Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  “You weren’t there!” Darwen exclaimed. “It was Christmas. You were at home.”

  “You could have invited us for a sleepover,” said Rich, even redder now as he revealed a hurt he knew sounded petty and stupid.

  “A sleepover?” exclaimed Darwen, who couldn’t believe he was having this conversation after everything that had happened over the last couple of hours.

  “A sleepover,” Rich snapped. “It’s something friends do.”

  “Silbrica is dangerous, Rich! Don’t you get it? It’s not a holiday resort where you go to look at neat animals like they’re in a zoo. Half of those animals would take your head off as soon as look at you.”

  “So you’re protecting us?” Rich shot back. “Is that it?”

  “Yes!” said Darwen, realizing for the first time that this was true. “You know how many times I’ve gone over what happened at Halloween and thought about how badly it might have ended? If something had happened to you or Alex? You know how I would have felt about that?”

  “Because it’s all about how you feel, right, Darwen?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You didn’t even tell us about Weazen until after we saw him,” said Rich, furious now. “How is that protecting us?”

  “I just didn’t think you needed to know!” Darwen roared back.

  Immediately, he wished he hadn’t said it.

  “And there it is,” Rich said, quieter now. “You thought you knew best. Again. Okay. Now we know. Well, Darwen, thanks for your protection, but for future reference, we don’t need it. We don’t want it.”

  “Fine!” yelled Darwen.

  “Fine!” shouted Rich.

  “Wait,” said Darwen, but Rich was already unzipping the tent and crawling in.

  Darwen sat outside in the dark for another five minutes before following him. He didn’t think Rich was asleep, but when Darwen whispered his name, he didn’t respond. It was some time before Darwen climbed into bed, longer still before he fell asleep, and his dreams were full of the mechanical clown lurching in its chair, roaring with laughter, while great snakes with Scarlett Oppertune’s face coiled around it.

  Darwen got up when the howler monkeys started calling. He took a cold shower, dressed, and ate alone as soon as Torres had laid out the breakfast buffet. He reported to the kitchens and told the staff he was to help with cleaning again. As the other students came up to breakfast, he went from tent to tent with a bucket of cleaning supplies. When he came to Mr. Peregrine’s tent, he waited to be sure the ex-shopkeeper wasn’t inside before going in to clean. The vinegary scent was stronger now, but Darwen didn’t try that hard to get rid of it. Serve the old man right for betraying him.

  He knew he was overreacting, but that was what it felt like to Darwen. Mr. Peregrine had not believed him about Scarlett and had ordered him to abandon his search for Luis and the others. Either on his own authority or on the Guardians’ orders, the old shopkeeper had betrayed him.

  When Darwen emerged, Alex was waiting for him, eating fruit from a bowl.

  “This cleaning thing wasn’t supposed to be a career choice,” she said. “The word is that you decided to wake the entire village in the middle of the night. Sleepwalking, supposedly, which is about the dumbest excuse I ever heard. Rich doesn’t know any different and ‘would prefer not to discuss it, if you don’t mind,’ so I’m assuming you two had one of those he-broke-my-toy-tractor fights that boys have. Wanna give me your version?”

  Darwen sighed and sat on the edge of the platform beside his bucket. He told her the same story he had told Mr. Peregrine, this time including an account of that conversation and the one he had had with Rich.

  “Wow,” she said. “You are making yourself popular. Thought about running for class president?”

  “We don’t have a class president,” said Darwen.

  “Sure we do, Darwen. You’re the very first. And it’s all because we love you.”

  “Were you planning on saying anything helpful, or are you just here to take the mickey?”

  “See, why couldn’t you have fallen back on a colorful British expression like that last night? No one would have understood a word you said, which would have been better than that sleepwalking hogwash. Honestly, that’s the best you could come up with? That’s just sad.”

  “You believe me?”

  “About Scarlett the snake woman and the Insidious child-nabbing tentacled whosit?” she said. “Sure. You’re dumb, but I can always tell when you’re lying.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Darwen.

  “You’re welcome. Anyway, you need to finish up. We’re going zip-lining, whatever that is. Meet on the beach in”—she checked her watch—“half an hour. Get your bug repellant, camera, strong shoes, blah, blah, blah. The usual surviving-in-the-wilderness stuff.”

  “I’m ready,” said Darwen. “Why don’t you hang out with me for a while? I’ve been trying to think through why Scarlett might want the land the village is on if it’s not just about building a hotel.”

  “Not now,” said Alex. “I’ve got to get ready.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Darwen.

  Alex hesitated. “I have to . . . do private stuff,” she said. “Pee and what have you.”

  Darwen considered her. She was being evasive. Maybe she was going to report back to Rich. “Come on, Alex,” he began, but she cut him off.

  “It’s not just Rich who’s mad at you, Darwen, okay?” she said. “You did it again, going off by yourself, figuring you’d just report your adventures to us afterward. We’re not your fans, Darwen. We’re supposed to be friends. More than that. We’re the Peregrine Pact.”

  “I’m not sure I want to have much to do with Mr. Peregrine, if you want to know the truth,” said Darwen.

  “So you really are alone,” she said. “I hope that makes you happy.”

  And with that she stalked off.

  With nothing better to do, Darwen went down to the beach early and sat on the same palm trunk where he had talked to Mr. Peregrine the night before. Gabriel was already there, alone and wearing the ridiculous cap with the veil again.

  “Cleaned our tent out,” said Darwen.

  “Good,” said Gabriel, adjusting the veil so that Darwen could see his face.

  “You should get out more,” said Darwen. “Get some air and sunshine. Maybe we could organize another football—I mean, soccer—game with the kids from the village.”

  Gabriel’s eyes flickered, and Darwen thought he looked pained.

  “Tough here, isn’t it?” said Darwen. “I mean, exciting and full of neat stuff, of course, but still . . . tough. And then these kids going missing . . .”

  Gabriel looked down, but Darwen caught that flash of anguish in his face again.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you need someone to chat to, you know, since you’re new and all, Rich and I are—”

  “What?” said Gabriel, looking up again, his face now blank. “Sounded like you were yelling at each other last night.”

  Darwen said nothing, relieved to see Genevieve Reddock leading a gaggle of girls down from the camp, looking excited and—as always seemed to be the case on this trip—a little uneasy.

  “What’s zip-lining?” said Darwen, changing the subject as the girls splashed noisily past them and climbed into the first boat.

  Gabriel shrugged. “I guess we have to get there by boat,” he said.

  “Always,” said Darwen miserably.

  They waded out and climbed aboard next to Genevieve, Naia, and Mad. Mr. Peregrine was already on board, clad again in those ridiculous rubber waders. Darwen said nothing and avoided his eyes. There was no sign of Rich. They were pulling away from shore before Darwen saw him, walking down to one of the other boats with Alex.

  �
��How long will we be in the boat?” he asked Jorge.

  “Ten minutes,” said the guide. “We’re just going around to Drake Bay.”

  Darwen breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Is it true that you sleepwalk?” asked Naia Petrakis.

  “Not usually,” said Darwen.

  “Rough place to start,” supplied Mad.

  “Yeah,” said Darwen, turning away in the hope they would drop the subject. He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. The thought made him feel more alone than he had since coming to Hillside. He thought of Lancashire, which felt so very far away now, and a wish rose in his mind, clear and sharp and fully formed, an image of him returning to his parents and telling them about all the amazing things he had seen in Costa Rica. They would sit with plates of steaming hotpot and talk about everything that had happened since he left England, since they had died. He stared at the water as the boat bounced over its surface, turning away so that no one could see his face.

  Since he and Gabriel had been the first to get aboard and had taken seats by Mr. Peregrine in the prow, they were the last to get out, by which time the boat was rocking and sliding in the surf. Darwen went first, but the boat pitched suddenly. He stumbled, but Mr. Peregrine came off worse. As the old man slipped backward, his hand reached for the prow and caught on a rusted rivet, which stood proud and sharp.

  “Mr. Peregrine!” Darwen shouted. “Are you okay?”

  “What?” said the teacher, his face blank.

  “Your hand,” said Darwen.

  “Let me see,” said Jorge, scrambling over.

  “It’s fine,” said Mr. Peregrine.

  Jorge didn’t listen, but turned the teacher’s hand over. He winced, sucking the air in between his lips, and for a moment Darwen’s head swam. There was a deep gash running across Mr. Peregrine’s palm, deep enough that Darwen could see what looked like muscle inside, though the cut beneath the flap of skin was bloodless.

  Jorge exclaimed in Spanish, then helped Mr. Peregrine up and over the side, though the water was waist deep. He hurried Mr. Peregrine up the beach to where a cooler of supplies had been unloaded and took out a first aid kit. Darwen and Gabriel splashed after him, laboring in the surf, feeling the shingle beneath their feet sucking away with each out-rushing wave. By the time the boys reached Jorge, Mr. Peregrine’s hand had already been smeared with ointment and bandaged. The teacher looked calm, but Jorge and Gabriel were both anxious.

  “You want to go back to the camp?” asked Jorge.

  “No,” said the teacher. “I need to supervise the excursion.”

  “It must hurt,” said Jorge.

  “Not as much as you would think,” said Mr. Peregrine, climbing carefully out of his waders and smiling, “and I’m tougher than I look.”

  Darwen watched them as the girls crowded around, and there was something odd about the way Gabriel looked at Mr. Peregrine. The boy’s eyes were hard and focused.

  Mr. Peregrine, for his part, merely shrugged and smiled blithely. “See,” he said. “It has already stopped bleeding. Let’s not overreact. Very well,” he added, turning to the gathering students, “this way, everyone.”

  Darwen glanced at Gabriel, but whatever he thought he had seen in the boy’s face before was gone, so that he wondered if he had imagined it.

  Once the other boat had arrived, a pair of rickety jeeps, a pickup truck, and an ancient minibus ferried the students up through Drake Bay and into the heavily wooded hills above the village. Darwen made the journey in the open back of the pickup, which would have been fun if he had had someone to share it with. Rich had deliberately hung back to travel in the minibus with Alex.

  The zip line turned out to be what Darwen called an aerial runway: a cable strung between poles down which you slid. Darwen had seen them on playgrounds and campsites, but nothing could have prepared him for the length and height of this particular specimen. It was made up of twenty stages, some of them hundreds of meters long, designed to take them through the very canopy of the rainforest and back to the campsite. They hiked up to the starting point—a wooden platform built around a massive tree that had to be accessed by ladders—wearing helmets and a complex system of straps and carabineers.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” said Jorge, smiling.

  It didn’t feel it. The first platform was a hundred feet in the air, and the cable extended out over a valley that fell sharply away. The greenery below didn’t seem too distant, but Darwen knew they were looking at the tops of trees, some of which were very tall. It was a long way to fall if something went wrong.

  “Who is going to go first?” asked Jorge.

  Everyone looked around, some uncertain, some clearly afraid. Darwen’s eyes met Rich’s, and for a second he thought there would be a shared comment or joke, but Rich scowled and looked away.

  “I’ll go first,” volunteered Darwen.

  He had come all this way. He wasn’t about to let Rich spoil it.

  Jorge and the pickup driver checked his harness, snapped a new cable in place, and told him how to control the speed of his descent.

  “Put your right hand up here,” instructed Jorge. “If you are going too fast, lean back and pull down on this leather part. This is your brake.”

  Darwen couldn’t see the “brake” making much difference, but he could feel everyone watching him and was determined not to show his fear.

  “Have fun, Arkwright,” called Nathan. “Try not to fall hundreds of feet to your messy death.”

  “Ready?” said Jorge, swinging him into position.

  “Ready,” Darwen lied.

  And then he was off.

  For a split second he thought he had come unlatched, that the cable had broken and he was just falling, but the sensation passed, and he was soon arcing out over the treetops, speeding faster and faster, the drone of the pulley wheels rising in pitch as he hurtled along. Trees whipped past in a flash of green, and then he was out in the blue air, looking down on the jungle canopy, swooping birdlike toward the next station, where one of the jeep drivers was waiting, braced for impact. For a moment all the tension, problems, and anxieties of the trip fell away, and Darwen was just a boy flying above the treetops and feeling the wind on his face.

  He whooped with delight, and an unmistakable bird called back at him before taking flight, a bird with a beak as long and heavy as its body.

  “A toucan,” he exclaimed as he barreled into the pickup driver. “I saw a toucan!”

  His fear was gone, as were all his concerns about Silbrica and Rich. He led the way, stage by exhilarating stage. The zip line led them steadily back down toward the tent camp, and two hours later they were trekking along a path that emerged behind the bathrooms.

  Darwen’s uncomplicated happiness at the thrill of it all was disturbed only once, a little over halfway down, when he realized that the towering trees around him showed signs of considerable damage, as if something large had been moving through the canopy, snapping heavy branches as it went. He might not have thought much of it, except that he caught Jorge studying the damage with the same look of concern that he exhibited on the night the village girl had gone missing. It wasn’t over, no matter what Mr. Peregrine said. Somehow he would find those kids and bring them home again.

  And now he knew how to do it.

  The stone spheres could be made into a portal with nothing more than water and his mirroculist talents. He just had to gather some together, get away from everyone else, and cross over to Silbrica. He even knew where he could find the stone balls, and just as he was trying to figure out how to get back to them, he had a stroke of luck. It came in the form of an announcement from Mr. Iverson over lunch.

  “Those who wish to stay in the camp this afternoon can do so,” he said, “but we will be taking two boats out to Caño Island again, one for those who wish
to do some more snorkeling, the other for any who want to return to the archaeological site.”

  That was it. Finally, after weeks of frustration, Darwen was going to be able to do something. He was going to Silbrica, and he was sure that on the other side he would find Luis, Eduardo, Calida, and the others. He didn’t need Mr. Peregrine. He was going to complete his mission—his real mission—by himself.

  But even as he thought this, he found himself looking around for Rich and Alex. They were huddled together, talking earnestly as they sipped from straws stuck in green coconuts. Even as he watched, Alex got up and came over. “Mr. Richard Haggerty requests the pleasure of your company at the Caño Island dig site,” she said.

  “I’ll bet that’s not the way he said it,” said Darwen.

  “Not exactly,” said Alex. “He thinks you ought to go there. See if there’s anything you can learn about the pouncels.”

  “And you?” said Darwen, suddenly hopeful that Alex would come too. He needed a buffer between himself and Rich right now.

  “He thinks I should come too,” said Alex, “but I’m not gonna.”

  “Come on, Alex,” said Darwen. “He won’t even talk to me if you aren’t there.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Alex. “So you don’t want me there because I’m your friend and the only person who doesn’t think you are a lying snake, but because you want me to run interference for you with Rich.”

  “Run interference?” said Darwen.

  “It’s a football term,” Alex snapped. “American football. You might wanna bone up on the culture that you, ya know, live in. Anyway, what I’m saying is that I’m not going to be your translator or your nursemaid or the padding that stops you from knocking each other’s corners off.”

  “Is that another football phrase?”

  “No, that’s just me.”

  “But Alex . . .” Darwen implored.

  “I have spoken,” Alex announced, drawing herself up to her full height. “Do not ask me again.”