The Midnight Carnival (9 page)

THWACK.

It wasn’t just the sound – which was loud – she felt it like a punch in the face. The mugwort let go and she rocked back on her heels, gasping for breath and spluttering water. She
fell to one side, her elbow sinking into the muddy bank, and waited for her vision to clear and the coughing to ease. Her limbs felt gooey inside, like she was a deflated balloon, all wrinkly and stretched out of shape.

‘Ugh.’

That and the not-so-pleasant taste of the not-so-clean river water was nauseating. Unable to get to her feet, Adie crawled up the bank, feeling the damp and dirt seep into her clothes. Her uniform was filthy, she would get in trouble at home.

A shadow flitted through the trees ahead. She stopped and ducked low, the scruffy weeds scraping her chin. It was small and quick, too quick to be a person. A fox, maybe?

There it was again. And it was no fox.

Adie pressed herself into the ground but she knew the creature had seen her. It danced between the trunks but always ended up behind the sycamore she was facing. It wasn’t an animal, but it wasn’t human either. Finally, skinny fingers crept around the bark and it showed its face.

The creature’s face was oval, with very round and very large eyes. The skin was pasty, almost grey, and stalks of hair stood out from the head like scrawny twigs. Its mouth widened into a grin and it tipped onto all fours. Adie couldn’t see it then, hidden beyond the bank above, and her heart raced. The round eyes appeared at the top of the bank and the creature wagged a finger at her. She noticed, with alarm, that
its mouth was filled with sharp, triangular teeth. It grinned again and, with a swish of its skinny limbs, it was gone.

A faery
, her mind screamed with panic.
I’ve brought back a faery from Hy-Breasal
.

She shook her head. It wasn’t possible. How could it follow her? Water-messaging was just that – messaging. Her body didn’t travel to Hy-Breasal on water. How could a faery’s body have travelled back on it?

It wasn’t possible, she knew it wasn’t. But some awful knot of dread began growing in her stomach, and she lay there, in the mud, not moving, not caring about the cold damp that soaked to her skin.

There was a faery loose in her world, and she had no idea how to send it back.

8

Chasing Faeries

The girls sat squashed on one side of Mrs Quinlan’s kitchen table, while the woman sketched in chalk on the homemade blackboard perched on the counter.

‘Who can tell me what this is?’ she said, pointing to the oblong outline on the board.

‘And do you know what else there is, Miss?’ Una said as she traced invisible shapes on the table. ‘An alligator. It’s not even stuffed or anything. A real-life alligator that goes wandering round the park. It’s deadly.’

‘Oi!’ Mrs Quinlan shouted, tapping furiously with her chalk.

‘Oh,’ Una said, looking up. ‘No, that’s nothing like an alligator.’

The Cat Lady fired the duster so fast Una barely had time
to duck. It struck an antique carriage clock on a shelf on the wall, which toppled to the floor and smashed.

‘That’s dangerous!’ said Una. ‘You could’ve hit my head.’

‘I was aiming for your head.’

‘You know, Mrs Q, you couldn’t be a teacher at school. You’d never get past the Garda vetting.’

‘Keep talking. I’ve got plenty of stuff to throw.’

Adie’s hand went up.

‘
Finally
,’ the woman sighed. ‘Yes, you.’

‘Mrs Quinlan, are there Hunters here?’

Mrs Quinlan took a deep breath as the end of her chalk slid off the board with a horrible squeak.

‘What?’

‘Are there Hunters here, like there are on Hy-Breasal? Hunter witches, I mean.’

‘What has that got to do with the diagram on the board?’

‘Um, nothing. But
are
there Hunters though?’ Adie persisted. Grace looked up. It was the first time Adie had spoken all day, and the first time she’d looked interested in anything in ages.

‘From the garbled nonsense you were all spouting when you got back from that bloody island,’ Mrs Quinlan snapped, ‘I understand that Hunters hunt
faeries
.’

‘Couldn’t we learn to do that?’

‘We could use B-brr for practice,’ said Jenny, pointing to the little nymph as he scraped congealed butter from the
table and licked his fingers. ‘Give him a ten second head-start and then we all go after him.’

‘Hunters mostly used glamour,’ Rachel said, ‘to entice the faeries to them. They didn’t do much chasing.’

‘You’re not doing that!’ Delilah snatched B-brr to her chest and cradled him like a baby. ‘That was done to him before and… I don’t know how long they had him locked in that birdcage.’

There were tears in her eyes, and Grace felt sorry she hadn’t stopped the conversation when it turned to B-brr.

During the Witch Trials, trainee witches had used glamour to take on the appearance of faeries to lure B-brr from his cage. Even Rachel, excellent as she was at glamouring, had done it. Disguised as another wood nymph, she had got him to step through the open door and dance with her on a table top. After that, Rachel had been celebrated and whisked off to the Hunters’ Mansion. B-brr had been locked back inside his birdcage and dumped in the black turret.

‘Sorry, Delilah,’ said Grace. ‘We weren’t thinking. Of course we wouldn’t do anything like that to the little fella.’

‘Wouldn’t we?’

Jenny looked genuinely surprised. Grace felt like slapping her.

‘No. We wouldn’t.’

She gave the tall girl a stern look that eventually got a shrug in reply.

A sudden crack made them all jump. Mrs Quinlan held a pointer to the left of the blackboard. On it she had drawn a crude map, with the uppermost building labelled ‘school’.

‘What am I pointing at?’ Her face was red and her hair more frazzled than usual.

Grace tentatively raised her hand.

‘The demon well, Miss?’

‘Yes, the demon well. And would someone please explain to me what a demon well is?’

Grace looked around, annoyed that all the others kept their eyes on the table. She raised her hand again.

‘It’s a soft spot between planes… like between worlds, where things can get through. Beings can get through. From one world to the next. Like demons. They can get through to our world from their world, through this soft spot.’

‘That was very inarticulate, but you’re essentially right. Demons –
demons
– have a door to our world. They could emerge at any moment, hundreds of them, thousands. All they need is for one evildoer – or gormless twit in your case – to open that door.’ The woman jabbed her pointer into the spot again. ‘That’s why it must be watched, it must be guarded. Why do you think Beth and I are training you lot, huh? Do you think we’re slaving for free so you can muck about, changing your hair colour, playing with alligators, chasing faeries?
Huh
?’

She dropped the pointer and leaned over the table, her
pale eyes as threatening as Grace had ever seen them.

‘We’re training you to be keepers of the well. That’s your job. That’s what you’ll be good for when we’re done. Beth and I won’t live forever. We’ve guarded the well until now and soon it will be your turn.
That’s
what we’re doing here. Ensuring the safety of the next generation.’

‘Dropped the ball though, didn’t you?’Jenny was looking the woman right in the eye.

Grace felt a cold rush down her limbs and silently begged her friend to be quiet. Mrs Quinlan leaned further over the table.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We summoned a demon from the well, right under your nose. Have you forgotten about that? A bunch of schoolgirls, who barely knew anything about witchcraft, pulled a demon out of the well by accident, and you didn’t have any idea. You would never have found out either, if we hadn’t come to you for help. What kind of ‘keeper of the well’ does that make you?’

The silence was agonising as Jenny and Mrs Quinlan glared at each other. Finally the woman spoke, her voice low.

‘Get out. All of you.’

The group, minus Delilah, walked down Mrs Quinlan’s drive and into the cul-de-sac of Wilton Place. Una marked
off something at the back of her notebook and squashed it back into her bag.

‘What are you doing, Una?’ Grace asked.

‘I keep track of all the times Jenny’s got us kicked out of class. You’re on a roll this year, Jen.’

Jenny didn’t reply. She was still seething. Grace could tell because she was having trouble keeping up with her furious stride.

‘What if we don’t want to stay here?’ the girl finally said through gritted teeth.

‘Sorry?’ said Grace.

‘What if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in Dunbridge?’ Jenny stopped and addressed them all. ‘Aren’t they taking a lot on faith here? Just ’cos Ms Lemon and that Cat Hag have deigned to teach us some magic, they think we’re going to owe them the rest of our lives. I don’t particularly want to park my bum on that demon well for the next sixty years. I’ve got plans. I wanna go places, I wanna do stuff. So what the hell are they expecting from us?’

Grace hadn’t really thought about it before. She meant to learn as much as possible from Ms Lemon and Mrs Quinlan, she meant to become a great witch. But she didn’t consider that that meant spending forever in one spot, watching one little patch of carpet in the school until the end of her days. Is that what their teachers really wanted them to do for the rest of their lives?

‘It is a lot to ask. Maybe we should talk to Ms Lemon about it.’

‘Stuff that,’ huffed Jenny. ‘They’re both in it together. It’s not worth their while teaching us if we don’t grow up and let them retire.’

‘Jenny’s right,’ said Rachel. ‘If we tell them we don’t want to be keepers of the well, they won’t teach us anymore. And I want to keep learning.’

‘Me too. So everyone keep schtum and don’t bring it up in front of them. You listening, Una?’

‘Don’t bring up the demon-well-life-sentence thing in front of the teachers,’ said Una, ‘I got it. I’m not a moron.’

‘No, but you do tend to talk when you shouldn’t, so don’t–’

‘I got it! Jeez.’

Jenny nodded like it was all sorted, then took off again with her too-fast walk. Adie fell to the back of the group and Grace followed her.

‘Are you okay? You seem quiet. Is it alright with you if we don’t bring up the future too much with the teachers?’

‘I’m fine. It’s alright with me.’

‘You look a bit tired.’

‘Didn’t get much sleep last night.’

‘Is there something bothering you?’

Adie smiled, but it looked forced.

‘No, I’m fine. Nothing to worry about.’

Grace was about to push further, but her friend hurried
into a jog to catch up with the others.

It was getting dark. The moon was rising beyond the river causing the shadows of the trees to stretch all the way to the bank. Adie tried to ignore the black shadowy fingers that seemed to reach for her as she stood by the water.

She wasn’t the most skilled witch amongst her friends, but she had one undeniable talent – controlling water. She didn’t know why, but ever since her first lesson with liquid it had seemed eager to bend to her will. She played with it absent-mindedly now, warming up her magic muscles, making small spikes dance across the surface of the river. If she was to catch the faery before anyone found out about it, this was how she would do it.

Mr Pamuk had been curious when she returned for another batch of twice-burned mugwort.

‘Your water-messaging went well, little witchlet?’

She had smiled and nodded. It hadn’t gone well. It had been a complete disaster. But if this supernatural creature had invaded her world via the mugwort, then surely she could send it back the same way. All she had to do was trap it, and hopefully her mind could drag it back to Hy-Breasal on another water-message. It all hung on whether or not the faery would return to the river.

She had been waiting for nearly an hour, patrolling the
trees on either side of the river for that familiar, quick shadow.

There! A shape flickered in the dark.

Adie held her breath and waited, watching. There it was again. Too fast to be a human, too skinny to be an animal.

Quiet as a mouse, she crept up the bank, never taking her eyes from the figure in the woods. It danced around tree trunks like a moth around a flame, flitting back and forth, making no noise at all. Adie was aware of how loud her steps were, no matter how carefully she moved. The
crunch
of dry leaves and the
shush
of weeds stepped on. She was moving in slow motion when she saw the figure stop suddenly. It swayed gently in the mottled light of the moon through the leaves. It was watching her. But it didn’t run. Maybe it wanted the company.

‘Hey there,’ Adie kept her voice low and soft. ‘How’re you doing?’

The creature continued to sway in time with Adie’s footsteps.

She could see its twig-like hair now, and the outline of its oval face. A step closer and its big, round eyes glinted like saucers.

‘Remember me?’ Adie asked. ‘You came with me to the river. Not sure how you did that, you little rascal.’ The faery didn’t respond, and she wasn’t sure it could understand her. ‘But you’ve gotta go back now. You can’t stay here, okay? I’m going to help you get back. Alright?’

The creature hunched its shoulders. Adie dropped to one knee, flinging an arm behind her to summon the water she had already been shaping beneath the surface of the river. Thick liquid strands erupted near the bank, clashing in the air to form a lattice. The creature grinned and turned, but Adie lashed the woven water after it, snapping her hand into a fist as the lattice closed around the faery in a ball-shaped cage.