Benjamin Forrest and the School at the End of the World

by Chris Ward

  ‘None of us did. But sometimes you can’t ask the questions, you can only answer them.’

  ‘I need to find the Grand Lord. Maybe he can tell me why I’m here and what’s happened to my brother. It’s all connected, I’m sure of it. How can I find him?’

  Moto’s head-wheel spun. ‘You will put yourself in great danger. I cannot advise that this is a good choice.’

  ‘I don’t care. How can I find him?’

  ‘You must follow him to the High Mountains.’

  Benjamin nodded. He didn’t think he’d ever felt so afraid in his whole life. ‘How do I get there?’

  Moto’s head spun again. ‘You will find a way.’

  ‘Can you help me?’

  This time, Moto’s head spun back the way it had come, and his body shook from side to side as though caught in the grip of a sudden earthquake. ‘Reanimates do not pick sides. This is your quest, Benjamin.’

  In the seamless stone wall beside him, a door began to take shape; at first just a pencil outline slowly sketching itself out, before grooves and protrusions began to appear, and finally it popped open to reveal a dark corridor.

  ‘Good luck, Benjamin,’ Moto said, revving his engine for emphasis. ‘And remember, you are welcome here any time.’

  Before he realised what was happening, Benjamin stepped out into the corridor. He turned back, but the door was already disappearing, and within a few seconds, the wall was featureless again. Not a single mark remained to indicate a door had ever been there.

  ‘Hey!’

  He turned. Miranda stood at the end of the corridor, and as she came running over, Benjamin saw her cheeks were flushed with exertion and a fire blazed in her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to show. Boy, did you cause a stir up in the Dining Room. Everyone’s looking for you.’

  ‘I went under the floor.’

  ‘Wilhelm said you might have. He said there’s loads of stuff down there.’

  ‘People, too. Kind of.’

  Miranda rolled her eyes. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

  They started into a walk, heading toward the basements. Benjamin wasn’t sure where they were going, but nervous energy was eating him up. He told Miranda what had happened, and what Moto had said.

  ‘But he—this motorbike thing—he wouldn’t help you?’

  Benjamin shook his head. ‘After he told me what I needed to do, he seemed to change, like he was afraid. That what I was proposing involved great danger.’

  ‘It’s a stupid idea, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘What? Going to find the Grand Lord?’

  ‘Just wait for him to come back.’

  ‘What if he never does? What if this Dark Man guy has kidnapped him?’

  ‘Then what do you think you can do about it?’

  Benjamin shrugged. ‘I have no idea, but I can’t just sit back and do nothing.’ He clenched his fists, refusing to cry in front of her. ‘I’m a prisoner here. I get followed around, I get told that bad things are happening around me, and that something has happened to my brother back home, yet I’m supposed to show up to bloody trigonometry class and act like I’m in a normal school?’ He stamped a foot. ‘No. I’m done with all of that rubbish. I want to know what’s going on.’

  He looked up at Miranda, who stared at him with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘That was quite a tantrum,’ she said. ‘I’d struggle to do better, myself.’

  ‘I’m fed up with this place. Perhaps the Dark Man will kill me. I don’t care. Perhaps if I die, I’ll go back home.’

  ‘If it was that easy, no one would still be here,’ Miranda said. ‘I really don’t think you should try to get to the High Mountains. It’s like, miles away. And you have to go through the Haunted Forest. That’s where the cleaners come from, you know. People say the moaning of the dead wandering about is louder than the sound of the wind.’

  ‘I’ll figure out how to get through there when I get to it.’

  ‘You’re really planning to go, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Miranda put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Well, you don’t have to do it alone.’

  ‘It’s safer that way.’

  She smiled, then gave Benjamin a playful punch in the stomach that left him winded. ‘We’ve been friends since literally before I was born. I’m not going to let you do something so dangerous on your own. Got that?’

  ‘Don’t hit me so hard,’ Benjamin wheezed. ‘But yeah, I got it. Thanks, but no way. I’m not letting you get involved in this. The ghouls are after me, not you. If the Grand Lord is the only one who might know why, then I’ll find him, alone. I’m not putting you at risk.’

  ‘Too late. I’ve packed my bag.’

  ‘I don’t care—’

  ‘I do. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get to the High Mountains?’

  ‘Do you?’

  Miranda shook her head. ‘No. But you can’t just walk. It’ll take forever.’

  ‘I thought of that,’ he said. ‘Listen, if you really want to come with me, I leave at dawn. Meet me by the back entrance to the school, near the gully, when the red sun passes in front of the other.’

  Miranda glared at him. ‘I’ll be early,’ she said. ‘So don’t try to leave without me.’

  ‘Of course I won’t. I need my security, don’t I? But we’ll need supplies, too. Food, blankets. That kind of thing.’

  ‘I’ll tell Wilhelm to pilfer what he can.’

  ‘Wilhelm’s not coming.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look, this is my quest. I don’t want to endanger anyone I don’t have to. I can’t make anyone fight my battles for me.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Only me and you. So don’t be late.’

  After telling Miranda what he wanted her to find, Benjamin made his excuses to leave, not looking back as he walked away.

  Guilt immediately weighed on him like a pendulum hanging from his neck. He had no intentions of letting anyone come—Miranda, Wilhelm, or otherwise. As he headed back toward the teachers’ apartments, intending to collect his things and leave before anyone else got back from dinner, he wondered whether or not he was making the right decision.

  28

  TRANSPORTATION

  The cleaners largely ignored Benjamin as he made his way through the kitchens, filling a bag with an assortment of food he hoped would last him a few days—some uncooked vegetables, a bag of mushrooms, a box of dried yellow powder he assumed was the custard sauce that was spooned over everything. Desperation made him brave the store cupboards where the cleaners wiped down surfaces, shifted things around, and stocked items up, but whenever one of the terrifying dead gazes turned in his direction, he just smiled and muttered something about an errand for Professor Loane.

  In most cases, the response was a long, slow smile that he was sure would haunt his dreams forevermore.

  Soon, he had filled his schoolbag with so much stuff he could barely lift it. He found a safe place to hide it away, then headed down into the bowels of the school to the medical room where he had been patched up by the nurse. As expected, it was quiet and dark, but when he lifted his hand to the door, it began to hum and vibrate, the lock clicking open so he could slip inside.

  The scratch on the back of his hand had yet to heal. It had sealed over and no longer bled, but instead of fading away as a scratch from a normal cat would have done, a scar as red and thick as the line from a felt tip pen split the back of his hand from the base of his little finger to the back of his thumb.

  During the day, he obscured it with a little soap mixed with flour that he had stolen from the kitchens, and as long as he carried on as normal, it was unnoticeable.

  But when he pressed his hand to something and concentrated, it glowed bright enough to illuminate his face in a dark room, and he felt something inside him, like an invisible rope that would do what he wanted if he gripped hard and pulled.

  The first time he had t
ried it had been something of a shock. Lost on his way back to the dorms, he had come up against a locked door and in his frustration wished it would open. He had felt a knot in his stomach and a tingle in his hand, and then the door had slammed back against the wall behind hard enough to break one of the hinges, revealing a stack of cleaning equipment inside.

  After that, he had begun a little experimenting, and while he had no idea what he was doing or how it seemed to response to his requests with a certain level of accuracy.

  It didn’t always do what he wanted, though. It had once made a flower pot explode in his face, and a glass window shatter in the old gym. But after a little experimentation, he’d found he could control it in very small tasks.

  One was unlocking doors.

  The medical room was dark and silent. Using the glow from the corridor to see by, Benjamin crept across the room to the filing cabinet of medicines and bandages, then held up his hand and concentrated. After a few seconds, he heard the lock click as a prickly sensation ran through his hand. He opened the door and emptied a box of plasters and bandages into his bag, together with a couple of tubes of ointment.

  He pulled the medical room door closed but didn’t lock it, not wanting to waste the power of his hand when he might not be coming back. After squatting down on the floor outside, he pulled up his leg where he had felt a sudden sharp pain upon entering the room, and dabbed a little cream into a cut that had opened up on his calf muscle. No more than a fingernail’s length long, the wound was thin and deep like a paper cut, and it stung right down to the nerve.

  The cream made him wince at first, but the pain quickly eased. Then, as if it might help, he rubbed a little cream into the back of his hand.

  Nineteen. The first of them had nearly healed, but there would be more if he continued to use the strange power of the scratch from the reanimated cat statue. And what happened if he tried to do something greater than unlock a door? Would he lose a limb? Lose his sight or hearing?

  ‘I have to stop,’ he whispered, putting the cream and the plasters back into his bag. A part of him enjoyed the pain, though, a part that actually wondered what it would feel like to use so much of the power it made him truly suffer.

  It’s trying to control me.

  The thought wouldn’t leave his mind, but he did his best to ignore it. He collected his bag, then made his way toward the back of the school, to a long corridor that stretched out beneath the outer walls and ran underground in a dead straight line before opening out into a wide, bowl-shaped area that looked like an abandoned quarry. Again he had no choice but to use his power to unlock the door, and this time, he had to dab cream onto a new cut that appeared on the back of his right thigh. This one was barely a hairline crack, though; the door, despite being bulky, had possessed a simpler lock.

  He pulled it closed with two hands so as not to make a sound, then looked around as his eyes adjusted to the dark.

  Lined up in organised, semi-circular rows were vehicles. Some looked like normal cars, others were small trucks or tractors. Some were carts, designed to be pulled by horses or oxen, while others were wooden, mechanical contraptions that looked like ancient siege machines.

  Benjamin couldn’t yet drive. Two nights ago, he had sneaked out here and sat in some of the drivers’ seats to get a measure of what he might need to do, but it was no good. He was either too short to both see through the windscreen and reach the pedals, or the controls were an unfathomable mystery. Most of the machines needed keys he didn’t know how to locate, and even if he did, at some point they would surely need fuel or repairs. It was likely that, within a couple of days, he would find himself back on foot with a heavy bag weighing him down.

  He walked along the back line until he came to a small, covered shed. With a smile, he opened the door and peered inside, letting the faint glow of the sky illuminate the treasure lined up against the wall.

  Bicycles.

  More than a dozen, half of which were in various states of repair, some missing wheels or chains, a couple upended on their handlebars and seats, in the process of being fixed.

  Six were in good working order. Two hummed with slight reanimation. Their pedals spun with well-lubricated freedom when he kicked them, and the brakes felt strong and sharp. One looked like a racing bike, but the other was a BMX designed for tricks and off-road, not dissimilar to the one he had at home. It wasn’t quick, but it would deal easily with the kind of terrain he expected to encounter. With a satisfied nod, he touched the chain lock until it clicked open, then wheeled the bike outside, trying to ignore a sudden sharp pain on the back of his shoulder.

  Using a piece of rope he found at the back of the shed, he tied his bag to the metal shelf behind the seat. Then he pulled the bike to the edge of the little parking area, climbed on and, with one last look back over his shoulder at the towering monument of the school, a black outline against a burnt orange sky, he pushed himself onward into the unknown.

  29

  HUNTERS

  The light of the red sun, which never quite set but moved in a circle low to the horizon, gave Benjamin just enough light to see by as he pedaled along the rocky tracks through the cultivated farmland that provided the school with its food. The ground, lumpy with the occasional protrusion of some great buried man-made object of plastic or steel, was harder to traverse than he had expected, and even hills that appeared shallow were steep enough to force him to dismount and push.

  When the true dawn came with the rising of the yellow sun as it passed through the glare of its red counterpart, he was just cresting a long, low rise. Pausing to catch his breath, he looked back at the school perched on its headland a depressingly short distance behind to the southeast. The outline of the clifftop was clearly visible, the school a shadowy cluster of angles and peaks against the grey background of the sky.

  A few miles in front lay the undulating expanse of the Haunted Forest, visible between troughs in the hills as a dark green-and-grey blanket. In his way, however, lay the river—a black line meandering gently through the hills from north to south. Even farther south, a tributary broke away, flowing into the gully that became a cavern running beneath the school. The larger part angled west before opening into a wide estuary as it reached the sea.

  He had thought long and hard about how he might get across the river, but he hadn’t yet seen a single bridge. A couple of miles to the north, however, stood a cluster of buildings with a pontoon protruding out into the water, so he decided to head for that. If there was a ferry, when he reached it he would worry then about how to pay for his crossing.

  He was hungry, so he took a snack from his bag and glared forlornly at the carrot his fingers had closed around as if it was the root of all evil in the world, even though it didn’t taste that bad. He’d do anything to swap it for a chocolate bar or a piece of his mother’s sponge cake.

  While he was chewing, something caught his eye, something moving quickly through the hills, following the same rough path that he had taken.

  A small truck.

  He looked up in dismay at the rising sun. Surely they couldn’t have discovered his escape already.

  He got back on the bike and headed downhill. At the bottom of the slope, the path reached a crossroads and he turned south, away from the possible ferry dock, making an obvious mark in the dirt to show which way he had gone. Then, as soon as the road had turned rocky a short distance farther on, he climbed off and carried the bike through the grass until he reached the northwest-heading branch a couple of minutes’ walk past the crossroads. Not a particularly clever deception, but it might buy him enough time to find a way across the river.

  The trail began to rise. Benjamin tried to stay on the bike, but the climb was exhausting, so he jumped off and began to push, glancing back to see if his pursuers had found him.

  He was nearly at the crest of the following rise, when the small truck bumped over the hill he had been standing on just twenty minutes before. He couldn’t see who was drivin
g, but he recognised the boy standing up in the open back, holding onto a rail on top of the cab.

  Godfrey.

  How had they found him?

  With a muted cry of exasperation, Benjamin jumped back onto the bike and pedaled downhill as fast as he could. He listened for the sound of an engine, but the wind whistling through the gullies and crevasses that crisscrossed the rocky hills masked everything. As he neared the bottom of the slope he risked a glance back.

  He caught a momentary glimpse of wheels rising up over the hilltop, the front of the vehicle glittering in the sun, then everything was turned over and over, the world spinning, as he sailed through the air to land in the grasses beside the path. He hadn’t seen the rock that had hit his front tire to throw him from the bike, but he felt the one that crashed into his forehead, turning everything black.

  ‘What shall we do with him? Do you think there’ll be a reward?’

  ‘We might get a pass from the Locker Room for a couple of weeks, but that’ll be about it.’

  Benjamin’s head pounded. His eyelids felt stuffed with glue as he forced his eyes open. He was lying on a patch of grass, facing away from whoever was talking. His arms were tied behind his back with what felt like garden string, the fibres making his skin itch. His ankles were also tied. His left side felt numb from how he was lying but if he moved they would know he was awake. Instead, he lay still, listening.

  ‘He’s nothing but trouble, but he’s the teachers’ favourite. I say we dump him in the river and let him take his chances. He’ll come back as a cleaner in a couple of months most likely.’

  The voice was vaguely familiar, one he had heard around the dining hall.

  ‘He’s still knocked out. If he wakes up and sees us, we’ll get into trouble. If we just untie him and go back, no one will know.’

  The second voice belonged to Snout.

  ‘Shut up, you pansy. Let’s take him over the river and tie him to a tree outside the Haunted Forest, see what comes for him.’