The Bone Quill

by Barrowman, John

  ‘May the saints preserve us,’ said Brother Cornelius.

  Before the stout monk could get off the bunk, the headless jester sprang up into the air, stretched his arms to a ceiling beam, somersaulted over it, grinned malevolently and dropped on to Cornelius’s shoulders, pinning him to the bed.

  All in three blinks of Brother Cornelius’s eyes.

  Brother Renard’s eyes, on the other hand, were squeezed closed in a kind of trance, the chair rocking furiously under him as he fought to contain his imaginings, his fists clenching and unclenching.

  On the bunk, Cornelius was flailing madly to fight off the animation. The jester wrapped his loose legs around Brother Cornelius’s waist and sprang from the bunk again, taking the terrified monk up to the ceiling beam. Cornelius’s scream became a whimper when the jester dropped back down to the bed, leaving the herbalist clinging to the oak crossbeam, high above the floor.

  SEVEN

  ‘Let me try to ... to animate a way down for you, Brother Cornelius,’ called Solon, hunting frantically around the tiny room for something he could use to sketch.

  He could find nothing. Then he remembered. The Abbot had stripped the room bare to avoid Brother Renard using any tools to animate.

  Brother Renard was still rocking and shuddering. A thick, green beanstalk embroidered on the border of the quilt shot upwards, winding and knotting itself over and under the bunk, quickly smothering the headless jester in vines. The jester shook his jingling hat and exploded in a cloud of red and yellow stripes. The moment he had disappeared, the beanstalk grew directly up to the crossbeam and curled around it, sprouting thick, green leaves and white flowers above where Brother Cornelius was dangling.

  ‘I believe in his own way,’ shouted Solon to the terrified monk, ‘that Brother Renard may be offering his assistance. He must be in a battle inside his own imagination.’

  ‘I do appreciate Brother Renard’s motives, but I’ve no intention of climbing down from this height on one of his shaky imaginings,’ squeaked Brother Cornelius from the crossbeam. ‘If it’s all the same to you, Solon, I’ll wait for a ladder.’

  ‘It may be safer to come down when you can,’ called Solon. ‘Who knows what may be next?’

  There was a furious buzzing from the quilt. It was coming from a hive of honeybees swarming on one of the middle squares, their black and yellow bodies bulging furiously from the cloth.

  ‘Oh my. They look angry,’ said Brother Cornelius weakly.

  With a piercing squawk, a fat puffin suddenly flew out of the beanstalk’s foliage, swooped over Cornelius’s head and defecated a blob of purple ink on his balding pate.

  ‘Ach, for the love of God, Renard,’ Cornelius cried, mopping his brow. ‘Alright. Alright. I’m coming down.’

  The Abbot suddenly burst through the door.

  ‘Oh, Brother Renard!’ he cried, pressing his fingers to his temples. ‘What on earth has you so agitated?’

  He took in the monastery’s herbalist carefully climbing down a beanstalk, Solon standing underneath waiting to assist him, Renard rocking and scribbling, and a puffin that looked remarkably like Brother Cornelius leaving coloured droppings on every surface in the room.

  The Abbot went to the window, threw open the shutters and shooed the puffin out into the evening sky where, at a short distance from the window, the bird broke up into a rainbow of feathers. Then he crouched down in front of the old Animare and took his hand, calming his imagination, controlling his thoughts, inspiriting him as only a Guardian can.

  Immediately, the beanstalk dissolved in flashes of green, and Brother Cornelius fell heavily on top of Solon. The puffin’s droppings disintegrated in clouds of purple paint, dusting Brother Cornelius, Brother Renard, the Abbot and Solon in a layer of stinky sprinkles.

  EIGHT

  London

  1871

  The twins tumbled on to a wooden pier that stretched like a gnarled finger over the River Thames. Light from the late afternoon sun filtered through the London smog and on to the choppy water, exactly as Monet had painted the scene and precisely how the twins had imagined it.

  ‘Where’s Zach?’ asked Em, picking herself up off the timber jetty. They were alone on the pier, two tiny figures silhouetted against the muted majesty of a ghostly Westminster.

  ‘Em, look!’

  ‘Can you see him?’ Zach, where are you?

  ‘Not yet, but that’s not what I mean. Check out the river!’

  Em walked to the palings of the pier and looked downstream. ‘Wow. That’s some floating traffic jam.’ She glanced back at Matt as realization dawned. ‘Wait. That’s not how it is in the painting. Monet painted only two or three small steamers on the river. There must be at least fifty boats out there.’

  A line of barges piled high with coal navigated the middle of the Thames towards the factory docks to the east, their tall chimneys belching black smoke into the leaden sky. Smaller vessels were dodging in and out of the wake of the barges. Opposite the twins on the other side of the river was a line of rickety wooden cranes, standing in the middle of partially demolished red-brick warehouses.

  ‘If we were in Monet’s painting,’ said Matt excitedly, ‘then this scene would be as he painted it. But we can see outside the frame of his picture.’

  ‘What are you—’ Em began. She suddenly covered her mouth and nose with her hand. ‘Oh my God, what is that disgusting stench?’

  The air was rank with the stink of rotting fish, horse manure, unwashed bodies and coal tar. On the Victoria Embankment behind them, raw sewage was flowing in thin trenches and spewing into the river in lumps.

  ‘I’m going to throw up.’ She leaned over the palings, gagging.

  Matt squeezed his sister’s shoulders. ‘Do you realize how amazing this is?’ He sounded stunned. ‘We’re not in Monet’s painting. I think we’ve travelled back in time to when he painted it. I bet if we followed the river downstream, we might actually find Claude Monet with his easel. We might even be the thin figures on the pier that he is painting right at this very moment.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Em croaked. ‘But ... but how—’

  A horse-drawn omnibus clanged its warning bell loudly as it trundled past the pier, red spiral stairs twisting to an open top deck filled to capacity with passengers, all of them breathing in the visible London smog. The surface of the road in front of the pier was mostly trampled soil, and was as bustling as the river.

  ‘How can we do any of the things we’ve discovered we can do as Animare?’ said Matt, wild with excitement. ‘Grandpa said no one really knows how the combination of Mum’s and Dad’s Animare and Guardian abilities would affect us. All he said was that it would make our imaginations more powerful and more unique than anyone before us.’

  Matt’s eyes blazed at the scene around him, his black mood of earlier all packed up and stored beneath his rising excitement and pulsing adrenalin. ‘Monet must have been an Animare. It’s the only way this makes sense!’

  Fear charged through Em’s veins, muting the excitement Matt was projecting through her.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Now we’re in seriously big trouble.’

  NINE

  Scanning the chaotic city scene for Zach, Em took in the big and small differences between this London and the one that she and Matt knew from their childhoods.

  In this London, the pedestrians hustling along the Embankment were more formally dressed. Many of the men were in colourful waistcoats, knee-length frock coats and top hats; the women in full skirts layered over frilly petticoats, their heads topped with elaborate hats.

  But in the middle of the wide street, vendors were in rags. Em noticed children of all ages everywhere, darting in and out of buildings, weaving along the middle of the busy road, sleeping in twos and threes under carts. And then there were the smells, like boiling cabbage and rotting flesh.

  Concentrate, Em, she admonished herself. Find Zach. Her anxiety about what might have happened to him was mounting.r />
  Zach! Can you hear me?

  ‘You had a tight grip on him when we animated, didn’t you?’ she asked Matt.

  ‘Of course!’ Matt was too wired to focus on Em’s fears. ‘We linked arms as soon as the light burst in our heads. I felt him shifting with us. I know he’s here.’

  Zach!

  ‘Everything is pulled by horses,’ exclaimed Matt.

  Em shook her head at his inability to focus when she really needed him to.

  ‘I’m just saying. We have really time-travelled. How awesome is that? Like Doctor Who or Terminators.’

  Suddenly, the wooden planks of the jetty began to tremble under their feet, and an explosive release of air like a powerful fire-hose erupted nearby.

  ‘Oh, man,’ said Matt, darting to the other side of the pier. ‘Check that beast out.’

  Charging across the Charing Cross Railway Bridge about a hundred metres downstream was a colossal steam train, its muscular engine coughing clouds of black smoke into the already severely polluted air.

  ‘That’s a really big train,’ said Em.

  ‘Duh!’

  Em wiped a layer of soot from her sleeve where she’d leaned against the palings. ‘If this really is nineteenth-century dirt, Matt, then our abilities are turning pretty scary.’

  ‘Scary? Are you kidding me? More like amazing,’ said Matt, jogging quickly down the shaky plank stairs and on to the Embankment. ‘The London Eye should be on the other side of the river. That factory way down there becomes the Tate, and the Millennium Bridge should be there. None of these people has ever heard of traffic lights or telephones or computers or Star Wars or ... this is so cool!’

  Em yanked Matt under the jetty stairs as two fussily-dressed gentlemen passed them, staring at great length and with quite obvious contempt at the twins’ attire. Matt was in a well-worn pair of baggy jeans and a vintage T-Rex rock T-shirt from his dad’s wardrobe. Em was in cuffed skinny jeans, sparkling pink flats and three layered tank-tops. She’d never been so self-conscious in her life about her punk hair and her funky clothes.

  ‘This city ought to treat the urchin population the way it treats the rats,’ they heard one of the gentlemen sniff. ‘Drown them all.’

  ‘Hey!’ Matt began indignantly.

  Em held him back. ‘Zach! Remember? We have to find him!’

  The centre of the wide street directly in front of them was dotted with horse troughs and vendors with carts full of sad-looking vegetables, trays of herring, tatty leather boots, wool caps and a cart filled with books, papers and postcards. Shiny black and silver open carriages lumbered along the dusty road, hansom cabs darting between them. Men in grey suits and bowler hats and one or two women in sweeping skirts and boleros rushed like ants in and out of the buildings of Whitehall: official Parliament buildings the same then as now.

  Or should it be the same now as then? Em thought.

  Angry at her own distractions, she scanned the busy promenade again ... for the fourth time. Still no sign of Zach. She had a nasty feeling that London in 1871 wouldn’t be kind to a boy who was deaf.

  TEN

  Driven by his excitement that they had time-travelled, Matt darted out into the tide of pedestrians walking north along the Victoria Embankment. Em lunged at her brother, pulling him back under the plank steps.

  ‘Wait,’ hissed Em. ‘We need to find Zach first. No exploring. We shouldn’t leave this general area until we find him.’

  ‘Don’t you want to explore a little? That’s probably what Zach’s doing.’

  ‘You know it’s not.’

  Matt shrugged. ‘Okay. I know. I know.’

  Em scanned the busy promenade again for Zach, her eyes on anyone blond, tall and about Zach’s age, but her mind kept returning to something else, something more worrying.

  ‘Matt, how will we get back to the Abbey? How will we find Mum if we get trapped in the nineteenth century?’

  Matt climbed up on to the Embankment wall for a better view. ‘I expect all we have to do is destroy our sketch of the painting and flash, bang, zoom – we’ll be home. But I’m not ready to do that.’ He looked down at her. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Flash, bang, zoom?’ She tucked her hair behind her ears, once and then again two more times, a gesture Matt recognized as Em’s habit when she was anxious. His mum did the same thing, especially when she was concentrating on her art or thinking about their dad.

  Matt smiled at his sister, making her feel a little better. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Matt, I appreciate your confidence in our abilities, but I don’t care if Queen Victoria and Prince Albert drive past in a carriage; we’re not going anywhere or doing anything else until we find Zach.’

  ‘Jeez, Em, you’re starting to annoy me again. We’ll find him, I promise, but I just want to look around for a minute.’

  Em grabbed her brother’s wrist and climbed up on to the wall next to him. She squeezed, finding his pulse the way Simon had taught her.

  ‘Mattie, listen to me. You and I are going to find Zach right now. We are not doing anything else. No sightseeing. No wandering off. We’re going to find Zach.’

  She kept her concentration on his breathing, shifting her calm into his mind, trailing after his thinking, loosening his stubborn feelings from their moorings.

  For a few seconds, Em held Matt’s thoughts in her head, his excitement frozen, his inclination to dart off weakening. She thought she had calmed him, until he whipped his hand from hers, laughing.

  ‘Seriously, Em, you’re trying to inspirit me?’

  Em shrugged. ‘Worth a try.’

  She did her best to mask her delight from his mind. Because despite his protesting, Matt had stopped trying to charge off on his own and was scanning the busy avenue for Zach in a fairly focused way instead.

  ‘I see him,’ shouted Matt suddenly. ‘He’s over there.’ He pointed near the railway bridge. ‘Somehow he must have fallen from the animation before we did.’

  Zach was caught in the middle of a gang of scruffy boys, many of them about the twins’ age but a few much younger. Em could sense the volatile emotions of the group. She understood that they were about to pummel poor Zach, who was not so much afraid as confused. It was clear that he was still reeling from the fact that he had fallen into a scene from Oliver Twist.

  Help!

  Finally, Em heard Zach’s cries in her head.

  Run in the direction of Big Ben, Zach!

  Zach dodged the first wharf rat that charged at him and dashed out into the busy avenue. But because he couldn’t hear the yelled warning from a pedestrian nearby, he sprinted directly in front of a soldier on a black horse.

  The horse bucked and rose up on its hind legs, its front hooves beating the air next to Zach’s head. Yanking on the reins with one hand, the soldier swooped down and grabbed Zach’s hoodie with his other, pulling a windmilling Zach off his feet and into the air.

  The gang of urchins fled in multiple directions, making it difficult for a nearby policeman to catch any of them. The soldier kept a tight grip on Zach’s sweatshirt, despite Zach’s squirming and kicking to free himself.

  Zach, we’re coming.

  ‘Got one here for you, constable!’

  The piercing pitch of a policeman’s whistle rose above the din of the street. Within seconds, a black police wagon trundled out of a cobbled lane next to Whitehall.

  ‘And here’s a lesson for you, you filthy urchin! I’ll teach you not to frighten my horse.’

  Zach’s pain buckled Em to her knees. The soldier had slipped his riding crop from his saddle and begun thrashing Zach, who curled up on the ground, covering his head. Em slid from the wall and howled with every lash of the soldier’s riding crop on Zach’s back and shoulders. It was all Matt could do not to run to Zach’s aid, but he couldn’t leave his sister in this state.

  ‘Breathe, Em,’ Matt ordered, white with rage for his friend. ‘We’ll help him. We will. But you need to be calm.’

 
When the soldier stopped whipping Zach, Em exhaled in a burst of air. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Matt helped her up from the pavement. The twins watched helplessly as Zach was tossed into the prison wagon, already crowded with filthy children, and driven into the flow of traffic heading north towards the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  ELEVEN

  ‘But where’s this prison wagon going?’ asked Matt, as he and Em raced along the muck-filled gutter of the Embankment in hot pursuit of Zach, dodging round carts, wild dogs and endless people.

  ‘Victorian street children were rounded up and taken to workhouses,’ she panted. ‘I’m guessing that’s where we’re going.’

  She stopped, her hands on her knees, coughing and breathing hard. It wasn’t comfortable running in this thick smog. ‘We’ll never catch him at this rate. God, this place stinks.’ She scraped muck from her shoe and tried to spit the stench from her mouth.

  Zach, we’re coming. I promise.

  ‘Can you still hear him?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Barely.’

  Ahead of them, the police wagon was already slipping from their view, rolling round the curve of the riverbank up ahead.

  ‘Give me our drawing,’ demanded Em.

  ‘Why?’ asked Matt, fishing the page out of the back pocket of his jeans. ‘We’re not going back without Zach.’

  Em smiled at what she was sure was the result of her successful inspiriting. Ducking round three nannies in crisp uniforms pushing prams as big as ponies, she dragged Matt behind a flower-seller’s cart and handed him one of the crayons.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Matt asked.

  ‘We need to draw something that moves fast.’ She glanced down at the river. ‘I’ve got it! Come on.’

  Em led Matt down the shaky jetty steps to the river’s edge. The stench was worse down here, and Matt’s eyes began to water. A rowing boat was beached on the hard, black sand, a fisherman wading by the riverbank.