Praise for the
Darwen Arkwright
series
“Great storytelling draws you into the book just as surely as Darwen—a Lancashire lad caught in the USA—is drawn through the mirror!”
—JOSEPH DELANEY, author of The Last Apprentice
“Impressive feats of imagination. . . . Young readers will certainly agree with the author’s supposition that some teachers are simply inhuman.”
—BCCB
“Hartley is most effective in creating an air of menace . . . along with an on-target satire of a school overly enamored with standardized testing.”
—BOOKLIST
“A fantastic entry. . . . A. J. Hartley shows an uncanny, brilliant ability to shape the inner life of an unmoored child.”
—New York Times bestselling author ELOISA JAMES
“Jam-packed with action from the first to the last page. The characters are well drawn, the alternative world fully developed, and the situations deliciously scary. There hasn’t been such a ‘mirroculous’ adventure since Alice climbed through the looking glass to play chess with the Red Queen. Monsters, machines, and mayhem—this imaginative story has it all, making it an enticing selection for young readers who fell in love with The Golden Compass and The Chronicles of Narnia.”
—NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS
an Imprint of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
For Finie and Sebastian
Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1311, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2012 A. J. Hartley
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-101-59074-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
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Contents
Praise for the Darwen Arkwright series
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One: Taken
Chapter Two: The World Studies Teacher
Chapter Three: Christmas Presents
Chapter Four: The Great Apparatus
Chapter Five: Plans and Preparations
Chapter Six: Weazen
Chapter Seven: Under a Cloud
Chapter Eight: Cultural Ambassadors
Chapter Nine: Mr. Peregrine's Trip
Chapter Ten: Into the Wild
Chapter Eleven: Camping
Chapter Twelve: The Jungle
Chapter Thirteen: Claws
Chapter Fourteen: Scarlett Oppertune
Chapter Fifteen: The House in the Woods
Chapter Sixteen: Cano Island
Chapter Seventeen: The Blue Morpho
Chapter Eighteen: Demonio
Chapter Nineteen: Night Terrors
Chapter Twenty: In Trouble Again
Chapter Twenty-One: All That Glitters
Chapter Twenty-Two: Discoveries
Chapter Twenty-Three: Old Enemies
Chapter Twenty-Four: Lies
Chapter Twenty-Five: Cano's Secret
Chapter Twenty-Six: Marooned
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Terror in the Trees
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Insidious Bleck
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Taking the Initiative
Chapter Thirty: The Warehouse
Chapter Thirty-One: The Ugly Truth
Chapter Thirty-Two: Risky Moves
Chapter Thirty-Three: The World-Famous Laughing Man
Chapter Thirty-Four: Choices
Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex Makes an Entrance
Chapter Thirty-Six: Home
Acknowledgments
Darwen Sebastian Arkwright looked around, delighted by his first glimpse of Silbrica in weeks. He walked away from the portal, past a rainbow-colored waterfall—which strobed first turquoise, then emerald green, then a yellow as bright as liquid gold—and onto the overgrown track. He forced himself to look for signs of gnashers and listen for the roar of distant scrobbler engines, but he doubted either would be found here. It felt safe.
As Darwen pressed further into the forest, strange lemon-colored plants with stems like columns and slick, funnel-like tops grew close around him. A startled animal no larger than a field mouse but with a snout almost as long as its body and fur that was tiger-striped green and yellow like grass looked up from drinking at the funnel flowers, then slid effortlessly down the stalk and scurried off along the path. The track wound right, then left, then right again, so that even when he turned to look back the way he had come, Darwen could see nothing but a thicket of the bizarre vase-like plants shifting fractionally in the breeze. Above these towered trees with smooth black bark and blue fringed leaves as long as coffee tables, which reduced the world below to twilight. Somewhere in the distance he heard a bird or animal call—a strange, wild sound unlike anything he had ever heard before.
I should go back, he thought, knowing he wouldn’t, not after weeks without access to a mirror through which he could cross into Silbrica.
Following the greenish mouse creature, he took another few steps, and just as it looked like the track would peter out entirely, he saw something ahead: a gate made of crystalline rock, but not built from pieces fastened together or even carved. It looked like it had somehow grown out of the forest floor, eroded out of the surrounding rock by centuries of wind or rushing water. It had to be a portal to another part of Silbrica, what they called a locus. The gate was hung with twining vines, one of which held a bright white flower like an open hand, palm uppermost. Darwen peered at it and saw, just beneath, a button set into the sparkling stone. His hand reached, then hesitated.
Probably doesn’t work, he thought.
It looked disused and forgotten. The stone was beautiful, veined like marble but translucent as heavy, hand-blown glass. He could see his hand through it
when he reached below and—without really thinking about it—pushed the button once.
Nothing happened.
Darwen waited, but there was no sound, no rush of steam.
I knew it, he thought. Broken.
His sense of imminent adventure faded and the forest felt strangely dark and brooding. He turned and began cautiously retracing his steps, suddenly keen to get back into the open, alarming the tiny striped animal so that it scampered into the undergrowth and vanished. And then the plants ahead of him seemed to flicker. A yellowish light played softly over the strange leaves and his own coffee-colored skin.
Darwen turned.
The portal had come to life. It wasn’t the silvery light he had seen in other Silbrican portals, but a pale gold, amber at the center. Darwen ran an unsteady hand through the tight curl of his hair. The gate would only stay open for a moment. . . .
He ran toward it, leaping in without so much as a pause.
Everything happened very fast.
He found himself sprawled in a darkness so complete that for a second he thought he had been swallowed up by the Shade monster, which surrounded its victims with empty blackness. Then there was a bright flickering light, and Darwen could see. The ground was dirt and strewn with leaves, and there was a massive contraption that looked like it had been frozen in the act of emerging from the ground. It appeared to be an armored bulldozer covered with clumsy pipes and boilers. The light came from behind it, but the machine itself was black, silent, and clearly inoperable. The air felt as humid as the jungle he had just left, and the smells were similar. But it was night, and that wasn’t the only difference.
There was also the screaming.
He got to his feet, looking wildly around, trying to make sense of the flickering light that streamed around the dead bulldozer, bright as lightning in the darkness. For an instant the world became a shifting pattern of silver leaves and coal-dark shadows, and then he saw the boy.
He was the source of the screaming. He was young, about Darwen’s age, wearing a T-shirt and shorts with sneakers. His dark eyes were wide with horror, and his mouth was open. Words were coming out, and though Darwen couldn’t understand them, he felt the boy’s terror.
The boy’s legs were still, but he seemed to be moving anyway, pulling back toward the source of the light. He reached desperately out to Darwen, still screaming, and Darwen took an urgent step toward him. And that was when he saw it.
The light came from a brilliant circle on the ground behind the boy: a portal from which the bulldozer had been unable to emerge. It was flickering because something was blocking it out, something long and heavy that writhed snakelike as it reached up and through from the other side. It pulled the boy toward the gate, and Darwen saw the thick and fibrous tentacle squirming around the child’s middle.
Darwen hesitated, catching the boy’s terror, then he reached down to the forest floor, desperately searching for anything that could be used as a weapon. He found a ball-like stone and flung it as hard as he could at the pulsing tentacle. The stone bounced off, but the undulating movement of the snakelike arm paused for a second. Darwen stooped for another stone, but by the time he had straightened up with three more, the boy was being sucked down into the portal again, only now there were two more tentacles coming through, reaching hungrily for whatever had attacked them.
The boy shrieked again, and Darwen flung another stone, missing. In almost the same instant, the boy was pulled down and into the pool of light. Another pair of tentacles came creeping out, each one studded with suckers and ending in a set of toothlike claws. They whipped forward with horrible speed, and any thoughts of trying to rescue the boy went out of Darwen’s head.
He turned back toward the amber portal he had come through, praying it would stay open a moment longer. One of the tentacles reached for him but brushed against a branch instead, seizing it for a moment, then tearing the limb free with impossible strength. Darwen surged forward, avoiding another tentacle that was snaking toward him. He risked one look back to the boy, but he was already gone. Blind with horror, Darwen leaped through the portal.
He didn’t stop to look back, but he heard the tentacle follow him into the locus of the rainbow falls, heard the splintering of the crystalline rock as it tore the gateway apart from the inside. And still he kept running.
The following day marked the end of Darwen’s first semester at Hillside Academy in Atlanta, and there was an air of excitement that even the school’s strictness couldn’t quite stifle. One more day and they would be free for two whole weeks of vacation. With a bit of luck, it might even snow.
But Darwen’s mind was elsewhere. One thought burned bright and urgent in his mind as he stared at the stone sphere he had accidentally brought back from Silbrica: he had to find that boy. He had to save him.
Madhulika “Mad” Konkani—a wild-haired girl who once caused a power outage when the kitchens couldn’t produce her vegetarian meal—asked him what he was going to do over the holidays, and he didn’t respond until she flicked him hard on his earlobe. The sixth graders filed into class, where the science teacher, Mr. Iverson, stood owlish at his desk in his oversized glasses and patched lab coat.
“Our last day before the winter vacation,” he said, smiling. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t work.”
A tall blond boy with perfect teeth who was draped in his chair like he owned the entire room and a black boy who was lounging like a bored cat rolled their eyes at each other: Nathan Cloten and Chip Whittley, two of the popular kids who had never taken to Darwen. Nathan yawned.
“Today you have a special challenge,” said Mr. Iverson, “at the request of our new world studies teacher. Class, I would like to introduce . . . Mr. Octavius Peregrine.”
“Chuffin’ ’eck!” Darwen exclaimed, using one of his favorite phrases from his native Lancashire, in northern England.
“No way!” Darwen’s friend Alexandra O’Connor exclaimed. “I mean . . . no way! Mr. P. is a teacher? Here?” Her mouth dropped open, her slim black hands clamped together, and her pigtails (jauntily fastened with green glow-in-the-dark plastic skulls that in no way went with her Hillside uniform) bounced as if they might fly off with the astonishment.
“Maybe it’s a different Octavius Peregrine,” said Darwen’s other closest friend, Richard Haggerty, his face as pink as usual. Rich seemed too big for every chair he sat in and looked slightly sweaty and uncomfortable indoors, as if he should be sitting astride a tractor somewhere, chewing on a grass stalk. He had a rich Southern accent and spoke slowly, but everyone knew that he was the smartest kid in the grade, particularly when it came to science.
“Because Octavius Peregrine is such a common name, you mean?” said Alex, deadpan.
Then, as if on cue, the man they had known as a shopkeeper and one of the gatekeepers of the world beyond the mirrors entered the room. Darwen was so dumbfounded that he barely heard a word of Mr. Iverson’s speech about their new teacher’s impressive independent research into the “archaeology and anthropology of ritual spaces and the ancient peoples who used them.” Rich, meanwhile, was gazing at the old shopkeeper with new respect.
Darwen had last seen Mr. Peregrine three days ago, but their history went much further back than that. It was Mr. Peregrine who, while masquerading as a shopkeeper, had given Darwen the portal-mirror that had led him to the magical world of Silbrica. It was because of Mr. Peregrine that Darwen had discovered that he was a Squint, properly called a mirroculist, that rarest of people who can climb through certain darkling mirrors and can even bring along others who are touching them—humans and Silbrican creatures alike.
With his friends Rich and Alex—the Peregrine Pact—Darwen had discovered a threat to the school from a former member of Silbrica’s Guardian Council. The council member, Greyling, had assembled an army of hulking, green-skinned monsters called scrobblers, crea
tures with huge tusklike teeth and red eyes behind brass goggles, armed with terrible energy weapons. On Halloween those monsters had broken into the human world to take children to fuel their awful power generators. Darwen and his friends had stopped them, but the mirror Mr. Peregrine had given him hadn’t survived the battle. Without that mirror, Darwen couldn’t travel to Silbrica—couldn’t visit its enchanting creatures or see its magnificent machinery. And so Darwen was left stranded in Atlanta, an ordinary but unfamiliar city that Darwen had come to only a few months earlier, after his parents’ death.
But three days ago Mr. Peregrine had produced another mirror. It had been damaged, presumably during the scrobblers’ earlier attack on his shop, and the old man had warned Darwen that this one was “one use only.” Once entered, it would give Darwen a few hours in Silbrica before shutting down forever. This was the mirror Darwen had used last night. And thank goodness he had, or he would not have seen the boy and the monster that had taken him.
And now, amazingly—since he had said nothing of it when Darwen had last seen him—Mr. Peregrine was their world studies teacher!
It was as if the world beyond the mirrors—a world in which Darwen had taken refuge, at least until it had been darkened by Greyling’s war machine—had moved a little closer. Darwen might have no new mirror, but with Mr. Peregrine now a part of his daily life, it was only a matter of time before he could go back to Silbrica and find the missing boy.
Mr. Peregrine was dressed as if he had researched the part of a professor in movies from half a century ago. He wore a tweed suit with leather patches on the elbows, his usual gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles, and a flat-topped mortarboard cap like students wear for graduation. He was carrying a clipboard, and between his lips he held a huge and absurd-looking pipe.
“Er . . .” said Mr. Iverson. “You know you can’t smoke in here, Mr. Peregrine?”
“Really?” said Mr. Peregrine, as if this was most remarkable. “Thank goodness.”
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