“You’re in a groove, huh?” Clare laughed, hauling herself out of her own pit and dusting off the knees of her jeans.
“You could say that.” Al grinned up at her, tipping back her hat and wiping the sweat from her brow with her sleeve. “Come get me when you’re done and we’ll head over to the Rifleman.”
The Rifleman’s Arms was a quaint little English pub they’d found. It had a cute little patio and hearty food. And the owner would serve the girls one little baby half-pint of cider each with their meals, even though technically they weren’t of legal drinking age quite yet. The owner said they deserved to be treated like adults because of the job they were doing with such dedication over at the great hill: “Illuminatin’ the past and all that. Very important work.”
It was nice that the Rifleman’s proprietor felt that way, Clare mused as she walked through the long grass, heading for the large canvas tent set up in the far corner of the adjacent field. Especially given the one or two locals who didn’t exactly see the excavations in that light. Emphatically so. Even though Glastonbury’s bustling little tourist economy traded heavily on the past—and people’s fascination with it—some of the town’s residents were of the opinion that what’s buried should stay buried. And you didn’t want to go messing about with the hill, meddling with the natural (some said unnatural) energies of the place. The girls got opinions from all sides on the matter. Glastonbury itself, and the hill in particular, seemed to inspire strong reactions in people.
Clare got that. What she wasn’t getting was anything out of the ordinary. No spooky vibes, no shimmer shimmies … and for that she was grateful. She was doing good hard work, she was learning stuff, and she was having fun. She left it at that.
NORMALLY, ALLIE WOULD HAVE JUMPED at the chance to knock off a few minutes early and retreat to the cool comfort of the pub’s back patio. But on the third straight day of digging, she was actually finding a kind of rhythm to the work. And after the effort of clearing the roots, she felt as though she just might find something. Something that had lain hidden for a long time there in the shadow of the hill. It felt almost like a premonition. And it was what kept her there digging after Clare had gone to file their log.
The girls had been working side by side since they’d been there, the camaraderie between them an unbreakable bond. They were their usual inseparable duo. And lunches with Milo made for a cheerful, easygoing triumvirate. Even Allie’s feelings of thirdwheel awkwardness had dissipated. The trio was getting to be known as a familiar sight, with Milo in the middle and the girls on either side. But something was making Allie stay in her trench that morning. And in fact it wasn’t long before her trowel hit that very something. At first she thought it was a rock. But it was smooth and round in a way that all the other rocks she’d encountered so far were most definitely not.
Okay. Another pot shard …
But a bigger one. Maybe a whole, entire pot!
Oh, the giddy thrill! she enthused with silent sarcasm. At least, that’s what she was going for. But her inner voice actually did sound giddily thrilled.
Allie called out for Clare, but she was nowhere in sight. She thought about waiting until Clare returned, but she was just too excited. Hoisting herself half out of the shallow trench, she reached over and grabbed her tablet before doing any more digging. Almost humming with excitement, Al propped it on its stand, flicked it into video mode, and set it to live-stream to the blog. Then she touched the record button on the screen.
She took off her hat to keep it from casting a dark shadow over her face and waved at the camera eye.
“Hey! Okay, all you dig-diggers out there in Cyberlandia, this is your friendly neighbourhood Al-Mac out here on day three of the Glastonbury Dig, and I’m back atcha with another dispatch from the field. Trench A-3, Sector 6 in the field, to be exact. And you better hang on to your Indy Jones fedoras, kids, because this entry is gonna be one for pot-sterity …” Allie chuckled to herself.
Clare, if she’d been there, would have thrown something at her head for a pun like that. It was probably a sad commentary on the lack-lustre-y-ness of their discoveries thus far, but Allie was almost quivering with excitement at the thought of maybe, just maybe, unearthing a whole, entire pot. Buzzed as she was, though, she still followed procedure. Careful photographing and measuring and recording were her first priority. She blew through that nonsense in about a minute, describing in rapid-fire detail for the blog watchers what she was doing as she went. Then she was ready to take a crack at actually working the artifact free from the surrounding soil.
“Okay … here we go …”
She gave the thing a gentle tug.
“Here … we … gooo …”
A less gentle tug.
“Go!”
A hearty yank.
The thing didn’t budge. Allie wondered if it was being held prisoner from beneath by another tree root. She felt around blindly with her trowel edge but couldn’t tell. Wary about damaging whatever it was, Al laid the little shovel in the dirt beside her utility kit. Then she brushed at the layer of compacted soil with her gloved fingertips, but she couldn’t get a good feel for the object’s edges through the heavy canvas. She muttered a bit under her breath, sat back on her haunches, and wiped the sleeve of her shirt over her brow. It came away pale with sweaty yellow dust. For a moment Allie just glared at the bit of smooth, rounded artifact that seemed cemented into the ground. There was an assortment of tools and various grades of bristle brushes in the kit. There was even a delicately edged chisel.
But for some reason she ignored them all.
It was incredibly unlike her. Out of character. Allie McAllister was nothing if not a by-the-book, methodology-trumps-excite-ment, procedure-and-nomenclature-and-all-that-boring-stuff rule obeyer. In retrospect, she was never able to adequately explain the impulse that made her strip off the tartan-patterned gloves that Clare’s aunt had given her and dig her bare fingertips into the soil on either side of the artifact—potential artifact (probably just a rock, seriously)—and grip its edges.
It was cool.
Not in a “hey, cool” way. But temperature-wise. Cool. Almost … cold.
Allie dug her fingers further into the dirt and felt the powderfine grit working its way under her black-painted nails. The curve of the buried object extended downward, smooth and slightly irregular. If this was a pot or a bowl or something, it had been made by an amateur. And as the thing curved around its bottom there were even nobby bits that felt out of place—like blobs of clay at the rim. She hooked her fingertips around them and exerted a gentle upward pressure. What she was doing in that moment was strictly against procedure as it had been minutely explained to them at the outset of the dig. And she was capturing it all and sending it streaming out into the world on a live feed. She’d be lucky if they didn’t kick her sorry carcass off the dig within the hour.
But she didn’t stop.
Allie was caught in the fierce, breathless grip of a mounting impatience. She climbed out of the trench and positioned herself to use her leverage and pull upward to free the whatever-it-was. She reached down. Her fingers burrowed deeper into the sandy soil, curved around the bottom of the object, and one more time, she gave a mighty heave …
With a sudden sucking pop, she fell backward onto her butt as the thing came free like a stone flung from a catapult. She did a half shoulder roll, holding the precious artifact—if that’s what it was—safely over her head and came to a stop a few feet away. Panting from the exertion, Allie lowered the object in front of her face and stared at it.
It stared back.
The empty eye sockets of the skull she held in her hands seemed to grow large enough to swallow her whole. The day turned to darkness, and the world around her faded into ghostly nothing.
“AL?” CLARE CALLED as she and Milo stepped into the sunlit clearing.
The field was empty save for the sound of a single, sweetly singing bird.
“She was here just a few
minutes ago …”
“I thought you said she was going to wait,” Milo said, stretching out his shoulder muscles. Clare had found him, as usual, hunched over his souped-up laptop back at Command Central.
She turned to him and shrugged. “I guess she changed her mind. She must have bugged out early and is probably already at the Rifleman. Right?”
Milo checked his watch. “Well, it is after noon—and I am kind of starving. Sure.” He swung his arm down and caught Clare’s hand in his. “Let’s go. With any luck, she’s nabbed one of the good outside tables.”
“Um. I guess so …” Clare hesitated. What if Al had gone on ahead because she was tired of waiting, or annoyed, or mad at Clare?
Raging paranoia aside, Clare was a little worried about her relationship-y-ness with Milo and how it was affecting her bestfriend-y-ness with Al. She didn’t think Al minded—in fact, Al had already told Clare that she was happy for her and what a doofus Clare was for not having recognized Milo’s obvious worth years earlier. Nonetheless, Clare proceeded with caution when it came to balancing the two. Milo was worth dodging flaming arrows for, sure. But her friendship with Al was worth getting hit by one. Almost. And—okay—it had been a glancing blow and had barely even scorched the sleeve of the jacket she’d been wearing at the time (which had been Al’s anyway), but still.
Al was Clare’s anchor. Her bestest best friend. Her blood sister—they’d even done the thing with the pricking of thumbs and elastic bands when they’d been little. And Al McAllister was the only thing that had pulled Clare back from the past again and again when Clare had insisted on shimmering until she managed to put things right.
Clare would never do anything to hurt her and she would mess up big time anyone else who hurt Al, herself and Milo included.
So there.
“Hey …” Milo grabbed her hand and tugged her gently along toward the hedgerow gate. “C’mon, Clare de Lune …”
He grinned over at her as they walked and Clare melted a little. She still got all fluttery when he called her by that pet name— even though the first time she’d heard it, she thought he was calling her crazy. Not that her behaviour at the time hadn’t warranted such an assessment.
The Rifleman’s Arms was a brisk five-minute walk from the dig site, up a pleasant laneway called Chilkwell Street. A little on the outskirts of town, situated amongst a few of the less touristy shops, the street was crowded with old, two-storey stone buildings with brightly painted doors. There was a cheese shop, a dressmaker, and an antiques dealer along the way, but Clare had never bothered to stop in at any of them. She was usually too hungry. Also, she wasn’t really in the market for a nicely aged Stilton, customsewn frock, or granddaddy pocket watch. And yet today she found herself slowing down in front of the antiques-shop window.
Three days of poking in the dirt with a toy-sized shovel hadn’t exactly yielded a treasure trove of artifacts and, as much as Clare was enjoying the exercise, she was also kind of pining for the sight of a brooch or a blade or, heck, a slightly tarnished button.
The little bell above the shop’s front door tinkled off key as she and Milo stepped inside the dimly lit store. By the light of a laptop’s glowing screen they saw the shop clerk, perched on a high stool behind a long counter, half-hidden by an antique cash register that sat crouched like an overfed brass house cat. The clerk was hunched over a piece of antique machinery that looked as though it might be the long-lost cousin of an accordion. At first, Clare couldn’t tell whether the clerk was male or a female, given his/her oversized sweatshirt, hood up, and enormous, froggylooking welder’s goggles with dark round lenses. A thin line of acrid smoke that smelled like burning copper rose in a lazy spiral from where he/she was soldering two pieces of metal together.
“Identification, please,” the clerk muttered vaguely in their direction, without looking up, as Milo and Clare approached. A girl, by the sound of her voice—which was a rich, deep alto, but still definitely female.
Clare stared in bemusement at the clerk, whose attention seemed wholly split between the object of repair and whatever was on the computer screen in front of her. The ridiculous goggles effectively obscured the upper half of her face and made the rest of her features look tiny and strangely elfin in comparison. And the big, sloppy hoodie made it seem as though she was trying to conceal some kind of hideous physical deformity. Either that or she just found it chilly in the shop. In any case, not exactly a fashion plate.
Glastonbury really is full of an odd assortment of folk, Clare thought.
“Identification,” the clerk said again, tapping the countertop with the glowing red-hot tip of the soldering iron.
“Sorry?” Clare said.
Goggle-enlarged eyes flicked up behind the dark green lenses and then down again. “Store policy. Theft prevention.”
“Oh. Uh … okay.”
Not exactly a trusting soul, Clare thought, but she and Milo did as they were asked. Milo handed over his driver’s licence and Clare dug in her purse for her Canadian passport. The clerk glanced at the ID. Then she glanced at it again. And then, beneath the outlandish headgear, the lower half of her face turned ghostly pale.
“Gurgle,” she stammered as she almost fell backward off her stool. Then she lunged forward, slammed the lid of the laptop shut, yanked the soldering iron plug out of the wall, and disappeared through a beaded curtain into a darkened back room.
“Uhng … ur … Bad fish and chips!” she exclaimed over her shoulder. “Store’s closed!”
Clare blinked. “Okay. Did that girl actually say ‘gurgle’?”
“Some kind of local Somerset dialect, no doubt.” Milo shrugged, picked up his licence off the counter and handed Clare back her passport. “Remind me not to order the fish and chips at the Rifleman.” His stomach made a rumbling noise despite himself. “Should we go find Allie and food now? Not necessarily in that order? Growing boy, here …”
He patted the demonically smiling image of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from the movie Ghostbusters that adorned his genre T-shirt du jour and Clare grinned at him.
“You know, I’m starting to think the population of this whole island is just one long parade of eccentrics,” she said, shaking her head as they left the shop and its intestinally challenged clerk behind.
“You’ve watched some of the more popular UK sitcoms, right? Even the British wouldn’t argue with you on that one.”
“Good point. Still. Goggles Baggypants back there actually said ‘gurgle’?” Clare snorted.
“She did seem kind of hobbity and strange, didn’t she?”
“Oh yeah. I can’t wait to tell Al. She already thinks we should be writing a sitcom based on our hostess and the other guests back at the bed and brek.”
But it seemed she’d have to wait to share her story whether she wanted to or not. As Clare led the way through the pub’s cozy rooms and out to the back patio, one thing became obvious. Allie McAllister wasn’t there.
6
The brilliant blue of the afternoon sky flashed red and then began to fade to black. Allie had a single, shining-sharp instant to register terror. She knew what was happening—what was about to happen—and she dropped the skull like the proverbial hot potato and thrust out her hands to brace herself: the inevitable, mystically induced disorientation was about to overtake her.
The shimmering.
The uncanny feeling that all the atoms in your body were flying apart, swirling around and slamming back together again. Her whole being would sparkle like fireflies as she felt herself falling forward into a void filled with nothing but blackness and stars …
… At least that, according to Clare, was what happened.
In reality, all Allie felt as she stood there with her eyes squeezed shut was a sudden drop in air temperature like a shadow falling over her. She gasped, opened her eyes to see the sky rapidly darkening, and felt a brief sense of aggrieved disorientation. Clare had totally misrepresented “shimmering” when she’d describe
d it to Allie all those times …
She stared up into a sky that was an endless deep black except for the place where the moon seemed to punch a hole right through it. Just as in the dream she’d had on the way to Glastonbury, the moon was blood red. But this time her rational mind didn’t even bother trying to rationalize it. Besides, it didn’t look like any pictures of lunar eclipses Allie had ever seen and she knew it.
She also knew that this time she definitely wasn’t dreaming. That’s because a glancing blow from the shoulder of a passing horse—galloping by riderless and foaming at the bit—knocked her for a very painful loop that spun her around and left her gasping for breath. Where the hell had that horse come from? she almost asked. But when she turned back around, she found she didn’t need to. Because several more like it were coming straight at her. Only these ones had riders. Roman cavalry soldiers.
Holy shit.
The rider closest to her had obviously seen Allie appear out of nowhere. He was staring wide-eyed at her from under the brim of his helmet and hauling on the reins of his mount to avoid running her down. She thought for a second she should be grateful for that, but then he started waving his sword around, pointing it at her and screaming in Latin at his fellows to “Kill the witch!” Or words to that effect.
Suddenly Allie wished she’d never learned Latin.
A couple of the more enthusiastic of the cavalry lads veered sharply in Allie’s direction, and she lost her academic, this-can’tpossibly-be-happening urge to stand there and see how the whole thing was going to turn out. Instead, she turned and started running for all she was worth. The sound of pounding hooves was so loud Allie thought they must have been almost right on top of her.
Half a foot to her right, a hard-flung spear slammed into the ground. Allie twisted mid-stride to the left, dodging another one, and then zigzagged toward a stretch of forest. There was angry, insistent shouting behind her now but she didn’t bother trying to translate.
Every Never After Page 5
