Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘I would,’ said Josh. ‘It was a crap fair. We’re like vigilante justice. And it’s not like anyone was badly hurt. Forget about it. Tell us more about the fountain-speak.’

  After Ryan had reproduced the burbled words as best he could, Josh ran for Donna’s road atlas and flicked to the index.

  ‘Let’s see if it’s a place name, like last time. Sounds like it starts with a “w” anyway. Webb’s Hill . . . Whelmford, that’s the closest we’ve got. Here, look, it’s not far away, it’s only a few miles from Magwhite.’

  Like Magwhite, Whelmford was a small village that lurked on the northern edge of the great sprawl that was Guildley, where the town was just giving way to fields. The village took its name from the little tributary mead which ran through it, connected with the spider’s web of canals round Magwhite and then joined the Eff, the great river which pierced the heart of Guildley, swung south and finally flared into an estuary near Ebstowe on the coast.

  ‘Come on! My chauffeur’ll take us there right now. Oh . . . wait a minute.’ The man behind him had given up on the fruit machine. ‘It wants to,’ Josh muttered. He always said that about fruit machines that he thought were ready to pay out. He walked over, and Ryan watched as Josh’s hand moved from coin slot to button to button. A thick chinking-chunking sound came from the innards of the machine, and coins started spilling out into the little tray.

  ‘Magic,’ Josh whispered. Ryan stared.

  Before playing, Josh had put his hand up to the coin slot at the top. He just hadn’t put a coin in.

  Donna drove them to Whelmford in silence. Ryan noticed that on the parcel shelf was a bag belonging to Josh, which seemed to contain three library books on electromagnetism, an old circuit board and what looked like photocopied diagrams of the inner working of machines. Clearly Josh had been studying his power some more.

  Electromagnetism. Yes, it was an appropriate power for Josh. Magnetism and electricity. Draw people in and spark things off. Not for the first time Ryan wondered if the Well Spirit had given each of them a power to suit their character. Ryan, with his ‘upside-down’ way of viewing the world, was given a new, strange sight. Chelle, unable to prevent anything falling into her brain or out of her mouth, became the mouthpiece for the wishes of others. And Josh of course was the action hero, the one who would make things happen.

  At Whelmford Donna parked, yanking the handbrake so that it grated.

  ‘I have to go back to the office,’ she snapped. ‘I work afternoons on Wednesdays.’ Hearing her voice was shocking after her long silence. Ryan had almost started to think of the new, docile Donna as some kind of animatronic replica.

  ‘You can be late.’ Josh gave a grin like a mantrap, flipped a lever and eased his seat into recline. ‘In fact . . . I kind of like it here. Maybe we’ll sit in the car and digest our food for a bit first.’

  ‘Josh . . .’ Ryan saw Donna’s hands forming fists around the steering wheel and wondered if his friend was pushing his luck. ‘Um, I’m going to take a look for that bridge I saw in the um, you know . . . OK?’

  ‘Catch you up,’ Josh said lazily as Ryan scrambled out of the car followed by Chelle, who was watching Donna with a similar air of apprehension.

  On either side of the little river were wide, tarmac-covered waterside footpaths. There were lots of cleanly painted benches, rubbish bins and signposts with red, yellow and blue spots on them to show where the footpaths went. There was a wire-mesh fence to stop you falling the two feet into the water.

  ‘There it is,’ he whispered suddenly. Before him was the calendar picture bridge the Well Spirit had shown him.

  Chelle walked out on to the bridge. Behind her honeysuckle swayed softly, peach-coloured petals curling like hair. She rested her elbows on the curved iron rail and hunched her sun-freckled shoulders. And then she started to giggle. It was a pleasant, infectious, husky giggle, but it did not belong to her.

  ‘Oh, it’s hopeless,’ she murmured. ‘Just look at it, it’s not moving. But I can’t leave it in the hedge until the next delivery tomorrow – what if it rains?’ The giggling began again and, despite himself, Ryan felt his spirits rising like lemonade bubbles in sympathy. He lifted his eyebrows in question, and Chelle nodded, grinning.

  There was a gate on the far side of the bridge, set into the wall. The sign upon it read ‘Mead Priory – Private’. Ryan joined Chelle on the bridge and peered across at the gate. It was hard to feel shy in the face of the golden giggle they had heard. And in any case, he felt the strangest sense that this place was his. The sun had been waiting and keeping it warm for him.

  A fringe of honeysuckle and some other creeper overgrew the gate, but beyond Ryan glimpsed a gleam of grass and red brick. The creepers were shaking slightly, and a finger of brown paper jutted from the foliage.

  ‘Hello?’ he called out.

  ‘Oh no!’ whispered Chelle in a panicky undertone. ‘Wait . . . oh, I see them on the bridge. Kids. That’s OK then.’

  The honeysuckle thrashed, and then a strong brown hand grabbed a fistful of tendrils and tugged them aside. Through the new gap Ryan glimpsed a pale blue T-shirt and a triangle of shadowed face.

  ‘You’d better go,’ he muttered to Chelle through smiling teeth. Obediently she scampered out of sight.

  ‘Don’t go!’ It was a female voice. Ryan approached the gate slowly. ‘Hi, um . . .’ The curtain of creepers rustled again, and a face appeared. It was a woman, with her hair tied back bandanna-style by an Indian-looking yellow shawl studded with tiny mirrors. Her face was tanned darker than her lips so that they looked pale, but healthy pale. Freckles clustered on her upper forehead and cheekbones, and some of them had melted together. ‘Sorry, but do you think you could just . . . work that antler free your side?’ Ryan could see now that a weirdly shaped parcel was lodged halfway through the thick creeper and that a deer’s antler had ruptured the brown paper.

  ‘Sure.’ He laid careful hands on the smooth, bony cool of the antler and set about trying to work it free. He supposed that it must be a stuffed and mounted deer’s head, until an ill-timed tug pulled the paper around the head loose and he found himself staring into the tiny, peevish features of a rabbit. ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ The husky giggling began again. ‘It’s a jackalope. It’s all right, it’s not real – people a hundred years ago used to glue horns on to stuffed rabbits so that travelling fairs could take them round the country and people would pay to see them. Collectors like them.’

  ‘So you’re a collector?’ What would a collector wish for? A suit of armour? A Fabergé egg? Ryan squinted through the greenery. ‘Try pulling again.’

  ‘OK.’ Tug. ‘No, I’m not really. I buy collectors’ items online and then sell them on again. And usually,’ tug, ‘they leave things in that mail box there,’ tug, ‘but I guess this didn’t fit so they left it on the step and I couldn’t pull it through the . . . woah! Here he comes!’ With a rustle the jackalope disappeared. ‘Thanks!’

  ‘Why didn’t you get them to deliver it at the front door?’

  There was silence and for a moment Ryan thought the woman had gone. When she reappeared at the gap her features were slightly defiant.

  ‘I don’t have one,’ she said simply. ‘I had it bricked up five years ago. And I had the Russian creeper here planted so that people wouldn’t spot the gate unless they knew to look for it. Nobody can find me unless I decide I want them to.’

  Ryan thought of car-park diatribes and painted milk bottles and schoolyard scorn and spluttering billboards.

  ‘That sounds brilliant,’ he said with feeling.

  ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘Mr Jackalope’s shown me something I knew already. I’m going to have to cut all of this back . . . so I can get out if there’s a fire or something.’

  ‘Um . . .’ Think! Think like Josh. ‘Well . . . I’m trying to make some money by . . . helping people with gardening. I mean, it’s been so hot and lots of plants need watering . . . I thought I’d g
o door to door just to ask.’

  ‘Really? Wow, it’d be great to have some help with this . . .’ Again there was a peculiar, slightly defiant hesitation as she sucked at a briar scratch on her arm. ‘Look, I’m getting some new secateurs delivered in a couple of days – if you really wouldn’t mind dropping in after that, we could attack this beast together. What’s your name?’

  ‘Ryan.’

  ‘I’m Carrie. See you soon, Ryan.’

  She waved goodbye with two fingers made fat by her gardening gloves.

  ‘Slick,’ was all Josh said when Ryan got back, but he kept grinning at Ryan until Ryan felt he could fly.

  As they drove back Chelle recounted the few scraps of Carrie’s thoughts she’d heard – most of them related to the jackalope or gardening. Meanwhile Donna clenched and unclenched her jaw as Josh played with the tuning on her car radio without touching it and turned the volume up loud.

  Ryan got home to find that his note was still on the table. He crumpled it and put it in the bin. At dinner his suspicions were confirmed. Nobody had noticed his absence. But it was all right. He munched cauliflower cheese and thought himself to a moated tower hidden by briars.

  It was several hours after dinner, just as everybody was getting ready for bed, that the phone rang. When Ryan answered the phone he scarcely recognized Chelle’s voice. She was almost hysterical.

  ‘Ryan! I don’t know what to do! It was on the local news! It’s Will Wruthers – he’s had a horrible accident on his motorbike, and he’s in hospital, and he’s really badly hurt . . .’

  ‘Where are you, Chelle?’ Ryan could hear traffic in the background.

  ‘I . . . I snuck out and was walking to the hospital to see if they’d let me see him . . . but she followed me, so I hid in the phone behind Basement Bargains and now I don’t dare go out in case she’s there waiting for me . . .’

  ‘Who? Who’s out there?’

  ‘Oh no – she’s coming in, Ryan, she’s—’ There was a squeak from Chelle and some thick wet clicks as if the receiver was being manhandled at the other end. Then he heard a dry, crackling voice and knew that Miss Gossamer had snatched the phone.

  ‘Is that the Lattimer-Stone boy or the Doyle boy?’

  Ryan held his breath. In the background he could hear Chelle’s high, asthmatic yelps for air.

  ‘I know it’s one of you, anyway. I want you to know that I’ve been watching you for a week. I’ve seen the three of you, stealing people’s private thoughts and spitting them out, putting curses on everything around you and wearing the evil eyes your filthy master gave you. Everybody else may think you’re children, but you don’t fool me. You’re nothing but foulness, all three of you, and before you poison another innocent life I shall send you back to the hell that owns you.’ The line went dead with a bang.

  His hands unsteady, Ryan dialled Josh’s number, but there was no response. He sat shaking, the receiver cool against his hot cheek.

  She knows. Miss Gossamer knows everything. Oh, Chelle, why didn’t you tell us?

  Oh. Oh, Chelle. You probably did, didn’t you?

  ‘I’m coming, Chelle,’ Ryan said into the dead receiver and slammed it down.

  18

  Dead Leaves

  Ryan did not care whether his parents heard the door bang. The evening air was cool enough that he huffed out small ghost breaths as he broke into a jog. He felt nothing but lightness and clearness, as if someone had rinsed him out with very cold water. His hands were shaking, and he did not know what he was planning, but somewhere Chelle was gasping for breath.

  He ran four streets before he saw the lights of the hospital with a throb of relief. But, like many big buildings, the hospital pretended to be closer than it was. By the time he saw the gaudy blue and yellow sign above Basement Bargains, there was a stitch like a tear in his side.

  He was not quite sure what he expected – perhaps to find Miss Gossamer had completed her transformation into the mummified cat, slinking off down the street with a squeaking Chelle in her jaws. Instead, on a bench beneath a street lamp he saw Miss Gossamer and Chelle seated side by side. Chelle was stooped over her inhaler, and the old woman’s hand rested gently, reassuringly, upon her shoulder.

  Ryan came to a halt. He had never felt so idiotic. Miss Gossamer wasn’t a monster, and no adult could stay angry when confronted by a timid twelve-year-old going into paroxysms of asthmatic terror. They’d talked, both of them had calmed down, he was as useless as ever.

  ‘. . . and if I’d had a daughter, she’d have been about your mother’s age,’ Miss Gossamer was saying, her words falling light and dry as dead leaves. Ryan didn’t move. He felt that if he stirred he would spoil the tenderness of the moment and crush her sentences beneath his trainers.

  ‘Do you know,’ continued Miss Gossamer, ‘I can sometimes see the granddaughter I should have had. Just about your age. Reddish gold hair, as mine once was, and a turn-up nose like my mother’s. And big grey eyes. Everybody in my family has grey eyes. She’s wearing green satin shoes with a strap. My old party shoes. I’d have bought a pair just like them for her. Freckles on her forehead and hands, because she plays out in the sun all day. She’s a sunbeam.

  ‘And I know if I open my eyes she’ll be there next to me, swinging her legs and smiling up at me. But then I do, and she’s not there.’ The old woman’s voice changed and became a strange leaden bleat. ‘No, you’re there. Instead of my beautiful girl, you. You who have no right to exist. And you’re in her seat.’

  Chelle’s eyes were wide, and her hands shook as she tried to work her inhaler. High, strained hiccups emerged from her throat, along with another sound, a horrible impersonal wheeze. Nothing was over. Nobody was calm.

  ‘The worst of it is, your parents are such good people, and they have no idea what you are. Sooner or later I shall have to tell them of course. I can’t leave good people in a house with something like you. They shouldn’t have to breathe your air. Can you imagine how I dread seeing their faces once I’ve told them everything? Looking at you with fear in their eyes?’

  ‘Chelle . . .’ Ryan’s voice was a feeble rasp. ‘Chelle . . . can’t breathe, Miss Gossamer.’

  Miss Gossamer became very still, and then her hand gently pat-pat-patted at Chelle’s shoulder, as if comforting her.

  ‘The air doesn’t want to be breathed by you, does it? That should tell you something. It’s good air. It knows.’ Her voice still had a hard and horrible tremble in it.

  ‘Miss Gossamer, she’s having an attack!’ Ryan was recovering his own breath now. ‘Please, please, look at her, she – it’s an asthma attack, a bad one, she’s had them before . . .’

  Miss Gossamer looked slowly around at him, and the street light ambered her mummified features. Nothing seemed alive in her face.

  ‘Ryan Doyle. I thought it was you on the line. Your friend Josh would at least have had the courage to say something. You’re the slyest one of the three, though, aren’t you? Nobody suspects poor little Ryan with his ugly glasses . . . and those painful warts of his.’

  She tipped back her head a little, and her eyes were alive after all. Ryan felt his stomach plummet as if he’d trusted his foot to a rotten plank and was now watching the splintered timber tumbling over and over itself as it fell towards black and distant water. And he suddenly knew that Donna Leas had never hated him, and the children at school had never hated him, and that in all the silly violence of rage and spite his parents had never hated each other, because this was different, and this was hate. This had brewed itself to a blackness like ink.

  ‘Only innocents have the right to be treated as real children,’ she said. ‘It’s no good crumpling up as if you’re going to cry. I don’t believe in your tears any more than I believe in Chelle’s asthma.’

  ‘Well, you’d better,’ shouted Ryan, ‘before she starts turning blue and I start yelling for an ambulance.’ His voice sounded deeper and hoarser than he had ever heard it. He had never, never talked that way
to someone older than him. But it was as if Miss Gossamer had torn up a contract between them. If she would not treat them as children, why should they treat her like an adult?

  ‘The hospital is just there, Ryan. If you were really concerned, you’d agree to have all three of us go together. We can have somebody look at your warts while we’re there.’

  Her implied threats set his blood banging in his ears. He held out his fists, knuckles forward, and for once felt a fierce satisfaction as, with a soft rending sensation, his hand-eyes opened.

  ‘These warts?’ He no longer cared if she thought he was some kind of demon child. ‘You don’t know all the things I can do with these, do you?’ Between the stubby lashes that sprouted from his knuckles glimmered the gluey moonstones that were his new eyes. ‘You’d better leave her alone, or you’ll find out.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall call for an ambulance for us all,’ suggested Miss Gossamer, still in a tone of quiet menace. In that instant Ryan’s sneaking hope that some adult would discover the threesome’s predicament and solve it for them died a cold, miserable death. There was nothing at the hospital for them but psychiatry and long wart-eye-lancing needles . . .

  So why was Miss Gossamer keeping her own tone so low? Why wasn’t she calling for an ambulance?

  ‘Yes, why don’t you?’ Ryan said slowly. He could feel his mouth becoming small and rigid, the way his father’s had in the car-park argument. ‘Do it now. I’ll help you. Let’s all have a good yell.’

  Miss Gossamer’s hand slid from Chelle’s shoulder. Deep furrows sank either side of her mouth and trembled, but Ryan didn’t know what they meant. And then she took a deep and bitter breath, stood and walked stiffly away down the street. He had never known how victory felt, this sensation of liquid metal through the marrow of all his bones. His mind was still buzzing with unneeded energy. But he let darkness swallow her and retrieved the inhaler that Chelle had dropped.