Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  His fingers were inches from it when again the texture of the room glistened and changed. A soap bubble of glow formed in the air around the door, then shrank inwards until it vanished into the handle. It happened so quickly that Ryan almost missed it.

  He flinched away from the innocent-looking handle, then snatched up a corner of the bed’s coverlet and folded it over his hand. An unseen hanger claw scraped his temple as his muffled fingers fumbled at the handle. It turned, and he hurled himself against the door, propelling himself out of the room.

  Outside was darkness, pure darkness. He flung himself sideways and flattened himself against the wall beside the door.

  There was a soft wash of gold over the landing, bathing the area in which he stood. When it faded, the metal banister had taken on a sultry glimmer. With a tremulous squeak, screws in the nearby plug socket started unscrewing themselves. One by one they tumbled to the floor and rolled gently to and fro.

  There was a pause, during which Ryan held his breath and his position. Then all at once the air seemed to snatch up the screws and fling them. Sharp pains stung Ryan’s neck and face.

  How does Josh know where I am?

  A flying screw scratched the back of Ryan’s hand, only just missing his new eyes. He glanced down, and was almost dazzled by the yellow haloes that wrapped his watch like overlapping sunbeams . . .

  Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

  Hunched over to protect himself from the screws, Ryan struggled desperately with his wrist strap, and tore the watch off. Anything else metal? He thrust both hands into his pockets and drew out coins and his house key, all gently radiant. He threw them aside and searched himself desperately. No zips on his shorts or his sweater . . .

  On hands and knees he scuttled along the landing towards the stairs, only to have one lens of his glasses frosted by a piece of angry shrapnel.

  Idiot!

  He tore off his spectacles, stared at the gleaming metal in the frames and threw them away from him, slightly sickened by the crunch as they landed. Now that his real eyes could not focus, he had to keep them closed so that his twin vision did not make him sick.

  He reached the head of the stairs and half scrambled, half tumbled down them. There were fizzing and smashing sounds coming from the kitchen and the landing above, as if his attackers were now flinging themselves about at random, looking for him.

  The hallway was gently stroked by a wash of false light, and Ryan saw to his despair that concentric golden globes were forming around the front door and rushing inwards to be absorbed by the handle and lock. At the same instant he heard the jangle of keys outside. It must be his mother returning.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’ It was like trying to make one’s voice rise above a whisper in a dream. ‘Don’t touch the door!’

  Jingle, jangle. His mother sorting through her keys to find the right one.

  Thinking fast, Ryan grabbed one of his mother’s flower vases and hurled it at the door. It shocked apart just above the handle, shedding gardenias and splattering greenish water all over the door. There was a spac! sound as a spark jumped from the handle. In the same heartbeat, or so it seemed, a key rattled in the lock and the door swung open.

  ‘Mum—’

  Run, was what Ryan wanted to shout. He had hardly time to see his mother’s astonished face before something heavy hit him in the side of the head and knocked him against the living-room door. He steadied himself on the door handle reflexively, and heard a snap of static.

  Oh no. That was his last lucid thought before a big midnight-coloured hand seemed to yank him inside out like a sock puppet.

  Suddenly he was lying on the floor. There was a stinging tingle in his hand. Everything was dark and for a moment he couldn’t remember why.

  Smash. The mirror by the door. Pic-pac-pac. Wall cables tearing free from their ties. They snapped, splaying wires and spitting sparks. His cheek against the floor, Ryan stared hypnotized as each spark danced over its reflection in the parquet floor.

  And beyond the sparks, framed in a lopsided doorway, he saw his mother as she ducked something, stared about her, then grabbed a coat from one of the hooks and a stick from the umbrella stand. One with a metal handle, he noted with a weak despair.

  Run run run you can’t understand any of this and he can see your handbag zip and car keys and loose change . . .

  But Ryan’s mother never ran from anything.

  It was a dance of sorts, and somehow it seemed to float towards him as if through water. A woman dancing through darkness in a dress suit, leaping the sparks that fizzed around her ankles and somehow just missing the radiator suffused with treacherous gold. Her flailing stick caught a flying candleholder out of the air and then swung back wildly and shocked the last shards out of the shattered mirror.

  She flung the coat over Ryan, cloaking all his eyes in darkness, and then he felt her scooping him up bodily. There was a gasp of pain and a clatter, and he guessed that she had dropped the stick. He lolled against her as she dragged him down the hallway, his feet slithering against the polished floor. There was a rattle of the door handle, and the thunder of the rain grew louder. There was a breeze against his calves and a crunch of gravel beneath his feet.

  When she pulled the coat from his head they had reached the pavement. Both of them with one accord sank to sit, the rain hammering and blinding them.

  ‘I’m getting you to the hospital,’ his mother was saying over and over, sounding as if she might cry. ‘I’m getting you to the hospital, love . . .’

  ‘Not in the car!’ Ryan’s voice sounded high and hysterical, and he didn’t care.

  The street seemed to be full of people. The Doyles’ neighbours had come out to find out what had caused the screaming and smashing, and it turned out that many of them had already called the police. Ryan only calmed down when he saw his mother take out her mobile phone and use it to call an ambulance.

  ‘Please . . . I just want to . . . hold it . . .’ She let him hold the phone to his ear, and he heard the familiar dialling tone, with no trace of static or high electronic whine. Josh had gone.

  When the ambulance arrived, they let Ryan and his mother hug each other tightly all the way to the hospital.

  ‘I think someone broke in,’ Ryan heard his mother saying. ‘I just got back, I think they were still there, they’d torn up the house and ripped the wires out of the walls. I think he got a shock from one of the wires . . .’ He met his mother’s eye and she gave him a meaningful look. Although his mind was having as much trouble focusing as his eyes, he understood it. This is going to be our story, said the look. This is what we’ll tell them when they ask.

  He unfolded her hand and touched her palm with his fingertip. Your name is Anne, he thought. That’s so funny. You’ve always been Mum. Mum and Dad, the two pillars that hold up opposite ends of the sky. But you’re Anne, and you’re not a pillar and things can happen to you. Josh tried to kill my mum. Josh tried to kill Anne.

  When they reached the hospital Ryan’s mother helped him out of the ambulance. Casualty had harsh low lights with a yellow glare like refrigerator bulbs. A young doctor hurried over immediately to look at Ryan, and asked him questions. But the questions were fuzzy and so was the doctor. Josh tried to kill Anne, thought Ryan and he started to cry. He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Here, Ryan.’ Why were they helping him into a wheelchair?

  Ryan was wheeled down a couple of corridors into a large open room where there were a number of cubicles walled in by big curtains. It must be bad, they must be about to operate.

  They helped him up on to one of the cubicle beds. One of the nurses kept talking to him calmingly, in sentences that didn’t seem to have full stops. Sometimes she would say, ‘OK, Ryan? Do you understand?’ and he nodded, because he guessed it didn’t matter if he understood or not.

  ‘All right, Ryan, dragons.’ His mother’s voice, very quietly. She had invented the ‘dragon game’ when he had been very young indeed and facing a series of
injections. There was a dragon trying to push through the wall, and the only way to scare him off was to face him down. And although it was a childish game, Ryan held tight to his mother’s middle finger and together they stared intently at the opposite wall.

  There was a pain in the inside of his elbow. Ryan’s eyes filled with tears, but he didn’t let the dragon through. The dragon was no match for Ryan and Anne.

  At last he dared to glance back at his arm, and felt pins and needles in all his joints when he saw that there was still something sticking into his flesh, a little clear plastic something with a pink cap. Somebody clipped a thing like a clothes peg to one of his fingers. One of the doctors turned Ryan’s hand over and examined his knuckles before Ryan could do anything about it.

  ‘Just molluscum,’ he muttered in an undertone to the nurse beside him, who jotted something on a clipboard. ‘Ordinary warts.’

  ‘The dragon’s gone, Ryan,’ said Anne. ‘We scared him off.’

  Ryan slept fitfully in his cubicle bed and kept waking to see his mother curled up nearby on a chair. At last he slept more deeply and when he woke his mother was gone and his father was seated beside him, quietly reading with a pocket torch. Hearing the rustle of Ryan’s starched sheet, he looked up and smiled.

  ‘It was your mother’s turn to sleep,’ his father murmured in an undertone. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Are they going to operate on me?’

  ‘Probably not. Do you remember getting an electric shock?’

  Ryan nodded, hoping his father wouldn’t ask him to describe the circumstances.

  ‘Your mother tells me you blacked out for a moment, and you seemed confused afterwards, so the hospital has to keep you in for a while just to make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Ryan said quickly. ‘I’m a lot better. Is Mum OK?’

  ‘She’s fine. Concerned about you, that’s all. Ryan – do you know who broke into the house . . . ?’

  ‘I didn’t see them. It was just a lot of bangs and crashes in the dark. I was sneaking down to the front door when Mum got home.’ Ryan waited for his father’s nod and felt a flood of relief. ‘She . . . she was really great, Dad.’ He wished he could show his father the picture of his mum dancing through death and mayhem to rescue him. ‘If you’d seen her . . . you’d never want to be angry with her again.’

  ‘Ryan, you don’t have to say things like that.’

  But I do, because, because . . .

  ‘You’re splitting up with Mum, aren’t you?’ It came out in a breathy, tremulous, five-year-old’s voice.

  Ryan’s father raised his eyebrows and scrutinized his book as if waiting to see what it had to say for itself. Then he took a deep breath and released it.

  ‘All right.’ His voice sounded deeper than usual, and he spoke carefully as if to an adult acquaintance. ‘I know that your mother and I have been quarrelling recently, and I remember what you said the other day.’ Ryan suddenly felt that perhaps he did not want to hear what his father had to say. ‘Sometimes a couple goes through a phase of arguing a lot, but that does not necessarily mean that they are going to break up. It doesn’t absolutely mean they won’t, but in our case . . . we almost certainly won’t. The truth is, things have actually been getting a lot better between us.’

  ‘But . . .’ Ryan tailed off. It seemed so obviously untrue.

  ‘If we had decided to end our marriage, it would probably have been the summer we moved to Guildley four years ago. We spent months stepping on eggshells for fear of breaking everything. I knew things were getting better when we dared to raise our voices or say what we thought again.’

  Ryan’s eyes filled with tears of relief.

  ‘Josh said . . .’ he began.

  ‘Ah. Things become clearer. So Josh made you think we were breaking up.’ Ryan’s father sighed. ‘I did not plan to tell you this, but now I think it may be useful to you to know it. Josh’s parents are undergoing divorce proceedings – it’s an open secret. They’ve been living almost separate lives for quite some time.’

  ‘Dad . . . I really wish you’d told me all this before.’

  His father studied his own shoe for a few moments and then nodded slowly.

  ‘Dad? Can visitors come in and see me?’

  ‘Yes, though not right now. Visiting hours are nine a.m. until nine p.m., I believe. Who did you want to see?’

  ‘I don’t really mind. Only not Josh. Just . . . please not Josh.’

  ‘We always find it difficult to forgive our heroes for being human. I think Josh may have been taking some complicated feelings out on you. Try not to take it personally. But you don’t have to see him if you’d rather not.’ Ryan’s father rose and peered down at Ryan with a troubled, tender smile. It was, Ryan realized, very much like the smile he occasionally gave Ryan’s mum. ‘You look tired. Get some more sleep, Ryan.’

  Ryan lay for a long time with his eyes closed but his mind busy. At long last he understood the hatred he had seen in Josh’s face on the night of the bat-spotting, as he had stared at Ryan’s mum. Anne shaking her son, in a rage of concern and love, while the Lattimer-Stones waited dispassionately by their car. Anne, bossy and windswept, bullying and steamrollering her loved ones, and willing to fight like a she-wolf in their defence.

  The Lattimer-Stones would fill in their divorce papers as if they were crosswords and then decide in cool, civilized tones which of them would take the cars, the house, the adopted son. Ryan’s mum was everything The Haven lacked, everything that Josh lacked. That was why Josh hated her. That was the real reason Josh had set out to destroy her. The revenge wish had simply lit his touchpaper.

  Anne was sleeping now and the ward was silent, but there was still a dragon behind the wall.

  23

  Soul Repair

  ‘Ryan! My mum and dad brought me over and I was worried because all I knew was you’d had an electric shock and my sisters said if they were keeping you in that probably meant it had fried your brain . . .’

  Chelle squeaked the visitor chair over to Ryan’s bed.

  ‘I think I’ll leave you to judge how thoroughly Ryan’s brain has been cooked.’ Ryan’s father stood and stretched. When he was tired there were always faint grey smudges like ash down his cheeks. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. Ryan, your contact lenses are on the side table.’ Nice, non-metallic contact lenses. Ryan had never imagined that he would regard them with such affection.

  Chelle clenched little fists of excitement on top of her bare knees until Ryan’s father had gone.

  ‘Ryan, what happened? The phone screamed then went dead when we were talking last night, and this morning your mum phoned my dad and she was saying someone broke in and tried to kill you, then she wanted to know if my parents knew where Miss Gossamer had been when it happened and they said yes, she’d been at dinner all evening, and then there was the most incredible row and I could hear your mother even though she was on the other end of the line.’

  ‘She thinks it was Miss Gossamer?’ Ryan was assaulted by a weird mental image of a demented Miss Gossamer rending her way through the house, ripping out cables and flinging toasters.

  ‘Well, I heard them talking about it afterwards when they forgot I was there and it sounds like she told my dad all about my asthma attack and said that Miss Gossamer was trying to kill me by making it worse. And then she said she’d been spending two days finding out all about Miss Gossamer—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes! Looking up records and everything, and my dad said he thought probably doing some things that could get her in trouble, and she said that Miss Gossamer had a history of instability and she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near children . . .’

  Ryan felt himself flushing. After their argument his mother had not run off to shadow Saul Paladine. She had charged into battle against Miss Gossamer, armed only with a fragment of the truth and a host of misconceptions. She was on his side, beautifully, madly and possibly illegally.

&nbs
p; ‘. . . and she’d lost a baby and then had a breakdown and started trying to steal other people’s babies or toddlers from outside shops and she was found taking one of them for a walk near the canal . . .’

  ‘Stop! Chelle, did you say she lost a baby? Do you know how she lost it?’

  Chelle’s face furrowed.

  ‘It died. No! It drowned. Because after your mum phoned, my mum and dad were wondering if she might have drowned it herself because of being all disturbed . . . and they don’t trust her any more, Ryan, and they won’t leave her alone with me, and I so love your mum, I love her, and when it’s Christmas I’m going to buy her books as presents for everyone, even you, I hope you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘Chelle!’ Ryan stared at her open-mouthed, as the facts slid together like cog-teeth. ‘I know what happened to Miss Gossamer’s baby! She didn’t kill it. The Well’s Angels did – an early version of us, fifty years ago. That’s why she got so worked up at the Lattimer-Stones’ dinner party when she heard you speaking Donna’s thoughts, and saw what Josh did to that bulb. The men who murdered her baby probably had the same powers as us, and she recognized them. That’s why she’s been spying on us ever since, trying to catch us out. And that’s why she hates us so much.’

  ‘But it can’t have been her trying to kill you yesterday, Ryan, she was with us all night . . .’

  ‘Course it wasn’t. That was Josh.’

  ‘Josh?’ Ryan watched Chelle’s face collapse as she listened to his account of the night before. ‘Maybe . . . maybe he wasn’t really trying to kill your mum. Maybe . . . it was just meant to scare her?’

  ‘It was meant to scare her all right. I mean, you’d be scared if the lights went out and everything in the room started exploding and attacking you, wouldn’t you? So you’d run to the door and grab the handle, and, kzap! Josh did something special to the door handles, something he didn’t do to anything else. I think he was stuffing them full of static electricity, enough to kill anybody who touched them. Maybe the only reason I survived was he didn’t have time to do all the handles properly, so he didn’t bother so much with the living-room one – the one I touched. If I hadn’t got to the front door in time . . .’ There was a sombre silence.