Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  “Octavius,” said Jorge to Mr. Peregrine, fuming, “we have known each other a long time, but you leave me no choice. I am relieving you of your authority.”

  “Which was to be expected,” said Mr. Peregrine, finally moving so that the fly was dislodged and flew buzzing around the office. “The Guardians never did tolerate opposing positions very well.”

  “Come on, Alex,” said Darwen. “I guess we’ll have to stop him by ourselves.”

  “Darwen, I understand your feelings,” said Jorge.

  “You understand nothing,” said Darwen, turning on him savagely. “You believe in nothing.”

  “If you interfere with the Guardians’ wishes,” said Jorge, “we will have to stop you.”

  “Yeah, pretty boy?” said Alex, stepping so close to where Jorge was sitting that her face was inches from his. “Bring it on.”

  Darwen and Alex had left the office full of defiance and determination. Five hours later, their plans and preparations made, that determination had not dulled.

  “You okay?” Darwen asked Alex.

  “I think so.”

  “We have a little over an hour until sunset,” said Darwen. “I think you should go.”

  She nodded, but still looked uncertain.

  “What if I can’t—”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I trust you.”

  “Great.” She frowned. “No pressure.”

  Darwen grinned and watched her leave before setting off on his own. She was making for the houses by the soccer field; he was heading into the jungle again.

  Though the sky over the ocean was painted with the soft blue and gold of twilight, the forest itself was getting dark fast. Since Darwen had decided that he couldn’t stick to the path all the way for fear of being seen, he had to pick his way through the trees, studying the leaves at his feet for signs of movement. No one had seen a bushmaster or fer-de-lance so far, and he prayed he wouldn’t be the first, particularly not out here by himself in the gathering gloom. He tried not to think about the wandering pouncels.

  It took him over half an hour to complete the journey, which was odd because he knew he would soon be covering the exact same distance in a matter of seconds. At one point he had pushed a little too far north and had only caught himself when he saw the trees thinning suddenly: it was the clearing. He waited, conscious of a man—Mr. Delgado, he thought—pacing the perimeter with a rifle. Again, Darwen crept west. He didn’t swing back north until he knew he was well past the circle of yellow bulldozers.

  How could anyone not be outraged?

  Perhaps, as Rich said, they just didn’t care. Hillside looked after its own, and the people who lived here—worthy though they were of the kind of study you would apply to Latin or algebra—were anything but Hillside’s own. For the students this was a trip into a different world. It might be a kind of theme park erected for their amusement, but as a place where people lived, it was no more real to them than Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

  For a moment the image of the clown face came into Darwen’s mind, and he heard its cycling laughter, but he pushed the memory away.

  Even in daylight it would be hard to navigate through this part of the jungle. To the north and east, the ground rose steeply, but down here Darwen could see nothing beyond the trees surrounding him. Only when there was a gap in the canopy could he correct his course based on the metal cable high above the treetops, and as the light dropped still further, he would lose even that.

  He checked his watch and picked up the pace.

  The woods hummed with the chirp of insects, and once Darwen spotted a brilliant yellow-and-black frog, bright as plastic, sitting on a leaf. He kept his distance, knowing it was poisonous. Once, he heard movement in the undergrowth to his right and saw bushes shift as the creature—pig, coati, deer, or something predatory like a mountain lion—moved off. He was still watching for the animal when he realized he had found what he was looking for.

  It was, simply, a tree. A big one that lanced up into the canopy like the mast of a ship. It was twined with ancient vines as thick as Darwen’s waist. These had grown into the bark as they spiraled up, and at various heights on the trunk, steel cables had been bolted into place. Spikes were set into the tree all the way up in a kind of ladder.

  Darwen took a long look up, wiped the sweat from his brow, and started to climb.

  It was slow, precarious going, and by the time he reached the planked platform, the sun had set entirely. He moved cautiously, feeling his way around and clinging to the vast trunk. It was so dark that it hardly made a difference, but he kept his eyes focused on the tree itself, not turning outward until he felt absolutely secure.

  He was at least a hundred feet up, gazing out over the dark jungle canopy. The zip line’s twined steel cable ran up to the northwest and down, back over that distant clearing with its yellow bulldozers, to the camp. From here he could barely make out the space where the trees had been cut. It seemed very far below and miles away, though he knew he would cover the distance in under a minute once he got moving.

  From his backpack he took out a harness that he had taken from the office that afternoon, and he stood on tiptoes to hook it over the cable. He was struggling with it when a whir of movement and a volley of sound exploded inches above his head. He jumped, lost his balance, and stumbled toward the edge of the platform as the toucan—fortunately that’s all it was—rocketed into the dusk. He caught himself, but the harness slipped, hung tantalizingly on a stray branch, then fell all the way to the bottom.

  Darwen swore, then checked his watch. Perhaps he would have time to climb back down. . . .

  Darwen had barely completed the thought when a flicker, like lightning, flashed up from the forest floor in the distance behind the camp. He watched it change to a soft radiant glow, circular, in the middle of the clearing.

  It was now or never. There was certainly no time to make a perilous climb back down the tree for the harness.

  Fumbling with the dread of what he was about to do, Darwen unthreaded the belt from his pants and reached up. He looped the belt over the cable twice, threaded the end through the buckle, and twined what was left around his wrist. He tried a little jump to see if it would take his weight, and the belt slid a few inches down the zip line, leading Darwen to drop his feet to the platform in panic.

  His hands and face were sweating. He could feel the cold trickle down his back, soaking his shirt. He felt the air beneath him stir and was reminded of just how far he had to fall, how much danger awaited him even if he succeeded.

  He gritted his teeth and stepped off the platform into nothing.

  He shot down the zip line, the wind rushing against his face, and almost immediately he could feel the leather of the belt getting hot. He tried to adjust it, but his weight was too great. He was also picking up speed.

  He took his eyes off the belt, which he thought had started to smoke, and realized just how quickly he was going. Ahead and below he could make out the clearing, lit by the soft glow of the portal. And then he saw a flash and, a fraction of a second later, heard the crack of a rifle from the trees below.

  They had spotted him.

  He pulled his legs up, feeling the heat in the leather starting to burn his fingers, and looked down. The pool gazed up at him like an eye. He was still forty feet above it, but it had to be . . .

  Now.

  He untwisted the belt from his wrist, held for one last second, then let go.

  He fell like a stone, pointing with his feet, hoping against hope that he would hit the target and not the ground, which would surely kill him. He dropped through the darkness, heard the singing path of another bullet speeding past him, and then entered the pearly glow of the portal.

  There was no splash. There was only the sudden dazzling flare of energy, blinding him completely for a
second, and then only chaos and pain.

  It took a second for Darwen to realize what had happened. He had expected the shock in his legs and knees, but the shot to his right arm and forehead took him so completely by surprise that he almost blacked out. He opened his eyes, his head swimming, but he was still moving, falling, rolling down the wrought-iron stairs from the portal into the thick greenish fog of the jungle locus. He was holding something large and padded, like an oddly shaped leather couch that was falling with him, and it was that object that was protecting him from the hard metal edges of the steps. He had reached the bottom before he realized that the couch was actually nothing of the kind.

  It was a massive toad. Or very nearly. It was like a toad, its skin warty and brownish, its eyes huge and bulging, its mouth wide and flat, but it was also like a scrobbler. It had paws like hands with long, horny nails, and it was longer than a toad so that it might stand upright. It also wore fragments of armor and equipment.

  It hit the ground with a thud and rolled onto its back. For a moment Darwen lay on top of it, staring into the blank eyes of the appalling creature he had landed on. Then he was scrambling off, terrified, but the monster didn’t move, and its huge brown fists were open. The collision had knocked it out.

  Darwen looked hastily around. It seemed like this was the lone guard. The jungle clearing with its vine-framed portals looked exactly as it had when he had seen it last.

  Darwen’s eyes returned to the prone toad-man. It was wearing what looked like pieces of stained chain mail looped across its chest and around its long, powerful limbs, and its head was half-covered by a leather helmet to which metal plates had been fastened. It wore an oversized backpack covered in dials and switches, all sparking ominously, which seemed to disappear into the creature’s neck somehow. Darwen nudged the helmet with his foot, and it moved enough to show that the tubes from the backpack fitted through brass valves right into the monster’s throat. Darwen shuddered. With an effort he lifted one of the beast’s massive muscular arms and revealed a belt holster. He peered again into its face to ensure that those dreadful bulbous eyes were still blank, then unfastened the holster’s flap and drew out a kind of pistol.

  It was so heavy it would take both hands to aim and fire, and it wasn’t quite like any gun Darwen had ever seen before, with its brass barrel and the curious bulb of blue glass that stuck out just beside the heavy trigger.

  He considered shoving it down the back of his jeans, but decided that was a pretty good way of accidentally blowing his legs off. He held it in front of him instead and crossed over to the portal he had entered with Alex and Rich, but had left only with Alex.

  He knew what was inside, knew also that if he was spotted right away, he was as good as dead, gun or no gun, but he thought again of his friends, of Luis, the boy he had seen in the grip of the Bleck weeks ago, and of that awful generator that was going to roll into his own world. He had no choice.

  He took a deep breath and stepped through.

  Things had changed since Darwen’s last visit to the warehouse locus. What had been dark and smoky was now full of hard, brittle light, and the air pulsed with the swirling, wheezy music of a carnival organ. The wheeled generator had been swung around and shunted up to the very archway by a huge armored bulldozer covered in pipes and gears, which made the Sunbelt Vacation machines look like toys. As soon as Darwen stepped in, he was up against the generator. This was a stroke of luck, as it meant he didn’t have to try to cross the vast warehouse unseen. Before, the generator had been bare and cold black iron, but now it was roughly painted in candy-striped red and white, like a circus tent. He ducked behind one of the great sets of wheels and looked for an entrance hatch.

  Lights glowed dimly along the generator’s length, and Darwen guessed that the cables that trailed from it were powering everything in the warehouse, even as they prepared to unhook it for the short journey fifty feet up through the portal and into the jungle clearing a world away. Darwen didn’t need to look through the portholes in the side to know where that power was coming from, but he was also sure that they couldn’t get it through the gate. He didn’t know why, but the scrobbler machines stopped working when taken through the stone-sphere portals. That was why Scarlett was using a living being like the Bleck, and it meant that he still had time.

  He peered through a gap in the caterpillar tracks and saw that the rest of the great chamber was pulsing with activity. There were the awful, headless gnashers bounding about on their knuckles, dragging spools of cable and machine parts, their shark mouths gaping across their chests like savage gashes. There were scrobblers with tools and weapons, their gas masks slapped with bright paint so that they all had leering, rigid clown faces. There were more of the ugly toad-men, some squatting, their heads low, others making slow, grotesque hops around the machinery, their warty skin like underfilled leather sacks. They all wore the control-studded backpacks, all wired directly into their throats. All the way at the back, there was the Insidious Bleck, pulsing slowly in its cage, watched warily by a handful of scrobblers with energy weapons. If any of them spotted him, he was dead. Simple as that.

  Cluttering the floor were discarded sideshow booths and fair rides. He could see a long counter with air rifles fastened to it and a mechanical parade of rubber-duck targets. There were the cuplike seats from a luminous green waltzer studded with oversized lightbulbs, red bumper cars stacked up with their rod-like antennae and the lurid entrance sign for a ghost train, hung with fake cobwebs. Above them all, its back turned toward Darwen and sitting dark, still, and silent in his glass box was the World-Famous Laughing Man.

  Darwen tore his eyes away and scanned the room for Greyling, whom he had seen last year as a glowing, silvery man in a hooded cloak. There was no sign of him, and only one figure truly stood out: a glamorous woman in a carefully tailored suit of shocking pink. Scarlett Oppertune. She, it seemed, was in charge.

  Darwen watched her pointing and ordering, sending the gnashers and scrobblers scrambling to do her bidding, and a deep anger welled up inside him. This was all her doing: the abandoned village, the shattered jungle, the kidnapped children, and whatever her master, Greyling, planned to do once he had his base established.

  Darwen had to force himself to return his focus to the generator. Before anything else happened, he had to get the children out. He had been searching for Luis for weeks, for Eduardo and Calida, and now for Rich.

  But how?

  The underside of the machine was like a great iron pipe that had been bolted together in sections. Each nut was the size of Darwen’s fist. No way in there.

  He crept out, keeping the hulking torpedo shape of the generator between him and the scrobbler army and its high-heeled general. He climbed onto the tracked wheels and then up onto the generator itself. There were portholes along the side, and through them a yellowish radiance streamed out. Reluctantly, Darwen looked in.

  There were ten seats, eight of them already occupied. He saw Calida, Luis, and other local children whose faces he didn’t recognize, all strapped in place, with metal headpieces wired into the generator’s circuitry. At the far end was Chip, slumped over as if asleep, and beside him . . .

  “Rich,” Darwen breathed.

  From here it was impossible to say how many of the children were still alive.

  There was one way in: a hatch with a red-painted wheel, like an air lock. Darwen set down the heavy pistol, got a hold of the wheel, and tried to turn it first one way, then the other, but it wouldn’t move. He strained, sweating, until he thought his muscles would tear from his bones, but the wheel wouldn’t budge.

  He sank back, gasping, and in his exhaustion he failed to notice the pistol that had been balanced precariously on a ledge behind him. He nudged it, watched as it wobbled and fell as if in slow motion, then swung his hand to catch it, and only succeeded in losing his balance. He slipped off the generator and
hit the ground hard, no more than a second after the pistol had clattered its way down among the valves and pipes.

  And then the laughter started. It seemed to come from everywhere, the same cycling roar of hysteria, and over in the center of the warehouse, Darwen could see the mechanical clown turning toward him and rocking in his chair.

  They had seen him.

  Darwen hurled himself to the ground as the first uneven salvo of energy-weapon fire came streaking toward him. It lit the air like lightning, cannoning off the iron apparatus around him with showers of sparks. Somewhere at his back a valve burst, and steam rushed out in a hot and angry hiss.

  Scarlett Oppertune spun toward him, her face a mask of fury. She bellowed her orders to the scrobblers. “Don’t shoot at him, you idiots! You’ll damage the equipment. Bring him to me.”

  As the hulking figures started their ponderous advance—joined by one of the monstrous toad creatures, the elbows of its forelegs splayed out as it lumbered forward—Darwen made a choice.

  He knew he couldn’t get the generator hatch open by himself. He dropped to his knees, reaching under the pipes and dusty cables, fingers straining, searching. The nearest scrobbler was only ten yards away, and there was a gnasher loping in his shadow, its shark mouth gaping. Darwen felt something hard, snatched at it, and came up with the pistol in his hands. He aimed and pulled the trigger.

  But nothing happened, and then Scarlett began to laugh, a low, throaty chuckle of real amusement.

  The scrobbler, which had hesitated, came on again, quicker now. The toad was coming too, and much faster than Darwen had thought possible. It opened that massive horizontal slash of a mouth, and Darwen suddenly knew how it would catch him.

  Its tongue.

  He stared at the gun. Maybe it had broken when it fell, or wasn’t loaded, or . . . wasn’t turned on! There was a switch just above the trigger guard. He flicked it over, and the glass bulb on the side glowed blue and steady, the whole pistol shivering in his grasp. The energy throbbed inside it, and the weapon become distinctly live, hovering, shifting, as if eager to find a target. It took all of Darwen’s strength to keep it pointed in front of him. Once again, this time wincing away from it as he did so, he squeezed the trigger.