The Lightning Catcher: The Secrets of the Storm Vortex

by Anne Cameron

  They were already halfway across the Octagon when Angus saw a familiar figure emerge from the Inner Sanctum.

  “Hey, that’s Catcher Coriolis,” he told Dougal and Indigo quietly.

  “The lightning catcher who works in the crypt?” Indigo asked.

  Angus nodded.

  “Creepy.” Dougal shivered. “How can anyone sleep in a tomb without having nightmares?”

  Catcher Coriolis, clearly suffering from a terrible winter cold, stopped to blow his nose.

  “A-choo!” He caught the almighty sneeze in a spotted handkerchief, the noise echoing around the Octagon like an explosion. He gave his nose an extra blow, for good measure, and then disappeared down the steps toward the kitchens.

  Dougal and Indigo both turned to follow him, but Angus swiftly pulled them back again.

  “Hang on a minute.”

  Catcher Coriolis had dropped something on the floor. Angus darted across the Octagon and scooped up the lumpy object.

  “It’s his keys to the Inner Sanctum! Catcher Coriolis must have dropped them when he sneezed.”

  “Urgh!” Dougal wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Germy keys.”

  “Germy or not, these keys might be our only chance to search the Inner Sanctum,” Angus said, quickly making sure the Octagon was deserted.

  “You’re joking! What if Catcher Coriolis notices his keys have gone?”

  “If we’re lucky, he won’t bother checking for them until he’s finished his dinner,” Indigo said, “which means we’ve got at least half an hour.” She was already rolling up her sleeves, getting ready to tackle whatever dangers they might face.

  Angus swallowed hard. He slotted several keys into the first lock on the door until he found the correct one. The lock clicked open. The chances of their getting caught were extremely high. But the desperate plan had possibilities, and since none of them had come up with any better ideas . . .

  He fumbled with the rest of the locks until the door finally swung open.

  “Come on!” Angus led the way down the narrow stone tunnel. Indigo followed without hesitation. Dougal flinched as the door closed itself behind them. With a twist and tug they were through the steel safety door in seconds.

  Angus headed straight for the door through which the buckets of storm debris had been taken.

  “Maybe there’s other stuff about the storm vortex in here, too, old stuff that everyone else has forgotten about,” he reasoned as he felt along the rough stone wall inside, searching for a switch. He flicked the light fissure on.

  “Oh, my!” Indigo gasped.

  Books and papers, stacked on ancient-looking shelves and in great tottering piles across the floor, covered every surface. It instantly reminded Angus of Mr. Dewsnap’s study, where half-eaten sandwiches and cold cups of tea lay abandoned on top of every heap. These piles, however, stretched all the way up to the ceiling, which was also covered in books, their spines clamped hard against bare rock, their covers flapping open like great colorful bats. Dangling from the pages within, in long black strings . . . Angus blinked, wondering if he was seeing things. Words were melting off each page. Dozens of stalactitelike sentences wafted daintily in the air.

  “I don’t believe it!” Dougal said, stunned. “Old Archibald Humble-Pea was right! Remember that secret code I deciphered at the back of our fog guides about what they had hidden in the Inner Sanctum. It said something about melting words!”

  Angus gazed at the stringy sentences, shocked that it was actually true.

  “But why would anyone want a book with stretchable words?” Indigo asked.

  “I don’t know.” Dougal grabbed the end of the nearest sentence and pulled it out so he could read it properly. “This one says, ‘It was only then that Philip Starling decided to ban all future experiments with storm snares as it led to—’”

  “As it led to what?”Angus asked.

  Dougal shrugged. “Haven’t got the foggiest.” The words snapped back to their original length as soon as he released them. “That was the end of the sentence.”

  Angus tried to read some of the words as they passed carefully underneath them, looking for any mention of weather explosions, vortices, or 1777. There was something about storm-force fog, and a thick, elongated sentence that ended with “Fractonimbus.”

  “Watch out!” Dougal warned, brushing a jumble of vowels and consonants aside. “Some of those words could be deadly!”

  “Since when have words been deadly?” Angus asked, peering through the long, drawn-out sentences at him.

  “Dad told me about this book he once found in the Little Frog’s Bottom library where all the words had been infused with tiny specks of hailstorm. It brought him out in lumps the size of golf balls. So if there’re books in here about poisonous fog or venomous lightning bolts, we could be in big trouble!”

  Angus quickly flicked a large spidery “sirocco” off his shoulder. He ducked warily under a long, sinewy sentence about fogcicles and froze. Standing directly in front of him, wearing floor-length robes of plain brown, was somebody he’d never seen before. The stranger scowled at Angus with small, beady eyes, his forehead creased.

  “Identify yourselves!” he demanded, pointing a crooked finger with a blackened nail at Angus.

  “Er, s-sorry, sir. We—we got lost,” Angus said, trying to sound convincing as Dougal and Indigo stopped nervously beside him.

  “Lost?” The man’s face was transformed instantly with a keen, thoughtful expression. “Sir Neville Loxley,” he said, pronouncing each word clearly and precisely. “A famous lightning catcher, lost on the Imbur marshes for three days and the first to discover howling, poisonous, and contagious fogs.”

  “Er.” Angus glanced sideways at a puzzled-looking Indigo. “I, um . . .”

  He caught the tiny movement from the corner of his eye. The man’s robes, billowing around his ankles as if caught in a stiff breeze, had just flickered.

  “Hey!” Angus stumbled forward without thinking and prodded the robes with his finger. The figure rippled like a reflection on a smooth pond of clear water. “He’s not even real. He’s a projectogram, look!”

  “Oooh! I know exactly what he is.” Dougal rushed over for a closer inspection. “He’s a holographic projectogram. They’re just like the holographic histories,” he explained when Angus and Indigo stared at him blankly, “only instead of having a storyteller inside a book, these ones are life-size projections. They only ever got to the experimental stage, though,” he added. “I think they had a few glitches.”

  “Like what?” Angus asked, watching as the storyteller scraped at his mossy-looking teeth with his grubby fingernails.

  “You couldn’t shut them up, for a start. They started following people around like walking encyclopedias, spouting all sorts of useless facts about thunderclouds, Imbur Island, and stuff.”

  “Imbur Island,” the holographic projectogram said as if to prove Dougal right. “An uncharted island lost in a mythical storm, home to the lightning catchers, the ancient Stargazer wood, and the rare crestfallen newt.”

  “If he’s a walking encyclopedia, maybe we should ask him about the weather vortex,” Indigo suggested, looking uncertain.

  Dougal shrugged. “It’s worth a try. According to the tag on his robes, his name’s Hartley Windspear.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Windspear, sir,” Indigo said, her face suddenly glowing with embarrassment, “but can you tell us anything about the weather vortex that’s swirling around Castle Dankhart?”

  The storyteller stared back at her, his robes still billowing in a holographic breeze, but he remained silent.

  “What about weather explosions, then?” Dougal suggested. “Like the one that happened at Perilous in 1777?”

  “Perilous,” the projectogram said suddenly, making all three of them jump. “A word meaning ‘dangerous’; an Exploratorium of Violent Weather and Vicious Storms on the Isle of Imbur; and the only suitable word to describe a famous chicken and chuckleberry pie ba
ked by the Frog’s Bottom Bakery.”

  “Er, I think Hartley Windspear might have been in the Inner Sanctum by himself for a bit too long,” Angus said as the storyteller stopped abruptly and began swatting at imaginary flies above his head. “Plus, this is getting us nowhere.” He checked his weather watch. It had now been fifteen minutes since he’d stolen Catcher Coriolis’s keys. If the keeper of the crypt chose to have a dessert, they might have an extra fifteen minutes. But if he’d already discovered his keys were missing, if he was already on his way back up to the Inner Sanctum with extra lightning catchers . . .

  “Come on,” he said, leading the way quickly past the projectogram. “We’ve got to search this place quickly!”

  They zigzagged their way past some giant sheets of rippled glass that appeared to contain nothing but a few squashed letters. There were singing weather forecasts, moldy archives full of secret documents that had been written entirely in ancient weather symbols, and a pile of backward-ticking clocks.

  Finally, at the far end of the room Angus caught sight of the buckets. He ran the last few steps . . . and felt his spirits plunge. They’d found nothing but the flotsam and jetsam. He’d been desperately hoping there would be something else, some crucial information about the storm vortex perhaps.

  “We might just as well look through this stuff while we’re here,” Dougal said, rolling up his sleeves.

  “Look for anything odd or out of place or anything that doesn’t make sense,” Indigo said.

  “None of this makes any sense,” Dougal said, lifting a pencil sharpener from the top of a debris pile.

  Angus dived straight into the first bucket, pulling out lengths of frayed rope, fragments of seashells, hairnets, and rusty bolts. Indigo took the next bucket, tipped the contents out onto the floor, and sorted through it, grouping everything in piles. There were long splinters of blue glass, a whole heap of silver starlings, and some useless scraps of newspaper.

  “This stuff is disgusting,” Dougal said, trying to untangle a strip of stinking seaweed from a pair of holey socks.

  Angus rummaged through the bizarre collection of storm-battered objects, frantically hoping that a knotted length of elastic or a clump of wiry quills would somehow give them the vital clue they needed, that everything would suddenly fall into place and they would miraculously understand exactly what was going on under the cloud at Castle Dankhart. But as he finally reached the bottom of the bucket, his optimism began to fade once again.

  “Have either of you found anything yet?” he asked Dougal and Indigo, already knowing what the answer would be.

  “Not unless you think an old toilet seat can solve this mystery,” Dougal said, holding up the ancient-looking object. “I don’t even want to know how it ended up in a storm vortex.”

  “Vortex,” a voice suddenly whispered behind them. “A swirling eddy or whirlwind with a cavity at the center.”

  Angus jerked around on his knees. Hartley Windspear had followed them silently to the far end of the room and was now watching them with interest.

  “Oi! Clear off!” Dougal said, chucking an old shoe at him. “You’re starting to give me the creeps!”

  The projectogram glared at Dougal for several seconds, then turned and drifted off with an indignant sniff.

  There was a sudden scraping noise from behind them.

  “What was that?” Indigo shot to her feet.

  “I dunno, but I think we’d better get out of here before Catcher Coriolis comes looking for his keys,” Angus said, feeling the whole adventure had been a total waste of time.

  They scooped up the rest of the storm debris and chucked it back into the buckets. Then they hurried through the room toward the door. Angus checked his weather watch anxiously and felt his insides squirm. It had now been thirty-five minutes since they’d picked up the keys.

  “We’ve got to get out of here quickly!” he said, breaking into a sprint.

  They had almost made it back through the strange melting words when the worst happened. The door up ahead opened, and several familiar figures entered the room. Angus and Dougal scuttled behind the nearest tottering pile of books. Indigo dived behind another, crouching low as voices drifted toward them.

  “. . . positive I had the keys when I left the crypt,” Catcher Coriolis said, shaking his head. “I came in here to return a book I’ve been reading about crypt fungus, and then I went straight down to the kitchens.”

  “Catcher Sparks is already conducting a thorough search of the kitchens.” Rogwood stepped through the door, joining the conversation.

  “Very well.” Principal Dark-Angel appeared beside him. “For the time being at least, it seems we have no idea if the keys have been lost or stolen. We must search the entire Inner Sanctum for intruders and double-check that the crypt hasn’t been broken into again.”

  “Might I suggest that we also find Mr. Crevice?” Rogwood said. “If the keys have been stolen, he would seem to be the most likely suspect.”

  “That weasel’s caused more trouble than he’s worth.” Gudgeon emerged behind them. “He’s had his eye on those dragon scales right from the start. If I ever catch him trying to sell a pricey new bunion cure in that scruffy shop of his . . .”

  Dark-Angel sighed. “It appears Valentine has failed to keep the bone merchant out of mischief. I will have to expel Mr. Crevice from Perilous immediately.”

  Angus turned to stare at Indigo, hoping the lightning catchers were about to leave, and almost passed out cold. The holographic projectogram, attracted by the sound of new voices, had come to see what all the fuss was about. He was now hovering directly behind them with a curious look on his face. Angus nudged Dougal silently in the ribs and jerked his head in Hartley Windspear’s direction.

  Dougal’s face blanched. “That’s it! We’re dead!” he whispered. “Dark-Angel will have us thrown off the island when she finds us skulking about in here with those keys!”

  “Psst!” Angus said as quietly as he could, trying to attract the projectogram’s attention. “Please! Mr. Windspear, you’re going to get us into serious trouble!”

  “Oi! Move it! Clear off! Get lost!” Dougal added, trying to shoo him away without knocking over the stack of books they were hiding behind. But the projectogram stood his ground, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Listen, we promise to come back and ask you loads of questions if you just go and stand somewhere else,” Angus said, hoping the projectogram couldn’t detect a lie when he heard one. He had no intention of ever breaking into the Inner Sanctum again.

  The projectogram hesitated for a second, then started to walk away from Angus and Dougal, but it was already too late.

  “Ah, perhaps Hartley Windspear can give us some answers.” Dark-Angel had spotted the holographic projectogram and was walking over to meet him. “Good evening, Hartley. Tell me, has anyone apart from Catcher Coriolis entered this room this evening?”

  The projectogram stared at her benignly, his robes still wafting in the nonexistent breeze.

  “Has anyone asked you any questions about the crypt, the storm prophet tombs, or fire dragon scales?”

  “Fire dragon scales.” The projectogram latched onto the phrase, suddenly coming to life. “Rumored to boost brainpower, cure dim-wittedness, scurvy—”

  “Yes, yes, we know all about those particular rumors, thank you,” Dark-Angel said, interrupting him. “We are far more interested in any other visitors you may have had this evening.”

  Angus held his breath, the agonizing seconds ticked by, but the projectogram kept his silence.

  “We’re wasting our time, Delphinia.” The keeper of the crypt appeared at her elbow, wiping his runny nose on a handkerchief. “If Mr. Crevice has stolen my keys, he’d hardly waste his time in this part of the Inner Sanctum. We must inspect the storm prophet tombs immediately for any signs of damage.”

  “Rufus is right,” Rogwood said, already turning toward the door. “We can question Hartley later if necessary.
I would also suggest a thorough search of the—”

  The door closed suddenly, cutting off their conversation. Angus waited for several seconds to make sure that none of the lightning catchers were coming back; then he scrambled onto his feet.

  “Thanks for not giving us away!” he called over his shoulder, giving the projectogram a friendly wave as they sprinted past.

  “Fire dragon scales,” the projectogram repeated, clearly trying to hold their attention for a few seconds longer, “rumored to boost brainpower, cure dim-wittedness, scurvy, bunions, and pimples.”

  “Yeah, thanks, we already know about that!” Dougal said.

  “Also the subject of a series of top secret experiments conducted in 1777.”

  Crash!

  Angus skidded to a halt, knocking over a small pile of books, as Dougal and Indigo smashed into him from behind.

  “What did you just say?” he asked, swiveling around to face the projectogram.

  Hartley Windspear pulled himself up to his full height. “Fire dragon scales, the subject of a series of top secret experiments conducted in 1777. Rigorous tests were performed on a number of volunteer lightning catchers to determine if a preparation of powdered fire dragon scales could bestow the skills of a storm prophet on them. Because of some unfortunate side effects, however, including spontaneous drooling, memory loss, and severe bouts of hiccuping, all tests were eventually stopped. No storm prophet skills were noted among the volunteers.”

  “This is unbelievable!” Dougal said, looking shocked.

  “What happened after that?” Angus asked urgently, hoping there was more.

  The projectogram paused, and then: “Further experiments were conducted by adding powdered fire dragon scales to lightning storm particles. All experiments were halted, however, following several severe reactions and a large explosion that resulted in the appearance of a spectacular weather vortex. The vortex was declared out of control and raged above the Exploratorium for weeks before it was finally extinguished.”

  Dougal stared at Hartley Windspear, speechless.

  “In conclusion,” the projectogram continued importantly, “the lightning catchers noted that fire dragon scales, when combined with lightning storm particles, could produce weather of cataclysmic power. They each signed a declaration, therefore, swearing never to mention the experiments in the kitchens, bathrooms, or communal areas of the Exploratorium.”