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I made myself some honeyed oats and listened to dance music on the kitchen radio for a while. Then I read one of Uncle Gerry's few science fiction novels in the reading room. As best I could tell - the writing was very old fashioned - it was about a psychic detective framing a robot for a murder on a space station. A chapter after the robot turned the tables and murdered the detective, I got bored and must have dozed. By the time I woke up, Aunt Bea was home and had baked a beef pie for lunch!
I hoped that Mum would wake up for lunch, and give me the opportunity to look at the trunk while she ate. But Mum slept and slept.
Eventually, after I'd done the dishes, walked down to the corner shop for some milk, mopped the kitchen floor and run out of other chores and excuses, I trudged upstairs with my exercise book. Back in my bedroom, I pulled my chair over to the card table and sat down to study.
Almost instantly, my eyes glazed over. Numbers didn't come to me easily. Ask me to write a story, or give a speech at assembly and I was your man. Ask me to count backwards from 100 by threes and I stammer like Dr Vassel. I can't see patterns in numbers like Dad did. I think that's one reason he was so good at his job; he could detect anomalies, breaks in sequences of numbers that hinted at lies.
Distracted by the wad of notes in my back pocket, I flopped onto the floor, crawled under the card table, reached behind the bronze floor safe and retrieved my moneybox. It was a gift from Dad: originally a soft drink bottle from the 1950s, it was shaped like a rocket, and was cast from amber glass with an inverted taper lip wide enough to swallow coins. Dad had cut a hole in the bottom and fitted a black rubber plug fashioned from a squash ball. The bottle's label showed the appalled faces of three faded aliens standing on the bridge of their ship, aghast as a nuke blew up Earth. As I stuffed the 11 notes through the bottle's neck, I wondered how a nuclear holocaust was meant to tempt people to drink cola - I guess you wouldn’t have to worry about the calories!
I backed out from under the table and resumed the appearance of study. Unlike me, Dad was great at maths. Give him two numbers - any numbers - and he could add, subtract, divide and multiply them in a matter of seconds. He was like the Amazing Human Calculator!
My calculator!
I'd smashed it to smithereens on Mr Seth's doorstep! I'd have to ask Mrs Dixon to lend me hers for the test.
Without the calculator, I struggled even more than usual through a practice test. But it wouldn't have mattered if I'd had a supercomputer. I couldn't get Mr Seth's strange words out of my head. They flittered and echoed like bats in a cave, distracting me from algebra and long division. Your dad wasn't investigating criminals. Me Seth had said. Something much more interesting.
What could be more interesting than hunting down criminals? I shook my head and tried to refocus on a quadratic equation. I'd read far too many adventure stories. Maybe Mr Seth was talking a load of rot. Except for maths, I wasn't a total idiot. Yet Mr Seth had said he could prove it. Had almost challenged me to test him by looking under the trunk in Mum's room.
How did he even know about the trunk? I'd barely noticed it until he'd mentioned it, and I'd lived in Sub Rosa for over a year! How could I concentrate on maths with questions about Dad base-jumping inside my skull?
I gritted my teeth and dug in. My head in my hands, I propped my eyes open with my fingers and tried to absorb the contents of my text book. The numbers blurred and bled into each other, a fuzzy maze of obscure symbols that suddenly made no sense, like the Arabic script of Mr Seth's magazine. At one stage, I must have fallen asleep at my desk.
When I woke up it was dark. Pins and needles shot up my legs as I stood up, my chair scraping against the floorboards like a pair of pivoting basketball shoes. I bent over and flung the textbook onto my bed.
I pulled on my fur lined slippers and skated across my room, pausing to inspect the cold plate of meatloaf in the shadows of the landing. My Aunt must have put it there, not wanting to disturb my studies!
I descended the stairs, noting Aunt Bea's door was closed. Down the hall I walked, careful not to make big movements that would alert Katy to my presence. I turned into the dining room and paused outside the conservatory door. The door was on tracks, and I slid it open. I stuck my head into the room and stifled a cough. Mum lay on her back, still asleep.
Like a cat burglar prowling for diamonds, I slunk into Mum's room and hunkered down next to the trunk. The trunk was as long and almost as tall as Mum's bed but quite narrow. It sat atop a red, blue and gold prayer rug granddad had carted back from Syria. All the blinds were locked shut, except on the back wall, which had been half-opened to let in the air.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the relative gloom. Squatting next to the trunk, I saw faint markings. Bathed in moonlight, however, the markings revealed a pattern.
Outlined on the front of the trunk was the unmistakable image of a rounded face, with two large oval eyes the colour of dirty quartz glowering over a flat, broad nose. Two rows of tiny grey teeth embossed a raised strip between pebble studded lips and a mono-brow zig-zagged across the face's furrowed brow like an eroded range of hilltops. On either side of the face, palms of a ghostly hand signalled 'stop'. Each was pocked with a single black hole, like an unhealed spear-wound. The figure seemed to beckon and to ward off: an invitation and a warning.
The moon disappeared and the face and hands vanished into the grain of the wood. Nervously, I tugged at the frayed ends of the prayer rug. The rug slid easily to reveal a blue-black patch of wood - a trapdoor - more coarse than the glossy red floorboards around it.
I walked around the trunk. Kneeling on the patch, I scrabbled around its edges. At the corner of the square furthest from me, my fingernails snagged on a thin wire wedged between two boards. Gently, I scooped under the wire and pulled up. The loop of wire snapped tautly, and then twisted like a combination lock.
Two thin wooden latches popped up with a loud click, and a whiff of old lacquer. I glanced up at Mum. She continued to sleep. I sat down and, with both hands, heaved at the latches. The patch of wood loosened easily. I fell back clunking my head for the second time in three days! Like a Buddhist monk at prayer, I rolled back into a sitting position, then carefully swung my legs to the side. I lent forward, and peered down into the dark void where the patch had come from.
Although the moon was still smothered, a sickly green light flickered faintly from the hole, revealing a silver ladder. As if sensing me, the light darkened, staining my hands an eerie blue. Something black and wispy wobbled and spun up the ladder rungs. It was impossibly quick and coming straight for me!
I lurched sidewards and the thing leapt out of the hole and vaulted over my shoulder. It was a huge rat, almost the size of a rabbit!
I stifled a scream, as the rat skittered into the dining room. I prayed that it would run right out of the house before Aunt Bea saw it. I prayed even harder that King Rat had no friends or family down there. Because Mr Seth was right: despite my fear, I had to go down the hole to see what I could see!
I lowered my legs into the hole, swinging them from side to side until my feet found purchase on the second top ladder rung. Lowering myself down, a rung at a time, I eased my grip until my chest, then head followed my legs into the mysterious blue abyss below.
Looking down was not an option. I closed my eyes and clamoured down the ladder until my right foot, then left, sank into the soft, spongy ground at the ladder's base. It was cold inside the hole, but warmer than the street. The place was musty and stunk of cat wee and rotting food. It was fairly quiet, and I could hear trickling water close by.
Of course, I hadn't expected a secret trap door when I set out to inspect the trunk, so I was unprepared, with no torch or proper shoes. My soft, woolly slippers were sodden. With trepidation, I crept forward triggering a row of red-brown dot-lights on the floor, like the emergency lights on an aeroplane. They revealed a short tunnel, maybe 10 metres long, leading to what looked like a cave.
/> As I padded carefully down the tunnel, the red-brown lights faded. A strange silver-blue seep-glowed from swathes of moss that carpeted the smooth, stone walls, like stubble dipped in bioluminescent paint.
At the end of the tunnel, against a smooth stone wall, sat another trunk. It was similar to the one at the end of Mum's bed, though much smaller. An ochre oval had been painted onto its lid. Unlike its bigger brother upstairs, the trunk had no eyes, teeth or nose, but elephantine ears drooped off each side, and its fat, pursed lips described an almost perfect 'O'. I shivered, half-hoping it too was filled with sheets and towels. But I doubted it: why would Mr Seth go to the trouble of helping me discover a trove of linen?
Despite my thumping heart and dry, cottony mouth, something felt oddly familiar. Like I'd seen it before. Nothing seemed connected to the real world of Mum, Aunt Bea or Sub Rosa, even though they were only a ladder climb away. For a moment, I wondered if I'd fallen asleep in Mr Tangen's shop after drinking my hot chocolate. Perhaps, none of it was real.
My toe smashed into a loose shard of boulder, and I yelped with pain. This was no dream! I hopped the rest of the way over to the trunk then paused, unsure. Curiosity and fear fought each other for a few seconds: a battle between head and gut. I thought of Dad, and curiosity won. I flung open the lid and looked in.
Books. Boring, musty books that looked like they were from the 1970s, or even earlier. Financial Models for the 20th Century, Micro-computers and the Future of Management Information Systems, Business Strategy for the Electronic Age. One at a time, I threw them onto the floor, looking for something more interesting. But it was just a jumble of old dusty junk! Floral sweaters that looked like something you'd wear to Dress-as-a-Hippy Day, a scuffed up football trophy on a cracked granite base with no plate. What looked suspiciously like a kaftan. A faded red and blue baseball cap. A brown leather suitcase with a broken clasp. An array of used fishing tackle. Utterly mundane rubbish.
I sighed. Mr Seth had played a practical joke on me. A good one too: I was in a stinky, cold wet hole in the middle of the night. There were better things to do, like maths study or even sleep!
Just as I was about to throw everything back into the trunk and leave, I found a shrivelled scroll scrunched up at the back of the trunk, under a broken badminton racquet. "Probably a shopping list," I said to myself, as I unfurled its crumbling paper and held it up to the moss-light.
Everything changed!
Dad's accounting degree. That meant everything in the trunk was probably his - Dad's old stuff from his university days! My arms and legs jangled. When Mum and I had left the City with Aunt Bea to come to Quakehaven, we travelled light. To tell the truth, I'd been happy to leave all the old personal stuff behind. But as time passed, it was harder to remember Dad clearly - even harder with nothing more than a couple of old photos, movie posters and my moneybox to keep the memories fresh, and solid and real. Mum had been far too sick to deal with Dad's detritus, but maybe Aunt Bea had picked it up and, for some reason, decided to store it down there. Now I had a whole trunk of Dad's stuff. My rightful inheritance!
I smiled at the thought and grabbed one of Dad's old sweater vests. Like many of his clothes, it was hideous. The pattern looked like someone had put a rope of Christmas tree lights and a jar of chillies into a blender for 10 minutes, then knitted the results. I pulled it over my head. It smelled just like him, but mixed with mothballs and a light hint of coconut and talcum powder. The most wonderful smell in the world!
It was like Dad had enfolded me in his arms. Then my tingling hands started to shake. My brain kicked into gear. What was the trunk doing down here, hidden away, like a dirty secret someone didn't want found? And what was so important about this stuff that Mr Seth had gone out of his way to tip me off about it? How did he even know it was here? Had he planted it? Had I just stepped into a trap?
The more I thought about it, the less sense it all made. That's when I noticed the lights. While I'd being savouring the scent of the sweater vest, the moss-light had perished and the red-brown aeroplane emergency lights had re-ignited. They now pulsed a deep-orange purple. With each flash, my shadow appeared to convulse, draped as if wounded over the open trunk. With each strobe, my shadow's shape changed minutely, looking less and less like me each time, like a photocopy of a photocopy.
My head started to spin, and the almost painful tingles in my hands lanced up my arms, into my chest and swirled around my burning neck like a feral string of pearls. A deep, familiar cackle reverberated through the tunnel from the top of the ladder and my shadow quailed and trembled, hugging the blue-bearded walls.
Groggy, and too slow to react, I lumbered back down the tunnel. I tried to scale the ladder, but the rungs were barbed wire and sliced through my slippers like shears. The hole in the floor above closed with a fearsome bang and, for the first time, I realised whatever was up there was a foot from Mum's bed! The emergency lights flashed thrice - white, blue, then sickly green. Then they died.
I was alone in the dark.