The Underground City, page 8
“I’ll do that on one condition, Casimir,” Lewis said. “If I release your son from the magic mirror, I want you both out of my life completely. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” nodded Casimir. “Thank you, Master.”
And with that, his face disappeared from the little hand mirror.
Lewis started in surprise as, for the first time in weeks, he saw his own reflection appear instead. Full of sudden hope, he got up and ran first to his dressing table, and then to the mirror in the bathroom just to make sure Casimir had really gone — and gave a heartfelt sigh of relief as his own reflection stared back at him.
13. The Black Shadow
Next morning, Lewis closed the last of his exercise books, put his pencils in his pencil case and pushed the neat pile of homework to one side with a sigh of relief. Thank goodness that was finished, he thought, looking at his watch. He’d timed it nicely; it was just about lunchtime. His spirits lightened as he went downstairs to the kitchen for Mrs Sinclair had promised to make him a chicken curry and the smell was drifting tantalizingly through the house.
As he pushed open the door, he saw that the small kitchen television set was on and from the sound of the commentator’s voice, there was yet another disaster taking place somewhere in the world.
“There’s been a terrible accident on the Forth Bridge, Lewis,” Mrs Sinclair said. She was stirring the curry but her eyes never left the screen.
Lewis gasped. “That’s near here, isn’t it?” he said, looking at its distinctive shape. He’d seen pictures of it and knew it lay close to Edinburgh.
“Aye. Two trains collided and half of one train is hanging off the bridge. The carriages are full of people and they’re scared that the whole train might slip down into the water with them all in it!”
“Gosh! That’s awful!”
“Here,” she said, spooning a generous helping of curry over a gleaming mound of white rice, “have your lunch at the kitchen table and you’ll be able to see what’s happening.”
Lewis ate the curry absent-mindedly, his eyes fixed on the TV screen. It was really quite frightening. Even the commentator was affected as stumbling groups of passengers were led along the tracks from the wrecked trains. Lewis could hear the tremble in his voice as he described the rescue attempts that were being set up to try to get people out of the carriages that had slipped off the bridge. It was going to be a dangerous operation as the whole train was balanced so precariously that the slightest jerk might send it toppling into the water. Helicopters were of no use as they couldn’t operate so close to the bridge. All in all, he didn’t seem too confident of the outcome.
“Oh, my goodness,” Mrs Sinclair jumped up as part of the train hanging crazily from the bridge gave a dreadful lurch. They could hear the people in the carriages screaming. “How on earth are they ever going to rescue them?” she said, twisting her hands.
“I …” he searched his mind for a reason, “I can’t watch,” he said. “It’s too frightening. I’m going out, Mrs Sinclair.” And he pushed his plate to one side and dashed up the stairs to his room.
“Casimir!” he snapped at the bathroom mirror. “Show yourself to me.”
Casimir appeared. “Casimir, did you see what was happening on the television downstairs?”
“Yes, of course, Master.”
“Listen, There’s no way that anybody can save the people on that train. The two end carriages are hanging over the water and if anybody tries to climb out they’ll send the whole lot crashing into the Forth. Can you save them by magic? Or something?” he asked hopefully.
Casimir looked at Lewis consideringly and sighed. After hundreds of years imprisoned in the well at Al Antara, he thought sourly, it had to be a do-gooder like Lewis who had released him! Still, he mused, rescuing the people on the train might do much to relieve the crashing boredom of the schoolboy’s totally uneventful life. He bent his mind to the task and instantly came up with a solution — for he had, as it happened, quite enjoyed reading Lewis’s comics with him. “What if I were to turn you into Superman or even the Black Shadow?” he offered. “The Shadow, I think, would be more suitable as you’re so young. How about it? All in black, wearing a mask and a cloak with stars on it?”
Lewis sat up straight, his eyes suddenly shining. “What a fantastic idea, Casimir,” he gasped. “The Black Shadow! But … can you really make me fly?”
Casimir looked at him exasperatedly. “Of course I can,” he said shortly. “I’d hardly have suggested it otherwise, would I?”
And, in an instant, Lewis changed completely. He looked in the mirror. There he stood, looking slightly taller than normal, but the spitting image of the Black Shadow.
He swirled his cloak experimentally before pressing down on the soles of his feet to see if he could really fly. Excitement gripped him as he lifted gently off the carpet and soared into the air.
“Use your arms to change direction,” Casimir recommended hastily as Lewis, cloak flapping, headed straight for a solid-looking wardrobe.
“This is great, Casimir,” he said, changing direction and ducking frantically as he almost hit the light shade. Landing beside the window, he pulled it up so that he could scramble out onto the sill and, trying to ignore the drop to the street, took a deep breath.
“I think you’d better make me invisible until I get to the bridge,” he suggested as he launched himself into space from the windowsill. It was the hardest thing Lewis had ever done in his life and he gulped in relief as his cloak spread out behind him as he sailed through the air. Stretching his arms in front of him, he found that he could guide his flight and, soaring upwards to get his bearings, immediately saw the dim outline of the Forth Bridge in the distance.
The air was freezing and whistled past him as he flew. “Casimir! I’m frozen!” he yelled. “Doesn’t this outfit have central heating?” Casimir obviously obliged as a wave of heat shimmered through the black suit and he relaxed gratefully as it warmed him through.
The news commentator choked into his microphone and did a double-take as the black, cloaked figure suddenly appeared out of nowhere and flew over the waters of the Forth, heading for the huge criss-crossed spars of the bridge.
“What on earth!” he stammered. “I don’t believe it …”
And as each and every camera swung round to follow his flight, Lewis swooped down to land on one of the great girders. Now that he had actually arrived on the scene, he suddenly felt very scared. Conscious that every eye was on him, he worried that he might make a mess of the whole thing. The bridge, for a start, was no longer the tiny meccano-like structure it had seemed on the television set. It was immense! Even the train seemed three times the size of normal trains, its tilted underside hung with row upon row of wheels like some enormous caterpillar.
“Hey, you!” a policeman shouted, running up the railway line. “Get down from there at once!”
Lewis looked at him through the slits in his mask. “I’ve come to get these people out of the carriages,” he shouted back.
“Don’t be a fool!” the policeman yelled. “Get down from there at once!” Lewis ignored him and, before the policeman could get near enough to catch him, pushed himself off the girder and swooped to hover beside the dangling carriages. The people inside were as still as statues. Nobody needed to tell them what would happen if they made any sudden movement. They followed Lewis with their eyes and a woman started to sob.
“This is absolutely unbelievable,” the commentator said excitedly. “We have some kind of Superman here. He’s hovering just above the stricken carriages …”
Lewis scanned the train. Many of the windows had fallen out and he decided to try to lift people through them. Fervently hoping that Casimir had given him the strength of at least ten men, he hovered above one window and reached inside.
“Hold your hands up and I’ll pull you clear,” he said to a young girl. “Just relax. And you be ready next,” he said to the woman beside her.
A cheer rang out from the bridge as he soared upwards holding the girl by the arms and passed her into the care of a waiting ambulance crew.
As he swooped back to the train, an engineer ran up the track. The cameras zoomed in on him as he stopped by the television news crew.
The engineer was distraught. “Get off the bridge, quickly!” he said urgently. “The main bolts have snapped and the carriages are hanging only on a few links. They won’t be able to hold it for long! Get off the bridge at once!”
“Clear the bridge! Clear the bridge!” The order drifted down to Lewis as he swung upwards with a mother and her baby.
The ambulance crew stayed, however, the medics taking it in turns to carry the stretchers back to the ambulances as Lewis deposited more and more people by the side of the tracks.
A little group of engineers stood watching at the end of the bridge; white faced, grim and staring. They, alone, of all the watchers, knew the weakness of the pitifully few links that held the carriages to the rest of the train and waited in despair for the inevitable crack that would signal the breaking of the last few bolts. The television commentator who had thought of asking one of them to come across and give his opinion in front of the cameras, took one look at their faces and decided against it.
In the end, Lewis had to force himself to go inside the carriages to reach people, especially those that had been injured. The strength Casimir had given him made it easy for him to lift them but knowing that the whole set up might collapse at any minute, made it an absolutely hair-raising task. He’d have been even more concerned had he known just how much magic Casimir was using to keep the dangling carriages attached to the rest of the train and it was only when Lewis carried the last man from the last carriage that Casimir cut the spell. The bolts then did what they should have done at least half an hour previously. They snapped with a vicious crack — and with a tearing, grinding jerk, the carriages toppled slowly from the bridge and fell into the dull, grey waters of the Firth of Forth.
Everyone was so busy watching the carriages fall into the water that Lewis was able to become invisible again without anyone noticing. He was utterly exhausted and rested for a while on one of the girders before heading once again for Edinburgh.
“My, you missed such a thrilling rescue!” Mrs Sinclair said as he came in. “You should have stayed and watched it, Lewis! It was just like the cinema. They’re calling him the Shadow, like some comic-strip character. He rescued everybody out of that train, you know! It was wonderful!”
“The Shadow?” Lewis pretended to be surprised. “You’re having me on!” he exclaimed. “He’s a character in my comic books!”
“Aye, but this was a real person, all dressed up in a mask and a cloak. He could fly through the air, just like Superman. And he rescued so many people! Wonderful, he was!”
“I wish I’d seen him,” Lewis did his best to sound disconsolate. “Do you think they’ll show it again?”
“Ocht, of course they will. It’ll be repeated all night, I should think,” Mrs Sinclair said, “but it’ll no’ be as thrilling as watching it when it was happening! What they can’t understand is how the carriages didn’t fall sooner. The engineers were saying they were only held up by a few links!”
“Were they really?” Lewis said slowly.
“You owe me, Lewis!” Casimir said softly as Mrs Sinclair went to serve the dinner. “You owe me big time, believe me!”
14. The Shadow Strikes Again
“I bet it’s him,” Neil muttered to Clara as they sat glued to the television, watching as the black, cloaked figure carried passenger after passenger out of the wrecked carriages that dangled so perilously from the Forth Bridge.
“Bet it’s who?” asked the Ranger, looking at Neil in surprise.
“The boy that Kitor saw on Arthur’s Seat,” Neil answered.
“So?” Clara didn’t sound convinced.
“It must be! Who else is there in Edinburgh that has the magic to do stuff like that?”
“We don’t really know a lot about the world of magic,” his father said doubtfully. “Perhaps there are other magicians in Scotland that we haven’t heard about.”
Kitor flapped his wings. “The MacArthurs are the only magic people here,” he said. “I don’t know where this boy has come from but he is definitely a magician and a powerful magician at that. The magic shield the MacArthurs put round Arthur’s Seat wouldn’t have kept him out otherwise.”
“I wish the MacArthurs would come back,” Janet MacLean sighed. “Is there no way we could get in touch with them, John?”
“No way at all,” her husband replied. “We’ll just have to wait until they turn up!”
“We know where the boy lives,” Neil said, looking at his father doubtfully. “Kitor still keeps an eye on the house. If he could let us know when he goes out, we might be able to follow him.”
“No, Neil,” Mrs MacLean said firmly, “if he’s as powerful a magician as Kitor says, then it might be dangerous. Let’s wait and see what the MacArthurs have to say when they get back.”
“Your mother’s quite right, Neil,” pointed out their father, “for if he was trying to get into the hill to see the MacArthur then it follows that they must know one another. And I can’t help feeling that the MacArthur might not like us interfering in his affairs.”
“That’s true, Dad,” Clara said, nodding thoughtfully. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“I’d just concentrate on the pantomime, if I were you, and leave the MacArthurs to sort out the Shadow when they get back.”
Neil and Clara looked at one another and nodded agreement, their minds already elsewhere. For the basement and cellars of the Assembly Hall were now stacked with scenery and props for the pantomime and during the rehearsal that night, they planned to search for the entrance to the Underground City.
Lewis, too, was watching television that evening, clicking the remote control and moving from channel to channel. Every station was full of it. The Shadow was going to be headline news in all of tomorrow’s newspapers!
“Casimir,” he said when he was up in his room getting ready for bed. “Can you tell when accidents and things happen?”
“When they happen, yes,” was the answer. “Nobody can see an accident before it happens, Lewis.”
“Will you tell me when anything happens; you know, like it did today? I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t become the Shadow then the people I rescued would all be dead now. It’s a scary thought, Casimir.”
Casimir quite liked the idea and cheered up considerably at the thought of some action. He’d never, of course, have said anything to Lewis but quite frankly found living inside him a dead bore. “There are a couple of climbers stuck in the Cuillins, if you’re interested,” he said casually. “The rescue services can’t get near them. It’s blowing a blizzard over there and their helicopters are grounded. They’ll both be dead before morning.”
“Over where, exactly?” asked Lewis, whose geography wasn’t very good.
“The Cuillins are mountains on the Isle of Skye, off the west coast,” Casimir said. “Really, Lewis! If you spent as much time on your schoolwork as you do reading those comics, you’d be a lot better informed!”
“I’m really tired, Casimir,” Lewis said, looking longingly at his bed.
“You don’t have to go,” Casimir said. “Pretend I didn’t tell you.”
“But you did and if I don’t go, they’ll die! Can you see them, Casimir?”
Casimir flashed a picture into Lewis’s mind. Two climbers huddled together on a narrow ledge in the middle of a snowstorm.
“Let’s go, Casimir,” Lewis said quietly. “There’s no way I can leave them. They look as though they’re going to fall at any minute.”
“We’ll travel fast, Master,” Casimir promised.
He was as good as his word. Lewis swung out of his window and as he soared over George Street, seemed to go into overdrive. The sudden burst of speed shot him like a rocket over the castle and the rest of the city at a terrific rate that at first took his breath away. He soon became accustomed to it, however, and watched as the landscape rolled under him like a moving carpet; as though it was he who was stationary and the country that moved beneath him. It was only when they hit the fringes of the blizzard that Casimir slowed the pace.
Lewis had never been to the west coast of Scotland and although they were only vague, shadowy shapes seen through the driving snow, the mountains towered around him; strange, threatening and overwhelming in their presence. He felt like an alien as Casimir navigated him towards the ledge on which the climbers huddled, already half-frozen by the biting cold.
Their eyes rounded in terror as he approached them, black and evil-looking, out of the blizzard. There was no place to turn; all they could do was press themselves back against the solid bulk of the mountain and hope that their end would be swift. The masked face, the black cloak and the fact that he was flying in the air over a drop of thousands of feet convinced them that if he wasn’t the devil himself, he was certainly the next best thing.
“Calm them down, Casimir,” Lewis whispered under his breath. “I’ll never get anywhere near them otherwise!”
Magic rayed down on them from the cloaked figure and Lewis watched as their fear faded, and it was only when hope stirred in their eyes that he landed on the ledge beside them.
“Hi!” he said casually.
It was probably the best thing he could have said. James and Charles, both students at Edinburgh University, were bright lads and, as they instinctively doubted that devils in any shape or form opened conversations with “Hi,” they looked at one another in relief and waited for more.
