We sprint along the gallery. The door’s locked, but my trusty key sorts that out in a damn jiffy. I shove the door open, step into the roaring darkness beyond –
And my toes feel nothing but air.
I’m teetering on the edge of something. Hickory and Violet pull me back from the edge just in time. We slam the door behind us and huddle against it, watching in wide-eyed wonder as the candles and torches flare to life all around us, lighting up the dark.
We’re standing at the edge of another broken bridge, only a metre away from a hundred-foot drop. But we’re not back at the chasm. We’re in a tall, circular chamber. And there are waterfalls, dozens of them, pouring from arches and balconies below us, beside us and above us, some of them tumbling from such impossible heights they’re merely sheets of fine mist by the time they hit the violent whirlpool of water surging around the bottom.
‘This is it! We found it!’
The hall of waterfalls. We’ve made it at last, but where do we go from here? We’re trapped. Stranded. There are no stairs leading from this cracked and slippery ledge.
The whirlpool far below spits and swirls. The door trembles at our backs.
The creatures aren’t giving up.
I scan the archways for any sign of Mum, but the few that aren’t gushing water are empty. The place is deserted. I shout over the roar of water. Tell her we’re here – we need her – come out. I can feel the panic rising again. The ledge shaking and crumbling at my feet. The quake’s building again. Violet yells at me, tells me to stop, but I can’t.
‘She’s here! She has to be!’
The door shudders at our backs again. A claw slashes the wood between my head and Hickory’s. He screams in my ear, ‘We need to go. Climb around the walls right now.’
‘We can’t leave,’ I shout. ‘We need her, it’s the only way.’
More snarls and chirrup-croaks, way up to our right. Some of the creatures have found another way into the hall. They’re twitching their webbed feathers at us from another broken bridge. One of them leaps onto the wall, starts crawling down towards us. Others follow.
But that isn’t the worst of it.
Something else is coming, too.
There, far beyond the creatures. A pinprick of strange, white light – soft, crisp and cold – shining from an archway at the top of the chamber, glowing brighter and brighter.
I stare at the light, captured by it like a moth to a flame. Is it Roth? A troop of Leatherheads? But then it comes, that dawning realisation, like a kick to the guts.
This is something bigger. Something worse.
‘Spectre,’ Hickory says, shrinking away from the light. ‘No, no, no …’
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
The white light shines brighter, filling the hall. I expect the creatures to scatter, but they don’t. They’re still coming for us, leaping from ledge to ledge, scrambling down the walls. And why wouldn’t they? They can’t see the light. They have no idea what’s coming.
‘What do we do, Hickory?’ Violet shouts.
I scan the empty archways again, my gaze dropping to the whirlpool once more, that swirling void. I know exactly what we need to do. Where we need to go. As much as I hate it – as much as I fear it – the Manor has already shown me the way. Violet was right.
My mum isn’t here. This isn’t the end of the path.
‘We jump,’ I say.
I take Violet’s hand in mine. Entwine my fingers through hers. I grab Hickory’s hand, too, because he’s come this far with us. Maybe he really is supposed to be here, after all. He nods at me. I turn and nod at Violet. Incredibly, in the face of so much danger, she smiles, outshining the Spectre, filling me with a different kind of light, warm and glowing.
‘See you on the other side, kid,’ she says.
And as the door crashes open behind us, we jump.
THE SPECTRE
We fall and fall and hit the water so hard my whole body aches. We’re sucked into the whirlpool at once, straight down the gurgler. The force of the current rips Violet and Hickory from my grasp. I bounce off a wall and flip end over end, dragged deeper and deeper into this black hell. The noise is deafening. The terror absolute. This was a mistake. I won’t survive this. I can’t. You’re gonna die down here, I tell myself, all alone. But then my head smacks into something – a wall, a passing statue, who knows? – and everything changes.
I can still feel the pain, the terror, the swell sucking me down, but I can see. Dad’s right there, hanging in the water nearby, just like in my dream. I reach out to him, kick my legs. I want to hold him one last time. Tell him I love him. Tell him I’m sorry I failed. I shape the words in my mind and cast them out into the water. Mum’s there too, floating in the dark right beside him.
I tell her I wish she’d been there. I wish I’d found her. I wish, I wish, I wish.
Let go. Her voice comes to me again. Soft, whispered.
That eerie, underwater groaning echoes through the water. Tentacles of white light wrap around my ankles, my waist, and throw me against a wall.
The force of the impact drives the last gasp of air from my lungs.
Mum and Dad have vanished. The bubble-wash calms. The current fades.
The Spectre rises before me, a beastly, blinding light. Shifting shapes and ghostlike. Ethereal. But I can just make out a pair of horns. And four legs. And the tentacles aren’t quite tentacles at all, but long tendrils of light streaming from its sides, curling with the ebb and flow of the water. It’s staring at me with its white-fire eyes. Staring into me, through me.
It’s about to Grip me. Trap me in that place of nightmares. Fulfil its duty as a protector of the Manor, a Guardian of the Cradle of All Worlds.
The Cradle.
The key.
Lungs burning, I take the key from my pocket and hold it out. The Spectre growls, so deep and loud it reverberates through the water, through my flesh, my bones, my very soul.
But it doesn’t Grip me.
If you want to save the Manor, help us. I cast these words out into the water, willing the Spectre to hear me. Let me go. The creatures are coming. Buy us some time.
The Spectre floats a tendril of light over the key, around my hand. A spasm rattles my lungs, my throat. I shove the key back into my pocket and tell the Spectre to make up its bloody mind already. Tick-tock. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m drowning here, buddy.
The Spectre nods and retreats, disappears so quickly down the corridor it’s as if it were never here at all.
The darkness returns. The bubble-wash roars. The current sweeps me away again and my whole body convulses, desperate for air. I think my spine’s about to snap.
But then the pain begins to fade. The spasms ease. I stop fighting, overcome by an irresistible sense of calm. So this is what it’s like to drown.
What was I so afraid of?
THE TIDE UNLEASHED
‘Is she dead?’
‘She’s alive. Come on, Jane. That’s it.’
‘They’re coming. Get her up. We need to go.’
Eyes open on the girl, leaning over me, wiping my forehead with her hand. Fuzzy at the edges again, fading in and out. The floor’s trembling beneath me. My quake’s still going strong.
‘Violet?’
‘Yes. It’s me, Jane. Don’t worry, you’re safe.’
‘No, she isn’t,’ Hickory shouts. ‘Help me clear this stuff.’
Violet helps me up. ‘He’s right. We need to go. Right now.’
I lean against her. We’re standing on a balcony. Behind us, a corridor of whitewash splashing at our heels. In front of us, a long candlelit hallway. Patches of strange, crusty white stuff on the trembling floor, sparkling slightly under the candlelight. Hickory’s further down, trying to fight his way through a wall of egg-slop blocking our way forward.
‘You found me?’ I mutter to Violet.
‘Hickory did. Fished you from the water just in time. What happened? We saw the light. W
ere you Gripped?’
I shake my head. ‘No, I –’
‘Are you seriously swapping stories right now?’ Hickory shouts. ‘Hurry up!’
We step up the pace. Violet parks me by the trembling mass of jelly-eggs and digs in with Hickory, elbows deep. He’s half-buried in the stuff already, going nowhere. There’s just too much of it. He yells at Violet. She yells back. I’m not exactly sure what they’re saying because my mind’s drifting again. I look around at the trembling Manor walls, and the rapids back down the hallway, and hope to hell the Spectre’s helping us out, flying around the hall of waterfalls from creature to creature, Gripping as many as it can. Even if it is, it probably won’t be able to take them all out. There are too many.
We need to stop the creatures, but how?
Let go.
It was just a dream – a dream of a dream – but that doesn’t change the fact that I saw something, felt something, heard something real. My parents in the water. My mum. I guess she’s been with me all along, speaking to me, telling me what I have to do.
It’s time.
I unwrap the bandage around my palm. ‘Violet, give me your knife.’
‘What? Jane, you can’t stop these things with one knife.’
‘Yes’ – I hold out my hand – ‘I can.’
She realises what I’m saying, takes a moment to believe it. Even Hickory stops digging through the muck and stares at me.
I stand as tall as I can manage.
Violet hands me the knife. She looks speechless, stunned, but grabs a strap of my Leatherhead get-up and pulls me close. ‘Go nuts,’ she says, and slaps me, hard.
I wasn’t expecting it, but I can use it. The sting on my cheek. The shock. I bottle it up, turn and stumble back towards the water. I breathe hard, feed the frenzy, fill the bottle even more with everything that scares me, every thought that makes me mad. The praying mantis and the weasel. Atlas, Peg and Eric Junior. The Manor Lament. Winifred blowing up the tunnel. Booby traps, Tin-skins and Leatherheads. Swinging chandeliers and carnivorous trees. The prison camp. The train. The crystals. The river. The creatures swimming our way right now.
And Roth. Imprisoning my parents. Holding a knife to Mum’s stomach. Making Dad’s feet dance. The sight of him. The deathly reek of him. His half-mask.
Those eyes.
Roth. Roth. Roth.
I let go. Uncork the bottle. Spill the furious tide of terror and rage. The stone around me trembles and cracks. The quake gets stronger, louder. I’m nearly at the balcony now and I can see the creatures coming to get me. Leaping through the water, climbing along the walls.
I grip the knife as tight as I can. Hold the blade to the wound and slice. The pain tears me apart, but only for a second. This time I rein it in, focus it, channel it through my hand.
I drop to my knees and skid. Slam my bloodied palm down on the stone.
And I can feel it. Everything. Every claw on the wall getting closer. Every vibration on the rock as the creatures swim through the water. But I’m not just feeling the stone, I am the stone. Every block. Every crack spreading out from my palm and coursing along the floor, over the balcony, up the walls and across the ceiling. Every enormous chunk breaking free and falling into the water. I am the cave-in. The collapse. The end of the line.
The power’s incredible. All-consuming. I force my fury down the corridor and smother any creature I can, sealing the way. But the power’s too strong. I can already feel it slipping away from me. Feel the cracks spreading above me, behind me, back towards Violet and Hickory, towards our only escape. Water sprays down from the ceiling.
The corridor above us must be flooded, and now it’s coming through.
I cry out for help. Try to lift my hand from the stone, but I can’t. Violet and Hickory are here in a flash. Grabbing me, lifting me, severing the connection. Helping me back towards the eggs. We’re nearly there when the ceiling gives way right behind us.
The ceiling gushes like a burst dam. Boulders fall. We’re swept off our feet towards the wall of eggs, through the eggs, all of it blasted clear. Then we hit something. Another wall. A dead end. The force of the water pins us to the stone and fills the hallway in no time.
I’m drowning in darkness again.
I can hear Hickory and Violet crying out beside me. Feel their arms and legs hitting mine through the swirl of eggs and water. But just as I think we’re finished, that nothing can save us now, I feel something else. A wall of honeycombed stone behind us. A gateway.
I slam my bleeding hand against it.
OTHERWORLD
We splash, tumble, skid and roll. A tangle of limbs. The sunlight’s so white, so blinding, I can’t open my eyes. I’m pretty sure I elbow Hickory in the stomach. He knees me in the head. I think that’s Violet grabbing my arm and squeezing. There’s a stone-grinding sound behind us. The flow of water and egg-slop eases. I shield my eyes and look back just in time to see the stone door close. The jet of water becomes a slit of spray, a dribble, and then nothing.
The gateway has shut. Now it’s just a mottled slab of stone in a small outcrop of rock. A tiny island rising from a desert floor. I see it, but I can’t believe it.
Desert.
We’re in a bloody desert.
I turn over and cough up a lung. Feel the pain in my left hand. The slushy grit at my fingertips. It’s real. We’re sucking down the air of a brand-new world. Air that tastes old somehow. Bitter. I sit back and squint at the creature eggs scattered all around us, the chunks of blackish Manor stone. Beyond our mucky puddle, a flat sheet of white stretches all the way to the horizon, glaring so brightly it hurts. Suddenly, the patches of crusty white stuff inside that last Manor corridor make sense. Salt. There must’ve been an ocean out here, once.
‘That,’ Violet says, ‘was too close.’
She’s kneeling beside me, catching her breath with her face turned up to the sky. For now, the heat’s welcome. Soon it’ll be unbearable. Hickory’s already scurrying back to the gateway. He shoves his weight into it. Paws at it like a cat shut out in the cold, his eyes clenched tight. I bet he’s afraid of all this space. The sunlight and the sky. He wants back inside the Manor already. This is what happens when you spend two thousand years indoors.
‘Well done,’ Violet tells me. Her eyes are as squinty as mine. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Not really.’ I try to clean my still-bleeding hand in the puddle. Unwrap a bit of leather from my leg and wrap it around the wound. It’s all I can do for now.
Violet shields her eyes and looks out at the horizon. Her Leatherhead costume’s as ratty and come-undone as mine. ‘I wonder where we are,’ she says. ‘Smells pretty bad.’ She screws up her face and sniffs her arm, shrugs. ‘Maybe it’s the eggs.’
This is all wrong. Sure, we escaped the river and the creatures, but we’ve lost our chance at finding the Cradle. Of beating Roth and returning home. This gateway’s dead to us now. There’s nothing on the other side but rock and water.
Worst of all, I’ve failed Dad.
‘I’ve ruined everything. We’re trapped out here.’
Violet helps me up. ‘You did the right thing, Jane. We would have drowned if it weren’t for you. Or been eaten alive. Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.’
‘If you tell me everything happens for a reason, Violet, I’ll scream.’
‘You know it’s true, though.’ She forces a smile but it doesn’t last long. ‘I’m sorry Elsa wasn’t there.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘me too.’ I feel like an idiot, pinning all our hopes on a dream.
We must’ve missed something. Got out of the water at the wrong corridor. The trail’s broken. The path to the second key. The path to my mum. Even if we somehow manage to find our way back inside the Manor, we’ll never pick it up again, not without becoming breakfast.
I take the key from my pocket, hold it tight.
‘Oi!’ Hickory’s still huddled against the gateway, pointing up at a strange little clamp-thing att
ached to the rock. A brick-sized scrap of metal with a bit of rope dangling from it. ‘What’s that?’
‘Calm down, Hickory,’ Violet says, but then I look up and grab her arm.
A trail of black smoke hanging in the air, fading by the second.
A flare, rigged to trigger when the gateway opened.
A signal.
Another voice echoes through my mind. Not Mum’s. Dad’s. A desolate world. Ruined. Decayed. He’d been waiting a long time for the gateway to open again.
Then I see them. Not one sun burning in the sky, but two.
‘No, no, no.’ A cold shiver rattles my bones despite the searing heat. That bitter tang in the air tickles my throat again. A familiar scent, I realise, similar to the air we breathed on the train when he came onboard. I make binoculars with my hands and scan the salt flats, checking for a distant death camp, an approaching army. ‘We have to run. Now.’
Of all the worlds connected to the Manor, why would it bring us here?
‘Hey.’ Violet grabs my arm, stops me spinning. ‘What is it?’
‘Two suns,’ I say. ‘And that smell. It isn’t the eggs.’ I wave my hands at the desert. ‘We’re in Roth’s world. We came through a different gateway from my parents, but –’
‘That’s impossible,’ Violet says. ‘There’s an infinite number of worlds connected to the Manor. The chances of us ending up in Arakaan are just – just –’
‘There,’ Hickory shouts, pointing behind us. ‘Somebody’s coming.’
A smudge on the horizon. A dirty little cloud kicked up from the desert floor. A line of ant-sized figures in the heat-shimmer.
‘Leatherheads,’ I say. ‘On horses. We have to run.’
But we can’t run. We can’t hide. And we all know it.
‘Don’t panic,’ Violet says. ‘They won’t kill us. Not if we show them the key. They’ll have to take us back to Roth. Back inside the Manor. So they’ll … they’ll have to take us to the gateway by the dune sea, right? The one John and Elsa used when they first came to Arakaan. Which means we’ll have time to escape.’
Jane Doe and the Cradle of All Worlds Page 23
