Organ Music by Margaret Mahy Page A

sockets, hung on for a little, staring out at the world. Then she vanished.
    â€˜Come on !’ yelled Harley again. His voice was thick and strange. ‘I’m going to go to sleep if I don’t move. Come now!’
    Suddenly David realized that papers on the floor were blazing. Winnie Finney had kicked the contents of the rubbish basket into his heater. The basket itself was on fire, and the desk was starting to burn. The room began to fill with smoke, along with a nasty smell of melting plastic. David coughed and spluttered as he turned and ran, smoke following. Behind him the flames leapt higher.
    We’ll never get out , thought David, but suddenly, like blessings from above, overhead sprinklers came on. David toppled himself forward, falling beside Harley. Smoke was curled after him.
    â€˜This way,’ mumbled Harley. ‘Ground floor.’ But he just stood there, doing nothing.
    â€˜Don’t go to sleep!’ yelled David, getting back onto his feet and shaking him. ‘Not now! You can’t! You didn’t drink all that coffee. You spilled a lot of it.’
    Smoke shifted in the air around them. It almost seemed as if Winnie Finney’s ghost was moving in the air around them, anxious to escape. Then David, peering past Harley, made out a shape blurred with darkness, just ahead of them.
    â€˜There’s someone waiting there,’ he coughed. ‘Someone huge!’ David’s heart seemed to stop beating for a moment, but then he remembered. ‘It’s that statue!’ he cried. ‘The door must be somewhere over there.’
    And it was. Moments later they were out of the great white spaceship-building, standing on a street. People were running towards them.
    â€˜Where can we hide?’ hissed Harley, but these people were not interested in them. It was the smoke billowing through overhead windows, the flicker of flames inside the building that had caught their attention. One man saw them, slowed down and stopped.
    â€˜What’s going on? What have you done?’ he asked.
    â€˜We haven’t done anything,’ said David, and for that moment, at least, it seemed quite true. An enormous relief was taking hold of him. It began in the pit of his stomach and moved up through him as if coals inside him were giving out black smoke like the smoke billowing through the second floor windows. Harley fell on his knees and then lay on the ground, and David, feeling the outside world blur and close in on him, tumbled down beside him. Somewhere out in the distance a robot wolf began howling – and then another one. Fire engines must be on the way.

‘Dr Finney – that man Winnie Finney – wasn’t a medical doctor,’ said David’s mother, perching on the side of his bed. ‘He was some sort of engineer specializing in very sophisticated automated machines for use in forestry operations. Unfortunately, something terrible happened to him. He was a widower with one child – a daughter whom he adored – and this poor girl had a faulty heart. She was on a waiting list for a transplant operation, but while she was waiting she died, and apparently her death pushed Dr Finney over the edge, as they say.’
    â€˜Anyhow,’ said David’s father, ‘when that overseas conglomerate bought a share of the Willesden Forest Research Centre, he made contact with some rather peculiar people and, to cut a long story short, began running a very unpleasant business inside the Willesden Research Centre. They operated –’
    David cried out as if the word suddenly horrified him.
    â€˜â€“ I mean they really did operate – sometimes here, sometimes in Australia or Singapore. They had several bases. The medical teams came into the country as tourists, and would wind up at the Willesden Forest Research Centre. Meanwhile, Winnie Finney developed his strange car, and he and Dr Fabrice collected people off the