Cave Beneath the Sea

by Edward Willett

  They’d walked, dripping, out of sight, Ariane had ordered them both dry, and then Wally had trotted off to the change room while Ariane had gone into a washroom, turned on the tap, and headed back to Medicine Hat.

  Sometimes Ariane just waited in Medicine Hat until it was time to retrieve Wally, but that morning Ariane had asked Emma to take her back to the farm so she could work on her homework. Considering she’d only managed one sentence of her essay, that had clearly been a waste of time. Ariane stared out the window at the snowy landscape. And now we’re late.

  Emma turned off of the TransCanada at the first exit into Medicine Hat. The Medicine Hat Lodge, a four-storey building of brown brick, stood close by the highway, and two minutes later they pulled to a stop in its parking lot.

  The snow had thickened in just the last few minutes of the drive. Emma sighed as she turned off the engine. “Looks like we’re definitely spending the night,” she said. “I’ll book a couple of rooms – one for you and me and one for Wally.”

  Ariane nodded. She hurried into the lobby, filled with the fading light of the snowy day outside through the big slanting atrium windows overhead. Emma followed at a more sedate space. “You check in, Aunt Emma,” she said loudly for the benefit of the desk clerk. “I’m going swimming!”

  She heard the clerk, a young First Nations woman, laugh. “She’s excited,” she said.

  “She loves the water,” Emma said.

  “So do I,” the clerk said.

  Not like I do, Ariane thought.

  The pool area featured a leisure pool and a four-storey dual waterslide. It was quiet that evening. The worst thing from Ariane’s point of view was that the waterpark filled an interior courtyard, so that hotel room windows stared down at it from all directions. But who really noticed an extra kid or two in a pool? She and Wally always materialized at the bottom of the waterslide, and her powers, more finely tuned all the time, allowed her to delay until the area was empty. Who would note that the two youngsters climbing out had never actually gone down the slide?

  Into the change room, out of her clothes, into her swimsuit, leaving the shard of Excalibur in its place, snug against her side. She put on the backpack and went over to the change-room sinks: no need to go into the pool to start her trip. She turned on the water. Just before she touched it, she checked the time on the wall clock.

  Seven o’clock. Eight o’clock in Ontario. She was two hours late.

  Sorry, Wally, she thought uneasily, then let the water take her away.

  Chapter two

  A Face in the Crowd

  Wally sat back in his chair in front of one of the computer terminals in the Gravenhurst Public Library and stretched, reaching up toward the fluorescent lights overhead. Outside the narrow windows, rain fell from a grey sky, already darkening toward twilight. On the desk in front of him the monitor glowed cold white, like the snow back in Saskatchewan. And just like the wintry fields around Barringer Farm, the monitor was currently barren.

  Another day wasted, Wally thought. The trouble is, I’m a couple of years too early.

  What he really needed was a search engine that could take a face from a photo and then find, not just copies of that same photo – that part was easy – but that face in the background of photos taken by other people. CSIS – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service – might have the capability, but the public search engines just weren’t there yet.

  Still, he kept hoping. He’d tried every image-search engine he could think of in the half-dozen times he’d made one of these bizarre swish-through-the-water-and-emerge-in-a-strange-swimming-pool trips to some random town with a library. On his first trip he’d visited a copy shop and scanned the old photo of her mom Ariane had provided. Now he carried it around on a USB stick in his pocket, plugging it into computer after computer. So far, nothing.

  Every other search he could think of had turned up empty as well. Emily Forsythe was out there somewhere – they knew that, because Wally had seen a blurry photograph captured from some convenience store camera in Carlyle, Saskatchewan, weeks ago when he’d briefly been an honoured guest of Rex Major’s instead of a mortal enemy. His sister, Flish, now occupied the luxurious guest room that had been his in Major’s Toronto lakeshore condo and she was undoubtedly also enjoying the theatre room.

  He sighed. He missed that giant screen.

  He glanced at his watch, a brand-new waterproof-to-two-hundred-metres diving watch he’d bought with some of the money he’d purloined from Rex Major. Ariane would be showing up in the pool in less than an hour. Time to call it quits.

  He lowered his gaze to the terminal – and froze.

  He’d thought the latest search, using a brand-new still-in-beta engine he’d stumbled across while poking through some of the stranger corners of the Internet, had simply hung up: he’d entered the image and the screen had frozen. But it had suddenly come back to life.

  The search engine showed two hits. The first was a link to the North Shore News, a newspaper serving West Vancouver, B.C. He clicked on the link.

  A photo appeared: a group of people eating outside a restaurant with a green awning, Canadian and B.C. flags flying, and a big sign spelling out, in lower-case letters, “troll’s.”

  Wally knew the place: he’d had fish and chips there one summer when he was nine, while his family waited in Horseshoe Bay to board the ferry to Vancouver Island. He leaned in closer.

  The search engine had placed a box around one slightly out-of-focus face. Fuzzy though it was, there could be no doubt: it was Emily Forsythe.

  Ariane’s mother.

  Wally checked the date. The photo had been taken a month earlier.

  His initial surge of excitement faded. She’d probably just been waiting for a ferry. She could be anywhere by now.

  But there was a second link. He clicked it.

  This one took him to someone’s Facebook page, and a selfie: a young Asian woman smiling at the camera she was clearly holding out at arm’s length. Out of focus in the background was a B.C. Ferry docked at the Horseshoe Bay terminal. But just a few steps behind the young woman, turned toward the camera, much clearer than in the previous photo, he saw Emily Forsythe.

  And that photo had been taken just two weeks ago.

  If she was there for two weeks, Wally thought, she’s probably still there. That’s where she’s gone to ground!

  He quickly highlighted and copied the URLs for the two photos, pasted them into a word processing document, and saved them them on the USB stick. Then he pulled out the stick and stood up from the workstation. He got his backpack out from under the chair and headed for the library’s glass front doors.

  A man stood there, holding the door open, a big black man in a black suit, talking to someone outside on the rain-pounded sidewalk.

  Wally felt as though he’d been slugged in the stomach. He ducked behind a bookshelf, heart pounding.

  It can’t be.

  He peered around the corner of the shelf, then jerked his head back again.

  It is.

  Emeka. One of Rex Major’s bodyguards.

  But there’s no way, Wally thought. There’s no way he could have found me. Major couldn’t have known we were coming here. He couldn’t have...

  Unless...

  He felt sick. They’d searched for swimming pools near libraries over and over. This was the fifth town he’d been to. And somehow, that combination of search terms had flagged something on the Internet, somewhere in some server running Rex Major’s Excalibur Computer Systems software, the software that contained tendrils of Merlin’s magic – magic that was growing stronger as more shards of Excalibur surfaced.

  Major had seen that the latest search had turned up Gravenhurst, and had taken a chance. He’d sent Emeka on the two-hour trip from Toronto, just on the long-shot possibility Wally or Ariane, or both, would turn up. He’d lucked out, while Wally’s luck had run out.

  I’m trapped, Wally thought; and then, fiercely, No. There has to
be a back door.

  He headed away from the front door, but after six steps he stopped, swearing silently at himself.

  He hadn’t cleared the browser. The picture of Emily’s mother would still be showing.

  He hurried over to the computer stations, cleared the browser’s search history, closed the browser, straightened up –

  And found himself staring at Emeka, who stared back, eyes wide. Clearly he’d never really expected to find Wally in a library in Gravenhurst.

  Wally took advantage of the big man’s momentary confusion to dash past him.

  “Stop!” Emeka shouted as Wally charged to the door. “Thief!” he added for good measure.

  Not very original, Wally thought. But it didn’t matter: another big man in a black suit loomed in the main door. Wally changed direction and charged back into the library. Librarians shouted at him. A couple of small children goggled at him wide-eyed. And Emeka raced after him, banging into a kid-size chair and sending it tumbling across the room. Wally heard him swear. Not in front of the kids, Emeka, he thought.

  Every library he’d ever been in had a door marked “Staff Only” at the back, and the Gravenhurst Public Library was no exception. He burst through the forbidden portal, dashed through a workspace as two more librarians yelled at him, slammed open another door, found himself in a short corridor, and a moment later burst out the back door of the library into the parking lot, surrounded by mounds of recent snow melting fast under the unseasonable December rain. Lucky it’s not freezing rain, Wally thought fleetingly – that would have certainly slowed him down. Instead, it was just really, really cold rain.

  Instead of crossing the parking lot, he turned the corner and ran down the gravel-covered alley behind the library, splashing through puddles and slush. He dashed through someone’s back yard and down their front sidewalk, across the street, between two more houses, zigged and zagged several more blocks, and eventually, panting, soaked to the skin, freezing cold, and unable to run another step, found himself in a gravelled parking lot, staring at a sign that read, bilingually, “Fisheries and Oceans, Small Craft Harbours, Gull Lake (Gravenhurst), Managed by the Town of Gravenhurst.”

  Beyond the sign stretched a half-frozen lake, the woods and rocks of the far shore dim grey shadows in the rain, the water puddling on the ice near the shore.

  We should have picked a town near a lake that doesn’t freeze in the winter, Wally thought. But who wants to materialize in a freezing cold lake, even if you can just wish yourself dry?

  So instead, they’d focussed on swimming pools. And clearly, it was the search for swimming pools that had caused Rex Major to send Emeka out here. He looked back up the street. He seemed to have lost the big black man, at least for the moment – but if Wally’s guess was correct, Emeka knew he would be heading to the swimming pool. He’d probably already gone that way himself.

  Which meant he’d be waiting for Ariane.

  Wally sighed, took a deep breath, and started running again. He was going to freeze to death if he stood still much longer anyway.

  The Gravenhurst YMCA was about a kilometre away. Wally ran toward it along the lakefront, passing houses surrounded by half-melted snowdrifts, eventually turning left to cross the railroad tracks. Just past the tracks, a sidewalk angled through an opening in a chain-link fence toward the main entrance of the YMCA, a low-rise, modern building of steel and glass. Wally slowed and peered through the rain, looking for either of the men who had surprised him at the library. Emeka, big enough to play centre for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, seemed an unlikely candidate for stealthy lurking. The trouble was, he’d only caught a glimpse of the other guy, and aside from the fact he’d been wearing a dark suit – the de rigeur uniform of Rex Major’s hired thugs, it seemed – his appearance had made no impression on Wally. That’s probably why they all wear the same thing. Like in Men in Black. Who notices another guy in a dark suit?

  Still, the slush-streaked grounds of the building seemed devoid of life – not too surprising in the cold downpour. Now that he’d quit running, Wally was beginning to shiver again. He wished he had Ariane’s power to order the water off his body.

  He wished he had Ariane.

  They can’t grab me from the lobby of the YMCA, he thought.

  He started down the sidewalk.

  Four pine trees grew to the left of the sidewalk, three too small to hide anyone larger than Wally – and one more substantial tree, from behind which Emeka abruptly emerged. Wally stopped dead.

  “Hello, Wally,” the big man said, his voice deep enough to qualify as a growl. “Mr. Major would like to talk to you.”

  “The feeling is very much not mutual,” Wally said. He looked behind him. A black SUV – didn’t Major’s men ever drive anything else? – had just pulled up at the opening through the chain-link fence. The other man he’d seen at the library got out.

  Wally had always thought swearing was a sign of a poor vocabulary, but he lowered his standards with a single muttered word, then turned right and ran across the soaking grass toward another opening in the fence, just below a big sign headed “Centennial Centre.” Below the title temporary lettering read “Join the YMCA Running Club Today!”

  I think I just did, Wally thought.

  The second man from the SUV charged along the fence to head him off. Emeka pounded at his heels. Across the street Colonel Sanders watched the chase from the sign of a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, but if anyone looking out wondered why two men were chasing a boy they didn’t bother coming out into the rain to find out.

  Wally skirted the little slush-choked skateboard park adjacent to the YMCA and angled away from the fence, which ended at a line of trees and shrubs. He plunged in among the bushes and, momentarily out of his pursuers’ sight, immediately changed his trajectory, hurtling a sad grey snowdrift to avoid leaving tracks, racing through someone’s backyard, changing direction again on the far side of the house, running through another yard, altering direction again, scrambling over a fence, and finally emerging, heart pounding, breath coming in wet gasps, onto another street. He changed directions yet again, splashed through more puddles and slush, left the houses behind, and finally emerged onto a street lined with small businesses. Up ahead, he spotted a department store. Perfect. He looked back – no pursuers in sight. He dashed into the store and stopped, chest heaving, dripping water as the clerk behind the front counter, a girl two or three years older than he was, looked up from a copy of Teen Vogue and gave him a surprised look. “Wet out there,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Did you know Mythbusters proved you get less wet running than you do walking?” He shook his head, spraying water from his shaggy red hair. “Can’t say it worked for me.”

  “Uh-huh,” the girl said, and went back to her magazine.

  Wally looked around the deserted store, and then out the window at the equally deserted street. Guess I lost them. But now what?

  They’d return to the Y, of course. They knew – or guessed – that was where Ariane would make an appearance. They couldn’t do anything to her – not on a rainy day – but they could still hope to grab him, and if Rex Major had shown one thing over the past couple of months, it was that he thought hostage-taking was a great way to get Ariane to do what he wanted.

  Trouble was, he was right. Ariane had given up a shard in the Northwest Territories when Major had threatened Wally’s life. Afterward, Ariane and Wally had stolen it back, but the example had been set. Ariane had actually led Major to the third shard, in New Zealand, because he’d taken Aunt Phyllis captive. Only the fact Wally had managed to free Aunt Phyllis and get to New Zealand to let Ariane know about it had saved the shard that time.

  Major clearly thought Ariane would give up both of the shards she had if he could grab Wally again, but today’s attack was just a spur-of-the-moment attempt: they all knew, Ariane and Wally and Major alike, that the ultimate hostage-taking prize was Ariane’s missing mother. Major knew she was alive, and knew Ariane would d
o anything to protect her. He was searching for her just as Wally had been. And he couldn’t be far behind. He had access to computer algorithms Wally could only dream about. He might have already seen the Horseshoe Bay photos. He might have already sent men to B.C. to try to find her.

  He might already have her.

  No, Wally thought. If he did, Emeka wouldn’t be here in Gravenhurst. If Major had Ariane’s mom, he wouldn’t bother chasing me. But we still have to act fast. We have to get out to B.C. and find Ariane’s mom before Major can.

  But first, we have to get out of this trap.

  Ariane could show up at the YMCA at any moment. Wally had to get back there, but he had to get back there without being caught.

  He looked around the store, and felt like a cartoon character above whose head a light bulb had just illuminated. Department store...clothes!

  He’d stolen quite a lot of money from Rex Major’s bank account during the brief time he’d had access to it, and thus it was courtesy of Rex Major that he always carried a lot of cash with him when he came on these research jaunts, just in case. In case of what, he’d never been sure, but he thought he’d just figured it out.

  “Where’s your boys’ clothing section?” he asked the girl.

  She pointed, and Wally set off deeper into the store.

  He had been wearing blue jeans, white socks, red Converse sneakers and a down-filled jacket over a T-shirt that read, “You don’t have to tell me winter is coming, I’m from Saskatchewan.” But within a few minutes all of that, sopping wet though it was, was jammed into his backpack, and he was decked out in brown khakis, a green sweater over a white golf shirt, brown suede shoes over black socks, and a blue windbreaker. He’d jammed his red hair up into a weird cap that looked like a failed knitting experiment, and added dark-lensed black-rimmed sunglasses. He didn’t look a bit like himself.

  He hoped.

  A couple of other customers had come in while he was changing; he stood in line behind them at the till. When it was his turn, the girl’s eyebrows raised.