Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘I dunno. Chelle, can you do this? My contact lens’s slid up and I keep slicing my thumb.’ Chelle took over and set about slicing her own thumb. ‘I just keep thinking, the rain started again, didn’t it? So the Well Spirit must have granted his wish to get her power back. So she made him her Chosen One, and she wouldn’t let her Chosen One drown, would she? That’s what I keep hoping.’ At last Chelle sat back sucking her thumb and holding the last screw.

  They lifted the grille away, and peered at their reflections in the brimming brown water.

  ‘What about us?’ Chelle whispered. ‘I mean, we’re not as Chosen as Josh, are we, so I guess she won’t try to stop us drowning, will she? What are you doing?’

  ‘Taking out my lenses,’ Ryan said under his breath. His chest was full of what he had to do, and he knew that it was important not to think about it too hard. He replaced the lenses in their little plastic box and put it in his pocket. He thought of Josh, Josh going down the well the first time to save them all. He thought of Josh’s plans, and of James Bond surfing down a snow slope on half a door or somebody’s cello case. If only Ryan had a cello case, or even part of a cello case. ‘Can you keep an eye out up here and make sure that Miss Gossamer doesn’t come back and nail down the grille again?’ It was all he could think of to say to keep Chelle safely at ground level. When he stepped up to the side of the well, her eyes widened with an expression of bewildered horror.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he lied, ‘I have a plan.’ And then he trusted himself to instinct and jumped into the water.

  There was a shock of cold and his knuckle-eyes sprang open. Ryan’s vision filled with bubble-flecked brown. His ears licked shut and chimed with depth. He fought against his instinctive need to kick out, to flail with his arms and drive himself back to the surface. Experimentally he let out a few beads of breath, and drew in another without pain. The Well Spirit had called them to her and apparently would not allow them to drown on the way to her presence. Ryan did not know if she would be so understanding once she had heard what he had to say for himself.

  He sank slowly, watching the murky brown light around him change to an eerie emerald. He felt a mounting pain as if someone was pushing fingertips just under his ear lobes, but each time he swallowed it went away.

  The walls receded on either side until it seemed that he was dropping into an enormous cavern, and below him he realized that he could make out the flicker of white flames in an enormous hearth. The light glistened on distant walls that seemed to have been made out of a mulch of stone, the way wasps build from chewed paper. One great slab jutted from the rough rock floor like a feasting table, softened to shapelessness by velvety green weed. Every other inch of the floor was scattered and heaped with coins, some bright, some blackened, some frail as shells. Ryan’s trainers touched the floor and slithered.

  The Well Spirit sat before her hearth, an expressionless silhouette, the flames easily visible through her floating, melting hair. Beside her on a bed of sovereigns Josh lay unmoving, his own short hair obeying the same soft sway. His sunglasses were missing, and Ryan could see that he had gold coins instead of eyes.

  My Angels.

  The words reached him like a ripple through the water rather than a sound. How strange they were, like the exclamation of a mother or a loving grandmother. But he knew that they were meant quite literally. Angels that belong to me. A moment later he noticed that Chelle was descending slowly behind him, her legs cycling comically, the pinks in her clothing waning into greys.

  ‘Chelle . . .’ His voice was a squeak of dismay, and yet he could not help being glad that she was there. He half expected his voice to sound bubbly, but instead it was tinny and muffled.

  ‘I threw the grille in the canal – Miss Gossamer’ll never find it.’ Chelle’s voice was muted, as if she was speaking inside a bottle. She did not seem to need knuckle-eyes to look around her, any more than Ryan had needed them in his dreams. Her gaze fell upon Josh’s coin-eyes and she looked at Ryan aghast. Ryan could only mirror her expression and shake his head helplessly. He had no idea if Josh was alive or dead.

  Draw closer.

  Ryan and Chelle glanced at each other for reassurance, then obeyed the noiseless command. They drift-loped forward like astronauts, their clothes bulging and flourishing around them strangely.

  As they drew closer Ryan developed a tooth-twinge feeling that something was wrong, something was different. It was a moment before he realized what it was. The Well Spirit was no longer swinging her head in a slow, thrashing motion as if trying to wake herself from a nightmare. Her head was held steady, and from its angle he guessed that her gaze was directed at Josh. The green-stained fingers of her hand crept over his forehead as if feeling for some bump or injury. And then for a moment he saw something arcing and melting in the firelight, something that was not the Well Spirit’s hair.

  He snatched at Chelle’s arm, bringing the two of them into collision.

  ‘She’s changed!’ He hissed bubbles in her ear as he pretended to steady himself. ‘She has wish snakes now! She never had them before – something’s happened to her!’ He was not sure if Chelle had understood, but he dared say no more. Hesitantly Chelle and Ryan drew closer and settled themselves on two green-draped rocks.

  Disobeyed. Ungranted. Destroyed shri-i-i-ine.

  With each word, the firelight flared and their faces tingled with something that was not heat, rather more like the rush of blood after a blow. On the last word, Ryan suddenly felt a choking sting in his lungs, as if the water within had briefly become unbreathable. He was left in no doubt about the likely consequences of giving the Well Spirit an answer she didn’t like.

  ‘The other god made us do it,’ Chelle suddenly chirruped.

  What? Ryan screamed inside his head as the hearth’s flames leaped to twice their height.

  ‘Yes, only it’s not our fault, because we were trying to grant one of your wishes, the one with the Harley-Davidson, but to do that we had to, um, swim across this lake to get the Harley half of it because you only find them inside a certain kind of apple on this island owned by . . . the Harley Queen, only it turned out that there was a god in the lake and when we were splashing around we scared away the sacred . . . horned rabbits which did his bidding and so he said we had to serve him in their place. So we’ve been trying really, really hard to serve both of you only it’s very difficult . . .’

  Name god.

  ‘Um, well if I name him then he’ll be really really angry that I told you . . .’ The radiation from the fire became almost stinging. ‘. . . Um, um, but I suppose as a Well’s Angel I have to grant wishes for coins, so if I got a coin for the information I’d just be doing my job and he couldn’t be angry, could he?’

  Slowly one green-fingered hand reached out, felt tenderly across the piles of treasure, selected a large silver coin with a hole in the middle, and flicked it in Chelle’s direction. It spun in slow motion towards her.

  ‘Ha!’ As her hand closed around the coin Chelle’s face brightened triumphantly. ‘Ha, got you, penny for your thoughts, ha ha.’

  The next second Chelle doubled up, then straightened and opened her mouth. For a moment Ryan thought she was choking, but no, she was speaking. It was a language that he had never heard before, full of gutturals and gasps, lisps and leaning vowels. It was harsh and haunting at the same time. Occasionally a word or phrase was recognizable in the way that faces may be half familiar in dreams.

  It was a few seconds before he understood what Chelle had done and why. If the Well Spirit had grown wish snakes, she could become a wisher. And now that Chelle had her ungranted wish coin, Chelle was channelling her thoughts.

  As he listened, the words spilling from Chelle’s mouth changed and he recognized the language as French, although a lot of the words were lost on him. Another ripple passed across Chelle’s expression and the words were suddenly English, although uttered with a creaking slowness as if the sentences were chains jammed with rust. />
  ‘. . . and now she echoes me who is this other god steal my servants this other god shall not shall not have them drown them first but not this one he would never betray me I shall not let the other god see him or steal him but why does he not move perhaps cover him with more gold to make him comfortable keep him warm and safe . . .’

  Again the green fingers drifted slowly across Josh’s brow, and for the first time Ryan noticed a bleached cut near his hairline.

  ‘He’s hurt,’ he said aloud.

  ‘. . . fell fell from climbing fell against the bricks but I stopped the blood and made him live and I will keep him safe here until better and he will stay with me be my child . . .’

  My child. Ryan could suddenly see it all. Josh sniggering angrily at the mouth of the well, telling himself that he’d show everyone now that the Well Spirit had no choice but to make him her representative, the wielder of all her power, her archangel, her Chosen One. Josh had not understood that every wish came in two parts, including a secret part of which even the wisher was often unaware. In desperation the Well Spirit had granted both parts of his wish. No doubt Josh now had all the supernatural power he could want, but this had not been the whole of his wish. Josh wanted to be special, to be the centre of the world for somebody at last. To grant his unconscious wish the Well Spirit had changed her very nature . . . and given him a mother.

  ‘He’s not going to get better here,’ said Ryan, venturing forward a little. ‘It’s not right for him – there’s no air, there’s no light – we’re not made for that kind of thing.’ He thought he could make out some details of her face, a crease in her neck as she lowered her chin to scowl, a jade sheen on her cheek.

  ‘. . . never fall again safe here . . .’

  ‘Safe isn’t enough,’ Ryan said gently, suddenly feeling a pang of pity for her. ‘Even if you could stop him starving, his muscles would start to waste, and he’d bleach white or blue, and his hands and feet would wrinkle up, and in the end you’d see the coins in his eyes greening over, and then if he ever woke up he’d hardly be able to move. And his eyes aren’t supposed to be like that.’

  ‘. . . my finest gold . . .’

  ‘I can see that. Only . . . those aren’t Josh’s eyes.’

  ‘. . . needs me . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Ryan softly, ‘but he needs air and friends and his life more. You want the best for him, don’t you? Then you’ve got to release him. And . . . not just out of the well. You’ve got to ungrant his wish and change him back, and release him from being an Angel.’

  ‘. . . ungrant wishes myself lose me my power . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘. . . if I let him go never come back . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ryan said honestly. ‘No, I think maybe he won’t ever come back to Magwhite. But –’ he wrestled with his pity and lost – ‘but I could. To let you know how he is.’

  ‘. . . needs someone to guard him . . .’

  ‘We can try,’ Ryan said slowly. ‘Only . . . you’ve got to release us as well, before we get locked in a loony bin like your last Angels, or we can’t.’

  The fire ebbed and sighed. At long last Ryan stared into her face. Her eyes were holes through which the water flowed freely, dark and fathoms deep. For a fleeting instant he saw himself reflected in them. He was upside down, and his tiny features were unreadable.

  Wish for release when you reach the air. This time I grant. The soundless boom rippled through the hall, and they knew they had been dismissed.

  The light of the fire seemed to be dwindling, and in near darkness Chelle and Ryan slid from their stony seats and half crawled, half swam to Josh’s side. They each dragged an arm over their shoulders, feeling the chill of his hands against theirs, and kicked away from the stone floor.

  As they rose through the black and the green and the brown, Ryan could feel pressure building behind his nose and inside his ears. He heard a hoarse roaring of air. His throat started to tighten and jerk as if at last it realized what it was breathing. Above him, the surface was a capricious, billowing silver disc. He kicked and struggled his way towards it, but it seemed to get no closer. His eyes and nasal passages were stinging, his lungs were lurching helplessly, airlessly . . . and then he smashed through the surface with his face. Suddenly he was spitting and choking water from a stinging throat.

  He trod water and supported Josh while Chelle scrambled out, and between the two of them they dragged the older boy out to lie on the mulch. Josh’s eyes were closed, but the lids were rounded as if at last they hid ordinary eyes again.

  ‘Wish time,’ whispered Chelle, as Ryan climbed out. She extended her forefinger, the tip of which was poked through the centre of the silver coin.

  Ryan reached a shivering hand for it and paused. What would his hidden wish be? How could he know? The last week alone had shown him how little he knew himself. Could he be sure that there were no twisted wishes at the back of his mind, mean hopes, vengeful thoughts, secret rages? Who can you trust when you can’t trust yourself?

  ‘I think you’d better do it,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’ Chelle smiled and tugged her finger free. She fluttered her lips in a silent wish, and then dropped the silver coin into the waters of the well.

  Epilogue

  All three of them were, of course, in trouble. And when Ryan’s mum picked Ryan up at last from the hospital where Josh had been taken, she found many new and inventive ways of explaining this to him all the way home.

  ‘You’re in the Ninth Circle of Trouble,’ she snapped, yanking the steering wheel to take them off the roundabout. ‘You’ll need a new emergency service to get yourself out of this one.’ Ryan tried to feel as daunted as she wanted him to be, but, tucked in the back seat of the car, trouble felt like blankets and brusque, bruising hugs.

  ‘I don’t ask much,’ Ryan’s mother flashed him a look in the mirror, ‘but I do expect to be able to trust you.’ This was true, Ryan realized, thinking of the way she had taken his word against Miss Gossamer. ‘Is this a regular thing for you, running out of the library in secret? Is this the day I have to stop trusting you, Ryan? How many other lies have there been?’

  ‘Just lately there’ve been quite a lot,’ Ryan admitted. ‘Mum, I’m really sorry, but . . . it’s over now.’

  ‘It’s over, is it? “It” is over, is it?’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘Is it?’ his mum asked once more. ‘Because I need to know if Josh is going to hurt you again, Ryan.’ There was silence but for the tic-tac-tic-tac of the indicator. ‘Don’t assume that I’m stupid, and kindly don’t assume that I’m blind. When I came home on the night of the break-in, objects were moving around by themselves. I didn’t tell the hospital or the police – they’d have decided I was unstable and whisked you off to social services. But I saw it.

  ‘At first I thought Miss Gossamer might have been responsible. But today I went to talk to our neighbour Mrs Milton, the one with the leg and the attic room, and she says she saw Josh in our garden that night, letting himself in through our back door.’ She flashed a fierce, rapid glance at Ryan and drove on for a few moments without speaking. ‘Reports of poltergeist cases nearly always take place in a house where there’s a troubled teenager,’ she added at last, in a curt, businesslike tone. ‘Josh has become a centre for poltergeist activity, hasn’t he?’

  Ryan’s face prickled and his tongue was dry as paper. He hesitated, and then slowly nodded.

  ‘Sort of,’ he said.

  ‘And you and Chelle knew about it and have been protecting him, even after he attacked you.’

  ‘Josh . . . wasn’t Josh at the time, Mum.’

  ‘That boy’s disturbed, and I’m not having you suffering for it. Can you take him down from his pedestal long enough to see that?’

  Ryan nodded slowly.

  ‘I think I hated him for a bit,’ he said after a moment. ‘Just for, you know, not being everything I wanted him to be. But . . . even with all th
e bad stuff he was still my friend. And if your friend’s drowning, even if he’s trying to drown and struggling to shake your hand off his sleeve, you don’t let go, do you? He was . . . in a bad place, Mum. We had to go there to get him back, and if I’d told you you’d have stopped me.’

  ‘Damn right,’ she said, but her voice sounded less angry. ‘So what do you suggest, Ryan? I’m not happy with you spending more time with him.’

  ‘Mum . . .’ Ryan rallied his will power. ‘He’s still drowning. I can’t let go. But I promise there’ll be no more lies. I swear. On . . . my eyes.’

  His mum said nothing for some time, and Ryan waited for her to steamroll his wishes as usual.

  ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I’m going to trust you. I’m going to trust you to tell me if there’s any more trouble. I won’t pursue Josh over the damage done to the house either. The Lattimer-Stones know now that he sneaked in that night, and I’ll leave everything in their hands.’ She gave Ryan another glance that seemed to say, but if he ever hurts you again . . .

  A long silence followed.

  ‘Mum?’ The curiosity was too much. ‘If you made one wish in a wishing well, what would it be?’

  ‘What? I’ve never done anything of the sort, how should I know . . . ?’

  No, you wouldn’t, would you? Too busy rampaging through the world, granting your own wishes . . .

  Ryan regarded his mother with exasperated pride as she narrowed her eyes at the odds, and ran a red light.

  The Lattimer-Stones passed judgement on Josh the moment he was well enough to see them. As far as they were concerned he had been seeking attention, first by sabotaging electronics around The Haven, then by smashing up the Doyles’ house and attacking Ryan, and finally by running away from home and falling foul of the flood waters. He was to go to boarding school in another county, somewhere expensive with good counselling services.