Wonderscape

by Jennifer Bell

  “Good boy!” Cecily cheered. She dashed over and tried the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. “I think the lock’s broken,” she said, twisting the key round and round. She rammed her shoulder against it, trying to force it open.

  All of a sudden, the floor swayed.

  “Whoa!” Arthur spread his arms, trying to balance. Ren skidded into the side of the desk.

  “What’s happening?” Cecily cried, gripping the door frame. Her eyes darted around the walls as objects creaked and rattled in the darkness.

  It felt like the whole room was on a see-saw. Arthur wondered if there had been an explosion in another part of the house, but then he hadn’t heard anything. Reaching for something to steady himself, his fingertips found a small cabinet. Through the glass doors he spied bottles of ink, a jar of quills and several lanterns. “Here, grab one of these.” He passed one lantern to Ren and slid another across the desk for Cecily. “We’ve got to see what’s going on.”

  Taking it in turns, they lit their lanterns using the candle on the desk, and then held them above their heads. The remaining shadows were swept away to reveal an uneven wedge-shaped room with timber-framed windows hidden by more canvas drapes. Old-fashioned scientific instruments including hourglasses, brass weighing scales and leather-cased microscopes were stored on the shelves.

  Cecily scanned their surroundings with a look of horror. “What is this place? And why does it stink of fish?” She banged a fist against the door. “Hello? Can anybody hear me? We’re trapped!”

  Arthur sniffed, catching an unpleasant briny odour, but that wasn’t what troubled him most. He focused on the canvas drapes. Given the layout of the house, those were inside walls – they shouldn’t have windows.

  He crossed the floor in a few wobbly steps and threw back the curtains. Beyond the glass, a glowing orange sky stretched all the way to the horizon where a red sun was crowning. He couldn’t process at first what the dark streaks flashing across the landscape were, and then it hit him like an exploding gnome to the face: they were waves.

  “I don’t understand,” he spluttered. “That’s the ocean outside.”

  “What?” Cecily joined him at the window, pressing her face up against the glass. “No way. That can’t be real.” She twisted the window handle and pushed the pane open. The roar of the crashing waves and the cries of gulls blew in, along with a spray of cold droplets, which settled on Arthur’s cheeks.

  It was real, all right.

  “Look,” she whispered. “We’re sailing.”

  To their left extended the side of a huge wooden ship, over thirty metres long. The hull was punctured with gun ports and topped by heavy rope netting, which hung down over the edges of the deck. Suspended at the ship’s bow was the gold figurehead of a triangle-hexagon-cross symbol – the same one Arthur had seen on Cloud’s collar. “We’re in a cabin at the stern of a ship,” he realized. He read the vessel’s name, painted in ornate black letters on the hull. “It’s called the Principia.”

  Ren’s lantern clattered as she staggered back from another window, further along. “But … we can’t be. A minute ago we were in a house on Peacepoint Estate. How is this even possible?”

  Arthur shook his head, struggling to find answers. Earlier that morning, the sun had risen as he was waking up, and yet here it was, dawning again. He stumbled over to the desk, pulled a chair out from underneath and fell into it.

  Questions circled in his mind, making him dizzy. He wondered if the three of them had been exposed to some sort of chemical that had given them all hallucinations, but that wouldn’t explain why they were all experiencing the exact same thing at the same time.

  “Do you think we somehow … travelled from Number Twenty-Seven to the Principia when we walked through that weird door?” Cecily guessed, biting her lip.

  Thinking of the spinning ring of smoke, Arthur was reminded of one of his favourite computer games – Portal 2 – in which characters used teleportation to negotiate various obstacles. “I suppose the door could have been a portal connecting the two places,” he offered. “But portals don’t exist. At least, not in reality.” He briefly speculated whether none of this was real and they were all, in fact, trapped in some sort of VR simulation.

  But then, he could still feel the ocean’s spray on his skin and taste its salty tang in the air, and as far as he knew, even the most advanced virtual reality headsets couldn’t do that. And anyway, how would they have stepped into a VR simulation at Number Twenty-Seven? The whole thing was crazy.

  Before they could discuss things further, the Principia changed direction, tossing everyone to starboard. Cloud issued a panicked bark as he slipped across the floorboards, surfing on several books. A handful of scientific instruments slid from the shelves and clanged to the floor. Arthur just about managed to catch the pile of brandy-leather notebooks in one hand before they toppled off the desk.

  “Someone must be steering this ship,” Ren decided. “If we can find a way to get their attention, they might be able to help us. I could try squeezing through one of those windows and climb up to the deck?”

  Arthur raised his eyebrows. Ren might have ridden a motorbike through her school canteen, but scaling the side of a ship on the open seas was a different matter. He clambered back to the window and examined the Principia’s hull. Varnished and speckled with sea spray, it looked extremely slippery; and there were no footholds that he could see. “It’s too dangerous,” he told her. “We’ll have to find another way.”

  As he pulled the window shut, Ren narrowed her gaze on the iron door. “All right, then, Cecily, do you have any hairgrips?”

  “Err…” Cecily rummaged through her bag as Ren made her way to the door. “I’ve got a few. Why?”

  “One of my mums does locksport as a hobby,” Ren explained, crouching to inspect the keyhole. She pulled a multi-tool key ring out of her back pocket – the kind that included a bottle opener, screwdriver and laser pointer in one device – and began fiddling. “It’s where you compete in races to defeat locks as fast as possible. She’s taught me enough for me to try picking this one, depending on how broken it is.”

  Arthur had never heard of locksport before but it sounded interesting; he made a mental note to look it up on YouTube when he next got the chance.

  “That’s odd,” Ren murmured. She pushed her ear against the door and slowly turned the silver key, then cleaned the key plate with the tip of her finger. “This lock isn’t broken, it’s in disguise. It’s a combination lock. The numbers zero to nine are etched around the keyhole. If you turn the key in the right sequence, the door should open.”

  “Then we just need to find the correct combination,” Arthur concluded, trying to stay calm and think logically. This would all be over soon. They just needed to break out, find whoever was in charge and ask for help in order to return to Number Twenty-Seven. They couldn’t be that far away. “Can you crack it?”

  “I can try,” Ren said. “In the meantime, you two might want to look around for something with some numbers written on it. It’s a long shot but whoever set the combination could be one of those people who write their password down in case they forget.”

  While Ren persevered with the lock – which involved a great deal of hushing them to be quiet – Arthur and Cecily searched the shelves, drawers and cabinet cupboards, hunting for notes or scraps of paper. Cloud sniffed around the floor, wagging his tail whenever he found random food crumbs.

  After checking through the books on the shelves, which were all bizarrely blank, Arthur turned his attention to the half a dozen notebooks on the desk. Gathering them up one by one, he noticed that the spines were numbered from one to six, and the same neat brown handwriting flowed across every page. He opened the first notebook to the middle and, with an unexpected degree of effort, managed to read a small section of strangely worded English:

  …it may be knowne how motion is swifter or slower. In each degree of time wherein a thing moves there will be motion or
else in all those degrees put together…

  The author seemed to be writing about physics, but Arthur was too giddy from the shock of everything to follow what they were saying. He tipped the book upside down and gave it a shake in case there was anything tucked inside. Nothing fell out, but he did spot that one of the pages in the notebook had been folded over. When he searched through the other volumes, he discovered that a single page in each one had either been bent in half, or had a corner turned down.

  “This guy seems important,” Cecily remarked.

  Arthur lifted his head and saw she was holding her lantern up to a framed portrait hanging on the wall. It depicted a grey-haired man wearing a navy brocade coat with gold buttons. He had a thin face, prominent nose and dimpled chin.

  Cecily rubbed the bottom of the frame, coughing as a puff of dust rose off it. “It says, Captain W. Saint-Ocean. Anyone recognize the name?”

  Arthur studied the portrait. There was something familiar about the captain’s face, but he didn’t know what.

  “Ne-ber her a him,” Ren mumbled, several hairgrips poking out between her lips. “Thiv lock iv impobabble,” she added, her shoulders sinking. She took the grips out of her mouth. “I can hear six wheels inside the mechanism, which should mean there are six numbers in the sequence, but I don’t have the skills to crack something this complicated. Sorry.”

  Arthur was about to abandon the notebooks as well when he realized he was holding one open to the folded page. This time, he saw that the creased corner looked just like an arrow, and it was pointing to a particular word in the text: five.

  He tapped his fingers against the desk, thinking. Six notebooks. Six numbers in the combination.

  A sliver of a hypothesis began to form in his mind. He rushed back through the other notebooks and, using a pen and exercise book from his rucksack, jotted down the words indicated by the folded corner of every page. As he read them back in order, his skin tingled:

  1 – four

  2 – two

  3 – zero

  4 – three

  5 – five

  6 – four

  “I think I’ve found something!” he announced, flashing Ren and Cecily his exercise book. “The pages in these notebooks were folded over to mark a sequence of six numbers; it could be the combination.”

  “Wow, OK. That’s a seriously complicated way to leave yourself a password prompt,” Cecily commented. She glanced thoughtfully around the room. “You know, this is starting to remind me of a locked-room challenge my friends and I did for my birthday last year. It’s where you’re shut in a room filled with props and clues and you have to solve a puzzle in order to break your way out.”

  Ren slumped back against the door. “So, what, you think we’re in some sort of game?” She pulled a face. “On … Peacepoint Estate?”

  “I agree it seems unlikely,” Cecily replied. “But if it is a game, we should be able to play our way out – try the code.”

  Joining Ren at the door, Arthur read the numbers from his exercise book one by one as Ren rotated the silver key. On the last turn, nothing happened.

  “Well,” Ren said, “that was about as useful as—”

  Then the door made a low humming noise and a jet of blood-red gas spurted from the keyhole. Everyone flinched.

  “What is that stuff?” Cecily asked.

  The vapour twisted into a triangle-hexagon-cross symbol. “I don’t know,” Arthur replied, “but that’s the same design I saw on the front of the Principia and on Cloud’s collar.”

  As they looked on, the mysterious symbol changed shape, twirling and separating into words. In a matter of seconds, writing hovered in mid-air between them all:

  WONDERSCPE

  REALM 33: VOYAGE OF THE CAPTAIN

  Loot: 150 DIRT, Wonderskill and realm-key

  Travel with wonder,

  “Who or what is Hxperion?” Cecily said. “And do you think Wonderscape is the name of this game? I’ve never heard of it.”

  Arthur waved his fingers through the vapour. It was cold and wet, like snow. “No idea, but this red stuff is breaking every rule of science I know. For starters, it’s a gas; it shouldn’t be able to hold a defined shape.”

  “So how has it formed words, then?” Ren asked.

  Before Arthur could respond, the vapour dissolved and a tea-stained paper scroll materialized in its place. Arthur caught it before it hit the ground and unrolled it so the others could see. It contained six lines of text written in the same handwriting Arthur had found inside the notebooks:

  Set sail across a stormy ocean

  With one, who wrote the laws of motion.

  To join my crew you first must find

  A ladder of a weightless kind,

  Then onwards through a fateful pass

  Where ice must fall and fire blast.

  “It’s a riddle,” Arthur said, reading it through slowly. “You could be right, Cecily. This is all starting to feel like a game – that other message even mentioned loot. But … I still don’t understand how this is all possible.”

  Ren gave the scroll a wary glance before trying the door handle. “This is unlocked. Shall I open it?”

  There were no sounds coming from the other side. Clutching the scroll in one hand, Arthur tried to settle his nerves. His insides felt like tangled spaghetti.

  “Whatever’s happened to us,” Cecily said gingerly, “we don’t seem to be able to return to Peacepoint from inside this cabin. We need to learn more about this game we’re trapped in.” She lifted Cloud up from the floor and gave him a hug. Judging by the amount he squirmed, this was clearly more for her own benefit than the little dog’s.

  With a deep breath, Ren turned the handle and pushed.

  3

  The iron door creaked as it swung open, releasing an icy gust of wind. Arthur wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find on the other side, but it certainly wasn’t a dead end.

  “What’s this meant to be?” Cecily asked, stepping inside the cramped wooden chamber. “A walk-in wardrobe?”

  The circular space was barely big enough for the four of them. Cloud barked his disapproval as Arthur shuffled to the far side and tipped his head back. Daylight fell through an opening ten metres above. Beyond it, a black mast soared into the sky. “I think the ship’s deck is above us,” he said, trying to suspend his disbelief for a moment. They weren’t going to get anywhere by just standing around, asking questions. They had to focus on the things they could control. “We need to find a way to get up there.”

  Cecily cast a doubtful look around the chamber. “I’m no climbing expert, but don’t we need something to grip on to? These walls are polished smooth. I suppose we could try tying our blazers together to fashion some sort of rope…”

  Arthur considered their options. They couldn’t drag any furniture in from the cabin, since it wouldn’t fit, and Cecily was right about the walls. The only remarkable thing about them was a column of teacup-sized circles cut into the wood on one side. As an experiment, he ran a finger over one of the circles and realized he was able to push it in. It swivelled to reveal a flat, circular mirror.

  “That riddle mentioned something about a ladder,” Ren reminded them. “If we really are in a game, it was probably a clue.”

  Arthur unwound the scroll and read part of it aloud again. “To join my crew you first must find a ladder of a weightless kind…”

  “But what kind of ladder is weightless?” Cecily questioned. “One that’s floating about in space?”

  Arthur rotated one of the wall mirrors, thinking. What doesn’t have weight? It was a tricky question. Scientifically speaking, weight was related to the force acting on an object, normally gravity.

  “What about air?” Cecily suggested. “That doesn’t weigh anything.”

  Ren frowned. “You want us to use a ladder made of air?”

  Cecily’s cheeks flushed. “Fine. Not air.”

  Arthur’s spinning mirror caught a ray of sunlight
and sent its reflection dancing around the chamber like a firefly. It gave him an idea. “Actually, with all these mirrors, the ladder’s more likely to be made of light.” He crouched down and tilted the lowest mirror so it reflected a beam of light onto the opposite side of the chamber. It wasn’t quite horizontal, so he angled the mirror until the beam was parallel with the floor.

  As soon as he’d made the adjustment, Cecily shrieked and leaped into the air, juggling Cloud. “What was that? Something poked my leg!”

  “Let me see,” Ren said, squeezing around her.

  As they switched places, Arthur caught sight of a thick iron rod sticking out of the wall at the same level as the beam of light. “Look – that wasn’t there before,” he told them. “Maybe we’re meant to build a ladder of light, in order for the bars of a real ladder to appear?”

  Once Arthur had stuffed the riddle scroll into his rucksack, the three of them shimmied around each other, adjusting the mirrors. Arthur felt awkward being in such close proximity to them both. Ren appeared to be angry with everything all the time and Cecily was just as intimidating as she had seemed at school. He could only hope they’d be nice to him long enough to make it through whatever it was they’d got themselves involved in.

  “Ouch, that’s my foot,” Cecily hissed. “Mind where you’re treading.”

  “You’re not exactly respecting my personal space either,” Ren grumbled.

  Arthur felt his elbow dig into something soft and cringed. “Sorry!”

  Every time a horizontal beam of light landed on the opposite side, an iron bar extended from the wall, building a ladder towards the ship’s deck. To reach the higher mirrors, they were all required to start climbing the ladder before it was complete.

  “What kind of game uses super-advanced technology like portals, but nobody’s ever heard of it?” Cecily asked, halfway up. With Cloud tucked under her right armpit, she reached for a mirror with her left hand and rotated it until a new shaft of light crossed their path.