Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  It was very nearly the story of a tragic miscarriage of justice. The body of a tiny baby girl had been found in one of the Magwhite canals, and various witnesses remembered seeing a girl in her late teens running along the towpath with a look of distress, late the previous evening. When the girl was identified, she reluctantly admitted that the baby was hers, and that she and her aunt had been hiding it from the world because she was unmarried. Everybody suspected the girl and her aunt of killing the baby to save the family name, but the girl insisted that she had been hounded for days by a group of ‘witchy’ men, who had eventually stolen her baby, and that she had been running up and down the canal side looking for them.

  Her tales of these ‘witchy’ men did not improve her case. She described one of them as ‘reading her mind and throwing her own thoughts at her in mockery’ and another as ‘using boils to spy on her’. She had actually been arrested, when a houseboat owner came forward to say that on the day the murder took place he had seen and recognized three men hurrying along the towpath with a baby. The three men were found to have many photos of the poor young mother and child. When interrogated, one of them confessed but insisted that they were forced to commit the murder by the well of St Margaret the White. The police finally concluded that the three had formed a strange sort of religious cult and that the baby had been a sacrifice. All three men were found guilty but insane. After their arrest their madness became more and more apparent, and within two years of being sent to a mental institution each of them had found a way to commit suicide.

  Ryan felt sick. At the back of his mind he had wondered why nobody else had ever stolen coins from the well. Now he knew that they had. There had been other ‘well’s angels’. Maybe they had started off giving people bikes or boyfriends, and ended up killing a baby girl, telling themselves that they had no choice. Maybe there had been no choice. After all, what had happened to the men when they were imprisoned and unable to fulfil the Well Spirit’s demands? If they hadn’t been insane when they went into the mental hospital, Ryan could easily imagine them being gradually driven mad as the angry Well Spirit appeared to them again and again, snarling from their porridge or glaring from the steamed tiles of the shower, demanding that they carry out missions that were now impossible.

  At the end of the chapter was a reference to another book, which apparently covered the story in more detail.

  ‘Mrs Corbett? Do you have Poachers, Prowlers and Psychopaths: The Dark Side of Guildley? I can’t find it in True Crime.’

  ‘Yes, we do, though I think that’s a rather more adult . . . ah.’ Mrs Corbett peered at the screen, then at Ryan. ‘It looks as if your mother has it. In fact, it looks like she’s had it for . . . four years.’

  ‘Oh . . . um, she probably doesn’t remember that it’s not hers,’ muttered Ryan.

  ‘Well, could you be a good boy and remind her?’ Mrs Corbett sighed in annoyance, then gave Ryan a quick smile to show that she wasn’t angry with him.

  ‘Um . . .’ Ryan paused at the doorway. ‘Mrs Corbett, I don’t suppose you remember how thick the book was, do you?’

  Needless to say, when he got home, Poachers, Prowlers and Psychopaths was not prominent on any of the shelves. Mrs Corbett had told him that it was about four inches thick and a foot high. He knew that it had left the library wearing a tan and black dust jacket, but this didn’t help since he was pretty sure that it now wouldn’t be. There was nothing for it but to drag a chair from room to room, pulling all the books of the right size from the shelves, piling them on the kitchen table and stripping them of their jackets.

  At one point Ryan’s father walked through the kitchen, watched him with raised eyebrows for a bit and then passed on without comment. After a couple of hours Ryan gave up. The book was nowhere to be found.

  All afternoon he toyed with the idea of calling Josh and Chelle to tell them what he had found out, but his imagination kept playing out conversations in which he broke his nose against the barricade of Josh’s sneering hostility. Perhaps if he found out something useful, some alternative to serving the Well Spirit that didn’t involve descending into dribbling insanity . . .

  Late that evening, while Ryan was in his room, the phone rang. Ryan guessed it might be his mum and listened from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Still rampaging about?’ His father’s voice. ‘Well, yes, one could say so. This afternoon he “rampaged” over to the library for some vengeful homework research. This evening in a fit of unbridled rage and rebellion he flung himself into tidying our bookshelves and putting jackets on the right books.’

  Pause.

  ‘I hope Mr Paladine appreciates his place in your priorities.’ Pause. ‘Well, if not, then . . . what was that?’ Pause. ‘No, he doesn’t want to, not until you get back. Do you know when that will be?’ Pause. ‘I have to be in London tomorrow evening so yes . . . Well, please try.’

  Ryan waited for his father to put down the receiver before scampering back to his room to hug his pillow. His mother hadn’t left forever, anyway. She was coming back.

  The next morning, a little more sure of his ground, Ryan got another lift to the library with his father. However, after half an hour in the Folklore section, he walked out and found a bus to Whelmford. He had made a promise to Carrie.

  As he walked along the edge of the river, again he felt a sense of peace settle over him despite the ominous greyness of the sky and a new sense of hanging heat. Had he returned here to help Carrie or to enjoy her refuge from the world for a little while?

  To his surprise, when he reached the gate, a lot of the creeper had already been cut back, and he could clearly see the path that wound through a long narrow garden to the red-brick bungalow beyond.

  ‘Ryan!’ Carrie seemed just as surprised to see him there. She was gathering severed tendrils and stuffing them into a big dustbin bag. ‘I didn’t think you were coming! Your friend said you couldn’t make it – we’ve done most of the work . . . but come in! We’re making tea.’

  Ryan’s spirits sank. The Mead Priory was a sanctuary no more. The defensive wall of briars had been breached and there was an intruder inside the walls. He followed Carrie down a little crazy-paving path newly scraped of moss, and in through some mould-tinted French windows.

  Josh stood over a rickety-looking tea trolley with his sleeves rolled up, pouring tea into two chipped mugs, one of which had clearly been used to mix paint at some point in its history. When he looked up, Ryan saw that he was wearing his sunglasses even in the darkened room.

  The living room seemed to be a refugee camp for furniture, some expensive, some cheap, some pieces clumsily mended with gaffer tape. Most available surfaces were piled with boxes, clocks, vases, plaster busts, 1950s jukeboxes and picture frames. It was rather as if someone’s attic had rebelled and taken over their house.

  ‘Look who made it after all!’ Carrie gave a smile which suddenly became thin and watery, as if something had made her unhappy. Seeing both of them together seemed in some way to make her nervous. ‘I’ll get another mug and those lemon sponges . . . it’s just as well I made too many of them.’

  There was an awkward pause after she’d left the room. Josh stared down into his mug and kept adding more sugar with the tiny ceramic-handled teaspoon, until Ryan thought he had decided to pretend he was alone in the room.

  ‘She’s kind of funny, isn’t she?’ Josh murmured at last, as if talking to himself.

  ‘It’s like she’s not used to people and keeps suddenly remembering something about them that frightens her,’ agreed Ryan, and then brought himself up short. It was no longer safe to discuss wishers with Josh. ‘How . . . how are things going?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Good.’ Josh stirred his tea slowly. ‘We drove around Magwhite yesterday, picked up the thoughts of a couple of new wishers. One of them wants his girlfriend to be promoted to chief shoe-sales-person, and the other’s about seven and has a thing for jiving robot toys. I’ve sent Donna to buy him one. Then we hung arou
nd near yours, and got another flash of that revenge wisher. Only I think she was buying groceries for a recipe, thinking about milk and stuff. And something about “easily with teaspoons”.’

  Perhaps, thought Ryan, Josh and Chelle had never really needed him. Perhaps he had even been slowing them down.

  ‘Chelle’s been winding me up a bit, actually,’ Josh said, as if answering his thought. He raised his head to look at Ryan. ‘When there’s three of us . . .’ He shrugged, wrinkled his nose and kept stirring in the long-dissolved sugar. ‘It’s like . . . you know coleslaw? It’s OK, it’s not got much taste, it’s stuff that turns up as extra when you’ve ordered what you actually want. And you can eat a bit of it, or squersh it over on to the side of your plate. But you don’t ever, like, sit down and think, “Mmm, I know, I’ll order a big plate of just coleslaw.” Chelle’s coleslaw.’

  Despite himself, Ryan felt a proud, simmering warmth in his stomach. He suddenly realized that, somewhere in the back of his mind, he had always hoped that it was his company that Josh really sought out, and that Chelle was more tolerated. However, now that Josh had voiced the idea aloud, he could also see the true ugliness of that hope. The glow of joy faded.

  Ryan had been hoping that his hero would find the magic thing to say that would heal the rift between them. But this wasn’t it.

  ‘OK, truce.’ Josh sniffed hard and spoke as if his words were costing him some effort. ‘I’m declaring this table a no-sulk zone. Look, I’ve got this T-shirt in your size. We’re driving right past your house tonight. If you’ve stopped sulking, we can pick you up.’

  ‘I can’t,’ lied Ryan. ‘My dad’s got us tickets for the theatre this evening.’

  Josh bit his lips, then slipped a fingertip behind a lens of his glasses to rub at one of his eyes. Ryan thought he heard a couple of the nearby clocks falter, as if they had held their breath for a moment.

  ‘Here we are.’ Carrie returned, bearing a tray. ‘I’ve made custard as well.’

  The custard had been poured so as to hide the burnt places on the sponges. Ryan took a spoonful, but as the custard slid from his spoon he was reminded of the weird liquid moss in the dream Magwhite. Suddenly he felt as if the three of them were huddled in a shadowed forest of telescope tripods, stag antlers, walking sticks and hat stands, as if in that instant the Magwhite woods had somehow surged softly into the house like smoke. He looked up and found Josh was smiling at him.

  We’re playing a game, and she doesn’t know, said the smile. That’s fun, isn’t it?

  ‘You never finished the story you were telling me while we were cutting back the creeper,’ said Josh.

  ‘Oh, that!’ Carrie laughed, then gave the unhappy thin smile again. She glanced at Ryan apologetically. ‘Josh was telling me that he once had to climb down the Magwhite well to get the bus fare. And I just asked if he’d found a ring while he was in the well.’

  ‘She’s told me that she threw one down there once, on purpose,’ Josh explained, ‘but she hasn’t told me what she wished. C’mon, there must have been a wish.’

  ‘The ring was . . . well, it was an engagement ring.’ Absently Carrie scraped back the peel of custard to show the singed pudding underneath. ‘And when the other person didn’t . . . want to be engaged any more, I threw the ring down the well.’

  ‘Then there wasn’t a wish at all!’ Ryan felt a flood of relief.

  ‘Oh, there was.’ Carrie gave a small, regretful grimace.

  ‘It must have been a biggie,’ Josh murmured, encouragingly.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Ryan snapped quickly, and felt himself redden. ‘If you do . . . it won’t come true.’

  ‘That’s OK, I don’t want it to be true any more.’ Carrie pinched the base of her ring finger as if to see whether the ring had grown back. ‘Maybe you won’t understand this, but . . . I can’t bear open spaces. I started to get that way when my parents died, and it got worse and worse until I could hardly bear going outdoors.

  ‘Then I met someone who seemed to like me, and it made me feel safe. For the first time in years I was able to go out without feeling as if buildings were going to crash down on me, or like I was going to fall upwards into the sky. Knowing him was like having a little invisible roof I could carry around with me. I got a job and met lots of people. We got engaged. And then he changed his mind and moved to Arizona. The biggest, flattest, brightest place in the world, as if he’d picked somewhere he knew I couldn’t follow him.

  ‘Anyway, the bad stuff all came back, but much, much worse. Everything around me was terrifying and hurt. I couldn’t bear people, not even the kind ones. I couldn’t bear voices, or the smell and sound of cars, or the shapes of buildings. There didn’t seem to be anything in the world worth the pain of stepping outside my door, so I decided I wouldn’t any more. And then I got rid of my door, so the world wouldn’t know where to come knocking.’

  Ryan felt as if she was opening a wary hand to show them her soul, soft and vulnerable as a baby chick. It was awful to watch.

  ‘You don’t have to tell us any more,’ he said, unable to keep the plea out of his voice.

  ‘Unless it makes you feel better to talk,’ Josh added quickly.

  ‘I wished that the world out there would just go away and leave me alone. Well, it did. The world couldn’t get in, and I couldn’t bear to go out. But it’s been years now and I’m going to put in a new door. I’ve picked it out of a catalogue – it’s red. And look! Here I am with people in my house, for the first time in two years!’ She grinned suddenly. ‘I think I’m allowed to take back my own wish, aren’t I?’

  Ryan opened his mouth, but his store of answers seemed to be empty.

  Josh was still smiling. His knuckles gripping the mug handle were garden-greened, and Ryan remembered the tarnished fingers of the throned figure in his dream of Magwhite.

  21

  Spiders’ Feet

  Ryan turned down Josh’s offer of a lift in Donna’s car. As he walked away from the Mead Priory he realized that he was shaking. He had just met up with his best friend, but he felt as if he’d just been challenged to a duel.

  What ring, Josh? What bloody ring?

  Chelle picked up the thoughts of wishers whose wish-coins they had stolen. She was picking up Carrie loud and clear, there was no doubt about that. But there had been no ring in the blackened mess of coins Josh had shown them after climbing out of the well.

  Ryan caught a bus back to Guildley and had to run from the bus stop to get back to the library before his father did. As his father drove him home, the streets appeared to be full of renegade trolleys and rubbish. A pair of boots, linked by their laces, drooped over a telephone wire, and Ryan fleetingly imagined them pulling themselves up the pole by their own laces so that they could spy out the land.

  ‘Ryan . . . I have to leave for London tonight at about seven. Your mother says she will be back no later than nine. Will you be all right until she gets home?’

  Ryan imagined a future in which his parents organized their comings and goings so as to miss one another, always enquiring in the same careful, unemotional tone to find out whether he minded. He answered with a shrug.

  Over dinner, Ryan’s father stared out of the window as Ryan stirred his gravy. Outside, the sky was slowly turning to yellow paper, a Glass House sky, and nobody seemed to have noticed.

  There’s going to be rain. Rain’ll spoil the blackberries. He was not even sure where the thought had come from.

  Just as suddenly, he remembered collecting blackberries with Josh and Chelle on a day when the rain had left all the berries swollen and tasteless. A spider had run over Chelle’s share, and Josh had waited until she’d eaten most of them before letting her know.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she had wailed, looking sick and miserable. Indeed, Josh had finally tired of her anguish.

  ‘Look, you pillock, it’s OK, it’s . . . Ryan, tell her why it’s OK.’

  Ryan had racked his brain. ‘Because . . . s
piders have really clean feet. They . . . they clean them on their webs.’ It was enough. Chelle had looked into his face with complete trust and relief and had eaten the rest of her berries.

  Thinking back, Ryan was suddenly quite certain that if Chelle had been the only person to see the spider run across her berries, she would have eaten them without qualms. It was Josh talking as if they were dirty that had poisoned them for her. Poor Chelle, always waiting to find out what she was allowed to think or feel. No wonder she had been so quiet when Ryan and Josh were arguing.

  Ryan could not imagine her having a stand-up row with Josh, but if she ever had, would he have taken her side?

  No, said his conscience.

  I’m just as bad as Chelle, he thought.

  Worse, said his conscience. You’re just as bad as Josh. You talk like her friend and then treat her like coleslaw.

  When Ryan’s father finally packed his overnight case and left, the house felt dark and empty. Ryan turned on the stereo in the kitchen, but that made him uncomfortable too. The sound was too naked and obvious. Something or someone would hear it and know where to find him. Something or someone would come, and he would not hear it coming. He turned off the music.

  One foot high and four inches thick. Ryan began sorting through books again in search of Poachers, Prowlers and Psychopaths, but it was hard to concentrate. The thick yellow paper of the sky tore in thunder, and outside the window the grass flattened itself in a downdraught. When the rain began, it fell with too much force to gloss the leaves. The hedge and grass twitched and quivered as if under a pelting of dry peas.

  He kept remembering Carrie’s fragile but determined smile as she talked about taking back her own wish. Would the Well Spirit allow that?

  No un-granted. Wished hurt. Wanted miserable.

  No un-granted.

  The Well Spirit did not care whether people’s wishes were stupid or regretted. I wished that the world out there would just go away and leave me alone.