Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement, left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, because of fatal allergies to iron, blood, and consecrated ground, Mackie is fighting to survive in the human world.
Mackie would give anything to live among us, to practice on his bass or spend time with his crush, Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn irrevocably into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world, or theirs.
Read an extract of The Replacement:
I was in kindergarten the first time my dad told me about Kellan Caury. The story was short, and he told it over and over, like Winnie-the-Pooh or Goodnight Moon. When my dad told it, I could see the important parts like scenes from an old movie, flickering and grainy. Kellan Caury would be quiet and polite. A grown-up, maybe in his thirties. He was like me. Mostly. Except that he had an extra set of joints in his fingers and I always pictured him in black and white. He ran a music repair shop on Hanover Street and lived above it in a little kitchenette apartment. He couldn’t tune pianos because he couldn’t stand to touch the steel wires, but he was honest and fair and everyone liked him. His specialty was fixing violins.
When kids started to go missing, no one thought that much about it. It was the Depression, and no one had enough food or enough money, and kids were always disappearing. They got sick or ran away, or died from accidents or starvation, and that was too bad, but no one really got suspicious or asked that many questions. Then the sheriff’s daughter disappeared. This was in 1931, just before the end of October. Kellan Caury had never hurt anyone, but it didn’t matter. They came for him anyway.
They dragged him out of his little kitchenette apartment and down into the street. They burned out his shop and beat on him with wrenches and pipes. Then they hung him from a tree in the churchyard with a bag over his head and his hands tied behind his back. They left his body there for a month.The first time my dad told me this, I didn’t get what he was trying to say, but by the time I was in first or second grade, I was already starting to understand.
The moral of the story is, don’t attract attention. Don’t have deformed fingers. Don’t let anyone find out how amazing you are at tuning strings by ear. Don’t show anyone the true, honest heart of yourself or else, when something goes wrong, you might wind up rotting in a tree.
Everyone has a point of origin. A place they come from. Some people’s places are just simpler than others’. I don’t remember any of this, but my sister, Emma, swears it’s true and I believe her. This is the story she used to tell me at night, when I would climb out of bed and sneak down the hall to her room.
The baby in the crib: crying, in that anxious, fussy way. His face is shiny between the bars. The man comes in the window—bony, wearing a black coat—and grabs the baby up. He slips back out overthe sill, slides the window down, pops the screen back in. Is gone. There’s something else in the crib.
In the story, Emma’s four years old. She gets out of bed and pads across the floor in her footie pyjamas. When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother.
It’s me.
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