Verdigris Deep

by Hardinge, Frances

  His father disappeared into the tent with Chelle. Ryan could not help noticing that there seemed to be quite a lot of people inside already.

  ‘Have you seen the crowds outside?’ Josh was grinning like a zip. ‘And there’s more coming. Hundreds. Betcha.’

  ‘That’s . . .’ Ryan blinked as two annoyed-looking men pushed past, glaring around them, one holding a nearly empty beer bottle. ‘Yes, that’s really good. How . . . where did they come from?’

  ‘Ebstowe football stadium.’ Josh stretched. ‘I was going to try to do something to stop the game but I thought, nah, even if I blow all the lights and set off the fire alarms that’ll just hold things up. But then I remembered the Shuttlecock. It’s the pub up by the stadium, where all the locals go after the game. Last night I went and leaned up against the windows and did all the lights and fridges. Broke ’em all. And I made some posters on Mr Lattimer-Stone’s printer, with ads for the fair and saying it’s got a cheap beer tent, and stuck ’em up near the pub. So all the locals’ll come straight out of the game and over here looking for cheap beer, and they’ll look for it in there because it’s the only tent. Makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ said Ryan with feelings of deep unease. ‘That . . . kind of . . . makes . . . sense . . .’

  By the time they got back to the blue tent, there was standing room only. A lot of men were pushing through the crowd this way and that and calling loudly to one another.

  By pushing along the tent wall he found his father, who was stooping slightly with the canvas pressed against his head. Chelle was sheltering behind him. Ryan’s father did not look happy and seemed to be craning to gauge the crowd.

  ‘Ryan,’ he said with quiet seriousness, ‘if things get too crowded here and we need to leave, we’re going to duck under the tent canvas here, instead of using the main entrance, all right?’ The canvas walls did not quite reach the ground, and Ryan could see sunlit tarmac through the gap.

  A blue spotlight appeared on the stage, juddered and adjusted itself slightly to the left. From somewhere above, a square frame was lowered. It had been painted to look like a night window. A woman with a white doll face, tiny pursed red mouth and round pink cheeks ran on to the stage on tiptoe, then settled down on the boards, her hands pillowing her head to show that she was sleeping.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ryan’s father had noticed Chelle with both hands forced over her mouth, making little sounds as if she was about to throw up. ‘Is it your asthma?’ He could not know that she was stopping herself speaking someone else’s thoughts. The canvas of the tent twanged slightly, and when Ryan looked down he saw his father holding its fabric up so that Chelle could crawl out into the daylight.

  The lights dimmed further, and then the shining figure of a man seemed to leap through the window with magical grace, his boots hitting the stage with a slightly less magical thud.

  The doll-faced woman woke and raised her hands either side of her face in a gesture of surprise and alarm. The figure in gold approached her and, plucking a rose from the air, offered it to her. With his other hand he reached into space and produced a gleaming goblet.

  ‘Mine’s a pint!’ shouted somebody in the crowd. There was a roar of laughter, which made Ryan realize how many grown men there were in the tent.

  The spotlight grew brighter, and the laughter became louder as the features of the Harlequin were more clearly illuminated. He was doing a good job of keeping a straight face despite sweating heavily in his pleated gold costume.

  ‘Look at him!’ shouted someone else from the audience. ‘He’s old enough to be her father!’ After this, everybody decided that they were allowed to shout at the stage. When a parade of ‘Harlequin’s helpers’ capered in from the wings, all in gold pantaloons and skirts, the laughter became deafening.

  Something was happening over at the entrance, something that involved a lot of shouting.

  The doll-faced woman was staring out across the audience with a spangled handkerchief in her hand, as if deciding whether to run. Harlequin, however, was keeping to the tinny cues of the music. She let him take her hand and patiently guide her through the steps of the dance, but her head kept looking towards the audience.

  There was a thud, and Ryan knew that somebody had hit somebody. It didn’t make a satisfying pock! noise like in films, but it had the sound of something real that would hurt. The crowd swayed and surged, losing any interest it had had in Harlequin’s antics.

  ‘Now,’ Ryan’s father said quietly, stooping to lift the canvas, but it was not needed. With a faint musical sound the guy ropes were giving, and the canvas flapped loose to reveal a gash of sky. Only then did they realize that the chaos was not limited to the tent. The doll-faced girl shrieked and ran as dozens of hands grabbed at the tent canvas and pulled it loose, leaving the Harlequin and his helpers open to the sky.

  The visiting crowd had become an invading army. There was a loud smashing sound erupting from the grubby, spotted mirrors in the crazy house. A pelting match had broken out between groups of the marauders, with one team using plastic ducks as missiles, and the other, plush dolphins.

  Harlequin’s helpers scattered, shrieking hysterically. Only the Harlequin stood alone, staring about him at the carnage with a strange serenity. Perhaps he’s in shock, thought Ryan. Ryan’s father had pulled Ryan, Josh and Chelle to relative safety behind a tumbled ice-cream cart. Chelle’s mouth was still full of fist, and Josh’s wide eyes held a fierce, wild light, but Ryan’s father did not notice. He was staring at the Harlequin with unsuppressed fascination.

  As the cap of the helter-skelter broke off and crashed to earth, accompanied by a roar of triumph and screams of dismay, Harlequin looked about him with burning eyes. He raised both palms to his face and, as little plumes of blue smoke issued from jets hidden in his gloves, he blew them like a kiss towards the death of the fairground and smiled. Ryan’s hand-eyes flicked open just in time to see a single ghost snake tethered to the clown’s heart raise itself as if in salute, and then fade.

  17

  A Storm and a Sanctuary

  The day after the fair, Ryan’s father read them his latest column.

  ‘This week I have been a martyr to my family,’ it began. ‘On Monday my wife compelled me to attend the opening performance of The Coldrake Legacy featuring Saul Paladine. On Wednesday I submitted to the entreaties of my small son and visited the theatricals of the Ebstowe fairground.

  ‘The two performances gave me some interesting opportunities for comparison. Ebstowe’s “mime, music and magic” extravaganza ended some half an hour before the advertised time, for reasons I will explain shortly. The Coldrake Legacy, on the other hand, started a full hour later than scheduled. It seems the air-conditioning in the theatre had been producing a curious smell, undetectable to anyone but the celebrated Saul Paladine, who refused to perform until he was sure that there were no fumes that might tickle his throat and endanger his famous voice. This sensitivity is no doubt a great burden to Mr Paladine and should not be mocked, but nonetheless I intend to do so at some length . . .’

  Ryan’s father went on to describe the anarchy at the fair in a very funny way. He had gone to the trouble of finding out the name of the mime artist, and described the way in which he had gone on with his performance even as the fair was destroyed around him.

  ‘And so,’ the article ended, ‘I believe that Saul Paladine has a great deal to learn from Jacob Karlborough. The determination to maintain one’s art in the face of overpowering odds seems to have died in the West End theatres, but it is good to find it alive and well amid the dingy spangles of our seaside resorts.’

  Ryan was silently outraged. ‘Small son’ made him sound like a five-year-old, and ‘entreaties’, as if he had been bursting into tears and clinging to his father’s leg. Ryan’s mother was loudly outraged. She said that ‘compelled’ made her sound like a ‘domineering harpy’ and if the article was published there would be trouble. The article was published. T
here was trouble.

  The resulting squabble simmered through breakfast and throughout the family’s shopping trip. Outside the supermarket, it erupted into a blistering all-out row, hands clenched around the handles of carrier bags.

  ‘Well, God forbid that my feelings should stand in the way of a turn of phrase!’ Ryan’s mother was screaming. Her features were almost unrecognizable.

  Ryan’s father’s mouth barely moved. His sentences were curt and short, and his face bore a wild look of concentration as if it was taking all his effort to keep them that way.

  Some ten yards away, Ryan stood there stupidly holding a carrier bag full of canned sweetcorn while he watched the continents of his world collide and the stars fall out of the sky. Almost involuntarily he started counting through the Fibonacci sequence in his head to keep himself sane. One, two, three, five, eight . . . Today the numbers failed him. The way they built up only seemed an echo of what was happening before him, where every bitter sentence added to the last to make something bigger and worse.

  On the far side of the car park he noticed Mr and Mrs Lattimer-Stone watching from inside their estate and muttering mask-faced to one another. He felt worse than naked in front of them, as if something had torn out his middle and left him a ridiculous doughnut boy that everyone could look right through. As their car pulled away he wondered if they felt sorry for him, and then hated himself for even caring.

  You’re supposed to be clever, said a goading voice in his head, with much the same note of bitterness and contempt Donna Leas had once used. If you’re so clever, do something about it. Say something. Make it better.

  He looked about himself for inspiration, but all he saw was a supermarket trolley drifting slowly towards the wire fence, in thrall to the pull of the slope. It looked as helpless as he felt. Then he felt a sensation like that of a raindrop sliding across his knuckles, and he saw all four of the trolley’s wheels swivel as one. It turned in time to avoid crashing into the wire, and began to glide towards him, against the slope of the tarmac.

  Oh no . . . not now . . . not here . . .

  Another trolley completed the same arc behind it. One trolley, two, three, five . . . Fibonacci trolleys.

  Ryan pulled out one of the sweetcorn cans and hefted it to shoulder height, but the muscles in his arm seemed to have gone slack. What was he hoping to do, scare them away like stray dogs? The trolleys juddered their plastic child seats with a wet paddling sound and jangled their chains. Ryan was reminded of a snake’s rattle. Feeling sick, he decided to come quietly.

  Ryan’s mother and father noticed nothing as their only son was taken into custody by a host of supermarket trolleys and herded to the far side of the car park.

  He was not surprised when the trolleys corralled him to the fountain in the corner of the car park. An artificial ‘waterfall’ spilled from an upper shelf into a lower pool, the glossy curtain of water broken only by two abstract metal figures. The larger, apparently a smiling mother, seemed to be holding her baby son up into the flow. Both had limbs that tapered to points.

  Somebody will see this, thought Ryan as the mother lowered her baby, tucked it under one arm and leaned forward to stare at him with the two oblique slashes she wore for eyes. A miserable shred of him wished somebody would see it, and that they’d storm over to bully the truth out of him and make the whole thing stop. But the world went on blind in sunlight, leaving Ryan staring into a noseless face bubbling with green water.

  ‘Hhhwwehhlllumh pfhawrrrrthh . . .’ It was worse than he remembered it.

  The water that chuckled into the shallow basin had lights in it that almost made pictures. Taking a deep breath, Ryan held out both fists in front of him. He closed his eyes and . . . opened his eyes.

  With his strange new vision he saw a gleam of a stream with a low bridge over it and a bank trailing honeysuckle into the water. It might have been a picture from a calendar, and it was utterly unfamiliar to him.

  ‘Wwehllmp hffaawwwwwdthhh . . .’

  Just stop, Ryan begged silently, as a dusting of tiny drops settled against his cheeks. All she wanted was an agreement to whatever she had said, and she would stop. He nodded, feeling as if his muscles were spaghetti. Just stop.

  ‘Ryan!’

  His mother’s voice. Ryan opened his normal eyes, heart pounding. The metal mother and child had returned to their innocent, playful pose. He slumped. There were little stars of water on his spectacle lenses.

  ‘Ryan.’ His mother took him by the shoulder. ‘Why did you slip off like that? It doesn’t help to have you running off and sulking right now.’

  He looked up at her in mute misery. She frowned back, and apparently saw something which stopped her being angry with him. Instead it seemed to make her more angry with his father when they walked back to join him, but Ryan felt too weak to care about that.

  A frost settled on the house when they got home. Ryan did not want to talk to anybody. When Josh phoned to invite him to a cafe down the road, he said yes, without asking his parents first.

  ‘Great, I’ll get a car round to you stat.’ Josh was hissing with laughter. ‘You’ll see what I mean in a mo.’ Nowadays there was only a thin rustle of static when Josh called, another sign of him getting his ‘powers’ under control.

  Ryan went up to the landing where the opera music from his father’s room tangled and clashed with the Brahms from his mother’s room, then changed his mind. He went back downstairs and left them a note on the kitchen table.

  A horn sounded outside the front door, and Ryan opened it to find a small green Renault parked outside. Chelle waved through a back window. Josh got out of the passenger door, and Ryan could see that Donna Leas was in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Jump in,’ called Josh, and Ryan climbed into the back next to Chelle, biting back his questions.

  It was a short drive, one that they could have walked easily. The back of Donna’s neck was red above her sleeveless summer top, and as she drove she kept jerking the steering wheel this way and that.

  ‘Stop just here,’ Josh said loftily. ‘Wait for us; we’ll be an hour or so.’ He was clearly enjoying himself.

  As they got out of the car, Ryan peered back at Donna’s set face. How had Josh managed to tame the library witch? Was this some new power that they had not discovered before?

  ‘I’m buying the drinks,’ Josh said when he got inside. ‘And I feel like chips. We’re all having chips. So, Ryan – ’ he nudged him – ‘what d’you think of my new chauffeur?’

  ‘She drives a bit like she’d like to crush your side of the car,’ was all Ryan could think of to say.

  ‘It’s cool, isn’t it? All today I’ve been like, oh, Donna, I need a lift to the cafe, or, Donna, go buy me some cigarettes, will you? And she has to. It’s great.’

  ‘Why? Why does she have to?’

  ‘Cos she’s scared stiff of Punzell finding out she’s not psychic. She doesn’t know how we did the Chelle reading her mind thing, and she doesn’t know why machines keep going weird, but she knows it’s us. It’s obvious. And we had this massive row yesterday – I told her if she wanted the bulbs to keep popping when she was in the room, and didn’t want me to tell Punzell everything, then things had to be a bit different, that’s all.’

  Chelle tittered slightly. Josh grinned.

  ‘Aw, look, Chelle, Ryan’s trying not to smile but he can’t help it, can he? Oh, c’mon, Ryan, you remember what she was like at school, right? Just cos they gave her power over us. Well, now we’ve got power over her – it’s payback, that’s all. Justice.’ Josh glanced at Ryan, then abruptly lost patience and pushed back in his chair so the feet rocked. Behind him the radio spat static for a second. ‘What are you looking so sick about? You like messing about with bus stops and not having money to buy things, do you?’

  ‘No.’ Ryan felt too weak to think of the right thing to say. ‘Yeah. Whatever. I mean . . .’ He roused himself. ‘I mean, yeah, you’re right, Josh. Sorry. I’m just a bit . . . th
ings happened this morning.’ He told them about the car-park fountain. He said nothing about his parents’ argument.

  ‘That’s great!’ Josh banged the edge of the table with his spoon, as if he was knocking his words like nails into the wood. ‘We got another lead. Nice one.’

  ‘Did we really finish the Harlequin’s wish?’ Ryan looked at Chelle, who nodded vigorously.

  ‘Oh yes, he’s all done. I was in his thoughts and then when the top came off the helter-skelter he was full of ooh, and happiness, and then it all sort of went pop! and I wasn’t in there any more . . .’

  ‘I think I saw the wish being granted.’ Ryan frowned. ‘This ghostly snake thing was rippling out of the Harlequin’s chest and it suddenly melted into air – the same as happened with Will at the bike rally. I think the snake-thing was the wish, and it vanished because it was granted. But . . . at the rally when I looked around everybody had the same kind of snakes . . .’

  ‘Well, everybody wants something, don’t they?’ answered Josh. ‘Even people that don’t drop coins down wells.’

  ‘But then . . . why didn’t I see them before?’ Ryan cast his mind back to the dinner party, when his hand-eyes had been open full-stretch. Now that he thought about it, had there been a nebulous shifting in the darkness, an almost imperceptible writhing of the shadows?

  ‘Practice.’ Josh grinned. ‘You’re learning to see more, Ryan.’

  ‘I wish we’d known what the Harlequin’s wish really was from the start,’ Chelle murmured. ‘I mean, I knew he hated everybody at the fairground, but I thought all the time that he just wanted to be famous in a West End production and show them and really, really he—’

  ‘He wanted to show them.’ Josh grinned behind his beetle glasses. His spoon had started tapping out the beat to the song on the cafe’s stereo. Ryan recognized it as ‘Avenging Angels’ by Space. ‘Well, they got showed, all right.’

  ‘But it’s not really our fault, is it, Josh, we didn’t mean to break the fair, it doesn’t count, and we wouldn’t have done his wish if we’d known that really he was wishing for the fairground to be trampled into little pieces . . .’