by Lauren Child
The two of them walked and argued. Ruby the persuader, Clancy the resister.
After fifteen minutes and forty-seven seconds Ruby had broken him down and Clancy found himself stepping into the little yellow dinghy that was sandwiched between fishing boats.
‘Don’t expect me to get out of this boat until it’s time to step back onto dry land,’ was all that he asked.
‘Sure.’ Ruby was checking the scuba equipment stored in the dinghy. ‘I reckon I can promise that ’cause I think my dad mended the holes,’ she said casually.
‘What!’ said Clancy, desperately attempting to scramble back out.
‘I’m fooling with you Clance. This is a Spectrum dinghy; it travels faster than you can imagine and is pretty tough with it. Dya wanna turn your humour switch up a notch?’
‘Ha ha,’ said Clancy – no hint of a smile. He peered into the bag. ‘By the way, why have you brought two wetsuits and two pairs of flippers?’
‘Thought you might enjoy a dip, check out the scenery.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Clancy again.
They used the paddles until they made it out of the harbour, bickering the whole way, and then Ruby pulled the engine cord and their voices were drowned out by the buzz of the motor. The little vessel headed out to sea. The tramp on the harbour bench looked up for a minute or two and watched until the dinghy became a speck on the horizon and finally disappeared completely from view. He yawned, sat up and rummaged for something in the yellow bag he was using for a pillow. He took from it a leather scabbard, unclasped it and pulled out a jagged knife.
‘Now where do you think you’re going Ruby Redfort?’ he muttered.
Chapter 41.
Swimming blind
RUBY HAD TURNED OFF THE ENGINE and the little boat was bobbing about on the dark water, the moon partly obscured by slow-moving cloud, most of the stars faint or invisible. It was not a pretty night – there was something menacing about it and the sea not as calm as it had been two days previously.
‘Why have we stopped here?’ Clancy was looking around him; the Sibling Islands were still a way off.
‘We don’t want anyone to hear us coming, do we?’ Ruby was tackling her wetsuit, not the easiest of things to get into while bobbing in an unstable craft. While she wrestled with the suit, she talked. ‘I’ll swim out there, it’s not so far.’
She looked out at the silhouette of the smaller island. The unmistakable shape of the bird was just ahead of her. If the lullaby was right, the cave entrance was just beneath. Ruby didn’t expect to see the cave mouth – according to Martha’s account, it had probably been covered by a rockslide. But Martha had also said that the pool in the cave had turned into a whirlpool when the currents started up again, had sucked her down and spat her out in the sea outside.
And an underwater exit was also an underwater entrance. So Ruby was pretty sure there was a way in.
Clancy grimaced. Ruby knew what he was thinking, she couldn’t help thinking it too, but she had to do this so she would just make herself believe it was going to be OK. RULE 12: ADJUST YOUR THINKING AND YOUR CHANCES IMPROVE.
‘Sea monsters aren’t all bad Clance. I mean they’re just going about their sea monster business, same as you.’
‘Well, not quite,’ said Clancy. ‘’Cause I don’t go about eating people who accidentally cross my path.’
‘It’s not their fault if they mistake us for lunch.’
This little pep talk wasn’t helping Clancy one bit. ‘I’m still not going in Rube.’
‘OK, but it means you’re gonna have to wait here on your own – in the boat – on your own,’ said Ruby. ‘In the boat – alone.’
Clancy didn’t take the bait. ‘Fine,’ he said.
‘OK,’ said Ruby. ‘If you’re staying here, then stay here, don’t go taking the boat off or anything, OK?’
‘Of course I won’t,’ assured Clancy. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘I don’t know. You might get chicken or something and make for the shore.’
Clancy folded his arms. ‘I told you I will be here and I will.’
Ruby put on her mask and zipped up her wetsuit. ‘So you’re sure about this?’
‘You bet,’ said Clancy.
Sitting on the edge of the dinghy she said, ‘This is your last chance…’
‘Good,’ said Clancy.
Ruby let herself fall backwards and disappeared under the surface of the water. Clancy stared in after her, but all he could see was dark water and all he could hear was the thwack of the waves against the side of the boat.
Ruby swam through coral reefs which towered up like castle turrets, fish darting past her, the more confident ones following at her side. As she swam, she dropped the phosphorescent limpet lights which told her where she had come from and would lead her neatly back to the boat – they should last a few hours at least.
What was she looking for? She didn’t actually have any firm idea, a sort of vague one maybe, but no co-ordinates, only the rock’s golden bird to navigate by, and when she surfaced, she found it was too dark to make that out. She would just have to trust her instincts.
Clancy bit his nails. He wasn’t feeling so good. It wasn’t seasickness – Clancy didn’t suffer from seasickness, he had good sea legs. What Clancy was suffering from was more akin to anxiety sickness, but right at that moment he couldn’t tell the difference; all he knew was that he was feeling pretty queasy and it had a lot to do with being on the ocean. The best way to treat seasickness was to get into the water, but there was no way Clancy was going to do that.
Which, as it turned out, was just as well.
Ruby found herself in a forest of slick seaweed. She swam blindly, pushing her way through, and then quite suddenly she banged her hand on a sheer wall of rock. She had reached the smaller of the Sibling Islands, the one known to sailors as Little Sister. If Martha was right about what she had seen, then this was the island where the treasure was hidden. The cliff face rose up high out of the water all the way to the bird, and seemed to sink down many miles below the surface.
Ruby stopped and pointed her flashlight, casting light up and down, methodically looking for a fissure in the rock’s surface, an entrance, but there didn’t seem to be one. She realised she wasn’t exactly where she hoped she’d be; the current was beginning to return and must have gently carried her a little to the east – she was going to have to work her way round. She looked back at the trail of Hansel and Gretel lights she had dropped in her wake. They twinkled in the dark, inviting her to swim back to Clancy – beckoning her home.
At first Clancy thought the boat had somehow hit a rock – the bump to the underside of the vessel nearly knocked him off his feet. He steadied himself; his legs felt very weak and he sat down heavily in the centre of the dinghy. Maybe it was nothing, just his mind playing tricks on him. Sailors said being alone at sea could send you half crazy, maybe that was what was happening to him. He began to think about Ruby – it seemed like she’d been gone an awful long time. How much air did she say she had?
Ruby had been searching for some time now, way longer than she had expected, and her oxygen was getting low. She checked her tank: she had just about enough to get all the way back to the boat, nearly anyway.
A huge jolt catapulted Clancy from his musing and he had to snatch quickly at the dinghy’s ropes or he would have been flung into the dark water. His breathing was so loud he could hear nothing else. His head was hanging over the side of the boat and he was staring down into the depths.
And that’s when he saw it.
Chapter 42.
Whatever happened to plan B?
CLANCY WAS CROUCHING OVER THE ENGINE, the ignition cord in his hand. He paused, not because he didn’t have every intention of pulling it, but because he didn’t know which direction to go in.
Ruby had told him to stay put. But that was not really an option any more. The only choice he had was the direction he took. Ruby had been pretty clear that the boat shoul
d not be taken too much nearer to the caves because you know who might hear the motor or spot the dinghy. Clancy would have considered rowing, but that option (in the form of the oars) had been devoured by the thing in the water.
He would head for shore, he would get help, he could alert people. Yeah, that’s what he would do. It was the heroic solution, surely?
He pulled the cord five times before the engine began to whir and then, as he was about to speed off in the direction of dry land, a horrible thought occurred to him. What if Ruby was on her way back to him? What if she was left in the middle of the deep dark sea with no boat, no air and nothing but the thing for company?
Oh dear, life can throw up some terrible decisions. It was a shame Clancy and Ruby had not followed one of her most important rules: RULE 36: ALWAYS COME UP WITH PLAN B BEFORE YOU HAVE EMBARKED ON PLAN A.
Ruby might well have wished she too had come up with a plan B – her air was just about out and she was going to have to either give up on finding the underwater entrance or risk drowning. The Sibling Islands were not the sort of islands one could clamber onto – they were, for the most part, sheer rock face with very little in the way of foot- and handholds, so clambering out of the water was a near impossibility. But she couldn’t give up looking; there had to be an entrance somewhere. She would chance it – she felt lucky.
Darn it Ruby!
Clancy knew what he had to do and he was not happy about it.
He switched off the engine and slowly, very reluctantly, reached for the scuba gear. He listened out. The thing had gone quiet – maybe the noise of the engine had upset it. Maybe he could stay put – sure, it was getting a bit wet in the boat, but he could bail out the water and just wait it out for Ruby.
But maybe not.
Thud.
The boat sprang a small leak. Spectrum dinghy it might be, but it could not withstand the battering of a two-ton sea beast. There was another terrible jolt and Clancy hung on for dear life. The thing had not gone; in fact now there seemed to be two things, two very different things, fighting with each other. The second a whole lot more terrifying than the first, a giant beast with massive tentacles. But if he was to make it out alive, then this was the very distraction he needed. If he was quick, he could escape the boat while the things tried to kill each other instead of him.
As he grappled with the wetsuit, he muttered to himself, thinking about all the times he had been told to forget his ocean fears. How people were always telling him how unlikely it was that he would be attacked by a sea creature.
The probability is really small – you have much more chance of being run down by a truck or drowning in your own tub.
He mimicked their patronising voices. Boy, would he tell them a thing or two when he made it home… if he made it home.
The way Clancy saw it, he didn’t have to go in the ocean – his family had a pool. The other point was he could be careful when he crossed the road, he could be careful when he was in the tub, but it didn’t matter how careful he was in the ocean off Twinford, he might still get devoured. Who knew what was swimming about in the waters off Twinford beach?
Well, he did. He’d just seen it. And it had terrified him.
All this he muttered to himself as he pulled on the wetsuit. He checked the oxygen tank just as he had seen Ruby do, and that’s when he discovered that it was all out of air. He stood up in the boat and yelled at the sky and then yelled at the sea, and when he was done yelling, he picked up Ruby’s belt and in a fury started thwacking it against the redundant oxygen tank. I’m going to die, he cursed.
As luck would have it, Ruby was lucky. She ducked down under the waves one final time to search the underwater cliff face for a tunnel in the rock that might lead her inside the island.
And there it suddenly was, a passageway.
Kekoa was a good teacher and Ruby had listened hard. It couldn’t be the main entrance to the island, not the one the pirates had used all those years ago – this entrance would be a squeeze for a grown man and as for supplies and the like, not a chance. The snag was there was no way the oxygen tank was going to fit through this tiny opening, but of course she did have the breathing buckle. She reached for it and that’s when Ruby discovered that no, she did not have the breathing buckle because she had left it attached to her jeans belt and that was lying on the floor of the boat.
Nice going Agent Redfort.
She could hold her breath for one minute and one second, but was that long enough to make it through an underground water-filled tunnel? Did she really want to find out? Not like this she didn’t, but she would push her luck; it seemed the only thing to do – she was tired after so much swimming and she honestly wasn’t sure if she would be able to make it back to the dinghy.
Ruby breathed her very last bubble of oxygen from her tank before letting it sink to the bottom of the ocean. She pushed her way in – it was pretty dark and very small. As she moved forward, the thought occurred to her that this underwater tunnel might not actually lead anywhere. But Ruby could feel a stream of cold water rushing past her from deeper inside the rock. Freshwater, she guessed, from some source within the island. It gave her hope that her tunnel was leading somewhere: whether it was leading somewhere big enough to crawl through was another matter.
Not ideal, not for anyone, but particularly not for someone who suffered from claustrophobia, the kind where just the thought of being trapped made you want to tear your way out of your own skin. She was beginning to feel waves of panic sweeping through her – if there was one thing Ruby Redfort loathed, it was small dark spaces, spaces with limited oxygen and in this case, spaces with no oxygen and possibly no way out. RULE 21: DON’T THINK BACK, DON’T THINK AHEAD, JUST THINK NOW.
Ruby focused on slowing her heartbeat and propelling herself forward by pushing against the narrow rock walls. All the time she heard Mrs Digby speaking to her. ‘Stop fussing child, we don’t have all day.’
Finally, after what seemed like twenty minutes but was in fact only forty-five seconds, she surfaced. Gulping in dank air, she took stock of her surroundings.
She was in a cathedral-like cave, filled with sound, the acoustics such that the lapping of water, the drips, the splashes created a piece of strange and melancholy music. There was no pool in the cave, save for a small puddle on the rock floor, so this obviously wasn’t the chamber where Martha had seen the pirates hide the rubies, nor could it be the cave where the Sea Whisperer lurked, and where the whirlpool had appeared. OK, so she wasn’t quite where she wanted to be, but she was alive and she was in. Ruby wasn’t about to give herself a hard time for winding up slightly off course – the point was she was breathing.
A million glow-worms illuminated the stalactites. It was beautiful, eerie and no doubt dangerous. Ruby quickly pulled off her flippers and mask and stuffed them into her backpack; she would take these with her. Her rubber dive shoes sort of protected her feet from the broken shells that covered the surface of the grotto floor. She climbed nimbly through the cave, picking her way through the elaborate rock formations. She moved quickly until she was faced with a choice: left or right?
She chose right. From here she was careful to mark the rock surface as she went with an X, nothing too visible, just enough to notice if you were looking for it.
Very soon the slope became rough rocky steps, in some places narrow and very slippery. But as she made her way further up, the air got drier and the path became easier to climb – old steps created two centuries ago by pirates, but still perfectly good. The passage felt more like a corridor, caves to either side like chambers. Ruby’s adrenalin levels were just beginning to drop and her heart to calm when she heard a familiar sound, the sound of footsteps coming towards her.
Hitch had been
on surveillance for
more than an
hour…
His binoculars were trained on Horseshoe Bay, but though he could see the pirate ship waiting in the deserted cove there was no sign of a rendezvou
s. It looked like whoever was joining them tonight was in some sort of fix. Something must have happened; something had gone wrong with the plan.
Chapter 43.
A stitch in time
THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THE CLICK-CLACKING of the shoes on stone that reminded Ruby of something she had struggled hard to forget. Not that she ever would.
It was the very particular sound of hand-made, leather-soled Italian shoes.
The first time she had heard them, the wearer had been making his way down the stone corridor of the City Museum. Back then she’d had ample time to ponder who the shoes might belong to – this time she knew all too well.
Sometimes there is something about getting it right that gives one no comfort; this tends to happen when the thing you are right about is so bad that you wish it was dead and buried 500 feet beneath the ground.
This was how Ruby felt as the familiar sound approached. She held her breath, only releasing it when the click-clacking had passed her hiding place and travelled some way down the corridor. She waited until she could be sure the Count had turned the corner, was out of earshot, couldn’t possibly hear the breathing of a girl crouching behind a rock.
But then the footsteps came to an abrupt stop.
There was a pause.
A few seconds passed and then slowly and steadily the sound changed direction, the click-clack footsteps got louder, nearer and then stopped. Ruby held her breath.
Did he see her? She didn’t dare look up.
‘Oh my, is that little Ruby Redfort?’
Ruby looked up at him – at his elegant nose and chiselled features, his silver-grey hair perfectly combed, his trim silhouette clothed in a fine black gabardine suit. She looked at his black polished shoes, his sharp white teeth and then into his cold dark eyes. He seemed at first surprised and then almost delighted by her sudden appearance. Ruby, however, felt nothing but doomed. The last thing she felt she needed was a face to face meeting with the man they called the Count.
