The Color of Darkness

by Ruth Hatfield

  She opened her eyes.

  “Close them!” said Barshin. “Close them now and listen to me.”

  Cath wanted to look around, to see how near the hands were. If only the horse would move on again.

  “No!” said Barshin. “Keep your eyes closed. Listen! I told you not to get off Zadoc!”

  “I didn’t get off,” said Cath. “The hands pulled me off.”

  “They aren’t here,” insisted Barshin. “No one else is here, only you and me and Zadoc. Every other creature you see is in your head.”

  “He pulled me. I felt his hands.”

  “No,” said Barshin. “If you couldn’t survive on the ground in here, how do you think anyone else could? You pushed yourself off. I saw it. I tell you, nothing can survive here.”

  “Then why did you let me come, if it’s so bad?” said Cath.

  “You needed to get away,” said Barshin. “And you saw before—it isn’t bad. It’s just Chromos.”

  “All I saw this time was hands.” Cath shuddered. “Horrible hands.”

  “That’s because when we came before, you were hopeful,” said Barshin. “You were scared, but you thought deep down that you could get away. This time, you let yourself fear that you couldn’t. And of all the things in your mind, the things you’re scared of are the most vivid, so they come to you first in here.”

  “I didn’t look for anything,” said Cath. “It just came.”

  “But you can stop that.” Barshin squirmed upward, so his face was pressing against her cheek. “Always think forward. Don’t look back for safety, just think of what you want! I told you before—just put your dreams in your mind’s eye and that’s what Chromos will always be for you.”

  “Dreams?” Cath felt something sting at her heart and it fizzed inside her chest. “That’s easy. I want to go to my house, between the sea and the mountains.”

  “Then open your eyes,” said Barshin. “But be careful.”

  Cath opened them, and Zadoc began to run.

  * * *

  The great plain of Chromos passed by in a blur of emerald green; Zadoc didn’t stop to let Cath gaze around at the world that sprung out from inside her. He headed fast in one single direction, but Cath didn’t worry: it all made sense to her. He was taking her to her house again.

  She tried to see where the sun was, so that she would at least know the vague direction to take once she was back on earth. Lemon yellow, it hung in the sky up to her left, staying constant beside her. Good: she could set out from the Sawtry and keep the sun in the same place, and then she’d get there eventually.

  But suddenly, her heart slammed into the pit of her stomach and she felt a tearing inside her tangled guts. They had gone past the house, or turned away from it, she wasn’t sure which, and they were heading somewhere else. Somewhere she didn’t want to go. But how could that be?

  If it wasn’t something she wanted, then it must still be something she feared.

  Zadoc slowed, changed direction, and began moving east. Now the sun was rising, trying to break through a sky the same smeared green as the mold that grew on the wall behind the couch at home. For a moment Cath thought she saw the shapes of the Sawtry apartment buildings looming up from the horizon. He wasn’t taking her back there, was he?

  She kicked her panicked heels into Zadoc’s sides. “Oi,” she said. “Don’t you dare take me home! Dad’s after me. Take me to my house!”

  “But you don’t know where it is,” said a voice.

  Not Zadoc’s voice.

  Cath’s skin went cold. She swung around just as Zadoc stumbled over a bump in the ground and stopped. They were in a low meadow next to a river, and the grass was just about green and the river just about brown, though farther afield the land was lumpy and purplish.

  A few meters away, a figure was leaning on a tree. It was a tall, thin man with close black curls and a face paler than Johnny White’s as he’d lain on the ground losing his blood. This man was wearing a white shirt and black trousers tucked into battered boots that stopped just below his knees. He looked a bit like a highwayman, but his face was ugly—it held something of Dad in the way his lips twisted and his eyebrows pulled together in a scowl.

  “I said,” repeated the figure, “you don’t know where it is, do you?”

  “Who are you?” asked Cath, feeling Barshin like a lump of rock about her neck.

  The figure smiled exactly like Dad did when someone came to the door of the apartment with a fistful of money.

  And then she knew.

  Zadoc snorted and took a step backward.

  “Oh, don’t be feeble,” sneered Sammael.

  “Get lost,” said Cath.

  Sammael eyed her with slight interest. “I was talking to your noble steed,” he said. “He’s always found my presence rather challenging. You don’t know where you’re going, do you?”

  “Yeah,” said Cath. “I’m going back to my house. The one I saw in here before. That’s all.”

  Sammael took three steps toward Zadoc’s side and then he was there, looking up at them. But he was taller now, and Zadoc had shrunk, and Sammael barely had to lift his eyes to be staring into Cath’s.

  Up close, he was even uglier. But she felt no fear.

  “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you? What makes you think a mere human girl like you can get what she wants from Chromos?”

  “I don’t think nothing,” said Cath. “Barshin brought me here, and I saw that house. Now I’m going to find it and live there.”

  Sammael smiled. His teeth were very white. “It’s always interesting what people find up here. Some find their wildest dreams and fantasies. Some find things that are boringly real. I’d have thought you were made of wilder stuff. A house in the middle of nowhere—a real house, somewhere safe—that’s the sort of thing I’d have expected from Danny O’Neill. Tell me, did he even try to come up here with you?”

  “Yeah,” said Cath, still not knowing whether she ought to be more afraid. “He tried. But then he started screaming and going on about—”

  She broke off, biting the word dog away from her tongue. A swift lie came easily, covering her hesitation.

  “About some fire burning him, and he wouldn’t get on Zadoc. I dunno—I didn’t see no fire or nothing, just a bit of light from Chromos.”

  Sammael sneered. “I thought that might happen. You can’t come to Chromos if you don’t want to. And you can’t fool it by just pretending that you do, either. Chromos knows what’s really inside you. Only those who are prepared to embrace the unknown can thrive here. Danny O’Neill wants to sit in a dark corner with his eyes shut. He would be eaten by his fears the moment he came near Chromos. What use is there in a person like him?”

  “He saved me,” said Cath, surprised to find herself defending Danny.

  “Oh, through some great act of bravery, no doubt,” said Sammael. “Did it all by himself, did he?”

  “He got rats. They chewed down the door.”

  Sammael snorted. “Rats! How appropriate. Except I wouldn’t do a rat the dishonor of comparing it to Danny O’Neill. I suppose he came running in at the head of them, then?”

  Cath shook her head. She wondered why Sammael was bothering to ask questions when he knew all the answers already.

  “Shall I tell you why Danny O’Neill doesn’t want to come to Chromos?” asked Sammael. “Or have you worked it out for yourself?”

  Cath shrugged. “He’s just scared, ain’t he? It’s normal.”

  Sammael cocked his head and considered her. “Top marks. But you aren’t scared. Do you think that’s normal?”

  Cath shrugged again.

  “Okay,” said Sammael, gesturing toward the hazy horizon with his long thin hand. “See that out there? You must know by now that what you and I see, what your little rabbit friend sees, and what Zadoc sees are all entirely different things in here. Because you know that Chromos holds up a mirror to the soul. If you’ve ever imagined yourself as more than you are,
cleverer, more inventive, more full of life and ideas, then Chromos has everything you need to show you how to live. But to see anything good in here, you have to be brave.”

  “Danny’s brave,” Cath said. “He came back to find me. That was brave.”

  “Danny O’Neill is scared of everything!” Sammael spat. “What does it matter what he does? Inside, he is scared. He is scared of badness, scared of the cold, scared of the dark. Oh, he isn’t so different from most other creatures. Darkness is always scary at first. But all living creatures on earth have darkness inside them, right inside their souls—you can’t escape that fact. Most creatures leave it well alone, they don’t look at it, and they don’t face it or try to understand it, so it grows powerful inside them. Then in here, it rises up and blinds them. Because in their own hearts, the thing they are most afraid of is themselves.”

  Cath felt Zadoc tremble underneath her, but she didn’t mind the idea of darkness. There was plenty of it about in the Sawtry buildings. And Sammael was right, in a way—worse things seemed to happen when people tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Like Dad, saying he was only angry at Johnny White, and not at the whole enormous world. Dad couldn’t kill the world. But he could kill Johnny.

  She looked at the yellow flowers on her hand. “How come I can deal with it, then?”

  Sammael tilted his head. “It is the way you are. There is a wildness inside you, and you aren’t afraid of it. I am an ancient creature: I saw what would happen to the world once humans came along. People do not like wildness; they are obsessed with controlling things. I’ve made Chromos trickle onto the earth, so those cramped minds can rise up and spread their wings. And I’ll keep doing it—making new links between the two realms. Imagine it: with every new link, earth becomes more like Chromos. One day, you’ll be able to think up anything and it’ll exist! You’ll fly, ride clouds, run faster than the speed of light, change trees into lions and lions into stars. You’ll live in palaces, jungles, at the bottom of the sea—anything you want, you’ll dream it up and make it, right there in front of you. I’m going to keep opening Chromos until earth is so soaked in color that nothing is impossible. And you—you’re just the kind of person who’ll thrive there. That’s why those flowers only stained you instead of eating up your arm. You’re wild and free and won’t be satisfied with a small life. People like Danny O’Neill are so stupidly afraid. They don’t know that if you want to see the stars you have to tear your eyes away from the wolf that’s chewing up your feet. They think that happiness lies in safety. Safety! Paradise isn’t a green field where the sun always shines. Paradise is fire!”

  His eyes blazed, and the flames were dark.

  “You’ll make a fire of your world, if you’re worth anything at all. You’ll fight the grayness and the drizzle and the nagging fear, and you’ll set alight everything you touch. There aren’t many like you.”

  Cath shook her head. “Burning things ain’t right,” she said. “It’s what people like my dad do. That ain’t good.”

  Sammael curled his lip and stepped back in disgust. “Bah! You don’t know what you’re talking about! But what do you matter? I am the creature who walks across Chromos, and I decide how much of it gets onto the earth. You humans always look for good or bad, for right or wrong. That’s why you have your grubby little earth. But when Chromos comes pouring over you, you won’t know good from bad. You won’t even know up from down. Chromos doesn’t care about right and wrong. It cares only for the burning fires of imagination! Remember that.”

  With this, Sammael hooked an arm around Zadoc’s shrinking neck. Grabbing a handful of Zadoc’s mane, he dragged the horse a short distance away, twisted his arms in a quick shrug, and kicked out a leg. Zadoc stumbled. Cath saw too late what the horse had stumbled into: a smoking gray patch just like the one she’d seen next to the well.

  Zadoc plunged into the boiling gray soup, Cath clinging to his neck, and Barshin to Cath. They drew in their breaths, held them, and disappeared.

  CHAPTER 14

  ISBJIN AL-ORR

  “Oi! You little scumbag!”

  Cath’s dad pounded behind Danny, still shaking rats from his trousers, but every one of his giant strides was as big as two of Danny’s and the ground shook as he thumped his feet onto the cracked concrete.

  Cath had vanished completely into the fiery air, and with her had gone the vicious, snarling fury that had prevented Danny from following her: the fury of a creature he’d thought he’d never see alive again.

  Danny had no time to think about Kalia, or to wonder how she had returned from the dead and leapt at him, teeth bared, trying to snap her jaws around his flesh. He saw his bike where he’d chucked it down at the entrance to the apartment building, sprinted to it, and threw his leg over the crossbar. His foot slipped on the pedal as he tried to start the bike—once, twice—and his hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t keep the handlebars straight. But somehow he got the pedal hard against his shoe, and then an arm reached out, grabbing his shoulder—

  Danny stood on the pedals, bounced down a curb, and felt the strong kick of his sturdy bike. Good bike. All it needed was to be kept straight and pedaled, and it wouldn’t let him down. He pushed as hard as he could, kinking around parked cars, flying out of intersections without stopping to look. Luckily the roads were quiet and he didn’t hear any cars slamming on squealing brakes or annoyed horns beeping, although a lady trundling a shopping cart did have to take a step backward to avoid him. But then he was wheeling along a street of terraced houses and out of town, into the countryside.

  Unable to resist glancing back over his shoulder, he hit a pothole that grabbed the front wheel and sent him spinning into the grass shoulder. He landed in a heap, feet and ankles all twisted up in bike and wheels, and the bike had become such a part of him that for a moment his fuzzy head felt the whole tangled mess as though it were full of blood and nerves, attached to his body like a centaur’s legs.

  He kept his head down and waited for Cath’s dad to come running up the street toward him, but there was no sound of approaching footsteps. He must have gone farther than Cath’s dad could run. Facedown on a damp shoulder with grass up his nose and dandelions in his ears, he was finally safe. From Cath’s dad at least.

  What was that digging into his leg? He put his hand into his pocket. Of course: the stick. It hadn’t broken in the fall, but then he didn’t think it would ever break. It didn’t seem to be made of breakable matter.

  Pain shot up his ankle. He swore, then, too late, realized he was still holding the stick.

  The grass rustled with a gasp of surprise that rose and echoed around the shoulder, and it all came back to Danny in a sickening flood: Kalia, Tom, Sammael, the dreams—there was no way of getting away from it. He had helped Cath escape, but that was only the beginning of what he had to do. If he was going to try and use Kalia to get Tom free, he had to find a way of getting into Chromos that would let him talk to the dog and tame her. He certainly wouldn’t be able to get up onto the back of that strange creature of dust who had carried Cath away if Kalia was intent on killing him before he got close to it.

  He remembered the bristling world around him and the things that had spoken to him on his last journey. Trees, rivers, grasses—everything seemed to know something new: he’d learned that quite often all you had to do was ask.

  Well, the stick was in his hand and the grass had already heard him: he might as well turn his mistake to some good advantage.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “Can any of you grasses hear me?”

  There was another small, rippling gasp, and then a silence. Danny still found it much stranger talking to plants than to animals.

  “I said, can you hear me?”

  “Of course we can,” said a clipped voice from beside his right ear. “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “Yeah. You’re the grass. I’m Danny O’Neill.”

  “Danny O’Neill? But of course.”

  Of course th
ey knew it was him. Was there anything that the grass didn’t know?

  “I need to get somewhere,” he said, struggling into a sitting position while trying not to squash the grass too heavily.

  “You need directions? We grasses know the way to almost anywhere on earth. Where is it you need to go?”

  “A place called…” He swallowed. Even the name was hard to say. “A place called Chromos. Do you know how to get there?”

  There was some angry muttering among the grasses, and then the same voice spoke out again.

  “Chromos isn’t a place on earth—you must know that. And you are Danny O’Neill. Getting involved in your schemes, whatever they are … it sits badly with some of us. Some say that you are trying to take control of the world of grasses.”

  “Of course I’m not!” said Danny, sitting back on his heels. “What good would that do? This talking thing was just an accident. But Sammael’s after me. He wants to kill me. I need to go into Chromos and get something to try and make him stop.”

  “Sammael wants to kill you?” said the grass. “Why, for the love of oats?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Danny. He felt a spot of rain on his neck and looked up at the clouds, but they were white rather than gray. “Just believe me, he does. So please could you help me?”

  “Well…” The grass considered for such a length of time that Danny looked back down the road again, worried that Cath’s dad might have had a chance to catch up. But there was no sign of him.

  After much muttering and whispering among the grasses, too tangled for him to follow, the grass that seemed to have appointed itself spokesperson said, “You do not ask where Chromos is, but how to get there. So I am supposing you know that the answers to those questions are significantly different. And we grasses know where Chromos is—it is over us, around us, and inside us. It is a world made by the collective minds of all the living creatures on earth, joined together. But how to get there—I am afraid we have less information about that. It is known that creatures can travel through Chromos on the back of a guide made by the colors, although the secret of how to call up that guide has long been lost to us. And apart from that, only Sammael can travel into Chromos. Why, we don’t know. It isn’t his world—he must have discovered some device or other that allows him passage, otherwise it would swallow even him up. But we don’t know what that is.”