“Yes, there is,” said Zanna dreamily. She pointed, almost without looking. “There, see?” She sounded surprised. “It came this way.” She accelerated.
“Zanna!” said Deeba in alarm, and trotted to keep up with her. “How can you even see that?”
The main road was just out of sight: even at this hour, they could hear traffic. Zanna turned a corner, moving almost as if she were being tugged.
“Wait!” said Deeba, and came up behind her.
In front of them, in the base of one of the monoliths, surrounded by puddles of pretty oily water, below a weakly shining lamp, the girls saw a door. It was ajar. On its threshold, even Deeba could see it was marked with a smear of oil.
“No way,” Deeba said, eyeing Zanna. “You are not going there…”
Zanna stepped inside. Behind her, shouting, “Wait! Wait!” Deeba followed.
“Is anyone there?” Zanna said, not very loud. They were in a narrow corridor below ground level. The only windows were stubby ones by the ceiling, cracked and flecked with cobwebs and fly husks. The one or two bulbs let light out resentfully, as if they were misers who hoarded it.
“We are going,” Deeba said. “There’s nothing here.”
Pipes and wires ran along the walls, and meters ticked.
“Hello?” Zanna said.
The corridor ended in a huge basement. It must have stretched underneath almost the whole tower block[25]. Along its walls were old tools; there was rope in thick puddles; and sacks; and rusted bicycles; and a dried-out warmed-up fridge. Here and there were faint illuminations, and the light from streetlamps came through the filthy windows. The girls could hear the moan of traffic.
In the middle of the room was a pillar of pipes, where needles jerked up and down on gauges, and pressure was channeled by fat iron taps. In the dead center was an ancient, heavy-looking one the size of a steering wheel. It looked like it would open an airlock in a submarine.
“Let’s go,” whispered Deeba. “This place is scary.”
But, slowly, Zanna shuffled forward. She looked like a sleepwalker.
“Zanna!” Deeba moved back towards the door. “We’re alone in a cellar. And no one knows we’re here. Come on!”
“There’s more oil,” Zanna said. “That thing…that umbrella, was here.”
She touched the big spigot experimentally.
“ ‘…when the wheel turns,’ ” she said.
“What?” said Deeba. “Come on. You coming?” She turned her back. Zanna gripped the wheel, and began to turn it.
It moved slowly at first. She had to strain. It squeaked against rust.
As it went, something happened to the light.
Deeba froze. Zanna hesitated, then turned the wheel a few more degrees.
The light began to change. It was flickering. All the sound in the room was ebbing. Deeba turned back.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
Zanna tugged, and with each motion the light and noise faltered a moment, and the wheel turned a little farther.
“No,” said Deeba. “Stop. Please.”
Zanna turned the valve another few inches, and the sound and light shifted. All the bulbs in the room flared, and so, impossibly, did the sound of the cars outside.
The iron wheel began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The room grew darker.
“You’re turning off the electricity,” Deeba said, but then she was silent, as she and Zanna looked up and realized that the lamplight shining through the windows from outside was also dimming.
As the light lessened, so did the sound.
Deeba and Zanna stared at each other in wonder.
Zanna spun the handle as if it were oiled. The noise of cars and vans and motorbikes outside grew tinny, like a recording, or as if it came from a television in the next room. The sound of the vehicles faded with the glow of the main road.
Zanna was turning off the traffic. The spigot turned off all the cars, and turned off the lamps.
It was turning off London.
6. The Trashpack
The wheel spun; the light changed; the sound changed.
The glow from outside went from the dim of streetlights, down to darkness, then slowly back up to something luminous but odd. The last of the car engines sounded very far away, and then was gone. At last the wheel slowed and stopped.
Deeba stood, frozen, her hands to her mouth, in the strange not-dark. Zanna blinked several times, as if waking. The two looked at each other, and around at the room, all different in the bizarre light, full of impossible shadows.
“Quick! Undo it!” Deeba said at last. She grabbed the wheel and tried to turn it backwards. It was wedged stubbornly, as if it hadn’t moved for years. “Help!” she said, and Zanna added her strength to Deeba’s, and with a burst of effort they made the metal move.
But the wheel just spun free. It wasn’t catching on anything. It whirred heavily around, but the light didn’t change, and the noise of traffic didn’t return.
London didn’t come back on.
“Zanna,” said Deeba. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Zanna. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Deeba said. Zanna grabbed her arm and they ran back into the corridor.
The peculiar light was shining around the edges of the doorway they had come in by, as if a giant black-and-white television were playing just outside. Deeba and Zanna went for it full-tilt, and shoved it open.
They stumbled out. And stopped. And looked around. And let their mouths hang open.
It was not night anymore, and they were not in the estate. They were somewhere very else.
Just as it had when they entered, the door opened on waste ground between tall buildings, and to either side were big metal bins and spilt rubbish. But the tower blocks were not those they had left behind.
The walls just kept going up. Everywhere they looked, they were surrounded by enormous concrete monoliths that dwarfed those they remembered, and stood in more chaotic configurations. Not a single one of them was broken by a single window.
The door swung shut, and clicked. Zanna tugged it: of course it was locked. The building they’d emerged from soared into a sky glowing a peculiar glow.
“Maybe that room’s, like…a train carriage…” Deeba whispered. “And we’ve come down the line…and…and it was later than we thought…”
“Maybe,” whispered Zanna doubtfully, trying the door again. “So how do we get back?”
“Why did you turn it?” Deeba said.
“I don’t know,” said Zanna, stricken. “I just…thought like I had to.”
Holding each other’s arms for comfort, peering everywhere wide-eyed, Zanna and Deeba crept into the passageways between the walls.
“I’m calling Mum,” Deeba said, and took out her phone. She was about to dial when she stopped, and stared at the screen. She showed it to Zanna. It was covered in symbols they’d never seen before. Where the reception bar usually was was a sort of corkscrew. Instead of the network sign was a weird pictogram.
Deeba scrolled through her address book.
“What’s that mean?” said Zanna.
“Those aren’t my friends’ names,” whispered Deeba. Her phone’s contact list contained random words in alphabetical order. Accidie, Bateleur, Cepheid, Dillybag…
“Mine’s the same,” said Zanna, checking her own. “Enantios? Floccus? Goosegog? What is that?”
Deeba dialed her home number.