I couldn’t watch another page get destroyed. I clenched my fists and before I knew it I was hurling myself at Blair. I didn’t think about the fact that she was twice as big as me. I didn’t think about the fact that I was about to attack the scariest girl in school. Because the storm had come. The one that happened when I get really angry. It’s like there was thunder in my belly and lightning in my fingertips and nothing and no one could stop me.
Thump.
Blair tumbled backwards, hit the wall and then plummeted into the lockers. There was a huge crashing sound, like a really big tree falling in the forest. Then the whole corridor went deathly quiet. The boys stopped messing about with their football. The girls stopped chatting. You didn’t push Blair. You didn’t even look at Blair if you could help it. Blair fixed me with a dark stare and then, the worst thing of all, she smiled the most terrifying smile I’d ever seen.
Then she began thumping every locker on her way towards me.
Bash. Bash. BASH.
Everyone in the corridor scattered, apart from me and Tom. We were both rooted to the spot. I could still feel the anger swirling through me, the way the wind rattles through open windows and doors into an empty house. But it was mixed up with pain too. Because The Little Book of Lady Adventurers lay in pieces. Blair had destroyed mine and Mum’s special book. All our stories flew around the windy corridor. I wondered what Mum would have said if she had seen this. Suddenly my hand grew very hot.
“That was a mistake,” Blair said, as she flicked her long ponytail over her shoulder.
With one swift movement she grabbed my shirt collar. I closed my eyes and braced myself for whatever awful thing was about to happen to me next, but suddenly there was a high-pitched scream. I opened my eyes. Blair was on the floor, her mouth wide open.
“What are you doing?” Blair said, pointing a shaking hand at me.
I looked down: my legs had disappeared! I blinked. I had to be imagining it. I just had to. But I could see the fear in Blair’s eyes. All I could think was, Not again, not again. This can’t be happening again! The corridor flickered in front of me. I tried to grab hold of something, anything. But it was too late. I could hear Tom shout, but his voice was really far away. The sound of thunder filled my ears and everything went dark.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a place I’d never been before. A place where no girl should ever go. I was lying flat out on the floor of the boys’ toilets.
The boys’ toilets, it turned out, were not like girls’ toilets. They were a whole new world of disgusting. The ceiling was dotted with dried tissue balls and the whole room smelled very strongly of wee. This was worrying since I was lying in a large pool of something; something I very much hoped was water. I watched my legs flicker and then return but when I tried to get up I couldn’t. The wind had been knocked out of me. I felt like I’d fallen from the sky and crash-landed on the floor. Outside I could hear shouting from the field and the smack of a ball hitting the window, so I knew the break bell hadn’t rung yet.
Lying on the floor, I could hear the gentle splat, splat, splat of rain hitting the window. Then all of a sudden the sky opened up and I heard everyone on the field screaming and running inside from the unexpected downpour. I would have a very hard time explaining what I was doing lying on the floor if anyone came into the boys’ loos. As I scrambled up, I groaned as I realized I would need to face Blair Watson, who had very much witnessed me evaporating into thin air.
Chapter 12
Outside the boys’ loos something caught my eye. In the centre of a dirty display case with a banner reading Treasures of the Islands was what looked like Mum’s ammonite fossil. But it couldn’t be, could it? I pressed my nose up to the glass and swiped a layer of dust away with my blazer sleeve. There it was, Mum’s purple shell fossil, the one that I’d thought was sitting in a drawer at home. I would never have spotted it if I hadn’t come out of the boys’ toilet into an empty corridor. I leaned over the case to take another look and the door creaked open. I looked around and then reached in. I held it in my hands like it was something very precious, because this was Mum’s treasure. The reason she had met Da.
Mum had loved telling me the story. How she had come to the islands to see the puffins but ended up finding love instead. I made sick noises when she said that bit. But she would carry on telling me how she had been down on the beach and found this amazing purple shell.
“I’d never found a fossil before,” Mum would say. “So once I found one, I wanted to find another. I thought maybe this cave was filled with them. So I decided to go exploring. I was so busy searching that I didn’t notice the tide coming in. By the time I’d felt my socks getting a bit wet, it was too late. The beach had disappeared under the waves and I was stranded. I thought all my adventures had come to an end.”
And then Mum would do this big dramatic pause, even though we both knew what happened next.
“But then I saw this yellow boat. I started screaming but the man sailing it couldn’t hear me. I waved my arms around but he couldn’t see me. And then the boat started to move away. So there was nothing left for it. I dived into the sea. The water was so cold. And for a moment my whole body froze. But I could see that yellow boat and that man. So I kicked. And then I kicked again. And the boat got a little closer and closer still, until I could grab the side. And with all my strength I managed to pull myself in. And guess who was in the boat?” Mum would ask, and I would always pretend not to know the answer.
“Your da! And he was so surprised to see a woman covered in seaweed in his boat that he thought I was a mermaid,” Mum had always finished.
I looked down at the ammonite and remembered how it had sat on top of the fireplace in the living room. Until Mum had said it was too fragile and had hidden it away in a drawer.
I turned the fossil over. There was a sticker on it that read: Kindly donated by Ewan McLeod. I couldn’t believe Da had given this away! He knew I loved it just as much as Mum did. He’d even let me borrow it once. It was the night Mum had left for her filming job. The night she left and never came back. I hadn’t been able to sleep, so Da had given me the fossil so I wouldn’t miss her as much. Then he had dressed me up like a mermaid in a green bath towel and an old Halloween wig and told me stories about selkies under the sea until I’d fallen asleep.
“Shouldn’t you be in class, Amelia?” Miss Rutherford said, suddenly appearing from around the corner. I slipped the ammonite into my pocket and dashed down the empty corridor.
Chapter 13
I knew I was super late for class before I even turned the doorknob. I’d spent too long looking at the ammonite and it had taken me ages to find the science lab from the loos. So I was planning on sneaking in and slipping onto a chair at the back. Fat chance of that happening. As soon as I walked in I tripped over someone’s bag and fell flat on my face. The whole class roared with laughter, everyone but Blair, who looked like she had just seen a ghost. Then Gregory started clapping and Mr McNair looked up from his desk and pointed sternly to the clock. As I struggled back to my feet I saw Tom trying to catch my attention. He didn’t call me over or anything, or wave his hand in the air. Instead, he was making all kinds of crazy faces and shifting his eyes repeatedly to the seat next to him. But I didn’t want to talk about what had happened. I just wanted to get on with our boring science work and wait for the day to be over.
But Mr McNair wasn’t the kind of teacher to just let you work quietly through a textbook. Mr McNair liked to get everyone involved in one of his experiments. And that afternoon he had decided to do an experiment with bubbles. When he asked for a volunteer, everyone’s hands shot up, apart from mine. Finally, Mr McNair picked Chloe. Then he covered her hands in special methane bubbles and lit them on fire. There was a quick burst of flame, Chloe squeaked, and then the bubbles disappeared and so did the flame. Chloe lifted her hands up and waved them around and everyone clapped. But I wasn’t really watching any of it.
I kept thinking about
what had happened. I had disappeared: there was no denying it, no trying to convince myself it was a dream, or even a nightmare. It was real and it was happening to me. My stomach churned; it felt like it was full of thunder and lightning.
“Are you OK, Amelia?” Mr McNair asked.
I shook my head. I thought I was going to be sick, sick all over my desk, all over horrible Blair. But even if I had thrown up everywhere it still would have only been the second worst thing to happen to me that day.
“Feel ill,” I finally managed to squeak out.
Mr McNair nodded his head.
“Yes, you don’t look well. Better go and see the nurse.”
Tom pounced out of his seat, banging his knee in the process.
“I should go with her, sir,” he said, rubbing his knee.
Mr McNair raised an eyebrow.
“You know … just in case,” Tom added theatrically.
Just in case of what? I wondered. Just in case I disappeared again. I was already starting to miss back when I was scared of starting school, mortified at having to do special classes and terrified of the school bully. At least these were all normal things to be worried about.
“All right then, Tom, you can take Amelia to the nurse, but you’re to come straight back,” Mr McNair said, shooing us off.
I was halfway down the hall when I really was sick, all over Tom’s shoes. I rushed into the girls’ toilets. Tom followed me in sheepishly.
“Are you OK?” he called from the door.
“Fine,” I said, curled over the toilet bowl. Thinking that maybe everything would be all right if I just stayed in here for ever.
“Do you want to talk about what happened earlier?” Tom asked.
“No,” I yelled back, hunched over the toilet bowl, waiting to be sick again.
“I got your book by the way.”
I groaned, thinking of the mess Blair had made of The Little Book of Lady Adventurers.
“It’s not as bad as you think. I picked up most of the pages after you went and disappeared,” Tom said.
“WHAT?” I yelled, hurling myself out of the toilet stall.
I had been so busy worrying about Blair I hadn’t even thought about how I might explain everything to Tom. How could this day get any worse?
“Yeah, I think you might even be able to glue it back together,” Tom said.
“Not that bit! The other thing,” I whispered.
“Oh, yeah – the disappearing. That was pretty freaky! I mean, it looked like you just vanished. But you couldn’t have, could you? Unless you’re some sort of superhero? Did you get bitten by a radioactive spider, or are you genetically engineered? Or were you sent from another planet? Or maybe you’re just really good at magic? My uncle made a mouse appear out of his coat for me once. He must have kept it in his pockets for ages because I only used to visit once a month—”
“Tom, stop!” I yelled.
“Oh right, sorry. Are you going to be sick again? Do you need me to hold your hair or something?”
“I don’t do magic, all right?”
“Come on, you can tell me how you did it. I mean, you were sick on my shoes, I’m pretty sure that makes us best friends,” Tom said.
Tom made a good point. I had thrown up on him and he hadn’t run away screaming. Instead he was standing in the girls’ loos, offering to hold my hair back.
“Can you keep a secret?” I asked.
Tom nodded.
So I took a deep breath and started to tell Tom the truth. Well, most of it. I told him about touching Serpent’s Tooth Rock and the night I disappeared and even about Hettie and Penny’s warning. I told him because I was scared and I needed to tell someone. But mostly, it was because out of all the people I knew, I wanted Tom as my friend.
Dear Mum,
Since I really have started disappearing, I think it’s time I told you a bit more about it. So here’s what I call:
Six Things You Should Know about Disappearing
1.If you disappear from one place you reappear somewhere else.
2.It happens when my hand starts to tingle, which I first felt when I touched Serpent’s Tooth Rock.
3.It doesn’t happen all at once. Legs seem to disappear first.
4.Whatever you have on you, you take with you.
5.After you disappear, it takes a moment of flickering before everything comes back. It’s what I like to call the jelly stage. Imagine you are a giant jellyfish. Jellyfish have no bones and out of water they are just a gooey lump. This is what it feels like when you reappear.
6.Did you know animals can sense storms coming? Like horses have been known to stampede before a tornado, and birds to all fly away before a big storm hits. Well, my dog Pipi knows when I’m about to disappear. So if you suddenly get animals acting really weird around you, look out. Because something big and incredible and absolutely terrifying is probably about to happen to you.
I know this sounds pretty frightening. But I don’t want you to worry too much, Mum, because I’m working on how to stop it. In fact, my new friend Tom has a plan.
Chapter 14
So Tom’s great idea was to use the internet to look up what was happening to me. All right, I admit, it wasn’t the best plan. But it was a start. And it felt so good to have someone to finally talk to about all the crazy stuff that was happening to me that I didn’t really mind that step one of Tom’s master plan was to use Google.
Tom came round my house the first weekend of the half-term holiday to put our plan into action. Da was thrilled that for the first time in ages I had a friend round. He didn’t even seem to mind that there was a boy in my room, or that every time he popped up, we not so subtly hid the search results for things like:
•How to stop disappearing
•How to know if you’ve been cursed
•What is the likelihood of waking up with superpowers (that was Tom’s idea)
In fact, Da wouldn’t stop coming up to offer us home-made biscuits and tea and even a strange brown drink he found at the bottom of the cupboard. Tom was so polite that he even tried a bit, and then promptly spat it out.
“Eurgh, it’s like drinking a beefburger,” Tom said after Da left. “Want some?”
“Strangely enough, no,” I said, laughing.
“Your da seems nice though,” Tom said. “Have you tried to tell him about your little problem?”
This is what Tom called the whole disappearing thing. It didn’t seem like a little problem, it seemed like a pretty gigantic one. I hadn’t tried to tell Da again, or even Grandpa. I shook my head.
“I just don’t know how you can keep something this big to yourself,” Tom said, giving “How not to disappear” another Google. Lots of self-help websites came up, but none of it was useful.
“Well, I haven’t; you know now. Oh, and I guess Blair does too…”
“Probably best to try not to think about that too much,” Tom shuddered.
But it was hard not to. I had seen her face in science class. I knew this was something she wasn’t going to forget. It would almost have been better if she had just punched me, because I felt sure that whatever she was lying in wait and plotting would be so much worse.
“This is no good,” Tom said, scrolling through another website offering advice on how to get incredible vanishing waistlines.
“How about looking up Serpent’s Tooth Rock?” I said, and Tom typed it in.
10,032 hits.
We scrolled through a page, but it was mostly just pictures and a report of some tourist who fell off whilst trying to climb it. But when we got to the bottom of the second page there was something interesting.
Myths, Legends and the Curse of Serpent’s Tooth Rock.
The page took ages to load. Internet and phone signal can be really dodgy on the island, which is why Da refused to get me a phone, even though everyone else had one. As the loading circle was spinning away I thought about telling Tom the one thing I had left out of my story: what I had wished for o
n Serpent’s Tooth Rock. I worried if I told Tom about Mum and how she had left, it would change everything. I remembered how everyone had acted when they found out. No one knew quite what to do or say around me. Even Chloe, who had been my friend, acted really odd. It made me so angry that I ended up being really mean to her. It had ruined our friendship and I didn’t want that to happen with me and Tom.
Finally the page loaded and I heard a little gasp from Tom.
The Myth of Serpent’s Tooth Rock
I felt a shiver down my spine, like I already knew what it would say. I squinted and traced each letter with my finger, mouthing the words slowly.
One of the main landmarks of the small fishing island of Dark Muir, Serpent’s Tooth Rock is meant to bring both good and bad luck to the islanders. When the rock is above water it shows the weather is fair, however if the rock is low in the water a big storm is due.
That explained why everyone on Dark Muir seemed so worried. I had been little when a big storm last hit and that had destroyed half the harbour boats. But it was nothing compared to the storm Grandpa lived through when he was a little boy. The island nearly had to be evacuated. But all this still didn’t explain the disappearing or Hettie’s strange warning.
Serpent’s Tooth Rock has long also been thought to have magical powers, rumoured to grant both wishes and curses. For centuries islanders have held the rite of passage of touching the rock on their eleventh birthday.
“Did you read it?” Tom asked.
I nodded. I’d struggled with some of the words, but I understood enough. The rock couldn’t have possibly granted my wish. It had cursed me, just like Grandpa said.
“Is that it? Isn’t there anything on how to stop it?”
Tom shook his head.
“Oh, wait,” Tom said. “For more information check out the following book: Illustrated Myths of Dark Muir by Hugo Bottomly and Florence Fields. That’s our next clue!”
Lightning Chase Me Home Page 6
