A Box of Nothing

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Authors: Peter Dickinson
two of the great gulls. When James was allowed out for exercise he would look at their grey, bedraggled plumage and their yellow untamed eyes. For some reason they gave him a kind of hope.
    The worst thing wasn’t the food or the loneliness or the cruel guards or the big flies flocking around like pigeons—it was the ants. Red ants, a foot high. The rats used them as guard dogs. They could bite with their huge jaws and they could spit burning acid. A guard, on purpose, put a drop of the acid on James’s skin to warn him how much it hurt. It hurt, all right. The ants lived in a great nest under the camp, which meant that there was no hope of tunnelling out.
    No hope of escape, not by any ordinary means. No hope at all. Everything had gone wrong, just when it seemed to be going so right. James kept remembering the brilliant morning when the airship had floated over Rat City and he had looked down on this very camp, off on the expedition with the Burra to find what was wrong with the Dump. Sometimes he wondered if he hadn’t in fact found what was wrong, here, this foul camp. That was wrong, wasn’t it? In moods like this, when he was sure the guards weren’t watching, he would take his box of nothing out and turn it over and over, looking for clues to how it opened. If he could only find the secret, then perhaps the nothing would come flooding out and swallow the whole terrible camp, and Rat City, and the Dump, and James would be back outside the fence with Mum shouting at him. But somehow he knew that wasn’t the answer. The camp was wrong, yes, but it was only an effect, not a cause. The cause was somewhere else, and he had to get there. Then, perhaps, the box would be ready to open.
    He made scratches in a secret place on the wall behind his mattress to help him count the days. On the twelfth morning, before it was light, there was a lot of squeaking and scurrying around, and the oatmeal stuff was shoved through the door earlier than usual, and then James’s guards made him sweep his hut clean and fold his blanket into a neat square and then go and stand in the space between the gulls’ cage and his hut.
    He waited for hours in the icy dawn while all the other prisoners were brought out and made to stand in lines. It was a sort of parade. At last, when the sun was up and James was just beginning to stop shivering, he heard a shrill fanfare of rat trumpets. The rat anthem blared from the camp loudspeakers and the guards strutted up and down with truncheons, beating any prisoners they thought weren’t standing properly at attention. Several hundred smart rat soldiers marched into the space opposite the prisoners, stood at attention, and presented arms. A big open car rolled into sight, driven by a chauffeur with an armed guard beside him. In the back seat lolled a small grey rat wearing an enormous cap covered with gold braid. It was General Weil.
    The general got out of the car and inspected his soldiers. Senior officers walked respectfully behind him. He crossed the space and began to inspect the prisoners, not really bothering to look at them but chatting over his shoulder to the officers, who answered with smarmy rat snickers. Sometimes the general rubbed his paws together or smoothed his white whiskers. James guessed he was really enjoying himself, strolling around like this in front of his prisoners. A bit like Granddad taking people around his garden.
    When the general reached the gull cage he stopped. This was what he had come for. He looked fiercely at the gulls and began to squeak. Soon he was jumping up and down in excitement, the way all the rats seemed to, only more so. He shrilled and spat until there was froth on his whiskers. He was terrifying, a mad little old rat who could do what he liked with everyone. With James.
    At last he moved on. He was probably still in a bit of a daze after using all that energy yelling at the gulls, because he went straight past James without

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