Knights of the Borrowed Dark

by Dave Rudden

  “Well, this is nice,” he said brightly. “Sort of a”—he seemed to be searching for the right words—“bleak, hopeless charm about it. Good place to be sad, I imagine.”

  Denizen’s eyebrows rose. The children at Crosscaper weren’t treated with kid gloves. It was recognized that a bad thing had happened to you, and that bad thing was the reason you weren’t at home with a family, but the bad thing had happened to every kid there and that had knocked a lot of the edges off. Denizen could count on two hands the number of people he’d met in his life who had parents. It was just something you had to live with.

  With all that in mind, however, Denizen had never before heard someone point out so blithely that Crosscaper was miserable. He gave Ackerby a sideways glance, just to see if he was going to try to defend the orphanage, but the director looked like he had no intention of arguing.

  In fact…Ackerby looked worried. More worried than Denizen had ever seen him. The director always had a kind of sour look on his face, the put-upon glare of a man who disliked the world. This was something else entirely. Ackerby looked frightened.

  “Sir? Is everything—”

  “You two probably want a moment,” McCarron said, whipping a handkerchief from his pocket and scrubbing at an imaginary stain on the Interceptor’s flank. “Tearful farewell and all.”

  Ackerby didn’t look at Denizen. Instead, he spoke quietly and quickly out of the corner of his mouth.

  “I’m sorry, boy. I don’t…I don’t…Maybe it’ll be fine. Yes. Yes. Family.”

  The director never took his eyes off McCarron.

  “Family is so dear to…”

  He winced.

  “Folks?” McCarron was staring at them, the handkerchief swaying from his hand.

  Ackerby blinked and passed a hand over his face. He looked positively ill.

  “Go on, then,” he said in a faint voice.

  The No. 13 Questioning Frown was replaced by the No. 8—I Am Missing Something Important Here, Which Is Unfair Because It Concerns Me.

  Unfortunately, the only real course of action seemed to be to go along with it. So when McCarron eased open the front passenger door, Denizen got in, settling his bag in his lap. The interior of the Jensen Interceptor was white leather and wood paneling—pleasantly warm compared to the cold evening—and lived up to its name. If the door had been closed, Denizen could have easily believed himself in a spy submarine or fighter jet.

  Ackerby and McCarron were talking.

  “Do I need to sign him out or…?”

  “No, no…just…just go.”

  Absurdly, Denizen felt a little annoyed at how quickly Ackerby was handing him over—You’d think he was being held up at gunpoint—and then McCarron slid in beside him. He ran gloved hands across the steering wheel the way you’d ruffle the head of a beloved dog and sighed happily before turning to Denizen.

  “Ready?”

  There was something very final in the way he said it, and Denizen paused before he answered.

  Home can mean a lot of different things.

  It can be the place where you feel safest. The place where you know that, no matter what, there’ll be someone to look out for you. It can be a place you know so well you could navigate it in total darkness—a place you know like the shape of your own face. It can be a duffel bag. It can be a city.

  For Denizen, home meant a place where there weren’t any surprises. A place where he knew how everything worked. Granted, familiar didn’t mean enjoyable, but predictability had its own comforts.

  Denizen knew Crosscaper. He knew how it worked. The gates ahead led only to uncertainty. There might have been comfort in the predictable, but the unknown was exactly that—a mystery potentially full of the answers to all the questions he had been wondering about his entire life. Who he was. Who his parents had been.

  He’d never find them here.

  “Let’s go,” Denizen said quietly.

  FOR A LONG time, they drove in silence.

  The road looped round the shoulders of the mountain like a tailor’s measuring tape. On one side loomed the great stone face of the mountainside, on the other a sparse verge of grass—grazed by strutting, fearless sheep—and then the dizzying drop to a moonlit sea.

  McCarron let out a long, low whistle as they passed.

  Denizen was deep in thought. How long should he wait before asking why McCarron had driven up a cliff road in a black car at night with the headlights off?

  The lights were on now; otherwise Denizen’s heart would have climbed out of his chest entirely. Maybe he just hadn’t seen them. Maybe they’d been on low…but that was the thing about the darkness of the countryside—it was dark. If someone had walked up the road with a lit match, he would have seen it.

  Villages darted by them one by one—Dooagh, Keel, Achill Sound—then the bridge to the mainland, so long that for a moment the car felt suspended in space, the lights behind not quite meeting those ahead. The car’s purr rose to a throaty growl as the countryside folded up behind them.

  Denizen was counting kilometers in his head. Achill Sound was the farthest he’d ever been from home. Everything before Crosscaper didn’t count—that was a different chapter of his life, one where the pages were stuck together and unreadable.

  Despite himself, he felt an odd shiver of excitement with each new kilometer passed. Every sign added more distance and more names to his internal map. Lough Feeagh, Newport, Castlebar…

  “It’ll be another few hours to Dublin,” McCarron said eventually. “Feel free to take a nap.”

  And miss something? No thank you. Instead, Denizen tried to sneak a proper look at McCarron.

  He was maybe thirty, or a very rough twenty-five, and whatever he did for Denizen’s aunt must have paid well. Both McCarron and Ackerby had been wearing suits; however, whereas Ackerby’s was as ill-fitting as every other piece of clothing in Crosscaper, McCarron’s fit him like a second skin. There was a silver sword pin on his tie.

  And he had scars. Denizen was trying to time surreptitious looks with the street lights they passed. It wasn’t just one scar—there was a fine tracery of silvery lines on one side of his face, culminating in a bloom of raw white tissue on his cheek. It looked a little like the scar on Simon’s hand from the car accident that had killed his parents, all the color and life drained from the skin to leave it bleached and dead. That meant the scars were old. Really old.

  It took a moment for what McCarron had said to catch up with him. “We’re going to Dublin?” Denizen said. “Is that where my aunt lives?”

  McCarron nodded. Well, that’s one question answered. Denizen tried to shake off a treacherous shiver of excitement. Not knowing anything about his family had left him very appreciative of even the smallest iota of new information.

  And a city. I’ve never seen a city before.

  He coughed and Frown No. 4—the Give Nothing Away—slid down like a steel trap. He was going to interrogate his aunt. He would not be deflected. This wasn’t a school trip. This was a fact-finding mission.

  Denizen lay back in the seat, the leather creaking.

  “Go on, then,” McCarron said as they left another town behind.

  “What?” Denizen said.

  “Go on. Ask.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  That cat-burglar grin returned to McCarron’s face. “If I were you, I’d be asking all sorts of questions about your aunt. Walk in armed, so to speak.”

  “Do I need to?” Denizen asked. “Walk in armed, I mean.” Worry crept into his voice. “I don’t actually know anything about her.”

  Was this why she’d stayed away? It would be just his luck that the family member showing up after all this time turned out to be some sort of crazy person. That might explain why he hadn’t been sent to live with her all those years ago.

  “What’s her name?” he said suddenly. Start with the basics.

  “Vivian,” McCarron said. “Vivian Hardwick. Though I wouldn’t start wit
h Vivian. You sort of have to earn Vivian. Aunt Vivian? Auntie?” A strange look passed across his face. “Definitely not auntie.”

  “Oh,” said Denizen. “What do I call her, then?”

  “I suspect she’ll be doing most of the calling,” McCarron said, “but you can’t go wrong with a good Ms. Ms. Hardwick.”

  They drove in silence for a few more minutes until what McCarron had said sunk in. “You’ve worked with my aunt for a while?” Denizen’s voice was hesitant. “Did you…did you know my parents?”

  It took McCarron a long time to respond. “Sorry, kid. Up until this morning I didn’t even know you existed.”

  Denizen couldn’t stifle a disappointed sigh.

  Gloved fingers drummed on the steering wheel. “Look, the next few days are probably going to be hectic, but if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that you Hardwicks are tough. You’ll see your way through it.”

  You Hardwicks. That was strange. He’d never thought of his name as a plural before.

  “Thanks, Mr. McCarron.”

  McCarron grinned at him.

  “My friends call me Grey.”

  —

  DENIZEN WATCHED THE countryside slip by through half-closed eyes. Rain was pounding the windows, but inside the drowsy shell of the car there was nothing but heat and the firefly glow of the dashboard lights.

  They passed through clusters of houses huddling together for warmth, through towns and forests and fragments of dreams. It was the same dream Denizen always had—his mother, the warmth and strawberry smell of her. The familiarity of it comforted him.

  He shifted in his seat, somewhere between sleep and waking. She was saying something. He’d dreamt of the words so many times, but he’d never known what they were….

  Abruptly, Denizen woke. He had…There had been something important, but it drifted away from him, vanished like mist when he tried to grasp it. A bad taste had collected in his mouth. His stomach roiled. He shook his head to clear it.

  “We’re not far,” McCarr—Grey said. “I got a call to check up on…a work thing.” His tone was cheerful, but there was an edge beneath it.

  The landscape around them had changed—fields and forests replaced by neatly trimmed grass on man-made slopes, the dirty gray concrete of overpasses and the grimy steel of safety rails. Bridges passed over them in stripes of shadow. Denizen could see a tunnel ahead, its mouth lit by golden lights.

  They flickered. Twitched in their sockets.

  Sweat broke out on Denizen’s forehead. Another bridge swept shadow over them. The speed of the car, the way it drifted smoothly over the asphalt, made it feel like the Interceptor was falling, that any moment the wheels would gently lift away from the road and the car would plummet, tumble forward end over end—

  He swallowed. “Do you…” Nausea burned at the back of his throat. There was a sick tug in the pit of his stomach, greasy sweat on his forehead. He fought to get the words out. “I feel a bit—”

  “Denizen?”

  He clawed at his seat belt. “I don’t feel very well. I feel a bit—I feel—”

  “Don’t unbuckle that,” Grey said sharply.

  “What?” Panic was mingling with the nausea. He’d never felt like this before. “Why?”

  Hard to focus. His breathing was ragged. The lights of the dashboard blinked and smeared, the voice of the singer on the radio rose to a scream….

  Grey’s voice sounded a million miles away.

  “Because I feel it too.”

  The mouth of the tunnel collapsed.

  Stone gave way with a sound like giant bones snapping. Grey slammed on the brakes and wrenched the wheel sideways. The car spun—the landscape a dizzying blur—before skidding to a halt as the mouth of the tunnel caved in on itself with a roar of tortured concrete. Dust wheezed out from between the cracks. The car rocked on its wheels. Silence was a long time coming.

  The world returned in pieces. First, the tink-click of the cooling engine. Then the croaking of Denizen’s breath. A stripe of fire across his chest where the seat belt had cut.

  “You all right?”

  Denizen blinked blearily. Grey’s hand was on his shoulder. He tried to focus through the ringing in his ears. The car…The tunnel had…

  Grey’s face was twisted in concern. “Denizen. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Denizen said finally. He eased the seat belt away, hissing at the pain, and twisted to look down the road in front of them. Stone dust painted the air white. Another hundred meters, another few seconds of driving, and the tunnel would have come down right on top of—

  Denizen shivered.

  Grey had already opened his door and eased out of his seat, standing with his hands in the pockets of his pants. The tunnel walls ended raggedly before him like the gaping collar of a headless man. Grey clucked his tongue, as if this were a minor inconvenience rather than an actual brush with death.

  “Oh dear,” he said to no one in particular.

  Denizen got out of the car. It took him a moment to see what Grey was staring at amid the exposed steel rebar and the broken concrete slabs, but when he did, the cold feeling in his stomach deepened to a frozen ache.

  Something moved in the murk. A shadow—trickling from cracks and crevices, seeping from the fractured rock.

  For a moment, Denizen thought it was oil, some kind of leak building behind the collapse, but liquid would have obeyed gravity. Here the rivulets darted up at each other, trickles becoming streams, growing fat and webbing across the stone.

  A street light went out. Then another. The bulbs popped as they died, and with each dying, the night marched up the road toward them. Denizen barely noticed. His eyes never left the tunnel mouth. It was pitch-dark now, blacker than the starless sky above.

  Something within let out a wet, burbling growl.

  “Denizen, I need you to listen very carefully.” The warmth had left Grey’s voice. “There’s a bag in the backseat of the car. I’d like you to bring it to me.”

  Another rumbling growl. Insistent. Hungry. Stone rasped on stone.

  “Now, Denizen.”

  It was awkward walking backward to the car, but nothing in the world could have made Denizen take his eyes off the tunnel mouth. It stared back—he felt it, the unblinking regard of old and terrible eyes. Every breath he took felt too loud. His heartbeat pounded in his skull.

  Prey. That was it—he felt like prey. This was the moment the snake swayed. This was the moment the cat blinked before pouncing. Denizen knew it as surely as he knew his own name.

  He forced his fingers to move, and the door opened with a throaty click, as loud as the end of the world. Denizen winced.

  And the thing in the darkness stepped into the light.

  It was massive. That was the first thing Denizen noticed. Its sheer size was an assault on his senses, a weight that forced him back. Its limbs hung asymmetrically from vast and jagged shoulders, badly wrought wings rising to scrape the tunnel mouth—stone scarring white in its wake.

  It dragged short and violent gasps through the mouthless thumb of stone that served as a head. The shadows of the tunnel came with it, hanging from its throat in cobweb curls, snaking like veins through its lumpish chest.

  Each shuddering step it took drove home to Denizen how wrong it looked.

  As if you’d been asked to sculpt an angel, but you’d never seen one before, and there were people to tell you what one looked like…but they hated you.

  Its roar blew out the last of the street lights.

  “Denizen,” Grey said. “The bag?”

  Turning his back on the creature took every bit of courage Denizen possessed. The beast was stalking toward them. The notched blade of a girder was clutched in its hand, half covered in lumps of concrete, and Grey looked so tiny and fragile before it.

  Fragile and utterly unconcerned.

  “Thank you,” he murmured as he took the bag from Denizen’s unresisting hands. He casually opened it and rumma
ged through, humming to himself like he’d forgotten his keys.

  The angel snarled and the sound beat against Denizen’s ears, making his head ring. There was something fundamentally wrong about it, in every line and detail. At moments it was blurred as if he were looking at it through dirty glass, and at others its shape was painfully sharp.

  It was…it was inconsistent. His head ached just looking at it.

  The concrete slopes around them were bisected here and there by railed staircases. The more Denizen looked at them, the more he was reminded of an old arena, like the Colosseum—a place where duels were fought to the death, where great beasts circled little men….

  All Grey needed was a sword, Denizen thought dumbly, and the image would be complete.

  Grey drew a sword from the bag at his feet. Denizen couldn’t even bring himself to be surprised. The weapon gleamed in Grey’s hand, an elegant piece of sharpened steel, and all Denizen could think of was that they still used those safety scissors shaped like ducks at Crosscaper.

  The angel bellowed and Grey nodded in return, the blade in his hand scribing a circle in the air. The stone head swung to follow the movement as though Grey were an old-time hypnotist with a watch. Denizen didn’t dare breathe as the thing took one more staggering step toward them, dust sloughing from its shoulders.

  The moment broke. The beast charged. Grey laughed and leapt to meet it.

  Pavement cracked under its feet as it launched itself into a lumbering, apelike run. Half wings beat uselessly at the air, shadows racing across its bulk like a time-lapse photograph of a sunny day.

  The first swing of the girder-blade hit only air. The second dug a meter-long furrow in the surface of the road, and the third smashed a signpost to a drunken angle. The creature raised its blade again, roaring like a rockfall—and Grey lifted his hand and spoke a word.

  Just for a moment, Denizen felt sunlight on his face.

  The angel came apart with glacial slowness. Dust bled from its joints, shadows retreating like paper touched to flame. Flash-charred steel and stone clattered sizzling to the ground, and Denizen blinked spots from his eyes, turning his face from the sudden heat.