Kill Fish Jones (11 page)

Having zapped back to the gentle English countryside and taken a few moments to recover from his trip to the mountain, Grimshaw's next task was finding a way to polish off the weird boy. In his notebook, under the heading ‘
Sufferer 4: Susan Jones, The Woman Who Knocked
', the list of things and people that he had to take away from her to cause her pain were all ticked through. Except one. Her son.

Using Mrs Minchin's
How to Be a Dutiful Housewife
to search for hints usually gave ideas that were in tune with Grimshaw's frame of mind. The falling sheep, for example, had been suggested when he was feeling rather frivolous. Now, with his head still full of sky and high places, Mrs Minchin gave him an idea that was astonishing in its unexpectedness and impact. Especially impact!

It was so brilliant that Grimshaw couldn't help laughing out loud. Then he packed away Mrs Minchin and went to look for a good place to hide his backpack.

It was time to kill Fish Jones.

‘We don't have Jon's map,' said Susan flatly. The sun was just coming up over the horizon, lighting up a clear sky with a few golden clouds scattered across its pale blue. Although they had stopped to sleep for a while in the car, they had been awake again and driving since dawn. Now, Susan had left the main roads and had parked the
car in a small town while they took stock and maybe got some breakfast.

Fish sighed. The map was in the van that Marsha had been loading up. The one that had been parked outside the house and was currently a knot of mangled metal.

He dug in his pocket and found his dog-eared memo pad and a pencil. Turning to a blank page he wrote:

‘Crow's Cottage, near Bone Mill, Yorkshire'. Then he began to draw, adding in the landmarks Jon had mentioned, like Menga's Tarn and the butterfly valley.

Susan glanced at him. ‘You remember? All I can think of is a fallen-down water mill and a road into the moors.'

After some sleep, she sounded better, and to Fish's relief there was no trace of the shadow-snake. It had stayed gone. Instead, a faint silvery shine glistened on her skin. Susan had grown up with Marsha; they had shared their childhood and their youth. Even though they had drifted apart over the last few years, all that history still counted. Fish wondered if he had a glow of his own, but he thought that maybe, however much he cared for them and would miss them, neither Marsha nor Reg had ever been a central part of his life. At any rate he couldn't see anything, though he peered occasionally at his arms.

One thing though – he was beginning to feel very hungry.

‘Anyway, let's get that breakfast,' Susan went on, as if she had read his mind. ‘I could really do with a cup
of tea! We'll get something to take away with us too, then we can just keep driving until we get there, OK?' She sent Fish a smile. ‘We'll be all right. We've got to believe that.'

Fish nodded, sending an automatic glance over his shoulder to make sure the demon wasn't lurking in the back seat. To his relief, it still hadn't put in an appearance.

Susan gave him a worried look. ‘Do you think we're being followed or something? I can see why you might, but curses aren't like that. They're not something tangible that you can see.'

Fish smiled at Susan in a way that said nothing, and then concentrated on sketching a map of the route to Jon's cottage in the heart of the fells.

When he was done, they left the car and headed into the town square. It was still early and all around them the shops and cafes were just waking up and getting ready to face the day. Together, Fish and Susan ambled slowly down the high street. Neither of them felt like hurrying, they had been on the road all night and right now they were both enjoying a moment of feeling normal.

‘There,' said Susan, spotting a small cafe on the other side of the road, where a woman in a blue dress was reading the menu posted in the window. ‘That's just the right place.'

And she stepped off the pavement to go and take a look.

High above the Earth and clinging on to a portion of old satellite, Grimshaw went over his calculations again. Avatars had an excellent spatial sense and chronometer travel was pretty accurate, but even so, landing on a target this small and moving this fast had posed some problems. Grimshaw had spent some time pinwheeling dizzily in orbit, but on his fifth try had managed to zap to a position close enough to catch hold of the lump of space junk and pull himself on.

Grimshaw knew the Earth's orbit was filled with man-made debris ranging from nuts, bolts, gloves and other leftovers from space missions to defunct satellites and failed space probes. Some of it would fall harmlessly back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere or landing in the vast amount of ocean that covered the globe. At the last estimate the blanket of junk wrapped around the planet totalled roughly one hundred and ten thousand objects, many zooming along at speeds of over seventeen thousand miles per hour. Grimshaw knew this, not because he had found it on the Acts and Facts, but
because he had read his way through a copy of
Science Monthly
while waiting for the vicar to stop sobbing long enough to climb the church tower. He had thought the article very interesting, but now realised that it had not mentioned the sheer giddiness of all this whirling about so far above everything. Nor did it mention the general all-round amazingness of the world.

From this high up, hanging in the freezing vacuum, the sight of the Earth backed by the great void of space knocked the view from the mountaintop into a cocked hat and out the other side. To his left, one last slice of the planet was still covered by the blanket of night, but where day had cast its light the many hued greens of the forests and the golds and purple-browns of the land swam in an ocean of deep turquoise blue. The whole beautiful thing was wreathed with white clouds that swirled across its surface. It was breathtaking.

Shaking himself vigorously, Grimshaw turned his attention back to the job in hand. The particular piece of space junk that he was clinging to was due to fall to Earth any moment. When he felt the orbiting chunk graze the Earth's atmosphere, Grimshaw tensed, ready for action when the right moment arose. The piece of debris kept going on its downward course, plunging deeper into the pull of the planet. Now, instead of silence, the wind whistled in his ears as the junk fell so fast that it began to burn. He congratulated himself on having left his trousers and notebook in his backpack, hidden in a
bush on the planet below. Grimshaw could survive the flames, but they wouldn't have.

The junk's death dive was magnificent. The heat became intense as he hurtled on towards the blue-green globe, which grew and grew until the swirls of colour became mountains, rivers, plains and deserts. Grimshaw would have yelled with the sheer exhilaration of it if he had had any breath left to yell with. The speed of his descent was so great that, had he breathed in, the oxygen would have ignited in his lungs, burning him to a crisp from the inside out.

And then the crucial moment arrived – the moment when Grimshaw had to act. The half-alive had substance, but not much in the way of weight. Using what little he had, Grimshaw leaned to the left, changing the junk's flight path in a small but significant way. Underneath him the metal glowed white hot, vaporising as it fell. When it hit its target it would be a fraction of its original size, but still big enough for Grimshaw's purpose.

Clouds were rushing up to meet him in cathedrals of blue-white vapour that looked almost solid. For a fleeting moment, Grimshaw felt their cool touch as the junk dived into them. Then the junk sizzled their towers, domes and twisting helter-skelters into steam as it tore through and out the other side. Grimshaw burst out into air that stung his skin with its fresh brightness. And now there was real landscape below, sea, sand, woods, fields hurtling past at a fantastic speed and all seen through a corona of fire. And then a town. The view narrowed
to a high street and a boy in an overlarge T-shirt, walking along the pavement, studying something in his hand.

At this point, Grimshaw had intended to hit the send button on his chronometer and jump ship. But then something occurred to him. Something huge and terrifying.

If he stayed where he was, he would be clinging to the debris at the moment it plunged out of the sky and smashed the boy into raspberry pulp. It would be the nearest he could ever come to the sort of personal visitation of death that Tun and his like were allowed, and though he might not want to do it to noble Susan Jones, the boy was nothing more than an ordinary victim, a secondary Sufferer with nothing special about him. The thought sent shivers of panic and excitement running up and down his spine. Even if hitting the ground would hurt a little – well, a lot actually – it might just be worth the pain. His mind made up, Grimshaw hung on.

While Susan was heading over the road to investigate the cafe, Fish was working out that he had almost enough small change in his pocket to buy a couple of pastries from the bakery as a treat for them both later on. He was short by just one pence. He could ask Susan for it, but that would spoil the pleasure of producing them as a surprise, which would be a shame. And then, at just the moment he was wishing he had one penny more, he noticed a glint of shiny copper lying in the gutter. It was a bright, new one-pence piece! He frowned, puzzled,
because he could have sworn that it had not been there a moment ago, that it had appeared all of a sudden. Then he shrugged, smiled and went to pick it up.

Bending to tuck his fingers around the small coin, Fish felt a scorching blast as something incredibly hot went past him. There was a terrific cracking thud and dust flew everywhere. Someone screamed. Although Fish didn't know it, the person who screamed was Susan.

It had all happened very fast. Turning to call Fish, Susan had seen the lump of junk hurtling out of the blue, heading straight for her son's head. When Fish unexpectedly bent down, the junk sailed through the empty spot where his head had been a second before and crashed, steaming, into the pavement. The impact sent fragments of hot stone flying everywhere.

One of them hit a passing car and smashed the windscreen. Out of control, the car spun in the road, hitting Susan with a glancing blow that threw her into the air like a rag doll. Her body turned a graceful arc and then slammed back to Earth with a sickening thud. The car went on, sliding in a full circle before it came to a halt, jamming itself into the back of a parked delivery van.

Fish didn't see any of this. He straightened up to stare in shock at the mess of steaming, mangled metal that had so nearly got him in the back of the head. Sprawling a little way beyond the junk was an equally steaming demon. Its skin was seared black and was still sizzling.
It shook itself dizzily, a pained look on its ugly face. It looked up.

Their gazes locked.

Fish saw the demon's evil-looking, all-black eyes widen for a moment as it realised two things. First, its prey was still alive, and second,
the human could see it
! Terror surged through Fish as he stood there, gaze to gaze with the horrible thing. The demon snarled at him, and arched its back as if it was about to spring. But it didn't attack. Instead, it reared up until its face was on a level with his.

‘Run,' it sneered in a voice softer than Fish would have imagined. ‘Run all you like, human. I will find you wherever you hide. And I will
GET YOU
.'

And then it vanished. And in that second, it dawned on Fish that something terrible was happening behind him.

His heart went cold as he realised that Susan wasn't there. She wasn't right beside him asking if he was all right. Turning, he saw confusion, people running and calling out and the wreckage of a car. There was a group gathered around someone lying in the road.

For a long, awful moment, Fish understood that his mother might be dead. Around him the world went grey and cold as the blood drained from his face. He struggled not to pass out and had to crouch down against the bakery wall, his head bent forward until the darkness passed.

Now the wail of sirens filled the morning. An
ambulance and two police cars glided to a halt. Uniformed men and medics scrambled out. Some ran to the woman and others to the car, where the shaken driver was trapped inside his crumpled vehicle, amazed that he was still alive. A policeman began talking into his radio.

Crouched against the wall of the bakery, Fish watched, his heart hammering and his mind in turmoil. The grey clouds had passed and now his blood sped around his body crazily, pounding in his head and making him feel hot and clammy. He wanted to run out, calling for his mother, but years of coping with a world that no one else could see had made him careful.

By now, Susan was being lifted on to a stretcher. Fish was sure that in the muddle of people nobody would pay much attention to a small boy mingling with the onlookers, so he took a deep breath, stood up and walked calmly out into the busy crowd. He pulled on the arm of one of the ambulance men, the one standing slightly back from the two handling the stretcher. The man looked round, then down. Fish could see himself reflected in tiny detail in the man's eyes. Just a kid with white-blond hair and eyes the colour of hazelnuts, drowning in a T-shirt far too big for him.