The Beast of Seabourne

by Rhys A. Jones

  The Beast of Seabourne

  Book 2 of the Artefact Series

  Rhys A. Jones

  SPENCER HILL PRESS – MIDDLE GRADE

  Copyright © 2014 by Rhys A. Jones

  Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized.

  Spencer Hill Press

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Contact: Spencer Hill Press, PO Box 247, Contoocook, NH 03229, USA

  Please visit our website at www.spencerhillpress.com

  First Edition: October 2014.

  Rhys A. Jones The Beast of Seabourne: a novel / by Rhys A. Jones – 1st ed. p. cm. Summary:

  A teen and his friends continue the search for five mysterious artefacts, racing to keep them from an evil CEO with plans to control the world.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this fiction: Barbie, Bluetooth, Calvados, Coke, Crufts, Dr Evil, eBay, Facebook, Fizz Wiz, Ford Fiesta, Google, Happy Meal, Indiana Jones, iPod, Jelly Babies, Jurassic Park, Keep Britain Tidy, Krispy Kreme, Land Rover, London Times, Mars, Mission Impossible, Mr Potato Head, Nobel Prize, Perspex, Phantom of the Opera, PlayStation, Prada, Quarter Pounder, Renault, Skype, Slipknot, Tango, Tardis, Tesco, UHU, The X Factor, Thornton’s, Wonder Loaf, Xbox

  Cover design by Lisa Amowitz Interior layout by Marie Romero

  ISBN 978-1-939392-13-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-939392-69-5 (e-book)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Beryl Noreen,

  Gone but not forgotten.

  Chapter 1

  The Storm In A Box

  Grey April light trickled through the classroom’s grimy windows, reflecting off the surface of an inch-deep lake of dyed blue water shimmering in the base of a square Perspex tank. Just a month ago, that same tank had been the home of a goldfish called Albert. Now, a sculpted clay mountain emerged from the fish-free water at a tapered shoreline.

  Oz Chambers sat hunched forward, staring at the splay of wire spaghetti taped to one of the tank’s sides. He squinted and carefully screwed one last wire to a terminal of an electrical switch. Gingerly, he repositioned the tank on the scuffed wooden desk he was working at and sat back to admire his handiwork. He grinned and looked up into the expectant faces of his two best friends, Ellie Messenger and Ruff Adams.

  “Here goes,” Oz said, and flicked the switch.

  “How long should it take?” Ellie asked. Nearly thirteen, she had a honey-blonde mop that kept falling forward into her face, and piercing blue eyes that turned toward the older girl behind her.

  “It should take 73.6 seconds, Ellie,” the girl replied. Her voice was pleasant and devoid of any accent.

  “Thanks, Soph,” Ellie said. “That a rough guess, then, is it?” Ruff asked, arching his eyebrows.

  “73.6281 seconds,” Soph replied in her usual even tone.

  Ruff rolled his eyes and shook his curly head.

  “Serves you right for being a sarky gonk,” Oz murmured.

  Even though they all knew Soph 550.7 OS 20 was just an avatar—a human representation of the incredible artefact known as ‘the obsidian pebble,’ which Oz carried in his pocket—it was tough not to simply treat her as another person. Other than glowing faintly in the gloom, as if she were illuminated from within the metallic-orange tunic she wore, Soph looked like, and talked like, any other normal sixteen-year-old girl. But to the three of them sitting in that dingy classroom, pretty, holographic, superintelligent Soph, and everything that she was, had become a part of their everyday existence.

  Now, more than a year after she’d exploded into their lives, Oz found it almost impossible to imagine life without her. A DNA genlock ensured that the pebble responded only to Oz and to no one else in the world. The scientific experiment warming up in the tank in front of them was just the latest in a long list of things Soph had done to completely change their lives.

  “What is that again?” Ruff asked, pointing to the black plastic box Oz had attached the wire to.

  “That is a fan for the heat exchanger, Ruff,” Soph explained.

  “Where did that come from then?”

  “From a broken laptop. We got everything from that reclamation place on Marston Street. You should know; you were there,” Oz said, trying not to sound too exasperated at Ruff’s customary absent-mindedness.

  “Yeah,” muttered Ellie, as she slid Ruff a scathing look,

  “but he got sidetracked in the discarded video game pile, remember?”

  “Hey, I found Apocalypse Race to Titan there. I’d been looking for it for ages. Ever since my buzzard lump of a brother sat on my copy,” Ruff said, snapping open the ring pull on a can of Tango and slurping from it thirstily.

  Ellie made eyes to the ceiling and absently stroked a lock of hair back behind her ear with one finger.

  “Look,” Oz breathed, “it’s working.”

  “Oh, wowee,” Ellie said, leaning in, “there’s steam coming off the water.”

  Columns of smoky vapour from the heated water were coiling upwards and drifting towards the clay mountain, where they roiled and writhed along its flanks to congregate at its peak.

  “Why isn’t the steam thin and wispy like from a kettle?” Ruff asked.

  “There’s something in the water that thickens the steam up,” Ellie answered, sounding a bit irritated. “Soph’s explained all this.”

  “Secret ingredient?” Ruff asked.

  “The steam has been aggregated by a composite of sodium hyaluronate and a carbomer,” Soph said.

  “Eye drops, remember?” Ellie said.

  “Glad we cleared that up, then,” Ruff muttered, his expression as befuddled now as before he’d asked the question. Oz and Ellie weren’t listening. Their attention was focused on what was happening inside the tank. The clouds—because that was exactly what the thick steam had become—now shrouded the mountain’s peak. Pint-sized bolts of lightning flashed blue and silver, and minuscule rumbles of thunder caused the Perspex walls to tremble. Suddenly, in one three-second downpour, the clouds ruptured, emptying their contents in a torrential curtain that battered the clay mountain and cascaded in small rivulets down into the agitated lake.

  Ellie, Oz, and Ruff looked at one another, punched the air, and whooped, at the same time.

  “That is so cool,” Ellie said. “How does the rain form again, Soph?”

  “A discharge of electrostatically charged ultra-fine silica sprayed from the top of the mountain into the clouds causes the water to coalesce, resulting in precipitation,” Soph explained.

  No one spoke for several seconds, though Ruff opened and closed his mouth twice.

  “All I know is we had to use a whole box of talcum powder for that, but who cares? I think it’s totally wicked,” Oz said, sitting back.

  “It’s a first prize in the science project, and a free trip to Cornwall, is what it is,” Ruff said, rubbing his hands together and showing a lot of teeth.

  “Maybe. But don’t forget, there’ll be strong competition,”

  Oz warned them.

  “Dilpak Malhotra’s made a wind turbine,” Ellie said.

  “And Marcus Skyrme is doing electric cars,” Oz added.

  “Yeah, but no one, and I mean no one, is going to have a working model of the water cycle,” Ruff said, still grinning. “I mean, come on. Never mind the year eight science project; this is probably worth
a Nobble prize at least.”

  “Nobel, you gonk,” Ellie said with a sigh.

  “Whatever.” Ruff shrugged.

  Oz was beaming. “Thanks, Soph. It’s brilliant.”

  “All I have done is provide a blueprint. The three of you have been responsible for the construction.”

  “Well, it was Oz mainly,” Ellie said.

  “Yeah, we didn’t get much of a look in,” Ruff added pointedly.

  “Oh, come on,” Oz protested. “Ellie provided the tank, and you sculpted the mountain.”

  “Yeah, but you put it all together,” Ruff said, glowering.

  “I had the soldering iron. It made sense for me to put it together. Besides, I just followed Soph’s instructions—”

  “—and you wouldn’t let me use sand on the mountain to make a landslide so that we could have a mini-tsunami,”

  Ruff added, sounding really grumpy now.

  Ellie shook her head despairingly.

  “Look, I know it might seem like I’ve done most of it and that I haven’t wanted you to come over much, but with all the work that’s been going on at Penwurt, I…” Oz let his voice trail off. He was fed up with apologising for the decorating and repairs that seemed to have been going on forever at his house and, more importantly, for how his mother had discouraged visitors and banned sleepovers until the mess was cleared up.

  “I thought they’d already finished the basement,” Ruff said, not even trying to hide the accusatory tone in his voice.

  “Almost finished, I said. But Mum had to use half the insurance money from the fire to get some of the roof fixed before they started on the basement, ‘cos the chimneys still leak, and it’s all taken yonks.” He saw Ruff frown again and added weakly, “After it’s done we’ll be back to normal, and you can come over to stay whenever you like, honest.”

  “It’s ages since we’ve been over,” Ruff said with a scowl.

  “Over a year,” Ellie said. “Soph must be really fed up with us.”

  “I know, I know,” Oz sighed as another wave of guilt sloshed over him. “But Mum’s got a thing about health and safety. The whole place has had to be inspected because of the fire. I was even banned from the orphanage block and the basement until about a week ago,” he explained, hearing the whining, pleading tone in his voice and hating himself for it.

  Their sceptical expressions did nothing to ease his guilt. He wished they would change the subject, but as usual, Ruff was being annoyingly persistent. None of them doubted that Soph was some sort of technological wonder, though they remained clueless, as indeed did the avatar herself, about where she came from and why she was now so completely a part of their lives. The answer to that mystery—what Soph referred to as her memsource—remained locked inside one of the two remaining artefacts—the two the trio had sworn to find in order to make Soph whole.

  “I can’t believe there isn’t anything on the Net about the ring or the pendant,” Ruff mused, picking up on Oz’s guilty thoughts.

  “I have searched all existing sources on the Internet, Ruff,” Soph said, “but the only historical data available is that with which you are already familiar.”

  “It’s not going to be as easy as just Googling for them, is it?” Oz said. “The clues to the hidden passages were in my dad’s clock, remember? The Internet didn’t really help us there.”

  Oz knew Ruff possessed an unshakeable faith in the Internet as an answer for just about everything. But Ruff had brilliantly cracked the code that opened the passage doors with just a pencil and paper.

  “Perhaps we should go back to our original source to help Soph,” Ellie said, in a throwaway tone.

  Oz and Ruff stared at her.

  “What, Achmed’s in Egypt?” Ruff asked, frowning.

  “No, I mean Garret and Eldred’s.”

  Oz gave Ellie a thoughtful glance. He vividly remembered the old antique shop where they’d found the second artefact, the black dor, which had been mislabelled as a broken scarab brooch.

  “I heard that it had closed down after the burglary,” Ruff said.

  “Yeah, but Mr Eldred didn’t close down, did he?”

  They were both right. Someone had found out that they’d visited the shop, and that someone had strong-armed the octogenarian shopkeeper into telling what they’d bought.

  “Mr Eldred is hardly likely to welcome us with open arms,” Oz muttered. “Not after what happened to him. Besides, my mum would go absolutely bananaramas if she found out.”

  “She doesn’t have to find out, not if it’s just me and Ruff that speak to him.”

  “Yeah, no worries,” Ruff said, nodding towards Ellie. “We’ll sort it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ellie said, folding her arms over her chest. “You going to poke him on Facebook, then, are you?”

  “All right, action girl. Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I know that we’ll have to find out where he lives and stuff.”

  Oz grinned. “Fair point. How are we going to find him?”

  “Leave that with me,” Ellie said as a sly smile lit up her face. She looked around at the grimy windows and battered desks and wrinkled her nose. “Now can we go, please? This place honks of mushrooms.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed,” Ruff said, brushing cheese-and-onion crisp crumbs off his jumper before draining the remains of the Tango in one swallow.

  Oz snorted and began wrapping the tank in some old sheets he’d brought from home.

  “It is safe to just leave it here overnight, you reckon?” Ellie asked.

  Oz pointed to a disgusting grey-and-black stain in the shape of a giant, two-headed, squashed toad that stretched halfway up one wall. “It’ll be fine. I know it’s horrible and fungoid but I chose it for exactly that reason. No one comes in here because of the damp.”

  “You sure about that?” Ruff asked, frowning.

  “How many times have we been in here and never been disturbed?” Oz countered.

  Ruff cocked his head sideways. “Loads, I know, but I’m sure I can hear—”

  “I’m telling you…” Oz went on, but froze as he picked up what Ruff had already heard.

  “…strictly out of bounds,” came a strident voice from the corridor outside.

  “Oh, sugar. It’s Swinson,” Ellie hissed, grabbing Oz’s arm and staring in horror at the door.

  “What are we going to do?” Ruff asked in a panicky whisper.

  Oz’s insides contracted with a sickening swoop. No one ever came to this block of musty old classrooms. He searched frantically, but there was nowhere to hide, no other door to escape through. There was nothing they could do, unless… “Soph?” Oz implored, swinging his desperate face to the avatar.

  “You wish to remain concealed?” Soph asked.

  “Too buzzard right we do,” Ruff blurted.

  “Then please sit quietly and do not make a noise.” With that, she faded into nothingness.

  “But…”

  The door crashed open, and two people stood in the doorway. Bright sparks flickered at the edge of Oz’s vision, as blood drained from his face into his hollow legs. He had to fight a terrible urge to duck under the desk. There, almost filling the doorway, loomed Valerie “the Volcano” Swinson, deputy headmistress at Seabourne County School. She’d earned the name from the combination of an explosive temperament and a body shaped like an inverted traffic cone. As usual, she wore her gull-wing glasses on a string around her thick neck, but her customary pursed, accusatory expression dissolved into frowning disappointment as she peered into the dingy room. Framed in the doorway beside her was a pretty, immaculately dressed girl wearing a malicious smile, which also dissolved into instant confusion as she, too, surveyed the emptiness.

  “Well?” demanded the Volcano.

  “But I…I watched them come in here. I heard them talking,” the girl protested.

  The Volcano’s eyebrows arched. “They seem, however, to have vanished into thin air. More importantly, this room is strictly off-limits while th
e education department finds the funding for repairs and re-plastering. And though I am grateful for you bringing this supposed transgression to my attention, Phillipa, in this instance it seems that you are mistaken. Though I agree this is exactly the sort of place I might expect to find Mr Chambers and his little troupe flagrantly flouting school rules, it is clear that they are not here.”

  Oz’s heart thundered in his ears. It felt as if it had travelled up to just behind his Adam’s apple and was trying to drum its way out through his mouth. Ruff, Ellie, and Oz, sitting just feet away from the door, looked at one another in white-faced disbelief. Phillipa “Pheeps” Heeps, with whom Oz had a long and bitter history, was bug-eyed, looking for signs of occupation.

  Several times her gaze raked across him, but her eyes slid off as if he wasn’t there. Behind her, two of her clones—part of an entourage that usually followed Pheeps around like sheep, labelled by Ruff as “Pheeps’ Creeps”—pushed their way in, their faces instant pictures of stunned bewilderment. Oz could only stare in wonder at them, standing no more than a few feet in front of his nose, looking right at him. Looking and not seeing anything. The Volcano sighed and turned to the three girls.

  “I suggest the three of you go back and make the most of what remains of the lunch break. I will keep an eye out for Oscar Chambers and his cronies, don’t you worry.”

  She herded Pheeps and her Creeps out and slammed the door behind her.

  Oz, realising that he’d been holding his breath, exhaled gratefully and swallowed his pulse, but his relief was short-lived. Next to him, Ruff was turning an alarming shade of purple, one hand clamped firmly over his mouth. Oz glared at him desperately, but all Ruff could do was shake his head, a look of total mortification on his face, when at that moment, from behind his hand, a loud and prolonged Tango-induced burp erupted.

  Oz looked at Ellie staring in utter disbelief at Ruff, who had clamped a second hand over his mouth to quell the laughter—or worse, another burp—that now threatened. Oz was forced to take the more drastic measure of chomping down on his knuckles to stifle a guffaw.

  Without warning, the door burst open, and Pheeps thrust her beady-eyed face back in again.