Dark Eden

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 he’s dead but he drops back down the tube to Underworld, to rot or be eaten up by whatever it is that lives down there. Three, you get him with the string but not the club, so he’s still alive and threshing and biting like crazy and you have to hold tight and hope the string doesn’t break or he’ll get you with those vicious spiny teeth. This time, though, they got all of it right. The string caught the slinker round the neck, the club mashed its head so that, if that slinker wasn’t dead straight off, it certainly near enough was, and Gerry and Jeff pulled it out of the hole, its body still twitching and its little claws still waving about and clicking and grabbing at the air.
    ‘Got yer!’ yelled Met delightedly, giving it another whack with the club.
    Gerry ran forward to trample on it. Met hit it again.
    But Jeff, he was a strange little boy. He had been part of all this up to that moment, but now suddenly he was standing back from what was going on, like he was looking in from outside.
    ‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘This is happening. We are really here.’
    ‘Of course we’re bloody here, you dork!’ exclaimed Met, giving the quivering slinker another whack.
    But Gerry regarded his brother with a concerned expression. He was protective of Jeff, and at the same time he looked up to him, even though Jeff was the younger of the two of them. He knew there was something strange and special about Jeff while he, well, he was just Gerry.
    Jeff squatted down by the slinker,