Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  9

  “A VAST, YE SWABS!” Will challenged Chester the moment his friend emerged onto the porch. Will was advancing up the garden path toward him, one hand on his hip as he slashed a cutlass through the air.

  Chester grinned, then his face went blank. “I’ve got no idea what that actually means.”

  “No idea what what means?”

  “Swabs. What the heck are swabs? Pieces of cotton wool?”

  “No, I think it used to mean something really nasty, so you’d better defend your honor, you lily-livered cuttlefish!”

  Will stopped brandishing the sword to admire it for a moment. “Considering it must be probably centuries old, this is in brilliant nick. You can see tiny pictures of a cross and a branch engraved on it, and some words in what looks like Latin,” he said, peering at the cup-shaped piece of metal that curved from the cross guard to the pommel, and which served to protect the swordsman’s hand in combat. Then he attempted to read out the inscription, stumbling over the words. “Soli Deo Gloria.” He looked at Chester with a shrug.

  “Sorry, dear Gloria?” Chester suggested, not really paying attention as he spotted the assortment of other weapons Will had spread out on the floor of the porch. “If it’s a duel you want …,” he declared as he chose a long-bladed dagger and tried it out, stabbing the air in front of him. “No, that doesn’t do it for me,” he muttered as his eyes fell on by far the largest of the weapons, a metal pole nearly six feet long with both a lethal-looking spike and a large ax head at the end. “This is more like it,” he said. “What is it, anyway?”

  “That’s a halberd,” Will replied.

  “A halibut?” Chester laughed as he weighed it in his hands. “Right! On guard!” he yelled as he launched himself down the front steps, landing just in front of Will. “Your time has come, White Beard!” he said.

  Will lunged with his cutlass several times, Chester blocking with the halberd, the clash of steel ringing around the luminous garden. Then Chester went on the offensive, swinging the halberd at Will, although without much force. Taking advantage of the low gravity, Will easily avoided the weapon by leaping high into the air.

  Chester continued to sweep the halberd at Will, who each time sprang high above it. After a while, Chester got the giggles and couldn’t go on. “This is like one of those crazy kung fu movies where they all leap around as though they’ve got springs on their feet.”

  Will was trying his utmost to maintain his very best murderous pirate face, but couldn’t stop himself from laughing, too. “Yeah, you’re right. What was that film called — Leaping Dragon, Flapping Duck, or something like that?”

  “Ready thyself, White Beard,” Chester said. “Prepare to face the largest can opener in the world!” He swung the halberd again.

  To avoid the attack, Will executed a perfect backward somersault in the air, landing squarely on his feet farther down the path.

  “Aha!” he exclaimed, delighted with his acrobatics. “Not so easy to kill, am I, Ninja Rawls?”

  “Show-off,” Chester muttered.

  They continued to play-fight each other, vaulting across to other paths they’d discovered between the flower beds, gradually moving their battle to the rear of the shack, where they hurtled between the rooftops of the small outbuildings.

  “Let’s stop a minute — need to catch my breath,” Chester puffed, landing beside Will.

  “Yeah, OK,” Will replied, passing his cutlass in front of him in a figure eight. “This is great, isn’t it?” he said, smiling at his friend.

  Chester smiled back, nodding in agreement. As the days had passed, they had adjusted to the reduced gravity, and the nausea they’d experienced to begin with had all but gone. Martha looked after them well, and without the constant threat of the Styx hanging over them, for the first time in a long while they could truly relax and enjoy themselves.

  To fill the hours, they devised new activities to keep themselves occupied. Will had found an ornate ivory chess set in one of the trunks, and they would play into the small hours, drinking endless cups of tea. And Martha was only too happy to teach them about the different properties of the plants in her garden and entertain them with stories about the Colony and the Deeps. She’d been reluctant to let them use her crossbow when they first asked her, but finally gave in to their constant requests. Although it took them a while to master the weapon, they eventually got the hang of it and set up some targets by the barricade at the end of the garden. They found it amazing how true the flights of the bolts were, traveling in an almost straight line with little or no loss whatsoever of trajectory — another feature of the low gravity.

  “OK, Captain Snow, let’s do it,” Chester said, now that he’d recovered.

  “Only if you can catch me first,” Will dared his friend, leaping clean over the roof of the main shack and landing on the ground in front of it. There he took refuge behind some bushes that, exceptionally for the garden, didn’t seem to emit any light. Chester stole around the side of the shack, then surveyed the garden. Guessing exactly where Will was hiding, he propelled himself at him, wailing with his best battle cry.

  Will ducked out from the bushes and onto the path, his sword up and ready to repel the attack. Chester advanced. But in the blink of an eye, something dropped in front of him.

  “Wh —?!” Chester gasped.

  It was Bartleby. As the cat arched his back, Will saw that all his muscles were bunched under his hairless skin, as if he was about to pounce. Bartleby edged forward and hissed at Chester with such vehemence that he dropped the halberd. As he hastily stepped backward, he tripped and fell into a border of dainty plants that let off a pinkish hue. The cat, still in a panther crouch, crept toward the terrified boy.

  “Will, do something!” Chester squawked. “Call your crazed moggy off!”

  “Bart! Stop!” Will cried.

  Bartleby glanced at his new master for confirmation, then lowered himself to the ground. But he was still watching Chester intently, as if he didn’t entirely trust him.

  “Silly old cat,” Will said, stroking him affectionately on the head. “What did you do that for? You didn’t really think Chester was attacking me, did you?”

  Chester was more than a little put out that his friend was taking the incident so lightly. “Will, I swear, it was about to go for me. It had those sick giant claws out!”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t have gone that far,” Will said.

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Chester grumbled as he picked himself up and retrieved the halberd. He stared angrily at Bartleby, who had begun to purr as Will continued to rub his temples. “Know what?” Chester added.

  “What?” Will asked.

  “I’ve just realized how much you two look like Shaggy and Scooby-Doo.”

  Will was just framing a suitably rude response when Martha called to them from the front door.

  “You’d better come.”

  The boys trooped up to the shack and followed Martha inside. She hovered by the edge of the table, her anxiety evident.

  “Martha?” Chester asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m afraid it might have begun,” she said in a flat voice. “I checked first thing and wasn’t sure, but I think it has.”

  Will dropped his cutlass onto the table with a clatter and took a step toward Martha. “You’re talking about Elliott, aren’t you? What’s happened?”

  “Remember I told you about Nathaniel and the germule that did for him?” Martha said.

  “Elliott’s got the fever?” Chester gabbled quickly. “Oh no, Will, she’s caught it, too.”

  “Now, hold your horses,” Martha said, raising her dirty palms to them. “It’s not definite, not yet — it might not be the same thing. But she has taken a turn for the worse, and it doesn’t look good.”

  In silence, they all made their way to Elliott’s room.

  “Oh no,” Chester whispered.

  They saw right away that a change had come over the unconscious girl
. Her face looked very shiny and flushed, and the long shirt she was wearing was soaked with her perspiration, as were the bedclothes all around her. Martha went over to Elliott and gently lifted the towel from her forehead. She dipped it in a basin of water beside the bed and wrung it out before replacing it on the girl’s head.

  “You said her arm was doing well,” Will said, trying to look for something positive to say.

  “Yes, it’s the oddest thing, but her bones mended very quickly. It’s as though …,” Martha began, then trailed off.

  Both Will and Chester gave her inquiring looks.

  “They would say in the Colony that she’s been blessed by the preacher’s touch,” Martha said.

  “The preacher? But I thought they’re all Styx, aren’t they?” Will asked, his expression one of puzzlement as he remembered the religious ceremonies he’d been obliged to attend during his months in the Colony. “That can’t be good.”

  “Oh yes, it is — you see, the Styx are not like other people,” Martha replied. “They heal in half the time that you and I do. The girl’s bones have knitted together so fast I’ve even been able to take the splints off.”

  The boys had been so preoccupied with the disturbing news about the fever that they had failed to notice Elliott’s injured arm was now only bound by a lightly wrapped bandage.

  “But the fever,” Chester said, turning to Martha. “I feel so guilty — we’ve left you to do everything while we’ve been horsing around … while Elliott got like this. Tell us how we can help.”

  “For starters, we have to keep her temperature down — the poultice on her forehead should be moistened every ten minutes or so,” Martha said.

  “Fine — you go and get some rest, Martha,” Will said. “We’ll take turns looking after her.”

  In a chair by the bed, Will was on his second three-hour shift, having recently relieved Chester, who’d stumbled wearily away to his chaise longue. After a while, Will caught himself beginning to doze off as he slumped lower and lower in his seat.

  “Come on,” he growled, then slapped his cheeks several times to wake himself up. In a bid to keep himself occupied, he began to look over the diagrams he’d drawn of how he thought the Pore and the other similarly huge openings might once have been open at the surface, but then had become sealed up. To do this he’d tried to remember everything he could about plate tectonics and what happens when there is movement between two plates. “Destructive, Constructive, and Conservative Margins,” he murmured to himself.

  And, in a small picture at the very bottom of the page, his imagination had run away with him and he’d drawn a galleon tipping over the edge of a huge, swirling whirlpool in the ocean. He closed one eye as he contemplated it, and found that he was whistling through his teeth. He stopped immediately.

  “Holy smokes, I’m turning into my dad,” he muttered as he flipped over to a clean page. He tried to jot down his observations from the last week. The trouble was that he didn’t have anything new or particularly interesting to record, and his efforts soon degenerated into a series of overlapping circular doodles scribbled in the margin, which almost matched the number of times he was yawning.

  An hour later, he’d discarded his journal and was hunched over a Bible with a thick leather cover, which he’d discovered in a trunk earlier that day. The dry pages crackled like old leaves as he turned them, and now and then he squinted at a sentence he thought he might be able to translate, blinking his eyes with disappointment when he found he couldn’t get anywhere with it.

  “Why didn’t I take Spanish at school?” he asked himself as he closed the Bible. He twisted around in his chair to contemplate the chessboard set up on a small side table next to him. After a few moments, he slid his queen to a new square, but didn’t take his finger from it.

  “No, that’s a stupid move,” he grumbled, moving the piece straight back to its original position. He shot a look at his imaginary opponent. “Sorry, not thinking straight.”

  Elliott stirred and said something. Will was immediately at her side. “It’s me, Elliott — it’s Will. Can you hear me?”

  He took her hand and clasped it in his. Her eyes were moving rapidly under her closed lids, and the normally pale skin of her face was a disquieting color, as if she’d been dusted with crimson powder and it had collected around all her features, particularly her cracked lips.

  “It’s all right,” Will said soothingly.

  Her mouth twitched as if she was trying to speak but didn’t have the strength to draw breath. She frowned as if there was some internal conflict going on in her head, something in her febrile dreams that she was trying to resolve. Then she murmured a few words that Will could just about catch. The first sounded like “Drake”; a few minutes later she said something which could have been “Limiter.”

  “You’re safe now, Elliott. We’re all OK,” Will said softly, realizing she might be reliving the events at the Pore.

  Then she said Drake’s name again, much more clearly this time, and her eyelids looked as though they might actually open.

  “And Drake’s fine,” Will assured her, although he didn’t know this for certain.

  Elliott began to babble — to Will’s ear it sounded like a bunch of numbers. Over and over she said them, at a barely audible level. He snatched up his pencil and jotted them down next to his doodles. She seemed to be repeating a string of the same numbers, but he wasn’t sure he’d got all of them down in the right order.

  Just then Chester shambled in.

  “Can’t be your turn already?” Will asked him.

  “No,” he replied sourly. “I just couldn’t get to sleep out there.”

  “Why not?”

  “That bloomin’ moggy of yours is snoring so loudly, I swear I kept waking up thinking I was about to be run over by a moped.”

  “Well, just wake him up,” Will said, unable to stifle a grin. “Maybe you should try whispering the word ‘dog’ in his ear. That might work.”

  “Yeah, right, and get my face bitten off,” Chester grunted. He looked at Elliott. “How’s she doing?”

  “Very hot, but she’s been trying to talk. She mentioned Drake, and I think she might also be having nightmares because she said ‘Limiter.’ And she kept repeating some numbers — I don’t know what they are, but I wrote down all the ones I could hear —”

  “Like these?” Chester interrupted, pulling a scrap of paper from his pocket.

  Will took it from him and compared the sequence with the one in his journal — Chester’s was the more complete.

  “Hey, cool. But do you think that’s all of them?” Will asked.

  “I reckon so — she said them enough times. Suppose they must be important to her, somehow.”

  “Eleven digits,” Will pondered. “Maybe it’s a code?”

  “You tell me, Sherlock,” Chester replied, then yawned as he sank down to the floor at the foot of the bed, and out of Will’s sight.

  “Oh … good night, then,” Will said in a disappointed tone. He’d been hoping that Chester would keep him company on his vigil. But the only answer he received from his friend was some loud snoring, which continued unabated as Will puzzled over the sequence of figures, trying to work out if there was some sort of pattern to them.

  Mrs. Burrows came out of the employment agency, stopping on the sidewalk as she put the appointment cards in her bag.

  “Burrows,” she overheard someone saying, then, “bad business,” but she didn’t catch the rest.

  She turned to find two young women with a gaggle of children around them. The women had clearly recognized her from the way they were staring. One of them immediately whipped her head around and began to walk off, tugging her children behind her. The other simply continued to glare, her top lip hooked in a vicious snarl as she clenched the handle of her baby carriage. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, which displayed to full effect the large flaming heart tattooed on her upper arm and the name Elvis emblazoned below it.
/>   “Child killer,” she leered at Mrs. Burrows before she heaved the stroller around and went after her companion.

  Mrs. Burrows was flabbergasted.

  Following the television appeal, there had been a few mentions in the tabloid newspapers, but it was all pretty low-key stuff. However, the local rags had picked up on the story, running a series of articles about her and her missing family, and then there’d been a two-page spread on Chester’s parents, in which several ambiguous comments about Mrs. Burrows’s suitability as a mother were made. Inevitably, Mrs. Burrows had achieved a degree of local notoriety from these.

  Trying to shrug off the incident, she began to walk slowly up Highfield’s Main Street, then picked up her pace. She didn’t want to be late for the first of her job interviews.

  10

  MARTHA WAS CHOPPING up a bundle of dried plants she’d fetched from one of the outbuildings. With both hands she lifted a football-sized fungus from her basket and plopped it onto the table.

  “Looks a bit dodgy,” Will commented, wrinkling his nose.

  “These are rare as snake feet around here,” Martha said as she patted the sides of the mushroom, rather like a baker with a lump of dough. Then she began to peel away the tough outer skin as one would a very large orange. “You should know what this is.”

  Will nodded. It was a pennybun, but in comparison to the ones he’d seen in the Colony, this was a sorry specimen. Its skin was dry and in places ruptured, and it sagged as if it had lost some of its innards. “Has it gone bad?” he asked.

  “No, it’s jugged pennybun.”

  “Jugged?” Will said.

  “Yes, I hang them for a couple of months. Gives them a richer flavor,” she answered. She began to cut it into small sections, lobbing them into a cooking pot.

  “Just looks rotten to me,” Will said, nudging the end of one of Martha’s chisels so it spun on the tabletop. He watched as it came to rest, then spun it again.