Darwen Arkwright and the Insidious Bleck

by A. J. Hartley

  The pistol leaped in his hands. What came out of the end was not like a bullet at all. Instead a stream of blue-white force shot from the end and held like a rope for as long as he held the trigger. It wasn’t tight and hard like a laser, but wandered and sparked erratically, so that the scrobbler had to sprawl a good ten feet out of its line of fire to be safe. The toad creature behind wasn’t so fortunate. It strayed into the energy stream and was blown backward off its feet. When it hit the ground, it lay motionless and smoking, its tongue lolling.

  Darwen released the trigger, scared of the power he had unleashed but confident that he had created a useful standoff. Scarlett, who wasn’t laughing anymore, had retreated behind a massive Egyptian sarcophagus with a gold death mask, and the scrobblers were lumbering behind cover all around the warehouse. Only the blind gnashers seemed uncertain, stock-still and testing the charged air with their probing tongues as the laughter of the mechanical clown rose in pitch and volume, drowning out the carnival music. Darwen had bought himself valuable seconds.

  But to do what? He couldn’t use the pistol to open the generator without killing everyone inside, and though the gun was still humming, it was less than it had been. He wouldn’t get many more shots like that out of it. His eyes flashed desperately around the warehouse, with its gleaming sideshows and carousel animals. The scrobblers were starting to inch toward him again. A voice came from the great gold sarcophagus: Scarlett.

  “Well, now, Mr. Arkwright,” she said. “We’ve been expecting you. So nice to see you again. Well, not really, but we must observe the pleasantries. As I recall, you made life rather difficult for me back in Atlanta when you knew me as Miss Murray. I won’t be permitting anything like that tonight. So, while you have made quite an entrance, I’m afraid it won’t improve the manner of your exit. But you have my attention. So let’s see if we can come to some kind of agreement that might help you avoid any unpleasantness.”

  Darwen looked up. Some kind of agreement?

  “I mean,” she continued, “we can do it by the book: you sit there shooting until your weapon runs out of energy, and then my trusty agents gather you up and feed you into the generator. Or”—she paused, savoring the possibility—“we can try something different.”

  “Like what?” Darwen shouted back, stalling.

  “Okeydoke,” she said, suddenly chipper, “how about this? How about you kick your little gun over to one of my gas-masked friends, and I’ll get you a milk shake—chocolate, of course—and we can have a little chat about some alternative futures.”

  Milk shake?

  “Like I’d trust you!” Darwen shouted back. “You’d kill me as soon as you had the chance.”

  “Trust?” She laughed. “Who’s talking about trust? I may have been a teacher, but I’m also a businesswoman. I wouldn’t expect you to take my offer without a decent incentive. Lay down your weapon, walk away from the generator, and we’ll talk. I could certainly make it worth your while.”

  “Meaning what?” said Darwen.

  “Meaning that the New Council might make room for the mirroculist,” she said, her voice silky now. “You’ve been confused, that’s all. Learn to see things from our perspective and, oh, Darwen! What wonders will be open to you.”

  New Council? Darwen thought. But that’s not what he said aloud. “Wonders?” he echoed, lowering the pistol a little in his hands.

  “All the marvels of Silbrica,” she purred. “Not the few tame loci your friend Mr. Peregrine has shown you, but whole worlds beyond your imagination! Stand with us, and you will be able to stride between them all without so much as a thought, and with them will come power! It must be so tiresome, all your potential wasted on the petty doings of school and homework and bullies, trudging from place to place, sitting in traffic, when you could be leaping from portal to portal. How tedious it must be for you! How lonely!”

  Distantly, Darwen was aware of the continuing laughter of the clown, and he remembered taking his mother’s hand all those years ago at the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool.

  Lonely.

  “You talk about trust, but you can’t trust the old Guardians any more than you believe you can trust me,” she went on. “You know that. The members of the old council were always liars and manipulators. What have they told you of their real purpose, I wonder? Not much. Enough lies and misdirection to keep their pet Squint at their side, but not nearly enough of what is really going on. Because, Darwen Arkwright, if a mirroculist like yourself could see the true picture, you would quickly snap Mr. Peregrine’s leash, the rope of lies with which he keeps you tethered, and then you would really come into your own. You haven’t begun to tap the kind of power you could wield. The old shopkeeper won’t let you. But join us, and things could be very different.

  “The Guardians will be replaced,” Scarlett purred, and now she stepped out into the open again, moving to where a great red lever stuck out from a bank of valves and dials. “I could give you a seat on the council that will take their place. And then you could have anything you wanted. With me beside you, Darwen Arkwright, and my master at our head, who could stand in your way?”

  Darwen felt a rush of something unexpected, a thrill of pleasurable anticipation. Power. He had never had it. He had a gift, but to be able to use it for whatever he wanted, not having to worry about other people . . .

  “She speaks the truth.”

  The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It was calm and low, distant but crystal clear, and it unwound like smoke in Darwen’s ears. He realized that the mechanical laughter that had been ringing through the building had stopped. He looked up. The clown’s face had changed. It was still the same figure, but what had been hard and shiny was now pliable and soft, like flesh, and its eyes, which were open now, were somehow, unmistakably, alive.

  Greyling.

  Darwen knew him at once, even in the clown’s impossible face.

  “You recognize me,” said the clown. “How gratifying.”

  “I knew it would be you in the end,” said Darwen.

  “Of course you did,” said Greyling. There was something of the clown in his voice, a lilting playfulness that went through Darwen like fingernails on a blackboard. “Because you are clever. Because you are talented in ways those around you cannot begin to appreciate.”

  “What do you want with this place?” Darwen asked.

  “The place is irrelevant,” said the clown, its head lolling, “or it would be without these wonderful little stone spheres. They really are remarkable, Darwen. You know what gives them their power, of course? It’s not the stone itself. It’s the labor that went into making them. The care. The respect. They were produced by a people without the most basic of metal tools. Do you have any idea how much work that would take? The time? The craft? The love? There’s power there, Darwen. We had to adjust our equipment, of course, fine-tune the frequency to make them resonate in just the right way, but the real power came from the stones themselves. They hold the memory of those who made them like the tracks of tears. Emotional residue, Darwen. Potent stuff. They have only one drawback, which you have kindly sidestepped for me.”

  Darwen frowned. “I haven’t done anything for you.”

  “Actually,” said Greyling, “you have. As you know, those wonderful little stone spheres can be used to open portals, but, as you have probably begun to realize, anything to do with Silbrica—especially the power bound to its portals—is tied to thought, to intention. If it wasn’t, I would never have been able to get so much energy out of a few children’s books and toys last year. The people who made the stone balls knew nothing of machinery, Darwen, and their respect for—even love of—the jungle and all that lived in it was almost boundless. Again, there’s power there, and it lingers, but it’s a particular kind of power, and it doesn’t suit all things. Imagine my disappointment when I found that my wonderful machines all
died as they tried to cross through the gates! It was very frustrating to have to rely on living creatures like the Bleck to do my work for me.”

  “So you can’t bring the generator through after all!” said Darwen, practically shouting. “You’ve lost.”

  “You misunderstand me,” said Greyling. “I cannot open the stone-sphere portals for my beautiful and terrible machines. Only the mirroculist can do that, because the mirroculist masters the portal from whichever side he is on, while my powers are limited to Silbrica only.” He paused, like a magician savoring the moment before the magical reveal, and Darwen felt a swelling sense of dread. “That is why I brought you here,” Greyling continued. “So that you could do for me the one thing I could not: open a nice wide gateway for my scrobblers and their equipment, including, of course, their generators. I am immensely grateful.”

  Darwen stared at him, his confusion turning to dismay. His gaze flashed over the scrobblers, the armored bulldozers, and the generators, which sat as if biding their time, and the horrified realization finally hit him. He knew what they had been waiting for. He remembered the zip line, his long, slow fall through the portal . . .

  No.

  “Thanks to your spectacular entrance tonight,” the clown continued, “I can now pronounce this portal open to whatever I want to send through it!”

  As he spoke, Scarlett threw the great red lever beside her, and there was a hiss of static. Darwen turned back toward the sound and saw that the arch was now flooded with a blue radiance that came from beyond the portal.

  “My lords, ladies, and gentlemen,” Greyling sang out, like he was introducing a circus act, “thanks to our most honored guest, the world-famous mirroculist, Darwen Arkwright, the invasion of the human world has begun!”

  Darwen stared at the portal, overwhelmed by a sense of despair so crushing that he could not speak. Everything he had done had been in vain. All his courage, his determination—it had been for nothing. He had thought he was a hero, a savior, but the whole time Greyling had been toying with him, luring him so that he would do the one thing Greyling could not do for himself.

  He had failed. Worse, he had handed victory to the enemy.

  “I had hoped,” Greyling continued, “that you would have helped willingly, knowingly, rather than by stumbling accident, as it turns out you have, but I still believe that we might be partners in greatness. With a mirroculist of your talent at my side, what could we not achieve?”

  There was a pause, and Scarlett’s eyes flicked between them, watchful.

  Then the clownish Greyling smiled. “Darwen,” he said, “you have already opened my portal for me. Would you care to have done it as my friend or as my enemy? We may not have such an opportunity again, Darwen Arkwright. Join me.”

  “Why do you look like that?” asked Darwen.

  Greyling seemed to hesitate.

  “You know things about me,” said Darwen, answering his own question. “About my past. You can change the way people see you, and you tapped into my memories somehow, looking for something that would make you seem . . . familiar, comforting. Something that would associate you with happy times in my life. But I think Alex was right. There’s something in my head that’s trying to send me a message. I don’t know why, but when you chose the way you would appear to me, you got it wrong. I remembered Blackpool,” he said, thinking it through, “because going to the Calloway lights had reminded me of going there with my parents. You found the right place, the right moment, but you chose something I always hated, something that scared me, and you know what I think? I think that—somehow—I did that. Without knowing, without even sensing you were doing it, some part of me made you choose the wrong image so that when the time came for me to choose, I would recognize you for what you are. And now that time has come, and I’ve made my choice.”

  Darwen stood up. He took a long, steadying breath, raised the pistol in two hands, and fired, clamping the trigger down, emptying the weapon.

  The energy stream sent the strange fairground shadows leaping, as if the carousel horses had come to life and the clown had grown twenty feet. Then there was a fizz, a pop, and the gun died in Darwen’s hands.

  “Missed,” said Scarlett, smiling her toothy politician’s smile. “And now it’s all empty.”

  She leaped toward him, something of the eel creature’s speed in her uncanny approach, and in moments she was close enough to touch. Instinctively he reached for her face, clamping his hand to her mouth and holding on. It had worked once before. . . .

  But she did not wince away in pain as she had at Halloween, and when he released her, the smile was back. “You didn’t think we’d try again before we’d found a way around that little weakness, did you?” she said silkily. “Ironic, isn’t it? You have opened the portal for us, and none of your little friends will be able to come and help you. Not without the mirroculist to hold their hands. You are going to regret not being a better shot, little boy.”

  “Who says I missed?” said Darwen, recovering his defiance. “I wasn’t aiming at you.”

  She smiled, thinking this was a ruse, but then she heard the scrobblers streaming out of the shadows. She caught their panic and turned.

  The cage door was still smoking where Darwen had hit the lock. It hung open. And in great undulating waves of its sinewy tentacles, the Insidious Bleck was coming out.

  Darwen wasn’t sure, but he thought it looked angry.

  It moved with extraordinary speed, pulling itself from the wreckage of the cage and crawling on the elbows of its tentacles across the factory floor. It tossed aside a pair of scrobblers and a gnasher, one of which had tried to stick it with some kind of spear wired to the pack on the scrobbler’s back: a cattle prod. The scrobbler was down, but the prod was still sparking, as if jammed in the “on” position. Scarlett had bolted into the cover of the fairground clutter, but the monster seemed uninterested in her. It was making for the portal, trying to get out.

  Darwen ran toward it. Diving toward the prone scrobbler, he rolled into a crouch with the cattle prod pointed up at the Bleck. The cable reaching to the scrobbler’s pack gave him just enough room to lunge once and find the underside of one of those bristle-covered tentacles. There was a sound like fish going into a deep fryer, and the Bleck screamed, shrinking away. Darwen waited to make sure it had seen him, then ran as hard and fast as he could back toward the generator. Again he dove, sliding into the dust beneath the machine, drawing his legs up tight as the Bleck came after him.

  If it was patient, he thought, it would seek him out with its tentacles, probing until it found him, and then it would drag him out and lift him up to that awful beak. But it wasn’t patient. It was furious. It had been kept penned for weeks, perhaps months, pushed and prodded and caged by creatures of malice and greed, and it was now blind with rage.

  Which was what Darwen wanted.

  The Bleck caught the generator in its immense tentacles and lifted the entire thing off him. In the sudden light, Darwen saw its furious eyes and, dimly, heard Scarlett scream with anger as it cast the generator aside. There was a crash that shook the warehouse and a series of popping explosions.

  The room was filled with a terrible, high-pitched shrieking. It was Greyling, raging as he lurched back and forth in his chair.

  A tentacle like a massive python caught Darwen and snatched him up into the air. His legs kicked, but his arms were bound fast to his sides. He could do nothing. He smelled the monster’s breath and saw the pulsing feelers around its mouth reaching for him as the great, razor-sharp beak opened.

  Then there was a flash, and the Bleck quivered. Its eyes widened, then dimmed. It collapsed, and Darwen found himself rolling free. Another flash. Scarlett Oppertune had taken one of the scrobbler’s energy weapons and fired it directly into the Bleck’s fleshy underside. Her face was a mask of fury and hatred. She shot again, and the mon
ster twitched. Then again, and again, until the weapon would fire no more.

  For a moment Darwen thought Scarlett had saved him on purpose, but one look at her told him that was not true. She had just been angry, furious with the creature that had finally refused to do her bidding. But she still wanted Darwen dead.

  Scarlett turned to the generator, which was lying on its side, its rivets popped and its seams broken open, before her gaze again found Darwen. All the style and polish was gone from her face now, it was so twisted with bitterness and savagery. She aimed the weapon at Darwen and tried the trigger again, but it merely clicked. “Kill him!” she shouted at the dazed scrobblers. “Now!”

  But as she gave the order, something remarkable happened.

  Alex stepped through the portal.

  “Hey, Darwen,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  “Been better,” said Darwen.

  “Two mirroculists!” exclaimed Scarlett, her eyes narrowing with disbelief. “How can there be two mirroculists?”

  “Must be one of those buy-one-get-one-free deals,” answered Alex. “Your lucky day. Not so lucky for Señor Delgado and his pals. They were on their way to help out here and really didn’t see me coming.”

  “Rich and the others are in there,” said Darwen, pointing at the ruptured generator. “Get them out.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Scarlett with a nasty grin. “It’s time you learned some manners, young lady. You might have somehow slipped past those half-wit humans, but you are in my world now and that means—”

  But before she finished her remark, her voice trailed off. She shaded her eyes and peered past Darwen toward the flickering portal.