The Color of Darkness (5 page)

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Zadoc came to a sudden halt, and Cath pitched over his shoulders, and then she was standing on the old railway line in a clearer part of the thicket, holding a hot, struggling Barshin in her arms. The hare's legs kicked against her until she dropped him, then he leapt high into the air and jackknifed twice before settling back onto the ground. His entire body was shaking.

“Oh—oh dear,” he stammered. “Oh dear, I'd forgotten—I'd forgotten—quite how blinding that place can be.”

“Where's Dad?” said Cath. “Is he still here?”

Now that her feet were on the ground, her legs felt as if they'd been drained of their blood. She scanned the edge of the bank, but Dad wasn't standing there, and neither was Elvis the dog. How much time had passed in that place? Was it really long enough for Dad to have given up and gone home?

“I've got to go there again,” said Cath. “I've got to go back. What
was
that place?”

“Chromos,” said Barshin. “It's the land of colors. A world made of our minds—of our imaginations, if you like. But not an imaginary world. It is another land that sits on top of our world, in exactly the same place. Everyone sees a world unique to themselves in there, though. And apart from you, only Zadoc knows what you see. Because what
you
see in Chromos is the color at the core of your very being: what you imagine most deeply—your desires, and your fear.”

“How does it know?” Cath shrank for a second at the thought that something had seen inside her, looked deep into the thoughts she always kept well hidden away.

Barshin shook his head. “It just knows. That's what Chromos is made of—the longings and the dreams of every creature that has ever lived, and much more besides. It just knows.”

Dreams. Did that mean she could do things there? Make things? Become things?

“I want to go back,” she said.

Barshin nodded. “Of course. You can escape into Chromos whenever you like, if you know how. You can't always control it, mind—you might spend seconds in there, or hours, or days. You might travel only a few yards, or hundreds of miles. You might see just as you see on earth, or you might see another world entirely. Anything is possible in Chromos. You just have to know how to call Zadoc, and then you can come and go as you please.”

“Can't I go by myself?”

Barshin twitched his whiskers and said, “Oh no! As I warned you—you must always be on Zadoc's back, or touching him, at least. He ensures that you only see the strongest possibility in your mind. Imagine if you were to see all of them! You'd go crazy on the spot. But I could call Zadoc again for you, if you wanted. I can always call him.”

“Yeah,” said Cath. “Call him now. Maybe Dad's coming back. I should go now.”

The colors still danced before her eyes. That wide plain, the animals, the house—was that really out there, somewhere? Could she really find it again?

“Well, you see, the thing is, I need a favor. Perhaps you could do something for me? And then I'll call Zadoc for you, whenever you want.”

“Do what?” Cath didn't take her eyes off the hare, even though she knew she should be looking out for Dad.

“I need to get a message to someone. I was told he might be a tela, too, but I've tried talking to him and I don't think he can hear me. Do you think you could give him the message?”

There was bound to be a hidden bit. There always was, if anyone ever asked you to pass on a message. That was the sort of thing that happened all the time on the Sawtry.

“I can't,” said Cath. “The minute I get out of here, Dad'll find me.”

“He won't,” the hare assured her. “I promise you. Didn't I say that time passes strangely in Chromos? Look—the sun's higher, and the morning dews have gone—we must have been away for a while this time. They'll have searched and not been able to find you, nor to follow your scent out of here—how could they, when you didn't leave? I'm certain they won't still be waiting. If they are, I promise to take you straight back into Chromos. And I'm not asking you to go alone, I'll come too. I just need you to speak for me, so that this message is heard and understood.”

Cath considered Barshin for a moment. He might be lying. But what reason could he possibly have to lie?

“Okay,” she said grudgingly. “Who is he, this guy you want?”

She half expected the hare to say Dad, or one of the guys on the estate, although there wasn't any reason to think a hare would want to say anything to them. He didn't look like a gangster hare.

Barshin said, in a curious, tight voice, “A boy. He's called Danny O'Neill.”

The name rang a bell. It wasn't a bell of alarm, though: Danny O'Neill was just a boy in her year at school, a small, pale boy who never had much to say to anyone. Cath hadn't looked at him more than twice in the two years she'd been there. Not that she'd looked at any of the boys much. They weren't as vicious as the girls, but they were still stupid idiots who hated her just because she was Cath Carrera and dared to exist.

“I know him,” she said. “What's the message?”

“His cousin is in danger,” said Barshin. “His cousin Tom is in great danger—there are hideous rumors flying around the world. And Danny O'Neill is the only one with the knowledge and power to intervene. Something has gone horribly wrong, and it is his duty to set it right.”

“Jeez,” said Cath. “Don't ask much, do you?”

“It isn't a question of asking much.” Barshin twitched. “It's a question of what's wrong, and what must be done in order to fix it. So, will you tell him my message?”

“Sure,” said Cath. “Don't mean he'll listen, though.”

“He'll have to listen,” said Barshin. “He has no choice.”

“Come to school, then,” said Cath. “That's where he'll be.”

 

CHAPTER 5

SAND

“Sand. What harm can you do with sand? Throw it in someone's eye? Scratch their eyeball? Sand's harmless! And it isn't even very much sand!”

“Be quiet, stoat.”

The tall, humanlike figure closed his fingers and opened them again to look at what he held. A few grains of brownish sand.

The stoat peeped out from where she sat, tucked inside his shirt collar, and chattered angrily. “Rubbish! You're telling me you can destroy the world with a few grains of sand? It's rubbish! You're useless! Powerless! I need someone who's strong and vicious and mean and savage! They told me Sammael was the one to come to. And all you've got is sand!”

Sammael's fingers twitched. His arms were as thin as broomsticks inside his white shirtsleeves, and a low shine lit up his close-curled black hair, but no sun or moon hung in the sky. Here in Chromos, no lights followed him, only shifting clouds of darkness.

“You misjudged me, stoat, if what you wanted was blood and fire. I'm the master of a better kind of revenge. Could you do this with a sword?”

He opened his fingers and let the grains of sand trickle down onto the floor. They bounced for a second, and then a gray patch began to spread around the place where they lay.

“It's just another path,” muttered the stoat. “You've shown me them before. They don't do
anything
bad.”

Sammael stepped back to the edge of the patch, and then leaned forward to peer down it.

“This one's different,” he said.

The stoat craned her neck. For a second all she saw was the real earth below, the world she'd come from and been normal in, until terrible things had happened.

The wide, green earth, a field, a couple of humans walking through it.

Humans. Hated humans.

The stoat bared her teeth.

And then a great puff of colors—scarlet, green, purple, yellow—rose up from the floor at Sammael's feet, and rolled over, tumbling into the hole and streaming down through the sky toward the earth.

The colors pounded down in a waterfall into the earth, and others swarmed to join them—blue, gray, orange, and pink—and the humans shrieked. They turned to each other, but neither seemed to notice the colors falling onto their heads. Instead, they stared madly into each other's eyes, then began to dance, legs stamping and beating the heavy soil. Closer and closer they got, until their legs and arms became tangled together and they fell, shrieking and yelling.

And then they began to fight. One tried to strangle the other. The second put up fists and feet, kicking and punching at his friend. They choked each other with mud. They hit each other with stones. They shouted and screamed and roared. They did not stop until one of them was dead and the other was lying beside him, bruised and exhausted.

Still, neither noticed the colors that continued to fall from the sky and soak away into the earth.

“The human mind turned inside out,” said Sammael. “Madness. Violence. Chaos. Was that the kind of revenge you were imagining?”

“Hah!” screamed the stoat, her blood hot with excitement. “That's better! But it's only two of them. More must die! Do more! Do it to all of them, right now!”

“Patience,” said Sammael, turning away from the hole. If only the earth didn't absorb the colors of Chromos as fast as they fell. If only they would spread about its surface like a flood, then no more holes would be needed. But that wasn't the way things worked. He needed more holes. A hole as big as the world itself.

“More!” shrieked the stoat. “I want to see more!”

Sammael's fingers reached up to his collar. He closed them around the stoat and held her little brown body in front of his face, looking into the glinting black eyes.

“I said, patience. I need exactly the right sand to make these kinds of holes. It doesn't grow on beaches.”

“Well, find more! Come on!”

The long fingers clenched, and the stoat squirmed in a spasm of pain.

“Softly, softly,” murmured Sammael. “I'll be getting a whole lot of it, quite soon.” He contemplated the angry animal, and then his impassive face softened. “But maybe you've got a point. No harm in trying to hurry things along a bit, is there?”

He put the stoat back inside his collar and began to walk through the floor of Chromos, down and down, as smoothly as if he were striding down the long slope of a hill toward the solid earth below.

 

CHAPTER 6

NATURE AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Tom was mending the fences around Hangman's Wood. Sweat ran between his shoulder blades as he slammed the mallet down onto post after post. The rain had stopped for a moment, but a stifling thickness in the air spoke of a coming storm. Still, the sky was now pleasantly blue with white clouds scudding across it, and even if the fence line did stretch on ahead of him and there were a hundred more fence posts to beat into the ground, it was good to be working. And to have something to hit.

Johnny—
thud!
—what a coward—
thud!
—running away and leaving him to it—
thud!
—those dogs leaping on the badger—
thud! thud!
—those men laughing—
thud!
—and he, Tom, had run away—
thud!
Running away—
thud!
—what kind of a thing was
that
to do?—
thud! thud! thud!

Sometimes, in the pauses between thuds of the mallet, he heard the rapid rattle of a woodpecker in the wood, and earlier there'd been a few soft hoots from an owl, unwilling to close its eyes against the morning. The skylark had grown used to the sharp bangs too, and was hovering high above him bellowing a crazy jumble of tumbling song. Crows and magpies were cawing irritably at one another as they prowled the corners of the empty field.

He stopped hammering for a moment to let his arms and back recover a bit. As he leaned against one of the new fence posts, a woodpecker fluttered down from a tree at the edge of the wood. It began poking its beak into the ground to look for grubs, so silent and focused that he thought it must be alone until he heard a squeak behind it and saw another, younger woodpecker tumbling down the tree.