I am not brave. I’ve never said I was. I’m not exactly a coward, but I am not one to volunteer for dangerous missions. So I was one of the ones to stay inside the church. I thought I should be there because I could write about things and observe, rather than be part of the things that were happening. Scott and Aiyshah were the same.
I am writing now and Daryl went back up to the top of the tower to be a look-out and the others are outside. That is Jasmine and Reece and Bradley and Demi. They were all singing and shouting to make themselves braver as they went, calling out things like ‘hey, you sickos, we’re not scared of you’ and other much ruder things that I won’t write down. They put the body on one of the trolleys and pushed it out, bumping and jolting on the uneven floor. They had to lift the body up by the sheet to get it on. Nobody wanted to touch it. They said it was cold and hard and heavy. So they went and for a little while there was heavenly peace and I thought it would be a good time to start my entry, not sure when I would be able to write again.
It is easier for me to bury my head in a book and not think about the bad things happening. If I can write about it maybe I will be safe. But I will have to stop writing soon. Something has gone wrong you see.
It happened like this. For a while we heard nothing from the steeple or from outside. Aiyshah and Scott had been waiting at the church doors, peeping out, ready to open them wide when the children were ready to come back in. They were by the church doors and guarding them. I’m sorry, I think I already wrote that – I don’t have time to check and make corrections.
At first the two door guards were giggling and laughing a bit, sort of overexcited like primary school children, turning their scaredness into laughter as if it might protect them. They were joking, saying they had seen something, and making each other jump and then cursing like mad. And then after a while one of them, Aiyshah, said no, she really had seen something and Scott mocked her and carried on messing about and teasing, but she got quite agitated and kept saying it over and over and saying ‘no, look!’ and pointing, and in the end Scott saw it too and they screamed and slammed the doors shut.
Caspar asked them what they had seen and they weren’t completely sure, but they were fairly sure it was sickos, three of them, in a pack, all dirty and muddy and brown, coming out of the trees. Now the children inside the church really were scared and they were running around, and Daryl came down from the tower and asked what was going on. ‘Didn’t you see it?’ said Aiyshah. ‘There were three sickos coming.’ Daryl said he hadn’t seen anything, he had been too busy watching the children who were trying to dig a hole for the grave. They were still talking about it when we all heard a sort of rattling and a scratching and banging at the door. Aiyshah shouted out to see if it was other children. We heard no voices back only the rattling and scratching.
We told Daryl to go back up on to the steeple and see what was happening and warn the others, and then we did hear voices outside, and shouting.
‘We have to open the doors,’ said Aiyshah, ‘to let them back in. We can’t leave them out there with sickos.’
‘But if we open the doors the sickos will get in,’ said Caspar, who is more frightened than the rest of us because he is already wounded, and can’t walk easily.
There were voices all talking over each other now, Caspar saying things like, ‘We need to be ready for them.’ And Scott saying, ‘Are you sure there were only three?’ Nobody really wanting to know the truth.
It is very difficult. It is a difficult decision and we don’t know what to do. I will stop writing now because I need to help. I can’t hide in this book after all. My hand is shaking too much to write and real things are going on. We are in a desperate situation and I hope the search party comes back soon. Surely they can’t be much longer? Unless something has happened to them as well. I do not want to think about that. I will stop writing because it is making me think too much.
I have to help. I have to do something.
60
Ollie and the other kids were still waiting down below, clustered round the foot of the metal staircase, hyped up, excited and nervous. There was some grumbling going on, from those fighters who wanted to be up where the action was and didn’t like being left out. Mostly, though, they were in huddles, talking in brief, urgent, hushed bursts, trying to make sense of what they’d seen. They all had their theories. Only Ollie was keeping his thoughts to himself, staying quiet, his eyes moving ceaselessly over the rows and rows of shelves.
Ebenezer approached him. He was carrying Seamus’s spear.
‘You want this?’ he asked. ‘Looks like a good one.’
‘Don’t you want it?’ Ollie looked at the spear. The head was covered in dark blood that was still sticky.
Ebenezer shrugged. ‘Don’t like to use a spear.’
‘Me either,’ said Ollie, ‘but I know who does.’ He took the spear off Ebenezer and walked to where Achilleus was sitting on the bottom of the steps. He looked tired and there was a thin film of sweat on his skin. The wounds he’d got at the palace were still healing and now that he’d stopped moving the pain was obviously getting to him.
‘You want this for your collection?’ Ollie said.
‘Dunno,’ said Achilleus. ‘I already got three spears. I’m not sure Paddywhack can carry any more.’
‘I’m all right, Akkie,’ said Paddy eagerly. He was sitting next to Achilleus, the golf-bag leaning against the steps. ‘I can carry another one.’
‘Yeah, but do we need another one, though?’
‘That’s a good spear,’ said Paddy. ‘It’s really cool. It’s got a good wide head on it, with a sharp cutting edge, good for close-up fighting. Your main spear’s a stabber, a good stabber mind, like a needle, but it doesn’t have an edge on it. It doesn’t cut so well, so it’s no good for slashing.’ Paddy jumped up and took the spear off Ollie. He tested the balance and nodded appreciatively, as if he was some kind of weapons expert. He then took out a rag from his golf-bag and started to clean the blood off it. ‘Now this spear,’ he said, ‘this one’s a beauty. With this big fat blade on it you can use it like a sword to hack. It’s a proper spear, made for fighting not for show. You know what this is? It’s the Gáe Bolg.’
‘The gay what?’
‘The Gáe Bolg. It’s Irish. It means the death spear or the belly spear, for cutting open bellies. My da used to love to tell me the old stories about the Irish heroes and all the old legends. Da used to play the fiddle, in pubs and that. He was from a traveller family before he married my ma. He knew all the old folk songs and the stories, used to be a storyteller too. We went to all the festivals. Gaah, it was a crack, man, he knew some grand tales. Of Finn MacCool, and the greatest hero of them all, Cúchulainn. You remind me of Cúchulainn, Akkie. The Gáe Bolg was his spear. He was the only one who knew how to use it. This famous warrior woman called Scáthach taught him how. It was made from the bone of a sea monster.’
‘Yeah,’ said Achilleus, taking the spear off Paddy and weighing it in his hand without bothering to stand up. ‘Ova happs. That’s a cool story.’
‘You like the spear?’
‘It’s sick. The belly spear, the death spear, the Gay Bulge.’
‘Cúchulainn was like an Irish superhero,’ said Paddy. ‘He was well strong, and brave, scared of no one, he was. He killed the hound of Cullen with his bare hands when he was still just a boy, like you. And his strength, all his power, like, was in his middle finger.’
‘You mean like this?’ Achilleus grinned and gave Paddy the finger.
‘I didn’t mean like that, no.’ But Paddy was giggling. ‘I never thought of that before. His middle finger.’
‘I have the power!’ said Achilleus, sticking his finger up at everyone in the group. ‘The power to give you the finger!’
Ebenezer shook his head and tutted. He didn’t like crude stuff, as Achilleus well knew. It only made Achilleus worse, though. He passed the spear back to Paddy and gave Ebenezer the finger with both hands.
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Ebenezer turned away from him, made a face at Ollie.
‘That was clever back there,’ he said. ‘Working out what Seamus was up to. Knowing he had them lumps round his neck.’
‘It was a guess,’ said Ollie. ‘A lucky one.’
‘What would you’ve done if you were wrong?’
‘I’d have thought of something.’
‘Yeah. You always think of something.’ Ebenezer slapped palms with Ollie and glanced up towards the top of the stairs.
‘What are they doing up there?’ he asked.
‘We’ll find out soon enough, don’t worry,’ said Ollie.
‘We got to get back to the church,’ said Ebenezer. ‘We left all them other kids there.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ollie. ‘I’d almost forgotten about them. They’ll be all right, though. That place was pretty secure.’
‘I wonder what they’re doing.’
‘Not our problem right now, Ebenezer. We just got to find out who these weird kids are and then grab what we need and go.’
‘I wish I was there in the church with them. A church is a good place. This place … It’s all wrong, Ollie.’
Ollie smiled at Ebenezer, trying to reassure him. Ebenezer had a strong faith. Prayed every night. Ollie sometimes wished he had someone to pray to. He pictured the kids back at the church. Wondered if they were praying right now.
Wondered if God would bother to listen.
A voice called down to them from up on the platform.
‘They’re ready.’ It was Emily. ‘You can come up now.’
61
Blue still felt like he was in some weird dream. Not the first time he’d felt this way over the last year. He’d lost track of how many times he’d woken from some twisted nightmare only to find that he was deep in a worse nightmare – what the world had become – and wishing he was back in his bad dream, not having to cope with reality. Reality. You kind of got used to things when they went on around you all the time, so that he’d almost forgotten what the world had been like before the disease came creeping into it.
What was going down now, though, was something else entirely, something new. Something deeply strange. Einstein had had a million questions, but TV Boy had told him to keep them. Told him he was going to make everything clear. That it was going to be ‘show-and-tell’ time. This was shaping up to be one wigged-out show-and-tell, though.
The rest of the warehouse kids had gathered on the platform now, and Blue didn’t know what to think, where to look. To say they were all different shapes was the understatement of the century. And the thing was, they weren’t all human shaped. How they were alive he didn’t know, because the way they looked was … impossible. Alien.
His mum had been a nurse, working in a home for disabled children. Blue used to go in and help her out sometimes in the school holidays. At first he’d been nervous and shy, uneasy, but he’d soon realized that, apart from those one or two kids with really severe learning difficulties, they were just like any other kids. They had the same thoughts and interests as him. Just like in any other group of kids there were show-offs, jokers, quiet ones, clever ones, thick ones, cool ones and arseholes. It made no difference what they looked like, or how they spoke, whether they were in wheelchairs or had neck braces or whatever – kids were kids. In the end he’d made a couple of good friends there. He’d got used to their disabilities, stopped noticing them in most cases.
This was way different. He’d never seen kids like these before. There were the girl and boy they’d spotted downstairs, him with tiny legs and a huge round spider body, her with an impossibly thin frame and a head that looked like a huge round ball. Then there was another girl with legs that looked to be over a metre long and a tiny body on the top. Another boy had a lower leg and foot that had grown into what looked like a long, wide blob. Another girl, who Blue was very careful not to stare at, seemed to have her guts growing on the outside of her body, covered by a thin, almost transparent membrane. One girl had what appeared to be a normal body but a strange, fishlike head, with the eyes pushed round to the sides and a wide, wet mouth.
Perhaps the strangest of all were what he’d at first thought were a normal boy and girl. When he’d realized that they were actually fused together, and that there was a third body growing out of their backs that looked lifeless and shrivelled, he had actually gasped. He knew they couldn’t be conjoined twins, because you couldn’t have conjoined twins of different sexes, and he’d certainly never heard of conjoined triplets.
No. This was impossible. It was too much to take in. These kids weren’t disabled. It was more like they were a different species. Monsters, Seamus had called them, but they were human, weren’t they?
They were children.
They all had made-up names, as if they were comic book characters rather than real people – Spider Boy, Betty Bubble, Legs, the Pink Surfer, Flubberguts, Fish-Face, Trinity. They’d come up by another staircase and had erected what looked like very basic scenery from a school play. There was some shredded green and brown paper hanging down like curtains or leaves in a forest of some sort. One or two of them had gone behind the ‘curtain’; the rest were sitting around on the platform, some on the floor, others on the various chairs and sofas. A couple of them looked excited, pumped up and ready for the show, but most were quiet, watchful and wary. As were Blue’s lot, who were sitting where they could, waiting for the show to begin. A few of his party, however, including Achilleus, had stayed downstairs. Maybe they hadn’t been comfortable, were worried that they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from sniggering with embarrassment.
Blue had no idea what this was going to be all about, but he’d watched TV Boy climb awkwardly under the table where the old television sat. Like a long-legged crab crawling into a hidey-hole. And now silence slowly settled over the platform.
TV Boy had lit some candles around the table and they illuminated the TV with a soft yellow glow. It was getting dark in here. It was later in the day than Blue had realized. He had a stab of guilt when he thought of Big Mick stuck out in the reception area and the kids they’d left behind in the church. He had wanted to get back there by nightfall, but they hadn’t picked up any supplies yet and they needed to know who these kids were and what their story was.
Someone put a record on the ancient wind-up gramophone, a jolly number, bouncy and crackly, sounding like an old children’s song from years ago.
And then the kids started to sing over the top of it …
‘We are the Twisted Kids. Tit-fed gits, the gifted twits!
We are the screwed-up, twisted kids.
Our backs are bent, our knees bend back,
Our heads have tails, our bones are whack.
We’re freaks and that is plain for all to see!
Our guts hang out, we scare good folk,
We’re God’s bad joke, the moulds got broke,
With arses where our elbows ought to be …’
Blue caught Einstein’s eye. WTF? The day was getting weirder and weirder. Now TV Boy popped up, inside the set, looking out at them all, with only his head and shoulders visible. When he appeared the warehouse kids clapped and whooped and cheered. TV Boy stayed like that, staring out at them, waiting for everyone to settle down, and then finally he began to speak, making his voice deeper, serious, posh. A TV announcer’s voice.
‘And now here is the news …’ He added a day and a date from fifteen years ago. The record was changed, the children’s song being replaced by a scratchy old military march. TV Boy nodded in time to it for a few seconds before putting on a pair of glasses and carrying on. His voice had changed again, so that he sounded like a newsreader. It was unreal. Blue couldn’t help smiling. He’d got hung up on the idea that these kids were comic book superheroes, and he reckoned TV Boy’s superpower was being able to impersonate people.
‘Good evening. The headlines at six o’clock. Flooding in south-west England, earthquakes in the Middle East, tornadoes in the Ameri
can Midwest, starvation in Africa and twenty million people watch a cat playing the piano on YouTube.’
A couple of the warehouse kids laughed. Blue’s lot just sat there open-mouthed. The needle was lifted off the record and TV Boy carried on.
‘But first, loggers in the Amazonian rainforest have discovered a “lost” tribe who speak their own unique language and have a culture that appears unchanged for thousands of years.’
Some of the kids came through the curtain, the fish-faced girl, the one called Flubberguts and the boy with the elongated foot – the Pink Surfer. They crouched low, looking around, scared and amazed, acting out the South American tribe emerging from the forest.
TV Boy carried on.
‘We talked to one of the international medical team who have flown out to study the Stone Age tribe. So called because they have had no previous contact with the outside world and live a life very similar to how we believe our distant ancestors lived at the time of the last ice age.’
TV Boy whipped off his glasses and quickly put on a battered old sun hat. His voice changed, to something accented and European. His whole face seemed to change too, so that Blue could imagine he really was watching a scientist on a news broadcast.
‘We are still working to decipher their language, which bears no relation to any other language we know of in the area. This is not unusual. At least a thousand different indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas …’
The three actors started making a peculiar insect-like clicking, whirring noise.
‘… So far all we have been able to discover for certain is that they call themselves the Inmathger. They are small people, and many display genetic birth defects, indicative of centuries of inbreeding. It is quite clear from their reactions, however, that they consider us to be the ones who are deformed.’