, ‘I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. I just came down here looking for a place to sit. I’m on a school trip, and I really do
n’t think, you know, that you ought to be talking to me like this.’

  ‘No, no,’ said the lady with an impatient wave of one beefy hand. ‘You’re the one with the misunderstanding. The fact is, you’re exactly the person I’ve been waiting for all these years. And I’m going to show you why.’ She stepped smartly over to the room’s doors, shut them, locked them, and put the key in her front pocket.

  ‘Er . . . hang on,’ said Chris, standing up.

  ‘That display case beside you,’ said the lady in a tone that showed she would take no argument: ‘Look inside it.’

  Chris looked at her and frowned.

  ‘It’s only the single most important artefact in the whole museum,’ said the lady impatiently. ‘It’s only going to make you realize the whole point of your life! And all I’m asking you to do right now is look. How hard can it be?’

  ‘All right,’ said Chris slowly. He shrugged, and turned, and gestured at the glass box to his left. ‘What – this one? Why do you—?’

  That was as far as he got.

  When he’d first come in and sat down in the room, he’d only given the objects in the display cases a cursory glance: they were filled with more old stuff, just like the rest of the museum. But now, in the case beside him, something had changed.

  The case was now filled with light – a glow strong enough to illuminate every speck of dust and fingerprint on the glass and cast Chris’s shadow on the wall behind him: a strange, speckled, watery blue light that shivered and shone as he stood there staring at it. It was coming from one of the objects in the case – a small length of several wire-like metals plaited together into a loop: a wristband. The ends of the plaited-wire loop did not meet but ended instead in two weird cast-metal shapes: one end looked a little like the tip of a reptile’s tail and the other like a long-jawed open mouth. The whole object was glimmering at him like it was electric.

  He looked at the object’s label, trying to make out the handwriting.

  ‘Found on the island of Krak—’ He tried again, squinting. ‘Kraka—’

  ‘Krakatoa,’ the lady finished from beside him. ‘Possible remnant of a Melanesian sea cult. Estimated date of origin, 1000 BC.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Dr West always did believe in hedging his bets.’

  Chris looked at her. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘This object,’ said the lady, her eyes shining with barely suppressed excitement, ‘may have been found on Krakatoa. But that’s not where it comes from. One second,’ she added. ‘I’ve just got to do something here.’

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out another key, which she proceeded to fit into the narrow hole in the front of the display case. She twisted it until she heard a soft click. Then, to Chris’s mounting surprise, she spread her strong hands with their thick fingers across the protective glass – and lifted it off!

  ‘Hold on a second,’ said Chris weakly as she set the glass cube on the floor. ‘Are you sure you’re really supposed to—?’

  ‘Right,’ said the lady, picking up the glowing bracelet. ‘Give us your arm. Your left, please.’

  Before he could stop her, she’d taken hold of his wrist. Chris felt a small shock of cold as the metal met his skin. He heard a soft but solid ratcheting click.

  ‘There,’ said the lady, eyes glowing with pride. ‘I knew it.’

  Chris stared at the lady. Then he stared at the extraordinary object that she’d just clamped onto his wrist.

  ‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me here. In fact, I honestly haven’t understood a single thing you’ve said to me since you, uh, caught me in the chair there. But I should really be getting back to the rest of my class. They’ll all be looking for me,’ he added with heavy emphasis.

  The lady took a deep breath and let it out again slowly. ‘Fine,’ she said. She walked over to the door, unlocked it and opened it, gesturing outside it at the passageway beyond. ‘My work here is done. Off you go.’

  ‘Great,’ said Chris with huge relief. ‘Great. Er, here: let me get this bracelet thing off for you.’ With his right hand he attempted to unfasten it – without success. ‘Um, could you give me a hand here? There’s some kind of catch . . .’

  The lady just looked at him and smiled. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Chris distractedly. The mouth end of the bracelet thing seemed to have got hold of the tail end in an incredibly powerful grip. There didn’t seem to be any way to separate them that he could see – in fact, looking at the object on his wrist, he was hard-pressed to see anything to indicate that the two ends of it ever had been separated.

  ‘You have been chosen,’ the red-crew-cut lady told him. ‘The Earth needs her Defender once more, and you will be the channel of his power. It is your destiny: it is inescapable. And you will carry out your duty until you – or he – are dead.’

  Chris had given up trying to take off the bracelet and was gaping at her openly now. The woman was clearly barking mad. He closed his mouth. It was time to take charge of the situation.

  ‘So . . .’ he said uncertainly, ‘you just want to . . . give me this thing?’

  The lady smiled. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’re not going to turn round and say, I don’t know, like I stole it or something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But isn’t it . . . like, valuable?’ There. This was her last chance. After this, Chris reckoned he’d done his best.

  ‘Young man,’ said the lady, ‘you may be the chosen one, but you’re obviously not very bright. What you’ve got there’ – she pointed at the bracelet on Chris’s wrist (which had now stopped glowing and was rapidly becoming dull and dusty-looking again) – ‘is more “valuable” than you could understand. But it’s yours. It’s been waiting for you – alone – to claim it, and now it belongs to you.’ She paused. ‘My advice to you is to get back to your class. If the time of the Defender is at hand, you’ve got bigger problems coming, believe me, but’ – she smiled – ‘there’s no sense getting in trouble with your teacher if you can avoid it. All right?’

  ‘Uh . . . sure,’ said Chris weakly.

  ‘See you around,’ said the lady.

  ‘Uh, right,’ said Chris.

  But the doors had slammed shut and locked again. He wasstanding out in the passageway alone.

  THE MALLAHIDES AT HOME

  CHRIS PITMAN WAS an idiot. Or that’s what Anna kept telling herself on her way home.

  What had he been thinking, arriving last at the Great Court like that and obviously from a different direction to her? There’d been no less than five announcements made on the British Museum’s PA system; the museum staff were looking apprehensive, and Miss Appleby had started talking about calling Chris’s parents. Even perennial troublemakers Johnny Castle and Gwen Hadlock had arrived a good ten minutes before Chris finally showed up – and when at last he did actually shuffle into view, he was incredibly dim-witted about saying where he’d been. Anna had practically had to force-feed the words into his mouth about ‘checking the last few answers for the quiz’ – which was doubly infuriating since (as she also told herself) Anna shouldn’t have cared whether Chris got into trouble or not.

  Still, she thought as she turned the corner into her street, if he hadn’t been with Johnny and Gwen, where had he been? And why had he kept tugging at the left sleeve of his blazer in that weird and nervous manner?

  It’s not your problem, Anna thought firmly, reaching for the buzzer of the discreet government-owned block of flats where she currently lived with her father. Unconsciously she smoothed her hair down at the sides before looking at the camera over the door.

  ‘Hey, Anna,’ said the voice from the speaker.

  She heard a buzz, the soft thunk of thick bolts drawing automatically back in their sockets, and then the door swung smoothly open.

  ‘Hi, George,’ she said to the burly military man who was standing guard behind the foyer’s deceptively plain pine-effect desk.

  �
�How was school?’ George asked.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Anna.

  ‘Not that bad, surely!’ said George.

  Anna gave him a wan smile. The lift doors slid open and, still smiling politely, she was about to step inside when—

  ‘Sorry, Anna,’ said George. ‘We’ve got to do the thing again, I’m afraid. Silly, I know, but orders are orders.’

  Anna shrugged and came back to the desk. George had pressed the button. The retinal scanner had already emerged from its secret compartment on the counter, so without needing to be prompted, she bent slightly and put her right eye to the eyepiece.

  ‘Ready?’ said George. ‘And . . . there. All done.’

  Anna stood up straight, blinking from the sudden flash. ‘Well, George?’ she asked, smiling at him politely. ‘Am I who I say I am?’

  ‘Go on with you, cheeky monkey,’ said George.

  Trying not to show how little she liked being called that, Anna got into the lift.

  Anna had lived in places like this all her life. The geographical locations varied – her father’s work had taken them to all sorts of countries all over the world – but their accommodation didn’t, not really. Government-run buildings – impersonal blocks of flats built for the secure housing of important personnel and their families – were pretty much the same everywhere. Because of the nature of what her father did, he and Anna had always had to live with special security arrangements of one kind or another. It was just the way things were. Anna didn’t know anything else.

  Sometimes she imagined what it was like for other people – growing up with the same surroundings all the time, making friends with the expectation that you’d know them for a while rather than being constantly aware of the fact that at any moment you might have to cut yourself off again and move to another country. She thought about people like Chris Pitman and what it must be like for them. Chris was an idiot in a school full of other idiots. But at least he managed to fit in.