by Chris Ward
‘Oh. It’s a sad story.’
‘With a happy ending. Of sorts. For a while, at least.’
‘Really?’
‘Had my second coming as the gatekeeper to the school. Or at least I was, until they built that stupid new entrance. You can call me Gatekeeper, because serial numbers are easy to forget, unless you’re really good at math.’
‘I’m not.’
‘That’s settled, then.’
‘When did they build the new entrance?’
‘Three hundred years ago, by your numbers, I’d guess. I’m no good at math, either. Anytime and all time by mine. Fools. All that plastic and flexi-glass. Like it doesn’t reanimate so much quicker than wood? Found that out the hard way, didn’t they?’
Benjamin blinked. ‘That was silly of them.’
The gatekeeper dipped his head in a sage nod. ‘Right you are. Looks like we’re on the same page, boy. Who are you?’
‘My name’s Benjamin Forrest. I woke up on the beach. A turtle that looked like a car ate half my schoolwork, and then tried to eat me.’
The gatekeeper gave a shrug. ‘They’ll do that, you fool. You have to learn how to talk to them. Don’t you know anything?’
‘To be quite honest—’
A sudden howl rose up off the cliffs to the east, from the direction of the beach. Benjamin jumped, recalling a school trip to a wind farm outside Swindon and a tour through the generator building. The roar had been so fantastic, so great, Benjamin had heard barely a word the guide had said. The terrible howl reminded him of those whirling, relentless turbines.
‘Wow, is that the wind?’ he asked the gatekeeper, clapping his hands over his ears.
‘Um, no. Small problem,’ the gatekeeper said. ‘Better make yourself scarce, unless you’re not yet tired of being eaten.’
‘What is it?’
‘Scatlocks. Irritating little things. They like to burrow into your ears and eyes, and just about anywhere else. Best take cover. They’ll eat you, but I’ve heard their mouths are so small that it takes several thousand of them several days to finish you off. Can’t imagine that’s a great deal of fun, can you?’
The gatekeeper rolled toward the door. A gear lever stuck out, poked into the lock, and the door swung open.
‘Come on, get inside, won’t you, fool?’
Benjamin hiked his bag over his shoulder and ran for the door. He had almost made it, when the air filled with a blizzard of white-and-grey fluttering things that ripped at his clothes and tore at his bag.
‘Hurry! Get inside before they do!’
‘I can’t see you!’ Benjamin screamed, spinning around, trying to cover his face with his hands. The scatlocks felt crisp and dry, like they were made of—
‘Here!’
Something metal prodded him in the side, and Benjamin grabbed hold of it with one hand, batting the scatlocks away from his face with the other. The gatekeeper pulled him backward through the door, just as one of the scatlocks ducked down the front of his shirt.
Screaming, Benjamin yanked it out and threw it at the floor like it was a live snake. The door slammed, shutting out the violent noise. A light switched on to reveal a dark, damp cavern with a tunnel leading up a gentle slope to the right. Jagged lumps of rock protruded from the ceiling a few inches above his head.
As Benjamin gathered his breath, the gatekeeper turned around with the white, fluttery thing speared on the end of one of his gear levers.
‘Be careful you don’t kill them. I’m not sure that’s allowed. I’ll put it back outside later.’
‘It attacked me,’ Benjamin gasped.
‘It was trying to chase you off its territory,’ the gatekeeper said. ‘Reanimates don’t like humans all that much. You’re unnatural, you see.’
‘No, I’m not!’ Benjamin said. ‘This thing’s unnatural. Look at it! What is it, anyway?’ He poked at what looked like a plastic bag folded into the shape of a butterfly.
‘I told you. It’s a scatlock. They nest on the cliffs in great colonies, and they get aggressive with anyone who gets too close. One day, they’ll inherit Endinfinium, you mark my words.’
‘Endinfinium … that’s what the girl said. Where are we?’
‘We’re here, is where we are. There is nowhere else.’
Benjamin took a deep breath. ‘Yes, there is. There’s England, and there’s Basingstoke and there’s Victoria Road. That’s where my family lives.’
‘Well, not anymore. You’re here now, and here you’ll stay. This is Endinfinium.’ The gatekeeper rumbled like a croaky, old engine, which Benjamin sensed was a snort of pride. ‘Endinfinium is the end of everything, and it’s for infinity, so I’m told. But what would I know? I’m just an old tractor.’ The gatekeeper leaned forward, looming over Benjamin’s head like a giant, homemade toy. ‘Anyone ever told you that you ask a lot of questions?’
‘A few teachers, yes. I would have asked the girl, but she went off somewhere.’
‘Miranda?’
‘She told me to look for you, then ran off back to the beach.’
The gatekeeper’s headlight eyes revolved. ‘That girl. She’ll get in trouble if she’s not careful. Always running off, forgetting about the Oath. Well, let me tell you the answers to a couple of questions you’ll likely have fairly soon. Right now, you’re not anywhere, but the place you want to get to is a couple of miles farther along this way, across a rickety, little bridge.’
‘And where’s that?’
The gatekeeper sighed as if the answer should have been obvious.
‘The only place a boy of your age should be going. Endinfinium High. The School at the End of the World.’
3
The Bridge
The tunnel sloped gently upward, all rough-hewn rock with flickering oil lamps set into natural alcoves. Occasionally a door led off, some with markings and others plain, but the gatekeeper ignored them all as he continued his arduous march. For Benjamin, a soft spot had started to develop for the old tractor who was like a grouchy but beloved uncle, the sort who would ignore a beautiful summer sky to tell you war stories about his misspent youth.
‘Are there many other people here?’ Benjamin asked after a time, having tired of the gatekeeper’s parts’ relentless mechanical grinding in the echoing confines of the tunnel. ‘Apart from Miranda, everything I’ve seen was kind of … weird.’
‘Of course there are, fool. A right old bag of marbles we are out here. No end to the assortment. Reanimates, wanderers, and humans living in perfectly fractious non-harmony. I’m sure in time you’ll find what you’re looking for.’
‘Miranda said you were a bit grumpy.’
The gatekeeper grunted. ‘Huh. I bet she did. Compared to her, the two suns must be grumpy. Always too enthusiastic for her own good.’
‘Two?’
‘What?’
‘Two suns?’
‘Yes, the big one and the small one. Don’t you look up?’
Benjamin made a note to pay more attention when he next went outside. ‘Well,’ he said, patting the gatekeeper on the nearest part of his chassis, ‘I don’t care what she says. I think you’re a bastion of sweetness and light. As fresh as summer flowers, with a smile that could out-beam the sun itself.’
‘Which one?’
‘Both!’
The gatekeeper lurched backward, his radiator grill wheezing. His head struck the roof of the tunnel, and a puff of dust sprinkled down.
‘Fool, making me laugh like that. How will you find your way out of here if I keel over and die?’
‘Stop calling me fool.’
The gatekeeper leaned down toward him. One headlight flashed in a wink. ‘I don’t know what it is with you humans. You think you know everything, then you show up and start bumbling around like you’ve never seen reanimates before.’
‘I haven’t. Last thing I remember was being in the woods near my house. There was a forest road, and my little brother, David, he was there, and … that’s it.’
‘And how did you end up here?’
‘That’s what I’d like to find out, before I get eaten by a burrowing car or suffocated by a flying plastic bag.’
The gatekeeper stopped as the tunnel came to an abrupt end at a large pair of doors not dissimilar to the entrance. ‘Well, hopefully you’ll find someone who can help you over at the school.’ A gear lever poked out. ‘Good luck, young Benjamin, and if you find yourself with nothing to do, come and entertain me with a few tales of that other place. Banstock, wasn’t it?’
‘Basingstoke.’
‘Ah, yes.’
Benjamin took hold of his gear lever and shook it. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your help, Gatekeeper.’
‘A pleasure. Now be careful out on the catwalk. It can get a little bouncy in the middle if the wind gets up.’
The gatekeeper poked a lever into the lock and the doors swung open to reveal a spiraling stone staircase. Natural light from somewhere above made a circle on the floor. Benjamin stepped forward, and before he could change his mind, the doors swung shut. Through an opening high above, a circle of orange-tinted cloud was visible.
The staircase opened onto a barren outcrop of rock with sharp drop-offs to either side. Behind him, in the direction he had come, was a pretty cove—a semi-circle of sand at the bottom of a steep cliff.
Ahead, the mountainside descended with perilous steepness toward a wide bay. Large, blue-grey rollers battered jagged headlands, while out beyond the line of the breakers, strange creatures moved through the water, some sleek and streamlined, others bulky and angular. From time to time, one would surface in a burst of colour, flop over and disappear back beneath the swell. They were too distant to see clearly, but Benjamin was certain he had never seen anything like them off the pier at Weston-Super-Mare.
And there across the bay, wrapped over the top of a rocky headland, stood a building quite unlike anything Benjamin had ever seen. In some ways a castle, in others a tumbledown ruin, what could only be Endinfinium High was not so much a dazzling display of architecture, but a building clinging for dear life to the crumbling cliff beneath. For every tower reaching optimistically toward the sky, a collapsed wall or an overhanging balcony looked just seconds from a long and painful drop to the rocky shoreline.
Far across on the school’s headland, the grey line of a path switched back and forth as it led up to the school. Unfortunately, this lay on the other side of a vertigo-inducing rope bridge that stretched from a thin ledge below Benjamin’s feet, to a gate in the castle’s outer wall.
Attempting to cross the bridge seemed a quick way to end up as food for the monstrous fish in the water below. With frayed and damaged rope, the bridge swung like a pendulum in the strong wind, at times nearly looping over on itself.
Benjamin scuttled back down the steps and began pounding on the door, screaming for the gatekeeper to let him in, but now that his duty was over and the scatlocks had gone, the old tractor had obviously retreated back to his sunny little spot in the courtyard.
With no other choice, Benjamin sat for a while and stared across at the school, too scared to move. In the end, though, his body made the decision for him: he was hungry, and the school was the only place likely to have food. He remembered eating Coco Pops with David that morning before they had gone to play down in the woods, but since then, the passage of time had scrambled at some point, and now his stomach was so empty, it could have been a balloon at a child’s birthday party.
His first step onto the bridge felt solid enough. It was made of wooden slats lashed together with rope and it creaked with every step, but it felt firm enough as he inched out over the bay, one fearful step at a time.
He was a fair way out when the first real gust of wind came. As the bridge swung sharply left, he grabbed hold of the guardrail ropes, wondering if this was a normal, earthly wind, or perhaps a wind caused by having the end of the world just a few miles to the east. Gritting his teeth and hanging on as though the rope might disappear, he waited until the bridge swung back the other way. Then, as it hit the flat, he scampered a few steps forward.
This had to be a dream, and he had to be about to wake up. This realisation helped to quell his fear a little, even as the rope bridge bucked again. Benjamin closed his eyes and wrapped his arms through the guardrail ropes, holding on for dear life, until the bridge swung back again and settled for a few seconds to allow him to race another few steps farther forward.
He was now midway across the bay. The bridge dipped in the middle, at its lowest point close enough to the water below that Benjamin felt spray on his face from the tossing waves. In the brief moments of calm, Benjamin marveled at the creatures that seemed to dance there—great luminous tentacled things; twisted, angular monstrosities that looked like hybrids of beast and machine. Indeed, vessels were down there, too—arrow-shaped ships with billowing sails that bucked and swerved through the surf. Figures that might have been men stood on their multi-coloured decks.
The rope bridge bucked again, then flattened out. Benjamin darted a few more steps forward. The door seemed even closer; he was sure he could make it.
His optimism began to rise, when a howling sound from the headland behind him sent a shiver down his back. He forced himself to look over his shoulder, terrified of what he would see.
The flickering white mass of a flock of scatlocks rose above the clifftop’s pinnacle, like a shifting, formless cloud. They bunched into a tight ball, appeared to pause, and then rushed forward across the bridge.
Benjamin turned and dashed for the far side, stumbling and falling more than once as the bridge jerked beneath him. His knees picked up splinters, but he ignored the pain, pushing himself back up in a tumble of arms and legs, forcing himself onward, aware that death by a swarm of angry plastic bags might outweigh death by plunging into monster-infested waters.
He was within a few steps of the far side when a board broke underneath him and, with a howl of terror, he dropped through the slats, wooden teeth scraping at his clothes. Desperate fingers closed over the jagged edge of the broken board, and he hooked his nails into the grooves of the wood while he kicked his legs out, desperately trying to swing himself up.
It was impossible. He had never enjoyed P.E. much and didn’t have the upper body strength to pull himself up or the core strength to lift his legs and hook them. If he tried to swing, his hands would likely slip.
He glanced down. Right beneath him, something ominous swirled in the water.
The wind gusted again, swinging him right. Something batted against his hip.
My bag, he thought.
It was still hooked over his left shoulder. Risking losing his grip and plunging into the waves below, Benjamin let go with one hand, using it to unhook the bag. With a wide, arcing swing, it caught on the guardrail and held firm enough take his weight. Steeling himself, he pulled upward with all his might.
He was halfway up through the hole, when the strap on his bag broke. For a moment he felt a great lightness, before the bag sailed away to the water far below. Benjamin watched, wondering why he wasn’t tumbling after it. His legs flapped, feeling a thick, jelly-like resistance.
Something was cushioning him. He looked down but nothing was there, though when he looked up again, Miranda was running out toward him. She grabbed his wrists, hauled him up, and both of them fell in a heap on the creaking bridge.
‘Don’t tell a soul,’ she said, her eyes filled with fear. Then, as Benjamin frantically shook his head, even though he wasn’t yet sure what she was talking about, Miranda pulled him to his feet.
‘Quick,’ she hissed. ‘The door.’
The cloud of scatlocks hovered right above them. Miranda threw the door open and, in a single motion, pushed Benjamin inside, then slammed the door closed. The howling wind and the buzz of the scatlocks cut off in an instant.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Almost there.’
She turned and raced down a tunnel. As she passed, flames appeared in f
ittings bolted to the wall, as if lit by sensors. Benjamin ran after her, and a few seconds later, she stopped at a door.
‘We’re here,’ she said, flashing him a smile as she twisted the handle. ‘After you.’
Benjamin stepped through, then gasped at the sheer size of the room in which he found himself standing.
‘Where are we?’
The girl’s smile broadened. ‘This,’ she said, sweeping a hand before her, ‘is the Great Hall of Endinfinium. It’s where we have assembly.’
Benjamin turned to look around him.
‘Wow,’ was all he could say.
4
The Great Hall
The hall was at least three times the size of his school’s gym, shaped like an old Roman auditorium, with a wide central floor between dozens of ascending rows of seats on either side. Benjamin imagined gladiators racing chariots, or lions and bears eating slaves while a massive crowd roared.
About halfway to a raised stage at the far end, a man quietly swept the floor. Otherwise, the vast room was empty.
‘There’s no one here at the moment,’ Miranda said.
‘I noticed.’
With the trials of the rope bridge pushed to the back of his mind, Benjamin descended a set of steps to the floor below, his footfalls echoing around him. The vaulted roof lay in shadow, while seats rose up thirty rows deep to where unlit spotlights the size of dinner tables stood beside black curtains. Alcove lights brightened the hall’s dimensions just enough, but he could imagine the place filled with light and theatre.
‘What do you do in here?’ he asked.