Lost Worlds Read Free Page A

those you see in American movies looking like they are only half made, out of wire
mesh and metal struts, with those strange wooden doors that split horizontally in the middle and open up and down on some kind of pulley system, rather than side to side. The lift had brought them
directly up from the door that led off the street – and ‘street’, Natalie thought, was a polite way of describing the narrow cobbled alley where they had parked. The lobby area
where they were now waiting was lined in unpainted brick that was so old the corners were rounded and bits of them were flaking off. This place probably dated back centuries.
    Her eye was caught by a movement above the lift. For a moment, she thought it might be a rat, and she was prepared to utter a dramatic ‘
Eugh!
’ and demand that they left, like,
right away
, but she recognized it as a camera. A closed-circuit security camera. The movement had been the camera rotating so that it was pointed directly at her.
    She turned her back on it, the way she turned her back on anything that didn’t fit into her ideal world.
    A few moments later the door opened.
    The boy standing in the doorway was not what she had expected. He was tall – taller than her, and she was taller than average – and his nose and jaw were so perfectly formed that his
face looked like something from a Greek statue. His hair was collar length and unkempt, but in a ‘can’t be bothered’ way rather than a messy, ‘can’t look after
myself’ way. His eyes were a piercing blue, and he was standing strangely, slumped against the door frame with his left arm out of sight, but what she could see of his torso made her think of
an inverted triangle – immensely wide shoulders and thick arms, a chest that narrowed down to a thin waist and legs that were much narrower than his arms.
    ‘Professor Livingstone,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
    Natalie’s mother smiled. ‘Nice to see you too, Calum. I was in London for a conference, and I had some spare time, so I thought I’d come over and see how you are.’
    Calum was nodding politely, but his eyes were scanning Natalie’s face. She could almost feel a spot of heat where his gaze touched, and she had to fight hard to maintain a steady,
challenging stare back at him.’
    ‘You brought your personal assistant?’ Calum asked.
    ‘No, I brought my
daughter
. Calum Challenger, meet Natalie Livingstone.’
    ‘I suppose you’d better come in,’ he said. He turned round clumsily, and Natalie saw that the arm that was out of sight behind the door frame was actually reaching up above
Calum’s head and holding on to a leather strap that had been screwed into the ceiling. As her eyes grew used to the dim light within the apartment, she saw that there were similar straps
– like the ones she’d seen on buses, on the rare occasions she’d had to catch a bus – hanging in a regular pattern all the way across the room.
    Just at the moment her mind worked out what they were for, and her lips formed an unplanned ‘You have to be
kidding
!’, Calum Challenger reached out with his right hand for
another of the straps, and begin the process of swinging across the apartment, obviously expecting them to follow.
    That, she thought as she watched him move away from them, would explain the arms and the shoulders. His upper-body strength must be amazing.
    ‘Freaked?’ her mother asked softly.
    ‘Getting there,’ she replied.
    Exhausted, hot and sweating, Gecko swung in from the fire escape through the window into his flat.
    It wasn’t the main window, of course. He kept that closed for security reasons – burglary was a common problem in south London. He swung in through the smaller window on the top
– the one he kept open for ventilation. It was barely large enough for a cat to get through, let alone a burglar, but he knew that if he came down the fire escape fast enough, grabbed the
right metal strut in the right place, swung