PathFinder (5 page)

Oskar needed time to think, time to work out what to do. He knew that as soon as he got home, any thoughts about Tod would be eaten up by his parents’ sadness. He had plenty of time to walk home the long way by the salt marsh – a dried-up lake just beyond the village. He knew he could easily be home before Jerra left. Oskar loved the feeling of peace that the ancient PathFinder ghosts who wandered the marshes gave him. Maybe he would find some tonight; maybe he could even ask them what to do. Surely an ancient ghost would know?

It was the dark of the moon, a night when the PathFinders traditionally left lights in their windows until morning. As Oskar followed the boarded path, which weaved its way between the tree-trunk stilts of the houses, he felt as though he were walking through a mystical woodland, while above him the candle flames flickered like tiny stars falling to earth. It was beautiful, but it was also eerily empty. Since Ferdie had been taken, people did not go out much at night and all the ladders were drawn up so there were none of the easy comings and goings between the houses that had once happened.

With the quiet buzz of conversation in lilting PathFinder voices drifting down, Oskar headed along the track between the straggle of outlying houses. The wind was behind him and sent him quickly along. Soon he was leaving the lights and houses behind and following a narrow path as it dipped down into the cool darkness between the dunes. Even now, Oskar did not mind the dark; he knew the paths with his eyes closed and he enjoyed the feeling of invisibility that his night cloak gave him as his feet found their way across the weathered planks sunk into the sand. Silently Oskar padded along and soon the gentle
peep-peep
of waterbirds digging for worms on the marsh told him that he was very nearly there.

It was then, above the peepings, that Oskar became aware of a strange sound – a hoarse, breathy panting. He stopped dead. Knowing that, like many PathFinders, his skin and red hair had a sheen at night, Oskar pulled up the hood of his cloak; then he crouched down into the sandy darkness and listened.

Oskar could read the land like Tod could read the sea. He felt a few grains of sand skitter down; he heard the crackle of the dry dune grasses somewhere above him and he sensed the vibrations of large but light-footed creatures. Oskar reckoned that they were walking on all fours and, from the hesitant way they were moving, it seemed to him that they were unsure where to go.

The creatures drew to a halt and Oskar realised that they were almost directly above him. He froze. He suspected that the merest twitch of a muscle would get him noticed – and there was something about these creatures that made Oskar very certain that being noticed by them was the last thing he wanted to happen.

Click-clicker-click
.

A low series of clicks were coming from the top of the dune. Oskar listened, recognising three distinct tones flicking in and out of what seemed to be some kind of discussion. He suppressed a shiver. The clicks were so foreign, so inhumanly mechanical, that they scared a very ancient part of his being. But what frightened Oskar most was something much more recent – the memory of a late-night conversation he had overheard between his parents not long after Ferdie had gone. “Jonas, I’m telling you, I heard
clicks
,” he remembered his mother saying. “Like this –” Oskar’s mother had made rapid clicking noises with her tongue. “I thought it was one of Oskie’s mechanical toys. You know how Ferdie liked – no, no,
likes
– to borrow Oskie’s stuff. Oh, if only I’d gone in to see what it was. If
only
 …”

Click
.
Click-clicker-click
.

Oskar went cold. He knew that just a few feet above him were the creatures that had taken Ferdie.

Click-click-clicker-click
.

And now they were back. Who had they come for this time?

Clicker-click
.

He remembered Aunt Mitza’s parting instruction: “Say goodbye, Oskar Sarn. Say
goodbye
.”

Oskar knew the answer: they had come for Tod.

The Race

C
lick-click-clicker-click
.

Oskar felt a rising terror. He decided that the only way to stop the panic was to see what was above him. The reality could be no worse than the images that were filling his head. Very slowly, Oskar looked up – and wished he hadn’t.

Oskar’s night vision showed him far more than he wished to see. Three beings, with wide, flat heads like those of a giant snake, stood at the top of the dune. Taller than a man, whip-thin yet muscular and as eerily white as deep-sea denizens that had never seen the light, they were half crouched on two powerful back legs; their smaller front legs – which had almost human hands – were off the ground, giving them an air of indecision. Their big heads were nodding in time with their
click-clicker-click
s and a sudden dart of a forked black tongue, glistening with slime, made Oskar’s mouth go dry with fear.

Oskar recognised the creatures at once as Garmin. There was a drawing of them in one of his favourite books,
Magykal, Mystikal and Mythikal Creatures: Facts
. He was shocked. He had no idea Garmin actually existed.

Clicker-click
.
Clicker-click
.

But the Garmin were as real as he was. Oskar could see the page in his book as though it were in front of him:

Garmin

Predator. Extruder. Non-venomous. Nocturnal. Cave-dwelling.

Covering: White skin. Minimal hair.

Oskar took a little comfort from “non-venomous”, but that was outweighed by “predator”. He was trying to remember what “extruder” meant when another shower of earth came flying down. Suddenly the Garmin took off, their powerful back legs sending them leaping swiftly across the top of the dunes – heading for Tod’s house. A stab of fear ran through Oskar. The Garmin were going so fast that they would be there in no time at all. Oskar knew he had to get to Tod before the creatures did.

Oskar’s only chance of reaching Tod first was to take the Burrows – direct routes through the dunes. Many were roofed over with planks and some actually burrowed through the sand. The Garmin would have to run up and down the hills, but by using the Burrows, Oskar could cut straight through. He raced off at top speed and was soon heading for the nearest Burrow. Oskar’s parents had forbidden him to use the Burrows, as there had been a lethal sand-snake infestation some years earlier, but right then, Oskar didn’t care about sand snakes. He reached the mouth of the Burrow, took his light stick from his pocket, snapped it open and dived inside. The dim green light of the stick showed just enough to stop him from cannoning into the sandy walls and, he hoped, to scare any remaining sand snakes away. Barefoot, Oskar ran fast, feeling the damp sand cold beneath his feet and hearing the muffled
thub-thubber-thub
of his footsteps. He was soon out of the Burrow and into the night air, heading for the next one, careering into a steep-sided canyon between two dunes, the sharp-edged grass cutting his legs as he ran. But Oskar felt nothing – nothing except for the terror of
being too late
.

Three long minutes later, Oskar emerged from a particularly low Burrow on to the old cinder track that led up from the rock pools at the end of the fishing beach. He paused very briefly to catch his breath and orient himself:
Tod’s house should just be visible from here
, he thought. And sure enough, it was. To Oskar’s surprise, the tall house standing alone was remarkably easy to spot – it was lit up like a MidWinter Feast tree, with candles blazing in every window.

Oskar was puzzled. Aunt Mitza was notoriously stingy – even at the dark of the moon she allowed only one window to be lit, but now every window had a whole line of candles blazing away on its sill, and the house shone like a beacon in the night. Suddenly, Oskar understood. The reason the house looked like a beacon was because that was exactly what it was: a beacon showing the Garmin where to come.
Aunt Mitza had planned it all
. Feeling sick with fear, Oskar raced up the track and hurtled down into a dark and particularly deep Burrow. Some thirty seconds later, he was pushing open a trapdoor and staggering out into the undercroft below Tod’s house.

Oskar snapped his light stick closed and shoved it into his pocket. He stared at the brilliant window-shaped pools of light that the candles cast on to the sand surrounding the undercroft and listened hard for any clicks. All was silent. A sudden creak in the floorboards above sent his heart pounding until he realised it was just heavy footed Aunt Mitza moving across the room. Oskar knew he had to act quickly. Skirting the raised brick top of the icehouse, he padded soft and fast across the earthen floor of the undercroft, all the while listening, listening,
listening
. The sudden flap of a fishing net against the side of the house as the wind caught it made him stop dead – until he realised what it was and carried on.

Oskar reached the tree-trunk stilt at the front left-hand corner of the house, which was nearest to Tod’s attic window. Carved into all PathFinder house stilts and continuing up the round corner posts on the sides of the houses were shallow footholds, cut so that nets could be easily hung up to dry. Oskar remembered Dan Moon scrambling up the very same stilt to hang out his nets after the day’s fishing, cheerfully calling down to him and asking how he was. Oskar felt sad remembering Dan. Like Tod, he still found it hard to believe he was gone.

Silent as a cat, Oskar swung himself up on to a foothold and began to climb. Soon he was level with the first floor, where not so long ago, he had been having supper. Suddenly, in the window that faced the Far, Oskar saw the dark shape of Aunt Mitza outlined against the light, standing still and watchful, staring out into the night.

Like a lizard in the sun when a shadow passes over it, Oskar froze. He clung to the corner post, waiting for Aunt Mitza to go. But Aunt Mitza stood motionless – apart from her head, which she turned in quick, anxious movements. Soon Oskar’s fingers and toes began to go numb and he knew he had to move or fall. Praying that Aunt Mitza didn’t look around just then, he took a deep breath and carried on up, swinging from side to side, his bare feet finding the footholds, left … right … left … right, his strong hands pulling him ever upwards.

Tod’s house was four storeys high if you counted the undercroft and the attic. By the time Oskar reached the bargeboard that ran below the reed-thatched roof, the muscles in his arms and legs were burning and his fingers were raw and bleeding from two broken nails. But Oskar felt nothing but triumph –
he had made it
.

Clinging to a net hook, his feet resting on the rim of the porthole that lit the attic stairs, Oskar considered how he was going to get across to Tod’s window. It was only a short distance – no more than eight feet – but there was nothing to hold on to. Trying not to think of the drop below, Oskar put his right foot into the curve of the nearest net hook and levered himself up so he lay flat upon the thatch. Then, determined not to look down, he inched his way, crab-like, along the spiky reeds and was soon within arm’s length of Tod’s little dormer window. But, as he leaned across to get a handhold on the window sill, Oskar’s heart leaped into his mouth. Far below, he glimpsed three white shapes flitting across a pool of window light on the ground.

Click-clicker-click
.

The Garmin were here.

Garmin

Alice TodHunter Moon was not
a girl given to screaming. But it took all of Tod’s nerve – plus her determination that Aunt Mitza was
never
going to hear her scream – not to yell out loud when she saw a bloody hand with broken nails clawing at her window. Tod picked up a net hook and advanced towards the window, ready to smash the hand away. She swung the hook back and was about to bring it crashing through the glass when Oskar’s pale face – his mouth open in dismay as he saw the net hook swinging his way – came into view on the other side of the window.

With a deep
thud
, the net hook buried itself in the thick upright in the middle of the casement window and a shocked Oskar lost his grip and began to slide down the thatch. Tod threw open the window and in one easy, practised movement she grabbed hold of Oskar’s shirt, pulled him in and deposited him on the floor – she had landed fish bigger than Oskar Sarn many times. He lay winded, staring up at Tod in much the same manner as her last Gooper fish had done.

Tod dropped to the floor. “Oskie!” she said. “Oskie, hey, what are you doing?”

“Tod,” Oskar gasped. “You – we – we’ve got to get out of here. The things that came for Ferdie – they’re Garmin, and they’ve come for you.
They’re here
.”

Tod went cold. She jumped up, pulled Oskar to his feet and headed towards the attic ladder, dragging Oskar with her. Oskar protested. “No, no,” he whispered. “The window.
Out of the window!
” Tod did not hear. She was already on the ladder, climbing down like a monkey and beckoning urgently to Oskar to
hurry up
. Oskar had no option but to follow. He swung himself after her and as Tod stepped on to the landing below, Oskar jumped lightly from the ladder and grabbed her.