Word Hunters

by Nick Earls

  Al flicked to Mursili’s number on his phone and sat down at the desk while he waited for it to be answered. He could feel his heart racing, beating right up in his throat already. He tried to focus on the plan. His bag was packed, and Mursili could give them some idea of what lay ahead. He opened his laptop, got online and started looking for ‘okay’.

  ‘Ahoy,’ Mursili said, when he answered. ‘Do we have something?’

  ‘Yes, we do.’ Al switched him to speaker and set the phone down. ‘The word is “okay”. “O-K-A-Y.” I’m going to Wikipedia.’

  ‘All right. I’ll do the etymology dictionaries and then go wider.’

  Al heard Mursili’s phone clunk down onto a hard surface.

  ‘Choctaw,’ Lexi said, reading the Wikipedia entry over Al’s shoulder. ‘It looks like a Native American language. Or West African, from slaves. I really don’t want to end up on some slave ship that’s grabbing people in Africa hundreds of years ago.’

  ‘No “okay” in this dictionary.’ It was Mursili’s voice. ‘There’s “tokay”, which is a kind of wine.’ They could hear keys clicking. ‘All right, found something. I’ve got someone disputing the Choctaw theory. And the West African, where apparently it’s “ki” or “kie”, an expression of surprise. Like saying “oh” in English so that sometimes, when they’d learnt English, the slaves said both. “Oh, ki.” But that’s surprise, not agreement. It’s not linked.’

  Al scanned the Wikipedia entry. He couldn’t concentrate to read it properly. ‘Everything else is 19th century American.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mursili’s mouse clicked next to his phone, and then scraped across his mouse pad. ‘Yes, I think that’ll be it: 19th century American. Quite a few possibilities there, though. If you can avoid the Civil War, you should be all right.’ There was a pause, while Mursili read something more on screen. ‘I think that’s as close as we can get for now. I’ll call you in a minute, to check that you’re back safely.’ There was another pause. Lexi stared at the phone, wanting to hear something certain and safe, wanting one single good answer about where they were headed. But Mursili just said, ‘Good luck,’ and that was it.

  They were on their own.

  Doug was running on his wheel when Al opened the lid of his box. Al reached in and Doug climbed onto his hand, looked up and gave a few quick blinks, which Al took as rat sign language that Doug was ready for the next adventure.

  Lexi opened Al’s backpack to give it one final check. They’d made a list and she went through it, mentally marking everything off – a knife, two torches, a ball of string, a roll of tape, some pliers in case a peg key broke, the bushwalking first-aid kit …

  ‘First time in my life I’ve ever looked in a bag and wanted it to have more weapons,’ she said.

  ‘This is Fig Tree Pocket.’ Al put his arms through the shoulder straps. ‘We don’t do weapons.’

  She went over to the desk and stood in front of the dictionary again. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She reached for the ‘& more’ button and pressed it.

  The fall was short, with a few small bumps before the cloud opened up. Each bump was a language manual or a book about grammar, and together they felt like moguls on a ski run, with one quick thump immediately followed by the next. From studying his copy of Caractacus’s timeline Al knew it went all the way back to 1850, but this run was over almost before it began.

  Below them was a lake like a huge grey-blue tongue. They were dropping towards the edge of it, away from the farmlands and forests and towards a city, right to the heart of the city, where it met the water.

  They could see baseball diamonds, train lines and a park, but they landed on the flat roof of a building close to ten storeys high.

  ‘Okay,’ Lexi said, because it seemed like the right word to use. She checked the roof. They were alone, except for two pigeons on a nearby railing with their heads tucked in against the cold wind blowing from the lake.

  There was a sign attached to the front of the building and she could just make out the tops of the letters. It looked as if it was wired to light up at night.

  She reached into Al’s bag for the peg. ‘Chicago, 1929.’

  ‘That’s going to mean gangsters,’ Al said, as if it might be a good thing.

  ‘Of course it is, because they added so much to the language.’ Lexi shoved the peg back in the bag. ‘I don’t want it to be gangsters.’

  ‘But think of who we might meet. Al Capone.’

  ‘Stop. You’re not making it better.’ She pulled the strap on his bag through the buckle. Somewhere inside, Doug made a muffled noise.

  ‘We’re dressed to meet gangsters.’ Al wasn’t stopping. He had baggy pants with braces, a white shirt and a cap. His key badge was now on his braces. Lexi was in a maid’s uniform, with her badge on her collar. ‘Maybe I run messages for them. Maybe you – I don’t know. Maybe you dust their machine guns. You look like you’re in a silent movie.’

  ‘We both do.’ Lexi had a lacy kind of hat on her head, and she moved it to make it less uncomfortable. ‘It’s the 1920s. This is how everyone looks in old movies.’

  ‘How many pegs?’

  ‘I didn’t check.’ She looked over the edge, at the big black cars on the street and the delivery boys slipping between them on bikes. ‘Someone distracted me by talking about gangsters.’

  ‘They only ever got Al Capone for tax evasion.’ Al swung the bag from his back. ‘We’ll be okay.’

  He had a foothold on the past again and he was loving it. Chicago, 1929. He couldn’t remember who was real and who wasn’t – Bugsy Malone or Bugsy Siegel. There were too many movies, but this was the real thing – the place and the time when law-breakers and law-makers fought each other from the running boards of big dark cars.

  He unbuckled the bag. Doug climbed out and sniffed the air, but it was too cold to carry much more than the smell of smoke.

  In the bag, the tape, the string and almost everything was just as Al had packed it, though now with word pegs on top. He counted five of them. He would definitely have told Lexi if there had been three, and maybe four. She wouldn’t want to hear that there were five. But something was missing. He ran through the contents again in his head.

  ‘The knife’s gone.’ He lifted up a pair of gloves, but there was nothing under them. ‘Did you take it out?’

  ‘Of course not. You saw me. You probably—’ She was going to say that he had probably forgotten to put it in there, but she had seen it. ‘It was there. I don’t know what’s happened.’

  It was another question for Caractacus. Where had the knife gone? Why had the knife gone? They would have to make a list of questions and put it in Al’s bag too, for the next time they were in the 5th century.

  ‘At least it’s America,’ Al said, looking across the buildings of the wintry city as smoke spilt from factory chimneys and the noise of traffic came up from the street. ‘And we haven’t overshot the 1830s yet. If it was Grandad Al back then in Nantucket, he won’t be here, but at least we’re on our way.’

  They checked the roof for anything that might help them, but there was nothing there except pigeon poo and a few broken bottles.

  They found an unlocked door that led to stairs and, as Al stepped inside, Lexi said, ‘Hey, no initials. Not yet, anyway. No sign that any other word hunters have been here. Do you think we’re in the right place? Are we going wrong already?’

  ‘We came straight down. If we’d flown off course, maybe. No, we’re where we should be.’ He led the way down the stairs. ‘It’s 1929. Most word hunters come from before then anyway, so they wouldn’t have done this step.’ Grandad Al would have, though, if he’d done ‘okay’. Grandad Al came from more than 50 years later, and wrote ‘AH’ in blue pen each time. ‘Maybe the initials are somewhere in the building.’

  H
e wanted to find the blue ‘AH’. He wanted ‘okay’ to take them right to Grandad Al. Every step along the way there was a new portal to find – a new portal they might not find. Grandad Al was a teacher and a veteran word hunter, and he’d missed one somewhere. Al wanted to see initials: any sign they weren’t off course.

  They stopped at the first floor they came to, at a door with the number 8 on it. When he put his ear to it, Al had a gambling den in mind – gangsters, jazz, the whir of a roulette wheel, bottles of illegal drink clinking on a trolley – but all he could hear were voices and feet on a hard floor. Sometimes maybe the past wasn’t interesting – it was just getting on with business.

  ‘We landed on the roof,’ Lexi said. ‘Not at the front door down on the street. Maybe whatever we’ve got to do happens high up. I reckon we give it a go.’

  Al pushed the door open.

  Whatever went on in the building, it was no gambling den and everyone was moving quickly. Men crossed the corridor from one door to another, carrying documents as if they were in a hurry. All around was the sound of typing, hands typing at high speed and pages being pulled from typewriters with a zipping sound.

  ‘Copy!’ someone in one of the rooms shouted. ‘Copy!’ It was clearly a demand.

  A boy dressed like Al ducked into the room and left about a second later, separating sheets of paper as he ran.

  ‘I’m one of those,’ Al said to Lexi. ‘Whatever they are.’

  A man stuck his head out of the nearest doorway. ‘Copy boy,’ he said to Al. He had sheets of paper in his hand. ‘This one’s not for the subs. It’s for the board meeting. Take it there now, would you?’

  ‘You have submarines?’ Al said, before he could think it through.

  ‘What? Submarines?’ The man stopped checking the pages. Then he worked it out and laughed. ‘Oh, you must be new. We have sub-editors, not submarines. They fix up the garbage some of these guys write. But this isn’t for them. These are the style guide updates for the year. Every newspaper has a style guide to keep its work consistent. The board needs to sign off on any changes. Last door down the hall.’ He pointed into the distance, then held the documents out for Al to take before stepping back into his office.

  Al read the top page. ‘It’s a newspaper. That’s what they do here. They’re writing for a newspaper.’

  On the way down the corridor, they passed other offices where people were typing at desks, and a photographers’ darkroom.

  ‘Girl!’ someone called out as they got closer to the boardroom.

  It was an older woman with small glasses and her hair in a bun. She called Lexi into a room that turned out to be a kitchen and storeroom. Al waited a few steps down the hall, straightening the pages. He tried not to think of the one time they had been separated, when Lexi had been captured in the New Forest in 1100. But this was Chicago in the 20th century, a newspaper office, a time and place he almost understood.

  ‘They have coffee already,’ the woman said to Lexi, ‘but I want you to make certain they never need to ask for more, and that they have plenty of cigarettes. Take some and refill the boxes on the table now. They may also need more iced water.’

  The woman gave her a carton of cigarettes. Lexi had seen people smoking at work in old movies, and now she was supplying some of those people with the cigarettes.

  The door to the boardroom was clear enough. It had ‘Boardroom’ on it in gold letters. Al knocked.

  ‘Come in.’ Whoever owned the voice sounded kinder than the woman with the bun or the people shouting, ‘Copy!’ It turned out to be the man at the head of the table. ‘One each, please,’ he said when he saw what Al was holding. ‘I’m assuming those are the style guide updates?’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ Al said.

  He worked his way along the table, placing a copy in front of each of the men sitting around it. The smoke in the air made Doug cough and Al coughed to cover it, but no one seemed to notice. The windows in the room were all shut. Lexi took cigarettes from the carton and filled the silver box at one end of the table. A man reached out and took one right away, and lit a match.

  ‘Next up,’ the man chairing the meeting said, ‘the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is intending to make its awards an annual event, and the name “Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards”—’ He shrugged. ‘Anyone not asleep yet? The name is unbearably long. So we’ll be cutting it down to “Academy Awards”. Give it a year or two. People will get used to it. Then we’ve got “big shot”.’

  ‘It started out as gangster talk.’ The chairman glanced down at his notes. ‘Regular people say it now. It’s not about the calibre of your gun anymore. It’s about being in a position of power, or getting big ideas about your own importance. “You think you’re such a big shot.” You hear people saying that.’ He looked around the table, but no one had anything to add. ‘I think that’s the lot, but I’ve had Henry put it all in writing for each of your departments.’

  He took a t page before turning it over.

  ‘No, there’s one more,’ he said. ‘Page two. “Okay.”’

  ‘How’s that work?’ one of the other men said. ‘I thought it was just an “O” and a “K”.’

  ‘It was. But it’s become a word. It’s generally accepted as one, so we’re proposing to spell it as one. We’re a newspaper. It’s up to us to take the lead.’

  The other man stared at the word on the page, weighing it up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if that’s the case, I guess “O-K-A-Y” looks about right.’

  ‘Okay.’ The chairman smiled, picked up his pen, put a tick on the page and initialled it. With that, the top of the pen started to glow golden. ‘How about that? I think I’m all out of ink.’

  Al stepped forward. ‘I’ll fix that right away, sir.’

  The man handed him the pen and looked down at his notes for the next agenda item. Lexi ignored the coffee and the water, and moved straight to the door. Light from the ‘& more’ button on top of the pen pulsed across Al’s hand, but no one other than Lexi seemed to notice it.

  He followed her out to the corridor and into the empty office opposite. He turned around and she reached into his bag and took out the activated peg.

  ‘Five of them?’ she said. ‘There are five of them?’

  Doug blinked at her and scrunched himself into the shadows in case he was in trouble.

  ‘Yep. I asked for one with five, ’cause I thought the ones with three and four were getting a bit easy.’ Al touched the button and the top of the pen opened up as if it was melting. ‘Not my fault, Lex. And in two seconds there’ll be only four of them, anyway.’

  He held the pen out to her.

  ‘I know it’s not your fault. It’s just—’ They had four more chances to find Grandad Al, four more chances to get lost.

  She pushed the peg into the portal.

  They shuddered over more small bumps, and again the drop was short.

  The mist cleared and below them was an island, or in fact several islands and the broken coastline at the edge of a continent. The island they were falling towards was taken up by a city, with its grid of streets crammed with reddish-brown buildings several storeys high. There were steamships and sailing ships at work on the water.

  ‘Wings!’ Lexi shouted as they dropped towards a street crowded with carriages and carts. ‘Traffic!’

  Al panicked and flapped his arms and tumbled. Lexi swung hers out from her sides and swerved. Just in time, Al did the same.

  There was a park on one side of the street and they aimed for the grass, but only made it as far as a roadside tree.

  Al dropped through the leaves and ended up straddling a branch. ‘Whoa! Nearly 19th-century roadkill.’ The steamboats said 19th century, and the carriages looked right for it, too.

  Lexi was caught in a pile of skirts in the for
k of the tree’s two biggest branches. She couldn’t even work out how many layers she was wearing.

  Al laughed. ‘You look like a doll, like the kind of doll some nannas hide their toilet rolls under.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ She struggled to move. ‘You’ve got your pants tucked into your socks.’

  Al didn’t care. She was right – his pants were weirdly baggy above the knees and tucked into long socks below them – but this time he was the winner. He wasn’t wearing leggings or looking like a way to hide toilet paper. He mostly looked as he had in 1929.

  ‘Just get the peg out,’ Lexi said as she pushed herself up and lifted her boot over the fork. A squirrel dropped out from between two of her petticoats, shook its head and dashed up the tree trunk.

  She half-jumped, half-slipped to the ground, leaving a torn piece of petticoat behind her on the branch. How did anyone do anything dressed like this? Or maybe you weren’t supposed to. Al’s bag was made of leather this time, and he took it off and handed it down to her, before swinging his leg over the branch and dropping easily to the ground.

  ‘That last one was quick,’ Lexi said as she undid the buckle. ‘We didn’t even get to street level. How would we have found Grandad Al if it had been the right era?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Al realised there was a lot he didn’t know, a lot they didn’t think to ask Caractacus when they met him in the 5th century. ‘I didn’t think it’d work out so easily.’

  Lexi had the peg in her hand and she showed him. ‘Still America. Closer to the 1830s, though. New York before skyscrapers. When did they get those?’

  Through the park, Al could see a grand building with columns and a domed tower. Across the street was an office block five storeys high with a sign on it that, in curly old-fashioned writing, said ‘The New York Times’. ‘There’s nothing higher than that.’ He pointed to it. ‘I think they have to invent the lift before buildings get much bigger. That’s got to happen some time around now.’