Stoneheart
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped” book.
Text Copyright © 2006 by Charlie Fletcher
First published in the U.K. by Hodder Children’s Books
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion Paperbacks for Children, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion Books for Children, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.
First Hyperion Paperbacks edition, 2008
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4231-3800-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-4231-0176-5
ISBN-10: 1-4231-0176-6
With love and thanks to my parents,
Margaret and Paul Fletcher, makers of a happy childhood and much else besides …
T
ABLE OF
C
ONTENTS
1. Belly of the Whale and the Monkey’s Teeth
12. The Riddle of the Sphinxes
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
“Things Men Have Made”
—
D. H. LawrenceOur happiness here is all vain glory,
This false world is but transitory
The flesh is weak, the Fiend is slee
Timor mortis conturbat me.
“Lament for the Makers”
—
William Dunbar
Belly of the Whale and the Monkey’s Teeth
G
eorge never spent any time wondering why he wanted to belong. He just did. Things were like that. You were in or you were out, and in was a lot safer. It wasn’t the sort of thing you questioned. It was just there.
On the class trip before this one, they’d been to the War Museum and learned all about trench warfare. George had thought that’s what life felt like: just keeping your head below the parapet so you wouldn’t get hit.
Of course that was last year, in the past, like all the other things about being a kid. He still thought about them sometimes. He still remembered what being a kid was like. But he was over that. He was twelve. Real Twelve, not “Only Twelve,” as his father had called it the last time they’d spoken. He knew
his
twelve wasn’t anything like his dad’s because he’d seen pictures of his dad as a kid looking clueless and specky and fat, all of which—in George’s twelve-year-old trench—would be the equivalent of sitting on top of the parapet with a big round target painted on your head, yelling, “Cooee! Over here.”
George could remember talking and laughing about stuff like that with his dad, before his dad moved out and there was too much talking altogether.
He didn’t say much at home anymore. His mother complained about it, usually to him, but sometimes to other people late at night on the phone when she thought he was asleep. Somewhere inside it hurt when he heard her talk about it—not as much as when she said he used to have such a lovely smile, but nearly.
And nowhere near as much as never being able to say anything to his dad ever again.
The thing was, he wasn’t
not
saying anything on purpose. It was something that seemed to have just happened, like his baby teeth falling out, or getting taller. Mind you, he wasn’t getting taller as fast as he would have liked, and right now that was part of the problem.
He was average height for his age, maybe even a bit more—but somehow he
felt
shorter, the same way he sometimes felt older than he was. Or maybe it wasn’t exactly older, just a bit more worn and rumpled than his classmates—rather like his clothes. His clothes were all thrown in the same washing machine, colors and whites together, and though his mother said it made no difference, it did. It made everything pale and gray and washed out, and that’s exactly what George felt like most of the time.
It was certainly what he felt like today, and not being able to see properly was making him feel more insignificant than usual; all he could make out was the whale’s belly and the back of his classmates’ heads as they clustered around a museum guide showing them something interesting. George tried to push forward, but all he got was an elbow in his ribs. He sidled around the pack and tried to get another view, careful not to push anyone.
He found a place where he could nearly hear and edged closer, peering through the thin gap between a circular stand full of pamphlets and a boy about four inches taller than he was. As he rattled the stand with his shoulder and reached to steady it, the boy turned and registered him.
George smiled at him on reflex. The boy didn’t return fire on the smile. He just looked away without comment. George wasn’t too worried about being blanked. In fact he was relieved. The boy was the name-maker, the one with the gift for finding the cruelest nicknames for his peers, then making them stick. He’d
almost
been a friend of George’s when they’d all been new together, but finding his gift had given him a kind of easy invulnerability, a power that meant he didn’t have to have friends anymore, only followers. That’s what made him dangerous.
The boy turned back around. This time he spoke. “Something I can help you with?”
George froze. Then tried to hide the freeze with another smile and a shrug. “No. Uh. Just getting a better—”
“Don’t stand behind me.”
The boy turned away. But several others had seen, and in their eyes George saw something he recognized. Not interest, certainly not sympathy not even much dislike. Just a pale gratitude that they weren’t the target this time.
So George swallowed and stayed where he was. He knew enough not to be seen being pushed around. He knew once you did that you were sunk. He knew there was a level below which you couldn’t afford to sink, because once you were down there, there was no ladder back up. Once you were in that pit, you were fair game for everyone, and everyone unloaded on you.
So he looked down at the square of marble he stood on and decided he’d stick to it. There were teachers present, anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?
The boy calmly reached backward and toppled the stand, right into George. George stepped back, but there wasn’t enough room, so he batted at the metal column with his hands to protect himself. It hit the floor with a loud metallic crash, spilling pamphlets all across the tiling around him.
The room suddenly went very quiet. Faces turned. The boy turned with them, innocent-looking amazement quickly morphing into shocked surprise.
“Chrissakes, Chapman!”
The cluster of boys around him dissolved into hooting anarchy, and the three adults—two teachers and a guide—were left looking for the culprit. And with everyone else doubled up and pointing, there he was, head above the parapet, feet bogged down in a landslide of bright-colored paper booklets.
Mr. Killingbeck fixed him with a sniper’s eye, crooked a bony trigger finger at him, and fired a one-word bullet.
“Chapman.”
George felt his face reddening. Killingbeck snapped his fingers at the other boys.
“The rest of you clear Chapman’s mess up! You—follow me.”
George followed him out of the whale room back into the central hall of the Natural History Museum. Mr. Killingbeck stopped in the middle of the room beneath the dinosaur skeleton and beckoned him closer.
George had enough experience of Mr. Killingbeck to know not to start what was coming. So he just waited. The man’s mouth worked slowly, as if everything that he said tasted bad and had to be spat out before it caused him more pain and discomfort.
“Mmm, tell me, were you trying to be rude, Chapman, or does it just come naturally?”
“It wasn’t me, sir.”
“Who was it, then?”
There was no answer that George could give. He knew it. Killingbeck knew it. So he didn’t say anything.
“Moral cowardice and dumb insolence. Neither very appealing, Chapman. Neither what you were sent here to learn, are they?”
George wondered what planet Killingbeck was on. Planet 1970-something, probably. Not a planet where George could breathe. He began to get choked up. His face began a slow burn that he could feel without seeing.
“That was unforgivable, boy. You behaved like something wholly uncivilized. Like that ape over there.”
The bony finger jabbed at a monkey in a glass cage, baring its teeth in the grimace that would be the last message it ever sent to the world. George knew what it felt like.
“You’re uncivilized, Chapman. What are you?”
George just looked at the monkey, thinking how strong and frightening its teeth looked. More like fangs, really.
Killingbeck worked his mouth.
George found the blob of plasticene in his pocket and began kneading it with his fingers. It still had the knobbly contours of a face he’d sculpted on the bus.
“I think it’s worth something more than sullen silence, Chapman. I think it’s worth an apology, for a start.”
George’s thumb coasted over the open mouth in the plasticene face and wedged it a bit wider.
“Get your hands out of your pockets.”
George smashed the nose on the plasticene and pulled his hand out of his pocket.
“You’re going to say sorry if you have to stand there all day. Do you understand?”
George worked the plasticene in his fist.
“Or you can tell me who did it. Do you understand?”
George understood. There was a rock. There was a hard place. And then there was him, jammed up between the two. He couldn’t grass on another boy, even a bully, because grassing would drop him into a place so low in the eyes of the other boys that, not only was there no ladder back up, but there was no floor either. Rat on someone, and the rest of your life would be spent in free fall down a pit that just got deeper and darker and never stopped.
That was the rock.
That was simple.
The hard place was less simple, maybe because it was so big, so immovable.
The hard place was everything else.
The hard place was his life.
The hard place was everything that led to this moment.
And the moment was clamping around him and giving him nowhere to run.
“Chapman?” Killingbeck’s finger tapped impatiently on the side crease of his trousers.
George looked at the monkey’s fangs. How easily they’d snap through that impatient stick of flesh and brittle bone. He’d like to have those teeth in his head. He’d like to bite that finger off and spit it back at Killingbeck. He’d like it so much that he could feel the crunch and crack and almost taste the blood. The feeling was so immediate, so real, that he was suddenly frightened by it as it hung black and treacly in his mind. He’d
never
had a thought like that. The shock made him reel inside and forget that he wasn’t speaking.
“Sir?”
“Well?” Killingbeck’s voice jerked him back into the now, back between the rock and the hard place. He didn’t know what he was going to do. But he suddenly knew from the prickling in his eyes that there was one treacherous possibility.
George was not going to cry. And knowing what he
wasn’t
going to do suddenly made it all clear—he knew what to do, what to say. And he knew to say it very slowly, very calmly, so as not to let the thing rising in his throat choke him.
“I understand that’s what you think I should do, sir—”
Killingbeck looked at him with the surprise of a hungry man whose dinner just bit back. His mouth stopped chewing at the next thing George was going to say.
“—I just don’t agree with it.”
The pupils in Killingbeck’s eyes irissed down to the size of periods.
George knew he’d made a mistake. He knew, with a sudden flash of intimacy which scared him more than the finger-biting image, that Killingbeck wanted to hurt him. He could feel the itch in the man’s hand as the bony fingers blunted into a fist.
“Well. Well, well, well. That’s fine.” Killingbeck closed his eyes and ran his free hand through the thick gray hair that curled back around his skull, as if he were trying to massage the very thought of George out of his head. “You’ll stay here until you decide to apologize. If you haven’t done so by the time we leave, you will be in more trouble than you can imagine. You will stand straight, you will not sit down, you will not put your hands in your pockets, you will not chew at sweets, you will not move from this spot. The museum guards will not let you out unless you are with the rest of the party. We will pick you up in an hour and a half, and you will apologize then, in front of everyone. Do you understand
that?”
His eyes snapped open. George didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
Killingbeck 180’d and strode off after the rest of the class.
George listened to the click of his heels across the stone floor.
Then he put his hands in his pockets. Then he sat down on a bench. Then he put a piece of chewing gum in his mouth.
And then he got up, walked to the door, and out into the drizzle that was soaking the steps in front of the museum.
The guards didn’t give him a second look.