I put my hand to my face and realized that my nose was bleeding where I’d used it as a brake-pad.
“Well,” she said, “you don’t get this kind of excitement at school, do you?”
Coruisk caught us by surprise. The path led down to sea-level, where we found our way blocked by a little channel leading to the shore. We turned and followed the channel inland. We crossed over a rocky hump and the loch loomed into view, several billion gallons of cold dark water stretching away in front of us.
“Coruisk,” said Becky, standing on the rocky hump like someone who had just climbed Everest. “We did it, kiddo.”
Around the loch on every side the Cuillin Hills rose into the night. The central strip of water shone blue in the moonlight, but the distant banks vanished in the soot-black shadows of the peaks. High above us plumes of mist were forming on the very tips of the mountains and trailing off into the star-filled sky.
The sea had seemed big, stretching out to the dark horizon. But the size of the silhouetted mountains made the loch seem even bigger. The silence was complete. There were waves on the sea. And the sound of water lapping against rock. The water here was as smooth and motionless as mercury. This was not a place where human beings were meant to be after dark.
“So,” said Becky, “what do we do for our next trick?”
I thought about Charlie. “I don’t know.” I could feel tears pricking at the corners of my eyes. We’d spent two days getting to this place. We’d risked our lives at least twice. I didn’t know what I was expecting to find when we got here. But I expected to find something at least. And this was the emptiest place I’d seen in my entire life.
“Chin up,” said Becky. “Let’s fix ourselves some dinner.”
We trudged along the edge of the channel, crossed over using a series of stepping stones and looked for a good camping spot. En route we found the ruins of an old cottage that for a few seconds looked as if it might offer some kind of clue as to why Coruisk was so important. But it was just a ruin. Four crumbling walls, a doorway, two window holes, a mud floor. We climbed up to a flat area of grass, neatly protected from prying eyes and the growing wind by a large oval boulder.
Becky erected the tent behind the big stone. I got out some plasters and antiseptic wipes and Savlon and did first aid on my heel and my nose. Once we were snuggled into our sleeping bags we broke out the bread and cheese.
Well fed and footsore, we lay on our backs looking up at the stars through the open tent flap. Becky jammed her iPod earphones in and listened to some Evil Corpse. Or Gangrenous Limb. Or Dead Puppy. Or whatever else she’d downloaded recently.
I tried to remember the names of the constellations. The Bear. The Plough. Orion. Finally, I zipped up the tent, pulled the sleeping bag round my neck and closed my eyes.
“Uh-uh-uh-uh,” moaned Becky tunelessly. Then she stopped. She took one of the earpieces out of her ear, shook it, stuck it back in and tore it out again. I could hear a strange bubbling noise coming out of the tiny white speaker. “It’s broken,” she snapped. “Again.”
“Your watch,” I gasped. “Look at your watch.” She looked at her watch. The face had lit up and the hand was spinning backwards. “Ouch,” she yelped, ripping it off her wrist. “It’s hot.” Somewhere inside the holdall, the torch was turning on and off. Two seconds later the whole tent was bathed in a brilliant blue light.
∨ Boom! ∧
12
Taking the tube
This was why the old man had chuckled. They were out there. He didn’t have to get rid of us. His friends would do that. At Coruisk. Miles from anywhere. And there would be no one to save us.
I looked at Becky. She was white. And she was shaking. Or I was. It was hard to tell. It was the middle of the night. But under the canvas it looked like lunch time. In Greece. In summer.
“Becky,” I said, “I’m going outside.” I had to see what was going on. I had to know who, or what, was out there and what it was planning to do to us. And if there was an opportunity to run, I wanted to run.
“Wait for me.” Becky reached into her pocket, pulled out a large penknife, opened the blade and crouched beside me, next to the zip.
I opened the tent. The unearthly blue light poured through the slit and we had to shield our eyes.
We stuck our heads out and looked up.
“Flipping heck!” muttered Becky.
There was a vast column of blue light, thick as a tube train, going straight upwards into the night sky. I wormed my way out of the tent and crouched in the shadow of the boulder. Becky crouched behind me. Together, we stood up slowly and peered over.
Even from thirty metres away we could feel the heat. The base of the column was rising out of the ruined cottage we’d passed earlier, making the crumbling stones shine so brightly they looked radioactive. Above the ruin, waves of brightness whisked upwards at high speed away from the ground. I took hold of Becky’s arm for some small comfort.
Suddenly, there was an ear-splitting boom! like no boom! I’d ever heard. It made my head wobble. It made my stomach wobble. It made my toes wobble. The light went off. The boom! echoed back off the faraway mountains and slowly died away to silence. All we could hear was the blood thumping in our ears.
When my heart slowed down a bit I turned to Becky. “Well, I guess this has to be the place.”
“Look,” whispered Becky, pinching my arm. “Down there.”
I followed her eyes to the narrow channel connecting the loch to the sea. A silhouetted man was walking over the rocky ground towards the ruin. Behind him a little boat was moored in the channel, with a second silhouetted man on board.
The first man reached the ruin, turned, waved to the man in the boat and stepped inside. We heard the cough of an outboard motor being started up and the boat pulled away from the shore. There was a short fizzing noise and once again the column of brilliant blue light shot up out of the ruin into the sky.
“Oh my God!” said Becky.
The man had walked into the ruin. He had to be toast now. I was dreaming. I had to be dreaming.
The light shone. The waves of brightness whisked upwards. The boom! boomed. My toes wobbled. The light went off. The boom! echoed round the valley. And silence returned.
I gagged a bit. “We just saw someone being killed, right?”
“Eeuw!” said Becky. “That was not good.”
“We have to go down there,” I said.
“Why?” asked Becky.
“Because…because…” I said. “Because that’s the thing. That’s the reason we’re here. We can’t sit here just looking at it.”
“No,” said Becky. “I didn’t bring you all this way so you could be cooked alive.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to sit here and look at it. See if it happens again.”
So we just sat there looking at it. For a long time. A very long time. And it didn’t happen again. Becky wandered off to pee and came back again. I fell asleep and woke up when the pins and needles got really bad.
“OK,” said Becky. “Let’s go and take a look. This is driving me nuts.”
We did a commando shuffle through the dark. Down the slope from one shadow to the next. A tree. A rock. A bank of earth.
I thought about Dad, the model planes and the Aubergine Parmesan. I thought about Mum and her natty suits. I thought about my little room with the octopus poster and the cardboard skeleton. I thought about gravity and the Industrial Revolution. It all seemed a very long way away. Like something happening in a model village, tiny and silly and not quite real.
It wasn’t fear. It was something way past that. It was like walking away from a car accident. I felt shocked and spacey and full of adrenaline.
We reached the back wall of the ruin and crouched down. And that was the weird thing. The stones were cold.
There was no noise from inside, either. I looked at Becky. She looked back at me. The blade of her penknife flashed in the starlight.
&nb
sp; She nodded and mouthed the word, “Go.”
We stood up, tiptoed round to the front of the ruin and leaped through the hole that used to be the front door.
The place was completely empty. Moonlit walls. Dirty flagstones. Some weeds. Some little flowers. Nothing burned. No scorched earth. No crispy little person-remains. Nothing. It was just like it had been when we passed it earlier that night.
Dead or not, the man had vanished. I looked up. Had the blue beam vaporized him? What would happen to us if it came on again? Would we be vaporized too?
“Becky,” I said nervously, “maybe we shouldn’t hang around in here.”
She wasn’t listening. “There has to be a way out. A hidden door. A secret hatch.”
“Becky, please.” I tugged at her sleeve.
She scraped the floor with her boot. She ran her hand over the stone walls. She ferreted among the scraggy plants growing in the corners.
“I’m leaving,” I said. “I really don’t like this place.”
“Give me the wristband.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Yeah?” said Becky. “Well, you think of a better one. In the meantime, give me the wristband.”
I gave her the wristband.
It happened as soon as she peeled back the silver foil. The interior of the ruin was illuminated by fifty pinpricks of green light set into the stone walls. Beside the door a panel had appeared.
I snatched the wristband back and wrapped it up in its foil again.
“There’s a button,” said Becky.
“Just don’t press it.”
“Oh, right,” said Becky. “So we’re just going to stand here and look at it. That’s not going to get us very far, is it?”
She pressed the button. The floor beneath my feet dropped away and I found myself being lowered into a round shaft.
“Help!”
“Jimbo!” yelled Becky. She threw herself onto the ground and grabbed my hand, but I was falling too quickly and our fingers were pulled apart.
She stood up again and jabbed frantically at the button. It was too late. A thick plate was sliding over my head, cutting off the hole and shutting out the light. I banged on the walls and yelled.
Above me, I could hear Becky grunting as she struggled with the covering to absolutely no effect. A striplight came on over my head. I looked around. I was standing in a tall white ceramic tube. The walls were smooth as glass and on one side was a panel of buttons, dials, screens and gauges. Above me, the tube was sealed tightly by the steel plate.
“Jimbo…! Jimbo…! Jimbo…!” came the muffled sound of Becky’s voice.
I gazed at the panel of buttons. Maybe one of them opened the door. But which one? And what were the others for? Press the wrong one and I might be microwaved, or crushed. The tube might fill with water. Or sulphuric acid. Or cockroaches.
I was finding it difficult to breathe. Was I running out of air, or just hyperventilating? I fumbled in the pocket of Craterface’s jacket and took out his spanner. I bashed the wall as hard as I could. It clanged like a church bell and my fingers hurt. I hadn’t made a scratch.
I put the spanner back, took out the wristband and unwrapped it. Instantly the panel came alive. Figures and symbols flashed up on a blue screen. Needles shook and quivered. Buttons glowed.
“Jimbo…! Jimbo…!” Becky was still shouting faintly.
“I’m still here,” I shouted back. “I’m trying to get out.”
I wrapped the wristband in its foil and put it back into my pocket. Then I picked up the orange notebook. I opened it at the page where Charlie had written down the code from Pearce’s attic: Trezzit/Pearce/4300785.
The map reference was Coruisk. This was Coruisk. Perhaps the other numbers meant something too.
“Jimbo…!” shouted Becky, her voice dulled almost to silence by the ceiling of the tube.
I crossed my fingers and punched the numbers into the main keypad. “Four…three…zero…zero…seven…eight…five…”
The word ‘Pearce’ flashed briefly on the screen, followed by a spurt of letters and symbols. I heard a low throb coming from machinery beneath my feet.
I pressed my back against the curved wall. I zipped up Craterface’s jacket, braced my feet, took a deep breath and held on tight.
Nothing happened for several seconds. Then I heard the boom! Except it was much closer and much louder this time. I thought my ears were going to rupture. Every atom in my body was vibrating. I felt horribly seasick. My clothes were soaked in sweat. I covered my ears with my hands and fell to the floor and curled up into a ball.
The atoms in my body slowly stopped vibrating. My ears still hurt, but the nausea was fading. I got slowly to my feet. The word ZARVOIT flashed across the screen and there was a short bing-bong like a doorbell. I heard a little hiss and turned to see that one of the sides of the tube was sliding open.
The tube had gone downwards. I was in a cellar. Or a bunker. Except that there was light pouring through the gap, and it was white and it was bright and it was very much not underground. I gripped the spanner tightly.
It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. I was looking out into a vast white hangar. I looked up. No Coruisk. No Becky. No ground. Just a smooth white ceiling twenty metres above my head.
Around the room were huge, high windows. Outside the windows was a black sky thick with stars. This wasn’t a dungeon. This wasn’t a cellar or a bunker. I must have travelled through some kind of tunnel. I was somewhere else on Skye. Or I was on the mainland. Or I was on that whale-shaped island sitting in the bay.
And that’s when I saw them. Seated at a long table nearby. Mrs Pearce. Mr Kidd. The man from Captain Chicken. Inspector Hepplewhite. They were all wearing long violet robes.
This could not be happening. A few more minutes and the alarm would start beeping and I’d head into the kitchen and there would be a big cooked breakfast waiting for me. Sausages, toast, scrambled eggs.
Captain Chicken stood up and started walking towards me.
“Sausages, toast, scrambled eggs,” I said to myself. “Sausages, toast, scrambled eggs.”
“Welcome, James,” he said, “and well done. Well done indeed.”
The spanner fell out of my hand and clanged on the floor. There was no cooked breakfast. This was really happening.
“Fantabangle,” said Mr Kidd to Mrs Pearce.
“Mockety,” said Mrs Pearce to Mr Kidd. “Parlant mockety.”
Captain Chicken grasped my hand and shook it. “I think we’re all agreed. You are precisely the kind of person we need.”
“A very enterprising young man,” said Inspector Hepplewhite.
“My name is Vantresillion, by the way,” said Captain Chicken. “Bantid Vantresillion.”
I finally rediscovered my voice. “Where am I?”
“The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy.”
“What!?”
“It’s about seventy thousand light years from the centre of your Milky Way Galaxy,” said Captain Chicken. “In the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud.”
“What!?” He was insane.
“It’s often confused with the Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy,” he said. “By you, I mean. Not by us. The Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy is, oh…much further away. Now…” He rubbed his hands together. “You’ll be in need of some sleep, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
He turned and waved his hand over some kind of red sausage sitting on the table. I heard a pop! from behind me and turned round.
And this was when I realized I might not be somewhere else on Skye, or on the mainland, or on the whale-shaped island. Because there was a spider walking towards me. A huge spider. About the size of a golden retriever. With the face of a squashed monkey.
I squealed and stepped backwards.
“Don’t worry,” said Captain Chicken. “It’s completely harmless.”
The giant monkey-spider walked up to me and held out a hairy leg. “Shake
it, baby!”
I heard myself making a low, moaning noise.
“My name is Ktop-p-páãçôñìî,” said the spider. “It will make a car crash in your mouth. But you can call me Britney.”
“Go with the spider,” said Vantresillion. “It’ll show you to your room.”
The spider pressed a hairy leg into the small of my back and pushed me gently towards the door. “Ticket to ride!”
∨ Boom! ∧
13
Short hairy tails
We went out into the corridor, turned left and started walking. I tried very hard not to look at the spider. Everything was white and smooth and hi-tech. There were no lights. The ceiling just glowed a bit. There were no doors. The walls just opened up every so often so that people in purple robes could enter and exit.
“This way,” said Britney.
We turned a corner.
“You come from Earth,” said Britney, trotting beside me. “I hear it is most delicious. Tell me about bagpipes. Tell me about Buckingham Palace and Elvis Presley. Tell me about cross-Channel ferries and Abba, who are a Swedish pop band that shake my booty.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
“Who is Charlie?” said Britney.
We walked in silence for a few more minutes.
“Does my English sparkle?” said Britney. “Do we groove? Speak it to me from the hip. You are the horse’s mouth. You eat the Yorkshire pudding.”
I was very tired. I needed sleep and I wasn’t in the mood for an argument. “Yes, you groove.”
“Disco inferno!” said the giant monkey-spider, waving two legs in the air.
We turned another corner and the white walls gave way to glass. We were walking across some kind of covered bridge between one building and the next. I stopped and looked out. And actually it was even scarier than seeing Britney for the first time. Because all around us, in every direction, stretched a barren, brown desert. No trees, no grass, no water. Just rocks and dust and craters. I turned to look out the other side of the bridge. And what I saw was much, much worse. There were two suns. And they were green. And they were revolving slowly around one another.