John McNally - Giant Killer

The Forum.

Carla stopped dead at the sight. For Finn with his gamer head on, it was like a new map revealing itself.

Lit by flaming torches, it was a courtyard hollowed out of a hotchpotch of buildings, a core three storeys deep. A single round opening in the centre of the roof let in curls of snow and huge filthy banners proclaimed the words Honour , Obedience and Master . Doors and entranceways, some ancient, some more recent concrete, peppered the four sides of the courtyard, and a rising irregular spiral of stairways and open walkways connected them all together. It was like something out of a painting by Escher.

“Freaky …” said Finn.

“Go!” Olga scolded and led the way, little legs rushing up the mad spiral. Carla set off after her and tried to keep up. The hot bucket swung and she could feel her gloved hand starting to burn.

Halfway up the spiral was the entrance to a great concrete space hidden beneath the ancient monastery roofs, hundreds of bunks in serried ranks, full of sleeping teenagers.

“Tyros …” said Finn at Carla’s ear. “This is some kind of hive. We need to make a phone call, now. ”

“Olga! Where is there a phone?” Carla called and mimed a handset. “A telephone?”

Olga just looked perplexed. “Go!” she said, and they were off again, climbing past another dozen entranceways.

“Tell her!” yelled Finn. “We have to find a phone or a computer, or … the collar! That thing on Yo-yo, whatever it was. Have you still got it?”

Carla grabbed her pocket. Nothing. Had she taken it off Yo-yo? She could barely remember.

“I must have lost it somewhere on the mountain.”

“ ARRRGGHHHH! ” – the sound of screams was coming from the top floor. Olga hurried them through an arch guarded by Siguri, then on through a huge door into a church of crumbling beauty … and the screams of Santiago.

“ AARRRRGGHHHHHH … ”

He lay stretched out on a rack in the centre, the heart of the High Chapel, face down, his arms being pulled up behind his humped back by the Siguri chief, a thickset Turk. The screams echoed off the painted saints and gilded icons. Looking down on him was the Abbot, the leader of the monastery and the Siguri, a man in Roman robes, with a face so badly burnt it resembled the surface of a planet.

Half a dozen Siguri and a severe female secretary looked on.

The secretary flicked her head at Olga and Carla, indicating an iron stove.

“WHERE is the STRANGER?” raged the Siguri chief.

Carla wobbled the last few steps to the stove, but almost dropped her bucket as she became aware of a strange sound.

It was a sound Finn knew only too well.

Schlup-schlup-schlup – dinner time.

“Yo-yo!” said Finn, hardly believing it. “I think Yo-yo’s here.”

He could feel Carla’s heartbeat spike through the scalp beneath his feet.

“Oh no, if he gets a sniff of me …” said Finn, becoming suddenly worried.

“It is all quite simple,” the Abbot said, wearily looking down at Santiago. “You like it out in the woods. It’s where we found you. It’s where you belong.”

“Yes, Padre …”

“We know there was a trespasser, a stranger. We spotted him. We found his dog.”

He gestured to the far corner of the chapel. There, unmistakably, was Yo-yo’s rear end, his head buried in a pan of stew which he was transferring to his stomach in great wild gulps.

“It was very clever of you to find them.”

“No, Padre …”

“Yes. You left your toboggan out. Did you bring the stranger in? Did you hide him?”

“Santiago no bring dog!” he answered.

“No. We found the dog,” the Abbot reassured him. “In the woods. But you were in the woods too.”

“Pine cones. For the fire …”

“You were gathering aromatic fuel? In a snowstorm?”

Santiago wriggled an approximate nod, ashamed to be lying.

At the stove, Olga used some tongs to drop off their hot stones, taking her time as Carla watched Santiago on the rack. Finn could almost feel the morality rising through Carla’s scalp, but counselled – “Don’t do anything. We have to figure something out.”

“Who was it, do you think, that the lookout and the searchers saw then?” the Abbot asked Santiago, letting the question hang. Santiago could not help but fill the silence.

“An … angel, Padre?”

“An angel ?” said the Abbot. “With a dog ?”

Santiago shook in disagreement. “NO DOG, Padre – dog run away! Crazy dog!”

“Could it be a stray?” the Abbot asked the Siguri chief.

“No, sir. A stray would have starved by the time it got up here. This dog has been regularly beaten; its master must be the stanger.”

Olga started to lead Carla back out.

The Abbot waved, the rack wheel turned, and Santiago cried out again in excruciating pain.

“ Arrrrrrrrrrgggghhh! ”

The cry stopped Carla in her tracks – at the very moment Finn’s scent finally rang a big bell in Yo-yo’s tiny brain – YAP!

Yo-yo whipped round. There! There was the good girl! There was the Finn smell!

YAP YAP YAP! YAP!

The Siguri chief, the Abbot, even Santiago, turned to look.

“It has the scent of its master!” said the chief.

Yo-yo was straining at the rope that held him, pointing only one way: at Carla, halted before the great door, ready to turn and declare herself.

“Let the dog go!” ordered the Abbot.

“No, Yo-yo! PLAY DEAD!” Finn yelled uselessly from Carla’s hair.

The Siguri holding Yo-yo released him and he sprang towards Carla like an accusing finger, all skew-whiff as the stew sloshed about the wire rack of his body, until … BANG !

The doors behind Carla burst open and in came the severed head of Baptiste, ravaged by bears and dangling from a Siguri gauntlet.

HOWWWLLL! – Yo-yo cowered back in fear.

CLANG! – Carla dropped her empty bucket in shock.

“ Stupido! ” cried the secretary, and slapped her so hard Finn had to cling on as she fell.

The Abbot was shaken. “Bring it closer!”

Baptiste’s head was marched up and dangled before him.

There was one lidless eye, the other was missing, as was the top quarter of his skull. A wafer edge of white bone stood proud of the blood and brain on what was left of his brow. His skin was ghostly, ghastly pale, and his black mouth gaped open. A section of collarbone dangled from ligaments at his neck. Here was the master. Here was the stranger.

The Abbot recognised him at once. “Oh, my dear boy …”

Santiago was released and led back through the labyrinth, held between Carla and Olga like a broken bird, eyes tight shut, muttering some mad, grateful, polyglot incantation (“ Fo me ca Maria – fo me ca Primo – fo me ca Jesu – fo me ca Master – fo me ca Dei ”) while Yo-yo strained at the end of a rope just ahead, anxious to put as much distance as possible between himself and the severed head.

They arrived back in the library to exclamations in a dozen tongues. Carriers crowded round. Excited, Yo-yo began to yap, then – just like it would in the playground – a handbell broke up the scene – Ding-a-ling!

“Quiet! Do you want the Siguri back?” demanded the Primo.

Santiago limped over to him.

“What did you tell them?” the Primo asked.

Santiago recounted what had happened in a breathless, dramatic babble.

At the end of it, the Primo asked, astonished, “ Baptiste? ”

“His head – just his head,” Carla confirmed. “He dragged me here from Shanghai. When I got away from him, the bears got him.”