He paused and raised it just a crack off the floor. Thin, yellow light rippled around the room casting long, flat shadows all around. There was a wardrobe, a door to what was probably a tiny bathroom, a bedside table with a battery-operated lantern, another window looking down toward the sea, and . . . a bed. Darwen stared at it, trying to make sense of its lumps and creases. He raised the flashlight a fraction more, and now he could see.
There was no one there.
He released his breath in a long sigh that contained a laugh. He put one hand to his chest as if to calm his racing heart and then played a little more light about the room.
There was no gate to Silbrica here. No mirror, no oven door, nothing that might provide a portal for the pouncels.
He considered the carefully made-up bed. It hadn’t been slept in. He shone the light underneath it, checked the bathroom—which also was mirrorless—and then opened the wardrobe. It was full of brightly colored suits on hangers. Darwen pushed a garish pink one aside and staggered back in horror.
Hanging on the rail, wearing the blue suit he had seen her in that morning, was Scarlett Oppertune.
It was Scarlett Oppertune, or something very like her. In fact, it looked like a Scarlett Oppertune suit, a costume that went beyond clothes and had some kind of mask built in. And skin-colored gloves. They hung there, limp and rubbery, but when Darwen plucked up the courage to touch them, they felt horribly like flesh. He shone the light on the thing’s face and knew immediately that this was no mask. The detail was extraordinary, the tiny wrinkles, the eyelashes, the smear of makeup on the cheeks. He forced himself to touch the face, to lift one drooping eyelid, and was repulsed to find a staring, if faded, eye glaring back at him.
His first thought was that Scarlett was dead, drained somehow, her skeleton removed so that she just hung there, but then he remembered that awful night when he and Alex had encountered the people who had called themselves the Jenkinses. What had seemed to be a kindly old grandmother and her husband had turned out to be little more than suits like this one, the true inhabitants being the giant insect-like creatures he had seen again only a couple of nights ago.
Darwen closed the wardrobe door so he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. He turned toward the bed, and, for the first time, his eyes strayed to the window. Feeling the air move fractionally, he realized it was open. He snapped off the light. Something was moving outside.
It was too dark to see clearly, but it seemed to Darwen that there was something like a gargantuan snake out there, yards long and as thick as an anaconda. He dropped to a crouch, hands gripping the window ledge, as he stared in fascinated horror.
The creature was moving. One end stayed almost still, while the other end—which Darwen thought was the head—rotated like the hand of a clock. As he watched, he saw it complete one cycle and then begin again. It traced one more circle, then started doing something else, pushing objects into place around the rim. In the dim light, Darwen thought that they rolled as the monster moved them.
The stone spheres, he thought. And what the thing has just made is like the muddy hole I fell into.
The thought was incomplete in his head when he realized that the creature outside had stopped what it was doing and was moving quickly across the ground toward the open window. Toward him.
Darwen gasped. He turned toward the door before realizing that he was on the wrong side of the bed.
The monster was almost at the house. He had no choice. He dropped to the floor and rolled under the bed just as the snake thing slid up the wall and in through the window. He felt the weight of it on the bed above him, saw the shadows leap as the lantern clicked on a soft, bluish glow, but it didn’t pause, sliding over and down with a soft slap as it hit the floor inches from his head.
He lay absolutely still, stiff with fear and revulsion. The creature slithered heavily to the wardrobe, and Darwen couldn’t help himself. He had to see. He angled his head back and watched as the creature reared up and wrenched the wardrobe open with its teeth. Its tail flexed, flicking a hair’s breadth from Darwen’s face, and then it slipped into the wardrobe among the hanging suits. Darwen gaped as the thing forced Scarlett Oppertune’s slack jaws wide open and then eased itself nose first into her mouth. The long slow body followed, yard by terrible yard, and the Scarlett suit inflated unevenly, squirming, shuddering, filling. There was a series of metallic snaps, and with each one a flabby limb became firm and straight like the fabric of an umbrella tautening as it goes up. The new weight of the thing brought it down from the rack of hangers, but Scarlett Oppertune, high heels and all, stepped out of the wardrobe as if nothing could be more normal.
Darwen just stared, knowing that if she looked down, she would see him.
She didn’t. She stalked back to the table and turned off the lantern, then climbed onto the bed and lay there. Darwen was motionless, wondering if she might hear his galloping heart no more than a foot away from hers, assuming the creature inhabiting her body had anything as ordinary as a heart.
He didn’t know what the creature was, not really, but he had seen something very like it before. It had been the true shape of whatever lived inside Miss Murray, his former world studies teacher, whom Rich had called—with uncanny perception—Murray the Moray, like the eel with the razor-sharp teeth. She had led Greyling’s attack on Hillside. Could that be why he had felt like Scarlett knew him, like she had almost called him by name? Could it really be Miss Murray? And if it was, what could that possibly mean beyond the fact that, if she got the chance, she would surely kill him?
He lay very still on his stomach, wondering how long it would take her to get to sleep, wondering if she would sleep at all, and what would happen if she suddenly got up and saw him lying there. He had to get out.
He had been able to get the front door open silently when he came in, and he hadn’t re-latched it behind him. If he could crawl quietly across the floor, he might be able to slink out. He spread his fingers on the wooden floor and felt his muscles tighten as he prepared to move. He eased himself out a fraction, then paused, waiting. He could see the faintest graying of the blackness around the edge of the door, and he focused on that as he inched his way out from under the bed.
Slowly, so slowly it felt like hours, he raised himself onto his hands and knees, one tiny motion at a time. Keeping the toes of his shoes and the barrel of his flashlight off the floor, he began to creep toward the door: hand, then knee, then the other knee, then the other hand—four movements, each one a risk, to advance eight inches.
Then something touched his left hand.
A cockroach the size of a cell phone.
Darwen forced himself to stay still and silent as it climbed up his left arm and over his back. He fought the impulse to cry out, and he crawled another eight inches. The roach rattled across the floor, and Darwen froze, sure that Scarlett would put the lamp on to see what was making the sound. The noise changed, and Darwen risked a look back into the darkness.
He thought he could just make out the shape of the bug moving up the leg of the bed and onto the thin covers, black against the pale sheet. It wandered up toward the pillows, and then, without warning, the figure in the bed, whose shape he had not been able to see properly, shifted suddenly. A pale hand snatched at the roach and lifted it wriggling up toward the head.
Darwen turned away as he heard the unmistakable crunch of teeth.
Then he was moving again, reckless in his desire to get out. He didn’t look back, but he heard the slow chewing, felt the presence of the creature in the bed behind him like a nightmare he couldn’t shake.
One more hand-knee “step” and he felt the door against his head. He moved, shifting the door fractionally, and, before he could stop it, it closed with an audible click that sounded like a gunshot in the silent hut.
There was a noise like a breath from the bed, and Darwen got c
lumsily to his feet, fumbling for the door handle as he turned to see if Scarlett was coming for him. From where he was, he couldn’t see anything, wouldn’t see her until she was virtually on top of him. The latch clicked again as he worked the handle, and this time he couldn’t wait, couldn’t be careful or slow. He snatched the door open and stepped hurriedly out, only just resisting the urge to sprint off the deck and down through the village.
He knew he was making noise, but fear drove the concern away. There was a flash of light, and he winced, sure it was Scarlett’s lamp, sure that the creature inside her was coming after him, but then there was a crash of thunder overhead, and he realized it had just been lightning. By the time he reached the stairs, it was raining. He risked a look back, and as another ripple of lightning creased the sky, he saw that the door had swung softly shut. There was no sign of pursuit.
He wanted to get as far from this place as possible, but there was one more thing he had to see. Keeping a safe distance from the open window, he ran silently through the rain around the side of the house to the spot where he had seen the thing like Miss Murray—or Scarlett, or whatever he was supposed to call her now—in her eel shape scooping out the saucer-like depression in the ground.
He found it easily and without needing the flashlight. It was exactly as the other had been, and he had been right: she had circled the shallow hole with a dozen of the ancient stone spheres.
But why? She could easily have been seen doing it, so why take the risk?
Darwen crouched on the edge of the circle, looking back up to the isolated hut. The rain was getting heavier by the moment, and little rivulets were forming in the village and rushing down toward the beach at his back. The circle itself was starting to fill with water. It was time for Darwen to get back.
He got up to leave, and the shift in his perspective coupled with a timely sheet of lightning overhead revealed something new: his own reflection. As the shallow depression filled with water, it was turning into a great mirror!
Darwen stared, his mind racing, oblivious to the driving, hammering rain. Then the pool was full to the rim of stone spheres, and something happened.
There was another flicker of energy, but it wasn’t lightning. It was soft and greenish, and it ran around the mirror-like pool, leaping from stone to stone as the circuit completed. And then the surface of the water was buckling and sloshing not because of the raindrops hurtling into it but because something was coming through, something far too big to be contained in that shallow puddle.
It was long and thick and studded with suckers, purplish and black on the top, but pale beneath, and though it looked snakelike, Darwen knew instantly what it was. The tentacle reached its pointed tip into the sky as if tasting the air, and then it surged through, yards at a time, and behind it came more, filling the pool as the monster squeezed in through the portal.
Darwen’s terror finally broke out. He gave first one cry and then another, shouting to the villagers to wake up, to defend themselves before the thing in the pool took their children.
Lights came on, and he saw the pale face of Scarlett Oppertune in her window. But he did not run. Instead he kicked at the stone spheres, pushing them away from the circle. The greenish light around the pool flickered and stalled. The great tentacles seemed to hesitate, hanging suspended in the air with a strange and sudden stillness, and then they and the Insidious Bleck to which they belonged were sucked back into the pool with a splash and were gone.
No one believed Darwen. He had no hope of persuading the adults about what he had really seen, so he made up some half-baked story about sleepwalking. He didn’t care if the villagers thought him stupid or blamed him for interrupting their night’s sleep. It didn’t matter to him whether or not they knew that he had probably just saved another of their children from the monster in the pool. He had just found himself out here, he said, woken by the thunder, and then he thought he had seen something, but it had turned out to be a trick of the light.
But if he thought that he would be allowed to get away with merely looking foolish, Darwen had another think coming. One of the men sleeping in the village was Jorge, and he was instantly suspicious. He insisted on personally escorting Darwen back to the camp, where he was handed over to the teachers to repeat his sleepwalking yarn.
“And you do this a lot, do you?” said a bleary-eyed Mr. Sumners. “I don’t recall your aunt referring to your, ahhh, somnambulant strolls on your medical form.”
“My what?” said Darwen.
“Your sleepwalking,” said Sumners, his patience strained to the breaking point. “You’d think she would have mentioned something like that, considering where we were going.”
“Oh,” said Darwen. “No, I’ve never done it before.”
“Is that right?” said Sumners. “Next time do us all a favor and sleepwalk into the ocean, Arkwright, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” said Darwen.
“Looks like you’re on tent-cleaning duty again tomorrow,” he said.
“But sir—”
“Good night, Mr. Arkwright. Try to make it back to your tent without dropping off. I’d hate for you to step on something deadly.”
“Yes, sir. Right, sir. Good night, sir.”
Darwen trudged back toward his tent with his flashlight trained disconsolately on the ground, so he didn’t see Mr. Peregrine until he almost bumped into him.
“Want to tell me what really happened?” asked the teacher.
They walked down to the beach, where they wouldn’t be overheard, and sat on a fallen palm trunk facing the black ocean. The torrential rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the sky was already clear enough to see stars.
Darwen told Mr. Peregrine everything: Scarlett’s sinister transformation, the part played by the stone spheres in the creation of the portal, and the terrible thing that had started coming through it, a creature Darwen was now prepared to name aloud. “It was the Insidious Bleck,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Well,” said Mr. Peregrine, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think you are right that the stone spheres are somehow connected to the portals—that would explain why the ancient peoples who lived here treated them with such reverence—but what you saw coming through could have been any number of Silbrican beasts. As to the nature of Miss Oppertune . . .” He hesitated thoughtfully, and Darwen felt his doubt.
“What?” said Darwen. “I saw the suit thing the creature inside her used. I saw her out there making the portal.”
“Well, it was very dark, Darwen,” said Mr. Peregrine, “and you were—understandably—scared. There’s no shame in admitting that. You need not invent—”
“I’m not inventing anything,” said Darwen, his confusion turning to anger. “I know what I saw.”
Mr. Peregrine held up his hands in surrender and smiled. “Darwen, you have done what you came here to do,” he said, “and it is a remarkable achievement of which you should be very proud. You have solved the mystery of how Silbrican creatures are coming through, and this will undoubtedly save lives. But your suspicion of Miss Oppertune, unpleasant though her plans may be, seems to me beside the point.”
“No,” said Darwen, standing up, his face dark with fury. “The children haven’t been taken by Silbrican animals hunting at random. It’s the Insidious Bleck, and it’s being brought through on purpose by the thing we used to call Miss Murray. I don’t know why, but that is what’s happening.”
“If that were the case,” said Mr. Peregrine reasonably, “why would Miss Oppertune be trying to drive the villagers away? She would want the children here.”
“I don’t know,” said Darwen. “You tell me. You’re supposed to be the one who helps me figure this stuff out, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Peregrine, “I am. And I am telling you that your work is done, and well done. I will pas
s the information about the stone spheres along to the council, and they will seal the breaches by their own means. You have completed the task assigned to you and can now concentrate on enjoying the rest of the trip with your friends.”
“What about Luis?” asked Darwen, his voice a little high.
“It’s over, Darwen,” said Mr. Peregrine. “You have a busy and fun-filled day tomorrow. You’ll need your strength to enjoy it. Bedtime.”
He spoke with such finality that Darwen didn’t bother protesting. He turned, leaving the old man sitting in the dark, and made for the tent camp, dazed and struck by the special pain that comes from feeling totally powerless.
“Been out for a stroll?”
It was Rich. He was sitting in the dark in his pajamas on the platform outside the tent. He snapped his flashlight on and shone it in Darwen’s face.
“Not now, Rich,” said Darwen. “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
“Why bother?” said Rich. “You obviously didn’t think I was worth taking along wherever you’ve been.”
“What?” said Darwen. “Rich, seriously, this isn’t the time.”
“Sure,” said Rich, whose face was pink with anger, “why tell me? It’s your business, right? Private mirroculist work?”
“Shhh,” said Darwen, glancing at the tent. “Gabriel might hear.”
“Yeah,” said Rich, getting up and turning back toward the tent. “Wouldn’t want anyone to know what’s going on. You’re big on secrets, aren’t you, Darwen?”
“It’s not like that!” Darwen hissed.
“Really?” said Rich, bitter and unconvinced. “How many times have you been through to Silbrica since Halloween by yourself, when you knew Alex and me were dying to go in with you?”
Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck Page 19