Worm Winds of Zanzibar (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  Martin Dukes

  Worm Winds of Zanzibar

  © 2013 Martin Dukes

  For Harry

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Prologue

  ‘Caught in a Moment’, the first book in this trilogy, describes the adventures of Alex Trueman in the strange world of Intersticia, a world that exists in the slender intervals between moments of time. From Alex’s point of view the world around him freezes into immobility. Bizarrely, all that moves are the strange airborne dugongs and manatees that glide silently above. At first it seems that he alone is free to wander the hushed streets with their motionless cars and people. But he is not alone. Alex soon discovers that he shares this world with others, a few dozen fellow dreamers who share his fate. There is plump, bespectacled Will, pretty brunette Kelly and the lonely outcast Paulo. Presiding over them all is the enigmatic Ganymede, an irascible vagrant who distributes food to his dependants and sets them perverse tasks to perform in return.

  Alex soon finds that he has rare skills in Intersticia. Almost uniquely he can affect the motionless world of “Statica” around him. He can open doors, help himself to food and move objects. This forbidden activity soon sets him on a collision course with Ganymede, which puts the very existence of Intersticia at risk. Alex flees into the wilderness, where he makes contact with rebel loner Paulo, but he finds himself made virtually a prisoner when Paulo discovers his special skills. Escaping from Paulo, Alex makes contact with the Angels who oversee Intersticia and enters into an uneasy alliance with Ganymede to undo the damage he has unwittingly wrought. He discovers that whilst most of his fellow dwellers in Intersticia are daydreamers like himself, stranded in their dreams, others are in comas lying in hospital in the real world, and some dead, their spirits lingering in this strange half-life for a while before death claims them. Death’s delegate, Atropos, known to the Intersticians as ‘Cactus Jack’, stalks the silent streets of Intersticia in search of these unfortunates. Alex learns that his friend Kelly was killed in a car accident in the preceding instant, and that her boyfriend Paulo was the one who drove the car that killed her. To make matters worse, Cactus Jack is prowling in search of her. Alex engages in a race against time to save her, a race that takes him to the Councils of the Angels and to a midnight meeting with the strange pan-dimensional snarks, who agree to help Alex, Kelly and Paulo travel back in time, to the instant before the fatal accident occurred. But first Alex must find Paulo and persuade him to re-live that fateful instant. Then they must evade Cactus Jack and take the weirdest ride of all out of Intersticia, by riding on one of the strange dugongs and manatees that glide incongruously above the streets of Intersticia. Kelly, Paulo and Alex fall back into the instant they left their own world. Paulo, alerted to the danger, swerves to avoid Kelly but in so doing crashes the car he was driving and is killed. Kelly and Alex resume their lives, memories wiped clean of their adventures in Intersticia.

  Chapter One

  Alex had never seen a fatal accident before. It affected him more deeply than he would ever have thought possible. He found himself trembling as Mum hurried him away towards the car park. It was not as though he had known the anonymous victim, whose spilt blood he had seen through the shattered windscreen. And yet he sat ashen-faced, silent as Mum drove him home, absently fingering the slip of paper the stranger had pressed into his hand.

  “It's shock,” Mum told him. “You're bound to be upset. I can't think what you were doing there anyway. One minute you were standing right next to me, the next you're halfway across town. Honestly, I can't take my eyes off you for a moment.”

  And Alex supposed she was right. It was shock. How else could you explain the curious sensation of numbness he felt, numbness of mind as well as of body? It was as though a dense fog had descended upon his brain, reducing his mental processes to a crawl.

  “Yeah,” he said when it appeared that something was required of him. “Sorry.”

  He regarded the familiar streets passing by with a dispassionate eye, thinking of nothing much at all. A strange calm settled upon him, a calm that derived not so much from peace of mind but from its absence.

  “Come on, help me with these bags,” said Mum as they pulled up on their drive.

  She pulled out the car keys and considered him thoughtfully for a moment.

  “You’re still really pale,” she said, running a cool hand over his brow. “How do you feel now?”

  “Fine.”

  Alex sighed and reached for the buckle of his seatbelt. He made to tuck the slip of paper into the ashtray, and then, after a moment's hesitation, pushed it into the pocket of his jeans instead.

  ‘Kelly’ was the name on the paper, and next to it was scribbled a telephone number. What did it mean? Why had the stranger pressed it into his hand? These were questions that gave Alex occasion for much speculation during the course of the next week. There were times when he picked up the paper in one hand and his phone in the other, a finger poised to tap out the digits. But always the finger withdrew, unwilling or unable to push through the unseen but impenetrable barrier that seemed to shield the keys.

  Life carried on, a life that seemed strangely unfamiliar and a life that found him unfamiliar, too.

  “What's got into you lately, anyway?” asked his friend Henry, regarding him sidelong as they sat eating lunch one Tuesday. “You've been acting kind of weird lately. And what about this 'daydreaming' lark? What's goin' on there then? Last week it was all you could talk about, but nowadays you've got nothin' to say.”

  “It was just a fad, that's all,” Alex told him with a shrug. “There was some strange stuff goin' on in my head.”

  “You're tellin' me it was strange,” said Henry with a snort, gesturing with a fish finger. “It was pretty weird for Gary Payne and his little pals, wasn't it? You're not telling me there wasn't something a teensy bit out of the ordinary goin' on there.”

  He regarded Alex thoughtfully, head cocked to one side.

  “I mean, come on, Alex... spill the beans.”

  Instead of spilling the beans Alex stirred them morosely on his plate, pushing them gradually into a shape that became recognisable as the letter 'K'. When this became suddenly apparent to him he pushed back his chair and lurched to his feet.

  “I don't want to talk about it,” he hissed. “Got it?”

  Henry regarded him wide-eyed, surprised by this uncharacteristic outburst.

  “Oh, fine! I'll clear up for you then,” he called after Alex’s retreating back.

  And then there was the stopping time issue. Last week the notion that sustained daydreaming could somehow halt time had been very much in the forefront of his mind. Now he felt reluctant to consider it at all. Why? The fatal crash was evidently a factor, and certainly the episode was never far from his immediate thoughts, but it seemed to him that this was only a fragment of the answer. Whole areas of his consciousness seemed inaccessible to him. It was as though he lived in a house where there were long darkened corrido
rs and certain doors that were always closed and locked.

  “Would you like to go to the cinema tonight?” asked his mum after tea on Wednesday night. “I think that new film about the giant machines is on – you know, the ones that turn themselves into cars and things.” There was an artificial cheerfulness in her tone. She was worried about Alex, too. He was normally a cheerful and talkative boy with a positive outlook on life. Now he seemed untypically withdrawn.

  “Nah,” he said, without glancing aside from his X-Box game. “That looks lame. I’m not, like, twelve years old.”

  There was also the risk of being spotted at the cinema accompanied only by his mother, a potentially fatal blow to credibility.

  “I could ask Bella and Richie to come along,” she continued, perhaps aware of this line of reasoning. “We could see something else.”

  Bella and Richie were Alex's cousins. Bella, a year younger than him, was a sullen, silent child, perpetually absorbed in the inspection of her phone. Richie, two years older, had some kind of personality issue which meant that despite allegedly being very clever he was also a bit odd. Alex's Auntie Lynn was forever having him tested to see if they could get him diagnosed with a proper scientific name to describe this phenomenon. Alex already had a perfectly suitable non-scientific term to describe his condition – he was a dork.

  “What about Henry, then?” asked Mum, taking no encouragement from the set of her son's features.

  “He's out,” said Alex after a moment's consideration, a moment's loss of focus that caused his on-screen character to be consumed by dragon fire.

  “Yeugh!” he grumbled as he threw his controller onto the sofa. “Mum!”

  Mum did not quail beneath Alex's furious glare, and after no more than a fraction of a second he forced a wan smile, conscious of having overstepped the mark.

  “Sorry.”

  Mum came up behind him and ran her fingers through his hair in a way that was agreeable rather than otherwise, providing no one else in the world could see, and made a bit of a lump come into his throat.

  “I was only trying to cheer you up,” she said. “You don't seem to have been yourself just lately.”

  “I'm fine,” Alex told her, although without conviction. “No worries. Honestly.”

  Someone else who didn't think that Alex was himself was Gary Payne, although it wasn't until Thursday afternoon that Gary came to this conclusion. It was in the changing rooms at the end of PE. After a game in which Alex had made his usual undistinguished contribution, he was morosely untying his bootlaces and considering the likelihood of his getting picked for the house matches next week. With luck, David Hayes, the House Captain, would have remarked on his performance and struck him from any mental list he might have been drawing up. Unfortunately, Livingstone House were undermanned in his year so there was a real risk that he might be obliged to play. Balanced against this was the potential humiliation of Karim, the fat asthmatic boy being picked ahead of him. At least Karim had never scored two own goals in the same match. Distracted by these bleak considerations, Alex was too slow to prevent Gary Payne from seizing one of his shoes and holding it aloft whilst he brandished it triumphantly to his friends.

  “I found a spare shoe,” he called to Mason at the other end of the room. “You don't want it, do you?”

  Gary was feeling bullish because he was good at football and he had just scored two goals at the right end of the pitch. Teasing Alex with the traditional shoe caper was as good a means as any of marking the occasion. To the accompaniment of loud jeers and whoops the shoe was thrown from hand to hand.

  “Cut it out, you total loser,” said Henry, trying unsuccessfully to intercept it in flight.

  Alex found his cheeks burning with shame and fury. The likelihood was that his shoe would end up on the changing room roof and he would be obliged to go and ask the caretakers to help him retrieve it. Immediate action was called for to avert this potential source of embarrassment. With a swiftness and decisiveness that surprised Alex, but surprised Gary even more, Alex took a grip on the situation. He did this in a very literal fashion by suddenly reaching out and taking a firm grip of Gary’s throat, pushing back against the bench so that he was unbalanced, pressed hard against the wall between the coat pegs. His fingertips pressed deep into the soft flesh.

  "“We don't want to hurt each other, do we Gary?” Alex snarled into Gary's big red face.

  There was something very sincere to be read in Alex's eyes, and Gary got the message loud and clear. For a moment the clamour in the changing room faded to a vague background hum as Alex held Gary's gaze.

  “Give, Gary!” said Alex, with a bit of extra pressure for emphasis. Gary’s eyes bulged and his face achieved a shade of red bordering on purple as Alex’s fingers proceeded implacably with squeezing the life from him.

  “Alright, alright,” gasped Gary, dropping the shoe. “Take it steady, mate. You’re crazy!”

  After another moment of meaningful eye contact with his tormentor, Alex let go. This might have been the occasion for a battering by a vengeful Gary, but instead the big lad contented himself with a few face-saving remarks about some folks being unable to take a joke and went off to mutter darkly in a corner with Mason and Macauley.

  “Whoa!” said Henry admiringly as they came out of the changing room. “Way to go, Alex!”

  Alex derived a certain grim satisfaction from this encounter, but also a sense that something was wrong, that the person occupying his skin was not the person he was used to. It was impossible not to enjoy the approving comments of his friends at Gary's discomfiture, and even some of the girls in his class seemed to accord him a new respect, which meant, effectively, noticing him for the first time. Gary, for his part, stayed away from Alex, although this might have been because he was plotting to beat him up one night after school. Alex shrugged inwardly at this prospect. It was as though he had developed a reduced capacity for anxiety.

  “You're right. I think there is something wrong with me,” he admitted to Henry on Friday night as they walked back from the fish and chip shop. There was a bench on the little patch of open land in front of the arcade of shops that might, in rural circumstances, have been described as a 'green'. They sat here to eat their chips whilst Alex got on with telling Henry how strange he felt.

  “It's like...” he said, screwing up his eyes and gesturing with a chip, ”… it's like I had a big chunk cut out of my memory or something.”

  “Memories of what?”

  “I don't know, do I?” said Alex impatiently. “That's the whole point. It's like something's happened to me but I don't know what.”

  Henry wiped his greasy hands thoughtfully on the front of his top.

  “You were on about the stopping time thing all last week and now you won't talk about it at all. There was definitely something goin' on there, wasn't there? When did you stop wanting to talk about it?”

  “Saturday,” said Alex. “It all comes down to Saturday. And it wasn't just seeing that chav get wasted like my mum thinks. It's more than that.”

  “So what’s goin’ on? Can't you stop time anymore?” asked Henry.

  “I don't know,” said Alex ruefully. I haven't really tried, to be honest. I think I'm kind of... over all that.”

  Henry nodded, his attention drawn to where a group of girls were going into the newsagent's.

  “And there's another thing,” said Alex after a while. “Some guy gave me a girl's phone number, just after the crash. He just comes up and presses it into my hand, then walks off. What do you make of that?”

  “What was the name?” asked Henry, attention recaptured.

  “Kelly. Never heard of her, though. Have you?”

  Henry considered this, pursing his lips and wrinkling his brow. “How do you know it wasn't a surname? You know, like Mr Kelly or something.”

  “How would that help?” asked Alex, exasperated. “I don’t know anyone called Mr Kelly, either. It was a girl's name... I just know,” he added,
pre-empting any objection of Henry's. “And I think it's got something to do with... you know... feeling strange and all that.”

  “It could have been mistaken identity, I guess,” suggested Henry, reasonably enough.

  “It wasn’t,” said Alex, irritably. “Don’t ask me how I know. I just know that, too.”

  “There’s a load of stuff you just know, isn’t there,” said Henry. “Have you got the number?"

  “Yeah. Got it here,” said Alex, groping in his pocket.

  “Why don't you call it, then?”

  Alex made no immediate answer because his fingertips met no slender edge of paper. There was nothing there. With a spreading chill across his consciousness, Alex realised that he had changed his jeans since coming home that evening. What if his mum had washed his dirty ones without checking his pockets? What if the slip of paper was reduced to a meaningless blob?

  “Hang on!” said Alex, holding up a hand to cut off Henry's musings on girls' numbers and reaching for his phone. His mum was not picking up. Alex bit his lip as the phone rang out and then went to voicemail. Without waiting to leave a message, Alex texted “Don’t wash my jeans!!!”

  “I've got to get home,” he told Henry. “I'm worried Mum might have screwed things up.”

  “Huh?” Henry mused wonderingly as his friend set off at a brisk jog towards the bus shelter at the end of the road.

  “Mum!” called Alex, slamming the front door behind him and kicking off his shoes carelessly in the hall. “Mum!” he called again, looking up the stairs. She was out in the back garden, talking over the fence to old Mrs Armitage next door. A pile of crumpled garments occupied the plastic basket at her feet whilst a variety of other items remained in place on the washing line. A cursory glance assured him that his jeans were not amongst them.

  Mum had hardly paused for breath, let alone acknowledged his arrival, but his rooting about in the basket quickly secured her attention.