The Forever Man

by Eoin Colfer

  ‘Very well,’ he said with a tinge of resignation in his voice. ‘We burn the witch.’

  Garrick’s smile was gentle and paternal, but inside he gleefully gloated and congratulated himself for taking the time, all those years ago, to manufacture for himself the bag of tricks to which he had treated these bumpkins on this day. Fortunate too that he had left them behind in Mandrake, for if not they would have been long spent before now.

  You get what you pay for materials-wise, Alby, he told himself. Another personal maxim.

  His moment of triumph was rudely truncated by the sudden intrusion of Godfrey Cryer, who barged into the chamber, panting as though pursued by the hounds of hell.

  ‘The witch!’ he called to Garrick, his voice hollow with fear, for the news he was about to deliver would likely enrage his master. ‘She has been taken. Isles took her. Bewitched he was. Africans are susceptible to magic, I have heard.’

  Garrick was momentarily peeved at this news, but then he conceded to himself that it was a most satisfyingly dramatic turn, which could have leaped from the pages of a penny dreadful.

  The show must at all costs go on, Alby.

  ‘The familiar!’ he cried with the authority granted him by his disappearing act. ‘She will attempt to free her familiar. To the chapel!’

  And, from the table, down he went in a single lurching leap that covered half the distance to the door. With a barge of his elbow, he knocked Cryer aside, making a note in his mind to deal with the fool later, and out into the night he ran, his black boots and pale skin making him seem like a legless ghost floating down the main street of Mandrake’s Groan.

  The Field Office

  Meanwhile, in the fens. Huntingdonshire. 1647

  Fairbrother Isles’s actual name was Fender Rhodes Isles, thanks to his mother’s adoration of legendary funkster Stevie Wonder, who favoured Fender Rhodes electric keyboards. His mother had actually wanted to name her baby boy Wonder but Fairbrother’s father, to his credit, baulked at the notion that his son should be forever taunted as ‘Wonder Isles’.

  ‘Sounds like something outta Star Trek’ were his actual words, and so they settled on Fender Rhodes, which wasn’t great as names go, but it was better than the alternative.

  Fender had jettisoned his own first names on his arrival in the seventeenth century and replaced them with Fairbrother, hoping that any other undercover time travellers might put two and two together and get FBI – but no one had, leading Isles to believe either that his code was too subtle or that he was stranded back here in the age of Roundheads and witches.

  Isles had been at this end of the time tunnel for so long that sometimes he wondered if he might have dreamed up the whole future thing.

  Computers, cellphones, space travel, Power Rangers.

  It was beginning to sound nuts, even to him.

  Gradually, as the first years trudged by, he forgot all about his real name and began to think of himself as Fairbrother and even to buy into his cover as the town’s drunkard-cum-halfwit. He bought into it a little too much and spent more nights in the jail than he did in the field office, a fact that annoyed the professor quite a bit. But what was the prof gonna do? Fire him? The prof was a civilian anyway, so technically he wasn’t Isles’s boss.

  But, even as he told himself this, Isles knew that this particular civilian was not just a normal guy. This civilian was extra special, or as they might say in the good old twentieth century: a high-value asset.

  So all alone he had been, without brother or sister agents, unless you counted Pointer, who hardly qualified as human company any more. All alone until today, when this kid materialized with a magician and the Witchfinder, as far as he could see, but the kid wore the blue and gold. OK, her eyes were weird, but he’d seen a lot weirder in the past twenty years. In fact, the good people of Mandrake probably considered him far weirder than the cat-girl. Yes, he’d been forced to blow his cover to spring her, but what was he going to do? Leave the girl for Garrick to lynch in the square? Hardly. Once a Fed, always a Fed. Though this kid looked a little young to be an agent. Maybe that meant he was getting old.

  ‘Old and outta shape,’ Fairbrother said aloud, patting his blossoming stomach. He would cut back on the ale, he decided. And the pies. Maybe do a little cardio.

  Hey, he realized, I feel … What is this feeling? I feel switched on. Plugged in. I’ve got purpose.

  It had been a long time.

  Isles negotiated a path through the forest clumps that dotted Mandrake’s perimeter, though to be honest the term ‘path’ barely applied. ‘Trail’ would perhaps be a more accurate word, for he varied his route, as his drill instructor in Quantico had impressed upon him and his classmates by following them back to their secret off-base beer stash one night and trussing them all up with plasti-cuffs.

  Never take the same route twice in a row, kids. Twice in a row is a pattern and a pattern leads to your beer being confiscated at the very least.

  Isles had learned the lesson well and now had over a dozen routes back to the field office, which were rigged with tripwires and bear pits in case anyone was on his tail. Low-tech stuff but very effective.

  Isles switched the mewling figure he was carrying across to his other shoulder as he left the forest proper and moved into the marsh. The waist-high reeds drummed his thighs as he waded through, spraying him with a fine mist that he generally appreciated as his head was often fuzzy, but today he felt sharp and connected, as though something important might happen.

  The falling night and thick fog that habitually hung over the fens soon enveloped him, and Isles felt confident enough in this natural cover to take the most direct route back to the office. As he walked, he softly whistled the five notes made famous by the twentieth-century movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and within seconds a sleek brown hunting dog appeared at his side, keeping pace easily but sneezing whenever a reed flicked against his nose.

  ‘I hate these rushes,’ said the dog. ‘Right at face level for me, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Isles, patting the dog’s head with his free hand.

  The hound twisted away from the touch. ‘Quit it, Fender. I swear, you do that again I will bite your hand off.’

  Isles laughed. ‘Come on, Pointer. You love it, boy.’

  ‘And don’t call me “boy”. I ain’t no dog, man,’ said Pointer. ‘I’m a mutation. Have a heart.’

  Isles relented; after all, Donald Pointer had once been his partner and was the only person/dog who still called him Fender.

  ‘ OK. Sorry, partner. How’s the old man?’

  ‘He’s the old man, you know,’ said Pointer. ‘Still trying to set things right.’ The dog sniffed Chevie’s leg. ‘What you got there? Lunch?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re not a dog, right?’ said Isles.

  Pointer barked once. ‘Darn. These animal instincts, you know. It’s been twenty years, partner. I’m forgetting what it feels like to be a federal agent.’

  ‘Well, what I have on my shoulder here might just be able to remind us what that feels like.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said the dog doubtfully. ‘She looks a little young. The FBI are doing daycare now?’ Pointer loped alongside quietly for a minute, then said, ‘And I’m getting a vibe, man. For some reason I don’t like this female.’

  Isles laughed. ‘Hah. Maybe that’s because she has cat’s eyes.’

  The dog stopped in his tracks, growled, then shook himself and fell in beside his partner.

  ‘You are not a dog,’ he told himself. ‘You are not a dog.’

  Not yet, thought Isles. But more and more every day. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left of my partner but the colour of his hair.

  Isles and Pointer had once upon a time been two of the FBI’s go-to guys in the field of witness security. During their spectacular tenure at Wit Sec they managed to shepherd twenty-five crucial witnesses into the witness box without losing a single body. Isles was the strategy guy and Pointer was the muscle, which was not
to say they couldn’t trade roles when the situation called for it. Their most famous case in Bureau circles was when they avoided a bunch of mercenaries surrounding a Florida courthouse by sneaking the witness through the sewer system. Afterwards the witness, a low-level driver by the name of Stickshift Rossini, had said, Hey, guys, that was one close encounter, which led to Isles and Pointer adopting the five famous notes as their theme tune.

  When they make the movie, Donald Pointer used to say, Denzel plays you. Stallone is the only man alive who can do me justice, and they gotta recycle the Close Encounters music.

  The movie never happened.

  What happened was they got assigned to a very special professor guy in London, of all places, and took a time jaunt back to the seventeenth century that didn’t quite go as planned.

  Isles’s shoulders were starting to ache with Chevie’s weight, no matter how many times he switched her over.

  ‘Hey, Don, buddy. You don’t think …’

  The dog trotted a few steps ahead. ‘Don’t even ask, man. You shouldn’t even let that question form in your mind.’

  ‘Hey, you didn’t even let me speak, partner.’

  Pointer turned on him. ‘Oh, it’s partner now you want the cat-girl to ride on my back. I ain’t a donkey neither, got it?’

  Isles was always amazed that his partner had taught himself to talk with a dog’s vocal apparatus. It shouldn’t have been possible, but maybe there was a human larynx in there. However, even though Pointer could talk, days could go by when he spent his time engaged in more dog-like activities, like chewing on stuff and chasing rats. And he could deny it all he wanted, but sometimes in the evening Pointer loved nothing more than a good tummy scratch.

  ‘ OK,’ said Isles. ‘Loud and clear. You ain’t a dog and you ain’t a donkey neither.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Pointer miserably, his long face making the expression more effective. ‘But what am I?’

  Isles shrugged with one shoulder only. ‘Hey. I’m a special agent but not that special. I can’t answer that question, but maybe the old man can wake this kid up and get us a few answers.’

  Pointer sniffed the air. ‘Well, our luck is in. The old man is out of bed. What do you say we go and see if he can put some of his sparkles to work?’

  ‘I say that’s a plan, Dog. I mean, Don.’

  Pointer jogged off in disgust. ‘That ain’t funny, Fender. That and the patting on the head. Neither of those things are funny.’

  Isles’s eyes were serious as he said, ‘No. Course not. Sorry, pard. No more pooch jokes.’ But, behind the beard, his lips were drawn back in a grin.

  The FBI Mandrake field office was actually a swamp treehouse that Isles had constructed in the branches of an unusually tight cluster of English oaks that seemed as though they might even pre-date the marsh itself. Isles’s history as the son of a master carpenter and a graduate of Fort Benning Sniper School made him literally the best-qualified person in the world to construct and camouflage the makeshift federal HQ. Pointer didn’t like the ladder much, but he got used to it after a while and now trotted up it like a goat up the side of a cliff. The door was not at the top of the ladder, where a person might reasonably expect it to be, but rather three precarious steps along a winding branch and forty degrees round the girth of a massive trunk. The door itself was virtually invisible after all these years and yet Isles’s hands could have found the recessed latch in the dark with his senses clouded by ale, which they often were.

  But no more ale. I’ve been reactivated.

  He shouldered in the door, which was not designed to swing easily, and Pointer trotted into the office before him, resisting the urge to mark his territory, both because it was a base animal instinct and because the scent could be used to track him. Inside was what could be described as an exceptional example of a log cabin; building them had been Isles’s father’s bread-and-butter business, though he could also knock up a nice deck or patio. There was a large central room, complete with fireplace and stone chimney, and passages leading to a bedroom, workshop and armoury. The interior was lit with electric lights that were run off a small generator hooked up to solar panels way up in the copse canopy. Huddled over a table, gazing at the screen of a clunky laptop computer, was what seemed like the ghost of an old man in a laboratory jacket, shimmering and semi-transparent, his sparse strands of white hair crackling around his head like lightning bolts.

  ‘Hey, Prof,’ said Pointer. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘What’s up?’ said the old man without raising his head. ‘What’s up is that the rift is opening more frequently and we can expect a cataclysmic increase in the number of incoming mutations any day now. That, my friend, is what’s up.’

  Isles lowered Chevie on to a wooden sofa padded with blankets and straw. ‘I think the wait is over. Three warm bodies came through today. I got one right here.’

  Now the elderly spook did raise his head. ‘What? Three bodies you say?’

  ‘Yeah. Popped out right in the town square. First time that’s happened. I had to break cover to get this girl out.’

  The old man’s accent was Scottish and his expression was concerned. It was a look that seemed etched on his face, as though he’d died with it and had come back from beyond the grave with it locked.

  He hurried over to the sofa and hovered over Chevie.

  ‘This girl. I know this girl. Somehow. I’ve met her. Perhaps the other me.’

  Pointer coughed. ‘Yeah, the other you. Right, Professor.’

  The professor tried to test Chevie’s temperature but his spectral hand passed straight through her.

  ‘This is so infuriating. I hate this foam state.’ He glanced sharply at Isles. ‘Any mutations, Special Agent?’

  Isles knelt beside Chevie and gently pulled back one eyelid with his thumb. ‘Just the eyes, as far as I can see.’

  The professor nodded. ‘I see, I see.’ He put an ear close to Chevie’s chest, then actually lowered it into her chest to better hear her heart.

  ‘Come on, Prof, man. That is utterly disgusting,’ said Pointer.

  This from a guy who licks his own butt, thought Isles but did not say it. He had given his partner enough grief for one day.

  The ghostly professor withdrew his head. ‘How long has she been catatonic?’

  Isles closed one eye, calculating. ‘Well, she came through a few hours ago. There was never that much going on, you know, but at least there was some verbalization and movement. But now, these last thirty minutes, not a peep. Just shallow breathing.’

  The professor hovered six inches off the floor. ‘Something traumatic happened to her, besides the wormhole. She’s still mutating. In flux. Get me the medi-kit.’

  Isles pulled a Kevlar pack from under the sofa and unzipped it to reveal a comprehensive medical pack that was about two-thirds empty.

  The professor tapped his own chin and there were orange sparks at the contact. ‘I need the defibrillator and the local anaesthetic.’

  Pointer raised one of his paws. ‘It’s all down to you, partner. These paws aren’t going to be much use.’

  Isles pulled the portable defibrillator battery from the pack and flicked the switch to CHARGE.

  ‘ OK, that will take a minute to warm up. Where do you want the anaesthetic injected?’

  ‘We discovered accidentally that the anaesthetic seemed to be quite effective at halting or even reversing mutations,’ said the ghost-professor. ‘I don’t know how it works. I don’t know how anything works. The more I find out, the less I know.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Isles sharply, pulling the plastic cover from a loaded hypodermic. ‘You’re babbling, Prof. Where should I stick this?’

  The ghost blinked nervously and if he could have sweated he would. ‘At the mutation point. In the eye.’

  Isles began to sweat profusely himself. ‘You want me to stick this big old needle into this little girl’s eye?’

  ‘Yes. In the middle. And then hit her with the defibrillator,
which will hopefully wake up her brain.’

  ‘Hopefully?’ said Isles.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the ghost. ‘Sometimes it works.’

  ‘I gotta say, Professor. Your expression isn’t really selling this needle-and-shock idea.’

  ‘That is unfair!’ said the ghost. ‘I’m stuck with this face and you know it.’

  ‘Go on, you sissy,’ said Pointer. ‘Just do it. She’s only a cat anyway.’

  ‘And you’re not a dog, right?’

  The professor levitated three feet from the floor and glowed fiercely. ‘Please, Special Agents! Time is of the essence here.’

  The defibrillator beeped. It was ready.

  ‘ OK,’ said Isles, and used one massive hand to both hold Chevie’s head still and gently open her left eye. The other hand held the needle, which he moved into position slowly until it hovered above the eyeball. ‘In the middle, right?’

  The professor swooped closer. ‘Yes. But not deep. A quarter of an inch, no more.’

  Isles rolled his own eyes. ‘One quarter inch, right.’

  ‘Give her every drop. Then hit her with the paddles.’

  ‘Inject then paddles – got it.’

  Isles hesitated a final moment, then thought, What the hell, and pushed the needle into Chevie’s eye. He felt the slight resistance of the cornea before the needle slid into the pupil.

  ‘Far enough,’ said the professor, who had tilted and swivelled so that his head was inside Chevie’s.

  That’s not distracting at all, thought Isles.

  ‘Now hit the plunger.’

  Isles did so, being careful to hold the body of the syringe steady so that the needle intruded no deeper than it needed to. He pressed the plunger firmly and steadily until the hypodermic was empty and pulled it out.

  He turned to find Pointer with one of the defibrillator’s paddles in his mouth.

  ‘Good dog,’ said Isles automatically, and just as automatically followed with an apology. ‘Sorry, partner.’

  Isles took the paddle, then reached for the second. ‘Clear!’ he shouted, because that’s what you’re supposed to shout, right?