The Forever Man

by Eoin Colfer

  He had abandoned his notions of a great destiny, though, for what could he ever rule but men who would wither and die before him?

  But this now: these shenanigans with Riley and Chevron Savano. This is entertainment on a strange and broad stage. And there is tunnel magic involved, for have I not been deposited here twice now? I sense a weakness.

  Which was why Garrick had confiscated every silver bangle and pin in the town to protect himself from her pull.

  Though precious metal would not be enough if I were to touch the Timekey.

  No one shall touch it, he vowed. Savano shall burn at the stake with the key round her neck.

  But until then he would enjoy this distraction.

  Up ahead the tracker hounds snuffled and abandoned their previous course, taking a sharp right turn towards a wide expanse of green-skimmed bog, which glistened with reflections that promised hidden sinkholes and unsure footings.

  Enough, thought Garrick. I will not be made a complete dunderhead.

  He cast his eye ahead of the dogs and saw their target. A third hound, sleek and brown, his forequarters poking from the reeds.

  ‘Aha!’ he called to the handler, a portly, bow-legged fellow whose feet were jammed into some form of wooden clogs, which were proving most unsuitable for a hunt in the fens. ‘Look, man. Look! A decoy.’

  The handler was confused. ‘It’s a dog, master. A decoy dog is you saying? Another familiar?’

  Garrick looked closer at the brown dog and realized with a jolt of excitement that there was an extra element in his seeing of the dog. He was feeling its presence like a tug at his innards.

  There is kinship between us.

  The dog was from the wormhole. A mutation.

  Here now was a new gift from the wormhole, which was just awakening in him. There was so much of its cursed foam in his make-up that he was able to detect other mutations, for he supposed that he was a mutation himself, just as Chevie now was and, without doubt, this dog. Garrick looked harder with his extra senses and thought he could see the ghost of a man shifting inside the hound.

  I can see that which the wormhole has changed. The previous being, as it were.

  Garrick knew what had happened. This man was of weak stock and had allowed the wormhole to reassemble him according to the desires of his subconscious.

  Pathetic fool.

  What other gifts do I possess? he wondered. What more could I be? This was indeed a time of surprises. The previous dawn he had believed his elaborate quest for vengeance at an end, and yet here he was feeling curiosity for the first time in an age.

  Garrick gave no sign that he saw anything in the animal other than what it appeared to be; he simply whistled and clicked his fingers as any good fellow might do upon spotting a handsome animal without tether or rope upon him out in the wild.

  ‘Good chap,’ he called, kindly-like, as though there were a treat in his pocket. ‘Come over here now, and don’t be leading our boys astray.’

  Garrick wondered whether he should skewer the beast with one of his throwing blades, for he had several about his person, but thought, No, there is more to be gleaned here, Alby.

  Questions first. Painful death later on.

  He whistled five notes that he felt hanging in the air around the dog, and its flat head came up and their eyes met. They each felt the other’s knowing, and the dog tensed for flight.

  Garrick cursed his impulse to whistle the tune that his brain had simply plucked out of the air.

  Even the air has information for Albert Garrick, he thought. I am a superman.

  And yet the dog might run and there would be chasing. And, whereas earlier he had not minded a pursuit, now he had questions – serious ones at that – which might change his entire future and that of the world, come to think of it.

  As it was, the dog would have run had not the shallow lake directly between it and Garrick’s troop exploded in a geyser of slime, sludge and tentacles.

  ‘Hah!’ shouted Garrick, enjoying the spray that engulfed him, while the others cowered or were tossed backwards. A phrase came to his mind that he had heard Chevie Savano use once upon a time: ‘Now we have ourselves a party!’

  Donnie Pointer had been having himself a ball for the past hour, leading Garrick and his dumb mutts all over the marshlands. Messing with people was one of the only perks of being stuck in dog form. As a matter of fact, Pointer had had himself a little too much fun and got cocky. When he ran out of pee, he thought he might show himself to the hounds, just to drive them insane altogether. In the name of accuracy it should be said that he actually intended waggling his butt at the canines, as that was just about the most insulting gesture in a dog’s arsenal.

  While Pointer was scoping out his target for the rear-end wiggle, Garrick caught a look at him peeking out of the rushes, and the Witchfinder’s gaze sent a shiver running from the tip of Pointer’s nose to the point of his tail. There was something about that look. An intensity. Like he knew what was really going on here. Plus the man was as creepy as hell with that pasty face.

  You know what? Pointer thought to himself. Enough fooling around for one day. Time to get old Donnie to a safe distance.

  A prudent notion, but one that occurred to Pointer a single second too late, for even as he shifted his weight to his rear legs something surged from the scum-skimmed lake before him.

  It seemed as if the entire bog erupted, and Pointer found himself borne aloft on a thick shaft of water, marsh mud and sludge while his body was spun and juggled by rubbery tentacles.

  Oh nuts, he thought. Rosa.

  Rosa Fuentes had been just about the brightest star in the Puerto Rico FBI field office and had made such an impression on the higher-ups that, instead of promoting her internally where her local knowledge was invaluable, they shipped her to London to get a little European anti-terrorist experience before a ticker-tape parade back home, where she was expected to take over before she hit forty. The only thing the brass didn’t like about Rosa Fuentes was the large intricate tattoo of a giant squid that adorned her back and shoulders. Of course they had no way of bringing this up in interviews and, strictly speaking, they shouldn’t even have known about it, but Rosa was proud of her tattoo and claimed it had been a symbol of good luck in her family for generations. There was a legend that one of her forefathers, way, way back, had actually been rescued from the Caribbean by a giant squid, who had looked deep into his eyes and seen the goodness there and deposited Alejandro Fuentes on the timber wreckage of his own boat. Rosa’s tattoo was based on the charcoal drawing sketched by Alejandro on a loose plank from the gunwale as he waited to be rescued.

  So the tattoo was disapproved of but tolerated, and meanwhile Rosa was setting the bar high in the London office – until she was lent out to the sci-fi-sounding WARP division in Bedford Square and her climb up the career ladder stopped abruptly.

  Rosa was sent to Victorian London along with Agent William Riley to look after a Mob banker. Bill Riley made it through intact, but Rosa had been lost in the tunnel.

  Such was the strength of Rosa’s will that it took on a form of its own in the wormhole: that of her forefather’s saviour. Rosa’s human form was abandoned and her mind was embodied as a gigantic squid, which was routinely dumped in the marsh or lakes dotting the fens and just as routinely sucked up into the rift again. Unfortunately for Pointer, Rosa chose this moment, which was already pretty stressful, to reintroduce herself to her one-time colleague, though they both looked a lot different from how they had been back in London.

  Pointer found himself wrapped in thirty-foot tentacles, with the life being squeezed out of him by razor-edged suckers. He was face-to-face with the dinner-plate eyes of a monstrous squid that reared impossibly from the lake, water gushing in rivulets between its rows of suckers, and a howl that belonged to neither human nor sea creature emanating from its beak.

  ‘Hey, Rosa,’ said Pointer through gritted teeth. ‘What’s up?’

  What was up was ap
parently Pointer himself, as the squid tossed him high in the air, bashed him with the knobbly clubs on its longer tentacles, then wrapped him tighter than a mummy in its eight arms.

  Pointer could not help it. He howled like a dog, but quickly got a grip on himself.

  ‘Come on, Fuentes,’ he said. ‘I know you’re in there. It’s me, Donnie Pointer.’

  Every Fed in the London office had heard about the giant squid tattoo and, after what Pointer himself had gone through, it took him about two seconds to make the connection to Rosa Fuentes. Also the squid had an eyebrow ring over its right eye, even though it didn’t have an eyebrow. But the ring had been another of Rosa’s trademarks.

  ‘Rosa,’ said Pointer, making sure not to bark the name. ‘Rosa. It’s me. A brother Fed. We have a mission, Special Agent Fuentes.’

  The squid did not release Pointer, but it did not squeeze any tighter either. Instead it held him there, suspended in the marsh mist, and watched him closely, waiting for any sign of treachery.

  ‘You can trust me, Fuentes. We used to shoot pool, remember? In the rec room. I beat you every time, right?’

  This was the wrong animal to tease. Pointer howled as his bones creaked.

  ‘ OK, OK. You won a few racks too. In fact, it was pretty even.’

  The pressure eased a little and Pointer thought he saw something in the squid’s eyes. Recognition maybe, or probably just a slight dulling of the crazed hatred.

  ‘And remember that music you liked? The swing jazz stuff. Mulatu Astatke. That guy was cool, Rosa. We danced at the office party, remember? I stood on your toes.’

  The squid huffed and a ripple ran along its tentacles. It might have been a laugh.

  ‘We’re on the job, Fuentes,’ said Pointer. ‘We took an oath, remember? We got a motto. Fidelity, bravery and …’

  ‘Integrity,’ said the squid. Well, it didn’t say the word exactly, just snapped its beak four times. Once for each syllable. But there was definitely intelligence there.

  Pointer kicked his paws in the air and pressed ahead. ‘Our principal is in danger, Special Agent. We have a hostile in the vicinity.’

  The squid rose a full thirty feet higher, tentacles shivering with rage.

  ‘Oooooh?’ it said, spraying Pointer full in the snout. ‘Ooooh?’

  Pointer stuck his nose earthward in Garrick’s direction. ‘You see that pasty-looking streak of misery who thinks he’s some kind of tough-guy pirate?’

  The squid swivelled its eyes till they fixed on Albert Garrick.

  ‘Sssssss,’ it said, nodding repeatedly. ‘Sssssss.’

  ‘That’s our guy,’ said Pointer. ‘You got the green light, Fuentes. Take him out. Extreme prejudice.’

  The squid spared one tentacle to tumble Pointer into a bed of moss and lichen while the rest of it descended on Garrick like a mottled megaton bomb.

  Pointer thought he must be stunned or mistaken, because it seemed from his vantage point that, just before impact, Garrick threw back his head and laughed.

  The squid came down on Garrick and drove him into the soft earth, throwing up a great shower of mud and sod that engulfed the hunting party, and it seemed clear that even the Witchfinder, who had battled witchcraft in all its sly and obvious forms, could not emerge unscathed from this tussle. Backwards along the border of the lake they drove, the squid’s great legs powering them onward with an undulating corkscrew motion. It was a fierce struggle that saw the battling pair plough through soft ground and sharp shale.

  Garrick’s skull cracked more than once as the squid forced him down on to blunt rocks and even dashed his brains against a tree trunk, but, although the Witchfinder’s frankly ghoulish laughter had trailed off, still his face held a rictus and his hands strove for the squid’s cauldron head. Inch by inch he hauled himself closer, repeating over and over in his loud voice, ‘I smell magic. I smell magic.’ Words that boomed like cannon-shot across the fens in spite of the chaos.

  Garrick was pinioned inside a whirlwind of destruction, but no sooner was he wounded than the quantum particles in his very marrow clamoured to heal him. With the activation of the healing foam, he felt the colour return to his cheeks.

  Oh, happy day, he thought. A ghoul no more.

  But later for vanity, Alby, Garrick scolded himself. Now for action. The audience has a certain expectation of their Master Witchfinder.

  For any other human this would surely have been a fatal entanglement. Most humans would simply have died of fright at the sight of the giant squid, a monster from their nightmares come to thrashing, sinewy life. But Albert Garrick was not most humans. In fact, he was not mostly human. He was a mutation and, unlike the mutation he was fighting, Garrick had been augmented. He was better, in ways he was discovering as he went.

  I sees different, he thought, thinking in Cockney. I sees magic.

  The monster with which he grappled had an aura about it. Nah. Not ‘it’. Her.

  Rosa Fuentes. The information was coming through her fingertips.

  More FBI. Will they never learn?

  Apparently they would not, so now Garrick applied himself to his task with glee and fervour, hauling himself along the squid’s grapplers, ignoring its hissings and thumpings as best he could. Time after time he was knocked back or ploughed under, but, strong as the creature was, Albert Garrick was tireless and steely.

  The world seemed a maelstrom around him, yet somehow here in the belly of the struggle it felt strangely calm. Garrick sank his fingers into the very matter of which the squid was composed and saw that the quantum foam was his to control; he took it into himself and felt stronger with every gulp of matter that he stole from the squid. So, as his strength grew, the squid lost its power.

  I am growing the hair of Samson, thought Garrick. This matter is mine to control.

  The squid sensed the loss of its mightiness and tried to discard Garrick, but it was futile. He was now like a tick in her flesh. What had once been Rosa Fuentes panicked and increased her thrashing, a keening squeal erupting from her beak, and still Garrick dragged himself forward, ignoring the piercing sound and batterings.

  Round and round they went, inscribing great circles in the soft ground, throwing up great wings of atomized lake water. And somehow Garrick was in the ascendant, beating down the giant squid until their revolutions slowed and they slid to a blubbery halt against a slab of moss-covered rock.

  ‘I wants it,’ he hissed at her, forgetting his toff’s theatre voice, all barrow boy now. ‘I wants it, d’you hear me, creature?’

  He crawled along the squid’s shrinking form, reeling her in like a fisherman’s rope until he was at last at the bulbous head. The eyes darted this way and that but could not escape Garrick. He sank his fingers into the dissolving flesh of the creature’s head and took the quantum foam from it, absorbing it into himself, his chest heaving from the effort, feeling sparks of information and energy rattle through his veins.

  Knowledge is power. Energy is understanding.

  Garrick felt the particles speak to him, and understood now the wormhole in its entirety and knew suddenly what his destiny was.

  Of course, he thought. Of course.

  He continued to siphon foam from the creature. The squid shuddered and shrank, becoming amorphous and vague, its limbs flopping ineffectively and its giant head deflating – yet still Garrick bore down, greedy for every drop. A shroud of mist collected around them and glowed orange, strange shadows flickered alarmingly, and the hunting party shrank back from the otherworldly show.

  Inside the cocoon, the giant squid disappeared, reduced to a two-dimensional representation on the back of a young Latin lady, lying in the mud on the brink of death and wearing the neoprene jumpsuit of the WARP unit.

  Garrick’s hand clasped her skull as though he might crush it, as indeed he intended to do, but not before delivering a gloating message.

  ‘My thanks to you, Rosa Fuentes,’ he said, all showman once more. ‘You have given me the key to this worl
d. And I shall use it to destroy everything you love.’

  Rosa Fuentes blinked, then coughed, and the blood that ran from between her teeth was tinged with orange sparks. ‘Hostile,’ she said. ‘Hostile.’

  Garrick chuckled. ‘Oh, I see. Yes, I am a hostile. I could be fairly called that.’

  ‘Hostile,’ said Rosa again, and from her side she pulled a large handgun that seemed like a cannon in her small fist and Garrick was so surprised that he could do no more than make a small ‘O’ shape with his mouth before Rosa raised the gun and pointed the barrel at his face.

  ‘Green light,’ said Fuentes, then shot Garrick between the eyes, sending him flying through the air and into the slimy depths of the still-churning lake, where he floated rapidly towards the middle like a punt poled from the bank. As the lake calmed, it was a strangely peaceful scene, with the sun finally poking through and the chirp of birdsong and the plume of smoke drifting from the hole in Garrick’s head.

  ‘Hostile down,’ said Rosa, and her arm flopped into the mud and the remaining seconds of life in her began to tick down.

  Pointer was the first to move, possibly because of his training; he disentangled himself from the greenery where he had been deposited and ran straight to Rosa Fuentes, frantically nudging her.

  ‘Come on, Rosa,’ he said, though he was so upset that his voice had more dog in it than man. ‘Come on, Special Agent.’

  Rosa dropped the gun in the mud. ‘Hey, hey, Pointer. Is that really you, compadre?’

  Pointer licked her face; he couldn’t help himself. ‘Yeah, Rosa. Yeah, it’s me.’

  Rosa smiled and her eyes flickered. She was barely there any more. ‘I was a squid for so long. It was torture.’

  Pointer was miserable, his big doggy eyes matching how he felt. ‘I’m sorry, Rosa. I didn’t know. I would never have sent you in.’

  Fuentes coughed again, then she was peaceful and opened her eyes. ‘No. No, thank you, Donnie. I’m free now. Free. And we got him, didn’t we?’

  Pointer cast a quick glance over his haunch at the lake, where the men of Mandrake were wading towards Garrick. He noticed that the Witchfinder’s arms were already thrashing in the water.