Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows (21 page)

Storming the Castle

T
he castle loomed
over both town and harbor, lit by powerful lamps that made its impressive battlements and towers look romantic and impregnable. It was linked to a perimeter wall that encircled the whole town and sat right next to the railway tracks, which were carried across the estuary to the north via a monumental bridge whose turrets had clearly been designed to match the castle. The main entrance had closed hours ago.

“How do we get in?” asked Rich.

They had parked the car on a side street, its back end sticking out onto the sidewalk. Rich had done an excellent job getting them here, but parking clearly wasn't his strong suit.

“Think we could climb the wall?” asked Alex, not sounding hopeful.

“No,” said Rich and Darwen together.

“Maybe if we walk around the outside, we could find a tumbled-down bit,” said Alex.

“Man,” said Rich, gazing at the great round towers and crenulated battlements. “I know we're in danger here and all, but did you ever see anything so cool in all your life? Unreal. You can feel the history, you know? The knights who used to patrol those walls, the archers and crossbowmen who would have stood right there . . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Alex. “It's an old castle. Very nice. And it might as well still be guarded by knights and who-all 'cause we can't get in.”

“Huh,” said Darwen, checking his wrist. “My watch stopped. Is this another weird time thing like at the shadow school?”

Alex looked at hers.

“Mine's dead too,” she said. “About forty minutes ago. My mom's cell phone's dead as well. Man, she'll have a cow.”

“Mine is still working,” said Rich, pressing the old-fashioned watch he always wore to his ear. “Still ticking away.”

“But yours is a wind-up,” said Darwen. “No electrical parts. I'll bet whatever the man in the gas mask used to knock out Blodwyn's flashlight fried any circuits that were close by.”

“Good thing the car was over the road,” said Rich.

The car
, Darwen thought.
Is that how he killed Mum and Dad? He used some Silbrican gadget to mess
with their car as they were driving?

“You think Mr. P is inside?” asked Alex, gazing up at the castle.

“No,” said Darwen. “Not in this world. But there is a portal here that the Guardians told me they don't use. Might lead right to him, but we'll have to force it open.”

“Oy,” said a man's voice. “What do you think you're doing there? Castle's closed.”

Darwen turned to find himself looking into the keen eyes of a man in black trousers and a matching sweater. He wore a name badge and brandished a flashlight. A security guard.

Great
 . . .

“You have keys?” asked Alex. “To the castle, I mean.”

“Of course I have keys,” said the man, affronted. “I'm the guard, aren't I?
Do I have keys?
What's it to you?”

“We were inside earlier and I dropped my passport,” said Alex. “We're supposed to be leaving in the morning, but if I can't get my passport . . . I won't be able to get home.”

Amazingly, her eyes shone with unshed tears, and as one broke and ran down her cheek, she put her head in her hands.

“Steady on there,” said the man, rather less assured. “I'm sure you can talk to your consulate or something. American, are you?”

Alex nodded, sobbing. Darwen and Rich just stared.

“School trip, is it?”

Again, Alex nodded.

“Teacher know you're out at this time?”

“Teacher said it was my own fault and they'd have to leave me, so I sneaked out to look,” said Alex. “They came to help,” she added, glancing at Rich and Darwen, who nodded their agreement stupidly.

“You sure you lost it in there?” said the security guard, nodding at the castle.

“Positive,” said Alex. “I know where I put it down and everything. If you could let us in for a minute . . .”

“More than my job's worth to let you in now,” said the security guard. “Probably got turned in to lost and found. It will be in the safe. I can't get into that.”

“We were, like, the very last to leave,” Alex improvised. “They were locking up as we left. I don't think anyone would have had time to find it. My mom will kill me if I have to stay here another day while they get me a new passport. And I'll have to pay for a new flight! You know what that will cost?”

She began crying again, this time grabbing hold of the security guard and burying her face in his ample middle, something that turned the man rigid with terror.

“Where do you think you left it?” he managed, his eyes wide, discomfort coming off him like a smell.

Alex turned to the castle, picked a tower, and pointed, managing to give a secret wink to a stunned Darwen as she did so.

“That one,” she said. “I put it down to take a photograph. Just set it down on a ledge and then forgot it. I'm such an idiot. It's so beautiful here. So full of history. You can almost see the knights and archers on the walls. I can't believe I ruined it.”

“There, there,” said the man, patting her head awkwardly as Rich stared at her. “Let's see what we can do. Now, we can only look for a minute, and if it's not there—”

“Excellent,” said Alex, cheering up a little too quickly. “Thanks.”

The security guard fished in his pocket, produced a ring of keys, and unlocked the door.

“Maybe you two should wait outside,” he said to Rich and Darwen.

“Out here by ourselves,” said Rich, trying without much success to sound younger and smaller than he was. “In the dark?”

“And I need to go to the toilet,” said Darwen.

The security guard scowled, then sighed. “All right,” he said, “But stay where I can see you and don't touch anything in the gift shop.”

He led them through the entrance hall and the store, which was crammed with books and souvenirs, then waited while Darwen descended to the bathrooms. He didn't need to go to the toilet, but the prospect of trying to force open one of Greyling's portals was making him anxious. For a moment he stood nervously in front of the mirror over the sinks, trying not to think about the agent in the gas mask, staring at his reflection as if—if he looked really closely—he might actually see himself aging. His parents hadn't just died in an accident. They had been murdered, and that act had somehow made Darwen a mirroculist.

But only
, he thought bitterly,
for a while
.

Was his gift fading even now? Would Rich and Alex have to carry him back because he could no longer open any of the portals?

After a couple of agonizing minutes, he rejoined the others. The security guard led them through another door to a bridge over the street and up a long ramped approach that climbed to the remains of a gatehouse. There was an open area on the top flanked by two massive towers and the main door through a thick stone wall surmounted by battlements. Rich gazed up.

“Murder holes,” he said, eyeing the chute-like openings over the doorway. “They could drop rocks, or shoot arrows, or pour burning oil on you as you tried to batter your way in,” he added, though his smile faded when he caught Darwen's look.

Murder holes.

Darwen thought of Blodwyn, of his parents.

Not now
, he thought. He had to to focus on finding that portal and Mr. Peregrine.

He concentrated, reaching out with his mind as they crossed the threshold into the castle proper. They were in a grassy area, open to the night sky, the interior walls with their high arched doors and windows extending out toward the battlements and the sea. Darwen pivoted, scanning the layout. There were eight huge towers, but the four closest to the water sprouted smaller turrets that went even higher, like round chimneys with crenulated tops.

“I'm turned around,” said Alex, giving him a pointed look. “Which tower was it again, Darwen?”

Darwen thought. He could feel the cool night air, smell the seawater, hear the distant traffic on the roads outside. Rich was right. You could almost sense the age of the place. But there was something else, like a sound on the very edge of hearing, or a memory, triggered by an old song, a dim awareness of something that did not belong in this world . . .

“Over there!” he said, pointing ahead and slightly to the left. “The one right on the far corner.”

“That's the Chapel Tower, that is,” grumbled the security guard. “I thought you said it was that one back there? Well, all right. But get a move on. I can't stay here all night. Five minutes, I'm waiting. Five!”

Darwen led the way at a jog. The security guard, he was relieved to note, did not follow.

They moved into the depths of the castle, passing through a heavy interior wall into a well-preserved section where the fractured walls rose up high around them and the darkness deepened significantly. Darwen felt himself drawn all the way to the back of the castle—the closest point to the sea—and then to the left and into a tower. A few steps up he found a round room with a deep, half-moon alcove on one side, its walls fluted with stone buttresses aside three tall lancet windows, their tops curved into points. The buttresses continued up into the half-domed ceiling, where they met.

“The chapel,” said Rich.

“You sure this is the place?” Alex asked Darwen. “How do you know? Gotta say, man, you're starting to freak me out a bit.”

“Hey, check it out,” said Rich, squatting to a slip of thick gray paper on the ground. “A railway ticket. You think it's the same as the one we found on that scrobbler's body?”

But Darwen didn't answer. He was gazing at the arched recess, trying to decide if this was the portal they had been seeking ever since Costa Rica, when they had realized Mr. Peregrine had been taken. If it was, he thought, picturing the dead bulbs in the corner of the mansion's map room, it was one of those that had been taken off the Guardians' grid years ago. He looked around it for any sign of a control mechanism before realizing that the stone inside the recess had a slight sheen to it as if it had once been polished. When he tipped his head slightly to one side, he could just make out a shadowy reflection on the wall. It wasn't a mirror, exactly, but it was close enough.

Darwen reached out with his mind, trying to stir the ancient portal into life.

At first nothing happened, but as his eyes slid shut, he was struck by a sudden weariness, as if something of his own energy had left him. He swayed where he stood, but then felt a shift of the light through his eyelids. Alex gasped, and Darwen opened his eyes. A radiant curtain of blue light streamed across the dark stone of the chapel like a movie projector, dividing into two distinct arches.

“How did you do that?” asked Rich, but Darwen just shrugged, breathing deeply and considering the two portals, trying to decide which was the right one. It had never occurred to him that there would be more than one. They didn't have time to make the wrong choice.

As if to emphasize the point, there came a curious whooshing sound. It wasn't close, but it was still loud, and if they hadn't heard the sound already once tonight, they probably wouldn't have known what it was. It was that strange-looking flintlock pistol with the basketwork mesh.

Rich gasped. “Blodwyn's killer,” he said. “He's here.”

Alex was staring at nothing, horrified. “The security guard!” she said. “God, no. We need to see if he's okay.”

“There's no time,” said Rich. “We have to get out of here. Which gate is it, Darwen?”

But Darwen didn't know. He tried to focus his mind, but the sound of the weapon still rang in his head, and he could almost see the security guard, slumped against a wall, a man who had been killed because he chose to help three kids from America. . . .

“Darwen, which portal?” Rich insisted.

“I don't know,” said Darwen, pressing his fists to his eyes.

He's coming for us now
, Darwen thought
. Hunting us. He won't talk. He won't ask questions or offer deals and promises. He'll just raise that energy weapon of his—

“Darwen,” Alex pressed, “which portal?”

He'll be in the castle by now, walking up the ramp in that steady, unhurried way of his, the way he once walked up to the door of a little green Fiat and climbed inside. Maybe he's already through the gatehouse—

“Darwen!” Rich said.

“You have to choose!” Alex urged.

“Can't,” he muttered. He stared at the two shimmering portals, but he felt nothing from each of them, his mind full of the imagined crunch of gravel under the agent's shoes as he paced through the castle toward them.

And then, without warning, he wasn't imagining it at all. He could hear even footfalls only yards away. They hesitated, then changed, echoing on the stone steps of the tower.