Vengeance Child

by Simon Clark

  He worked his way along the shoreline path. The only figure out in this foul weather was John Newton, a writer of true crime stories, who lived in the cottage nearest the river. The man was clearing away branches left by the ship’s destructive wash.

  ‘John,’ he called over the roar of the gale. ‘John?’

  ‘Victor. Did you see what that ship did this morning?’

  ‘John, this is important. Have you seen a boy around here recently?’

  ‘About ten minutes ago, one of the Badsworth Lodge party headed up that way toward the middle of the island.’

  ‘Can you remember what he looked like?’

  John Newton added a dripping branch to the pile. ‘About eleven or twelve. Very slightly built. Oh, and his eyes. Very distinctive eyes. Why, what’s—?’

  ‘Thanks, John.’

  Whatever John Newton’s response might have been vanished into the teeth of the gale. Victor raced southward along the path. This wasn’t a big place. He’d find Jay, without a shadow of doubt. It was only a question of time.

  Archer ran. In fact, he ran so fast it didn’t seem like running. Dark soil streamed under his feet. Above his head, a green blur of branches. He followed the pair of Saban Deer that flitted through the undergrowth; they were more spirit creatures than real skin and fur, or so it seemed to Archer.

  Mayor Wilkes chased Archer, roaring at him to stand still. For a moment back there the eight-year-old felt himself slipping into the comatose state that gripped him when the world became too much to bear. But Archer knew the man would hurt him if he stopped, and it’d be a far greater hurt than any bully had inflicted on him in the past.

  ‘You, boy, give me the bracelet!’

  Archer kept moving. Because he was so small he could run without stooping under the branches. Not so, the thundering man. They were at chest height for him. However, instead of bending down he punched his way through. Those hard fists snapped the twigs. Every so often he’d encounter a clump of pink blossom. Smack! The fist would strike. Then an explosion of pink petals. Nothing stopped him. What was more, Archer knew the man was gaining on him. Gulping with fear, the boy pushed on through the shadows.

  ‘Come back here, you little wretch!’ The voice sounded closer.

  And now the forest seemed endless. Archer’s legs grew weaker; it was as if the bones had turned as soft as marshmallow. Stitch dug painfully in his side. Hide! But where? The man would find him. They were alone here. Nobody would hear a little boy’s screams of pain. For the first time in his eight years Archer found himself looking into the future. Ahead there was only darkness for him. A deep void without light. The same darkness that dominated the coffin of his father’s corpse.

  His chest tightened. He could barely breathe. The whimper of terror in his throat turned into a crackling sound. Then the light hit him with the abruptness of a slap. He blinked. The forest now lay behind him. In front, the stone mass of the castle on its mound. Its tower loomed above him. He glanced back: surely Mayor Wilkes would be close enough to grab him.

  The bushes fringing the forest were at their thickest here. Archer had been able to move freely beneath them. Mayor Wilkes, however, encountered those branches at chest height. His fists still smashed the greenery; yet, here at its densest, it did impede his progress.

  ‘Stay where you are, or I’ll make you wish you’d never been born.’

  Exhausted, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, Archer slogged his way up the grassy slope to the castle wall. A small doorway pierced the masonry. He prayed the entrance wouldn’t be locked. Soon he wouldn’t be able to run another step. Then he’d be easy meat for the furious, roaring figure that now emerged from the forest.

  Storm winds shook the trees. The tower resembled a fist ready to fall on Archer and crush him into the earth in a mess of blood and bone and hair. By the time he reached the timber door set in the castle wall he saw that Mayor Wilkes had emerged from the forest. Archer sobbed. The man didn’t appear tired. If anything, the anger made him more powerful. His eyes blazed – glorying – exulting – in the merciless power he’d soon wield over the child. Archer stumbled. On his hands and knees he struggled to get air into his lungs. Energy drained away from his body. He could barely raise his head.

  ‘Boy! Give me that bracelet. Then, so help me, I’m going to enjoy teaching you a lesson!’

  Fists, kicks, biting . . . Archer foresaw all too clearly what the next few moments promised. With a yell he kicked free of the exhaustion that held him back. He staggered to the door. Don’t be locked . . . please don’t be locked.

  Mayor Wilkes pounded relentlessly across the turf toward Archer.

  The boy gripped the door handle then tugged it down. It turned. Archer pushed the door. It remained firmly shut. He pushed harder. Still it didn’t open. It must be locked after all. He groaned in pure terror. Any moment those fists would crash against his head. He pictured the dead woman in the car. The truth was obvious now. Why Mayor Wilkes needed the bracelet was brutally clear.

  Weakly, Archer rattled the door. Just time for one more try. He pulled the handle down hard with both hands. A loud click. A mechanism moved. First time around he hadn’t depressed it far enough to engage the lever. So exhausted he could barely push, he allowed his body weight to open the door as he slumped against it. Behind him, Mayor Wilkes had stopped running. He was enjoying the luxury of that purposeful, deadly walk toward Archer.

  The boy limped through the doorway into the castle yard, surrounded by its twenty-foot-high stone wall. In one corner of the yard stood the timber cabin that served as the groundskeeper’s store and souvenir shop. Shutters up. Door locked. Huge padlocks glinted; they held the outside world at bay. Along one wall, a stack of stone blocks ready to be used to repair eroded masonry.

  Archer tottered across the cobbled yard. The main entrance gate had been sealed with forbidding padlocks. Huge things, as big as a boy’s head. Archer turned round to witness a dreadful sight. A smiling Mayor Wilkes stepped through the doorway in the wall. Firmly he shut the door behind him, then shot across a bolt at the top – a bolt the tiny waif from Badsworth Lodge couldn’t reach. Archer looked for open doorways in the castle buildings. There were none. And there was nobody about. Apart from the bad man, Archer was alone.

  ‘Archer. You’ve got something for me.’ Mayor Wilkes grinned as he closed in, his hands balling into fists.

  Thirty-Six

  Above the castle, torrents of misty air raced in from the west. The turbulence drew a ghostly weeping from the battlements that only underlined Archer’s fear.

  Boy and man faced each other across the cobbled yard. The grown-up bared his teeth in something akin to a snarl. He knew he’d won.

  ‘Give up, boy, there’s nowhere to run.’ The adult approached.

  Archer searched for a way out. Only the gates and doorways were locked. He was trapped in the castle yard. At that moment a shaft of sunlight speared the cloud. A pool of radiance skated over the stones to where a fence surrounded a metal grid, which had been set into the ground. Archer found himself drawn to follow the shaft of sunlight.

  ‘There’s nowhere to run, Archer. Don’t waste your time.’ Wilkes followed at a stroll. ‘Don’t you realize it’s time to get this over with?’

  Archer ducked between the bars of the fence to find a square grille that was no larger than the door of a domestic oven. It covered a circular opening cut into the ground. This is the castle well. He remembered Victor had explained its purpose when he showed them round. It used to go a long, long way down but now it had been partially filled with debris. And at this moment the beam of sunlight shone down through a rent in the cloud to illuminate the build-up of dirt in the well. There, foil gum wrappers glinted on the soil plug like so many silvery eyes.

  ‘Game’s up,’ Wilkes announced as he approached the safety fencing.

  Archer saw that the stonework that formed a ring around the well opening had been eroded. A chunk had crumbled away, so
there was a gap between the grille, which stopped people falling in, and the edge of the well. As fast as he could the boy used his tiny build to his advantage. In seconds he squirmed feet first into the gap. The iron edge of the grille scraped his chest, while the rough corners of the stone retaining blocks gouged his back.

  But he was through.

  ‘Come here, you little cretin.’ Wilkes leaned through the fence to grab Archer by the hair. Hooked fingers snagged the curls. The boy forced his skinny torso through the gap. His feet kicked free as he dangled in thin air, hanging on to one of the iron bars of the grille. Then before the man could grab his wrist he let go.

  Damp air gusted by him as he dropped into darkness.

  When Victor saw him standing on the shore he realized this was how it was meant to be. He’d gone in search of Jay. The boy, however, had waited for the man. The mist had thickened, so Jay cut an ethereal figure there on the beach; a shadowy apparition, rather than a living being. Victor knew he was entering the second stage of the illness, yet at this moment his mental function appeared normal. He remembered, perfectly, what had happened in the last forty-eight hours. The cool wash of air kept his senses alert.

  The boy regarded him with the almond-shaped eyes. ‘Have people died of the sickness?’

  He nodded. ‘Completely innocent people that had nothing to do with the sinking of the N’Taal.’

  ‘Didn’t these people elect governments that did nothing to help the people on the ship?’

  ‘Some will have voted, but they didn’t have a say in whether the governments helped those refugees or not.’ Victor moved toward him. There was an alien quality about the expression, as if another intelligence occupied the boy’s mind. ‘You know Solomon was here.’

  ‘The policeman from Africa. He died.’

  ‘Did you . . . ?’ Victor stopped himself. Accusations would be futile. He had to take a different approach. ‘You are an eleven-year-old boy, Jay. Don’t let this thing, whatever it is, use you. You have a right to a childhood and to grow up into a man. It’s wrong for you to be used as a weapon.’

  ‘Do you know how many children under the age of thirteen died on the N’Taal?’ The voice could have emanated from skeletons that clung to each other in a rusting hulk. ‘One hundred and seventy.’

  Victor’s heart pounded. ‘Fight this thing, Jay. Don’t let it use you.’

  ‘One hundred and seventy children. In all three hundred and ninety men, women and children.’ When he stepped backwards, pebbles scrunched under his feet. The sound of bones being stirred by the tide.

  ‘If Solomon was right, then you’re a victim of the ship’s passengers, just as they were victims of all those countries that prevented them from entering their ports.’

  ‘Do you know how many babies under twelve months drowned, Victor?’

  ‘If it was a million there’s nothing you can do to bring them back to life.’

  Shapes emerged from the mist. Shaggy, beast-like shapes. For a moment Victor wondered if Jay had conjured something monstrous. Then Victor realized these were trees that had been washed up after the tidal wave. He noticed that amongst the mud-smeared branches there were more fishing lines of the type he’d found earlier on the beach. Hanging from those lines were entire bunches of fishing hooks. Big glittering ones with fearsome barbs. There must have been hundreds of the hooks. One bunch had trapped a gull that hung there lifeless, its beak partly open.

  ‘Keep away from the trees, Jay,’ he warned. ‘Can you see the hooks? Once they stick into your skin the barb holds it in there. You can’t just pull it out.’

  Jay retreated along the beach. ‘When this is over I’m going to a town, then I’m going to a city. I’m going to keep doing this, Victor. I know how to make people suffer and die . . . lots and lots of them.’

  ‘Do you want Laura to die?’

  ‘She’s leaving anyway. You’re going to marry her . . . you’ll take her from us.’

  ‘So you can control this talent for curses, then.’ Victor became angry. ‘You have free will. You may be the Vengeance Child, but you can decide who lives and who dies.’

  ‘No . . .’ He shook his head, yet Victor saw doubt in his face.

  ‘Come on, Jay. You understand what it means to grow up. You’re eleven years old. Growing up means you take control over your actions. When a baby is six months old it can’t decide when to pee or take a dump. By the time it’s three it can. So, I’ll tell you what I believe. OK, until recently you had no control over this power inside of you . . . this power that puts a curse on people . . . a curse that causes bad things to happen. It just happened spontaneously, like a sneeze, but now you do know how to control it. Sometimes, if you like a person, you hold the curse back. If you don’t, for example when Max bullied you, then you take out the hex; you wind it up, let it go. You went to town hurting Max, didn’t you? You got him so scared, he tried to kill himself. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  A sheen of perspiration gleamed on Jay’s face. He’d retreated into himself as he worked through what Victor had told him.

  ‘Also this other thing, Jay, where you take people into past events of their lives. That’s a new talent you’re developing, isn’t it? You look into our heads and see the big, big things that happened to us, then you exploit it.’

  ‘Ghorlan.’

  ‘Yes, like Ghorlan. You knew she’s my wife.’

  ‘Was your wife. She’s dead.’

  ‘Yes, I know. She drowned out there.’ Angry, he pointed at the river.

  ‘No. She didn’t go in the water.’

  That’s what you say!’ Victor knew he was losing self-control as he advanced on the boy. ‘You’re going to torture me, aren’t you? How did she die, then? Just burst into flames, I suppose? Are you going to inflict nasty scenarios on me?’

  Jay continued to walk backwards. Behind him a tree emerged from the mist. From lines tangled in the branches hooks by the dozen glinted. Jay turned, then he ran full pelt at them. Victor raced after Jay and managed to stop him short of the branches with their arsenal of steel barbs.

  ‘You can stop this epidemic, Jay, like you can stop inflicting all this pain on innocent people.’ He caught his breath. ‘So, Jay, what do you intend to do?’

  ‘Do?’ Jay gave a little chuckle. ‘Intend to do?’ The boy’s expression suggested someone slipping into a trance. When he spoke, it was in a breathy, sing-song way. ‘What I intend to do, Victor, is show you things . . . we’re going for a little walk.’

  Thirty-Seven

  Archer thought, I’ve broken all my bones. I can’t breathe . . .

  The eight-year-old lay at the bottom of the shaft, on his back, staring up at the metal grille. Each inhalation made him whimper. Squares of light formed by the grille changed as a figure leaned over it. He knew that Mayor Wilkes looked down at him.

  ‘Bigger drop than you thought, eh?’ the man grunted. ‘You might have just saved me a job.’ The silhouette vanished. Archer gazed at clouds through the criss-cross pattern formed by the bars. A shaft of light shone down from the sky to fill the well. Sheer walls rose up all around him, lined with smooth stone. Then the sunlight vanished. It seemed even darker than before. When Archer drew breath his chest ached so much.

  Then came loud grating sounds. Is he opening the grate so he can get at me? Only when blocks of darkness appeared to blot out part of the criss-cross pattern did he realize what Wilkes was doing. Slowly but surely the man was sliding heavy pieces of masonry over the grille. Especially over the gap that Archer had slid through. These, the hunks of stone stored in the yard for the restoration work, were being used to entomb the boy.

  ‘This will keep you in your place,’ Wilkes barked. ‘You won’t be able to shift these in a hurry. What do you say to that?’

  Breathing hurt so much Archer couldn’t reply even if he had wanted to. Meanwhile, Wilkes brusquely tossed sentences at the boy. They weren’t meant as consolation. Anything but. ‘The island’s under quarantine. Let me explai
n. That means nobody can leave the island, nobody can come on to the island. We’re cut off from the mainland. Therefore, the castle will be closed to the public for the foreseeable future. I have the spare set of keys. Besides that, my word is law. No one will come here for at least a week.’ His eyes burned down through the grille. ‘Do you understand what that means for you? You will wallow in that stinking pit of yours, by yourself, for seven days, and seven very long nights. Without food or drink. No doubt you will do a lot of yelling. Go ahead, be my guest. But seeing as we’re at the tip of the island no one will hear.’ He laughed. ‘It looks like rain, too. Did I mention that when it rains the well fills with water again? It’s customary to wish a chap in peril good luck, but it isn’t good luck I’ll be wishing you. Goodbye, Archer.’ Footsteps receded across stone cobbles, then the door in the wall slammed shut.

  It took a long time. Eventually, however, the pain eased in Archer’s chest. He realized he’d been badly winded, that was all. What was more, when he moved his limbs he knew he hadn’t broken any bones. From what he could tell, the surface he’d fallen on consisted of old dry leaves. This soft mulch had broken his fall, not his legs.

  ‘Gotta get out, Archer,’ he murmured. ‘Show Victor the bracelet. He’ll know what to do.’ Get out, Archer? Easier said than done. The walls were smooth. Most of the time he couldn’t see because the cloud made it so dark. Occasionally, though, a beam of light would break through. The intense sunshine would reveal the yellow stonework. It also revealed something else that made his heart leap.

  He should have been pleased. He should have yelled, ‘Yes!’ then punched the air. However, dread gripped him in its implacable fist. You’ve done this, Jay. You’ve brought me back here to frighten me. For there, just at arm’s length, half-hidden by shadow, was a chilling sight. A stone archway. One just high enough and wide enough to wriggle through. Not for a second did he believe it led to safety. But he couldn’t sit for ever at the bottom of the well. Mayor Wilkes said it would flood when it rained. Archer couldn’t swim. Anyway, after seven days, what then? If he was alive the mayor would return to ensure that Archer never told anyone what had happened.