Dark Eden by Chris Beckett Page A

down from Starry Swirl in a shining Veekle to take everyone home. But I was far far away when the Veekle came. I saw it come down from sky in the distance and I ran and ran towards it, but things kept getting in my way, and I couldn’t move forward, and I knew that pretty soon it would lift up again into sky, and return to Earth without me, and never come back.

     
    Next waking Bella sent me out scavenging. It wasn’t a proper hunt and I had to stay just outside Family Fence because I was with big Met and Gerry and Jeff, and Jeff can’t walk far with his clawfeet. Of course there weren’t many pickings just outside the fence because everyone scavenged there, but we were lucky, sort of, because pretty soon Met spotted the tail end of a slinker disappearing down the air-tube of a whitelantern tree.
    It was the grey kind, the thickness of a man’s arm and maybe two three times as long, with thirty forty pairs of little claws and glittery eyes and an ugly mouth full of vicious little spiny black teeth. That was the kind you had to watch out for if you were looking for candy in stumps and air-tubes. Littles sometimes got excited about candy and forgot to check for slinkers, and then slinkers came up and bit them in the face – there were quite a few in Family with scarred faces or missing eyes or noses – so grownups always told us to kill any slinker we found near Family. And lately we’d taken to eating the creatures too. There was a fair bit of meat on one of them, when you picked it out of the shelly bits and the bones, even though it tasted of mud and it gave some people bellyache.
    Anyway when we saw it go down the tube, we backed off for a bit to give it time to turn itself round in there. Meantime we took out some wavyweed string that we had in our bag and made a loop in it. I had a club with me. It was a good one, made of a whitelantern branch with two big stones shoved into the hole at the bigger end and sealed in there with buckfoot glue. I gave it to Met, who was tall and clumsy and not too bright.
    ‘Don’t you want to do for it, John?’ he asked, like it was my right, since I’d done for the leopard, to kill any animal I liked.
    Met was one of those many people who look to others to tell him what to do and what to think.
    ‘No, you saw it, Met, you do for it.’
    The flutterbyes had fluttered off when the slinker appeared, but flutterbyes don’t have much memory, and, now the slinker was out of sight, they’d all started coming back again after the candy. And pretty soon there was a bat there too, a tar bat, leopard-black, swooping and diving like a scrap of darkness in the glittery forest, snatching up the flutterbyes as they came up from the tubecandy.
    Silly bat didn’t know what was coming. Snap! Out shot the head of the slinker and got it with one crunch, along with a couple of flutterbyes. Click click , went its feet as it backed down the tube again.
    I looked at Met. He’d have preferred me to take charge really, but he could see from my face that I was leaving it up to him.
    ‘Er … You two ready with that string then, Gerry and Jeff?’ he asked.
    The three of them crept forward quietly and Gerry and Jeff stood each side of the tree trunk with the loop dangling over the hole. Met stood in front of them with the club ready.
    Another bat came looping down. Whoosh , went its wings as it dived through the flutterbyes, snatching up a big fat blue one with its little hands. Then up it swooped again, up through the shining branches, up, up, up, gobbling down the flutterbye as it went. Up, up, up, then round and down it came again, right down, right next to the tube hole.
    ‘Now!’ yelled Met as the slinker’s head came out. Jeff and Gerry pulled tight. Met brought his club down smack . The bat swerved away with a little shriek.
    Three things could easily go wrong at this moment. One, the slinker pulls back too quick and you don’t get him. Two, you get him with the club but not the string, so