Angie Sage

by Araminta Spookie 2: The Sword in the Grotto(Ret)

  I smiled. Wanda can be quite nice at times.

  “Now will you tell me your Plan?” she said.

  Soon we were climbing down the rickety old ladder that leads from Sir Horace’s room. Wanda didn’t like it one bit. She was saying stuff like, “But horrible things might be living down there” and “How do you know it leads to the grotto?” which I was answering very patiently, considering that every time she said something the ladder wobbled, and I was holding on to it with only one hand, since I was the one with the flashlight.

  But when we were halfway down the ladder, Wanda suddenly stopped and wailed, “Suppose we get lost and we never find our way out again and we spend the rest of our lives just wandering around in the dark forever?” And the ladder shook so much that I practically fell off.

  “Oh, be quiet, Wanda,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything else.

  Soon we got to the bottom of the ladder, which I was really pleased about, but Wanda still looked miserable.

  “Look, Wanda,” I said very patiently. “We tied the end of the green string to the secret door, didn’t we?”

  Wanda nodded.

  “And you’ve got the string, haven’t you?”

  Wanda nodded again.

  “So all we have to do is unwind your mom’s green string as we go until we get to the grotto. Then we just pick up the sword and follow the string home again. Easy peasy. There’s no way we can get lost, is there?”

  “I suppose not,” said Wanda. And then she thought for a bit. “Unless something eats the string.”

  “Don’t be silly, Wanda.”

  “And if something started to eat the string, then the string would lead it straight to us and it would eat us, too!” Wanda wailed.

  “Oh, shut up, Wanda.”

  Now the secret passage was more like a regular tunnel. The walls were made of bricks, and the ceiling was tall enough for Wanda and me to stand up easily. It was arched and made of brick, too. The floor was quite hard, like earth, and was covered with sand. It was pretty warm down there because we were getting close to where the passage runs behind the boiler room. I was looking out for Edmund, but it was Wanda who saw him first.

  “Hello, Edmund,” said Wanda. Edmund floated around the corner and came toward us. Unlike Sir Horace, who just looks like an old suit of armor, Edmund looks like a real ghost. He is a boy of about ten, I guess, but he is an almost transparent boy with a greenish glow around him. He has a pudding-bowl haircut, wears a medieval tunic with a long hood, and carries a really neat dagger in his belt.

  “Good Day, Wanda. Good Day, Araminta,” said Edmund in his funny old-fashioned accent. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, like it always does when Edmund speaks. His voice has a hollow sound to it, and it’s hard to tell where it is coming from.

  “Hello, Edmund,” said Wanda.

  Edmund was floating around in front of us in a rather annoying fashion and was generally getting in the way. I could see what an irritating boy he must have once been.

  “Excuse me, Edmund,” I said, “we’d like to get past. Do you mind moving out of the way? We don’t want to walk through you.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Edmund.

  I was about to tell him it was none of his business, but Wanda piped up and said, “We’re going to the smugglers’ grotto to get the sword. You can come too if you want, Edmund.”

  “No he can’t,” I told Wanda. “We’re in a hurry, and Edmund only floats very slowly.” Besides that, considering he’s a ghost, Edmund is boring and a bit of a goody-goody, but I was too polite to say that.

  “You must go back. You may not come any closer,” said Edmund in his spooky voice.

  “Don’t be silly,” I told him, and I tried to push him out of the way.

  It was horrible. My hand went right through him and out the other side. Suddenly I felt frozen. I shivered so hard that my teeth chattered, and when I snatched my arm back all the hairs on it were covered in ice.

  “Arrgh!” I screamed.

  “What?” squeaked Wanda, looking scared. “What is it?”

  “It’s Edmund. He’s freezing. It’s horrible. Brrr.” I shivered again. I just couldn’t help it.

  When Wanda saw all the icicles on my arm, her eyes opened so wide that I thought they might fall out. Any minute now, I thought, Wanda is going to panic big-time.

  But she didn’t. She put her hand in her pocket and took something out and then really fast, like a flash of light, she threw a shower of sparkly dust over Edmund. Whhoooosh.

  The dust settled over him like snow. Edmund looked confused for a moment, then he yawned, lay down on the sandy floor, and went to sleep. I was impressed.

  “What was that?” I asked Wanda.

  “Soporific Snow,” she said. “Dad gave me some from his magic bag. Good, isn’t it?”

  “Good? It’s amazing. Wow.” Barry is a conjurer, and sometimes he does tricks for us, but I had never seen one as good as this.

  “Come on then,” said Wanda, “we’d better get going.” And she strode off, unwinding the ball of green string as she went.

  “Hey, Wanda,” I yelled, “wait for me!”

  7

  THE SECRET TUNNEL

  Not long after we had got past Edmund, we noticed that the air was different—it felt cold and damp and it smelled of earth. The walls of the secret tunnel changed too—now they were roughly cut rock. The light from my flashlight shone off the damp rocks and we knew that we were no longer inside the house. We were under the ground—this was the real thing.

  The tunnel was quite wide, and Wanda and I walked along side by side. After a while Wanda whispered, “How far down do you think we are?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. And then I whispered, “Why are we whispering?”

  “Because it’s scary,” whispered Wanda.

  “No it’s not,” I said really loudly, and my voice sounded hollow like Edmund’s. Well, maybe it was a bit scary.

  Wanda was good with the string. She kept unwinding it as we went, and when I looked back, I could see it stretching along the tunnel. It was nice to think that the end of the string was still there, tied to the secret door under the attic stairs.

  We had walked for about half an hour, and I reckoned we were probably almost underneath the mushroom farm, when we went around a corner and Wanda suddenly said, “Which way do we go now?”

  In front of us, the secret tunnel split off into two smaller tunnels. They both looked narrow and they both looked dark. I didn’t like the look of either of them.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you want some chips?”

  Cheese and onion potato chips help you think. I am sure of that, because after we had finished them, we knew what we had to do.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Left,” said Wanda.

  So we did rock, paper, scissors—best of three—and Wanda won. Then we did best of five and I won. So we went right.

  Big mistake.

  It was okay to begin with. Kind of. The tunnel I had chosen smelled funny. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. And just as I was about to remember what it smelled of, Wanda said, “Now which way?” as if it was my fault that the tunnel had split up again—this time into three ways.

  “Middle one,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Wanda.

  “Why not?” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s not right. We can always find our way back along the string and try the other one.”

  Wanda wasn’t happy. “We could be here for days doing that,” she said. “And we haven’t got much more string left.”

  We set off down the middle tunnel, which was an okay tunnel, as tunnels go, but still smelled funny—and then suddenly Wanda screamed.

  “Arrgh!”

  I dropped my flashlight.

  “Oh, yuck. Oh, errgh.” Wanda was hopping about like something had bitten her.

  “Wh-what is it?”

  “I–I stepped
on a dead body….” Wanda squeaked. “I-it was all squashy a-and horrible. My foot went right through it.” She shivered and grabbed hold of me. “I want to go home,” she whispered.

  Well, that made two of us.

  I went to pick up my flashlight, and Wanda screamed again.

  “Everything’s turned white,” she yelled. “Look….”

  I didn’t want to look, but I did. The flashlight shone along the ground, lighting up the floor of the tunnel. It was the weirdest thing I have ever seen—a kind of knobbly white carpet stretched out in front of us.

  “Mushrooms. You only stepped on a mushroom,” I told Wanda, annoyed.

  Wanda looked down at her feet. “Oh,” she said. Then she said, “Well, it was a giant mushroom, actually, Araminta. Look—they’re huge. You try stepping on a whole heap of monster mushrooms in a horrible, dark, smelly tunnel and see what you feel like.”

  “I just did,” I told Wanda, “and I felt fine. And I didn’t go screaming in someone’s ear, nearly making them deaf, either.”

  Wanda didn’t reply. I thought maybe I should try to cheer her up a bit, so I said, “Well, at least we know where we are now.”

  “No we don’t,” said Wanda gloomily.

  “Yes we do. These mushrooms must have escaped from the mushroom farm. I bet we are underneath it right now. Which means we are nearly there. Come on, Wanda. It will all be worth it when we find the sword.”

  “If we find the sword,” Wanda muttered.

  We didn’t say much after that except for, “left,” “right,” “left—no, right,” and “oh, I don’t care, you choose.” The trouble was, the tunnel just kept splitting off into different directions, and we had no idea which one would take us to the cave. It was like being in a maze—a horrible mushroom maze, as the whole time we were stepping on mushrooms. At first I felt sorry for them getting squashed, but after a while they just got annoying. They were really slippery, too.

  We kept on hoping that any minute we would find the grotto with the sword in it. But we didn’t. All we kept finding was the green string, so we knew we were back to where we had been before. Again.

  After a while Wanda said, “It’s no good. We’re just going around in circles.”

  For once she was right.

  8

  THE PORTCULLIS

  Wanda was not good at going around in circles. She did not take it well.

  “All right, Wanda,” I said. “If we haven’t found the sword in five minutes’ time, we’ll go home.”

  “Promise?” asked Wanda.

  “Promise,” I said. I knew we’d have to go home soon anyway, since our string was nearly finished.

  Wanda spent the next four minutes and forty seconds staring at her watch and counting the seconds in a loud voice. It was very annoying, especially as I still really wanted to find the sword and give it to Sir Horace for his birthday.

  We were walking down a steep slope. The mushrooms had disappeared, and I knew we had not been here before. Wanda was so busy staring at her watch that she did not notice when suddenly we turned a corner and there it was—the little round grotto with the sandy floor and the sword lying there in the middle of it, just waiting for us, like I had known it would be.

  Incredible!

  “Wanda,” I said, “look!”

  But Wanda was still droning on, “Two hundred and seventy-eight seconds…two hundred and seventy-nine seconds…two hundred and—”

  “Wan-da,” I yelled. “We’ve found it!”

  At last Wanda stopped counting and looked up. “Wow…” She whistled under her breath. Wanda was about to rush in when suddenly I remembered what it said in my Secret Tunnel Handy Hint Handbook.

  Handy Hint #3: Watch out for traps, particularly at the beginning and end of a tunnel. How often has an intrepid tunneler battled through the most secret of tunnels only to come to grief in a cunning trap at the end of her journey? Alas, far too often, as we at the Secret Tunnel Handy Hint Handbook know to our cost.

  “Stop!” I yelled to Wanda—and just in time. Because right above our heads, where the secret tunnel went into the cave, I could see five horrible metal spikes pointing down at us.

  Wanda stopped dead in her tracks. “What are you shouting about now?” she asked grumpily. “I thought you wanted to get the sword. It’s stupid to stop now when all we have to do is just—”

  “Wan-daaa.” I sighed very patiently. “Just look up, will you?”

  Wanda looked up. “Oh,” she said. “What is it?”

  “It’s a trap,” I told her. “A horrible trap.”

  Wanda stared at the spikes for a bit, then she said, “No it’s not. It’s a portcullis.” Miss Know-it-all Wanda Wizzard folded her arms and looked smug.

  “I know that,” I said. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a portcullis. I just said it was a trap. Obviously it is a portcullis trap.”

  “Obviously,” said Miss Smug Pants.

  “What we have to do,” I told her, “is make sure there aren’t any trip wires.”

  Wanda looked worried. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because if there is a trip wire and we trip over it, then the portcullis will come crashing down on top of our heads, that’s why.”

  Wanda shuddered. “That’s horrible,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Stuff like that happens all the time in secret tunnels.”

  “Well, you never told me that when you were trying to get me to come with you,” said Wanda, staring up at the sharp spikes.

  “You never asked,” I told her. I crouched down and shone my flashlight along the ground, which was covered in thick sand.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can’t see a trip wire or anything, so I guess we’re safe.”

  I don’t think Wanda believed me. She got down on her hands and knees and had a real good look too. “I guess it’s okay….” she muttered.

  “Do you want to go first?” I offered. I was being polite, as Aunt Tabby is always telling me not to rush in front of people.

  Wanda gave me a funny look and said, “No thank you, Araminta. We’ll go together.” She grabbed hold of my hand and yelled, “One…two…three…Go!”

  So we went. We shot under the portcullis like a couple of bats out of a sack and nothing happened. The horrible spikes stayed just where they were, and there we were—in the grotto at last.

  “Yes!” I grinned at Wanda. “We did it!”

  Wanda ran around the cave, kicking up the sand and jumping about, yelling, “We did it, we did it. Yaay!” I think she was pleased too.

  And then there was a horrible clang and a huge thud. The grotto shook like an earthquake had struck. But it was a whole heap worse than an earthquake.

  It was the portcullis trap—it had come crashing down. Now a massive iron grille barred our way home.

  Wanda and I stared at it. Even Wanda didn’t say anything for a while. And then, when she did say something, her voice sounded all squeaky and trembling.

  “We’re trapped,” she said.

  Wanda was right.

  Again.

  9

  THE GROTTO

  Wanda did not take too well to being trapped in the grotto, either. In fact, she took it even worse than she’d taken going around in circles. I told her that it was no good jumping up and down and yelling; we had to try and get out.

  First we tried to lift up the portcullis, but it weighed a ton. It didn’t budge one little bit. We kept on trying, but I could tell there was no way we could move it in a million years.

  “And there’s no point shouting ‘One, two, three…heave’ in my ear over and over again,” I told Wanda. “It’s not going to help if I go deaf as well.”

  After that we tried to dig down below the portcullis. The sand was soft, and I thought that maybe we could squeeze out underneath, but it was no good. There was rock below the sand, and also a thick metal plate, which I guessed was part of the portcullis trap.

  “Come on, Wanda,” I said. “We’ve got to lift up th
at portcullis.”

  But it wouldn’t shift. Then we tried stupid things that we knew wouldn’t work, but we had to do them just in case. We tried to squeeze underneath, but we couldn’t fit. Wanda tried wriggling through the gaps between the bars, as she is smaller than I am, but she nearly got her head stuck. We even used the sword to try to lever up the metal plate under the sand. But the portcullis stayed right where it was, blocking our way home.

  Wanda acted a bit strange after that. She started shaking the bars and yelling for help. I didn’t see the point, so I went and sat down beside the sword and tried to think. But however hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anything. And soon all I could think was, “I wish Wanda would stop yelling.”

  “Shut up, Wanda,” I said.

  “Shut up yourself,” said Wanda. She sounded really annoyed, but underneath I could tell she was as scared as I was. When I’m scared I get very quiet, but when Wanda is scared she just goes bananas.

  “Do you want a cheese and onion chip?” I asked.

  “No. I’m not hungry,” she said. But she stopped yelling and came and sat down beside me.

  I felt much better after I had eaten my potato chips. I decided I might as well have a look at the sword, seeing as we had come all this way to find it. You could tell that it had once been a really great sword. The handle had some nice patterns on it, and there were some lumpy bits under all the dirt and rust flakes that looked like they might be jewels. But I had to admit that my first impression of it had been better, because in fact it now looked like a piece of old junk. It was the kind of thing that Aunt Tabby would bring back from a garage sale and Uncle Drac would sigh and ask why on earth did we need more garbage. But I still knew it was the perfect birthday present for Sir Horace.