Chapter 11: The Phantom Quadrant
The Attic continued its journey to the Phantom Quadrant, but the run-in with the pirates had put extra pressure on the crew. Dodds asked Tom and Wendell to carry on piloting the ship, whilst he helped Grandas and the other Cragulons make repairs to the damaged rigging. Helix had seemingly overcome any worries over space-walking and was helping out on deck, delivering messages or sometimes carried tools tied onto his collar. Even the Mechomator was enlisted to help out with fixing the broken shields. It was lowered down the side of the Attic in a harness. Using a hammer that it kept in one of its compartments, it began a loud clanging on the hull, to try to prise the shield back into position.
Everyone was so busy, Stella found herself with nothing to do except lie on the top bunk of the cabin and brood. She leant back for a bit of a doze, but felt something just under the pillow. Lifting the pillow up, Stella could see one of Helix’s rubber-like dog toys underneath. She was about to chuck the thing away, but instead placed it beside her. She realized she was being silly, but at that moment, she felt very alone. She thought about the impending arrival in the Phantom Quadrant and possible meeting with the Greddylick. Whenever she closed her eyes, she could see the creature leering down at her, and her skin came out in goose bumps as she remembered the sniffing fingers.
Most of all, she worried that she would freeze again. Doctor Nostromus’s words back in Botwing’s study echoed in her head, ‘More than your safety rests in you learning how to use that star of yours, little girl.’ Stella held her necklace in her hand. It seemed an innocent trinket: a doubtful tool to defeat something like the Greddylick. In fact, the more Stella examined the crystal, the more absurd it all seemed. In the dim light of her cabin, the star seemed to have lost a bit of its lustre. It didn’t even glitter in the way that it used to. Yet, she had used it to blast Shane Biggs into a tree, hadn’t she? Stella tried to remember what she had done on that day. It had all happened so quickly. She remembered seeing Shane twist Tom’s arm and then stepping out from her hiding place. Looking back, she had no idea why she had done that, it was like she was seeing herself as another person.
“Maybe it’s all been a mistake,” she murmured to herself. “They say this is mine, but I can’t do anything with it.”
The little man seemed to stare back at her in a dumb rebuke.
“All right, I’ll give it a go,” she resolved.
Concentrating on the star, Stella tried to recreate what she had been thinking and feeling that afternoon Shane was bullying Tom. She knew she had been angry, and there had been that rushing sound in her ears. Lifting the crystal up, Stella stared at it really hard. She tried to feed her anger. ‘It’s not fair,’ she thought. ‘I don’t want any of it.’ She didn’t want to be adopted, she wanted her mum and dad to be her real mum and dad. She didn’t want to be different, she just wanted to be normal: with normal friends at school, who didn’t think she was weird. Thinking of the Smella Stella chanting and the faces at school who laughed at her, she felt she could burst with the unfairness of it all. Concentrating hard, Stella tried to channel all that pent-up emotion into her pendant.
“Stop!” Stella shouted. But nothing happened.
It was no good. Stella didn’t feel like stepping out and blasting the Greddylick; she just wanted to be safely at home. The crystal showed no sign of having changed, and the whole experience made Stella feel a little silly. Giving a sigh, she replaced the pendant around her neck.
“I told you it was no good,” she told Helix’s dog toy. “It’s just a stupid old necklace.”
Abandoning sleep, she vaulted down from her bunk to find some company.
Grandas was in the observatory, gesturing directions to the Cragulons.
“Hi, Grandas, is there anything I can do?” Stella asked.
She felt that even a hard few hours of Gravo-waxing would be better than her moping around.
“Hello, Stella Mayveader,” Grandas said. “Much to be done, we took plenty a beating from those pirates.”
Stella looked out onto the deck at the roof tiles pockmarked by space cannon shot and the splintered rigging. “Yeah, it looks pretty bad.”
“Looks bad, but ve are still here,” Grandas said. “Danks to some good shield vork, eh?”
“I dunno, Grandas. I think it had more to do with Tom’s piloting.”
“Good piloting, yes. Good shield vork. Good navigating. Dat make good spacefarers. Grandas very proud to be part of good crew with Doctor Dodds.”
Stella wished she could feel as confident as Grandas, but she wanted to change the subject.
“When will we get to the Phantom Quadrant, Grandas?” she asked.
“Very soon. Ve must be cautious, Stella Mayveader. De Phantom Quadrant is a very strange place. Some ships, dey go in, but not go out.”
“Is it the pirates again?”
“No – not pirates. Nobody knows. Grandas has heard stories of ghost ships in the Phantom Quadrant. Old ships that appear out of nowhere from the stars and then phut! Gone. As if never there.”
This kind of conversation didn’t help Stella’s unease, and she decided to leave Grandas searching into the void after ghost ships and return to the steering room. She found Doctor Dodds guiding Tom through a cloud of interstellar dust, whilst Wendell cowered under the sofa. The window was filled with a billowing grey gas, broken occasionally by a flash of lightning.
“Ah, Stella, glad you’re here, Helix has just gone to your cabin to find you,” Dodds said. “We’re just about to come to the co-ordinates where Vanga-Tron was found.”
“Are you sure we should be going straight in there, then?” Tom asked nervously, from his place behind the wheel. “I mean if the Greddylick is there…”
“I hope that he is still here,” Dodds retorted. “Once we catch up with him, we can get those stolen memories back,” he said, giving Stella a reassuring smile.
The gas cleared from the window, like a veil being lifted, to reveal the macabre sight of a giant, grinning skull. It hovered in front of them, glowing a pale, white, bone colour against the inky mirk of the mist.
Wendell gave a wail. “Aaaaagggh! It’s going to eat us!”
“Nonsense.” Dodds sniffed “That thing hasn’t moved in thousands of years.”
The huge skull loomed in a perpetual grin in the window, but it remained perfectly still. Behind it, eleven more identical skulls hung amidst the wispy fog. They looked to have been carved out of gigantic meteorites.
“This is the Field of Skulls,” Dodds said. “If a certain trainee navigator had studied their star charts more thoroughly, they would have seen that these have been used as space markers for centuries.”
“You mean somebody made these?” Tom said.
“Well, someone or something definitely put them here,” Dodds said. “They’re not a natural space phenomenon. The theories are varied. Some say that an old intergalactic civilization carved them and placed them in the middle of this dust cloud. Others say they had a religious meaning, or they were put here as a warning. It’s another mystery of the Phantom Quadrant. That’s why people come here,” Dodds said and pointed to a ship that was drifting by one of the huge skulls.
“That must be Vanga-Tron’s ship. Could you please head towards it, Tom?” Dodds asked.
Symbols flashed on the side of the floating craft’s hull. At first, Stella found them incomprehensible, but they kept flashing into different forms, until they shaped themselves into alphabetic letters she could understand. These spelled out ‘Vanga’s Venture Voyages’, before forming another set of images. She remembered what Jerbil-Din had said about Vanga-Tron being a tour guide and realised what it meant.
“Tourists come here!” Stella said in amazement.
“Oh, yes. The adventurous ones,” Dodds agreed. “You don’t often see a dozen enormous skulls staring back at you, even in deep space.”
There was something about the skulls that made Stella feel deeply uneasy. She couldn’t understand why anyone
willingly visited this creepy place.
“We need to dock onto that skull over there,” Dodds said, pointing to the nearest skull to Vanga-Tron’s ship. “That must have been the one the tour party visited.”
“And the Greddylick was waiting,” Tom murmured anxiously, but he steered the ship closer to the skull.
Stella started as a feeling of wetness brushed against her hand. It was Helix’s nose. He had entered into the steering room and had pressed his face into Stella’s palm, with a plaintive whine.
“It’s all right, Helix,” Stella said uncertainly. “It’s just an old rock.”
This sounded unconvincing even to her, as Dodds began guiding Tom’s progress into one of the cavernous eye sockets. A blanket of darkness engulfed the ship, and the Cragulons on deck started lighting lanterns that shone as pinpricks of light within the chasm.
The Attic inched forward slowly, until almost pressing against a vast granite wall. Stella looked in the window lens and saw that the bottom of the ship was very close to the cavern floor.
Doctor Dodds spoke into the intercom trumpet, “Weigh the anchors, Grandas.”
There was a set of loud cracks as what looked like a number of enormous bath plugs sprang from the ship and clamped themselves to the sides of the cave.
“Without so much as a scratch to the keel,” Dodds said with satisfaction. “You keep this up, Tom, and you’ve got the makings of a first-class helmsman. You all best get ready. You too, Grandas,” he said into the trumpet. “We’re going for a little walk. I’ve always wanted to visit one of the fabled skulls of the Phantom Quadrant.”
Dodds clapped his hands together and stalked away from the steering room, whistling to himself.
Stella expected Tom to be pleased at this praise from her uncle, but he just bit his lip. He looked even more wretched than when they first spotted the skull.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” she said to him. “I’m sure it’ll be quite safe. Remember what Uncle Dodds said. Tourists come here all the time.”
“Yeah! But do they always come back again?” Wendell squeaked from under the sofa.
Tom grabbed Stella’s arm, squeezing it so much that it began to hurt. “We don’t have to go. We should stay here. Especially you. The Greddylick could be out there. Just waiting.”
Stella pulled her arm away from him. “I know. That’s why we’re here.”
“Well, if you won’t hear sense, maybe I should stay, then.”
Stella couldn’t believe Tom’s change of heart. He had always been so eager to follow her everywhere. Although she’d been against him coming along in the first place, she felt stung at the thought of him not being there. It was as if he was letting her down.
“I thought you said you weren’t afraid,” she sneered at him. “If you’re too scared, maybe you should stay here!”
“I could stay too,” Wendell said, but Stella had grabbed his string and pulled him after her.
“Come on, Wendell. Uncle Dodds needs us.”
“Oh, well, if you insist,” Wendell gulped, as Stella stormed away.
Helix trotted after her, whining to himself.
Stella climbed up to the store cupboard to fetch the spacesuits, but was met by Uncle Dodds, who was wearing a rucksack and carrying two others in his arms.
“I’ve got our kit,” he said, handing Stella one of the rucksacks. It was heavier than it looked.
“I’m not sure I can carry this on top of a spacesuit. Uncle,” Stella said.
“You won’t need a spacesuit. Not in the skull. Whoever built it breathed oxygen, the same as we do.”
Stella looked at the other rucksack in Dodds’s hand.
“We won’t need the third one. Tom’s not coming,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her tone.
“Oh, I see,” Dodds said.
“I knew he was too afraid. He shouldn’t have come.”
“You judge your friend too harshly, Stella.”
“He’s not my friend,” Stella retorted, trying to ignore the stinging in her eyes.
“Oh?”
“No. He’s just a stupid coward.”
“Friendship can be a scary thing sometimes. But there are more powerful things than being scared, Stella. That is why it is always worth taking that risk.”
Stella hadn’t a clue what her uncle was talking about, but she followed his lead back to the steering room. By the time they got there, Grandas had hauled open the hatch in the Attic floor, but Tom was nowhere to be seen. Grandas lowered the ladder down the hatch, but it was so dark outside that Stella couldn’t see the bottom of it.
“I can’t see a thing,” Stella said.
“Yes, it is a bit murky. We’ll have to use our peepers.” Dodds reached into his rucksack and pulled out a curious cone-shaped object. There was a spring at the narrow end of it, and he slammed it into his palm. The cone gave a wha-tong sound, and the wide end opened and flared into a bright light.
Stella rummaged through her rucksack and found a similar cone. The wide end of it looked like a large closed eyelid, complete with eyelashes. When Stella hit the spring at the other end of the cone on the floor, a similar wha-tong sang from the peeper, and the eyelid flickered open. A beam of light speared into Stella’s face, causing her to blink away purple spots from her vision.
Dodds ignited another peeper and strapped it around Helix’s head. “Go on, old friend. Looks like we’re going to need your nose,” he said.
Helix gave a bark and leapt down from the hatchway. The distance wasn’t as far as Stella had first thought. Helix had landed on his feet and had started patrolling around the cavern, sniffing at the floor to find a trace of a scent. Stella was becoming increasingly surprised at the versatility of her dog. She had always thought that Helix’s keen sense of smell was only used for sniffing out food.
Dodds then climbed down the ladder himself. He called upwards, “Stay close. Let’s not get split up.”
After Dodds had made it to the floor, Grandas urged Stella after him. “I follow you, Stella Mayveader. Do not vorry, any Greddylick must get past Dodds and Grandas.” He gave a gravelly laugh. “I vould like to see dat, I vould,” he said and slammed his fist into his palm with a crunch.
Stella replaced the peeper in her rucksack and began lowering herself down the ladder.
Wendell decided to help her down. He floated down beside her, glowing in the dark. “It’s not all that bad, I suppose,” he said. “Almost cosy.”
Stella couldn’t agree. But she didn’t say anything, as she was gritting her teeth and telling herself it was childish to be afraid of the dark.
The ground was uneven, and the beams of light from the peepers illuminated a set of ridges on the floor. They looked uneasily like piles of tightly packed bones. Stella gave the floor a kick, but nothing seemed loose. If the cavern was made of bones, they were all stuck together. All sound seemed eerily hushed in the gloom, so when Helix broke the silence with a bark, Stella jumped in surprise. He had picked up a scent by the mouth of a narrow tunnel. Dodds gestured for everyone to follow and strode to investigate.
Helix trotted in front, the peeper on his head lighting the way. Dodds followed after him, whilst Wendell and Stella trailed behind. Grandas stomped behind them, his granite footfalls echoing across the cavern. Their shadows stretched onto the roof of the tunnel, disappearing into the darkness.
“Hey, Stella, I didn’t know you could do it too,” Wendell said. “Do you have any gas in your family?”
Stella looked at the bobbing balloon, glowing with a green tinge in the dark before her. She wondered what he meant. Looking around her, everything seemed to be tinged with a blue gleam. She jutted her chin down to her chest and could see the source of the light. It was her crystal, shining a bright blue at her neck.
“Uncle Dodds,” Stella called out, “I think you should see this.”
Dodds turned around and noticed the burning star at Stella’s neck.
“Maybe it is a varning?” Grandas
said, swiveling his head around, looking for danger.
“It could be,” Dodds said thoughtfully. “Or it could be that the star knows this place. How do you feel, Stella?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Are you scared?”
“No, I’m not scared. I just feel very sad. I don’t know why.”
“Let me know if you feel anything else, anything at all. This place obviously has an effect on your necklace.”
They were interrupted by Helix barking, and they all ran towards the peeper light that Helix was shining into the tunnel. A figure was crouched against a craggy outcrop of bones. It was whispering words to itself and rocking backwards and forwards. Lifting its face towards the light, it froze, stunned. Although the face was slack with fear, Stella recognized the bushy eyebrows and dark eyes, from Uncle Dodds b-mail.
“Jerbil?” Dodds asked. “Jerbil-Din? What has happened to you?”
Jerbil-Din’s mournful gaze squinted against the peeper lights. His gaze latched onto Stella’s, and he lurched to his feet.
“Get her away! Get her away! There is great danger here,” Jerbil-Din moaned. “The master has come for the seven-pointed star,” Jerbil-Din screamed, turning away from Stella and sprinting down the tunnel.
“Stella, go straight back to the Attic and stay there. Wendell, you go with her. Helix and Grandas, we’ve got to get Jerbil. He’s our best chance of finding the Greddylick,” Dodds said. He thrust Stella back the way they had come and ran off after Jerbil-Din.
“Wait,” Stella called after them, “I’ll come with you.” But her voice trailed off into the shadows.
“I…I think we should do as Doctor Dodds says,” Wendell stuttered.
Stella felt tempted to follow them, but the tunnel felt quite threatening with just the two of them. “Okay,” she said, “but I don’t know what we’re going to do if they get into trouble.”
She grabbed Wendell’s string and allowed him to light their way back. Turning the corner to the tunnel, just before they reached the mouth of the cave, Stella could make out another shadow stretched along the walls. It was thin and spindly, and it caused Stella to rear back.
“Hello!” a voice called. “Stella, is that you?”
Stella recognized the voice and traced the distorted shadows back to their source. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I was trying to find you,” Tom replied.
***