Seven Sorcerers (5 page)

‘Um …’

‘It’s OK,’ said the boy, ‘it often takes people like that. We’re in the Drift. Skerridge won’t think to look for you here, he’ll think you’re still in the Widdern.’

‘The what?’

‘My name’s Jonas,’ he said, ignoring her.

Nin thought he must have brilliant night vision because he set off confidently into a darkness that was completely empty of house lights, street lights or any other lights at all. She shivered. Although she could sense the wall of number 27 as a wedge of solid darkness to her left, to the right there was a feeling of open air. A definite lack of Next Door.

In fact, now she came to think about it the world had gone silent too. No distant murmur of cars, no … Well, it was night time so there wouldn’t be any people anyway, but something was still missing. The underlying hum of a fair-sized town, the sound that went on even while everyone slept, had gone too.

‘Wait!’ She hurried after Jonas, stumbling on the uneven ground of a hillside that suddenly had grass instead of pavements.

‘You’re Nin,’ Jonas was saying. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye out for you. I guessed he’d be after you next, once he’d dropped Toby off.’

Nin stopped dead. ‘Toby?’ she demanded. ‘What about Toby?’

Jonas paused, turning to face her. By now, Nin’s eyes were adjusting to the dark and she realised that there was light after all. The stars were brilliant in a sky of inky velvet and a wedge of moon touched the landscape with silver. Her eyes fixed on something that rose against the northern horizon like a distant wall of hazy white.

‘Sorry,’ Jonas said ruefully. ‘Couldn’t help him. Can’t take them on, you see, they’re too powerful. I was just watching to see if either of you managed to get away. As you did.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘We’ll shelter in the woods till dawn. The Drift isn’t a good place to be out in at night.’

Nin started towards him then stopped, unsure of what to do. ‘My mum will worry.’

Jonas watched her for a moment. ‘No, she won’t,’ he said gently. ‘She won’t even wonder where you are.’

For the first time since all this horribleness began Nin felt her eyes fill with tears. Jonas set off again, making his way down the grassy slope of the hill towards the darker shadow of the trees.

Still crying, Nin followed him. There was nothing else she could do.

She got the tears under control on the trip down the hill. Although she stumbled often, she was grateful for the dark. At least he couldn’t see her face.

At last, they reached a small copse and groped their way under the trees. The shape that was Jonas sat down with his back to a broad trunk, so Nin settled next to him. She felt safer in the copse because the gentle rustle of leaves and the twitter of the odd night bird did a lot to cover the unnatural silence that didn’t belong to the Dunforth Hill she knew. Fortunately, the leaves also covered up the skyline with its rounded silhouettes of trees instead of the usual hard-edged ones of roofs and chimneys.

‘So,’ she said firmly. ‘Why have all the lights gone? And what wood is this?’

‘This is the Drift,’ said Jonas patiently. ‘The lights have gone because it’s another world and not many people live here. The wood doesn’t have a name, there are too many woods in the Drift to give them all names.’

Nin was silent. There were so many questions tumbling around in her head, all trying to get out at once, that they were stuck in a kind of mental traffic jam.

‘Anyway,’ said Jonas conversationally, while she tried to get a grip, ‘how did you do it? Get away from
Skerridge, I mean. No kid has ever managed that before.’

‘That THING stole my brother,’ Nin burst out, before she realised she was going to say anything at all. ‘It stole Toby and everyone forgot about him except me.’ She paused, remembering the dark shape under the stairs, the silent breathing in the shadows. ‘Then, I knew it had come back for me, so I stayed up all night and waited for it.’

Jonas watched her intently; she could feel his gaze in the darkness, like a cool touch on her face.

‘Skerridge must’ve left your memory behind when he took Toby. That’s not like him, I can tell you. It’s part of their magic.’ Jonas sounded sad. ‘To steal your loved ones’ memory, so that everyone else forgets too. If you hadn’t been so close to Toby, your memory of him would have faded with the night.’

‘Like everyone’s memory of me will be gone too,’ said Nin flatly. It wasn’t a question and Jonas knew it. ‘Although,’ she looked over at his shadowy shape. ‘If you were watching me before … well,
you
still remember me?’

‘I’m already stolen, already on the outside, see. The memory spell wouldn’t find me because in a way I don’t exist.’

‘And that’s why you don’t have a home, because you got stolen too?’

‘Yep. Mind you, it was Polpp who snatched me, not Skerridge.’

‘Why did you look out for me?’

His gaze slipped away from her face then, she felt it go.

‘Like I said, I knew there was a BM around so I kept watch. You never know if a kid’s going to get away.’

‘BM?’

‘Bogeyman. Anyway, your brother went and you seemed like a possible too, so I waited to see if the BM came back. Got nothing better to do. Course, I didn’t realise then it was Skerridge or I might not have bothered.’

‘I’m glad you did.’ Shivering in the darkness, Nin sneaked out a hand. Jonas must have known because he took it and gave her fingers a friendly squeeze. She inched close enough to feel his shoulder, solid against hers. She was cold, although it was a mild night, and she ached with the hugeness of it all. The next question struggling out of the maelstrom in her head was, ‘What exactly is this place anyway,’ but something bigger got there first.

‘How many kids go missing like this?’ she gasped. ‘I mean, how many have disappeared that nobody even knows about?’

‘These days, there are only a couple of dozen BMs left and mostly they like to hang around scaring a kid for weeks before they do the snatch. So, I dunno … say … up to a hundred kids every year? Of course, that’s peanuts in a population the size of Britain, but …’

‘That’s
awful,’
gasped Nin. ‘Can’t somebody do something
about it?’

Jonas burst out laughing. ‘Like who? The police? Round up the BMs and bung them in the nick, I s’pose? If they could see them to round them up, of course. Not to mention they’d be toast in a second.’

‘Toast?’

‘Bogeymen have Firebreath. I mean,
real
Firebreath, not just post-onion firebreath.’

Nin blinked at him. It was getting lighter. On the horizon, at least the bit of it she could see from under the hanging branches, the sky was tinged with soft gold.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘BMs don’t just go for any kid, they like a particular sort. The shy or nervous or thoughtful ones. You know, the sort who see faces in the pattern on the curtains, or make sure the cupboard doors are closed at night so nothing can come out. And if they find a kid with brothers and sisters who are the same, they, or one of the others, tend to go back.’

‘Like me and Toby?’

‘Uh-huh. So although most families get away with nothing, others can lose every single kid. Now that is truly awful!’

‘What happens to the ones that don’t escape? Like Toby?’ cried Nin, suddenly afraid. ‘What happened to him?’

‘Kids that don’t escape, which is most of the ones that get stolen in the first place, get dropped off at the Terrible House,’ said Jonas, watching her carefully. ‘After that –’ He shrugged – ‘nobody ever sees ’em again.’

‘The Terrible House?’

‘Uh-huh. They get handed over to Strood …’

‘Strood?’

‘And that’s it. Gone.’

Nin opened her mouth and then shut it again. She had been about to say ‘gone?’ but she was starting to feel like some kind of echo so she bit it back.

Her confusion must have shown on her face because Jonas grinned at her in the half-light.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know, but not just now. By the feel of things, the sun is about to come up and I don’t think you’ll be paying any attention to me for a little while.’

Nin raised an eyebrow and turned to look towards the horizon. It was deep gold by now and along the edge of the world, where the land curved away against the sky, burned a rim so bright she could barely look at it. She got up and took a few steps forward, coming out from under the trees to stand in the open where she could see better. She had a weird feeling inside, like caged electricity, as if something huge was about to happen.

The dawn ignited.

Even in the face of everything that had happened to her, it took Nin’s breath away. It honestly looked like the sky was on fire.

‘It’s all right,’ said Jonas, ‘the sky is on fire, it’ll calm down when the sun’s up properly.’

Nin shifted her gaze to him. But only for a second. Overhead the flames burned on, lapping up the night in
dragon tongues of smouldering amber and fierce yellow. Around them the hillside was bathed in molten light.

‘A lot of things here are what people make of them,’ said Jonas. ‘Take number 27 for starters.’ He nodded his head back up the hill the way they had come, so she turned to see.

Looking somehow closer to them than it should, number 27 towered against the flaming sky, huge and grim, its eyeless windows watchful. Nin could see shadows coming off it like steam.

‘On the Widdern side there’s nothing in there,’ Jonas laughed. ‘Just a lot of empty, burnt-out rooms. This side, it’s a place you don’t want to go!’

The flames grew dim and went out, leaving a pale blue sky full of gentle sunlight. At last, Nin got her first real view of the Drift.

All the houses were gone. The hill swept before her, its coat of grass strangely vivid and speckled with buttercups that shone like gold. Away in the distance, she could see the lazy curve of the river, but it was not the one she knew. Its banks were no longer edged with parks or neatly kept houses. Instead it had a fringe of dark and ragged woodland that turned to open meadow further upstream. Here and there, white trees stood out amongst the green like the bone-dead casualties of some weird attack by lightning. And beyond the wood, rising above the shadowed trees, was that bank of cloud, sitting on the horizon like a white cliff against the sky.

‘The Raw,’ said Jonas before she could ask. ‘It’s like a
kind of fog. You get patches of it all over the Drift, but it doesn’t go away.’

‘Fog always goes away,’ said Nin, puzzled.

‘I only said it was
like
fog.’ There was an edge to his voice, as if the mist made him nervous. ‘Sometimes the patches kind of … explode outwards. Or sometimes a whole new patch just appears somewhere else. But wherever it is, once it’s there it never goes away again.’

Nin was only half listening. She had just spotted a concrete hump that looked seriously out of place.

‘That kind of looks like the underpass to the park.’

‘That’s because it
is
the underpass to the park,’ said Jonas. ‘It’s a partial gateway. You can get to the Widdern through it from the Drift, but not back again. From the Widdern, it only goes where it’s supposed to go, under the road.’

‘Huh,’ Nin snorted. ‘I don’t s’pose it’s any friendlier in the Drift than it is in the Widdern.’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jonas smother a grin. She turned to look at him, but he just stretched and shook himself.

‘It’s morning,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Bad things don’t like the light. They give up when the sun rises.’

‘And that’ll include Skerridge, will it?’ said Nin fiercely.

‘Probably.’ Jonas grinned. ‘Bet he’s right ticked off about you!’

Skerridge was steaming. It was coming out of his ears
and nose in thin streams, and every time he opened his mouth to curse he let out a cloud of scalding vapour. He stamped back up the hill, dragging the sack behind him and peering at the dawn light growing on the horizon.

Somehow Right Madam had given him the slip. He couldn’t believe it had happened. He, Skerridge, Chief Bogeyman and Champion Kid-Catcher, given the slip by some nasty girl-brat. He stopped to scream with rage, sending billows of hot mist spurting into the early-morning air. Then he threw the sack on the ground and pounced on it, shredding it with his bone-yellow claws. When it was a rag he chucked it aside and stared again at the horizon.