Verdigris Deep Read online

  1 The Flight of the Trolley

  2 Upside-down Eyes

  3 The Cavern

  4 Running Down the Clock

  5 The Glass House

  6 Crook’s Baddock

  7 A Dream in Steel

  8 How to Make a Miracle

  9 The Tyrant of Temple Street

  10 The Library Witch

  11 The Paranormal Punzell

  12 The Collectors

  13 Enchantment

  14 The Attack of the Harley

  15 Dangerous Driving

  16 Fair Punishment

  17 A Storm and a Sanctuary

  18 Dead Leaves

  19 The Shattering

  20 True Crime

  21 Spiders’ Feet

  22 The Dragon Behind the Wall

  23 Soul Repair

  24 Gathering the Fragments

  25 The Hijack

  26 The Drowning House

  27 Russian Vine

  28 Mother Leathertongue

  Epilogue

  Verdigris (Ver-di-gree) n. a blue-green rust that tarnishes ageing and forgotten copper coins, altering them entirely . . .

  1

  The Flight of the Trolley

  For a wonderful moment Ryan thought Josh was going to make it. When they had turned the corner to find the bus already at the stop Josh had burst into a run, scattering starlings and shattering puddles. The bus’s engine gave a long, exasperated sigh and shrugged its weight forward as if hulking its shoulders against the rain, but Ryan still believed Josh would snatch success at the last minute, as always. Then, just as Josh drew level with its tail lights, the bus roared sulkily away, its tyres leaving long streaks of dull against the shiny wet tarmac.

  Josh chased it for about twenty yards. Then, through the tiny crystal specks of rain that freckled his glasses, Ryan saw his hero stumble, slow and aim a kick at a lamp post.

  The bus seemed to have carried away Ryan’s stomach, and the last of the summer daylight. Suddenly the dingy string of shops seemed much colder, darker and more dejected than before. Ryan could still taste the chocolate milkshake that had cost them their ride, and the flavour made him feel sick.

  Behind him he heard Chelle’s asthmatic gasping and turned to find her fumbling with her inhaler. She took a deep breath, her round eyes becoming even wider for a second so that he could see the whites all round them. She stared at Josh’s slowly returning figure.

  ‘He said . . . Josh said . . . he said that the bus was always late, he said there was time for a milkshake . . . I am sososososososo dead . . . my mum thinks I’m babysitting . . .’ Her pale eyebrows had climbed up her forehead in panic to hide behind her blonde fringe.

  ‘Shush, Chelle,’ Ryan said as kindly as he could. It was hopeless. Chelle was unshushable.

  ‘But . . . it’s all right for Josh, everyone expects him to get into trouble. I . . . I don’t know how to be in trouble . . .’

  ‘Shush,’ Ryan said with more urgency. Josh was almost within earshot. Whenever Josh felt bad about something he had done he got angry with the whole world, became playfully vicious. Ryan did not want to be stranded in Magwhite with an angry Josh.

  They were not meant to be in Magwhite at all.

  Magwhite was an almost-place. The gas towers and the railway made it almost part of Guildley. The lurid fields of oilseed rape that stretched away to the east were almost countryside. The sad little strings of houses, the minimart and the bike shop were almost a village. The towpath walks were almost pretty.

  Someone had once been knifed there, or maybe a finger with a ring had been found on one of the paths, or perhaps the local rugby club came to pee in the canal from the bridge. Nobody could quite remember which, but something had happened to give the name ‘Magwhite’ ugly edges. If Magwhite was mentioned, parents’ faces stiffened as if they had picked up a bad smell. It was very definitely Out of Bounds.

  There was nothing much to do there, but its out-of-boundsness made it exciting. Feeding chips to the jackdaws outside the boarded-up Magwhite post office was more interesting than feeding ordinary birds in the park. So, ever since the summer holidays had started, the forbidden excursions to picnic by the Magwhite canal had become almost routine.

  Magwhite was their place, but now there was nothing Ryan wanted more than to be out of it.

  Josh trudged back towards the others, his head bowed, the rain darkening his fierce, blond, scrubbing-brush hair. He seemed to be grimacing at his foot. Maybe he had hurt it against the lamp post. Then he looked up, and Ryan saw that he was grinning.

  ‘S’all right.’ Josh shrugged and wiped the rain off his yellow-tinted sunglasses with his sleeve. ‘We’ll catch the next one.’

  Chelle was biting her lower lip, her upper lip pulling down to a point, like a little soft beak. She was trying not to disagree, because she worshipped Josh more than anybody else in the world, but words always seemed to dribble out of Chelle like water from a broken tap.

  ‘But . . . we can’t, that was the last Guildley Cityline bus, our return tickets won’t work for the Point-to-Point bus, and we haven’t got enough money for new tickets for all of us . . . we’re stuck . . .’

  ‘No, we’re not.’ Josh was still smiling. ‘I have a plan.’

  It was a simple plan, an odd plan, but it was a Josh plan, so it had to work.

  Behind the wall of the minimart car park, there was a long tree-tangled slope that ran down to the canal side. In this wood roamed escapee supermarket trolleys, stripped grass trapped in their wheels, ‘sweetheart’ creepers trailing from their wire frames. Josh’s plan was to find one of these, take it back to the minimart car park, attach it to the chain of trolleys outside the entrance doors and reclaim the pound coin deposit in the handle slot.

  Suddenly everything was an adventure again. The threesome dropped over the wall into the wood and started hunting through the trees.

  It was a strange wood, stranger still now the light was fading. Ryan loved it for its litter. Yellowing newspapers nestled in branch nooks, like a crop of dead leaves strangely patterned with print. A sprawling throne of rotten oak trailed dark ivy and coddled a treasure trove of crushed cans. The twigs of one wavering branch had been carefully threaded through the fingers of a red woollen mitten, so that the little tree looked as if it was waiting to grow another hand and start applauding.

  ‘Ryan, you’re our eagle eyes, find us a trolley,’ said Josh, and Ryan felt an uncomfortable swell of pride and doubt. He was never sure if Josh was making fun of him. ‘He sees everything different to us, Chelle. Cos his eyes, right, they’re in upside down. You just can’t tell looking at them.’

  Chelle gave a faint giggle, but in the darkness her dimly visible face looked uncertain. Her eyes were large and widely spaced, windows into a world full of doubt and surprise.

  ‘It’s true,’ insisted Josh. ‘He blinks upwards, you know. Not when you’re watching. But right now, in the dark, I bet he’s blinking upwards, aren’t you, Ryan?’

  Ryan wasn’t sure how to answer, so he plunged on through the trees and pretended not to hear. Scaring Chelle was easy, and Josh seemed to find pleasure in teasing her. It was often hard for Ryan to remember that Chelle was older than he was. Ryan himself had been ‘moved ahead’ and dunked into the icy waters of secondary school a year before everyone he knew. It did not help that he was small, skinny and full of sentences that seemed fine in his head, then came out sounding over-adult and clever-clever. He had formed an alliance of desperation with Chelle. She had an air of kitten-tottering helplessness, and the pallor of her hair and skin made her look as if she had been through the wash too many times, losing her colour and courage in the rinse. All this made her an irresistible mark for the bullies in their class. Both Ryan and Che
lle had been glad to find someone willing to talk to them, even if in Chelle’s case she apparently lacked the ability to stop talking.

  Josh had been their salvation. He had the advantage of age – there is a world of difference between a first year and a second year – but, in any case, no bully knew what to make of Josh, with his Cheshire Cat grin and knuckleduster humour. Taunts seemed to bounce off the shields of his yellow sunglasses, leaving his attackers winded by the ricochet. He won people round somehow, as if everyone wanted in on the private joke that kept him smirking. Josh had remembered Ryan from primary school, much to Ryan’s surprise, and suddenly both Ryan and Chelle were taken under his capricious wings. For the last year, his friendship had protected them from the worst school-time persecutions like an invisible amulet. For all these reasons, Ryan guessed that Chelle did not truly mind Josh’s teasing, but he never felt comfortable joining in with it.

  Usually there were half a dozen trolleys in the little wood. This evening, however, the trolleys seemed to know that they were in danger of being taken back to captivity and had all gone into hiding. At last Ryan cornered one down by the canal. It was lying on its side as if it had fallen in its hurry to get away and been unable to get back on its wheels. The three of them dragged it over to the wall, feeling the trolley catch at every bramble and tussock, trying to jolt itself out of their grasp.

  It was only when they reached the car-park wall that they started to see a small flaw in Josh’s plan.

  The ground on the woodland side of the wall was much lower than it was on the car-park side. They’d scrambled up and down the wall themselves so often that they no longer noticed how high it was. Now they stared sadly at the trolley, then up at the wall, which loomed above and laughed at them.

  ‘We can do this,’ Josh said after a moment. ‘’S just mechanics, that’s all.’

  Following Josh’s new plan, the three scavenged materials for a makeshift rope – a loose-flapping ribbon of plastic cordon tape, a mouldering abandoned T-shirt, a length of wire. These were knotted together, and one end tied firmly to the trolley. The other end was thrown over a low branch, and Chelle and Ryan grabbed it as it tumbled down on the other side. Josh, who was by far the strongest of the three, clambered up on to the wall and waited to grab the trolley when Chelle and Ryan had hauled it high enough.

  This can’t work, thought Ryan as he started to pull on the ‘rope’. But then the trolley raised its handle-end, swung to and fro, and took to the air. The plan was working.

  The flight of the trolley was a beautiful thing to see. It bucked repeatedly against the tree trunk, and its wheels left dark scars across the lichen, but it rose, a few inches at a time. Then just as it was almost within reach of Josh’s fingertips, it bumped up against one of the lower boughs and half disappeared among the leaves. They tugged and tugged, and the foliage shivered and shook, spilling sleeping raindrops on to their upturned faces. But a thin branch had pushed its way up under the trolley’s blue plastic child seat and would not release it.

  At last Ryan and Chelle stopped tugging. They stood sucking their burned palms and stared up at the triumphant trolley.

  ‘I think . . .’ began Chelle, tumbling helplessly into the silence, ‘I think if we sort of stuck a stick up under that wheel and levered it, swayed it to and fro, then it might . . .’

  ‘It’s stuck,’ said Josh. They had all known this in their souls, but Josh saying so made it true. Josh’s tinted sunglasses had dulled with the setting of the sun, and behind them Ryan could see the pale flicker of eyelids as he blinked twice and narrowed his eyes. He was biting both lips together so they were quite hidden – a bad sign with Josh.

  Without another word, Josh dropped from the wall and strode away down the slope towards the canal. Ryan and Chelle exchanged a look and then followed.

  He’s not going to run off and leave us, is he? . . . but what did Josh have to lose if he went home late? Being in trouble meant something different in Josh’s home and sometimes Josh seemed to have no fear of that anyway. Ryan caught up with him.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he tried.

  ‘The well.’ Josh sounded too calm.

  They followed Josh’s ruthless pace, struggling through dead-nettles and ducking the drooping purple fingers of the buddleia, until they reached the moss-covered steps that led down to the canal bank and path. Trainers sliding against the wet slate of the steps, they descended until the glitter of the canal was just visible through the trees; then Josh stopped. To one side of the steps was a small dimple in the ground, and at the bottom of the dimple was a stark ring of concrete, with a wire mesh covering the hole in the middle. Several crisp packets had been pushed through the wire and stuck in the mesh.

  Josh got down on his hands and knees. Only when he got out his Swiss Army knife and pulled free the screwdriver attachment did Ryan realize what he was doing. Soon Josh had unscrewed three of the bolts fastening the well cover in place and was starting on the fourth.

  ‘It’s a wishing well, isn’t it?’ Josh explained, continuing to wrestle with the rusty bolts. ‘And that means coins. Got it!’ The wire mesh came away. ‘All right, who’s going down? Chelle, you’re thin and wriggly. Want to go?’

  Chelle’s only answer was a thin squeak of alarm.

  Josh grinned at her. ‘All right then.’ He swung his legs over the edge and, to the others’ dismay, started to lower himself in.

  ‘Josh, look, um . . .’ began Ryan. He exchanged a worried glance with Chelle as Josh disappeared into blackness.

  ‘Josh, what if you get stuck? Shouldn’t we make another rope and tie it round your chest, cos—’

  A sharp cry echoed in the darkness below them.

  ‘Josh!’ squealed Chelle. She threw herself on to her hands and knees beside the well and stared down into the murk, her pale hair falling around her face.

  ‘It stinks down here!’ Josh called up suddenly.

  ‘Josh, you scared us!’ Chelle’s nervousness melted helplessly into giggles.

  ‘That’s right, you go ahead and laugh. Here I am . . .’ Josh’s echoing tones were interrupted by a sudden splash. ‘Oh bollocks.’

  Chelle peered quickly down into the well again.

  ‘I think he’s fallen in,’ she managed through her laughter. ‘I can hear sploshing.’

  ‘Can’t be that deep then,’ whispered Ryan. He was pretty sure that if Josh was drowning he would be spending more time screaming and less time swearing under his breath.

  ‘Right, I’ve got some,’ they heard at last. The well’s echo gave Josh’s voice a solemn and impressive sound. ‘Coming up.’ Josh whistled to himself as he started to climb, the tune interrupted now and then by the scrape and splash of dislodged masonry. At long last he reappeared and clambered out. He shook one leg then the other, trying to dance the water out of his trainers. Even in the dusk light, however, it was obvious that his trainers were the least of his problems.

  Chelle fumbled a small white something out of her pocket. She looked at it, and then at the sodden wreckage of Josh’s clothes, and her shoulders began to shake uncontrollably.

  ‘I’ve got a tissue!’ she squeaked, and somehow this was much funnier than it should have been.

  Five minutes later they were running down Magwhite’s high street just in time to catch the last bus to Guildley.

  Open-mouthed, the driver looked at the green that slicked Josh’s hair and smudged his sunglasses, took in his clothes, dark and clinging with water from the waist down, contemplated the slimy puddle of blackened coins in Josh’s outstretched hand.

  ‘You just pulled all that lot out of the well, didn’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Josh, with his best brash, unblinking stare.

  It was the total shamelessness of this lie that seemed to throw the driver off balance. He gave Josh a long look, as if to say that he wasn’t fooled, that he’d be watching him. Then he jabbed at a few buttons on his ticket machine and a loop of three tickets curled into Josh’s waiting
hand.

  Josh sauntered to the back of the bus and waited while Chelle spread the seat with newspapers for him, then settled himself with a grin, as if he would face no inquisition when he reached home half-drowned, with rust under his fingernails.

  He did it. At that moment Ryan would willingly have taken a bullet for Josh. He would have followed him over deserts or waded across leech-infested rivers for him. Ryan hugged the surge of feeling, as Chelle talked and Josh wiped his sunglasses with her tissue. Suddenly he wanted to face some great danger or difficulty and prove himself to his hero in turn, and he was so full of the wish that it seemed it might split him like a conker shell.

  If Ryan had known as much about wishes then as he came to know later, he would have been a lot more careful with his thoughts.

  2

  Upside-down Eyes

  The first faint signs of the Change became apparent about a week after the robbery of the Magwhite well. Ryan was the first to notice them, but that was not surprising. Ryan was always the first one to notice anything.

  He woke up that morning sensing that he had just lost his hold on a dream. It had left him with an uneasy feeling, as if a cold hand had slipped out of his just as he started to wake. Then his head cleared, and the lingering sense of clamminess passed away. He surfaced to the smell of coffee, and knew that the house was going to be invaded again.

  His mother had a rigid drill for whenever anybody came to interview her. She believed fanatically that the best way to make a house seem welcoming but elegant was to fill it with the smell of expensive ground coffee. Downstairs three coffee-makers would be growling their hearts out in the kitchen, the living room and the conservatory.

  Ryan reached for his glasses, and his finger touched an empty case. Clearly his mother had already been in his room.

  Only when the back of his hand brushed against his night-time glass of water did he almost remember something of his dream. The memory smelt like greenhouses and damp blots on walls. It felt cold and silvery, and Ryan knew that he had been dreaming about the Glass House again.