Hexwood

  “The paratypical field,” Ann said, staring up at him expectantly.

  “Oh!” said Mordion. She was right. Both fields were very strong, and one was also very subtle and so deft at keeping itself unnoticed that, with the passing of the weeks, he had forgotten it was there. “I let myself get caught in it,” he confessed. “As to – as to what I said about Hume – well – I’d never in my life had to care for anyone—” He stopped, because now Ann had made him aware his memory was wrong, he knew this was not quite the case. At some time, somewhere, he had cared for someone, several someones, children like Hume. But this stab of memory hurt so deeply that he was not prepared to think of it, except to be honest with Ann. “That’s not quite true,” he admitted. “But I knew what it would be like. He can be a perfect little pest.”

  Hume just then cast down a bundle of his treasures at Ann’s feet, shouting at her to look at them. Ann laughed. “I see what you mean!” She squatted down beside Hume and inspected the wooden sword, and the log that looked rather like a crocodile – a dragon, Hume insisted – and fingered the stones with holes in. As she inspected the doll-thing that Mordion had dressed with a piece torn from his robe, she realised that she approved of Mordion far more than she had expected to. Mum had tried to make her stay at home to rest, but Ann had set out to find Hume and look after him. It had been a shock to find Mordion was already doing so. But she had to admit that Mordion had really been trying. There were still strange – and frightening – things about him, but some of that was his looks, and the rest was probably the paratypical field at work. It made things queer, this field.

  “Tell you what, Hume,” she said. “Let’s us two go for a walk and give Mordion a bit of a holiday.”

  It was as if she had given Mordion a present. The smile lit his face as she got up and led Hume away. Hume was clamouring that he knew a real place to walk to. “I could use a holiday,” Mordion said through the clamour. It was heartfelt. Ann felt undeserving, because she knew that, as presents go, it was not much better than a log that looked like a crocodile.

  As soon as Ann had towed Hume out of sight, Mordion, instead of getting on with his house, sat on one of the smooth brown rocks under the pine tree. He leant back on the tree’s rough, gummy trunk, feeling like someone who had not had a holiday in years. Absurd! Centuries of half-life in stass were like a long night’s sleep – but he was sure he had had dreams, appalling dreams. And the one thing he was certain of was that he had longed, with every fibre of his body, to be free. But the way he felt now, bone-tired, mind-tired, was surely the result of looking after Hume.

  Yes, Ann was right. Hume had been bigger at one time. When? How? Mordion groped after it. The subtler of the two paratypical fields kept pushing in and trying to spread vagueness over his mind. He would remember this. Woodland – Ann looking horrified—

  It came to him. First it was blood, splashed on moss and dripping down his hand. Then it was the furrow in the ground, opening to show bone-white body and a tangle of hair. Mordion contemplated it. What had he done? True, the field had pushed him to it, but it was one of the few things he knew he could have resisted. He must have been a little mad, coming from that coffin to find himself a skeleton, but that was no excuse. And he had a very real grudge against the Reigners, but that was no excuse either. It was not right to create another human being to do one’s dirty work. He had been mad, playing God.

  He looked at the cut on his wrist. He shuddered and was about to heal it with an impatient thought, but he stopped himself. This had better stay – had to stay – to remind him what he owed to Hume. He owed it to Hume to bring him up as a normal person. Even when Hume was grown up, he must never, never know that Mordion had made him as a sort of puppet. And, Mordion thought, he would have to find a way to deal with the Reigners for himself. There had to be a way.

  Ann led Hume away, hoping that the weirdness of this place would cause Hume to grow older once Mordion was out of sight. It would be confusing, but she knew she would prefer it. Small Hume kept asking questions, questions. If she did not answer, he tugged her hand and shouted the question. Ann was not sure she should tell him the answers to some of the things he asked. She wished she knew more about small children. She ought to, she supposed, having a brother two years younger than she was, but she could not remember what Martin had been like at this age at all. Surely Martin had never kept asking things this way?

  They crunched their way up a hillside of dry bracken, littered with twisted small thorn trees and, before they were anywhere near the top, Ann found she had explained to Hume in detail the way babies were made.

  “And that was how I was made, was it?” asked Hume.

  This was one of the times he pulled Ann’s arm and kept shouting the question. “No” Ann said at last, mostly out of pure harassment. “No. You were made out of a spell Mordion worked out of my blood and his blood.” Then Hume pulled her arm and shouted again, until she described it to him, just as it had happened. “So you got up and ran away without noticing either of us,” she finished, as they came to the top of the hill. By this time she was resigned to the paratypical field keeping Hume as he was.

  As they entered woodland again, Hume thought about what he had been told. “Aren’t I a proper person then?” he asked mournfully.

  Now she had damaged Hume’s mind! Ann wished all over again that the field had made Hume older. “Of course you are!” she told Hume, with the huge heartiness of guilt. “You’re very particularly special, that’s all.” Since Hume was still looking tearful and dubious, Ann went on in a hurry, “Mordion needs you badly, to kill some terrible people called Reigners for him when you grow up. He can’t kill them himself, you see, because they’ve banned him from it. But you can.”

  Hume was interested in this. He cheered up. “Are they dragons?”

  “No,” said Ann. Hume really was obsessed with dragons. “People.”

  “I shall bang their heads on a stone, then, like Mordion does with the fish,” Hume said. Then he let go of Ann and ran ahead through the trees, shouting, “Here’s the place! Hurry up, Ann! It’s inciting!”

  When Ann caught him up, Hume was forcing his way through a giant thicket of those whippy bushes that fruit squishy white balls in summer. Snowball bushes, Ann always called them. They were almost bare now, except for a few green tips. She could clearly see the stones of an old wall beyond them.

  Now what’s this? she wondered. Has the field made the castle a ruin?

  “Come on!” Hume screeched from inside the bushes. “I can’t get it open!”

  “Coming!” Ann forced her way in among the thicket, ducking and pushing, until she arrived against the wall. Hume was impatiently jumping up and down in front of an old, old wooden door.

  “Open it!” he commanded.

  Ann put her hand on the old rusty knob, turned it, pulled, rattled, and was just deciding the door was locked when she discovered it opened inwards. She put her shoulder to the blistered panels and pushed. Hume hindered in a helping way. And the door groaned and scraped and finally came half open, which was enough to let them both slip through. Hume shot inside with a squeal of excitement. Ann stepped after more cautiously.

  She stopped in astonishment. There was an ancient farmhouse beyond, standing in a walled garden of chest-high weeds. The house was derelict. Part of its roof had fallen in, and a dead tree had toppled across the empty rafters. The chimney at the end Ann could see was smothered in ivy, which had pulled a pipe away from the wall. When her eyes followed the pipe down, they found the waterbutt it had drained into broken and spread like a mad wooden flower. The place was full of damp, hot silence, with just a faint cheeping of birds.

  Ann knew the shape of that roof and the shape the chimney should be inside the ivy. She had looked at both every day for most of her life – except that the roof was not broken and there were no trees near enough to fall on it. Now look here! she thought What’s Hexwood Farm doing here? It should be on the other side of the stream
– river – whatever. And why is it all so ruined?

  Hume meanwhile charged into the high weeds, shouting, “This is a real place!” Shortly, he was yelling at Ann to come and see what he had found. Ann shrugged. It had to be the paratypical field again. She went to see the rusty kettle Hume had found. It had a robins nest in it. After that, she went to see the old boot he had found, then the clump of blue irises, then the window that was low enough for Hume to look through, into the farmhouse. That find was more interesting. Ann lingered, staring through the cracked, dusty panes at the rotted remains of red and white check curtains, past a bottle of detergent swathed in cobwebs, to a stark old kitchen. There were empty shelves and a table with what looked like the mortal remains of a loaf on it – unless it was fungus.

  Does it really look like this? she wondered. Or newer?

  Hume was yelling again. “Come and see what I’ve found!”

  Ann sighed. This time Hume was rooting in the tall tangle of green briars over by the main gate. When Ann made her way over, he was on tiptoe, hanging on to two green briar-whips that had thorns on them like tiger claws. “You’ll get scratched,” she said.

  “There’s a window in here tool” Hume said, hauling on the briars excitedly.

  Ann did not believe him. To prove he must be wrong, she wrapped her sweater over her fist and shoved a swathe of green thorny branches aside. Inside, to her great surprise, there was the rusty remains of a white car bonnet, and a tall windscreen dimly glinting beyond. Too tall for a car. A van of some kind. Wait a minute! She went further along the tangle and used both fists, wrapped in both sweater sleeves, to heave more green whips aside.

  “What is it?” Hume wanted to know.

  “Er – a kind of cart, I think,” Ann said as she heaved.

  “Stupid. Carts don’t have windows,” Hume told her scornfully, and wandered off, disappointed in her.

  Ann stared at the side of a once-white van. It was covered with running trickles of brown rust. Further, redder rust erupted through the paint like boils. But the blue logo was still there. A weighing scale with two round pans, one higher than the other.

  It is a balance, she said to her four imaginary people.

  There was no reply. After a moment when she felt hurt, angry and lost, Ann remembered that they had lost her this morning when she went into the wood. Ridiculous! she thought Behaving as if they were real! But I can tell them later when I come out So—

  Using forearms and elbows as well as fists, she heaved away more briars until she could stamp them down underfoot. Words came into view, small and blue and tasteful. RAYNER HEXWOOD INTERNATIONAL and, in smaller letters, MAINTENANCE DIVISION (EUROPE).

  “Well, that leaves me none the wiser!” Ann said. Yet, for some reason, the sight of that name made her feel cold. Cold, small and frightened. “Anyway, how did it get this way in just a fortnight?” she said.

  “Ann! Ann!” Hume screamed from round the house somewhere.

  Something was wrong! Ann jumped clear of the van and the briars and raced off in Hume’s direction. He was in the corner of the garden walls beyond the waterbutt, jumping up and down. So sure was Ann that something was wrong that she grabbed Hume’s shoulders and turned him this way and that, looking for blood, or a bruise, or maybe a snakebite. “Where do you hurt? What’s happened?”

  Hume had worked himself into such a state of excitement that he could hardly speak. He pointed to the corner. “In there – look!” he gulped, with a mixture of joy and distress that altogether puzzled Ann.

  There was a heap of rubbish in the corner. It had been there so long that elder trees had grown up through it, making yet another whippy thicket “Just rubbish,” Ann said soothingly.

  “No – there!” said Hume. “At the bottom!”

  Ann looked and saw a pair of metal feet sticking out from under the mound of mess. Her stomach jolted. A corpse now! “Someone’s thrown away an old suit of armour,” she said, trying to draw Hume gently away. Or suppose it was only the legs of a corpse. She felt sick.

  Hume would not be budged. “They moved,” he insisted. “I saw.”

  Surely not? This heap of rubbish could not have been disturbed for years, or the elder trees would not be growing there. Horror fizzed Ann’s face and hurt her back. Her eyes could not leave those two square-toed metal feet. And she saw one twitch. The left: one. “Oh dear,” she said.

  “We’ve got to unbury him,” said Hume.

  Ann’s instinct was to run for help, but she supposed the sensible thing was to find out the worst before she did. She and Hume climbed up among the elders and set to work prising and heaving at the earthy mess. They threw aside iron bars, bicycle wheels, sheet metal, logs that crumbled to wet white pulp in their fingers, and then dragged away the remains of a big mattress. Everything smelt. But the strong sappy odour of the elders seemed to Ann to smell worst of all. Like armpits, she thought. Or worse, a dead person. Hume irritated her by saying excitedly, over and over, “I know what it’s going to be!” as if they were unwrapping a present Ann would have snapped at him to shut up, except that she too, under the horror, had a feeling she knew what they would find.

  Moving the mattress revealed metal legs attached to the feet, and beyond that, glimpses of the whole suit of armour. Ann felt better. She sprang with Hume up the mound again and dug frenziedly. An elder tree toppled. “Sorry!” Ann gasped at it. She knew you should be polite to elder trees. As it fell, the tree tore away a landslide of broken cups, tins and old paper, leaving a cave with a red-eyed suit of armour lying in it under what looked like a railway sleeper.

  “Yam!” Hume yelled, sliding about in the rubbish above. “Yam, are you all right?”

  “Thank you. I am functional still,” the suit of armour replied in a deep monotonous voice. “Stand clear and I will be able to free myself now.”

  Ann retreated hastily. A robot! she thought. I don’t believe this! Except that I do, somehow. Hume leapt down beside her, shaking with excitement. They watched the robot brace its silver arms on the railway sleeper and push. The timber swung sideways and the whole rubbish heap changed shape. The robot sat up among the elder trees. Very slowly, creaking and jangling rather, it got its silver legs under itself and stood up, swaying.

  “Thank you for releasing me,” it said. “I am only slightly damaged.”

  “They threw you away!” Hume said indignantly. He rushed up to the robot and took hold of its silvery hand.

  “They had no further use for me,” Yam intoned. “That was when they went away, in the year forty-two. I had completed the tasks they set me by then.” He took a few uncertain steps forward, creaking and whirring. “I am suffering from neglect and inaction.”

  “Come with us,” Hume said. “Mordion can mend you.”

  He set off, leading the glistening robot tenderly towards the door they had come in by. Ann followed, reluctant with disbelief. What year forty-two? she wondered. It can’t be this century, and I refuse to believe were a hundred years in the future. And Hume knows the robot! How?

  Well, I know the date is 1993, she told herself, and she knew, of course, that there were no real robots then. It was hard to rid herself of the feeling that there must be someone human inside Yam’s unsteady silver shape. The paratypical field again, she thought. It was the only thing that would account for those elder trees growing above Yam and the way Hexwood Farm itself was so mysteriously in ruins.

  With a sort of idea that she might catch the farmhouse turning back to its usual state, Ann looked over her shoulder at it. It happened to be the very moment when the decaying front door opened and a real man in armour came out, stretching and yawning like someone coming off duty. There was no doubt this one was human. Ann could see his bare hairy legs under the iron shinguards strapped to them. He wore a mail coat and a round iron helmet with a nosepiece down over his very human face. It made him look most unpleasant.

  He turned and saw them.

  “Run, Hume!” said Ann.

  The
armed man drew his sword and came leaping through the weeds towards them. “Outlaws!” he shouted. “Filthy peasants!”

  Hume took one look and raced for the half-open door, dragging the lurching, swaying Yam behind him. Ann sprinted to catch up. As they reached the door in the wall, more men in armour came running out of the farmhouse. At least two of them had what seemed to be crossbows, and these two stood and aimed the things at Ann and Hume like wide heavy guns. Yam’s big silver hands came out, faster than Ann’s eyes could follow, closed on Hume’s arm and Ann’s, and more or less threw them one after the other round the door and into the snowball thicket. As Ann landed struggling among the bare twigs, she heard the two sharp clangs of the crossbow bolts hitting Yam. Then there was the sound of the door being dragged and slammed shut. Ann scrambled towards the open ground as hard as she could go.

  “Are you all right, Hume?” she called as soon as she was there.

  Hume came crawling out of the bushes at her feet, looking very frightened. Behind him there were shouts and wooden banging as the armed men tried to get the door open again. Yam was surging through the thicket towards them, swaying and whirring. Twigs slapped his metal skin like a hailstorm on a tin roof.

  “You’re broken!” Hume cried out.

  Ann could hear the door in the wall beginning to scrape open. She seized Hume’s wrist in one hand and Yam’s cold, faintly whirring hand in the other, and dragged both of them away. “Just run,” she told Hume.

  Mordion got off his rock hastily when Ann appeared, breathlessly dragging Hume and the lurching, damaged robot. He found it hard to make sense of what they were telling him. “You went to the castle? Are they still chasing you? I’ve no weapon!”