The Forever Man

by Eoin Colfer

  Not dead, then.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We got him. The hostile is down. Area secure.’

  Rosa laughed, though it cost her. ‘Area secure? You sound like one of those Secret Service dummies.’

  Pointer nuzzled her cheek. ‘Yeah, they wish. Those guys should get a real job. Sunglasses models is all they are.’

  ‘You know it,’ said Rosa, and she patted Pointer’s head; for once he didn’t mind.

  Three pats she managed, each heavier than the last, and with the third her hand rested on Pointer’s head and her chest heaved no more.

  Pointer whined a little and nuzzled Rosa’s cheek, but his nuzzling was not to last long as what was left of Rosa Fuentes dissolved into a series of orange sparks that spiralled upward into the mist. Pointer followed their flight for a moment and then was almost overcome by the desire to attack Albert Garrick, but there were bigger factors to consider than his desire for revenge. And he wasn’t an animal. Not yet.

  Pointer threw a growl at the band of men wading into the lake to rescue Garrick, then he clamped Rosa’s pistol in his jaws and disappeared into the mist like a ghost hound, leaving only clouds of breath hanging in the air where he had been.

  He made it maybe a hundred feet before his body reminded him that, even though the giant squid had been a friend of his, she had almost squeezed the life out of him. Suddenly the tree trunks were all a-wobble and a buzzing filled his brain.

  I’m going under, he thought, and staggered into the nearest clump of shrubs for cover.

  What a professional, he thought, before collapsing on to the cool moss.

  Hunter and Hunted

  Mandrake. Huntingdonshire. 1647

  Riley would have preferred to make good his escape from Mandrake during night-time, for the dark is the magician’s element and he had spent countless hours blending with the shadows of the Orient Theatre. One of Garrick’s many unorthodox training methods was to lock the doors, bar the shutters, and give his apprentice five minutes’ head start.

  You may hide in any nook or cranny inside the theatre, Riley my boy, but take care that I do not find you …

  For, if he was found, Riley would suffer six licks of the strap and a twelve-hour fast. This was a game that Garrick named ‘Hunter and Hunted’ and in all the times it had been contested Riley had never succeeded in avoiding the strap. It seemed as though Albert Garrick could see a spider in a hole, so adept was he at pinching the boy’s collar, no matter how gloomy a corner or precarious a ledge Riley chose. In the interest of fairness, according to himself, Garrick would often play the role of hunted and give Riley one hour of the clock to find him, but the lad never laid eyes on Albert Garrick. There was no punishment for failing to find his master, for Garrick found his own smugness reward enough itself.

  Slipping out of Mandrake in daylight would prove a small enough challenge for a lad schooled by such methods; there were shadows aplenty cast by the brick houses along the narrow streets. Though there were small clusters of militiamen on duty, Riley flitted past some and sauntered round others and was even brazen enough to snatch a small loaf from the baker’s cart. It pained him to thieve from an honest labourer but he had not had a morsel since 1899, which logically meant that he would not be hungry for some two and a half centuries. Nevertheless, his belly was up in arms, so to speak, and the bread was nicked to quiet the gurgling, if nothing else, for that was how Garrick had found him more than once in their game of Hunter and Hunted.

  Riley would have liked to have taken some time to survey the town while he chewed, and to get a lie of the land. It would be easily done to pull his cape tight to conceal his Victorian get-up and walk the grid, as Chevie might say, but there were two factors that precluded this activity. First, the constable and his men were surely already raising the alarm, and so any strange youth strolling the town backstreets would be detained for interrogation. Second, and infinitely more important, was the fact that Garrick was on Chevie’s trail.

  And, if he finds her, he will drag her back here for burning, no matter who tries to prevent it.

  Riley knew that he could not allow that to happen to his dearest and truest friend, especially when she was addled, to say the least. On a normal day Chevie would have a fighting chance against any villain who might cross her path, but in her current state of mind she would be easy prey for the self-appointed Witchfinder.

  But how to prevent it? How to stop a man who could not be stopped? A demon who, according to himself, could not be killed?

  Well, thought Riley, that’s all blather and theory, ain’t it?

  Perhaps those who had attempted to do Garrick in hadn’t tried the right methods.

  With a shock Riley realized that he was giving consideration to how he would murder Albert Garrick.

  Then with a second jolt he saw that if he succeeded in his mission, then he would use all the trickery Garrick had instilled in him to become what Albert Garrick had always intended him to be.

  An assassin.

  And his teacher would be his first victim.

  Now if that don’t have a touch of the ironies about it, nothing does.

  Riley arrived at the town wall and sidled along till he came to a hefty gent chopping up a pallet of firewood, enough to see him through the following winter.

  Quite an expert the fellow was by the looks of his axe selection. A long-handled swinger for the big logs and a short-heft chopper for the kindling.

  Riley waited till the man switched to the smaller axe and busied himself hacking quarters, then with a magician’s sleight of hand he spirited the longer axe under his cloak and was away over the wall in less time than it takes for a hangman to pull the lever.

  So Albert Garrick cannot die, he thought as he dropped to the ground and ran towards the trees. That may or may not be true, but I’ll wager he will have a hard time living with his head burned to a cinder and buried in a hole far away from his body.

  With this thought Riley took the first step towards becoming that which he had for many years despised.

  If Albert Garrick had been travelling on the sly, leaving the scene of a grisly murder of his own doing, as he often had, no man on earth could have tracked him. Perhaps a particularly keen-eyed hawk might have kept pace in daylight, but other than that the trail would quickly run cold.

  Fortunately for Riley, Albert Garrick was not his usual skulking self. He was a righteous champion of justice leading a group of zealots on a crusade and, while there was some due paid to stealth, there was no time sacrificed to covering their tracks.

  Soon Riley found the path left by the group of clodhopping men. He quickly determined that there were in-and-around ten men, with two more ranging ahead after a couple of dogs. Generally when hounds had a scent in their nostrils the path ran as the crow flies – that is to say, straight-wise – but this pursuit ran from pillar to post and from zig to zag. Riley concluded with a grin that someone was playing games with Garrick’s posse comitatus. The notion that Garrick would be infuriated by this made him grin all the wider.

  Riley caught himself in the act and was instantly chilled to his marrow, for he knew his cold expression was that of a killer, even though it was born out of love. But had not Albert Garrick’s first kill been a crime of passion? The difference being that Riley planned to kill to save the one he now loved, whereas Garrick had killed the one he loved for not returning his passion.

  Good luck explaining the difference to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, he thought.

  Then he said aloud: ‘To hell with that and to hell with me too, if it means that Chevie will live.’

  And that was it. Riley’s mind was made up and he knew he was willing to pay whatever price necessary to save Chevie, up to and beyond his own life.

  Riley had always been a city boy and he found the fens and the accompanying hoots and whistles from the wildlife downright spooky, as his only experience of moors and such came from the images conjured by candlelit readings of penny dreadfuls featuri
ng daring highwaymen and ghoulish undead creatures that roamed the countryside. The fens seemed totally alien to Riley and he could not help but think that the rules of nature would not apply in this particular marshland. The fog too was different from the heavy soot-laden pea-soupers that regularly enveloped London, which could render the city itself almost invisible from Primrose Hill. This fog had a taste of the country in it and Riley found it actually quite bracing, though it did throw up strange shadows and flickerings as the sun endeavoured to break through from above.

  Still, like any London dweller of his day, from common muck-snipe to the royal widow herself, Riley was accustomed to navigating through fog. At least this one didn’t have soot flakes in the mix, which could half blind a fellow if one caught him square in the eye.

  At any rate, his tracking skills were not required for very much longer, for from up ahead there came fearsome, terrible sounds. Riley had never before heard noises like this but he felt sure they were produced by an enormous, enraged creature.

  Run away! said Riley’s sensible voice. Flee!

  But that voice had grown very faint of late, and Riley hurried towards the inhuman sound, for he knew that was where Albert Garrick would be.

  Riley’s enormous-enraged-creature theory soon proved to be spot on when he emerged into a soggy field. And at the far side of a green-scummed lake loomed an enormous creature, which first put Riley in mind of the tentacled Martians described by H. G. Wells in his terrifying serial The War of the Worlds, but then, as the creature’s head emerged briefly from the fog, he saw that it matched more closely another of Wells’s favoured monsters: the giant squid.

  And ranged around this beast, which seemed to suffer no discomfort from the lack of its natural element, were Garrick’s dozen. Like straw dolls they were in size, and batted about just as easily by stray tentacles that caught them as they fled. If that wasn’t enough to bring a smile to a Puritan’s face (though these particular Puritans being swatted by a giant squid were probably not in a smiling mood), Riley would be damned if that wasn’t Albert Garrick himself having the senses shaken out of him by the creature; being pulled in nice and close, he was.

  Riley hunched down among the reeds and clutched the axe handle tightly in both hands.

  This was not the time to rush in swinging. This was the time for watching and waiting. Perhaps this great beast would do his work for him.

  Which doesn’t make you any less of a murderer, said Riley’s little voice. You had the bad intention and that’s what goes down in your ledger.

  Nevertheless, it was of some comfort to Riley that the creature seemed intent on rending Garrick limb from limb, and wouldn’t that be a weight off the boy’s mind? But that was not how it turned out. In spite of the odds, Garrick was more than a match for the giant squid and literally wore it down, sucking the juice right out of its skull, until both figures were obscured by the mist and Riley could make out nothing but shifting shapes in the shadow.

  I ain’t one jot surprised, he thought bitterly. For if there is anything in this universe that can kill Albert Garrick, I ain’t encountered it yet. Even the blooming wormhole gave him an easy ride. Some people get cat’s eyes or animal parts and all Garrick gets is powers and comprehensions.

  There was a flash from within the mist, then a booming gunshot that sounded loud enough to be cannon fire and for a split second Garrick was illuminated as he flipped backwards into the lake.

  Riley didn’t even bother hoping.

  If a giant blooming squid can’t do the big job, then a barker ain’t gonna manage it.

  But perhaps all this chaos could work in his favour. Garrick saw himself in the role of hunter here, not hunted. And a smart fellow with a shiny axe in his hand might be able to turn that fact to his advantage.

  And so, even though his heart pounded like the clappers of Big Ben and his hands shook so furiously that he almost dropped the axe, and for a full five minutes he underwent a fit of anxiety the like of which he had never known in spite of his travails, Riley determined to press on. He was on a mission now. All his life he had been hiding from Albert Garrick, which had ill served him to say the least. Now he must turn the tables on his old master.

  Garrick felt the swamp water pour down his gullet and into his lungs, and his instinct was to cough but he fought it. The particles would attack the invading liquid, he was sure of it, as this was not the first time he had been submerged or partially so. Indeed, on one occasion when the world had known and feared him as the Red Glove, a pirate with a reputation to rival Blackbeard’s, he had been caught away from his ship in a little cutter and blasted to Davy Jones’s locker by a rival gang’s cannonball. The pilot had died of course, and Nubs Lewis, a Taff with no fingers but a genius with explosives in spite of that, ended up dead too. Garrick had simply settled on to the seabed with the wreckage and then walked ashore, marvelling as the time particles fashioned some form of gill mechanism in his throat that enabled him to breathe.

  He wondered what the particles would do now, when he was barely submerged and his lungs were filling with gloopy marsh mud. To his delight his organs convulsed and drove the liquid out through his mouth like the plume of spray from a whale’s blowhole.

  ‘Thar she blows,’ he cried, then flapped his arms to come upright in the water. As he stood, something – a small pebble or the like – plopped from his person into the water, and with his magician’s reflexes Garrick scooped the object out of the murk. He saw it was the bullet that had lodged in his brain barely a minute ago, and he marvelled that with all these repeated bashings and shootings he wasn’t losing something of his intelligence, like a horse-kicked village idiot.

  Perhaps I am, he thought. For how would I know it?

  But he was not.

  It is more powerful I am becoming and none can harm me.

  But this was not true, and he knew it. The wormhole would have melted him like butter on a pan this time had it not been for the silver. For some reason the precious metal had the same effect on the wormhole as it had on vampires and werewolves.

  And how did one kill a werewolf?

  You shoot the shaggy blighter in the heart with a silver bullet, that was how.

  If only … If only.

  There was silver enough. But did the wormhole have a heart to shoot?

  Perhaps I could summon the heart.

  ‘Master Witchfinder,’ said an anxious voice, and Garrick glanced up from his thoughts to see a bunch of so-called militiamen wading his way, concern writ large on their rustic faces. Concern, or perhaps it was fear. These were generally the expressions that greeted him. Never happiness. Perhaps gratitude from clients who had sought his particular services over the years, but the gratitude was tainted by greed, or base relief, or even revulsion for the assassin that they themselves had hired.

  Not that Garrick felt sorry for himself. Not for a moment. He had striven for long decades to establish his fearsome reputation over and over again. Only once had he tried the goodly man life and it had not agreed with him, nor with those around him when his patience finally broke.

  Garrick smiled at the memory. It was amazing really, how quickly monks could run in those ridiculous sandals.

  ‘Do you yet live, master?’ asked the lead idiot, as though Garrick were not standing there before him breathing. In all probability, what the dolt meant to ask was: But how do you yet live?

  ‘I do, praise the Lord,’ he said, ‘for there is work to be done. One witch-born creature has been vanquished, but the witch herself remains and it is of the utmost importance, I say to you all now, that she be taken alive. And should one of you panic and loose a shot in her direction, loose so much as a nasty glare in her direction, then that person shall be deemed to be in collusion with the witch, for I want her unharmed. Is that understood?’

  This was a confusing argument indeed for simple country folk to grasp. The Witchfinder appeared to be saying that if anyone harmed the witch they would be considered her confederate, whi
ch was not the usual run of things.

  ‘Be you saying that the one who harms the witch is a friend of the witch?’ asked the leading man.

  ‘Yes, I be saying exactly that,’ said Albert Garrick, mocking their old ways of speech. ‘Exactly that dost I be saying. With mine own mouth from whenst came the words.’

  The militiamen stood silently for a moment in the murk and mist like ancient pagan statues, water lapping gently at their thighs, afraid that more beasties would emerge from the water, but still more afraid to move before the Witchfinder gave the word.

  Garrick let them suffer the chill for a few moments, so his words could penetrate. On no account must Chevron Savano be harmed, for she was the means he would use to finally rid himself of the wormhole.

  Chevron Savano and her Timekey.

  ‘Now, good men of Mandrake,’ he said eventually, when their jaws had begun to knock together from the cold. ‘Now we hunt.’

  And hunt they did, throughout the day, late into the afternoon, with little to show for it but bone weariness and gnawing hunger. There were incidents that Albert Garrick would consider minor but which scared the wits out of his militiamen. A flock of tiny lizard-birds descended on them, pecking hands and faces with their tiny beaks. But the poor creatures were wormhole-stupid and easy prey for musket-shot and pike. Though the militiamen suffered no serious wounds, they were shaken to the core by this attack of devil birds, a notion that Garrick encouraged, for it strengthened their dependence on him.

  The second attack came from the marsh water; this time it was no giant squid but an oversized toad, which seemed almost comical until it began to speak the King’s English.

  ‘All right, boys,’ the toad said, a Scot by the sound of him. ‘I was looking for the chipper and then, bang, I’m crawling out of some kind of a swamp.’

  That was as far as the poor creature got before the lead militiaman cried, ‘A talking toad!’

  And another: ‘A Scotch toad. Have at it!’