Green Monkey Dreams (16 page)

‘Don't get your hopes up. It's better not to think about it at all,' Mrs Belfrey had advised. Sometime before dawn, it occurred to Noah that he'd forgotten to lend his book to Mrs Kendell. It wasn't until the next day he remembered the cemetery and his search for his
truename.

His heart told him he must find out his parents' name before the Kendells took him away. (If they took him, warned Mrs Belfrey.) If he failed to find his
truename
, he would never reach all the things he sensed locked in his chest: all the powers that surged in their cage.

And now it was the last day. He had sneaked out, climbing over the back gate, holding onto the chain to stop it rattling, and hurrying through the blazing heat for one last search of the cemetery.

He had hardly been there any time before Buddha and his gang turned up. Unlike the first time, they got hold of him before he realised they were there. Maybe they had been watching and waiting for him. He hadn't tried to struggle because there were too many of them. He let his arms hang limply, waiting for the two holding his arms to relax too, and give him a chance to pull free.

‘We've come for you, Spook. We've come to put you in your place,' Buddha leered, his face shiny with sweat. The two boys holding Noah started to walk, dragging him between them.

‘Where . . . what are you doing?' he'd asked warily. He was always a bit afraid Buddha would get carried away one of these times and really kill him.

‘We're taking you home,' said the bony boy he saw most often with Buddha.

‘Yeah, home,' giggled a girl with dull brown hair and flat eyes.

Suddenly his two guards stopped.

‘Home,' Buddha announced.

Noah looked at him uneasily, and followed his gaze. Then his heart started to gallop because Buddha was looking at a freshly dug grave. A big pile of dirt was covered with some green fake lawn, and a stiff green plastic lid concealed the hole for the coffin. The north wind breathed its hot fetid breath in Noah's face.

‘What are you going to do?' Noah asked.

‘You like it here so much, freak, we're doin' ya a big favour. We're gunna make it so ya never have to leave again.'

‘We're gunna plant ya!' the bony boy announced with a half-hysterical giggle.

‘Lift that thing off,' Buddha ordered and the gang obeyed, heaving the grave lid to one side. They all stepped forward to stare into the dense darkness of the hole, struck by the rich earthy scents and the depth, struck by the idea that this was where it all ended.

The moment gave Noah the chance he'd been waiting for, and he twisted violently to free himself from the loose grasp of his guards, running straight for the old part of the cemetery where the gravestones and monuments would give him some sort of cover.

‘He must be here somewhere, keep looking,' Buddha yelled, and Noah's heart nearly stopped. He'd been daydreaming like a fool and they were all around him. He could see Buddha and it was a miracle Buddha didn't notice him. He was too scared to move and by the time Buddha shifted away a bit, Noah was wet with sweat.

It had been too close for comfort. He got up cautiously and made his way round the edge of the building and back onto the path. There was no chance of him getting to the gate or even the fence now, but there must be a better place to hide. He slipped between two graves and walked in a silent crouch. In this part of the cemetery there were no fresh flowers. The graves were old and weathered and hardly anyone went there any more. He came to a whole row of graves with monuments shaped grimly like the real coffins buried underneath. Noah noticed one of the false stone coffins was cracked. He assumed the big rectangles would be solid, but he could see through the crack that the mock stone coffin was hollow.

He climbed up on the cracked tablet and began to tug frantically at the broken bit. He was pretty small and if he could just budge it a bit farther, he could slip inside and lie there safely until Buddha had gone. Better to get back late than bloody and beaten up.

‘Hey!' One of the gang spotted him. ‘Hey . . .' he said less certainly, as he saw what Noah was doing.

Another boy skidded to a halt behind him. ‘Is 'e . . . ?' He stopped, staring at Noah crouched on top of the grave, fingers in the crack.

Buddha came thundering up to them. ‘What are you two standin' here like stunned mullets for? Get 'im!'

‘He . . . 'e was gettin' in' is grave,' the first boy said, looking sick.

‘He was,' the other confirmed faintly.

‘What?' Buddha asked incredulously. The rest of the gang arrived and they all stared at Noah, still crouched atop the grave. ‘He was gettin' in 'is grave,' one of the boys told them.

‘He
is
a spook,' a girl whispered nervously.

‘Maybe 'e's a vampire,' someone else said in a high-pitched, frightened voice.

Noah stood up suddenly, and they all jumped. He held his hands up to the sky and looked down at them.

‘So. You know. But I'll make sure you don't tell anyone the truth about me.'

It was broad daylight, but the sun gleamed oddly on Noah's pale form and his body appeared to shimmer insubstantially in the heat haze. Unwittingly, some of the gang stepped back. One of the girls started crying.

‘Bullshit . . .' Buddha said, but his face was pale. He took one step forward.

At that moment, a black shadow that had been creeping fractionally across the cemetery all afternoon reached Noah, and his pale dazzling form fell into darkness.

‘Run!' one of the boys screamed, and they ran, scattering like leaves before a stormwind. All except Buddha.

‘Buddhaaa . . .' Noah moaned, then he gave a low cackling laugh. That was enough for Buddha. His nerve broke and he turned to race after his disappearing gang.

Standing in the shadow, Noah was trembling from head to toe partly from fear and partly from triumph. He had frightened them off. Him.

But that shadow . . .

He looked up at the giant's tower, a silhouette in the fading gold of the afternoon, and a strange feeling seemed to flow up into him from the grave under his feet. Slowly he turned to stare at the message inscribed in the stone, and his skin rose up into goosebumps.

Seek No More.

His eyes moved up, and he read the name above the message.

Kate lifted the hair from the nape of her neck, wondering what sort of weird kid would hang around a cemetery on a boiling hot summer day. First they had been delayed in traffic coming through the city, and then they had arrived at the orphanage to find Noah missing. The orphanage woman who met them offered to get him, but her father had to volunteer Kate. When the woman said he was bound to be at the cemetery, her father had given her mother a pointed look.

Noah was a weird kid all right. She hadn't even noticed him the first time they brought her to Glastenbury, until her mother had pointed him out. Of course, Kate hadn't paid too much attention, hardly believing they would really adopt someone.

Adoption had been her father's idea to help her mother get over having a baby who was born dead, and not being able to have any more children. Funny how they reversed positions after one visit. Suddenly her mother was keen on adopting and her father wanted them to wait. That was because of
who
her mother wanted to adopt. They hadn't been able to meet Noah straight off because of raising false hopes in him, but they had gone to look over the merchandise a couple of times.

‘He looks like an albino,' her father had murmured in the car on the way home. Kate pretended to be asleep so they would go on talking. ‘I might have known you would choose the sickest looking kid there. You always choose the runt of the litter at the pound!'

There were lots of visits after that. On one, they had spoken to some psychiatrist. ‘There's nothing wrong with him physically,' her mother had said afterwards in a low tense voice, peeling potatoes. In the hallway, Kate had stopped to listen. Eavesdropping was the only way to get uncensored information.

Her father had been boning a fish. ‘You heard the psychiatrist. He's mentally disturbed. It's probably some kind of hereditary thing.'

‘He's not crazy.'

‘I didn't say he was crazy. Don't be so defensive. You're obviously far too emotional to make a sensible judgment over this. Why can't you pick an ordinary kid?'

‘I don't want an ordinary kid,' her mother had said angrily. ‘And I can't see that fantasising he was found in a basket makes Noah crazy.'

‘He thinks he's some sort of wizard or something,' her father had spluttered. ‘He thinks he's got special powers!'

‘Shh, Katie will hear. Jack, he's a lonely little boy who daydreams and imagines he's special. What's so terrible about that? He's got a good imagination and he reads a lot. Maybe he's finding it a bit hard to separate what's real from the stories, but we can fix that.'

Her father said flatly, ‘Is that what this is all about? He's sick and you think you can cure him?'

‘Jack, if anything, I think he can cure me.'

That seemed to be that and the adoption went ahead. They told Kate a watered-down version of Noah's daydreaming, though they did condescend to tell her Noah had made up a name for her: Katlyn darkhair. She liked the sound of that.

Her eyes were drawn by the medieval-looking water tower in the paddock, its shadow falling right over the cemetery.

As she approached the gates, a gang of scruffy-looking kids came hurtling through into the street. The heat seemed more intense once she was inside and Kate squinted against the sun. At once, she spotted someone towering above the graves over to one side, near a stone crypt.

She frowned and blinked in astonishment, then she realised she was only looking at Noah who was standing up on top of a grave. She shook her head, thinking the sun must be getting to her, or the cemetery. For a minute she would have sworn she saw a tall, darkly dressed man with flowing blond hair right where Noah was.

She hurried over to where he was now squatting, staring at the headstone above the cracked grave slab.

‘Anyone you know?' she quipped.

Noah turned quickly, his face tense as if he were expecting someone else. Then he smiled.

It was the sweetest smile Kate had ever seen in her life on a human being, and all the smart-alec jokes flew out of her head.

‘Hullo,' Noah said, an echo of the smile in his voice. ‘Are we leaving now?'

Katlyn darkhair nodded.

T
HE
P
HOENIX

‘P
rincess Ragnar?'

Ragnar turned to William and tried to smile, but her hatred was so great that it would allow no other emotion. She did not feel it as heat but as a bitter burning cold flowing through her, freezing her to ice, to stone. Driven by such a rage, a princess might unleash her armies and destroy an entire city to the last person. She might command the end of a world.

‘Princess? Are you cold?'

She barely heard William's words, but when she shook her head, before he turned away to keep watch for Torvald, she saw in his pale-green eyes the same blaze of devotion that had flared three summers past when he had pledged himself to her.

Her mind threw up an image of him making that pledge, the words as formal as the words from an old Bible.

‘Princess, I, William, am sent by the Gods to serve and guard you in this strange shadowland, until we are shown the way home by such signs and portents as I am trained to recognise. I pledge my life to you.'

Twelve years old, with one slightly turned eye, a broken front tooth, ripped shorts and a too-large cast-off T-shirt advising the world to ‘Be happy', and here he was pledging his life to her.

He had a collection of T-shirts abandoned by the drug addicts and drunks who came to stay at Goodhaven to dry out. The weird thing was that those T-shirts always seemed to have something pertinent to say about what was happening when he wore them, and in the end, she came to see them as signs, just as William saw as signs a certain bird flying overhead, or a particular rock resting against another.

Hearing his absurd pledge, she had experienced a fleeting instinct to laugh out of nervousness or incredulity. That would have changed everything. Life could be like that sometimes – hinging on one tiny little thing or other. But she hadn't laughed because underneath the urchin dirt and crazy talk, she had seen a reflection of her own aching loneliness.

‘Are you sure you have the right person?' she had said, instead of, ‘Are you crazy?' But it was close. They even started with the same words.

‘You are Princess Ragnar,' he had said.

Those words sent a shiver up her spine, even after so much time. Because she had never seen him before. Then there was
how
he said her name – as if he was handling something infinitely precious. No one had said it like that before in her whole life except maybe her mother, though perhaps that was just a memory born of wishful thinking.