Obsidian Pebble

by Rhys Jones

  Ellie and Ruff walked up close to the clock. There, inlaid in the scrolls of the rosewood case, was a small hourglass with the words tempus rerum imperator engraved beneath it.

  “Time, commander of all things,” Oz said again.

  “Okay, so this clock has an hourglass engraved on it,” said Ruff dubiously. “How does that help?”

  “Eldred told me today that my dad had bought this clock from him. We know it was from here originally and my dad went back to get it.”

  “But why?” Ruff said. “Doesn’t even work.”

  “I know,” Oz said, trying to concentrate. “But Dad used to say to us that an old boar figurine might be just a mildly interesting blob of metal heavy enough to weigh down the post, but to whoever owned it a thousand years ago, it meant something else altogether. Something really important, and much more than we could ever imagine. He was always on about things having other meanings.”

  “Yeah, but come on, this is a clock,” Ruff said. “Can’t be anything else, can it?”

  “The hands on this clock have been at a quarter past nine for as long as I can remember,” Oz said. “My dad would never wind it. What do you think would happen if the hands were moved around to—”

  “Five and three,” Ellie said excitedly. “Of course, fifty-three. It makes sense.”

  “Does it?” Ruff said, peering even closer. “But what has this clock got to do with what’s on the laptop? What’s it got to do with the black dor?”

  “Ruff, I gave up asking questions a long time ago. Let’s just do it,” Ellie pleaded.

  Oz fetched a chair. Standing on it, he reached up and pulled open the glass face. Slowly, he moved the hands around so that the hour hand was on three. When the minute hand reached the twelve position, the clock chimed three times. Oz was so shocked he almost fell off the chair. He had never heard it chime before, and it sounded deep and sonorous and oddly ominous.

  He waited until it stopped and slowly moved the hand again until it was on the five. As it reached the digit, something gave a mechanical whirr. Ellie and Ruff exchanged glances and Oz saw out of the corner of his eye that there was a lot of doubt in that glance.

  “Let’s just wait and see,” he said shortly.

  The clock continued to whirr, until it finally stopped with a faint, mechanical click. They waited. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe if—” Ellie began, but Oz cut her off.

  “Let’s just hang on another minute,” he snarled, more tartly than he’d meant to.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Ellie, please.”

  “I only wanted to say that it might help if you twisted the hourglass thingy, that’s all,” she snapped.

  “How can I? It’s inlaid…” Oz caught his breath. The brass hourglass symbol wasn’t inlaid anymore. In fact, it now proudly stood out of the surrounding wooden casing, and was smooth and solid under Oz’s finger. He was standing so close that he must not have seen it pop out. Gently, Oz put his thumb and forefinger around the shape and twisted clockwise. There was a mechanical thunk and the bottom section of the clock, beneath the pendulum, moved forward to reveal a small drawer.

  “Wow,” Ruff said in wonder.

  With trembling fingers, Oz examined the drawer. There was only one thing in it—a folded wodge of very old, battered-looking pieces of paper, which he carefully removed and placed on the desk.

  “Better shut the door, Ellie,” Ruff whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  Oz waited until Ellie had closed the study door and then, gently and very carefully, unfolded the papers. There were three yellowed and crinkly sheets. The first was filled with a careful copperplate hand.

  “What does it say?” Ellie demanded, pushing her head between the two boys’ shoulders.

  “Looks sort of official. I recognize that name, ‘Redmayne,’” Oz said in a whisper.

  “He was the bloke who owned the Bunthorpe barn, wasn’t he?” Ruff asked.

  Oz nodded.

  “What does it say?” asked Ellie urgently, pushing her head further forward.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll have one each,” Oz said, handing them out.

  “Mine’s a will,” Ruff said, reading down the list of instructions. “Left his son four horses, two goats and three pigs. Oh, and the stable boy got a butter churn and a milking bucket. Lucky gonk.”

  “Wow,” Ellie said. “This is from John Shoesmith, the farrier, and it’s to his brother-in-law, Redmayne.”

  “What does it say?” Ruff asked.

  Ellie was frowning in concentration. “It’s some sort of apology. Yes, listen to this…

  “It was my firm intention to carry out the instructions of Squire Worthy as delivered through you to me, but, dear Edmund, I confess that I was unable to put one mark of injury on the shell with my hammer, even when delivered with enough force to bend a horseshoe. My furnace left it as cool as marble. What was I to do? The Squire was clear in his purpose. And yet, that moment when by chance I held it to my ear and understood with no shadow of doubt why the injured gelding in the stall before me was lame, left me dumbstruck. I knew instantly that its forelock was bruised and its lameness not due to a nail bind as I had thought. How I knew remains a mystery, yet when the shell was taken from my ear I was as dull and ignorant to the animal’s suffering as ever I had been before. To my shame, I confess I kept the shell after assuring you I had destroyed it.

  “And yet my conscience has been eased by the success I have brought to our family, and I beg your forgiveness and that of the Squire. Had we known on that day in 1758 when the barn shook so hard and the shell appeared, delivered, it seemed, by some unearthly hand, that it would have brought the Squire such misery, we might have done better to throw it into the river. But now, I must state that such thoughts are far from my mind whenever I use it to ease the suffering of those creatures brought to me…”

  Ellie looked up, her face flushed with excitement.

  “So this farrier bloke was supposed to destroy the shell,” Ruff said.

  “But he didn’t,” Ellie finished Ruff’s sentence for him. “He kept it and used it.”

  But Oz was only half-listening. He stared at the page he held, which had been written in a different hand.

  “This looks like it was written by Redmayne himself. Listen to this.” Oz proceeded to read the letter out loud to a rapt Ellie and Ruff.

  “As this letter may be read after my death, it is my will that the truth be told in regard to the burning of Bunthorpe barn in the year 1761. It is my contention that those responsible did set the fire through spitefulness or fear because they were unable to procure those items which appeared that night under so strange and wonderful a circumstance. Said miscreants, intent on robbery, found nothing to steal, as was my intention. Following the bell ringers’ fright, I shut and locked the barn, but returned later to feed the animals. There, in one corner, I found four items which I knew to be not mine and of such strange appearance to be not of usual construction nor pertaining to this area of England. The four objects were an obsidian pebble, a carved black dor, a stone ring and a pendant of oblong design.

  “I immediately spoke to my brother in law, John Shoesmith, the farrier who had been with me three years before when we experienced a similar occurrence, this time with the appearance of a black shell. As on that night, we agreed to a similar course of action and set out to deliver the items to Squire Worthy, who has knowledge of such things. Although the shell has proven to be a dread blight on the Squire’s family, we felt that he might yet find some good use and succour from their appearance. What was certain was that such items as were found should be protected until such time as the Squire, or others chosen by him, understood their purpose. In so doing we proposed to form, with others, an Obex so as to hinder those Puffers whose dealings and lies have become a blight on our land. It is they who would surely wish to use these four artefacts for their greedy purposes. It is they, I am certain, who were the arsonists that night. Their actions cost m
e dearly, but I am comforted in the knowledge that they were unable to find that which they were seeking. Squire Worthy took the four items for safekeeping and seemed pleased. It is my fervent hope that the dread and tragic consequences of our discovery of the shell are not repeated. Our duty is to the Squire and his family, and yet…”

  Oz turned the page over. There was no more. He examined the roughly torn edges and held them up for the others to see.

  “There’s a bit missing,” Oz said.

  “Great,” Ruff muttered. “Now let’s have it in English.”

  Oz frowned pensively. “Well, we know what happened in 1761, but something else had already happened three years before, obviously.” “The shell,” Ellie said. “Right, and something happened that made them want to destroy it, but Shoesmith somehow found it helped him be a vet and so he kept it. And then the other artefacts appeared in 1761, and they gave them to Worthy again,” Oz said.

  “Clear as mud,” Ruff muttered.

  “But Obex and Puffers? What are they?” Ellie asked.

  “Nice little research job for you there, Ellie,” Oz said.

  “What do you think ‘dread and tragic consequences’ means?” Ellie mused, but no one had an answer.

  Ruff had turned the will over and now gasped once more. “Wow, take a look at this.”

  On the back of the yellowed paper was a series of numbers, a single row above and columns arranged in groups of four below.

  722141158/9229514/181411229267129

  1891213/13187922/20152688/9127

  228822132422/8122611/8122611/2615614

  71813/8122611/59181322/13187922

  9127/1891213/8122611/228822132422

  “It’s another cipher,” Ruff said. “The top line is the code, the bottom columns are probably the message.”

  “That’s you sorted for the night, then,” Oz said to Ruff.

  Ruff didn’t laugh. Instead there was a long pause, during which he stared off at the floor intently. Oz could almost see the cogs in his brain whirring. Finally, Ruff said, “There’s this site I know for gamers—Cypherspace, it’s called. Cheats for games, help with decoding secret codes, that sort of stuff. I’ll get on to that.”

  Ellie threw herself down into a chair. “But what does it all mean?”

  Oz stared at his friends, eyes gleaming intently. “It’s proof that the artefacts existed, that’s what it is. Redmayne confessed to finding them and giving them to Worthy.”

  “You don’t think your dad knew about the letters?” Ruff said.

  Oz shook his head. “He bought the clock back from Eldred because he knew it belonged here, but he was always talking about getting it fixed. He just never got round to it. He wouldn’t have said that if he knew it was really a safe, would he?”

  “So, Morsman found the letters in the orphanage and had the clock turned into a safe to keep them in,” Ellie suggested.

  “But that doesn’t help us explain how the symbols got onto your laptop, does it?” Ruff said bluntly.

  When Oz thought about that, it made his head hurt. Ruff was right, of course. They’d been led to this place by the laptop message. And the laptop message had something to do with the trinket box, he was sure of it. He shrugged and said, “No, it doesn’t.”

  “There is, of course, another way to look at this,” Ruff said in a small, quiet voice.

  “What?” Ellie asked.

  “Redmayne goes on about tragic circumstances after discovering the shell, and Shoesmith said they might have done better to throw it in the river. Morsman went looking and died in strange circumstances. And your dad…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to, because the others knew exactly what he was thinking. But Oz was having none of it.

  “Oh, come on, Ruff,” Oz snapped. “A curse? That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

  “What, and finding weird laptop messages and long-lost brooch clips isn’t? I know how it sounds,” Ruff said, “but have you forgotten what we saw in that park tonight?”

  Oz opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. For once, he was stuck for a reply.

  * * *

  Because Ruff insisted he needed the laptop for his decoding, Oz and Ellie returned to the library once again, looking up the musty old volumes for help on Obex and Puffers.

  It didn’t take them long to find either. Ellie, searching in an ancient encyclopaedia, let out a groan of distaste as she held up a line drawing of a human brain. “Says here that ‘obex’ describes that part of the brain that joins the spinal cord to the base of the brain.”

  “That can’t be it,” Oz said. He was thumbing through a dusty dictionary. “Wait a minute; it says here, ‘can also mean ‘to throw in the way of or to hinder.’”

  “That makes a lot more sense,” Ellie said, looking up. “If Redmayne wanted to throw the Puffers off the track, hindering them might be exactly what he was doing.”

  “Whoever the Puffers were,” Oz said thoughtfully.

  They glanced at each other before burying their noses back in the books. What became obvious pretty quickly was that Puffers had nothing to do with wind, as Ellie had suggested, or snakes, which Oz had thrown up because of some vague idea that it might be something to do with puff adders. Eventually, Oz came up with the surprising answer.

  “Alchemists?” Ellie said, repeating Oz’s triumphant announcement. “Weren’t they weirdos trying to be chemists before anyone really knew anything about chemistry?”

  “Sort of,” Oz said, peering at the book. He looked up. “What do you think of when you think of alchemists, though? I mean, what do you see?”

  Ellie cocked her head to think. “Someone in a wizard’s hat in a fume-filled old laboratory, with flasks and retorts of different-coloured liquids bubbling everywhere.” “Exactly. You’ve just described a Puffer,” Oz said. “It’s what they called the old bellows they used to keep the fires going. You know, those things you squeeze to make air come out of to fan the flames.”

  “So Puffers are bellows?” Ellie asked.

  Oz shook his head. “It’s what real alchemists called the fakes. According to this,”—he held up a different but equally moth-eaten book—“true alchemists were a bit like monks. They worked alone, spent years trying to work out the secret of life. You know, philosopher’s stone stuff.”

  “So what were the Puffers, then?”

  “Cheats. They were the ones who moved from town to town, fooling people with tricks and fireworks, trying to get people to give them money to turn metal into gold.”

  “And this Obex was set up to stop the cheats,” Ellie said, nodding.

  When they told Ruff, he seemed only mildly interested. The code-breaking preoccupied him. “Need the key phrase that unlocks the cipher. Once we get that, I reckon it’ll be a piece of cake.”

  But by half past nine he was no further forward, and Oz suggested they forget about it for the night. Reluctantly, Ruff agreed, but only after Oz said that he was about to make rounds of toast and jam and watch a video.

  By eleven, though, the day’s events were taking their toll and all three of them traipsed off to bed. Oz lay in his, watching the moonlight paint a crosshatch of silver light on the wall through a chink in the curtains. They knew an awful lot more than they did yesterday, but really, they knew nothing at all about a lot of things. What part did Lucy Bishop have to play in all of this? Who was she working for?

  And then there was the thing in the park. Was he just some nutter living on the streets or in the park, or was his appearance part of a mad jigsaw with more parts missing than found?

  But what kept Oz awake until well after midnight were the letters in the clock. What did they mean? And why the secret cipher?

  The curtains swayed gently in the easterly breeze that had picked up outside, making the moonlight dance on the wall. He looked across at his desk. The laptop was charging, but the trinket box and the dor were hidden away in one of Oz’s secret places. After tonight, Oz had decided that he couldn’t be too caref
ul.

  That night, he didn’t dream of the girl with the grey eyes, either.

  Chapter 11

  Lions vs Skullers

  The next morning Oz awoke with a new sense of purpose. Despite Ruff’s lack of success with the cipher, they did have lots of pieces of the puzzle and he was sure they were that bit closer to solving the riddle of the ghostly footsteps. He couldn’t rid himself of the feeling, either, that the message in the letters would lead him to understanding what had happened to his dad, and to a way of dispelling the filthy rumour of his supposed suicide. Oz had nothing but his own instinct and belief to support this conviction, but at every turn, and with every new bit of information they gathered, it seemed to grow inside him. All they needed now was a bit of luck with Ruff and the cipher.

  It was a bright, crisp morning, and though Oz wanted to talk about nothing but yesterday’s events, Ruff and Ellie were not in the mood. But then Oz remembered that today was the day of their return match with Jenks’ and Skinner’s Skullers team, and their preoccupation became instantly understandable. Despite Oz’s best efforts to take their minds off the game, all they wanted to do was warm up. So immediately after breakfast Oz went with them for another kickabout.

  People’s Park was already busy with joggers and dog walkers taking advantage of a rain-free morning. The thing that had loomed out of the dark and foggy emptiness of the night before seemed like nothing more than the vestige of a strange dream. But even a sunny morning could do little to alter Ellie and Ruff’s nervous bickering. When a stray shot went zooming off into the distance, arguments flared once again.

  “You kicked it, you fetch it,” Ellie said, watching as the ball continued to roll off into the distance.

  “But you’re closest,” Ruff argued petulantly.

  “It was your rubbish shot!” Ellie yelled.

  “I’ll get it,” Oz said, glad of the chance to get away from their sniping. He knew what this atmosphere was about. Two of the best players in Ellie’s and Ruff’s team were sick with flu, and another two were doubtful. Their chance of beating the Skullers now was nigh on non-existent.