Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  “And what do I do when I’m in?” asked Darwen.

  “We,” Rich prompted.

  “What?” said Darwen. “Oh. Right. What do we do when we’re in?”

  “Investigate!” said Mr. Peregrine airily. “Ask around. Put your ear to the ground. Play the gumshoe, the detective. Find out where the weak points are in the barrier between Silbrica and this place.”

  Moments later, as the two boys walked away, Rich grumbled, “Not very specific, is he? Investigate? How? I mean, where do we start once we’re through?”

  Darwen glanced down at his shoes, then shrugged, his eyes lighting up. “We look for Luis.”

  Ten minutes later they were eating breakfast with the rest of the students: yogurt, cereal, and fruit with juice and coffee. Half of the students had had a lousy night’s sleep, and Jennifer Taylor-Berry swore that she had seen a bat the size of a chicken flying around the washrooms. This, of course, made Darwen think of the strange cat-faced creature he had seen in the trees, while it prompted everyone else into an animated discussion of the howlers.

  “I thought it was a tiger!” yammered Barry Fails to anyone who would listen.

  “That had swum over from Asia,” said Rich.

  Barry didn’t get it.

  “I thought we were dead, man,” he said. “Totally.”

  He wasn’t the only one who felt they had had near-death experiences over the last few hours, but the mood was generally upbeat, and whatever had terrified the students at night seemed quite exciting now that they could actually see where they were going.

  “I hope we see something cool today,” Barry added, and with this even Rich couldn’t disagree.

  The only people who didn’t seem caught up in it all were Chip and Nathan, both of whom seemed quiet and a little surly, as if resenting how much everyone else was enjoying the prospect of their first hike. Princess didn’t seem too pleased either, but that was because, as Alex was quick to point out, she had brought absolutely nothing suitable to wear. Jorge took one look at the spangled sandals she wore to the beach and sent her slouching back to her tent.

  “We have some boots you can borrow,” he said.

  Princess wrinkled her nose as he produced them, though whether that was because of what the boots looked like (knee-high and rubbery—what Darwen called Wellingtons) or because they had been worn by other people, she didn’t say.

  Darwen was delighted to see that Mr. Sumners looked absurd in wide, flapping shorts and a cowboy hat shading his pink face. Their tight-laced homeroom teacher, Miss Harvey, was wearing carefully ironed pants, long boots, and a blousy shirt tucked meticulously in at her waist, but her normally well-coiffed hair looked wild and frizzy no matter how much she fiddled with it. The boys stared at her, blinking, as if unsure who she was, and she gave them a hard look, practically daring them to speak.

  “All aboard!” called Jorge, striding down the shingle with a backpack and water bottle slung over his shoulder.

  There were three small powerboats that had to be maneuvered into position with their sterns toward the beach. The sixth graders squealed and shrieked as they waded out into the surf and were hoisted into the boats by the shirtless local boys who doubled as drivers. The faculty divided themselves and clambered awkwardly into the boats one at a time. They all looked very self-conscious, though Darwen thought that Miss Martinez was having more fun than she wanted to let on. Mr. Peregrine, clad once more in his rubbery waders, just smiled and gazed out over the open water as everyone got into their life jackets. The oddest looking of the group was Gabriel, who had rigged an Atlanta Braves baseball cap with a kind of veil made out of fishing net.

  “Keep the bugs off,” he said.

  Darwen, who couldn’t see Gabriel's face properly, just shrugged and grinned in a way he hoped was encouraging.

  It was going to be a hot and humid day. Beyond the thin line of beach, the world was the green of the jungle on one side and the blues of ocean and sky on the other, and if the boat would stop tossing long enough for him to enjoy it, Darwen thought it would look like paradise. But the boat did not stop, and as it hit full speed, Darwen’s stomach started to squirm with each slap of the boat’s keel. After half an hour, he was feeling queasy, and after an hour he was miserably nauseated. The boat bounced from side to side, sending Darwen’s head flopping as if he were a rag doll. He gripped his knees and stared at the boat’s wet plastic floor.

  “How much farther?” he called over the engine noise, without looking up.

  “One more hour,” said Jorge brightly.

  Another hour?

  Ten minutes later the roar of the boat’s engine cut out, and they drifted to an uneasy, sloshing stop. Darwen looked up, praying they were at the shore, but the boats were still out in open water, and all the students were gazing in the direction Jorge was pointing. Holding his stomach, Darwen peered out and saw something large and dark surface briefly, its sides flashing in the sun. Then another appeared close by, and a moment later another puffed a cloud of water only feet from the boat.

  For a split second Darwen thought, It’s the Insidious Bleck! but then the students oohed and aahed as Jorge proclaimed the shapes in the water to be pilot whales. The cloud they had blown out dispersed around the boat, and several students groaned and winced away. Darwen got a lungful of the stinking rancid-fish-and-ancient-garbage substance, so that for a second he had to hold on to the side of the boat, certain he was going to throw up. As he did so he realized he was not alone. Someone else was staring green-faced into the water. It was Sumners. For a moment their eyes met, and a kind of desperate understanding passed between them. But then the math teacher vomited for real into the ocean, and Darwen turned quickly away as the boat restarted.

  They were heading roughly south along the Pacific coast, always in sight of the shore a mile or so to their left. To their right a strangely flat-topped island loomed.

  “That is Caño Island,” said Jorge. “Some of the best snorkeling in Costa Rica. We will do that tomorrow.”

  “In the boat again?” asked Darwen, a little desperate.

  “There is no other way to get there,” said Jorge cheerily.

  And then, at last, the boat was slowing and pulling in toward a stretch of beach not clearly different from what they had been passing for the past two hours.

  Two hours, he thought. And no way back but the same lousy boat ride.

  Amazingly, he and Sumners seemed to be the only ones stricken with seasickness. Rich was trying to be sympathetic, but he was clearly having a wonderful time and couldn’t wait to start the hike proper. As the boat coasted through a placid and reedy river estuary, Darwen inched himself toward the back so that he could be first off. As the pilot reversed the boat up to the shore, Jorge leaped out and manhandled the stern end in the sloshing waves before extending a strong brown hand to Darwen.

  He didn’t need to be asked twice.

  He leaped down, splashed his way up the shore, and collapsed onto a fallen tree trunk, his eyes shut, reveling in the sudden stillness of the world. When he opened his eyes again, he was surprised to find that he had been joined not by Rich but by Mr. Sumners.

  “Boats,” muttered the math teacher. “I’ll kill Peregrine.”

  Darwen laughed in spite of himself, but that made him feel worse, so he went back to sitting very still and quiet until everyone was ashore. Mr. Peregrine came well up the beach before climbing carefully out of his rubber waders and directing the students along a path.

  “You don’t look too chuffed,” said Alex as the group began to walk inland. “Can you be unchuffed or only right chuffed? I want to be able to use it correctly.”

  “I’m not too chuffed with you right now,” Darwen muttered.

  “I see you were bonding with Sumners,” said Alex, pretending to be offended. “You must be sick. I had no id
ea seasickness affected the mind.”

  “Hilarious as ever, Alex,” said Rich. “Feeling better?”

  “Yeah,” said Darwen. “I’ll be okay in a few minutes, once the ground stops moving.”

  Rich grinned.

  “What, no ‘hilarious as ever’ for Darwen?” said Alex, punching Rich on the shoulder as they set off after the others.

  “He’s an invalid,” said Rich. “Be nice.”

  “Let’s hope it’s nothing serious,” replied Alex. “If you need to go to a hospital, you can forget it. We are in the middle of nowhere.”

  She was right, of course, but Darwen knew that whatever the place looked like, it was exactly where he needed to be, and that thought focused his mind on something other than his seasickness. They had passed Caño Island, and that meant they were in the region known for the strange stone spheres, the place from which Luis had been taken.

  “Nowhere,” Alex repeated. “Officially. Find Nowhere on a map, and we are in the middle of it. Nowhereville.Population: us.”

  “Okay, Alex,” said Rich.

  “I’m just saying that if anything terrible happened and we needed serious medical attention,” she went on, “you know, like, if we got bitten by a massive bushmaster snake—like that one right there!” She screamed, pointing into the undergrowth beside Rich, who bolted away, white- faced, just as she started to roar with laughter. There was, of course, no snake.

  “Man!” she exclaimed. “You really don’t like snakes, huh? I mean, really. You bolted like a jackrabbit from a cougar.”

  “Dag gum it, Alex!” Rich shouted.

  “What is the matter?” exclaimed Jorge, running back toward them.

  “Nothing,” said Rich, reclaiming his dignity as best he could. “Alex’s sense of humor . . .”

  Jorge glared at them. “We do not make false alarms here,” the guide said fiercely, “and we do not make more noise than is necessary. Remember. Pay attentions!” He tapped the side of his head, staring at each of them, and then marched away.

  “Nice going,” said Rich.

  Alex raised her eyebrow. “Whatever, snake boy.”

  The vegetation tightened as soon as they left the beach, and soon they were following a narrow trail through hot, dense forest of the kinds of plants Darwen had only seen in greenhouses. Occasionally the group would stop and Jorge would talk about the trees, the ecosystem, or some particular creature, like the leaf-cutter ants whose parade lines crossed the path from time to time, each tiny orange insect bearing a piece of bright green leaf several times its own size so that the forest floor seemed to run in emerald rivers. They also paused at the actual rivers, and Jorge scanned the water carefully before instructing everyone to wade across.

  “Looking for crocodiles,” said Alex to Rich. “And sharks.”

  “Sharks live in the ocean,” said Rich dismissively. “The driver was just trying to freak you out.”

  “Actually, she’s right,” said Jorge, who seemed to have gotten over his initial irritation with them. “These rivers are brackish—part freshwater, part salt. When the tide is high and the rivers rise, sharks swim up from the coast to hunt. Bull sharks, mainly. Much more dangerous than crocodiles. Sometimes tourists go missing and then, a few days later, we find their clothes beside one of the rivers where they decided to swim.”

  He shrugged and smiled at the silliness of the visitors, apparently not noticing that all the students—and Mr. Iverson—were now moving twice as quickly across the shallow river.

  But, to the students’ relief, they saw no sharks and only one small crocodile sunning itself on a sandbank. What they did see was a variety of monkeys, an anteater, a motionless, greenish sloth, and a dozen exotic birds including a massive scarlet macaw that flew overhead, the sun flashing on its brilliant plumage. To Darwen’s eyes it was nearly as exotic and remarkable as anything he had seen in Silbrica. It wasn’t until they had paused for a packed lunch that they saw the tapir.

  In appearance, tapirs are somewhere between very large black pigs and small hornless rhinos. They are rare and endangered, and Rich had expressed a great deal of excitement about the possibility of seeing one. So when Jorge became very still and raised his hand in the air to silence the students, it was Rich who had craned to get a better look, Rich who had first whispered that he thought the great beast was sleeping, and Rich who had quickly amended that verdict when he saw the blood.

  “It’s dead,” he said, his voice heavy with shock. “Something killed it.”

  He was right. Though Jorge and the teachers tried to shield the mutilated carcass from the students’ eyes, they saw enough, and while some of them became subdued and even a little weepy, Barry led a gleeful discussion about what could have brought the big animal down.

  “Got to be a jaguar,” he said. “Look for tracks!”

  There weren’t any, but close to the tapir’s body there were a lot of smaller paw prints, each about the size of Darwen’s fist. Miss Martinez had pressed a handkerchief to her mouth at the sight of the dead creature. As she looked away, Darwen slipped past her to get a better look.

  He was glad his stomach had had time to settle since the boat ride. The tapir had been half-eaten, though the sight was more sad than it was horrific, and Darwen was able to take it all in without flinching. The wounds on the body matched the odd little paw prints they had seen in the muddy earth: four short talon marks, one of which extended backward like the claw of a bird, while one at the front was two or three times the length of the others. Darwen turned to find Rich at his shoulder, and their eyes met.

  “No cat would leave marks like that,” Rich whispered.

  “And the tracks don’t extend onto the trail,” said Darwen.

  “So they attacked from the trees,” Rich agreed.

  “They’re a lot smaller than the tapir, but there are several of them.”

  “A pack, working together,” Rich mused. “Each one bigger than a monkey.”

  Darwen was watching Jorge. The guide was pacing around the carcass, studying the tracks and the wounds, then looking up into the forest canopy, his face baffled and concerned.

  “Move back there,” said Mr. Sumners, bustling over and spreading his arms like a cop on a TV show steering people away from a crime scene.

  Darwen rejoined the group in silence, thinking of the strange creature that had spooked the howler monkeys that morning, the creature that did not show up in Rich’s field guide.

  “Still,” said Rich, “it’s not what you saw when you went into that jungle locus, is it? You saw a huge tentacle. These things are more like apes.”

  “So things are worse than we thought,” said Darwen. “There’s a breach in the barrier between worlds, and the Bleck is leading things through. Dangerous things.”

  “What’s that?” called Barry.

  He was pointing through the trees to where something dark and hulking leaned out of the ground. The students peered through the trees.

  “It’s just some old bulldozer,” said Nathan Cloten. “Looks like it’s been there a hundred years.”

  In fact, of course, it didn’t. It looked part steam train, part tank. It was a massive, clumsy machine spouting pistons and flywheels and a pair of grotesque chimneys, and sticking out in front of its massive, tracked wheels was a huge plow-like blade, big enough to handle the oldest trees. It looked antiquated, but it had only just begun to rust, and Darwen was prepared to bet that it had been there no more than a few months.

  “Looks like it was burrowing up out of the ground when it stopped,” said Barry.

  “You are such an idiot, Usually,” said Nathan casually.

  Darwen looked at Rich and Alex, but they were watching Jorge, who had suddenly started directing everyone’s attention to another column of leaf-cutter ants that were marching across the trail.


  “They do not eat the leaves,” he was saying. “They are farmers, and they use the leaves to fertilize a kind of mushroom that they eat.”

  Darwen wondered if it was his imagination or if the guide was deliberately distracting the group from the spectacle of the paralyzed bulldozer, a device that had clearly originated in another world entirely.

  It was mid-afternoon, and Darwen was sitting on the damp edge of the tent platform he shared with Rich and Gabriel while he recovered from the return boat ride. It had rained twice already today, long heavy showers that began and finished abruptly, but that pounded the ground until it swam. The sky was clear again now, but the air felt thick and heavy. Alex swung lazily in a hammock fastened between two trees, watching as a pair of white-faced capuchin monkeys browsed in the branches only feet above her.

  “In mourning for the dead pig, Arkwright?” called a jeering voice. It was Nathan, with Chip and Barry in tow.

  “Yeah,” Chip added, “Redneck Rich was crying his eyes out.”

  “Nobody cried,” said Darwen, shielding his eyes with his hand.

  “Yeah, right,” said Nathan.

  “Another devastating Cloten riposte,” said Alex. “You must be on the debate team.”

  “I can’t believe they didn’t let us bring it back and roast it up for dinner,” said Chip. “A nice bit of steak. Way better than that slop they served yesterday.”

  “That was a very nutritious meal,” said Alex, wiggling out of the hammock as if her family’s honor had been called into question.

  “Probably the best food you’ve ever had, right, O’Connor?” said Nathan, putting on a rustic Southern accent quite unlike his usual precise tone. “You head on over to Haggerty’s for chitlins and gravy?”

  “What’s chitlins?” asked Barry.

  “Cheap, nasty stuff,” said Chip. “I’d rather eat that dead tapir right where it was.”

  “Yeah!” Barry agreed stupidly.

  “I told that guide—” began Nathan.