The Color of Darkness

by Ruth Hatfield

  “Can you think of any way I could get those boots?” he asked again. “Now that you know that it’s possible.”

  “I cannot,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “Nor can I think that such a move would be without severe consequences.”

  And Danny knew he couldn’t embark on a quest against Sammael without knowing that Tom was safe. Not when Sammael had the promise of Tom’s sand firmly in his hands.

  Tom first, he decided. Get into Chromos, get Kalia, make the bargain with Sammael, and get Tom. Then stop Sammael, once and for all. Easy.

  “I have to get into Chromos,” he said. “I don’t suppose you know of any other way? Are there any more stories about it?”

  “There is only one other way of which I know,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “And that is to summon up the guide of Chromos and get on his back.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “I had a feeling you’d say that. Any idea how?”

  “Oh no.” The stag shook his antlers gently. “I don’t think any mortal creatures know that. I’ve certainly never heard of one.”

  “Oh, I have,” said Danny. “And we tried it. Trouble is, there was something in the way of the guide, and I couldn’t get near it.”

  “Something in the way?” Isbjin al-Orr looked at him, the black eyes keen and hard. “If you’ve managed to get that far, surely there can be only one thing getting in your way?”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You’re a human. You’re too scared.”

  Danny raised his palm to the sky. “I can’t help being scared!” he said. “How could I possibly help that?”

  “Well,” said Isbjin al-Orr. “You can’t help feeling scared, I suppose. But there are three basic responses to being scared, aren’t there? One is to flee and hide. The second is to stand the ground bravely, shaking but solid, refusing to be moved.”

  “And the third?”

  “The third?” The stag tossed up his head and stamped his hoof hard on the ground. “The third is to bring gladness into your heart and run toward whatever you fear, bellowing at the top of your voice. Perhaps that’s your way into Chromos, my friend. It seems as though you have no other options left.”

  “Run toward it?” said Danny. “But that’s stupid.”

  “Perhaps,” said Isbjin al-Orr, raising his nostrils to twitch at the breeze.

  Danny waited for the stag to finish the sentence, to agree with him, to nod and say that it was right to be cautious.

  But Isbjin al-Orr stood and sniffed at the wind, and took in all the scents of the faraway world that drifted through the air toward him.

  And his eyes shone with silver.

  CHAPTER 16

  DOWN TO EARTH

  As Cath fell out of Chromos, Zadoc’s legs hit the ground and crumpled, and his nose banged against a pile of bricks so that his whole body jerked in a spasm of surprise. Cath was thrown into a mess of wire. It snaked into the holes in her sweater and pulled at her as she sat up, seeing the last fragments of Zadoc’s hooves dissolve into the air as he leapt straight back into the place he belonged.

  Where was Barshin?

  The hare was close by, trying to find somewhere solid to put his feet in a mound of broken wood. Deftly avoiding rusty nails and splinters, he managed to balance on the end of a plank and stood trembling, the wood shuddering underneath him.

  Cath reached out a hand to steady the plank, sending nervous Barshin leaping into the air. “What was that? How did we get back?”

  “He pushed us into a gray patch. We fell out of Chromos.”

  Cath remembered Zadoc’s words, and panic leapt into her throat. “Did Zadoc die? He said he’d die if he went down one of those patches. He can’t die!”

  “Oh no.” Barshin settled himself uneasily back on the plank. “I think it was quite an old patch—the colors were slow. He’ll only have started to die. It will take him a while to finish.”

  A swell of sickness rose up Cath’s throat, and she tasted sour bile. It was just hunger, she told herself, and closed her eyes to make it go away. Barshin didn’t sound that sure, really. He was probably being dramatic. Zadoc would be fine.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw that they were in some kind of junkyard, piles of broken stuff all strangled with grass and rubbish. Away to the right there was a fence with barbed wire along the top. The fence was old and sagging, but the barbs were shiny and stretched taut between the posts.

  Then Cath knew where she was—the allotments behind the Sawtry, where the old coffin dodgers spent their lives shaking their fists at kids who got through the fences and waged war on their vegetables. Cath had stomped on a rotten old pumpkin here once—her foot had squelched into a pile of smelly mush that stank like ripe old fish guts.

  She shook herself off and got up, trying to put away the thoughts of Zadoc. “Can’t we—?”

  “Oi!” came a shout from behind her. “Oi! You! Ruddy kids! Just you wait…”

  Cath ran. There was a gap in the fence at the bottom corner where the plots were overgrown. She dodged around the edge of the rough scrub that passed for the gardens of the Sawtry and ran on, liking the way her legs lifted and her feet touched only lightly on the ground, as though she were flying, just touching the earth to remember that it was still there.

  “We’ve got to get back to Danny!” Barshin loped easily beside her, bouncing smoothly over the wasteland. “We’ve got to save Tom’s sand. You’ve seen for yourself now—Sammael’s evil!”

  Cath slowed as they reached the next fence and gave Barshin a shrewd look. “Ain’t I done enough? I gave Danny your message, didn’t I?”

  She crouched, lifted the wire mesh fence, and put her head down to scramble underneath it. It was an easy enough slither, although all the rain-damped dust had turned into a layer of fine sticky mud that smeared itself over her face, sweater, and jeans. She wiped some of it off her cheeks and stood up, watching Barshin wriggle elegantly through the gap she’d made.

  Barshin shook mud off his hind legs and gazed up at her.

  “Come on, teach me how you call Zadoc,” Cath said. “You said you would. I’ve gotta know how to get to that house.”

  Barshin sat back on his haunches. “I will,” he said. “But only once I’m sure that Tom’s sand is safe. And as for Zadoc dying—when he does, there will be another guardian to replace him, eventually. You will get to your house in another few years or so. I’ll come back and find you when I’ve seen to my duty. Good-bye.”

  He turned away and hopped along the fence line in the direction of the estate.

  Cath watched him for a frozen second. Another few years? When the Sawtry buildings came into her field of vision, she almost threw up at the sudden cold in her stomach, as though someone had filled her full of old rice pudding and then punched her.

  “Barshin!” She choked on the name and had to dig her fingernails into her palms to stop the ice spreading through her veins.

  The hare stopped, his back to her.

  “Teach me now!” she yelled. “You have to! You know I can’t go back home!”

  The hare hopped on, farther and farther away.

  “Stop!”

  The farther he went, the smaller he became, shrinking against the dark outline of the buildings. If he went into the complex, she’d have to go there and find him, and she’d never get into the Sawtry without being seen …

  “Stop!” Cath tried again, but she knew it was no use. Barshin had got his message to Danny; now he didn’t need her anymore. She was the one who had nowhere else to go.

  This time she didn’t bother to shout. She thought Barshin might hear her anyway, somehow.

  “Okay, I’ll do it. You win.”

  The hare turned and came bounding solemnly back. He settled close to her feet and looked up at her, putting his head back and laying his long ears down his neck.

  “This is it, okay?” Cath said. “I’ll try and help him once more and then that’s it. I like Chromos. This ain’t my war.”

  “Maybe not,�
�� said Barshin. “But perhaps it is your battle, whether you want to fight it or not. Come, we will ask the hares that live on the edge of town if they know where Danny might be.”

  He’s not right, thought Cath savagely as she followed him in the opposite direction. It’s not my battle. There’s only one battle for me—how can I make sure that one day soon I’ll wake up and know I never have to see the Sawtry again?

  And she felt the buildings behind her, bunched and ready to pounce, like a wolf watching a straying lamb.

  * * *

  It didn’t take too long to get up to the nature reserve, although Cath had never been that far out of town. Getting out of town seemed such a huge thing when you were in it; even getting off the Sawtry seemed impossible sometimes. But it turned out all you had to do was start walking and keep walking.

  The woodland was strangely tame, in a way that the railway cutting in the park wasn’t. The trees were tall and glossy, the forest floor covered in clumps of small shrubs around clearer patches of earth. Not many brambles, the only plant Cath knew by name. There were even signs up with maps and pictures of flowers and animals you might see there. Cath ignored them. Time enough to learn the names of things when she was living in her new house.

  She stamped after Barshin and heard a great, sudden rustling, followed by the thudding of hooves. Nothing like Zadoc’s hooves, though. Not even enough to make a single hope leap in her heart. These hooves were small and they raced away before she had time to see what they belonged to.

  Danny was leaning back against a tree. He looked up sharply at Cath’s arrival, and then swiftly at Barshin.

  “You got away, then?” said Cath.

  Danny nodded his head. “Your dad chased me for a bit. I lost him.”

  He seemed to be thinking very hard about something, turning it over in his brain. Cath wasn’t going to ask what.

  “I saw Sammael,” she said.

  Danny flinched, but he didn’t set his face into that expression of not wanting to know that he’d worn yesterday outside school.

  “You saw him?” he said. “Where is he?”

  “Chromos. I dunno where, though—we were going too fast. He don’t like you, does he?”

  Danny leaned his head back against the rough bark of the tree, his short brown hair messy with wind and bits of leaf. Underneath his flushed cheeks, his face was gray with tiredness.

  “What did he say, then?”

  “He told me about Chromos—how he uses it to put ideas in the world. He wants to keep doing it, so that the world gets to be more and more like Chromos and nothing is impossible. Imagine it…”

  Danny shook his head and shuddered. “That would be terrible,” he said. “Imagine if all the worst things that could happen came true.”

  “But it might be the best things,” said Cath. “Chromos is a weird place, yeah. But kind of great.”

  “So Sammael’s going to do something really great for us, is he?” said Danny. “Right. Don’t be an idiot. He’s going to open up Chromos so it covers the world, and it’s going to be chaos. Horrible chaos. We’ve got to stop him.”

  “Chicken,” said Cath. “You haven’t even seen it. You couldn’t even go there ’cause you were too scared of it.”

  “No,” said Danny. “I couldn’t go there because I’m normal. And you’re a freak.”

  Cath shoved him hard, and he fell over, sitting down heavily on the exposed tree roots. She turned and walked away. If she left him behind, sitting in the woods alone, then Sammael would do what he’d promised and Cath would be able to live in a world full of color and strange life, and she’d find that house between the mountains and the sea, and stay there, and not have to live and die on the dead, gray estate.

  “Why are you leaving him?” said Barshin, hopping after her, and for the first time since she’d been a tiny kid, Cath felt a scalding heat run up her nose into her eyes until something threatened to dampen the corners of them.

  “He’s a loser,” she said. “He’s a goody-goody, snotty-brained, pathetic little loser. I ain’t doing nothing with him no more. You showed me Chromos, didn’t you? What did you do that for?”

  “To help you escape,” said Barshin.

  “Yeah. And so now it turns out that it was great, the best place I’ve ever seen, and he wants to screw it all up just ’cause he doesn’t like it, and I’ll still be down here running away from my blimmin’ dad until I’m old and dead.”

  “He doesn’t want to ruin Chromos,” said Barshin. “He just wants to make sure it stays where it is, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” said Cath, shrugging. She blinked once and saw, straight ahead, a bank of clouds swallowing the trees, freezing the forest in a sucking mist. And then she blinked again and it was gone, the world normal again, white and green and brown, a few fragments of blue breaking up the sky overhead.

  If only she could keep going, leave them both far behind. But there was the question: where would she go?

  She looked down at her feet and turned, and kept turning until she was facing Danny O’Neill again. Then she walked back to him.

  * * *

  Danny told her what the stag had said, about the story of Phaeton and Sammael’s boots. Cath listened in silence, picking at threads on her frayed cuff.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked, wiping away more dirt from her face with the sleeve of her sweater.

  “I have to make sure Tom’s safe first,” Danny said. “You’re right—I should try and make a bargain for his sand. So I have to get Kalia. But apparently I can’t get into Chromos because I’m too scared.”

  “You reckon?” said Cath.

  “I don’t care.” Danny shrugged. “It’s normal. That’s what being brave is, isn’t it? Feeling scared and doing things anyway.”

  “Except getting into Chromos,” Cath pointed out.

  Danny looked at her, frowning as though he couldn’t quite work out how all the bits of her face fitted together. “Are you really not scared to go in there? Not at all?”

  “No,” said Cath. “Why would I be?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Because you’ve no idea what’s in there, or what it might do to you? Something like that?”

  Cath shook her head. “It’s fine. I know it is. It feels … brilliant. Like I can do anything. Like the whole world is mine.”

  Danny’s fists clenched against his legs, and for a second his face was still and sharp. “Let’s try again,” he said. “Tell me about it as we’re going in. Maybe if I listen to you, I’ll feel the same. I need to get there. That must count for something.”

  So Barshin gave his strange growling shriek and the air began to shimmer, although it wasn’t as strong as last time—closer to a harsh heat haze than a tremendous shaking of the air’s very particles—and Zadoc’s hooves began to appear. They had changed color, to a gluey purple, and his legs were now the browny-green of a stagnant pond. His eye was still bright with the thousand colors of Chromos and he still tossed his head, snorting. But Cath thought for a second that she caught a brief glimpse of the world through the other side of him, as if for a moment he had lost all his colors and become one with the forest.

  She ran to his side.

  “Come on!” she shouted to Danny. “Get on! We’ll go to my house!”

  “What’s it like?” Danny gasped, pushing himself up off the ground and approaching Zadoc. But his face was white and he was biting his lip.

  “Away from everywhere. Between the mountains and the sea…” But she stopped. She didn’t want to tell Danny where it was, even if it would help her in the end. Nobody should know except her and Barshin.

  It didn’t matter anyway. Danny’s arms were up and he was yelling something about dogs, and staggering backward, falling over a tree root, tumbling down onto his butt, kicking his legs out, fending off something she couldn’t see.

  She let go of Zadoc, and he vanished out of the air with a hissing snap. Barshin, who had come forward in readiness to throw himself
into her arms, dashed back to the safety of a bush and crouched under its fringes, peering out at the place where Cath now stood alone.

  “Stop it, idiot,” Cath said to Danny. “Everything’s gone.”

  Danny’s arms and legs stopped waving, and he brought them down to the ground and then sat up, looking around with suspicion. Eventually, when he had seen that only Cath, the hare, and the forest remained around him, he stood and brushed off his clothes.

  “I couldn’t hear you,” he said. “Kalia just went for me. She hates me too.”

  “Seems fair,” said Cath. “If you killed her and all.”

  “I’ll never get her,” said Danny. “She’s the actual thing stopping me from getting into Chromos. Going in and thinking her up, giving her to Sammael—it’s never going to work.”

  He stood, shoulders sagging, staring at the ground. The tips of his ears had gone red; Cath couldn’t see his face. She ground her teeth, wanting to kick him, then jumped as Barshin came leaping out from under the bush, scuttling to a stop at her feet.

  “He’s going to the farm! He’s going there soon!”

  “What? Who?”

  “Him. He’s going to see Tom! The hares that were watching the farm—they say he was there yesterday, and they’ve seen him again nearby. We have to go and stop Tom from talking to him! We have to go and try again! Now!”

  Cath told Danny, whose shoulders sank so low that she was sure his knuckles touched the ground for a second. He looked at her, his eyes rimmed with red, although he wasn’t quite crying. Yet.

  “It’s too late,” he said. “All of it. It’s too late.”

  “No it ain’t!” Cath saw her house in her mind’s eye, just beyond the fringes of this little woodland. It was out there, waiting for her. She knew it. All they had to do was save Tom.

  “What do you care, anyway?” said Danny. “You’ll be fine, whatever happens. You can just go home and wait for Sammael to rip Chromos open. You’ll have a great time when everyone else has gone insane.”

  “I ain’t got time to wait!” Cath snapped. “I. Can’t. Go. Back. Get it? I gotta get to Chromos before my dad catches up with me again. And Tom’s your cousin, ain’t he? You can’t just hang around with a face like a bulldog’s butt going on about how you can’t do nothing. You’ve gotta do anything you can! Come on!”