Part 1.1: A Deal

Saul made so many maps he couldn’t keep them all.

For a few weeks late one cold, dry autumn, when he was younger, they came out of him uninvited. He didn’t hear a voice inside, he didn’t get the idea from anywhere or anything: he just sat down one day and started to draw.

Some were complicated messes of black lines and white spaces: dots dividing roads into uneven lanes, X’s, traps and dead ends. Others were simple and colourful maps to lonely quiet places where most of the work was done before he touched the paper. He gathered the best of them in a black folder with a bold black-on-white sticker down the spine that said TREASURE MAPS—then, of course, ‘X,’ because the maps were here, in the binder.

The others had to go. It wasn’t easy to accept, but there were too many. Some of the keepers were obvious - the biggest, the craziest, the ones that felt like they were trying to tell you something. The hardest were the ones where almost all was all right, but not all was quite there. There might be a few too many X’s. There’s no point in a map to somewhere you find treasure every time you stick a fork in the ground. Or perhaps a road got carried away, doubled back and hit itself in the belly, ending at a flat black line that stopped the journey, an abandoned barren space trapped in a mistaken loop. Sometimes, Saul he would just take a step back - maybe in his mind, or maybe really get up from the kitchen table and stand back, so he could see the shape of things - and they would reveal themselves as wrong. He learnt to know that wrongness when he saw it. Even when he wanted to keep them, if he really listened, there’d be a deeper, quieter voice inside him reminding him that he already knew it wasn’t good enough.

And the ones that weren’t good enough, they had to go. His parents liked the idea of a tidy flat more than he did, but even Saul could see it. Sometimes half the kitchen table was so covered with coloured papers and pens and crayons and pencil shavings and more papers and blank papers and torn papers and every other kind of paper that they had to push it all up into a great toppling cliff just to eat breakfast. So they went, the maps. Bagged on a Sunday and gone on a Monday.

Every week, the recycling lorry came first thing Monday morning. The rubbish would be waiting, bundled in the green bags that came through the letterbox from the council, all together in a pile - corn cans and magazines, trash and treasure maps - and you could see them through the bags, squished up against the inside, trapped by plastic knots, prisoners on the way to jail. Or something worse. Saul would imagine he could hear the maps calling to him. “Help,” they’d scream, voices muffled by rubbish: “I’ve got something to show you!”

They had to go. They had to.

After a while, he stopped drawing them, and it wasn’t a problem any more.

Saul and his brother loved the trucks, the frightening big mouths with the hydraulic jaws that chewed and chewed at all the rubbish till all the rubbish was gone. But the collectors started early down their road, and as quick as they’d run to their window of a morning, as loud as their Dad groaned it’s not morning yet and I need to sleep and will you please not step on my aaaargh, they’d open the curtain to clean pavements and spotless roads. When schooltime came, Dad would open the door and notice too. Then he’d say, “We’re very lucky to live somewhere where people come and take our rubbish away.”

“Yes Dad.” But why can’t we watch?

Well, sometimes they could. Very occasionally, collections were late. On those days, it was fun: the lorries were hungry, loud and magnificent in daylight. Their big chewing mouths were somehow on their bums rather than their heads, but hey. They ambled down the street with slow authority, yellow-jacketed collectors running back and forth to pick up their food, lines and piles of goody bags up and down the pavement, and they brought them back and threw them in – sometimes three, four at at time – between great rusty crunching teeth, and all of them – the bags, not the men – disappeared in flutters of plastic shards and wisps of card.

Behind the beast came its loyal followers: the long line of cars on the one-way road, moving slowly, respectfully, sounding joyous horn blasts of worship. Prolonged and loud horn blasts they were, too, all the way from one end of the road to the other. A full quarter of a mile further north, on the borough border. It was like a royal procession.

One thing they did notice on those days, though, those days of inexplicable lateness, is that the collectors seemed a little… grumpy. There was no other word for it. Nate would say hello to them in the street, as the boys walked to school, and sure they’d ”hello“ back at him, or raise a grumpy hand, but they’d never smile. They weren’t happy collectors.

* * *

So: one Sunday night, Nate couldn’t sleep. Being strictly accurate, lots of nights Nate couldn’t sleep. But this particular night, something woke him in the witching hour and he stayed awake. And, in an unusual display of concern that might or might not have been evidence of him becoming a big, or at the very least bigger, boy, he chose not to disturb his parents. Instead, he slipped out of his bed, tiptoed to his brother’s, climbed up and tucked himself in. Saul was snoring. Nate poked him. He snored louder. Nate poked him harder.

“Is it morning yet?” said Nate, though presumably he knew it was not.

“Unnngh,” said Saul.

“Is it morning?” said Nate, not once but many times, slowly getting louder and louder, poking Saul in a rhythm not quite regular enough to be ignored, perfecting a technique developed previously by its current recipient. Saul eventually gave up and woke up, grudgingly aware he was in the presence of a master.

Nate suggested that they should get up and make themselves a midnight breakfast (yoghurt, cold sausages, cornflakes and jam) and then maybe build a train track. Saul considered the idea and it was good, and he was about to say so when they both heard a noise outside.

Their room had a big window that faced the street. The entrance to their house was right below that window, a few steps below street level, at the bottom of a small, cracked and slippery flight of stairs. This being Monday morning – or at the very least some time Sunday night – the space in front of the entrance was taken up with a pile of bin bags. And that’s where the noise came from. It was a rustling, clunking, clanging sort of a noise, with the unwelcome twist of obviously being a noise that someone—or some thing—was trying not to make.

Nate said nothing. Saul looked at him. Things can be scarier when you admit they’re there.

“We should see what that is,” said Saul quietly. “The door’s locked.” On reflection, he wasn’t sure it was. But it must be.

Not entirely willingly, they crept over to the window and stuck their heads under the curtain, slowly slowly easing themselves up between curtain and window, noses pressed against the glass. With his left hand Nate groped around till he found his brother’s and squeezed it. Saul squeezed back. Then he laughed. “Look,” he said, trying to not to sound as relieved as he felt.

It wasn’t robbers, or kidnappers, or type or flavour of night creature: it was the rubbish collectors. Maybe three or four of them, moving back and forth across the little section of street that the boys could see from their window, silent and quick for the most part, zipping out and back from lorry to house. But they looked different to how they did in the daytime. More purposeful, if you could believe that. Not quicker, necessarily, but more relaxed. Perhaps they preferred empty streets, working without interruption. It was cold enough that the boys could see their breath hang in little clouds in front of their faces. Saul craned his neck, trying to look down to the front door. It was tricky—the window was right above it, so you couldn’t see the space right outside the door where the noise had come from.

One of the collectors, taller than the others, was standing on the pavement outside the house. He was looking down at the door too. He stood still while the others around him worked, hands on hips, back straight. He really was very tall. His mouth was moving and his face looked fierce. The boys could really only hear sounds from outside the door, mostly because they came through the wood of the door and up the stairs. The window was double glazed and it cut out the sound pretty well, so they couldn’t hear what the tall man was saying. Saul tried to read his lips, but he couldn’t.

There was a movement below, a flash of green, and the top of a head emerged as another figure climbed up the stairs holding the two green bags they’d left out last night. Saul was expecting them to do what they always did: dump the bags in a pile of others from the houses and flats either side, wait for the lorry to come along, then chuck them all into the back.

Sure enough, as they watched, the lorry moved into sight and coasted to a stop right opposite the house. There was steam rising gently from its back, as if it were a big beast that had just emerged from the mud and into the sun. It looked like it was breathing.

The collectors didn’t do what they usually did. Instead, the tall man crouched down and looked closely at the bags. His awkward squat made his knees stick out to either side so he looked like a grasshopper. The man who’d carried them up the stairs, small and strong-looking, his face covered by a big hood, bent over them too. They turned the bags over, peering through the translucent sides. Stern-faced, the tall man tossed the first one aside. The hooded man bent even closer to the second bag, gesturing at something. The tall man’s left hand dipped quickly in and out of his pocket, emerging with a small, bright knife that flashed orange under the streetlight. With sharp, quick movements, he slashed the bag from neck to bottom, put the knife back in his pocket, and pushed his hands into the middle of the bag, moving carefully. He pulled out one, two, three sheets of paper, careful not to tear them, and laid them carefully on the pavement. He dug around a bit more in the bag, then nodded to the hooded man, who rose and tossed both bags carelessly into the lorry and thumped hard on its side. The big metal boom he made was loud enough to be heard through the glass. The lorry eased forward again, inching out of sight towards the main road.

Back on the pavement, the tall man was still looking at the papers. He seemed happy with two of them, which he folded carefully and put in his pocket. The third he crumpled into a ball and tossed into the street, where it bounced once, twice, before rolling out of sight into the gutter. The man pulled his hat down over his forehead, linked his fingers and stretched. His long body arched towards the streetlamp, the angles and lines of his face dark in the orange light. Then he relaxed, shouted something up the street towards the back of the lorry, rolled his shoulders and straightened through the cloud of his own breath. Saul relaxed too. Spying was making him nervous. He sighed and leant forward, mirroring the tall man, and as he did so the curtain behind him moved.

Quick as a bird the man’s neck snapped round. He stood motionless, his eyes, bright and shiny like new pennies, locked on Saul’s. Saul felt Nate grip tightly to his arm. He froze too. The man just stared up at the window. He didn’t move, didn’t say anything, didn’t wave. No hand raised in greeting this time.

They stayed like that for what felt a very long time: Saul desperately trying not to move, even holding back his breathing, as if stillness might make him invisible, erase the fact of having been seen. Nate made a soft humming sound down by his elbow. The man stood like a heron on the empty pavement, outlined in black and orange, his long shadow stretching down across the street and into the trees on the opposite side. The rest of the road slept. In the branches, Saul noticed a malevolent looking squirrel watching the scene with interest, its eyes tracking the Tall Man, its little head moving from side to side in tiny jerks.

The lines on the man’s face moved. Slowly, he smiled. It was a strange smile, but a smile nonetheless. A single gold tooth caught the light and shone brighter than the eyes. Now the hand came up. The man nodded, slowly, a tiny movement that Saul might even have imagined. I have seen you, he seemed to say. Saul’s own hand rose up in greeting, as if by itself, as if in agreement with something, but even as it rose, the man’s long, long legs began to move, and he disappeared out of sight.

The boys crept downstairs toward the front door, nervous even though they had seen the men go. Saul had heard of people who went through bins secretly, at night, looking for information they could use to do things they weren’t meant to.

He lifted the keys from their hook carefully, so no jingling noise would drift upstairs and wake his parents. He fiddled the key awkwardly into the lock and opened it. He pulled back the chain, released the latch and opened the door a crack. A blade of cold air cut into the hall. One head above the other, he and Nate stuck their noses outside and looked around. No-one was there.

“Hold the door,” Saul whispered. He slipped up the stairs from the door and emerged out on the pavement, looking both ways, the rough stone cold on his bare feet. The air smelled sharp and clear, with just a hint of diesel from the main road, even at this time. There was no-one around and the lorry was gone. He bent and retrieved the ball of paper from the gutter, then, with a sense of relief, turned and skipped back down the stairs. Nate looked up at him, his eyebrows raised.

Together they ran back up to the bedroom and leant against the radiator under the window, backs to the street. Side by side under the same duvet, Nate leant over his brother’s shoulder while Saul flattened out the paper.

It was one of his maps, one of the not-so-good ones from a few weeks ago – one of the last ones. Mum and dad must have been throwing out old papers. Saul turned it over in his hands, looking for something that might have made this one interesting, some clue as to with why the man had picked it out.

Their mum woke them up like that, after who knows how long, backs to the radiator now uncomfortably hot, leaning against another beneath the single cover. She didn’t say anything, just smiled, and they never said what they'd been doing. It was a mystery, but life is full of mysteries. By the end of the following week Saul had forgotten the strange dream of the tall man with the bright eyes. The week came and went as it usually did, and so did the weekend, and the following Sunday bedtime was as it usually was, and the boys fell asleep in a fashion that was normal enough. But then, at some point in the night, as that next Sunday shifted and changed to another Monday morning, strange things started to happen.

Saul snapped awake in the dark. It was quiet. If he listened hard he could hear Nate’s quiet snuffling, a cold he’d had for days. He was used to that—that wouldn’t have woken him. He opened his eyes. The usual shadows spread across the ceiling, the air held its usual nighttime chill. The room smelt of cotton and dust. He sat up in bed, blankets rustling. As he did so, there was another tiny noise. He froze, half in and half out of bed.

“Nate?” he whispered.

Just snuffling.

He wondered if he had imagined it. Or dreamed it. Might he still be asleep? He felt too cold for that to be likely.

Just then, a quiet tap at the window. Clear, definite sound. Tap.

Saul dived over to his brother’s bed, shot under the covers and froze. Nate just snuffled, heat radiating off him in the dark. Saul shook him til he stirred and drew a deep breath. “Shh,” Saul whispered, and for once, Nate listened. In the gloom under the covers Saul could just about make out his eyes, sleepy and curious, not yet scared.

“There was a knock. On the window,” he said.

Nate didn’t seem bothered.

Saul nodded in the direction of the window. “Come?” Nate nodded.

The two of them drew back the cover slowly. The curtain hung as it always did, the faint orange glow of the streetlight pushing gently through.

“Shall we get mum and dad?” Saul whispered. Nate shook his head.

Then, another tap.

Before he could get too frightened – and, to be sure, he was scared enough already – Saul lifted the curtain. The two of them ducked side by side into that little private space between curtain and window. The cold came off the glass and prickled his skin.

Out in the street was a figure, its long arm drawn back under the light, ready to throw something. As they popped their heads up it froze in place, long legs motionless, sharp lines on its face distinct in the streetlight. They stood like that for a moment, the two boys in their pyjamas, the stick-like figure in the street, without moving, just looking at one another. Then the Tall Man relaxed his arm and straightened up. His jaw moved and little clouds of steam came out of his mouth and hung in the air in front of his face. He obviously saying something, but the window was shut tight and Saul couldn’t hear a word.

Before Saul could stop him, Nate clambered up on top of the radiator, stretched to his full height and pulled down the window handle. He pushed the window open, Careful not to fall out after it. Saul held tight to a fistful of his pyjamas just in case.

“—the maps,” said the tall man.

“What?” said Saul.

“Can’t shout,” said the man. “Come down.” He looked frustrated.

“We can’t,” said Saul. “It’s the middle of the night.” Nate nodded. “We don’t know you.”

“Do you really ever know anybody?”

“What?”

“You saw me before.” This was true.

“We know what you do. We don’t know you.”

“What difference?” It was a good question. “I’m Captain,” said the Tall Man after a while. He might have been smiling. He might not.

“Of what?” said Saul. “The rubbish?”

“No!” said the Tall Man grumpily. Then his voice softened a bit. “Yes. I guess. This not what I meant.”

“What do you mean?”

“Captain of the Gog.”

Nate laughed. Saul didn’t.

“Still don’t know what you mean.”

“Come down.”

“No.” Saul thought for a second. “But you can come closer. If you want.”

The Tall Man took a step that carried him over the line between the pavement and the front of their house, then another step that took him almost to the door. Saul realised with some shock just how very tall he was. He could easily reach up with those long, stick-like arms to the sill, and probably pull himself through the window. Saul wondered if perhaps this conversation was a mistake.

“I am Captain of the Gog.” The tall man just looked at them, as if there was a right answer to that.

“I’m sorry. I don’t…” Saul looked at Nate. “We don’t… what’s the Gog?”

The tall man frowned. “Best vehicle in London. First of any kind around Embankment Loop.”

“Embankment what?”

“Embankment Loop. Flooded tunnel.”

“In a lorry?”

“No time to explain.”

“Have you got a boat as well? I don’t believe you.”

“We talk about this later. We need your help.”

“With what?”

“Maps.”

“What maps?”

“No good ones for a long time.”

Despite the cold, Saul was increasingly certain that he was in fact dreaming.

“What maps?”

“In the bags.” He gestured towards the bin bags by the door.

“There’s no maps in the bags.”

The tall man looked frustrated. He reached into the breast pocket of his luminous yellow council jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He opened it slowly and carefully, held it up to the window. It was grimy and criss-crossed with fold lines, covered in notes in red biro: scrawled writing Saul couldn’t read, strange symbols around the edges that looked like nothing he’d seen before. But beneath all the markings, Saul saw something familiar.

Under all the red was a black and white picture. No other colour on this one. A complex series of lines that looked a bit like roads, linked up with a number of big round things. There were a few black X’s scattered across it. In parts of the picture the lines were straight and seemed to be going somewhere; in other parts they circled in on themselves and got tighter and tighter till you couldn’t work out where the ends were and the patterns disappeared.

It was one of Saul’s old maps. In fact, he thought he could remember throwing this one out. He hadn’t kept it because he hadn’t been happy with the roundabouts. They weren’t round enough, they looked squished.

“Hey! That’s mine.”

“It’s not yours if you throw it away.”

It was difficult to know what to say to that.

“Anyway, we’ve improved it,” said the Tall Man, pointing at the red marks round the edge . “This was actually a good one. Clapton.”

“What do you mean, ‘good?’” said Saul. “They’re not real. I just did them in the kitchen.”

“What do you mean, not real?” asked the Tall Man.

Saul couldn’t think of a better way to say it.

“They are real,” said the Tall Man. “What you call this?” He waved the piece of paper up at the window. “Who drew it?”

“I did.”

“Why? Why you drew it?” the Tall Man asked.

“I don’t know,” said Saul. “I just wanted to?” For a few weeks, it had been all he wanted to do.

“Exactly.” said the Tall Man.

“Hmph,” said Nate, as if maybe he agreed. Saul felt a little ganged up on, this wasn’t fair.

There was a bit of a pause.

“But,” said the Tall Man suddenly, “there is problem.” He looked uncomfortable. “The last few weeks… sorry. Not good.”

This was a bit too much. “What?”

“I know. I am ashamed to say. We need help.”

“Help? For what?”

The Tall Man looked as if he couldn’t believe how stupid the conversation had become. “Finding things!” He put two fingers between his lips and whistled, long and slow—a soft soughing sound, not shrill.

There was a rustling in the hedge by the door and a small girl appeared. Nate’s grip on Saul’s hand tightened. How many more strange people were hiding in the bushes?

The girl wore bright yellow waterproof dungarees over a hooded top, a black woolly hat, and black gloves with the fingers chopped off.

“This is Gaia,” said the Tall Man. “Record keeper. Future historian. She writes everything we do.”

“Why?” asked Nate.

“Some day, somebody might write a book about it.” The Tall Man pulled the girl closer to him, not unkindly. “Gaia,” he said, “explain.”

“In the beginning,” said the girl Gaia, “we became friends. Then one night, in the middle of the night, because of something that was definitely not our fault, there was a serious accident—“

“No,” said the Tall Man, smiling for the first time. “Tell them why we need help.”

“Ah,” said Gaia. “Right. Well. White Hart Lane, nothing. Bruce Grove, nothing. New River, Finsbury Park, a clue but not much – a few small things, nothing good. Somebody else got there first, we knew they were about, we saw them round the reservoir, day before. Next day, vegetable garden by the Castle, another clue, couple small pieces, some carrots.”

“We weren’t supposed to take those,” said the Tall Man. “Did you write that down?”

“Yup. Got more carrots from Sainsbury’s next day, put them back that evening.”

“Hang on,” said Saul, who’d done a bit of gardening. “That’s not—“

The Tall Man silenced him with a wave of his long hand.

“London Zoo after that,” said Gaia, her eyes closed. “Nothing on the side with those big nets, but after dark we came up from the canal and snuck in through the Woodland Walk, found a few things.”

Nate’s hand tightened again. Saul looked down. His brother was grinning.

“Anyway,” continued Gaia, “point is, that was it. Obviously the zoo was good, it’s been a zoo since 1800—”

”—1828,“ said Nate.

“—Around 1800. But we haven’t found anything at all since then. Nothing. Not using our the normal ways, and not using your maps. Which since we discovered what they can do, and thank you for this, have always, with a bit of work, showed us something. But now… three weeks. Nothing.”

“We’re falling behind,” said the Tall Man.

“Seriously behind.” Said Gaia. She looked worried. “We need help.”

Saul was seriously confused, and starting to feel tired. “Help with what?” Nate was positively thrumming next to him, as if he was trying to stop himself jumping up and down.

Gaia turned to the tall man with a fierce look. “See?” She said. “Told you.”

“Probably you don’t know what you’re doing,” said the Tall Man. “We are not crazy. But obviously we went through your bins. Now. You’re just a little boy—“

“Hang on—” said Saul again, but nobody hung on.

“And it was not wrong to use your maps. Because you didn’t care. Because, one, you didn’t know, and, two, you threw them away. So finders keepers, everybody wins.”

“No they don’t,” said Nate.

Gaia looked embarrassed.

“And he didn’t throw them all away,” said Nate.

“Shhh,” said Saul, too late.

Gaia stared up at the window. Without taking his eyes off Nate, the tall man cocked his head slowly to the side, like a giant heron about to skewer something.

Saul was utterly lost. He looked down at his brother, who had excitement coming off him like smoke. He decided to just go with it. “I didn’t throw them all away.” He gave Nate gentle push. “Go on then.”

In less than a minute Nate was back at the window with the big black folder.

“Maybe he does know what he’s doing,” whispered the Tall Man to Gaia. His whispering technique was more a change of tone than of volume.

Saul held up the folder, open so they could see. Seeing his maps together for the first time in a while, he was proud: the colours, the lines, the styles—the roads, the seas, the forests… all those x’s. He had done them, bit by bit, line by line, at the table, without ever really thinking about it. Now, he realised, for the first time, he had the start of something big and beautiful in his hand.

He wondered why he’d stopped.

He leafed through a few of them. “See?” he said. “These are the good ones. I kept the good ones.”

“They kept the good ones…” breathed Gaia.

“Can I?” asked the Tall Man, holding out a hand.

“No,” said Saul. “Of course not.”

“We are not thieves.” The Tall Man looked so upset that Saul nearly changed his mind. But he didn’t. He didn’t trust them. If he gave them the folder, they might just disappear up the road with his maps.

“You can have a look at one of them,” he said, with an unfamiliar feeling of authority. A quiet voice at the back of his head suggested he might be being a little childish. He ignored it. “I’ll choose.”

He flipped grandly through the sheets with his eyes closed, stopped, and stuck his finger between the pages. Gently, he pulled out the one he’d touched from the plastic cover into which Mum had so carefully placed it for him. It was blue, green, red, white. There were trees, small circles - boulders? - and lines. Probably footpaths. No roads.

The Tall Man’s hands reached out like branches, dry fingers rustling on dry paper. He plucked the map from Saul’s grasp and bent over it, turning his back a little so he and Gaia—who had to perch on top of the little wall—could see better in the glow from the streetlight. “Look,” the Tall Man breathed, “That could be Fleet—“

“Could it?” said Gaia.

“Then that could be Strand. So that… Piccadilly line. So then that could be the old tube station…”

“What old tube station?” called Saul.

“The empty one under the Museum,” said Gaia, as if it was a silly question.

Saul and Nate looked at one another.

“Do you mind, um…” The Tall Man looked nervous again. “Can we… take this…?”

Saul began to think about how best to answer this question, but Nate piped up first. “No.” he said.

“No?” said the Tall Man. His fingers twitched a little and his back hunched. He was definitely thinking about running off.

Gaia noticed. “No,” she said. “Don’t. You can’t just take it if you asked.”

The Tall Man sighed and straightened. With huge and obvious reluctance, he reached out with the paper. Gaia’s eyes followed it up like those of a hungry dog.

“But you could borrow it,” said Nate. The Tall Man froze, arm still out.“If.”

“If what?” said the tall man. Saul wanted to know too.

“If we come,” said Nate with his most fierce face, mouth like a kestrel’s beak. “To keep an eye on it.” Saul tried not to smile.

Gaia and the Tall Man looked at one another. The Tall Man’s breath hung in front of his long, sharp nose. Gaia bounced from foot to foot, her shoulders up around her ears and her fingers flexing and unflexing in those strange gloves.

“They’re not crew,” said Gaia. She turned to the boys. “You’re not crew.”

“We’ll join the crew,” said Nate.

“No—” said Saul and Gaia together.

Nate started to close the window.

“One minute,” said the Tall Man, and reached out to block the glass. Something uncomfortable passed between him and Gaia. Saul felt the situation moving beyond him, his power to make decisions slipping away.

“Won’t take a minute,” said Nate. “We’re in or we’re not.”

“Probation?” said the Tall Man, tentatively. “We’ll give you a week.” And, with a horrible feeling in his stomach, Saul knew this was happening.

* * *

The cab was tidy, for a rubbish lorry. There were coffee cups in holders and supermarket sandwiches on a shelf in front of the passenger seat. A newspaper on the dashboard. A sunroof, which was a surprise.

None of it felt real to Saul. It was as if he was still asleep. As they climbed up into the cab, the Tall man reached over solemnly, saying nothing, and shook their hands—first Nate’s, then Saul’s. Any moment now, Saul was sure, his parents would wake, and realise with horror they were gone, and come running down the street after them. But they didn’t. The front door stayed shut, the street empty. With a rumble and a grumble they moved slowly to the top of the road, and turned right in the direction of the river. A soft rain began to fall.

The seats were unusual. Fancy for a lorry. They were covered in a shiny, soft, dark brown leather that looked old and smelled like honey. There were four of them in the cab, two in front and two behind. Gaia sat up front, next to the tall man’s seat, high up on a pile of cushions. Saul watched her for a while.

It was quiet at this time of night. The only people out were huddled in bus stops, collars up against the rain. Saul supposed the city couldn’t just stop at night. Maybe there were always people out in the rain. A red night bus rolled past in the opposite direction, the light behind its windows warm and welcoming, the shapes of one or two passengers smudged by the water.

The rain picked up. It was heavy now. A single great wiper hung from the top of the cab’s windscreen. It swung slowly from side to side, sloshing the water off the side of the glass in waves. The Tall Man drove slowly and deliberately, with no sudden moves or quick stops.

“Where are we going?” asked Saul.

“To the river.”

“Do you have a boat down there?” asked Saul. Gaia laughed quietly. Rain made little rivers down the window panes. Small lines appeared at the corners of the tall man’s eyes. Saul felt Nate’s annoyance from the seat beside him, and laid a hand on his brother’s knee.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked.

“This is our boat,” said Gaia.

“This isn’t a boat,” said Nate.

“Welcome aboard the Gog,” said the Tall Man. And that was the last either of them would say about it.

The Tall Man swung the lorry left off the main road and down a narrow street that cut through a small green space. At the far edge of the grass it dipped sharply, down a steep hill with houses on either side. Towards the bottom the road levelled out, and the houses gave way to a large park on the right and playing fields on the left. Rugby posts poked gently waving fingers up at a dark orange sky. At the bottom of the hill, the road came to an end. Beyond that, in the small pool of light thrown by the very last lamppost, Saul could just make out the dark metal hump of a footbridge. Beyond that, the light gave way to real night: darkness in which he saw nothing. He knew where they were. This was the edge of the canal. Behind it were marshes and wetlands.

Nobody said anything. The lorry grumbled slowly forward towards the end of the road, where Saul knew there was a dead end: just the footbridge and the water.

Outside, the city was quiet; the trees in the empty park moved slowly back and forth. Nate’s was craning his head back so he could see better out the window. Behind them, the houses on the hill were now just black lumps barely visible through mist and rain.

The lorry slowed further. The background city sounds had died away. There was no outside traffic noise now, no buses rumbling. Over the engine’s slow huffing and the the thump-squeak-thump of the wipers, Saul wondered if he could hear a soft hissing from the trees.

“Is the boat on the river? Where do you park?”

Still no answer. The Tall Man slowed the lorry right down to walking pace and pressed a blue button on the steering wheel. A quiet whirring noise started up behind and beneath them somewhere. They were nearing the end of the road. To the left, the rugby pitch gave way to a small car park. Even at this time of night it was half full; one of the vehicles was a camper van, the windows obscured by curtains, a small cloud of steam rising from a vent in the roof. Saul imagined a person, maybe people, maybe a family, tucked up warm in the van with the rain bouncing off the metal roof. For a moment he thought of his parents, at home in bed.

Ahead, the road just stopped. There was the canal, deep black, a border for the light. As they drew closer he could see along the near banks: to the right a footpath stretched away, lined with silent canal boats as far as Saul could see in the gloom. To the left, the river was bordered by a flat tarmac space in front of some large buildings that Saul knew belonged to a rowing club. Perhaps the boat was in there.

The whirring noise stopped. The lorry squeezed between the bollards that marked the end of the road and onto the flat space in front of the boathouse. It felt very naughty - Saul had never seen a vehicle of any kind on the footpath before. He zipped up his jacket to his chin, ready for the rain outside; he checked to see that Nate had done the same. Then he reached down for his seatbelt.

“Don’t do that,” said Gaia. She touched Saul’s hand and stopped him.

The Tall Man turned the wheel hard right, so the lorry was pointed at the river. Stretching up in his seat and peering over the the dash, Saul could see the end of the tarmac, the paved edge of the river bank, a metre drop down to black water. After that, nothing.

A small hand gripped his. Nate laughed quietly in the darkness.

The lorry shot suddenly forward, quicker than a lorry should. Saul was thrown back hard into his seat. His head tipped back. The sky through the sunroof was orange and grey. He looked for something, a star, the moon, the reassuring flash of a aircraft’s wing lights, but there was nothing. And then the sky was gone.

The nose of the lorry dropped and Saul was tipped forward again, just his seat belt stopping him from falling out of his seat and smashing headfirst into the windscreen. The water leapt to meet them, and he tried not to cry as it hit the glass. He was thrown forward, his neck whipping painfully, then bounced around in his seat in great big wrenching movements, the belt cutting into his shoulders and his neck. Nate whooped with excitement.

The windscreen turned black, then the blackness reached up and around the windows until all light outside was gone. The only sound was water, a deep gurgling as if they were being swallowed. Saul couldn’t remember ever having been this scared. He squeezed his eyes shut tight.

* * *