Josh raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth slowly, but words did not come. He turned the motion into a stretch-yawn and brought his hands back behind his head.
As he did so, however, Ryan’s thoughts were sliding coolly and cleanly into place. He stood up gingerly and moved to the door.
‘A psychic projection of will,’ he said, a bit more loudly than he’d intended. Everybody else in the room jumped slightly and turned to look at him.
‘It’s something we were practising with Donna . . . it was what you were talking about before, transmitting thoughts, and Donna was having a practice with Chelle because . . . we . . . asked her to. And Donna’s very good at it. Even through a door. And now we don’t know how to turn it off . . .’
Mr Punzell stared at Donna as if he had never properly seen her before. She looked a bit like a rabbit caught in headlights.
‘. . . mustn’t think about big blue eyes . . .’ whispered Chelle. ‘Books! I’ll think about books, there are lots of books on the shelves . . .’
‘Brilliant!’ breathed Mr Punzell. ‘Come here, Donna, look at the books I’m pointing at, and, Michelle, you just keep on talking, let the thoughts flow through you.’ Gently he drew Donna to the nearest bookcase and held the candle up to the shelf.
‘. . . Great Landscape Gardeners of the Eighteenth Century,’ whispered Chelle, ‘A History of the Avant-Garde, The Pioneers of the Bauhaus Movement . . .’ She must have been getting the book titles right, because Mr Punzell kept nodding and swallowing.
‘So blind, I have been so impossibly blind . . . Donna – you were in the house the first time all the lights blew out, were you not? And now again. So much uncontrolled power . . .’
‘. . . what?’ murmured Chelle. ‘Perhaps he’s right, maybe I did, I don’t know . . .’
Mr Punzell suddenly seemed to remember Chelle, and glanced around at Josh and Ryan.
‘You had better take your friend away from here . . . no doubt she will start to recover when she is removed from the Focus of Power. She will probably be very drained, what with having been a channel for another’s psychic energies. I suggest you find her something sugary. And milk, lots of milk.’
Milk was extremely useful, it seemed. Ryan wondered what else it could cure besides radioactivity and psychic strain.
Chelle took her handkerchief from Donna’s unresisting hand and pushed it into her mouth. Then the three children walked from the room, leaving Donna with the face of a sleepwalker, and Mr Punzell resting his fingertips on her temples and looking at her as if she was the most interesting person he had ever met.
They were only halfway down the corridor when Chelle pulled the handkerchief out of her mouth again.
‘Listen!’ she whispered. They listened. They could hear nothing but Mr Punzell’s distant voice.
‘What?’ asked Josh.
‘Listen!’ Chelle sounded as if she was grinning. ‘It’s me! I’m not saying anything!’
It was true. Despite Donna’s proximity, Chelle was no longer spilling out her thoughts. And Ryan became aware that he could no longer make out the others’ faces in the dark corridor. His knuckle-eyes had closed and dwindled once more.
‘Do you think that means that . . .’
‘I think so. I think we’ve done it.’
There was a stuttering brilliance overhead, and all the lights came on, leaving them blinking. Josh was grinning broadly.
‘I think we’ve done it,’ he said again. ‘I think we’re the bloody champions. I mean, Chelle, did you see Ryan? That was beautiful. Ryan, you just appeared out of the darkness, voice booming, with your eyes all big without the glasses and shining in the candlelight, and everybody was like, whooo, demon boy . . .’
‘Oh yes, it was just like that!’ Chelle hiccupped with laughter.
‘And upstairs, did you see that? With the lights?’ Josh extended his hand, and stared at it for a moment. ‘Paff!’ he whispered. ‘Just like that. Did you see? I could get used to that.’ He drew his hand back and spent a few moments staring into his own palm.
14
The Attack of the Harley
Naturally, Ryan’s parents had hated the party, but this had at least put them in a good mood with one another. During the drive home, they laughed at Mr Punzell and were sure that he had arranged for the lights to go out himself.
Lying in bed that night, Ryan ran a finger over his warts. They had smoothed themselves flat against his skin. It always seemed like bad luck to assume the best, so he tried to tell himself that the nightmare of the Well Spirit almost certainly wasn’t over, that granting Donna’s wish couldn’t have been enough. Despite himself though, he could not help hoping that the Magwhite curse had been lifted.
The next morning, having slept deeply and dreamed lightly, he went down and discovered a strange woman on the doorstep, painting faces on the milk bottles.
At first all he could see of her was rounded shoulders covered in mottled indigo velvet and a bush of frizzed black and purple hair. Then she pulled herself up into a squat and showed him a broad-cheeked, white-painted face.
He stood there in his socks and stared. She stared back. The paintbrush in her hand dripped.
‘Oh God,’ she said finally in a flat, hard voice. ‘She has young.’
‘Um . . .’ Ryan’s gaze flitted to the milk bottles, which had been decorated with the shapes of skulls and were wearing little painted collars of feathers and bones like tiny tribal warriors. ‘Um . . . could we have the full cream for Weetabix, please? It’s the one with the gold lid.’
Very carefully, the woman with the paintbrush lifted one bottle and handed it to him. He thanked her, closed the door and took it to the kitchen.
‘Mum, I think Pipette Macintosh is on our doorstep.’ He held up the milk bottle. A light entered his mother’s eyes as she ran from the room. After a few minutes she returned.
‘I missed her,’ she explained. ‘She flew past on her scooter just as I reached the gate. Jonathan, no!’ Ryan’s father paused with his thumb just indenting the foil lid. ‘Nobody is to touch these bottles until I’ve had the chance to study them, and get Gerry to look at them – this looks like some kind of voodoo-curse motif . . .’
‘A terrible curse,’ muttered Ryan’s father. ‘She has doomed the whole household to the smell of bottled cheese.’
It was just after lunch, while Ryan’s mother was happily researching the history of voodoo, that the phone rang.
‘Ryan? It’s Josh. Look, you’ve got to get to the park this afternoon so we can talk. I’m going to phone Chelle in a moment.’ He sounded excited, happy and businesslike. ‘I’ve found out something really cool.’ He wouldn’t explain any further, and as Ryan hung up he could not crush a hope that Josh had noticed his own Well Spirit curse lifting. After all, the crackle on the line had been much fainter than before, and Josh’s voice clearly audible.
The three of them met in the park.
Josh squatted beside the others and took his new digital watch out of his pocket. ‘Watch this.’ Josh held it by its straps and stared at it. His eyebrows twitched, and his breathing became audible. After a few moments the little display changed to ‘alarm set’ mode, and the alarm time counted up through eight o’clock, nine, ten. A beep sounded and it returned to time-display mode. Josh had not touched any of the buttons.
‘I’ve been practising that all night. After I pulled off the light-bulb thing, I thought, I’ve got to see if I can control this. I mean, the well-thing must have given it to me for a reason, right? Ryan, you say that my power looks like great big drips of light oozing all over everything. Fine, whatever. But some of it seems to work like electromagnetism.’ He stared down at his watch. ‘You know I can . . . feel these little contacts under the buttons here, and if I concentrate I can just . . . zap! make something happen between them.’ He laughed quietly and put the watch on his wrist, then looked up at the others. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you two?’
Chelle looked as if she wa
s about to cry. ‘I just thought it was going to be over, because we’d granted a wish, and I thought that was, that was, that was it . . .’
Ryan swallowed and looked at the nearby pond, where silver pearls of water welled in the throats of the lilies.
‘Course it isn’t,’ Josh answered bluntly. ‘We’ve got to grant all the wishes for the coins we took – any idiot can see that.’
‘But we can’t! There’s too many of them, and some of them might have gone to live in Australia or died or something . . . we have to tell somebody, Josh.’
‘Don’t be stupid. There weren’t that many coins. And we’re not going to tell anybody. Look, it’s not so bad. We’ve just been thinking about this wrong, that’s all. We’re not sick; it’s not like we’ve got chickenpox or something. We’ve got . . . powers.’
‘My powers look quite a lot like chickenpox,’ Ryan murmured resentfully.
‘It’s all right for you,’ Chelle chirruped hopelessly, ‘controlling your powers and making bulbs go out, and Ryan can use his to see in the dark, but I can’t control mine and my mum’s already telling everybody what I said to Mr Punzell because she thinks I’ve got a crush on him and it’s sweet and Mrs Gossamer keeps asking me about it, in lots of different ways so I won’t notice . . .’
‘Who says you can’t control it? Maybe you just need to practise like I did, and then you’ll be, like, doing the whole mind-reading thing on anyone you like, but without saying it out loud. Have either of you tried doing anything cool, or have you just been ignoring the weird stuff and hoping it’d all go away?’ He stared from one crestfallen face to the other. ‘Well then, don’t get grouchy just cos I’ve had the guts to try stuff out. C’mon – we need to think about the next wish.’
‘The only other one we know about is Will,’ Ryan pointed out. ‘He’s on the shortlist for the magazine prize – I checked – but they won’t be picking a winner until the motorcycle show tomorrow.’
‘We’ll have to show up and make ’em pick him.’ Josh spread out a battered copy of Silverwing. ‘Look – here’s a picture of last year’s winner. See that lottery-ball-machine-thing next to him? That’s how they picked the winner. And I bet I can make it drop the right ball so Will wins.’
‘I don’t think my parents will let me go to a bike show,’ Ryan muttered, feeling stupid. ‘They’re already afraid I might go crazy and turn into a biker or something.’
‘Biker Ryan.’ Josh collapsed into his silent shaking chuckles. ‘But they’ll let you go to a fête, won’t they?’ he said eventually. ‘Just don’t mention the bikes.’
The day of the motorcycle show was bright and sticky with heat.
They caught a cross-town bus, then followed the signs to the showground.
They heard the show before they saw it. The mosquito whines of motorcycle engines became great tearing grak-grak-grak roars that somehow made the summer sun weigh all the heavier. Revving engines answered one another across the field. The wind itself was warm, and there was a smell of oil, hot dogs and summer grass.
The Golden Oak showground was a broad, blank space of grass often used for funfairs, charity events and summer fêtes. Today the grass was rutted here and there with the thick stripes from tractor wheels and curving zipper-like tracks from motorcycle tyres. Dotted across the grounds were hundreds of motorbikes, with smiling owners who seemed to be enjoying themselves even if they did look very hot in their black or banana-yellow motorcycling jackets. There were some families, the younger children looking bored and miserable amid the heat and noise. A perspiring mime artist, wearing clown-paint, blue pantaloons and a sandwich board advertising the Ebstowe fair, occasionally presented lollipops to children, with a pained-looking smile.
‘Miserable subhumans,’ Chelle said in a low, lugubrious drawl. It didn’t sound very Chelle-like.
‘She’s off again,’ hissed Josh. ‘OK, look about. Wet Will must be close if Chelle’s picking up his thoughts.’
‘You sure, Josh?’ Ryan hesitated. ‘Only . . . it didn’t sound much like Will’s way of talking.’
‘Well, maybe he’s even more depressed than usual today.’ Scanning the crowd, however, they saw no sign of Will Wruthers.
‘The best I can hope for is death by sunstroke,’ said Chelle in a low, bitter, mournful tone. The others looked at her. She shrugged. ‘Even if I fainted in the mud here,’ she continued in the same un-Chelle-like tone, ‘everybody would just trample over me.’ Aware that she was drawing some funny looks, Ryan bought Chelle a toffee apple and she sank her teeth into it to stop herself saying anything else.
‘Hang on,’ said Ryan, ‘I’ll see if I can find him.’
As it turned out, pushing through the crowd involved headbutting a lot of leather-clad elbows. Ryan looked around in vain for Will’s tremulous features and found his way blocked by the sandwich-board clown mime, who wanted to give him a leaflet and a lollipop.
The creamy paint of the mime’s face was smudged with sweat. His eyes were windows into a world full of misery, loathing and despair.
‘Come to Ebstowe Fair for a day of family fun,’ the mime intoned joylessly. It was unmistakably the same voice that Chelle had been using shortly before.
Ryan found his way back to the others.
‘We’ve found another wisher,’ he muttered.
‘Score! But we can’t worry about that now. Look over there, Silverwing magazine’s got its own stand.’ Josh pointed across the field. ‘Let’s head that way and see if we can spot Will.’
As the threesome drew nearer the Silverwing stall Chelle again began whispering to herself anxiously.
‘. . . what am I even doing here? What if Mum phones work and finds out I’m not there? And what if I win? No no I won’t think like that, I won’t win. But what if I do? But then again . . . oh . . . just look at it . . .’
At the front of the Silverwing platform stood the Harley-Davidson Ultra, in all its gleaming, metallic-blue glory. For the first time, Ryan almost understood Will’s obsession. The metal of the Harley bulged and rippled as if it had muscles. This was a motorbike that would slice the horizons in two and find you new ones before you could breathe, all the while leaning easily back on itself as if it wasn’t even trying.
Across the back of the platform ran a row of seats. Will Wruthers sat in the seat at one end, twisting his hands and looking at the Harley.
‘. . . ten minutes until they announce the winner . . .’ To judge from Chelle’s whispers, Will seemed tied up in knots between hoping he won the Harley and hoping he didn’t.
‘There!’
Ryan winced as Josh’s excited elbow caught him in the ribs. Following his friend’s pointing finger, he saw a lottery machine full of balls up on the platform.
Over the next ten minutes the seats started to fill up as the other shortlisted people arrived. When a small crowd had gathered before the stand, a bald man in motorcycle leathers walked on to the platform and tapped the microphone, then started giving a brief intro.
‘Josh . . . how do you know which ball to make pop out?’ Ryan asked under his breath.
Josh bit his lips together and chewed at them.
‘Probably got everybody on the shortlist numbered in alphabetical order. So . . . Wruthers is bound to be last, isn’t it? Number twenty.’
Ryan could almost hear their plan creaking under his feet like a badly built bridge.
The bald man finished his speech, went over to the Harley and let its engine thrum, then returned to the microphone. ‘Now, time for our own little lottery.’ He turned to the machine.
‘Oh please oh please oh please . . .’ whispered Chelle, ‘number sixteen, number sixteen . . .’
‘It’s sixteen, Josh!’ hissed Ryan urgently.
Josh nodded. His mouth was twitching, and Ryan realized that he was mouthing the word ‘sixteen’ over and over again. The ball machine stopped stirring the balls and made a skreeking, grinding noise. The bald man winced then gave the audience a wry smile.
/> Behind him a video screen showing motorbikes curling around a racecourse fizzed with static.
‘Josh . . .’ whispered Ryan warningly. His friend did not answer. Looking up, Ryan found Josh’s face fixed in a pale mask of focused rage, his eyes piercing the ball machine. The backs of Ryan’s hands stung and tickled, and when he dropped his gaze he saw to his horror that his unbandaged warts were a grape-like cluster of bulges, and that their lashes were fluttering as if about to part. Chelle caught his expression and looked downwards too. Her eyes widened. Terrified, Ryan glanced back at Josh, a panicky word on his lips, but suddenly he was looking at his friend through a halo of pale gold, like a blot left on the eye after staring at the sun, and the whole scene seemed too bright.
Nobody else seemed to have noticed. A ball dropped out of the machine into a steel basin beneath, and the bald man stooped for it. The murmur of the crowd hushed expectantly, so everybody heard quite clearly when the comfortable growl of the Harley rose to a deafening roar. Suddenly it bucked its front wheel, and surged free from the grip of the man holding its handlebars.
Will Wruthers’ eyes widened as the Harley bounced off the ball machine with a deafening crack and careered towards him. He pulled his knees to his chin and flung his arms around his head. A metallic clang, a chorus of screams, and the Harley roared over the back of the platform. Will’s seat was no longer there. Will was no longer there.
‘Josh,’ Chelle breathed aghast, ‘I think you’ve killed him . . .’
Josh said nothing. He was breathing heavily. His face held no expression at all. Ryan noticed that a ball had rolled to rest against the microphone on the platform. It had ‘16’ printed on it. The ball that sat forgotten in the bald man’s hand seemed to be number eleven.
The threesome let the surge of the crowd carry them forward and then stood staring at the prone figure of Will Wruthers. The Harley had knocked him clean off the back of the platform. He was still tangled in his fallen chair, and displayed no signs of life.
Verdigris Deep Page 10