ruefully at the perimeter.
"And we could have dug a fire ditch around it too," he said. Jeremy joined him and fanned his spear outwards.
"I hear you. Filled with diesel, with a channel that came in here so we could torch it up when the assault came.”
Talk of impending attack seemed suddenly ludicrous to Nathan. The very fabric of night was warm and aromatic; only the slow designs of dreams could be woven there.
They talked low and excitedly for an hour or so longer. Nathan felt the afternoon's exertions hit him in a wave of tiredness. It was like he previously had only the merest concept of that word. The marrow of his bones had been replaced by a sludgy gray concoction, the pure distillation of lethargy. In spite of himself, Nathan was enjoying the sensation. Sleep seemed possible at any moment. His head would pitch forward and then into the fire where it would sizzle as he slept.
And I will sleep, he told himself. I have earned a thousand years' worth of sleep.
Lying on the bottom of the trench, enclosed in his sleeping bag, Nathan was still listening for the bells' low tolling when exhaustion claimed him.
Ian's watch was uneventful. A single night bird took wing above him about halfway through his shift, but that was all. He felt ready. A weapon to hand and his friends close by; could the world possibly offer anything more? Let our enemies try and take this place. With the moonglow framing him in low silhouette, he was as a Victorian-era statue embodying wild and noble grace: The Savage Child Watches For His Prey. Animals suggested themselves in the branches stirring above when the wind rose. There were spiders of course, their great spindly legs supporting bodies lost in the darkness clotting the treetops. Other things shifted and played there, however Ian did not like to dwell in contemplation of them for too long.
By slow, languid degrees, Ian joined his friends in sleep. Sighing gusts rustled the plantation, rhythmic and lulling. The boy looked at the harlequin shapes dappling his hand as the branches wove shadow across the trench. Ian's head nodded once before he righted his vision. There he found the state where waking thoughts acquiesce to the whispered demands of dreams. The forest became the ocean's edge, a tidal pool sluiced by warm surf. He drifted with the water's motion. Sea-grass fronds and shell domes were beneath his trailing hands. The sky was oppressively low, shot though with black lightning. In the nearby shallows lolled a whale, curtains of water streaming from its glossy flukes. Ian slept then, and knew no more.
A shuddering roar arose from the world's foundations. All three boys still clung to sleep. Nathan was tracking through the dawn's gray void at immense velocity. His pace matched that of a man running through the city streets below. A bow wave preceded him, the very atmosphere shearing before the force of his progress. Nathan could see the vortices of ruptured air spreading rearward from this living engine of momentum as a wake of steam. Nathan woke. That sound was still loud in his ears.
He shook his friends to readiness.
"Something is coming for us," he whispered. "Get your spears.”
The trio took up their positions beneath the growing mantle of drumming steps.
"Come on, you bastards," snarled Ian.
The sound stopped. A white flash in the sky above. Nathan saw only the pine boughs reddened by dawn.
"Where is it? Can you see it?" hissed Jeremy.
A robed skeleton appeared beneath the cross-brace for the Malayan Gates. It did not warp into being from spectral mists. It was just there, a tall man's height, the face half-hidden by ashen cloth.
And the frog was in its bony palm.
Nathan felt as if a giant hook made of ice had been inserted through the back of his skull. He could see himself standing in the trench suddenly, like when you flipped the views of a character in a computer game.
The hook began to pull him forward. Nathan was startled to see the spear rising in his hands. He felt capable of anything. Looking at Ian and Jeremy, he saw their stance mirrored his own, spear forward in the manner of a medieval pikeman. Jeremy yelled, his voice trembling.
“If you want Nathan, you will have to get through us first.”
No movement from the skeleton; a long series of moments which crawled down the boys' spines. Ian decided to end the stalemate. Dropping his main spear, he stooped for a lighter, throwable version. Jeremy nodded and looked at Nathan. Ian hefted it for a moment, poised and released. To their combined shock, the boys saw the javelin fly true, striking the figure where they guessed its stomach would be. Ian was both immensely proud of the shot and wracked with primal guilt.
Now I've done it, I've really done it! he thought.
Another missile flew wide of the skeleton, and a third javelin arced over its head. Nathan and Jeremy grabbed up their larger weapons again. Their intended target leapt lightly over the warning-line of bells and was in their trench. Ian's spear dislodged from its robes mid-flight, and with a dancer's grace the thing plucked it from the air, stabbing it into the ground before landing.
Jeremy and Ian went forward, hefting their spears to chest-height.
“Not any closer,” he warned. “We know how to use these!.”
Nathan took his place in the line. Raising and uncurling its hand, the boys saw the frog nestled there. Adrenaline was coursing through Nathan's body like a high Summer tide. He spoke his thoughts.
“It can't be real, can it? A skeleton that walks!”
“There's only one that I know of,” Jeremy mused.
“I hit 'im square in the guts,” lamented Ian. “But he didn't feel it at all”.
Nathan imagined his next words were from a movie, one just before the villain is delivered his death blow.
“Maybe he'll feel this.”
The boy stormed forward, seeking to bury the spear in their guest's vertebrae. It sidestepped just before the blade's impact and snatched the weapon away from him. Nathan sought to rejoin his friends but both its gruesome right hand splayed open and was upon his forehead like a pallid spider dropping from a web.
At the touch of that dusty claw he had felt an immense will brush against his mind and then recoil. Just behind that contact was an unimaginably expansive intelligence. Nathan gasped, for this was not the discovery of a being extant to his body. He was conscious of that mind as an ocean revealed within his very being, its depths filling the space between heartbeats.
He could see the faintest trace of moss between the ivory nubs of his wrist-bone. It was only now that Nathan felt how hard his heart was hammering; his T-shirt was sweat-soaked. Finally the skeleton took a single step away, its claw retracting deep within the folds of his robe.
"Is it who I think?" asked Jeremy.
Nathan nodded. “It's Death. He wants us to follow him for some reason, I'm sure of it. Like a kind of a mission.” The last embellishment did not seem that fanciful. For why else would they be chosen?
Ian retrieved his spear, looking nothing so much as a tiny warrior seeking the Childrens' Crusade. Jeremy approached their guest.
"I need to be shown proof. What if you are just planning to take us down to the underworld for your own amusement?"
Ian giggled for a moment but quickly stilled himself. Death moved forward to clasp Jeremy's forehead as he had Nathan's. The boy shrank away from his advance.
“It's because we found the frog, right?" asked Jeremy. “I mean, it just makes sense. That makes us special …. like special forces kind of.”
Both boys watched for Ian's reaction. When it came, it was to the figure in black, fierce and proud.
"Do your worst," he said.
Death gave no sign of recognition. He turned and leapt lightly up to the trees. Nathan saw that the swelling sunlight fell upon him as a thick halo. The black of his robes captured the light but did not devour it. The boys followed, with Nathan carefully cradling the frog in a cupped hand.
We have fallen into a dream, Nathan thought. We might never wake up. He looked down at the frog.
"It isn't scared at all," he noted, drawing
a finger across its head gently.
Ian looked for himself.
"We are going to keep it forever," he said firmly. "He promised, right?"
Nathan said yes. Jeremy scooped the frog into his palm as he walked beside his friends. Their guide set a quick pace. Jeremy voiced their thoughts.
"Where is he taking us, Nathan? I mean where is the mission going to be?"
Nathan lied with deft precision.
"There's a war going on. In the underworld. There's … a pretender to the throne of Death.”
His friends said nothing. Nathan knew that concept was taking root within their imaginations. In truth, it was the title of one if Scott's favourite albums.
"So we are going to fight for Death himself!" said Ian.
"Soldiers of Death!" said Jeremy. As soon as he spoke the words, he thought of the orange lights extinguished by Death's flight. It meaning stood before him yet he refused to acknowledge it. Placing the frog carefully back in his pocket, he thought no more of it.
Hegarty's Creek ran thinly over rocks down where the pines ended and natural bush began. It entered the local golf course not far from there as a promising brook, but the innumerable tramplings of golf ball-seeking children reduced it to a muddy trickle by the time the greens ceased. At its widest point, even the smallest of them could stand with a foot on either bank. Death walked into the creek, the water barely covering his ankle bones. As he continued on, he sank. It was as if he were the entering the sharply sloping depths of a lake. Within six steps