Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  Perhaps there were ways to ‘make somebody’s world go away’, but none of them were good.

  Rain, rain. Dripping billboards and glistening trolleys and blackberries swelling up like balloons. Rain with a tidal-wave roar. And then a sound behind the rain, a sharp little tap-tap-tap.

  He looked up towards the noise, and with a strange sense of inevitability saw a pallid face peering in at the living-room window through a darkening draggle of hair. Ryan ran to the front door and heaved it open.

  Chelle was sucking at her inhaler to recover her breath, and wore no coat. Her skirt and top were splashed up one side as if a passing car had doused her. Her calves were tiger-striped with mud. Ryan pulled a towel off the nearest radiator and handed it to her. She wrapped it around herself, then levered off her trainers. She eyed her damp feet, then stared, daunted, at the smooth and gleaming parquet floor of the hall.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Ryan gently. ‘Just slide.’ They half slid into the living room, Chelle’s wet feet a little rubbery and stumbling against the tiles.

  ‘They think we’re playing board games in the Cavern,’ Chelle said at last, ‘but that was just a story he made up so he’d have an alibi. He went out my window, and Donna’s driving him and he’s going to get her to phone me on her mobile later, but when he went I waited five minutes and I was going to phone you but phones are machines and machines like him, so I went out my window instead and came here . . .’

  ‘He was at Carrie’s today, Chelle.’ It was such a wonderful relief to let his anxieties fall out through his mouth. ‘Carrie, the lady with the jackalope, made him tea, she trusts him and she’s told him her wish and it’s a really bad one, and if he’s going back there to grant it . . .’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s the other wisher, the mystery revenge wisher, he’s after. He keeps driving me around so I can pick her up, and we tracked her to this warehouse, and he said he was heading down there when he left today, and I don’t like her in my mind, it’s a her, I know it is . . .’

  Despite himself, Ryan felt a throb of relief. Carrie would be safe that evening anyway. Josh might be inflicting terrible revenge on someone that night, but at least it wasn’t somebody Ryan knew.

  ‘And he wears his sunglasses all the time now, even indoors and at night . . .’ continued Chelle.

  ‘And he keeps dabbing at his eyes but really carefully so you can’t see them behind the sunglasses . . .’

  ‘And after you went he made me put a bucket in the Cavern because it’s underground like the well and said it was a sort of a shrine, and he wrote letters and yes and no round the outside and he floats things in it like a Ouija board so he can try to talk to the Well Spirit now you’re not around, and I have to sleep in there . . .’

  ‘And Carrie says she threw a ring in the well when she made her wish, Chelle, and Josh didn’t show us any kind of a ring; he didn’t tell us he’d pulled a ring out of the well . . .’

  ‘And he’s really enjoying the machine stuff and I think he’s making cashpoints give him money and I know Donna’s really scared of him now . . .’

  ‘He likes it, he likes people being scared, and knowing what’s in their heads, and changing their lives . . .’ Everything was pouring out of Ryan as if he was a second Chelle, the unacknowledged thoughts sliding out of the shadows of his mind. ‘He likes the power . . .’

  ‘He really wants to do the revenge wish; he talks like the person who the wisher hates had done something bad to him, even though he doesn’t know who it is . . . and none of this is like Josh . . .’

  But in a way it was like Josh, all of it. Ryan suddenly thought of the tricksters in stories who made you laugh because they did funny things you didn’t dare do, and then did more wicked things that were still amusing, and then turned your stomach over by doing horrible, diabolical things that were only funny to them. It didn’t mean they’d changed; it just meant they’d slid off the far end of their own scale, an end you hadn’t seen before.

  Only . . . sliding that far off the end of the scale meant . . .

  ‘He’s going mad.’ Ryan completed his thought aloud. ‘I mean, maybe he found the ring in the well the first time and just hid it. But I think he went back to the well to look for the Well Spirit and to get more coins, so we’d have to keep doing this and he’d keep his “powers”, and I think that’s when he found Carrie’s ring. And if so, he’s not just wrong, he’s losing it. He’s not playing on our side any more.’ They stared at each other round-eyed, feeling like revolutionaries.

  ‘Why?’ whispered Chelle. ‘Is it because he was the one that went down the well – did the Well Spirit do something to him then? I mean, you said yourself that she was making all the wishes come out twisty and horrible – so is she . . . is she just . . . evil or something?’

  Ryan gnawed his lip in silence as he thought. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think so exactly. I think she’s kind of . . . confused. I mean, imagine this: you’ve got this really old god, and people worship her because they need the water from her well, and they hope it’ll rain so the crops will grow, so they plop offerings into the water, copper amulets and that kind of thing. And so she gets used to granting wishes, nice simple wishes like, “Please don’t let our village starve.” Ryan could feel himself using his words to sculpt the storm clouds of the suspicions he had started to form in the library, giving them shape at long last. He looked down at his hands, tensed to wrestle his unruly thoughts into place.

  ‘And then maybe after a while people forget the old god name, but they call her something like Mother Leathertongue or Maggie-of-the-Well, and she’s suddenly a bogeywoman to scare children away from the well. And then the Christians take everything over, and they start calling her St Margaret the White, but people still remember that she would grant wishes in exchange for offerings. When I saw her in my dream her robe was covered in bits that looked like gold foil, but I found this medieval saint book in the library, with pictures of gold offerings that looked just the same – I think that’s what they were.

  ‘And then people start to forget about her. There were some big floods some centuries ago – maybe that was her getting angry, but she couldn’t keep it up. Canals got built and everybody had running water and nobody needed her. Then they ran a road through Magwhite, and lots of people had to stop there to change buses, and suddenly people were dropping coins into the well again, not because they worshipped it, but because nowadays people make wishes like that in any well or fountain without really thinking about it. So all of a sudden she’s choking on hundreds of these little bits of metal with weird new wishes. She doesn’t know why or what’s going on. I mean, she’s got a throne made out of rubbish because people left it in her woods and I think she thinks it’s offerings.’

  ‘So she’s just doing bad things to the wishers because she doesn’t really understand what the wishes are?’

  ‘Kind of, only . . .’ Ryan screwed up his face, trying to find words for the shadowy idea in his head. ‘It’s not just her, it’s the wishes themselves. I don’t think anybody knows what wishes are. Because I think they’re . . . I think they’re sort of like conkers.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I mean, there’s the green prickly bit outside, and there’s the real solid conker inside. I think wishes are a bit like that. There’s an outer bit which is what the wish seems to be, but there’s another bit inside which is kind of the real wish. And . . .’ This was the hard bit. ‘And I don’t think when most people wish, they really know what they’re wishing. It’s like they only see the green spiky outer bit.’

  Chelle looked confused, and Ryan talked more quickly to stop his ideas escaping him.

  ‘OK, look. The shell bit of the wish might be, “I wish I had a Harley-Davidson.” And Will really thought he wanted a Harley-Davidson, but he didn’t, only in a way. I mean . . . that was just the green, spiky bit of the wish. Inside there was this shiny nut bit of wish. Which was, “I wish I was the kind of person who had
a Harley-Davidson.” ’

  ‘That’s the same, isn’t it?’ asked Chelle.

  ‘Sort of, but not really. I mean, he wanted to be somebody that everybody saw driving by on a Harley-Davidson, so they would think, Wow, look at that guy on the Harley, I bet he’s really cool and interesting and exciting. And he wanted them to be right. Only this really cool person wasn’t there, and Will Wruthers was instead. I mean, I mean, I think the shiny nut bit of the wish was . . . “I don’t like this Will Wruthers, I wish he wasn’t there.”’

  Outside, the thunder cleared its throat. Chelle stared at Ryan, her towel-covered knees drawn to her chest.

  ‘Problem is,’ continued Ryan, ‘I mean, I think the problem is – she isn’t very good at people. Not nowadays people, anyhow. She doesn’t really get the green spiky bits of their wishes. She’s been down a well for hundreds of years, right? So then she gets asked to do all this weird stuff about West End shows and bikes and dancing robots – how’s she supposed to understand all that? That’s where we come in, because she knows we’ll understand the green prickly bit, and granting it is much easier and quicker with our help. But the shiny nut bit of wishes, she gets that, kind of. She can help with that. Because those are the great big, painful, simple wishes, you see. Life. Death. Love. Revenge. She gets that.

  ‘Like she understands that Will Wruthers hates Will Wruthers as he is, and wishes he didn’t exist.’

  ‘Oh no, oh no, does that mean that now we’ve done the bike bit we’re meant to go back and make him all different and cool and interesting? I don’t think we can Ryan, he’s so floppy and helpless . . .’

  ‘No.’ Ryan hesitated, watching Chelle’s nervous beak of an upper lip pull down over her lower lip. ‘I think it means we’re meant to make him dead.’

  Chelle met Ryan’s gaze and her eyes widened as if she could see the images scrolling past his mind’s eye. Wet skid marks against dull tarmac. A fractured wing mirror jewelling the roadway. And tumbling in slow motion, like a piece of rubbish in the Magwhite dream, a figure in a leather biker jacket . . .

  ‘We can’t!’ wailed Chelle. She pressed her hands against the sides of her head as if trying to push out the image.

  ‘No, but Josh can. We’ve got to stop him. We’ve got to stop all of this.’

  ‘I liked being an angel,’ Chelle whispered huskily. ‘Back before everything got ugly. I really liked it. I . . . I helped. Or I thought I did. And people listened to me, nobody usually listens to me . . . not even you, Ryan.’ It was true, and Ryan couldn’t deny it in the face of Chelle’s sad, unreproachful gaze.

  ‘I know,’ he said helplessly, ‘I’m sorry, and if I’d listened to you properly from the start I’d have realized lots of things a lot sooner.’

  ‘Can’t we still be angels, but fix people properly? At least the ones we broke by fixing them the first time?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, even if the Well Spirit didn’t stop us, I don’t think people are at their best when they’re wishing sometimes. There’s what people want, and there’s what they think they want, and there’s what they really need, and there’s what they deserve, and if those things are all going to be different . . . what do we do?’

  ‘Perhaps we should just try to get them to want something better. Ryan, I really liked being an angel.’

  Ryan did not answer. There was an unusual hint of stubbornness in Chelle’s low tones.

  Chelle glanced at her watch. ‘Oh – I’d better run back now. My parents have got Miss Gossamer to dinner, but I’m scared she’ll sneak off to listen at my door, and Josh and Donna will phone soon and if Mum comes and knocks everyone will find out I’m not there again.’ She scampered into the hall and wriggled her feet back into her trainers. ‘When he calls I’ll try to get him to tell me whether he knows who he’s avenging against, and if he does maybe we can call the police or, oh, something . . .’

  ‘Chelle, will you . . .’ Will you be all right? Yes, he could ask that, but then Chelle would start to think that maybe she shouldn’t be all right, and couldn’t cope, and she’d lose this new, bright readiness. Spiders’ feet. ‘Will you . . . phone me right after he phones you? Only use a payphone, just in case your home phone is working for him.’ Ryan had no real reason to think that Josh could make phones spy for him, but there was no point in taking chances.

  Chelle nodded.

  ‘Brilliant, Chelle,’ Ryan said quietly.

  Chelle suddenly gave him her brightest I-caught-the-cricket-ball smile, and before Ryan had time to offer her a coat or umbrella she had the door open and was running off into the rain. Chelle, a soggy angel in pink-trimmed trainers and no coat.

  Ryan suddenly recalled that Josh was chasing after the revenge wisher, and the wisher’s thoughts had last been picked up in his own neighbourhood. He had told Josh that he was out on a family trip to the theatre, so it would look odd if Josh and Donna drove past and saw all the house’s lights on. He found the family’s ‘power cut’ torch and scampered quickly around the house, turning off lights.

  However, it was nerve-racking waiting in the dark. Ryan started sorting through the books again by torchlight, to take his mind off things. He knew that he did not need the torch, but he was reluctant to use his hidden eyes and see his own wish snakes curling from his chest.

  He was just starting to wonder if maybe his mother had given the book away or returned it to the wrong library when he remembered the set of ‘mother and baby’ books on one of her bedroom shelves. Her bedroom window faced on to the garden, not the street, so Ryan closed the door and risked turning on the light.

  There was a row of pink and pale blue volumes . . . and at the end a book with a black and tan dust jacket, and the title Poachers, Prowlers and Psychopaths. Ryan seized it triumphantly from the shelf and tweaked it open, then subsided with a small groan of frustration and disappointment. Once again, he had made the mistake of judging a book by its cover. This was yet another book in a borrowed jacket.

  As he was preparing to throw it aside, the phone rang. He snatched the receiver of his mother’s extension.

  ‘Ryan?’ Chelle’s high, chirruping phone voice. ‘Josh phoned, he called quarter of an hour ago, only it’s taken me ages to find a phone box that’s working and I’ve not got much money because one of them ate my fifty . . . Josh was laughing when he called, he sounded really excited, he says he knows who the revenge wisher is, and he kept laughing and saying, “easily with teaspoons” over and over again . . .’

  Ryan did not answer. He was staring down at the front page of the book in his lap. A glossy black and white plate showed an elaborate structure in the shape of a crude female form, fashioned entirely out of welded spoons. Underneath it, slanting words read ‘The Voodoo Loa Ezuli, with Teaspoons’. Ryan snatched off the dust jacket. He was holding Urban Shriek: The Sculptures of Pipette Macintosh.

  His mouth went dry. The mystery wisher had been noticed near his house. So had Pipette Macintosh. The wisher’s thoughts had only ever been caught fleetingly. Pipette Macintosh rode a scooter. The wisher wanted revenge. So did Pipette Macintosh.

  ‘Ryan? Can you hear me?’ Chelle’s voice sounded faint, then was swallowed by a hush of static, threaded through with a piercing feedback note. Ryan jerked the phone away from his ear.

  He’s close by. But close to her or close to me? Holding his breath, Ryan reached out and very carefully parted two slats of the Venetian blind.

  Josh was standing in the back garden by Ryan’s favourite bench. His hands were slightly raised in front of him as if he was about to start conducting an orchestra. He was still wearing his slanted, beetle-eye sunglasses. The rain had plastered his hair to his head, but from the shape of the shadows in his cheeks Ryan could tell he was smiling.

  Ryan let the blind fall. Before he could turn and run for the light switch, the air of the room bristled against his skin like cat’s fur. With a faint scratching noise, a pile of paper clips on his mother’s desk leaped into a huddle
. Nothing else moved, yet in the room’s very stillness Ryan seemed to feel something tense. Then there was a faint tick above him, and the bulb went out, plunging the room into darkness.

  22

  The Dragon Behind the Wall

  The roar of rain. Movements in the room, creaks, hums, a tick from the window latch. The lazily menacing tinngg . . . tinngg of coat hangers swinging in darkness. Ryan’s skin prickled all over, as if he was feeling the breath of something big in the same room.

  His hands tensed, and he felt a ripple of sensation as his secret eyes sprang open.

  And this was worse than the impenetrable, restless darkness. Now, amid the shadows, he could make out objects haloed by a dim, primrose glow. The phone in his hand was a tangled mat of shadowy golden gossamer.

  The air bristled again, and a pulse of gold washed through the room as if the headlights of a passing car had painted it for an instant. Suddenly his surroundings were alive with softly luminous objects, each stirring with jerky, furtive purpose.

  The phone seemed to breathe in. A blush of gold in the air, sucked next instant into the handset. Without warning, a blue spark snapped from the aerial to his thumb. He dropped the phone even before he felt the tingling sting. It hit the floor with a crack.

  It was the first shot of the ambush. Something beside him squeaked. A rounded head raised itself on a crane-like neck, black against the blind. A single pale eye met his stupefied gaze. Then there was pain as the angle-poise lamp lunged for him and its metal rim bit into his shoulder. At the same time, the right side of his jaw suddenly went cold. He tasted bruising on his gum. Something had hit him in the cheek.

  Ryan crouched, shielding his face. Next to his head, his mother’s computer was a hazy maze of light. Suddenly it oozed clots of gold and blots of blackness. A flash, a gunshot crack, the smell of burning plastic. Ryan sprawled backwards. His head struck the footboard of the bed.

  Noises on all sides. A tinny wrangling from the wardrobe, a duck-paddle flap from the desk, a grinding roar. Ryan was scuffling a retreat along the floor when an invisible claw suddenly raked his face. He threw his arms up wildly and found himself wrestling a flock of coat hangers, fending off the hooks which sought his neck and eyes. Feeling his shoulder nudge against the bedroom door, he flailed for the handle.