The Girl and the Guardian

Chapter Thirteen

  The Deathwagon

  She breathed in to scream, but before any sound came out the thorn creature had grabbed her throat with the pale stick-like fingers of one hand, cutting her off in mid-breath. It began frisking her with the other. Its arms seemed, horribly, to have no joints, or else to be all joints, and she had the image of an eel’s body writhing under the black sleeves (she hated and feared eels at the best of times, ever since Mark had caught one and put it in her bed, still writhing). She felt she was going to be sick, choking in its hard, clinging grip.

  It found the cellphone where she had hidden it in her pocket and held it up, its sharp eyes flicking over the sleek plastic surface as if to penetrate its secrets. She heard its wheezing breath for a moment, as – a horrible shock to Shelley – it began reading the text. Then it made a guttural exclamation that reminded her of an angry rooster. With a snake-like movement it thrust the phone under the dark robes which hung off the short bulbous body. Then, still gripping her throat, it made a sound like the caw of a crow. There was the swish and crack of a huge whip in the silence, and a tall, black wagon rumbled into view. It had stopped behind the bluff while the thorn creature had run ahead to pounce on Shelley. Its sides were made of riveted plates of black metal, and it rolled along on huge iron-bound wheels. Great draft horses pulled it, driven by another of the thorn creatures sitting high up in the front. There was sweat on their flanks, and blinkers on their eyes. Now the black hulk of the wagon loomed above her, blocking out the sun. With a harsh cranking sound, a long mechanical arm extended out of the top of the wagon. It reminded her of the hydraulic grabbers on the trucks which picked up the rubbish trundlers along her street. These trucks had always looked slightly menacing to her – but nothing like this wagon. This, she knew, was built for some evil purpose. ‘For live rubbish?’ she wondered, horribly. As if to prove her right, the arm jerked down to where she stood, heart pounding, pinioned by the thorn creature. Its pincers of steel gripped her waist, and the thorn creature let go of her. She felt the pincers jerk upwards, pressing up into her ribs, making her gasp for air. The creature held up its clawed hand, and the arm stopped. It had seen something. Slowly it reached out both hands towards her face. The hands were long and pale, and clawed like the feet. She tried to turn away, but the hands darted in quicker than thought and snatched her glasses off. Tucking them under its robes, the thorn creature raised its hand again to the driver. With a sickening wrench that forced the air out of her lungs even as she screamed, the arm heaved her up until she was dangling above a dark hole in the top of the wagon. Then it jerked down and lowered her into the dark, stinking hole. The pincers snapped open, and she fell with a jarring impact onto a metal floor thinly covered with slimy, mouldy straw. The light from the hole above vanished to a crack as the hatch clanged shut. A harsh sound like laughter came through the metal walls, then another crack of the terrible whip, and in the darkness she felt the floor lurch forward under her feet as she tried to get up. The dreadful wagon was bumping along the road again, and Shelley, dazed and shocked, was a prisoner inside it. Her worst fear since the night of her dream had come true. She had met the Thornmen.

  She crouched on the floor, trying to keep her balance, and stared into the darkness about her. As the light spots dancing in front of her eyes faded, she began to make out a few huddled forms in the corners of the wagon. Big sad eyes were staring at her, but no one spoke. The forms resolved into children - human children, she thought with relief, though she couldn’t see them clearly in the dark and without her glasses. They were all younger than herself, and all very dejected-looking.

  ‘Where… are they… taking us?’ Shelley asked, still breathless from the pincers. She felt her heart pounding, as she reluctantly breathed in the stinking, stifling air and tried not to be sick. No one spoke; they all just stared back at her blankly.

  Then a sliding window in the front wall grated open, just enough to show the dark eyes of the Thornman who had captured her. It was still smiling, she thought with disgust, as she looked up at it. Or was it just the strange armour around its head that made it look as if it was smiling? She got to her feet without thinking why she was doing it and took a step towards the creature.

  She noticed that its skin, pale before, was turning dark to match the blackness of the inside of the mobile dungeon. Then, as she looked into its hawk-like eyes with huge pupils like an owl’s, without warning the sharp petals of the facial armour opened wide. They seemed to be part of its body, pivoting in bony sockets around the face. Her eyes were drawn to the broad forehead: there was something odd about it, an outline, like a huge closed eyelid. Shockingly, it opened, not with normal lids but sharp, outward-folding petals like those that surrounded the face, and she was staring into a huge eye like the single eye of the Cyclops of Greek legend, dark amber like a crocodile’s, with huge fathomless pupil which dilated as she stared into it, transfixed. She made an effort to break away from its stare, but she could not. Resist as she might, she felt her mind, at least the vision part of it, being taken over, and horribly, she began to be shown things: dark forms before her eyes swirled and congealed into moving pictures of fear and horror. With a terrible clarity, as if she had been given glasses to see every detail, she saw the road ahead, dipping into a deep valley and plunging down through long corridors of tall thorn bushes or brambles like those she had seen on the plain, only much bigger. Rasping tendrils waved over spiny grey-green foliage, and cruel dagger-shaped thorns covered the tangled snaking branches beneath, where the light was dim, and large pale cockroaches scuttled through the dry thorn-mould. She saw their waving antennae and their mandibles opening and shutting.

  Then the real nightmare began. She saw things which made her skin crawl: people impaled in the thorn thickets all along the roadside by a foul lake, some dead and rotting, others seemingly in a coma. Their hair was matted and they looked as though they had been there a long time. With a sickening shock, she recognised one of the impaled figures as the beautiful Lady from her dream – but she was not the same person. She was thin and drawn, with a look of pain on her face, bedraggled and wretched. Her eyes were half open, but she was not moving at all as they rumbled past. Her long uncombed hair was tangled up in the cruel thorns, and her fingernails were so long they were curling over. Despair hung in the air along that road, and seeped into Shelley’s heart so that it seemed to stop beating.

  ‘So it’s hopeless,’ she thought, or was he saying this in her head? ‘The good people have already lost and now they’re…’

  ‘…being punished for their futile resistance.’

  ‘The Thornmen are…

  ‘…in control.’

  ‘So that text message came from…’

  ‘The accursed witch. She is not dead, not yet, but she dares to send futile messages to foolish children – and others, blinded by love – whom she will lead to their destruction, to share her fate. She will be punished by seeing you – and those others – hung next to her. Soon, very soon.’

  She was hearing the creature’s voice in her head, unmistakably. Her throat choked up with a sob that would not come out, and then (still held against her will to the vision the creature was showing her) she saw the wagon grinding along, slowly, inexorably, towards a low rocky hill with a black cave entrance shaped like a gaping human skull. They entered the mouth of the skull under the pale jagged teeth and the world of light vanished. Stick-like thorn creatures crowded towards them, black like the dark pit from which they emerged. Some were holding cage-like lanterns, containing lumps of something that glowed with a sickly green light. The wagon disgorged Shelley with the rest of the prisoners into an echoing hall of horrors, like an underground railway station seen in a fevered nightmare, full of smiling, silent stick men. There were doors leading off everywhere into darkness. Then to her dismay she was singled out, and pushed into a passage that wound like entrails left and right but always down, down. There was a stomach-churning stench like rotting fish. Fi
nally she approached the lowest point: a great void, utterly black, with horrible black nightmare shapes writhing within it, waiting to swallow her up. She felt herself sliding down the tunnel towards it. But now it glowed with an oddly welcoming light, black like velvet, a kind of un-light that promised oblivion, eternal rest and safety, release from fear and suffering. She heard the urgent command: ‘Embrace the Void, let go of your foolish struggles, be embraced by the peaceful Dark!’

  She tried to cry out. She guessed she must be fainting. It had never happened to her before. There was a roaring in her ears as she dropped to the jolting floor of the wagon. The creature that had shown her the visions, its Cyclops eye now lidded, was still smiling down at her through the peephole. The wagon rumbled on, and the other prisoners huddled in the corners, in their own private nightmares, eyes downcast.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Boy Raiders