Birth of a Killer. Darren Shan
much time on the daubings — he would take the blame if production dipped.
“Bend over,” he grunted and grabbed the back of Larten’s neck. Thrusting the boy down, he reached into the bucket of orange dye with his brush, swished it from side to side, then ran the coarse bristles over the top of Larten’s scalp. The dye stung, and a few drops trickled into Larten’s eyes, even though he kept them squeezed shut.
Traz painted Larten’s head a second time, then a third, before releasing him. As Larten staggered away, coughing and wiping his eyes, Traz forced Vur down over the bucket. He was even rougher with Vur and daubed his scalp five times. Vur was crying when the foreman finally let him go, but he said nothing, only stumbled along after his cousin.
Traz daubed the head of every child in the factory. Each had a specific colour, depending on their job. The lucky few who worked on the looms were blue. Cleaners were yellow. Cocooners were orange. He liked being able to tell with a single look where a child was meant to be. That way, if he saw an orange-haired boy lurking by a loom, he knew straightaway that the child was shirking.
Larten and Vur had been assigned to the cocooning team when they started at the factory at the age of eight. Their heads had been orange ever since. In fact Larten couldn’t remember what colour his hair had been before that.
Larten’s father had been a muscular child and had worked on a team carting heavy loads around. His head had been dyed white, and although he’d left the factory before Larten was born, his locks had kept their unnatural colour, so Larten had resigned himself to a life of orange hair. Nobody knew what sort of poisons Traz included in his dyes, but they seeped into a person’s pores and remained there for life. Larten wouldn’t be surprised if the dye had even turned his brain a dark orange colour.
Once past Traz, the boys made their way to the room of cocoons to begin their shift. They worked in the factory for twelve hours a day, six days a week, and eight hours on most Sundays, with no more than a handful of holidays every year. It was a hard life, yet there were others worse off than Larten and Vur. Some of the children were slaves, bought by Traz from poor or greedy parents. The slaves worked constantly, except for when they slept. They were supposed to be set free once they came of age, but most died long before that. Even if they lived long enough to earn their freedom, they were usually ruined by that time, good for nothing except stealing or begging.
The factory primarily produced carpets, but it also manufactured silk clothes for patrons with more money than Larten or Vur could dream of ever possessing. Silk came from worms, and the boys were part of the team responsible for loosening the strands of the worms’ cocoons.
Silk worms hatched from the eggs of carefully bred moths, and were fed on chopped mulberry leaves to fatten them up. They were kept in a warm room, countless thousands stacked on wooden trays from floor to ceiling, munching away. Larten had been in the room a few times and the sound was like the rain falling on the roof of their house during a storm.
When they had eaten enough, the silk worms spun a cocoon around themselves. It took three or four days. After that they were stored in an even warmer room for eight or nine days, then baked in an oven to kill the worm, but preserve the cocoon.
That was when Larten, Vur and their team went into action. When the cocoons were delivered, they sorted through them, dividing them into piles on the basis of size, colour and quality. Then they dipped the cocoons into vats of hot water to loosen the threads. Once they’d done that, they passed the cocoons to another team, whose members unwound the threads onto spools, which were finally given to the weavers at the looms.
Although Larten couldn’t remember what colour his hair had been when he first came to the factory, he would never forget the first time he dunked his hands in a vat of near-boiling water. Traz watched, smiling, as the boy worked up the courage to stick in his fingers. The foreman laughed when Larten touched the hot water and jerked away with a yelp. Then he grabbed the boy’s hands by the wrists and jammed them in. He held them under, chuckling sadistically while Larten cried and his flesh reddened.
Larten studied his fingers. They were callused, stained and cut in many places. He didn’t mind the calluses and stains, but the cuts worried him. Silk worms were disgusting, filthy creatures. Larten had seen many of his team lose a finger or a hand when a dirt-encrusted cut became infected. Some had even died of blood-poisoning.
There was nothing worse than the stench of gangrene. Sometimes a child tried to hide an infected wound in the vain hope that it would miraculously cure itself. But the smell always gave them away, and Traz would gleefully cut out the rot with a heated knife, or hack off the diseased limb with an axe.
Larten lived in fear of infection. He hoped he would have the courage, if the day ever came, to cut himself before Traz could, and cleanse the wound with a firing brand. But he knew it would be a difficult thing to do, and he was afraid he’d try to hide it as so many others had before him.
“I see some green,” Vur murmured, looking closely at Larten’s left hand. Larten’s heart beat faster and his head darted forward. Then he caught Vur’s smile.
“Cur!” he growled, playfully punching his cousin.
“They’re fine,” Vur laughed. “The sweetest pair of hands in the factory. Now let’s stop wasting time. There are cocoons to boil.”
Sighing, Larten reached into his bucket. He took out a few cocoons, steadied himself, then drove his hands deep into the heart of the bubbling vat. The pain was fierce to begin with, but after a few seconds his toughened flesh adjusted and he worked without complaint for the rest of the morning.
CHAPTER THREE
The hours passed slowly and quietly. Dunking cocoons wasn’t a demanding job and boredom quickly set in. Larten would have loved to chat with Vur and the others on his team. But Traz prowled the factory relentlessly, and although he was a large man, he could move as lithely as a cat. If the foreman caught you talking, he would whip you until he drew blood. There was a rumour that he’d once cut out a girl’s tongue and kept it in his wallet. So all of them went about their business in silence, only talking if it was work-related.
The fires beneath the vats were kept burning around the clock – slaves worked throughout the night – and the room was forever smoke-filled. It wasn’t long before the children were coughing and spitting, rubbing grit from their eyes. Larten could never get the taste of smoke out of his mouth. Even in dreams his tongue was heavy with soot.
His clothes stank too, as did Vur’s. Some nights, when Larten’s mother was in a foul mood, she would scream at the boys and force them to undress. She’d toss their clothes into the yard and they’d have to go to bed early to hide their naked bodies from Larten’s jeering brothers and sisters.
Larten’s father hadn’t wanted to send the boys to the factory. He hated the place as much as they did, even though he’d escaped and now laboured elsewhere. He had managed to find work in other areas for the older children, but jobs were scarce when it came time for Larten and Vur to earn a living. The silk factory had recently won a lucrative contract and Traz was offering halfway decent wages. There was nowhere else for the unlucky pair to go.
Larten had to keep the fire beneath his vat at a constant heat. As soon as he felt the temperature of the water dropping, he fed the flames with an armful of logs from a mound at the back of the room.
Across from him, Vur finished dunking another batch of cocoons, then set off at a jog for the pit out back. Traz reluctantly accepted the need for toilet breaks, but if he caught you walking instead of running, you were guaranteed a whipping.
Larten grinned. Vur had a weak bladder and most days he had to go to the pit three times to Larten’s once. Vur tried drinking less, but it made no difference. Traz had beaten him in the early days, when he thought the boy was making excuses. But eventually he realised that Vur’s complaint was genuine, and though he still cuffed Vur occasionally, he let the wretch go as often as he needed to.
Vur looked worried when he returned this time.
“What’s wrong?” Larten whispered.