Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  “Don’t know,” said Darwen. “As usual, I have no clue what is going on.”

  “You think she’s hiding something? From us? You’re imagining it.”

  Darwen watched Alex positively prancing back up the path toward them, a water glass in one hand and a ceramic jug in the other, grinning like the cat that got the nondairy creamer.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said.

  Because if there was one thing he was sure about in the baffling haze that hung over this trip like the mist clinging to the jungle, it was that he needed his friends. Last night after they had squabbled, he had tossed and turned for hours. Some of it was the mystery and their lack of progress toward finding Luis and his brother, but some of it was just the tension he felt with Rich and Alex and knowing that they were right. It had been his fault. He had taken over, ignored their advice, and gotten them in trouble. He needed to be careful about that. Danger he could stand, but not loneliness. Not now.

  “Okay,” said Rich. “Pass me the jug, will you? Right, now run the coin against it.”

  “Done,” said Alex.

  “Did it leave a black mark on the ceramic?” asked Rich, head in his book.

  “Nope,” said Alex.

  “Okay, so it’s not pyrite—fool’s gold. Could be the real thing. Now try the magnet.”

  Darwen took Rich’s heavy flashlight and put it up against the coin.

  “Anything?” said Rich.

  Darwen pulled the flashlight slowly away.

  “No,” said Alex. “Wait. Try that again.”

  Darwen repeated the action, and this time it seemed like the coin stuck to the magnet for a moment.

  “Maybe a tiny bit,” said Alex.

  “Hmmm,” said Rich. “Pure gold should show no magnetic properties at all. Try the glass.”

  Alex took the glass. Gabriel was hovering at the edge of the table, watching closely, and a couple of the other students were craning to get a better look from their seats.

  “Can you scratch the glass with the coin?” asked Rich.

  Alex tried.

  “Nothing,” said Alex.

  “Which means what?” said Darwen.

  “All minerals have a measurement of hardness from one to ten,” said Rich. “It’s called the Mohs’ scale. Glass has a hardness of 5.5, gold of 2.5 to 3. So true gold shouldn’t scratch glass.”

  “And this didn’t,” said Alex. “So it’s gold?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Rich. “It could be, or it could be made of something else with a similar hardness, like copper.”

  “So we don’t know anything,” said Darwen.

  “If it’s magnetic, then there’s something other than pure gold mixed in, at the very least,” said Rich. “Copper isn’t magnetic either, so it can’t be that, or not purely that.”

  Mr. Iverson returned with a box. “Oh, I see you found your book, Mr. Haggerty. Any progress?”

  Rich repeated the results of the experiments so far and then summarized his instinct. “I’d say it is gold, but there are other minerals blended with the metal, so it’s probably cheap.”

  “Which would suggest that the villagers are being ripped off,” said Darwen.

  “No surprises there,” Alex remarked, shaking her head.

  “Try this,” said Mr. Iverson, setting the box on the table and opening it. Inside was a potent-looking microscope. “I hoped it might come in handy.”

  “Cool,” said Rich.

  As they set the microscope up, the crowd of students watching got larger, despite Alex’s advice that they should all mind their own business. Rich turned on a light at the instrument’s base, positioned the coin, and peered into the eyepiece. He adjusted the focus and magnification, and, for a long moment, no one spoke. Rich eventually sat back, but his face was confused, even shocked.

  Mr. Iverson looked in, and his body suddenly became quite still and tense.

  “What is it?” said Alex. “Here, let me see.”

  At last it was Darwen’s turn, and at first he thought he’d made a mistake. The surface of the coin didn’t look regular or solid at all. It was pocked with little holes and irregular shapes. He adjusted the focus and saw why the metal felt so uneven, even sharp to the touch. It looked like the surface of the little balls he sometimes made by combining the tinfoil wrappers off candy. If this was a coin, it was one unlike any he had ever seen before.

  But why?

  “What am I looking at?” he asked, still staring into the eyepiece. He rotated the coin slightly. As he did so, a tiny feature of the metal caught his attention. It looked oddly familiar. He stared at it, trying to remember where he had seen that precise shape before.

  “I said the gold was probably very cheap,” said Rich. “But that’s not the only explanation. It could also be very old.”

  “How old?” asked Alex.

  “Hundreds of years,” said Rich. “Maybe more.”

  “It can’t be,” said Mr. Iverson.

  “It would make sense,” said Rich. “The impurities in the metal, copper and other minerals including trace elements of iron, which give it a slight magnetic quality.”

  Mr. Iverson began, “Are you suggesting—”

  “What?” asked Alex, exasperated. “What do you think it is?”

  And then Darwen remembered. At the heart of the coin, he could make out a tiny hook that had not been completely flattened into the surface, and now he could also see the way that the metal’s marbled surface laid out the outline of a strange leg—a leg with talons on the end.

  He sat up and gaped at the others.

  “It’s a pouncel,” he said. “These coins have been stamped from the figurines they found on Caño Island.”

  There were more red beans and rice for dinner, something even Alex couldn’t get enthusiastic about. “Once or twice is fine,” she exclaimed, exasperated. “Great, even. But every night? How about some jambalaya with jalapeño cornbread?”

  “We eat what they eat,” said Rich, nodding to the staff. “It’s local stuff. That’s why the fruit is so good. Anything else has to be imported, and that’s expensive. In case you hadn’t noticed, these people don’t have a lot of money.”

  “Fair enough,” said Alex, resolving to eat with greater enthusiasm. “And it is pretty good, really.”

  “What do they have,” said Rich, putting his knife and fork down suddenly, “except their history and their life in the rainforest? Nothing. And Scarlett is taking those things away from them, paying them off with gold that is nothing more than the mangled remains of their own past.”

  Darwen and Alex stared at him, surprised as much by his passion as by his expression.

  “The mangled remains of their own past,” Alex echoed. “That’s good. I’m gonna write that down. Remnants is better, though. The mangled remnants of their noble history.”

  “Contempt is what it is,” said Rich, ignoring Alex’s editorializing. “Scarlett is rubbing their noses in their own desperation. She comes in her helicopter and her fancy business suits, and she tells them they’re poor and reminds them of how dangerous their life here is.”

  “Kind of is,” said Alex.

  “And then—just to show how little she respects them and their culture—she buys them off with—”

  “The mangled remnants of a once noble past.”

  Rich turned to yell at her, but changed his mind. “Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

  Alex nodded thoughtfully.

  “You’re right,” she said at last. “It’s terrible. We should stop her.”

  “Could Scarlett know anything about the pouncels?” asked Darwen. “The real pouncels, I mean, not just the figurines.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Rich. “Why?”

  Darwen scow
led. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “It just feels . . . weird. An odd coincidence.”

  “That’s what coincidences are,” said Alex. “They feel weird.”

  “Scrobbler technology in the jungle,” said Darwen. “Missing kids. Creatures crossing over from Silbrica. I feel like I’m missing something.”

  “Like what?” asked Rich.

  Darwen just shook his head and shrugged again.

  “And we still don’t know how to get back into Silbrica,” said Alex. “Fat lot of good having your own pet mirroculist if there are no portals for him to open for you.”

  She was, annoyingly, maddeningly, right.

  They cleared their dinner things away, played a casual game of darts during which everyone stood a long way from the board every time it was Alex’s turn, and then went up to the washrooms to get ready for bed.

  Darwen moved to turn on the tap, and it was there again in the mirror.

  The laughing face.

  He froze, looking at it from the corner of his eyes, terrified that if he moved a muscle, it would vanish. It was just as before, pink and shiny, the hard eyes with their manic glare and the gaping mouth. Then he heard it, the laughter cycling around and around through his head, and this time he saw the head jerk back once into blackness, then come back, as if yanked into place by a wire.

  And suddenly he knew what it was.

  The memory he had almost been able to taste came back to him clear and whole. He was, perhaps, seven. His family had taken a trip to the seaside in Blackpool, an old Lancashire resort town. They had gone to the fairground there, the theme park called the Pleasure Beach, which had been built for all those Victorian holidaymakers who had come by train over a century ago.

  Inside the park, over by one of the rides, there had been a glass case containing a life-sized figure dressed as a clown, with a smaller clown on its lap. The sign above had indicated that it was Blackpool’s “World-Famous Laughing Man.” Darwen’s dad had told him it hadn’t always been dressed as it was now, but it had been there for decades, since before the war, he thought. It was mechanical. One minute it was sitting still and dead-looking, the next it would start rocking backward and forward in its chair, its head thrown back and this awful laughter coming from it. It never stopped. Just went on and on laughing and laughing all day. His mum had hated it, and it had given Darwen nightmares for weeks. Even now, the memory made him shiver. But if he was right, and that’s what the image in the mirror was, then what was that flash of Darwen’s past doing in a Costa Rican jungle camp?

  That night Darwen lay awake, listening to the sounds of the forest, trying to make sense of all he had learned and trying just as hard to shut out the memory of the mechanical clown’s hysterical laughter. Everything but the clown pointed back to Scarlett: her plans to get rid of the village, her money, which wasn’t real money at all but a kind of ancient echo of Silbrica. Even the disappearance of the children seemed to be helping her get rid of the village. Could she be working for the Bleck?

  Rich and Gabriel were both asleep, or seemed to be. Rich snored like a donkey, but Gabriel never made a sound, so that more than once Darwen shone his flashlight over to Gabriel’s bed to make sure the boy was still there. Darwen felt sorry for him—and had since he’d arrived, though he knew he hadn’t really helped make him feel welcome.

  Maybe you should tell him why you’re really here, he thought.

  No, said Alex’s voice in his head. Bad idea. The kid is scared of his own shadow now; what would he be like knowing that the woods are full of monsters waiting to grab him?

  Darwen grinned in spite of himself. That was exactly what she would say, and he suspected she would be right. And then a word came to him, a word that didn’t seem to belong in this set of ideas at all, but that somehow slotted itself in perfectly. The word was helicopter.

  He breathed it aloud, then sat up, shrugging off the sheet and reaching for the flashlight. “Rich,” he whispered. “Rich!”

  But Rich didn’t wake, and Darwen hesitated before poking him. He didn’t want more bickering, he didn’t want to get Rich into trouble again, and he certainly didn’t want to wake Gabriel. For a moment his hand stayed where it was, index finger extended and ready to jab Rich in the shoulder.

  But then he withdrew it and slid quietly out of bed. As he got dressed in the dark, he noted that the night was hot and heavy with the promise of more rain, so the tent felt clammy and oppressive. It wasn’t much better outside, but there was a faint breeze coming in off the ocean. He shone his flashlight into his shoes to make sure nothing had crawled inside, then put them on, sitting on the edge of the platform and wondering how bad it would be if he was caught out of bed at night again.

  The word helicopter hovered in his mind like the object itself had done the first time he’d seen it coming in low over the trees. That was how Scarlett had first arrived. It had been dramatic and, most importantly, it had been loud. But since that first day, he had not heard it again. Which meant one of two things. Either Scarlett had another way of getting to and from the village—though there was no way she was hopping out of a boat and wading up through the surf in those immaculate high heels of hers—or she hadn’t left. She could have come and gone by helicopter while Darwen had been hiking or out at Caño Island, but he had not left the camp since seeing her this morning, and there was no way that helicopter could have come and gone without him noticing it.

  So where was she? Not here in the camp, surely. So she must be staying in the village. But where? Someone like her would loathe the living conditions in this place.

  The answer came immediately. In his mind’s eye he saw the carefully maintained hut set back from the others, the pink jacket with the brass buttons. How could he have thought a jacket like that would be worn by one of the local girls? The one he had seen sweeping the porch had left a bucket of cleaning supplies at the foot of the stairs just the way the maids he saw in his aunt’s building did when they were going from one apartment to the next. There was no doubt that was Scarlett’s place, and if she was spending whole nights in conditions she would surely despise, she must have a reason for it.

  Maybe she knew where the tear in the barrier between worlds was. Maybe it wasn’t just a tear. Maybe it was a portal after all, a way into Silbrica that could be opened and closed on command. . . .

  Darwen turned his flashlight to the path and set off along the coast and into the jungle. He moved quickly and quietly, keeping his eyes on the track and avoiding the leaf litter in which snakes might nestle. Once as he turned to look toward the ocean, he caught sight of what he first thought was a flittercrake—the strange flying creature he had once glimpsed in an Atlanta mall—but as the animal flew back and forth, he realized it was some kind of large bat that was fishing from the air with its hind feet. He shuddered and started walking again. He didn’t mind bats on television, but the thought of those long, drooping legs tangling in his hair gave him the screaming creeps.

  He hurried on through the steamy darkness and at last felt the relief of open sky as he got out from under the trees. There was the soccer field and, just beyond it, the huddle of buildings where the camp workers lived. There were no lights, no signs of movement, and the hammocks on the porches were all deserted. No one wanted to risk being outdoors at night.

  Darwen turned off his flashlight and moved carefully between the buildings along the closest thing to a street, though it was little more than a path from which the tiny houses were set back, looking at each other. He walked past the oldest four, two on each side, moving toward the new one, which sat silent by itself, its back right against the tree line. As he got close, he could smell its fresh-cut timber, but that only made it feel out of place and a little sinister.

  He had no idea what to do next.

  He put one hand on the stair rail, then tested the first step with his foot. It creaked, and he
adjusted, suddenly aware of his heart thudding in his chest. There was a window beside the door. It had mosquito netting tacked around it and curtains inside, but Darwen thought there was a gap between them. If he could get up there, he might be able to get a look in.

  He tried the second step and, when it made no sound at all, the third. One more and he was up on the porch decking, only a few feet from the door. He lifted his right foot, spreading his arms for balance, and took another step, listening hard.

  Nothing.

  One more step and he was touching the wall. He shifted, and the planking groaned loudly beneath him.

  He froze, breath held, eyes wide and staring at the wall, terrified that even looking around would make more noise.

  Seconds passed. Ten? Thirty? He wasn’t sure.

  At last he took the final step to the window and peered in through the two-inch gap in the curtains. There was only darkness.

  Now what?

  He considered shining the light in through the crack, but he knew that would just alert anyone inside to his presence. He had come this far. There was only one choice.

  He took two quick, quiet steps, avoiding the plank that had creaked, and put his trembling fingers on the door handle. He grasped it, feeling the sweat on his palm, listening for any sign of movement beyond the constant hum of the jungle, and then, with infinite care, he turned it.

  There was a tiny snap, and Darwen felt the weight of the door in his hand as it swung free. He pushed it carefully, and it made no sound as it opened.

  Several things struck Darwen at once. First, he sensed the darkness inside soften a little, though he could still barely make anything out beyond hulking black outlines. There was a scent too, sweet like perfume but with something a little sour under it, masked like the persistent edge of vomit after a bathroom has been disinfected. He knew that if someone was lying awake, they would see him standing there in the doorway, but he needed the light, so he stayed where he was and waited.

  Still, incredibly, nothing happened. No movement, no breathing. Nothing.

  He took a step inside, hands outstretched in front of him, but he knew he would find nothing without light. His body was tense, and he felt cold, though sweat was running in his eyes. Carefully he turned and pushed the door silently so that it almost closed, then he dropped slowly to a crouch, put the flashlight down headfirst on the floor, and turned it on.