Dark Days

by Derek Landy

  “Hello, Remus,” said China.

  He didn’t bolt as she had expected. He just stood there and looked at her, a deer caught in the headlights, a thief caught in the act.

  “You’ve been a very naughty boy,” she said. “You tried to kill Valkyrie Cain, and I actually like Valkyrie. You got yourself caught up with Scarab and his plans to change the way things are and I like the way things are. I don’t like change – not when I’m not prepared for it.”

  “I know about you,” Crux said, his voice tight.

  “You shouldn’t have got involved in this. You should have stayed hidden and as far away from me as possible.”

  “I know your secret,” he said quickly. “And now you’re scared. Scared of what he’ll do to you when he finds out.”

  “Did you tell my secret to anyone else, Remus?”

  “Everyone.”

  China smiled. “Now that’s a lie. I don’t think you told a soul.”

  He shook his head. “I did. I did. You don’t know.”

  Her hand slipped into her purse. “The last eleven months have been hard on you, haven’t they? You’ve had nowhere to go to for help. No friends. No colleagues. Just you and your scrambled little mind. All you needed was to have one lucid moment…but you didn’t get it, did you?”

  Crux licked his lips. “Everyone knows what you did. I told them. They’re all talking about you. They’re all whispering. China Sorrows, China Sorrows, she’s the one, they’re saying. She’s the one. Nefarian Serpine killed Skulduggery Pleasant, but China Sorrows led his family into the trap.”

  She stepped towards him. Crux clicked his fingers and fire flared in his hands. China pulled the trigger. The bullet ruined a perfectly good purse and then made a mess of Remus Crux’s chest. He fell backwards, fire extinguished, and was already dead when China stepped over his body and walked away.

  38

  THE CASTLE

  The last time Valkyrie had seen this castle she had been running from it. They had just rescued Skulduggery and Serpine’s Hollow Men had been closing in from all sides.

  “I rescue you a lot,” she muttered.

  “Sorry?” Skulduggery said, looking back.

  “Nothing.”

  Every ground floor entrance had been bricked up, so they got in through a window on the first floor and worked their way down. It was quiet and cold. Skulduggery went first down the stone stairs, then Fletcher and Anton Shudder. Valkyrie and Ghastly brought up the rear.

  The stairs to the basement level were cemented over.

  “Spread out,” said Skulduggery. “We’re looking for any sign of recent activity.”

  They split up. Valkyrie went to the back of the castle. Here and there were items of old furniture, dust-covered, standing alone in otherwise empty rooms. She stepped into a drawing room with an ornate fireplace, turned to go, then stopped. She looked at the way the light caught the grooves that had been scraped into the floor in front of the fireplace. She knelt by them, running her fingers along the worn edges. Valkyrie was no expert, but she reckoned that these shallow grooves that curved in a uniform pattern had been here for about as long as the castle had been standing. Something heavy had been repeatedly moved across this area over the years – but had it happened recently?

  Valkyrie stepped on to the fireplace’s base and ran her hands along the mantle. The right corner was the only spot free of dust and her fingers drifted lightly over the stone. She felt something give and the fireplace rotated silently, swinging her around and through the wall into a cold corridor. The fireplace completed its rotation with a soft click. Valkyrie didn’t move. The corridor was dark and made of stone, lit by torches in brackets along the walls. To her left was a thick chain, trundling up from a large gap in the floor through a big hole in the ceiling, like it was part of some huge pulley system.

  And no more than two metres away, standing with its back to her, was a Hollow Man.

  The torchlight flickered off its papery skin, catching the stitches and the strains where its arms were pulled down by its heavy fists.

  Valkyrie tried activating the switch again, but the mechanism was locked. The Hollow Man twitched its head as if it had heard something. Valkyrie reached out to the thick chain and gripped it with both hands. It carried her off her feet and up through the gap in the ceiling. As she looked down, the Hollow Man turned, too late to catch sight of her.

  She passed up through the gap and checked around quickly before letting go of the chain. She took out her phone and checked the bars. The signal was blocked. She’d pretty much expected that. She hurried down to the end of the corridor, keeping tight to the wall, doing her best to make sure that her shadow wasn’t going to give her away. She reached an intersection and peeked out and saw Springheeled Jack.

  Valkyrie dropped back and hunkered down. Three strides took him abreast of her, but he passed without glancing down. Once she started thinking again she counted to ten then added another five before getting up. She peeked out, but he was gone, moving along some other corridor. She crept in the opposite direction, putting as much distance between them as possible. If she had to run from Hollow Men, she figured she could do it, but running from him? She wouldn’t get three steps.

  She heard a man talking. There was a laugh and it wasn’t nice. The further she crept, the clearer the voice became. She still couldn’t make out the words. The voice reached its clearest as she passed a door, but when she put her ear to it, she couldn’t hear any better. Valkyrie frowned and stepped back, following the sound, her eyes dropping. On the ground beside the door was an opening. A ventilation shaft. She heard Kenspeckle’s voice, but still couldn’t hear what was being said.

  Valkyrie got to her hands and knees and peered in. It was dark. Very dark. She flattened herself to the floor and crawled into the shaft. She let her eyes adjust, feeling the thick layer of dust under her hands. She moved forward on her elbows, banging her head against the roof of the shaft and gritting her teeth against the pain. She could hear the words now.

  “…nice of them to give me a plaything, don’t you think? So thoughtful. They don’t want me getting bored, you see.”

  Valkyrie moved on, feeling a cobweb break against her face. With a controlled franticness she cleared it away, trying to dam her mind against the images of spiders scuttling in her hair. Ahead of her was a junction, a break in the darkness, where the ventilation shaft opened into the room where the voice was coming from. Valkyrie squirmed up, laid her face against the cold stone and peered in.

  Tanith wasn’t chained up or shackled to a wall, as Valkyrie had expected. Instead she was sitting in an armchair, hands flat on the armrests, legs crossed. An old man sat opposite in an identical armchair. His white hair stood out in clumps and he had dark rings under his eyes. It took her a moment to recognise Kenspeckle.

  Beside both chairs was a small table. On Tanith’s table were a cup and saucer, and on the table beside Kenspeckle was a teapot and a bowl of sugar cubes. The room was stone, but the armchairs were on a rug and there was a frayed tapestry hanging on the wall. There was a lamp, minus a lampshade, in the far corner of the room. The bulb was broken. It was a feeble attempt at introducing warmth and normality to the stark and bizarre, and it was even more unsettling for it.

  Kenspeckle drank his tea and returned the cup to its saucer with a delicate plink.

  Tanith’s face was strained and wet with sweat. Her eyes were unfocused and her body rigid. Valkyrie searched for a shackle or a sign that Tanith’s powers were being bound, but she couldn’t see anything.

  There was a small pool of dried blood beside the armrest closest to the ventilation shaft. Valkyrie followed the course the blood would have had to have taken, and noticed for the first time Tanith’s hands. On first glance nothing was out of the ordinary, but it was as if someone had taken a cloth to them and wiped them quickly and without care, not bothering to clean away all the blood.

  Valkyrie saw the way the light hit something metal on the ba
ck of Tanith’s hand, and she realised with a lurch in her stomach that Tanith’s hands had been nailed to the armrests.

  She wanted to cry out and tears came to her eyes. She saw two more nails. They were thick and looked long and old, and had been hammered through Tanith’s collarbones to keep her upright in the chair. A fifth nail entered Tanith’s right leg just above the knee and drove down and through her left, pinning them together.

  Kenspeckle was talking again, but Valkyrie wasn’t listening to the words. She stared at her friend. She couldn’t breathe. She was suddenly too hot in the ventilation shaft and it was tight, far too tight, and close. She had to get out. She had to back out the way she had come, and she had to smash down that door and rip that Remnant out of Kenspeckle’s body. It was the only thing to do. It was the only thing that mattered.

  Valkyrie tried moving backwards, the anger churning. It was bubbling, boiling, rising in her throat. She wasn’t moving. She couldn’t move backwards. Panic mixed with anger and fuelled it, and a small voice somewhere in Valkyrie’s mind told her to calm down, but she wasn’t listening.

  She moved on, crawling, moving quickly, grunting, not caring if that thing that was not Kenspeckle Grouse could hear her or not. And then there was no more ground and Valkyrie was suddenly sliding downwards. She cursed as she went, trying to snag an intersecting crawlspace, but only succeeded in taking a rat’s nest with her. The rats squealed beneath and beside her and she lashed out, trying to throw them off. Her head struck stone. Her body twisted.

  Below her, brightness and heat.

  She tumbled through the gap and fell about a metre. There was another gap directly below it and she reached out instinctively, spreading her arms and legs and jamming herself over the opening, stopping herself from falling through to the room below.

  Valkyrie looked down on to a large wooden table, and the partially inflated skin of the Hollow Man that lay upon it.

  Another Hollow Man lumbered into view, carrying a bucket of slop and what looked like entrails. It didn’t look up and Valkyrie didn’t make a sound. It went to the furnace built into the wall, the only source of light in the room, and opened the metal grille above the flames. Spilling some and not caring, the Hollow Man poured the slop into the furnace. Valkyrie’s muscles were beginning to ache.

  The Hollow Man picked up a large pair of bellows, its heavy hands clumsy and awkward, and poked the tip through the hole at the top of the furnace. It pulled the handles apart, sucking in the foul gases, and Valkyrie watched it shuffle over to the table. It jammed the tip into the skin and the bellows wheezed, and the skin inflated a little more. The Hollow Man picked up a large needle and sewed, making sure the gases wouldn’t escape.

  Valkyrie’s arms were trembling. Her legs wouldn’t betray her, but her arms were about to go. She looked back down at the Hollow Man as it picked up the bellows and returned to the furnace. She felt something heavy move in her hair and she flinched, her arms giving way. She fell through the opening and hit the table.

  She heard the bellows drop and lay flat on her back, holding her breath. The partially inflated Hollow Man lay beside her, blocking her from view. She didn’t know how good a Hollow Man’s eyesight was, but in this gloom she hoped it wasn’t any better than hers.

  Valkyrie gritted her teeth when she felt the rat in her hair again. Every ounce of her wanted to tear it away, but she stayed still, even when it crawled out on to her chest. It sat for a moment and then leaped on to the Hollow Man’s skin. She heard it jump to the ground and scamper away. A second later she heard the bellows being picked up. She let out her breath and raised herself up a bit, just enough to make sure that she wasn’t being tricked.

  And then the Hollow Man skin turned its half-inflated head to her.

  39

  HOLLOW MAN

  Valkyrie grabbed the thick thread that was holding the Hollow Man together and yanked. The sewing came undone and the gas hissed at her as the skin deflated. She tasted the stench and gagged as she rolled off the table, the gas making the bile rise in her throat. She threw up, her eyes stinging and streaming tears.

  She felt rough hands on her and then she was hauled off her knees and thrown against the wall. A fist crunched into her ribs and she cried out. Something crashed into the side of her head and she went stumbling, tripping over a discarded chair and falling painfully to the hard ground.

  Her eyes wouldn’t open. She tried crawling away, but her ankle was grabbed and she was pulled back. She knocked her chin against the floor and tasted blood. She turned over, lashing out a kick at knee-height. Her boot hit the Hollow Man’s leg and it was soft, but there was no knee to break. The grip on her ankle was released and she covered up, waiting in the darkness for the next blow. It found its way above her raised knees and below her elbows, dropping straight down on to her belly, and the breath left her. She tried to roll over, but those hands were on her again, those coarse, clumsy fingers, and she was yanked to her feet and sent stumbling blindly. Her hip struck something, the edge of the table, and Valkyrie folded and sank to her knees.

  Her eyes opened a crack. All she could see was a blurred murkiness. She closed them. She couldn’t breathe. She heard the whispering of papery skin behind her and she launched herself backwards. She collided with the Hollow Man, but she’d misjudged the angle and she felt it stagger but not fall. She tucked her head in as she rolled, came up in a crouch, her stomach muscles still not allowing her to straighten. She felt tears on her face and tasted blood and vomit.

  She moved, staying low, stepping away from the Hollow Man’s footsteps. Her hands were held out in front and she concentrated on feeling the air against her skin. Immediately, she felt the draughts, the heat from the furnace pushing through the room, rising up through the gap from which she had fallen. She stood on something and nearly tripped. The bellows maybe. The furnace was behind her. A blast of heat, uncomfortable on her back.

  The air shifted and she felt the Hollow Man’s movements, felt it lurching through the streams of clogging warmth, disrupting them as it came. It was close and unsubtle, coming head-on, and she used the air, drawing it in to her and then pushing, hard. It collided with the Hollow Man and drove it back, out of her sensory range. She heard it crash against the table.

  Valkyrie rubbed her eyes before attempting to open them. They still stung, but it was bearable. The tears turned everything to a blur. She wiped her face with her sleeve and blinked rapidly. The Hollow Man came into focus. It was on the ground, crawling towards her, its own sewing needle sticking out of its lower back. Its legs were already half-deflated, the green gas slowly escaping through the puncture wound.

  Valkyrie stepped sideways to avoid its grab. She went to the chair, righted it and sat with a groan. She worked at getting her breathing under control as she watched the Hollow Man change direction and crawl over. By the time she was taking deep breaths again and her eyes had stopped watering, the Hollow Man’s flat, outstretched fingers were centimetres away from her foot. It had stopped moving.

  Valkyrie stood and spat, trying to get rid of the foul taste in her mouth. She crossed to the door and opened it, making sure there was no one around, and eased out. As she hurried down the flame-licked corridor, she felt the pain, but ignored it, just like she ignored the part of herself that wanted to hunker down and cry. She focused on the other part, the part that revelled in her triumph. Another fight that she’d won. Another battle where she hadn’t died.

  She moved through the junction and found stairs leading up. She listened for a few seconds, made sure no one was going to surprise her, and ascended. The stairs curled around a thick column of stone like a vine around a sapling. Valkyrie reached the top and kept moving in what she decided was a southerly direction. She came to a corner and Billy-Ray Sanguine rounded it.

  He looked at her for a moment, a little surprised, like he couldn’t quite place her, and then that white-toothed grin came, but by then she was running the other way. She heard him laugh as she barrelled
through a door.

  There were shouts now, from all over, and she heard running footsteps, the echoes rebounding along the stone. Valkyrie came to another set of stairs leading up and took them three at a time. There were two Hollow Men at the top. They reached for her, but she slipped by them. She reached a corridor with a window at the end and piled on the speed, hearing someone behind her. Beyond the window was a room, its light spilling through into the darkness. The walls of this room had tapestries. She saw a chandelier. It was the castle’s main hall. Which meant that this wasn’t a window – it was a mirror.

  Valkyrie jumped, curling into a ball as she hit the glass. The world fragmented with a crash that filled her head. The main hall was lower than the corridor and she fell through the air, shards of mirror falling with her. She slammed to the floor and rolled, crunching the glass beneath her. She caught a glimpse of Skulduggery and then he was beside her, helping her up, and Ghastly, Fletcher and Shudder were running in.

  Somebody cleared his throat. Loudly. They all looked up at the broken mirror. Billy-Ray Sanguine stood in the corridor above them, hands in his pockets. “How is everyone?” he asked. “How’s everyone doin’? We should catch up later, all of us, talk about old times and have a laugh. Can’t do it now, I’m afraid. Bit pressed for time, what with our ultimate masterplan and all.”

  “Come down here, Sanguine,” Skulduggery said.

  “Why, so you can arrest me?”

  “No,” said Ghastly, “so we can kick the hell out of you.”

  An elderly man appeared beside Sanguine and Valkyrie knew she was looking at Scarab.

  “We have guests?” Scarab asked.

  “Yes, we do, Pops,” Sanguine replied. “I’m afraid the girl broke a mirror though.”

  “Well, that’s OK,” smiled Scarab. “I don’t believe any of that seven years’ bad luck stuff anyhow. Heck, even if I did, it wouldn’t matter – they’re all going to be dead by tomorrow anyway. Hello there, Detective Pleasant. Been a while.”