Dark Eden (53 page)

‘Yeah,’ David said. ‘Dying in the cold and hating themselves forever. That’s what you get for trying to break our Family, and that’s why we have Guards now to make sure it never happens again.’

‘Oh I know, I know,’ wailed Lucy Lu, ‘I know it has to be. But when you see them as I see them, you can’t help feeling sorry for them: always lonely, always miserable, always with the cold of Snowy Dark creeping through them and always … always …’

She stopped because we could hear shouting voices coming from forest behind us on the Peckham side of the clearing. In came three more of David’s Guards, dragging along another young man, with a buck on a rope following behind them.

The Guards didn’t take any notice of the fact that an Any Virsry was going on, and they paid no attention to the person in middle of Circle who was supposed to be Family Head.

‘David! David! Look who we found skulking around outside Family. Look who it is!’

Who
was
it? He looked familiar – that narrow, clever face with the wispy blond beard – but we hadn’t seen him for a long time, and he’d grown, and we’d never seen him looking so scared before. But Gela’s sweet heart, it was one of them! It was one of our lost kids!

‘Let go of me,’ snapped Mehmet Batwing, ‘I wasn’t skulking. I came down here to talk to you. I’ve got things you might want to know about.’

‘Talk then!’ growled David. ‘Talk!’

‘Never mind David, Mehmet,’ I yelled. ‘Talk to
us
! Where’s our kids? Where’s Gerry? Where’s Jeff? Where’s John?’

Other people started calling out and coming forward too, mums, sisters, brothers. The Guards quickly stepped in to keep us back and away from Mehmet and David, but they couldn’t stop us calling out.

‘Where’s Tina and Harry? Where’s Jane?’

‘What about Dix? Dixon Brooklyn, I mean? And Gela and Clare, are they alright?’

‘No, talk about Lucy first. Lucy Batwing. Tell us about her!’

David raised his hands for quiet before Mehmet could answer.

‘One at a time, one at a time!’

He turned to me.

‘And you can forget John,’ he said. ‘He’s not part of Family any more. He’s none of our business.’

‘That’s right,’ chipped in Lucy Lu, staring at us all with her weepy eyes. ‘Tommy and Angela told me themselves, remember? They told me we should forget that John Redlantern ever existed, and never speak of him again.’

‘Oh shut up, Lu, you silly woman, you just told us they were all dead!’ said a big Batwing woman called Angie. She was Mehmet’s auntie. It had been her who’d raised the boy up after a leopard did for his mum. ‘You come here, Mehmet my pet. Come to Auntie Angie.’

‘Yes, and I
want
to hear about John,’ called my sister Jade, ‘I want to hear about him!’

And she looked at me guiltily, as if she doubted her own right to get involved.

‘Gela and Clare Brooklyn,’ someone else was calling. ‘Are they alright? Tell us that they didn’t die in the snow!’

‘What about Julie Blueside? And Angie and Candy?’

Everyone was pushing forward, crowding round Mehmet and David and the Guards.

‘What about Dave and Johnny and Suzie Fishcreek. How are they? Suzie’s alright, isn’t she?’

It was weird. Even before I heard Mehmet’s answer I knew what it would be. Everyone was yelling yelling at the same time, but when Suzie’s mum called out, a kind of hollowness suddenly opened up in middle of all that noise.

‘No,’ Mehmet said, ‘Dave and Johnny are still alive, but Suzie is dead.’

And whole Family was silent then, completely silent. You could hear the
hmmmmmmmm
of the misty forest all around us, the
hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
of the trees nearby.

‘Dead?’ said Suzie Fishcreek’s mum, smiling broadly like he’d just told a joke. ‘
Dead?
No, that can’t be … You just told us … Well, you didn’t
tell
us but the fact that you’re here proves that … Well …’

She giggled.

‘No, not dead,’ she said firmly.

Poor woman. Mehmet had brought her sons and her daughter back to life for her when he came into the clearing, just like he’d brought Jeff and Gerry back to life for me. Suzie had leapt out of Snowy Dark for her, alive and well. And now, a few minutes later, she was dead again.

‘Yes, dead,’ said Mehmet. ‘That fool John led us up onto the snow. He had no proper plan. He didn’t know what to expect. It’s only luck that we didn’t all die. But Suzie
did
die. There’s a terrible kind of leopard up there, a white leopard that can throw its voice from one place to another. It did for her up there, her and one of our bucks, and it drove off the other one with Jeff on it, so we were all left in Dark.’

My heart went cold. The world closed in round me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was Mehmet going to kill off
my
child as well?

‘Jeff?’ I cried. ‘It drove Jeff off? What happened to him? Did he come back? Is Jeff alright?’

‘He was alright last time I saw him.’

‘Well, so’s Suzie then,’ said Suzie’s mum, smiling round at the people around her. ‘She’s not dead. Mehmet’s here, isn’t he? Mehmet is here to prove that they’re all okay!’

‘Suzie died,’ Mehmet said. ‘Last I heard all the others were alive. Dave Fishcreek was with me earlier this waking. He came down with me from Tall Tree Valley, but he ran off when you guys started yelling at us and waving spears. Johnny Fishcreek, and Julie and Angie and Candy Blueside, they’re all back up there in Tall Tree Valley. We’ve got our own little Tall Tree group up there. Three babies too.’

‘And Jeff? And Gerry?’

‘All the others stayed with John. He had to keep going, didn’t he? Tall Tree Valley is a good place – all the bucks you could wish for – but he had to go back up onto Dark again, trying to find the way across to the other side.’

So of course me and all the other mums and sisters and brothers and friends were calling out to know more again.

‘It gets cold up where we are sometimes,’ Mehmet said, ‘and snow comes down. But it doesn’t kill us, does it? It’s not cold like up on Snowy Dark. And it’s not dark either. But, first time the snow came down, off they all went, the bloody fools, Tina, Dix, Janny, Gerry, Jeff, dumb old Harry, all that lot, following that crazy John, that crazy killer John, back up onto Dark where Suzie died, and where we all
nearly
died, and would have done too if Jeff hadn’t come back for us. Good luck to them, they’ll need it.

‘But me and Dave and Johnny and the Blueside girls, we figured we could work out how to deal with a bit of snow. We
have
figured it out too. We wear thick wraps. We make strong shelters and big fires. We turn bucks into horses. It’s a good life up there. We get all the buckmeat we could ever want, and all the …’

‘My Jeff came back for you, you said,’ I called out. ‘What did he do? Where had he gone? Where did he come back
from
?’

But David stepped in before I got an answer.

‘Never mind that now. Tell us what you mean by
killer
John?’

Mehmet gave a weird little smirk. His head was cradled against his big fierce auntie’s enormous breasts – she’d pushed her way through the Guards like they were little kids – and he had other Batwing people standing round him, stroking him and touching him like they couldn’t believe he was real. He could tell he wasn’t in danger now and he was enjoying the attention and the power he had over us all.

‘Oh, didn’t you know, David?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you know that John did for your friend Dixon Blueside? Speared him from behind when he was trying to get back here. And Gerry and Harry – you know, Gerry Redlantern and big old, dumb old Harry Spiketree – they did for the other two that Dixon had with him. Harry did for John Blueside. And Gerry, well, I’m afraid Gerry did for his own groupmate Met.’

Oh Gela’s crying eyes! What a thing Mehmet had let loose! We’d guessed that something bad had happened, something bad enough to make whole bunch of them suddenly head off up to Dark, but we’d never known what that something was. Now John Blueside’s mum, and all the rest of Blueside group too, began to yell and bellow across the clearing at Redlantern and Spiketree, pushing forward against Guards, who held them back with the sticks of their spears.

And Met’s mum, my own cousin Candice, turned on me.

‘
No, no, no, no, no, no!
’ she screamed. ‘I hate Gerry, I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.’

She snatched at my eyes with her nails like a tree fox, scratching my face so I bled. People pulled her off me then, but she carried on screaming. Other people were joining in too, screaming and screaming: Blueside people screaming at Spiketree and Redlantern people, Redlantern people screaming at one another, all in the little fuggy space of the clearing with the thick fug all around and the fake Circle in middle of it all.

And then Suzie Fishcreek’s mum finally heard in her mind what her ears had heard a little while ago. Suzie was dead. Her daughter had been torn apart by a white leopard that lived in Dark and the snow. Over all the other screaming and shouting, she let out one single horrible high-pitched shriek.

‘
Silence!
’ bellowed David.

Everyone was quiet.

‘Silence,’ he said again, glaring round at us.

Gela’s eyes, I’m a batface too and I’m no beauty myself, but he looked ugly
ugly.

‘Screaming and yelling won’t solve anything,’ David said. ‘What’s needed now is to get that killer John and spike him up, just like I always said we should. Him and his creepy friend Gerry and that baby-man Harry. You all thought I was being hard, but if we’d spiked Juicy John up when I first suggested it, there’d be four people alive now who are all dead. This time we’re going to do it my way.’

‘Yes, but they’re right across the other side of Snowy Dark,’ I whispered to myself. ‘Thank Gela, they’re
far
away from here. David is only play-acting. There’s nothing he can really do.’

‘Yes, John is a killer,’ Mehmet said. ‘He could have killed any of us. That’s the only reason I went with him over the top in the first place. I didn’t want to go. I spoke out against it. I told him I didn’t agree with the killings. But …’

David took no notice of any of this.

‘You bring us down some of those buckhorses of yours, Mehmet, if you really want to be our friends. And bring us some of those warm wraps. And show us the way the others went over the mountains.’

‘Oh yes, I will,’ Mehmet said. ‘I surely will. I don’t want to break with Family. We Tall Tree people don’t want to break with Family. One of us was a cousin of John Blueside, don’t forget, and three of us grew up with him and Dixon Blueside in their group. We want to get back at their killers as much as you do.’

‘Then maybe we can sort something,’ David said, ‘us and you. Maybe you can be part of Family again.’

‘I don’t think that’s down to you, David,’ came Caroline’s voice from behind him. ‘It’s for Council to decide things like that, Council and me as Fam …’

‘Bucks and wraps and information,’ David said to Mehmet, completely ignoring Caroline – and from that moment on, we lost any last notion we had that her or Council counted for anything at all – ‘bucks and wraps and information. That’ll show us which side you’re on.’

‘Gela is talking to me,’ cried Lucy Lu. ‘Gela is talking to me now. She’s explaining things. And I see now why I thought that John and the others were dead. The truth is that they’re
worse
than dead. Even to the Shadow People they seem dead. Even to the Shadow People, think of that! In one way I misunderstood what the Shadow People were telling me, that’s true, but in a deeper way, I did understand, I understood
too
well. That’s what Angela says. They’re not just dead. They’re
worse
than dead.’

‘John says he talks to Gela too,’ Mehmet said.

Michael’s names, you should have seen how Lucy Lu changed when she heard that! All the dreaminess and weepiness disappeared in a moment. Her face went all twisty. She looked like she was crouching ready to pounce. She looked like a hunter about to make a kill.

‘Him?’ she snarled. ‘Him talk to Angela? Ha! Don’t make me
laugh
.’

‘Yes, but listen to this. He fools people
because he’s got Gela’s ring
!’

There was a gasp from whole Family.

‘What do you mean?’ demanded David. ‘What do you mean, her ring?’

‘The lost ring, like in the story. The one she lost and then cried and cried for wakings afterwards. I’ve seen it myself. You can tell it comes from Earth easy easy. It’s made of metal – it’s smooth smooth, and shiny – and it’s got tiny writing inside it: “
To Angela with love from Mum and Dad
”, that’s what it says. I’ve seen it myself. John found the ring in forest near here and told no one, kept it all to himself, and then he destroyed our Circle.’

‘You went over to him after he destroyed Circle, Mehmet,’ I called out. ‘Stop trying to pretend that you …’

But people yelled at me to shut up. They didn’t want to think about that. They didn’t want any complications. They wanted to think about the wonderful ring from Earth, the lost ring in the story, being found again, and they wanted to be angry angry with the arrogant newhair who’d destroyed Circle but kept the ring. He’d taken away
our
bit of the past without even asking us, and kept
his
own bit without even telling. He was my nephew and I loved him, but even I thought that was selfish and bad.