Darwen Arkwright and the School of Shadows (8 page)

“The caryatids,” said Rich and Darwen at the same moment.

“Can statues die?” asked Alex, her face pale. “Because I think one of them just did.”

Instinctively they edged away from the door.

“What do we do?” asked Rich. “Anything that can take down one of those statues . . .” He looked at Darwen and the fear in his eyes was infectious. Darwen shook his head. He had no idea. There was no way out of the room but down a confining stairway right into the path of whatever was coming. They had no weapons of any kind.

“What's through there?” asked Rich, indicating the only other door, the one beside the long case clock, which Darwen had assumed opened onto the balcony outside and the widow's walk.

He rushed to it and threw it open.

“A bathroom,” he groaned.

“Windows?” asked Rich, hurrying over.

“No,” said Darwen. The room was tiny, barely larger than a broom cupboard. There was an ancient sink and a toilet. Nothing else. Certainly no way out onto the roof.

“Maybe it—whatever it is—won't come up,” said Alex.

Darwen turned to her to answer but saw that she had her eyes shut tight, fists clenched till the knuckles blanched.

“Maybe the staircase is too narrow,” said Rich.

Darwen nodded desperately. “It won't be able to get up,” he agreed.

But the dragging scrape and slow, heavy tread that made the house creak was getting louder.

“We should go down,” said Rich. “Try to slip past it and out. If it traps us up here . . .”

“But Mr. Peregrine,” Darwen began, throwing a hopeless look at the mirror that showed the awful laboratory with its tanks of colored liquid.

“We can't get to him from here,” said Alex, whose eyes were open again. “Rich is right. We should go.”

Darwen looked at each of them, knowing they felt the same anguish he did, then nodded. “Go,” he said.

Rich went first, gingerly stepping out onto the stairs, Alex right behind him. The lone caryatid moved, or rather Darwen assumed it moved, though it happened so fast he didn't actually see it. One moment it was standing beside the door, the next it was barring their path.

“We have to go,” Rich said to the stone, expressionless face. “You have to let us get down.”

But then there was another roar from below, followed by two more of the dreadful, keening screams, and suddenly the caryatid blocking the stairs wasn't there anymore.

“It's gone to help the others,” said Darwen. “Now's our chance.”

They rushed down the stairs unimpeded, but when they reached the bottom, Rich paused. He was looking at what appeared to be a slightly misshapen soccer ball that had rolled to the foot of the stairs, but as Darwen examined it closer, he realized it was the shattered remains of one of the caryatids' heads, now just a hunk of carved rock. As they hesitated, there was a crash from down the hall and more stone fragments came flying out, pelting them where they stood.

Darwen blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, wiping the grit from his face, there were two caryatids in the hall, their backs to him, their swords drawn. One of them leapt around the corner with impossible speed, and there was another bellow of rage from their massive adversary, but he could not see what happened.

Then two things happened at once. First, Darwen heard hurried footfalls and grunts coming through the house: scrobblers. Naturally. Whatever the monster around the corner was, it wasn't alone. Getting out was going to be a lot harder than they had thought.

Second, and almost worse, was that the last remaining caryatid turned to them, its head moving slowly. Its eyes opened, showing the same amber fire, and with its sword arm it motioned them deliberately back up the stairs.

“It wants us to go back to the watchtower,” said Darwen. “It's going to try to hold them off by itself.”

“There's no way,” said Rich.

But before they could debate the matter further, the thing with the voice like thunder came around the corner, and they no longer needed persuading to run back upstairs.

Under Attack

D
arwen had known
it would be big, but he was unprepared for the way the thing filled the hallway. Its face was reptilian, eyes small and black, snout turning into a long, cruel beak that gaped, showing a cavernous, pink throat. The creature looked like some colossal snapping turtle, though its shell was segmented, skin hanging in leathery folds between hard panels the size of car doors. Walking on its back two legs, dragging a squat tail that ended in sharp spikes as it moved, the monster hunched around the corner before resting on the elbows of its forelimbs as it considered the remaining caryatid. It unfurled its massive front fists, and the nails that flashed into view looked like foot-long fishhooks. Then it looked past the caryatid with hard, deliberate eyes and saw the three of them huddled behind it. Lowering its head and opening that terrible mouth so wide that its eyes disappeared, it bellowed.

The volume was almost physical. Darwen could feel it in his chest like a shock wave. He clasped his hands to his ears again and took an involuntary step backward. In the same instant, the caryatid lunged forward with its sword and stabbed the monster just beneath its armored shoulder. The stone blade found a space between the shell plates, sliding in deep. But though the strike had been impossibly fast, the caryatid seemed to linger in its victory, and one of those dreadful claws swept across its sword arm, shattering it.

With its remaining hand, the caryatid lashed its splayed fingers toward the creature's face, but the huge maw snapped, severing the stone hand just below the elbow. The caryatid hesitated, but the battle was clearly lost, and anything it did now was only to buy them time.

But time for what?

The monster filled the corridor. There was no way to go but back up the stairs. The others came to the same realization as soon as he did, but Darwen stalled as they began to climb up to the tower, watching as the caryatid was flung with unimaginable force against the wall, where its body broke apart. The amber eyes found him on the steps for the briefest moment, and then they were just stone again. As the monster roared its triumph and came surging down the hall, crushing the stone fragments beneath its massive feet, Darwen, Rich, and Alex fled.

They took the stairs two at a time, feeling the rumbling vibration of the tower as the creature surged after them. Darwen risked only one look back as he rounded the second story, hoping against hope that the staircase was indeed too narrow for it to get up. But the narrowness of the hall barely slowed the monster down. Its skin was like elastic, and it was able to squeeze up the stairwell, as if the very sockets of its bones were dislocating so that the beast became almost formless. As Darwen ran wildly up the stairs, he remembered Rich saying something about snakes that could eat prey larger than they were by unhinging their jaws. . . .

He was the last into the watchtower. Rich was flat against the furthest wall while Alex had thrown open the door to the tiny bathroom and was now staring desperately around, as if there might be something—anything—that would help. There wasn't. She slammed the door shut and turned to the others just as they got their first glimpse of those reptile claws dragging the beast up around the corner and into view. The head peered into the room, hard black eyes shining, and then it roared again so that the room shook.

Alex, Rich, and Darwen shrank back against the wall, clutching each other, but there was nothing to be done. With sudden and astonishing clarity, Darwen saw that he was about to die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Sorry, Mr. P,” he muttered, his head sinking to his chest. “We tried.”

For a moment his eyes closed, and when they opened again, that serpentine head was pushing itself into the room, its clawed hands holding onto the doorjamb as it pulled its massive bulk inside. The room seemed to halve in size as the monster came in, pushing aside Mr. Peregrine's bed like it was a toy. The beak mouth gaped one last time, but it did not roar, and the only sound was a satisfied hiss, which might have been a laugh. The eyes locked onto them and the claws swung back to strike.

There was a sudden flash of light, a bang, and a whiff of electricity in the air.

The monster stood motionless for a long second, then its eyes rolled back in its head, and it fell heavily forward, crashing to the floor so that Darwen had to leap to the side to avoid being crushed.

There could be no doubt that the creature was dead.

But that was nothing to what they saw behind it.

Standing in the doorway straddling the monster's scaly tail was a figure in a pink halter top and bright green shorts, with a rhinestone studded purse slung over her shoulder. She had sunglasses pushed back on her head, and her eyes were still focused down the barrel of the oversized blaster she had been aiming with both hands.

It was Eileen.

Eileen

“S
he's one of
those suit things, like the Jenkins insects!” shouted Darwen, reaching for the glass of water on the nightstand and flinging its contents at the thing that had taken the shape of his babysitter.

The water hit her in the face and splashed all over her cheery pink top. For a split second, she just stood there, then she considered her shirt and stared at Darwen. Rich pointed out the obvious.

“She's not dissolving.”

“Give it a second,” said Darwen, lamely flicking the last drops from the glass in her general direction.

The thing they had thought was Mr. Peregrine, the thing that had turned out to be a flesh suit containing a giant insect, had been vulnerable to water. Eileen, on the other hand, merely looked irritated.

“Another breathtaking insight,” she observed, in a voice so precise, so unlike her usual vacant tone that the others stared at her. “This is Mr. Peregrine's crack mirroculist and his sidekicks? No wonder Silbrica is falling apart.”

There was so much wrong with this remark and the careless way in which she delivered it that for a moment Darwen could think of nothing to say. Eileen, he noticed, was studying the weapon in her hands and frowning. The blaster looked like something halfway between a shotgun and a bazooka as fashioned by some mad Victorian scientist: all copper pipes, brass cogs, and intricately inlaid wood, ending in three different barrels, one with a tiny red light at one end, another studded with holes, and a third that flared like the horn of a trumpet. There were three blue lightbulbs set up above the trigger mechanism, but only one of them was lit.

“We have to get out of here,” said Eileen, to herself as much as to the others.

“Can't we just, you know, shoot our way out?” Rich suggested, looking hopefully at the weapon in her hands.

“
We
can't,” said Eileen pointedly, “because
we
only brought one blaster between four of us and
we
have already used up most of its power getting in. The terrapods always fight in threes, and each one will have a platoon of scrobblers in support. There's no way we're going back down those stairs.”

“What's a terror pod?” asked Rich.

“
Terrapod,”
said Eileen, nodding hurriedly to the reptilian creature whose body almost blocked the door. “That. Not real bright, but strong, and tough to bring down.”

“I thought it was, like, a dinosaur or something,” said Alex, trying to sound flippant.

Eileen gave her a withering look and started scanning the mirrors on the walls.

“Who are you?” Darwen demanded.

“I'm Eileen,” said Eileen. “Your babysitter. Remember? I also work for the man you know as the owner of a little mirror shop in the unfashionable end of a trendy mall. None of which matters right now, so can we get on?”

Rich gaped at her.

“Is there a way through these?” Darwen asked, determined to seem like he knew what he was doing. “I might be able to open them if—”

“Of course not,” said Eileen, as if he was being stupid on purpose. “This is Octavius's observatory. You can look through them, hear through them, but they aren't portals.”

“Octavius?” Darwen echoed.

“Mr. Peregrine,” snapped Eileen. “Now give me a moment's silence and let me think?”

As she spoke, the house seemed to tremble with a roar from below. She was right. Another terrapod was making its way through the halls below, and by the sounds of things, some of the scrobblers had already reached the stairs.

“Think,” Eileen muttered to herself.

“You're sure there's no way to open these observation window things. . . .” Darwen tried, pressing the surface of one that showed what looked like a stone circle on a rainy moor.

“I told you,” Eileen shot back without looking at him. “Will you please be quiet?”

Darwen felt himself flush and, catching glances from Rich and Alex, looked down. Given how close he had come to dying, it seemed amazing that he should be left feeling so stupid, useless, and afraid.

Eileen had flung open the door to the tiny bathroom, checked inside, and slammed it hard with a grunt of frustrated disgust. The door failed to latch and bounced half open, juddering as it hung.

“Why does it say twelve noon?” asked Alex, considering the grandfather clock that stood beside the bathroom.

“What?” snapped Eileen. “Who cares? It's wrong, okay? Just let me figure this out. . . .”

“But it's not just wrong,” Alex persisted. “It's said that time since we got here.”

“So it stopped,” Eileen shot back, her voice rising. “Big deal! Octavius has been gone for weeks. No one wound it. Of course it's stopped.”

“Where's the pendulum?” asked Rich, who was squatting in front of the glass panel in the lower part of the clock's case. “I don't see a pendulum. I see gears and workings and stuff, but they shouldn't be down there, and they sure as heck-fire don't look like a regular clock.”

“Will you all just STOP TALKING!” shouted Eileen, turning so swiftly toward Rich that her blond hair whipped around, her eyes widening as they fell on the top of the stairs.

She dropped to one knee, made a rapid alteration to the settings on the blaster, and unleashed five quick shots that lit the room like yellow lightning. The two scrobblers that had been inching their way up the stairs dropped, and at least two more ducked back around the corner.

Eileen checked the blue light on the side of her gun, and her anger was replaced by something like despair. They were running out of time.

“What if it's not a clock?” said Rich, who—amazingly—had not taken his eyes from the hands on the dial despite the shooting. “What if it's a control mechanism?” And then, as if answering his own question, he added, “But for what?”

“The door,” said Alex, pointing at the bathroom door Eileen had failed to shut. “Close it.”

Darwen did so, hoping she had some idea what she was doing.

“Now move the hands on the clock,” said Alex.

“To what?” said Rich.

Alex shrugged. “Till you find something that works,” she said.

At the head of the stairs, Eileen fired twice more, but at the roar of another terrapod somewhere below, she backed into the room, looking haggard. As if for the first time, she noticed what Rich was doing. He had opened the glass window on the clock face and had taken hold of the long hand. He glanced at Darwen and shrugged.

“Set it to eleven,” said Darwen, stepping back from the door and considering the clock thoughtfully. He had no idea what he was doing, but someone had to make a choice.

Rich wound the long hand backward, and the hour hand edged back with it. “Done,” he said.

Eileen was now watching Rich closely as he reached for the door handle. He tried to turn it, but it wouldn't move.

“It's locked,” he explained.

“Maybe it needs the hand of a mirroculist like me to open it,” said Alex with a would-be careless air aimed at Eileen.

Eileen gazed at her, her face hard to read. “You really are—” she began, then stopped herself.

“Oh yeah,” said Alex. She took a couple of confident strides toward the door. She was reaching toward the handle when she was snatched backward by a massive greenish fist.

Darwen whirled around, but it was too late. As they had been focusing on the clock, the scrobblers had gotten up the stairs. Two of them were already inside and three more were coming. Behind them, pulling itself up the stairs like a wall of leathery flesh studded with two hard black eyes, was another terrapod.

Darwen flung himself at the scrobbler who had caught Alex, Rich at his heels. Eileen dropped and fired twice more toward the head of the stairs, but Darwen had no idea if she hit anything.

He and Rich hit the scrobbler just as Alex stamped on one of its heavy boots. Darwen punched twice into the creature's stomach, feeling pathetically small. With its hands full, the scrobbler lowered its goggled face and opened its mouth wide, showing boar-like tusks. It was going to bite him, and the sheer horror of that loosened Darwen's grip. He fell back to the floor.

“The door, Darwen!” yelled Rich. “Open the door!”

Darwen rolled to his feet and scrambled to the bathroom door, standing and yanking it open in one move.

It was immediately apparent that their hunch had been right. Where the little bathroom had been there was now a long carpeted hallway lit with wall-mounted oil lamps that burned amber. Darwen had no idea where it led, but it would get them out of here, and if you had to be a mirroculist to go through, then the scrobblers couldn't follow.

That also meant he couldn't go through alone without abandoning the others. Alex would be okay if she could get free, but since Rich and Eileen weren't mirroculists, Darwen would have to be touching them.

He turned back to where Alex and Rich hung on the arms of the massive scrobbler that was trying to shake them off, only to find that the other had shouldered its way past Eileen and was right on top of him.

He shrank into the corner. With one wild swing, the scrobbler slammed the portal closed. To make matters worse, the entrance to the stairwell was suddenly darkened by a massive reptilian head with the sharp beak of a snapping turtle: the second terrapod had made it up. Darwen dropped into a squat, and through the legs of the scrobbler standing over him, he saw Eileen hopelessly fiddling with her blaster as she retreated from the stairs into the room.

The scrobbler swung at Darwen with what was probably a tool but might just as well have been a medieval mace. He dodged and a portion of the wall behind him exploded in a shower of plaster dust. As he tried to run, the scrobbler caught his shoulder with one gnarled, clawlike hand and squeezed. The pain was intense and Darwen collapsed, dimly aware that the scrobbler was raising the mace over his head.

And then the room exploded with the roar of the terrapod and everything seemed to stop. The scrobbler winced, its grip slackened, and Darwen rolled out from under it. Alex and Rich had broken free too and were already at the portal, which Alex had opened.

“Go!” roared Darwen. “I'll bring Eileen.”

They ducked inside, but as Darwen crossed to the portal, the terrapod managed to squeeze in from the staircase. Darwen didn't see the slash of its talon, but he felt it open a cruel gash along the side of his thigh. He kept moving, feeling nothing but a curious cold deadness in his leg, which suddenly turned to fire. He tried to take a step toward Eileen, reaching for her with all his strength, and for a moment he saw her face quite clearly, as if he had never seen her before. All her teenage nonchalance, her irritation, her permanent disapproval had gone, and she looked very young, and very scared. She was still clutching the blaster in one hand, but she was no longer trying to shoot, and though one of the scrobblers had her about the waist, she was reaching with her free hand toward Darwen.

They were only inches apart. For a moment he thought he could reach her, but then he felt the impact of the terrapod's fist, and he spun backward, falling through the portal and onto the carpet of that impossible hallway. The shock of the blow left him dizzy so that for a single, blessed moment he was able to forget that he had left Eileen alone in the room.

He called her name, but he knew that without being able to touch her, she couldn't get through the portal, and try as he might, his legs just wouldn't let him go back. He put a hand to his thigh and felt it come away warm and slick with blood.

Then Rich was pulling him along the hallway.

“Eileen?” called Alex from somewhere down the hall. “Where's Eileen?”

Rich leaned into Darwen's face. “She's still in there?” he said, looking wildly back to the watchtower.

“I couldn't reach,” Darwen murmured. “I tried, but I just couldn't. . . .”

And then Rich was climbing over him, grasping one of his hands and stretching till he was close enough to the portal. Then he was gone.

“No!” called Darwen and Alex at once.

It was suicide to go back in there. And even if he could get to her, Rich wasn't a mirroculist. He'd be trapped with the scrobblers and the terrapod.

“Rich!” called Darwen. He tried to stand, but the pain in his leg flared like he had been kicked, and he crumpled, his eyes closed tight. When he opened them, he saw Alex looming over him.

“One of us will have to go back in to get him,” she said.

Darwen could only nod, and then suddenly, impossibly, Rich was back, dragging a battered-looking Eileen through the portal behind him.

“What?” gasped Alex. “How did you . . . ?”

Rich, for all his exertion, managed a shy smile.

“Guess I'm one of you now,” he said.