* * *
On the east, south and west sides of the house, shrubs and palings obstructed every entrance to Under. A person could get in, but it required a degree of vulnerability - a lie down and a wriggle - which was doable in the daylight but certainly (not least because of snakes) excessively stupid in the dark. On the north side, however - the Boogerville side - a boy of Neville’s size could thread his way through the windblown old shade house and, once past the shield of ferns and shrub cuttings, walk with barely a need to duck, straight into Under.
Physically, it was a doddle done daily. Mentally, after dark, it was akin to climbing into an open tomb, with the recuperating ferns looking an awful lot like lopped heads, hanging from stiff knots of hair, and the potted shrubs slumping like discarded bodies.
He had forced himself to leave his torch behind, doubting his resolve to have it and not use it, which would’ve meant both alerting the Things to his approach and signalling to them that he was too frightened to meet them on their own terms. The magic cyclone bolt, however, was non-negotiable.
Before entering the shade house he took one last look up, to where the stars twinkled here and there through the branches of the bottlebrush, and he wondered if he would see them again. He wondered too at the silence that had fallen out of the night, as though everything had stopped to watch, to see if he would really do it. Even the busy racket of the Things had faded almost to nothing - only a light, distracted, intermittent drumming. Which might’ve meant they thought he was still above. But might, on the other hand, simply mean that they were impatient for his arrival.
He drew breath and stepped under the shade cloth roof. Two steps. Three steps. Five more and he would be at the edge of Under. He paused though he knew he mustn’t; blinked his eyes to accommodate the darkness. Could he really do this? Were they really ready to show themselves? He sniffled, squinted and felt the hairs on his head prickle awake as, at his shoulder, silent as stone and black against black, one of the dead-body shrubs began to rise up, slowly but purposefully, until its headless top nudged one of the lopped heads and set it to swaying, ever so lightly.
“I’m here,” the disembodied head squeaked.
Neville’s breath stuttered to a complete stop in his chest as his stomach climbed past it on the way to this throat.
Me too, he wished he could say. Or I’m ready. Or I’m not afraid. But nothing came. “If you can’t do it,” the disembodied head squeaked again, “I’ll go for you.”
A whiff of air pushed through his throat, whining like a broken pump.
“’Soon?”
“I am here.”
“No! You can’t be! You have to go!”
“I said I would be with you, wherever you went. So I am here. Whatever will happen, will happen to both of us.”
“I have the magic bolt, ‘Soon! If it isn’t enough . . . then nothing’s going to work! At all! Ever! You have to go!”
She was silent and, as she had been that night in Shoomba Territory, all but invisible. Still, he knew the look she’d be giving him. And he also knew that, grateful as he was for her presence, she could not stay. Having her there, ready to rescue him, would be like having the torch in his hand, ready to bring saving light. If he was ever going to be any use to Neville the More, he had to do at least this one task on the terms that were given. And he knew himself well enough to know that he could only be sure of being brave if that was his only choice.
“Go home, ‘Soon!” he snapped. “You can’t help with this!”
At first he thought she was going to refuse. But then she sniffled and moved toward him, to pass him by. But at his shoulder, she paused and whispered almost straight into his ear.
“Those are the words your Quiet Man said to me, Neville. Gom shoo! Go away! I went away from Anosh and lost him. I will not let you be lost too.”
Somewhere, high, high overhead, the faint nasal honking of a single night goose could be heard. No chorus of answering honks. Just one goose, terribly alone in the vast dark sky, going south. She stepped past him and disappeared from sight while Neville, now truly and at last alone, took the last fateful steps to the edge of the Home Country house - to the edge of Under.
He knew the width of the space. Knew the first trees of the Dead Forest were to left and right of him, though no more visible in the blackness than the dozens of others beyond. For all anyone could tell, the house was floating again, as it had in the high wind of that long-ago storm. Indeed, as though shuddering to remember the task given it in this place, on that terrible night, the magic bolt began to throb in Neville’s hands. He raised it and held it out in front of him, as blind as any eyeless boy (which, for all intents and purposes, he was). Then, with one last look behind, he stepped into the darkness.
It was cold. And damp. Earth that the sun never touched. He tried to speak. Swallowed. Tried again.
“I came. I’m ready.”
His voice was barely a croak in the great hollowness of Under, but it brought to life the scratchy snick of movement. And seeing in his mind their sinister attention turning his way, even though knowing his task was to wait until they were all around him, Neville couldn’t stop himself jabbing into the darkness with the iron bar. Thunk! One of the dead trees, set to thrumming. The sound rattled through the rest of the forest and reverberations stung Neville to his bones.
Still, an instant of relief. Followed two seconds later by a sound which, far from fading, began to grow in intensity, rapidly becoming an urgent drumbeat on the floor over his head. Boom boom boom! Percussive! Banging and crashing! Faster, louder, more sudden and more threatening than anything Neville could’ve anticipated. Panic flooded him. He stumbled back toward the shade house, getting not even a full step before something crossed up his feet and dumped him on the sand. As he fell, his grip on the magic bolt, as Shoomba’s had been on that fateful night, was lost and, in an unexpected instant he was disarmed. On his bum, up to his wrists in the cold loose sand with booming, moaning and shouting bouncing at him from all sides.
He tried to roll to his knees, sought desperately for some clear image in the lights that flared at the edges of his retinas. Off to his left. Low down. Almost at eye level. The golden eyes again! Rising out of the sand - out of the terrible depths of the sand. Somewhere, choked off howls, not his own, and then a webby gauze sliding like another skin across his eyes and lips.
They were too quick! Not slow and sly like he’d imagined, but sudden and horrible and eager. Grasping and blinding! Wrapping themselves about his head, dragging him down into the earth. Desperately, he scrabbled at his face, at the spidery dry grip , inadvertently mashing cat-pissed sand into his mouth and nose and eyes. A scream rose and died in his throat, torn apart and fragmented by the choking grit and, in a mad instant of certainty that he would die, Neville imagined ‘Soon, lying in the shallow grave she’d dug for herself on Rahimi Island; remembered the men who’d been drowned in red dust, somewhere far, far from here. His mind filled to overflowing with a black, blind, suffocating terror and he knew - knew at last, beyond all doubt why the Quiet Man’s mind had fled so irrevocably, so irretrievably, so recklessly into the jungle.
Still, even with that, a lightning bolt of self-pity burned its way down his spine. Why did she leave? He’d told her to go but she’d said she would stay by him wherever he went! Where was she now - a witch, an Amazon, a girl brave enough to steal a magic iron bolt? Now when he needed her!
And he gave up. Terrible to say! He had lost his weapon, his friend and his courage and now foul slavering Things might be on him, sniffing their way closer! It didn’t matter. He stopped fighting the filmy creature that was wrapped about his head and threw himself flat, crying, mewling, groping into the darkness, shuffling his fingers through the dead grit. Until, magic as it was - perhaps knowing that he and this house were its to defend - the iron cyclone bolt crawled, cold and lethal, throbbing with power, back into his hands.
He gripped it desperately, feeling imme
diately the essence of it flowing into him. And he came back. With no other thought than to survive, he came back - rolling from side to side, flailing blindly. This way, that way! Whatever drooling, long-fingered, flesh-ripping creatures had surrounded him, however they may have lassoed his head with their awful filaments, they could not have expected the deliriously murderous power with which this weapon had imbued Neville the Less.
For what seemed an age, there was nothing! No contact! Only the air and the earth and voices, howling along with his own, crashing through to him, speeding closer. Muffled, shrieking and unintelligible. They were certainly coming! Gutted, bloody, fur-covered, half-alive Things. Coming for him.
With every ounce of his endurance, with all the puny strength of his little arms, he swung that magic iron bolt, beating the earth, the air, even his own legs, into a bruised lather. He didn’t grow tired. He didn’t grow sore. He grew only more defiant. Until finally, the meaty thwack of contact! And the despairing cry of the stricken.
“Uuhhhhnn!”
And just like that, the yammering voices stopped. The sand next to his head hissed and peppered against him as a Thing, its suckers surely only inches from his throat, collapsed in agony. His pause was barely measurable, as he commenced again to swing and pound with his bar, spitting blood and sand onto the invisible corpse. The vicious joy of victory suffused him. He had promised Mum not to be a soldier, but the promise was beyond him! He would! He was! At least for this moment, with this superb weapon. He was the Neville the Mighty! And it felt good! And he knew that, like his best friend, he would not be lost. Not be taken for a Nobody. Not by anyone! Not without a fight!
The light was unexpected - first blinding, then crazy with dancing shadows.
‘Soon
First I thought, what can it be, that sound? That booming! Then, when I saw him fly from the house I thought, he is alive again! He is a soldier again. And this is how a soldier will kill. Fast. While running. In a moment he will be past and I will be cut down, dead and a ghost and I will never free my Anosh and never be in the arms of my Riff and Raff again.
I tried to light my torch, to show him it was only me. A small child, not worth his hate. And maybe be saw, because instead of striking, he swept me up. I tried to shout! Let me go! I will leave Home Country and never come back! Please!
I don’t know if I succeeded; his arm around my chest was so strong. Crushing the air from me. And his hand! So cold! Cold as a dead one’s hand! And there was his own voice!
“Stop!” he was shouting. “Stop stop stop!”
But I could not stop. I kicked with all my strength. I tried to bite. I bashed his chest with the back of my head. I wriggled my hands to pinch and scratch. But he was a man, so strong, with no feeling, and he ran on with me in his arms, around his house, under the bottlebrush. In the shade house, my face was knocked with ferns and plants and I cried out. Then he tripped against pots and fell on me! His moan - like a beast - and my own cry, together - as though, in that fall, we had become one creature with two voices!
My wind was gone then, but I heard the change in him; to new words - to the old words - tangling and tearing them in his throat.
“Moazeb bash!” Watch out! And swearing; worse things even than he’d said to me in the morning. And he let me go. As though, after carrying me, he’d found me to be only a lump in the earth after all! And he went on, crawling over me, his knees hammers against my back. And all around, I heard the breaking of plants and pots beneath his fists.
In those moments, even as I was being broken to death by his weight, I knew. Even without going in his dreams, I knew. Something had possessed his body. Something was drawing him to that place where Neville the Less had gone to fight the Things. With my last strength then, I reached for the Quiet Man, tangled my hands in his clothing, trying, now that I was free, to cling to him, to hold him back. Because what I couldn’t tell was, is it Neville he will kill? Will he kill his own son? Or is it the Things that must beware?
I could not hold him. For three, four paces, I was dragged like a dog on a chain. Until something - not my little weight, I think, but something else in the darkness of his mind - caused him to stop. He turned, pressed me to the ground - pressed my hands to my chest. Not hard. Not to hurt. But to stay.
“Tu khoub khohi shod!” he hissed in my face. You will be okay! His breath was of whiskey. And then, with a shout of hope, he crawled away into the darkness. And so, for the first time I thought: maybe it’s not killing that he goes for. And I remembered the torch on the cord about my neck.