by Liz Kessler
“What’s what?”
“Wait, it’s gone. You’ll see it in a minute.”
A moment later, it was there again, flashing at the top of the screen, so faint you would miss it if you weren’t looking out for it. “That!” I said.
Robyn shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t noticed it before.”
The flashing star had caught my curiosity. “Let’s see what it is,” I said.
We tried to trace it around the screen, while I pointed and shouted “There!” every few seconds, and Robyn chased after it with the mouse and clicked — just a second too late each time.
“It’s impossible!” she said, passing the mouse to me. “Here, you try.”
I tried for another minute or two with no luck. I was about to give up and suggest having another ketchup-bottle fight instead when the star appeared again. This time, I somehow managed to click at the right moment, and the star was instantly replaced by a bright white box with some squiggly text slowly coming into focus. “Got it!” I said with a smile.
“I hope we get more than a little box saying congratulations after all that effort,” Robyn said.
We stared and stared at the squiggly writing, but it didn’t get any clearer. It just squiggled across the box, rising and falling in sharp peaks and valleys.
“Not even that!” I said sarcastically. “Great game, I must say!” I moved the mouse over to close the box. “Come on, let’s go back to —”
“Wait!” Robyn grabbed the mouse. “Look. What does it remind you of?”
I watched the lines squiggle up and down across the page a bit more. “I dunno,” I said. “Maybe those charts you get in hospitals that record your heartbeat and stuff.”
“Exactly. It’s showing the levels of something. Hold on a sec.” Robyn moved the mouse to the volume button in the corner of the screen. The volume was muted. She clicked the icon and instantly a crackling, screeching sound came through the speakers.
“Yikes — what’s that?” I clapped my hands over my ears.
“I don’t know! Hang on.” Robyn adjusted the levels of the various audio controls, and the crackling died down to a faint hum.
“What’s that one?” I asked, pointing to an icon that stood apart from the others. It looked as if it had been added on separately. The others were all square boxes with a circle inside them. This one contained a star with a red line through it.
“No idea,” Robyn said.
“Try it.”
She clicked the star. As she did so, the red line disappeared and the humming sound instantly stopped. The computer was silent. For about two seconds. Then something incredible happened. We heard voices coming through the speakers! And not just any voices.
“That’s — that’s —” Robyn stared at the screen, watching as the squiggly lines danced up and down in perfect time with the rise and fall of the two voices.
“I know!” I said, although I could hardly believe what I was hearing. “It’s Daisy!”
“What did you think you were doing?” My supervisor’s voice boomed through my MagiCell so loudly, I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“I — I —” What could I say? I’d run out of the office so fast, I hadn’t even thought of making up an excuse. Since then, all I’d focused on was trying to get a message to Philippa to warn her about her mom — which had turned out to be impossible when I couldn’t appear as myself. That would be the one way to guarantee an instant image link to ATC. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of punishment that would have meant. Interfering with another fairy’s assignment is one of the worst things you can do — especially when it’s not even your department!
“I’m waiting,” FGRaincloud74921 said.
“I needed some air,” I said feebly. “It’s the office; it makes me a little claustrophobic at times.”
Silence at the other end of my MagiCell. Did she believe me? Had I gotten away with it?
“How dare you treat me like a fool!” FGRaincloud74921 burst out so angrily, her words turned to sharp drops of rain, splattering down at me like arrows.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I haven’t really done anything I shouldn’t have.” In a way it was true. I’d tried, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere. Well, how was I to know that if I became a mouse, I’d go and chew up the note I was trying to pass to Philippa? Or that she’d shrug off the old woman as a weirdo? I’d thought that somehow she’d always know it was me, no matter how I transformed. I’d even kept my own eyes both times, in case that would help.
“You are to return to ATC immediately,” FGRaincloud74921 said, ignoring my plea of innocence. “We will deal with you there.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
“You are close to Portal BZ 589245. Go there now. We will send someone to meet you. Do not talk to anyone, look at anyone, interact in any way with anyone or anything until you are back at ATC. Understood?”
“Totally,” I said. With shaking hands, I turned off my MagiCell, let out a heavy breath, and headed for the portal.
“You’re sure it was her?” Robyn asked for about the seventh time.
“I’m positive! I’d know Daisy’s voice anywhere!” Once Robyn had clicked the star and removed the crackle, the voices had come through as clearly as if they’d been in the room with us. “But I’ve got no idea what they were talking about.”
“Me neither,” Robyn agreed. We’d only heard a small slice of a conversation. Probably about ten seconds — and none of it had made sense.
“Is there any way of playing it again?” I asked.
We searched the screen. Robyn held the cursor over the bottom of the box, and a new line of controls came into view. “There!” I said. A button in the middle had an arrow on it, like the play button on a remote control. “Try that.”
Robyn clicked the button — and the snatch of conversation that we’d already heard played over again. If I’d had any doubts before, I certainly didn’t now. “It’s definitely her,” I said. “But what are they talking about?” The other voice was telling Daisy to go back to ATC, then reeling off a bunch of numbers and talking about something called a portal.
“I don’t know,” Robyn said. “But those numbers must mean something.”
“It sounded like they related to the portal. But what’s a portal?”
Robyn shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s something about the style of those numbers, though. It reminds me of something. Like a map reference, perhaps.”
“Of course!” I jumped to my feet. “Have you got a pen and paper?”
Robyn pulled a drawer open. “In here.”
I grabbed a pen and opened up a spiral notebook. “OK, play it again,” I said.
Robyn hit the play button and the conversation started over again. When it got to the numbers, I scribbled down exactly what I heard.
“Come on,” I said, tearing the page off the pad.
“Where are we going?” Robyn asked, getting up from her seat.
“Downstairs to the shop. The map section! There must be something there that’ll help us figure out what this is.”
She paused. “I don’t know. I mean, do you think we should? We don’t know what we’re messing with. I mean — this was Annie’s computer. She must have been linked up to Daisy’s MagiCell from her last assignment, but I bet this is all top-secret fairy stuff.”
Annie’s a fairy godmother herself. We only found out when I was here for fall break. She’s actually a really important one. The Dream Maker — that’s the fairy godmother in charge of creating and distributing dreams all around the world. That was probably why her computer had access to fairies’ conversations like the one we’d heard. I was sure Robyn was right — we hadn’t been meant to hear it. But at the same time, it was Daisy’s voice we’d heard! And I knew Daisy well enough to be able to tell from the tone of her voice that something was seriously wrong.
“I can’t leave Daisy to get into trouble without trying to help,”
I said.
Robyn nodded. “I know. You’re right,” she said, leading the way down to the shop. “Come on, let’s see what we can find.”
Half an hour later, we were back in Robyn’s bedroom with a pile of maps and guidebooks. We’d looked up the word portal while we were in the shop and found it was a kind of doorway. So Daisy had been told to go to a fairy doorway!
We’d narrowed the numbers down to some sort of map coordinates but hadn’t figured out whether it was some kind of GPS thing or what. I sat by the radiator, leafing through an atlas.
Then Robyn picked up a map from the pile we hadn’t looked at yet. “Philippa — look!”
I put the atlas down and looked to see what she was holding. It was a local map, with the words Chiverton Maps: JK & BZ on the cover.
I looked at the letters I’d written down. “BZ,” I said. “Do you think it’s in here?”
Robyn started unfolding the map. “Only one way to find out.”
We spread the map across the bed. “If I remember from geography, the first three numbers are along the bottom and the second three go up the side,” Robyn said. She ran a finger along the bottom line and another up the side of the map. They met at a point roughly in the center of the map. “That’s where it is,” she said. “Somewhere around this point.”
We scoured the map, looking for anything in the area that could possibly be a fairy doorway.
“That’s it — it must be!” Robyn cried, suddenly jabbing a finger at a symbol right in the middle of where we were looking.
I checked the symbol against the key on the back. “Archaeological site?”
“It’s Tidehill Rocks!” Robyn said excitedly.
“Tidehill Rocks?” I repeated. “Isn’t that —”
“Yes!” Robyn gathered up the map and started putting her shoes on. “The stone circle. It has to be there. Tidehill Rocks must be a fairy portal!”
We clambered up the hill, squelching through mud and wiping rain off our faces. We followed the path that led from the main road all the way up into the woods, even scrambling up a sheer hillside where the ground had collapsed earlier.
“Be careful,” Robyn said. “There was a landslide here last year when there was lots of flooding. You’ll be OK as long as you don’t go off the path — the edge is a lot closer than you think. Follow me.”
I had no intention of going off the path. I couldn’t see far beyond it anyway, through the damp mist that was settling more and more heavily around us as we walked farther into the forest. I followed her steadfastly until the ground evened out again and we could walk side by side. In the distance, a startling sight came into view.
“Wow,” I said, stopping to wipe another strand of wet hair out of my eyes.
“I know,” Robyn said. “Amazing, aren’t they? There’s nothing like coming over this hill and seeing them.”
Tidehill Rocks stood ahead of us: a circle of large stones, standing proud and majestic and solitary, a line of mist hovering around them, like a band holding them together. As we drew closer, I could see there were nine stones making up the circle, and a larger one probably four or five times my height in the center.
“They’re incredible,” I whispered, so awed by the sight, I didn’t want to speak too loudly. A feeling of peace spread through me as we drew closer. This place felt magical. Nothing bad could happen here!
There were a couple of other people there — a man walked his dog, and a woman wrapped up in a big coat walked around the stones while she talked on a cell phone. A stab of irritation ran through me. Imagine coming to a place as beautiful and sacred as this and talking on your phone!
We looked everywhere. Daisy wasn’t there.
“How long should we wait?” Robyn asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “Maybe she’s already left. Maybe she’s not here yet. Let’s hang around a bit.”
Robyn nodded, and we kept on wandering around the stones. The woman was on the other side, still talking on her cell phone. The man with the dog eventually left.
I couldn’t stop staring at the stones. They were so big, and they’d been there for thousands of years, and yet no one had any idea who’d put them there, or why. I guess that was part of what made them feel so special — the mystery of it.
Robyn suddenly grabbed me. “Philippa!” She pulled me down behind a stone and pointed at the woman on the other side of the rocks.
“What?”
“That woman. I just caught a glimpse of her face.”
“And?”
“It’s the same woman who bumped into you earlier.”
I crouched down behind the stone next to Robyn. The last thing we needed now was to get into a conversation with a weird person who was going to bark strange orders at me. “Let’s wait here till she’s gone,” I said.
The woman hadn’t seen us, and I couldn’t hear what she was saying on her phone — the wind was carrying her words in the opposite direction — but every now and then I caught a glimpse of her face and she looked anguished. There was something about her eyes. . . . What was it?
“Hey, look!” Robyn pulled me away from my thoughts. She was scratching away at the stone in front of where we were crouched. Just above the ground, there was something engraved into the stone.
“What does it say?”
Robyn rubbed away at the moss and mud around the words. “I don’t know. Help me.”
We worked together to wipe the muck out of the letters. “I guess not many people crouch down behind the stones,” I said.
“I bet we’re the first people to see this for hundreds of years!” Robyn’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. I wasn’t so thrilled, to be honest. We were here to find Daisy, and I was pretty sure once we’d rubbed the dirt out of the words, it would just be an old signature. A twelfth-century version of Jill was here or something.
It was hard to make out at first — the writing was old-fashioned, and the engraving was quite faint. But once we’d cleared away the dirt, we could read it. It was a poem. Robyn read it aloud.
“Follow a fairy ’round the stones,
Amongst a hundred trees.
Call her name and catch her eye,
And join her world with ease.”
I stared at the poem, my jaw so wide open it began to ache. “Fairies,” I managed to say eventually.
Robyn was equally stunned. “We were right. This really is a fairy portal!” she said.
“So you think the poem is for real, not just someone messing around?”
“Why would they write it way down here, virtually out of sight at the bottom of a stone, if they were messing around? And look how old-fashioned the writing is.”
“Wow,” I said lamely as I read the poem again. What did it mean? What could it mean?
Just then a sound broke into my thoughts. The woman on her phone. She was close enough for us to hear her now. I almost wanted to jump out and shout at her: “How can you wander around here talking on your stupid phone when this place is so magical?” But I didn’t, of course. For two main reasons. The first reason was that I’m not the kind of person who does that sort of thing. And the second reason — well, the second reason was only just starting to dawn on me.
“Robyn!” I whispered, grabbing her arm. “Listen!”
“That woman?” she asked. “I know; how dare she —”
“No! What she was saying — did you hear her?”
By then, she’d walked by and was heading away from us again, and she’d put her phone away in her pocket. But the snippet of conversation I’d overheard was enough to convince me that I was right. I didn’t hear the whole thing, but I was sure I’d heard her say something that humans generally don’t know anything about.
Robyn shook her head.
“I only heard a few seconds, but I’m positive about what I heard.”
“What? What did you hear? What did she say?”
I paused. Was I imagining it? Did I just want it to be true? Would Robyn laugh a
t me if I told her? No — none of those things mattered. I knew what I’d heard, and suddenly I knew what I had to do. “She said, ‘See you at ATC.’ I’m sure of it,” I said, getting up from behind the stone and brushing my legs off. “Wait here; I’m going to check it out.”
Then I followed the woman as she walked around the stones. She still hadn’t turned around. Still hadn’t noticed me. I held my breath as I followed her, passing one stone after another, until we reached the last one. Follow a fairy ’round the stones, amongst a hundred trees. . . .
And then we passed the final stone. Call her name and catch her eye, and join her world with ease.
Taking a deep breath, and praying I didn’t have this wrong and wasn’t about to make the biggest idiot of myself, I stood still and called out as loudly as I could, “Daisy!”
For a moment, nothing happened. My cheeks burned. I’d made a fool of myself. I was wrong. Robyn would laugh at me.
And then the woman turned around, looking to see who had spoken, her face crinkled up in confusion and disbelief. And then she saw me. Looking me straight in the eyes, she grinned so widely that I was left in no doubt at all.
“Philippa!” she shouted. And in that moment, everything disappeared. The ground, the stones, Robyn — everything except me and Daisy. She was no longer the weird woman; she had transformed into the Daisy I knew. Her blond curly hair, her smile, her sharp green eyes — the eyes that I suddenly realized I’d recognized in the woman, that had troubled me so much when I couldn’t figure out why I knew them. They were Daisy’s eyes!
For a moment, I thought I was fainting. The feeling reminded me of the one time I’d gone on the Tilt-A-Whirl at a fair — sick and dizzy from spinning around and around, feeling as if the ground was falling away from me.
I shut my eyes, hoping that would make the feeling go away. But when I opened them again, they only confirmed that this wasn’t the temporary feeling of dizziness you get from a carnival ride. The ground really was falling away from me!
