Song to Wake to - Levels # 1 (Paranormal Romance)

by Jd Field

  Chapter 9: The Seven Sleepers

  Mum sat at our new, IKEA kitchen table. “Hello love. I’ve got crumpets.”

  I clenched my fists. The simple affection in her voice brought tears to my eyes. “Thanks.”

  Ideally I would have taken the crumpets upstairs and done my research in private. That wasn’t how Mum and I worked, though, so I fetched my laptop from my room, set it up on the kitchen table and headed straight for Facebook.

  He was there, name blazoned across the top of his page. ‘Eddy Doforni Moon.’

  “Doforni?” I said out loud.

  “What dear?”

  I took a bite of crumpet. “Nothing.” The page had only just been created, but already all four of the horsemen were Eddy’s friends. I narrowed my eyes. The photo album was empty, but I figured it wouldn’t be for long.

  The next day there was a combined history and geography trip to Sedgemore, where a key battle had taken place in the Civil War and where there was also, apparently, something very interesting about the drainage system. The first time I remembered the trip was when I saw the buses waiting in the car park. Cursing my forgetfulness, I ran to the cafeteria to get something to eat on the journey.

  I stood in the coach aisle and surveyed the faces looking back at me. Sarah smiled from three rows away. Further back Pippa inclined her head towards the empty space beside her. Beyond her, in the seat next to the toilet, Eddy Moon sat alone, looking out the window. His long legs and quick walk would be no good to him there.

  “Hi Sarah,” I said as I passed her. “Hi Pippa, sorry, I’m going to sit further back.”

  I didn’t ask Eddy if the seat was free. I just smiled brightly and sat in it. “Morning Edward.”

  “My name’s Eddy,” he muttered. “I was christened Eddy. I told you we can’t be friends.”

  I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard his rejection, though it bruised me like a blow. “Ah, that’s right. “Eddy Doforni Moon.”

  The coach rumbled out of the car park. In the spaces between the seats, over their tops, and along the side, next to the window, inquisitive eyes peered at us. I knew that everybody in the coach would be whispering about us. What was I doing sitting next to the weirdo, the tramp, the stable boy, Eddy Moon?

  Eddy focused his tawny eyes on me. “How do you know my middle name?”

  I tried not to stare. The sleepy lion expression on his golden face seemed to paralyse my lungs. I forced the words out. “It’s on your Facebook page.”

  “I don’t have a Facebook page.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Eddy sat at my mercy, trapped between me and the window. “What do you mean?”

  I pressed a palm against the rough, carpet-like covering of the seat in front and explained: How Moscow contacts of the Four Horsemen had set up his Facebook page. How the Moscow computer whizz kids planned to blend photos provided by Kieran and Tiago into scandalous pictures. How scandalous pictures would be deemed unfitting of the head of Camelot and the challenge would be re-run to make one of the Four Horsemen the winner. And finally how I had contacted Facebook, complaining of the illegitimacy of Eddy’s Facebook page, and had the page frozen.

  He shook his head. “You’re astonishing.”

  My heart flipped over. I blinked. “The page is suspended, but I don’t think that’ll stop them for long. When we get back to school you’ve got to tell the headmistress, you don’t have to name names, just make it clear the page is nothing to do with you. Then if they go ahead you’ll be insured.”

  Fading autumn countryside slid past the enormous coach window. I watched a motorcyclist overtake us at speed before continuing. “And probably the best idea would be to set up your own, alternative page. You can point at that as proof it’s not you. Make one without that mental middle name of yours.” I froze, mouth open. Why couldn’t I have stopped while I was still being smart? Why did I have to ramble on into rudeness? Underneath all my helpfulness I hid the scratchy, little grudge of annoyance at how he had treated me the day before.

  Eddy’s flaming eyes, though, didn’t get hotter than lukewarm. I guessed he was still dwelling on what I had told him. He shook his head. “Yeah, Doforni. It doesn’t even mean anything.”

  “Then why is it your name?” I studied him as I talked, trying to see a physical sign that I had been forgiven. He didn’t make it easy, he seemed to have a control over his face that I could only dream of.

  “I don’t know. Mr. Neil gave it me.” He rearranged his long legs, squashing them together and turning them toward the window.

  I sensed his anxiety at talking about personal issues, so I directed conversation back toward the mundane. “How tall are you Eddy?”

  “I’m six-four, but I’m not going to grow much further. I’ll stop at six-six.”

  I chuckled. “You never know.”

  Again certainty formed his features into a beautiful mask, like the face of a Renaissance statue. “I know.”

  “How can... Oh never mind. Tell me about Mr. Neil.” I held my breath, waiting for Eddy’s familiar reticence to return.

  He shrugged. “There’s not much to tell, really. He’s quite old now. He’s rich. He doesn’t do much apart from travel and look after school stuff. He’s the chairman of governors.”

  I nodded.

  Eddy’s eyes scanned the view out the window. Was it more interesting than me, or was he avoiding looking at me because it would be somehow too intense? I feared the former.

  “He’s really clever, he used to do the crossword for The Sunday Times.”

  “Used to?”

  “He’s away somewhere. Travelling. I haven’t seen him for more than a year.” A shadow flickered across Eddy’s face. He glanced at the window. “Look, we’re nearly there.”

  “Right.” Urgency tensed my whole body. “Um, Eddy. What you said about never being friends, I mean, you were angry, right?”

  He gave me a steady, appraising look. “I suppose. Yeah, we can be friends. But...” He shifted his legs, ready to stand. “We can’t be anything else though.”

  My jaw dropped. I stared at him. How could he tell what I had been thinking? I turned crimson. I had been rejected before a hint of anything had happened. That had to be a record. Forcing out a strangled laugh I frowned at him, as if to say ‘What an absurd idea,’ then squeaked “Yeah, so?” like a stroppy nine-year-old.

  The bus rumbled into a gravelled parking lot and I turned away. Yeah so? Madeleine the conversationalist needed some serious remedial help. I was barely Madeleine the speaker of English. Standing up, I shuffled down the aisle of the bus and realised why I wasn’t super upset.

  I didn’t believe him.

  If he could change his mind about being friends, then he could change his mind about being more than friends. These things weren’t definite. I could convince him, given time. He had said I was astonishing after all.

  I clambered down the bus steps and the chill autumn air stung my cheeks. More of a worry was why he made his rulings. What was wrong with me? Again I turned my focus inward. Was it my appearance? Was I too serious? Maybe I had been too nosy. My skin prickled with fear. If Eddy didn’t like girls to be pro-active, or take an interest, then I was screwed.

  I followed the group across the parking lot, thinking about the time Eddy rescued me from the dogs. He had been warm and kind and I had just been myself. I hadn’t changed, so maybe it was him.

  At the visitor centre we were met by a very excitable guide, who took us around the most important sites of the battlefield. We gathered beside a tiny stone memorial to the men who died in the last ever battle on British soil and listened to a grim list of how men drowned in ditches, were shot in fields, or hung from gallows by the roadside. A cold wind swept over the flattened grass, and it wasn’t hard to hear on it the echoes of death cries and shouts of pain and triumph. The guide showed us a ditch and told us to imagine attacking a man with a gun on the other side of it, then led us along a path to a small hill where we
could get a view of the area.

  Eddy strode off at the front of the group, talking to the teachers and Pippa was grabbed by a group of girls from Cornwall House, doubtless asking her about me and Eddy. I hung back, waiting for her to get annoyed and snap at them. Eddy towered over the teachers, and I watched him walk beside them. Would he turn back and look at me?

  “Hey stranger.”

  I looked up.

  Karen put her arm over my shoulder. “I haven’t seen you since the Camelot party.”

  “Hey Karen.” I smiled.

  She fell into step beside me. “Though it’s probably my fault. We Lyonesse girls keep ourselves to ourselves, everybody says it. I know we shouldn’t. It’s a bad habit of ours.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Nobody had said it to me, but besides Sarah I was incredibly badly wired for Levels gossip.

  “Don’t you just love it here?” Karen took my arm. “This is kind of why I chose Levels College.”

  I frowned and looked around. “What, the Battle of Sedgemoor?”

  “No, doofus, all the King Arthur stuff.”

  “What King Arthur stuff?”

  “Oh come on girl, what are you talking about? I sat in my sweaty little school library in Jamaica reading all about the adventures of Arthur and his knights. Reading and longing to be a part of them, and you were right here and didn’t even care?”

  “Well I suppose...” I skipped a stride to keep up with her long legs. As we gained height the patchwork grid of flat meadows and water-filled ditches expanded below us.

  Karen’s eyes sparkled. “At Levels they used names from the legends for the houses, Camelot and Avalon, and the others. And the school symbol?”

  “A sword.”

  “And as for the whole challenge thing, obviously whoever invented it read about the Knights of the Round Table almost as much as little Jamaican me.”

  “Remind me.”

  “In the story there’s a sword in a stone, and whoever pulls it out is going to be the king. At school, whoever gets the sword out the pool is head of Camelot.”

  “I see.” I nodded slowly.

  “But this is my favourite bit of the Arthurian legend. Over there...” She pointed to a low, tree-crested hill in the distance, “...is where they think maybe Arthur fought his last battle and here...” she stamped one foot on the packed earth of the path. “Has got the legend of the Seven Sleepers.”

  I shook my head as I spoke. “Seven Sleepers?”

  She stopped dead and stared at me. “No? Really? No.”

  I raised my empty hands, as if to show her I had nothing. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “This is Windmill Hill, down there is Westonzoyland, where the pub is called “The Seven Sleepers”, after the legend of the seven men that are supposed to be asleep under the hill.”

  I looked at the low hump of grey-brown grass and balding, stunted trees ahead of us. “Really, under here?”

  “Yeah, it’s supposed to be King Arthur and six of his best knights, waiting for the call when the world really needs them to wake up and rescue us all from doomsday.”

  “Doomsday!”

  “I’ll take you to the pub one day. Fourteen years ago there was a landslide and somebody found a big old gong in a little cave somewhere on the side of the hill. How cool is that?”

  “Really? Like a dinner gong?”

  Yeah, big metal one. They banged it, but historians said it was a hoax, the gong was modern, so now they’ve got it in the pub.”

  “Awesome!”

  One of the fabled Lyonesse girls caught us up with something incredibly important to tell Karen.

  I joined Sarah at the crest of the hill. “Hey Sarah, did you know about the Seven Sleepers?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “The pub? Of course. Last year I had a boyfriend who had a car and we came here.” She looked at her nails. “Well he wasn’t exactly my boyfriend.” She bit at her thumbnail. “But he did have a car.”

  I smiled. “You know why it’s called The Seven Sleepers, though?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s like, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are waiting in a cave to come and rescue us.”

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  Sarah frowned at me. “What? Anyway, what I meant was, his dad let him drive his car. But it was a really nice one.”

  I giggled.

  “Anyway. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are you about our party at the weekend?”

  I grimaced. I had forgotten all about it. It seemed an age since I invited the Four Horsemen to the Logres social. Now I’d secured the information I needed from them, the party itself was really unappealing. Party Madeleine annoyed and exhausted me. “Oh, Sarah, I meant to tell you about that. I’m really sorry, I forgot, I’m supposed to go and see a friend of mine in Bath this weekend.”

  She opened her mouth in mock horror. “No!”

  Guilt made me bite my lip. Had I disappointed her?

  “You poor thing.” Sarah put her hand on my arm.

  I smiled. She felt bad for me, missing out on the party. Sarah would have hundreds of friends there, everyone of whom she had known longer than me. She didn’t need to worry about company.

  “Yeah. I’m such an idiot, but you’ll have a brilliant time.”

  She shrugged. “Duh! Of course.” Then her face fell. “Hey, you haven’t invited that tall guy. The...” I could see her brain searching for a polite term. “The interesting one, have you?”

  Anger fizzed at the back of my throat. I wouldn’t be able to deal with Sarah’s snobby fluttering without snapping at her. “Sorry!” I raised my hand, dug my phone from my bag, and turning my back on her, pretended to answer it.

  The first groups of kids began trailing back down the hill. I followed, looking around, wondering where the entrance to the mysterious cave could be. The hill crouched low, but some of its faces sloped steeply. Tufted with brambles, they could easily hide the entrance to a chamber. I shivered, and looked along the path. At the front of the school group, easily looking over the heads of the others, Eddy stared back at me. For a moment I felt the golden heat of his gaze, then he turned away. There had been a strange intensity in his eyes, but I couldn’t read it. Why was he looking at me? Was he thinking about how we could be friends but nothing more? Did he wish it could be different?

  Back in the car park I climbed onto the bus for the ride home. This time Pippa kept her eyes on the window as I walked along the aisle.

  I smiled at her. “Hi, um, is this seat free?”

  She glanced at me. “I suppose.”

  I sat next to her. “Really sorry about earlier.’ Filled with students, the bus became warm and humid. I took off my jacket. “I had to speak to Eddy.”

  She couldn’t maintain her mask of indifference any longer. “Well I saw. I mean, everybody saw. What were you doing sitting next to him?”

  What could I say? I was obsessed with his face, with his body, with his infuriating reticence. No. “We’re both, you know...” I hooked the first two fingers of each hand into quotation marks. “New kids on the levels. He’s struggling with the whole Head of Camelot thing, as well as everything else.”

  The wind on the hill had made a complete mess of my hair. I pulled my ponytail free, then gathered all the loose strands and looped my hair band around them. After skating my fingers over the nape of my neck to check for any stray wisps I folded the ponytail and looped the hair band around it again. My shoulders prickled and I looked behind me.

  Eddy Moon’s eyes had been fixed on the back of my neck. He looked away, muscles flickering in his tight jaw. I flushed.

  “Hmm.” Pippa narrowed her eyes. “Everybody was staring at you, you must have noticed. He’s not very popular.”

  “I know, but I don’t see why.” My voice rose. I hauled my bag onto my lap. “What’s he done to them?”

  “I don’t know, I mean, you have to admit, he is a bit weird.”

  I hugged my bag and stared at her. “Come on Pippa, not
you as well? Just ‘cos he’s a bit shy, and doesn’t wear Armani, everybody’s on his case.”

  She pushed out her lower lip. “I guess. Ok. If you’re so determined, get him to sit with us at break, or something. I’ll talk to him, see if I can find the...” Her quote fingers mirrored mine. “The real Eddy Moon.”

  Good luck, I felt like saying, and if you do find him, make sure you introduce me.

  My notepad and pen slipped from the side pocket of my bag and I picked them up. Without thinking I began doodling inside the back cover. ‘Eddy Doforni Moon, eddydofornimoon.’ I sighed. ‘ed, dy, do, for, ni, mo, on.’ I narrowed my eyes at the letters, as if they were a signpost in a foreign language.

  “Oh my God!” Pippa shouted laughter and grabbed the notepad out of my hand. “We’re both new kids! You liar!”

  “Shh!” I hissed, looking back down the coach, to see if anybody was paying us attention. “Give it back.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Pippa’s face sparkled with mirth. “You fancy him! You really fancy Eddy Moon!”

  I grabbed the notebook from her hand. “Shut up Pippa. Obviously I don’t fancy him. He’s just interesting, is all. Different. I like his name.” I babbled, hoping somehow that if I could stop her from saying I fancied Eddy, I would also stop her from thinking it. “He sounds like somebody out of a soap opera.”

  She pursed her lips and examined my face. “You nut.”

  “Whatever. Anyway. Are you going straight to lunch from the bus?”

  “I guess.” She nodded. “Then riding.”

  “When are you competing?” I laboured to change the subject. “Did I tell you coach has put me in the swim team for southern schools next week?”

  We spent the last part of the journey talking about our coaches, then our teachers, and I ran off the bus ahead of her, avoiding any chance of her putting me in the same frame as Eddy.

  That afternoon’s lessons were tricky, Physics and Art both took a step up from the gentle introduction we had been receiving. Only when I was on my bike and on my way home did I have a chance to think about Eddy. I pictured his enormous hands, palm up on his thighs as he talked. Passing Naylor’s farm, I swerved around patches of mud on the road. I imagined the work Eddy had to do on the Hechters’ farm to get his hands as leathery and hard as they were. Ahead of me one of the archaeologists stood beside their little tent. As soon as he saw me he stepped forward, waving his hand.

  “Hey, hey, excuse me.”

  I braked. “Yeah?”

  “Really sorry for stopping you like this.” He adjusted his glasses. “Yesterday you said something about the tomb of a foreigner.”

  “Mm-hmm, sorry about that.”

  “No, no, it’s fascinating. I mean, where did you hear that?”

  I sat back down on the bike saddle. I didn’t know why, but my instinct was to protect Eddy Moon. “I can’t remember. It was ages ago, sorry. Why?”

  “Because look at this.” He beckoned.

  I leaned the bike against a tree and followed him. Under the awning a square pit gaped, jagged rocks projected around its edge like grey teeth. On the floor of the pit lay a rectangular stone, the size of a single bed.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s only a tomb.” The archaeologist removed his glasses and scrubbed at them with his cuff. You were right.” His voice rose higher. “And see the cross on the top?”

  I peered downward. Carved lines marked the centre of the box. I would have hesitated to call them a cross.

  “It’s Byzantine!”

  “No, really?”

  He nodded so eagerly that his spectacles slipped down his nose. “It’s a foreigner, exactly as you said. And to have a tomb made for him in the manner of his home, he must have been somebody important, wealthy.”

  “Cool.” I tried to make out the branched cross on the tomb lid. “Are you going to open it?”

  He nodded. “We’ll record everything as it is at the moment, then open it before we lift the coffin out. Otherwise the contents will all shift around. We’ll have to get a crane. That thing...” He jerked his head at the black sarcophagus. “Must literally weigh a ton. At least.”

  “Awesome.” I climbed back on my bike. “I’ll come back tomorrow and see how you get on.”

  I pedaled away, mind whirring ten times as fast as my feet. How did Eddy know?