Life Stealer

  Cat. It was Cat protecting me. It should have given me a boost, but it didn’t because although he had put himself between me and the bad stuff, I could hear how weak he was. How much it cost him.

  “Cat,” I whispered. “Save yourself. And I’ll do the same.”

  Kahla looked around.

  “Is he here?”

  “No.” I didn’t dare shake my head for fear the squash really would come back up. “Not really. Not… bodily.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “My head aches.” I sat up gingerly. “But apart from that… no, let’s get going. But is it OK if we just push our bikes?”

  “Of course. No, wait…” Kahla placed a hand on either side of my head and started humming. And the nausea actually sank back into my stomach rather than sloshing around at the back of my throat. I felt stronger and my head hurt less.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She just nodded.

  The house, or the cottage as Mrs Barde had called it, lay in a clearing in the forest, surrounded by a collection of sheds, outhouses and log piles. A rusty green metal post box with plastic letters stuck to the side read: G BRIEL.

  “There’s probably an A missing,” Kahla said. “But is it a first name or a surname?”

  “Surname,” I said, without mentioning the cold jab of recognition that had pierced me at the sight. A thin column of smoke rose from the chimney, so it seemed that someone was home.

  Kahla walked resolutely up to the door and knocked.

  Nothing happened. A resurrected winter fly buzzed in the sun. Apart from that it was quiet.

  “Try again.”

  Kahla knocked on the door, a little harder this time.

  Still nothing happened.

  “Hello?” she shouted, way too loud, it seemed to me. “Is anybody home?”

  “Shhh,” I hissed. She looked at me as if I were insane, and of course I was. I mean, if you knock surely it’s so people can hear that you’re outside and would like to be let in? But I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that being quiet would have been wiser.

  We heard footsteps coming from inside – light, but slow. Then the door was opened.

  “Yes?”

  She was small, scrawny and ancient. She wasn’t very wrinkled, but there was something about her skin – it looked like wrapping paper that had been smoothed out and reused too many times. There was something sparrow-like about her, from the brittle-looking collarbones showing through the tired skin to the short feathery grey hair that looked as if she merely took a pair of scissors to it whenever it grew long enough to get in her way. She wore an oversized old lumberjack shirt and a pair of green gardening trousers ripped at the knees. Her face was tense and apprehensive.

  “Eh…” Even Kahla didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you collecting for charity?” she asked. “We don’t give to charity.”

  “No,” I said. “We’re not… collecting. We… we would just really like to know… like to know a bit about… a bit about Kimmie.”

  At first, nothing happened. It was as if the name had to work its way through her brain. Then she closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, and her whole face contracted like a fist clenching.

  “We… could come back another time, if that would be more convenient…” Kahla said.

  “No, we can’t,” I protested, thinking about Cat. “It has to be now! I’m sorry, but… are you Kimmie’s mum?”

  She opened her eyes again.

  “Of course I am,” she said. “Come in.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Jackdaw on the Perch

  Kimmie’s room wasn’t big. Perhaps it was the sloping walls that made me think of my own room at Aunt Isa’s. But there was no round window here, just an ordinary square one. The curtains might once have been floral, but they’d faded so far that the flowers were nothing but blurred pink splodges on a grey background. There was a small, white-painted writing desk below the window. The stacks of books piled up on it meant there was hardly room if you’d wanted to do any actual writing; on top of one of the stacks sat a not particularly well-stuffed jackdaw, perched on a branch with its head tilted slightly. Its beak had lost its colour and it was a bit cross-eyed. It looked incredibly dead.

  There was wallpaper on the walls with a pattern that might once have matched the curtains, white with garlands of pink rosebuds surrounded by pale-green leaves, but I could hardly make it out because of the many pictures, posters, drawings and photographs, all of birds. There were crows, ravens, jackdaws, sparrows, thrushes and wood pigeons, tits and blackbirds, forest birds, waterfowl, waders, raptors, game birds… birds, birds, and more birds. A row of glass display boxes held the white wing bones from different types of bird, arranged on a background of black cardboard. Three empty bird cages were stacked in a corner and a quick look revealed that the books on the desk were pretty much all about… yes, you guessed it.

  “Was she into birds?” I asked, somewhat superfluously.

  “Ever since she was little,” Kimmie’s mum said. “She was mad about them. She could say biiiird before she could say Dad, Mum or food.”

  Kahla studied the cross-eyed jackdaw.

  “Who made it?” she asked.

  “Oh, God. That was a terrible business.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She’d won that grand scholarship to Oakhurst Academy. She was over the moon because the only thing she ever wanted to do was something wildwitchy, especially with birds. But I’m not sure how excited we were, my grandmother was a wildwitch, so I know a bit about it, but their dad… well, he couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. But he did realize that Oakhurst was a posh school and that going there would ordinarily cost a lot of money.”

  She stopped in her tracks and stared at the jackdaw for so long I could almost believe she’d never seen it before.

  “What does that have to do with the jackdaw?” I finally asked.

  “Well. It was Kimmie’s. It was so tame it followed her everywhere she went. But they wouldn’t allow it at Oakhurst, and when she discovered that, there was a terrible fuss. Suddenly she didn’t know if she wanted to go there after all, and her dad lost his temper and shouted at her, called her an ungrateful little miss and told her she was going to that school if he had to drag her there himself, she wasn’t going to make a fool out of him and all those people who had given her the scholarship. Eventually, he promised he would see to it that she could take the bird with her to Oakhurst. And in the end that’s what she did.”

  It took a while before it dawned on me what she meant. And on Kahla, I think.

  “You mean… like that?” I said, pointing to the badly stuffed bird. “Dead and mounted on a twig with wire?”

  She nodded. “Probably not what Kimmie had in mind,” she said. “But she went without any more fuss. All quiet, which was so out of character.”

  All quiet. Kahla and I stared at each other, and I think we felt pretty much the same: Horror. And a stab of compassion for the girl who was once Kimmie Gabriel.

  I caught myself shaking my head – not because I didn’t believe the story, but because… well, because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. By now I was pretty sure that Kimmie with the tame jackdaw had turned into Chimera. And I didn’t want to feel sorry for Chimera. She was evil, she was my enemy, she… she was no longer a wildwitch or a human being. She had given herself wings and feathers by stealing the lives and souls of hundreds of birds. I’d been there when the wings fell off her; I remembered the flutter of invisible wings when everything she’d stolen was set free. Somehow I’d severed her wings, even though I still didn’t understand precisely how I’d done it and I very much doubted that I’d be able to do it again.

  Kahla was the first to recover.

  “We heard that she was expelled from Oakhurst,” she said. “How did her dad react?”

  Kimmie’s mum hugged herself. “He got angry. But he wasn’t surprised. He said he knew all along she would come
to no good.”

  “And Kimmie? How did she take it?”

  “She… she wasn’t quite herself. There was something odd about her when she came home from Oakhurst. She was still interested in birds, but… I don’t know. She seemed colder, somehow. I don’t think she loved them any more. She once said she envied them their ability to fly. She tried to find out what made them able to do it. Studied their feathers and their skeletons, and so on.” She pointed to the collection of white bird bones and the carefully drawn sketches of different types of feathers. “And then there was the food thing.”

  “Did she eat more than normal?” Kahla said.

  “You can say that again. She was hungry all the time. Begged for food, stole it if we didn’t give it to her. We had to put a lock on the door to the kitchen and to the larder, or she would creep downstairs at night and eat us out of house and home.”

  “And she never used to be like that?”

  “No. No, she was never really interested in food until she got to Oakhurst. The strange thing was that she didn’t get fat, no matter how much she ate. The opposite happened. She seemed to get thinner and thinner, and sharper and sharper to look at. At first we thought she might have worms or something, but the doctor said she didn’t.”

  I wondered if Kimmie would have been hungry enough to try and eat new-born badger cubs. The thought intruded, even though I didn’t want it to. I pushed it away with a feeling of nausea.

  “Mrs Gabriel…” Kahla hesitated, which didn’t seem like her. “Kimmie… had a sister, didn’t she? Maira.”

  Kimmie’s mum suddenly looked as if someone had drained the blood out of her and replaced it with lead. No, not suddenly. She seemed to have grown heavier and greyer while we’d been talking about Kimmie. However, when Kahla mentioned Maira, the last trace of life disappeared from her face.

  “You have to go now,” she said. “I don’t know why you’ve come here… asking all these questions, but you have to go now. I thought… I thought you might know where Kimmie was, but you’re no different from all the other snoopers…”

  She broke off. For a moment she stood completely still. Then she made a strange, clutching movement with one hand as if clinging to something no one else could see. Whatever it was, she missed it. She staggered forwards, slumped to her knees and ended up sitting on the floor, leaning against what was once Kimmie’s bed.

  Kahla and I both froze. Back home, a teacher had once collapsed during a German lesson and been taken away in an ambulance because he had had what they called “a funny turn”, but I hadn’t been there when it happened, I’d only seen the ambulance drive off with him. I wasn’t even sure you could call an ambulance out here, let alone what number to ring. Nor did I know if Kimmie’s mum was having a funny turn, but she certainly didn’t look too good.

  “Mrs Gabriel?” Kahla ventured cautiously. “Is something wrong?”

  Which was a pretty stupid thing to say because something obviously had to be wrong for her to slide onto the floor in that jellyfish way.

  At first Kimmie’s mum didn’t say anything. Her eyes were open, but I had the feeling she wasn’t really looking at anything.

  Kahla squatted down in front of her and clasped both her hands. I heard her take a deep breath before she started singing a slightly hesitant wildsong.

  It did have an effect, but not the one we had been hoping for. With great effort, Mrs Gabriel snatched back her hands and snarled at Kahla:

  “No. Not that. Blasted witchery.”

  “But… I think I can help…”

  “No. Go away,” she groaned. “Pills!”

  “Where, Mrs Gabriel?” I asked.

  “Bathroom. Cabinet.”

  I stared wildly at Kahla.

  “Stay with her,” I said. “And if she passes out, please will you…?”

  “Not really,” Kahla said, looking frustrated. “I can’t. Not when she’s made it clear she doesn’t want me to.”

  I went out into the passage and opened the next door. It wasn’t the bathroom, but another girl’s bedroom, Maira’s, I presumed. I didn’t have time to take a proper look, although my curiosity pricked me, so I only caught a brief glimpse of sunshine-yellow walls, a massive pile of stuffed toys and posters of cute baby animals with very big eyes.

  The bathroom was the next door. I found two different types of pills and filled a toothbrush mug with water.

  Fortunately, Mrs Gabriel hadn’t passed out when I came back. In fact, she looked a little better. She shook a pill out of one glass bottle and popped it in her mouth, but she didn’t want the water.

  “No,” she said, her voice a little thick due to the pill. “I’m not supposed to swallow it. I just leave it under the tongue to dissolve.”

  “Is there someone we can get for you?” Kahla asked. “How about Mr Gabriel?”

  Kimmie’s mum ran a trembling hand through her tousled, grey hair. Her brow furrowed.

  “I don’t understand why he’s not back yet,” she said. “He was only going out to have a look at it and take some samples, and it isn’t that far.”

  “Look at what, Mrs Gabriel?”

  “Some kind of disease.”

  How could you have a look at a disease?

  “What kind of disease?”

  “The trees. Well, pretty much everything. He thinks there’s something wrong with the soil. He did report it to the Forestry Commission, but they didn’t do much, so he decided to take some soil samples himself and have them analysed. He says it’s spreading.”

  A knot tightened in my stomach.

  “What’s happening to the trees?” I asked.

  “They’re dying. Everything is, he says. It’s spreading quickly. It’s a bit eerie – there’s this dead spot where nothing lives now.”

  Kahla and I looked at each other.

  “So… where would we find this spot?” Kahla asked.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Dead Forest

  A forest is noisy. There’s always something rustling, creaking, squeaking or scolding. If you’re having a picnic, you might think of the forest as quiet and peaceful, but from a wildwitch’s point of view, it’s one of the busiest places in the world. It’s like the main railway station in a big city, a teeming, buzzing melting pot of plants and animals, of life.

  Imagine standing in the middle of the arrivals hall at such a station. A place where there ought to be people everywhere, schoolchildren, office workers, pensioners and housewives, young women and grumpy old men, kids screaming for ice-cream, pickpockets, backpackers, noisy loud-speakers, cleaners with humming floor sweepers, the smell of deep fat fryers in burger bars, bottles clattering, wheeled suitcases, beeping, noise, noise, noise.

  Imagine being in a place like that, and it’s quiet.

  Completely quiet.

  Not a sound, not a single footstep, no shouting or laughing, nothing.

  There’s not a soul to be seen. There are no smells, not even of pee.

  That was the dead forest.

  Kahla had stopped. I heard her swallow a mouthful of saliva – it was that quiet.

  “What happened here?” she whispered.

  “I think everything’s been eaten,” I said.

  It had got worse since the last time I saw it, when I borrowed the hawk’s eyes. The dead trees and their bare branches were the first thing I noticed, surrounded as they were by buds and spring green. Some had already collapsed, snapped as if their sturdy trunks were nothing but matches, or uprooted. The pale, dead roots resembled crooked fingers still trying to cling on to something although it was far too late.

  I saw them first because they were the biggest, but everything else had gone too – tender anemone shoots, new wood sorrel, shrubs and mosses, beetles, snails, mushrooms on old tree stumps, the ants on the forest floor. The spring wind no longer played with grasses and leaves, but whirled up layers of thick grey and brown dust that covered the earth like the ashes after a fire.

  Kahla was about to take a step
forwards, but I stopped her.

  “Don’t go in there,” I said, grabbing her arm before she reached the dust. “It’ll eat you too.”

  Kahla frowned. I could see that she was starting to recover from the shock. I prayed she wouldn’t rush in despite my warning, believing that a skilled wildwitch could handle anything.

  “But standing here doesn’t solve anything,” she objected.

  “Kahla. This isn’t something you and I can fix,” I said. “The smartest thing we can do is call for help as quickly and as loudly as we can. We’ve found the hungry one. That’s what we came to do.”

  “No, to find out who the hungry one was,” Kahla corrected me. “That was what Mrs Pommerans said.”

  “But we know that as well. The hungry one is Kimmie. And Kimmie is Chimera.”

  The moment I uttered the name, we heard a sound. A strangled cry in the middle of the great silence.

  “Here…” it said. “Here…”

  “That’s a man,” Kahla said.

  “Yes. It must be Kimmie’s dad. Mr Gabriel.”

  “Well, then at least he hasn’t been eaten,” Kahla declared.

  We hurried through the living forest towards the shouting. I noticed that Kahla was careful to stay clear of the crumbling tree trunks and the grey dust.

  “Over here…” the cry sounded again. It was a man, and yet there was something wrong with his voice. Somehow it sounded… withered.

  “There!” Kahla said, pointing. “By the pine tree.”

  The man – Kimmie’s dad – was lying face-down on the ground. His black, red and white lumberjack shirt was like a signal flag, so we knew immediately that this was a human being. After all, not many animals wore plaid.

  He had stopped shouting. Perhaps he could hear that we were on our way.

  “Mr Gabriel?” Kahla said. “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t say very much. Kahla knelt down beside him, but despite us having found him, he didn’t stop trying to crawl across the ground, dragging his legs behind him.