The Apothecary Page 0,94

to lock you up here.”

“I can explain everything,” the apothecary said. “Officer, please join us for a drink.”

Officer O’Nan shook his head, but I thought he looked longingly at the bottle.

A train was announced over the loudspeaker. While everyone paused to listen, Benjamin sprang from his seat and vaulted over the low metal railing, running for the stairs that led down from the mezzanine. The policemen ran after him. The apothecary dashed away through the other tables.

Pip and I looked at each other. My memory of the exact connection we had to the apothecary was starting to grow hazy.

“What’s going on?” my mother said.

“We have to help them get away,” Pip said.

My mind cleared again, and I remembered that Benjamin had been saying good-bye. Everything in me protested, but I knew Pip was right. We left my parents and sprinted down the stairs, taking them three at a time.

When we reached the tracks, I saw Benjamin pulling his father up into the door of a train that was starting to move. The two policemen were gaining on them. Pip ran ahead and darted between the policemen’s legs, grabbing their ankles, and they all went down in a sprawl.

I dodged around the fallen men and leaped onto the car behind Benjamin’s as the train started to pick up speed. My foot slipped and I clung to the door handle, my feet hanging free over the platform for a few long, dizzy-making seconds. Then I recovered and pulled myself up.

I looked back and saw the policemen on the platform struggling up after their collision with Pip, but then my mother buttonholed them, brushing off their coats, asking if they were all right. She had a hand on Officer O’Nan’s chest, and I could tell she was keeping him from getting up, while pretending to help him. Through my gathering fog I thought how brave and smart she was. Pip was still tangled in the policemen’s legs and loudly complaining. My father leaped onto the train beside me.

The train was full of passengers stowing their bags and finding their seats, and my father and I made our way through them, dodging bodies. When I reached the passageway between our car and the next, Benjamin was crouched on the other side, pouring a liquid out of a vial. There was a strange smoke coming up from the rattling floor, over the couplings between the two train cars, but it wasn’t the orange smoke Jin Lo had used to get us out of the bunker. It was pale grey, with wisps of yellow, and had a sulphurous smell.

“Benjamin!” I said.

He looked up, and his eyes were sad. He stood and pocketed the vial. “We can’t get arrested, Janie,” he said. “You understand, right?”

“Pip stopped the police,” I said. “They aren’t on the train!”

“We can’t take the chance.”

“Just let me go with you!” I was about to step over the grey-yellow smoke, but my father caught my arm and I looked down. The floor was dissolving between our car and Benjamin’s as the metal corroded and started to fall away. The sulphur smell became stronger, and the smoke thicker in the air. I could see the exposed coupling between the two trains, until that started to crumble, too.

“Wait!” I said, not knowing if I was talking to Benjamin or to the floor. It was impossible to take my eyes off the melting of everything that kept the two cars attached. Soon a single cable was all that was left, and finally it corroded and snapped. The front of the train seemed to leap free of its burden, and Benjamin was racing away.

“No!” I said, reaching out, in an agony of regret. My father put his arm around me.

“I’m sorry I put Janie in danger, Mr Scott!” Benjamin called. “But she won’t be, now. She’ll be safe!”

Then the disappearing train was swallowed up in a pea-soup fog, which had settled over the city out of nowhere. The last I saw of Benjamin was a flash of his sandy hair in the doorway of the car.

Our part of the train had come to a noisy stop, engineless and helpless. My father and I climbed down and pushed past the confused people milling about on the platform. Someone said the engineer had stopped the train on the tracks ahead, but I knew that Benjamin and his father would have vanished already into the suspiciously sudden fog. There was no point going after them. We walked back almost a mile