Adventures In Otherworld Part One - The Chalice of Hope

by Michael Kerr



  ADVENTURES IN OTHERWORLD

  Part One

  THE CHALICE OF HOPE

  By

  MICHAEL KERR

  Copyright © 2013 Michael Kerr

  ― CHAPTER ONE ―

  THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

  The ground shook beneath her feet as the giant beast rushed forward, opened its massive, dripping jaws and emitted a deafening roar that would have put a lion to shame. And as Sam watched, frozen and unable to move a muscle, a long jet of bright orange flame shot out from the enormous, fang-filled mouth of the hideous reptile, to engulf an animal that, to Sam, looked very much like an African buffalo. The unfortunate creature was immediately turned into a blazing, barbecued meal, for what Sam decided was a dragon. She looked on in stunned amazement as the scaly creature lowered its head, snatched up the now crispy animal, swallowed it down whole and belched loudly.

  The grey gloom of dawn was replaced by morning sunlight painting a bright, golden brushstroke across the bed. Sam kept her eyes closed and tried to hold on to the scary dream she had been having. In it, she had been on a magical journey in a strange land that could not possibly exist. It was another world, inhabited by creatures that her imagination must have conjured up. It had seemed so real, but now that she was awake, the dragon dream evaporated in the way that morning mist is burned off the surface of a lake by the sun.

  After quickly dressing, Sam went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash before going downstairs.

  There was no way Sam could possibly know that her amazing dream had been a vision of what was to come true in the very near future.

  It was the first day of the holidays, and Sam was looking forward to the long summer break from school. Today was going to be fun. She was meeting Ben Cooper and Tommy Scott, and the three of them were going on a bike ride to Grimwith Reservoir, which had a picnic area, and was in a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains and forest.

  “What’s your hurry, Samantha?” Marion Craig asked her daughter. “Where are you planning on rushing off to?”

  “A bike ride, Mum. Out to the reservoir,” Sam answered, wishing that her mother would not insist on calling her Samantha. Her dad didn’t.

  “Well don’t you dare go swimming in it,” Marion said. “It’s deep and dangerous, and full of all sorts of junk that people dump in it.”

  “I know, Mum,” Sam replied, hurriedly finishing her breakfast.

  Twenty minutes later, Sam was freewheeling down the winding road, heading for Sugden’s Mini-Market on High Street. She felt a little light-headed, and there was a ringing in her ears that sounded exactly the same as when a gentle breeze jiggled the wind chimes that hung from a bracket outside the back door of the house. She stopped the bike and tried to work out where the ringing was coming from, but couldn’t. It seemed to be all around her, almost calling to her. Had it been Sunday and not Saturday, she would have thought it was the peal of distant church bells. It reminded her of something in the strange dream she had almost forgotten, but what? She couldn’t remember.

  By the time Sam came to a stop next to where Ben and Tommy had leaned their bikes up against a pillar box outside the little supermarket, the slight dizziness and the sound of bells or chimes had gone away. She was left with a sense of expectancy, and felt sure that something very exciting was going to happen, and soon. Something out of the ordinary.

  “Hi, Sam,” Ben said, coming out of old man Sugden’s with a cellophane-wrapped pork pie in one hand, and a litre-sized bottle of Coke in the other. “You ready for a big adventure?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “Where’s Tommy?”

  “Still inside, buying cakes and crisps and stuff. If he gets much fatter, he’ll explode like an overblown balloon. Yuchh!”

  “I heard that,” Tommy said appearing behind Ben, holding a lumpy plastic carrier bag that was packed with chocolate and other goodies. “I can’t help being a little overweight. My mum and grandma are big. It runs in the family.”

  Ben laughed. “Give me a break, Frog. You are what you eat, they say. And you eat tons of junk food.”

  Tommy’s problem, to a degree, was because he couldn’t get involved in sport. He had never played football or participated in PE at school, due to the fact that he had been born with a withered right leg that was encased in a hinged metal splint called a calliper, unseen under his baggy cargo pants. He was permanently lame, and walked with a slight limp.

  Tommy gritted his teeth, really annoyed at being called Frog, which was a nickname Ben had given him, and one that all the other kids at school had picked up on. Sam was about the only person who called him Tommy these days, apart from his mum. And he didn’t look like a poxy frog, he thought, blinking his large, bulging and amphibious looking eyes, which appeared even bigger, magnified behind black-rimmed glasses with lenses as thick as bull’s-eye windows.

  “So let’s go, guys,” Sam said, shaking her head to reposition her blonde ponytail from where it was snagged on her shoulder.

  They rode out of Grassington, not stopping until they had passed through the village of Hebden and travelled another two miles.

  Ben pulled off the road into thick bracken, and Sam and Tommy followed him. They hid their bikes among waist-high ferns and set off on foot into the forest, up to one of their favourite spots, that was a limestone cliff offering magnificent views of the countryside. Each time they came, they approached the ridge by a different route, finding new deer trails to follow to make the trip fresh and exciting. After half an hour of climbing upwards, with only the noise of their feet scrunching pine needles, twigs and cones, and Tommy complaining that his leg was aching, and that he needed to rest, they neared the top.

  The bright, hot sun vanished behind lead-coloured clouds, and the air was suddenly cooler. Fog drifted between tree trunks, curling towards them, and they were soon engulfed by it and unable to see more than a few feet in any direction.

  “Where’d this come from?” Tommy gasped, stopping and sitting down with his back against the gnarled trunk of a tree.

  “Who knows?” Sam said, shivering and taking her backpack off, to pull her fleece out and quickly put it on. “But it’s cold and spooky. Let’s go back and carry on to the reservoir.”

  “It all adds to the fun,” Ben said.

  “You mean getting lost in thick fog on a summer’s day is fun?” Tommy grumbled, jabbing his glasses up his snub nose, only for them to slide back down again.

  “Lighten up, Frog,” Ben said. “It’s only a bit of hill fog. It won’t kill you.”

  After a few minutes, when Tommy had got his breath back, Ben helped him to his feet and they set off in what they thought was the right direction, but soon realised that they were lost. They carried on, and broke through the fog as if they were emerging from a thick cloud. The sky was blue, and the sun was out again, warming them instantly.

  “I don’t recognise this place,” Sam said, staring up at the twisted columns of grey rock in front of them, which had been shaped by time and wind and rain.

  “Over there,” Ben said, pointing to a large gap between two craggy pillars. “Let’s see where that leads.”

  Sam and Tommy reluctantly followed him. Ben was twelve and three quarters, which was three months older than Sam, and a whole six months older than Tommy. Ben was also the tallest, and with the combined advantage of height and age, had become their leader.

  They picked their way carefully through the narrow chasm of cold, wet limestone. The rock above them leaned inwards, almost forming a roof, and only a thin slice of sky stopped them from think
ing that they were in a dark cavern.

  After what seemed a long time, Ben stopped dead in his tracks, and Tommy – who always looked anywhere but in the direction he was going, and had the scars to prove it – walked slap bang into him, nearly knocking him over.

  “Watch where you’re going, dummy,” Ben said, whipping off his Warner Bros baseball cap that featured Taz on the front, and swiping Tommy across the ear with it.

  “Ouch!” Tommy exclaimed, staggering backwards into Sam. “Wasn’t my fault. You stopped for no reason.”

  “Shuddup, Frog. You’re an accident waiting to happen. And do you call that no reason?” Ben said, standing aside so that the other two could move up and see the lake far below them, and the cascade of foaming water that fed into it.

  “Wow, a waterfall!” Sam said. “That’s awesome.”

  “And look at the colour of the lake,” Ben said.

  The lake was nestled in a natural bowl of rock, almost circular in shape, and larger than Wembley football stadium. The waterfall roared down into it like a shimmering silver curtain. And the lake itself appeared to be a vivid turquoise, not the pale blue colour of the sky, which should have been reflected off its surface.

  “How come it’s that colour?” Tommy asked.

  “Search me,” Ben said.

  “Can we get down to it?” Sam asked.

  They were standing at the top of a steep slope of shale that angled down to the lakeside.

  “Let’s try,” Ben said, and without pausing he stepped onto the loose flakes of rock, tried to keep on his feet, but slipped back onto his bottom and slid most of the way on the shifting, moving rubble, digging his heels in to slow his descent.

  Once at the bottom, Ben looked up and waved for Sam and Tommy to follow. “It’s easy,” he shouted, and his voice echoed around the cliffs: It’s easy…It’s easy…It’s easy.

  “You go,” Tommy said to Sam. “I don’t think I could make it. I’ll wait here.”

  “Hey, it’s all for one and one for all,” Sam said. “We stick together like the Three Musketeers. Right?”

  “Hello. Earth calling Sam and Frog,” Ben shouted up. “Are you two coming?”

  “Come on,” Sam said, grasping Tommy’s hand. “We’ll slide down on our bums, like Ben did”

  Tommy pulled a face. “Could be painful.”

  “Whatever Ben can do, we can do. Let’s go.”

  They held hands and screamed all the way down, the same as they’d done the previous summer on a rollercoaster ride at Alton Towers.

  At the bottom, the three of them took their backpacks off and sat on top of a big, flat rock that jutted out and overhung the lake. The surface of the rock was almost too hot to touch. It wasn’t midday yet, but if they’d had an egg, Sam was sure that they could have just cracked it on the stone and watched it fry in seconds.

  “I wish these mountain lakes weren’t freezing cold,” Ben said. “I’d love to go for a dip.”

  It was then that Sam once again heard a ringing sound in her ears, this time much louder than before. She thought she was going to faint, and had she been standing up, she would have without doubt fallen down. After a moment or two, her head cleared, but she felt different.

  “The water’s warm,” she said. “like a heated swimming pool.”

  “Yeah, and my mum’s Kylie Minogue,” Ben said.

  “Reach down and dip your fingers in if you don’t believe me,” Sam said.

  Ben shook his head. “So that you can push me in? I’m not that stupid.”

  Sam had already taken her fleece off to sit on, and without saying another word she untied the laces of her Nikes, pulled them and her ankle socks off, quickly got up, took three steps to the edge of the rock and dived off it, still wearing her T-shirt and frayed denim shorts.

  It was warm. She had somehow known that it would be. And that was not all. The ringing she had heard came back, and seemed to be in the lake, rippling through the water. It could have been her imagination, but the tinkling, musical sound tickled her skin. She surfaced almost halfway across the lake. How could that be? She should only be a few feet from the rocky shore, where Ben and Tommy now looked very small and far away. They were both on their feet, waving, shouting to her, but the roar of the waterfall drowned out their voices. She watched as Ben kicked off his trainers and jumped into the water, still wearing his T-shirt and jeans, to swim out towards her.

  Ben was smiling when he reached her. “How did you know it would be warm?” he asked.

  Sam shrugged. “I just did,” she said. “Did you hear the bells?”

  “Yeah. And I’m tingling all over. What’s happening, Sam?”

  “Something magical. I think the sound is coming from behind the waterfall.”

  “Shall we go and explore?”

  Sam nodded, and headed to where the wall of water hit the lake and sent up giant welts of foam and spray. She could see a rainbow formed in the mist of droplets.

  They swam through the waterfall, and were instantly in a twilight world. The water was still warm, but the air was chilly and gave them goose pimples above where their shoulders broke the surface. It was very quiet, as though the dripping walls of the giant cave they were now in was absorbing the sound and sucking it into the depths of the mountain that surrounded it.

  “Now what?” Ben said in a hushed whisper, no louder than he would speak if he was in a library. “There’s nothing here.”

  Sam squinted into the darkness and saw a faint yellow glow shining up through the water.

  “Over there,” she said, and made off towards it. The sound of the bells grew louder as she neared the bright patch of water. She stopped above it, doggy paddling, and waited for Ben to join her.

  Looking down, they could see something bright far below them. Without any hesitation, Sam upended like a duck and swam down the shaft of light. She thought she might not be able to hold her breath for long enough to reach the bottom and make it back to the surface, until a voice in her head told her to keep going. She swam faster, and at last she touched the shiny, smooth object, grasped it and pulled it free from the sand it was half covered by. A warmth ran up through her hands into her arms, to spread out and fill her completely. The bursting, aching sensation in her lungs disappeared, and she felt that as long as she held the mysterious metal container, then she would have no need to take another breath.

  Back on the surface, Ben took hold of one of the two curved handles of what was a large cup, and they used one arm each to swim out into the light and across the turquoise lake to where Tommy was standing on the shore eating a large chocolate-covered doughnut.

  “Whatcha got?” he muttered through the pastry, spitting out crumbs with the words.

  “Looks just like one of the trophies my dad has won in golf tournaments,” Ben said. “But this is brass or something. His are silver plated.”

  “It isn’t brass,” Sam said. “It’s gold. Solid gold.”

  Sam turned the heavy cup upside down to empty the water from it, and then placed it the right way up on top of a large boulder. The three of them stood in front of it and watched droplets of turquoise water run down its sides like raindrops on a window pane, to pool around its thick base and stain the rock.

  The cup began to ring and vibrate.

  “Sounds like a harp,” Tommy said, wiping chocolate from the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I think it sounds more like birds singing,” Ben said.

  Sam disagreed with both of them. To her, the noise coming from the cup still sounded like breeze blown wind chimes, or maybe the light tinkle of high notes on a piano.

  “There’s some writing on it,” Tommy said, pushing his glasses up his nose and bending forward until his eyes were only two inches from the curved surface of the gleaming vessel.

  “What does it say?” Ben asked.

  “Dunno. Looks just like the Greek alphabet in the back of my dic
tionary. All funny symbols.”

  Ben put his face next to Tommy’s. To him, the markings were more like the pictures that the ancient Egyptians used: Hieroglyphs. That was what they were called. Drawings instead of writing.

  “Let me see,” Sam said, pushing between them. For a second she felt very dizzy again. She studied the strange symbols and meaningless letters engraved into the gold. They were faint, and she thought that the cup must be very old for them to have nearly worn away. And then her bright blue eyes widened in disbelief as the writing began to move. The letters and pictures came alive and wriggled and rearranged themselves into English, to form the words: VIRTUE IS ITS OWN REWARD.

  As soon as Sam had read the writing, it returned to its original gobbledygook.

  “Did you see that?” she asked Ben and Tommy.

  “See what?” Ben said.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Tommy said.

  “You must have seen it,” Sam said. “Just for a second, the writing changed. It was in English.”

  “Was not,” Tommy said. “I never took my eyes off it, and nothing happened.”

  After being in the warm, turquoise water, hearing the bells, and seeing the glow that led them to the cup, Ben didn’t doubt Sam. “What did it say, Sam?” he asked.

  “Virtue is its own reward,” she said, running the tip of her index finger along the row of strange symbols that they all saw as something different.

  “And just what exactly is that supposed to mean?” Ben asked, picking the cup up and turning it upside down to look for a hallmark. If it really was gold, then it should have one. And, yes, there was something stamped on the bottom. It was a hand holding a hammer over an anvil.

  “Bet it’s an antique Viking or Roman thing,” Tommy said. “It could be worth a fortune.”

  “You found it, Sam. Put it in your backpack and let’s get out of here,” Ben said. “This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

  Sam tucked the cup inside her backpack, and when she and Ben had put their trainers back on, the three of them began to climb back up the slope to where they had first seen the lake through the passageway in the cliffs. When they reached the ledge, the opening was gone. They looked left and right, but there was only solid rock. It was as if the stone had healed up like a cut. The ridge that towered above them and encircled the lake was vertical and smooth, with no visible breaks in it.

  “We’re trapped. What do we do now? How do we get out of here?” Tommy wailed.

  “I think it’s the cup,” Ben said. “We shouldn’t have taken it. Maybe if we put it back where we found it, then everything will go back to normal.”

  Sam thought he was right. The cup was working some kind of spell.

  They slid, slipped and scrabbled back down, stepping carefully between boulders, to where the water lapped against the shore.

  That was when it happened. They all saw the same thing, and stood frozen to the spot. The air shimmered, and there were crackling, popping sounds coming from all around them. The waterfall stopped falling, to become solid like a giant icicle, before lifting up from the lake’s surface and beginning to flow again, but backwards, to vanish over the top of the cliff.

  Nature was playing tricks. A whirlpool appeared at the centre of the lake, spinning and growing. The noise was deafening. And with a mighty thunderclap, the water parted to form an avenue between two steep liquid walls.

  “This isn’t funny,” Tommy whispered. “I want to go home.”

  “It’s like what Moses did, parting the Red Sea,” Ben said.

  “I th..think we’re meant to g..go in,” Sam stammered.

  “No chance,” Tommy said, turning and running away from the lake just as fast as his lame leg would allow. He took no more than six steps, before crashing into an invisible wall, to bounce back off it and fall down.

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked, rushing over to where Tommy was sitting up and taking off his glasses.

  “Uh! No,” he said. “I’ve hurt my nose.”

  “Did you slip, Frog?” Ben asked him.

  “No. I hit something. There’s a...a force field.”

  Ben wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Instead, with his arms outstretched, he walked in the direction Tommy had been running. Sure enough, the palms of his hands came up against an unseen barrier. It felt spongy, and gave a little, but he couldn’t push his fingers through it. The harder he pressed, the more it seemed to resist. And it was moving, approaching them. If it didn’t stop, then they would be forced into the channel that now split the lake in two.

  “I think I’m having a nightmare,” Ben said. “Pinch me.”

  Sam nipped his arm.

  Ben yelped. “Okay, so I’m awake. Now what do we do?”

  Sam shrugged. “We’ll have to go across the lake.”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  As if in answer, the invisible wall reached them, to gently but firmly press them backwards.

  Huddling together, they walked out onto the slippery stones. With every step, Ben and Tommy expected the quivering, towering turquoise walls of water at either side of them to come crashing down to smash and drown them. But Sam was certain that no harm would befall them. She was absolutely positive that the gold cup possessed magical powers that would protect them.

  As they reached the far shore, the water collapsed with a deafening crash to fill the path they had taken through it. Ahead of them was a bank of fog. It was bright pink, and looked so thick that it might have been made out of candy floss or cotton wool.

  They walked into the fog, passed through it, and came out into the sun-dappled glade of an oak wood. When they looked back, both the fog and the lake had disappeared. Only trees stretched away in every direction for as far as they could see.

  “My oh my, you shouldn’t be here,” a sandpapery voice said from above them.

  Sitting high up on the branch of a tree was a large bird. It was as black as a crow, but bigger than a golden eagle. It flapped down onto the lush grass and hopped over to stand in front of them.

  “What are you?” it asked, glaring at them with yellow, glassy eyes.

  ―