Chaos Walking: The Complete Trilogy (2 page)

And then I do look round and I go and get my dog.

“Aaron, Todd? Aaron?”

“Don’t say that name again, Manchee.”

“Bleeding, Todd. Todd? Todd? Todd? Bleeding?”

“I know. Shut up.”

“Whirler,” he says, as if it don’t mean nothing, his head as empty as the sky.

I smack his rump. “Don’t say that neither.”

“Ow? Todd?”

We keep on walking, staying clear of the river on our left. It runs down thru a series of gulches at the east of town, starting way up to the north past our farm and coming down the side of the town till it flattens out into a marshy part that eventually becomes the swamp. You have to avoid the river and especially that marshy part before the swamp trees start cuz that’s where the crocs live, easily big enough to kill an almost-man and his dog. The sails on their backs look just like a row of rushes and if you get too close,
WHOOM!
– outta the water they come, flying at you with their claws grasping and their mouths snapping and you pretty much ain’t got no chance at all then.

We get ourselves down past the marshy part and I try to take in the swamp quiet as it approaches. There’s nothing to see down here no more, really, which is why men don’t come. And the smell, too, I don’t pretend it don’t smell, but it don’t smell nearly so bad as men make out. They’re smelling their memories, they are, they’re not smelling what’s really here, they’re smelling it like it was then. All the dead things. Spacks and men had different ideas for burial. Spacks just used the swamp, threw their dead right into the water, let ’em sink, which was fine cuz they were suited for swamp burial, I guess. That’s what Ben says. Water and muck and Spackle skin worked fine together, didn’t poison nothing, just made the swamp richer, like men do to soil.

Then suddenly, of course, there were a whole lot more spacks to bury than normal, too many for even a swamp this big to swallow, and it’s a ruddy big swamp, too. And then there were no live spacks at all, were there? Just spack bodies in heaps, piling up in the swamp and rotting and stinking and it took a long time for the swamp to become swamp again and not just a mess of flies and smells and who knows what extra germs they’d kept saved up for us.

I was born into all that, all that mess, the over-crowded swamp and the over-crowded sematary and the not-crowded-enough town, so I don’t remember nothing, don’t remember a world without Noise. My pa died of sickness before I was born and then my ma died, of course, no surprises there. Ben and Cillian took me in, raised me. Ben says my ma was the last of the women but everyone says that about everyone’s ma. Ben may not be lying,
he
believes it’s true, but who knows?

I am the youngest of the whole town, tho. I used to come out and throw rocks at field crows with Reg Oliver (seven months and 8 days older) and Liam Smith (four months and 29 days older) and Seb Mundy who was next youngest to me, three months and a day older, but even he don’t talk to me no more now that he’s a man.

No boys do once they turn thirteen.

Which is how it goes in Prentisstown. Boys become men and they go to their men-only meetings to talk about who knows what and boys most definitely ain’t allowed and if yer the last boy in town, you just have to wait, all by yerself.

Well, you and a dog you don’t want.

But never mind, here’s the swamp and in we go, sticking to the paths that take us round and over the worst of the water, weaving our way round the big, bulby trees that grow up and outta the bog to the needly roof, metres and metres up. The air’s thick and it’s dark and it’s heavy, but it’s not a frightening kind of thick and dark and heavy. There’s lots of life here, loads of it, just ignoring the town as you please, birds and green snakes and frogs and kivits and both kinds of squirrel and (I promise you) a cassor or two and sure there’s red snakes to watch out for but even tho it’s dark, there’s slashes of light that come down from holes in the roof and if you ask me, which you may not be, I grant you that, to me the swamp’s like one big, comfy, not very Noisy room. Dark but living, living but friendly, friendly but not grasping.

Manchee lifts his leg on practically everything till he must be running outta pee and then he heads off under a bush, burbling to himself, finding a place to do his other business, I guess.

But the swamp don’t mind. How could it? It’s all just life, going over itself, returning and cycling and eating itself to grow. I mean, it’s not that it’s not Noisy here. Sure it is, there’s no escaping Noise, not nowhere at all, but it’s quieter than the town. The loud is a different kind of loud, because swamp loud is just curiosity, creachers figuring out who you are and if yer a threat. Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all?

Swamp Noise, tho, swamp Noise is just the birds all thinking their worrisome little birdie thoughts.
Where’s food? Where’s home? Where’s my safety?
And the waxy squirrels, which are all little punks, teasing you if they see you, teasing themselves if they don’t, and the rusty squirrels, which are like dumb little kids, and sometimes there’s swamp foxes out in the leaves who you can hear faking their Noise to sound like the squirrels they eat and even less often there are mavens singing their weird maven songs and once I swear I saw a cassor running away on two long legs but Ben says I didn’t, says the cassors are long gone from the swamp.

I don’t know. I believe me.

Manchee comes outta the bushes and sits down next to me cuz I’ve stopped right there in the middle of a trail. He looks around to see what I might be seeing and then he says, “Good poo, Todd.”

“I’m sure it was, Manchee.”

I’d better not get another ruddy dog when my birthday comes. What I want this year is a hunting knife like the one Ben carries on the back of his belt. Now
that’s
a present for a man.

“Poo,” Manchee says quietly.

On we walk. The main bunch of apple trees are a little ways into the swamp, down a few paths and over a fallen log that Manchee always needs help over. When we get there, I pick him up around his stomach and lift him to the top. Even tho he knows what I’m doing, he still kicks his legs all over the place like a falling spider, making a fuss for no reason at all.

“Hold still, you gonk!”

“Down, down, down!” he yelps, scrabbling away at the air.

“Idiot dog.”

I plop him on top the log and climb up myself. We both jump down to the other side, Manchee barking “Jump!” as he lands and keeping on barking “Jump!” as he runs off.

The leap over the log is where the dark of the swamp really starts and the first thing you see are the old Spackle buildings, leaning out towards you from shadow, looking like melting blobs of tan-coloured ice cream except hut-sized. No one knows or can remember what they were ever sposed to be but best guess by Ben, who’s a best guess kinda guy, is that they had something to do with burying their dead. Maybe even some kind of church, even tho the spacks didn’t have no kind of religion anyone from Prentisstown could reckernize.

I keep a wide distance from them and go into the little grove of wild apple trees. The apples are ripe, nearly black, almost edible, as Cillian would say. I pick one off the trunk and take a bite, the juice dribbling down my chin.

“Todd?”

“What, Manchee?” I take out the plastic bag I’ve got folded in my back pocket and start filling it with apples.

“Todd?” he barks again and this time I notice how he’s barking it and I turn and he’s pointed at the Spackle buildings and his fur’s all ridged up on his back and his ears are flicking all over the place.

I stand up straight. “What is it, boy?”

He’s growling now, his lips pulled back over his teeth. I feel the charge in my blood again. “Is it a croc?” I say.

“Quiet, Todd,” Manchee growls.

“But what is it?”

“
Is
quiet, Todd.” He lets out a little bark and it’s a real bark, a real dog bark that means nothing but “Bark!” and my body electricity goes up a bit, like charges are going to start leaping outta my skin. “Listen,” he growls.

And so I listen.

And I listen.

And I turn my head a little and I listen some more.

There’s a hole in the Noise.

Which can’t be.

It’s
weird,
it is, out there, hiding somewhere, in the trees or somewhere outta sight, a spot where your ears and your mind are telling you there’s no Noise. It’s like a shape you can’t see except by how everything else around it is touching it. Like water in the shape of a cup, but with no cup. It’s a hole and everything that falls into it stops being Noise, stops being
anything,
just stops altogether. It’s not like the quiet of the swamp, which is never
quiet
obviously, just less Noisy. But this, this is a shape, a shape of
nothing,
a hole where all Noise stops.

Which is impossible.

There ain’t nothing but Noise in this world, nothing but the constant thoughts of men and things coming at you and at you and at you, ever since the spacks released the Noise germ during the war, the germ that killed half the men and every single woman, my ma not excepted, the germ that drove the rest of the men mad, the germ that spelled the end for all Spackle once men’s madness picked up a gun.

“Todd?” Manchee’s spooked, I can hear it. “What, Todd? What’s it, Todd?”

“Can you smell anything?”

“Just smell quiet, Todd,” he barks, then he starts barking louder, “Quiet! Quiet!”

And then, somewhere around the spack buildings, the quiet
moves
.

My blood-charge leaps so hard it about knocks me over. Manchee yelps in a circle around me, barking and barking, making me double-spooked, and so I smack him on the rump again (“Ow, Todd?”) to make myself calm down.

“There’s no such thing as holes,” I say. “No such thing as nothing. So it’s gotta be a something, don’t it?”

“Something, Todd,” Manchee barks.

“Can you hear where it went?”

“It’s quiet, Todd.”

“You know what I mean.”

Manchee sniffs the air and takes one step, two, then more towards the Spackle buildings. I guess we’re looking for it, then. I start walking all slow-like up to the biggest of the melty ice cream scoops. I stay outta the way of anything that might be looking out the little bendy triangle doorway. Manchee’s sniffing at the door frame but he’s not growling so I take a deep breath and I look inside.

It’s dead empty. The ceiling rises up to a point about another length of me above my head. Floor’s dirt, swamp plants growing in it now, vines and suchlike, but nothing else. Which is to say no
real
nothing, no hole, and no telling what mighta been here before.

It’s stupid but I gotta say it.

I’m wondering if the Spackle are back.

But that’s impossible.

But a hole in the Noise is impossible.

So something impossible has to be true.

I can hear Manchee snuffling around again outside so I creep out and I go to the second scoop. There’s writing on the outside of this one, the only written words anyone’s ever seen in the spack language. The only words they ever saw fit to write down, I guess. The letters are spack letters, but Ben says they make the sound es’Paqili or suchlike, es’Paqili, the Spackle, “spacks” if you wanna spit it, which since what happened happened is what everyone does. Means “The People”.

There’s nothing in the second scoop neither. I step back out into the swamp and I listen again. I put my head down and I listen and I reach with the hearing parts of my brain and I listen there, too, and I listen and listen.

I listen.

“Quiet! Quiet!” Manchee barks, twice real fast and peels off running again, towards the last scoop. I take off after him, running myself, my blood charging, cuz that’s where it is, that’s where the hole in the Noise is.

I can hear it.

Well, I can’t
hear
it, that’s the whole point, but when I run towards it the emptiness of it is touching my chest and the stillness of it pulls at me and there’s so much quiet in it, no, not quiet,
silence,
so much unbelievable silence that I start to feel really torn up, like I’m about to lose the most valuable thing ever, like there it is, a death, and I’m running and my eyes are watering and my chest is just crushing and there’s no one to see but I still mind and my eyes start crying, they start crying, they start
effing crying,
and I stop for a minute and I bend over and Jesus H Dammit, you can just shut up right now, but I waste a whole stupid minute, just a whole stinking, stupid minute bent over there, by which time, of course, the hole is moving away, it’s moved away, it’s gone.

Manchee’s torn twixt racing after it and coming back to me but he finally comes back to me.

“Crying, Todd?”

“Shut up,” I say and aim a kick at him. It misses on purpose.

We get ourselves outta the swamp and head back towards town and the world feels all black and grey no matter what the sun is saying. Even Manchee barely says nothing as we make our way back up thru the fields. My Noise churns and bubbles like a stew on the boil till finally I have to stop for a minute to calm myself down a little.