The Color of Darkness

by Ruth Hatfield

  At least Dad wasn’t talking to her. She breathed out and in again, tasting the sweetness of the damp air. Her feet edged backward, trying to take her away from the alley. But Dad didn’t know she was there. There wasn’t any need to run.

  She put her hands on the wall and peered around the corner, trying to keep everything but her eyeballs out of sight.

  “I told you to meet us,” said Dad. “You owed me, big-time. Five grand you lost us last week. Five. Grand. And I said, be fair, give the boy another chance. Let him keep lookout for us while we have a little bit of sport. Nice and easy. Did you have trouble understanding me?”

  Heavy and hairy, he was pinning Johnny White up against the alley wall with his massive forearms and solid round belly. Johnny White looked like a little piece of shivering straw.

  “No!” Johnny whined, not even putting his hands up to try and push Dad away. “I was going to, I swear … I was coming … I got lost … I swear, on my mum’s life…”

  “You little maggot,” said Dad. His face was so close to Johnny’s that they might have been about to kiss. “Nobody could’ve known we was in them woods, unless you’d told ’em. Ain’t that right, son?”

  “No! I didn’t … I swear! I’ll prove it—I’ll go on another job for you! Anything! Anything you want!”

  “Too late now.” Dad was fishing around in his pocket, bunching up a gloved fist. “You know, I don’t reckon you lost that money at all. I reckon you stole it. You stole it from me. Didn’t you?”

  “No…” Johnny gasped, the skin around his mouth going gray.

  Dad carried on. “You steal, you double-cross me—you ain’t no good for nothing. No more guts than a dead badger.”

  Then Dad pulled back his fist and punched Johnny in the stomach, and his other hand slapped itself tight across Johnny’s mouth.

  I’d bite him if he did that to me, thought Cath. Johnny’s just standing there, and he’s twice as big as me.

  Dad’s fist jerked away, and Johnny gave a strange grunt. His hands fluttered and went to hold his stomach. Dad stepped backward. A spark of wet silver caught the light.

  Johnny dropped to his knees. Dad looked down at him, smiling like a rattlesnake, and threw a knife onto the ground.

  And then Cath saw that a dark shadow was seeping along the sleeve of Johnny’s white sweatshirt, a crimson flower unfurling its petals over the pale cloth. And she understood why Dad had taken his hand off Johnny’s mouth. Johnny wasn’t going to be shouting now. He didn’t have the breath to spare.

  Nobody got away with double-crossing Dad.

  A piece of invisible fluff caught in her throat. She struggled for air and a sound rasped out, as raw as the croak of a crow.

  Dad looked up.

  His ice-gray eyes met hers. Cath couldn’t look away, because he was Dad, because she saw him every morning, because he was the only thing in the world that she’d always known, because Johnny White … because Johnny White was bleeding …

  Dad was on his toes in a second. And Cath ran.

  Back over the estate. Over the roads, across the yards, past the benches and concrete planters. Over the cracks and past the railings, around the cars and through the doors. Out of the far doors. Out of the Sawtry.

  “Cath!”

  He tried calling her, once, in a gentle voice that she’d never heard him use. But she knew him. She knew what he’d do if he ever got hold of her again.

  “CATH!”

  Now he was calling her in his real voice, that hard, furious roar of anger. His feet smacked against the concrete behind her.

  Cath ran. She looked ahead and kept her legs running. There was only one place to go to now, where she might get away from him, where she could bury herself deep in the undergrowth and cover herself with plants and bushes that would keep very still and refuse to give her away.

  The park, down by the old railway. She’d crawled into the bushes one summer and found a hidden world of wildness: dark thorns and twisted branches and tiny pockets of space linked by foxes’ tunnels. And after that, she couldn’t keep away from it.

  Normally, she only went when she was alone; she didn’t want to risk anyone finding out where she hid. Normally, she could outrun Dad easily, what with his huge hairy shoulders and his fat arms and his heavy belly.

  But nothing was normal now.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE HARE

  Breaking past the edge of the park, Cath ran straight across the middle, dived into a hollow at the base of a stand of cow parsley, crashed down onto her hands and knees, and began to crawl, crushing the long wet grass around her into a gaping trail that any human could follow, even Dad, if he could still get down on all fours.

  He wouldn’t be hurrying right now. He’d think he had her cornered.

  She clawed her way under a tangle of brambles, wrenching her hair and sweatshirt free of a thousand thorns, her blood too full of panic to care about the pain. And then the ground dropped away into the old railway cutting and the thin stems around her became a thicket, knotted and dense.

  She made for the bottom of the slope, following an animal’s narrow track. The damp undergrowth smelled of lemons and cut grass and gasoline.

  Down in the cutting she crouched, listening for the sounds of the morning and the sounds of Dad, putting her hands on the soil to feel for the vibrations of his heavy footsteps.

  The earth was cool beneath her palms. A crow screamed out above her. She wasn’t a wolf now, only a trembling mouse. The far bank of the cutting rose steeply up to a high fence crowned with rolls of barbed wire: there was no way out, except the way she’d come in. But she was invisible in here. If she sat tight, Dad would have to burn the whole thicket down to find her.

  “You wretched thing … Get off me! Get off!”

  Cath stopped breathing.

  “I said, get off me! Let me go! Ow!”

  “Sssh!” Cath hissed, hoping to scare whoever it was into silence.

  There was a rattling noise, which turned into a clinking bang. It was coming from only a few yards away along the bank.

  “Who’s there?” The voice came loudly through the thicket.

  “No one,” she said. “Shut up!”

  She inched backward and knelt on a thorn. It drove itself deep into the flesh of her knee, and she swore.

  “Help me,” said the voice. “Please. I’m stuck.”

  Cath wriggled her leg until she could pull the thorn out. A bead of blood pushed its way through the grime and began to trickle down her shin. This was it, then. Dad was bound to have heard that voice. He’d plow straight through the bushes, and she’d be found, even here. Was there never going to be anywhere she could escape to?

  “All right,” she said. “Whatever.”

  She crawled toward the voice, expecting the bushes to open up again, but the undergrowth was relentless.

  “Oh!” A high-pitched squeal came from close to her right arm.

  There was a lean brown hare stretched tautly away from her, ears flat against its head, black eyes hot with distrust.

  Cath stared.

  The hare stayed still for seconds. Too many seconds. And then Cath saw—its legs were caught in a tangle of leaves and wire, and it had pulled with all its strength to try and get free, so that the wire had tightened and was cutting into its flesh.

  Moving as slowly as she dared, she reached out to touch the wire. What would Dad have done if he’d found this hare? Stamped on its head, probably, and said something with a laugh about putting it out of its misery. She could easily kill it. All she’d have to do would be to put her hands around its neck and squeeze.

  Its bleeding legs were warm. They struggled as she touched them, and the hare scrabbled with its forepaws.

  “Sssh,” she said. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  The hare stopped struggling and stared at her.

  “You can talk?” it said.

  The hare’s mouth didn’t move, but Cath heard the voice, low and clear. Her heart t
hrew itself against her rib cage. Everything disappeared: the dogs, Dad, Johnny White.

  It was a hare, and she could hear it talk. And she’d thought for a second about killing it …

  She pulled her hand away.

  “’Course I can talk,” she said, keeping her voice to a low whisper. “Can you?”

  “Well, of course I can,” said the hare weakly. “But … you’re a human! Why would you be able to talk?”

  This was crazy. She was inventing things. Cath peered around the forest of stems, expecting to see some person lurking there, snorting with muffled laughter. But nothing was moving; not a leaf rustled out of time.

  She looked at the hare’s bleeding legs again.

  “Want me to get that off?”

  The hare twitched, and a tremor ran up its body.

  “Yes, please,” it said.

  Cath found the end of the wire and began to unloop it as carefully as she could, but her hand was shaking so badly that when she pulled the wire away from the skin, the hare trembled and moaned.

  “There you go,” she said, pulling the last loop off its hind paw. “Free.”

  The hare struggled with the urge to bolt away from her. It kicked at a few leaves and got perilously close to the wire again.

  “Idiot,” she said. “You’ll get caught again. Don’t do that.”

  She pushed the wire away. It was too tangled with the undergrowth for her to pull it out, so she did her best to twist it up into a tighter bundle.

  “You have my gratitude,” the hare managed. “How … how fortunate…”

  “Go on,” said Cath. “You’re free. Run away.”

  But the hare crouched awkwardly on its sore legs and stayed where it was. It was silent for so long that Cath realized she must have been inventing the sound of its voice in her head, just like she’d invented the feeling of being a wolf. That wasn’t surprising, really. Sometimes when the dogs barked at home, she thought she heard them shouting real words at her.

  And then the hare spoke again, so quietly that she wasn’t sure if she’d actually heard it.

  “Are you … are you one of them? Do they really exist?”

  Cath’s ears buzzed, and the words repeated themselves to her, again and again, until she knew beyond doubt that it was true. The hare was talking to her. Coldness ran over her skin, and she had to put her hands against the ground to steady herself. At least that was normal: the ground, wet and covered in trampled plants. Solid.

  She frowned, trying to concentrate. “They? What d’you mean?”

  “Them. The telas.”

  “What, like fortune-tellers? I ain’t one of them.” She scowled. The kids at school were always shouting crap about her real mum having run away to join a circus with all the other Gypsies, and living in a caravan rubbing a crystal ball and spouting a load of witchy rubbish.

  “Not teller. Tel-a. The creatures who inhabit the places … in between.”

  “What are you on about? What places? I live up the Sawtry.”

  The hare gazed at her, its black eyes steady. “Have you not heard the old legends? The telas begin life as ordinary creatures, but after a particular event they are thrown into one of the spaces in between—that is to say, between the usual divisions that separate creatures: human from hare, ant from skylark, grass from tree. After a tela has fallen into an in-between space, it can talk to whatever type of creature is lying on the other side of it. Perhaps that’s what has happened to you.”

  Cath forgot to breathe. Visions of hares raced through her mind, gathering around her scratched knees, telling her stories of the world beyond town. They would know places she could hide, and ways she could live under hedges and around fields, never having to see another human. They would teach her how to fight with cunning and agility, to make up for the strength she didn’t yet possess.

  “So I can talk to hares? All hares?”

  “Well, it would certainly seem so. Has something happened to you recently? Something shocking?”

  Cath felt her back tense. Was this hare going to say something about Johnny White? It wasn’t possible. A hare couldn’t know about that. “Don’t be daft,” she said. “Nothing’s happened to me. I’m normal.”

  It wasn’t true, though. Johnny White’s pale face came into her mind, and she knew suddenly that she wasn’t normal. She was older than the earth itself.

  “But … you are different,” said the hare. “Why did you come here, for instance? Humans don’t come crawling around here.”

  “No, they don’t,” said Cath, glad to push the thoughts of Johnny White away. “That’s why I do. I hide.”

  “From what?”

  Cath shrugged. “Everything. Everyone. Out there. And sometimes, in here, I think I can hear it—sort of—breathing.”

  For a second she heard it—the murmur of wind through leaves, of water swelling inside tough stems. Maybe it wasn’t only hares she could talk to. Perhaps she had crept into one of the places in between everything, and in a second, she would hear the whole thicket burst into a forest of chatter.

  She listened for it, waiting, stopping her own breath. But really it was only the rumble of cars and the drizzle. And footsteps.

  Dad’s footsteps. And Dad’s voice, speaking into a cell phone.

  “Get your backside over ’ere, now. We gotta find ’er. If she gets away … ruddy little cow. You get ’ere. Bring Elvis.”

  Elvis was the neighbors’ dog. Elvis was enormous and ferocious; he had a deadly nose. The only thing he ever looked like he might sing about was how many small animals he could murder in a morning.

  Cath began to shake. It was stupid, being so scared. Of course she could still get away. She just had to make sure she was hidden so deeply in the bushes that not even Elvis would be able to get to her.

  She tried to turn and inch her way backward.

  “What’s the matter?” said the hare. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve gotta go,” Cath muttered. “He’ll find me.”

  “Who will?”

  “My dad. He’s getting Elvis. I’ve gotta go.” A bramble caught on her sleeve and she tugged at it. Her arm was shaking.

  “Who’s Elvis?”

  Cath tore at her sweater in desperation, ripping a long gash in the sleeve. It was grabbed immediately by another bramble, thicker than the first. “A dog!” she said, yanking her arm out of the sweater. “A bloody horrible dog!”

  “A dog?” The hare stood upright, snapping onto its injured legs. “Ah, I see. In that case, I had better make myself scarce. Can I suggest an alternative to your—er—rather unstructured method of departure?”

  “What?” Cath tried to wriggle her other arm out of the sweater, but the brambles caught on her hair, anchoring fast to her head.

  “Stay still,” said the hare. “My name is Barshin. Remember it if you need to call out to me. And most important—touch nothing. Nothing! Your blood runs with many things, but they are all earthly. Touch nothing!”

  With a jerk of its wounded legs, the hare leapt into Cath’s arms. She caught it and clutched its warm body.

  A strange sound came from Barshin’s throat, low and rumbling like the growl of a cat. The dangling legs twitched and kicked out. For a brief second, blunt claws dug deeply into Cath’s stomach, and the growl turned into a single, wild shriek.

  The ground began to rumble and shake, and the air seemed to tighten, until Cath’s skin felt stretched, as though she’d been burned by the sun. She wanted to scramble away, but Barshin squirmed and a flash of twisted colors stamped itself on the air, the same shape as the bundle of wire she’d rescued him from, only larger, much larger—bigger than the bushes, bigger than the trees—bigger than the whole park, a mass of bright, streaming color burning at the sky, so hot that Cath had to close her eyes and bury her face in the hare’s soft fur to shield it.

  “Open your eyes!” screamed Barshin. “Open your eyes and look!”

  Cath threw back her head. The brambles were shrink
ing away, opening up a clear patch of moss that gleamed with the vivid green of springtime. Four dark pits appeared in the moss, quickly filling with brownish lumps that traveled upward, and upward, spreading and reaching out and painting the air into a solid block of color.

  A giant, browny-gray horse had appeared inside the thicket, a lean-framed animal with knees as knobbled as tree roots and jutting hip bones under a hide as dusty as an old dirt track. His head hung low; his mane stuck out in tufts. Only his eyes were bright—eyes that held all the colors of the flash that Cath had hidden her face from.

  “I am Zadoc!” boomed the creature, throwing up his head and trailing the colors of his ever-changing eyes across the sky. “Come to Chromos, if you dare!”

  CHAPTER 4

  CHROMOS

  “Get on!” said Barshin. “Quick!”

  He leapt out of Cath’s arms and landed, safe as a cat, on the horse’s back. Cath reached for a tuft of wiry mane way above her head. That wasn’t going to work—there was no way she could pull herself up there.

  But what was she even thinking? This couldn’t be real. It must be her mind, sending her crazy. In a minute, Johnny White would walk up and get on the horse and sit there laughing down at her. She must have fallen over, hit her head, it must be a dream …

  The horse rolled his eye, and then rounded his huge slab of a shoulder and lowered his chest, sinking to the ground.

  “Get on!” shouted Barshin. “He can’t stay long!”

  Cath touched the horse’s shoulder. It felt smooth and warm, as soft as old velvet with a pulse strong beneath the skin. Could it be real?

  “Stop thinking!” said Barshin. “Just do it!”

  She closed her fist around the gray mane, then scrambled up the mountain of rib cage and onto the ridge of spine. The horse stuck his legs out, heaved himself back to his feet, and shook like a dog. She grabbed at mane, neck—anything she could hold on to—and her legs rattled against the horse’s sides, as rubbery as if they’d lost all their bones.