The Forever Man

by Eoin Colfer

  It was plain in Cryer’s eyes that he would dearly love to strike Jeronimo Woulfe, but he was a scarecrow of a man and Woulfe hefted stone for a livelihood, so he refrained, lest he earn himself a second shattered collarbone for his troubles. Instead he contented himself with taunting the mason.

  ‘Jeronimo Woulfe would have me speak plain. Jeronimo Woulfe the great theologian.’ Cryer pointed a finger at the yawning rift. ‘Be that not plain enough for thee, man?’

  Perhaps it was Cryer’s tauntings that prompted Woulfe to blurt the most courageous statement of his life, or perhaps it was the series of veiled threats against his dear Elizabeth that drove him to it; in any event the words were soon hanging in the air, clearly audible to every soul inside the town walls.

  ‘It be plain enough to me, Cryer, that when the gates to hell split open over Mandrake that Albert Garrick was the first one through it!’

  Chevie held her breath, as she knew through bitter and often painful experience that Garrick could go either way when slapped with accusations: he could either be amused or gravely offended, and if he chose offence then brave Jeronimo Woulfe’s days of bravery were over.

  Cryer too looked at Garrick, but the magician-turned-witchfinder simply nodded at him as if to say: Master Mason makes a good argument, and what say you to it?

  Cryer realized he was on his own, but also saw his chance to impress his worth on the Witchfinder. And so he drew himself up to his spindly height, ignored the blossom of blood on his shirt front, and rained down scorn on Jeronimo Woulfe.

  ‘Indeed. Master Garrick was first to emerge from this rift and with a witch by the tail, if ye remember, and her familiar to boot. Risked his body and soul did Albert Garrick to deliver us all. For the devil must be conquered, sir. Conquered, I say. And this is our very purpose here on this night.’

  ‘So you say,’ said Woulfe. ‘So you persist in saying.’

  ‘ And the gates to hell shall be sealed with silver,’ said Cryer. ‘You are familiar with this line, I presume, a God-fearing man like yourself?’

  With a nod, Woulfe allowed that he was.

  ‘And so the master planned to fire shot made from silver at the gates, but then, says I, this is a tricky shot and the metal is soft and so may not either survive the barrel or pierce the gates’ revulsion to it, and these were sound points, for Master Garrick conceded them all. “So what is the alternative, good Constable?” says he to me. And says I directly to him, “Why, master, the Trojan Horse. We conceal that which is undesirable inside that which is not.” ’

  Woulfe was somewhat puzzled. ‘Are you saying that your plan is to conceal the silver that you have collected about this girl’s person?’

  ‘No,’ said Cryer. ‘Not about. Within. Inside. The precious metal is melted and down her gullet it goes, and at that exact second we activate the infernal device round her neck and summon the rift. It will snatch her away.’

  ‘And she will die by unspeakable cruelty,’ objected Woulfe, pale with the horror of these details.

  ‘The Devil’s Brew, as the method is known, has been relied upon by the Church for centuries,’ said Cryer. ‘And, when the witch ascends, the gates will close forever and all England shall hear of Albert Garrick and Constable Cryer.’

  Chevie had known fear in her life, and loss and unspeakable sadness, and love too more than once, but here now, listening to this casual description of her torture and death, she gave Garrick the satisfaction he craved by hanging her head and lapsing into quiet sobs.

  The yellow slash of a smile spread across Albert Garrick’s jaw, and he patted Cryer’s good shoulder with some affection.

  ‘Well said, my man. Nicely said.’ And it seemed as though Cryer’s head might explode with pride.

  Then the moment for satisfaction was past and Garrick turned once more to business and his secret dread of failure.

  ‘Double the guard on the witch!’ he commanded. ‘And have the silversmith make his preparations. I want every man, woman and child with eyes in their heads on the battlements scouring the fens. No one is permitted entry, not even Cromwell himself.’

  And, without bothering to wait for a sign of compliance, Garrick strode to the wall, his cloak swirling about him like a shadow.

  Not this time, Riley my son, he thought. This time things go my way. This time and forever more.

  Trash Talk

  On the south side of the town, three hundred feet from the wall and in the third line of trees, the canopy of a large elm held a small covered platform that was technically known as a satellite observation post. It had also become, over the past few years, a sleep shack for Special Agent Fender Rhodes Isles when he was a bit too grogged to make it back to the field office but did not fancy a night in the stocks. Isles reasoned that it was his duty to sleep in the shack rather than trudge back across the fens to the field office: firstly because he would possibly drown in the lake; and secondly because his senses were usually too dulled to be certain that no one was following him.

  But now the satellite observation post was actually being used as a satellite observation post.

  Riley, lying flat on his stomach, wiped a smudge of Agent Isles’s pungent home-made camouflage paint from his eyelid and peered towards Mandrake.

  Isles lay beside him like a beached killer whale beside a minnow. A beached whale with his face painted in olive and black stripes.

  ‘You notice anything, kid?’ asked the federal agent.

  ‘I notice that these boards reek of beer,’ said Riley. ‘They smell almost as rank as this make-up.’

  ‘Yeah, OK. I get it. Maybe I gotta cut back on the booze. But let’s stick to the matter at hand, whaddya say?’

  Riley glanced up at him. ‘This matter is very much at hand, Agent Isles. We’re going into the town presently and I need to know you ain’t going to heave all over me at the first fence.’

  Isles sulked for a moment, then said, ‘Don’t worry about me, kid. We got plenty else to worry about. Look.’ He pointed and Riley saw that the town walls were lined with people, all staring out into the blackness, waiting for a rescue attempt, no doubt. Every second soul held a torch so that the entire wall of Mandrake’s Groan was lit up like Piccadilly Circus.

  ‘Garrick is waiting for us,’ said Riley, drawing his cloak between him and the planking, as it seemed the frost was rising. ‘He wishes us to make a try for Chevie.’

  Isles huffed. ‘Well, I ain’t gonna disappoint him. We got an agent in there still breathing and we Feds don’t leave our brothers or sisters in the lurch.’

  Riley reached into Isles’s equipment bag and withdrew futuristic optics. A double telescope with green lenses and complicated dials. He screwed it to his eyes and exclaimed.

  ‘Spanking night-vision goggles, Agent. Clear as a July picnic it is.’ For of course Riley had been to the twenty-first century and witnessed all manner of marvels.

  ‘Yeah, those are a nice set. Came through the inter-dimension without a scratch. Seems like binoculars ain’t got a subconscious to mess them up. I did have a copy of The Hobbit in my bag when I jumped and it ended up as a tiny dragon. Flew off into the night coughing sparks. I ain’t seen it since. Even the professor can’t explain that one.’

  Riley scanned the townsfolk on the wall. ‘Seems like Garrick has every able-bodied person on watch. Whatever he’s planning to do, he ain’t leaving a thing to chance. I don’t see a way in, Agent. He knows all my tricks of misdirection, smoke and mirrors and whatnot. Ain’t nothing going to work with the Great Lombardi as was.’

  Isles slapped a small wooden chest beside him on the platform. The chest hummed gently and seemed to rock in objection to being thumped.

  ‘Don’t worry, Riley. We got our secret weapon here. Something very sneaky up our sleeves. There’s no way your guy Garrick can see this coming.’

  Riley was not much comforted. ‘There’s not much of a range on that weapon. Barely arm’s length, and that’s a deal closer to Albert Garrick than I like to get.
’

  Isles did not offer any further reassurances. The odds were against them and there was no point in sugar-coating it. The entire enterprise was a hair’s breadth away from being a suicide mission, unless the professor’s weapon actually worked. In spite of his show of confidence in the contents of the wooden chest, Isles had little faith in any weapon that he could not understand. You take a gun or a knife, then it’s pretty clear what’s going on, mechanically, as it were: point the thin end at the bad guy. But this magic chest? Isles had no clue how it was supposed to operate and the only reason he was putting any faith in it was because the prof had assured him it would work, and if there was anyone who had a handle on all this inter-dimension malarkey it was Charles Smart.

  I wish the prof was taking point on this, Isles thought.

  But that wasn’t possible. The professor was pure quantum energy and, if the wormhole got even a sniff of him, then it would hoover him up before he could say, It’s not a wormhole; it’s an inter-dimension (as he often did).

  Inter-dimension. That name is never going to catch on, thought Isles.

  Suddenly Pointer was at the foot of the tree, and neither Isles nor Riley, who could both be pretty sneaky individuals when the situation called for it, had heard the smallest sound to herald his arrival.

  ‘Hey,’ whispered the dog. ‘Are you guys up there?’

  Isles whistled their theme tune softly and in seconds the dog had scaled the trunk and wriggled between the two humans.

  ‘I think you have a bit of goat in you, partner,’ said Isles. ‘The way you can climb trees like that.’

  Pointer scratched his mud-coated nose with one paw. ‘Do you want the intel? Or do you want to insult me some more?’

  ‘What did you learn, Agent?’ asked Riley impatiently.

  ‘You see that, Fender?’ said Pointer. ‘The kid called me Agent. Maybe you could do that once in a while.’

  ‘Apologize to Mister Pointer,’ said Riley. ‘The sun has set and we are none the wiser.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ said Isles. ‘I’m sorry, partner. Can you fill us in now?’

  ‘I can,’ said Pointer. ‘But only because time is of the essence and not because I thought for a second that your apology was sincere.’

  ‘Chevie yet lives?’ asked Riley. This was after all the most vital piece of information.

  ‘Alive and kicking,’ said Pointer, but he frowned as he said it.

  ‘And yet?’ prompted Riley.

  ‘Well, she ain’t exactly swimming in gravy, know what I mean? She ain’t exactly quaffing champagne with the president.’

  Isles took the binoculars and trained them on the wall, searching for a gap in the line. ‘Yeah, we kinda guessed that, Donnie. What is she doing exactly?’

  ‘She’s hanging in there, either crying or trying not to cry. Mostly keeping it together, to give her credit.’

  ‘On the stake?’ asked Riley. ‘Where they will burn her?’

  Pointer wiggled closer to them for warmth. ‘Oh no. They ain’t burning her. That’s off the cards.’

  Riley felt as though he might sink through the cracks in the planking from sheer relief. ‘Thank heaven. Thank providence. And thank you, Agent Pointer. That is surely the most excellent of news.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, kid. They ain’t burning her. It’s much worse than that.’

  ‘Worse?’ said Riley, thinking perhaps the dog was toying with him, but then he remembered that Albert Garrick was involved and knew that if there was a worse fate than being burned alive then he would be the devil to find it. ‘Tell me, Agent. I beg you.’

  Pointer took a deep breath. ‘I crept in through a drain, which is why I might be a bit on the stinky side – but, hey, I gotta hide my aura or whatever it is Garrick can see. You know, if we ever get that creep in custody, I’m gonna be asking some tough questions.’

  ‘I don’t think custody is an option with this guy,’ said Isles. ‘It’s us or him, the way I see it. And by us I mean the rest of the planet.’

  ‘But what of Chevron?’ Riley insisted. ‘What news?’

  ‘So, in I go,’ continued Pointer, ‘all stealthy. I’m like a goddamn ghost, if I say so myself. And I creep towards the square, which I can find in my sleep since that’s where they restrain good old town drunk Fairbrother Isles when he’s had a few tankards.’

  ‘I have always appreciated the concern,’ said Isles drily.

  ‘So Chevie is up there on the stake thing – pole or whatever. And they got her surrounded. Every man jack in the militia is in the ring, all armed up the wazoo with pistols and pikes. But these guys look shook. All jittery and anxious, like something is up. So I trot in for a pet, which I am prepared to tolerate in the name of information. And I hear this kid in an old Roundhead helmet talking about the Devil’s Brew and how this is the plan for Chevie.’

  ‘So not burning?’

  ‘They got that on standby apparently, but the primary weapon is this Devil’s Brew. The kid is talking about it and he’s shaking, like big time. His sword is rattling in his belt. It’s un-Christian, he says, to pour molten silver down a girl’s gullet even if she is a witch.’

  These words, spoken so casually, may well have signalled the end of Riley’s world. Pour molten silver down a girl’s gullet.

  He could not stand it. He would not. And in that second all fear vanished from Riley’s mind and was replaced by a hard determination rare in one so young. He would rescue Chevie, and if he could not rescue her he would ensure that she never drank the Devil’s Brew.

  It was unbearable, the very notion, and Riley’s body acted almost independently of his mind, tensing to rise. Indeed, he would have risen and leaped from the platform, and possibly sprained one or both ankles and been of no use to man, woman or beast, had not Isles placed a large flat hand on his back.

  ‘Dial it down, kid. We gotta consider this development.’

  ‘Development, says you?’ spluttered Riley. ‘A development, is it? That devil plans to pour molten silver down the neck of my …’

  And even now he could not say it.

  Say what?

  Beloved, was that it?

  Perhaps. He knew they could be happy. The tunnel had shown him a vision of happiness and it had been so clear that he wanted to cry.

  Isles patted his back and the huge hand felt like a shovel. ‘I know, kid. You guys are sweet on each other. Even a mutt like Pointer can see that. But I gotta check in with the professor. See what he makes of this Devil’s Brew thing.’

  Riley held himself still with some difficulty while Isles fished a radio from his duffel and keyed the talk button.

  ‘Prof,’ he said, ‘you there? We got some intel. Sounds medieval but there could be some science to it.’

  Smart’s voice came out of a crackling wash. ‘Right here, Agent. What has Agent Pointer learned?’

  ‘Garrick has changed his plan. No more silver cannonballs. Now it’s molten silver inside the girl.’

  The radio crackled while Smart pondered, then he said, ‘This Garrick is more than a mere Luddite. He has calculated, perhaps correctly, that the rift would reject silver, even at those speeds, so he means to cloak it using Chevron’s own body. No doubt he plans to activate the Timekey at the moment before death, hoping that the combination of key and foam in Chevie’s own DNA will flummox the inter-dimension’s natural aversion to silver. This plan is much better thought out than the last one. All credit to Mister Garrick.’

  ‘All credit to Garrick,’ said Riley. ‘By all means, let us heap praise upon the devil who would first cleanse the world and then rule the ruins.’

  Smart sighed and through the small speaker the noise set Riley’s teeth on edge.

  ‘I was merely making an observation, Riley. The man is a formidable adversary and will at the least be the death of one of us and at the most be the death of us all.’

  ‘So what should we do, Prof?’ asked Isles. ‘Back to base, you reckon? I think the plan needs a bit of a rethink.’<
br />
  Smart’s reply was sharp and immediate. ‘No. The plan is sound. All that has changed is the manner of Miss Savano’s planned execution. We must still assume that Garrick will execute his plan at the darkest point of the night when the solar radiation is at its weakest, and the draw of the inter-dimension is strong enough to overcome its repulsion to the silver inside Chevie’s person. If his plan succeeds, then this world is going to be a lonely place. It’s possible that Agent Pointer would survive, and myself, but you will die, Fairbrother, and Riley too, and the world will be overrun by abominations.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ grunted Pointer, scratching the planking with his claws. ‘So Pointer is an abomination now.’

  ‘So we go in?’ said Isles.

  ‘As soon as possible,’ confirmed Smart. ‘I hate to say it, but the entire team is expendable in this instance. Everything depends on saving Agent Savano.’

  Riley shrugged off Isles’s hand. ‘At last we are in agreement.’

  Isles switched off the communicator. ‘A lot of interference for such a short distance. I guess it would work better if the professor actually needed a radio at his end.’ He pocketed the device. ‘I guess we’re going in. How’s our breach point looking?’

  Pointer’s low growl could have been a chuckle. ‘How’s it looking, Fender? It’s looking like a latrine, because that’s more or less what it is, and I can guarantee you ain’t gonna like it. Neither of you.’

  ‘This is not the moment for levity surely,’ objected Riley, who felt that the canine agent needed to apply himself to the task with a touch more gravitas.

  ‘Oh, it ain’t his fault, kid,’ said Isles. ‘That’s the dog genes.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Pointer. ‘The big questions don’t mean a lot to me any more. Dying, the afterlife and faith don’t even make the needle flicker. It all takes a back seat to beef and sunshine.’

  Beef and sunshine, thought Riley. What a luxury to think about those everyday things. Abominations and inter-dimensions, that’s what I get to think about.