The Color of Darkness

by Ruth Hatfield

  “We? You’ll help me?”

  “Of course.” Sammael nodded his dark head briefly. “I want them stopped as much as you do. Till tomorrow, then. Good luck tonight. Stay safe.”

  He walked away from the bank, his feet making so little noise on the rushes and grasses that the kingfisher sat undisturbed on its willow branch until Sammael’s white shirt and scuffed boots were well out of sight.

  And then Tom moved, and at the first rustle of his shoe against a twig, the little blue bird leapt from its branch and flew off into the safety of the trees.

  CHAPTER 7

  DANNY O’NEILL

  “That’s him over there,” said Cath. “On the bike.”

  The boy coming out of the alleyway was scrawny with close-cut brown hair. His bike was shiny and new and too big for him. As he swung the bike around and pedaled out across the road, Cath saw that his helmet was clipped through the straps of his schoolbag. Trying not to look like a geek. Failing.

  She opened her mouth to call out to him.

  “Danny!”

  But another voice got there first, a boy’s, and the tone was slow and mocking.

  “Oi! Dan-nee! Danny Oh-Neeill! Oi!”

  The boy was walking with a small group of others. It was Paul Barnes, who Cath would have said was Danny’s friend. But Danny wasn’t turning his head. His face was set steely pink, and his eyes looked straight ahead. He stood up on his pedals to push them faster.

  “Oi!” yelled Paul. “I’m talking to you, weirdo!”

  The group with Paul laughed. He picked up a stone from the pavement and chucked it at Danny. With deadly accuracy, or perhaps just luck, it hit Danny on the butt. Everyone screamed with laughter.

  “Want to talk to the trees?” shouted one of the girls. “Here!”

  She grabbed a stick from the base of one of the plane trees and lobbed it at Danny. He was too far away now for them to hit him, but the others began flinging more bits of broken stick at his diminishing backside, so that for a couple of seconds there was a volley of flying tree parts. Then Danny turned in to the school, tried to cycle off across the playground, and was shouted at by Mr. Berry, the vice principal. The gang dropped their sticks before they were seen.

  Cowards, thought Cath. Frightened by a teacher.

  It began to rain. A few dark spots peppered the pavement and Cath lingered under the last plane tree.

  “Take me in there,” said Barshin. “Take me to him. Together we can explain everything.”

  Cath breathed in the swarms of children and concrete and damp iron railings. Nobody noticed her there, standing with a small brown hare, but they would once she was inside the school gates. She swung the bag off her back and crouched down, pulling out the thin schoolbooks and holding the bag open.

  “Get in,” she said.

  Barshin took a deep breath and hopped into the bag.

  * * *

  Inside the gates, Danny O’Neill had vanished. Gone straight off to class, probably. Cath tried to slink past the door of her classroom and go after him, but the teacher was waiting outside, rounding up reluctant children.

  “We’ll go after this class,” Cath whispered to Barshin, although she wasn’t sure if he’d heard above the chattering and scraping of chairs. Trying to put the bag on the floor gently so as not to injure the hare, she moved so slowly that the teacher asked if she’d hurt herself.

  “Nope,” said Cath. The teacher wrote something in her notebook.

  The bag at Cath’s feet began to wriggle. She prodded it with a toe. There was a frantic scrabbling sound from underneath the table and a smell floated up, briny and hot.

  “What’s that?” said the teacher.

  “Nothing.” Cath prodded the bag. The scrabbling was replaced by a thin ripping screech as Barshin found one of the many small tears and used his powerful paws and teeth to gouge a hole. His head shoved itself into the open, nostrils wide, eyes wet with fear.

  For a moment, Cath had no idea what to do. Then the bag began to move across the floor and a foreleg came punching through another hole, and she grabbed at it. Barshin’s struggles were surprisingly strong.

  She swore. “Don’t do that!”

  “Let—me—out!” gasped Barshin.

  Cath twisted the bag, trying to find the clip.

  “Catherine CARRERA!” shouted the teacher. “Get that OUT OF HERE!”

  “I am!” said Cath, yanking open the bag. Barshin’s head was stuck through the hole he’d made. Cath tried to push him back through, but in his panic he scratched at her hand with claws that were sharp and stubby and made her bleed. She pulled her hand away.

  Somehow the hare freed himself and dashed from corner to corner of the classroom, bashing against table legs and walls in his panic. Cath dropped the remains of her bag and ran to the door, wrenching it open.

  “Come on!”

  And for a moment, only the two of them existed in the world—she and the hare, hearts leaping. They would escape—they’d escape together! We’re exactly the same kind of creature, thought Cath. All we need is to get away!

  Barshin saw the gap and shot through it, and Cath ran after him with the howls of the teacher smarting in her ears. Down the hallway, down the stairs, out into the sweet air of the concrete yard, and then they both stopped. The air was heavy with the forced quietness of hundreds of children in classrooms, hunched over desks.

  The hare was gasping a little. “That bag…” He shuddered. “Never again.”

  “You were safe, you know. But I guess—you were in a bag,” said Cath, understanding what it was to know and to fear.

  “Where’s Danny O’Neill?” said Barshin, looking around. “Was he back there, in that room?”

  “No, he’s in another class. Up there.” Cath waved a hand toward the upper corner of the opposite building, and then the door behind them swung open and her teacher came screeching through.

  “Shoo!” the teacher yelled, waving her arms in a windmill and clattering toward Barshin. “Shoo! Get away!”

  Barshin leapt into the air with a compulsive kick, crashing against Cath’s elbow. Together they bounded through the double doors of the building opposite.

  “At the end, on the right!” she panted to Barshin, who accelerated so quickly that she barely saw him reach the end of the hall. He launched a flying kick at the classroom door with his long hind legs, and Cath sprinted after him, knowing that she was running into a room with only one exit but that Barshin would scorch his way out if he had to. And where he went, she could follow.

  When she got there, the door had been opened and Barshin was somewhere under the sea of tables and chairs and legs of all kinds. Children were leaping up, pushing back the furniture, struggling to trace the path of the crazed hare.

  “It’s here!”

  “There! There! Get it!”

  A high shriek as the animal came too close to someone who’d only ever watched hamsters through the shiny mesh of a cage. A girl scrambled up onto a table.

  “It touched me! It touched me!”

  Only one person in the classroom sat unmoving. He was at a table by himself because his desk mate, Paul, had moved away to sit with another boy, and he had turned his eyes away from the chaos, as though he had decided that if he did not look at it, it could not come near him.

  But all too soon the hare was underneath his chair and every eye in the room turned toward him. The children backed away, one step, then two, and the shouts died down with a hiss.

  For a long second, Cath stared at Danny O’Neill. His face was white. He was gazing at a fixed point on the wall ahead. His fingers were curled around the edge of a piece of paper, which looked more like a drawing than a sheet of history notes.

  Cath had no time to try and see what it was. The teacher’s hand grabbed her collar, twisting it around into a choke hold.

  “Is that animal yours?” he hissed. “Get it out of here!”

  Danny O’Neill’s gaze flicked away from the wall and he caught C
ath’s eye. Why was he still just sitting there?

  “Run!” Cath shouted at him as shrieks began to rise again around the room.

  Danny pushed back his chair, crushing the paper in his fist. He stumbled blankly toward Cath.

  “Oh no you don’t!” yelled the history teacher over the hubbub. He tried to take a step toward Danny and tripped over a chair leg.

  Danny shot forward like a cannonball.

  The teacher let go of Cath’s collar more in surprise than pain, but before he could compute Danny O’Neill’s peculiar charge, Danny and Cath and Barshin the hare were running for their lives toward the same target: the school gates.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MESSAGE

  They dodged out into the road and ran along the pavement, the plane trees passing by in a blur. At the end of the street, Cath turned to the right, away from the Sawtry, and Danny to the left, away from the center of town, so they collided and stopped running, breathing hard. Cath’s right sock was soaked from splashing into a puddle, and now that she’d stopped running she saw that it was still raining, a little steadier. Danny’s face was glistening wet.

  “We can’t stop,” he gasped. “He’ll find us.”

  “Your teacher? Nah, he’ll only have run as far as the phone. Fat fool,” said Cath. People like that didn’t run.

  Barshin hopped up and down the curb a couple of times, shaking his paws as the raindrops landed on his fur. Danny wasn’t looking at him, although Cath could see by the tilt of his head that a part of him wanted to.

  “I can hear him!” said Barshin. “He talks too! He must be a tela! Why doesn’t he—”

  But Danny evidently couldn’t hear Barshin, because he broke in halfway through.

  “I don’t mean my teacher … I mean, we’ll get into trouble,” he said.

  “So?”

  “So I don’t want to. I’m going back.”

  Cath stared at him. “Are you scared ’cause we ran out of school?”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “I’m scared. I’m a coward. Go away and leave me alone.”

  “What about him?” said Cath. She pointed toward the hare, who was trying to brush raindrops off his whiskers. “Can you hear him? He says he can hear you.”

  Danny stared at her. “What?”

  “He says he can hear you. Says you must be a tela, like me.”

  “It’s a hare. People can’t talk to hares.”

  But he didn’t say “hares can’t talk,” thought Cath. That’s what anyone else would have said.

  “We can,” she said. “Can’t we? Me. And you.”

  Danny looked away. “You’re being stupid. I’m going back,” he said, and turned in a direction that wasn’t away from school, but wasn’t toward it either.

  What was wrong with him? Cath was used to feeling like she was some kind of alien, but this boy didn’t make sense at all.

  She reached forward and snatched the paper from his hand. He lunged to get it back, but she dashed around the corner into a bus shelter. And Danny just gave up. He stood outside the shelter in the rain, his shoulders sagging and his thin face set, as if he were trying not to cry.

  Cath smoothed out the picture. It was a tree, twisted and black and dead, and there was a streak of lightning coming down from the top of the page, driving itself into the crook of two branches.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s…” Danny put a hand up to brush away the rain from his face. He seemed tired. “It’s the tree in my back garden,” he said. “It got hit by lightning in a storm, a year ago.”

  “Is it for art?”

  He shook his head, holding out his hand for the picture. Cath didn’t give it to him.

  “Have you seen this?” she asked Barshin. The hare hopped out from under the seat, and she held the paper down for him to sniff.

  “I’ve seen others like it,” Barshin said. “It’s that tree again, isn’t it?”

  Danny lunged forward and tried to snatch the paper. “Give it back!”

  Barshin leapt in surprise, but Cath jerked the picture quickly away. She was used to being quick.

  “Give it!” said Danny weakly, not bothering to reach out again.

  Cath shook her head. “Nah. Anyway, I’ve got a message for you.”

  “Yeah? Let me guess … is it from Paul?”

  Cath remembered the morning, the sticks and stones. She didn’t ask why Paul hated Danny. It was clear now why anyone would hate Danny—he was a spindly, mealymouthed small kid who couldn’t stick up for himself and didn’t seem to want to try.

  “Nah, not him. Him.” Cath pointed at the hare.

  Danny looked at the hare, and the last traces of color in his cheeks faded to gray. The rain had flattened his hair to his skull and his short bangs were spiked along the top of his forehead, each point holding its own raindrop.

  He mumbled something that Cath couldn’t hear.

  “What?”

  “I can’t talk to it,” Danny repeated. “I know hares can talk. And I could hear them, once. But it’s finished with, all that. I can’t do it anymore.”

  “He can,” said Barshin. “He’s lying. I can hear him. He must be able to hear me.”

  “He says you’re lying,” said Cath.

  “No!” said Danny, putting his hands over his ears. “No! I can’t talk to that thing! Leave me alone!”

  “Calm down,” said Cath. “He ain’t some evil monster.”

  Barshin sat wisely still, twitching his whiskers.

  “You don’t know anything about it,” said Danny. “Nothing at all.”

  “About what?”

  Danny looked at her with his scared-kid eyes and took his hands away from his ears. He opened his mouth, seemed as though he might say something interesting, and then abandoned it in favor of a quick gulp of breath.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Go away.”

  “Okay,” said Cath. “He’s called Barshin, and he says to tell you a guy called Tom’s in danger. Big trouble, all that. There. Done. Bye!” She took a couple of steps, out into the rain again. “Oh yeah, and he says you’ve got to sort it out. As if.”

  She was about to walk away when Danny O’Neill punched the side of the bus shelter so hard that it gave a great cracking sound. It didn’t break, but his hand must have hurt like hell.

  Cath swung back. Barshin had gone skittering into a hedge and was peering out from under drenched leaves. Danny was staring at his knuckles, which were flashing a rapid shade of red.

  Funny, thought Cath. I’d have put him down as the crying sort.

  “People are stupid,” Danny said. “Everyone’s stupid. Adults are stupid. Even people who don’t look like they’re stupid are still stupid.”

  Cath wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but she didn’t disagree. Except maybe stupid wasn’t quite the right word.

  “It’s Sammael, isn’t it?” said Danny, looking over at Cath. “I knew something would happen. I knew he wouldn’t just give up. That animal’s come from him, hasn’t it?”

  Cath shook her head. “I don’t know nothing more. That’s all he said to tell you.”

  “How come you can talk to it?” Danny asked. “Did you find something?”

  “I told you.” Cath shrugged. “He said some people can, that’s all. He calls them ‘telas.’ He says something happens to them, and then they can talk to some other kind of animal. You’re one too, ain’t you?”

  Danny shook his head. “No, I’m not. And how do you know he’s telling the truth, anyway?”

  How did she know? She didn’t. But she knew when people weren’t telling the truth: she’d seen plenty of that. And Barshin had an honest feeling about him, something strong and clear.

  Cath turned to the hare. “He don’t believe you. We might as well go.”

  “No!” said Barshin. “This is important! Tell him I came to learn of this from a hare in a place humans call Great Butford woods. That hare saw Tom there, meeting with Sammael in the dead of night, in t
he middle of a storm. Since then there have been many stories, here and there—Danny O’Neill must know how these stories reach around, like the tendrils on a creeping plant—and I have spoken to many hares to try and find the truth of them. I have my own reasons for fearing Sammael. He made a bargain with a hare I knew, a long time ago, and I saw what came of that. But the danger for Tom is greater still. Danny O’Neill is the only one who can reach out to Tom and stop him. It is vital that he take on this responsibility. Please tell him that.”

  Cath shrugged. “If you want.”

  She told Danny as much of what Barshin had said as she could remember. Danny didn’t answer. Instead, he left the bus shelter and went over to the hare. He didn’t seem to notice the rain either. Cath liked him a little bit for that. She didn’t like that he clenched his fists when he looked at Barshin, though. She’d kill Danny O’Neill if he tried to hurt Barshin.

  A car splashed along the road. The driver turned her head sideways to stare at the two children out of school, both standing in the rain. Hopefully she was going too fast to see they were talking to a hare in the hedge.

  Cath shivered. The rain had soaked her to the skin. She was cold, and there wasn’t enough of her to make herself warm again. And she was hungry, too, and her ribs were hurting. People were stupid, Danny had been right. They were stupid, and they stood in the rain and got cold and didn’t give each other enough to eat, and these were some of the things that made life rubbish.

  It hadn’t been raining in Chromos. She hadn’t felt cold or hungry—her body hadn’t seemed to matter much at all. Why couldn’t Danny O’Neill say what he had to say and do what he had to do, so Cath and Barshin could go back to Chromos?

  “This rain’s horrible,” said Danny. “Let’s go somewhere dry.”

  * * *

  They went to the wasteland next to the supermarket and crawled into a huge drainpipe that had been dumped in the corner by the road. Danny went and bought hot fries from the burger van, and Cath ate most of them before anyone had time to speak. Barshin wrinkled his nose at the warm, fatty smell, but didn’t ask to try one.