Michael Grant - The Trap

But none of that mattered because Paddy was not in first class.

In second class you were still doing pretty well, with a nice little stateroom. There was no soup nozzle in the room, and the toilet paper was just paper, but it was soft (two-ply). And second-class passengers were served pleasant and healthy meals in the cheerful second-class dining room. You didn’t get to actually chat with your pig or lamb or chicken or cow, but you could wave to them.

But Paddy was not in second class.

Third class was a little more rough-and-ready. You had to make your own bed, for one thing. And meals were all self-serve at the oat ’n’ swine buffet.

SO, MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLAIN BECAUSE YOU MAY NOT KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT GOLEMS. FIRST OF ALL, IT’S GOLEM, LIKE GO AND THEN LEM. NOT GOLLUM. I AM NOT GOLLUM. I DON’T WANTS IT, PRECIOUS. A GOLLUM IS 90 PER CENT HOBBIT AND 10 PER CENT EVIL. A GOLEM IS 90 PER CENT MUD, AND ANOTHER 7 PER CENT TWIGS, PINECONES, DEAD BEETLES, AND LINT. THE LAST 3 PER CENT IS FAITHFULNESS. WE ARE VERY FAITHFUL. I WILL ALWAYS FAITHFULLY TRY TO TAKE MACK’S PLACE WHILE HE’S AWAY. EVEN THOUGH IT MEANS I HAVE DETENTION BECAUSE OF THE WHOLE DISSOLVED-FEET SITUATION AND THE SCREAMING AND ALL.

Nope, not third class, either.

Fourth class was where most impoverished immigrants travelled. They cooked their own meals over open fires in massively overcrowded holds down in the sweaty bowels of the ship, where they dreamed of spotting the Statue of Liberty.

Paddy was not in fourth class.

Fifth-class passengers weren’t even given a place to spread out a blanket. Mostly they climbed into laundry bags and hung those bags from hooks. Thus they rocked back and forth all night, banging up against the steel bulkheads with each passing wave. They were kept awake by the mystery of how they could hang up a bag they were actually in. Their meals were served at the same time as the livestock kept for the first-class passengers’ dinners. In fact, it was the same food.

Fifth class didn’t dream of spotting the Statue of Liberty because if they ever appeared on the open deck, they’d get a beat-down from beefy ship’s stewards. The only time they were allowed on deck was for gladiatorial games in which they were pitted against each other in pepper mill battles while first-class passengers bet on the outcome.

Fifth class? Tough place. Unpleasant place.

But Paddy was not in fifth class. He’d have loved to be fifth class.

Sixth class meant you slept in the fifth-class bathrooms, or heads as they say on boats. You could sit on one of the toilets until someone needed to use it. This wasn’t a great way to spend ten days, which was how long it took the HMS DiCaprio to get across the ocean to New York.

But Paddy wasn’t in sixth class.

Paddy was in seventh class. And seventh class was a very bad class aboard the DiCaprio. Seventh-class passengers were allowed aboard the ship, but once aboard they were hunted by the packs of wild dogs that lived down in the bilges.

The wild dogs were the offspring of escaped pets. You see, sometimes first-class passengers travelled with poodles or Chihuahuas or Pekingese. Over the years some of these animals had escaped their kennels and had bred and multiplied in the bowels of the great ship.

Imagine, if you will, poodles bred with Chihuahuas and then hardened and made savage by the dog pack life in the dank, dark holds far, far from light.

Nobody would want to go up against that kind of horror.

The bilges of a ship are the lowest level. Down below the engines. Not even the basement of the ship, more like if the ship had a basement but someone dug out a pit below that.

Anyway, the bilges were where all the water that seeped into the ship collected. Rainwater, sea spray, mop water, overflowing toilet water, spilled coffee water, seasickness results, you name it. It was about up to Paddy’s thighs. It smelled like a toilet.

For food, the seventh-class passengers had to trap and kill one of the many alligators that slithered through the dank, cold, oily, poo-smelling water.

So basically it was bad. Very bad. As bad as it gets.

But Paddy was a tough kid. On his first night in the bilges he earned the respect of the wild dog pack by biting the pack’s leader on the ear and gnawing away for so long that forever after that dog was known as Rex “One Ear” Plantagenet.

On his second night Paddy killed and ate an alligator.

By the time he left the DiCaprio – seventh-class passengers didn’t walk down the gangplank; they were tossed into the water and left to swim ashore – he not only had a belly full of tasty alligator sushi, he had a nice pair of homemade alligator boots and a matching alligator vest.

Which was frankly disturbing to the first New Yorkers who saw him, what with Paddy having had no facilities for drying or even properly cleaning alligator skin. So his alligator boots had bits of alligator intestine trailing behind.

On the plus side, no one asked him for spare change.

Paddy went straight from the dock to the headquarters of the Toomany Society, which was housed in Toomany Hall. The Toomany Society offered help to newly arrived immigrants.

“What do you do for a living?” the woman at the desk asked.

“I used to grow oats.”

“That’ll be really useful here in New York. We have so many vast fields of oats.”

“Are you being sarcastic?” Paddy asked.

“Actually, no. I mean, this isn’t New York like it might be in the future, say, the far-off twenty-first century. This is New York in the early twentieth century. And believe it or not, we still have farms here. A hardworking oater can eke out a miserable existence working sixteen backbreaking hours a day, seven days a week in harsh conditions. You’ll marry a dance hall girl, spawn ill-mannered brats, grow old before your time, and die of some miserable disease, possibly consumption. But hey, it’s a living.”

“What are my other choices?” Paddy asked.

The woman shrugged. “You’re not fit for anything but oat farming or banking – and you don’t have the wardrobe for banking. And then, there’s always crime.”

“Tell me about this ‘crime’ of which you speak.”

“Well, hmm… I suppose you’d join a criminal gang, extort money from shopkeepers, rob banks, dress in flashy clothes, and mostly sit around all day drinking with other criminals in between acts of mayhem.”

Paddy pointed a jaunty finger at her and said, “Bingo.”

y favourite colour used to be purple!” Mack cried out as Stefan and Jarrah pedalled frantically.

The Tong Elves were just behind them.

Nine Iron Trout was just ahead, ready to impale them.

Clearly the Pale Queen’s minions weren’t waiting around for the thirty-five days to be up. They were looking for a quick kill.

Or in Nine Iron’s case, a slow kill.

Panicky vendors were trying desperately to save squids and snakes-on-a-stick from the threatening flames. All the commotion was lit by cheery neon lights shining off candy-striped awnings.

Stefan had powerful legs. But the weight of a not-exactly-steady Mack flailing all over the handlebars slowed him down a bit.

Mack didn’t snap entirely back to reality until he saw Nine Iron’s cane-sword within about eight feet of skewering him like a fried scorpion.

“Hey!” he yelled.

Stefan tried to veer right to pass the safe side of the pedicab, but quick-peddling Tong Elves cut him off.

“Left! Closer!” Mack shouted.

Maybe Stefan obeyed or maybe he just wobbled, but either way Mack’s left hand came just close enough to a tray of mixed skewers.

He snatched them up, transferred them to his right hand, and with Nine Iron’s deadly sword just two feet from his heart, flung the skewers like darts.