The Chaos Code

by Justin Richards

  Matt got himself a drink of water, rinsing the mug well first. His hand was shaking, and the more he tried to control it, the more it shook. He had been putting it off, he realised, but he should really check the rest of the house. Maybe Dad was asleep in bed. Maybe he’d taken a sleeping pill or been up all the previous night working, or… Matt wanted to believe it, wanted to open the bedroom door and see his father staring blearily back at him and asking what time it was. What day it was, even. But he was terribly afraid that if he found Dad at all, it would be lying on the floor – attacked by the same person who had grabbed Matt.

  The house was empty. Every room was a mess, almost every floor covered with papers and books and journals. Even the bathroom. But there was no one – no Dad, and no intruder. Matt was sure of that. He was alone in the house now.

  Without really thinking about it, he went back to Dad’s study. He rubbed at his face, where it was sore – from the rough hand that had grabbed him? Or from where he had hit the floor?

  He checked his watch and was astonished to see that several hours had passed since he arrived at the house. It must have been some bump on the head. He should check the answerphone, he decided. Look to see if there was a scrawled note by the phone, telling him Dad was out and not to worry and he’d be back soon. And if not … What? Should he call the police? It seemed sensible, except – what would they say? What would he say?

  He mentally went through the conversation he might have. Was there any sign of a break-in? Well, no, not really. Had Matt’s father ever just gone off before without leaving any message or any indication of where he might be? Actually yes, all the time. Did Matt see who attacked him? No. Was he sure he had actually been attacked? Any signs of the intruder? No, Matt thought. They’d say it was all in his imagination. He was sure it wasn’t, but there was no way he could convince anyone else of that. No real evidence at all. Except …

  There were footprints. Matt saw them as he turned to go. A trail of pale, sandy marks led past the desk to the French windows. He had not noticed them before. But then, he had not been looking, and his vision had still been blurred and speckled from the blow. Curious, Matt followed them, opened the windows, and stepped out onto the patio outside.

  The moon had struggled through the clouds and combined with the light from inside the study, Matt could see that the footprints continued across the paving slabs and to the lawn.

  He stood at the edge of the patio, trying to make out if there were marks on the grass – indented foot marks, or more sand … Where had the sand come from? Where did it lead? He shuddered as he wondered why anyone would walk out across the back garden, where there were just fields and the river, rather than round to the front of the house and the lane. Unless it was Dad …

  Matt stared into the night, out over the garden. For a moment, he thought he saw a dark shadowy figure standing at the fence, in front of the field. A cloud covered the moon for an instant and the wind picked up, whipping the trees into a frenzy of thrashing branches. Matt stepped back, out of the light, afraid he might be seen – that someone might be watching him.

  When the moon returned, a moment later, the figure was gone. The sandy footprints had also disappeared, blown away by the breeze and scattered across the garden. Matt stepped back inside. He shivered, and not just from the cold of the night.

  Chapter 2

  It was late and his head was throbbing again. There was no message on the phone or scribbled near it. Matt walked once more round the house.

  Everywhere was a mess, but nothing seemed to be missing. Except his dad. He thought again about calling the police, but having to explain why he was alone in the house and then that he had no idea if there had even been a break-in still didn’t really appeal. There was no sign of anyone forcing their way in. He couldn’t be sure anyone would believe that the mess in the kitchen – and everywhere else – wasn’t business as usual for Dad. And whether he convinced them there was something wrong or not, it would be hours before he would get to bed. Assuming they let him stay in the house alone. Would they put him in a hotel? Or a police cell? Could they do that? He didn’t want to find out.

  So he rang Mum instead. Her mobile was switched off and offered to take a message. The flat number connected at once to an answering machine that told him she was away and to try her mobile. He hung up while he thought about what he could tell her. But he really couldn’t think of anything. Maybe she was on her plane. There was nothing she could do, and no point in bothering her. She’d just tell him Dad had wandered off somewhere and would be back soon and not to worry.

  The only room that seemed reasonably tidy was the spare room where Matt stayed when he was visiting. Even Dad’s bedroom had several large chunks of stone piled up by the bed – they were carved, ornate, like bits from ancient columns or salvaged from an old cathedral. So with some relief, Matt dragged his bags into the spare room and slumped on the bed.

  Still feeling dazed and woozy, Matt got undressed. He climbed into bed with a mouth tasting of toothpaste and wearing his pyjamas. Just as he pulled the covers back up, Matt suddenly realised there was an easy way to tell if Dad was away or had disappeared – whatever that meant. He all but ran down stairs.

  There was a door from the kitchen into the garage. It was locked, but the key was in the door. Matt opened the door and felt for the light. He breathed a sigh of relief as the fluorescent tube flickered to life. The garage was empty. Dad’s car was gone.

  Feeling much better, Matt went back to bed. Dad had driven off somewhere – that was all there was to it. He’d forgotten that Matt was coming, or mistaken the date, or never got Mum’s message. Everything was fine, Matt tried to convince himself as he yawned. A mess, but fine. Apart from the bump on the back of Matt’s head, but he ignored that. The pain was almost gone now anyway, just a dull ache. He’d fallen. Got scared and fainted. Whatever.

  Matt hesitated in the hallway, sure that something had changed – something was different from when he had arrived. His luggage was gone, but that wasn’t it … Must be his imagination he decided as he went back upstairs. He slipped off to sleep, sure that by the time he woke in the morning Dad would be back and the events and worry of the evening would seem like a bad dream.

  The sound of whistling and the slam of a car door woke Matt. It was the early morning of another grey day. He recognised the whistling – it wasn’t Dad. It was the postman.

  The post.

  That was what was different in the hall. There had been a pile of post under the letter box – he’d assumed that Dad simply hadn’t bothered to pick it up. And then, when he checked the garage, the post was gone. He remembered the muddy footprints across the hall floor, and the similar, sandy marks in the study. Had someone broken in just to steal the letters? What was the point of that? Did they somehow know Dad was expecting something valuable in the mail? But that would mean someone knew an awful lot about Dad. Like they’d been watching him, examining his life. Matt felt cold at the thought. Somehow that was even more of an intrusion than a break-in.

  He ran to check Dad’s room – empty. He stumbled downstairs, almost tripping on one of the books at the side of the stairs. He kicked it aside with annoyance and it tumbled down into the hall. A bunch of letters was appearing through the letter box and fell to the floor. The book skidded into them.

  Matt ran to the door and yanked it open. The postman was already on his way to the next house. He’d left the van’s engine running and it was puffing white exhaust into the cold morning as it stuttered and chugged.

  ‘Hi there,’ Matt shouted.

  The postman turned. ‘Morning. You staying again?’

  ‘Just for a bit. You haven’t seen my dad have you?’

  ‘Not for a day or two,’ the postman admitted. ‘Probably off on one of his expeditions.’

  ‘Yeah. probably. Thanks.’

  ‘Does he know you’re here?’ the postman wondered. ‘Not on your own, are you?’

  ‘He knows,’ Matt sa
id. ‘And Mum’s …’He shrugged, not wanting to lie.

  The postman pushed a bundle of post through next door’s letterbox. ‘You get your letter?’ he asked Matt as he went back to the van.

  ‘My letter?’

  ‘The one at number three. Bit odd that.’

  Matt checked the latch wasn’t down and hurried over to the postman, conscious that he was still in his pyjamas. ‘Sorry, what do you mean? What letter?’

  ‘Old Mrs Dorridge has it if you’ve not picked it up.’ He pointed to the house opposite – number three. ‘It was addressed to you but care of her. Came yesterday. I nearly stuck it in with your dad’s post, but it said on the envelope care of Mrs Dorridge at number three and it was underlined. So I thought …’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I dunno. Not my business to think, is it? But that’s where it is if you’ve not got it.’ He climbed into the van and banged the door shut. ‘Cheerio then.’ He waved out of the open window, and the van pulled away.

  Matt went back inside and got dressed, then hurried across to number three. He didn’t really know Mrs Dorridge. She was old with a face so weathered and lined that it looked like the side of a cliff. Her eyes were pale and watery and she peered round the door at Matt suspiciously.

  ‘Er, I think you have a letter for me,’ he said.

  There was a hint of a smile. ‘Oh yes. Matthew, isn’t it? I told the postman he’d made a mistake.’ She disappeared back into the house, her frail voice barely reaching Matt as he waited outside. ‘But he said no, look what it says. And I said well be that as it may …’ She reappeared, pushing the letter at Matt. ‘Very peculiar, I thought. I wonder who it’s from?’

  Matt took the letter, but Mrs Dorridge was reluctant to let it go until he answered. She raised her thin grey eyebrows encouraging him to reply.

  ‘I think perhaps they knew Dad might be away and wanted to make sure I got it,’ he said. He managed to tug the letter free of the old lady’s shaking fingers. ‘I don’t recognise the handwriting,’ he lied.

  In fact, he knew the handwriting only too well. He forced himself to get back into the house before he tore open the envelope. He felt empty inside – like he’d not eaten for days. Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, and again he recognised the handwriting. It was his dad’s. Why was Dad writing to him and sending the letter to Mrs Dorridge? Why not just leave him a note, or give him a call?

  ‘Dear Matt,’ the letter said, ‘You might find this interesting. Before she married me, your mother would have been able to help you with it.’

  He read it three times. Just two lines of handwritten text, followed by another line, printed in capitals. It started HTTP:// and Matt recognised at once what it was. Things were not getting any clearer, but for some reason Dad wanted him to look at a website.

  • • •

  Dad had a laptop, and Matt remembered seeing it on the desk in the study with papers blowing round it. Another thing that suggested Dad was expecting to come home soon – he wouldn’t leave his laptop behind.

  Typically, the laptop was half-buried, its silver metal casing gleaming through the detritus – papers, an old book, a dark, stone disc… Digging down to find Dad’s desk was like the archaeology that Dad did, Matt thought. All sorts of junk needed shifting before you got down to the important stuff. He swept the bits and pieces aside and opened the laptop. While it was powering up, Matt tidied the papers that had not actually been blown off the desk into a pile and looked for somewhere to deposit the things off the laptop.

  The stone disc, he found, wasn’t stone at all. It was clay. A copy of some relic or other, which Matt could feel squashing slightly in his grip as he picked it up. He had thought it was a plain circle, about four inches in diameter. As it caught the light though, he could see that there were markings on it.

  The symbols looked a bit like Egyptian hieroglyphs – tiny pictures of a man’s head in profile, a flower, a jug or vase. There were what might be tools of some sort, perhaps a shield, and more abstract shapes that were little more than lines and squiggles. One looked like the > maths sign while another was a small triangle filled with dots. The symbols were arranged between thin lines spiralling inwards. On one side they covered the surface, while on the other the symbols framed the main picture in the middle of the disc.

  The central picture was a strange, irregular shape – or rather two shapes, one about three times as big as the other. Matt turned the disc slowly as he looked at them, hoping to make out what they represented. But they were just shapes, he decided – like a child had drawn round something rather badly. Maybe it was a picture of something that had been broken apart in the middle?

  The computer loaded the welcome screen and Matt put down the clay disc at the side of the desk and clicked on the little picture of an archaeologist’s trowel that represented Dad’s user ID. It prompted him for a password, but Matt knew what it was from when he’d borrowed the computer before to do his homework – ‘parchment.’ Dad had talked about setting up Matt an ID of his own, but he hadn’t done it yet.

  While the computer loaded the desktop and connected to all the things it had to connect to, Matt picked up the book that had been lying with the disc across the keyboard. It was called Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings and was written apparently by Charles Hapgood. Just the sort of book Dad would be reading. Just the sort of book that Matt found really boring. He flicked through it – the dense-looking text, diagrams and old maps confirming his opinion.

  As he did so, a sheet of paper fell out. Matt picked it up, feeling a bit guilty at having lost Dad’s place in the book. It was a printout from a travel agent company, some sort of itinerary. He glanced at it, and saw that it must be a trip that Dad was planning – flying to Copenhagen, then by train and boat to somewhere called Valdeholm. Digging up boring bits of pottery, most likely.

  Matt was about to push the paper back between the pages of the book, when he saw that the other side had writing on it – notes scrawled by Dad, probably as he read through. They looked just about as boring as the book and itinerary did, but Matt skimmed through them as the computer continued the click and whirr and show him its hourglass.

  Piri Reis & Oronteus Finaeus cf Mercator and

  Buache. Show America and Antarctica clearly.

  Ant. ‘discovered’ 1818 but mapped by Russians

  b4 – and Mercater = 1569!!

  Buache (1737) shows Antarctica landmass

  pre-glaciation (as in 13,000 BC ??) – seismic

  survey didn’t confirm shape till 1958.

  M & B both based on older maps – from

  Alexandria (or Constantinople & taken by

  Venetians 1204?)

  Conclusions – obv.

  ‘b4’ was Dad’s way of writing ‘before,’ and ‘obv’ was his abbreviation for ‘obvious’ though Matt knew from experience that what was obvious to Dad wasn’t always apparent to anyone else. He tucked the paper back into the book.

  The top drawer of the desk seemed to be where Dad kept his pens and stationery – stapler, sticky tape, Post-it notes. Matt helped himself to a pen and found a blank piece of paper. Then, on an impulse, he stuffed the book of ancient maps and the clay disc into the drawer. Maybe Dad wanted them kept safe and together.

  The web page that came up was blank apart from an entry field headed: ‘Password.’ Matt stared at it for a moment, then typed ‘parchment.’ But there was only room for eight letters, which appeared as blobs in the box. So he actually typed ‘parchmen.’ The screen changed – but only to display a single line of red text beneath the now empty entry field:

  Password incorrect

  Maybe he’d mistyped the address and gone to the wrong page. He checked it against Dad’s letter, but found it was the correct website. So what was the password? It would be something Dad would expect him to guess. Matt had no idea what the secrecy was about, but obviously Dad wanted Matt to be the only one able to see whatever was on the page behind the password screen. Otherwise he’d have simply w
ritten whatever message he wanted to get to Matt in the letter. He’d need to work out the password to find out why Dad was being so cautious. Or maybe it was a game – Dad had arranged treasure hunts with cryptic clues when Matt was younger. But he was too old for that now, surely.

  But someone had taken the letters, Matt realised. He sat rigid, staring at the screen as he thought about that. Had Dad sent this letter to Mrs Dorridge because he knew that his mail was going to be stolen? Was it Matt’s letter that the intruder had been looking for? Matt’s mouth was dry, and swallowing did no good.

  He picked up the letter and read it again. Maybe there was a clue to the password in there, but it didn’t seem to be any use. Or was it? That last sentence had seemed weird to Matt when he first read it, but now he wondered if it was the clue he needed:

  Before she married me, your mother would have been able to help you with it.

  Well, he needed help. But why Mum? She was certainly good with computers. She’d been working for the company that serviced the university computers when she met Dad. He was head of the Archaeology Department, and told Matt that he found her in his office one day under the table.

  ‘She was connecting up the new computer systems,’ Matt remembered Dad saying. ‘I wouldn’t let her out from under my desk until she agreed to go for a drink with me.’