“Careful,” said Rich. “There could be anything—”
But before he could get the warning out, something shot from the ground at Alex’s feet. She leaped backward, and Darwen grabbed her arm as a pair of vines about ten feet apart erupted from the earth and shot straight up. It was like watching a time-lapse film of plants growing. The vines were thick, ropelike tendrils that twined and reached in the air like fingers looking for purchase. Great leaves sprouted and hung as the stems rose higher and leaned in toward each other, beginning to intertwine.
“Looks like muscadine,” said Rich. “Wild grape.”
“After you’ve dumped about a thousand gallons of Miracle Grow on it,” said Alex.
“It’s a gate,” declared Darwen.
And as he said it, the two united vines throbbed, and something coursed through them, running top to bottom, whereupon the arching space between them flickered with rippling turquoise energy that sparkled like a waterfall.
“Okay,” said Darwen, stepping closer so that he could feel the light from the portal flickering over his skin.
“Wait,” said Alex. “I wanna try something.”
She began to pace the rest of the clearing’s perimeter. As she walked, new vines burst from the ground, sped up, united, and pulsed with the strange power of the gates. By the time she had rejoined them, there were four new portals around the edge of the clearing.
“So which do we go through?” asked Rich.
“How would Scarlett get the Bleck to . . .” Darwen paused, stooping, then straightened up. “It’s this one.”
“Why that one?” asked Alex.
Darwen ran his hand down the side of one of the vines and showed them his fingers, which had come away black and greasy. Pinched between his forefinger and thumb was a scrap of burned skin sprouting the remains of a coarse bristle. He studied the ground, following an imaginary path from the vine gate to the great staircase. He hadn’t seen it before, but by the throbbing, sickly light from this side, he could make out the broken stems of plants in a clear and direct line. Something big had dragged itself straight across the clearing to the portal behind him.
“It went through here,” he said.
They looked at each other, their faces ghastly in the pea-green glow.
“Ready?” said Darwen.
“I wish you’d stop asking that,” said Alex. “No. We’re not ready. Never will be. But we’re going anyway, okay?”
“Okay,” echoed Darwen.
“Wait,” said Rich. “Let me just check something.” He stepped up close to the curtain of energy as if studying it, then, being careful not to touch Darwen with any part of his body, he brought his right hand up to the portal and made contact.
There was flash of emerald-white light, and Rich staggered back, shaking his fingers. His hair was standing on end, and there was a wisp of smoke that smelled faintly of electricity.
“That was smart,” said Alex. “Time to hold hands with the mirroculist, I think.”
Rich nodded, his eyes wide. “Good call,” he said.
They joined hands and stepped through together.
It took less than a second for them to wish they hadn’t.
It was the sound that struck them first: a deafening blare of drills and hammers, the rumble of heavy machinery, and the clang of metal. The smudged and brownish air was thick with the smell of welding torches, smoke, and oil, and after the brightness of the energy curtain, it took them a moment to see where they were.
Indoors, thought Darwen. Not a jungle locus. Some kind of hangar or warehouse.
He could feel flagstones beneath his feet. As he gaped through the murk, his eyes stung and ran, but he made out shapes in pools of feeble yellow light: great iron hulks linked with girders and cables and studded with warning lamps, engines with riveted water tanks and tall funnels, and—strangest of all—a massive iron cage the size of a house, a cage whose bars flickered with electricity. Inside, huddled against the back wall, was the Insidious Bleck.
So his suspicion had been right. The Bleck was not acting alone.
But it wasn’t its own master either.
Darwen stared, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, he could see that the warehouse was packed with items even stranger than the caged and tentacled beast. There were statues in gold and gaudy colors, booths and tents for sideshows and fairground games, a dusty carousel with painted horses and mystic symbols lettered in enticing paint. It felt like an abandoned carnival or circus, but then something else caught his eye: a long black metal tube, like a submarine, but on caterpillar tracks, like a tank. The tube had smoky windows.
Darwen didn’t need to get up close to know that it contained child-sized seats and metal harnesses linked by wires to oversized batteries. It was a generator like the one he had destroyed in Moth’s forest, and there would be children in it. But this one was on wheels and was pointed right at the archway through which they had just come. That meant only one thing.
They—whoever they were—planned to bring it through.
That was why the iron steps to the jungle portal became a ramp. Darwen looked around and saw massive bulldozers arranged like tanks and other pieces of machinery—including more generators—that they were still finishing.
And inside each one of them there would be children. Luis, Eduardo, and Calida, for sure, but also others whose names he could only learn after he got them out.
But that was easier said than done, because the warehouse wasn’t just full of machines. It was alive with man-sized figures in overalls, their heads hooded with what looked like grotesque bronze-colored gas-masks.
Scrobblers.
They were a good hundred yards away, but there was no doubt in Darwen’s mind: they were bigger and scarier than any he had seen before, and several of them were armed with huge, strange-looking weapons sprouting copper pipes and iron blast shields, but they were scrobblers all the same. Darwen watched them, and that was when he saw it. Right in the middle of all that weird carnival bric-a-brac, seated on a raised platform, was something that chilled Darwen’s blood more than the scrobblers, more even than the terrible generator.
It was a glass case with what looked like a dummy seated inside. The figure was dressed in clown clothes and had orange hair and a little blue hat, but its staring eyes had a manic focus, and its gaping mouth was black, hollow, and lined with bright teeth.
“No,” Darwen muttered.
“What?” Rich whispered.
“Just . . . don’t look at it,” said Darwen. “I have to get to that generator.”
“But there are scrobblers everywhere!” hissed Alex.
“This is what we came for,” said Darwen. “I have to.”
And he took a step forward.
Instantly the mechanical clown kicked into sudden and horrible life. It lurched backward and forward, its movements jerky and unnatural, and as it did so, the laughter started, full voiced but recorded, as if coming from long ago.
Whatever else it was, the clown’s laughter was a species of alarm. The scrobblers straightened up, turning, roaring with muffled anger as they spotted Darwen, Rich, and Alex.
One of them raised what looked like a cannon fixed by a metal arm to the harness it was wearing, pumped back a slide, and fired. There was a crack like thunder, a rush of smoke with a hot, flaming center, and something shot toward them. For a fraction of a second, Darwen thought madly of tentacles before realizing that it was in fact a tangle of steel cable and hooks: a net.
He dove to his right, and the steel trap missed him by a hair’s breadth. It hit Rich and Alex, throwing them back and springing closed around them. The web tightened, and, with a squeal of metal, a winch mechanism on the scrobbler’s back started to draw them toward it. Darwen caught a glimpse of Alex’s face as they were pulled past
him. Her eyes were wide with horror. Rich was crumpled, his eyes shut. He had been knocked unconscious by the impact.
Darwen sprang to his feet and ran after the metal net, not knowing what to do but sure he had to help. Other scrobblers had focused on him now, and one of them fired another of the harpoon traps. It careened over his head and snapped back again as it exhausted the slack with a sound like a whip cracking. He ducked as it cannoned back toward the scrobbler, then ran forward again, swallowing down the terror that he was actually moving toward the enemy. One of the scrobblers, its red eyes just visible through the glass of its gas mask, had picked up a heavy wrench in its massive fists and was swinging it menacingly, the muscles of its greenish arms rippling.
Darwen took one more stride, then flung himself headlong onto the net. He seized the cables but was almost thrown off as it sped back toward the scrobbler like a retractable tape measure. Alex was squirming inside, but Rich was motionless, and his eyes were still closed. Darwen scrambled for a release mechanism, but the tension of the cable kept the net shut tight.
“There’s got to be some sort of quick-release catch!” shouted Alex over the cackling laughter of the clown. The scrobbler with the wrench took a long stride toward them.
Darwen looked wildly around. He had no more than ten seconds. Less if the one with the wrench decided to rush them rather than wait for the winch to do its work.
As the three of them were pulled closer, the net plowed through castoff cable and discarded tools. Darwen saw a metal implement and reached for it without knowing for sure what it was until he had it: a crowbar, long and heavy with a spike at one end.
He swung it at the clasp that fastened the net to the cable, missed, and tried again. The point slid off the iron, but Darwen had put all his weight into the strike, and he couldn’t stop it from slamming into the stone floor beneath. Sparks sprayed from the tip of the crowbar for a moment, and then, with a terrible keening sound, the net’s progress stopped so abruptly that Darwen was thrown forward.
The crowbar had gone through the net and lodged in a gap between the uneven flagstones. The pitch of the winch shifted up a register, whining dangerously, and Darwen rolled around to see the scrobbler batting at the controls with its massive, clawed hands as smoke issued from one side. Whatever the creature was trying to do didn’t work, because it pitched suddenly forward onto its face.
With the net stuck, the winch was pulling the scrobbler toward them!
Darwen got to his knees and fumbled for the clasp where the crowbar was jammed into the ground. There was a single restraining bolt holding it to the net. He seized it and tried twisting the nut off the end, but his sweaty fingers slid, and it wouldn’t move. The scrobbler on the end of the cable was getting closer, sliding on its back toward them as the one with the wrench gave chase.
Darwen gritted his teeth and tried again, sure his hands were bleeding, and suddenly the nut moved.
Darwen spun it off. Then he tugged at the bolt, ignoring the scrobblers that were almost on top of him now.
It came free in his hands, and several things happened at once. The scrobbler that had been winching toward them stopped abruptly as the cable tore free, and the scrobbler with the wrench tripped heavily over its companion. In the same instant, the net sprang open, and Alex emerged with impossible speed.
Rich, however, did not move.
Darwen pulled at him, but the boy was too heavy, too tangled up in the trap.
“We have to go!” shouted Alex.
More scrobblers were coming from all over the great smoky chamber. Dozens of them. One of them fired some version of the energy weapon that Darwen had seen at Halloween, and a great jet-like lightning tore across the room and slammed into the wall beside them like an artillery shell. There was a blaze of light so bright that for a moment Darwen couldn’t see at all, could only feel Alex pulling at him. “Rich!” he shouted. “Wake up!”
But Rich didn’t stir, and dimly, horribly, Darwen realized that Alex was right. He couldn’t even let her go by herself. She needed him to open the portal.
The scrobbler with the wrench was back up and running. Others were only feet behind that one.
Wiping angry tears from his eyes, he muttered, “Sorry,” and, “I’ll come back,” and then he sprang to his feet, shooting one last desperate look at the generator he had not reached. He ran back the way they had come, snatching at Alex’s hand as he did so, the clown’s laughter still ringing in his ears.
They crashed through the curtain of energy that led back to the jungle clearing, and Darwen stumbled in his haste. Alex’s hand slipped from his just as they came through, and she tore across the circle to the other side, falling straight into one of the other vine-framed portals despite her attempts to stop herself. Darwen saw the arch in front of her, saw the flickering wall of light, and waited for her shout of pain as she bounced off.
But she made no sound. And instead of being thrown back as Rich had been, she rolled right through. The flickering curtain closed behind her, and Darwen could only stare in disbelief.
What on earth . . . ?
He stood up. Should he go after her or abandon her as he had abandoned Rich? The scrobblers would be following. He had no time to decide.
And then she was back, standing in the gateway looking astonished and scared. “Pouncels,” she said. “Lots of them. Go!”
They ran along the path from the clearing and onto the wrought-iron staircase. As they reached it, they heard the crackle of a portal opening behind them, and the scrobbler with the wrench came barreling out into the green and glowing jungle.
“Go!” shouted Alex again.
The scrobbler turned its terrible gas-masked face and came after them.
Darwen ran up the stairs two at a time, reaching behind for Alex as he got to the top. She didn’t wait to take his hand, however, and went straight through the portal. He followed, horror and confusion and panic fighting inside his head for dominance, and then he was out in the clammy night air of Caño Island again.
Darwen stopped, all of the terrible things that had happened breaking over him.
He had failed to get Luis. And they had left Rich behind.
“Darwen!” Alex screamed.
A gas mask was coming up through the portal. For a moment Darwen could see its hateful red eyes through the glass, the green-tinged skin and yellowing tusks beneath the brass and leather, but Darwen felt frozen, like he had left half of himself back in the warehouse with Rich.
“Darwen!” Alex shrieked.
And that was all it took.
Darwen came to life again, kicking the stone spheres out of position. There was a flicker and a pop. The scrobbler dropped out of sight, and the portal became dark, leaf-strewn earth once more.
The boat arrived for them shortly after dawn. The official word was that Rich had gotten lost in the storm, so while Darwen and Alex were ferried back to the mainland with a stunned Mr. Iverson and a taciturn Jorge to be fed and to have their wounds tended, a team of three local people who knew the rainforest best would comb the island for him. The journey back was spent in absolute silence, a silence that Darwen did not break until he found Mr. Peregrine in his odd-smelling tent. “They took him,” he said in a flat, hollow voice. “The scrobblers took Rich.”
“Scrobblers?” said Mr. Peregrine, his teacup poised at his lips, his injured hand still bandaged. “Are you sure?”
“We saw them,” said Alex, coming up behind Darwen. “They nearly got us too.”
“We had no choice,” Darwen added, desolate but determined to explain this above all. “We had to leave him. But we’re going back. We just need to figure out how.” He had not discussed this with Alex, but he knew he didn’t need to.
She just nodded, her face defiant.
“Scrobblers?” Mr. Peregrine repeated.
&nb
sp; “And you know who they work for,” said Alex.
“Well, historically,” Mr. Peregrine began, but Darwen cut him off.
“Greyling,” said Darwen. He said it without bitterness, without triumph, but he gave Mr. Peregrine a long, frank look until the teacher finally sat back.
“Greyling?” said Mr. Peregrine, incredulous. “Greyling was defeated. This has nothing to do with—”
“It does,” said Darwen. “I saw the generators. It’s him.”
“Did you see him?” asked Mr. Peregrine.
Darwen shook his head, but at that moment they heard people on the track to the village: two local adults and their three small children loaded with bags going down to the beach. Scarlett had bought off another family.
“That’s not all,” said Darwen. “Gabriel marooned us on that island on purpose. Possibly with Jorge’s help. We were supposed to be taken by the Bleck.”
“Whatever is taking the children is just an animal,” said Mr. Peregrine, smiling. “It’s not working with anyone. I realize that you have had a terrible ordeal, but—”
“No,” said Darwen, his eyes full of fire. “You don’t. You weren’t there. You didn’t see. That’s why I’m telling you.” He paused, then continued more stoically, determined to get his point across. “You were right that it’s not the Bleck that’s primarily responsible. It appears to be what you say it is—an animal. But there’s a kind of portal junction that connects several Silbrican jungle loci, and, with Scarlett’s help, Greyling is using it to send the Bleck through to kidnap children. It doesn’t eat them. It takes them for the generator.” Darwen gave Mr. Peregrine a half second to let all of this sink in. “Once Greyling’s figured out how to get machinery through the portals, they’re going to bring the generators through. They will then have a power source in our world. Rich”—Darwen’s voice fractured, and he had to clear his throat before continuing—“is probably already inside.”
“And the pouncels?” asked Mr. Peregrine, his expression still guarded.
Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck Page 25