by M. G. Harris
Although right now I can hardly imagine who. . .
Mum takes my hand. “I’m sorry. This has all been terrible for you, I see that now. I’m sorry if I was wrapped up with my own problems before. But don’t you think we should be together – the first Christmas without your father?”
“I think that you need the praying and the talking and stuff . . . and I don’t.”
“And what do you need, Josh, to stay up late, hanging around with girls, drinking and listening to loud music?”
I grin and shrug. “Well, yeah. Mum, I’m fourteen!”
“You know you’re not supposed to drink alcohol until you’re eighteen? It’s the law.”
I roll my eyes. “Mum. . .”
“Who would you stay with? Tyler? Ollie?”
“Probably not, actually. I might stay with Emmy. From school.”
“Emmy?” Mum eyes me suspiciously. “Is she your girlfriend now?”
“No! She’s just a mate.”
“Because I don’t think you should stay over with a girlfriend.”
I groan. “Mum!”
“Anyway,” she continues, “in case you were wondering . . . Rodrigo called me back yesterday. About that whole business with him thinking he’d seen your father. Rodrigo checked his diary. Turns out he was also in Saffron Walden a couple of months before, in April. They made the recording then, in the same church. He’s been wondering if he could have had the occasions confused. Seen your father the first time he was there, not in June.”
I’m stunned. “He actually said that?”
“Well, he wasn’t sure. To be honest, he still thought it could have been June. But the facts simply don’t match with June, do they?”
I chew my lip. Now that I’ve actually been to Saffron Walden, I know that the facts show that it was June. But I can’t let on.
“I suppose they don’t.”
Mum seems satisfied. “Well, Josh, I’m going on that retreat. I feel rather strongly that you should come too, but you’re too old to be forced.”
“Thanks, Mum,” I say seriously. “Thanks for thinking I’m old enough to choose.”
She sniffs. “It’s a pity I don’t agree with your choice. But I suppose that’s how it is when your children grow up.”
Mum settles more happily now. And I’m happy too . . . that I’ve found a way to keep Mum out of any danger while I investigate all the weird things that have started happening. I have this unexpected feeling of being Mum’s protector, instead of the other way around. It doesn’t feel bad, not at all.
We agree some dates for Mum’s retreat and I promise to call Emmy to set up a week at hers. Then Mum leaves me alone in my room.
I lay the postcards on my desk, in order. Another puzzle.
What key holds blood – has to be a reference to my father and me.
Death undid harmony – too right it did.
Zombie downed – blatantly, the body in the airplane.
This is about my father’s death. Someone, somewhere is trying to tell me something.
Well, to be precise, it’s someone in the state of Veracruz. I don’t know anyone who lives there, which makes that clue a bit of a blind alley.
I’m stumped. I look back at my Mayan codex puzzle. Nothing makes any sense. I can’t think straight. There’s just too much going on. My head actually starts to hurt.
I need to talk to someone – just get away from this for a while.
I look at the list of people on my instant messenger program. Just like most days, Tyler’s listed as “Away” and Ollie’s not logged on. But “St_Emmy” is.
This is as good a time as any to ask about staying at her place for Christmas. . .
Hey, Emmy.
Wotcha, Josh. Sup?
Not much. You?
Mikey’s party.
Mikey. . .?
You’ve seen my band, yeh? He’s the bass player.
Party? On a school day?
Tis the season to be jolly. Last week of school. Plus it’s his fifteenth today.
Cool.
I never see you at parties any more.
Yeaahhhh . . . I know. I’ve got lazy.
You should come to Mikey’s.
Mikey . . . where does he live?
Old Marston.
He wouldn’t mind?
He won’t notice!
OK. Got his address?
I can’t remember the last time I went to a party. Before my dad died, definitely. Right now, though, I’ll do anything to be out of the house and talking to someone else. And to be honest – if I’m going to ask for a week-long sleepover, it had better be in person.
Mikey lives in a big cottage in the old village of Marston. I take the bus and my skateboard. I manage to remember to change out of my school uniform, and wear an old black Nirvana T-shirt over jeans.
I arrive before Emmy, unfortunately. Mikey’s friends are mostly kids who aren’t particularly friendly with me.
“Oi, weirdo! Seen any UFOs lately?” one of them says to me, then laughs like he’s made an award-winning joke. The crowd he’s with doesn’t seem to understand his comment, so he spends the next minute or two explaining the background to them.
Great.
I move away and stand by the punch bowl, sipping a disgusting mixture of red wine, vodka and fruit juice. Looking at the door, waiting for Emmy. Wishing I hadn’t bothered.
With one ear, I listen to the conversation behind me.
Garcia this, Garcia that.
Then one voice pipes up, “Josh Garcia, not the Josh Garcia with the, like, hilariously traumatized blog about UFOs and that. . .?”
There’s a big laugh from the entire group.
I think about going over there and punching a couple of them, but at that moment Emmy bursts through the door and is jumped on by Mikey and the rest of her band. Her latest hair-dye job is black with red; she’s wearing bright red lipstick and black fingernail polish. She’s wearing a matching “American Idiot” T-shirt. With this girl, it’s all about Billie Joe Armstrong. Then she notices me.
“Hey, Josh,” she says, grinning widely. “You made it! Cool.”
From behind me, the voices continue.
“The Joshua Files, it was called.”
“How d’you know, were you one of his readers?”
“Not me, idiot, my big sister. She lives to be a geek – I told her this loner from school was obsessed with UFOs and said they’d abducted his dad . . . and she started reading it. She used to leave comments on his blog . . . they were blog-buddies!”
Squeals of laughter. Emmy raises her eyebrows to say “What the heck?” but I put a finger to my lips, then point behind us. She gets the message right away.
“Let me try to remember her blog name . . . I know, it was TopShopPrincess.”
“TopShopPrincess?”
“Something to do with the Arctic Monkeys. . .”
“They’re old. . .”
“Nah, man, they’re nang, idiot; shut up and listen. Then one day she left a comment – something so terrible that poor Joshey got all upset . . . and deleted the blog.”
The guy’s got a real audience now. Behind me, I sense them turning around to stare at me.
“Heya, Josh, what did she write?”
But I can’t say anything, I’m just too stunned. Emmy picks up that I’m angry, furious. . . She puts an arm around my shoulder. “You OK?”
I can’t tell if I’m OK.
TopShopPrincess was this guy’s sister. Fact.
Not Ollie.
I can hardly take it in.
Emmy begins to sound properly concerned. “Ignore them. If you actually tried to collect the stupidest people in our school, you couldn’t do better than that lot.”
I manage to find my voice. “It’s not that. . .”
“What’s wrong?”
I’m thinking about the exact order of events. I met Ollie right after that comment of TopShopPrincess’s – the one that made me delete the blog.
/> And then . . . my knees almost give way when I remember.
I met Ollie after the burglary. The one that happened when I was so conveniently out of the house with Tyler.
The burglar took my laptop computer, read my blog up to that date, found out about TopShopPrincess.
Ollie wasn’t TopShopPrincess at all.
That was just the perfect way to sneak someone in under my guard. A spy – a mole. Whoever “Ollie” is – if that’s even her name – she knows what she’s doing.
I stumble towards the kitchen. I need to get those taunting voices out of my head. Emmy follows me. She closes the door. For a second she leans against it, blowing her fringe out of dramatically made-up eyes that stare at me, sizing the situation up. And then she walks over and hugs me tight.
“Josh, mate, don’t let it get to you. . .”
I’m so desperate to confide in her but I feel gagged, choked into silence.
Emmy asks softly, “Is this about when you ran away to Mexico? Everyone knows, you know. There was a big fuss about it, wasn’t there?”
“A bit.” I glance at Emmy. She stares sympathetically into my eyes. We look at each other for a moment. It gets a bit awkward.
To break the tension I say, “Thanks, Emmy. It’s nice of you, you know. To listen.”
Emmy laughs. She punches me softly in the chest. “Get lost.”
And just like that, the tension vanishes.
“Let’s get back to the party,” Emmy suggests. “Put some music on nice and loud, dance. Forget the losers.”
But how can I enjoy a party? My head is all over the place. At home there’s a half-deciphered fragment of Mayan codex and a bizarre message coming through on mysterious postcards from Mexico. Not to mention what I’ve just learned about a girl I thought was becoming a really close friend.
Ollie wasn’t TopShopPrincess. She’s been lying to me from the beginning.
Whatever suspicions I had about Tyler, what I’ve discovered about Ollie pretty much blasts all that away. She’s been lying, pretending to be someone she’s not. And I fell for it – every word.
It’s as though I’ve become entangled in jungle creepers, binding me more tightly every way I turn. I have to find my way out of this mess – sort the truth from the lies.
The truth is out there. . .?
You bet it is.
The next morning Emmy turns up at my house at seven, smartly dressed in her school uniform. I’d been thinking of pulling a sickie anyway, so I’m still in my PJs, clutching the three postcards from Mexico.
I’ve been staring at them for the past ten minutes. Getting nowhere.
“Thought I’d check that you’re not going to go all emo on me, start cutting yourself or anything.”
“As if,” I smirk. “But I don’t fancy school this morning. I’ve got stuff to do.”
“‘Stuff’,” Emmy repeats, precisely. “Very mysterious. And you wonder why people think you’re weird.”
“My life . . .” I begin “. . . is not like everyone else’s.”
But instead of mocking, Emmy says, “Something happened to you in Mexico.”
“Yes, it did.”
“Something to do with UFOs. . .?”
I hesitate. “Emmy . . . I can’t tell you. If I told you. . .”
“You’d have to kill me, I get it.”
“No, no.” I stare right into her eyes. “But someone else might.”
“I can keep a secret,” she whispers.
Then she looks at the postcards in my other hand.
“You got a new pen pal?”
I hesitate. Can I trust Emmy? I’ve known her since I was six, but the world’s turned into a pretty suspicious place lately.
And my hesitation seems to make Emmy all the more interested.
“Oh, you have. . .? Is it a girlfriend? Is that it, Josh, you hiding some secret girlfriend?”
I hold the postcards behind my back. “I’m not.”
Emmy pushes her way into the house. Now I’m starting to remember why we fell out. She always did come on a bit too strong.
“Go on, let me see.”
“They’re not from a girlfriend.”
Emmy tugs at the cards, pulls one out of my hand. She’s grinning, like she’s sure she’s on the brink of a hilarious discovery. And I can’t resist it.
OK, Emmy, let’s see how funny you really think this is.
“‘Zombie downed’. . .?” She glances up at me with a puzzled look. “So you’ve got weird friends too.”
“They’re not from a friend,” I admit.
Then I show her the others. After all, I tell myself, Mum’s already seen them. It’s not as if this is a complete secret.
When she’s seen them all, Emmy just frowns.
“Now that’s odd,” she says, when I tell her that I don’t know who’s been sending them. “But if it’s a message – it must be in code.”
“Well, blatantly,” I say, although it’s the first time it’s occurred to me. I guess I’ve been too distracted with the way the clues actually seemed to be saying something about my father’s death.
“I’d actually been wondering whether it’s a Caesar cipher,” I say, thinking back to our Latin homework. “You know, the one Julius Caesar used to write coded messages to his generals.”
Really I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just trying to impress Emmy.
Emmy looks at the postcards again. “Caesar cipher . . . where D means A and E means B and stuff? Where it’s really the third letter along, or something?”
“Or something,” I agree.
Emmy scrunches up her nose. “Course it’s not that, muppet. Those messages all look like nonsense when they’re in code. WTF and stuff like that.”
“Not ‘WTF’,” I say, with a grin.
Emmy breaks into a laugh. “Not that, exactly. Cipher words never read like proper words. Too many consonants. Your message has actual words – it can’t be a Caesar cipher. I reckon it’s a riddle. Like in computer games.”
“Oh yeah, nonsensical riddles that bosses set for players, for no obvious reason,” I say sardonically.
“Like that, yeah.”
“Emmy, this is my real life, not World of Warcraft. In real life people don’t waste time trying to get you to follow riddles.”
Emmy stares at me, taken aback by my ominous tone. “Josh, man, it’s just one of your relatives in Mexico having a giggle, yeah?”
I come to my senses.
What are you thinking? You can’t involve her in this.
“You’re probably right,” I agree. “It’s someone having a laugh.”
“So . . . you really going to skip school?”
“Yeah. . .” I lie. “Coursework to catch up on. You know how it is.”
“Totally. In fact, maybe during the school holidays, you could help me with the physics coursework,” Emmy says as she leaves. “That stuff about electromagnetism. I just don’t get it.”
Electromagnetism. . .?
I’m nodding, smiling, whatever I need to get Emmy out of the house before I’m tempted to talk to her about my problems again. I don’t really think about what she’s just said until I get back upstairs.
When I do, I can hardly believe how blind I’ve been.
My translation of those glyphs from the Ix Codex: el-ek-to mak-ne-ti-ka pul-sa.
Or in English: electromagnetic pulse.
And kan-ta-na.
If you played around with the pronunciation . . . could be container.
It’s not exact, but probably as close as you can get to make English words using Mayan syllables.
Except for the first page, the Ix Codex is written in English.
School is completely off the agenda now. The next few hours go by in a chocolate-and-fizzy-drink-induced blur. The next time I look up from my desk, it’s almost three o’clock – and Mum will be home soon.
I have two of the three pages roughly decoded.
