Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows

by A. J. Hartley

  What do you want?

  The words were familiar, a phrase you might say when you opened the door to a stranger, perhaps, but this was no casual inquiry. It was asking what they most desired, trying to get a handle on who or what they were. The question was a test, Darwen was sure. He was also sure that it was directed at Rich, whose life now hung in the balance, the snake poised to strike as sure as if an ax was raised above his neck. Darwen hoped beyond hope that Rich knew the right answer.

  For a long moment, however, Rich said nothing; and there was silence in the desert. Then it came again.

  What do you want?

  Darwen braced himself, willing Rich to speak, but far from clear what he wanted his friend to say. Knowing Rich, it would be something long and precise, something with lists and subtle scientific distinctions, something complicated. Rich leaned back, his eyes tightly closed, and somehow, Darwen wasn’t sure why, his answer appeared in the snake’s mind so that Darwen could hear it as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud.

  Space.

  That was it. One word.

  Darwen felt his muscles tighten as if he might have to leap to Rich’s defense or merely spring out of the way of the snake’s attack. Space? What did that even mean? He felt Alex shift from foot to foot uneasily. She had obviously heard it too.

  Space.

  Darwen heard it again, but this time it was clearly the voice of the snake, a slow, pondering echo of what Rich had said. And then there was more than the word, there were pictures in Darwen’s head: a vast, open sky full of stars and patches of cloud uncolored by the blue-green light of the electronic cage in which the snake had been trapped. He saw the wide expanse of the desert, vast rolling dunes stretching as far as the eye could see, and tussocky bluffs where antelope grazed. He saw the vastness of the sky and the land, and he felt the thrill of movement through empty air without shackles or restraints, and then there were meadows and forests and oceans from Silbrica and their own world, and through them he saw people and animals of every kind wandering free. He saw the land where Rich’s dad lived, the little field and the woods beyond where the creek ran, and for a moment it was like they were all little kids running barefoot through the wet grass. There were no scrobbler devices, no armies, no hint of Greyling’s presence. No cages.

  The snake reared higher still, its great reptilian lips gasping a long sibilant hiss somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, and then it was plunging down toward Rich, diving.

  Darwen flinched, and Alex clapped a hand to her mouth, but Rich did not move, and the great snake slammed into the sand only inches from his neck and tunneled straight down. A plume of dust and grit rose like a funnel cloud as the huge crimson body arched into the ground like a torrent of water breaking over a precipice, and then it was gone.

  If it had been a test, Rich had passed.

  Darwen helped him to his feet. Rich was speckled with sand and he looked rattled and jittery, but he was smiling.

  “That was amazing!” said Darwen. “How on earth did you come up with that? Space? Really? I would never have thought of that.”

  “It was weird,” said Rich, who seemed a little stunned by what had happened. “I tried to think of something it would want to hear, but I could feel how smart it was, how old. Did you get that? It felt like it had been around for centuries. And I knew that if I tried to play it somehow, it would know. So I was just, you know, honest.”

  “That was pretty cool,” Alex said, considering him in the low light.

  “What?” said Rich, his smile broadening. “No cracks about my hillbilly family and my hankering for the great outdoors?”

  “I’m just glad we’re alive,” said Alex. “You can’t argue with survival. Still, not sure I’m comfortable being inside your head. One more reason to steer clear of hundred-foot telepathic snakes.”

  “Agreed,” said Darwen. “But apart from the survival thing—which is great—I’m not sure what we achieved other than letting loose a monster.”

  “True,” said Alex. “We probably didn’t make a lot of antelope friends just now.”

  “I don’t know,” Rich said musingly. He had been reflective since the snake left. “I wouldn’t say we made a friend exactly, but he doesn’t think of us as the enemy. Might be useful.”

  “He?” said Alex. “You mean the snake?”

  “He,” said Rich with certainty. “Yes.”

  “Well, I guess that’s good,” said Alex as they trudged back across the desert sand. “We met a monster that doesn’t want us dead. Makes a nice change.”

  Back at the portal, Darwen checked his notes from Lightborne and said, “Okay, now to find Mr. Peregrine.”

  “Will there be more monsters?” asked Alex with a formidable glare.

  “No,” said Darwen. “We will be leaving Silbrica.”

  “And going where?” asked Rich.

  “Wales,” said Darwen. He recounted the strange sightings around Conwy and the accents of the men monitoring Mr. Peregrine. “Lightborne told me about an active portal in Wales. It’s close to Conwy.”

  “It’s not much to go on,” said Alex.

  “It’s all I’ve got right now,” said Darwen, “and I really don’t want to go alone.”

  Rich shrugged. “I have a few more hours before anyone notices I’m gone,” he said.

  “And you promise a total absence of monsters?” said Alex.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” said Darwen, grinning.

  “Hmmm,” Alex mused. “Not a phrase to fill me with confidence in our safe return, but what the hey. I’m in.”

  “Okay,” said Darwen, activating the portal. “Here goes.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Blodwyn

  For a moment all was dark on the other side of the portal, then a dazzling light arced around and Darwen looked hurriedly away. He found they were standing in a cramped round room with huge diamond-shaped windows that rose from shoulder height all the way to the ceiling, glittering blackly in the night. In the middle of the tiny room, sitting on a green-painted metal base, was a great glass box containing complex equipment and, at head height, the source of the brilliant light. It came in slits from behind a curious array of curved glass panels that might have been lenses or reflectors, and the whole thing was rotating slowly. The light took up so much space that the rest of the room was little more than a metal walkway around its edge. Outside, a full moon rode, and by it, Darwen could just make out the wide, black ocean far below.

  “This is our world?” said Alex. “You sure?”

  “I know what this is,” said Rich.

  Alex looked around, taking in the fact that there was no door into the room at all, only a tight metal staircase that came up through the floor, and suddenly, it dawned on her as well. “It’s a lighthouse,” she said. “Darwen? Why are we in a lighthouse?”

  “Chuffed if I know,” said Darwen. “No idea.”

  “Okay,” Alex pressed. “Then where is the lighthouse located?”

  “Again, not sure,” said Darwen.

  “Is someone up there?” called a voice from below.

  Rich froze.

  “Yeah!” called Alex, meeting Rich’s exasperated stare and hissing, “You see somewhere to hide up here that I don’t?”

  Rich shrugged, conceding the point.

  At that moment a woman’s cautious face appeared in the stairwell. She was middle-aged, with a slightly florid face, and beneath her understandable wariness at the prospect of finding three kids at the top of a lighthouse in the middle of the night, she looked kind.

  “What on earth are you doing up here?” she asked, pulling herself up the steps with large, strong hands. “Have you been hiding since the last tour?”

  Darwen gave an apologetic half nod.

  “That’s a long time to be up here by yourselves,” she said, “and
it’s really not allowed. I hope you haven’t been messing with anything.”

  “No, ma’am,” said Rich. “We were just looking.”

  “Ma’am, is it?” she answered, amused and impressed. “Well, you can’t stay up here. I was about to lock up. It’s a good thing I heard you when I did or you would be stuck here till morning. I’m normally good at keeping track of the tour groups, but I was watching the puffins. We’ve got three pairs nesting on the cliffs.”

  Her voice had a familiar musical lilt to it, cycling up and down and up again.

  The slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

  “Wales,” said Darwen, smiling. “We made it.”

  “Well, yes,” said the woman, looking slightly bemused, snapping a walkie-talkie off her belt and setting it down. “Anglesey to be specific. Welcome to South Stack. The lighthouse is fully automated now, but—as you probably heard on the tour—when it was first built over two hundred years ago, everything was done manually and the lighthouse keeper who lived in the rooms below had to light twenty-one separate oil lamps backed by reflectors almost two feet across—”

  “This is all very interesting,” Rich cut in, uncharacteristically, “but I really have to go down. Not a big fan of heights or tight spaces.”

  Darwen was keen to be gone too. There was clearly no other portal up here. Darwen wasn’t certain how he knew it, but he felt sure that if there was a Silbrican gate other than the one they had come through, he would have felt it somehow, sensed it. The glass surround of the great light was the portal: they were standing in it, and it went to only one location. That meant they were going to have to make their next move overland as Lightborne had suggested. He gave Alex a nod, then considered Rich, who was gripping the ledge below the glass with both hands and looking slightly green.

  “Afraid of heights?” said the woman with a grin. “How did you get up here? Better question: how on earth did you cross the bridge or come down the four hundred steps?”

  “Four hundred steps?” Rich repeated.

  “From the cliffs,” said the woman. “Only way down.”

  “We have to climb down this metal tube sticking out of the ocean,” said Rich carefully, his face ashen, “and then we have to climb four hundreds steps up those cliffs just to get . . .”

  “Anywhere, really,” the woman agreed, beaming. “Yes.”

  “Conwy, for instance,” Darwen said, trying to sound casual. “How far is that?”

  “Thirty miles or so,” said the woman, rubbing at a smudge on one of the great windows with her sleeve. “That where you’re going next? Conwy is on the mainland. Is someone driving you? Where are your parents?”

  Alex and Darwen looked at each other. Rich had closed his eyes and was squatting on the floor, still holding onto the ledge above his head. Not for the first time, Darwen wished Eileen was with them, and not only because three kids traveling alone together looked suspicious.

  “It’s just us,” he said, smiling as if this was merely a fun adventure, not something that merited a call to the police. “We’re kind of . . . backpacking.”

  “Only without backpacks,” Alex added. Rich opened one eye and gave her a look.

  “It’s bit late for backpacking, don’t you think?” said the woman. “I suppose you could take the train from Holyhead. That will take you to Bangor, across the straits. Then you can go up the coast to Conwy. It’s a tidy walk to the station from here, though, and there are no taxis. Couple of miles at least, and that’s after the steps.”

  “Better get going then, huh,” said Rich, his eyes closed again.

  Darwen gave the woman an apologetic shrug and helped Rich—eyes still shut—to his feet.

  “I still don’t know how you got past me in the first place,” the woman remarked. “When I heard you moving around, I thought it was the ghost, but he’s usually outside at night.”

  “The ghost?” said Alex.

  “I really need to go down,” said Rich.

  “In a minute,” said Alex. “What ghost?”

  “Supposed to be the ghost of old Jack Jones,” said the woman, leaning in and grinning, glad of the chance to tell her story. “He was the lighthouse keeper killed during a terrible storm here in 1853. He was coming down the cliff walk when he was hit by falling rock. He managed to drag himself across the bridge but couldn’t get into the lighthouse. Took him two weeks to die, poor man. Or so the story goes. They say he bangs on the door at night, trying to get inside.” She said the last words very slowly and seriously right into their faces. For a second she held their uneasy gazes, then laughed suddenly, straightened up, and gave them a wide smile. “You go on ahead,” she concluded. “I have to make a phone call.”

  Despite the woman’s cheery face, Darwen found himself chilled, and when Rich begged to go down once more, he agreed, winding his way down the stone and metal corkscrew staircase with exaggerated care.

  “More ghost stories,” muttered Alex as the woman ducked inside one of the rooms below the main tower to make her call. “Just what I need.”

  “What do you make of it?” Darwen asked as they threaded their way through the rooms at the bottom.

  “I’d make nothing of it,” said Rich, “except that we just came in through a portal at the top, and we’re obviously not the first to do so, and we’ve heard a lot about ghosts ourselves lately. Seen a few too. I’d say odd things have been seen or heard here for a couple of centuries, and folk tradition has fastened on this dead lighthouse keeper as a kind of explanation. What actually came through,” he concluded, “I couldn’t say. But I’ll be glad to be out in the fresh air.”

  The air outside was indeed fresh, a stiff sea breeze that whipped at their clothes from every side and carried the tang of salt to their eyes and lips. Even at night the place was alive with seabirds: gulls, but also guillemots and razorbills, which peppered the cliff walls and occasionally fluttered out over the churning black ocean below. The metal walkway across the chasm was positively hair-raising—and not just for Rich—and the zigzagging stone staircase up to the headland took an age to climb. Darwen was glad of the moonlight, without which it would have taken them twice as long.

  At the top, they sat while they got their breath back, looking down to the ghostly white lighthouse and the dark sea beyond.

  “It would be night,” said Alex.

  “The trains probably aren’t running now,” said Darwen, “and even if they were, we haven’t any money.”

  “I have a few bucks,” said Rich, searching his pockets.

  “English money,” Darwen said. “Dollars are no use here. We’ll have to find a bank.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Alex, producing a wallet and flipping it open.

  “You have a credit card?” asked Darwen.

  “I don’t,” said Alex, “but my mother does. Several. I figure we’ll get one use out of each before they get frozen. Better use automated systems like ticket machines so we don’t have to deal with awkward questions.”

  “You stole your mother’s wallet?” said Rich, aghast.

  “Borrowed,” she said with a pointed stare. “I’ll pay her back.”

  “How long have we been gone?” asked Darwen.

  “Not long enough to have been missed yet,” said Alex, plucking a cell phone from her pocket. “Time to make some calls. See if we can head off the panic.”

  “That your mom’s too?” said Rich, regarding it warily, like it might explode.

  “That’s right. Check it out.”

  And without another word she scrolled through the phone’s menu—its glow lighting her face—pushed a button, and waited for the call to be answered.

  “Is that Rich’s dad?” she said, in an uncanny imitation of her mother’s voice. “Hi, this is Gloria O’Connor, Alex’s mom? Listen, is it okay with you if Rich stays over here tonight? He and Darwen are
doing one of their sciencey-experiment things and they think it’s really important that they get to finish it. . . . I know, kids, right? Did we do this stuff when we were their age? I blame the interwebs.”

  Darwen and Rich stared at her in disbelief. The impersonation was extraordinary. Alex had her mother’s manner down to the last detail. It was totally convincing.

  “Is there anything he can’t eat?” Alex continued. “Good, he and Darwen can sleep in the living room. I have a pull-out couch I got for Alex’s uncle Bob. . . .”

  A minute later, it was done.

  “Okay,” said Darwen, “so Rich is covered. My aunt thinks I got an early night. Unless she checks on me, I have a good eight hours. Alex?”

  “I left my mom a note right about the time I lifted her purse,” said Alex.

  “What did the note say?” asked Darwen, impressed.

  “‘Uncle Bob is coming over tonight.’”

  The boys stared at her in confusion. “That doesn’t make much sense,” Rich replied.

  “Believe me when I say that what I wrote really doesn’t matter.”

  Darwen frowned, but if Alex was upset by how little attention her mother paid to what she did, she shrugged it off. “So we’ve bought ourselves some time, but we need to make the most of it.”

  “You bought us time,” said Rich. “That phone call was pretty amazing.”

  “We all have our talents,” said Alex.

  Darwen, who wasn’t so sure about that, looked down, his smile stalling. He was startled from his reverie by a car horn. A green mud-spattered Land Rover had pulled up beside them and someone was winding down the window.

  “Hop in,” called the woman from the lighthouse, smiling wide as a church door. “I knocked off early, like. Can’t have you wandering around the countryside in the middle of the night, can I? Can give you a lift as far as Menai Bridge. You can take the last train to Conwy from there, but we’ll have to be quick.”