The Power of Five Oblivion

Finally, she would prove herself to be worthy of the trust the Old Ones had placed in her. She would deliver the boy to them and she would be rewarded with a life of comfort and luxury away from the stink-hole that the country had become. It had never occurred to her that Jamie would slip through her fingers. She knew that the doors were no longer working. She didn’t think he had anywhere to go.
    Eleanor Strake had reached the end of the road and walked onto the quay. There had been a vicious gunfight here. Nine or ten police officers had been killed – it would seem by one person; a plump, fair-haired boy in his late teens. He was lying on his side, cradling a machine gun. He looked strangely at peace. Briefly she wondered who or what he had been defending. She continued forward and stood on the edge of the black, ugly sewer that had once been a river. There was no movement either way. The water was so dead that it didn’t look like water at all. It must have been years since anyone had seen a fish.
    Could the boy have come this way? Some old woman in the village had said he was in the woods, heading east, and it was always possible that she could have lied. But no sailing boat could have gone far on this oily sludge. If he had tried to leave that way, the police would have already picked him up. For just a moment, Strake felt a frisson of fear. If she failed, if she didn’t find him, what would happen to her? No need to answer that question. It was obvious.
    She turned round and began to walk back into the village, where her private helicopter was waiting. It was still early in the day. She was confident that she would have the boy by lunch.
    But in her haste and in her desire for blood, Commander Strake had made one mistake. Her officers had left no one alive to answer their questions and so she had never learnt that a man who called himself the Traveller had once arrived in the village on a canal boat. Of course, none of them had known that the Lady Jane was still fuelled and working, but even so, had the police asked, they might have noticed that the boat had now gone and that, following the banks of the river with a single, dim light glowing softly at the prow, it had been able to continue all night. It was already sixty miles away, heading south towards London.
    Dead woman walking. As Strake made her way back through the carnage, she waited for the squawk over her radio to say that the mission had been accomplished, that Jamie Tyler had been found. But part of her already knew that it had gone wrong and that the voice would never come.

    Jamie gazed ahead of him, watching the banks of the river as they slid past.
    It had been twelve hours since the escape from the village and for much of the night he had been too wired up, too traumatized even to think about going to bed. He had thought he was safe, at least for a time, but in a matter of hours everything had been turned on its head. First Miss Keyland sneaking into the forest, then the telephone box, the sudden arrival of the police, the flame-throwers and the machine guns – and finally George, standing between them and their attackers even as his own life ebbed away … it had all been too much and it had happened too quickly.
    And then there was the Lady Jane . Jamie had never been on a canal boat before. He’d never even been on a canal, and apart from the Truckee River, flowing in its concrete channel through the city of Reno in Nevada in America, any waterway was a mystery to him. For the first hour he had stood at the stern with Holly while the Traveller stood hunched over the tiller, guiding them through the night. The boat had a single lamp at the front, covered over so as to give as little light as possible, just enough to allow them to see the edges of the river. The engine hardly made any noise, just a deep throbbing, and Jamie wondered if it had been treated in some way too, to muffle the sound. He had found himself transfixed, staring at the dark water. It was like his own thoughts. Better left behind.
    Nobody had said anything for the first few hours after they had left. There was still a chance that the police would overtake them and block their way. It was only when the river had carried them round a hillside, putting a mass of land between them and the village that the Traveller had finally broken the silence.
    “You should get some rest,” he said. “It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”
    “I can’t rest,” Jamie said. He