Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  The room inside was darker than he had ever seen it before. The bulbs above were lightless. Cloths and picture frames had been used to block out the windows. Many of the boxes that had strewn the floor were now piled on desks and shelves, as if an attempt had been made to rescue them from the rising waters. This attempt had clearly been abandoned halfway, however, and the water now soaked greedily into brown-paper parcels, book stacks, piles of rich cloth. Amid the disarray Carrie sat on a small table, one hand supporting her head, one slippered foot dragging in the wash. Her chin had dropped to her chest, reminding Ryan of the Well Spirit, and as she started to raise her head he was suddenly gripped with a panicky certainty that he would see her eyes open and pour rivulets.

  She opened her eyes, and they were her own. It was still Carrie, but a weary, older Carrie that seemed to be looking at him from the far end of a dark tunnel.

  ‘This is Chelle, Carrie,’ he said. ‘We’ve come to rescue you.’

  The distant Carrie peered out of her mind-cavern and recognized him, then let her forehead slump back to her hand.

  ‘Off you go, Ryan. I’m all right. Close the door after you, there’s enough water here already.’ Chelle obediently shut the French windows and there was a pause. ‘What I meant was, close it with you outside it.’

  ‘Oh, but you can’t send us away, we caught two buses, and they both got stuck, and so we got out and we walked and walked up to our knees in river and mud and we’re going to be in such trouble when we get back, but we came here for you . . .’ Chelle’s voice rose steadily in pitch. ‘Anyway, we can’t leave, we’re Angels.’

  ‘Everybody else in the street’s gone, Carrie. They’ve all left.’

  ‘Good,’ murmured Carrie. ‘That’s how I’ve always wanted it. All I want is peace . . . just to be left alone . . .’

  ‘But you don’t want that!’ Ryan’s voice was a desperate squeak. ‘I know that’s what you wished when you threw your ring away, but people aren’t usually at their best when they make wishes. Making a wish is like saying, “I can’t deal with anything, I give up, somebody bigger come along and solve it all instead.” But you don’t want to give up, Carrie, you brought us in for sponge cakes, and you were fighting your way out of your creeper. You ordered a door.’

  ‘It never came,’ whispered Carrie.

  ‘Yes, it did!’ Chelle’s face suddenly came alive with revelation. ‘That big package outside, leaning against the hedge, all covered in plastic, it must be your door, so maybe the delivery people just couldn’t find your gate . . .’

  ‘I couldn’t find it either. It wasn’t . . .’

  ‘Well, it is now,’ said Ryan gently. ‘And so’s the door. It’s right out there waiting for you.’

  Carrie raised her face and looked about her at her antiques, as if seeking their reassurance that she didn’t need to leave. Ryan felt suddenly choked by the forest of clutter.

  ‘Please, Carrie, come and look.’ He took hold of one elbow, and Chelle grabbed the other, and they dragged her over to the French windows, splashing and stumbling and overturning boxes. ‘Look at the water! Can’t you see? It’s higher on this side of the doors than it is outside.’ Carrie’s bruised and empty stare took on a new bewildered sharpness. ‘You’re not shutting the water out, you’re shutting it in and letting the house fill up. The river’s flooding, but the water’s coming from in here.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘I know the world’s full of horrible things and people,’ Ryan urged gently, ‘but this isn’t a safe place to hide, Carrie. It’s a place where things wash in and get tangled up and never get out. It’s a place where things drown.’

  Carrie drew close to the pane so that her breath clouded it and her reflection became nothing but two startled eye-stars amid the fog. She trailed her fingertips down it, making little stripes of world through the white veil, and then braced her trembling hands against the French windows and pushed them open. With a sound like a long-held breath being released, water poured out past her shins.

  Without warning, Chelle ran up from behind and hugged Carrie, then carried the motion forward to guide her outside.

  ‘We’re all going to be in horrible trouble,’ she chirruped cheerfully through a faceful of Carrie’s cardigan, ‘but it’ll be OK and firemen will make us hot chocolate . . .’

  ‘Where’s the gate?’ Carrie asked sharply.

  Oh no, thought Ryan as he scanned the unbroken hedge. Oh no oh no oh no.

  Chelle started, then stared upwards, flinched and wiped something from her eye. ‘I just felt a drop . . . Oh no, Ryan, it’s rain. It’s raining again. She must be waking up . . . we’ve got to get out of here . . .’ Chelle splashed her way over to the secateurs.

  ‘Who’s “she”?’ Carrie was looking at them suspiciously, almost accusingly.

  ‘She’s . . .’ Ryan hesitated. ‘She’s where all the water comes from.’

  ‘So I didn’t just cry myself a sea like Alice then,’ said Chelle in altogether the wrong tone of voice.

  ‘She reads minds!’ Ryan added quickly, seeing Carrie turning to stare at Chelle as if she’d suddenly burst into flames. ‘At least some minds, sometimes . . . look . . . can we please talk while we chop?’

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ Chelle was murmuring, ‘none of this can be happening, I’m really going mad. And anyway, I broke my scythe trying to rip my way out of here and the kitchen scissors were no good . . .’

  Carrie stared at Chelle, the colour draining from her face. Then to Ryan’s dismay she turned and marched back through the open French windows.

  ‘Carrie, come back!’

  There were sounds of ripping cardboard, a clang and a couple of splashes. Carrie strode back out, brandishing what looked a lot like a cavalry sabre in one hand.

  ‘All right, Ryan,’ she said a little shakily, ‘you talk, I’ll hack.’

  Many times Ryan had rehearsed in his own mind what he would tell his parents if he was ever forced into the truth. Every time, his stomach had turned to cement at the very thought of having to explain. But, funnily enough, it was much easier telling the story of the well to somebody fighting a magic hedge with a sabre amid rising floods than it would have been on an ordinary afternoon. As Ryan talked Carrie said nothing, but her air of confidence and purpose increased. Perhaps all she’d needed was an explanation, however fantastical, that didn’t involve her descending into insanity.

  With a stiff pair of secateurs and a bread knife from the kitchen, Ryan and Chelle joined in with snipping and sawing the tough stems. Chelle’s face crumpled with effort, but her eyes were bright and clear above the handkerchief that now filled her mouth.

  The rain had become a pensive patter, then an insistent rattle, and was now making conversation difficult. However, when Carrie pushed dank straggles of dark hair out of her face and shouted something, gesturing with her sword, Ryan had no difficulty guessing what she was trying to say.

  The hedge was just as thick as before, but the waters were creeping higher.

  ‘. . . anything made of wood . . . rafts . . .’ Carrie pointed at the top of the hedge and made an ‘up and over’ gesture with her free hand. Ryan blinked at her through wet lashes and nodded. The water had almost reached his hips, and Carrie’s house had no upper floor to which they could retreat. They struggled back into the living room, where a lot of boxes were now floating.

  ‘Tear open everything!’ called Carrie. ‘Don’t worry about any of it – most of it’s stuff I’d never sell anyway! Right, I’ve got lots of polystyrene packing. Come here and I’ll masking-tape it to us to help us float.’

  Picture frames, the wooden jackalope plaque, a bicycle inner tyre, a balsa wood aeroplane – all of these were furiously lashed together with masking tape, string and skipping ropes to make little rafts, each just big enough for one person. Back outside, the water was now up to Ryan’s waist, and Carrie lifted first Ryan then Chelle so that they could struggle on to their rafts.

  Ryan�
��s head twitched. The wind was rising and he thought for a moment he’d heard a soft syllable against his ear, as if the breeze had carried it to him. From somewhere out by the river came the rhythmic, shingling sound of something tearing the surface of the water, in a stride or a swim stroke. Beyond the hedge, someone was approaching.

  Ryan had a sudden mental image of Josh striding on the surface of the river, stagnant water leaking from beneath his beetle-eyed sunglasses, and invisible Magwhite leaves wheeling around him. He screamed to Carrie to get out of the water, to get up on her raft, but he knew that it would make no difference. The Well Spirit was waking, and Josh was back.

  There was a crash from within the hedge, and the creeper fingers thrashed with new energy. Something was fighting its way through the foliage. Chelle was grasping the secateurs and shouting something, probably Carrie’s thoughts. Ryan crouched on his raft, gripping the open kitchen scissors, facing down the hedge as he had the dragon behind the wall.

  A pale corner forced itself through the greenery, wrinkled and pimpled with raindrops. A crash, a thrash, and an angular edge emerged, the plastic wrapping around it flapping and clicking and biting off the stems that caught upon it. It seemed to wrestle from side to side, crushing the creeper out of the way.

  ‘Hello?’ Through a new hole in the creeper Ryan could see a small fragment of face. ‘Is everyone all right in there?’

  The angular shape that had thrust through the hedge was Carrie’s new door, and peering through the aperture was the nervous, cave-cheeked face of Will Wruthers.

  27

  Russian Vine

  Everybody explained at once, with different levels of shrillness. Since Chelle and Carrie were shouting almost exactly the same thing, they drowned out Ryan fairly easily, but the rain’s hammering was loudest of all.

  Will shouted something again and wrenched at the door until it was horizontal, a flat surface just above the waterline. Now they could see a little more of him, standing beyond the hedge with water up to his pockets. He reached his hands through the gap above the door and beckoned slightly. Carrie gestured to Chelle, who paddled her little picture-frame raft forward, and wriggled clumsily off it on to the door. Will took her wrists and pulled, while Ryan and Carrie pushed against the soles of Chelle’s trainers. She vanished with a squeak of polystyrene as if the hedge had swallowed her, but reassuringly her piping voice could be heard a second later on the other side.

  Carrie heaved Chelle’s raft over the hedge, and there was a reassuring splash from the other side. ‘You next, Ryan.’

  Ryan’s raft dipped and shipped water as he edged his chest on to the door. The tunnel through the foliage now seemed to have doubled in length. The plastic sheeting slid and rucked under his knees and hands, but he found the shape of the handle and used it to drag himself forward. At last Will’s outstretched hands closed around Ryan’s wrists, and he too was hauled through to the other side, the creeper scraping at his face and trying to turn out his pockets.

  ‘How many more?’ Will was dressed in a heavy black and yellow biker jacket that made his neck and face look even thinner than usual. Nearby, Chelle was doubled over the remains of her raft.

  ‘One,’ spluttered Ryan as the two remaining rafts flew over the hedge, one after the other. ‘Just Carrie.’ He was still clinging to the near edge of the door, and when it tilted under his hand he guessed that Carrie was starting to wriggle through.

  ‘Carrie?’ Will leaned in again, and Ryan could just make out her frightened face, a crossword puzzle of light and dark. ‘You need to give me your hand.’

  Carrie managed a tight nod, smiled nervously and extended her free hand. Even as she did so, the creeper sighed and stirred. The loose stems pulled tight and meshed, cutting out the light, and the door wobbled and tipped sideways. There was a cry as Carrie’s silhouette tumbled off the door, crashed into the greenery and disappeared beneath the surface of the water.

  Will flung himself forward too late to grab hold of her and leaned across the door, plunging his arms into the brown murk. Chelle was shrieking and shrieking in a terror that wasn’t hers, screaming that she couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move and that something had her by the hair, by the hair. The tip of the sabre broke the surface for a brief moment, circled and then disappeared again.

  All three of them lunged towards the place where it had submerged, Chelle and Ryan spilling off their rafts and floundering through the icy water. Ryan clenched his eyes tight, pinched his nose and ducked below the surface, feeling his feet float from the tarmac as he did so. His knuckle-eyes stung with the water as they opened to show him Carrie trussed with green strands, a necklace of bubbles trailing from her nose.

  She was twisting in a glowing agate murk while honeysuckle blooms made butterfly-flutters against her neck and creeper strands tried to push serpentine into her nostrils, her ears, her mouth. Sometimes one of Will’s legs kicked into view, clad in bulging black leather and trailing a gauze of little bubbles. Then there was only brown murk, but Ryan reached out, felt the flinch of Carrie’s forehead and tore the tendrils from her face, ripped them out of the soft flood of her hair. The water was full of other well-meaning hands that brushed his, and limbs that jarred his jaw and knocked the breath out of his chest. A hand, perhaps Carrie’s, grabbed at his shoulder, and he kicked upwards reflexively, a terror of drowning suddenly destroying all other thought.

  His face broke the surface, the water clicked from his ears, and suddenly the air was full of snorts, gasps, and churning. There were two faces beside his, no, three – Will blinded by his own hair, his lips pushed out in a blowing expression, Chelle’s hair licked up like caramel above her high forehead, and Carrie, sobbing and clinging to Will’s shoulder as they kicked away from the hedge.

  Will dared the Russian vine just long enough to yank the door free, and they helped Carrie clamber up on to it. Chelle and Ryan scrambled back on to their little makeshift rafts, and Will commandeered Carrie’s. They all clung to the wire mesh fence to prevent the current carrying them away.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ gasped Will.

  ‘Russian vine,’ choked Carrie faintly. ‘I . . . I chose it because it grows fast . . .’

  ‘Not that fast it doesn’t!’ Will sputtered. ‘And what’s the matter with Chelle?’

  Even as he spoke, however, the uncontrolled thoughts that flowed from Chelle’s mouth trickled to a halt.

  The burst of energy that had set Carrie fighting her way out of her erstwhile refuge seemed to have deserted her. Ryan remembered her talking about her fear of outdoors, the way the sky was too wide and bright. The sky now seemed darker and lower than usual, but he doubted that that would help. There were still long strands of creeper interwoven with her hair, and her arms and thin pullover were covered in sludge like the foam from a chocolate milkshake. Now that she had stopped spilling Carrie’s thoughts, Chelle was able to volunteer her own.

  ‘I think she’s all, you know, in shock, so I think we have to bath her in whisky but not slap her or anything because that’s only if she’s hysterical . . .’

  ‘Yeah, she’s in shock all right,’ Will said uncertainly, and glanced up and down the river as if hoping some help might have materialized. ‘Which means she ought to be kept warm . . . which means we have to get her out of here. Hang on . . .’ He wrestled off his leather jacket and draped it over Carrie.

  ‘OK.’ Will straightened. ‘OK.’ He seemed to be realizing for the first time that he was the only conscious adult on the scene. ‘Everyone else is OK, right?’

  ‘Just a bit cold and chattery,’ Chelle said reassuringly, kicking out frog-style behind her.

  ‘OK, good. Um . . . We’re going to have to swim and push Carrie’s door along in front of us, OK? And let’s all tie ourselves together so we don’t get separated. The roads are underwater and blocked off for miles – it’s probably quicker to take the river to the next town. We’ll just wear ourselves out and get nowhere if we go against
the current, so we’ll go with it, OK?’

  For a time they swam along the ‘walkway’, but then they came to a place where the path stopped and the fence had crumpled. They took to the river proper.

  ‘So what the hell’s been going on here?’ Will asked at last as the current took them. Having two people explaining something is not twice as helpful as having one, and it was a good few minutes before Chelle and Ryan managed to get across the salient points.

  Ryan at last dared to glance at Will’s face and found that it was looking thin and grey again.

  ‘You probably don’t believe us,’ Ryan muttered, flushing. ‘I mean, do you want us to tell you about things you were thinking, just as proof? I mean . . . I know there was a kid called Donny Sparks who used to make you buy cigarettes . . .’ He couldn’t meet Will’s eye, but in his peripheral vision he could see a deep flush spreading over Will’s face and neck. Ryan wondered how he would feel in Will’s place. ‘You didn’t think anything too bad,’ he blurted.

  ‘Just show me your hands,’ Will said bluntly.

  Ryan held out one hand. His warts were, once again, a cluster of bulges. The percussion from the rain caused the pale eyelids to jump and flicker, exposing Will to half a dozen dark green sliver-stares.

  ‘All right, all right.’ Will, who had reached out to take Ryan’s fingertips, withdrew his hand quickly. He wiped his plastered hair back from his face. ‘That bloody wish!’ he exclaimed bitterly. ‘I remember dropping the coin in the well. I was fourteen. Twelve years went by, and my dream never changed or got any closer. That’s really sad.’

  Ryan did not know what to say.

  ‘So . . .’ Will lowered his voice and paddled a little closer to Ryan in order to whisper confidentially. ‘You and this other boy have been using Chelle to pick up people’s thoughts?’ He sounded appalled, but not incredulous. ‘Can’t you see that . . . a sweet little kid like that . . . there are some thoughts, adult thoughts . . . that she shouldn’t have to hear and understand. Not yet, anyway.’