“Let’s get sorted out first,” said Darwen. “Then you can test whose bow is the worst.”
“You mean the best,” said Alex.
“I know what I mean,” said Darwen, who didn’t think either bow looked too impressive.
Clouds were sweeping in from the sea, promising rain, but they set up camp on the beach by the fire anyway, lugging some of the supply boxes out there to sit on. It was quieter on the island than on the mainland, and the muted jungle buzz was without the sudden calls of birds and monkeys, which they had grown used to at the camp.
“So if Gabriel marooned us here,” Darwen said, thinking aloud, “because Jorge told him to, what’s going on?”
“He obviously wanted to get word to his colleagues, whoever they really are,” said Alex, “but he didn’t want to leave the island. Mr. Iverson wouldn’t let us go back to the mainland, so he decided to maroon us all here.”
“Or he always planned for us to get stuck on this island,” said Rich. “Maybe we’re about to be the first Hillsiders taken by the Insidious Bleck.”
It began to rain almost as soon as they had lit the fire.
“Great,” said Alex. “We’ll have to sleep in the shelter.”
They returned to the ranger station, cleared the wooden floor, took off their shoes, and lay there in their clothes, watching the rain by the light of the fire on the beach, waiting for the adults to fall asleep.
“This trip just keeps on getting better,” said Alex. Without warning she started to sing, rocking back and forth in time to the music.
“What are you doing?” asked Rich.
“Helps me get to sleep,” she said.
“It’s not doing much for me,” said Rich.
“Just a few minutes,” she said, “and I’ll drop right off. Promise. Got any requests?”
“‘The Sound of Silence,’” Rich deadpanned.
“Hilarious,” said Alex. “What’s that anyway, some moldy old song your dad listens to? You need to get with the times. Try this on for size.”
She started madly warbling, “Baby! Baby! Baby!”
“You do this in your tent with Naia and Mad?” Rich cut in.
“Every night,” she said. “Sometimes they join in.”
“And I thought sleeping in a stinky tent was bad,” said Rich.
“You know whose tent is worse than yours?” whispered Alex. “Mr. P’s. I had to go see him yesterday, and man! I don’t think he’s bathed since we arrived. It’s like something died in there.”
“Shhh!” said Jorge suddenly. He had leaped to his feet and was standing at the back of the shelter, his lit flashlight sweeping the tree line above.
“What is it?” asked Mr. Iverson, sounding groggy.
“Everybody get to the fire!” shouted Jorge. “Quickly!”
“But it’s raining!” said Alex.
“Now!” Jorge yelled.
“Is that really necessary?” said Mr. Iverson, standing and turning on the shelter’s storm lantern.
The others turned to him, and everyone went very still, staring with horror.
“What?” asked Mr. Iverson.
Behind the science teacher, on the very edge of the lamplight, were pairs of yellow lights.
Eyes.
“Go,” said Jorge in a low voice to the students. “Get to the fire and stay there. I will bring Mr. Iverson.”
“What?” said Mr. Iverson. Then he did the thing they had all been hoping he wouldn’t. He turned to see what they were looking at.
Mr. Iverson saw the gathering pouncels, and he panicked. He half jumped, half fell away from them. They reacted at once, leaping into the light, knifelike claws held out in front of them, mouths open and snarling. Mr. Iverson barely saw them. In his hurry he stumbled, turned his ankle, and fell, catching his head on the edge of the bench. The sound was sickening, a firm crack like the sound of a bat hitting a cricket ball. He lay motionless.
“Go!” roared Jorge.
Darwen, Rich, and Alex ran out into the rain and down the beach toward the fire. As they ran, the shingle became sand, and all they could see in the darkness was the blazing heap of wood, which roared and hissed at the rain like a volcano. Back in the station there was a crash, and Jorge’s voice rang out in a wordless cry.
They heard another shout, and it seemed so much further away now that Darwen’s heart sank. He didn’t trust Jorge, but he liked Mr. Iverson a lot. If something bad happened to him, something he couldn’t actually bring himself to imagine right now, he would never forgive himself. How many of the pouncels had there been? Five? At least that many, he thought. Maybe eight or more.
Another shout.
Darwen reached for a hefty-looking tree limb stuck deep in the heart of the blaze and pulled it out.
“What are you doing?” asked Rich.
“Going back,” said Darwen.
The branch was hot in his hand, and it steamed as the rain hit it. He held it overhead and started back toward the shelter.
“Darwen, that’s crazy!” shouted Rich. “There are too many of them.”
Darwen didn’t answer. He began to run so that he wouldn’t change his mind, looking up at the blazing branch above his head. It was still burning, but the flames were small and bluish, not nearly as impressive as he had expected them to be. He slowed. Jorge’s flashlight was slashing around the ranger station like a laser. There was another crash, like overturning furniture, and the light became still.
Darwen rushed to the scene, gratefully aware that Rich and Alex had brought burning brands of their own and were right at his heels.
The flashlight had rolled under the overturned table, but the lantern hanging from the roof beam was still lit. There was no sign of the pouncels. The two men were sprawled on the ground. Mr. Iverson was out cold. Jorge was crumpled in the corner, covered in blood.
Darwen ran to him instinctively and dropped to a crouch. “Jorge!” he screamed.
The guide’s eyelids tightened, then opened. “I am not your enemy,” he gasped between low, rasping breaths. “You have to trust me.”
“Darwen!” shouted Rich.
It was a warning. Darwen turned, rising, and saw three of the pouncels, the largest he had seen, edging back into the shelter. He waved his branch at them, but the flames were virtually out. The pouncels hopped backward as the branch scattered sparks, but then they stalked closer again.
“Go back to the fire,” muttered Jorge, his eyes closing once more. “You are safer there.”
“No,” said Darwen. He took a step toward one of the cat-faced creatures and lunged with the branch, but it dodged, then leaped in close, claws slashing.
Darwen shrank away, but he felt a gash open along his thigh, and he cried out. Two more pouncels had joined the other three.
“Go!” shouted Jorge again. He sounded weak but determined, and desperate though Darwen was, he knew the guide was right. They could do nothing here. He turned and fled back toward the beach.
Rich and Alex were in front of him now, and Darwen sensed their hesitation immediately. They were facing the fire, but they weren’t running.
“What’s the matter?” Darwen yelled, trying to see past them to the plastic storage boxes they had used as benches. “Run!”
But they didn’t move, and as he took another step toward them, he saw why. Something moved between them and the sea, something quick and dangerous, silhouetted against the glow of the fire. Then another. And another. There were more pouncels on the beach. A whole pack of them.
Darwen glanced wildly to Alex and Rich. They had been cut off.
“I don’t think hand-feeding them will work this time, Alex,” said Rich.
“That way!” shouted Alex. “Up to the dig.”
“Why?” gasped Darwen.<
br />
“Where else is there?” she replied.
She had a point. The beach wasn’t safe. The shelter wasn’t safe. The dig wouldn’t give them any more protection, but it might buy them a little time and cover.
Alex started to run, swinging her still smoldering stick at the pouncels on the beach so that it glowed fiercely.
Out on the beach they could see the sky. Once they went up that path again, they would be in the altogether different darkness of the forest. Darwen caught a flash of movement in the darkness, and he flung his stick in that direction. It flared briefly in the wind and then landed on the beach in a shower of sparks.
They found the path, but only just. Alex’s burning stick had gone out, and they had no lantern. It was only due to Rich’s tiny pocket flashlight that they were able to pick their way through a darkness that was almost complete. If the pouncels chose to attack now, Darwen knew they wouldn’t see them until it was too late. They slowed, faltering as they traced the trail inland, but they didn’t reach the dig site. A couple of hundred yards before they got there, there was a flash of lightning, and Darwen stuttered to a halt. He had seen something to his left in the sudden bluish white, something odd that made the ground look pale. Thunder rolled overhead, and then the lightning came again, and this time Darwen was looking right at it.
No more than a few yards off the path was a circle of rainwater ringed with stone spheres that they hadn’t noticed before. Darwen stared at it, and though the night was still warm, he felt cold. He also felt with uncanny certainty that he was being watched. He turned hastily around. The others had stopped and were waiting for him.
“Turn your flashlight off,” Darwen hissed.
“What is it?” Rich whispered. There was a click, and the pencil-like beam of light went out.
“There’s something on the path behind us,” Darwen replied. He saw it only as a deeper blackness in the dark, but he knew it had not been there before. It was just the size and shape of a pouncel. One, maybe more, had tracked them.
He didn’t know what to do. If only Mr. Peregrine had told him something, anything. Rich raised his hand with the tiny flashlight, aiming, but Darwen caught his wrist before he could turn it on. “That might provoke it,” he said.
Rich lowered his hand, and they stared into the darkness.
The lightning came again, and Darwen saw the pouncel clear as day, but it was not poised to attack. It was not even looking at them. Instead it was huddled on the ground as if terrified, and it was staring directly up into the trees.
Slowly, with a swelling sense of dread, Darwen did the same, and as the lightning flickered again, he saw it, the pale and purplish sack-like body, pulsing up there, the massive trailing tentacles, the terrible beak-like mouth with the terrifying feelers. There was no question that this was the creature carved into the ancient stone at the dig site, the thing the adults had thought was an octopus. It was suspended up there, its body the size of a car, slick under a tangle of short hair, undulating sluggishly, wrapped around a tree and hanging in the dark like a nightmare.
Darwen wasn’t sure which of them had cried out. He knew it hadn’t been him, because though a part of him had wanted to scream, no sound would come, and he could do nothing but stand and stare in horrified silence.
The darkness was complete for five, maybe ten seconds. Darwen couldn’t say for sure. But when the lightning came again, he saw that the creature had moved. The sky flickered like a faulty movie projector, and the great mass of the Insidious Bleck—for that was surely what it was—was unfurling its tentacles and reaching over the path with fluid, snakelike ease. It extended its tentacles, their pale undersides studded with suckers and hooks, their top sides bristling with hair. When it reached the next tree, it coiled one of its tentacles quickly and silently around it, and then the entire creature was hauling itself overhead, its great weight breaking off branches as it swung through the canopy. Its movement was easy and slow, so that an extraordinary possibility struck Darwen like a ray of hope in the darkness.
It hasn’t seen us.
He hadn’t moved a muscle since spotting it, and Darwen now found himself praying that Rich and Alex would make the same deduction. Out of the corner of his eye, however, he saw movement: a long, careful, loping stride that quickened suddenly. The pouncel was making a run for it.
Without pausing in its languid motion through the trees, without even clearly turning to see the pouncel at all, the Insidious Bleck dropped one long tentacle to the forest floor and snatched it up. The pouncel fought, lashing and scratching, but the Bleck’s tentacle had the strength and studied deliberation of an elephant’s trunk. It swept the howling pouncel upward and opened its appalling beak mouth wide to receive it.
The spell was finally broken, and Darwen was able to look away at the last second. Amid the pattering rain, drops of blood fell through the leaves. Darwen couldn’t think. He couldn’t plan or decide what was best or smartest. The horror of the thing was too great. Without an idea in his head, without even being able to see where he was going, he ran.
Somewhere high up in the forest, a tree creaked and groaned as the monster shifted its weight suddenly. A branch snapped, then another, and then there was a new rustling in the leaves that was louder and more violent than the storm.
It was coming after him.
Darwen didn’t even know which way he was facing. The lightning showed he was on the path, but he didn’t know if he was going inland or back down to the beach. Not that it mattered. He was headed away from the creature in the treetops, and his sense of the thing behind him was as good as a compass.
There was movement beside him, and even though Darwen was running, he jumped and almost stumbled. It was Rich. “It’s the thing from the carving!” he gasped. “The thing that took Luis. It’s going to take us too.”
Darwen couldn’t answer. He was sure the abomination in the trees was about to reach for him with one of those long, hairy tentacles and then sweep him up toward that horror of a mouth. He could almost feel it inches from his skin, his hair, and the thought worked on him with a revulsion he couldn’t switch off. He ran. It was all he could do.
“Where’s Alex?” asked Rich, fighting to keep up.
The question punched through the smothering fog of terror and stopped Darwen cold. He didn’t know. He had no idea where he was, let alone where Alex might be. He dropped, rolling into the leafy underbrush off the path, giving no thought to snakes or insects. He looked up. Rich was clambering awkwardly over a tree limb and squatting beside him, but beyond him Darwen could see nothing. There were no stars, no streetlamp glow as he was used to at home, no moon. Overhead the sky was the faintest gray smear beyond the silhouettes of the trees. The wind dropped, and for a second all was perfectly still. And then the grayness seemed to shift, and a blackness moved over them like a blimp drifting against the clouds.
Darwen felt its presence like a foul smell, and he shuddered before he could stop himself. Rich clamped one large, sweaty palm over Darwen’s forearm, and the two boys sat motionless as the creature in the trees moved with deliberate caution above them.
It knows we’re here, Darwen thought. But it doesn’t know exactly where. It’s waiting. Listening.
His heart was racing, and he had bitten down on his lip so hard that he could taste blood in his mouth. He breathed through his nose, as still as the trees themselves, and he too listened.
There had been a noise. Faint and not up in the canopy but down on the forest floor. In the darkness Darwen had no idea how far away it had been. Ten yards? Twenty? It had been a stealthy sound. Another pouncel, perhaps. Or Alex.
Darwen turned as slowly and quietly as he could and stared into the blackness where he thought the sound had come from. Almost immediately, he heard it again. Louder now. Closer. Something coming quietly toward them across the ground. Rich’s grip on his arm
tightened. He had heard it too.
The lightning flashed, and for a moment Darwen saw the jungle, a clutter of underbrush and tree trunks reaching up into the sky, but he saw no animal or person, nothing that might have made the noise. The darkness came again, and thunder rolled like a series of distant explosions. And beneath it, lasting a fraction longer than the thunder, something moved through the leaf litter. Not footsteps. A consistent slithering sound . . .
The lightning came again. Darwen’s first thought was that the forest had somehow grown denser, that new trees had sprouted around them. But the light lasted just long enough to see that some of what he had thought were tree trunks were purplish and matted with short bristling hair.
The monster was trailing its tentacles from above, sweeping the ground, searching for them.
Another flicker of lightning and Darwen had to clap a hand to his mouth. One of the great ropelike tentacles was less than a foot from his face. It hung quite still, but its tip, which bore a long, hook-like claw, writhed and pulsed like a maggot as it felt blindly for its prey. It inched toward them, and Darwen shrank inwardly, forcing himself not to kick the vile thing away.
And then he felt it. It had brushed the fabric of his T-shirt just above his shoulder. It stopped.
Darwen sat motionless and felt the tentacle grow almost thoughtfully still, and the entire world, in spite of the rain and the lightning, seemed to follow suit. For a second that felt like ten, nothing happened, and then the claw rotated a fraction, testing its hard tip against his shoulder. It pressed, then the pressure eased, and it moved more gently, almost caressing as it tried to figure out what it had found. It snaked down his chest, and he felt the hard bristles brush against his cheek as it moved. He could smell it too, an old and slightly rotten smell like wet earth or mulch. It was, he thought, the aroma of the grave.
The thought was still bright and horrible in his mind when he felt the tentacle curl slightly as it moved down. It was starting to tighten. Exploration had turned into something else. It was going to take him like it had taken the others.
Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck Page 23