by Alan Early
‘Excuse me,’ he said, standing in the doorway, ‘Mr Quinn? Miss Keegan? Can I speak to you for a minute?’
‘We’ll be right back,’ said Miss Keegan, pointing her finger at all three of them. ‘Don’t go looking for any underground rivers while we’re away.’ They stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind them.
‘Thank you,’ said Will. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
‘It’s as much our fault for following you,’ Arthur said.
They sat in silence for a moment before Ash said, ‘Your dad didn’t seem too angry. Mine will kill me when he finds out I lost my new phone. Plus all the life-endangering stuff.’
‘He’s just relieved now,’ said Arthur, ‘but when we get home he’ll probably ground me for life.’ He turned to Will. ‘What about your dad?’
‘My dad’s dead.’
‘Oh, I …’
‘It’s okay. He died a few years ago. In a car crash.’
‘I’m so sorry, Will. I … I know how it feels.’
‘You do?’ asked Ash.
‘Yeah, I do. My … my mum passed away in … in March.’ Out of habit, he fingered the ribbon tied around his wrist.
‘Oh, Arthur!’ She laid her hand over his. ‘I kind of guessed but didn’t want to ask.’
‘It’s tough,’ said Will. He looked at Arthur directly, tears glistening in his eyes. ‘And it doesn’t get much easier with time.’
Arthur nodded.
‘I’m sorry,’ Will said.
‘It’s okay.’
‘No. I’m sorry for how I acted.’ He put his hand out to Arthur. ‘Fresh start, Artie?’
‘It’s Arthur.’
‘Fresh start, Arthur?’
Arthur took Will’s hand and shook it firmly, optimistically. ‘Fresh start, Will.’
Just then he remembered the pendant. He picked up his soaking trousers from where they’d been lying by his feet and pulled the pendant out of the pocket. It hadn’t been damaged by the flood, but then it had probably spent years under the water anyway, maybe hundreds of years. Even though it was no larger than the palm of his hand, it felt heavy – or rather, heavier than it should have been. Denser, somehow. Will and Ash shuffled their seats in for a closer look.
‘Can I see it?’ Ash put out her hand and Arthur gave it to her. She held it up and scrutinised it.
‘It looks like bronze,’ said Will. Ash offered it to him but he declined. She looked at it again.
‘Well, it’s definitely some kind of pendant for a necklace,’ she said, handing it back to Arthur, ‘but what’s with the rope and the tree?’
‘It’s not a rope,’ Arthur said. ‘Look closer. It’s a snake. See? There’s the mouth and the fangs.’
‘Oh yeah. It kind of gives me the creeps. And it’s weird the way it was stuck down there in the tunnel wall. It looked like it was put there on purpose, but why would anyone do that? And who? The Vikings maybe? Your dad did mention that Vikings used the Poddle years ago.’
‘Could be. But what I’m most curious about is that weird flash that made the grate fall out.’
‘Yeah, what was that?’ exclaimed Will.
‘I thought it was just my imagination. Or that I’d knocked my head,’ Ash said. ‘But it really happened, didn’t it?’
Just then Joe and Miss Keegan re-entered the room. Arthur quickly hid the pendant in the top pocket of his pyjamas.
‘Let’s go home,’ Joe said.
Joe had taken a half day from work and now drove Ash and Arthur home. Miss Keegan gave Will a lift; when the three had gone missing, the class had been dismissed early for the day, she’d explained.
When they reached their estate, Ash ran into her house; only Stace and Max were home this early and both were very confused to see their sister wearing flannel pyjamas and carrying her soaking school uniform in a plastic bag.
When Arthur got home, he put his uniform straight in the wash and went to go upstairs to change.
‘One second, young man,’ said Joe sternly. Arthur came back to him, shuffling his feet sheepishly. ‘I’m glad you’re safe. But don’t ever do anything stupid like that ever again, do you hear me?’ His face wore a stony, stern expression.
‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
His face softened. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything like that again. I’ve lost enough this year without losing you too.’ They closed their arms around each other in a tight hug, both grateful that they were still alive to do it.
As Arthur slept that night, the pendant sat on his bedside table. He turned over in his sleep, groaning. If he’d been awake, he would have seen the pendant start to glow. An eerie green light emanated from the bronze medal. But Arthur was trapped in a nightmare, dreaming of dark tunnels and letters he couldn’t understand and hissing, hidden monsters.
Chapter Eight
Wednesday morning came and, as usual, Ash was waiting in Arthur’s driveway when he left his house. She held something out to him. He took the gift from her: it was a brown leather shoelace.
‘What’s this for?’
‘For the pendant. I’m guessing you have it with you? It’s so you won’t lose it.’
He did indeed have the pendant in his pocket. He took it out, threaded the lace through the loop at the top and tied it around his neck. He stuffed the pendant inside his shirt, where it felt momentarily cold against his bare chest.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Where’d you get it?’
‘An old pair of my dad’s shoes. It’s all right, though – he never wears them. He’s more of a Nike man.’
Cheerfully they made their way to school.
When they got there, there was no sign of Miss Keegan, but Will was surrounded by the class and was right in the middle of recounting their adventure of the previous day. He’d replaced the hospital bandage with a smaller Band-Aid and the cut over his eye seemed to be healing nicely. Their classmates listened in rapt silence to his every word.
‘And it stank so bad down there. I didn’t see any rats, but I’m sure there were loads. And –’
‘Skip to the good part,’ encouraged Rob Tynan. ‘Tell us about when it flooded.’
‘Well, the tide just started coming in real suddenly, right. This wave came out of nowhere, down the tunnel and,’ he slapped the desk he was standing at, ‘smashed right into us. It knocked us all off our feet. It hit me so hard that I slammed my head on the ground.’ He rubbed the Band-Aid over his eyebrow where it still stung. He saw Arthur and Ash enter behind the kids crowded around him. ‘But, eh, I was lucky. Because Arthur saw me in the water and helped me. He saved me.’
The class turned to Arthur. A few congratulated him, while others patted him on the back.
‘What happened then?’ prompted Rob.
‘What happened then is that their lovely teacher came in and it was time to start class,’ Miss Keegan said as she entered the room. ‘Everyone take your seats, please. I’m sure there’ll be lots of time to talk to our three adventurers during the break.’ The pupils hustled to their desks, chair legs screeching on the floor. ‘Settle down, settle down. Now, before Arthur, Will and Ashling decided to go for a little swim yesterday, we did actually have a very interesting and informative tour thanks to Arthur’s father. So I’d like you all to spend the next, say, two hours writing an essay on what you learned about the new Metro. You can include pictures if you want. You can focus on one aspect of the Metro or on the whole thing. You can write about the excavation or write about what it’ll mean to the city when it’s complete. It’s totally up to you. You can begin.’
She looked at her watch and sat down to correct the previous Monday’s maths homework. Arthur decided to focus on the work that his father was doing at the Metro – he’d bring in all of Joe’s past tunnelling experience as well as how the Usher’s Quay tunnel would eventually be constructed. He might even touch on how the Metro would be joining the east of the city to the west. But one thing he would certainly not be writing about was the River Poddle. He
suspected that neither Ash nor Will would want to revisit that particular topic either.
When the two hours were up, it was time for break. The school bell rang and the class filed out; everyone handing their essay to Miss Keegan as they passed. Arthur handed his up and was just pushing out the door with Ash and Will when Miss Keegan called him back.
She was looking at his essay as she leaned against her desk.
‘Miss Keegan?’
‘Take a seat please, Arthur.’ He sat down in the front row before her. She noticed Ash and Will standing in the doorway, waiting for him. ‘Out, you two! He’ll follow you.’ Casting a quizzical look towards Arthur, they walked off, leaving Arthur alone with the teacher.
‘Look, Arthur,’ Miss Keegan sighed, ‘I know yesterday was a hard day for you. I’m sure you’re still a bit shaky after your ordeal.’
‘Well, a little, yes.’
‘But I did ask you to do some work. Will and Ash managed to do theirs. Why couldn’t you do yours?’
‘Miss? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘The essay, Arthur. Why didn’t you write an essay like everyone else in class?’
‘But I did, Miss.’ And he had. He’d put a lot of work into that essay for the past couple of hours. He could even remember the last line about how the Metro would be great for tourism.
‘Arthur, please. You spent two hours doodling.’ She held up his essay. His name was written on the top, like he remembered doing. And the first few lines of the essay were still intact. But after line five, his writing disintegrated into random lines, dots and cross-hatches. He took the pages from her and flicked through them, confused. Page after page was the same – an identical pattern repeated over and over in place of real letters.
‘I can’t … I didn’t …’ He struggled to continue. He knew two things as he looked at the pages. First of all, he definitely hadn’t drawn these strange letters. He distinctly remembered writing the essay. But these were his pages, which just made him more confused.
The second thing he knew was that he’d seen these letters before. Carved into the wall of the stone tunnel and written in blood in a dream. An ancient alphabet that he shouldn’t have, and couldn’t have, known. Something called runes.
‘And what did you say to her?’ asked Ash. During break, Arthur had shown her and Will the pages. Will was currently studying them.
‘I just apologised,’ Arthur answered. ‘I didn’t know what else to say. She’s letting me write the essay again for homework. I’m not worried about that, though. I’m worried that somebody must have swapped my essay for this.’
‘You know what would be even worse, though?’ said Will, looking up from the pages. ‘That you did write this but you just can’t remember doing it.’
‘That’s not possible,’ Arthur said, then looked to Ash for confirmation. ‘Is it?’
She shrugged her shoulders doubtfully and, though Arthur didn’t want to admit it, he was doubtful too.
Arthur didn’t finish rewriting his essay that night until after 10.30. Exhausted, he went straight to bed. Joe followed to his own bed less than an hour later.
On the green outside, the dark figure emerged from the shadow of a tree and walked towards the Quinn household. Dead leaves crunched under his step while the breeze swept others around his ankles in mini typhoons.
He stopped in the middle of the road. This was far enough. At this distance, he could sense the power of the pendant. He could even see it, glowing green through the boy’s window as he dreamed inside.
The boy was protected now. Protected from him. Because of the pendant. Except it was more than a pendant. The man knew this. He knew what it really was. A key.
Chapter Nine
If Arthur thought that things couldn’t get any stranger, he was in for a surprise the next day at school. Class was well under way. Miss Keegan had taken his new essay with thanks when he arrived in the door with Ash and Will, and on the board she was now going over some geography homework from a couple of days ago.
As she droned on about mounds and fjords and glacial formations, Arthur found himself being distracted by a strange smell. At first he couldn’t tell what it was but as it grew stronger he found the smell in his memory. The air reeked of dampness and mildew, age and a faint whiff of open sewage. He’d smelled it before: under the ground, along the dank River Poddle. He looked at Ash and Will, but they didn’t seem to have noticed and were both paying close attention to Miss Keegan’s words on the blackboard. He looked at the teacher. Her mouth was moving and her hands gesturing yet suddenly he couldn’t hear a word that was coming out. In fact, there was now total silence in the class. Total silence apart from a distant dripping sound. Drip-drip-drip-drip. It seemed to echo off the classroom walls.
Drip-drip-drip-drip.
He suddenly sensed something at his feet. He looked down to find that he was sitting in a boat. When he looked back up, he was no longer in the classroom, instead he was travelling down the River Poddle. The boat was narrow and basic, barely more than a raft really. The edges were curved inwards so that the water couldn’t seep in. There was no one rowing or even steering; the little boat was being taken along by the flow of the water. It meandered down the river, walled on either side by a cold stone tunnel. A single torch burned, fixed to the bow.
Arthur sat in the stern. Even though he didn’t know how long he’d been there or how he’d gotten there, and even though all he knew was that he was back in the dark Poddle tunnel on a small wooden raft, he wasn’t frightened. But then he wasn’t exactly calm either. He felt anxious, like there was an important task at hand that he had to carry out. He forgot all about his classroom, his friends and his teacher, and tried to remember what that task was.
The only sound now was the water lapping against the boat. No – that wasn’t quite right. It was the sound of water lapping against boats, several boats. He turned around. For as far as he could see behind him, identical boats to his own followed. Each had its own torch, the light flickering on the stone walls and reflecting off the murky waters. But each boat had more than one passenger; in some as little as two, in others as many as five squeezed onto the fragile rafts. They were mostly men, although some looked as though they were barely out of boyhood, with long hair and beards, and were wearing dark tunics and heavy woollen shawls. Some of the men had weapons and shields with them in their boats; others had tools and building materials. Arthur looked down at his clothes and found that he was wearing a similar itchy tunic. He also had a few silver bracelets on his wrist and a necklace with the bronze pendant lying against his chest.
He scratched his head in confusion and found that his hair was long. It grew as far as his neckline and had a greasy, lanky feel to it. He rubbed his jaw to find a thick and bristly beard there. When he looked at his hands, he saw only a man’s hands: veiny and thick with a fine layer of hair over the back.
Without really meaning to, he found himself reaching out to the wall to stop the boat. The others stopped behind him. He stood up, unsure of what he was doing but not in the least wobbly in the boat. His manly hands felt along the stone wall, finding the perfect spot. He pulled the pendant harshly and the necklace split, then he slammed the pendant against the wall. There was a brief green flash of light. When he took his hand away, the piece of bronze was embedded in the stone, glowing faintly. The light faded as he turned to speak to his army.
Strange, Arthur thought distantly, that I know they’re an army.
The voice coming through Arthur’s lips wasn’t his own: it was a deep baritone, echoing off the tunnel walls. And it spoke in a language that Arthur couldn’t understand. The men nodded agreement and he sat back down. The boat moved on by itself.
They travelled further down the river than Arthur, Will and Ash had explored. And yet, somehow he knew that what he was seeing was accurate. He knew that the scratches on the walls were real; he knew that the turn to the right they soon came across was authentic.
There was
a light in the distance. It was flickering orange so Arthur knew it was firelight, but it was much brighter than the torches they had. As the boat moved closer, he realised he was looking through a door and into a large, cavernous room. Several torches adorned the wall he could see.
Then one torch in the room blinked out as they approached. It hadn’t been blown out; it just looked like it had run out of fuel or oxygen. Another went dark, and another, and another, until the room through the door was pitch black.
He looked at his own torch, and as he did every torch on every boat faded to darkness.
‘Aaah!’
Arthur opened his eyes and was shocked to find himself sitting in the middle of class. For a brief moment, he wasn’t sure if he’d actually woken at all or was still dreaming. But the giggles coming from some class members gave it away.
‘Am I boring you, Arthur?’ Miss Keegan said. She was holding a piece of chalk in her hand, midway through writing some geography answers on the board.
‘No, Miss, I’m sorry.’
‘Glad to hear it. Now, may I continue?’
‘Of course, Miss. Sorry, Miss.’
She turned back to the board and went on writing.
Will nudged him. ‘Are you all right?’
Arthur nodded.
‘Are you sure?’ whispered Ash, concern written all over her face.
‘Yeah. I just haven’t been sleeping well. I keep having these weird dreams …’
He trailed off mid-sentence when he saw the words that Miss Keegan was writing on the board. The geography answers, which had been written in plain English, were moving by themselves across the board. The chalk letters looked like they were dancing.
‘Hey! Look at that!’
‘What?’
‘That! Don’t you see it?’ He pointed to the blackboard where the letters continued to move independently. No one else seemed to notice; not Will, not Ash, not even Miss Keegan, who was writing more words on the board, only for them to come to life too. The letters suddenly slowed down and started to form new shapes: lines, x shapes, crosses, dots and crosshatching. All shapes similar to the ones he’d seen on the wall of the tunnel, shapes he’d somehow written down himself the day before.
