Chris Beckett: Dark Eden

‘We didn’t . . .’

‘Come on, Gerald. You knew David would be after them the moment he got the news. Don’t try and tell me you didn’t.’

Gerald looked desperately at Paul. I looked at Paul too. I gave him the look I give to naughty children, and he looked guilty and scared for a moment and then straight away he frowned, making his face hard hard hard, a proper Guard’s face. It was like he was putting on a mask.

‘Back off, Sue Redlantern,’ Paul said. ‘Back off or I’ll use this club on you, alright?’

‘What?’ I hissed at him. ‘Club me for asking you why you want to do for my own sons?’

He cowered like I’d just hit him, but held his club tight in his hand.

I let them go, the silly weak kids. And then I cried and cried. I cursed First Tommy and First Dixon and First Mehmet for bringing human life to Eden. I cursed Tommy and Angela for deciding to stay here and slip together and so bring all of us from peaceful peaceful nothingness into this cruel dark world. This was a bad bad place. People weren’t meant to live here. People were meant to live on Earth where it’s fresh and bright and new as the inside of a lanternflower. This place was only good for creatures from dark dark Underworld, with flat eyes and green-black blood and six limbs with claws. Nothing good would ever come to us in this miserable dark Eden. Never. Never. Never. There would only ever be pain and misery and blood, blood, blood.

‘Sue,’ a voice whispered behind me. ‘Sue.’

It was Gerald Fishcreek back again, without his brother, without his spear.

‘Julie warned them, Sue. She slipped with Jeff up there, up at Tall Tree, and she warned him about David and Mehmet. She told him Mehmet would talk to David, and what David would do when he found out where they were.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I spoke to her. You’re right, I don’t hate John and your boys. In fact when we met them up there I really liked them, specially your Jeff. And after the three of them had gone and there was no one else near, I said to Julie that I wished I’d warned them what was going to happen. And she said, “Well, don’t worry, Gerald, because I did.”’

Well, I hugged him, and then I hit him hard hard round the face, because if John and the others were saved by that warning from Julie, it would be no thanks to this cowardly little slinker, whose conscience only started to prick him after it was too late, so that he could reassure himself that he wasn’t really bad without the trouble of actually doing anything that was any good. And then I hugged him again anyway for telling me.

He pulled away from me, looking round guiltily. And now he put on his hard Guard face too, just like his groupmate Paul had done.

‘Don’t ever speak to me about it again, alright?’ he said. ‘Don’t ever tell anyone I spoke to you, because I’ll call you a liar if you do.’

‘Did they say what it was like over the other side?’

He looked round again. He wanted to go. He was scared scared someone would see him talking to me.

‘Big,’ he said, ‘a big big forest. So big, they said, that you can’t even see where it ends. And there’s a pool there that’s just the same. You can’t see the ends of it. You can’t see across to the other side.’

Off he ran. I sank down against a whitelantern trunk and cried some more. But it was a different kind of crying now. I was crying with relief. They still had a good chance of getting away from David, into that big big forest, which they knew and David didn’t.

Yes, I thought, but it’s an odd thing, isn’t it, a sad sad thing, for a mum to be relieved that her sons can go further away from her, and hide in a place where she may never see them again?

We spent one two hours in there, just trying to get the talking face back on the screen. All the time people were pushing to get in, pushing each other out of the way, pushing the bloody little squares, pushing past the bones of the Three Companions like they were just dead twigs in forest.

‘Watch what you’re doing!’ I said. ‘You’ll knock the others’ heads off as well!’

No one was even listening.

‘Try that one there!’ someone said.

‘No, try pushing the ones that Flower pushed!’

‘No, don’t do that ! What’s the point of that? We’ve tried that a hundred times. Leave those alone and let me try this one.’

‘Hey! Back off and let me through, I’ve got some more lanterns here. Let’s get some light on this!’

The strain in people’s faces! The desperation to get someone they didn’t know to appear for one moment more on that screen and speak words to them that they could hardly understand! That one thing, the screen with its voice, had taken over from all the other wonders here: the dead Companions, the Landing Veekle itself. Perhaps they just didn’t want to think about what all this really meant.

I crawled back out through the hole and left them to it. Jeff and Harry and Gela were already outside. Gela and Jeff were looking after a couple of babies plus five six littles who didn’t want to stay in the sky-boat because they found it scary. And Harry agreed with them about that. He didn’t like the bones or the metal cave, and he’d hated hated the strange voice that spoke to us from the screen. Now he was pacing around and muttering and moaning to himself, wanting to get away.

‘Harry doesn’t like it. Harry wants to go.’

Tina came out soon after me, then Janny, then Dix, all looking kind of shaken and a bit ashamed, like they’d let something bad come inside them and take them over, and now they regretted it.

‘I reckon we should stop this, ‘I said. ‘I don’t think the talking face will come back.’

Tina nodded. I stood up.

‘Come out now! Everyone out!’

No one argued with me. They all emerged one by one through the hole in the boat — Gerry, Lucy Batwing, Mike, Clare, Jane, little Flower, Clare . . . with Martha and Lucy London coming out last of all, both of them crying bitterly.

‘Listen up, everyone!’ I called out.

They all went quiet quiet, standing there next to the Veekle under the bright whitelantern trees, with the smooth soft sheen of Worldpool nearby.

I looked round at their faces, grownups and children, excited, scared, hungry for something that they didn’t even understand, and I tried to figure out what I ought to say. It was hard hard because I’d been excited too, and I’d felt that same hunger, and, like all of them, I was still dazed dazed by the face of Michael Name-Giver himself talking to us from the screen. (Who could believe that such a thing would ever happen to us?) But somehow I needed to help the others make some sense out of it, when I hadn’t really made sense of it myself.

‘So . . .’ I began. ‘So now we know how the story of the Three Companions ended. After all this time. After . . . all these wombs, and . . . and all these generations.’

I talked without knowing what I was going to say, but something was creeping up into my thoughts. It was like when you first spot a leopard in forest. To start with you’re still not sure if it really is a leopard or if it’s only a patch of flowers, and then you’re pretty sure it is a leopard but you still can’t quite make out its exact shape. And then you see it.

‘And that means, doesn’t it, that they . . . That means they never got back to Defiant . And . . . that . . . means . . .’

Oh Gela’s heart, that meant . . .

I looked at their faces. I could see some of them getting it too: Gela, Tina, Dix, the quicker, stronger ones. I took a deep breath to try and get control over my voice.