Page 74 of Only a Monster

Someone was emerging from the direction of Charing Cross. She nudged Aaron. Ruth was already looking.

The moon was gibbous, but offered little light. Only the person’s silhouette was visible. Their gait as they passed was eerie—slow and gliding. Joan found herself holding her breath.

New footsteps made them all turn again, toward Parliament. Two more people were approaching. Men in Victorian top hats. And still more people from Horse Guards Avenue.

Big Ben began to sound. It was midnight.

The arrivals were all on foot. Some silhouettes were familiar, some alien—clothes from the distant past, or the future. Monsters.

Aaron’s breath was coming shorter now. He sounded as nervous as Joan felt. She could just see his face, pale grey in the dark.

On Big Ben’s last strike, the world seemed to still. The sounds of London ceased. No cars, no rush of water from the Thames. No insects in the air. Joan craned to look at the horse guards. They were sitting on their horses, still as ever. Terrified? Or had they been frozen in time?

‘Look,’ Aaron breathed. He nodded at the junction between Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall.

At first Joan wasn’t sure if she was making patterns out of nothing, like seeing shapes in clouds. But something seemed to be changing in the junction. Shadows were shifting like smoke.

‘What is it?’ Ruth whispered.

Joan had seen it before—in paintings of old London. ‘It’s the gate,’ she said. ‘It’s the Whitehall Palace gate.’

The shadows solidified into a huge arch straddling Horse Guards Avenue. It was the arch alone, without the palace walls—the bare brick bones of it. Joan stared. Inside the arch, the stars were unaligned with the sky outside. Inside, the moon was full. And framed like a picture was Whitehall Palace, beautiful and whole, before the fire.

A lone figure came into view—on the wrong side of the gate. The figure stepped through, and a male voice rang out, theatrical and baritone. ‘Welcome to the Monster Court.’

A murmur of excitement ran through the crowd. The road in front of the arch was full of people now, and more were arriving. The atmosphere was giddy in pockets, solemn in others. But above all, a strange tension hung over everything. Joan could feel why. Some sixth sense inside her—the monster sense—could feel the timeline straining fruitlessly against this unnatural beast. Whitehall Palace out of its time.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ Ruth whispered. ‘I always heard that the King had power, but seeing it . . .’

Joan scanned the crowd. Aaron seemed to know who she was looking for. ‘Those guards aren’t moving,’ he whispered. ‘If the hero is here, he’s frozen like the other humans. There’s some kind of suspension over everything but monsters. I’ve never seen power like this either.’

‘This is the advantage that we need,’ Joan whispered back. ‘If Nick can’t get in—even with that key—we’ll get the device, not him. Then we’ll just have to figure out how to use it.’

‘One thing at a time,’ Aaron said. ‘We’re not in yet.’ He nodded at the gate, where guards were verifying people’s identities before allowing them through.

Tom had explained how the gate identification would work.

‘There’ll be a guest list at the door,’ he’d said.

‘And you can get us on the guest list?’ Joan had asked.

‘No,’ Tom had said, as if that were a ridiculous thought. ‘The guards have a book of personal marks. That’s the guest list. Guests find their mark in the list and then stamp their chop next to it to prove their identity. But I know for a fact that the guard who checks the marks gets lazy late in the night. So just get into the line late, and then find a mark that’s a near match to yours.’

‘And if we can’t find a near match?’ Aaron said.

‘Then you’ll get found out,’ Tom said. ‘He’s lazy, not an idiot.’

That had presented a problem. Joan didn’t have a chop, and the other two couldn’t leave a record of their real marks at the gate.

Tom had taken them down to a marina where narrowboats and barges with peeling paint bobbed up and down on brown water. His little bulldog, Frankie, had toddled behind him. When her stubby legs had struggled with the wharf steps, Tom had leaned down and bundled her under one arm.

‘The Hathaways live on the canals and the river,’ Ruth had whispered to Joan. ‘This is their territory.’

Muscular men and women had eyed them from boat decks and from chairs set up along the wharf. There’d been a homespun quality to the boats; most had obvious repairs. They’d all had the same symbol, painted on the cabin or as the weather vane: a two-headed hound, growling and black.

Real animals had been everywhere too—lounging on decks and running underfoot: dogs, birds, cats.

Tom had climbed down into a boat at the end of the wharf, Frankie still under his arm. He’d returned with a tray full of chops, the figurines dull and dirty.

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