The Curiosity Machine

by Richard Newsome

  Felicity prodded Sam between the shoulder blades and pointed the way. ‘Let’s go, hero,’ she said. She followed Sam as he picked his way down the woodpile. ‘Anyway, aren’t you meant to be the world’s foremost zombie slayer?’

  Sam plodded after Gerald and Ruby, deeper into the surrounding trees. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘provided there’s a video screen between me and the zombie in question.’

  The branches soon met overhead, and the path disappeared like a tunnel into the undergrowth. The sounds of the waves and the seabirds surrendered to a whirring chorus of insects and bugs, a song that floated in the thick tropical air like a beehive trapped under a sodden blanket. Gerald smacked a hand against his neck and inspected the results on his fingers. ‘Mosquitoes the size of fighter jets,’ he mumbled.

  Ruby soldiered on at the head of the expedition. ‘I can’t imagine this was a load of fun for Jeremy Davey.’

  Gerald stopped walking and rested his hands on his knees. ‘Summer in Sydney isn’t as hot as this,’ he said. He drank from the water bottle and passed it to Ruby. Between the four of them, they drained it and continued their march. Red-bellied dragonflies and brightly coloured beetles flitted across their path, wings flashing in the fingers of sunlight that managed to pierce the jungle canopy. Sweat more salty than the ocean stung Gerald’s eyes, and the first throb of a headache knocked at his temples.

  He was hungry, and thirsty, and over-heated. This trek into the unknown had disaster written all over it.

  After almost an hour of hard slog, the four hikers stepped out of the jungle into a broad clearing. A giant tree had fallen, opening a space in the canopy to the sky.

  ‘Oh, my gosh,’ Felicity said, stumbling to a halt. ‘It’s like a fairy glade.’

  Sunlight streamed into the clearing, picking out a curtain of dust motes and pollen that waved in rivulets of silver and gold. A nest of low rounded boulders dotted the jungle floor, as if set out as seats for a pixies’ tea party.

  ‘Look up there,’ Felicity said, pointing to the topmost branches. ‘Butterflies.’

  Gerald craned his neck. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of flittering wings reflected blues and oranges, yellows and reds. ‘That’s pretty amazing,’ he said. He dropped onto a mossy boulder. ‘But I’d give the lot of them for a barrel of cold water.’ He shrugged the backpack from his shoulders and flopped onto his side.

  ‘Ursus is out of his mind,’ Felicity said, finding a boulder of her own to collapse on. ‘This island is huge. Jeremy Davey could have dumped the perpetual motion machine anywhere. We could have walked past it for all we know.’

  ‘Read the note again, Gerald,’ Ruby said. ‘Maybe we missed something.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we just concentrate on looking for water?’ Sam said.

  Ruby smiled thinly at him. ‘Humour me,’ she said.

  Gerald pulled the zip lock bag from the backpack and flattened the note on the boulder. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, and read the deciphered code: ‘I have taken the infernal machine of Drebbel and consigned it to the depths but my conscience is ill at rest. I am fifty miles NE of Culpepper Island.’ Gerald looked up. ‘I guess that’s here.’ He continued: ‘I do not know if I deserve rescue so I rely on the judgment of the one who finds this message. May your soul be raised on butterfly wings.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Sam said. ‘The machine could be anywhere. What’s that even mean: consigned to the depths? Did he toss it into the bay where Fry dumped us out of the helicopter, or did he throw it over the side of a boat a mile out to sea? There’s an awful lot of deep out there.’

  Felicity watched a golden butterfly waft from the treetops. It landed on her nose. She eased it onto a fingertip and held it up to her eyes. ‘I like his sentiments about butterflies, though,’ she said. She marvelled at the changing hues as the creature’s wings opened and closed. ‘They are so beautiful.’

  Gerald glanced at Felicity. ‘If I’m not mistaken, that’s a Galapagos Sulphur,’ he said.

  Sam almost rolled off his boulder with laughter. ‘Look at you, butterfly boy,’ he hooted. ‘Maybe Jasper Mantle got it right with his birthday present. Since when did you become an expert?’

  ‘Lepidopterist,’ Felicity said.

  Sam turned his head to look at her. ‘You’re just making up words now.’

  Felicity studied Sam with a look of pity. ‘A lepidopterist is a butterfly expert,’ she said.

  Gerald’s cheeks flushed. ‘I’m not an expert,’ he said. ‘I just recognised it from the butterfly collection at the Billionaire’s Club. It was framed on the wall, along with about a million others.’

  ‘Except for the Xerxes Blue,’ Felicity said. ‘That’s the one Jasper Mantle is always going on about.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Gerald said. ‘There was an empty frame there, reserved for that one.’

  More butterflies descended from the branches above and soon the glade was a festival of flashing fairy wings.

  ‘Odd that Jeremy Davey would use the name of the world’s rarest butterfly as the keyword for his coded message, don’t you think?’ Sam said.

  ‘Unless he found one here,’ Ruby said. ‘Then it would make perfect sense.’

  Gerald shrugged. ‘Even so, what would make it so special that he would use its name as the code keyword?’ As he spoke, an extraordinary butterfly touched down as light as pixie dust on the coded note. Its wings, closed together like an angel’s hands in prayer, were as vibrant as the blue water around a coral island. Gerald watched as the butterfly slowly folded open its wings. Then he gasped. ‘May your soul be raised on butterfly wings,’ he whispered. ‘Come look at this.’

  Felicity, Sam and Ruby carefully clustered around the butterfly. Its wings were panelled with an alternating pattern of a bright blue square, then a completely transparent one.

  ‘It’s like a stained glass checkerboard,’ Felicity said. ‘How gorgeous.’

  ‘Sure, the wings are pretty,’ Sam said. ‘But so am I. What’s so special about them?’

  ‘Not the wings,’ Gerald said. ‘Look at the pattern they make on the message.’

  The butterfly opened its wings once more, flattening them above the paper. Sunlight shining through the coloured squares lit up a series of letters in Davey’s original note.

  ‘What are you saying, Gerald?’ Ruby asked.

  Gerald fixed her with a manic look. ‘What if this code isn’t fully solved yet?’ he said. ‘What if Jeremy Davey hid another message inside his original note?’

  Chapter 18

  The butterfly beat its wings and took off towards the trees. Ruby’s eyes did not leave Gerald’s. ‘Do you think that was a Xerxes Blue?’ she said. ‘The extinct Xerxes Blue.’

  ‘It’s only “extinct” because no one has seen one for a couple of hundred years,’ Gerald said. He pointed to the treetops. ‘But look, there’s a jillion of them up there. What if Jeremy Davey used the pattern in their wings to hide a second message? A message that can only be solved when you are on this island with these butterflies.’

  ‘Do you remember which letters were highlighted?’ Felicity asked.

  ‘No. We’re going to have to catch one.’

  Sam looked up to the blizzard of butterflies above their heads. ‘How are we going to do that?’

  Gerald opened his knapsack. ‘By using the second most useless of my birthday presents,’ he said, and pulled out Jasper Mantle’s collapsible butterfly net. Gerald pressed the brass button on the end and the net deployed. Then followed fifteen minutes of jumping, waving, shouting and falling over, until Gerald finally snared one of the butterflies.

  ‘Careful,’ Felicity said as Gerald laid the net on the boulder. ‘It’s so delicate; you don’t want to damage it.’

  ‘You take it out,’ Gerald said to Felicity. ‘Butterflies seem to like you.’

  ‘That’s because they have impeccable taste,’ Felicity said. She peeled back the net and plucked out the butterfly. It seemed to relax, and its wings draped open.
r />   ‘Hold it over the message,’ Gerald said. Felicity manoeuvred the Xerxes Blue above the page. It closed its wings for a moment, then settled again, wings spread. The sun shone down on the page and Felicity moved the insect up and down as if focussing a camera. Individual letters from the message were picked out in sharp, vibrant blue.

  Gerald grabbed a pencil and circled the highlighted places. ‘Got it,’ he said. The butterfly slipped from Felicity’s fingers and fluttered into her hair.

  ‘What’s it say?’ Sam asked, crowding over Gerald’s shoulder. Gerald shrugged him away, trying to see the paper clearly himself. Then he read the message: x pjnpjcob ci ibbs jl vxpbn.

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘Well, that’s just rubbish,’ Sam said. ‘A code within a code? Pffft.’

  Gerald furrowed his brow. Then it struck him.

  ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘It needs to be decoded as well. Just like the original message, using the keyword Xerxes Blue.’ Gerald quickly drew up a fresh grid, the same as the one he had used to decipher Jeremy Davey’s original note.

  ‘Now I swap the letters,’ Gerald said, scribbling madly, ‘and the butterfly code says…oh.’ Gerald blinked at the page.

  ‘Well? What’s it say?’ Ruby asked.

  Gerald looked at her. ‘It says: A tortoise in need of water.’

  There was another moment of silence.

  ‘That’s even more rubbish than the first one,’ Sam said. He flopped back onto his boulder. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? A thirsty turtle?’

  ‘Not turtle,’ Ruby said. ‘Tortoise.’

  ‘It’s the same thing,’ Sam said. ‘A slow, lumbering lump of a thing that is worse than useless, worse than—’

  Sam stopped talking. The boulder juddered beneath him. ‘Whoa!’ Sam said. ‘Was that an earthquake?’

  Ruby looked at her brother. ‘Has the heat got to you?’ she asked. ‘There’s no earth—whoa!’ Ruby dropped to her belly and gripped onto her boulder. ‘What was that?’

  Gerald and Felicity looked at the Valentine twins with alarm. ‘What is the matter with you two?’ Gerald said. ‘I haven’t felt a thing.’ Then Gerald’s boulder sprouted a round head on the end of a long neck, rose up on legs and started walking out of the glade. Gerald rolled off into a patch of ferns and looked up with astonishment.

  ‘Ooh!’ Felicity said. ‘Tortoises!’ She let out a trill of delight as her boulder ambled to its feet and set off after Gerald’s.

  Gerald stood back as more giant tortoises rose from their rest and formed a slow but determined caravan out of the glade and further along the path. Ruby stepped off the top of her ride and joined him. ‘Do you get the feeling this path was created by tortoises and not botanists?’ she said. ‘It’s a tortoise motorway.’

  Gerald looked in wonder as the beasts trudged in single file out of the clearing, taking Sam and Felicity with them. He scooped up the backpack and its contents and followed the convoy into the jungle. ‘They’re enormous,’ he said.

  ‘Galapagos tortoises can grow pretty big,’ Ruby said. ‘And pretty old—like more than a hundred years.’

  ‘Where do you think they’re going?’ Gerald asked, ducking under a low vine.

  Ruby flashed Gerald a grin. ‘Maybe they’re looking for a drink.’

  Gerald’s brain whirred. ‘Like in Jeremy Davey’s note?’

  Ruby nodded, her grin growing into a smile. ‘Yes, clever clogs,’ she said. ‘Exactly like in Jeremy Davey’s note.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ Gerald said, and pulled Ruby around to squeeze past the last of the tortoises. ‘Let’s beat them to it.’

  They caught up with Felicity and Sam, who agreed reluctantly to dismount from their steeds. ‘See you later, Turbo,’ Sam said and gave his tortoise a pat on the shell. ‘Don’t overtake on blind corners, all right?’

  The path soon emerged from the tangle of the jungle and wound up a slope of rocky scree towards the mountain at the centre of the island.

  ‘You really think the tortoises would come all the way up here for water?’ Sam said, scuffling his shoes along the flinty path. ‘It’s a bit of a trek.’

  ‘Why not?’ Gerald said. ‘It’s not like they’d be in a hurry to do anything else.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re in a hurry to do much at all,’ Felicity said.

  Ruby nudged Gerald with her shoulder. ‘The more you think about it, the more ingenious Jeremy Davey’s code is. The only way you can decipher it fully is to be on what’s probably the only island in the world where you can find a Xerxes Blue. It’s brilliant. The perpetual motion machine must be here somewhere.’

  ‘At least, some place where a tortoise in need of water wants to go,’ Felicity said.

  ‘How do we know that’s not at the bottom of this path rather than the top?’ Sam said. ‘That’s where the ocean is.’

  Gerald adjusted his backpack on his bare shoulders. ‘I guess we get to the top and find out.’

  The path continued up to a saddle on the ridgeline, about a hundred metres on.

  ‘What do you think?’ Ruby said.

  ‘Looks like a good place for a rest,’ Gerald said. They scrabbled the last of the way, sending a stream of loose pebbles down the slope behind them.

  ‘If the tortoises weren’t thirsty before they came up here, they would be by the time they arrived,’ Sam said. ‘I’m parched. What are the odds of a Coke machine behind those bushes?’

  The path disappeared between two scrubby shrubs. Gerald crawled through the tangle of twigs and leaves, then stopped short and stared at what lay before him. Ruby, Sam and Felicity joined him on hands and knees.

  Six giant tortoises rested at the edge of a large rockpool of crystal clear water, gulping their fill.

  ‘Tortoises in need of water,’ Felicity said, shaking her head. ‘How would they even know to come all the way up here in the first place?’

  ‘If you live for more than a hundred years on an island, you’re bound to come across all sorts of interesting things,’ Sam said, ‘even if it does take you a while to get from A to B.’

  Gerald kneeled beside one of the tortoises and cupped his hands into the pool. ‘If it’s safe for them to drink, it should be okay for us,’ he said, and tipped the handful of water down his throat. It tasted of honey and lavender. ‘That is so good,’ Gerald said.

  The six tortoises were soon joined by four young adventurers, all with their heads down and bottoms in the air. Gerald splashed water over his head and chest and fell back onto a rock to let the cooling breeze dry him off.

  ‘That may be even better than one of Mrs Rutherford’s meals,’ Ruby said, closing her eyes and letting out a long, low breath.

  ‘No wonder the tortoises come all the way up here. Have you ever tasted anything so fresh and sweet?’ Felicity said. She rose to her feet and wandered further around the pond, settling on a grass tussock. ‘This is a lifesaver.’ Then she noticed something tangled in the longer grass behind her. She tilted her head to the side.

  ‘That’s strange,’ she said.

  Ruby looked up. ‘What is, Flicka?’

  ‘There’s something wedged into the undergrowth here,’ she said.

  Felicity got down on her knees and rummaged in the snare of grass and twigs, and pulled it out.

  She held up a human skull.

  Ruby’s screams startled birds from their nests all the way back to the beach.

  Chapter 19

  It took Ruby a minute to respond to Felicity’s calming hug, and even after she stopped screaming, the jabbering and the rapid breathing and the quivering continued for a few minutes more.

  Sam observed the meltdown from the far side of the rockpool. ‘Ruby isn’t much of one for skeletons,’ he explained to Felicity. ‘She had a bad Halloween experience when she was six.’

  Gerald emerged from the bushes where Felicity had found the skull, his hair studded with leaves and sticks. ‘There’s a whole set of bones in there,’ he said, dusting off his hands. ‘An
d a stack of empty tortoise shells. It looks like that’s the place you crawl into when you’re ready to die on this island. It’s probably best if Ruby doesn’t have a look.’

  ‘Do you think it’s Jeremy Davey?’ Felicity asked.

  ‘There’s no way to tell for sure. Whatever clothing he had has rotted away,’ Gerald said. ‘But this was in his hand.’ He held up an old bottle, the dark glass weathered and pocked. ‘Look familiar?’

  Felicity reached out to take it. ‘It’s the same as the one we found in Mason Green’s apartment in San Francisco,’ she said, holding it up to the sun. ‘The one that had Jeremy Davey’s message in it.’ She peered down the neck. ‘This one is empty though.’

  Gerald knelt beside Ruby and put a comforting arm across her shoulders. ‘I suppose that one was for drinking. A last slug of rum before he died.’

  Ruby wiped a shaky hand across her face and shot a glance towards the skull by the water’s edge. ‘Felicity, could you please put that thing back where you found it?’ she said.

  Felicity shrugged and burrowed back into the shrubs before re-emerging. ‘Everything’s back where it belongs,’ she said.

  Ruby shivered. ‘At least that answers the question about what happened to Jeremy Davey,’ she said, hugging her arms tight across her chest.

  ‘But not about the perpetual motion machine,’ Felicity said. ‘Did you see anything else of interest in there, Gerald? No notes? No diary?’

  Gerald shook his head. ‘Just a big nest of dead man’s bones,’ he said, prompting another squeak from Ruby.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Hey, Gerald?’ Sam had not moved from the edge of the rockpool. ‘Can you feel a breeze up here?’

  Gerald looked up and thought for a moment. ‘Not anymore. It has gone really still.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Sam said. ‘So why do you suppose there are ripples on the top of the water over here?’

  Gerald, Felicity, Ruby and six tortoises looked at Sam, and then at the rockpool. The surface was corrugated with tiny waves. ‘Curious,’ Sam said, and he ducked his head under the water. After a moment, he resurfaced. ‘I think there’s something down there. And Ruby—’