Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows

by A. J. Hartley

  “Do we have any alternatives?” asked Eileen, her eyes fixed on the swelling tide of ghost figures coalescing at the foot of the stairs.

  Among them was a small, lithe figure, which fired two more quick shots through one of the windows, forcing a heavily armed scrobbler to duck back before it came bounding up the stairs. For all his dread at what was happening, Darwen sighed with relief.

  “That’s Weazen,” said Rich to Eileen. “He’s on our side.”

  Eileen just nodded and when Weazen saw her, he returned the nod, more formally. For all the panic and fear, Darwen was almost sure that the emotion in Eileen’s face was something quite different, something more like a momentary but acute sadness. It was there in her eyes as she looked at Weazen, and then—as suddenly as it had come—it was gone.

  “I suggest you use that gate,” said Weazen. “Or we’re all, you know, dead.”

  “Good point,” said Rich, taking one last pained look at the spinning hand on his watch. He pulled a lever and the portal arch filled with blue flickering light.

  “Can anyone use this, or just mirroculists?” asked Eileen.

  “Better be on the safe side,” said Rich. “You come through with me. You two bring Weazen.”

  So saying, he took Eileen’s hand and stepped into the portal. There was a flash, and they were gone. Alex went next. Darwen looked at Weazen, then stooped, and the little creature leapt onto his shoulder, firing his blaster at the gnasher that was pulling its blind way up the stairs.

  Together they stepped through.

  That they had escaped should have been an immense relief. But Darwen instantly knew that he was now in trouble of an altogether different kind.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ordinary Disasters and Terrible Possibilities

  It was daylight, and after the darkness of Silbrica, the bright, hard sunlight made Darwen wince. It also revealed the full horror of his situation. Alex was quite still, staring down, speechless. Rich was still holding Eileen’s hand, and both were equally frozen. They were standing on the platform built around the school clock tower for the workers installing the new stained glass window, and the entire school—newly released from morning assembly—was flattening its collective face to the windows of the quadrangle and staring up at them. The principal was leading a gaggle of other teachers, including Miss Harvey, Mr. Stuggs—the barrel-shaped PE teacher—Mr. Sumners, and a baffled-looking Mr. Iverson—the science teacher who Rich especially liked—marching across the grass to the foot of the scaffold.

  Time had indeed moved faster than usual.

  “Oh,” said Alex, finally finding her voice. “This is going to be bad.”

  It was.

  They had been out all night, which would have been enough to get them in serious trouble. But, to make matters worse, they’d also been found trespassing in an “out-of-bounds” portion of the school, apparently vandalizing the new window installation while—according to Mr. Stuggs—trying to smuggle a raccoon into the tower as some kind of “sick practical joke.” Darwen was just relieved that Weazen did his best to look like a harmless animal they had trapped in the grounds, instead of speaking in his own defense.

  Darwen pocketed Weazon’s blaster, being very careful to power it down before anyone noticed, though he couldn’t get the creature’s leather backpack off him. Eileen’s blaster was too large to conceal, so she just dangled it from its strap, trying to make it look like it was unworthy of attention. Somehow, Darwen didn’t think that was going to work.

  The three students and Eileen—who no one knew quite what to do with—were marched to Principal Thompson’s office, where they waited for their families to arrive. Darwen’s first thought was that this would mean dragging his aunt from some crucial boardroom meeting, but when she reached the school in under ten minutes, he realized that she had not gone into work at all, which was considerably worse. When she came in, she looked both haggard and hard, her mouth the thinnest of lines, her eyes bloodshot from crying but now bright and hard as diamonds.

  The first thing she did on walking into the principal’s office was to shoot Eileen the most brittle of looks and say, in a voice that was leaden with a calm that clearly took immense effort: “You’re fired. After this meeting, I don’t want to see you again, and if I hear you’ve been near Darwen, I’m calling the police.”

  Eileen looked stunned, but she just inclined her head fractionally, and though Darwen thought she spoke, he couldn’t catch the words.

  “What is that thing?” demanded Mr. Stuggs, peering at Eileen’s blaster.

  “Paintball,” said Rich.

  “Laser tag,” said Darwen.

  “Nerf gun,” said Alex, all at the same time.

  Eileen just shrugged, looking ashamed, and said, “Just a toy,” in a voice so small Darwen could barely hear it.

  “Get the foreman to inspect the window,” said the principal. “I want to know how much damage has been done and how much it’s going to cost to fix it.”

  The first part of this sentence was directed at Mr. Stuggs, who lumbered off, smirking, but the latter part was given to the students’ families. Rich’s dad was looking uncomfortable in a hastily tied tie of bright green, while Alex’s mom—despite an initial bout of relieved hugging when she saw her daughter was alive and well—had become frostily silent, something the principal’s talk of money did nothing to thaw.

  “And call animal control!” he called after Mr. Stuggs. “I want this creature out of my office. And why does it have a backpack? Is this supposed to be funny, Arkwright?”

  Weazen looked into Darwen’s face and blinked. Rich was trying not to stare at the Peace Hunter, but his concern was obvious. Even without the backpack, no one from animal control would think Weazen was a raccoon, and if there was one thing they didn’t need right now, it was more awkward questions.

  They had already been subject to a battery of them—mostly on the lines of where they had been all night and what they’d been thinking—and had not been able to say anything. They’d had no time to rehearse a story, so they improvised something badly between them. Rich said they had stayed in school last night to work on their talent show acts, though he couldn’t explain why it had taken so long or why they hadn’t thought to alert their families. Eileen added that she had come to pick them up but had had a problem with her car and couldn’t drive home. She hadn’t been able to call anyone because her phone was dead, she said, at which point it rang, and she had had to make up some nonsense of how it must have recharged overnight.

  All told, it was a train wreck.

  The students hung their heads as they were berated for recklessness, selfishness, and “behavior unbecoming Hillside students” while their families stood stoically by, barely containing their anger and embarrassment. The only upside was the report, brought by a slightly disappointed Mr. Stuggs, that the tower window showed no obvious signs of damage. Even that was tempered when, after a phone call from the office downstairs that animal control had arrived, Weazen promptly bit Darwen on the finger.

  Darwen yelped and dropped him. For a moment all the adults shrank back as Weazen chose his route to the door and bolted. Mr. Stuggs shot Darwen a furious look and wobbled out, though there was no way he was going to catch the lithe little creature.

  Darwen was sent to the nurse, who said that the cut on his finger was not bad but should be treated as if the “raccoon” was rabid. The wound was washed thoroughly, and despite Darwen’s protestations that he was sure the animal was uninfected (“And how would you know that?” demanded the nurse), he was then given a painful vaccination right into his injured finger. Throughout this, Darwen was very careful not to show the nurse that he was carrying a rather nastier cut to his thigh.

  When this was done, he was returned to the principal’s office, where everyone but Eileen—who had already been dismissed—was still waiting for him.


  “You have behaved extraordinarily poorly,” said the principal to the students. “You will leave the school premises immediately.”

  Rich gaped. “But morning classes are just starting!” he protested.

  “Not for you, Mr. Haggerty,” said the principal.

  “We’re being expelled?” Alex sputtered. “You can’t! That’s not fair!”

  “You are being suspended for the day,” said the principal. “You can come back tomorrow, when we will discuss your punishment further.”

  Alex opened her mouth to speak, but her mother’s glance at her was swift and murderous. For once, Alex said nothing.

  Darwen had just decided things couldn’t get any worse when something distinctly odd happened. It began with a sound, a distant hum that rose in pitch till it was a shrill whine that—had it been louder—would have been painful to listen to. In the same instant, the lights in Principal Thompson’s office flickered and dimmed, and Mr. Stuggs reentered, slamming the door shut with such a crash that everyone jumped. The PE teacher lowered his head and snarled, grimacing like a wolf, his teeth bared. Darwen took a step back, pressing into his aunt, but then he heard something like a growl from her as well, and turned to look into her face.

  It was still her, but the expression on her face was unlike anything Darwen had ever seen. Her eyes were hard and malicious, her lips trembling, teeth locked together like a pit bull about to pounce. He flinched away and she raised her right hand as if she was going to strike him, something she had never done before. Actually it was worse than that. Her fingers were slightly bent, her nails poised as if she was going to slash his face with them.

  And then the lights came back up and the moment, whatever it had been, passed. Honoria blinked and lowered her hand. Her face—though still angry—returned to normal, so that if Darwen hadn’t seen the alarm on Rich and Alex’s faces as well, he might have believed he had imagined the whole thing.

  • • •

  As they left the office a few minutes later, Darwen thought he heard Aunt Honoria murmur a thank-you to the principal, but the walk to the car—made in complete silence—had never seemed so long. The drive home was no better. Still, it took a while for Darwen to realize that while his aunt had been upset with him before, this was different. Usually she would read his failings as hers, turning in on herself and worrying about the kind of job she was doing as a parent. But though she had been upset by his disappearance, she was—this time—just plain angry, so angry, in fact, that she didn’t trust herself to speak to him.

  It was unnerving, and when they got home and she ordered him to bed immediately with the stern promise that they would talk about all this later, Darwen was actually relieved. He retreated to his room, shamefaced, and lay on the bed listening to her clatter around the apartment before making a series of irritated phone calls to work. She should really have been in the office, but since she had just fired his babysitter, she was stuck at home, and that wasn’t going to improve her mood.

  Darwen felt more lonely and homesick than he had in months. He wished he could talk to Mr. Peregrine, or that he could hang out with his friends with no thoughts of what lay on the other side of the mirrors. Most of all, and for the first time in a long while, he wished he had never left England, that he still lived in his little Lancashire house with his parents, and that the last year had simply never happened. He sat on his bed, trying to read or rooting disconsolately through his old things, but he couldn’t relax.

  At last, he turned on his computer and went online. Without really deciding to do so, and with a sense of nervous apprehension, he entered the date of his parents’ death into the search bars of various Lancashire newspapers. He had never done this before and didn’t really know why he was doing it now, but when the stories started to appear on the screen, he found that he could not look away. He found brief accounts of the car accident, how it had happened, and the terrible consequences, one of which was the bitter remark that “the Arkwrights left a ten-year-old boy, Darwen, who was in school at the time of the crash.”

  There were pictures too. Wreckage, mainly, and policemen moving bystanders out of the way. A woman with a shopping bag was staring from across the road, and there was a green Fiat parked close by, which had, perhaps, been driving right behind his parents when the accident occurred. Darwen tore his gaze from the twisted metal and more closely examined the faces in the pictures for some sign of the grief that seemed appropriate, but everyone just looked curious.

  He turned the computer off and lay on his bed, facedown, thinking of nothing, and eventually the exhaustion of the night caught up with him, and he fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed he was in the back of a car, driving along a dark road lined with buildings that looked like they were carved out of the living rock, but he couldn’t tell if people lived in them because he was watching the green Fiat behind. Darwen couldn’t see the driver, something that made him increasingly uneasy even as the car seemed to get faster and faster. . . .

  He awoke to find his aunt standing over him with a plate of sandwiches and a glass of juice. Her face looked troubled, but still hard, and she received his thanks without a word.

  “It wasn’t Eileen’s fault,” Darwen said as she was turning to leave. “She just did what we asked her to, then sort of got stuck.”

  “I don’t want to discuss her, Darwen,” said his aunt. “She is no longer a part of this family.”

  “Will you get another babysitter?” asked Darwen.

  “That depends,” said his aunt. “In the short term, probably, but in the long term . . . I don’t know. I need to think this all through.”

  Darwen heard the defeated frustration in her voice, and he felt a surge of panic. “But I’m staying with you, right?” he said. “I mean, that’s not going to change, is it?”

  She hesitated a fraction too long before saying, “No, that’s not going to change.”

  She left without another word and Darwen set his sandwiches down, his mind racing. She couldn’t seriously think about giving him up, could she? Because he got a one-day suspension from school?

  But it’s not just last night she’s upset about, is it? he reminded himself. She’s been worried about this ever since you came to her, that she wasn’t a good guardian, parent, or whatever. Every time she thinks you are making progress, you do something to smash it all up. She never wanted you here in the first place. She’s doing your dead parents a favor, and it’s screwing up her career, her life, in the process. But that’s not why she might look to hand you off to someone else. She’s not thinking about herself. She’s thinking about you, wondering if you might be better off in another home. . . .

  But where? Were there orphanages in Atlanta? He supposed there were, the idea settling in his stomach like a cold and cavernous space. Or maybe he’d go to foster parents or get adopted. Maybe they’d send him back to England and he’d have to start all over again, trying to make friends, knowing no one. . . .

  His pulse was starting to race as if he was being chased by scrobblers. If only he could explain to her that he wasn’t acting out because he was sad or disturbed. If only he could take her by the hand and lead her through the oven door and into Silbrica. Then everything would make sense to her and they would be okay again. Perhaps he could just explain without actually trying to make her believe it all. But that would be just the push she needed to convince her that he was delusional and in need of help she couldn’t give, the kind of home she could never provide. . . .

  The bedroom door opened again, and his aunt’s slim form appeared in the hall.

  “I have to go in to work for a couple of hours,” she said. “Can you be trusted to be left alone?”

  “Yes,” said Darwen. “Of course.”

  “There’s no of course about it, Darwen,” said his aunt, her face impassive. “No video games, no TV, no talking to your friends on the phone, no guests, and abso
lutely no leaving the apartment, you got me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Darwen, watching her carefully. The memory of the way she had raised her hand at school, the half snarl he had heard in her throat suddenly leaped to the front of his mind.

  Normally his slightly pathetic, apologetic tone would have brought an affectionate smile to her face, but not today.

  “See that you do,” she said, setting a sheaf of papers on the bed. “Homework,” she said, before turning and closing the door. He could hear her talking irritably on her cell phone even before the front door banged shut behind her.

  Darwen sighed and flopped back on the bed. The worst thing about it was that she was right. He was a screwup, and if she had known that he had been out all night trying to assemble allies and rescue Mr. Peregrine, then she’d know that he’d failed at those things too. He wasn’t even the only mirroculist anymore. In fact, what had looked like a unique gift actually seemed to rub off on anyone who spent any time in Silbrica. It was no wonder she was considering giving him up.

  He thought of the Peregrine Pact. Rich was clearly the brains of the outfit, though Alex had her brand of smarts too. But she also had nerve and creativity. And Darwen contributed what exactly? Even Eileen had turned out to be more crucial to Mr. Peregrine and his plans.

  He leafed through the homework assignments and groaned. This was going to take all afternoon.

  It did. He had barely put his books away when he heard his aunt return. She put her head around the door—clearly just to ensure he was still there and hadn’t set his bed on fire or something—and then ordered Chinese food for dinner. She didn’t ask him what he wanted.

  After dinner Darwen sat in the glow of his computer once more. He tried inputting portal numbers, references to the flesh suits and the laboratory where the conversion process was engineered, as if somewhere there might be some obscure conspiracy-theory site put together by people who’d had brushes with Silbrica, but there was—predictably—nothing. He went back to scanning newspaper accounts of his parents’ death and found different images of the crash site taken a little while after the wreckage had been removed. It was hard to believe that something so terrible could be cleaned up so quickly and completely. The people in the photos were going about their business as if nothing had happened.