Obsidian Pebble

by Rhys Jones

  Niko nodded and looked up at Oz and Ruff. “Thank you for helping Anya.”

  “No problem.” Oz smiled at Anya. “They’re a menace. They just like showing off.” She returned his smile shyly and went pink in the cheeks.

  “Yeah,” Ruff added breezily. “Jenks and Skinner should carry a government health warning, if you ask me.”

  “Skinner is pig,” Anya said to her shoes with feeling.

  Oz looked at Ruff and they both nodded; sounded just about right to them.

  They told Ellie the same story when she eventually came back. Ruff did most of the talking, and Oz noticed that he didn’t mention anything about Skinner and Jenks’ jibes about Ellie, or about how he had defended her. When they’d finished, all she could say was, “Can’t leave you two alone for five minutes. Now, what have you found out about Penwurt’s ghost?”

  They explained that Morsman was an adventurer who’d spent most of his time searching for artefacts, and that Ruff’s theory that maybe he was the owner of the ghostly footsteps didn’t really hold up because of the date of the Bunthorpe Encounter.

  Ellie agreed. They spent another half-hour trawling for information, but came up with a blank. So that afternoon they wandered around town, looking at the new cameras and tablet PCs and the games and DVDs before meeting up with Ellie’s mum, who was going to run them all home. But the footsteps were never far from their thoughts, despite their frustrating lack of progress.

  “You could ask your mum about the ghost,” Ellie suggested as they made their way through the late afternoon streets to the car park.

  “My dad might have known,” Oz said. “He knew all about the orphanage, but asking Mum is not a good idea. Like I said, I think she’s looking for reasons to leave as it is. A ghost would put the icing on the cake.”

  Which was true, even though what Oz was really thinking about was a black dog, not estate agents.

  “If your dad knew such a lot about the house, perhaps you could have a look in his study,” Ellie said.

  “More chance of Skinner becoming prime minister,” Oz said wistfully. “Strictly off-limits.”

  “But what could possibly be in there that could do any harm?”

  Oz shook his head and shrugged. “You tell me.”

  “Nah, I reckon the answer is in the orphanage, anyway,” Ruff said as he demolished a twelve-inch-long baguette dripping with mayonnaise. It was, after all, at least two hours since they’d had lunch.

  “Wonder what it was like living there, sleeping in those beds,” Ellie said.

  “Must have been hard,” Oz said.

  “But I think Ruff’s right. I think the answer’s there somewhere.”

  “So we just keep digging?” Oz asked.

  “Hi ho,” said Ruff through a mouthful of bun.

  “Don’t fancy a game of football tomorrow, do you?” Ellie asked airily.

  “Can’t. Party at the Fanshaws’.”

  “Great,” said Ruff, his face lighting up. “You can ask the weirdo twins if they know anything. S and S are probably on first-name terms with any ghost, if there is one.”

  “Very funny,” Oz said as Ellie caught sight of her mum and began waving frantically. They piled into Ellie’s nice, warm car and Oz settled back to listen to Mrs. Messenger give them a blow by blow account of Macy’s very complicated love life. But Oz tuned out quite quickly. Triggered by Ruff’s teasing comment, he was already thinking about the following day’s party. S and S, as Ruff affectionately called them, were Sydney and Savannah Fanshaw who, for some strange reason, seemed to like Oz quite a lot. At least, he thought they did.

  That was the trouble with S and S. It was sometimes quite difficult to tell.

  * * *

  Sunday lunchtime, Oz locked the front door and he and his mother headed for number 3. They were almost at the gate of Penwurt before Oz saw, out of the corner of his eye, a tall ladder leaning up against the gable end. He stopped to look up at it. Tim Perkins was at the very top, scooping out some disgusting-looking muck from the guttering and throwing it down to the ground in damp, dark, splattering mounds. The noise it made as it hit the ground was gross.

  “That looks like fun,” Oz yelled.

  Tim slowly swivelled his head to look down without relinquishing his one-handed, white-knuckled grip on the iron bracket that held the guttering firmly to the house. He did not look as if he was enjoying himself.

  “Not to be recommended after a late night on the town,” he shouted, and then added cheerily, “Still, someone’s got to do it.”

  Oz saw that Tim wore a belt around his waist studded with screwdrivers, a clipped-on measuring tape and a host of other impressive-looking tools. He certainly looked like he knew what he was doing.

  Outside number 3, the Halloween decorations were still up, even though the pumpkins were looking the worse for wear after last night’s early frost. When Oz glanced back at Penwurt, he saw that Tim had moved around to the old block but was still up the ladder.

  “Is he getting paid for doing that?” he asked his mum.

  “No,” she said, clearly delighted. “Fantastic, isn’t it? He’s so helpful. I said I’d make him a casserole this week and he seemed very happy with that.”

  Oz made a face. “He didn’t look very happy up that ladder just now. Do you think he’s all there?”

  “Well, you know what they say about gift horses—you never look them in the mouth, whether they’re all there or otherwise,” Mrs. Chambers said without looking back. When they reached the front door of number 3, she turned to Oz. “You ready for this?”

  “Yeah,” Oz said, and watched his mother press the doorbell. A moment later, a man with a startlingly orange tan opened the door. His face immediately split into a broad grin and Oz quickly lost count of the number of sparkling teeth on show in his generous mouth.

  “Gwen and Oscar. Welcome, welcome.” Theo Fanshaw pulled Mrs. Chambers across the threshold and Oz followed in a fallout cloud of powerful aftershave. “Leticia, Gwen and Oscar are here,” he yelled at no one in particular, before adding in a quieter voice, “So glad you could come. Especially you, Oscar. Sydney and Savannah have been looking forward to it all day. They’re desperate for company so that they can escape from us old fogies.” He snorted a laugh.

  From a door in the hallway, an equally orange-complexioned woman with very thin arms appeared. She was wearing something very sparkly. Mrs. Fanshaw grabbed Mrs. Chambers and kissed the air on either side of her cheeks.

  “Maavellous to see you both. Now, Gwen, some champagne with a smidgen of cassis, or would you prefer buck’s fizz?”

  Oz watched as his mother was led away towards a room that buzzed with conversation. She threw Oz one nervous, over-the-shoulder glance, to which he responded with a reassuring smile and a low thumbs-up. A door opened and Oz glimpsed a room full of people, including Lorenzo Heeps, who was laughing uproariously at someone’s joke as he smoothed a stray, inky strand of hair back in place.

  “The girls are upstairs in their suite,” Mr. Fanshaw said. “They have refreshments waiting for you.” He beamed and made Oz wish he’d brought his sunglasses. “You know your way, don’t you?” Mr. Fanshaw walked towards the door to the party, leaving Oz alone in the hall.

  As he mounted the stairs, Oz studied the interior of number 3. It was full of polished furniture, which looked old and expensive. The paint gleamed and the chandeliers glittered. The paintings on the wall all looked like someone had decided to throw loaded paintbrushes at the canvas blindfolded. If they were meant to depict something, Oz couldn’t tell what it was. He concluded that they were probably what people called “abstract” and probably therefore very expensive. Oz preferred paintings where you could tell where the sky ended and the ground began, and the people didn’t look like they’d been through a blender.

  S and S were not pupils at Seabourne County. They attended a private school and sometimes Oz would see them arriving home in their mother’s huge 4x4, dressed in grey and lilac un
iforms with lilac bowler hats. He hardly ever saw them around town, unless accompanied by their parents. It was only really at Christmas and at other party times that he ever spoke to them.

  Which was probably just as well.

  Oz turned left at the top of the stairs where the polished wooden floor gave way to a pink carpet. He walked through a pink door and into a pink-walled apartment.

  S and S liked pink. They tended to dress in identical clothes, which, given that they were scarily identical themselves, made it especially hard to tell them apart. A fact that always caused them great amusement. They both stood as he entered.

  “Hello, Oz,” said Sydney and Savannah in unison.

  “Hi,” Oz said, and walked into the twins’ suite, which was furnished by a cerise sofa, a pink TV and a cherry formica-topped table laden with sandwiches and crisps.

  “Want some pink lemonade?” asked one of them. Oz thought it might be Sydney.

  “Yeah, great,” said Oz.

  The girls both had large, identically mournful brown eyes and the same long brown hair. Today, they both wore coral jeans, rose coloured T-shirts and baby-pink Ugg boots on their feet.

  “Nice spread,” Oz said, admiring their food. “Expecting many people?”

  “Only you,” Savannah giggled.

  Oz almost choked on his lemonade. “Really? blimey, uh…great.”

  “We’ve got a new video game.”

  “We thought you’d like to see it.”

  “We know you like games.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Oz said.

  “We watch you play sometimes.” Savannah smiled, showing a row of perfect teeth that matched her father’s.

  The beaker of lemonade froze an inch from Oz’s mouth. “Really? You watch me play?”

  “Yes. We can see into your house with the telescope Daddy bought us.”

  This time the lemonade exploded out of Oz’s mouth in a volcanic splutter. “What?”

  “Do you want to see it?” Sydney said.

  Oz nodded dumbly, dabbed lemonade off his shirt and followed the girls up more stairs to the floor above and into a converted attic room. In front of a large window at the gable end sat a squat-looking telescope on a tripod. The window looked out onto Magnus Street and Oz could see Penwurt opposite quite clearly.

  “It’s called a hybrid spotting and astro scope. Magnifies up to a hundred times,” Savannah explained. But she did so without bragging. That was one thing about the twins he liked. They had all this stuff, but didn’t gloat.

  “We can see everything from up here,” Sydney added.

  “I bet you can,” Oz said.

  “It’s all computerised for looking at stars. You just tell it what star you want to look at and it’ll find it,” Savannah went on.

  “But we prefer to look at things down here.” Sydney grinned. She sat on a chair in front of the telescope and put her eye to the eyepiece and adjusted the telescope position. “Why is that man up a ladder measuring your house?”

  “Measuring? Oh, you mean Tim; uh, he’s not measuring, he’s cleaning out the gutters.”

  “Well, he’s measuring it now, look.”

  Sydney got up and Oz sat in the chair. An involuntary gasp escaped his lips as he looked through the telescope. There was a small red dot in the viewfinder, which helped locate whatever you wanted to look at. It was centred now on Penwurt where Tim, magnified enough to see the pimples on his nose, was up the ladder. But Sydney was right; he did have a steel measuring tape out along the length of the guttering and was scribbling something down in a book. Oz could even see the writing on the pen he was using,

  “Maybe he wants to know how many yards of guttering he’s cleaned. Or he’s thinking of replacing some damaged bit. He’s very, uh…helpful like that,” he said as Tim put the tape away and got out a scoop, ready to do some more de-crudding. Oz sat back, impressed. “This is awesomely powerful.”

  “We see all sorts of things from up here,” Savannah said, grinning. “But we don’t watch you all the time.”

  “No, we watch other people, too,” added Sydney. “Last weekend we watched you and your friend Rufus and that girl Ellie playing games.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Oz said airily, not knowing what else to say but making a mental note to make sure his curtains were completely closed every day. He turned again to the telescope and Sydney showed him how to change the magnification and how to use the laser sight to pan, while Oz joked about being glad this wasn’t a rifle, which triggered a burst of giggling from the girls.

  “We like it when you come to visit. We think you’re funny,” the twins sang together. But Oz only half-heard them. He’d picked up two other people on the grounds of Penwurt. One of them was Caleb, and he seemed to be trying to reason with a very animated Lucy Bishop, who was pacing up and down and waving her arms about with a very fierce look on her face.

  Savannah was saying, “There’s an attachment for a camera, too, if you wanted—”

  “—to take pictures,” Sydney finished off the sentence.

  “Really?” Oz said, and pulled back as the twins leaned in close to show him. When he looked again through the eyepiece, Caleb and Lucy Bishop were gone.

  They spent another half-hour with the telescope. The girls took it to the other side of the loft, where another window looked down over Seabourne itself. It was even possible to see the names of the tankers as they pulled in and out of the docks, kids playing in the street a mile away, dogs in the park where Ellie and Ruff had played football that morning. But Oz was relieved when Sydney eventually said, “Are you hungry? I’m starving.”

  Downstairs, the sandwiches were mainly pink, too—prawn mayonnaise, salmon, honey roast ham and tuna spread. But they were delicious, and especially so with the pink lemonade. He couldn’t believe how neat everything was. After he’d eaten a plateful under the girls’ watchful eyes, Oz was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. Long stretches of silence were a feature of spending time with S and S. They didn’t seem to need to speak, and sometimes Oz wondered if they could communicate telepathically. Desperate for something to say, Oz ventured, “Did your mum and dad make you tidy up because of the party?”

  “We didn’t tidy up. This is how it always is,” Savannah said.

  In his head, Oz could hear Ruff saying “buzzard.”

  “So, what about this video game you were going to show me?”

  Sydney got up and walked over to a shelf and came back with what looked like a pair of very chunky sunglasses. “It’s not really a video game, because there isn’t a video or a DVD.”

  Oz frowned.

  “It’s called a Spectrum Experience Unit. SPEXIT for short. It’s not on sale yet. My dad knows the owner of the company that makes it and they gave us one to try out. Go on, it’s amazing.”

  Oz took the glasses. They were heavier, and the arms slightly thicker, than ordinary sunglasses. They fitted snugly over his ears and once on, the room descended into darkness. All he could see through the lenses were the vague shapes of S and S and outlines of tables and chairs.

  “There’s a switch and a toggle wheel on the top,” Sydney said, and Oz felt his index finger being placed on the right spot. He pressed the button, and instantly everything changed. A 3D image of a pyramid floated in front of him and then a logo for something called JG Telecom, over which a transparent menu appeared. There were three choices—‘Wild White Water’, ‘Bungee Blast’ or ‘Roller Coaster Reality’. Oz toggled to Wild White Water and pressed the button.

  “Good choice,” Savannah murmured from somewhere beyond his vision.

  Instantly, the faint noise of music from the party below faded and was replaced by the muted rush of running water, with the faint but unmistakable roar of rapids in the background. The room, which up to that point Oz could see plainly around the rim of the glasses, disappeared. And there was the weirdest sensation of floating. Ahead of him was a canyon. In fact, all around him was canyon. Beneath him was a yellow fibreglass hull and he
realised that he was in a virtual canoe. Superimposed on the vista ahead, there appeared another transparent menu. Oz toggled to play and pressed the button.

  Immediately, Oz felt himself moving forward on the river. Instinctively, he put his hands out for balance and saw that he held a paddle. It even felt like he was holding a paddle.

  “Don’t worry, it never capsizes,” a voice said from somewhere behind him.

  Oz was gathering speed as the canyon walls began to slide by. Above, the sun shone in a cloudless sky. Incredibly, when he turned his face upwards he could actually feel its warmth. He put his right hand down to break the surface of the water and felt a cold, silky flow over his skin. Yet when he pulled his hands free and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, there was no dampness.

  The canoe continued to accelerate as a bend in the river loomed ahead. He felt himself pulled along by the current and experimented with his virtual paddle, and quickly saw how he could slow down or turn. Then he was at the bend and the noise of the rapids doubled in volume. He turned the corner and shot forward towards the rushing, boiling water. He dipped and swerved, plummeted and crested. Sometimes he even felt the splash of water on his face, but it was nothing compared with the sheer exhilaration of the adrenaline rush.

  Never, in all the games he’d ever tried, had he experienced anything at all like this. It wasn’t just the incredible graphics and the noise of the roaring water, it was the fact that it was so lifelike. The glasses cut everything else out and he felt immersed, surrounded by the environment. In short, it seemed…real. He fought the white water, relishing its power, using all his strength to steer away from the treacherous rocks and swirling whirlpools that threatened to suck him down.

  Even though a part of him knew that this was a game and nothing else, he was so caught up in it, so totally immersed in its reality, that he gave no thought to stopping. At last, after yet more bends and thrills, a little heads-up display appeared and indicated a two-kilometre mark. The rapids passed and Oz drifted out into flat calm and sat back, exhausted.