Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘Well,’ Ryan continued carefully, ‘after that I . . . went back to Magwhite . . . in my dream . . . to talk to the Well Spirit.’

  ‘What?’ He could feel Josh staring at him. ‘You went and talked to her again without asking us?’ Ryan’s cheeks were tingling, as if Josh’s anger was heat from an open oven door. ‘Did you tell her we weren’t working for her any more? Is that what you’re saying? That had better not be what you’re saying.’

  ‘No . . . I didn’t exactly. I just . . .’ Ryan swallowed, hearing the defensiveness in his voice and feeling his carefully prepared arguments crumbling into apologies. ‘I just told her about the latest revenge wisher, and told her that we . . . we couldn’t do anything for that one. I mean, I only went to talk to her because it seemed like an emergency.’ He looked quickly to Chelle for support. Say something Chelle say something . . . ‘You didn’t hear this new wisher the way we did . . . It was all about wanting blood, and it wasn’t just a joke or a turn of phrase . . . it was about real, to-the-death revenge. So if that’s their wish, we’re screwed, aren’t we? I mean, the fair was an accident, we didn’t know we were meant to destroy it. That’s not the same as hunting somebody for revenge in cold blood. I told the Well Spirit we couldn’t do that, because, well, we can’t, can we?’

  Josh leaned back on to his elbows. There was a pale flicker of his eyelids behind his glasses.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  Ryan could almost hear his own mind snap like a blob of bubble wrap.

  ‘Because . . . we can’t,’ he bleated helplessly, unable to think of anything else to say. He glanced at Chelle in desperation. He had expected her to back him up. But Chelle seemed to have chosen this of all moments to learn the art of silence and was watching him round-eyed over a fence of her own fingers.

  ‘Why not? Has it crossed your mind that maybe whoever it is might deserve it? Anyone who gets themselves hated that much probably asked for it.’ Josh picked up Ryan’s T-shirt by the sleeves and danced it to and fro before him. ‘Angels, right? Angels don’t just go around giving soup to the poor or singing over dead people. Angels avenge. Flaming swords. You know, mercy and justice.’ Josh grinned again suddenly and rumpled the T-shirt up around the neck-hole, then leaned forward and pulled it over Ryan’s head so that it sat round his shoulders. ‘It’s not going to be a big deal, Ryan. Get a grip – we’ve got transport and money now, we’ve got a plan, we’re getting the hang of our powers. Everything’s on the up.’

  ‘No,’ said Ryan, feeling ridiculous with the T-shirt around his neck. ‘No, it’s not. It’s really not. Nothing – nothing is on the up, Josh. Everything’s getting worse.’ He stared down at his hands and found them tensed and half-curled, as if trying to control his struggling thoughts. ‘It’s all wrong. Everything . . . just . . . tastes . . . wrong.’

  Chelle gave a sick little hiccup of a panicky giggle, then choked it by pushing her fingers in her own mouth.

  ‘To begin with,’ Ryan was still staring at his hands, ‘I think there’s something wrong with what we’re doing. I mean . . . yesterday Miss Gossamer was talking like we were some kind of evil force destroying people’s lives, and the worst thing is . . . she’s kind of right, isn’t she? Will’s in hospital, we broke the fair so lots of people got hurt and lost their jobs, and—’ he took a deep breath – ‘Donna’s got her Mr Punzell but she’s having to lie to him because she’s . . . being blackmailed . . .’

  ‘OK, Ryan.’ Josh leaned forward again. ‘Big fat news of the world: people are stupid. And they want stupid things. And it’s not our fault.’

  ‘Another thing,’ Ryan continued doggedly, ‘our plans don’t . . . work, do they? I mean, each time they turn out all right, but not the way we expect. Something is making things happen, kind of helping us along in a twisted way, and I think it’s the Well Spirit. I think, I think there’s something really wrong with her that we haven’t worked out.’

  ‘Something wrong with her? What, aside from her not being human, and visiting your dreams, and puking water out of her mouth and eyes, and changing us to give us powers?’

  ‘They’re not powers,’ Ryan added firmly. ‘You say we’re getting the hang of them. But that’s not “getting better”, Josh, that’s getting worse. I think we’re still changing.’

  ‘And so?’ erupted Josh. ‘So you’re going to do what? Tap your heels together three times and say, “I don’t like it, make it all go away, I don’t want to play any more?” What are you – five? You were the one that promised her we’d grant the wishes in the first place. Do you remember that? So no, Ryan, you don’t get to back out because it isn’t fun and leave us to do your dirty work. You get to stick at it with the rest of us.’

  Ryan felt as if Josh had him pinned against the portcullis in his head and was trying to push him through it. He felt as if he had two wills. His everyday conscious will squirmed to and fro, trying to find a way to agree with Josh and calm him down. But the second will was the portcullis, and it would not budge. No, this doesn’t happen, we don’t do this.

  ‘I didn’t just mean me,’ he said, very quietly. ‘None of us should be doing this.’ He reached up, knowing that he was going to push well beyond Josh’s patience, and pulled the T-shirt off himself. ‘And I’m not saying I know what’ll happen if we stop obeying the Well Spirit. But anything’s got to be better than this. We’re snooping into people’s lives and messing them up.’

  ‘Yeah, well, how come it’s not a problem when your mum does that?’ Josh glared back into Ryan’s shocked face. The tearing sensation that Ryan had felt when he watched Josh staring with hate at his mother was more intense than ever. ‘I mean, that’s why your parents are splitting up, isn’t it?’

  There was a rushing sensation, like the flood of wind at the wall above the dream Magwhite, and then somebody hit Josh. They didn’t do it very well. Josh was up on his knees in a second and Ryan felt his nose sting and his eyes fill with water as Josh’s arm knocked him across the face. It wasn’t . . . he tried to say, and I didn’t . . . But, he realized, it was, and he had, and indeed he was still trying to hit Josh, though more feebly now that the bigger boy was kneeling on his chest. His glasses were somewhere in the grass. He wanted to give in, curl up, but somehow he was still kneeing Josh in the back as hard as he could, while occasional blows struck his head above his shielding arm.

  ‘I’m telling you for your own good,’ Josh was saying over and over, through clenched teeth. Ryan’s left ear turned to fire as a stray blow struck home. ‘They won’t warn you, will they? You know what they’ll do? They’ll take you out some day and buy you a computer game and take you to McDonald’s and when you’re happy and think everything’s OK then they’ll tell you. You got to prepare yourself. They won’t prepare you.’

  ‘Josh . . .’ Chelle’s voice was a monotonous squeak in the background, ‘Josh . . . Josh . . . Josh . . .’

  Josh rolled off abruptly, and Ryan sat slowly, then stood, shaky and humiliated, his arm still covering his face. He felt as if the anguish of every fight he had ever lost had been combined into a single instant, because this time it had been Josh humiliating him.

  ‘Let him go,’ said Josh as he staggered away. Ryan hoped that Chelle would follow him anyway, so that he could tell her to her pale, timid face that she was hopeless. He’d mainly gone to see the Well Spirit because she had said she couldn’t face granting wishes any more, so why hadn’t she said a word to back him up? But she didn’t follow him, and Ryan didn’t seem to have the energy for anger at that, just a tired, leaden sense of betrayal.

  He unshielded his face and the world was a blur, but he couldn’t go back for his glasses, and he couldn’t bear to use his hand-eyes. He stumbled back to his own house with one hand feeling along the wall, and kerbs playing tricks upon him. When he opened the back door, his parents were waiting for him.

  They took turns to speak in a way that was designed to make Ryan realize that he was in serious trouble. Miss Gossamer had spoke
n to Chelle’s parents after all. She’d told them that she had seen Chelle and Ryan loitering with a gang of much older children up by the hospital, late at night.

  ‘Miss Gossamer tried to kill Chelle,’ said Ryan flatly.

  ‘Ryan,’ said his father without a hint of twinkle in his voice.

  ‘Chelle had a really bad asthma attack, and Miss Gossamer kept on and on trying to frighten her, to make it worse. I brought her here because she was too scared to go home.’ Perhaps it would have sounded more convincing if he could have put some outrage into his voice, but he was too tired.

  ‘Miss Gossamer mentioned that she’d tried to persuade Chelle to go home with her, but that the other children had teased her out of it,’ replied Ryan’s mother.

  ‘There weren’t any other children.’ Ryan sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and touched the tender places above his eyebrows. Unreasonably, he felt that all the years of obeying the rules should mean something, give him a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card just this once. But he had to stop talking the way he was. He had to be reasonable, so that the conversation would be over. He reached deep into his store of mental energy and patience . . . and there was nothing there. Nothing at all.

  ‘What’s wrong with your nose?’ Ryan’s mother asked suddenly. The mum-shaped blur came closer, and he felt his chin being cupped and his head tipped back. ‘Who did this? Was it the older children?’

  ‘Look, there weren’t any!’ Something in Ryan’s head burst, and his voice came out impossibly shrill. ‘She’s lying, OK?’ There was a shocked silence.

  ‘Ryan. I don’t ever want to hear you using that tone again, do you hear me?’ Ryan’s father.

  ‘Why the hell not? You two use it all the time! Do you think I’m deaf or blind or stupid? Do you think you’re protecting me when you don’t tell me what’s going on? Well, you’re not.’

  ‘That’s perfect, that’s just perfect. Now I have to deal with you changing on top of everything else. You choose this time to turn into a teenager.’ Ryan’s mother’s voice was shaking.

  ‘Well, I have to deal with . . .’ with more than you’d understand . . . ‘with mad women on the doorstep painting the milk bottles and voodoo curses and . . . and everybody talking about how my mum goes through people’s bins and messes up their lives. You . . . you can’t do that – picking into people’s most private moments and taking them apart, and making them yours and . . .’

  He turned and bolted blindly for the stairs. Behind him the now-familiar sound of argument erupted. The continents of his world were colliding again with world-crushing force, throwing shards of rock as high as the moon. He felt as if every time his foot struck a step, white fractures were spreading from the impact, shivering the very walls of the Glass House, frosting its floors and showering everyone within with gleaming, deadly dust. He had to force his secret eyes open to prevent himself rebounding off the frame as he reached his bedroom door.

  20

  True Crime

  Ryan surprised himself much later that day by waking up on his bed in his clothes. It seemed impossible that after so many terrible things had happened he could have simply lain back and fallen asleep.

  After painfully inserting his contact lenses, he made his way down the stairs. He felt cold, as if he really had shattered the Glass House that lurked beneath the familiar, leaving jagged unseen holes for the draughts to seep through. He was vaguely surprised to find that the living room was not a mess of wrecked furniture.

  Discovering the house empty left him relieved but a little at a loss. After all he had said, he hadn’t known whether his mother would be dangerously direct, or hurt, or stony, or volatile, but he had at least thought that she would be there.

  On the kitchen table was a little parcel of bubble wrap and sellotape, on top of a note:

  ‘This posted through door at lunchtime, Mum xx.’

  The two crosses were in a different ink. Ryan imagined his mother stopping halfway out through the door, her laptop case in her hand, then nipping back to the kitchen to add the two kisses. Or perhaps her first pen had run out. He unwrapped the package. It held his spectacles, a little smudged but unbroken. He hoped that they had been posted by Josh because that meant on some level they were still friends. Chelle posting them would be just a pathetic apology.

  He fetched himself a bowl and some cereal. It was weird to find that cornflakes existed after the end of the world. Weird, but comforting.

  ‘I’m right and they’re wrong,’ Ryan told the flabby flakes in his spoon. That had a weird sound as well. ‘I’m right and they’re wrong.’ Weird, but empowering.

  ‘I hear that is a popular refrain for those your age.’ Ryan had not noticed his father come into the room.

  ‘You were my age too once,’ was all that Ryan could think of to say.

  ‘Rumours abound to that effect, but have never been proven.’ Ryan’s father hesitated in the doorway. He appeared to be eyeing Ryan as if he was an unexploded bomb. ‘Ryan, do you want to discuss what hap—’

  ‘No . . . maybe. Maybe when Mum gets back?’

  Ryan’s mother would have charged into the conversation, lance held high, but she was not there.

  Where is Mum? Ryan wanted to ask. Has she gone away forever? Is she angry with me? Are you angry with me? Did Miss Gossamer say anything else?

  ‘Can I go to the library?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Yes.’ Ryan’s father stroked back his own hair with an expression of relief mixed with disappointment.

  Walking through the heavy swing door of the Eastgate Library, Ryan felt a sense of reassurance as if coming home. If he was to be able to think clearly anywhere, it would be here. The library had never turned to glass. Hurricane arguments had never swept through its aisles, throwing Ancient History on to the floor with Crime and Religion.

  Only as he passed the reception desk did he remember that last time he had left the library it had been in disgrace. He gave Mrs Corbett the librarian a timorous look, but to his surprise she gave him her usual reassuring smile. Perhaps none of his recent great crimes and outbursts meant anything to anybody else.

  He winced when he saw that the Local Interest section was packed with leaflets for the Crook’s Baddock Festival. The festival was always the last flare of summer before the end of the holidays. It reminded him that the autumn term would start in just over a week.

  Running his fingers over the peeling sticker on the walnut-wood shelves, he remembered Josh asking if there was a ‘psychic-holistic-dippy-hippy’ section. And yes, if he was to find out what was wrong with Magwhite, that would be exactly what he needed.

  Most of the Folklore section was too general, with books on Irish fairy legends, vampires and ghost stories. Some books had indexes, however, so he flicked to the back, looking for ‘well’ and ‘water spirit’ just in case.

  A lot of water demons and monsters seemed to be giant sea-snakes or ‘monstrous wyrms’ who lived in lakes, but one book also had stories of creatures that lived in wells or springs. Beings with nicknames like Jenny Green-teeth, Meg-of-the-Brook or Lady of the Rushes, who spent their time lurking beneath the surface of the water, waiting to drag in venturesome children or young men who approached in answer to the whisper in the windswept reeds. The book said that these stories were probably made up by parents who didn’t want their children playing too near the water. Ryan was less sure.

  Another book with a section on wells was dedicated to Anglo-Saxon and medieval saint legends. There was a long list of wells that had been dedicated to saints, the names of which were mostly strange to Ryan.

  He glanced through the list without much interest, before noticing that one well, sacred to St Bridget, was in a Cornish village with a familiar-sounding name. Checking back to the first book on well legends, he found the village name mentioned again, as the site of a well haunted by a notorious female demon, Mother Leathertongue. He turned the two accounts over in his mind like Lego bricks, trying to work out how to fix them toget
her. Could there be two wells in the same village? If not, how had Mother Leathertongue turned into St Bridget?

  Ryan took the two most useful folklore books to the counter with a feeling of frustration. But what had he been expecting? A volume marked When Well Spirits Attack: A Detailed History of Everything Wrong with Magwhite?

  ‘Mrs Corbett, what’s wrong with Magwhite?’ Ryan asked impulsively. Mrs Corbett looked somewhat jarred at this break from their ritual conversation. ‘It’s just, our parents never like us going there, so I wondered if there was something wrong with it.’

  ‘Well, a lot of people lost their lives there in some very nasty floods many centuries ago,’ she said after a moment’s thought, ‘but I doubt it’s that worrying your parents. Oh now, there was that old business with the well cult . . .’ A pocket of air caught in Ryan’s throat and bobbed with excitement as Mrs Corbett wrote the title of a book on a scrap of paper. ‘Try this – it might have something on it.’

  ‘Is it in the Religion section?’

  Mrs Corbett shook her head.

  ‘True Crime,’ she said, and pointed.

  It was a thin, crinkly little paperback called Real Life Bogeymen, and was broken up into ten short chapters, each on a different notorious criminal or group who had, in their time, caught the fearful imagination of the county. There was a nineteenth-century cobbler who lurked in lonely lanes dressed as an old pedlar woman so that he could waylay errand girls. There was a gang of young men who killed a postman in the 1940s for his Christmas sack. And then, in the 1950s, there was the story of the Magwhite well cult.