The Uncommoners #2

by Jennifer Bell

  Valian ran over the forest floor to where Seb was struggling with the jar. “We’ve only got minutes before someone in the stadium connects a snow globe to the Krigvelt and can see us again,” he said, tugging the Sack of Stars out of his jacket.

  “Where are we going to send it?” Seb asked.

  “I know,” Ivy said, hurrying over and whispering something into the lining. “I’ll explain when we get there.”

  As she lowered her head into the sack, the jungle disappeared behind her.

  “Come on, come on.” Ivy stared at the dark opening of the Sack of Stars, willing Seb and the Jar of Shadows to come out in one piece. “What’s taking him so long?”

  Valian fiddled with his gloves. “I don’t know.”

  Ivy’s pulse was racing, but her body felt numb and heavy, as if the Grivens contest had sapped all her energy. She took a great lungful of air, trying to stay calm.

  It was quiet in her dad’s office. The lights were off but moonlight crept in through the large bay window that looked out onto the street.

  There was a scratchy rustle and the Jar of Shadows rolled out of the Sack of Stars onto the soft carpet. Ivy watched curiously as it enlarged from bag size to normal size….It gave her an idea.

  Seb sighed. “That was the most nerve-racking bag journey of my life. We so didn’t think it through. The jar could have smashed at any point.”

  “But it didn’t,” Valian said, giving him a hand up. Between the three of them they managed to right the jar.

  Seb took a feather out of his rucksack. “I’m gonna send a message to Judy—let her and the others know we’re OK.”

  “All right, but…” Valian scanned the piles of books, cardboard boxes and dusty microscopes in the room. “What are we doing here?”

  “I thought of a way to protect the jar,” Ivy said. “It might be crazy, but I was thinking we could hide it in the museum.”

  “Here?” Valian exclaimed. “But—the Dirge could easily breach the security in this building. It wouldn’t be safe.”

  “But they’ll never know it’s here,” Ivy argued. “There are hundreds of jars just like it in the museum’s collection—I’ve seen them.” She turned to Seb. “Do you still have the tape measure that Granma Sylvie gave you?”

  Seb stuffed a hand in his rucksack and rummaged around. “I think so, yeah….”

  Ivy thought of the jar traveling in the Sack of Stars. “What if we shrink the jar so that it can’t be recognized?”

  Valian rubbed his chin. “Go on…”

  She went over to a large cardboard box that was sitting open on a desk. “Objects are added to the museum’s collection all the time,” she explained. “One of the things our dad does is date and classify everything before it’s put on display.” She peered inside. “All we need to do is stuff the small Jar of Shadows in some bubble wrap and put it in here. Dad will assume it’s been sent with all these other artifacts.”

  She turned and examined the porcelain jar properly for the first time, running her fingers around the top. It didn’t have a lid. It was like a money box—the only way to open it would be to smash it. “It’ll be taken care of in here,” Ivy said. “They’ll think it’s priceless.”

  “Technically it is,” Seb pointed out. “If Dad tries to date it, he’ll realize it’s thousands of years old. You know what—this is just crazy enough that it might actually work.”

  Valian looked from one of them to the other and nodded. “All right, let’s do it.”

  Ivy stood guard by the door while Seb and Valian resized the jar using the uncommon tape measure. It was quiet in the corridor that led into the museum when Ivy heard a scraping sound growing louder. She tensed as a shadow appeared behind the glass, and she stumbled back as the door opened….

  “I came as soon as I got your message,” Judy said, skating inside. She stopped to catch her breath. “I hadn’t even left the Grivens stadium.” She caught sight of Seb, wrapping the miniature Jar of Shadows in bubble wrap. “Are you all OK?”

  “Just about,” Ivy told her, smiling. “Thanks for coming.”

  A line appeared on Valian’s forehead. “You came from the stadium? How did you travel here so quickly? You couldn’t have used a bag.”

  “Er—no, obviously not.” Judy shook her head but didn’t volunteer an explanation.

  “You must have snuck in really quietly too,” Ivy remarked. “There are security guards everywhere.”

  Judy shrugged. “I guess I’m too fast on my skates. They didn’t seem to notice me.”

  Ivy had heard the loud thrum of Judy’s roller skates out in the corridor; the security guards would surely have heard them too. Something didn’t make sense.

  She ran through the different ways in which uncommoners got around and remembered being startled when Johnny Hands had arrived almost immediately after she’d called him using his business card.

  But Judy couldn’t be dead, surely….

  Ivy relaxed her senses and allowed her whispering to spread out to the walls of the room. She could hear the Jar of Shadows and several uncommon objects mumbling incoherently, but there was another voice present in the air, something energetic and warm.

  Ivy’s jaw dropped. “You’re one of the dead, aren’t you? I can sense it with my whispering.”

  Judy went very still. “What?” She tucked a strand of shiny hair behind her ear, her eyes flicking to Seb.

  “That’s how you read Dead Man’s Code,” Valian said softly. “All the dead know how to read it.”

  Seb coughed. “Sorry—dead?” The expression on his face was disbelieving. “No, you…you can’t be.”

  Judy examined her tutu, her voice wobbling. “I was going to tell you, but I thought you wouldn’t trust me anymore.”

  Ivy’s skin tingled with shock. She thought back to the times she’d been near Judy, trying to understand why she hadn’t sensed that she was dead. There were broken souls everywhere in Lundinor; perhaps Judy’s had got lost in the din.

  Judy sniffed, trying to keep her emotions in check. “Look—the reason I came here was to warn you. At the end of the contest Selena was nowhere to be seen, and if the Dirge have been hunting for the Jar of Shadows this long, she’s going to do everything she can to get it back.”

  “She can’t follow us here—she doesn’t know where we’ve escaped to,” Valian pointed out.

  “That’s why I think she’ll do something to bring you to her,” Judy said. “Like use someone you love as bait, someone she can trace easily.”

  “Granma Sylvie,” Ivy said, tensing. “Has she been in contact?”

  Judy shook her head. “Ethel was trying to get a featherlight to her when I left the stadium. Your granma still has no idea that you were entered in the Grivens contest.”

  Seb stopped glaring at Judy to refocus. “She must still be at the mansion. We have to go and check on her.”

  Valian picked up the Sack of Stars. “There’s no time to waste.”

  As he pulled the bag over his head, Seb scowled at Judy. “You can stay put. We don’t want liars coming with us.”

  * * *

  —

  The lights were on in the hallway of the Wrench Mansion. The place held bad memories from Ivy’s last visit—of escaping from Selena’s grim-wolf and fighting a host of vile dead creatures in the basement. Her senses were still on edge after the Grivens contest, and the mansion was a dangerous place. She stuffed the Sack of Stars into her satchel and brought out her yo-yo.

  With the weapon clutched in her hand, she took a few steps forward over the thick carpet. “Granma?” she called uncertainly. “It’s Ivy and Seb!”

  “And Valian,” Seb added, slipping his drumsticks out of his inside pockets.

  The house was full of cobwebs and shadows. Portraits of hard-eyed faces covered the walls—Ivy’s distant
relatives.

  She heard a rustle at the top of the grand staircase and began to climb. “Granma?”

  There was a clatter, and then a door on the landing swung open. Silvery light came flooding out. Ivy almost tripped on the stairs. Seb and Valian stopped behind her.

  “Ivy?” Granma Sylvie’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. Her voice was shaky.

  The three of them hurried up the last few steps but approached Granma Sylvie with caution.

  As the light fell across her face, Ivy realized that something serious had happened. Granma Sylvie’s eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. “What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her forehead. There was an unfamiliar edge to her voice.

  “Before midnight,” Ivy answered. She wasn’t sure of the exact time; she only knew that the Grivens contest had started at eight. “Are you OK? Has something happened? You haven’t been in touch all day.”

  Granma Sylvie sighed before two words slipped out of her mouth and everything changed.

  “I remember.”

  In contrast to the rest of the gloomy Wrench Mansion, Granma Sylvie’s teenage bedroom shone with the spirit of rebellion. Set into the roof beams—just like Ivy’s own attic room—it had wallpaper of a shimmering sky blue, and linen curtains soft as clouds hung at the windows. Floating in the middle of the ceiling, an uncommon milk jug spilled pale light across every possible surface, illuminating the toys, books and odd knickknacks Granma Sylvie had collected during her childhood.

  Ivy could see the moon outside despite the rain pattering against the glass. A London skyline spread out below; the mansion was temporarily residing in her home city.

  “What happened?” she asked. She could see that Granma Sylvie had been rummaging through her things for a while—books and soft toys lay strewn across the floor, the wardrobe doors were open and there were clean patches in the dust on the shelves where things had been moved around. “Did it all come back to you at once?”

  Granma Sylvie took a seat on the bed. “It was all to do with this room. I was so scared of setting foot in here, I’d persuaded the underguard to explore the mansion bottom-up; that way, I wouldn’t have to face my bedroom—and all the secrets it might contain—till the very end.”

  Ivy came to sit next to her, placing her satchel on the floor.

  “After the underguard left I eventually plucked up the courage to come in,” Granma Sylvie told them. “I was surprised by how familiar everything was. Each time I picked up an object or opened a drawer, a memory returned. That’s why I’ve been here so long.” She laid a hand on her bed, stroking the dusty fabric. “I used to sit here and read with my mother, and we’d plan our Hobsmatch together in that mirror on the dressing table.”

  “It’s like your own fears were preventing your memories from returning,” Seb said. “You had to overcome them.”

  Granma Sylvie tucked a strand of hair behind Ivy’s ear and tensed when she saw that it was scorched. “What on earth’s happened to you? Are you all right?”

  Ivy told her about the Grivens contest and Selena Grimes’s failed attempt to open the Jar of Shadows—excluding any mention of her and Seb’s involvement.

  Granma Sylvie shook her head. “Selena Grimes and I were friends once. I knew what she did…what she became.” A look of regret crossed her face. “I was never involved in her schemes, or my father’s. My mother and I fought the Dirge in secret.”

  “We all knew you weren’t one of the bad guys,” Seb said.

  Ivy smiled. At least now Granma Sylvie knew it for certain.

  Valian looked out of the window. “The reason we’re here is because we think that Selena might come after you.”

  Granma Sylvie scowled and pulled Ivy’s satchel onto her lap. “Earlier I remembered about the postcard—Amos sent it. The photo on the front was taken when he and I first became friends.” As she searched for the postcard, she came across the leather-bound journal. “This was Amos’s most treasured possession.” Her face glowed, as if something had been ignited deep inside.

  “What do you know about Amos?” Ivy asked hurriedly. For the first time ever, she could ask her granma about something uncommon-related. It felt fantastic.

  “He was invited to join the Rasavatum when we were just kids,” Granma Sylvie told her, tapping the journal as the information flooded back to her. “He told me, because he knew I was fighting the Dirge too. During the last three years I spent in Lundinor I helped him to develop a tracer serum, which he was planning to use to track down several of the Great Uncommon Good. That’s how he found the Jar of Shadows.”

  “He found the Jar of Shadows?” Valian said.

  Granma Sylvie stroked the black leather cover of the journal. She frowned and then opened it up, flipping through the empty pages. She seemed to be counting, and after exactly forty-two pages she stopped.

  “We need a liquid mixed with love,” she muttered. “It’s the only thing that activates the ink.”

  Uncommon ink…So that was what Ivy had been sensing all this time. She thought carefully. “Valian, do you still have that Raider’s Tonic that Miss H and Miss W gave you?”

  Valian reached into his inside pocket and brought out a small pewter flask. “Never leave my room without it.”

  Ivy unscrewed the cap and poured a few drops onto the pages of the journal.

  As the liquid sank into the paper, she shuffled closer to see what was happening. There was a rustling sound, and an odorless gray smoke rose from the spine of the notebook. Granma Sylvie closed it gently and laid it on her lap as the smoke continued to seep out.

  Ivy’s mind began to whir. The smoke…The black cover…

  She shuddered. “No way! Granma, that’s what you were seeing in your memory! It was never a black door with a smoking hourglass on it. It was this journal.”

  “That’s right,” Granma Sylvie said, sounding unsurprised. “My memories of what Amos was working on in his journal were trying to return; I just misinterpreted them.”

  When the gray smoke had stopped leaking out of the journal, Granma Sylvie opened it up again and fanned through. Neat black handwriting filled every page, along with sketches, diagrams and complex algebra—in a range of languages, from hieroglyphics to Chinese.

  Ivy couldn’t believe it had been hidden there all along. “What does it say?”

  Granma Sylvie flicked to a point three-quarters of the way through the book, where the writing finished and the pages were blank. “Amos chronicled his hunt for the Great Uncommon Good, along with everything he’d learned about the Dirge’s plans—including things about Selena. All his most important discoveries are in these pages. He protected his secrets by submerging the paper in a special uncommon solution he’d mixed. It meant that the words would only appear if a liquid mixed with love touched the paper. He believed it would prevent anyone with a cold heart from reading it.”

  Ivy wondered how Jack-in-the-Green had managed it; perhaps he’d used the help of someone else. She thought of Selena’s desperate visit to the Dirge back in 1967. “Do you know what happened to Selena?”

  Granma Sylvie’s face was grave. “Yes, but perhaps Amos can explain it better than me.” She flicked through and pointed to the top of a page dated October 20, 1967.

  Two months before Selena died. Ivy began to read aloud so that Seb and Valian could hear:

  “I am being followed. A quick-footed gentleman, possibly dead. Using a tracing serum (batch 2, formula 7.3), I tracked him to a cellar door on Lightning Bolt Lane, where he disappeared. I suspect he is working for the Dirge.

  “Selena has noticed me looking over my shoulder. I’m wary of telling her the truth about my investigations into the Great Uncommon Good. I know she loves me, but it is too dangerous to let her share my secrets. I cannot put her at risk too—”

  “Wait. Amos and Selena were in love?” Ivy said.
>
  “They were engaged to be married,” Granma Sylvie explained, “but Amos was afraid to announce it publicly in case the Dirge used Selena to get to him. She wasn’t Wolfsbane back then. That postcard you found—she and I were friends at that time, but we grew apart as we got older.” She nodded back to the journal, encouraging Ivy to read on.

  “The twenty-fifth of October 1967

  “A crooked sixpence was found at the scene of another murder today. The streets are empty; people are too scared to trade. With every innocent life that is lost, I become more determined to destroy the Dirge and their evil.

  “Tonight I plan to go through the cellar door on Lightning Bolt Lane. Maybe my follower knows a thing or two….”

  The writing finished there. Ivy turned the page. “Wait—that’s it?”

  “That was the night Amos died,” Granma Sylvie said quietly with a frown. “He was murdered on the other side of that cellar door, no doubt. His body was found the next morning in the street outside.”

  Ivy shivered and laid a hand on Granma Sylvie’s arm. “He was your friend; I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged. “He became a ghoul for a few years before he Departed. I had some good times with him, but the experience had changed him. He was never the same.”

  Ivy flicked through a few blank pages before the entries appeared again, only this time with subtle differences. The ink was now a pale, ghostly shade of blue and the handwriting was wobbly. Amos must have used the rest of the book to chart what happened to him after he died.

  “Selena came to me, devastated, after Amos was killed,” Granma Sylvie explained. “Her grief was so overwhelming she decided she could no longer bear it; she wanted to become a ghoul too, so that she could be with Amos forever.”

  “That’s why she sought out the Dirge in 1967,” Ivy said. “She wanted them to turn her into a ghoul. That was why she died that night—they killed her and she asked them to!”

  Granma Sylvie bobbed her head. “Except that her plan failed, of course. The Dirge successfully turned her into a ghoul, but when she met Amos again, he was so disgusted that she’d made a bargain with the Dirge—the very people he’d spent his life fighting—that he told her he never wanted to see her again.” She sighed. “I tried to reason with Selena afterward, but she was too heartbroken to listen. Consumed by grief and at her weakest, she sought sanctuary with the Dirge….” She hesitated. “After that, I can only guess what happened. The previous Wolfsbane must have Departed—and then Selena was invited to take their place. The Selena I had known was gone. Selena today may have the same face as the girl I knew, but she is infinitely more cruel and dangerous.”