Treat Your Automobile to Some Lucky Eight Gas.’
It had been an unusually sunny afternoon and the road still felt warm under her feet. She took a look around.
Am I meant to be meeting someone?
There was nothing in any direction, nothing at all. Ruby was about to admit to herself that she had made a mistake when she noticed a manhole cover. She walked slowly over to it and brushed the dust from the cover with her hand. The manhole cover had a company logo on it – a picture of a fly with the words Bluebottle and Larva underneath it. Around the edge was the same repeating pattern as on the card, and there was a number in the middle: 848.
Eight for eight.
She waited, only taking her eyes off the manhole to check her watch. At precisely eight o’clock she began working on how to open the cover.
There was a trick to it, and after only a few minutes she had worked it out: eight turns clockwise, four anticlockwise and another eight clockwise – bingo. With some effort she lifted the lid and peered down into utter blackness.
Ruby Redfort’s one real fear was the small confined space. Not cupboards or tiny rooms, or tunnels she knew her way out of – no, it was the small dark space she had never before encountered… the small dark space with no way out… with no oxygen… that’s what she was scared of.
She stared into the void for five minutes, thirty-two seconds before she got a grip on herself.
Was she really going to come this far and no further? Her instinct told her it would be OK, her body wasn’t so sure. Very slowly she eased herself down into the drain and jerkily pulled the manhole cover over her head. She merged with the dark; no more hands, no more feet – it was as if she had dissolved into black. The panic rose up through her body and started to play its usual tricks on her mind. Her breathing became short and rapid; she felt dizzy and sick.
‘Get a grip Ruby,’ she hissed. There was something reassuring about hearing her own voice spilling out into the darkness. She thought of Mrs Digby – all her life, Mrs Digby had been there to squash her fears and prop up her spirits. If she were here now she would say,
‘Don’t tell me you’re troubled by a little darkness Ruby? Good gracious! You don’t want to be bothered being scared of the dark when there are so many other bigger things to be frightened of – like for example getting to my age and losing your marbles or being run down by one of those city buses with their maniac drivers. These are fears – the dark’s the least of your worries, kid.’
Just thinking about Mrs Digby made Ruby breathe more easily. ‘Mind over matter,’ that’s what Mrs Digby always said and she was right. Ruby had made it RULE 12: ADJUST YOUR THINKING AND YOUR CHANCES IMPROVE.
Actually, it was probably the best rule there was.
Never panic!
RULE 19: PANIC WILL FREEZE YOUR BRAIN. Panic will get you nowhere. Panic can get you killed.
She began to edge forward through the nothingness, and as she moved her senses got sharper. She felt the tunnel getting steadily bigger, and realised that the surfaces were smooth – not gritty as she might expect them to be. It didn’t smell dank; in fact it didn’t really smell of anything. She could feel twists and turns and before long was standing not crawling – yet still there was no light. All sense of time had melted away and she could not accurately say how long she had been down there.
She was hot and tired when she stumbled into what amounted to a brick wall. She felt around her, stretching up and reaching across in all directions but there was no way forward, only back. It seemed the tunnel led nowhere – it had all been for nothing.
Ruby sank to the ground, put her head in her hands and wondered how she was ever going to summon the energy to get herself out of there. How long she sat there she did not know.
A sudden deep shuddering sound as if the earth were on the move.
A blinding light – light as white as the dark was black.
Ruby was jolted to her feet, eyes squinting, heart racing.
And then the voice.
‘So you made it, Ruby Redfort.’
The voice
RUBY KNEW THAT VOICE. It was the voice of the telephone, the voice of the codes and the riddles, but she could not see where it came from.
Slowly her eyes began to adjust and she found that the wall was no longer a wall, and she stumbled forward into an entirely white room.
It was a big room, huge, at its centre an enormous desk. Behind the desk sat a woman; the owner of the gravelly voice. The woman was older than her mother but not “old”. Dressed completely in white, she was elegant and strikingly beautiful, immaculately groomed – although in no way “dolled-up”, as Mrs Digby would put it.
Under the white desk Ruby could see the woman’s feet – she wore no shoes and her toenails were painted cherry red, the only visible colour in the room. She was studying some papers which were spread out across the tabletop, engrossed in these, too busy to be bothered looking up.
A fly buzzed aimlessly around the room.
Ruby wasn’t bad at physics, in fact she was pretty good, but even she couldn’t work out how a space this big could fit into a space this small – it was like she had crawled through a drain and found herself in a ballroom.
‘Wow,’ said Ruby. ‘Your decorators really know how to make a place feel roomy.’
The woman reached for her glasses, then, showing only the merest hint of curiosity, she peered across the desk. She paused before asking in a far from joking tone, ‘Do you know why you are here?’
‘Because you called me up and got me crawling down a tunnel?’ said Ruby.
The woman paused again. ‘Do you know who I am?’
Ruby looked at the desk, then above it at the all-white painting, and then at the carpet on the floor. After some close looking she began to see a pattern in the white mat and gloss paint, and another in the pile of the carpet. The patterns were all made up of the same letters, two letters.
‘LB?’ she said.
The woman nodded, almost smiling. ‘LB is correct. I am in charge here.’
‘And where exactly is here?’ asked Ruby
‘The hub of it all, the hub of intelligence.’
‘Come again?’ said Ruby
‘Well if you must have a label – Spectrum.’
‘Nope,’ said Ruby. ‘Still means nothing to me.’
‘And nor should it,’ said the woman. ‘Spectrum is a secret agency – a very secret agency.’
‘Well,
