The Forever Man

by Eoin Colfer

  And they did have at it, with speed and brutality. The toad gave a good account of itself, notably with headbutts, but ultimately was skewered and rolled back into the water.

  Garrick affected an anxious mood. ‘The witch sends her minions. She would destroy us all. Forward, men, forward, though our bellies and the very elements are against us.’

  So forward it was, through the fog that would not be banished, until the sun accepted defeat and sank into the marsh, or so it seemed, and the stars blinked their watery eyes through the gloom.

  In spite of his great speech of a few hours earlier, it was Albert Garrick who tired first, for he had been awake for many hours now and had done battle with a giant creature. Even though the dark matter had repaired his form, his mind was weary and he thought he would lie himself down by a tree and perhaps sleep a half of the hour.

  And thus, when a tree presented itself, Garrick ordered the men to continue their search and leave him to pray for their success. The militiamen were less than happy to move forward through the failing light without their leader, but who among them would question Albert Garrick? Not a one. Obediently they checked their loads and powder, finished whatever provisions they had, and plodded ever further into the vastness of the fens.

  In fact, this tree that Garrick chose was the very one from which Riley had been spying on the band. From afar initially, but then ever closer as the group took an unexpected turn and seemed to head directly for him.

  Have I been careless and eyeballed? Riley wondered. Will those men deal as brutally with my person as they did with those other creatures?

  But they could not have seen him, he reasoned. The light was dim and his form was well hidden by foliage. Also was he not a master at the art of concealment? Perhaps Albert Garrick could find him if he was looking, but there had been no contact from the town, of that Riley was certain, so he concealed the blade of his axe beneath his cloak and hugged the branch on which he lay.

  When Garrick lay down in the lee of the mighty tree and turned on his side, with a root as his pillow, Riley could not believe what he was seeing. For there, directly below him, all wrapped up in cloak and hat, with his head raised on a virtual chopping block, was the man he had come to slay.

  On a platter, he is, Riley realized. A chance like this will never come again.

  Riley knew he could have the man’s head off in a flash.

  I could be off and running with that head before Garrick’s body has ceased its spasming.

  That he was even considering such a ghoulish act caused his stomach to churn.

  This would see me swing back in London, he thought. And I would indeed deserve to dance the Newgate Jig.

  Riley gripped the axe’s handle and it felt greasy in his fingers. I must do it, he thought. I must sacrifice my soul for Chevie’s life.

  But could he?

  Could he feel the axe blade sink through flesh and bone, no matter that the bone was evil to its marrow? And could he then carry the severed head by the lank hair, with Garrick’s eyes rolling at him, to a safe distance so he could set it alight and bury it?

  Strangely it was Garrick’s own voice that Riley heard in his head: Go on, son. Do it. Make your bones. Lively now, opportunities the likes of this don’t grow on trees. Ha ha.

  Garrick would not have passed up the opportunity to make one of his dark jokes. Gallows humour was his most favourite type.

  I must strike, thought Riley, and the axe blade was strangely warm against his cheek. I must.

  From a good distance came the report of a single gunshot, echoing flatly over the marsh.

  Riley glanced in the direction of the shot, and then immediately down at Garrick, but the Witchfinder had not been disturbed, and the boy was almost disappointed that his chance was still open to him and now he must make a decision.

  There is no decision. I have no choice.

  And so, committed to action, Riley grasped a branch, swung himself down, making no more noise than a falling leaf, and landed square beside Garrick in the perfect position for the strike. Inch perfect he was and there would never until Judgement Day be a better opportunity.

  You will be a blight on this planet no more, he thought, and raised the axe high.

  The instrument was familiar in his hands, for had he not learned to throw every blade known to man as part of his training? And he knew the edge was sharp just by a look, for a starlight seemed attracted to it and collected in ruffles along the swirls left by a whetstone.

  So no excuses.

  Strike! he told himself. Strike!

  Yet he hesitated. To cleave a man’s head from his body, even when he was a monster like Garrick – this was a terrible act.

  Strike! Damn you for a fool. Think on Chevie.

  But he could not. The bad blood did not run through his veins and he could not murder a man in his sleep.

  He is not a man.

  Riley knew this and he still could not do it. He felt the flush of shame and anger rise in his cheeks.

  ‘You best be to work, son,’ said a voice over his head. ‘I ain’t going to lie there all night. Oh, bless me, I ain’t lying there at all.’

  Riley’s shoulders slumped. A dupe. Of course. This whole time. He kicked Garrick’s cloak and there was nothing in it but cloak.

  The gunshot had given Garrick the moment he needed to slip away and climb the tree, leaving Riley to stalk his wardrobe.

  Riley looked up and there was his master, his stockinged feet dangling, astride the very same branch that had borne Riley moments earlier.

  ‘I left the boots for effect,’ Garrick said. ‘You have lost your touch, Riley my boy. I spotted you an hour since. And now you are distracted by a gunshot like some wide-eyed punter. I feel shame for you, son.’

  ‘I ain’t your son,’ said Riley, gripping the axe with new resolve.

  ‘Too right, you ain’t,’ said Garrick. ‘I brought you up to seize the moment and look at you, dithering like a child in a sweet shop. You ain’t got the gumption, boy. You never did.’

  Riley took a step back to give himself room to swing. ‘Maybe, but what I do have is an axe.’

  Garrick was not in the least bothered by this. ‘Tell me, the Cat’s Collar. How did you figure it out?’ He winked. ‘It was my own blasted vanity, wasn’t it? That would be my downfall, if that were possible.’

  Riley needled him. ‘It is possible, though, ain’t it? The wormhole will have you, Albert Garrick. And next time you ain’t coming out.’

  Garrick’s eyes flashed but he recovered himself. ‘I’m working on that, boy. I have the bones of an idea, as it were.’

  Riley hefted the axe, figuring to brazen it out. He reckoned he was done and dusted but might as well go down swinging, as the pugilists of Covent Garden would say.

  ‘I have a bang-up idea of my own, Albert Garrick,’ he said belligerently.

  Garrick moved suddenly, hoisting himself up on to the branch and squatting there like a monkey. ‘So I see. Lop my head off, was it? Bury it some place far away.’ He tilted his head. ‘That might have worked. A pity you will never know.’

  It struck Riley that he was the younger man, with a lethal weapon to boot, and still he felt outmatched and, if he was honest, doomed.

  ‘Come on then, sir,’ he challenged. ‘Let’s be about our business.’

  Garrick smiled. ‘At least you go down into the dirt with some spirit. I like it when they have spirit.’

  With that comment, Garrick leaped high into the air and seemed to hang there suspended, lips drawn back in a vicious snarl, arms spread wide like the wings of a vulture.

  And there he hung.

  And did not descend.

  Pinned to the sky, it seemed.

  Riley could not understand it. What is happening here? Garrick can fly?

  But if Riley was puzzled, then Albert Garrick was even more so.

  ‘What devilment is this?’ he said, and actually seemed comical in his amazement.

  Albert Garr
ick.

  Comical.

  The words did not seem to fit together, and that impression was fleeting, as Garrick fought the forced levitation, concentrating till a vein pulsed in his forehead and slobber dripped from his lips.

  Comical no more.

  Riley felt a tug on his own person like a gust of wind at his back and, although he was not lifted from the ground, he recognized the sensation. The attraction. And his eyes were drawn upward.

  There, in the twilit sky, was a slash of copper light. A tear in the sky that might be a sunset-tinged cloud, but Riley knew that it was not, for it called to him the way no mere cloud ever could.

  The wormhole is here. In this world.

  This was terrifying. That science was no longer in control. Now the wormhole had come looking for them and there would be no need for dematerialization.

  On the bright side, it wanted Garrick most of all.

  But Albert Garrick would go nowhere easily. He grasped a branch and held on.

  He’s holding a branch, thought Riley. And I have in my hands an axe for chopping wood.

  So the lad ran round to the other side of the tree, where Garrick could not reach him without releasing his hold, and hacked at the branch. It seemed less awful somehow than chopping a man’s head from his body.

  ‘Up you go, Garrick,’ he cried with each swing. ‘Up you go.’

  Garrick howled and cursed him for a traitor for here above him was the only thing he truly feared. It was not that the wormhole would kill him; it was that it would undo him. Which was worse somehow.

  The branch was stout but the axe was sharp. The branch yielded with a splintering crack.

  ‘No,’ said Garrick. ‘This ain’t how Albert Garrick goes.’

  But it seemed as though this was how the great scourge of Garrick was to quit the earth, reclaimed by the wormhole for the particles in his body. The last strip of bark peeled away from the branch, revealing lighter wood below. With a soft snap Albert Garrick was cut adrift and began his ascent up to the waiting rift.

  ‘I will not!’ he shouted. ‘You shall not have me.’

  Riley would have dearly loved to watch him go: to be sure this time, for once and for all, that Garrick was gone. However, just at that moment an explosion rose through the western trees; a great blooming flower of flame and black smoke, quickly followed by the roar of combustion with a strange noise like the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer on a giant anvil.

  That explosion has Chevron written all over it, thought Riley. Or my name ain’t Something Riley.

  So he took his eyes from Albert Garrick and ran hell-for-leather across the marsh in the direction of the explosion, praying that he would not be too late to save Chevie’s life.

  One quarter of the hour earlier, Chevie had been in no immediate danger of dying, presuming that one could not actually explode from frustration. She had a million questions in her head and could voice none of them, for she was under strict instructions from Special Agent Isles to act like a statue. Still and quiet.

  Isles is probably out of his jurisdiction, she thought. But he’s still my superior officer.

  Her frustration came mainly from the fact that, as far as she knew, Riley was trussed up somewhere in that town, being subjected to whatever hellish torture Garrick had dreamed up for his witch-finding tests, and all she could do was sit here on a home-made sofa and grit her teeth.

  And she had so many questions for Smart.

  How can I get home?

  Does my home exist any more?

  Will I ever truly be myself again?

  But all she could do was watch the professor flicker nervously by his desk, staring at his old-fashioned computer monitor. He was glowing on low wattage but with Chevie’s photosensitive vision he shone brighter than the Las Vegas strip.

  Isles seemed impervious to stress and had bunked down in a back room, apparently content to snore softly until someone shook him awake.

  Eventually Chevie could take it no more.

  ‘Do you have any motion sensors?’ she whispered to Smart. ‘Or cameras on the perimeter?’

  Smart tried to smile and it seemed to hurt his face. ‘We don’t even have a perimeter, lassie. Agent Pointer is our advance-warning system.’

  ‘So what are you watching on that screen?’

  Smart invited her to see for herself. ‘It’s infrared. From one of Agent Isles’s scopes. I found out that it picks up dark matter too. One of those accidental scientific discoveries you read about, like penicillin or radioactivity.’

  Chevie looked at the screen. It was mostly dark except for a spooky red grin off centre.

  ‘The rift?’

  Smart nodded. ‘The beginnings of it. Any time now it will open wide.’

  ‘And then the end of the world, right?’

  Smart’s features relaxed into their habitual miserable expression. ‘Yes, no, who knows? I can’t say anything for certain any more. It might take months or years, or perhaps the rift will repair itself. But the anomalous energy has worn the inter-dimension’s skin so thin that it would take a burst of dark matter to bolster it. More than I have.’

  ‘Couldn’t you take mine?’

  Smart tried to stroke her face and Chevie felt pins and needles along her cheekbones.

  ‘No, child. It might kill you and, besides, it would be nowhere near enough. No, I injured the inter-dimension and I shall heal it. I have a responsibility.’

  The professor returned his attention to the screen, and was soon working on his responsibility. Chevie gave him two minutes to become completely absorbed, then backed away quietly.

  I have a responsibility too, she thought. The FBI brought Riley into this and now I have to get him out.

  It was more than responsibility she knew. More than duty.

  She tip-tapped the floor with the toe of her boot until she found the knot in the wood, and pressed it. A single board see-sawed, and Chevie thought, If the pooch can squeeze through there, so can I. Just hold my breath is all.

  It was a tight squeeze, but she made it.

  Almost before Chevie’s feet touched ground, she realized that her plan had a few flaws.

  She didn’t know where the town was.

  She was unarmed and undisguised.

  She could really use a pair of sunglasses right now.

  And also, in point of fact, she had no actual plan.

  I’m an improviser, she thought. That’s always been my talent.

  Which would be just wonderful if she could improvise herself a map of this godforsaken swamp.

  Luckily she did have cat’s eyes, which she would freak out over for years at a later point when Riley was safe, but for now she simply appreciated being able to see in the dark.

  It’s a pity I can’t climb trees.

  Chevie would grudgingly admit that she had a tendency to act on instinct rather than information, but on this occasion it was pure emotion. So she picked a path from many and set off along it. Yesterday she would not have seen even one path, never mind several, but her cat’s eyes noticed the slight bend in the grass stalks where they had been brushed more than once.

  I am not even following my gut; I’m following my heart.

  Which was pretty much at the top of the FBI not-to-do list, just below: Don’t shoot the agent in front of you in the butt. In fact, if this had been a legitimate mission she would have been removed for emotional involvement. She could just imagine her old boss, Special Agent Witmeyer, yelling at her: You’re off this case, Savano. You got too close to the kid.

  But there was nothing about time-travelling mutations in the Fed handbook and she was nowhere near close enough to the kid.

  Chevie tried to remember if this was the way Isles had brought her into the field office, but she had been pretty out of it at the time.

  I remember a swamp, she thought. And trees.

  That was a great help. You truly are a genius.

  The word ‘swamp’ resonated with her.

  Don’t s
wamps have alligators in them?

  Chevie was pretty sure there were no alligators in England.

  Yeah, but I’m also pretty sure that humans don’t have cat’s eyes, and dogs can’t talk.

  And, speaking of talking dogs, Pointer appeared in front of her, poking his head through a line of scrub.

  ‘Woof,’ he said, or maybe it was ‘Ruff’.

  Because they had bonded and she didn’t want to be impolite, Chevie tried to interpret the syllable.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Rough day all round.’

  In response to this Pointer gave her the evil eye, which Chevie felt was unfair. ‘Hey, how am I supposed to know? It just sounded like a bark to me. You need to enunciate, Agent.’

  This seemed to annoy Pointer so much his hackles rose, his head dipped and he drew his lips back in a snarl.

  ‘Pointer, dude. I don’t have time for this. You gotta take me to the town, OK?’

  Cue more snarling and hackling from Pointer.

  ‘I know what Isles ordered me to do,’ she said. ‘But this is the perfect time. Garrick’s out in the swamp. We can sneak into Mandrake and rescue Riley. In and out. Five minutes. We’re gonna laugh about this tomorrow.’

  Judging by the expression on Pointer’s face, it did not seem like he would be laughing at anything any time soon. In fact, it seemed to Chevie that he was downright angry. His flanks were heaving like bellows and he moved forward from the bushes, revealing himself and the remarkably square white patch on his hindquarters.

  I don’t remember a white patch, thought Chevie, and then: Oh, shoot. Wrong dog.

  If this wasn’t Pointer, it had to be one of Garrick’s dogs.

  And he’s looking at me like I’m a cat.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘We can be friends, can’t we? You wanna smell my hand?’

  But it seemed obvious that this dog was done sniffing. Now was biting time. The animal barked, three short yips that Chevie just knew were signals to his handlers, and then he attacked.

  Chevie was forced to do something she never thought she could: punch an animal right in the eye socket. There followed two howls of pain, one from the punched and another from the puncher.

  Chevie stuffed her hand under her arm, thinking: There’s a whole lotta bone in a dog’s head.