by Darren Shan
But I’m not a grown-up. I am, as the guy with the axe noted, a little boy. So, with a move that’s both the bravest and most foolish thing I’ve ever done, I hold my breath, bid reality a quick farewell, and throw myself off the bridge, into the hole and a world of green.
TWO — THE VINE
3
It’s a short fall, not even a couple of metres, and I land comfortably on my feet. The floor is firm but sticky. When I look up, the hole is just overhead. I could reach up and pull myself back onto the bridge.
I don’t.
Instead I turn my head slowly left, then right.
A tunnel stretches in front of me in both directions. It looks the same either way. Green walls, coated with short hairs. Odd lumpy sections jut out in many places, like small toadstools.
There’s no sign of the girl.
I take a step left, looking for clues. The step is harder to take than I expected, as if my foot was partly stuck to the floor.
I glance down and see the imprint of my foot. There are hairs down there and I squashed them. Although they’re already starting to curl upwards and regain their form, the shape of my shoe is clear and most likely will be for several minutes or more.
I crouch and look ahead. There aren’t any footprints. Looking the other way, I instantly spot marks made by the girl’s boots.
I take off after the girl’s trail, shuffling along as fast as I can. I wonder what she’ll think when I catch up, if she’ll view me as a threat, if she has a weapon of her own, if she might be as dangerous as the men.
I pause. The men were ice-cold killers who discussed butchering me for fun, but that doesn’t mean the girl’s a saint. Maybe she’s as violent as the men, and what I saw was a clash between two warring factions.
I consider retreat. The hole is still open – the light illuminates the tunnel – and I could be back on the bridge in next to no time. But how could I abandon the mystery at the first hint of a hurdle? Besides, I don’t think the girl is bad. She had a kind face, when she wasn’t twisting it into gargoyle-like grimaces.
I push on, but more nervously than before.
The nerves kick in even harder when I come to a downwards bend. It’s a sharp thirty- or forty-degree drop, and I can’t see where it straightens out again.
There are marks on the floor, a wide swath of flattened hairs where the girl must have sat and slid down into the darkness. And it’s very dark. This is where the light peters out. If I go on, I’ll be blind.
I look back yearningly towards the hole in the bridge. The contact point to my own world is within reach. Safety is mine for the taking. If I venture any further, I might never have the chance to retreat again.
I puff out my cheeks and sit down to think it over. My hands touch the hairs for the first time and I bring my fingers up close to my face to examine them. They’re covered with a yellow, sticky substance. It smells like freshly mown grass. When I brush my hands together, the stickiness rubs away and the yellow substance leaves hardly any stains. For some reason that seems like a positive sign, and making a snap gut call, I cut the safety cord to home and slide down the slope into blackness and the mysterious unknown.
4
The sticky hairs mean it’s not a smooth slide, and I have to keep using my hands to propel myself on. The tunnel eventually levels out and I stand again, but soon after there’s another dip, followed by a series of bends. It’s like being in a long, enclosed water slide, only without any water.
In the pitch black, I’ve no way of knowing if I’m still following the girl’s trail. For a while I was able to stoop and feel her footsteps in the hairs, but they’ve all sprung back up now. She could have opened a hole and slipped through to somewhere else, closing it behind her, or there might have been a fork in the tunnel that I missed. Hell, I might have passed dozens of forks and wandered into the middle of a maze, lost in the dark forever, no way out.
I shudder at the grisly thought and tell myself to be more optimistic. There’s no reason to suspect the worst.
Then again, there’s no reason to suspect the best either.
I soldier on. It’s warm, so I take off my blazer and carry it draped over my shoulder. I start thinking about school again, and chuckle at the thought of writing an essay about this, wondering what my teachers would make of it.
Then I spot light, coming from a hole in the side of the tunnel.
I hurry to the hole and examine it. Unlike the rectangular hole on the bridge, this is a rough circle – it looks like the girl carved it with a knife – and it’s slowly sealing itself shut. If I’d been a few minutes later, there would have been nothing for me to see and I’d have passed on, further into the darkness.
Thanking my lucky timing, I look out of the hole. There’s not much to see, because a large vine runs adjacent to the tunnel that I’m in, its outside wall a shade darker than the inside of my tunnel, with fewer hairs.
I stick my head out and look down. I see that the tunnel is also a vine, but it brushes against the other one beneath me, so I can’t see much more than that. I try looking up, but there are several smaller, green vines, twisting and turning around one another, blocking my view.
There’s no sign of the girl.
Putting a hand on either side of the hole, I pull myself up and stand. The first thing I note is that the vine I’ve come through is enormous, snaking away into the distance like an endless railway line.
I spot ground a long way down, scores of green fields. It doesn’t strike me as odd that there should be fields when, a short while earlier, I was in central London. I’ve passed too far beyond the realms of normality to be bothered by a bit of dodgy geography.
I use my hands to part the vines above me, and everything stops for a moment as I’m presented with a sight more incredible than anything else I’ve seen on this most extraordinary of days.
There are hundreds of vines slithering across the skyline in all directions, but I’m not flabbergasted by them. It’s the sky beyond that sets my senses reeling.
Because the sky isn’t blue.
It’s a light green colour.
And there’s no sign of the sun.
Above the vines, the sky is completely empty.
I sit down and stare at the green, vacant sky for a long, bewildered time. How can a sky have nothing in it? In my universe, full of stars and planets, that should be impossible.
But maybe I’m not in that place any more. Is this an alternate universe? Have I come through a... what was it called in that sci-fi show that Dave loved... wormhole?
I shake my head slowly. This is too big. I don’t know how to deal with it. Should I stay here and gawp? Return to the bridge and try to find a scientist who could make sense of it all? Just go mad?
In the end I decide the only way to handle the universal shift is to ignore it, so I get to my feet and look for the girl.
There aren’t so many hairs on the outside of the vine and they’re not as supple as those inside. Some of them snap when I move around.
I look for broken hairs and spot a few where the vine angles downwards ahead of me. I can’t be sure that the girl broke them – they could have been snapped at any time – but they’re all I have to go by, so I set off in that direction.
The vine twists and turns, sometimes corkscrewing back on itself. Occasionally it rises ahead of me and I have to scale it, but most of the time it leads me closer to the ground, which is a relief.
Other vines cross this one. Most are smaller than mine and I simply step across or duck beneath them, but I have to clamber over some of the bigger tendrils. My uniform, face and hands are soon yellow and sticky. I don’t know how I’m going to explain the mess to George and Rachel if I make it back.
That if should worry me way more than it does.
Eventually, after a few sharp drops, the vine leads me to within leaping distance of the fields. I’m still not at a point where I could jump without fear of breaking my legs, but I’d probably survive the fa
ll.
I can see where the vine goes to ground, a kilometre or so ahead of me. The end is within sight.
Also in sight is a short stretch of an old aqueduct, a series of tall stone arches with a path running across them. It stands in the middle of a field, connected to nothing else.
The vine passes through one of the arches and I pause when I get there. The arch is taller than I imagined, the roof maybe five metres above me, and it’s dark. The gloom makes me uneasy.
I pull on my blazer and glance at the roof of the arch, nervous even though I can’t see anything up there.
“Nice day,” someone calls.
I stagger towards the edge of the vine and almost lose my balance and fall. With a cry of fear I hurl myself back into the middle, where I’m secure.
“Who’s there?” I shout.
“Hush,” the voice says. “You’re disturbing the peace.”
I spot her. It’s the girl from the bridge, lounging in the loop of a vine that wraps round the arch. She lies there, one leg dangling over the side, both hands stuck behind her head, rocking gently to and fro.
“This is a nice zone,” the girl says without opening her eyes. “I don’t think I’ve been this way before. Is the weather always this pleasant?”
“I don’t know,” I answer.
“How long have the arches been here?” she asks.
“No idea,” I say.
The girl sits up. “So what’s this place called?”
I shrug helplessly.
“Doesn’t it have a name?” she asks lightly, as if that wouldn’t be strange.
“I don’t know,” I mumble. “I’m not from here.”
She looks at me directly. “A stranger like me, are you?” She pulls the fingertips of her right hand together, presses them to the centre of her chest, then makes a throwing gesture, spreading the fingers wide as the hand stretches out.
The girl frowns when I don’t respond. She does it again, and by the look on her face I know she’s expecting a reaction. With no idea what to do, I repeat her gesture with my own hand.
The girl’s nose wrinkles. “You’re an odd one,” she says. “I thought everybody knew how to make the greet.” She swings her other leg round so that she’s perched on the edge of her vine, pulls her fingers into her chest and makes the throwing gesture again. “When I do this, I’m offering you my soul. You should pretend to catch it and pull it to your chest, to join with yours.”
With her hand outstretched, she lets hers fingers close, then presses them to her breastbone. She nods at me to give it a try. I feel like a muppet, but I copy what the girl has done and she beams. “Very good,” she says.
“Is the greet what you do instead of a handshake?” I ask.
She stares at me oddly. “Of course. Shaking hands is a Born thing.”
I recall one of the killers saying something about the Born.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Excuse me?” She seems confused by the question.
“Born. What is it?”
She continues to stare at me.
“Where are we?” I press. “What is this place?”
The girl’s expression sharpens. “That uniform isn’t from this sphere,” she says. “What realm are you from? What zone do you call home?”
“I’ve no idea what realms and zones are,” I splutter. “I saw you on the bridge and decided to –”
“You were on the bridge?” the girl yells.
“Yes. I saw you pulling faces, and the guys in white suits who were chasing you. Then the hole opened and –”
I get no further. The girl leaps from her vine and lands in front of me. Before I can react, she thrusts a hand down to her right boot and produces a thin, sharp knife. Slipping behind me, she wraps her left arm round my head, pulls it to the side, then slides the blade up next to the soft flesh of my exposed, defenceless throat.
5
“Are you with them?” the girl roars, pressing the flat of the blade hard against my flesh. She hasn’t cut me yet, but one jerk of her hand is all it will take to slit my throat and send a fountain of blood gushing.
I moan sickly in response.
“Talk!” she shouts, giving my head a twist.
Between moans, I manage to squeeze out, “Gonna... be... sick.”
The girl blinks, clearly not having expected that reply. When my stomach heaves, she releases me and I fall to my knees.
I retch on top of the vine, trembling with terror.
“Please don’t kill me,” I croak.
“Calm down,” the girl says. She’s still holding the knife but isn’t pointing it at me. Instead she’s tapping her lower teeth with the tip of the blade, looking at me with more wonder than suspicion.
“I haven’t done anything,” I wheeze. “I’m not with them. I don’t even know who they are. Do you mean the guys with the axe and knife?”
“Is that what they were carrying?” she asks. “I didn’t get a close look. When I spotted them coming, I ran. Luckily I knew there was a borehole on that bridge.”
I wipe my lips and rise. My hands are still trembling, but not as much as they were when the girl was holding the blade to my throat.
“They wanted to kill you,” I whisper. “They talked about killing me.”
“You?” she frowns. “Why?”
“They were in the mood for blood.”
“But why you specifically?” she asks.
“They thought I could see them.” I gulp. “I could, too, but I pretended I couldn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t you have been able to see them?” she asks softly.
I gulp again. “Nobody else on the bridge saw them, or you either.”
The girl takes a step closer. When I flinch, she lowers the blade. “Are you Born?” she asks in a low voice.
“Of course I was born,” I reply. “I hardly popped out of an egg, did I?”
“No,” she says patiently. “Are you one of the Born?” When she sees that I don’t understand, she tries again. “Are you from London?”
“Yes,” I say.
The girl gawps at me, lost for words.
“This isn’t Earth, is it?” I ask.
She carries on staring.
“Did the men say anything else?” she finally asks, bending to slip her knife back into its place in her boot.
“Not much,” I mutter, then remember something. “But one of them was called... I think it was Oar Lann.”
“Orlan?” the girl snaps.
“That was it.”
“Orlan and Argate,” she says grimly. “Then you can consider that the narrowest of escapes. There aren’t many who slip the grip of Orlan Stiletto and Argate Axe. Did they follow you?”
“No. The hole closed after you jumped in. They didn’t even try to open it.”
“We’re lucky they didn’t have a key for the borehole,” the girl says. “But how did you open it?”
I smile shyly. “I copied what you did. When the locks appeared, I stuck my –”
“Locks?” she stops me.
“I saw the locks when I put my hand on the slab.”
“Ah,” she smiles. “You’re a locksmith.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are,” she insists. “Nobody else could see borehole locks. Normal people like me need keys.”
“But you didn’t have a key,” I note. “You just pulled strange faces.”
“That was my key,” she says.
“Oh,” I say weakly, bewildered.
“I’ve never heard of a Born locksmith,” the girl continues. She casts her gaze over me again, taking in my stained school uniform, my tie, my scuffed shoes. “What’s your name?”
It’s the simplest of questions, but for a moment I’m thrown. We’ve been talking about such weird and bewildering things that it takes me a few seconds to process the answer. Then, when my head clears, I chuckle.
“It’s ironic, but my name’s Archie.”
“Why is t
hat ironic?” she asks.
I point upwards. “Because of the arches. Arch... Archie...”
“That’s not ironic,” she says, “just coincidental.”
I scowl. “Anyway, that’s my name. What’s yours?”
“Inez Matryoshka,” she says.
“Match-ree-osh-ka?” I try.
“Mah-tree-osh-ka,” she corrects me.
I say it a few times under my breath, then decide to stick with her first name. “Is this where you’re from, Inez?”
“No,” she says. “I’ve never been in this zone before.”
“I don’t mean this spot. I mean this world... universe... whatever it is.”
Inez studies me closely. “You really have no idea where you are?”
I shake my head. “I saw you on the bridge and followed.”
“Why?” she asks quietly.
“I don’t know.”
She raises a sceptical eyebrow and I reconsider my response.
“Because of the mystery. I wanted to know where you’d gone. Also...” I hesitate. Dave was a big factor too, the terrible silence since he died. The last few months have been unbearable, and part of me saw this as a chance to escape the harrowing grief, at least for a while.
But I can’t share that with a stranger, so instead I murmur, “You were in trouble and I thought I might be able to help.”
I expect her to laugh, but she nods and says, “Thank you.”
She makes the greet again, pulling her fingers to her chest, then releasing her soul in my direction. This time I know what to do. Spreading my fingers wide, I draw her offered soul towards my chest and join it with mine.
Inez smiles. “I guess there’s only one thing left for me to say.”
As I look at her expectantly, Inez does a small curtsy – the first time I’ve ever seen anyone do that in real life – and says with a wink, “Welcome to the Merge.”
THREE — THE BUFFER
6
Inez leads me to the ground, where we step off the vine. The field is much the same as any on Earth, grass, lots of little mushrooms sprinkled around, no trees or bushes.