“There’s an awful lot of it. And I don’t think your mum’s going to be too happy when she sees it all spread out on the lawn.”
I gave her a wink. “Don’t worry about my mum. I can handle her.” Although, to be honest, I was a bit concerned myself. Still …
I reached in and pulled something large and wooden out and dumped it on the lawn. Vivi grabbed something smaller—a black bin liner full of rubbery bits and pieces—and put it down next to the wooden thing. Some of the stuff was large and heavy enough for us both to have to carry it from either end, and within an hour we had almost emptied the shed.
There was one last item that needed to be removed: a large, shopping-cart-size rectangular thing against the far wall that was covered in a tight-fitting tarpaulin. The tarpaulin didn’t reach all the way to the floor, and at the bottom you could see that whatever it was it had wheels. Four big, fat wheels.
“What is that?” Vivi asked.
“Not sure. Let’s get it out first and look at it outside.”
The thing was heavy but rolled easily enough. I turned it around in the tight confines of the shed before pushing it out over the lip of the door and onto the grass.
The sheet of tarpaulin was tied around whatever it was, so we got on our knees again and started easing the knots open with our fingers. Eventually, the knots were undone and we yanked the tarpaulin off with some difficulty.
It was some sort of machine. Like a huge black box on wheels. On the top of the box, toward what I assumed to be the front, was a wide hole that seemed to funnel downward into its center. Slightly farther back on the top was a kind of flap. Vivi unclicked the latch and opened it up. We both leaned over and peered inside. There was nothing. Just an empty cube-shaped space about the size of a football.
On one of the sides sat two huge square plastic buttons. I punched one of them. Then I punched the other. Nothing happened.
“Is there a cord? Do we need to plug it in?”
Vivi pointed back at the cube-shaped space under the flap. “I’ve a feeling that this is where the battery is meant to go.”
“What sort of battery is that?” I said. The space was much bigger than ordinary batteries, but not as big as a car battery.
“Perhaps Dr. Bloom hadn’t got around to inventing the battery for it when he died,” Vivi answered.
“No. That doesn’t make any sense. You build something around a battery. Not the other way around.” I inspected the junk we’d spread out over the garden. There was nothing that looked as though it would fit the space. “It must be here somewhere.”
“Perhaps it’s in the other shed.”
“Could be.”
I went back to the black box on wheels and punched uselessly at the buttons again. Walking around to the other side I noticed something written on it. In chalk. Some of the chalk had rubbed off—possibly when we removed the tarpaulin—and some of the letters had just smudged themselves into a blur. I squatted so that I was level with the writing and dug out my magnifying glass to focus. I could just about make out, in Uncle Jonah’s scratchy handwriting, the words:
Ra
Machi
“Rainbow machine!”
“What?”
“This is his rainbow machine. The one I think he was building. For me.”
* * *
Instead of being annoyed, Mum was delighted when she saw that we’d cleared out the two sheds at the bottom of the garden.
“That was a job desperately in need of doing,” she said when she saw all the rubbish covering the lawn. “Thank you both. Now”—she looked all over the garden—“if you could pack it all away in black bin bags and put it out front for the rubbish drones, I would be exceptionally grateful.”
We both groaned but got to work, carrying all the awkwardly shaped bits and pieces between us and leaving them out on the scrappy patch of grass in the lane until the garden was cleaner than it had been even before we began.
There was no sign of the battery in the second shed. We had picked through everything but couldn’t find it. Not a sign.
“Perhaps it was only a prototype,” Vivi said as we pulled the tarpaulin back over the machine and wheeled it to the back fence, tucking it away under the overhanging branches of a tree in the field behind the house. “Perhaps he used the battery for something else because the rainbow machine wasn’t going to work. After all, he burned all his notes on it, didn’t he? Why would he do that if it was something that was going to work?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, getting a bit irritated with her. “I don’t understand any of it. But if we can find that battery, we can see if it works or not.”
Vivi gave her head a little shake.
“What?” I asked.
“Well … the thing is … I don’t really understand what it could do to help you see color. Does it make a rainbow? If you turn on the machine, does it make a rainbow in the sky? Because, if that’s all it does, you’re still not going to be able to see any colors, are you?”
“Perhaps the rainbows are more vivid … stronger or something, so that I can see them.”
“You can’t make rainbows stronger than they are. That doesn’t make sense. Rainbows are just rainbows. You can’t just turn up the volume on them.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. It’s obvious.”
“Well, perhaps it doesn’t make a rainbow,” I spat. “Perhaps I have to put my face in the funnel part and it will cure me.”
Vivi smiled.
“Anyway, what do you care?” I ducked, avoiding the branches. “It doesn’t matter to you. You can see every color there is. You don’t care about whether or not I can see colors. It doesn’t bother you. You can just go through your life admiring the sky and the sun and the flowers. I can’t.”
“That’s not fair!” she said, her eyes beginning to fill with tears. “Of course I care.”
“No, you don’t! You sit up there in your room, watching the sky flying past, poking your telescope into the stars and talking to no one but your bloody parrot.”
Vivi marched quickly off into the lane, her shoulders high and tight. As she went around the corner, she didn’t even bother to look at me.
CHAPTER 10
INVISIBLE INK
I hardly slept that night. I felt so guilty, the pillow seemed to become shapeless and lumpy and impossible to rest my head on. I wondered about going down into the garden and investigating the pipe that seemed to run under it, but I realized that I would probably wake Mum and then I’d have to own up about the rainbow machine. So in the early hours—having finally given up on sleep altogether—I grabbed my QWERTY and swiped it out of standby mode. I sat up and projected recent news bulletins onto the wall. The scrolling headlines didn’t do anything to cheer me up.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY BRITISH SOLDIERS KILLED DURING SKIRMISHES IN NORTHERN HUNGARY
BRITISH TANK REGIMENT ALMOST COMPLETELY WIPED OUT AFTER AMBUSH BY ENEMY TROOPS IN MAASTRICHT
DESALTING UNIT IN EASTBOURNE RAIDED AND DESTROYED
UK WATER PRODUCTION DOWN BY 12% SINCE LAST YEAR
* * *
I kept the sound low and watched footage of soldiers under attack in the center of Turin. Huge smoky explosions followed by lots of shouting and running. Guns and helmets. Armored vehicles scrunching over rubble. Women huddling young children in corners of derelict buildings.
I turned my QWERTY off.
Miserable stuff.
As usual.
* * *
I hadn’t heard from my dad in nearly three months. The last time I talked to him, he was on three-day leave in Zurich. He buzzed me on my QWERTY and kept telling me how much he missed Mum and me. I couldn’t see his face clearly—the signal kept being interrupted due to the army’s encryption software—but he looked okay. A bit sadder around the eyes than normal and with more stubble around his chin than he usually had—which is understandable when you think he’s been o
ff fighting for nearly two years now—but otherwise he looked okay. I asked him what it was like, fighting in places he’d never even heard of before. He said that it was weird but that you got used to it. I asked him what food and water they were giving him and he said that the army fed and watered its troops well and that Mum and I didn’t have anything to worry about. I wanted to ask him loads of things, but I didn’t get the chance because the encryption software cut us off and wouldn’t allow us to reconnect.
That was three months ago, and I haven’t heard from him since.
* * *
I must have eventually dropped off because, before I knew it, I was waking up with a terrible, horrible thirst.
Of course, everybody wakes up thirsty. Well, everybody’s always thirsty. All day long. Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. Everybody talks with a click in their voice because of the dryness of their mouth and lips that look as if they are jigsaws. Tongues are always darting in and out, trying to spread around what little moisture there is. And everyone’s dirty. Don’t forget dirty. Nothing and nobody is ever truly, properly clean nowadays. Restricted water supplies do that to you, you know. Make you thirsty and dirty. Thirsty, dirty, and desperate.
But on this particular morning, my throat was even drier than usual. Perhaps I’d sweat during the night. Yes, that must have been it. In fact, my pillow seemed especially damp with sweat.
Downstairs, Mum had to let me have some of her allocation since I’d used up so much of mine just the day before, and I stuffed down my breakfast of eggs and potato fritters before jumping in the car and driving up to the city center with her.
At Trinity, Vivi was perched on the weird fountain thing reading a book that looked way too complicated for someone our age. She glanced up when she saw me approaching, then her eyes seemed to quickly jump back into the book.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I don’t like apologizing, but sometimes you just have to, don’t you? Especially when you’ve said things that you know you shouldn’t have. It’s better for the other people and it’s better for yourself. “I’m really sorry. I was an idiot yesterday. I didn’t mean any of it.”
Slowly, she closed her book and put it down on the crumbling wall beside her. “I know,” she said, sounding the same as she always did. “You were just frustrated because we couldn’t find the battery. I realize that.” She hopped off the wall and took the book down. “Anyway, I was thinking…”
“What?” I was amazed. I thought I was going to have to do some serious begging to win her round. But she’d appeared to be over it all. Was she pretending? I wasn’t sure. I watched her closely.
“I was thinking that you were right. There must be a power source for that machine somewhere. Must be. Anything else just doesn’t add up.” We walked across the courtyard. “And I think I know where it might be.”
“Where?” I asked. Looking at her face I could see that she had spent a good while last night thinking this all through.
“Under the ground,” she replied. “In that pipe thing under your garden.”
* * *
We stood in the empty shed, looking at the floor. It wasn’t flimsy—it was actual planks of wood secured in place with screws.
The pipe seemed to run under the far end of the shed, so I grabbed a screwdriver and started there. The first screw came loose quite easily. A couple of minutes later I’d removed all of the screws in the first plank, so I wedged the end of the tool into a crack and levered it out of position.
A hole. A gap. Beneath the shed. A deep, dark hole into which I could put my extended arm and still not touch the ground below.
“What is it?” Vivi asked somewhere behind me.
“It’s a sort of … a sort of chamber.”
I quickly unscrewed the next plank and the next one. Now I could push my head down into the hole. The air beneath felt cold on my face and I looked around. Most people would have needed a torch to see into that black pit. Not me. Even in dim light. I can make out shapes and detail that not many people can.
The small room had a brick floor and brick walls to which moss was clinging. It was about four feet wide by five feet long and the floor was about seven feet below the floor of the shed. I peered down into each of the corners (having to almost twist over onto myself to see into the corners still under the floor of the shed) and saw nothing at all. It was completely empty.
Then there was a flicker in my left eye. I turned to see where it had come from and I could just about make out a box shape on the wall. Only a few inches long and a few inches wide. The battery? I tried to focus on it and then—flash—another flicker came from the box.
I pulled my head out of the hole and hurriedly started removing the next few planks of wood.
“What’s down there?” Vivi asked impatiently.
I dumped another plank near her feet and ignored the question. “Go round the side of the house,” I said. “Against the wall is a rusty stepladder. Bring it here.”
She ran out of the shed.
The boards came up easily and, eventually, I lifted the last one that covered the pit.
Vivi bashed the stepladder into the shed. There was very little space in which to maneuver, so when she brought it in the wrong way around we had to take it back out into the garden and turn it so that we could lower it into the hole properly. I wedged the bottom end of the ladder into the far corner and wobbled it to make sure it was secure. It was, so I went down first and Vivi followed.
“It’s dark. I can’t see.”
It was definitely dark. The roof of the shed above blocked out most of the light and only a little light got through the grubby windows.
“Use your QWERTY,” I told her.
Vivi tapped the screen. Then she tapped it again.
“It’s not working,” she said.
“The torch function?”
“No. All of it.”
I tutted. “You need to get a new one. Here, use mine.” I unstrapped my QWERTY from my wrist and handed it to her.
“Yours isn’t working, either.”
“What?”
“Look.” She handed it back to me and I swiped my finger across it. Nothing. It was utterly dead.
“I don’t understand. It was fine last night.”
“Well, it’s not now.”
“Weird.” I slipped it back onto my wrist.
The little light on the box flickered again. Vivi noticed it, too, so I leaned forward and touched it. Suddenly the whole box seemed to glow, filling the chamber with light.
The box was a numerical keypad and above the keypad was a small screen with a flashing cursor. It was then that I noticed that most of the fourth wall was not a wall at all. It was made of the same shiny metal that we’d discovered just below the lawn, but with a slight, almost infinitesimal, gap straight down the middle.
“It’s a door,” I spat. “It’s a door into the pipe.… No, wait. It’s not a pipe. It’s a tunnel.”
Vivi’s mouth had fallen wide open but her eyes were bright with excitement.
“We need the code,” she said. “What’s the code?”
I tapped some random numbers into the pad just to see what would happen. After the sixth digit the pad gave a long, critical beep like it was telling me off.
TWO ATTEMPTS LEFT.… scrolled across the screen.
“Oh no.”
“If we don’t get the right code it will shut itself down, won’t it?” Vivi asked. “And then we’ll never open the door.” She gave me a glare. “Why did you have to go and waste one of the attempts?”
“Er, possibly because I didn’t know I was wasting one of them!” I replied sarcastically. “Possibly because the rules aren’t exactly scribbled on the wall.”
“No need to be like that,” she said sulkily.
I tried to think. What would it be? Assuming Uncle Jonah had put the door here, what code would he have programmed it with? It could have been anything. I didn’t exactly know how Uncle Jonah’
s mind worked—I didn’t know him that well. The random numbers I’d just punched in were as likely as anything else. Surely he must have left a clue of what they were somewhere.
In desperation I looked around the walls in the hope that I might find a small strip of paper with the numbers on it. There was nothing. No clue. Nothing to point you in the right direction.
“Don’t put any more numbers in until we know what it is,” Vivi said, coming in closer and looking at the blinking box herself. “We can’t waste any more chances.”
I turned to go back up the ladder.
“Where are you going?”
“Outside. Standing around down here isn’t going to help us, is it?”
In the garden, I walked along the length of the metal strip just under the grass.
“How far back do you think this tunnel goes?” asked Vivi as she came alongside me. “Do you think it goes all the way under the house? Or even farther?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. The last couple of days had started off like an adventure, but had just become frustrating. Everything seemed to just fall apart the more you looked at it. “Perhaps it’s all just a complete waste of time. I mean, is there even anything under there?”
“Of course there is!” She almost screamed. “Why would Dr. Bloom go to the bother of hiding that tunnel away? There must be something incredibly important on the other side of the door. Can’t you see?”
I kicked at some of the loose edges of grass with the tip of my shoe.
“Come on.” She softened her voice. “Let’s go back down and look at it again. There must be a way of working it out.”
I sighed and walked over to the shed. As I got closer to the door I looked up. On the strip of thin wood at the top of the door frame somebody had written something.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That.” I pointed to the beam. “Something’s written there.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Look. Just there.” I got on tiptoe and tried to see. Struggling, I fished the magnifying glass out from inside my shirt and held it up. The word ADDOBUS—all capitals—was scrawled in a thin, wiry hand over the rough-cut wood. “See?”
The Extraordinary Colors of Auden Dare Page 8
