Stonebird (16 page)

Here's the plan:

I know I said I wouldn't tell anymore stories about Stonebird, but I've got an idea. And if it works, it might be able to help Mom as well as Matt.

Everything goes smoothly to start with. We have math, which I manage to stay awake for, and English, and in
history we learn about a new war hero called Charles Coward, who is my favorite so far because he totally wasn't a coward. Then Mrs. Culpepper tells us to form a circle and she goes over to her desk and takes out the magic egg from the drawer on the right.

“I hope you've all been thinking about your stories,” she says, holding the egg in her hand.

Matt's staring at the egg, and you can practically hear his mind whirring. As Mrs. Culpepper walks over to the circle, I try and sneak a look at the drawer.

It doesn't have a lock . . .

Matt gives me a knowing look that shows he's seen it too.

My lips twitch in a smile, but I look away quickly.

The corners of my mouth feel numb because I haven't smiled in so long. And smiling with Matt? Too weird.

The egg goes around the circle and the stories flow and I know it's getting warmer and warmer. When it comes to me, I just make something up about Daisy getting chased by a pig out in the fields, and then pass it on.

And soon enough the bell goes.

My eyes dart to the clock and see the hands at three fifteen. The hairs on my neck shoot up and it feels like they're wriggling.

It's time.

I take ages packing my stuff away as the class empties around me. Chairs scrape and bang, feet pound the floor as everyone rushes out into the hall. Mrs. Culpepper stays behind, and soon it's just her and me and Matt and his
friends. She puts the egg back in the drawer and starts to tidy her desk.

Matt and his friends get up to go, and then it's only me left in the room. I sling my bag over my shoulder and walk out, with Mrs. Culpepper smiling behind me.

“Look who's all on his own,” says a voice from the corner of the hall, by the coat hooks.

It's Joe. He cracks his knuckles with a loud snap, like bone breaking in two. This is one of those cartoon moments where I should gulp a really loud gulp and run off. But instead I freeze as he lurches toward me. Matt and Cheesy are waiting by the door. I cast Matt a nervous glance, but he doesn't see.

“I don't think I've ever properly thanked you for what you did to us,” says Joe. As he gets closer he seems to grow, until he's twice my size, towering over me with his huge hands forming giant fists.

Electricity jolts through my legs.

Run!

I'm just about to peg it when Matt clears his throat.

“Hey, Joe,” he says. “Leave it. Come on—there'll be a chance for that later.”

Joe throws a quick look over his shoulder. “What?”

“I said, leave it!”

Joe turns back to me, glaring. I can see it in his eyes—he wants to charge, he wants to smack me one for scaring him with Stonebird. He takes another step closer, practically drooling.

“
Joe!
” says Matt sternly.

He stops and turns around. Matt's shoulders slump just slightly, like he's breathing a sigh of relief, and then he's gone, and Cheesy and Joe are following him out of the door.

Matt and I had said we'd meet by the jungle gym at half past three, but first I need to hide on my own, because Matt has to shake off the others.

I lock myself in the stall again, the same one Matt tried to smash down, and imagine the minutes ticking by on my broken watch.

Will it work? Can it possibly work? Two kids and an egg and a whole lot of luck.

I wait until I can't take the tension anymore, then sneak out around the back in case Mrs. Culpepper's still around. I can't let her see me . . . If she knows I was hanging around the classroom she might get suspicious when the egg goes missing.

There's a side door out of the school behind the third-grade bookshelves. It's one of those fire-exit doors with the metal bar you have to push to open, so it's easy to get out. It leads out to the pond, where—

I shake away the image of falling in.

After that it's the big playground, where the bank of grass is, with a jungle gym at the back near the hedge. A big hill blocks the playground from view. Matt's not there yet, so I crouch low and wait.

It's so quiet that every sound seems louder. My heart. The insects humming. The birds tweeting and singing in the trees. A plane roars overhead, leaving a white trail through the blue sky.

“Boo!”

I jump, scrambling to my feet.

Matt staggers back laughing, covering his mouth to try to keep quiet.

“That's not funny,” I say, but I can't help smiling.

“How long do we wait?” he says.

My watch is still cracked, so I check the sky to try and guess how much daylight we have left. “Thirty minutes,” I guess. “It should get a bit darker then.”

“Cover of darkness. Like it,” he says.

The sun dips lower in the sky, painting a line of orange above the trees to our right. My breath starts to cloud in front of me, and I have to rub my arms against the cold. School sweaters are warm, but not
that
warm.

Matt hops to his feet. “Let's go, before I freeze my nuts off,” he says.

Dim light shines from some of the windows in the school, but most of it is in darkness. Probably janitors or teachers staying late. There are no lights on in the fifth-grade classroom, which means Mrs. Culpepper must have left.

Across the grass, toward the flint wall and the door to the hall.

We sneak up to the classroom door and peer in.

“Wait!” Matt whispers furiously, pointing up. A red light flashes inside the room from a white box on the wall. “A sensor,” he says.

“Will an alarm go off?”

“I hope not . . .” He sighs. “Not much we can do now, I guess. We'll have to be quick.”

He opens the door, and just like that we're in.

“Get your egg. I'll keep watch.”

The red light flashes every time I move, and at first I freeze.

Come on, Liam, come on . . .

Flash flash flash flash
. Even my breathing makes it flicker, and if it is turned on, then the police have probably got the message already, and all I'm doing is standing around waiting.

Taking a deep breath, I run over to Mrs. Culpepper's desk and open the drawer—

But the egg's not there.

She's taken it home!

She can't have. She wouldn't! I saw her put it in the drawer.

Flash flash flash flash
.

My palms grow slick with sweat as I rummage through the other drawers, lifting up papers and moving books, just praying I'll find it, but it's not here, it's not anywhere, it's—

It's there. In the bottom drawer.

She must have got it out again and moved it after school. The egg's cold in my hand. The stories have all seeped away, and the warmth has gone with them.

Flash flash flash flash.

“Come
on
!” Matt hisses urgently from the door.

“Got it,” I say, running back to him.

“Nice. Let's go.”

The janitor comes around the corner just as we close the door behind us. “And what do we have here?” he says in a strong, syrupy accent.

“Just two kids on their way to church,” Matt calls over his shoulder.

He runs off laughing, and I run with him, heart pounding, stomach squeezed tight with the thrill of it, because we so nearly got caught, and maybe we did get caught, because the janitor could tell on us and then the game will be up.

But who cares? We're putting the plan into action tonight.

And if it works, nothing else will matter tomorrow.

Night falls quickly as we make our way to the church. Bats fly above the long, dark drive, swooping over the lumpy graveyard and swirling around the crumbling building.

I'm halfway toward the entrance when I realize Matt's not following me.

“I'm not going in,” he says, eyes darting around the grounds.

“It's not really haunted. They're just stories.”

“Yeah, I know. I'm not scared. It's just . . .”

“The gargoyle?”

He nods. Thin shadows from the bare trees move across his face. Part of me doesn't want to go in either. The thought of Stonebird's bloodstained clawed hands makes me feel sick. And what if it doesn't work? What if we've done all this for nothing?

“I'll see you in a minute,” I say.

The egg's colder than ever in my hand, and I'm thinking,
It's not going to work, there's only one of you, not a whole class, it'll never get warm enough
, and,
It won't work it won't work it won't work
. But it's
got
to work. It's got to.

Through the crumbling door and across the flagstone floor, with my footsteps echoing in the emptiness and the moonlight glinting from the broken glass in the windows, and the cold cold cold of the church pressing all around me.

The crypt door swings open easily, and there inside it, sitting in the dark, is Stonebird. His tail is curled around his feet and his wings are folded and he's resting his great glaring head in a huge clawed hand.

And his eyes . . .

Don't think about the eyes.

I hold the egg in both hands and rub it to try to warm it up, but it's cold, so cold.

Think, Liam, think . . .

With my eyes closed I can picture Matt falling to his knees in front of me, desperate. I can see his mom whispering to herself, on her own in the retirement home all because she banged her head. I can see Jess watching as Grandma eats her drawing and Mom leaning in close, gripping her hand, trying to find the person inside the ancient body, trying to fight off the demon.

I stand there holding the egg, thinking these things, and I tell a story.

And the story I tell is this.

There's a gargoyle hidden deep in the haunted church.

It sits in the cold and the dark, waiting. It's waited for so long that it can no longer remember home.

It sits, and it waits, and it remembers.

Because memories are all it has, when it's alone in the darkness of the crypt. Memories of castles and battles and demons. Memories of all of it, but especially the demons, because that's what gargoyles do, isn't it?

They fight demons.

They protect.

That's why you see them guarding the most important places in the world.

That's why it came here, isn't it? To protect.

The egg's getting warmer. I can feel it, feel it spreading through my hands and fingers, and maybe I'm just imagining it but it feels alive, like it's writhing, like the surface of the egg is shifting in my hands.

It protected the kid who needed saving.

But that kid doesn't need protecting. His grandma does. And Matt's mom. And all the people in the care home who have to fight the demon every single day just to remember their life.

It's those people who need help.

The gargoyle has not heard of this particular demon before. But it knows where to go, and it spreads its huge wings and takes off into the night, flies through the village until he gets to the retirement home. And—

A noise makes me stop.

A crunching, shifting, grinding noise. My eyes burst open but Stonebird hasn't moved. He's just sitting there, a statue covered in shadows, watching. Always watching.

“
Please
,” I say. “
Please help them. Please go to them
.”

The egg's hot in my hands now.

I don't remember walking forward, but now I'm right in front of him, looking up into his stone face and his stone eyes and reaching out to touch his stone heart, and it's warm. The gray stone is warm beneath my fingers, as warm as Mrs. Culpepper's magic egg.

“They need you,” I say, to the shadows and the silence. “The demon's real. It's the most real thing in the world. And it's eating them, every bit of them that makes them human. It's ripping them apart and turning them into nothing, just skin and bone and an empty head and eyes that try desperately to remember but don't know how.”

Still nothing.

Why isn't it working?

I've got the egg and I've told a story and it's supposed to work! He's supposed to come alive. Matt's outside and Mom will be wondering where I am, and even if she doesn't know it, she's depending on me, they're all depending on me, and I've failed them.

Because look at him. He's just stone.

Fire rages up inside me, and I thump Stonebird hard and feel numbness spreading in my hands where the pain flares, but I block it out because it's nothing, it's not important; the only thing that matters is the story, and Stonebird isn't listening.

“Please,” I say, thumping thumping thumping.

Please . . .

Red. I'm bleeding, but I don't even feel it. My blood is on Stonebird's thick, powerful chest where I've been
smacking him. Dark patches on the gray stone. Except it's not gray stone. Not anymore. Blue veins run through his chest, like the ones in the egg.

What . . . ?

I step back. The veins are writhing in his skin. Wriggling.

Move! Please move!

I close my eyes and picture Grandma and Mom and Matt and his family and all of them, all the people the demon has hurt, and the tears flood down my face.

I don't know how long I stand there, but after a while I remember Matt keeping guard outside, and guilt stabs my insides.

I open my eyes.

Then I blink, and realize what I'm looking at.

Or rather what I'm
not
looking at. Because the crypt's empty.

Stonebird's gone.