The darkness around them was just as it had been the last time they were here, and Darwen felt a dread of the place and the things that lived there, the scrobblers and gnashers, of course, but also—especially—the ghosts.
Weazen released his hand and was off, running into the dark craggy echoes of the school buildings Darwen had come to know so well. Watching him go, Darwen was relieved to have nothing to do but return to Atlanta, the storm, and whatever new trouble was waiting for him in school.
Yet as he got out of the rain and made his way slowly back to Mr. Iverson’s science class, Weazen’s words hung in his mind like a sword suspended by a slender thread above him. He was the mirroculist for now. But one day he would wake up and find that the mirrors were just mirrors. The thought settled on him like the chilling, soaking rain that ran down his face.
Chapter Nineteen
Clues
Darwen expected the gossip to be all about Weazen’s escape, but the students had other things on their minds. Alex overheard Melissa and Jennifer discussing how upset Princess was about what had happened to her while she had been rehearsing her dance recital for the talent show.
“Something was in the gym with her,” said Alex. “She was halfway through her routine—very glam, by the way, but you’d expect that—”
“And?” Darwen prompted.
“And this thing came in through the wall,” she said. “Pale, floaty. A ghost. Just a light, at first, but then got kinda more human: still just like light and air but clearly a kid, and she thinks it could see her. Moved right up to her across the gym while she was dancing. Freaked her out big time.”
“Sounds like what we saw,” said Rich.
“Which is a lot less comforting than you might think,” said Alex. “I’m staying out of this place at night, that’s for sure.”
“But what does it mean?” asked Rich.
Darwen shook his head.
“I wish Mr. Peregrine were here,” he said. “Something is going on. I can feel it. I just don’t know what.”
“Then we need to go back and get him,” said Alex. “And do it right this time.”
Darwen thought for a moment. He didn’t know where to start. He was afraid of what they would find if they went back into Silbrica now, and if they were caught or even delayed so that someone noticed his absence, he might be thrown out of school. He could even lose his place in his aunt’s home. But the thought of the old man trapped floating in that awful tank was too much to bear.
“Yes,” said Darwen simply. “We need to get to him and we need to do it right.”
Darwen spent his last minutes of homeroom studying the little book Weazen had given him, keen to find out what potential ally the Peace Hunter had been too anxious to even name. He had been about to tell Alex and Rich all about it when he stumbled on the key pages, which were covered in tiny, scratchy writing and included a picture. Darwen closed the book hastily. He was going to need to think about how to raise this with his friends.
The light dimmed fractionally. He looked up, vaguely aware of a high-pitched whine coming from somewhere outside the room. He got up, glancing around, but as he did so, Miss Harvey turned on him suddenly.
“I was just wondering where that noise—” he began, but he didn’t get the sentence out.
Miss Harvey, who was generally strict but pleasant, was staring at him as if she had never seen him before.
No, Darwen corrected himself. She was looking at him as if she hated him. Her head was lowered bullishly, and her eyes were fixed unblinking on his as if she might leap forward and snap at him with her teeth. From deep in her throat came a rumbling growl like some great and terrible beast contemplating its attack. . . .
And then it was gone: the sound, the dimmed light, and whatever had come over the homeroom teacher. But if Darwen had any fear that he had imagined the whole thing, Rich soon set him straight.
“So I was helping Mr. Iverson clean up just now,” he said, “and he got really weird. Just for a moment. But he was glowering at me, and he had this beaker in his hand and I was sure he was going to throw it at me.”
Other students had similar stories. Mrs. Frumpelstein had hissed at Genevieve Reddock like she was a cat, and Mr. Stuggs had actually pushed Nathan Cloten against the gym wall and stared into his face as if he was going to punch him. Stuggs could be a bit of a bully, but he never took it out on his lacrosse players.
Nathan, for his part, was most indignant about the episode. “I’ll be talking to my father about this,” he warned.
“Far be it from me to think ill of anyone who makes Nathan Cloten miserable,” said Alex, “but this is getting a bit weird, even by Hillside standards.”
As his aunt drove him home from school—no replacement for Eileen had yet been found—Darwen gazed out of the window at the Atlanta streets, shrouded with wet trees whose limbs were impossibly green in the post-rain sunlight. He had been watching his aunt closely, but she seemed her usual self.
“Can Rich and Alex come over tonight?” he asked. “They are both at Alex’s place until Rich’s dad can get over to collect him. If we called before he left work, they could drop by and—”
“No,” said his aunt.
No discussion, no explanation, no We’ll see if you’re good, or What do the parenting books say? Just: no.
All day he had been going back over his memories of that terrible mirror in the Atlanta mansion through which he had been able to see Mr. Peregrine suspended in that tank of liquid while another flesh suit was being grown. He tried to recall something—anything—he had seen that might give him a hint as to where the locus was, but the lab contained only Silbrican technology, which told him nothing.
Well, he thought, it had contained one other thing: people. Humans.
He tried to remember what they had looked like, one in overalls, one in a lab coat, but he couldn’t remember their faces. Not that that would have helped. It’s not like people could read the town you were born in from your face, like it was a sign around your neck.
“Better day at school today, Darwen?” asked his aunt carefully.
“Aye,” Darwen replied absently, still gazing out of the window. “It were all right.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, yes, ma’am,” said Darwen.
“Mrs. Frumpelstein is right, Darwen,” she replied, shooting him a look in the rearview mirror. “I’m sure you’d fit in better if you could neutralize that accent of yours. Sometimes I have to guess at what you’re saying.”
Darwen bit the inside of his lip and said nothing. His dialect was part of who he was. He knew it would fade over time, but he had no interest in speeding that process up so that the likes of Nathan Cloten would find him more palatable. Darwen liked his accent, liked what it reminded him of, liked the thought that it kept him tied to that little Lancashire town, to its streets and fields, to his parents. It was a badge of identity, of honor, and he would hold onto it.
A badge. Like a sign around his neck . . .
Accents!
He remembered the two men in the watchtower window. He couldn’t recall their faces, but their voices had stayed with him. The sound had struck him as musical and familiar. What had the man in the lab coat said? Something like, “Trust me, it makes a difference, look you.”
Look you.
He was sure of that. He could hear the lilting sound of the sentence, the way it turned up at the end of certain words, almost like a song. They were speaking English fluently, naturally, but the accent . . .
Look you.
Suddenly he was sitting in the living room in his little Lancashire house and his father was in the next room listening to that old record of his, the funny little radio play he loved so much, by a poet called Dylan Thomas, about a town where the houses were blind as moles and there were dogs in the wet-nosed yard, down by the slow, black
, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. . . .
Over and over his father had played the scratchy old record on his ancient turntable, reciting chunks along with the voices.
Tears started unexpectedly to Darwen’s eyes at the memory, but at the same time, he started to chuckle, so that his aunt half swiveled in her seat, causing the car to swerve dangerously, till at least three cars blew their horns.
“What?” she demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Darwen. “Just figured something out. A homework problem.”
“What’s the answer?” asked his aunt, her eyes returning to the dreaded rush hour traffic.
He recalled the musical language of the radio play and he knew with absolute certainty why the dialect he had heard from the man in the watchtower had sounded so familiar.
“Welsh,” he said, smiling to himself. “The answer is Wales.”
• • •
What Darwen was to do with the discovery he had made he wasn’t sure. It was possible, of course, that the Welsh accent he had heard was a red herring, an irrelevance. After all, Welsh people could be found all over the world, and perhaps scattered across Silbrica too. But it might also mean that Greyling’s lab was staffed by workers who lived close by. Darwen couldn’t be sure if the locus he had seen was in Silbrica or in the human world, but he was prepared to bet there was an access point very close to it in Wales.
Did it matter that Wales was only fifty miles or so from the town where he had grown up? Probably not, but the idea that he had a legitimate reason to go back, to breathe that damp air and walk those dark hills, filled Darwen with a secret joy. How he was going to get there was far from clear, but his journey surely began with the oven door inside his closet and the chute down to the Great Apparatus. Maybe he would have time to speak to the Guardians again about what it was to be a mirroculist and, more urgently, what it meant to lose those abilities. He didn’t know what else they could tell him that would make the truth of the thing more bearable, but he wanted—needed—to talk about it.
Back in his room, Darwen went online, resisting the urge to go back to the newspaper reports of the car crash. He spent an hour researching Wales, moving at random from page to page, perusing dry statistics about population and exports and watching videos of male voice choirs and rugby matches. Next, he typed “weird things in Wales” into his search engine. Not a very promising line of inquiry, he knew, but he hit the enter key and watched the screen fill up. Most of it was just odd facts and figures, but there were also tales of inexplicable experiences and ghost sightings.
Ghosts again? he thought, remembering the dreadful phantoms he had seen in the shadow school and the strangely similar apparitions other students had glimpsed around Hillside.
Darwen read hungrily, but none of it sounded right. Most were vague accounts of strange presences, while others were clearly folk tales. Nothing helped.
He ate a somber dinner with his aunt, who spent most of the time tapping at the keyboard of her laptop, something she normally—if reluctantly—refrained from doing during meals. She barely made eye contact with him, and Darwen had the curious feeling that the more he ate, the emptier he felt.
“Can Rich and Alex come over tomorrow night?” he ventured. “We need to work on our talent show act.”
“Which is what?” asked Honoria.
“Kind of a secret,” said Darwen in a way he hoped was appealing. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
“I’m not sure I can come to the gala,” she said. “I’m very busy at work. But okay, they can visit for a spell, if you are all on your best behavior.”
“Okay,” said Darwen. “And since you’ve not found another babysitter, maybe you could give Eileen another try. It really wasn’t her fault that—”
“No,” said his aunt, with such finality that Darwen winced. He started to say something apologetic, but she cut him off. “I would prefer not to discuss the matter further, Darwen,” she said, “and I really need to finish reading this report.”
Darwen returned to his room and went back to poking around on his computer, but since he was getting nowhere—beyond finding a video clip of some Welsh kid who could hum through his nose—was about to shut the thing off when he caught a headline that intrigued him.
“Peregrines hunting Welsh castle grounds?”
It was the first word that caught his attention, but he knew the article referred not to their missing friend but to peregrine falcons, one of the birds that had always fascinated him. He loved their speed, their agility, their rareness. He had never seen one in real life.
The article had three pictures. The first was of the bird in close-up, proud and beautiful. The second was an image of a castle rising up over a modern town with flat open sea on one side.
“Conwy,” read the caption.
The article described how the numerous pigeons that haunted the medieval fortress were apparently being hunted in the evening by falcons nesting in another part of the bay. Castle workers regularly found pigeon bodies reduced to little more than wings and backbone, though no one had actually seen the peregrines hunting. Nevertheless, the falcons were, according to local experts, the most likely culprits, certainly more likely than the creature featured in a third blurry photograph sent in by a local teenager, which, said the experts, was surely a hoax.
The picture showed a bat-like animal perched on the edge of a stone block and looking down. Its face was vaguely human, except for the long, cruel beak. . . .
There was no doubt about what the creature in the image was: a flittercrake. And if a flittercrake could hunt pigeons at Conwy castle, then a portal was very close by—a portal that might just lead them to Mr. Peregrine.
Darwen, it seemed, finally had a place to start hunting. He just needed to figure out how to get there, and that meant that it was time he treated the Guardians as the allies they claimed to be.
As soon as the sun was down, he slipped through the oven door and down to the Great Apparatus, wishing he had been able to bring Rich and Alex with him. But when he entered the council chamber above it, the seat that had been occupied by Lightborne was empty. Darwen coughed awkwardly, and the other members of the council opened their eyes dreamily.
“Sorry,” said Darwen. “I don’t mean to disturb you and whatnot. I was wondering where Lightborne was.”
“The head of the council is inspecting the damages performed by Greyling,” said Jorge from his chair by the energy dome. “You may find him at portal number 32.”
Darwen thanked him, but the Spaniard’s eyes had already closed as if he had forgotten Darwen was even there. His manner reminded Darwen uncomfortably of the first day he had been in this chamber, when the council had been in something like a coma, oblivious to what Greyling was doing.
Portal 32 took Darwen to one of the strangest loci he had yet seen, and for a moment he looked wildly around for something to hold onto. He seemed to be standing on solid air: glass or crystal of some sort, no doubt, hard as stone, but so utterly transparent that you couldn’t actually see it at all. Below was a rolling purple ocean flecked with pinkish foam over which graceful, black-winged seabirds skimmed and dived. Here and there, columns of some curious seaweed rose above the water like palm trees, and in their delicate, windswept tresses, the birds roosted between flights. Lightborne, his long silver hair stirred by the breaze, was leaning on a kind of rail made of the same invisible substance as the platform on which they stood, gazing out over the waves and watching the sun dip slowly into the horizon in a blaze of amber and scarlet.
He half turned at the sound of Darwen stepping through the portal, smiled, and returned to considering the view. “Remarkable, is it not?” he said, his blue eyes sparkling.
“Yes, sir,” said Darwen, meaning it. “It is.”
“For all its unique perils,” said Lightborne, “Silbrica remains a place of extraord
inary beauty, something we need to preserve. Greyling’s machines had contaminated the water of this locus, but, as you can see, we have been able to rectify the situation quite satisfactorily. It is good to remember such small victories when things seem hopeless.” The old man turned from the dark water, and as his gaze fell on Darwen, he smiled self-consciously. “But I suspect you came to discuss more important things.”
Darwen wasn’t sure he had much to say that was worth more than this breathtaking view, but he launched into an account of all he had done so far, trying to make it sound like they were making progress.
Lightborne listened in silence, nodding occasionally, but did not look at him until he was finished. “So you need to get to Conwy,” he said. “There was indeed a portal there, but it has not been on the Guardians’ grid for some time. I can show you how to reach it less directly, but part of the journey will have to be made overland in Wales.”
“That’s fine,” said Darwen, thrilled by the possibility. “And I also need to go here.” He showed Lightborne the page of the notebook on which Weazen had scribbled. Lightborne’s eyebrows went up.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “This is an extremely dangerous place. The creature Weazen has described . . .” He hesitated. “There are few deadlier beasts in all of Silbrica.”
“I know,” said Darwen. “But I have to try.”
Lightborne considered him carefully, then gave the smallest of nods. “Very well,” he said. “I’m glad that your search for Octavius is not clouding your sense of our larger Silbrican concerns. And I can show you how to move from this portal through to those that will lead you—eventually—to Conwy. I hope your hunch is right.”
Darwen nodded gratefully as Lightborne added some portal numbers of his own, but when he showed no sign of leaving, the old man gave him a searching look and Darwen was struck once more by how much Lightborne sometimes resembled Mr. Peregrine. “There is something else?” he said.
Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows Page 16