It didn’t hurt because of the thickness of his greatcoat, but Crafty still found it annoying. He wondered if Viper was trying to provoke him into losing his temper?
Flick! Flick! He did it again, a nasty smirk on his face.
‘You’re afraid of that blade, aren’t you, Benson?’ he said, pointing up at the guillotine.
‘Of course I’m afraid of it! Who wouldn’t be?’ Crafty snapped back, not bothering with the ‘sir’.
Viper leaned down until their noses were almost touching. ‘I don’t like working with sneaky little cowards,’ he said, spitting the words into Crafty’s face.
‘I’m not a coward, but I am afraid of working with you. You killed Donna Henderson,’ Crafty retorted. ‘You’ve killed other grubs too.’
‘All grubs die eventually – it’s just a matter of time,’ Viper said. ‘In the Shole there are more ways to die than you can imagine. Being Fey won’t save you. I remember one gate grub who died a particularly horrible death. You see, he had worms …’
Crafty looked at him in astonishment. Worms? What did that mean?
‘Worms, Benson!’ Viper said, rubbing his stomach theatrically and giving him an evil grin. ‘There were parasites in his belly – probably from eating undercooked pork or fish from the market. The Shole didn’t harm him directly because he was Fey like you. But it changed the worms. The following night he was in terrible agony. You see, those worms had grown teeth. They ate their way out of him. Nothing could be done. In the morning he was found lying in bed, full of holes. The sheets were covered in the nasty writhing things, and each one left a trail of blood.’
Crafty felt sick – he thought he might throw up right there and then. He remembered what Donna had said about the leeches – it seemed it hadn’t been far from the truth.
Sensing his horror, Viper nodded vigorously. ‘Yes – one way or another, you were going to die eventually, maybe weeks or even months from now. But then you ran and told tales to the Chief Mancer, and I’m afraid that’s unforgivable.
‘Your time will come much sooner now, Benson!’
The following morning, after yet another sleepless night, Crafty gave Lucky a detailed account of what had happened. They sat a long way from the girl so that she couldn’t possibly hear what they were saying. Once again, her nose was stuck in that mysterious book.
‘He actually said that to you, Crafty?’ Lucky asked, aghast.
Crafty nodded.
‘It’s an open admission that he intends to kill you. We can’t delay any longer! The first time we’re sent on a combined field operation, we should take our chance and sort him once and for all.’ Lucky spoke quietly, but his voice seethed with anger.
Despite what had just happened, Crafty still didn’t like the idea. He knew that ‘sort’ meant kill. It would be murder. But if they didn’t do something, then one of them – probably him – would die soon. There had to be another way of dealing with Viper, but even Crafty’s clever brain couldn’t think of one.
‘How long before we’re likely to have another combined operation?’ he asked.
‘That’s the problem,’ Lucky explained. ‘You can’t predict it. The rescue of the Duke’s son was the first we’d had in weeks. But then sometimes you have a cluster. Once we had three in five days – that was awful. I suppose we’ll just have to cross our fingers that the next one comes sooner rather than later.’
‘Do you think that story he told me – about the worms eating their way out of that poor gate grub … Do you think it was true?’ Crafty asked.
‘Could be,’ Lucky said. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like that, but the Shole has been around for seventy years, growing and getting more dangerous as time passes. Almost anything could have happened – things so scary they’ve had to be hushed up. There are many things that aren’t public knowledge, but somewhere in the Grey Library there’ll be a record of everything that’s happened, you can be sure of that.’
‘I wish we had access to that library,’ Crafty said. ‘We’re the ones risking our lives – we deserve to know what’s waiting for us out there in the Shole.’
He glanced back at the girl, wondering what on earth that book was. She certainly seemed to be enjoying it – it totally absorbed her. Crafty missed his books. Apart from talking to Bertha – and his father on his occasional brief visits – that had been the only good thing about his stay in the cellar. There were no books in his current room – perhaps the castle assumed that gate grubs wouldn’t be able to read …
Later that morning the far door opened.
Crafty’s heart was in his mouth, but to his relief it was the Chief Mancer who entered the Waiting Room.
He looked at the girl and smiled. ‘Miss Crompton-Smythe, please come with me. I have a job for you – one that you might find rather interesting.’
Crafty and Lucky braced themselves, expecting the girl to make some kind of rude retort – but instead, and to their complete astonishment, she actually smiled back at him. Then she tugged on her greatcoat, stuffed her book into its right-hand pocket and followed him out of the room.
‘Well – at least we know her second name now,’ Lucky observed.
‘You mean her two second names!’ Crafty said with a grin. ‘That’s a very posh double-barrelled name.’ Lucky looked blank so Crafty filled him in. ‘It suggests that her father and mother came from such well-connected, wealthy families that they wanted to keep both names.’
‘Not many of the Fey are wealthy. We get the jobs others don’t want. Hmm. Ginger Bob was very polite to her too – makes sense if she’s posh. Even someone from the Fey gets respect then. Since when did he care whether we might find a job interesting?’ asked Lucky. ‘I’ve never heard him address a grub like that before.’
‘Viper wasn’t very polite to her yesterday,’ Crafty pointed out.
‘But Viper’s rude to everyone, isn’t he?’
‘True,’ Crafty agreed.
They lapsed into silence. Crafty was worrying about his next job with Viper; Lucky was deep in thought too, staring down absently, but suddenly he started in surprise. ‘Hey – look at that!’ he cried, pointing to something on the floor next to the girl’s chair. It was a piece of paper with writing on it. The girl must have dropped it – perhaps it had fallen out of her book, Crafty thought.
He went to pick it up, then brought it back and spread it out on the table.
‘Her handwriting’s terrible!’ Lucky exclaimed.
‘If it is her writing,’ Crafty said.
The writing was very small and spidery, and almost impossible to read. If Crafty hadn’t recognized the odd word here and there, he’d have thought that it was either in code or in a foreign language.
But the title at the top of the sheet of paper was printed in capitals, and it was clear enough. It said:
REDRAFT ONE
And there was another just legible word that appeared in almost every other line:
aberrations
‘Those are creatures or humans that have been changed by the Shole, aren’t they?’ Crafty asked.
Lucky nodded. ‘Yes. Even though we rescued the Duke’s son, he’s still an aberration – and he’s not the first to suffer that kind of transformation.’
‘Other people have partially been turned into plants? What happened to them?’
‘Same as happens to all aberrations. If they’re dead, they end up in the Relic Room. If they survive, they find them a place in the Menagerie – that’s where they keep live specimens.’
‘Do you think that’s where the Duke’s son will be?’
Lucky shrugged. ‘That would be up to the Duke, but I’ve heard all sorts of rumours. Some of them are pretty horrible. At least he was only changed from the waist down. I heard the reverse once happened. This poor man was running around, but his head and chest were just branches and leaves. Only his legs from the knee down were still flesh and blood.’
‘Then maybe he was no longer aware of what had happened to
him?’ Crafty suggested.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Lucky said. ‘According to the story, they put him in the Menagerie and he just slowly died. He couldn’t eat, you see, and they worked out later that he needed sunlight – like a real plant. But the Menagerie is underground, so he just withered and died. I don’t think that would happen today. We know more about aberrations. Things have moved on.’
But Crafty couldn’t help thinking that Lucky looked a little doubtful. After all, they’d both heard the screams in the night.
He decided to change the subject. ‘Crompton-Smythe must be studying aberrations. I’d better put this piece of paper back on the floor for her to find. I don’t suppose she’d be very pleased if she knew we were reading it,’ he said, walking across and carefully setting it down on the floor again.
No sooner had he done so than the far door opened and she came back into the Waiting Room. He was still standing by her chair, and she stared hard at him. Then her gaze dropped to the piece of paper on the floor. She strode past him, her eyes blazing with anger, her face turning red. She picked it up and looked at it closely.
‘You’ve been reading this, haven’t you?’ she said, sniffing it. ‘I can smell your dirty greasy fingers on it,’ she thundered, ‘so don’t deny it!’
That was really strange behaviour, Crafty thought. How could she smell his fingers? Was it one of her Fey abilities? But there was no point in contradicting her, so he told her part of the truth. ‘I picked it up – I thought you’d dropped it – but then I realized that, even though I was trying to help, you’d be angry. So I put it back on the floor.’
‘And did you read it?’ the girl snapped, her jaw jutting forward,
‘We tried,’ Lucky said with a grin, ‘but your writing’s terrible – most of the words were illegible. But we did work out that you’re interested in aberrations.’
Crafty winced. Why couldn’t Lucky keep his mouth shut? The girl would be even more furious now! he thought.
‘You had no right!’ she yelled. ‘Have you no respect for other people’s privacy?’
‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have read your notes,’ Crafty admitted, trying to calm her down. ‘But where did you get your book from? The castle has a library, doesn’t it? The Grey Library? I’d like to go in there and read up on stuff about the Shole.’
The girl was just about to answer when the door opened again; Viper stalked into the room and glared at Crafty.
‘Come with me, Benson. I have a job for you!’ he spat.
Crafty hardly had time to be afraid. He snatched up his coat and followed Viper, feeling the girl’s eyes still blazing into his back. No doubt she’d carry on yelling at Lucky after he’d left.
When they got to his study, Viper took a seat behind his desk and pointed to the chair opposite him.
‘We have an important task today, a snatch, so you won’t need your coat – you have to be able to move freely and to use the gauntlets. It will be a difficult mission, so I want you alert and at your best.’ He paused.
‘By the way … take no notice of what I said yesterday. I was angry at your impertinence and the way you’d sneaked off to complain to the Chief Mancer behind my back. But I’ve decided to behave as if it never happened. We have to work together. I truly mean you no harm, so shall we agree to put all that unpleasantness behind us?’
Crafty looked at him in astonishment. The man seemed sincere. There was nothing sly about his manner – no trace of his usual smirk. He still didn’t trust Viper, but there was no point in saying so to his face.
‘Yes, sir,’ he replied cautiously.
‘Good! Excellent. Well, our task today is to snatch a creature that exists in an area that is a geographical aberration.’
Crafty wondered what a ‘geographical aberration’ was. Had it been Ginger Bob, he would have asked.
Viper opened a drawer in his desk, took out a little wooden box and pushed it across the polished surface towards Crafty. ‘Open the box and take out what’s inside.’
The sly, gloating expression had returned. Crafty sensed that he wouldn’t like whatever he found in the box.
He opened it carefully and stared at what lay inside.
‘Well, Benson – pick it up. It won’t climb out by itself. Or at least I hope not, ha ha! What are you waiting for?’
With great reluctance Crafty reached into the box and lifted out the object, which was cold and smooth to the touch. It was a finger, probably an index finger from a human hand. It was brown in colour, and shiny – the skin looked more like peat than flesh.
As he examined it, Viper kept talking:
‘So, Benson … Just over a year ago I sliced that finger off the hand of a dangerous creature we attempted to snatch from a location quite close to your family home. This time I hope to get the rest of it. We have a new lure, which should make the snatch easier.’
Crafty experienced a moment of revulsion – which was quickly overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness for the owner of that finger.
He suddenly knew exactly who that cold dead finger belonged to.
This was the Bog Queen’s finger. It hadn’t been cut off when Bertha was sacrificed. He’d been wrong about that.
It had been sliced by a guillotine.
Viper wanted him to snatch Bertha.
Crafty’s mind raced. How could he do that to Bertha when she was his friend? What would happen to her if he did – what happened when they studied aberrations? He had heard screams which might well have come from the laboratories below. Whatever they did must be very painful.
He couldn’t allow that to happen to the Bog Queen. Even if she survived, Bertha would end up in the Menagerie.
Crafty’s mind raced. He needed to think of a way to save her – and quickly.
Viper had come to his feet and was pointing towards the chair facing the black curtain. Crafty walked across, gingerly holding the finger in his right hand. In a daze, he watched as Viper strapped him into the chair, then pulled back the curtain to reveal the silver gate.
‘Concentrate, Benson. First we’ll locate the creature, then we’ll fit you with the gauntlets and attempt the snatch.’
Crafty wished he could pretend to fail in his task, but the process seemed to happen automatically. The clouds cleared, and through the gate’s frame he could now see an area of flat boggy ground with a few reeds. In places the mud was bubbling gently, with white steam rising as the warmer marsh gas hit the bitter cold above. Apart from the bog itself, nothing was moving.
Looking right, through the gloom of the Shole, Crafty could see three houses. With a pang he realized that the one in the middle was his own home, where he’d once lived happily with his father, mother and two brothers. How strange to be back here now …
‘So – where is the creature, Benson?’ Viper demanded. ‘It seems you have failed to locate it.’
‘Perhaps she’s close by, under the mud?’ he suggested. He certainly hoped so – it was through the earth that Bertha had always visited him in the cellar. She was in her element below ground, and if she stayed there, perhaps she’d be safe.
‘She?’ snapped Viper. ‘How do you know it’s female, Benson?’
‘Just intuition, sir,’ he said quickly, cursing himself for slipping up. ‘Is it a she?’
Viper didn’t reply. He just glared and held out his hand for the finger before popping it back into the little box. Then he offered Crafty the gauntlets, and Crafty took them and eased them on to his hands, tugging them right up as far as his elbows.
With a click, Viper released the lock on the pedal that worked the guillotine.
Suddenly Crafty was scared again. What if he tried to snatch Bertha, and Viper killed them both?
‘Get ready, Benson. I’m using the lure now!’
Crafty wondered what the lure was this time – an image of meat dripping with blood, as it had been for the other aberration he’d snatched? Somehow he didn’t think it would work with Bertha. He hoped that she stayed deep u
nder the mud.
For a while nothing happened. Then the surface of the bog began to ripple. It was as if a storm was driving it into turmoil. There were waves on the surface; undulations that deepened into a swell. It was behaving more like an ocean than a bog.
Viper clearly knew what was going on. Seeing Crafty’s alarm, he told him, ‘What you’re seeing is what we term a “geographical aberration”, Benson, because the ground itself, the landscape, has been affected by the Shole. This surface agitation is predictable behaviour.’
Viper certainly hadn’t predicted what happened next.
With a great belching, squishing, slurping sound, mud suddenly sprayed up out of the bog like a fountain. It spurted through the silver gate, somehow missing Crafty but splattering across Viper’s white shirt and face. He cursed furiously and turned away from the gate, wiping his eyes.
Not waiting to see what had caused the explosion of mud – though he thought he might know – Crafty concentrated, focusing on the image of swirling clouds. They instantly returned to the surface of the gate, obscuring what was beneath.
Viper turned round again and stared at him angrily, as if this was all his fault. His face and shirt were covered with mud. He smelled of loam, peat and rotting vegetation. If he noticed that Crafty was untouched by the mud, he didn’t comment.
‘Get back to the Waiting Room, Benson,’ he snarled, unfastening Crafty’s straps. ‘That’s all for now.’
Crafty quickly pulled off the gauntlets. He was only too glad to get away from Viper. After that humiliation he’d be in an even more dangerous mood than usual.
When Crafty got back to the Waiting Room, Lucky was gone, but the girl – Crompton-Smythe, he reminded himself – was reading her book. The piece of paper lay on the table next to her, and she was frowning as she took notes with a pencil.
Crafty didn’t bother speaking to her. He was in no mood for her insults. He hung his greatcoat on the back of his chair and thought through what had happened.
The bog had only become agitated when Viper had deployed the lure.
Was it that which had caused the eruption? Or was it something else, as he suspected – Bertha herself, maybe?