“Still breathing,” said Alex, dropping to her side, “but I don’t know. . . .”
“We have to get to that machine!” Darwen said. “The signal is still in her head. In all of their heads.”
“It’s too heavily guarded,” said Rich. “There were half a dozen scrobblers and a couple of gnashers up there when they caught me. They have strict orders from Greyling. No kind of diversion will move them.”
“Then we need to interfere with what it’s doing,” said Darwen.
“Why?” said Chip.
Darwen turned. He had forgotten the other boy was still there. Chip still looked cocky, as if he was relishing the situation, but there was a caution in his face that he couldn’t hide.
“Because this is what Greyling does,” Alex shot back at him. “He captures. He steals what people value most and he kills. You of all people should know that.”
Chip was still smirking, but his eyes were wary.
“What does she mean?” asked Nathan. “Why you of all people?”
“Talking nonsense,” said Chip, his eyes on Alex. “Just the usual O’Connor crap.”
“You saw it!” she exclaimed. “Back in Costa Rica. You know what he does. What he’s doing right now!”
“Doesn’t seem so bad,” said Chip, picking up the length of pipe the scrobbler-Honoria had dropped.
Rich was talking to himself. “The machine works on adults, but not kids, or not as well at least,” he reasoned. “And it works faster on some adults than others. Why? It has to be about who they are as people, what they want, how they see themselves. And if so, then it’s not just about electricity or other kinds of power. It’s not just wires and machinery. It’s about thought: theirs and—”
“Greyling’s,” Darwen completed for him.
“Right,” said Rich. “So if we can disrupt Greyling’s thoughts, we might be able to break the machine or at least slow it down.”
“That’s on me,” said Darwen, hauling himself to his feet and picking up Honoria’s helmet.
“Looks like your little ferret friend is about to get fried, by the way,” Chip remarked.
Darwen glanced back into the quadrangle, aware that the noise of battle had suddenly stopped. He caught a flash of fur as Weazen ran from one shattered rock to another. He was clearly out of ammunition and the scrobblers were closing in.
But before Darwen could see what happened next, Nathan blundered into his line of sight, pointing horrified into the mass of silent specters. “Chip!” he exclaimed. “That’s you!”
He was right. Gliding toward them through the throng of ghosts was one more solid than the others, one that was recognizable, but twisted with malice so that the face had almost ceased to be human. It was, in fact, the face of something more than half a scrobbler, a face Darwen had seen before.
“What is that?” said Chip in a low voice.
“It’s you!” Nathan repeated.
“It’s your echo from the shadow school,” said Darwen. “It’s stronger than the others because you have spent time in Silbrica. It’s like . . . a footprint, I guess, an impression that you made by being there.”
“An impression of me?” said Chip, staring at it.
“Your . . . true self,” said Darwen, struggling to find the words. “It’s as you appear on the other side.”
“It’s horrible,” Nathan gasped, his eyes still fixed on the dreadful apparition that was coming toward them, its mouth gaping in a dreadful parody of a scream.
“Why does it look like that?” said Chip, holding the metal pipe out in front of him as if warding the apparition off. “If that’s me, why is it so . . . ?”
He couldn’t find the word, and Darwen was astonished to see revulsion in his face.
“That’s what they think I am?” he said, and the sneer was gone now.
The apparition was getting closer, moving directly toward its counterpart from Hillside. It was cruel, vengeful, petty, destructive, a vessel of hatred.
“Chip!” Darwen shouted. “Don’t let it touch you!” He didn’t know why, but he was sure that would be bad.
But the scrobbler phantom leapt forward before Chip could move. For the briefest moment it was like they were wrestling, and then the two merged and the shadow turned around and its face was Chip’s own.
The wrestling continued, but now it was inside. The shadow fought with Chip and Darwen guessed that they’d know who won by what he did with the heavy length of pipe still gripped in one hand. His face contorted, rippled, then stabilized as it turned to Darwen, who shrank back against the stone.
For a moment, in spite of the confusion around them, there was stillness. At last the thing that had been Chip Whittley spoke.
“I,” Chip began, straining to find the words. “I am. Not. That. I won’t be.”
Darwen stared, not daring to believe it.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. Help us.”
Chip—if that’s who the glowing figure still was—just stood there, as if thinking, but then he put the scrobbler helmet down and turned away from it.
“I have to go,” said Darwen, not sure what had happened to the other boy or what he might do. “Now.”
Darwen ran back into the quadrangle, dodging scrobblers and gnashers till he was far enough forward to be able to look up into the face of Greyling that glowed sourly down from the shattered window. If only he could break Greyling’s concentration, disrupt the way his mind was channeling the power of his machines, maybe that would help. . . .
“You!” he shouted, waiting till the glassy eyes found him, holding the helmet in one hand, pointing squarely into the ratlike face with his other. “I know what you are.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
Talents
“I should say,” said Darwen, “I know what you were.”
The face flickered, and for a moment several different expressions were all visible—confusion, unease, curiosity—and then the image resolved again into its original bland expression, the hard eyes peering down the long, rodent nose.
“This is an unusually futile gesture, even for you, Darwen,” said the face. “What do you believe you have learned that could possibly make a difference to what I am already achieving?”
“You know,” said Darwen.
The face flickered again, and this time there was doubt in the eyes before the smooth mask slid back into place.
“Indeed?” said the face.
“You,” said Darwen, very carefully, “were a mirroculist.”
The ripples through the face lasted much longer this time. In them was wild, shrieking anger and a terrible anguish, though both slid back into fury and hysterical laughter. The laughter of insanity.
“I know what happened to you when you lost the gift,” said Darwen. “I know why you are here and what you are trying to do to replace it.”
“And you fear you will become me when your own gift leaves you,” said Greyling.
“No,” said Darwen. “I would miss it. But I would never kill and destroy to get it back. I’m stronger than that.”
“Stronger than me?” sneered Greyling. “You have seen my power, the forces I can command. You are just a child who can open a few doors.”
“I might be a kid,” said Darwen, “but I don’t need to command anybody. I have friends. We work together for each other and that makes us strong.”
“You think this sentimental nonsense will distract me,” said Greyling, amused. “It will not work. My mind is focused. I have an army poised to do my slightest whim and nothing you can muster will stand against them. You and your so-called friends have nothing—”
Greyling did not finish the sentence. Somewhere at the back, a confusion of noise had broken out. First came the earthshaking bellow of a terrapod, and Darwen’s heart sank. If Greyling had brought those monstrous turtle creatur
es with him, then fighting back looked pretty futile. But when he glanced back to see the thing with its scrobbler escort, he saw they were swatting at something: tiny green lights that hovered about them.
Moth had come after all!
“Dellfeys?” scoffed Greyling, unimpressed. “That is all you could manage?”
But it wasn’t. If Moth and her dellfeys were no more than an irritant to the scrobblers, the zingers that had begun swooping from above dropping their perfume bombs, the snorkies with their sabers, and the pouncels, which were suddenly leaping from the window arches and the rocky ledges, were rather more of a problem.
“They came!” Darwen gasped. “We called, and they came!”
Scrobbler weapons were being discharged in showers of sparks and belches of smoke, and the terrapod roared so the ground trembled, but then an entire wing of the quadrangle caved in, and through what had been the rock of the wall itself came a massive white shape with tusks of glass and trunks that shot blue fire. Two of the great white mammoths and their riders blundered into the quadrangle and even the terrapods shrank from them in terror. Greyling’s scrobblers were falling back, firing defensively, and the gnashers were running wild.
The face of Greyling was shifting at great speed now, flicking through the snapshots of its uncontrollable sadness and rage, and as it did so, Darwen could sense a shift in the air around him. The scrobblers were slowing, and Mr. Iverson, who had been standing motionless, as if entranced, tore the helmet from his head and looked around bleary-eyed. Mrs. Frumpelstein had hers off too. And Miss Harvey. Even Mr. Sumners was slowly, uncertainly sliding his off.
Good people, after all, thought Darwen. Whatever Greyling had forced into their heads, whatever he had offered them, they had resisted.
“No!” yelled the face of Greyling. The flitting images slowed, stabilized, as the blank look of unconcern was forced back into place. “None of this matters,” said the face. “It will not stop me.”
But that momentary break in the signal had made a difference. Darwen could tell. There was a new hesitancy to those the machine had converted. The scrobbler that had been Simon Agu’s father relaxed his grip on his son and slowly released him.
“A momentary delay,” snarled the face of Greyling. “For which you and your friends will pay dearly.” The face tightened into focus again, but it was dwindling now, and as it shrank, it became more real. And it wasn’t just a face. It was a man up there on the platform framed by the shattered window. This was no apparition. Greyling himself was standing before them, trying to hold his victory together.
Darwen had seen him in other forms—the silvery figure at Halloween, the clown manikin in Costa Rica—but he had never laid eyes on the real Greyling before. He was a thin-faced youngish man with overlong hair and hunted eyes, but he also looked unexpectedly average, a conjurer stripped of his costume and magic tricks.
The barely audible drone of the conversion machine swelled again, but there was something else, a sudden and curious silence behind him. Though Darwen dreaded taking his eyes off Greyling, he had to see. He turned.
The hesitant scrobblers were parting, cringing away, and through them flowed a sea of ghosts.
They were pouring in from the quadrangle corridor, slipping through the empty windows and streaming toward the clock tower. At their head was one who walked on the ground, who pushed his way past the dazed, uncertain scrobblers and mounted the stairs to the tower with a sense of grim purpose.
It was Chip Whittley. All trace of the scrobbler that had haunted the countenance of his Silbrican ghost form was gone, and Chip’s face glowed with a silvery light. At his heels were Alex and Rich, their faces bloodless in the pearly glow of the ghosts around them.
They moved directly toward the ragged hole where the stained glass window had been and, behind it, the stairs up to the clock mechanism.
Greyling hesitated, spreading his arms to block the column of specters, but baffled and unnerved by them. His eyes were desperate. “They cannot stop the machine!” he shouted. “They have no bodies, no force. They can do nothing.”
“They have will,” said Darwen. “Determination. Sometimes that is enough.”
Greyling stared with something like horror.
The thing that was and was not Chip Whittley stepped through the hole and up, but now the other specters were pouring on ahead and Greyling had shrunk away from them. Darwen could hear the frantic bellows of the scrobblers on the top of the tower, their weapons flashing harmlessly as the ghosts streamed through. The blasts tore part of the stone cladding away from the tower and suddenly Darwen could see the machine itself, a great crab-like mass of black iron squatting up there in the ruins of the clock face, its green lights blinking.
He saw it and watched as the figure he still thought of as Chip threw something open on the device so that a blinding blue flash tore out like a sheet of lightning. Chip screamed, but he held on, and suddenly the ghosts were flowing directly into the machine, their energy mixing with the signal it was producing, diluting it, changing it, blending it with their own essence.
“No!” roared Greyling.
There had been nothing to fear from the ghosts, Darwen realized. Not even, finally, from Chip.
The machine rocked and groaned, then emitted a pulse of amber light that coursed out across the remains of the school, halting every scrobbler in its tracks. It lasted only a second, but it was, Darwen knew, enough. The process had been reversed.
Principal Thompson blundered across the stage and leaned on the lever till it thunked home. For a moment everything seemed to swim, and then the shadow school was fading out, leaving the scarred wreckage of Hillside behind. The gnashers and scrobblers, and all their equipment, everything that had come from the other side, all winked out in a blink of light. The ghostly phantoms that had haunted the shadow school had all gone into the machine. The parents and teachers who had been subject to the conversion process now stood befuddled, but fully human.
“No!” shouted Greyling again, and now he was small and pathetic-looking in his furious disappointment, no more than a thin ordinary man staring into the face of his own failure. He snatched up a fallen blaster and aimed it squarely at Darwen. “You have disrupted my plans for the last time,” he said.
He squeezed the trigger.
Darwen closed his eyes and winced at the explosion of sound, feeling dust and grit hit him in the face. But then he heard screaming that was not his own, and he opened his eyes.
In front of him, having burst from the very earth itself, was a colossal crimson serpent, which loomed over Greyling as if suspended from high in the air. Part of its throat was smoking from Greyling’s shot, but it would take more than a weapon such as that to bring down so powerful a creature. Greyling resighted his blaster on the snake, but it was far too quick for him. With one lunge, the man—if man Greyling still was—was snatched screaming into the monster’s dreadful jaws and was gone.
There was a sudden and total silence. The great snake turned to consider Darwen, and Darwen felt the word Rich had used blossom in his mind: Space.
The great snake just hung there and Darwen felt its thoughts like music that raged like an ocean or a brushfire, but overlaid with rich and complex harmonies that filled his mind with joy almost like the perfume of the zingers.
We won, thought Darwen, considering the great crimson serpent that loomed over everything, still and watchful. We won.
But at a cost. He knew it before he saw Rich and Alex climb down, before he saw their stunned faces, before he could get close to the body they carried between them, assisted by a dazed-looking Mr. Iverson. The person they were cradling so carefully, the person who had, when it finally counted, sacrificed himself to save the others, was Chip Whittley.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Sacrifice
Darwen stared at the boy’s body, his eyes burning. Chip had given
himself to the machine, to save the others and to prove to himself that he was not what the shadow school thought him to be. Darwen blundered over to them but could think of nothing to do or say. They laid the body on the stage and just stood there, staring. It was a moment before Darwen realized that Mr. Iverson had brought Chip’s parents forward.
What happened next was the strangest and most terrible thing yet. Mr. and Mrs. Whittley were both tall and elegant, his father wearing a crisp business suit, his mother in a gold summer dress, though both sets of clothes had been torn by the conversion process. Chip’s father studied the arms of his ravaged suit, his face baffled and indignant. When his eyes fell on Chip’s body, his expression did not change, and he glanced around with the same affronted confusion.
“He doesn’t recognize him,” Alex whispered, her tears running freely.
“He will,” said Rich.
And he did. The effect of the conversion gradually fell away from him, but his bewilderment seemed to deepen as his hauteur melted. Darwen could see it in his face: This boy? Who is this boy?
And then, without warning, his wife began to scream. She fell on the body, hugging it to her, and finally he knew.
“Chip?” he whispered. “Chipper?”
Grief broke over him. Broke him. Husband and wife clung desperately to each other and nothing Mr. Iverson could say would calm or satisfy them. At last, Chip’s father turned his face up to the sky and howled. There was no other word for it. It was an appalling sound, raw and bitter and pained, as if he had been torn open and they were seeing—hearing—the very heart of the man, all his achievements, his wealth, his power stripped away.
And then something happened, something stranger than anything Darwen had experienced in all his time in Silbrica. That Which Eats lowered its serpentine head to where the boy’s body lay and then, with sudden and incalculable speed, threw its coils around him.
“What is going on?” someone demanded, but Rich stepped forcefully through the crowd.
Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows Page 31
