by Chris Ward
Feeling a surge of hatred, both for Wilhelm and for his stupid pet, she grabbed hold of Rick’s wings, slid open the window, and flung him out. If Wilhelm had been here, she would have flung him out, too.
Only as she did so, she realised what an idiot she was. Rick was a Scatlock; he could fly.
Angry with herself, she stood up on the bed to lean out the window. To her relief, Rick was a couple of floors below her, one wing severed by a window frame’s metal strut that had broken loose. Without the wind currents to aid him, the weight of the camera had sent Rick falling straight down. He was stuck, and the camera pointed inwards at the dark windows of an unused floor.
Good. No one for Wilhelm’s silly little camera to spy on.
She shut the window and climbed down, grunting, satisfied by the dust her shoes had left on Cherise’s duvet. She rubbed it into the material a little so it was less obviously a shoe print, then returned to her own bed and rifled through her bag for the itinerary.
7 p.m.—barbecue and campfire in the car park, with ghost stories and an organised ghost hunt in the forest.
Miranda rolled her eyes. She could hardly wait. The sooner she found Cuttlefur and they escaped from Endinfinium, the better.
24
Cleaning Time
So far, the toilet block of the old gym had lived up to its reputation. Wilhelm, decked from head to foot in protective waterproof clothing, grimaced as he held a plastic hose that sprayed out a liquid which smelt only marginally better than the urine it resembled. In front of him, a line of angry urinals clacked their reanimated mouths and tried to break away from the pipes holding them into the wall. Chips of masonry flew everywhere, the pipes clanged on other pipes deeper in the wall; the dank, dirty toilet room had filled with a cacophony of discordant ringing sounds like a Halloween carnival.
Beside him, one of the cleaners screamed as a plug hole in the middle of the floor burst upward, wrapping a dirty, plastic pipe around his leg. The pipe jerked backwards, and the cleaner slipped to the floor, splashing brown liquid over the wall. His hose fell loose, and for a few seconds until he was able to kick it away, Wilhelm was hit in the front of his mask by a torrent of cold chamomile tea.
‘Break! Break!’ came Captain Roche’s gruff shout as he supervised the clean-up operation from outside the toilet door. The huge gym teacher, too wide to get through the opening—even sideways—had assumed a typical management position, as Wilhelm saw it: all talk, no action. While he and the group of docile cleaners had spent the morning fighting off several dozen angry toilet fittings, the captain had sat on a bench and shouted encouragement while snacking on vegetable fritters brought up from the kitchens.
Wilhelm tossed the hose to the ground, and the nearest urinal snapped at it, porcelain teeth closing over air just inches away. A final squirt of cold tea struck it, and it shrank back, whimpering as though slapped. Wilhelm sighed and joined the line of cleaners filing out.
‘Good work, everyone,’ Captain Roche said, standing up with the kind of groan that suggested he’d become accustomed to doing nothing. ‘Good work done in there. Get something to eat.’
Other cleaners had brought up trays of other vegetable-based snacks, and Wilhelm was amused to find the food a step up in quality from lunch and dinner. Without his friends, though, the company—nine solemn cleaners who neither spoke nor attempted to eat as they sat around him in a circle—was somewhat lacking.
‘So, you know, do you have any hobbies?’ he asked the one nearest, a man who had probably once been in his forties, but had reanimated entirely in shades of grey, like a character in a black-and-white television drama. Eyes flicked toward him, looked him up and down in a suggestion of basic intelligence, but the cleaner, who sat patiently with his grey hands on his knees, otherwise made no reaction.
‘Do you like vegetables, or would you prefer a bit of bacon from time to time?’ he asked the cleaner, picking a vegetable fritter off of a plate and popping it into his mouth. ‘Ketchup or brown sauce?’
‘Aren’t you ever quiet, Jacobs?’ Captain Roche said. ‘It’s a wonder you don’t run out of things to say.’
‘You have to talk more when you’re speaking for two, sir,’ Wilhelm said. ‘I bet these guys don’t make much of a chorus club.’
The cleaners could, in fact, produce sounds, as Wilhelm had discovered when one had been caught by the plughole pipe, though the sound was more to alert someone to its presence, rather like a car alarm. As soon as the pipe had slithered away, the cleaner had continued to work as if nothing had happened.
‘Don’t they, like, get bored of basically being our slaves?’
Captain Roche sighed, as if conversation was a terrible chore. ‘We’re not forcing them to do anything,’ he said. ‘Once a month, we send a foraging mission across the river to the Haunted Forest. We pick up any who have wandered down to the waters’ edge and bring them back to the school. We don’t even tell them what to do. Some of them wander off again, others slot neatly into a role within the school.’
‘What happens to the ones that wander off?’
‘I don’t know. Same as happens to the ones we don’t pick up.’
‘Eaten by ghouls?’
Captain Roche groaned. ‘You kids and your fairy tales. We don’t know. Maybe. Maybe they have whole communities in the middle of the forest. Jacobs, don’t you tire of asking questions?’
‘Not when there aren’t enough answers.’
‘No wonder you and Forrest get on so well. Right, back to work.’
At the mention of Benjamin, Wilhelm thought about the trip the rest of the pupils had gone on. What were they up to now? Had Miranda finally gotten tired of that idiot, Cuttlefur?
He wished he could find out, but Miranda had taken Rick, and his computer was broken—
Or was it?
If dead things could reanimate, wouldn’t his computer fix itself?
‘Sir,’ he said, as he stood up, ‘how long does stuff take to reanimate?’
‘How long’s a length of rope, Jacobs?’
‘Depends.’
‘There’s your answer, then.’
‘Well, is there some way to speed it up?’
‘I teach gym, Jacobs. How would I know?’
Wilhelm closed his eyes and concentrated. Yes, it was there, just as he’d known it would be: the subtle heat of Captain Roche’s magic. With the exception of Edgar, the teachers maintained a line that Endinfinium’s magic wasn’t real, and they refused to use it in view of the pupils. They all possessed versions of it, though, and the little tingle of heat Wilhelm could feel where there should have been none meant Captain Roche was keeping his ready, just in case.
‘Do you remember much about life before you came here, sir?’
Captain Roche groaned again. ‘Jacobs, if the rest of you worked as hard as your mouth does—’
‘Just wondering, sir. I quite like it here. Not many people talk about where they came from.’
‘Perhaps that’s because there’s nothing much to tell.’
‘The cleaners, though. They were all pupils at the school once, weren’t they? Why did they die? What happens when you graduate?’
‘You find somewhere to best utilise your skills, Jacobs. For you, I imagine there are plenty of toilet blocks that need cleaning. And on that thought, how about we get back to work? If you’re done before Friday, I’ll let you have the rest of the time off until the others get back.’
‘And if I’m not done?’
‘You’ll be coming after classes for as long as it takes.’
Wilhelm sighed. ‘Yes, sir.’
The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze of smelly chamomile and angry toilet fittings. Several enthusiastic shower heads caught up one of the cleaners like a fly in a spider’s web, but Wilhelm managed to avoid any drama of his own, and by the time Captain Roche had called a halt for the day, he was aching from head to foot.
As he trudged back to the dorms and a depressing evening of playing tr
umps over dinner with Gubbledon, he wondered again how the others were getting on. Despite the harsh words that had passed between them, he missed both Benjamin and Miranda. He had always considered himself a bit of a loner, and in fact, back in the orphanage, he had shunned contact with others. Since arriving here, though, he had grown to like it.
The computer tablet connected to Rick’s live video stream sat on his bed where he had left it. The screen was still broken, but the hint of an obscured picture had come through the shattered glass. It felt slightly warm, as if it had begun to reanimate, but how long would it take to fix itself? It was impossible for him to fix it. Even if he found a similar one among the junk in the Locker Rooms, he wouldn’t know how to fit in a replacement screen without breaking it. No, he would have to wait for it to reanimate, which could take days, or even weeks.
If only the process could be sped up. He thought about the way they cleaned, using chemicals made from chamomile or even the tea itself, piped straight from a huge vat in the kitchens. Chamomile generally relaxed people when they drank it, and that’s why old ladies liked it, wasn’t it? And it was always served inoffensively warm.
If warm chamomile calmed reanimated objects, then to speed up his computer’s reanimation, he would need something completely opposite. Aggressive, hot.
He smiled.
The answer was obvious.
Fire.
25
Secrets
The figure in the hood crept through the dark corridors of the guesthouse, one hand on his pocket, holding the device the man in the woods had given him. If someone discovered him ahead of time, he was to use it immediately, squeezing and throwing simultaneously, and he would no longer have to worry about them.
So, if he wanted to complete his mission and return home, it was imperative he continue undiscovered. He had made contact with the innkeeper earlier, and a few whispered questions had established a meeting time and place.
He turned a final corner and rapped on a door labeled STORAGE.
‘Is that you? Come in.’
He kicked the door, and it swung open through a carpet of dirt. The innkeeper stood in the centre of a dusty but empty space, holding a candle in front of him. A single, small window was at his back, giving a dirty view of the distant horizon and a yellowish tint of a sunset that never quite happened.
‘You knew I was here?’
The figure in the hood nodded. ‘Of course. He taught me well. I could feel you halfway back down the corridor. You should be careful with the teachers around.’
‘Well, let’s go through the plan before we’re discovered.’
Cuttlefur pushed back his hood, and his blue hair flopped around his shoulders. He shook it irritably. He looked forward to the day he could cut the damned stuff off, particularly as his natural brown was starting to show through in the roots. The stupid girl would notice soon. Not for a few days at least, though; far longer than was needed.
‘Have you heard from him?’
The innkeeper shook his head. ‘Only as … thoughts.’
‘Then let’s make sure we’re on the same page, shall we? Can you imagine if we end up stuck here in this hellhole forever?’
The innkeeper shook his head. ‘We won’t.’
‘Let’s make sure of that. So, two days from now…’
The incinerator room was baking hot. Wilhelm, with a towel wrapped around his face to deflect the waves of heat, crept as close as he could to the roaring furnace where all of the school’s disposable waste was dumped, and placed the computer down onto a rock. The air felt hot enough to melt the plastic casing, but if it hadn’t melted him, then the computer would be all right. He retreated a safe distance to watch.
At the back of the cavern, he crouched down in an alcove out of the direct line of the fire. He’d heard stories of the incinerator rooms and had no intention of being eaten by the monster when it appeared. There was less food waste today than usual, but as always, whenever a dump of waste came down from the kitchens, things could get risky.
A roar filled the cavern and, despite his best intentions to stay out of sight, Wilhelm glanced out as something huge and distorted lumbered up out of the waste pile and staggered a few steps in his direction. It looked like a bear made out of fire and trash, a constantly evolving, amorphous thing shifting and transforming with each step it took. It stumbled toward the entrance, then paused as it caught sight of the computer. A flaming paw scooped it up, and Wilhelm tried not to cry out, terrified the creature would take the computer back into its den, until it grunted and flung it away. The computer bounced across the ground near Wilhelm’s feet.
Again he looked up at the rubbish monster that had started to disintegrate as the flames chewed through its temporary body. Wilhelm counted down from three, then raced out of cover, scooped up the computer, and bolted for the door, reaching it just before a hail of flaming foodstuffs struck the wall beside it.
He slammed the door shut and leaned his back against it, taking a deep breath. Sweat streamed down his face, and his skin felt sore. The cuffs of his school uniform had been singed, and while damage to school property was worth a spell in the Locker Room, he felt happy enough to have just escaped with his life. Going into the incinerator room while the rubbish monster was reanimated qualified you as a disposable foodstuff by default.
He waited until he had returned to the lobby before he inspected the computer. He had wrapped it into a rag and now, as he pulled away strips of charred cloth, he had little hope that his plan had actually worked. But when he touched the first corner of revealed casing, he gave a little gasp.
During his retreat up the steps from the basements to the lobby, the metal should have cooled. It was still hot to the touch.
And when he turned it around, he saw the screen had reanimated and knitted itself back together.
‘Yes!’
He switched it on, waiting for the video to reconnect. He fully suspected Miranda had put Rick into a box and probably covered him with a towel or something. But even without a visual link, he might be able to pick up nearby conversations.
The view continued to lighten as the camera adjusted its light filter to deal with a dim background. It was evening now, of course, but he had expected Miranda to keep Rick inside.
As he turned up the volume to maximum, he heard the creak of a tree, and the camera drifted left as if caught in a breeze. Wilhelm saw the branches of a small bush growing out of a crack in the wall of a building. The camera drifted back right, and he saw Rick was pointing into a gloomy window.
Miranda must have thrown Rick away, though it looked at least like Rick was still alive. If only there was some way to contact Benjamin, Wilhelm could ask him to retrieve Rick and bring him back—
‘No!’
A flash of blue hair appeared on the computer screen as Cuttlefur leaned against the glass and peered out, eyes scanning some unseen area below the camera. A moment later, a huge, ugly man appeared behind him, patting him on the shoulder.
‘No one can hear us,’ came a hissy rumble from out of the speakers turned up to maximum. ‘Let’s make sure we’re on the right page about how we capture the girl.’
‘I’ll be glad to see the back of her,’ Cuttlefur said. ‘The sooner the Dark Man has her and we can get rewarded, the better. She’s driving me crazy with her stupidity. I’d be happy to finish her off myself, but I know he wants her alive so Forrest will be stupid enough to try to save her.’
‘He was right about you,’ the fat man said. ‘You’re a nasty piece of work.’
Cuttlefur turned, and his face broke with a sadistic grin that made Wilhelm shiver. ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he said. ‘And that stupid girl has no idea. Come on, let’s go over the plan.’
They retreated from the window, gradually fading to shadowy nothings as the last of the evening light died away. Wilhelm turned up the volume, but it was now impossible to hear what they were saying.
What was certain, though, was tha
t Miranda was in danger. Maybe Benjamin, too. And no one but Wilhelm, who was stuck back at the school dozens of miles south, knew anything about it.
26
Dragon
‘Lawrence? Are you awake? I need a favour.’
The huge snake-train opened one massive eye so close to where Benjamin stood, he jumped back. The eye that also served for a headlight caught him in a circle of yellow. Benjamin glanced over his shoulder, afraid the bright light would be visible from the guesthouse in the valley below.
‘What’s your destination?’
Benjamin cringed. Lawrence’s booming announcement-style voice was loud enough to make the trees around him rustle.
‘The source of the Great Junk River.’
‘Climb aboard. Where?’
Benjamin jumped through the door as it slid open. ‘I’m not quite sure. Northwest, I think.’
Lawrence uncurled and began to meander through the trees, following the trail of an old dirt road. Over the six months Benjamin had spent in Endinfinium, he had developed a fear of the nighttime forest, so he sat by the windows, searching through the dark for the orange glow that would indicate the presence of ghouls, the reanimated part-human, part-machines who served the Dark Man. The Haunted Forest beyond the Great Junk River was alive with them—hence, its name—but the Grand Lord had told him that for ghouls to appear in most parts of Endinfinium, this required an influx of dark magic. While some pupils—Snout, for example—had the unfortunate ability to draw them out of the ground, ghouls were rarely seen outside of times of danger.
A strange sound came from Lawrence’s engine, like a machine’s version of whimpering.
‘Are you all right, Lawrence?’