The Color of Darkness (9 page)

CHAPTER 9

THE FARM

Stan swung the car up a driveway beside a sign that said
SOPPER'S EDGE FARM
. He bombed over the potholes as if his old clunker were a jeep. The floor scraped on the earth as it shuddered over the ruts, but Stan didn't care. He slammed to a halt as soon as the driveway widened out into a gravelly yard and cocked his head.

“Scram,” he said.

Cath got out silently. What could she say, anyway? Don't tell my dad? But if Stan was going to tell, he'd tell, and if he wasn't, she didn't need to ask him not to. Everybody understood how it was.

Maybe Dad wouldn't find her here. They were miles away from town. There was a redbrick farmhouse that looked like it had been kicked about by the winds and rain and snow for longer than anyone had ever been alive, and there were some black barns behind it, and loads of fences and puddles and bits of metal machinery around the place. The rest was fields, with a strong smell of cows. From somewhere on the damp breeze, Cath heard a long, mournful moo.

Danny got out of the car, and Barshin slowly hopped down after him, his long ears drooping. As soon as Danny closed the door, Stan turned around and shot off down the driveway. They stood for a second and watched him go.

“That guy…,” said Danny. “Is he, sort of, a friend of your parents or something?”

He thinks Stan is lowlife scum, thought Cath. And he thinks I'm the same.

“You ain't got a clue, have you?” she said, without anger. “Go on, then, where's your cousin?”

Danny shrugged. “I dunno. He's normally doing something with the cows. Oh crap, there's Aunt Kathleen.”

A tall, rawboned woman with a horsey face and wild toffee-colored hair walked around the side of the house. Her hair was struggling out of an elastic band, her clothes damp with smears of greenish slime. Her cheeks were as red as a smacked butt.

“Danny!” she said, looking confused. “I thought you were the postman. What are you doing here? Why aren't you at school?”

“I need to see Tom,” said Danny. His voice sounded weak, as though he didn't really mean it.

“Why?” said Aunt Kathleen, going from confused to suspicious in a nanosecond. Sharper than she looks, thought Cath.

“Um,” said Danny. “Nothing, sort of. I just need to see him.”

“Do your mum and dad know you're here?” snapped Aunt Kathleen, moving on equally swiftly to irritable. “And yours, whoever you are?” She swung around to Cath, and then noticed Barshin lurking by Cath's feet. Her face froze.

What were they all so scared of?

“Danny,” Aunt Kathleen said in a low, warning voice. “You haven't been up here for months. What's going on?”

Danny squirmed under her glare. He'll crack, Cath thought. He's the sort who runs sniveling to his parents the moment anything goes wrong. But to her amazement, he pulled himself together enough to shrug.

“I was just … busy,” he said. “This is Cath, the hare's her pet. She's from school.”

Aunt Kathleen narrowed her eyes and looked at her nephew, the girl, and the hare. She gave Cath the longest look of all.

“Tom's up by the wood, seeing to the fences,” she said. “He'll be down in a minute. You can come in and have some lunch, and I'm going to give your mum a call. I know you're nearly a teenager, Danny, but you're still a child as far as the law and your school are concerned.”

Cath scowled and balled her fists, ready for the questions about where she lived and who her parents were. But the ugly horse-faced woman merely raised an eyebrow at her, went over to the side door of the farmhouse, and opened it.

“In,” she said. “Where I can keep an eye on you.
All
of you.”

*   *   *

Inside, it was soft and cluttered and comfortable, with sofas and chairs covered in magazines and papers. There was a gentle animal smell, as though the furniture might be alive and warm, heating the house with the fumes of its breath. The kitchen had a big wooden table in the middle, half-covered in letters and bills, but Danny sat down at the clear end as if he did it every day of his life. Barshin crept into the darkness underneath the table and lay with his belly along the floor tiles, nostrils quivering, ears flat along his skull.

Aunt Kathleen put the kettle on, plonked a fruitcake down on the table, and gouged off a few thick wedges with a bread knife. Cath reached out and wrapped a hand around the biggest slice.

“Where did you get that hare?” said Aunt Kathleen to Cath.

Cath was stuffing cake into her mouth. She didn't stop to answer.

Aunt Kathleen gave Barshin a hard glance but the hare was still lying motionless on the cool floor, resting his chin on his forepaws and trying to recover control over his shaken stomach, so she gave up and made the tea. She put some mugs on the table and sat down, cradling the warm pot in her hands. There was a long silence while she stirred the tea bags and poured the tea into three mugs. Danny didn't touch his mug. Cath took a gulp of hers to wash down the cake. The tea was brick red and tasted of iron pipes. She covered the taste with another slice of cake.

“What do you want Tom for?” repeated Aunt Kathleen.

“Just … stuff,” Danny said.

“About the hare?”

“Sort of. You know … he likes animals.”

“He does,” agreed Aunt Kathleen. “Very much. So much so, in fact, that since last summer he hasn't stopped looking for them. I hardly see him. Oh, he never misses a milking and he cleans every cut and scrape the cows get, but outside of that—he's out all day, sometimes all night, for weeks on end. He doesn't even call Sophie anymore, and they used to be thick as thieves. What's going on, Danny?”

Danny stared down at his mug. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “Why don't you ask him?”

“I have. He says he's watching wildlife. But I know something else is going on—I
know
it. Can't you give me any clues?”

Cath glared at Danny for a sharp second. Just tell the old bat, she wanted to say. Tell her so she'll sort it out and I can get back to Chromos and be free. But Danny O'Neill was silently struggling with himself again, staring down at the table.

Cath's fists clenched. Why did this weak little kid who was scared of everything get to sit at this table like he owned it? Why did he get to have an aunt who put plates of cake in front of him and gave him tea he was too fussy to drink?

Well, she wouldn't like to be the kind of person who was scared to get in Stan's car, or scared to run around on her own. She reached for another bit of cake and stuffed it into her mouth, partly just to stop herself from speaking. With any luck, she could eat her fill and escape out of here before anybody found out where she was. She'd go up into those woods at the top of the hill and hide for a bit, until Barshin agreed to call Zadoc again.

“Right,” said Aunt Kathleen. “I'm going to call your mum. Don't leave this room, either of you. There's bread in the cupboard, if you want sandwiches.”

She got up and went out.

“What cupboard?” said Cath.

Danny fetched the bread and some ham from the fridge. He chucked it across the table at Cath and she tore open the packets, making squashed wedges of bread and ham. She tried offering a bit of ham to Barshin, but the hare flared his nostrils in disgust, so she sat back up and concentrated on feeding herself.

“What's that?” Danny's quiet voice broke through her furious eating. He was looking at the hand that was mechanically cramming bread into her mouth.

He'd seen the flowers on her skin. For a second she thought about spinning him some lie—he'd believe it, of course. She could just say it was a stick-on tattoo. Then she remembered that fist against the side of the bus shelter. He wasn't as stupid as he looked.

“I touched something in Chromos,” she said.

“Chromos?” He frowned. “What
is
Chromos?”

“It's where I went. Barshin took me there—we was running away. It's this place where you can dream up things, and they … I dunno … they're just
there
. Like, all the stuff you really want but don't think you can have.”

“Like what?”

Cath didn't want to tell him that. He wasn't Barshin or Zadoc, he was a person, and she didn't trust him. Instead she just said, “Anything. Whatever's in your head. But you can't touch any of it. There was this bush, really spiky, with all these yellow flowers that I really liked, but when I tried to touch it, it sort of burned its way into my hand. It don't hurt, though.”

She grabbed the last bit of cake before Danny could get it, but Danny seemed to have forgotten the food entirely. He shook his head as though trying to dislodge a fly in his ear, and then Aunt Kathleen came back in from making her phone call.

“Seems like you've got the whole town out looking for you,” she said to Danny.

Cath stopped chewing. But maybe it was okay. The people looking for Danny O'Neill weren't going to be the ones looking for her.

“Sorry,” mumbled Danny into his plate. He wasn't so bad when he was by himself, but he turned into such a sniveling little snot bag whenever grown-ups were around that it made Cath want to puke up a whole bucketful of scorn.

“Have you had enough to eat?” Aunt Kathleen asked.

“Yes, thanks,” said Danny.

“No,” said Cath.

A tiny smile flicked across Aunt Kathleen's mouth. “I think your friend is hungry,” she said to Danny. “Though decidedly lacking in manners.”

And instead of starting to screech like Macy would have done, Aunt Kathleen went across to the other side of the kitchen and opened a cupboard door.

“Here, Hollow Legs,” she said, plonking half an enormous meat pie in front of Cath and giving her a knife to cut it with. “Fill your feet. I can hear the ATV coming down now—that'll be Tom.”

*   *   *

Tom was almost as tall as Cath's dad, but much thinner and blond, and his face shone with cheerful distraction. He opened the side door and slammed it behind him, stamping into the kitchen and heading straight for the fridge.

“Worse than I thought,” he said, as though this was brilliant news. “Whole back edge of the fence on High Top is rotting. Going to take days to get the new posts in. Where's that pie, Mum?”

Swinging to survey the kitchen, he caught sight of the extra people at the table and his face froze for a fraction of a second. “Danny! Long time no see! What brings you here?”

Then his face quickly moved again and he recovered his easiness, advancing on the meat pie and giving Cath a broad grin. Cath scowled. Tom cut himself a wedge of pie and took a bite out of it, leaning back against the kitchen counter.

“Danny and his friend Cath are here to see you,” said Aunt Kathleen.

“Oh yeah?” said Tom, chewing rapidly. “What about?”

Aunt Kathleen raised an eyebrow at Danny, but Danny stayed silent, his cheeks reddening. His aunt held up her hands.

“Right, okay, okay, no more interfering aunt,” she said, heading for the door. “I'll go and finish cleaning out the henhouse. But don't you dare set foot out of this kitchen, any of you. Your mum's on her way, Danny. No running off, okay? Losing you once was enough.”

With that, she left the kitchen. Danny, Cath, and Tom were silent until they heard the door close.

“You met Sammael,” Danny whispered.

The pie paused halfway to Tom's mouth and then swiftly carried on. Tom bit again and swallowed before shrugging. His face had lost the easygoing smile.

“Yep,” he said in a low voice. “I met him. He's nothing like what you said. He gave me a book. I would have shared it, but you're not really into finding stuff out, are you?”

“Not that sort of stuff,” hissed Danny. “It's an evil book. You can't read it.”

Tom snorted.

“It's a book of bird and animal calls, not some kind of brainwashing cult manual. It just means I can learn to understand them all and learn what everything's up to. What terrible evil is that going to do to me?”

“It'll make you his,” whispered Danny. “You'll belong to him. He'll do whatever he wants with you.”

“Oh, don't be thick, Dan,” said Tom, letting his voice rise to a normal level and going over to fill the kettle. “Sammael isn't some deadly creature of the night. He's just a bloke who likes nature. You're only scared of him because he doesn't live in a suburb and drive a car and watch TV like everyone else. Just because he isn't conventional, it doesn't make him wrong, you know.”

Cath cut herself more pie, but she did it quite slowly, so she could have something to do while she thought. Sammael did sound interesting. Maybe when she got back to Chromos, she could find him and see what everyone was talking about.

“You don't get it!” Danny frantically crumbled a bit of piecrust between his fingers. “You never listened to anything I said about him! He isn't even a
person
—that's just what he wants you to think! He asked you for your sand in return, didn't he? Do you even know what that is? It's your soul, Tom, your entire soul. He'll find some way to kill you, then take it and use it to put dreams in people's heads. To give them
nightmares
. Horrible nightmares … Oh, I knew this was a stupid idea.”

“Why come, then?” said Tom, getting out a mug and a tea bag. “Sammael's not going to kill me—he's given me a book to make me
live
. Mum's already on my back half the time—I think she reckons I'm going to go as crazy as you have. Well, I'm not. I'm just having fun and learning about the fantastic world out there. If you're still too scared to come and see what it's got to offer, just go back to your video games and leave me alone.”

“Yeah,” said Danny in a sharp, sarcastic tone that Cath hadn't heard him use before. “I would've. But then
that
came along.”