The Curse of Deadman's Forest

by Victoria Laurie

  And for a while both boys stared at the dial’s face, waiting for the shadow to fade, but after several minutes it was clear that the thin strip of darkness was there to stay.

  Soon the delight of their discovery waned and Carl said, “Well, I’m going back to the fort. Give us a shout if you figure out what it’s pointing to.” And he turned away.

  But something Carl said was like a trigger in Ian’s mind and he thought back through what had happened right before the shadow had appeared. Carl had been asking about the plank of wood; Ian had told him he didn’t know where it was; then, when he’d looked back down, he’d seen the thin strip of shadow, which seemed to be pointing like a compass’s arrow across the room. Ian’s head snapped up and he looked over at the pile of spare wood covered by one of the moth-eaten blankets the boys had pinched from the cellar. Ian realized suddenly that the finger of the shadow seemed to be pointing directly at that pile of wood!

  “Carl!” Ian said, his voice edged with excitement. “Check under that blanket and see if your plank of wood is there, would you?”

  Carl looked at him oddly but moved away from another pile he’d been fishing through and lifted the blanket. There, right on top, was the long plank of wood he’d been searching for. “There it is!” he said triumphantly, pulling it out.

  But Ian was already staring in amazement back down at the sundial’s surface. The shadow had faded the moment Carl had lifted the blanket, and the surface of the relic returned to its dull, tarnished appearance. “Crikey!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got it! Carl, I’ve got how it works!”

  Carl hurried over to him again and looked at the dull face of the dial. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Your shadow’s gone, mate. Sorry.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Ian said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Ask me where something is and I’ll show you how it works.”

  “Like what?” Carl asked, obviously confused.

  Ian turned in a circle, looking for anything he could suggest, when his eyes lit on something across the room. “The treasure boxes,” he whispered.

  “All right,” Carl agreed. “Ian, where did you put your treasure boxes?”

  Immediately, the dial’s shiny surface returned and a shadow appeared across the face, pointing directly at a long stone bench by the stairs on the far side of the tower. Carl gasped, his head pivoting from the shadow to the bench. “Ian! It’s pointing right at your hiding spot!” Carl was the only other person besides Theo who knew Ian’s secret hiding place.

  Both boys hurried to the other side of the room, and Ian held the dial out so that they could see what happened the moment Ian lifted the loose plank that hid his treasure boxes. The instant his hand touched the silver top of the first box, the shadow disappeared.

  “Remarkable,” Ian whispered, in complete awe of the magical instrument in his hands.

  “Bloomin’ brilliant!” Carl said enthusiastically. “Let’s make it a bit more challenging, though, shall we?”

  Ian nodded, delighted that he’d finally managed to work out the secret of the sundial. “Where’s Theo?” he asked, and immediately the sundial’s shadow pointed right behind him. Ian turned and he and Carl looked out the far window, which gave a lovely view of the English Channel. The boys both knew that the shore where Jaaved and Theo had gone was in that very direction.

  Carl laughed and slapped his knee. “Smashing!” he gushed.

  Ian smiled happily while he looked from the dial to the window, and was about to agree with Carl when something on the distant horizon caught his eye. From the window Ian could see all the way across the channel to France, and something large appeared to materialize just offshore.

  Ian squinted and moved toward the window. “Ask it something else!” Carl urged, still bubbling with excitement.

  “Hang on,” Ian said, distracted by the shape, which he could see was zigzagging over the water. “Carl?” he said as a chill crept over him.

  “Yeah, mate?”

  “Do you still have those field glasses handy?” On a recent trip to London, Carl had purchased a set of binoculars, and he usually had them on hand for spying on the other orphans outside in the yard.

  “Of course,” he said. “Why don’t you ask the dial where they are?”

  Ian glanced down, and sure enough, the dial was pointing behind him, toward the fort. But Ian was more concerned with something else at the moment and he had the eeriest, most unsettling feeling. Something large and conelike was zigzagging back and forth across the horizon. It appeared to be just off the shore of Calais, and he couldn’t be sure, but it also appeared to be getting bigger. “Can you hand them to me, please?”

  Carl paused, then came to stand next to him and pointed out the window. “Ian,” he gasped. “What’s that?”

  “I can’t tell,” Ian murmured. “That’s why I need the field glasses.”

  Carl hurried to the fort and rooted around under the blankets and planks of wood. Ian knew the moment Carl found the field glasses, because the shadow on the dial disappeared. “Here you are,” Carl said, giving them to Ian in exchange for the dial.

  Ian focused the field glasses, searching the water for the dark shape. A moment later he had it within his sight and sucked in a breath, nearly dropping the field glasses in shock. “It’s a cyclone!”

  “Let me see!” Carl said, and Ian gave him the binoculars. “I don’t believe it!” Carl said as he caught sight of the funnel cloud moving at an alarming rate across the sea. “I’ve heard of waterspouts before but I’ve never actually seen one!”

  Ian wasn’t really listening to his friend, because at that moment he realized that the funnel cloud was quickly traversing the English Channel, and its course—although slightly sporadic—put Dover right in its path.

  “Carl,” Ian said, a sudden panic making his hands shake, “give me the sundial again, would you?”

  Carl lowered the lenses and handed over the dial.

  “Here,” he said.

  Ian wasn’t sure if the question he had in mind would work, but he had to try. “Where will the cyclone strike?”

  A thick shadow appeared across the face of the dial, pointing directly in front of them and marking the place that the relic had earlier identified as Theo’s location. “Theo!” Ian shouted, and whirled around in panic, then dashed toward the stairs.

  “It’s heading straight for the shore!” Carl gasped from behind him. “We’ve got to warn her and Jaaved!”

  Ian reached the landing and launched himself down the stone staircase several steps at a time, mindless of his own safety. There was terror in his heart as he imagined Theo and Jaaved caught within the cyclone’s funnel and whirled out to sea.

  He reached the door in full panic and pulled the handle, but the door refused to open. It was stuck fast. Ian hit the door with his fist in frustration. “Not again!” he shouted. “You hateful spook! Let me out!”

  It was well known by all the children at the keep that the east tower was haunted by a rather unruly ghost who enjoyed trapping wayward children who ventured up to this tower by locking the door from the outside. The ghost didn’t typically bother Ian and Carl, but at that moment, the cantankerous spirit’s prank was the last thing they needed.

  Carl was beside Ian in a moment. “Don’t tell me it won’t open!”

  “It’s that stupid ghost!” Ian growled as he pulled with all his might on the door. “We’ve no time for this! I order you to open this door immediately!”

  Carl joined him by pleading with the ghost. “It’s a matter of life and death! Stop playing pranks and let us out!”

  But the door held fast and Ian could only think about the cyclone swirling ever closer to their shores and how little time they had to reach Theo and Jaaved.

  “Let me try,” Carl insisted as Ian strained again and again on the handle.

  Ian backed away, his arms shaking from his effort, and he watched his much thinner companion pull the knob. “Maybe there’s something in the tower we can
use to pry it open,” Ian said in desperation, and he didn’t wait for Carl to agree with him but ran back up the steps to look about for anything they might use.

  But as he crested the landing, he stopped short when he saw that the cyclone was much closer to their shoreline, and he had a sinking sensation when he thought about how quickly it was bearing down on the area where Theo and Jaaved were. Ian knew that the path down to the shore was long, steep, and totally exposed to the sea, so even if Theo and Jaaved saw the waterspout in time to run, they’d be hard-pressed to make it to safety in time.

  “How can I get to Theo?” Ian cried, and just as he said this, something sparkled on the floor. Ian glanced down and realized, to his surprise, that in his mad dash to the staircase, he’d dropped the sundial on the ground. As he bent to pick it up, his eyes strayed to the shadow that had just formed on its surface. The thin gray line pointed to his left, toward the bench where he kept his treasures.

  From down the stairs Carl called, “Ian! The door still won’t open! Bring something to whack the hinge with!”

  But Ian was hardly listening. He had immediately recognized that the rhetorical question he’d asked was being answered by the sundial, and his eyes moved frantically to the bench again. Without hesitating a moment longer, he snatched the dial off the floor and raced to the bench. The dial’s shadow became thicker the closer he got to it—almost as if it were pointing down. Quickly as he could, Ian began pulling the slats out of the bench, thinking perhaps the dial was pointing to one of them, but the shadow didn’t change as he tugged each slat up and set it to the side. “What?” he asked, frustrated when his efforts revealed nothing. “What are you pointing to?” The shadow began to pulse, as if sending him an urgent message. At that moment he heard a scream from two floors below, and he knew that one of the other children had caught a glimpse of the cyclone.

  Carl had clearly heard it too, because he shouted up to Ian, “They’ve seen it too! Oy! Help us out of here! We’re trapped in the tower room!” Carl pounded on the door, but to no avail. No one heard them with all the shouting and thundering of footfalls echoing about the keep.

  Meanwhile, Ian was desperate to discover what the dial wanted him to find in the bench. He tugged hard on the very last slat, ready to give up and head back down the stairs to help Carl with the door, when, suddenly, there was a loud groan, and to his amazement a small section at the bottom of the bench fell away, exposing a dusty metal ladder leading down into darkness.

  For the briefest moment Ian was so stunned that all he could do was stare, and then Carl’s banging brought him to his senses again and he shouted to his friend. “Carl! Come quickly! I’ve found a way out!”

  Without waiting for him, Ian put the sundial into his pocket and stepped into the bench, lowering himself to the top rung of the ladder. He dug into his other pocket, pulled out his pocket torch, and switched it on, thankful that he’d had the foresight to change the batteries recently. “Carl!” he shouted again when his friend continued to pound on the door below. “Quit the door and come up here, now!”

  Carl ran up the stairs only to stand frozen, staring at Ian, whose head was barely visible from the lip of the bench. “Crikey!” Carl said at last. “What’s that, then? A secret passageway?”

  “Yes!” Ian replied impatiently, and gave one last glance toward the window. “I asked the sundial how we could get to Theo and it pointed to the bench. Now hurry along, we’ve no time to waste!”

  Ian and Carl got to the business of rushing down the ladder, which was slippery with dust and grime. Before stepping into the bench, Carl clicked on his own torch, and Ian was grateful for the extra light. As he climbed down, Ian wondered how old the iron rungs were, as they did not appear to have rusted much over time. Then again, the atmosphere appeared quite dry within the narrow space where the ladder had been secured. He just hoped the rungs were secure all the way to the bottom.

  “How far down do you think it goes?” Carl asked from a few rungs up.

  Ian angled his torch awkwardly in his fingers while holding fast to the iron bars, trying to peer down into the darkness. “I’ve no idea,” he said, moving as quickly as he dared down the ladder. “But I suspect it goes to the main floor.”

  Ian soon discovered that he’d guessed wrong. The ladder extended well past the main floor, all the way belowground to a cavern that ran under the cellar of the keep. He knew this because at one point there was a crack in the stone the ladder was attached to, and his light pointed into the cellar itself while the rungs continued down another five meters or so.

  Finally, the boys were able to stop their descent and put their feet firmly on the ground of the cavern. “Gaw!” Carl said, pointing his torch about the large enclosure, which had a tunnel leading out from it. “Would you look at this?”

  Ian, however, was impatient to get to Theo. Shining his light on the surface of the dial, he saw that the shadow pointed straight ahead to the tunnel. “No time for ogling,” he snapped, grabbing Carl’s collar. “We’ve got to reach the shore ahead of the cyclone!”

  The two boys dashed into the stone corridor as fast as their legs could carry them. The tunnel led them in a straight line but the grade of the floor gradually dropped them lower and lower. Ian could feel that they were running downhill and only hoped that the sundial was correctly navigating them to Theo and Jaaved.

  They’d gone only a few hundred meters when they passed a fork in the path, and Ian paused impatiently while flashing the beam on the dial’s surface to make sure they were still on course. To his relief, the shadow pointed straight ahead, and Ian put his faith in it and dashed on.

  The farther they traveled, the damper the air became, and Ian began to make out the briny scent of the ocean.

  “It’s leading us straight to the channel!” Carl said, and as if to confirm this, there was a noise that sounded like the pounding of waves onto the shore.

  But then they heard something else and Ian’s heart sank. It was a scream that sounded as if it came from a long way off, and he would have recognized that voice anywhere. “Theo!” he shouted, his heart racing with the terrible thought that they’d be too late, and he urged his legs to move faster still.

  Carl kept pace with him—he was the only boy in all of Dover who could, in fact—and together they rushed through the tunnel, straight toward a small pinpoint of light not far off.

  Struggling for air, Ian could see that a hundred meters ahead was the mouth of a cave, opening directly onto the sea. He could make out daylight and the sound of surf mingled with something much more ominous. It was like nothing Ian had ever heard before, like a train and a great howling wind mixed together. And just above that noise he distinctly heard Theo’s terrified scream.

  Gritting his teeth and putting every ounce of energy he had into his final sprint, he reached the end of the tunnel, which deposited him and Carl directly into the back of a very large cave overlooking the shore some ten meters below.

  The boys dashed into the heart of the cave only to stop short. In front of them was a huge swirling mass of black wind that all but blocked out the sun. It was so powerful that the current coming off it immediately knocked both of them off their feet. Sand and shells vaulted through the air around them, peppering the walls of the cavern with loud thwacks, and water pelted Ian so hard it felt as if he were being hit with rocks.

  “Theo!” Ian shouted, struggling to his feet. He had to hold his arm over his eyes to protect them from the wind, water, and debris. He struggled to remain standing while straining his ears for Theo’s voice, but nothing came to him save the roar of the cyclone bearing down on them. “Theeeeeeoooo!” he shouted again, panic welling within his chest when he could not see or hear her.

  Ian was forced to turn his face away from the brunt of the wind, and saw that Carl had also managed to gain his footing and was hugging the wall of the cavern, making his way toward the ledge. “I hear her!” he called to Ian.

  Seeing his friend have an easier
time of it against the wall, Ian staggered to the side of the cavern as well, moving as quickly as he could against the elements. The cave was growing very dark while the cyclone thundered closer and closer to the shoreline, blocking out the daylight, and as Ian reached Carl’s side, he heard a faint scream and knew it was Theo. “She’s just outside the cave!” Ian shouted, crawling past Carl to the edge, where he was forced to get down on his hands and knees lest the wind knock him off his feet again. “Ian!” he heard faintly from just below. “Help us!”

  Ian had to pull himself along the lip while he tried to locate her exact position. He could see the short shoreline about twenty feet below, and beyond that the swirling ocean, which had been churned a dark brown by the driving force of the cyclone. To Ian’s horror, the terrible storm was now a mere five hundred meters offshore.

  At the rate it was moving, he knew he had less than a minute or two to get Theo and Jaaved to safety, or they’d all be doomed.

  Squinting as sand and sea pelted his skin, Ian shouted to Theo, still attempting to locate her in the chaos. To his relief she called back more clearly. “There!” Carl said from beside him, pointing down and to the left. “On that ledge!”

  Ian followed Carl’s finger with his eyes and gasped when he saw Theo and Jaaved flattened against the cliff face. His heart panged when he took in her terrified face and the closeness of the cyclone’s funnel; he had to help her as quickly as he could. He took off his belt and looped the end through the buckle, then wrapped the small noose around his wrist, pulling it tight. He then offered the other end to Carl. “I’m going to lower myself down,” he shouted above the roar of the wind. “Take this and don’t let me fall off the face of the cliff!”

  “Hang on!” Carl said, gripping Ian’s arm before he could shinny over the side. “You’ll need more length than that.” Carl too quickly removed his belt and connected it to Ian’s. He then tightly gripped the end and braced his feet against a rock. “Off with you, then!” he said when he was ready.