Archer's Goon Read online

  During the night the set of drums the Goon had carried into the hall started to boom softly. Most of the family would not have noticed had not Catriona been so sensitive to noise. She woke everyone up three times, getting up and going downstairs to slacken them. She thought they must be vibrating to the traffic outside. But they continued to give out a gentle humming throb. Catriona got up again and padded them with handkerchiefs. She got up again and filled them with socks. Finally, she woke everyone up for a fifth time by going and hurling all the spare blankets over them, with a mighty BOOM. Even then, she claimed, she could still hear them throbbing.

  “Your mother spent the whole night listening to her own ears,” Quentin said irritably, shuffling into the kitchen with his hair on end and his eyes half-shut. “Where are my emergency supplies of tea?”

  “Your paunch is sticking out of your pajamas,” Awful said. “The Goon did them.”

  “It was that Goon that last touched them.” Fifi yawned.

  “What have I done to deserve Awful?” Quentin demanded. “Fifi, forget the Goon and save my life by giving me some tea. Everyone forget the Goon.”

  Howard willingly forgot the Goon. He went to school and spent the day happily designing spaceships. He forgot the Goon so completely that it was a real shock to him when he came out of school with his friends at the end of the afternoon and found the Goon towering like a lighthouse on the pavement outside. The Goon saw Howard. Recognition came over his little face in slow motion. He turned and came wading toward him above the crowd. Howard went suddenly from being the one who stuck out above the crowd to feeling frail and weak and knee-high. He looked around for help. But all his friends, finding themselves in the path of the Goon, had quickly thought of things they needed to do elsewhere. Somehow they were gone, leaving the Goon towering above Howard.

  “Came back,” the Goon pointed out, grinning as he loomed.

  “So you did,” said Howard. “I almost didn’t notice. What do you want now?”

  “Those words,” the Goon said. “They’re no good.”

  “What do you expect me to do about it?” said Howard.

  “Your dad home today?” asked the Goon.

  “Yes,” said Howard. “I think so.”

  “Go there with you and tell him,” said the Goon.

  Since the Goon was not a person you contradicted, they set out side by side. Howard said resentfully, “Why do you have to go with me? Can’t you go by yourself?”

  The Goon’s little face grinned down at him from beyond the Goon’s huge shoulder. “Not scared of me,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I am,” said Howard. “Just seeing you makes me feel ill.”

  The Goon grinned again. “Tell you things,” he said enticingly. “About Archer and the rest.”

  “I don’t want to know,” said Howard. But he found himself asking anxiously almost at once, “Is Archer annoyed the words are no good?”

  The Goon nodded and looked triumphant. “Like me really,” he said smugly.

  “I don’t like you. Nobody could,” said Howard. “What will Archer do?”

  “Send me,” said the Goon.

  “Are you going to make trouble for Dad today?” Howard asked.

  “Maybe,” said the Goon.

  “In that case,” said Howard as a sort of experiment, “we’ll go somewhere else.” He turned around and walked the other way. The Goon turned around and walked beside him. “Where shall we go?” said Howard.

  “Want to see Archer? Or one of the others?” the Goon offered.

  “Let’s see Mr. Mountjoy,” said Howard, not really meaning it.

  “All right,” the Goon said equably.

  Considerably to his astonishment, Howard found himself walking briskly to the center of town, up Corn Street and along High Street, with the Goon towering beside him. They came to the Town Hall and climbed the steps briskly, just as if they had real business there. Someone will stop us soon, Howard thought. They pushed open the big door and entered a wide marble hall. Howard thought he saw out of the corner of his eye some men in uniform who could have been policemen, but when he looked, they seemed to have melted away, just as his friends had. His footsteps and the Goon’s rang briskly through the hall as they went to a window marked “Inquiries.” There was a rather fierce-looking lady sitting at a desk behind the window. Before Howard could speak to her, the Goon found a door beside the window. He calmly tore it open and loomed over the fierce lady’s desk.

  “What do you want?” asked the lady, tipping her head back ungraciously in order to see the Goon’s face.

  The Goon smiled affably. “Mountjoy?”

  The lady was one of those who take pleasure in denying people things. She took pleasure in saying, “Mr. Mountjoy doesn’t see casual callers. You have to have an appointment.”

  The Goon said, “Extension six-oh-nine. Where’s that?”

  “Over in the housing department,” said the lady. “But—”

  “Where’s that?” said the Goon.

  “But I’m not telling you,” finished the lady.

  The Goon jerked his head at Howard. “Go and look for it,” he said.

  “You can’t do that!” the lady said, scandalized.

  The Goon took no notice. He just marched out of the room and across the marble hall to the marble stairs, and Howard hurried behind. The lady shouted after them. When that did no good, she came to the door of her office and shrieked, “Come back!”

  Howard very much wanted to come back by then. When the Goon stopped a few stairs up, he hoped they could go away now, before they got arrested. But the Goon simply called across the empty space to her, “Mountjoy?”

  “I’m not telling you!” shrieked the lady. “Come back!”

  The Goon jerked his head to Howard again, and they went on up the stairs. The next twenty minutes were the most harrowing ones Howard had ever spent. The Goon, smiling his daft smile, simply walked calmly into every room they came to. They went into offices, filing rooms, planning rooms, committee rooms, reference rooms, private rooms, and public rooms. Howard kept thinking: We’ll be arrested soon! We can’t do this! And certainly from time to time, agitated people no bigger than Howard did seem to try to bar the Goon’s way; but either the Goon smiled his daft smile at them and put them aside, or he said, “Mountjoy?” and when they shook their heads, he went on. Most people melted away before the Goon got that near.

  Like a Centurion tank through butter! Howard thought, hazy with embarrassment. The Goon went, and Howard followed. One room with a large table and a carpet actually had a committee meeting in it, twelve or so people sitting at the table. As the Goon marched in, a man in a dark suit said angrily, “This is the highway board, not a public thoroughfare!” The Goon smiled his daft grin at the man, spotted a door across the room, and homed on it in great strides over the carpet. The angry man picked up a telephone and started to talk indignantly into it. This time, Howard thought as he pattered after the Goon, we shall be arrested! He was so embarrassed by then that he hoped it would be soon.

  But the Goon seemed unstoppable. He took Howard up some more stairs and then strode down a long corridor with frosted windows, which evidently led to another wing of the Town Hall. He tore open the door at the end. Inside, there was a chain of offices, where people were typing at desks or walking about, consulting plans of buildings. The Goon turned his grin on Howard. “Getting warm.” He marched down the chain of rooms, and Howard followed, past the usual small people trying to stop them and the usual indignant faces, and made for a door at the end. A notice on it read “M. J. MOUNTJOY.” The Goon’s huge hand tore this door open, too. The man inside looked up with a jump.

  “Here you are,” the Goon said to Howard. “Mountjoy.” He beamed proudly at Mountjoy, as if Mountjoy were treasure and the Goon had dug him up.

  “That is my name,” Mr. Mountjoy said. He looked uncertainly from the Goon to Howard in his school blazer, with his bag of books hung from his shoulder. His eyes went to the
tape with which Howard had mended the rip the Goon had made in the bag and then back to the Goon. It was clear he thought they made an odd pair. Mr. Mountjoy himself wore a neat dark suit. He was largish and plumpish, with smooth hair and large, shrewd eyes. It was exactly the kind of man Howard had imagined to go with the smooth, rumbling voice on the telephone.

  “Talk to him,” the Goon said to Howard.

  “Er—” said Howard. “My father’s Quentin Sykes—”

  Before he got any further, the open door behind them was crammed with anxious people, who all wanted to know if Mr. Mountjoy was all right. They liked Mr. Mountjoy, and they wanted him safe. Howard felt more embarrassed than ever. Several of the men wanted to know if they should turn the Goon out. The Goon turned and looked at them as if this were a very surprising notion. Not so much surprising as impossible, Howard thought.

  Mr. Mountjoy straightened his sober tie uneasily. “I’m quite all right, thank you,” he said in a soothing rumble. “Please shut the door. Everything is under control.” But as the people crowded out of the room, Howard distinctly heard Mr. Mountjoy add, “I hope!” When the door shut, he eased his tie looser, and his eyes went to the Goon, fascinated. “You were saying, young man?” he said to Howard.

  “Why do you really make my father send you two thousand words every three months?” said Howard.

  Mr. Mountjoy smiled. “I don’t make him do it, young man. It’s just a friendly device I thought of to keep him from drying up again.” The smile was sincere, and the voice such a friendly, soothing rumble that Howard felt thoroughly ashamed of asking. He turned to go away.

  “Not true,” the Goon remarked pleasantly.

  Mr. Mountjoy gave the Goon an alarmed, fleeting look. “But it is. Quentin Sykes hadn’t been able to write anything for nearly a year after his second book came out. I liked the book, and I was sorry for the man, so I hit on a way to get him going again. It’s a sort of joke between us by now.”

  “Not true,” the Goon remarked, less pleasantly and more firmly.

  That changed Howard’s mind. “No, I don’t think it is,” he said. “If it’s a joke, why did you stop all the water and electricity in our house one time when he didn’t do the words?”

  “That had nothing to do with me,” Mr. Mountjoy said sincerely. “It may well have been a complete coincidence. If it was my superior—and I admit I have a superior—then he told me nothing about it at all.”

  “Was it Archer who did it?” asked Howard.

  Mr. Mountjoy shrugged and spread his plumpish hands toward Howard, to show he knew nothing about that either. “Who knows? I don’t.”

  “And what does Archer do with the words?” said Howard. “Who is Archer anyway? Lord mayor or something?”

  Mr. Mountjoy laughed, shook his head, and began spreading his hands again, to show he really did not know anything. But before his hands were half-spread, the Goon’s enormous hand came down from behind Howard’s shoulder. It landed across Mr. Mountjoy’s gesturing hands and trapped both of them down on Mr. Mountjoy’s desk. “Tell him,” said the Goon.

  Mr. Mountjoy pulled at his hands, but like Awful before him, he found that made no impression on the Goon at all. He became hurt and astonished. “Really! My dear sir! Please let me go.”

  “Talk,” said the Goon.

  “I deplore your choice of friends,” Mr. Mountjoy said to Howard. “Does your father know the company you keep?”

  The Goon looked bored. “Have to stay here all night,” he said to Howard. He propped himself on the fist that was holding down Mr. Mountjoy’s hands and yawned.

  Mr. Mountjoy gave a strangled squeak and struggled a little. “Let go! You’re squashing my hands, and I’ll have you know I’m a keen pianist!” His voice was nearly a yelp. “All right. I’ll tell you the little bit I know! But you’re to let go first!”

  The Goon unpropped himself. “Can always do it again,” he told Howard reassuringly.

  Mr. Mountjoy rubbed his hands together and felt each of his fingers, morbidly, as if he had thought one or two might be missing. “I’ve no idea what Archer wants with the blessed words!” he said peevishly. “I don’t even know if it’s Archer I send them to. All I’ve ever heard is his voice on the telephone. It could be any of them.”

  “Any of who?” Howard said, mystified.

  “Any of the seven people who really run this town,” said Mr. Mountjoy. “Archer’s one. The others are Dillian, Venturus, Torquil, Erskine, and—What are their names? Oh, yes. Hathaway and Shine. They’re all brothers.”

  “How do you know?” demanded the Goon.

  “I made it my business to find out,” Mr. Mountjoy said. “Wouldn’t you, if one of them made you do something this peculiar for them?”

  “Shouldn’t have done,” said the Goon. “Won’t like that. Know. Working for Archer.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” Mr. Mountjoy said. “I concede that you may not have much brain. You don’t appear to have room for one. But this is an odd place to be if I work for Archer, too.”

  “Doing him a favor,” said the Goon, pointing a parsnip-sized thumb at Howard. He said to Howard, “Know I’m your friend now. Want to know any more?”

  “Um—yes,” said Howard. “How does he send the words to whoever it is?”

  “I address them to a post office box number and send a typist out to post them,” said Mr. Mountjoy. “I really know nothing more. I have tried to find out who collects them, and I have failed.”

  “So you don’t know how this last lot went missing?” said Howard.

  “It never reached me,” said Mr. Mountjoy. “Now do you mind taking your large friend and going away? I have work to do.”

  “Pleasure,” said the Goon. He put both hands on the desk and leaned toward Mr. Mountjoy. “Tell us the back way out.”

  “I bear you no malice,” Mr. Mountjoy said hastily. “The door at the end. Marked ‘Emergency Stairs.’” He picked up a folder labeled “Center development: Polytechnic” and pretended to be very busy reading it.

  The Goon jerked his head at Howard in the way Howard was now used to and progressed out into the offices again. Heads lifted from typewriters and frozen faces watched them as they progressed right down to the end of the rooms. Here, sure enough, was a door with wire mesh set into the glass of it. “Fire Door,” it said in red letters, “Emergency Stairs.” The Goon slung it open, and they went out onto a long flight of concrete stairs.

  The Goon raced down these stairs surprisingly quickly and quietly. Howard’s knees trembled rather as he followed. He was scared now. They kept galloping down past other wire-and-glass doors, and some of these were bumping open and shut. Howard could see the dark shapes of people milling about behind them, and at least twice he heard some of the things they said. “Walked straight through the highway board!” a woman said behind the first. Lower down, someone was calling out, “They went up that way, Officer!” Howard put his head down and bounded two stairs at a time to keep up with the Goon. Scared as he was, he was rather impressed. The Goon certainly got results.

  At the bottom of the stairs a heavy swing door let them out into a backyard crowded with gigantic rubbish bins on wheels. Here Howard, as he threaded his way after the Goon, remembered to his annoyance that he had forgotten to ask Mr. Mountjoy how Archer—or whichever brother it was—had first got hold of Mr. Mountjoy and made him work for him. But it was clearly too late to go back and ask that now.

  The yard led to a parking lot and the parking lot led to a side street. At the main road the Goon stuck his head around the corner and looked toward the front of the Town Hall, about fifty yards away. Three police cars were parked beside the steps, with their lights flashing and their doors open. The Goon grinned and turned the other way. “Dillian nearly got us,” he remarked.

  “Dillian?” asked Howard, trotting to keep up.

  “Dillian farms law and order,” said the Goon.

  “Oh,” said Howard. “Let’s go see Archer now.”
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  But the Goon said, “Got to see your dad about the words,” and Howard found himself hurrying toward home instead. When the Goon decided to go anywhere, he set that way like a strong current, and there seemed nothing Howard could do about it.

  Chapter Three

  Five minutes later Howard and the Goon turned right past the corner shop into Upper Park Street. Howard was rather glad to see it. He liked the rows of tall, comfortable houses and the big tree outside number 8. He was even glad to see the hopscotch that Awful and her friends kept chalking on the sidewalk—when Awful was not quarreling with those friends, that was. But the thing which made him gladdest of all was to see his own house—number 10—without a police car standing outside it. He had been dreading that. Mr. Mountjoy had only to say who Howard’s father was.

  Dad was in the kitchen with Fifi and Awful, eating peanut butter sandwiches. All their faces fixed in dismay as the Goon ducked his little head and came through the back door after Howard.

  Quentin said, “Not again!” and Fifi said, “The Goon returns. Mr. Sykes, he haunts us!”

  Awful glowered. “It’s all Howard’s fault,” she said.

  “What’s that noise?” said the Goon.

  It was the drums, throbbing gently from under the mound of blankets in the hall. Quentin sighed. “They’ve been doing that all day.”

  “Fix them,” said the Goon, and progressed through the kitchen into the hall. Howard paused to take a peanut butter sandwich, so he was too late to see what the Goon did to the drums. By the time he got there the blankets had been tossed aside, and the Goon was standing with his fists on his hips, staring at the slack and silent drums oozing socks and handkerchiefs. He grinned at Howard. “Torquil,” he said.

  “Torquil what?” asked Howard.

  “Did that,” said the Goon, and marched back to the kitchen. There he stood and stared at Quentin the same way he had stared at the drums.