My Uncle the Spy

 

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Part One

‘I’m sorry my dear but we can no longer have you in the house. We are much too rich and popular to have a creature such as yourself hanging around under our feet, discouraging the Whitby’s from attending one of our social parties. No, I’m afraid it just won’t do! Your father and I have decided that you are going to live with your uncle, in the Dark End of town. Yes, that’s it – pack your things at once. You’ve got twenty minutes.’

Luci stood there, frozen and gob smacked, staring at her mother’s over powdered and leathery excuse for a face.

‘I’ve already told the butler to start clearing out your room,’ Luci’s mother added, ‘so it should make things easier – for us.’

She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised, really. When the maid had started throwing away her clothes instead of washing them, it probably should have set off a few alarm bells. To be honest, as Luci pondered the details now, she didn’t think her parents ever really liked her that much anyway. The comments her mother would always make about ‘if only we’d had a son … or perhaps a parrot,’ had always seemed rather genuine to Luci.

She’d been told that she was tall for her age, and it was as she bumped her head on the top edge of the back door of the car that reminded Luci of this often said remark. Her height made her look maybe a year or two older than she really was – three years tops. This had never yet come in handy. And if anything, only made people think she should be acting more responsibly than she did, just because she looked like she should. To her, this was nothing but an annoyance. But having no brothers or sisters, no friends or cousins to hang out with … that was even worse.

Luci lived … well, actually, she used to live, in a grand mansion amongst grand gardens, set at the end of a grand street in the Grand Part of town. Now she found herself in the back of a grand car with her not so grand singular suitcase sitting on the leather seat next to her.

Luci used to have ten wardrobes filled with clothes, shoes, jewellery and accessories of every kind a little girl could ever want, and that she never needed or really asked for. Now she had one bag half filled with two skirts, three pairs of tights, one dress, four shirts, one pair of jeans, some underwear, her pyjamas and three odd socks. Not that she ever wore much more than that meagre rotation of garments anyway. Her parents, however, seemed to have small joy in attempting to dress Luci up and parade her around in front of their high class friends at their latest social function or garden party, hence the abnormal abundance of clothing. But now even that had lost its shine. The only shoes she had in the whole world were on her feet. Black and scuffed, but comfortable, and apart from that they were her favourites.

‘You’re just not that not cute anymore,’ her mother had said casually after dropping the bombshell of Luci’s banishment.

‘Was she ever?’ said her father, as if Luci wasn’t even in the room.

‘No, I suppose not,’ her mother agreed. ‘But we did try.’

Shock is a strange thing. It almost holds you in a state of suspended animation, not allowing any other feeling apart from itself to influence your thoughts. Everything you do is done on autopilot as your brain puts itself into a kind of reboot mode, and tries to make sense of what has just happened. Shock and surprise usually go hand in hand, but the problem was, Luci was neither shocked nor surprised. Not really. Her parents had always had the potential to do something like this. She supposed, right now, she was just curious about the timing.

As She was speedily driven away from her old house in one of the family’s six Rolls Royce cars, Luci slouched down in her seat and looked out of the window at the tips of the tall poplar trees that lined the long driveway. The wind blew, the trees swayed, and the branches waved goodbye to her as she left what had been the only place she’d called home. It seemed that even Harold, the family driver, didn’t like Luci anymore either. He only took her as far as a lonely set of train tracks at the bottom of the hill, and then made her walk the rest of the way into the Dark End of town, alone.

‘Out,’ he said with a terse jab of his finger. Luci had barely swung her two feet out of the car and onto the dirty ground before the oversized automobile sped off at a rate of knots, and away into the distance in a cloud of brown dust. She stood, the epitome of glum, and watched Harold and the car and everything she had ever known be swept away with the swirling dirt.

Luci dragged her suitcase the three or so miles it was to her uncle’s house. Although, it wasn’t exactly easy to find. She looked down at the scribbled address the butler had written on the back of a crumpled dry cleaning receipt, and compared it to the house that was now in front of her.

The Dark End of town was indeed dark. Even the sun didn’t seem to bother to shine on it. A misty mizzle of rain had just begun to fall, making even the air look dirty. Luci approached the tall and thin house with care, as it sat, squashed between a larger counterpart on either side. It put in her mind the image of two school bullies baring down on a lesser student, as they sandwiched the poor little one between their shoulders.

Luci walked slowly up to the house’s large front door. It was cracked and black paint was peeling off of its surface. Before she had even psyched herself up to the idea of knocking on the door, it opened, seemingly all by itself. There was a high pitched creak as the doorway widened into nothing, an oily black shadow where the inside of the house should have been.

‘Quickly, inside!’ said an agitated voice from the dark depths of the house. There were no lights on inside.

‘Huh?’ Luci said with a raised eyebrow, looking around herself.

‘Did anyone see you?’ persisted the voice.

‘What?’

‘Were you followed?’

‘I – I don’t think so … uncle Albert?’ Luci asked with cautious breath.

‘Yes, yes. Get in, get in,’ the voice ordered.

Luci clambered up the few wet stone steps leading to the door and jumped inside. As Luci’s shoes fell onto dry floor, the door was slammed shut behind her, a booming sound followed by a number of strange whirring clicks filling her ears, plunging Luci and her new uncle into complete pitch blackness. Only for a second or two could she see nothing, though, before a match sparked into life and a tiny lamp was ignited beside her. The lamp illuminated the outline of a haggard looking man. The most Luci could see of him was the tip of his nose and the end of his chin, the stubble on it as rough as flint.

‘Luciphigenie?’

Luci felt like a cold spider had just crawled down her bare back.

No one had called her by her full name – ever. She doubted her parents even remembered it. The only reason she knew it was her full name was because she’d been snooping in some of her parents private documents, some years ago, and seen some baby photos of her with the full name scrawled on the back of them.

‘Y – yes,’ Luci said, a little agitated herself. ‘My – my parents told you I was coming?’

‘No,’ replied uncle Albert gruffly, peering at Luci through the gloom, his unseen eyes shining for a split second like marbles in the sun as he moved the lamp across her face. ‘But I knew you were on your way.’

‘Oh,’ said she, still clutching onto her suitcase in the wan light.

‘You can leave that there,’ Albert said, waving an unseen hand at Luci’s luggage. Luci gladly let the weathered case drop to the floor and followed her uncle a little deeper into the house.

Luci had never met her uncle Albert before. In fact, she didn’t even know she had an uncle until her mother had told her so. Almost exactly an hour and thirty-seven minutes ago. It was just before she had told Luci she was going to live with him.

‘You have an uncle,’ Luci’s mother had said.

‘Oh,’ was the tall girl’s reply.

Luci shook her head a little to try and get some of the rain off of her long hair, and wondered if maybe she should have taken her shoes off when she’d entered the house.

‘Um … uncle Albert?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Uh, do you know why my parents sent me here?’

‘Who knows why those two miserable excuses for human beings do anything,’ Albert said with disdain. A little flame, like the one you get on a small birthday cake candle, fluttered into life at the bottom of Luci’s stomach. She could feel it there, like a small beacon of light; she was beginning to like uncle Albert already.

‘So, are you my mother’s or my father’s brother?’ Luci asked, somewhat more comfortable now. A thin staircase rose up into the darkness at her right hand side as her and Albert walked.

‘Neither,’ grunted Albert.

‘Then how are you my uncle?’

‘I just am – enough questions,’ Albert barked.

At this point Luci was pretty sure she was entitled to all the questions in the world, after the morning she’d just had. But, in the interests of good relations with her uncle kicking off on the right foot, she decided to obey his request to cease her enquiries … for now.

She couldn’t see anything on the hallway walls as she passed them, the floor lost in shadow too. A dim pool of light began to well up in front of her and Albert, slowly transforming into the entrance to a wide but cramped looking room.

‘If you wouldn’t mind taking off your shoes before you come into this room,’ Albert said over his shoulder. ‘Don’t want them to know where we move.’

While puzzled at what Albert meant by them, she slipped her shoes off in any case and set them neatly beside each other, just outside the doorway. Aside from the dimness, the pieces of floor in the crowded room that Luci could see were covered in some kind of brown paper. It felt smooth and soft under her toes as she padded across it. Although the light in the room was sparse, it was like walking into the middle of the sun compared with the pitch black hallway.

As Luci swam deeper into the room, it was the first time she was able to get a decent look at uncle Albert, if he even was her uncle at all, Luci contemplated with scepticism. After his comment about not being a sibling of either her mother or father, she was beginning to doubt their relation.

At the moment she could only see the back of him, as she stood in the middle of the room, her hands loosely at her sides. Albert was rummaging around in a high stack of papers on a desk. His grizzly burnt snow coloured hair fell down around his shoulders and over the long and timeworn brown leather jacket he was wearing. He finally turned around and Luci nearly gasped out loud. Staring back at her were two bright hazel eyes – two hazel eyes just like hers! The rest of her uncle, however, bared no similarity or familiarity at all. He looked at her again with a keen stare, she feeling like a patient at a hospital being x-rayed.

‘Do you want to see where you’ll be sleeping?’ Albert asked.

‘Yes, please,’ Luci said as politely as possible.

Albert then lead her past a pair more of lightless rooms, before striking match again and lighting a silver candelabra full of candles, just inside the door of a final room.

‘It’s on the bottom floor, of course,’ Albert said, ‘for a quick escape if need be.’

‘Oh, okay … thanks,’ Luci said, forcing a smile to her lips, the first that had graced her face in weeks.

She gazed around the room. Apart from the blacked out windows, it actually didn’t look that bad. It seemed like it had been prepared especially, but quite some time ago. The four post bed was made neatly with dark pink covers, a stack of different coloured cushions piled up at one end. There was a desk with draws and a chair, a tall wardrobe and a big chest at the foot of the bed.

‘I’ll leave you to … settle in a little bit,’ Albert said. ‘I’ll be in the living room if you need anything.’

‘Okay,’ Luci said with loose words, and plonked down onto the bed as Albert left the room.

Luci sat quietly for a few moments in the low lit room, swinging her legs back and forth off the edge of the bed. She soon got bored with that, though, and slid off the bed and walked over to the tall wardrobe. Expecting it to be empty, she opened it wide to find the racks crammed with clothes. And there were nice shoes too, all in what seemed to be around her size. They weren’t anything like most of the clothes her parents had gotten her either. Those were all prissy and snobby clothes. The ones in this wardrobe were just nice, normal clothes, not made to impress anyone, but just made to be nice clothes.

Luci closed the wardrobe and went and sat at the desk. A long mirror was atop the desk, and she took a moment to look at her reflection. She looked older in the flickering candle light, and reached a hand up to touch her cheek, just to make sure it was her own.

She opened one of the drawers in the desk. It was empty. She looked in another. Empty too. Luci tried the final and bottom drawers. It was empty as well. She closed the drawers and stood up, sighing, and went to leave the room and find Albert, promptly stubbing her toe on the side of the desk. She stumbled onto the floor and grabbed her foot in agony, letting out a silent scream while she rolled around on the floor in pain.

Madly rubbing her big toe, some of the cutting pain starting to subside, Luci noticed something out of the corner of her eye fluttering to the floor from underneath the desk. She sat up, looking over to where she’d seen the fluttering thing fall, and crawled over to it. She reached out her hand to touch a photograph. It must have been stuck under the desk and been dislodged when she had bumped into it, thought Luci.

The photo was of a man and a woman standing in front of some buildings and looking like they were having a great time. They were young, much younger than her parents. The woman was beautiful and had long flowing hair. The man had a beard and was wearing a hat. It took a second look at the picture before Luci realised the man was Albert. He looked so happy, almost nothing like the man that she had just met. It was the eyes that gave him away; they really were just like hers. Luci locked her vision onto the picture for a little longer, before making a rush decision to shove it into her pocket. She held herself, flexing the now bruised but thankfully not bleeding toe, and limped out of the room in search of her uncle Albert.

Luci didn’t have much in her pockets. In fact, she didn’t have much of anything, full stop. Sure, her parents had bought her endless amounts of trinkets and clothes and toys and dolls, but none of those were really hers. Not really. She’d never really treasured them, or even wanted most of the things her parents had bought her. They got things that would make her look the part, fit the role as their dutiful daughter. But that was about all she was doing, playing a role.

Her parents insisted that she be home tutored for as long as she could remember. There was no school and certainly no friends. If there was one thing she knew how to do, it was be alone. She’d never really decided if she liked it, it was just all that she had known. But what would she do now? Now that she had to live with uncle Albert? Maybe now she would finally be able to go to school?

‘Uncle Albert? Luci called out with soft words, as she stepped back into the living room.

‘Hmm?’ said a large pile of books. Luci frowned. Albert popped his head up from behind the mouldy looking stack of thick leather bound books and looked at her. She wanted to ask him about the photograph, who the woman in it was, and why he had looked so happy then, but seemed so grumpy now. But at the last second, just as she was drawing in a little of the stale air to take breath and speak, something made Luci change her mind.

‘Uh – um – are all those clothes in the wardrobe for me?’ was what she said instead.

‘Of course,’ Albert said in a monotone voice.

‘Oh, thanks,’ Luci said with another forced type of smile, even though she didn’t really know why it was forced. It was a nice thing for him to have done.

Albert disappeared back behind the books and Luci took a seat on a nearby dusty couch. She took the opportunity to have another look around the living room again. She hadn’t noticed before how high the walls were during her first viewing of the space. The yellowing structures were at least twice as high as any regular living room walls. Although, it was hard to really tell, as the walls extended up and out of the tiny pool of light in the room, disappearing into actual darkness. The bits of the walls Luci could see were covered by shelves, as though the living room were in fact a library, or some ancient archive. There were no windows, either, the only light about continuing to be barren at best.

‘Don’t you have electricity?’ Luci said to the spine of a particularly thick tome entitled Mechanics.

‘No,’ Albert replied.

‘Why not?’

‘Too easy to track,’ said Albert. Luci couldn’t help but frown again.

‘Too easy for who to track?’ she asked. Her question went unanswered. Luci took this repeated lack of response as mildly interesting behaviour, and set about exploring the room further instead of dwelling on the unanswered questions of long lost uncles.

She wandered over to a corner of the room where a shabby piano was being used as shelf space, and lifted the piles of books off the piano chair. Unless they were round spindly ones, piano chairs are almost always hidden chests, used mostly to store song and note books for the player of the piano. This was one of the few interesting things Luci had learned during her time as the daughter of aristocrats of wealth.

The chair before her was of the long rectangular kind, so she opened it. The contents did indeed seem to only be a rabble of various song sheets and books, nothing too exciting thought Luci. She amused herself for a few minutes or so leafing through them, before her uncle’s voice suddenly startled Luci from across the room.

‘Got it!’ Albert said with a triumphant squawk.

‘Got what?’ Luci said from her seat.

‘Just a map we’ll be needing,’ he said with a matter-of-fact shrug of his shoulders.

‘What for?’

‘I need you to get that old suitcase of yours, Luciphigenie, and pack it up with some of the clothes from your wardrobe,’ said Albert, again without answering a direct question.

‘Oh … ’ she faltered a little. It still felt weird to be called by her proper name. ‘Are we going somewhere?’

‘First thing in the morning,’ declared her new uncle.

‘But – ’

‘Don’t worry,’ Albert said, still from somewhere behind a mountain of books, ‘I’ll explain everything when we get on the train. It’s vitally important that we get off early.’

Luci’s thoughts were buzzing like an old air-conditioner about to pack it in, the questions in her head now multiplying like rabbits in Spring. She turned to step back out to where she had left her case by the front door, but as she did so Luci spotted the suitcase leaning against the living room wall instead. She picked it up and carried it to her new room, dumping the beaten up piece of luggage on the bed and opening the lid. She took out her old clothes and left them where they lay, in a muted pile to the side, now wondering which of the new ones she should pack. In the end Luci decided on a mixture of warm and cold weather clothes, just to be safe, considering she had no idea where Albert and her were now supposed to be going.

As Luci packed her skin prickled with excitement, for the first time in a long time, at the prospect that Albert might actually be taking her on a holiday. A little something to make up for all those years spent with her parents. A cumulation of belated birthday and Christmas presents, all rolled into one maybe. She threw a particularly nice pair of pastel green lace up shoes into the suitcase as the last item and then jammed the lid shut, having to sit on it in order to secure the latches properly. Luci then made her way back to the living room to find Albert again, like a soldier eagerly awaiting new orders. After a careful scan of the space revealing an Albert-free zone, she instead turned to her lungs.

‘Uncle Albert?’ She called with as much gusto as she could manage. No answer. ‘Uncle ALBERT!’ Nothing. Luci’s vision strayed to a shelf in the living room covered not by books but with things. At least, that was all she could think of to call them at the time. Bits and bobs of all shapes and sizes and colours were now lit up but a candle obviously only recently lit. One of these particular things was a blue glass bird, its beak and tail sticking out of an otherwise smooth and shiny body. Luci suddenly felt a tingle. An urge growing within her to reach out and touch the little glass ornament. Her fingers twitched, and she reached out her hand towards the gleaming glass bird …

‘Did you pack?’ 

Luci shuddered, her elbow knocking a more mechanical looking object off of the shelf. It hit the brown paper floor with a deep Clunk!

‘Sorry, uncle Albert,’ Luci chirped, diving down to pick up the unharmed thing.

‘It’s fine,’ said Albert, ‘I don’t need it anymore. Did you pack?’

‘What? Oh – yes … ’

‘Good. I’ll see you at 3:55 am. We leave the house at four.’ And with that, Albert turned and left the living room. Luci stood, feeling a little numb, now alone in the living room. After a further moment in the stillness, she sighed, and left the room too.

Her dreams that night were filled with fluttering blue birds, all around her but just out of reach, and a pale face in the distance with long dark hair. The face was watching, happy one moment, then sad the next.

‘What’s wrong?’ Luci asked the face, but never received a reply.

Soon she was alone, shivering on the frost encrusted bank of a deserted river. She felt frozen, barely wearing more than a few stitches of clothing, or so it seemed. Her teeth chattered, her lips blue, when suddenly a dark figure emerged from the water. It was slowly rising up, a black syrupy mass, as if it were part of the river itself coming to get her. Luci turned to run, but her bare feet stuck solid in the thick mud of the riverbank. She felt like her legs were encased in two blocks of ice, the rest of her body straining to get away but unable to move. The dark mass was rapidly growing in size and getting closer and closer, the frigid breath of the thing fanning her skin in some horrible way. Luci began to panic, her pulse rising …

‘Up. We need to move.’

Luci prised her eyes open to see Albert leaning over her, his face bathed in new candlelight. He looked slightly concerned. But as Luci’s now sparkling hazel eyes met his, he pulled back away from her, and stood over the bed in a more serious manner.

Albert didn’t look so old this morning. He had shaven the spiky whiskers from his face and the hair on his head had been brushed and tucked back behind his ears. Upon his head was a black, short brimmed traveling hat. He looked quite dapper, Luci thought, a long black coat and stripped scarf around his neck completing the look.

‘We’ll get breakfast on the train,’ he said and turned to leave the bedroom. ‘Grab your suitcase.’

Luci put on different clothes than the ones she had traveled in yesterday, with the exception of her flat black shoes. She transferred the photograph she’d found of Albert and the mystery woman into the pocket of the skirt she was wearing, put on a short caramel brown jacket a bit like Albert’s that she had found in the wardrobe, and left the bedroom.

The two of them stood waiting in the frosty doorway of Albert’s house, the darkness of the early morning still pressing against everything in sight. Luci thought it curious that Albert didn’t have any luggage himself. But at the same time, fearing another silent reply, she decided not to ask about it. Maybe, she imagined, they were going to a holiday home where he had lots of clothes and stuff already?

After a short and quiet taxi ride Luci and Albert stepped onto the singular platform of a decrepit looking train station. A wordless wait later and the train emerged through a thick fog of steam, people appearing and disappearing in the pearly clouds like ghosts. Two tall men in dark suits, who Luci took to be businessmen ready for another days office work, stood at one end of the platform like wax statues, every other mentionable type milling around in a general hither and thither.

‘We’ll get on the last carriage,’ Albert said in Luci’s ear. And they did, sitting in almost the last seat at the very end of the last carriage, their backs against the end of the train. The whistle sounded, the train rattled into life and they were away.

‘There’s something I meant to give you back at the house,’ said Albert, before first looking around in a shifty kind of way, and then delving deeply into one of his jacket pockets. He gestured for Luci to hold out her hand, and when she did he dropped into it a small silver chain. The chain had a tiny clasp, and dangling off of it were tiny silver charms.

‘It was yours when you were a baby,’ Albert said. ‘It was a necklace then, but I guess it’s more of a bracelet now.’ Luci held the chain up in the dull rocking light of the moving train and peered at the charms. One was a butterfly, another was a kind of flower, and the other three she couldn’t quite make out.

‘Thank you,’ Luci breathed, now feeling even more utterly intrigued by her lost, but now found, uncle Albert.

‘Don’t put it on now,’ Albert added,‘put it somewhere safe.’ Luci nodded, stashing the chain in her pocket, as she did so feeling the smooth surface of the photograph which sat in there already, the two now sitting safely next to each other.

Another spark filled Luci’s head and she longed to ask about the photograph again. But while in the moments before, when he had given her the chain, there had been a softening in Albert’s face, now it seemed that he had shut up shop again, and was busy eyeing off various people as they entered the carriage and sat down in their own pews.

The train rolled on and Luci consigned herself to watching the buildings whizzing past the train, shrinking down, smaller and smaller, the further out of The City they went. She lent her head against the cool window and waited for Albert’s promised explanation of what on earth was happening, and where on earth they were going. But ever since he had given Luci the silver chain he had gone into some kind of autopilot, and was flitting between pretending to read a newspaper and keeping a close eye on every person who moved in, out and around the carriage. Just when she was beginning to feel sleepy, Luci’s eyelids starting to feel like lead, her uncle Albert spoke.

‘It will be dark when we get off,’ he growled more than actually said. Albert had another shifty glance around the train carriage before going on. ‘Did your parents ever tell you anything about me before they kicked you out?’ Luci liked that he didn’t sugarcoat the way she was unceremoniously shafted from her previous abode. Her impression of uncle Albert was rising again.

‘I, um,’ she tried to reply, keeping her voice low, as it somehow seemed to be what she should do, ‘they didn’t tell me anything. I didn’t even know I had an uncle.’ Albert raised one dark eyebrow.

‘That figures,’ he said with a scathing tinge to his voice. ‘They always did keep their own interests firmly to heart. Many times at the expense of other people’s lives … ’

Papp!

Suddenly a gunshot went off somewhere on the train.

Albert froze like a hunting cat. The rest of the carriage made surprised noises of concern, some tiny strangled yells, but by this time Albert was already on his feet. In fact, far from being alarmed, he didn’t look surprised in the slightest. He looked like someone who had been waiting all day for a letter, and just now, it had finally been delivered.

‘It worked,’ he said to himself quietly.

‘What worked?’ Luci whispered back, again compelled that it was how she should speak.

Someone pulled the emergency break and everyone in the carriage flew forward as the train screeched to a halt. Everyone except Albert. In that jolting moment he had reached out an arm to stop Luci from falling over, keeping his own balance expertly in the meantime.

‘I’m afraid we are going to have to get off somewhere other than planned,’ Albert said to Luci with a calm, congealed tone.

‘Why? What’s happened?’ Luci said, for the first time truthfully starting to feel a little scared. Another shot went off, this time much closer than the last.

‘Explanations will have to be saved for another time,’ was all he said before Albert then jumped away from Luci and into the carriage aisle. While everyone else was stumbling over each other in the wake of the gunfire and sudden stop, Luci’s uncle was fiddling with the outside latch of the carriage door. He had it open in seconds, and quickly beckoned Luci towards him. She squeezed herself into the aisle and followed him, surprising herself with her nimble movement, and made it to Albert’s side in a flash. Just as she got his side, though, the window of the carriage door exploded her face.

‘Luci!’ Albert yelled, his face suddenly ashen.

Luci simultaneously closed her eyes tightly and felt a strong arm grab hers, wrenching her forward. A bullet had just narrowly missed her body and shattered the carriage door window in front of her. Luci opened her eyes just in time to see herself be shoved forward and through what was left of the carriage doorway. Taking Luci’s hand, Albert then leaped from the train and onto the soggy ground beside the tracks. Luci barely had time to register her feet thumping onto the mud before Albert then pulled her along in a different direction, the two of them now running towards an empty rail yard not far from their stationary train. Albert suddenly let go of Luci’s hand, and in a kind of slingshot action propelled the girl forward, so that now he had himself placed between her and whoever had been shooting at them on the chaos-riddled train.

‘Head for those trees,’ Albert’s words reverberated from behind Luci.

Another bullet pinged off the rusted tracks at her feet as Luci ran for her life. She made it the trees Albert had set her on course for, and dived behind a large oak tree. He was right behind her, seconds later crouching down in the dirt next to Luci. Her heart was now fluttering like the wings of a humming bird, her hands shaking. There had been no time to think, only act on Albert’s rushed but even instructions. Only now Luci noticed that she had lost both of her flat black shoes in the chase, huddling now barefoot on the rough ground next to Albert as he peered back towards the glowing train carriage. The light of the day was now dim, and all around seemed washed in a dull blue paint.

The two of them waited. And waited.

Luci dared to steal her own look back at the train, able to see railway police now walking up and down the aisles, flashing red and blue lights flickering here and there in the middle distance. The police were inspecting the scene, talking to people, and on occasion, gazing out of the train windows into the darkness. It was now well into the night and the thick clouds above made the evening all the more dark as they forced the moon to shine elsewhere. After some time, the train rolled off again. And after watching the empty space of air where the train had been for a few extra minutes, Albert got to his feet and motioned Luci to stand up too. He looked as grave as an undertaker.

‘I’m so sorry, Luciphigenie,’ he said in a battered tone, ‘I should have told you everything from the start. I should have told you about the danger, given you a choice. Goodness knows you would have been safer in the Girl’s Home, but I couldn’t let you go, I guess I was selfish, really…’ Luci just stared at him, listening. It were as if her head were a spinning top, and her uncle had just given it a powerful twirl.

‘Told me about what? What Girl’s Home? What danger?’ these were the first words that made it across Luci’s lips. They weren’t particularly intelligent, she would think later, but they still needed to be said.

‘Wait there,’ said Albert, and he retraced their hurried steps when they had fled the train, and then returned to her. ‘Here,’ he said, and handed Luci her abandoned shoes.

‘Thanks.’

‘Okay,’ Albert said with a heave of cool air, ‘those two charming individuals on the train shooting at me – if you didn’t see them on the train I’m sure you saw them on the platform?’ Luci thought back to the two stiff businessmen she had spotted through the gloomy steam. ‘They were Splinters.’

‘Splinters?’

‘One of life’s little inconveniences,’ said Albert, now with a laconic whip in his words. The best Luci could offer as reply was a confused look. With patient eyes Albert watched her expression rumple, and then he slowly explained. ‘They are agents designed to be a sharp pain, but not creatures who really possess any great skill. I’m not sure if you noticed, but before we got on the train I paid a young man to bother them a little if he could. It proved quite useful indeed. You see, Splinters are crudely trained soldiers used mainly for their brawn; it doesn’t usually take much to make them blow their cover.’ A rumble of thunder rippled over their heads as Luci tried her best to follow what Albert had been saying.

‘But, if they are these “Splinters” – what does that make you?’

Albert gave her a hard look, and Luci felt the little hairs on her arms stir.

‘A spy. I’m a spy, Luciphigenie.’

Luci’s heart froze, defrosted, and then froze all over again. Her thoughts, on the other hand, screamed – my uncle is a spy?!

‘So … so … ’ she spluttered, ‘why were they trying to shoot you – shoot me?’ Luci asked, this time fully expecting a full and clear answer. Albert’s face again took on a sorrowful edge, and it was clear his words were uncomfortable for him to speak.

‘In my line of work, sometimes,’ Albert paused, a rough hand running over his once again bristly chin. ‘Well, I say sometimes, but it would be more accurate to say it frequently takes me into contact with the more undesirables of our world,’ he finished with a grimace. Albert had clearly never intended to tell Luci any of this. This much was now becoming clear to her. The place that her and Albert were really going, the destination they had been rushing towards so early in the morning, was no holiday at all. He had been taking her to live in a home for orphaned children. Luci’s heart dropped to the ground at this realisation, as though it had fallen to form a cold puddle pooling at her still bare feet.

‘What “undesirables”?’ Luci eventually asked, already almost sure that she didn’t even want to know the answer to her question, nor maybe even cared at all.

‘Now, that,’ Albert said, ‘is not yet something for your ears. All you need to know at the moment is that it’s dangerous, they’re dangerous, and I was stupid to think I could take you along with me. Even for the first fraction of the journey.’ Albert spoke the last few words more to himself than Luci. He looked frustrated, almost disgusted.

‘You weren’t going to really take me on any of it at all anyway, were you?’ Luci puffed her chest out a little as she said this, finding some courage, half proud of her own deductions and half hoping she had been spectacularly wrong to think Albert was just as keen to dump her off as her parents were. Despite only knowing her uncle Albert for less than a day, she liked him. And, she thought in her deepest thoughts, that was saying quite a lot. Quite a lot considering the amount of years she had spent with her parents, and she didn’t like them at all.

‘No, no I wasn’t,’ said Albert, leaning back somewhat as he spoke, now less unhappy and more intrigued.

‘You were taking me to a home. To dump me off.’

‘I can’t say I’d call it that,’ said Albert, for the first time appearing a tad uncomfortable. ‘But yes, you’re right again.’

Luci felt herself sighing, but a sigh she had never sighed before in her life. Her shoulders felt like bag of bricks had just been set on top of them, pushing the rest of her body into the hard ground.

‘What now then?’ she uttered, with a blink of hope instead of despair.

‘We’re going to have to try and convince your parents to take you back.’

‘No,’ said Luci, in a more hopeless than angry way, ‘they wouldn’t take me back even if I was made of solid gold … well, maybe solid gold.’

‘We could take you back to the Home. A backtrack might be enough to throw the next lot they send after me off the scent,’ Albert said, again mostly to himself.

‘Back there? What do you mean?’

‘It was the only way your parents would allow me to see you, if I agreed to take you there before they did. We passed the stop when it was still daylight.’

Something then tingled within Luci, and she thought about kneeling down to scoop up her liquid heart from the rough ground.

‘So why didn’t you?’ she said with hope rising in her lungs, ‘why didn’t you take me there?’ Her parents didn’t want her, that was obvious, but it maybe Albert did.

‘I don’t know,’ Albert said with a labouring shrug. ‘I was selfish. I could have put you into relative safety, but I couldn’t do it, not after it had been so long since I had seen you.’ Luci didn’t say anything. ‘Come on, lets find somewhere to sleep. Over here.’

Albert led her to an abandoned railway car, forcing his way into the moulding structure. As he shoved open the large sliding door, a deep and dank waft of rotting wood and dead animal attacked Luci’s nostrils like poisonous smoke. But it was beginning to rain, and a protest from her was unlikely to be headed. So first Albert gave Luci a leg up and then pulled his own form into the damp carriage.

The floating wisps of water soon turned into to thundering drops, sounding like a giant was pouring handfuls of millions and millions of marbles over the roof of the dilapidated carriage. Albert took off his leather jacket and gave it to Luci to use as a blanket. She stretched out on a booth seat, and Albert sat up on the seat opposite.

So many questions played tag with each other in her head. Her uncle was a spy. Okay. An actual spy.

Whether it was the exhaustion from thinking at a hundred miles an hour, or the fact that she had awoken at four in the morning today, the tiredness soon took over her need to ask more questions. Luci finally fell asleep with the image of Albert perched on the seat in front of her, straight-backed and alert, a dark silent sentinel watching over her as she slowly drifted away …


End of Part One …


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