The Power of Five Oblivion

horizon and the red and green paint simply screamed out: “Here I am!” Why had the Traveller never thought to have the boat camouflaged?
    We were still moving painfully slowly. At the same time, the flies seemed to have spread out, filling the sky. The Traveller was standing in front of me, his face set, his hands gripping the tiller. Jamie and I were next to him. I resisted the temptation to crawl back inside the cabin and hide, even though the three of us were obvious targets, standing on the flat platform with the bulk of the boat stretching out in front of us. I could see the entrance to the lock. The high walls would hem us in, concealing us … if only we could reach them in time. The fly-cloud had become an arrow. In a few seconds it would be directly overhead.
    The Traveller pulled the tiller. The Lady Jane twisted round and entered the lock. Suddenly there were tall, slimy walls on both sides. I could smell damp and decay. In front of us, water splattered through the gap where the gates met. I heard the engine roar and realized that the Traveller had pulled the throttle into reverse. Even so, we were moving too quickly. There was a loud crash and I was almost thrown off my feet as the bow of the boat hit the gate. Without being asked, Jamie reached forward and twisted the key, turning the engine off.
    It seemed like we were in an oversized grave. Water splashed and trickled down all around us. The walls, with their dark brickwork, rose up nine or ten metres and I was sure they would conceal us from anything … provided it didn’t come too close. None of us spoke, not so much as a whisper. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and knew that this was a different sort of fear from anything I had ever felt. My world had been invaded by something that couldn’t possibly exist. I took a deep breath, then looked up. The little slot of sky that I could see was clear. The fly-soldiers seemed to have wheeled off in another direction. We hadn’t been seen.
    We didn’t move for a few minutes. Then Jamie climbed onto the roof and up a ladder set in the side of the lock. I followed him. We had to close the gates behind us, fill the lock with water, then open the gates ahead. I looked back in the direction we had come and saw the cloud of flies, already half a mile or more away, disappearing into the distance.
    “That was close,” I said.
    Jamie nodded. “They’ll be back.”
    And London was still miles away.

THIRTY-SEVEN
WELCOME TO
LITTLE MOULSFORD
    There was no way round the village. The sign was placed right next to the canal and we could see the houses behind it, neatly arranged around a green that was so well tended that it didn’t look real. The houses themselves were all beautiful too. Shrink them down and you would be able to buy them in the expensive toyshops I’d once seen in magazines. They were pink and mauve and lilac, with names like Bide A While and Well Barn. And there was a shop selling antiques, a public house and a little gem of a church, not like the one I’d been used to but perfect in every way, with the stained-glass windows intact and the stonework bright and clean. Look at the church and you would imagine the vicar, smiling and benevolent. He would greet everyone every Sunday. And he would know all their names.
    It helped that this was a pleasant day. We had arrived in the afternoon and as always it was cloudy but the sun was doing its best to break through and there was a gentle, warm breeze.
    The Traveller didn’t like it. We were forty or fifty miles from London and this wasn’t the sort of scene he had been expecting. He hadn’t said very much but I got the impression that if Little Moulsford had been a flyblown dump with dead bodies lying at the roadside and weeds everywhere, he would have been able to relax more. It was just too perfect. Nowhere in England was like this any more. And we had to pass right through the middle of it. Worse than that, there were three locks in a row that we had to manoeuvre, meaning that we couldn’t even stay in the Lady Jane . As we opened and closed the sluices, we would be horribly exposed.
    There were people living here. They had heard us coming and a small crowd of them had gathered at the first lock as we approached. There was nothing really we could do except motor forward, trying to pretend that the three of us were on holiday having a lovely time rather than trying to escape from fly-soldiers, violent death and the end of the