No, that wasn’t right. She had plenty of words (dinosaur, for instance; nightmare, Godzilla, please save me). What she didn’t have was any way to make sense of them.
The reptile thing sniffed at Amelia and Charlie, then turned to Tom and said in Miss Ardman’s voice, ‘They didn’t know? You let me uncloak in front of children and they didn’t know? What kind of gateway are you running out here?’ She shook her head in contempt. ‘Human clowns. I’ll be telling Control about this, I promise you.’
She stepped past Amelia and Charlie and shook her head again. ‘Sorry, children.’
Amelia looked at the sharp talons gripping onto the case of jewels, the coarsely folded scaly skin emerging from the sleeves of the robe, and let out a little moan of confusion.
‘But,’ Charlie murmured. ‘What are you?’
Miss Ardman said more gently, ‘I’m a –’ and she made a clucking, grinding noise in her throat that Amelia couldn’t begin to sound out.
Charlie stepped towards her. ‘But I mean, what are you?’
Miss Ardman grinned. ‘Ah, the big question, not the specific one. I see. Shall I tell them, Gateway Man?’ She flicked her gaze towards Tom. ‘Shall I spoil your secret and tell them that I’m – what is your charming word for it? An alien?’
Charlie gasped and stepped closer again.
Miss Ardman stepped back and held out a warning claw. ‘No further.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean …’
‘Perhaps you don’t mean to,’ she said grimly. ‘But look at you all!’
It was true. They had all unconsciously crept nearer and nearer to the jewels. She had shrunk away from them until her back was against the wall, and now hissed, ‘Children or not, I will hit you if you come any closer to me.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Amelia sarcastically. ‘It’s not as if we were going to –’
‘Fall under the spell of my eggs and do everything in your power to steal them from me?’ Miss Ardman suggested, her voice bitter, but nervous too.
Amelia jolted. Eggs? Those jewels in the case were …
Miss Ardman saw Amelia’s astonished face, and said in a slightly warmer tone, ‘Yes, these are my unborn children. Perhaps you understand why I was so distraught over them. To you, they are like an addiction, things to crave, but to me … well, I am their mother. I assume all mothers are the same, whichever galaxy we are from. Wouldn’t all mothers fight to protect their children?’
Amelia gulped, and nodded.
The cottage trembled again, and Miss Ardman was abrupt. ‘I’m going.’
She swept past them all, her robes a ripple of colour, her tail so heavily spiked that none of them tried to follow the eggs again. She looked back over her shoulder at Tom and said, ‘Get your house in order, Gateway Man. Control will have an official complaint from me within an hour of my return home.’
‘Please don’t!’ Tom said. ‘Just –’
Miss Ardman turned and stared at him flatly. ‘Just what?’
Tom was silent.
‘Tell me this, then. If you can’t even control yourself around aliens, if you can’t provide decent security for an ordinary guest –’ Amelia goggled to think Miss Ardman might be ‘ordinary’ on any planet, ‘– how would you possibly cope with a visit from a time shifter? Or a band of plague smugglers? Or Krskn?’
The floor vibrated threateningly. Amelia’s gaze flashed to the floorboards – then over to Charlie, who looked as dazed and overwhelmed as she was – then up at Tom. But before her brain could even formulate a question, Miss Ardman strode on to the back room.
‘The front door is over –’ Amelia started, but then saw Miss Ardman knew exactly where she was going. Even if it didn’t make any sense. She was walking deeper into the cottage, across its bare floorboards, now gritty with sand, and over to a dark shadow in the corner. She stepped into the puddle of gloom, and Amelia saw that it was a hole – no, a set of stone steps, leading down into the ground under Tom’s cottage.
‘Come here,’ said Tom urgently. ‘Now! Away from that room.’
They heard Miss Ardman’s footsteps growing fainter and more distant, then, as Tom bustled them into the kitchen, the sound of a door being opened and banging closed again. Another great tremor shook the house, and Tom sighed. ‘She’s gone.’
Amelia waited to see what might happen next. After a few deep breaths, when it looked as though things might stay normal for at least another five minutes, she turned to Tom.
Tom glared back. ‘You wretched, nosy, pushy, disobedient –’ He seemed too angry to finish what he was going to say, and instead stomped to the sink and filled the kettle.
‘Well?’ Charlie demanded, his hands on his hips.
‘What?’ Tom kept his back to them both.
Amelia snorted. ‘Erm, let’s see …’ She pretended to think hard. ‘How about: eggs that make you crazy-drunk just to look at them, people looking like people but really being aliens, aliens living under your house, and you getting busted because you can’t cope with someone called Kristen?’
‘Krskn,’ said Tom, flinching.
‘What?’
‘The person I can’t cope with,’ said Tom more clearly, ‘is called Krskn. Also,’ he smiled slightly, ‘there are no aliens living under my house.’
‘But,’ Charlie began.
Tom held up a weary hand. The half-mangled one, but Amelia was by now so far beyond missing fingers, she didn’t notice.
‘Let’s get it all over with at once,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you back up to the hotel and let your parents explain it all to you.’
Amelia staggered. It was the final blow. After all the impossible, unbelievable things she’d just had crammed into her head, this was the worst. All her doubts had been confirmed.
‘My parents know about this?’
Everyone was in the common room for Tom’s emergency meeting. Mum and Dad sitting rather rigidly together, Mary looking almost despairing, and Tom …
Amelia couldn’t erase the image of Tom blubbering over Miss Ardman’s eggs. She’d thought there was nothing more uncomfortable than seeing an adult angry and threatening like Miss Ardman, but it had been excruciating to see one helpless and pitiful like Tom.
Tom didn’t seem too happy about being seen like that either. He’d avoided eye contact with any of them for the whole meeting, and had been twice as grumpy as usual.
James wasn’t sitting at the table with the rest of them. There was an old chest freezer along one wall of the common room and he was sitting on that, a disbelieving sneer on his face.
‘Aliens?’ he snorted. ‘Really?’
Dad smiled broadly. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said James with mock enthusiasm. ‘Totally! As in: totally not credible. As in: a great big pile of bull.’
Dad frowned, puzzled. ‘But you heard what Amelia and Charlie said. You heard Tom backing them up. Why would we say any of that unless –’
James held up a hand. ‘I have no idea. I mean, obviously, dragging us all out here to this dead-end loser town, you must be trying to destroy our lives. Maybe trying to derange us with made-up stories is part of that. Maybe we’re all part of a new experiment of yours now?’
‘Hey, Jamo,’ said Dad. ‘Hang on now –’
But James had already hopped off the freezer and stalked out of the room. ‘Not interested,’ he called back.
Dad got up to go after him, but Mum caught his hand. ‘No, leave him, Scott. Let him have some time to think it through by himself.’
Dad sighed and shook his head. ‘Not exactly what I was expecting from him.’
‘Expecting, Scott? But you weren’t expecting the kids to find anything out, right?’ said Mum. ‘That was the dea
l, wasn’t it? We keep them separate from it for as long as possible?’
‘Yeah, well.’ Dad glanced bashfully at Tom. ‘Top-secret. But I thought that if they ever did find out, they’d think it was, you know …’
‘Totally awesome!’ Charlie finished for him.
Dad grinned. ‘Exactly.’
Mary shook her head and looked anxiously at her son. ‘Charlie, do you understand just how important it is to keep this quiet? We all know the truth now, but you can’t tell anyone else about what you’ve seen. No one. Not even in hints, or as a joke, or pretending it’s a make-believe game. No-one can know anything about Miss Ardman or what goes on in Tom’s cottage.’
‘But what does go on there?’ Charlie interrupted her. ‘Miss Ardman has gone, but gone where?’
Dad looked even more excited and leant in to speak. Mum laid a hand on his arm again.
‘Are you sure, Scott?’ she said. ‘Once you tell them, you can’t take it back. What if Control …?’
Dad shrugged. ‘Miss Ardman’s complaint is more than enough to bring Control down on us, and the kids already know the main points. All I’m going to do is fill in the … mechanics a little. Better they understand properly from us than try to figure it out on their own, don’t you think?’
Mum looked at Amelia and Charlie, and then over at Mary. The two mothers sighed at each other, and Dad took that as agreement. He grinned.
‘Now, Amelia, you know that my research has been into the possibility of the existence of wormholes – giant deformities that could theoretically join two distant points in space together?’
Amelia nodded.
‘So …’ Dad coaxed her. ‘What do you think could be in the caves under Tom’s house?’
‘A wormhole,’ Amelia breathed.
‘No!’ Dad crowed. ‘Not a wormhole – hundreds of them! Perhaps thousands! A whole spaghetti bowl of wormholes, all shifting and jostling each other, taking it in turns to line up with the gateway under Tom’s house.’
Amelia gazed at him, trying to fathom it.
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Dad gushed. ‘All my life, I’ve been trying just to prove the maths works, never even hoping to find a single shred of physical evidence, and now – forget evidence! Any time I want, I can go down to Tom’s and actually hear the wormholes come and go. I can smell the air of other planets in other galaxies …’
Tom grunted and stared at his hands. He didn’t seem to share Dad’s wonder. Amelia suspected that living on top of all those wormholes might have turned out to be less fun for Tom than Dad supposed.
‘So,’ Charlie grinned at Amelia’s dad. ‘Miss Ardman wasn’t a one-off? There will be other aliens coming to stay here?’
‘Yeah,’ said Dad. ‘From all over. Turns out,’ he said proudly, ‘that we have the most active wormhole hub in the whole Milky Way! Can you believe it? In Forgotten Bay!’
‘But,’ Mum broke in, ‘we’re going to have some human guests too. They’re bound to show up once we open for business – and we can’t very well turn them away without raising suspicion.’
‘But,’ said Amelia, ‘the … uh … gateway hasn’t just opened, has it? Hasn’t Tom been looking after it all this time? So what’s changed? What are we here for?’
Tom grunted again. This time it sounded like he approved of Amelia’s questions.
Mum looked pained. ‘Everything’s changed. Tom’s handled this whole place on his own for years, and he’s done brilliantly,’ she added. Tom sniffed, but turned pink. ‘But things are different now.’
‘How?’
‘The wormholes are becoming more unpredictable for one thing,’ said Dad. ‘It could be something to do with the natural acceleration of the expansion of the universe, or it could be a new instability –’ He stopped, realising he’d lost Amelia. ‘Well, to put it simply, Tom’s old charts and timetables are getting less and less useful in predicting when the wormholes will arrive, and the wormhole connections themselves are getting less reliable. So there’s a lot of work here for me just on the physics.’
‘And,’ said Mum, ‘Gateway Control – who oversee and regulate all the gateways in use – are getting nervous about letting this gateway stay in our hands. They’d much rather have their own people running it, and we’re kind of on probation to see if we’re up to the job. Miss Ardman’s complaint isn’t going to help.’
‘But that would never work,’ said Charlie. ‘If aliens are supposed to be a big secret, how could they run it?’
‘You saw Miss Ardman,’ said Dad. ‘Did she look like an alien?’
Amelia shuddered. ‘I’ll say!’
‘No, I mean when you first met her. She looked human, didn’t she? All our alien guests – and any Gateway Control officials who come here to check on us – will all be cloaked by holo-emitters. Tom, do you have one to show them?’
Tom scowled more deeply still. ‘Nope.’
‘Ah, well,’ Dad went on. ‘They’re amazing, basically clockwork with a crystal core. They’re these tube things that you stick on your neck …’
Amelia and Charlie looked at each other in startled recognition. Charlie swallowed a grin.
‘… and you not only look like another person, you are physically wearing that form, too. I mean, you could have touched Miss Ardman and felt human skin, not scales. It’s brilliant.’
‘It’s dangerous,’ Tom spoke up.
‘Tom,’ Mum started.
But Tom retorted angrily. ‘No. If you want them to know the truth, then they should know the whole truth. The gateway is dangerous. Not just because it’s speeding up or unstable. Not just because Control wants to interfere. It’s dangerous because we are standing in the middle of an intergalactic superhighway – just standing in the middle of the traffic, totally unprotected, and hoping that we don’t get hit by anything.’
‘Tom,’ Mum said warningly. ‘Don’t frighten –’
‘No, I will frighten them,’ said Tom. ‘I want them frightened. Because frightened kids might take things seriously, and stay as far away from the gateway as possible. Frightened kids will have, maybe, a two per cent advantage, and if ever Krskn –’
‘Right!’ Dad said loudly, standing up and clapping his hands together. ‘Right! Good point, Tom, thank you! OK, great meeting, everyone. Now off you go, kids!’
‘But –,’ said Amelia.
‘Ba-ba-ba!’ Dad said over the top of her, refusing to listen. ‘Out you go! Now!’
Amelia didn’t push it. The moment Tom had said ‘Krskn’, all the hair stood up on the back of her neck. She had no idea why, but she didn’t want to hear any more about what went on in those caves under Tom’s cottage.
‘Charlie,’ Mary called after them. ‘It’s all secret, remember?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Charlie groaned.
‘I mean it, Charlie. For the first time, I really, literally mean it when I say you could get yourself in worlds of trouble.’
Charlie pulled a face at Amelia, and they went out through the lobby into the bright innocent sunshine. Over at the edge of the headland, James was throwing rocks out at the ocean below. She decided not to walk that way.
‘Come on, Charlie,’ she said. ‘We never checked out whether that really is a hedge maze.’
‘Yeah!’ said Charlie.
They broke into a run, and Amelia grinned, wondering if maybe life here could be almost normal. Maybe it wasn’t going to be all drama and mystery. Mum and Dad were still on her side – and surely they could handle whatever else decided to drop into Tom’s cottage. Meanwhile, Amelia had Charlie for company, and she could play at the beach, and she was going to get that puppy soon.
Behind her, she heard Charlie call out, ‘And when we get right
into the middle of the maze, I’m going to get back to work on this holo-emitter in my pocket!’
Okay, so maybe ‘almost normal’ was pushing it. Maybe, in fact, life at the Gateway Hotel was going to turn out to be pretty much the opposite of normal. Perhaps even dangerous at times.
Somehow, though, with Charlie beside her and the whole headland bathed in golden afternoon light while the waves crashed endlessly below, Amelia couldn’t help feeling excited.
Cerberus Jones
Cerberus Jones is the three-headed writing team made up of Chris Morphew, Rowan McAuley and David Harding.
Chris Morphew is The Gateway’s main story architect. His job is to weave the team’s ideas together into awesome, page-turning story outlines. Chris’s experience writing adventures for Zac Power and heart-stopping twists for The Phoenix Files makes him the perfect man for the job!
Rowan McAuley is the team’s chief writer. Her role is to expand Chris’s outlines into fully-fledged novels, building the excitement and fleshing out the characters. Before joining Cerberus Jones, Rowan wrote some of the most memorable stories and characters in the best-selling Go Girl! series.
David Harding’s job is editing and continuity. After Chris and Rowan have done their part, David arrives to iron out all the kinks. With his superior knack for spotting issues and coming up with solutions, David is the polish that makes The Gateway series shine! He is also the man behind Robert Irwin’s Dinosaur Hunter series, as well as several RSPCA Animal Tales titles.
The Four-Fingered Man
published in 2015 by
Hardie Grant Egmont
Ground Floor, Building 1, 658 Church Street
Richmond, Victoria 3121, Australia
www.hardiegrantegmont.com.au
This ebook is also available as a print edition in all good bookstores.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.
The Four-Fingered Man Page 6
