Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  “Well,” said Jorge, “I hope we’ll find something interesting today.”

  “At least there won’t be bottle caps out here,” said Alex.

  Rich frowned at her. He had often been accused of digging up nothing more than twenty-first-century trash.

  The group rounded the last bend in the path together and stuttered to a halt, staring at the site.

  The central dig square was just as it had been before, except for one thing. Beside one of the larger stone spheres embedded in the ground was something new, something between a backpack and a kitchen appliance. It was studded with dials and switches and linked by a piece of hose to something with a nozzle and a trigger that looked like a flamethrower.

  Darwen gasped. It was an energy weapon of the kind carried by scrobblers. He flashed a look at Rich and Alex.

  “What’s that?” said Mr. Iverson, stooping to it.

  “Don’t touch it!” exclaimed Rich, so that Mr. Iverson jumped and took a step back.

  “Mr. Haggerty, you startled me!” he said.

  “Sorry,” said Rich. “I thought it looked . . . I don’t know. Dangerous.”

  In fact, it didn’t. As Darwen got closer he could see that the pack was blackened and the glass over its various controls was broken. He cautiously flipped a few switches, but nothing happened. It was quite dead.

  “Whatever it is, it should not have been left here,” said Jorge. “Maybe one of the archaeologists brought it to use on the site, but”—he frowned—“I have never seen anything like it before.”

  Darwen didn’t know why, but he wasn’t sure that he believed the guide.

  “Even archaeological work should leave no trash behind,” he said. “The island’s environment must be preserved.”

  Jorge removed the tarp from the site and distributed the trowels that were stored in a box just outside the square.

  Darwen took one last look at the burned-out energy weapon and found himself wondering why all the scrobbler equipment they had found in Costa Rica was clearly broken. He pictured the armored bulldozer, which seemed to have died the very moment it crossed over from Silbrica. What had Weazen said? Something about the old gates not working this time?

  Burned-out scrobbler equipment half in and half out of Silbrica, like they couldn’t get it through the portal . . .

  But animals like the pouncels could get through. There had to be a reason.

  “We work slowly,” said Jorge. “I have strict orders from the excavation leader. One inch at a time. If you find anything at all, tell me.”

  It was hot work, made doubly so by the cramped conditions of the square. They couldn’t all fit in at once, so they developed a rotation with two resting at a time. Twice Darwen thought he had found something only to discover that it was just a perfectly normal piece of rock, and after half an hour, he began to wish the grown-ups would leave them to it so that they could set to arranging the stone spheres in a circle.

  “Huh,” said Alex.

  “What?” said Mr. Iverson, who was standing to the side, wiping the sweat from his face with a muddy hand.

  “I hit something,” she said, and tapped the tip of her trowel against it to make the point. It chinked. “Stone, it looks like, but big and flat. And there are lines on it, like it’s been carved. Is that good?”

  The others stared at her for a moment, and then Rich was pushing closer to see, and Jorge was calling for brushes from the box. They worked around the edges with the trowels and swept the surface of the stone slab clean until they could see the design etched into its surface.

  The carving showed a swirl of lines beside what looked like a pole.

  “It’s an octopus,” said Gabriel.

  “But this,” said Mr. Iverson, perplexed, indicating the vertical line, “looks like a tree. An octopus that lives in trees?”

  Darwen said nothing. He stared at the carving, and when he looked up, Rich and Alex were both looking at him. He nodded fractionally.

  It was the thing that had taken Luis. The Insidious Bleck.

  So it too had been here long ago. The Guardians had been able to seal off Silbrica and its monsters from this place. But now the beasts were back, they had a purpose, and they had at least one “person” on their side—Scarlett Oppertune. Darwen didn’t know how he was going to stop them, but his eyes slid over to the stone spheres half-buried in the hard ground, and he knew he was ready to try.

  Jorge couldn’t sit still. He kept pacing around the excavated square taking pictures of the carving with a little digital camera and muttering to himself. Finally he couldn’t wait any longer. “We should go back to the mainland,” he said. “I need to get to a computer and consult with my colleagues.”

  “Your colleagues?” said Mr. Iverson.

  “The archaeologists,” said Jorge. “I must send these pictures to San José.”

  “I promised the students a whole afternoon of research on the island,” said Mr. Iverson. “Can’t it wait a few hours?”

  “No,” snapped Jorge. “This is important.”

  “So is the education of my students,” said Mr. Iverson carefully.

  “We’ll be fine by ourselves if you want to head back,” Darwen tried.

  “I can’t leave you here alone, even with your teacher,” said Jorge. “And you can’t drive the boat.”

  “I’ll take the pictures,” said Gabriel in a sudden and unexpected burst of enthusiasm. “I’ve had enough of archaeology anyway. I could swim across to the boat where the others are snorkeling.”

  Jorge considered him and checked his watch. “The reef sharks will be starting to hunt soon, so the snorkelers will be getting ready to go.”

  He said this like Gabriel was merely booking a slightly earlier flight.

  “Are you a strong swimmer?” asked Jorge, slipping the camera’s memory stick into a ziplock bag he had in his pocket.

  “Yes,” said Gabriel

  Jorge hesitated, thinking, then nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. For a moment he stood, as if still undecided, then he took out a pen and wrote on a piece of paper. Gabriel read it, and something came into his face, a hesitancy that might have been fear. Jorge met his eyes and nodded once before handing him the plastic bag. “Send this to my colleagues when you get back to the camp,” he said. “Mr. Peregrine will know how to reach them.”

  Darwen was not the only one who looked surprised that Jorge had such confidence in the world studies teacher. Mr. Iverson’s face was carefully blank, but Alex’s eyebrows were about as high as they could go. Gabriel just nodded, then set off at a run. In seconds he had disappeared from view.

  Jorge turned to find everyone looking at him. Something odd had just happened, Darwen felt sure of it, and even Mr. Iverson seemed cautious, watchful.

  “Water break,” Jorge said. “And snacks. But we should eat back at the ranger station. We must not contaminate the environment. Let us cover the dig site and put our tools away. There is no one on the island now but us.”

  Darwen felt a shiver of excitement at the idea: just the five of them on a deserted patch of jungle ten miles out into the Pacific. It was like something out of Treasure Island. If only Jorge and Mr. Iverson had opted to go with Gabriel so that he could have gotten that portal working . . .

  “Caño Island has been completely cut off from the rest of the peninsula,” said Jorge, returning to tour-guide mode as they finished cleaning up and began the walk down to the beach, “so it has far fewer bird and animal species than on the mainland. Only one percent of the insects that live there”—he stopped midsentence, seeming to forget everyone around him. He was staring at a patch of dried mud by the trail.

  “What?” asked Rich. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing,” said Jorge, and he kicked at the earth with his boot, scuffing
the dirt.

  Rich gave him a hard look.

  Jorge’s face was expressionless, but when Mr. Iverson gave him an inquiring look, he just shrugged and smiled and moved off along the path. Darwen was about to go after the adults when Alex tugged his shirt.

  “Look,” she whispered.

  A few feet from where Jorge had been standing, there were tracks in the now hard ground, tracks showing claws and a central talon much longer than the rest.

  “You know what that means?” said Alex.

  “That there are pouncels on the island,” said Darwen, frowning, “and Jorge doesn’t want us to know.”

  “And they didn’t swim ten miles to get here,” said Alex. “So the stone spheres back there are an active portal.”

  “But someone has to arrange them into a circle,” said Darwen. “You don’t think Jorge is working with Scarlett? They hate each other!”

  “People lie, Darwen,” said Alex.

  Darwen hung back as she followed the others.

  He had liked the guide, and he still did. If Jorge was working with Scarlett, if he was involved in any way with the disappearance of Luis, Eduardo, and Calida, then the world was a little less pleasant, less trustworthy, less good. But why would he be? Why would anyone be abducting children?

  The question brought a name they had barely spoken in weeks to Darwen’s mind: Greyling.

  Last time, it had been Greyling who had been directing Miss Murray to power his machines, and though Darwen was able to tell himself that they had not seen any direct signs of him yet—no gnashers or scrobblers, no kid-sized generators—he knew that if Greyling was somehow behind everything, behind the Insidious Bleck, things would be far worse than he imagined.

  Darwen’s unease deepened as he reached the beach. A strange scene was playing out there. Mr. Iverson was standing on the shore gesturing wildly with both hands toward the distant snorkelers, whose boat was speeding away with Gabriel—presumably—on board. Jorge was kneeling beside their own boat looking serious.

  Darwen broke into a run. “What’s going on?” he shouted.

  “Him!” yelled Rich. “It was him!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jorge,” said Rich, turning fiercely. “He did it.”

  “It wasn’t him, Rich,” said Mr. Iverson, splashing his way to the shore. “It was like this when we got here.”

  “Like what?” asked Darwen. “Will someone please tell me what is going on?”

  Rich pointed at a patch of wet sand by the boat where Jorge was squatting. Darwen took a step toward it and was immediately overwhelmed by a familiar and powerful smell.

  Petrol—or, as he had gotten used to calling it over the last few months, gasoline.

  The yellow plastic cans were uncapped and on their sides. Someone had dumped their fuel. They were stranded.

  “Maybe the wind blew them over,” said Mr. Iverson.

  “And unscrewed the tops?” said Rich.

  Jorge stood up. He met Rich’s hostile gaze, then began walking down the beach toward the ranger station.

  “So we’re stuck here?” said Alex. “Until when? Not overnight, right? Someone will come for us before dark, yeah?”

  “Mr. Iverson,” called Jorge as he walked away, “could we talk for a moment?”

  Mr. Iverson, looking bewildered, hurried after him.

  The students watched them go.

  “It was Gabriel,” said Darwen, stunned. “It had to be. That explains why he wanted to leave so quickly. But what would make him do it in the first place?”

  “Because Jorge told him to,” said Rich. “I’ve been saying it all along: we can’t trust that guy.”

  “He expects something to happen tonight,” said Darwen. It was a guess, but it felt right. “Something is going to happen, and he wants to be here to see it.”

  “I knew we couldn’t trust him,” spluttered Rich.

  “Rich,” said Alex in her no-nonsense voice. “Stop talking.”

  Rich opened his mouth to argue, but she stared him down as only she could, and he turned sullenly away.

  “So now what?” asked Darwen. “There’s no cell phone signal out here. What about a radio?”

  “Yes,” said Rich. “I saw one on the shelf back there with the food supplies. It’s pretty old and has a hand crank. They may be using it right now.”

  “Come on,” said Darwen.

  They ran over to the shelter and found Jorge sitting at the ancient radio. He avoided their eyes and cranked the handle vigorously, then flipped switches, crammed a battered headset on, and adjusted a dial, talking. Alex listened closely, but her face showed no sign of doubt or alarm. After a few moments, he sat back and slammed the headset to the desktop, uttering a single shouted syllable that Miss Martinez was unlikely to ever teach them.

  “That was a bad word,” said Alex, in case they hadn’t guessed. “He seems pretty upset.”

  “No one said he wasn’t a good actor,” whispered Rich.

  “Nada,” said Jorge. “Nothing. Probably no one is near the radio. They won’t be until the other boat gets back. If we cannot reach them soon, it will be too dark for them to come in to shore. The rocks are very dangerous, and there are no lights out here.”

  “If they could get close to the island,” said Darwen, acting as neutrally as possible toward Jorge, “could we swim out to meet them?”

  Jorge shook his head. “Sharks,” he said. “I will keep trying,” he added, “but we should prepare to be here overnight. We should camp on the beach. It will be safer than in the rainforest.”

  “I thought there were no large predators on the island,” said Rich, barely keeping the skepticism out of his voice.

  “There are some snakes,” said Jorge without looking at them directly. Darwen knew the guide was thinking about the pouncels whose tracks he had tried to hide. “Why don’t you gather some wood for a fire?”

  “Er . . . because it’s, like, a hundred degrees,” said Alex.

  “For safety,” said Jorge.

  “Ah,” said Alex. “Wood it is. Coming right up. Lumber. Logs. Kindling—”

  “Okay, Alex,” said Rich, fishing in a box of supplies and emerging with a cigarette lighter. “We’ll get the wood. Mr. Iverson can stay here with Jorge,” he added, with a meaningful look at Darwen and Alex.

  “What?” said Mr. Iverson, who seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. “Sure. That’s fine.”

  As soon as they were out of earshot of the shelter, Rich said, “Someone has to keep an eye on Jorge. How’s Mr. I’s Spanish?”

  Alex waggled her hand and made a noncommittal noise: not bad, not great.

  Rich raised his eyebrow.

  “Good enough to tell if he’s ordering Silbrican monster attacks, I guess.” Alex shrugged.

  “You know,” said Darwen, “this is actually perfect.”

  “Being stranded on an island with monsters on it?” said Alex. “Yeah, it’s a dream come true. No, wait. It’s a nightmare come true.”

  “I mean we can activate the portal by the dig site tonight,” said Darwen. “We wait for the adults to go to sleep, and then we sneak up there, make a circle with the loose spheres, pour some water in—unless it rains, which it probably will—and we’re in.”

  They looked at each other, and the excitement passed through them like the electricity they were about to stimulate.

  “Let’s do it,” said Rich.

  “Agreed,” said Alex, taking their hands. “But until then we let Mr. Iverson and Jorge think they’re running the show. Let’s get that wood.”

  They worked for an hour, gathering fallen timbers and branches and dragging them onto the sand where the gas had been spilled.

  “Might make it easier to light, at least,�
� Rich shrugged. “And it’s a good distance from the forest. Wouldn’t want to accidentally devastate the environment, would we?”

  “No,” said Darwen. “That’s Scarlett’s job, though I still don’t know why.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t need a reason,” said Alex. “Maybe she just wants to destroy what other people value. Some people are like that. Ask that ignoranus Chip Whittley why he killed that butterfly.”

  “You mean ignoramus,” said Rich.

  “I know what I mean,” said Alex.

  Back at the ranger station, Jorge had laid out food rations from the plastic storage bins and made coffee on a tiny propane stove. “Cream and sugar?” he asked as he handed out chipped enamel mugs.

  “Cream?” said Alex. “We have a fridge?”

  Jorge laughed, pushing one of the big Tupperware boxes. “Just the powdered kind,” he said. “It lasts forever.” He looked out toward the ocean. “The sun is going down. Even if I reach the tent camp now on the radio, no one will come until morning. You should decide where you are going to sleep.”

  “What about you?” asked Darwen.

  “I am not tired,” said the guide, “and someone should pay attentions for a while.”

  “Why?” said Rich.

  “No reason,” said Jorge, though his eyes had that evasive look again. “Just to be safe. You can take your bows.”

  Darwen doubted their homemade bows and arrows would be of much use if the pouncels—or worse—attacked, but since he had nothing better to offer, he just shrugged. Even Alex brought hers, though Rich gave her a you-can’t-be-serious look.

  “Don’t be making fun of my bow,” she said warningly.

  “Oh, it’s a bow,” said Rich. “I thought it was a rare one-stringed harp.”

  “How about I use my one-stringed harp to put an arrow in your butt?” Alex responded.

  “You couldn’t hit the ocean with that thing,” said Rich.

  “From where?” asked Alex.

  “From the edge of the ocean,” said Rich.

  Darwen laughed.

  “We’ll see about that,” said Alex, looking affronted. “We’re going to have a little competition, you and me, Rich Haggerty.”