Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [45]
Benny smiled back at Artie. The truth was, she thought he was rather sweet. ‘We’re going to be home soon,’ he said. ‘Then you can relax and take it easy.’
‘I wouldn’t call it home,’ said Webster, attaching an antistatic earthing bracelet to his wrist and sealing it with Velcro. ‘I’d call it the haunted skyscraper.’ He bent back over his circuit board. ‘And anyhow, we’re going to have to be debriefed by the Cowboy Monster before anyone can relax and take it easy.’
The place that Webster referred to as the haunted skyscraper was officially called the King Building. Or at least, that was the name on the slab of black marble above the main entrance.
The van entered the building’s parking lot and swept past the smeared graffiti and plywood shutters of the ground level. While they parked Benny glanced out at the brightly coloured swirls of graffiti then looked upwards, at the towering black glass of the structure receding into the evening sky.
The King Building had been one of the great seats of corporate power. It had once housed the offices of the Butler Institute.
Benny climbed out of the van and strolled across the wide, empty car park. She felt unsteady, as if she had just completed a long voyage on a boat and finally come ashore. She looked down at her feet. On either side weeds grew tall and green through cracks in the concrete.
The Bowmans had climbed out already and gone round to the passenger door of the van, their matching black pony‐tails swinging from the backs of their baseball caps.
They took the weapons from the cab of the van and turned towards the King Building, without glancing back.
Benny never felt entirely comfortable in the company of the Bowmans and now she hung back, not wishing to travel up in an elevator alone with the couple.
Webster was unpacking his electronics and Artie was taking out the picnic box full of confiscated drugs. Benny waited for them, staring up at the skyscraper, intermittently illuminated by a setting sun that glowed a deep orange‐red behind a dark flow of storm clouds.
Broken windows pockmarked the smooth glass flanks of the building. Inside, the story was much worse. Whole floors had been gutted by fire or rotted by flood. Webster insisted the place had been the scene of a small war and after Benny had seen the bullet holes that laced the walls, she was inclined to believe him.
Mind you, Webster also claimed the whole place was haunted, particularly the old maintenance computer which had once run the building, and in his spare time he attempted to reactivate the dormant software. He described his hobby as trying to make contact with the spirit world.
At least it kept him out of trouble.
The man Webster called the Cowboy Monster was waiting for them in an empty office on one of the floors which had been converted to IDEA use.
Benny felt that his nickname was a bit unfair. It was true that he wore one of those thin black ties that you associated with westerns or oil millionaires, and a ring with a crude skull on it carved from a block of Mexican silver. But he also had a courtly, gentle manner and his heavy Texan accent was leavened with the vocabulary of a polite, scholarly man.
As Benny came into the room he lurched forward, lifting his bulk out of the oversized leather swivel‐chair behind the oak desk. He beamed at her. ‘Welcome back, dear. You’ve returned from the hunt, blooded and triumphant.’ He took her hand, clasping it in his huge fists. The crude silver skull on his ring grinned blindly up at Benny.
‘She wouldn’t have been triumphant if we hadn’t arrived to bail her out,’ said Christine Bowman, taking off her baseball cap and loosening the elastic band that held her