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Ned’s ears pricked up, closely followed by the ears of his pet rodent. There were several things that his two pals had in common. They were Ned’s only close friends outside the Circus of Marvels, and they had both lived on the same street as Ned, until the Waddlesworths (or Armstrongs – depending on which side of the Veil you lived) had decided to move to the neighbouring suburb.
“Only you two, out of the whole class?”
“Yup. He kept asking questions about how long we’d lived on our street; he had a really oily voice, sort of creepy. He said there was a very rare type of nit he was trying to track down and that he thought it had come from Oak Tree Lane.”
“That is weird,” said Ned, who did not like where the story was going at all.
“It gets weirder. So Gummy’s waiting outside and I’m sat on a chair in the school’s old meeting room. The inspector guy takes these plugs out of his nose and then shoves said nose right into my hair. Finally he pulls away, staggers backwards and looks like he’s going to be sick.”
“Well, who wouldn’t?” grinned Gummy.
“Then he looks at me and starts blathering on about the awful smell of children and how he finally has a lead. A second later he’s flying out the door past me, then Gummy, and clutching his nose like it’s been stabbed.”
Behind the Veil, there were many creatures, with many “gifts”. Ned had read about Folk with a sense of smell so acute they could follow a target, any target, for miles and once they had a scent, they never forgot it. He could feel beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
“So after that, you went home and you and your mum and dad came over to mine, right?”
“Yeah. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You’ve led him straight to us, Gummy!”
At that moment, something inside Ned changed. The mistletoe and wrapping paper, the thin veneer of an ordinary life with its ordinary joys and its run-up to Christmas, all, suddenly, faded away.
Behind Ned’s friend, the two bulbs in his extraordinary mouse’s eyes started to flash a brilliant white. Cold fear ran up and down Ned’s back. His mouse, a Debussy Mark Twelve, had been top-of-the-range spy gear in its time, a mechanical marvel of spinning cogs and winding gears. It would never blink like that on this side of the Veil, not in front of “jossers” who did not know about the Hidden. Not, of course, unless it was a serious emergency.
The mouse had been adjusted by the Circus of Marvels’ resident boffin and could now communicate with Ned, albeit in simple Morse code. Longer flashes of the eyes were a dash, shorter blinks a dot.
Ned wondered who was sending him a message. Only a few people knew the correct frequency to contact Whiskers: Ned’s parents, the Circus of Marvels and the Olswangs at number 24. His dad had insisted that if they were to return to a “normal” life, they would have to have friendly agents to watch over their son. “Fair-folk” used glamours outside the Hidden’s territory to remain human in appearance, but Mr Olswang clearly had dwarven blood in his veins and “Mrs” had to have been elven to be anywhere near as tall as she was. Either way, neither Ned’s parents nor the Olswangs had ever had cause to use the system until today, in Mr Johnston’s shed.
Ned’s friends looked at Whiskers in complete and utter horror.
“What in the name of everything is your mouse doing?” marvelled Archie.
“Shh, it’s blinking,” said Ned.
“DON’T GO, H, O, M,” he translated.
A single dot.
“E.”
There are few things less likely to make a boy stay where he is, than telling him not to go home. Especially when it means that his parents might be in danger.
“Y-y-you need to do some explaining,” stammered Gummy. “I mean, that’s just not right, not a bit! Your … your blinking mouse, Ned, what on earth is it?”
Archie leapt to his feet.
“It’s magic, innit?” said Archie. “You’ve got some weird magical rodent, you’re like blooming Gandalf or something. O,M,G, that is AWESOME!”
But when Ned spoke it was in a whisper. A whisper so cold that it stilled his friends to their cores.
“Say nothing, not to anyone. Promise?”
Whether because of Whiskers’ flashing eyes, or the look on Ned’s face, both of his friends remained silent.
“PROMISE!” forced Ned with a shout.
“Promise,” they murmured back sheepishly.
And with that, Ned was on his bicycle and pedalling away from the Johnstons’ as fast as its wheels would carry him.
“Ned, wait! You forgot your bag,” called Gummy, but Ned was already gone.
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Home (#ulink_0e4b7459-a92e-50e8-8a4b-dcf4ee3377f7)
he bike’s metal frame rattled noisily as it careered through the streets of Grittlesby and on to neighbouring Clucton. Three thirty and it was already getting dark. Pedestrians yelled at the blur of speeding metal, cars honked their horns and Ned’s mind became a whirlwind of all-encompassing panic.
Where his dad had trained Ned with the ring at his finger, his mum had taught him circus skills. High-wire, tumbling, fencing, juggling (either knives or flames) and all-round acrobatics. Everyone who worked the borders of the Veil had to know them, to be able to fight, or get out of danger, and there was no better teacher than Olivia Armstrong.
She had not taught him how to ride a bike – that much he had already known – but she had honed his reflexes and kept him fit. Even so, he thought his lungs were going to explode by the time he finally made it to his house, though not as surely as his heart. Training only works, no matter how thorough, when you remember it. Ned could barely remember how to breathe.
He didn’t notice the blaring car alarms, or that the lawnmower from number 39 was floating several feet off the ground. His powers were spiking again. He approached the front door and let out a sigh of relief. The lights were on and everything looked quite normal from the outside. He even heard “White Christmas” playing on their kitchen radio again.
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas …”
It was only when he pulled out his keys that he noticed the front door hanging very slightly ajar. That, in and of itself, would have been more than enough to make Ned worry, but it was the movement in his own shadow that made his hair stand on end. It spilt out across the ground, oozing with a will of its own. The shadow became a shape and then the shape rose up to greet him. Within it were two minuscule eyes, like a pair of stars on flowing black velvet.
Ned’s undulating familiar, the shadow-dwelling Gorrn, was a difficult creature, prone to taking offence over the smallest issue and also uncommonly lazy. Gorrn usually only came to Ned if he was summoned. The only time he showed himself without being asked was if there was very clear and very present danger nearby.
“Gorrn, is something wrong?”
“Arr,” groaned back the shadow.
Gorrn was a familiar of few words. “Roo” was either a question or a “don’t know”, “Unt” a flat refusal to help, but “Arr”?
“Arr” nearly always meant yes.
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Barking Dogs (#ulink_7079fd8b-3087-597f-84a4-587670389ab7)
rmed with nothing more than his mouse and his shadow, Ned stepped through the door of his house.
The inside looked normal enough, at least to begin with. There was no sign of trouble, and Ned could see that one of the gas rings in the kitchen had been lit, though the pan next to it was still waiting to go on. As if someone had been interrupted. Or taken by surprise.
“Mum! Dad?”
There was no answer.
Where were they, and why would they leave the front door open and the gas on?
“Kidnap,” blared the radio suddenly. “Tonight’s story focuses on how people are being taken from their homes, but also asks the big question – why?”
“Taken?” murmured a horrified Ned. “Whiskers – that Morse message, was it from the Olswangs?”
The Debussy Mark Twelve gave an affirmative bob of its head.
Ned peered through the living-room window, out across the street and on to the Olswangs’. Even as the day drew darker, he could see that there was something very wrong with their door. It appeared to have been broken off its hinges. Panic, clear and bright, made its unwelcome return. Surely this couldn’t be happening? The Veil, Barbarossa, it was all behind them but Terrence and Olivia Armstrong were gone – apparently – and the decorated home they’d left in their wake was lifeless and bleak, like a once-busy shop after a sale, when the lights were out and all the people had gone home.
“Protocol,” he breathed. His parents had lain out concise plans should this very situation arise. Search the premises for clues, carefully and methodically. Anything he found would prove vital if he was to get them back. If intruders were still present, he was to leave immediately.
“Boys, look around, will you? Gorrn, would you kindly search the bedrooms? Whiskers, look for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Arr,” said Gorrn, and the ominous creature was in the shadows and oozing up the stairs.
“Move, Gorrn!” hissed Ned.
His slovenly familiar gave an undulating shrug of what might have been shoulders, and began moving at two miles per hour instead of one.
The second third of his mostly mute search party promptly gave a squeak from behind the sitting-room’s sofa. His keen clockwork eyes had indeed found something “out of the ordinary” on the carpet. It had collected by the far wall and looked almost exactly like liquid mercury. Ned got down on his knees and took a closer look. The sudden absence of his parents must have something to do with the odd-looking liquid, but what?
“Blimey, Whiskers, what is this stuff and what’s it doing on our carpet?”
His trusty mouse, as wonderful as it was, had no answer.
“Take a sample, our friends on the other side will want to have a look at this.”
Whiskers did as he was told, using his tiny metal tongue as a syringe. The mercurial liquid was now Ned’s only clue and whatever it might mean, he was quite sure it had originated from the other side of the Veil – the side he would have to go to for answers.
To his left was the family Christmas tree. It sagged under the weight of lights and baubles and the promise of happier days. He looked at the pile of presents beneath it and his chest tightened. In a few days he would have been opening them with his mum and dad. But today and now, everything had changed. He would have to leave shortly and had no way of knowing when he’d come back. There were two presents that he’d been particularly excited about. As daft as it was, he couldn’t bear to leave without them, and scooped them up into his arms.
“Yes, Chief Inspector, but why, why are they being taken?” blared the radio.
Ned thought of his parents’ smiling faces and willed the interview to stop. As he did so, there was an angry bang! from the kitchen and his mum’s radio exploded. His powers had spiked again, loudly enough for something upstairs to take notice.
From the ceiling directly above Ned’s head came a low growl and it was one that he didn’t recognise. It was followed by a wailing sound from Gorrn, who Ned guessed had found an intruder!
“Gorrn? Gorrn, what’s going on up there?”
Silence.
If Ned’s training had taught him anything, it was that Terry and Olivia Armstrong were the best of the best. They wouldn’t have gone down without a fight and yet there were no signs of a scuffle, at least downstairs. He prayed that whatever Gorrn had come across had made them flee, and that if they’d done so, they’d escaped without getting hurt.
“Please be OK,” he whispered.
CRASH!
There was a loud tinkling of broken glass and another of Gorrn’s wails, at which point Whiskers responded with a highly agitated flashing of his eyes.
Two dots and a dash; “U”, followed by an “S”, then an “E”.
“USE, O, N, E,” translated Ned, “W, A, Y.”
“One way?” he mouthed.
“H, E, L, P – I, S – I, N – T, H, E – P, A, R, K.”
Ned froze. The One-Way! The Glimmerman had given it to him before he’d left the circus. His dad never let him leave the house without it, never. In an emergency it could be used to travel by mirror, any mirror, to a Hidden-run safe house. There were several problems with Whiskers’ frantic blinking message. Parks in general did not contain safe houses, at least not as far as Ned knew, and any clue to finding out what had happened to his parents was not going to be found in a bush, but upstairs, where Gorrn was fighting with … something.
As Ned cursed himself for not thinking ahead, the largest and most immovable problem presented itself.
He had left his bag containing the One-Way Key in Mr Johnston’s shed.
That decided it.
There had been moments in Ned’s life where one might think he’d acted bravely. In truth he had acted out of necessity. Today, here and now, was one such moment. No matter what the protocol was, if he was going to find his parents, he had to see what was upstairs. He placed the two Christmas presents by the front door and turned to his mouse.
“Right, Whiskers, you lead the way upstairs – I’ll be right behind you. On my count; three, two, one – GO!” he spat.
And Whiskers did go, right up his trouser leg.
“Coward.”
The Debussy Mark Twelve answered with a nip at his ankle. Heart now racing, Ned crept forward. On the landing outside his bedroom he saw Gorrn, rushing towards him at a decidedly faster pace than the last time he’d seen him. Whatever was behind the now-fleeing creature had clearly spooked him, and Gorrn did not spook easily. There was no sign of an intruder of any kind – which was how Ned guessed it was a bargeist.
He had come across one before. Completely invisible, unless you were scared, and the perfect hunter. Gorrn had dispatched one for him at the Circus of Marvels. If Gorrn was having trouble with this creature, it must be old – maybe even an alpha?
“Gru,” mumbled an out-of-breath Gorrn, which in this instance meant sorry.
“Gorrn? Gorrn, you’re supposed to protect me, you big lump!”
His familiar gave him an oozy, deflated shrug, before shrinking into Ned’s shadow.
“You two are useless!” grimaced Ned, before trying to focus on the problem at hand. All of his training told him to remain calm, yet the only way he was going to actually see the creature was if he let it frighten him, which as it turned out would be no problem at all.
High-level bargeists were not only particularly violent but had also developed the ability to grow in size. Ned swallowed as a shiver of genuine fear trickled down his spine. As he did so, the first part of the blood-hound started to show. Two smouldering eyes, under heavy furred lids, stared at him down the corridor. Two eyes that were growing bigger.
That was the thing about a bargeist, the more frightened you became, the more you saw of it and, in turn … the more you got frightened.
This was not going to be like sparring with his dad. Somewhere in the partly visible creature was a wolfish dog, with the bulk of a crocodile. Add jet-black fur as hard as nails and teeth as sharp as razors, sprinkle in a demon’s evil heart, and what you had was a bargeist.
Wasn’t this what Ned had wanted? A fight without rules? No manual to hand, no overprotective parents.
Yes and no.
His freedom had lost its lustre, along with his mum and dad.
