Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ said Ryan.

  ‘Be my guest. Pull up a trolley.’ Ryan took cautious hold of the nearest trolley and swung himself into it. Now he could see chains trailing from the Man’s wrists and ankles, linking him into the line of trolleys.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you. Well’s Angel to Well’s Angel.’

  ‘That’s nice, I like that. Well’s Angels.’ The Man laughed suddenly, and sounded far more human. There was something soothing in the sway of the trolley, though Ryan had to keep bracing to keep his balance.

  ‘Are you . . . alive?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The Man sounded interested, as if he’d never wondered about it before. ‘Not very. I never paid my debts . . .’ Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot . . .

  ‘Why doesn’t she just let us pay her back in coins?’ Ryan clenched his teeth against the cold and leaned forward to whisper, fearful that the leaves would pick up his words piecemeal and carry them back to the well.

  ‘Oh, that wouldn’t do for Her. Her power’s all about flow, all about give and take, isn’t it? It’s not enough getting offerings; She has to be able to pay for them by granting wishes, or She gets choked by Her debts. Now look, you’ll fall, you can’t resist the motion, just sit down and let yourself go with it.’

  Ryan sat down, for his legs were indeed getting shaky.

  ‘What if a granted wish gets ungranted again?’ he asked.

  ‘She wouldn’t be pleased with that,’ the Man said grimly. ‘It takes power from Her. Not as much power as it would if She ungranted a wish Herself though – that’s a pact She can’t break without crippling Herself.’

  ‘And . . . what happens when you stop doing what she says?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘She gets Her penny’s worth out of you. You’re made to pay with everything you have and it’s still not enough and you end up here.’ The Man looked furtively over his shoulder towards the dark maelstrom of leaf and litter. ‘Look, I understand Her better than I did. You and I can help each other. I think I can deal with Her if I can just get out of here.’ The Man’s breath smelt of canals and wet toadstools. ‘If you could take my place here, just for a little while . . .’

  ‘I’ve got a friend waiting for me—’ croaked Ryan, pulling backwards away from him.

  ‘You can’t resist Her without me!’ the Man snarled suddenly, lurching against Ryan’s trolley. ‘She’ll make you see things Her way!’ The Man’s right hand lunged out to grab Ryan’s wrist. On each knuckle was a full-size, perfectly proportioned human eye, baby blue and bloodshot. ‘You’ll see! You’ll see things Her way too!’ As his attacker’s face drew close, Ryan stared up through matted hair into deep sockets where in place of eyes were two tiny, shrivelled warts.

  Ryan yelled with terror and beat with his free fist on the eyes of the hand that gripped him. He did not stop until he felt the vice on his wrist slacken, until the trolley overturned and tipped him into ink.

  Lying on the floor in an unfamiliar and dim room, Ryan blinked hard three times to convince himself that he was awake. Memories surfaced, and he pieced together the mystery of his whereabouts. Instead of returning to their poor fractured home, the family had decided to spend the night in the local hotel, which stood on the edge of the park.

  I’m awake. His tumble to the floor had not woken his parents, who still breathed softly in the double bed opposite.

  Ryan padded quietly to the window and tugged a crack in the blind. His knuckles had started to burn and itch again and he could not resist resting them against the soothing cool of the window pane. Even without his lenses he could make out the low ceiling of cloud. As his eye fell on the blurred green pool of the park he squinted . . . and then tiptoed off to the bathroom.

  Coming back with his lenses in made nothing any better. He really was awake, and there really were two shopping trolleys in the trees on the edge of the park.

  Returning to their house later that morning was more difficult than Ryan had expected. The most horrible thing was the carelessness with which things he used daily had been thrown about and broken. Ryan thought grimly of the times he had sat on his favourite bench, ‘turning the house upside down’. Josh had turned the house upside down with a vengeance, and no amount of looking at it inverted would set it straight again.

  The ladles and fish slices had run rampant in the kitchen, and all the tall jars along the top shelf had smashed, cascading Ryan’s mother’s colour-coded pasta on to the floor and sideboards. Wires had pulled themselves loose from the speakers, the sockets and the video player.

  ‘They’re things,’ Ryan’s mother declared after silently regarding the sole surviving coffee percolator for a few moments. ‘Just things.’

  Her philosophical stance was tested, however, when she visited her bedroom and found that her computer’s innards had been fried, and that even the back-up disks on which she had saved her half-written book on Saul Paladine were completely blank. Seeing her standing by her computer as if by a grave, Ryan tactfully tiptoed away to help tidy. The front path was strewn with the fragments of the burglar alarm, which had apparently exploded like a Roman candle. Ryan knelt down to pick up the pieces.

  While he was crouched on the ground, he noticed something pink appearing furtively round the corner of the hedge. It was palm-sized, studded with sequins and feathers, heart-shaped and flat as a cookie. As Ryan watched, it became clear that it was dangling from the tip of a bamboo cane. More and more of the cane emerged unsteadily from behind the hedge until the heart thunked against the letter box, swayed, jiggled and thunked again.

  Ryan tiptoed over and peeped around the hedge.

  ‘Um . . . Miss Macintosh? Our letter box doesn’t push inwards like that, you have to kind of flip up the lid first and then push things through . . .’

  Hundreds of raindrops nestled like fish eggs in Pipette Macintosh’s thick, frizzed hair, which was starting to droop and draggle. The water had also humbug-striped her cheeks with mascara. Ryan wondered how long she’d been there, trying to poke the little heart through the letterbox.

  ‘The curse was never meant for you,’ she said in her usual flat, pebbley voice. She raised the cane so that the heart rattled down its length and came to a halt against her fist. Her gaze flitted over the plasters on his forehead and inside his elbow, the bruises that Josh’s fist had left on his cheek. ‘It was misdirected. I should never have let you pick up that milk bottle.’

  Ryan knelt down next to her so that they could talk properly.

  ‘Miss Macintosh . . . do you think you could take off the curse, please? Because it . . . really hurts. And please don’t curse my mum; I don’t want her to be dead. You’ve already killed her computer with her next book in it.’

  ‘Did I?’ A marbly gleam of glee entered Pipette’s eyes for a brief moment. ‘Please believe me, I never knew my own powers. I am spending time now with someone . . . rather special . . . who can help me understand them.’ Mr Punzell, no doubt. Ryan guessed that someone who could make houses attack people would interest him much more than poor Donna’s ‘psychic projection of will’.

  Pipette unhooked the pink heart with some difficulty and pressed it into Ryan’s hand, her broad mouth working with emotion.

  ‘Take this,’ she said. ‘Your life may depend upon it until I have had a chance to remove the curse. And rest easy about your family. I Shall Do Nothing More.’ She straightened. ‘A childlessness curse,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘I should have guessed what might happen.’

  As Ryan entered the house again, his father’s eye fell upon the pink talisman in his hand and all the muscles in his face tensed instantly.

  ‘This is harassment,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘You’d think at a time like this that woman would have the decency to stop her campaign of—’

  ‘It’s all right!’ Ryan called out hurriedly. ‘Look, it’s got “protection” written across it in – eeugh – cake icing. Dad, Miss Macintosh just meant it as a . . .’
>
  ‘. . . peace offering,’ finished Ryan’s mum, who had appeared in the doorway. Whereas Ryan’s father’s face had hardened at the sight of the ‘voodoo artefact’, hers had softened. Ryan placed it in her waiting palm. She stared at it for a while, then gave a defiant and slightly belligerent sniff. ‘Hmph! I’ll be more impressed when she drops the lawsuit.’ However, as she left the room she was still gazing at the heart with an almost youthful smile, the sort she wore when she looked over pictures Ryan had painted at the age of five.

  ‘Why’s Mum looking so . . . ?’ In her face Ryan had seen the pleased hope he had felt himself when he had imagined Josh posting his glasses back through the letter box. ‘It’s not like they’re friends making up! She’s never cared what Pipette thinks! I mean, if she does, why does she write those books?’ And that of course was the question he had been wanting to ask all along.

  ‘We all have different ways of dealing with our heroes,’ Ryan’s father said sotto voce.

  ‘The people she writes about aren’t her heroes! She writes horrible things about them!’

  ‘She writes the truth, or as near to the truth as she can find. What better way of celebrating someone? To find out everything you can about them? It certainly gets their attention.’

  ‘But they . . . hate her.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed his father, turning to go. ‘Every time.’

  Ryan moved over to the window and looked out into the garden, where his mum was sitting on his favourite bench, looking at the heart.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Ryan’s father suddenly muttered under his breath. The book in his hand had the words Typhoons, Tornadoes and Toddlers: DIY for Every Disaster down its spine. ‘Is nothing in this house what it seems?’ He stripped off the dust jacket, sighed and dropped the offending book on the table.

  ‘I think I know where the cover to that one is,’ Ryan said gingerly, picking it up. The spine now read Poachers, Prowlers and Psychopaths: The Dark Side of Guildley. He scurried away to read it.

  The chapter on the Well Cult in the book told Ryan little more than he had already suspected, but it did give the name of the girl whose baby had been murdered – Madeleine Gossamer. There was a bleary black and white photo of a young woman, her face a frozen, shell-shocked mask. He stared at it and wondered what she had wished. Perhaps when she had been ‘expecting’ and terrified of somebody noticing, she had just wished for the baby to go away. And then after the baby had been born, the ‘witchy’ men had appeared and taken the little girl away forever.

  Pipette was right. Wishing for childlessness was very dangerous indeed.

  In the late morning the Coopers turned up at Ryan’s house with a box of odds and ends, including a walkabout phone.

  ‘Just till you get your broken things replaced,’ beamed Chelle. ‘Look! It’s fluffy!’ She rubbed at the phone’s nylon tiger-striped fur.

  Chelle reacted eagerly when Ryan told her about Pipette’s visit. ‘It’s working then! Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if she really did have voodoo powers? She could summon one of those big voodoo spirits, and maybe we could get it to tell the Well Spirit to leave us alone. It would be so nice if we could play them off against each other like, you know, parents or teachers or something . . .’

  Ryan went on to tell her about his nightmare. ‘And this morning . . .’ he hesitated, wondering if he was going to sound idiotic, ‘there were two trolleys in a tree . . . watching our hotel.’

  Chelle nodded. ‘Same with us – only one of them was wedged in our hedge and the other one was up on the post-office roof, peering . . . so that means that the Well Spirit really knows we’ve both . . .’

  ‘. . . gone rogue,’ finished Ryan.

  ‘I don’t suppose that means she’ll take away our powers, does it?’ Chelle asked with a strange mixture of anxiety and hope in her voice.

  ‘Doubt it.’ Ryan grimaced. ‘She’s more likely to try to force us back into obeying her. The question is, if she knows that we’re working together, does that means Josh knows too? Have you heard from him?’

  ‘No.’ Chelle’s forehead creased. ‘Mum says Mrs Lattimer-Stone phoned this morning to find out if he was at ours. He’s barely been home since you went into hospital.’

  Chelle had more news. While she and her family were out, an envelope with her name on it had been pushed through the door. Within was a letter from Will letting her know that the motorcycle magazine Silverwing had said they were provisionally interested in a follow-up article from him. He was now typing up the rest of the notes he had handwritten in hospital.

  ‘But he said he couldn’t deliver the note to Carrie. He couldn’t find the gate.’

  ‘Ryan grimaced. ‘He went round the front of the house, didn’t he?’

  ‘No, that’s just it, he didn’t. He says he searched up and down the river bank for ages, and he couldn’t see it. He says it wasn’t there.’

  Carrie had given her phone number to both Ryan and Josh while they were visiting. Chelle shut the bedroom door carefully, then watched as Ryan dialled on the furry phone, trying to ignore its musty smell.

  The phone rang about fifteen times before an answering machine cut in. There was something horribly wrong with the voice on the message. It started off sounding like Carrie, and then the words started to break into chunks, as if something kept catching in her throat, or as if she was laughing in fierce guttural gasps. Then it slowed right down and sank in pitch until it was a throaty grating surrounded by static. A beep followed.

  ‘Carrie?’ A rattle on the other end of the line.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ The phone slammed down. Had that been Carrie? Ryan had hardly been able to identify the words, let alone the voice. It wasn’t somebody answering the phone; it was the wail of somebody being attacked. Chelle’s eyes were bright, questioning pennies. His hands shaking, Ryan phoned again and waited dry-mouthed through the macabre machine message.

  ‘Carrie, please, it’s Ryan, please answer.’ A slow click and another rattle.

  ‘Ryan, please stop calling now.’ It was Carrie’s voice, but there was a terrible desolation and weariness in it. ‘You’ve all had your fun with “the mad lady”.’ Ryan thought of Carrie’s fragile smile trembling and shattering.

  ‘Oh, Carrie, what’s he done, I’ll kill him. What’s he done?’

  ‘It just doesn’t work. I thought I could build up my courage and get out of here, but it just doesn’t work.’ There was now no shrillness in her voice, just a flat, drab certainty, which was much worse. ‘I told myself the world wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but it is. I can hear your friends, every night, and sometimes during the day, smashing things against my walls, laughing, scraping stones down the windows. And all the phone calls – the ones where they just hang up when I answer, and the ones leaving messages for “the nutter”—’

  ‘Listen . . . you’ve got to get out of there! Somewhere he doesn’t know where you are!’

  ‘I couldn’t open the gate.’ Her voice sounded crumpled as if with tears of frustration. ‘All those hours of clearing creeper and it seems like it all grew back overnight. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m never meant to get out . . . or maybe I just thought it was only a day since I cut it back, maybe it’s been weeks. I don’t know, the sky’s so dark with all this rain there’s no real day or night any more. But if it has been weeks, where’s my door? Why haven’t they brought me my door? My door’s just a dream, isn’t it? It’s not coming.’

  Ryan swallowed the hard lump forming in his throat and tweaked the aerial.

  ‘Carrie . . . who’s there with you?’

  ‘Nobody!’ There were deserts and dark empty seas in that wail, and the phone at the other end was slammed down. Ryan stared into Chelle’s expectant gaze.

  ‘There were other voices on the line,’ he said as steadily as he could. ‘There was this rushing sound like wind, and when it was strong I could hear someone breathing out pieces of words, like the ones I heard when the leaves brushed me in my Magw
hite dream last night. And Carrie couldn’t hear them.

  ‘She’s trapped in her house, and somehow there’s a bit of Magwhite in there with her.’

  25

  The Hijack

  The Coopers stayed for a sandwich lunch, then helped the Doyles in trying to force life into a tiny black and white television that they’d brought with them. All the while, Ryan remained miserably mute, his head full of Carrie in a darkness where whispers whirled like leaves.

  The TV buzzed and flashed, then showed a parallelogram world with slanted cars and toppling people.

  ‘. . . inches of rain in the last two days . . .’ The bored tone of a news reporter cut in. ‘Organizers insist that the Crook’s Baddock Festival will continue in spite of the weather and flooded roads. In the meantime, these early arrivals hoping to attend the festival can expect a long, wet wait before they reach Crook’s Baddock . . .’ A crooked image of miserable-looking families seen through the rain-streaked window of a coach, followed by a shot with a ‘diversion’ sign in the foreground and a long traffic jam snaking off into the distance.

  The idea burst a latch in Ryan’s brain and swirled through his thoughts, blowing everything askew.

  Her power’s all about flow, the man in his dream had told him. All about give and take. So if you could dam up the flow, just for a little while . . . Ryan’s eye fell again upon the file of gridlocked cars.

  ‘Mum? Dad?’ he said slowly. ‘Is it OK if Chelle and me go to the library this afternoon? We’re thinking of doing a school project on the Crook’s Baddock Festival, and we’d like to photocopy some stuff there.’ Ryan received a look from Chelle that wasn’t even questioning, just expectant.

  ‘Of course, but you’ll need a lift . . .’ Ryan’s mother ran upstairs, and came down with a sheaf of clear plastic ‘envelopes’. ‘And you’ll need these to stop the photocopies getting soggy.’

  It was not until Chelle and Ryan were safely ensconced in the library that Ryan tried to explain his idea.