Dark Eden

all dead!’ said a big Batwing woman called Angie. She was Mehmet’s auntie. It had been her who’d raised the boy up after a leopard did for his mum. ‘You come here, Mehmet my pet. Come to Auntie Angie.’
    ‘Yes, and I
want
to hear about John,’ called my sister Jade, ‘I want to hear about him!’
    And she looked at me guiltily, as if she doubted her own right to get involved.
    ‘Gela and Clare Brooklyn,’ someone else was calling. ‘Are they alright? Tell us that they didn’t die in the snow!’
    ‘What about Julie Blueside? And Angie and Candy?’
    Everyone was pushing forward, crowding round Mehmet and David and the Guards.
    ‘What about Dave and Johnny and Suzie Fishcreek. How are they? Suzie’s alright, isn’t she?’
    It was weird. Even before I heard Mehmet’s answer I knew what it would be. Everyone was yelling yelling at the same time, but when Suzie’s mum called out, a kind of hollowness suddenly opened up in middle of all that noise.
    ‘No,’ Mehmet said, ‘Dave and Johnny are still alive, but Suzie is dead.’
    And whole Family was silent then, completely silent. You could hear the
hmmmmmmmm
of the misty forest all around us, the
hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
of the trees nearby.
    ‘Dead?’ said Suzie Fishcreek’s mum, smiling broadly like he’d just told a joke. ‘
Dead?
No, that can’t be . . . You just told us . . . Well, you didn’t
tell
us but the fact that you’re here proves that . . . Well . . .’
    She giggled.
    ‘No, not dead,’ she said firmly.
    Poor woman. Mehmet had brought her sons and her daughter back to life for her when he came into the clearing, just like he’d brought Jeff and Gerry back to life for me. Suzie had leapt out of Snowy Dark for her, alive and well. And now, a few minutes later, she was dead again.
    ‘Yes, dead,’ said Mehmet. ‘That fool John led us up onto the snow. He had no proper plan. He didn’t know what to expect. It’s only luck that we didn’t all die. But Suzie
did
die. There’s a terrible kind of leopard up there, a white leopard that can throw its voice from one place to another. It did for her up there, her and one of our bucks, and it drove off the other one with Jeff on it, so we were all left in Dark.’
    My heart went cold. The world closed in round me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Was Mehmet going to kill off
my
child as well?
    ‘Jeff?’ I cried. ‘It drove Jeff off? What happened to him? Did he come back? Is Jeff alright?’
    ‘He was alright last time I saw him.’
    ‘Well, so’s Suzie then,’ said Suzie’s mum, smiling round at the people around her. ‘She’s not dead. Mehmet’s here, isn’t he? Mehmet is here to prove that they’re all okay!’
    ‘Suzie died,’ Mehmet said. ‘Last I heard all the others were alive. Dave Fishcreek was with me earlier this waking. He came down with me from Tall Tree Valley, but he ran off when you guys started yelling at us and waving spears. Johnny Fishcreek, and Julie and Angie and Candy Blueside, they’re all back up there in Tall Tree Valley. We’ve got our own little Tall Tree group up there. Three babies too.’
    ‘And Jeff? And Gerry?’
    ‘All the others stayed with John. He had to keep going, didn’t he? Tall Tree Valley is a good place – all the bucks you could wish for – but he had to go back up onto Dark again, trying to find the way across to the other side.’
    So of course me and all the other mums and sisters and brothers and friends were calling out to know more again.
    ‘It gets cold up where we are sometimes,’ Mehmet said, ‘and snow comes down. But it doesn’t kill us, does it? It’s not cold like up on Snowy Dark. And it’s not dark either. But, first time the snow came down, off they all went, the bloody fools, Tina, Dix, Janny, Gerry, Jeff, dumb old Harry, all that lot, following that crazy John, that crazy killer John, back up onto Dark where Suzie died, and where we all
nearly
died, and would have done too if Jeff hadn’t come back for us. Good luck to them, they’ll need it.
    ‘But me and Dave and Johnny and the Blueside girls, we figured we could work out how to deal with a bit of snow. We
have
figured it out too. We wear thick wraps. We make strong shelters and big fires. We turn bucks into horses. It’s a good life up there. We get all the buckmeat we could ever want, and all the . . .’
    ‘My Jeff came back for you, you said,’ I called out. ‘What did he do? Where had he gone? Where did he come