The Secret of Platform 13 Page 3

  And who would be chosen to bring him back? The rescuers would be famous; they would go down in history .

  ‘I wish I could go,’ thought Odge, nudging her blue tooth with her tongue. ‘I wish I could be a rescuer.’

  Already she felt that she knew the Prince; that she would like him for a friend.

  Suddenly she stopped. She set her jaw. ‘I will go,’ she said aloud. ‘I’ll make them let me go.’

  From that day on, Odge was a girl with a mission. She started school the following year and worked so hard that she was soon top of her class. She jogged, she threw boulders around to strengthen her biceps, she studied maps of London and tried to cough up frogs. And a month before the gump was due to open, she wrote a letter to the palace.

  When you have worked and worked for something, it is almost impossible to believe that you can fail. Yet when the names of the rescuers were announced, Odge Gribble’s name was not among them.

  It was the most bitter disappointment. She would have taken it better if the people who had been chosen were mighty and splendid warriors who would ride through the gump on horseback, but they were not. A wheezing old wizard, a slightly batty fey and a one-eyed giant who lived in the mountains moving goats about and making cheese . . .

  The head teacher, when she announced who was going in Assembly, had given the reason.

  ‘Cornelius the Wizard has been chosen because he is wise. Gurkintrude the fey has been chosen because she is good. And the giant Hans has been chosen because he is strong.’

  Of course, being the head teacher she had then gone on to tell the children that if they wanted to do great deeds when they were older they must themselves remember to be wise and good and strong and they could begin by getting their homework done on time and keeping their classroom tidy .

  When you are a hag it is important not to cry, b ut Odge, as she sat on a rock that evening wrapped in her hair, was deeply and seriously hurt.

  ‘I am wise,’ she said to herself. ‘I was top again in Algebra. And I’m strong: I threw a boulder right across Anchorage Bay. As for being good, I can’t see any point in that – not for a mission which might be dangerous.’

  And yet the letter she had written to the King and Queen had been answered by a secretary who said he felt Miss Gribble was too young.

  Sitting alone by the edge of the sea, Odge Gribble ground her teeth.

  But there was another reason why those three people had been chosen. The King and Queen wanted their son to be brought back quietly . They didn’t want to unloose a lot of strange and magical creatures on the city of London – creatures who would do sensational tricks and be noticed. They dreaded television crews getting excited and newspaper men writing articles about a Lost Continent or a Stolen Prince. As far as the Island was a Lost Continent they wanted it to stay that way, and they were determined to protect their son from the kind of fuss that went on Up There when anything unusual was going on.

  So they had chosen rescuers who could do magic if it was absolutely necessary but could pass for human beings – well, more or less. Of course, if anything went wrong they had hordes of powerful creatures in reserve: winged harpies with ghastly claws; black dogs which could bay and howl over the roof tops; monsters with pale, flat eyes who could disguise themselves as rocks . . . All these could be sent through the tunnel if the Trottles turned nasty, but no one expected this. The Trottles had done a dreadful thing; they would certainly be sorry and give up the child with a good grace.

  Yet now, as the rescuers stood in the drawing room of the palace ready to be briefed, the King and Queen did feel a pang. Cornelius was the mightiest wizard on the Island; a man so learned that he could divide twenty-three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-one by six-and-three-quarters in the time it took a cat to sneeze. He could change the weather, and strike fire from a rock, and what was most important he had once been a university professor and lived Up There so that he could be made to look human without any trouble. Well, he was human.

  But they hadn’t realized he was quite so old. Up in his hut in the hills one didn’t notice it so much, but in the strong light that came in from the sea, the liver spots on his bald pate did show up rather, and the yellowish streaks in his long white beard. Cor’s neck wobbled as if holding up that domed, brain-filled head was too much for it, you could hear his bones creaking like old timbers every time he moved, and he was very deaf.

  But when they suggested that he might find the journey too much, he had been deeply offended.

  ‘To bring back the Prince will be the crowning glory of my life,’ he’d said.

  ‘And I’ll be there to help him,’ Gurkintrude had promised, looking at the old man out of her soft blue eyes.

  ‘I know you will, dear,’ said the Queen, smiling at her favourite fey. And indeed, Gurkintrude had already brought up a little patch of hair on the wizard’s bald head so as to keep him warm for the journey. True it looked more like grass because she was a sort of growth goddess, a kind of agricultural fairy , but the wizard had been very pleased.

  If the Queen couldn’t go herself to fetch back her son (and the Royal Advisors had forbidden it) there was no one she would rather have sent than this fruitful and loving person. Flowers sprang from the ground for Gurkie, trees put out their leaves – and she never forgot the vegetables either. It was because of what she did for those rich, swollen things like marrows and pumpkins – and in particular for those delicious, tiny cucumbers called gherkins which taste so wonderful when pickled – that her name (which had been Gertrude) had gradually changed the way it had.

  And Gurkintrude, too, would be at home in London because her mother had been a gym mistress in a girls’ school and run about in grey shorts shouting, ‘Well Played!’ and ‘Spiffing!’ before she came to the Island. Gurkie had adored her mother and she sometimes talked to her plants as though they were the girls of St Agnes School, crying, ‘Well grown!’ to the raspberries or telling a lopsided tree to, ‘Pull his Socks Up and Play the Game.’

  The third rescuer was lying behind a screen being tested by the doctor. Hans was an ogre – a one-eyed giant – a most simple and kindly person who lived in the mountains putting things right for the goats, collecting feathers for his alpine hat, and yodelling.

  As giants go he was not very big, but anyone bigger would not have been able to get through the door of the gentlemen’s cloakroom. Even so, at a metre taller than an ordinary person, he would have been noticed, so it had been decided to make him invisible for the journey.

  This was no problem. Fernseed, as everyone knows, makes people invisible in a moment, but just a few people can’t take it on their skin. They come out in lumps and bumps or develop a rash and it was to test the ogre’s skin that the doctor had taken him behind the screen. Now he came out, carrying his black bag and beaming.

  ‘All is well, Your Majesties,’ he said. ‘There will be no ill effects at all.’

  Hans followed shyly . The ogre always wore leather shorts with embroidered braces and they could see on his huge pink thigh a patch of pure, clear nothingness.

  But he was looking a little worried.

  ‘My eye?’ he said. ‘I wish not seed in my eye?’ (He spoke in short sentences and with a foreign accent because his people, long ago, had come through a gump in the Austrian Alps.)

  Everyone understood this. If you have only one eye it really matters.

  ‘I don’t think anyone will notice a single eye floating so high in the air,’ said the Chief Advisor. ‘And if they do, he could always shut it.’

  So this was settled and the Palace Secretary handed Cornelius a map of the London Underground and a briefcase full of money. There was always plenty of that because the people who came through the gump brought it to the treasury , not having any use for it on the Island, and the King now gave his orders.

  ‘You know already that no magic must be used directly on the Prince,’ he said – and the rescuers nodded. The King and Queen liked ruling over a place where
unusual things happened, but they themselves were completely human and could only manage if they kept magic strictly out of their private lives. ‘As for the rest, I think you understand what you have to do. Make your way quietly to the Trottles’ house and find the so-called Raymond. If he is ready to come at once, return immediately and make your way down the tunnel, but if he needs time—’

  ‘How could he?’ cried the Queen. ‘How could he need time?’ The thought that her son might not want to come to her at once hurt her so much that she had to catch her breath.

  ‘Nevertheless, my dear, it may be a shock to him and if so,’ he turned back to the rescuers, ‘you have a day or two to get him used to the idea, but whatever you do, don’t delay more than—’

  He was interrupted by a knock on the door and a palace servant entered.

  ‘Excuse me, Your Majesties, but there is someone waiting at the gates. She has been here for hours and though I have explained that you are busy, she simply will not go away.’

  ‘Who is it?’ asked the Queen.

  ‘A little girl, Your Majesty. She has a suitcase full of sandwiches and a book and says she will wait all night if necessary . ’

  The King frowned. ‘You had better show her in,’ he said.

  Odge entered and bobbed a curtsey. She looked grim and determined and carried a suitcase with the words ODGE GRIBBLE – HAG painted on the side.

  The Queen smiled – almost a proper smile now that she was soon to see her son. ‘Aren’t you Mrs Gribble’s youngest?’ she said in her soft voice.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘And what can we do for you, my dear? Your sisters are well, I trust?’

  Odge scowled. Her sisters were very well, showing off, shrieking, flapping, digging the garden with their long fingernails and generally making her feel bad. But this was no time for her own problems.

  ‘I want you to let me go with the rescuers and fetch the Prince,’ said Odge. ‘I wrote a letter about it.’

  The King’s secretary now stepped forward and said that Miss Gribble had indeed offered her services but he had felt that her youth made her unsuitable.

  The King nodded and the Queen said gently: ‘You are too young, my dear – you must see that yourself.’

  ‘I’m the same age as the Prince,’ said Odge. ‘Almost. And I think it would be nice for him to have someone young.’

  ‘The rescuers have already been chosen,’ said the King.

  ‘Yes, I know. But I don’t take up much room. And I think I know how he might feel. Raymond Trottle, I mean.’

  ‘How?’ asked the Queen eagerly .

  ‘Well, a bit muddled. I mean, he thinks he’s a Trottle and he thinks Mrs Trottle is his mother and—’

  ‘But she isn’t! She isn’t! She’s a wicked woman and a thief.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Odge. ‘But if he’s a royal prince it will be difficult for him to hate his mother and—’ She broke off, not wanting to say more.

  ‘It could be a dangerous journey,’ said the Queen.

  Odge drew herself up to her full height which was not very great. Her green eye glinted and her brown eye glared. ‘I am a hag,’ she said huffily . ‘ I am Odge-with-the-Tooth.’ She stepped forward and opened her mouth very wide, and the Queen could indeed see a glimmer of blue right at the back. ‘Darkness and Danger is meat and drink to hags.’

  The King and Queen knew this to be true – but it was absurd to send such a little girl. It was out of the question.

  ‘Sometimes I cough frogs,’ said Odge – and blushed because it wasn’t true. Once she had coughed something that she thought might be a tadpole, but it hadn’t been.

  ‘Why do you want to go?’ asked the King.

  ‘I just want to,’ said Odge. ‘I want to so much that I feel it must be meant.’

  There was a long pause. Then the Queen said: ‘Odge, if you were allowed to go, what would you say to the Prince when you first saw him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say anything,’ said Odge. ‘I’d bring him a present.’

  ‘What kind of a present?’ asked the King.

  Odge told him.

  Four

  ‘Well, this is it!’ said Ernie Hobbs, floating past the boarded-up Left Luggage Office and coming to rest on an old mailbag. ‘This is the day!’

  He was a thin ghost with a drooping moustache, still dressed in the railway porter’s uniform he’d worn when he worked in the station. Ernie hated the new-fangled luggage trolleys, taking the bread out of the mouths of honest men who used to carry people’s suitcases. He also had a sorrow because after he died his wife had married again, and when he went to haunt his old house, Ernie could see a man called Albert Fisher sitting in Ernie’s old chair with a napkin tied round his nasty neck, eating the bangers and mash that Ernie’s wife had cooked for him.

  All the same, Ernie was a hero. It was he who had seen Mrs Trottle snatch the baby Prince outside the fish shop and tried to glide after the Rolls Royce and stop her – and when that hadn’t worked he’d bravely floated through the gump (although wind tunnels do awful things to the stuff that ghosts are made of) and brought the dreadful news to the sailors waiting in the Cove.

  Since then, for nine long years, Ernie and the other station ghosts had kept watch on the Trottles’ house and now they waited to welcome the rescuers and show them the way.

  ‘Are you going to say anything?’ asked Mrs Partridge. ‘About . . . you know . . . Raymond?’

  She was an older ghost than Ernie and remembered the war and how friendly everyone had been, with the soldiers crowding the station and always ready for a chat. Being a spectre suited her: her legs had been dreadful when she was alive – all swollen and sore from scrubbing floors all day and she never got over feeling as free and light as air.

  Ernie shook his head. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No point in upsetting them. They’ll find out soon enough.’

  Mrs Partridge nodded. She never believed in making trouble – and a very pale, frail ghost called Miriam Hughes-Hughes agreed. She’d been an apologizing lady – one of those people whose voices come over the loudspeaker all day saying ‘sorry’ to travellers because their trains are late. No one can do that for long and stay healthy and she had died quite young of sadness and pneumonia.

  They were a close band, the spectres who haunted platform thirteen. The Ghosts of the Gump, they called themselves, and they didn’t have much truck with outsiders. There was the ghost of a train spotter called Brian who’d got between the buffers and the 9.15 from Peterborough, and the ghost of the old woman who’d lost her umbrella and still hovered over the Left Luggage Office keeping an eye on it . . . And there were others haunting shyly in various parts of the station, not wanting to put themselves forward, but ready to lend a hand if they were needed.

  The hands of the great clock moved slowly forward. Not the clock on platform thirteen which was covered in cobwebs, but that of the main one. Eleven-thirty . . . eleven forty-five . . . midnight . . .

  And then it happened! The wall of the gentlemen’s cloakroom moved slowly, s lowly to one side. A hole appeared . . . a deep, dark hole . . . and from it came swirls of mist and, very faintly , t he smell of the sea . . .

  Mrs Partridge clutched Ernie’s arm. ‘Oooh, I am excited!’ she whispered.

  And indeed it was exciting; it was awesome. The dark hole, the swirling mist . . . and now in the hole there appeared . . . figures. Three of them . . . and hovering high above them, a clear blue eye.

  ‘Welcome!’ said Ernie Hobbs. He bowed, the women curtsied.

  And the rescuers stepped forward into the light.

  It has to be said that the ghosts were surprised. They knew that the Prince was to be brought back without a fuss, but they had expected . . . well . . . something a bit fiercer.

  Of course they could see that the ancient gentleman now tottering towards them was a wizard. His face was very wise and there seemed to be astrological signs on his long, dark cloak though when they looked m
ore carefully they saw they were pieces of very old spaghetti in tomato sauce. The wizard’s ear trumpet, which he wore on a string around his neck, had tangled with the cord holding his spectacles so that it looked as if he might choke to death before he ever set out on his mission, and though they could see a place on his shoulder where a mighty eagle must have once perched, it was definitely not there any more. Yet when he came forward to shake hands with them, the ghosts were impressed. How you shake hands with a ghost matters, because of course you feel nothing and someone who isn’t a true gentleman can just wave his hands about in mid-air and make a ghost feel really small.

  ‘I am Cornelius the Mighty,’ said Cor, ‘and I bring thanks from Their Majesties for your Guardianship of the Gump.’

  He then introduced Gurkintrude.

  The fey was wearing a large hat decorated with flowers, but also with a single beetroot. It was a living beetroot – Gurkie would never have worn anything that was dead – and she carried a straw basket full of important things for gardening: a watering can, some brown paper bags, a roll of twine . . . The ghosts knew all about these healing ladies who go about making things better for everyone, and they had seen fairy godmothers in the pantomime, but Mrs Partridge was a bit worried about the hat. The beetroot suited Gurkie – it went with her kind pink face – but of course vegetables are not worn very much in London.

  But it was the third person who puzzled the Ghosts of the Gump particularly . Why had the rulers of the Island sent a little girl?

  Odge’s thick black hair had been yanked into two pigtails and she wore a pleated gym slip and a blazer with ‘Play Up and Play the Game’ embroidered on the pocket. The uniform was an exact copy of the one that the girls of St Agnes wore in the photograph that Gurkie’s mother had had on her mantelpiece, but the ghosts did not know that – nor did they understand why the suitcase she was clutching, holding it out in front of her like a tea tray, was punched full of holes.