Dark Eden

moving around inside it, and creaked like a tree does in the wind.
    ‘It’s the Three, isn’t it?’ John said. ‘It’s the Three Companions. This is Dixon and Mehmet and Michael. The
first
Dixon, I mean, the
first
Mehmet. And Michael . . .’ He could hardly bring himself to say it, and when his words came they were all shaky and wobbly. ‘And Michael Name-Giver.’
    We didn’t answer him out loud.
    ‘And this is their sky-boat,’ Jeff said after a while. He spoke quietly, but more calmly than John. He was interested interested in everything, but he didn’t easily get excited or upset. ‘This is the Landing Veekle. They never made it back to
Defiant
at all.’
    In the fading light from the branch of whitelanterns, we could see the three skeletons more clearly and we could see that they still wore wraps around them, wraps to cover their whole bodies, like Tommy and Angela’s wraps that Oldest still kept bits of in the hollow log. The two skeletons with heads had white wraps, the headless skeleton had a blue one. And there was
writing
on the wraps. Gela’s eyes, once we’d got some fresh whitelanterns in to give us more light, we could see their names written there –
Mehmet Haribey
,
Dixon Thorleye
,
Michael Tennison –
names from that old old story which was so old that, though we believed it was true, we didn’t
really
believe it happened in the same world as us. But here they were, not in a story world at all, but right in front of us.
    Michael Tennison was the one whose head had fallen off. I picked it up now, that hard hollow thing with its white stony mouth that had first spoken the names of the animals and plants of Eden, all that long long time ago.
    ‘Just think,’ I said. ‘When we say “Michael’s names” this and “Michael’s names” that, this is the Michael we’re talking about!’
    People had got tired of pushing on the little squares by now and most had stopped doing it, but little Flower was still at it. She pushed in a square and suddenly – Tom’s dick, it was hard to believe – suddenly there was a voice speaking to us and a face looking out at us from a screen. Flower screamed, everyone shouted and yelled and jumped back, and the sky-boat rocked back and forth once again.
    ‘Be quiet!’ John yelled furiously. ‘Gela’s eyes, be quiet and listen!’
    It was a man’s face, a man with fair hair and tired grey eyes but no beard at all, his shoulders covered in a bright blue wrap.
    ‘ . . .Tennison,’ his voice was saying, but it sounded all thin and strange, like he was half-buried in the ground, and he spoke his words in a funny way that we could hardly understand, like he was speaking right up at the front of his mouth. ‘Michael Tennison. I’m afraid it looks as if the Landing Veekle must have been damaged when we . . .’
    And then the voice stopped, and the face disappeared, and the screen went black like all the others. And we pushed every one of those hundreds of little squares over and over again, over and over and over. We even got Flower to push them all again, in case there was something about her touch that made a difference, but we could not get the face or the voice to come back again, however hard we tried.

45

Sue Redlantern

    I was grinding up seeds to make some cakes for dinner when a Batwing kid came running into Redlantern area, shouting out that Mehmet Batwing had come down again from Dark. He’d come down with two Fishcreek boys, Paul and Gerald, who’d been the latest two sent up by David across Dark to the place called Tall Tree Valley where Mehmet and his lot lived. Mehmet, Paul and Gerald had gone straight to Guards up along Greatpool, without walking through the rest of Family at all. But one of the Guards had told his sister about it, and news was spreading from her across Family about what had happened. Apparently Paul and Gerald had met John up there: our John, John Redlantern! He’d been visiting Tall Tree too, but from the other direction, from some other place on the far side of Dark, some other forest.
    Harry’s dick, how many different places
were
there in the world?
    Not that I was worrying about that just then. As soon as I heard the news I knew something
bad
bad was going to happen and I ran straight over towards Guards, yelling out the news on my way to everyone I saw.
    ‘They’ve found out where John and his lot are!’ I called out. ‘They’ll go over after them unless we stop them! Go after our boys and girls.