The Cartographer by Peter Twohig

corporal) as he was the last person to be recruited. (This suited Luigi down to the ground as it meant he could be a lance corporal at last. He said he could hardly wait to tellhis dad; and he meant it, too.) And second, he would have to be initiated.
    Even so, that meeting put me off being a Commando a bit, so I decided to spend the rest of the week after school concentrating on the map, not that I had a lot of choice as one of the local kids had gone missing — the younger Harrigan kid, I heard Mum tell Mrs Carruthers — and after that none of us were allowed to go anywhere but straight to school and back. I knew who the Harrigan kid was, because his big brother, Greg, had once stuck bubble gum in my hair when Tom and me were at the flicks, and the little kid had been with him. Mum had to cut so much hair off that I ended up looking like Friar Tuck, so Greg Harrigan was our sworn enemy. But after Tom died, I lost interest in getting back at him.
    The Commandos reckoned that he’d probably run away to join the navy, but I wasn’t so sure as he was even younger than us. My money was on the old attic trick: Berny Aldersear, one of the kids at school, had once run away from home and gone no further than his own attic. He was there for a fortnight before they caught him raiding the fridge one night. His parents already reckoned he hadn’t gone too far when they discovered that he was still putting his socks and undies in the laundry basket. Old habits.
    But it’s lucky I did spend more time at home as it gave me time to think about the map. There are two kinds of map: the first kind shows you where all the good things in the world are so that you can find them, and the other kind shows you all the scary stuff so you won’t walk into it — that’s how my map had started out. But both kinds hide things that are so bad that they give you nothing but trouble. It’s up to you to find them, then decide where they should be on the map. After the Incident inthe Broken Down House, I decided that my map was crawling with those hidden things you had to watch out for. But there were way too many and after a little while I worked out why: I was cursed.
    Others might have seen it right off the bat; I did not. It took, for me, three new thrillers: Murder on the Second Floor , The Mystery of the Old Man in the Laundry and The Forking of the Dead-end Boy (a new form of crime, as far as I could tell, and one that I hoped might one day be named after me, as its discoverer) before the penny dropped.
    When I thought about it, it made sense that I was cursed; in fact, I was probably long overdue. Look at the facts: I knew the location of the Phantom’s Skull Cave, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, the Batcave and Jet Jackson’s secret laboratory with its jet hangar. And now I knew what the murderer down Kipling Lane looked like. I knew way too much to be allowed to live! I had brought this on myself; this had been coming for a long time, since Tom, really. In fact, I suppose I’d been half expecting it. This was not one of those curses that some loony old witch doctor bungs on you for refusing to marry his daughter; this was one of those curses that you catch, just by doing the wrong thing, like Pinocchio’s nose — and thank God that’s not a true story. It’s the kind you get when you can’t help someone who’s dying. I didn’t get it when Tom died — there was probably some kind of mix-up — so God sent the woman down Kipling Lane, to make sure the curse worked the second time round. You can’t fight that kind of stuff.
    But you can trick it. And I thought of a way to do it. I would become a new person, though exactly who I had not yet figured out, only that it would be someone with powers and abilities far beyond mortal men, someone who could outfox murderers,and do as he pleased without having to worry about bumping into his archenemy. The main thing