Free Irregular Verbs by Matthew Johnson Page B

see his own reflection, now, in the shield he had just finished cleaning. His wild hair he recognized—it had sometimes grown that way at the end of a summer, when it went months without being cut or even brushed—but the gaunt, jagged face was not the one he had known from school photos or seen in the mirror while brushing his teeth. He reached up to his cheek, felt the three scars that ran across it and remembered the day he had received them.
    The first things he had seen on coming through the door that night had been a great grey-white rabbit, twice as tall as he was and dressed in a checked waistcoat, and a hedgehog the size of a large dog who was wearing an apron and a ruffled cap.
    “Hello,” the rabbit said, in a voice like the people on the English TV shows the boy’s father liked to watch. “I’m Mr. Jacoby, and this is Mrs. Marmalade.”
    “Hello.” The boy pulled himself fully out of the small passage and straightened up. He looked around, saw a room with grey stone walls and a low ceiling. There was a stone hearth in the far wall, where a fire was burning low: the floor was cold, much colder than it had been at his house, and he was suddenly very conscious of being a small boy in his pajamas. “I came because—the Gnome with the Silver Key said—”
    “Mrs. Marmalade, take this boy to the dormitory please,” Mr. Jacoby said. Turning to the boy he said, “We’ll get you to work in the morning.”
    Mrs. Marmalade walked over to the boy, whuffling with each awkward step. She smelled of earth and rotting vegetables. He felt a sudden shock of fear as she looked up at him and he saw her face more clearly: it was not a human face at all, not a storybook face, but just a hedgehog’s face with beady eyes and sharp teeth. Lice were crawling on her hairy snout, and every now and then her long pink tongue darted out to draw one into her mouth.
    “I’ve changed my mind,” the boy said, turning around to get back into the passageway. It was gone, the rough stone wall showing no signs it had ever been there. “I don’t think I want to go on an adventure after all.”
    “Let’s get you off to bed,” Mr. Jacoby said, putting a paw on the boy’s shoulder. “It’ll all seem better in the morning.”
    The boy shrugged off Jacoby’s grasp. “I want to go home,” he said, his voice cracking as he began to cry. “Do you hear me? I want to go home.”
    He was thrown into the wall by the creature’s paw, and raised a hand to his cheek to feel blood running from the deep scratches there. He had not known rabbits had claws.
    There were other boys there, boys who had been brought here as he was, and in time he learned a bit about why they were there. There was a war going on, that was clear, though none of the boys knew anything about who the sides were or what the war was about. The House was a good way away from the front, but not so far that it was not occasionally rocked when one side or the other started blasting.
    The war had been going on for a long time, so long that the whole country around was a cemetery—some graves the tombs and barrows of the honoured dead, others filled-in trenches where men’s bodies lay where they died. The boys’ job was to search these graves for weapons and armour that could be used to equip the men at the front. Sometimes these men would pass through the House—though they were not all men, and not all of them were even things Calx could have imagined if he had not seen them. He had learned to avoid them all, no matter how friendly they acted or normal-looking they looked: they lived in another world, one more brutal even than the House.
    Each day every boy was sent to work for either Mr. Jacoby or Mrs. Marmalade: Mr. Jacoby supervised the boys who searched the graves, while Mrs. Marmalade oversaw the keeping of the House. At night the torches were put out and the boys allowed a few hours’ sleep, but more often than not they would stay awake a while longer, savouring