Catherine Fisher - Darkhenge

If it was really Clare she could change again, become some other creature, leap at him.

Why didn’t she finish it?

Then, with a suddenness that made him jump, he saw one of the tall shapes on the parapet he had thought were gargoyles move. It turned its head.

One on each side, two cranes stood still, looking at Clare. Their eyes were narrow and slitted, their thin legs scaled. The third alighted with a great flutter, landing on the black marble floor in front of Rob, folding its wide wings. For a moment it looked at him, its graceful neck bending. As tall as he was, it turned to the hawk. It was as if the three cranes were protecting him.

The hawk eyed them coldly. Then it was gone, winging out into the dark, the cranes soaring after it.

Rob breathed out, got up on hands and knees. His wrist throbbed and dripped blood. He felt stretched, all his muscles knots of strain.

Pulling the crane-skin bag toward him, he slid the strap hastily over his head.

The King crouched, watching. In the darkness of the black doorway the wind made an eerie whisper, and it lifted the King’s dark hair. He was still wearing the holly mask, but now, as he saw Rob looking, he put his hands up and carefully took it off. Underneath was what Rob had expected, the fifth mask, this time the spiny twigs of blackthorn; the dark eyes looked calmly through the narrow eyeholes.

In his hand, a sharp knife glimmered.

Seeing Rob glance at it, he slid it into his belt. Then he said, “I was going to cut you down.”

Rob coughed. Dust clogged his throat. He had to swallow before he could say, “But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t because this is all my fault. You see, I brought her here in the first place. At least, she called me and I came. She was riding the white horse and I drove my carriage right into her world. That’s how it should be, how it is in all the tales. Ask Vetch. But she … she’s taken over. She’s so determined, so bitter, that I’m worried now.” He shook his head, rueful. “No, not worried. I’m scared. I want you to take her back. I want to help you.”

He knelt on one knee under the low passage roof, his velvet clothes stained and worn. “We need to hurry. Where’s Vetch?”

Rob bit his lip. “He fell. He may be dead. I don’t know.”

The King looked dismayed. “We need him! Chloe told Clare to deal with him—probably her plan was to steal the bag that you have. It holds treasures and mysteries; perhaps she believes it holds the lost wisdom he stole from her in the three splashes of the Cauldron. You have it, so she’ll pursue you now.”

Rob’s hand tightened on it. “How do I know I can trust you?”

The King shrugged. “Only you can decide.”

That was obvious. But what choice did he have? There was no going back for Vetch. Rob pushed the hair from his eyes. “Take me to Chloe,” he whispered.

It was obvious why they called it the Castle of Gloom.

Chloe was on hands and knees now, because the passage—and there was only one—seemed to get narrower and smaller the farther she went. She had the ridiculous feeling that she was getting small along with it, shrinking like something from Alice, crawling along veins and threads of space. And now, when a hole had worn in the red dress and her hands were sore, something was changing. The darkness. She could make out the black stone of the walls, because there was a bend ahead and around the bend came light, a pale glimmer. She hurried, feeling the grit under her palms.

At the bend of the passage she paused, then peered around and stared in astonishment. The tunnel became a corridor, the antiseptic white corridor of some hospital, smelling of disinfectant and floor polish. It was totally real, but still so tiny that the flat fluorescent ceiling lights scraped her back, the second one along sparking and fluttering, as if the strip was going. She didn’t feel small now; she felt enormous, as if she had grown to clog the corridor, as if she would be wedged in it, and as she crawled on, she saw tiny doors on each side, and in one of them Mac was speaking, not to her but to some nurse, urgently. Gently, she blew the door shut.

She didn’t want him to see her like this.

Just when the corridor seemed to be too small to squeeze through, it turned left, and crawling around she found herself in the hallway of a Victorian house, paneled with oak and hung with portraits, as if she had crawled into an illustration from one of her old books.

Chloe scowled. She was sick of this.

If this was the Unworld, her world, she ought to be able to make it as she wanted. Larger, for instance.

She stopped, closed her eyes. She wished hard, like she wished at Christmastime, or when the exam results were coming out, or when Tom Whelan had talked to her that time in the school cafeteria.

And the hallway moved back.

It swelled up, stood aside. She opened her eyes and found she was sitting on its worn carpet. That her size was normal and she could stand.

There was a table lamp plugged into the wall; she lifted it up and found it was marble and heavy and trembled in her hand, but she could drag it high enough to see the nearest painting. When the light glimmered on the canvas, she laughed sourly at first. And then she stopped laughing.

Clare waited.

It had taken time to escape from the cranes, and she had changed shape more than once. Now, knowing Vetch would survive, would come, she perched high in the branches of the oak. Her eyes were huge, her gaze hungry, her head swiveling in its silent feathers whenever a mouse raced across the forest floor, or a moth gusted in the wind.

When he emerged, her owl sight was ready.

He had chosen well, as he always did. A bat is small and swift, its flight difficult to see, its barely heard echo a squeaky sounding of the forest. She let him fly up, watching him rise from the pit and ascend the black wall, resting sometimes in the withering stalks, then darting out again and circling higher, zigzagging with wild energy across the stars.

When she moved, it was silent. She spread her wings and was gone, and as the bat’s weak eyes sensed her, its panic was soundless too, a blundering into the balustrade, a flap between pillars.

She swooped, her vision a wide ring of stark silhouette, her senses full of the stink of the wood, every squirm of her prey, his wriggle and dart, lowering her claws for him, plunging down into the darkness of the castle.

Then suddenly the night rose up and closed around her like an eruption; she gave one squawk of fear, flapped, tore, struggled.

The dark coat was right over her head.

“Goddess, I think we should make a truce,” Vetch said quietly.

Rob recognized the corridor. It was the one in the nursing home, the one leading to Chloe’s room. He was desperate to know what was happening there, how long in the world’s time he had been gone, but though he could hear Mac talking, he couldn’t see him, and all the doors had been locked.

Now there was this.

It seemed like the hallway of some Victorian house; he knew it, and it took him a while to remember from where, but then it came, and he said, “Chloe’s book!”

“You never read it,” the King remarked.

“Not the one she wrote! She has a kid’s storybook. Fairy tales. This is from Beauty and the Beast. This corridor.”

The King nodded. “It would be,” he said sadly. He wandered on into the dimness, to the lamp that stood on the table. Looking up, he lifted it. “Rob,” he said, “look at this.”

Coming up behind, Rob turned cold.

It was one of his paintings. The one of the downs from Windmill Hill, which he had painted in the spring, while Chloe had lain in the grass and sunbathed. Or had she? Hadn’t she been writing something … hadn’t she gone on about it, and he had muttered yes and no and mixed his colors and not listened?