Hugo tried to peel Lady Ishbel away from Sunni, but she lashed out at him. With every ounce of her strength, Sunni staggered toward the center as Lady Ishbel clung to her like an outraged cat. As the familiar weightlessness took over and Sunni felt the stones’ positions changing under her feet, the shrieking of the ravens was almost as loud as Ishbel. The digging fingers fell away, the ravens’ noise faded, and Sunni felt herself swirling like a snowflake in a breeze.
When she came to, it was in a chilly place and a hard one at that. Her cheek was against something cold. She opened her eyes and, to her horror, came face-to-face with a skull. The ivory bone was delicate, even around the black hollows where the furious green eyes had been only a few moments before.
Sunni scrambled to her feet. Lady Ishbel’s skeleton, still dressed in her ridiculous golden gown and pendant, was sprawled across the center of the labyrinth in the Mariner’s Chamber.
An alarm wailed, and Sunni clamped her hands over her ears as she staggered away.
“Sunni!”
Sunni backed straight into Blaise, her whole body shaking. He caught her and calmed her as best he could, though he was shaking himself. “We’re here. It’s OK!”
Dean crouched over the bones and touched the dress. “Is this, is this —?”
“Lady Ishbel. Sh-she tackled me as I was coming through.” Sunni couldn’t take her eyes from the remains. “She wanted the map.”
They stood quietly for a moment, and then Blaise asked her, “Are you OK to do what Corvo asked?”
Sunni ran her hands over her tired face and nodded. She closed her eyes as she stepped over Lady Ishbel into the fourth quarter of the labyrinth. “Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.”
Winding backward along the path, she spoke it out loud, against the shrill sound of the alarm. When she had passed though all four corners, she leaped away from the labyrinth and turned back to watch it.
“Look!” Dean pointed. The black tiles faded in front of their eyes and blended with the surrounding flagstones. They could barely make out the labyrinth anymore.
“You shut it down, Sunni,” said Blaise. “It’s finished.” His voice was weary. “We’d better get our stories straight. What do we tell people?”
“The truth,” said Sunni. “What else? If they think we’re making it up, that’s their problem.”
“So we tell everyone about Angus?”
“I want to forget about him,” grumbled Dean.
“We’ve got to let people know he’s still in there. Especially Mr. Bell.”
Police sirens were shrieking in the distance, adding to the din of the alarm. Suddenly the chamber door swung open and a guard cautiously put his head around it.
“You!” He gasped when he saw the three disheveled figures on the bench. “How did you —? This room was locked!”
The only response he got was tired shrugs.
The sounds of engines and voices filled the air outside Blackhope Tower. Before the children knew it, blankets were placed around their shoulders and they were sipping cups of sweet tea as they waited for their parents to arrive.
Lorimer Bell was pinned against a wall in a darkened room.
Blaise’s father looked closely into his face and repeated, “It’s not good enough.” Behind him stood Mr. Forrest, nodding incessantly.
“But, but —”
“It’s just not good enough, never was, never will be.” Mr. Doran’s eyes were flat and blank as he bore down on the art teacher.
Lorimer protested, “I’ve done everything I can, honestly.”
“You have not, you have not,” intoned Sunni’s father, and Mr. Doran repeated, “Just not good enough.”
The two fathers pushed Lorimer farther into the wall. He felt something against his back. The painting — he was leaning against The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia.
“No, give me some air!” Lorimer gasped.
“You should be in that painting, not our children,” said Mr. Forrest, not moving an inch.
“Go into the painting and get them,” Blaise’s father commanded, and he pulled something metallic out of his pocket. It glinted as he raised it over his head and, in one swift move, slashed it across the surface of the painting. “I have made you an opening. Go and find our children.”
Lorimer leaped away from where the knife had split the canvas open. “Nooo! Why did you do that? They can never get out now!”
The art teacher awoke with a violent jerk. Another nightmare. He had had so many since the children and Angus vanished.
The telephone’s ring sliced through the silence. It had barely rung a second time before Lorimer had fumbled it to his ear and glanced at the bedside clock. Six thirty in the morning.
“Lorimer, great news,” boomed the headmaster. “All three children have been found at Blackhope Tower, worn out but unharmed, barring a few scratches. They won’t be coming to school for a day or two, of course, but we shall see them very soon.”
Lorimer nearly cried with relief. “I am delighted, George, absolutely delighted.” He could hardly focus on what the headmaster said next and hung up as soon as he could.
But as he got up and sat on the edge of his bed, his smile faded. The children were back, but what about Angus?
Later that day, Sunni rolled over and hugged her comforter in close around her face. Her bed was the softest place she could imagine being, and the quietest. She could have stayed there the rest of the afternoon, sleeping more deeply than she ever had before, but sun was filtering through her curtains and the fragrance of roast chicken was wafting up from downstairs. She looked around her room. She remembered choosing the colors, but now it felt like someone else had, in some other life.
On the desk lay her warped sketchbook. She had shown it to the police and told some of her story, but the officers had left scratching their heads and promising to return when Sunni felt “more herself again.”
She swung out of bed and went to peer at something on her bulletin board that caught her eye. Digging a postcard out from under layers of other pictures, she recognized with a jolt the painting of three young men in high-collared white shirts and tunics. They stood against a familiar landscape: a lake and a marble palace with woods and hills beyond. On the left was Zorzi, dressed in green. In the middle, dressed in blue, stood Dolphin. And on the right, proud and confident, was Marin, dressed in rusty red. Sunni turned the card over and read the caption: “The Apprentices, by Fausto Corvo, circa 1581.”
“So you’ve been inside the painting all this time and you got there by walking around the maze.” D.C. McNeill read over her notes as she spoke.
“Labyrinth, not maze.” Blaise sat next to his father on the sofa. He had slept for fifteen hours straight and then devoured the juiciest burger and biggest mountain of fries in his life.
“Don’t get used to this, buddy,” his father had said with a chuckle. “Tomorrow we’re back to healthy eating.”
Blaise rubbed his full stomach, ready for any questions the police could throw at him.
“You were saying something under your breath when you walked the labyrinth, Blaise,” McNeill said. “We were watching. Remember?”
“You were watching, all right,” said Blaise’s father. “That’s about all you were doing, seems to me. One minute I get a call saying Blaise is with you in the Mariner’s Chamber, and the next minute you’re telling me I just missed him and he’s vanished into the ether.”
“I can only apologize again, Mr. Doran,” said McNeill, gritting her teeth.
“It’s not their fault, Dad,” Blaise said. “I wanted to go into the painting, and I kind of tricked them into letting me because it was my only chance.”
Mr. Doran let out a long sigh. “Guess we did a good job raising you to be curious and explore the world. But you outdid yourself this time, son.”
Blaise smiled sheepishly at his father and then answered McNeill’s question. “The word I said was chiaroscuro. It means “light and dark” in Italian.”
McNeill made a note of it and continued in a flat tone, “And once you got in, you had to make your way through a series of worlds and fight off predators before you found the way out.”
“Yes,” said Blaise. “And we met some people who had been in there for four hundred years.”
The three adults exchanged incredulous glances at this.
“Did you meet a man from, er, our world who vanished after you did?” D.C. Nash asked from the armchair.
Blaise sucked in his breath. “Yes.”
“What was his name?” asked McNeill.
“Angus Bellini.”
A small but triumphant smile crossed the detective’s face as she made a note. “Do you think he’s still inside the painting?”
“Y-yes.” Blaise felt a rush of unease.
Nash leaned forward. “Please, Blaise, if you have information about him, tell us. He put a security guard from Blackhope Tower into the hospital, and we’d like to get him if we can.”
“He’s still in the painting,” said Blaise. “And he’s not coming back.”
“How do you know that, son?” asked Mr. Doran.
“He’s trapped there.” A shiver ran up Blaise’s back. “The labyrinth is closed now. No one else can get in or out.”
McNeill took all this in and pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache coming on. “You’re sure about that?”
Blaise nodded, and his father reached over to squeeze his shoulder.
“Any idea about the skeleton?” Nash asked.
“Lady Ishbel Blackhope,” answered Blaise. “She was alive in the painting, but she was too old to survive once she came out into our time.”
“How did she get through if the labyrinth had gone?”
“She came out with Sunni before we closed it down.” Blaise was grateful for the warmth of his dad’s hand.
McNeill shook her head as she wrote more on her pad. “This is some story, Blaise.”
“You don’t believe me? Then how did we show up in that locked room?”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe you. But it’s a lot to get my head around.”
“Sunni and Dean told us the same story,” said Nash. “Not that it makes it any easier to take in.”
Blaise relaxed a bit at this.
“We’ll give you a bit of time to rest and see if you remember anything else.” The detectives stood up.
When Mr. Doran let them out of the front door, a chorus of voices outside began calling out.
“Mr. Doran, how is Blaise? How about a photo?”
“Mr. Doran, can Blaise speak to us?”
“No, thanks, folks. Please give us a bit of space. If Blaise was your son, you’d want the same,” said Mr. Doran, firmly closing the door on the reporters.
Blaise took the phone to his room and looked up Sunni’s number.
“Hi,” she said cheerfully when she came to the phone. “How are you doing?”
“Eating loads, sleeping even more.” He laughed. “What about you and Dean?”
“Fine, but Rhona, my stepmom, wants Dean and me to speak to a counselor. She thinks we need professional help with our trauma.”
“Are you feeling traumatized?”
“Only about being stuck indoors. All these reporters are hanging around trying to talk to us and take photos.”
“Same here,” said Blaise. “But I’m going to school tomorrow and I don’t care who follows me.”
“Me too — totally. I can’t believe we’ve been away for three weeks. It seemed like we were only there three days.”
“I know. Bizarre. Just think — it could have been longer,” said Blaise. “We’ve got to see Mr. Bell and tell him about Angus. He phoned and talked to my dad while I was asleep.”
“Yeah, he phoned here, too, and when he asked Rhona how we were, she gave him an earful about our terrible ordeal and how it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been doing his project,” Sunni said, fuming. “When actually, it was all because she dumped Dean on me that afternoon!”
“Do you wish it had never happened?”
Sunni paused. “While we were there, I just wanted to get home, but now that I am — I don’t know. I’m glad, but I can’t stop thinking about Arcadia.”
“Me too. And nobody but us will understand what it was like — if they even believe us.”
Sunni sighed. “I know.”
“Is Dean feeling the same as you?”
“To be honest, I don’t know what Dean thinks — he doesn’t want to talk about Arcadia at all. He’s right back into his creature comforts, eating constantly and stuck on his computer, playing games. Rhona is spoiling him rotten.”
“Can I talk to him for a minute?”
“Yeah, if I can tear him away from the screen.” She shouted her stepbrother’s name. “OK, see you at school tomorrow.”
“Bye, Sunni.”
Dean was crunching something as he said hello, sounding distant.
“Deano,” Blaise greeted him. “All right, man?”
“Yeah. I just ate three pieces of pizza. And chocolate cake.” He gave a little heh-heh.
“Better than dried fish.”
There was a long pause. “Yeah.”
“So,” said Blaise, “you’re OK, huh? Your legs all right?”
“Got Band-Aids on.” Dean slurped a drink on the other end. There was another pause.
“Cool.” Blaise wasn’t sure what else to ask.
“Gotta go. My mom’s taking me to buy a new game.”
“Sweet. OK, man. Take care.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go in with you?” asked Mr. Forrest as he pulled the car up to Braeside High School’s main entrance. Groups of students hung around outside, waiting until the last possible second to saunter in.
“I’m sure, Dad. I’ll be fine.” Sunni stepped out of the car into the mild March air and waved back at him.
Before the car had pulled away, several girls ran up and enveloped Sunni in a group hug. She was pelted with questions and ushered into school like a queen bee at the center of her hive. At first it was amazing to feel all this welcoming warmth. But as the day went on, a ball of apprehension began to grow inside her.
Every head swiveled to look at her in the hall. Her name floated in and out of conversations to an alarming degree. Kids even cornered her in the bathroom to ask more questions and tell her what they thought. It began to dawn on Sunni that coming home wasn’t going to be easy, not by a long shot.
That afternoon Sunni dodged more curious kids and escaped to her art class.
She bumped into Blaise at the door and let out a deep breath. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you all day. You missed Spanish.”
“Yeah, overslept.” He scratched his head. “I’ve been keeping a low profile since I got in. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff people have said to me. That we’re liars and we made Arcadia up. People I don’t even know.”
“I’m getting it, too,” she said. “Some people are nice, you know, really glad to see me. But others are just mean.”
“I don’t get why it even matters to them so much.”
Sunni shrugged ruefully. “Are you ready to talk to Mr. Bell after school?”
“Yeah. I guess we’d better,” he said, and flashed a hopeful smile.
Applause greeted them as they walked into the classroom. Lorimer Bell stood by his desk, looking like he might burst with emotion. Blaise and Sunni slid into their seats, their faces pink and bashful, until Lorimer called out for quiet.
“We’re all very, very pleased to have you both back. It has not been the same in here without you.”
“Yeah, I had to think up my own ideas to draw,” said one boy, and the class tittered.
“Tell us what happened,” said a girl.
Lorimer put his hands up. “Let’s give Sunni and Blaise a chance to catch up first. There will be plenty of time for stories later.” He took a box of charcoal sticks from a cupboard. “Besides, we have work to d
o. Charcoal portraits. Everyone else is already paired up, so why don’t you two draw each other? Taking turns, of course.”
Blaise and Sunni raised their eyebrows at each other. Lorimer looked puzzled, so Sunni shook her head and said, “Sorry, Mr. Bell, it’s nothing. Portraits sound fab.”
Their charcoal sticks flew across the paper. The other students glanced over at the pair, who seemed to be in their own bubble, far away from the classroom.
When everyone else had left for the day, Sunni and Blaise stood by Lorimer’s desk.
“Do you have to leave straight away, Mr. Bell?” asked Sunni.
“No, no,” said Lorimer. “I hoped we could catch up.” He pulled up chairs for them. “We were all so worried about you.”
“Why didn’t you come get us, then, Mr. B?” Blaise’s voice was flat. “You knew how.”
A stunned look passed over Lorimer’s face.
“But you sent your cousin instead.”
“I did not send Angus — believe me.” Lorimer put his hand to his throat, remembering their last encounter. “He forced me to help him work out the password, and then he assaulted a guard to get access to the labyrinth.”
“The police told me about the guard.” Blaise nodded.
“The Mariner’s Chamber was closed off after Angus got in. I couldn’t have followed then, even though I wanted to help you.”
Blaise leaned forward. “But you knew more about Corvo and the painting than you told me.”
“How could I risk putting you in danger? Besides, I didn’t know the password, Blaise. Angus realized you had to have used a word you’d seen that day in the Mariner’s Chamber. He knew the only likely clues would be on the information card next to the painting and made the right guess.”
“Did you tell anyone else?” Sunni asked.
“I was sure the police wouldn’t believe me — it sounds like such a far-fetched story. And I hoped that Angus would bring you back.” Lorimer smiled, but his hands trembled. “How did you manage to find the way out?”
“Thanks to Angus, we almost didn’t get out. He nearly killed Blaise and didn’t blink an eye.”
“Angus is no angel, but he wouldn’t go that fa —”
The Blackhope Enigma Page 20
