Rampage!

by Wills, Julia; Hartas, Leo ;

  Instantly, six ears twitched at the sound. Six ruby-red eyes slid round to regard the sorceress. Medea chuckled and held out her hand as the creature stretched up on to its paws, arched its back and padded over to her. For a moment she ran her milky-white fingers lovingly through its fur, rubbing each of its ears in turn as it nuzzled its heads against her. Then, taking it gently by the scruff of the neck, she led it into the jungle, knelt down beside it and, leaning her forehead against the creature’s middle head, began chanting her dark charms and imagining its claws tearing through Aries’ flesh. In her mind’s eye she saw the ram’s horns vanishing one last time beneath a fury of pounding paws and felt a cold swell of delight as beside her the giant cat purred with understanding.

  Finally drawing back, she tilted its middle head up and kissed its nose. ‘Go hunt.’

  A moment later, the monstrous cat sloped away into the darkening jungle, its heads keenly sniffing the air around it.

  38 They don’t tidy their bedrooms, smile for the camera or clean out their hamster cages either.

  39 A rather unpleasant habit that she hadn’t indulged in since the age of ten.

  40 No pudding for me, thanks.

  THINGS THAT GO BUMP! HISS! RAAR! TIPPITY-TAP! ‘EEK! WHAT WAS THAT?’ IN THE NIGHT

  Night falls quickly in the jungle, stuffing every nook and cranny with a thick, velvety blackness. Tree trunks veiled in darkness start to slither and squeak, hissing and rasping with secret visitors. Invisible ferns rustle with the snuffling of unseen rats. And scuttly-wuttly things with far too many legs plop on your mosquito screen like trapeze artists tumbling into safety nets.

  Plunge!

  Whee!

  Splat!

  Or at least they do until the bigger things slink down from the branches and gobble them up.

  Which hardly made Alex feel any better.

  Despite the sheer exhaustion that made his body seem heavier than a Spartan’s shield, since falling into his hammock a few hours ago he’d lain awake, prickling at every screech and squeal and sudden snap of a twig underfoot. Not to mention the eerie three-voiced roar that repeatedly splintered the night, sounding louder and closer each time it keened, like a pack of wolves in the wilderness.

  Actually, let’s not mention that.

  Shuddering, he stared up at the impenetrable gloom overhead, thinking of how the rainforest at night reminded him of the Underworld Zoo, in those hours after the visitors had gone home, when the most ferocious monsters stirred into life. Creatures like Hydra, the huge, many-headed lizard. Easily the sleepiest exhibit in the daytime, frustrating the crowds by lying like a grey hillock, snoozing at the bottom of her tank, things were very different in the dark. And, much as Alex loved her, whenever he caught sight of her greasy scales, big as dinner plates, pulsing against the glass wall of her pool as she dragged herself up into the moonlight, he was always hugely glad that she was enclosed behind monster-proof mesh.

  Unlike the predators here.

  Not that the eeriness of the jungle was the only thing keeping him awake, I’m afraid. No, his unease had started much earlier, soon after bundling Aries into his hammock41 when he’d returned to chat with Jason over the campfire. Emboldened from having saved the Argonaut from the wasps’ nest earlier in the day and feeling as though the three of them (and the Gorgon and snakes) were at last on the quest together, he’d shared his own ideas with Jason on how they could defeat Medea. The one where Alex would strum the lyre to momentarily distract her whilst Jason slipped the statue into her hand. The one where they could sneakily follow her out into the jungle, zap her with a lightning storm from Zeus’s thunderbolt to freeze her long enough to tuck it beneath her arm. The one where Aries could butt her into the river and, when she stretched out for help, stick Nemesis neatly in her grasping fingers.

  Sighing, he felt his face grow warm again, blushing with that same mixture of embarrassment and anger that he’d felt when Jason had simply smiled indulgently at him, as if Alex were just a child. ‘That needn’t concern you or Aries,’ he’d said, flinging the rest of the fish bones from his supper into the fire, and watching the flames sputter with blue light. ‘I’ll handle it myself.’

  Handle it himself?

  Medea?

  So much for working together, piped up a sour little voice in his mind, or for learning any hero tricks. Alex bristled, thinking back to the Caves of Acheron, of watching Jason sword-fight using the stick of driftwood, and wondering if he’d teach him to fight as gracefully too, and felt freshly foolish.

  Yesterday, when Jason had punched him on the shoulder as playfully as a big brother, he’d really thought they were a team. But now he was beginning to realise that while Jason relied on him to read the map, catch the fish for dinner using Artemis’s arrows, build the fire and cook, he clearly didn’t think he was good enough to help with the important things.

  Suddenly the triple yowl echoed through the jungle again, closer than ever, and, thoroughly rattled, Alex slid out of his hammock. Even if Jason thought he was only about as much use as a chocolate sandal, he consoled himself that he could at least protect the camp by stoking up the fire to ward off any circling carnivores. Beside him, Grass Snake shivered off the shield and began passing him twigs and kindling in his mouth to help. Back in old Greece, he’d been one of hundreds of non-venomous snakes who slithered around the floors of Hippocrates’s healing sanctuary on Kos where he’d loved nothing better than building lots of lovely sparkly fires for purifying water. (To be honest, it’d been much more fun than all the hissing and wriggling he’d had to do in the long, boring ceremonies dedicated to Asclepius, the god of medicine, where the priests would fling him round their heads until he felt almost as sick as the patients.) Now, watching the blaze and knowing it would scare off even the most determined prowlers, they both felt calmer.

  On the other side of the clearing, Aries grumbled in his sleep, muttering uneasily, tangled in his mosquito nets. Yet Jason slept on soundly, the sword of Achilles laid alongside him in the hammock. Alex watched the splashes of firelight playing over his dirt-smeared features, lending him nobility even out here.

  Trust them, he thought, to be stuck with someone who wanted it to go it alone, determined to be the hero and scoop up all the glory right to the end. Except that, now, the more he thought about it, the odder it seemed. After all, on the quest for the Fleece, Jason had had no fewer than fifty helpers, Argonauts who’d fought beside him, battled the harpies and boxed with a king who wouldn’t let the Argo pass until someone stepped into the ring with him. And even though Alex knew that Jason had done all the dangerous bits by himself, he’d still taken a little of Medea’s help, wearing her magical salve to protect him against the fire-breathing bulls and waiting until she’d enchanted Drako before he clambered up the deadly serpent’s coils. So why wouldn’t he even listen to anybody now? Was it really because it came from a boy and a ram? Even allowing for Jason’s huge pride and achievements, they were still up against a vicious sorceress, and it hardly made sense to ignore every one of Alex’s suggestions.

  Jabbing the fire with a branch of mahogany wood, Alex felt a sour twinge of unease wrap itself around his heart, enfolding it like an anaconda. And, as he thought about how the other Greek heroes had achieved their missions, he felt it start to squeeze: Theseus had gladly taken Ariadne’s ball of wool, spooling it behind him so that he could find his way back out of the Minotaur’s maze; Herakles had asked his nephew to sear the stumps of Hydra’s necks with a flaming torch after he lopped off each head, to stop more from sprouting. Alex glanced curiously at the shield and the snakes and Gorgon sleeping beneath its silvered veneer. Even Perseus had needed to ask for directions to find Medusa from the Grey Sisters. So why, if men like that could rely on princesses, boys and a group of hags with only one eye between them, would Jason flatly refuse their help? It didn’t make sense. Unless, he thought, there was something Jason wasn’t telling them about what he planned to do.

  He looked over at
Aries, still snuffling in his hammock and knew that the ram would have lots of suspicions and doubtless each would be more dreadful and unbelievable than the last. But even so, by the time the tree frogs began their morning burp-chorus high above him, Alex still hadn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why Jason was being quite so secretive and, slinging Artemis’s bows and arrows over his shoulder, he headed down to the river, feeling more unsettled than ever.

  41 Such beds, even ones bought by world-famous pop stars, are not designed for rams. This is because when the hammock is high enough off the ground to be useful, the ram can’t clamber into it, but when it’s low enough to step into, the ram is left standing up with his belly gift-wrapped. How delightful.

  GREAT PUFFBALLS OF FIRE!

  Rose wasn’t having the greatest of mornings either.

  Squinting through the same early grey gloom as Alex, some ten miles west of her, she slipped and slithered over squelches of rotting leaves, catching a glimpse of Medea as she vanished behind the next twist of trees up ahead. Deft as a tarantula, the sorceress scuttled on, picking her way over tree roots, the rolled-up map tucked beneath her arm, whilst Rose gasped, losing her footing, her mind tumbling with the strange new words that she’d just been rehearsing.

  Linque tenebras!

  Leave the shadows!

  Mihi accede, umbra!

  Come to me, ghost.

  They squirmed and spun in her head, dark and unknowable, writhing about each other like the tentacles of a bloated jellyfish. Medea had insisted they use Latin because Wat had been a learned man and it would draw him more easily. Shuddering, she stumbled into an acacia tree, seething with ants, and yelped. Latin, English, Greek? What did it matter? She still found herself wishing wholeheartedly that she’d been left in her hammock fast asleep. Rather than having been rudely roused by the sorceress’s nerve-freezing whisper telling her that dawn was the best time for raising a ghost. Which, as alarm calls go, certainly beats a jangling clock on the nightstand.

  The idea had horrified her and it still did. Things like turning a butterfly into a caterpillar, even fleetingly bringing her father back to talk with her, suddenly seemed like child’s play compared to this fully fledged sorcery. But then, it wasn’t as if she’d had much choice, because as Medea had calmly pointed out, the summoning spell was a truly difficult one, and if she had to do it all by herself, then she’d end up using so much of the bangle’s remaining power that there simply wouldn’t be enough of it left to retrieve the gold from the lagoon anyway. Meaning that if Rose were truly serious about bringing her father back, she’d have to steel herself to do it.

  Rose turned and ran on again, feeling her breath snag in her lungs. A moment later, still trembling with nerves, she dipped her head beneath a low-hanging branch and found herself in a small clearing. On the opposite side, Medea stood poised, framed by the sprawling exposed roots of a huge mahogany tree. Between them, a few low stones jutted tipsily from the ground, standing in a line ending in a taller, more elaborately carved one.

  Looking down at them, Rose felt a jolt. Obviously she hadn’t imagined that a makeshift graveyard in the middle of the jungle would be like the cemeteries in London – all tended lawns, primped yew trees and scrubbed stones set with urns of chrysanthemums – but even so, she felt saddened by the clutch of headstones, rain-eroded and forgotten, cloaked in moss. She walked along the row, pausing to read the single names carved into each one: Carlos, Matias, Enrique, Fernando. The names sounded Spanish and it struck her as odd – after all, Wat was an English name – and she might have asked the sorceress to whom they belonged, except that Medea was waiting for her with a face as tight as a limpet. Standing beside the grandest stone at the end, the sorceress held out her arms like half a bridge, clasping the bangle between her fingers.

  Quickening her pace, and careful not to step on any of the graves, Rose hurried to stand opposite her and glanced down.

  Wat Raleigh

  Killed in battle

  3rd January in the year of our Lord 1618.

  The name, Wat Raleigh, seemed almost familiar, like someone famous enough that she might have learned about them at school, but history wasn’t Rose’s favourite lesson and she’d probably only have been doodling in her jotter when the teacher talked about the yawny old Tudors and Stuarts.

  Stretching out her arms, she tried to slow her breathing to calm the thrum of blood drumming in her ears and took hold of the other side of the bangle, fleetingly surprised at how much thinner and rougher it felt than the day before. She waited, the pose reminding her of the turns they had to do in country dancing.

  ‘Start walking anti-clockwise,’ said Medea. ‘And don’t stop until I tell you.’

  Rose closed her eyes and began to move, shivering as the sorceress started the spell.

  ‘Mihi accede, Wat Raleigh!’

  The words sounded weirder than ever, out here in the jungle dawn. Stumbling over the uneven ground, Rose took a deep breath and repeated her own part of the chant through dry lips: ‘Linque tenebras! Mihi accede, umbra!’

  Over and over, their incantations wove together, twining up through the trees, sounding strange against the chorus of frogs now in full song above them. Rose tried to close off the jungle around her, concentrating hard to remember her own set of words and to curb the rising dizziness she felt as they revolved together over the soil. Each half of the spell was made to dance around the other to make the whole thing work, rather like the parts of those rounds songs you sing at school, ‘London’s Burning’ or ‘Frère Jacques’, except that no matter how well you sing those, they’ll never summon a spook.42

  Suddenly the bangle jumped beneath their fingers. Startled, Rose’s mind went blank for a second, but hearing the sorceress still muttering, her voice tinged with excitement, Rose screwed her eyes tighter shut, kept her feet moving and forced her mind back on to her words.

  A breeze began blowing through the glade. It lifted the hair at the nape of her neck, cooling her. Around her, the air seemed to fizz and crackle, the way it did before a thunderstorm, and she felt her senses prickling, primed and ready for something to happen. Even so, she still jumped as a deafening swoosh of cold air slammed between her and the sorceress, freezing her face as surely as if she’d walked into an air-conditioned room.

  Of course, had Rose had her eyes open she would have seen the ice-white bolt of lightning that had shot down from the canopy, blasting through the bangle like a ray of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. She’d have seen it slam into the soil, zapping a nearby Bird-of-Paradise plant with so much frazzling power that its beak-like flowers were now clucking like a tree full of macaws, before toppling over, singed, on to the ground. And she might even have noticed how the fizzing energy trickled outwards, spilling on to the other four graves in flashes of light.

  But she didn’t.

  To be fair, I suppose that the sound of one grave being drenched by magic – a sort of whoosh-splut-zzzng – is much the same as the whoosh-splut-zzzng that the other graves standing in the row behind it make when they’re being doused, too. And besides, her attention was now wholly focused on the fact that the sorceress had stopped moving and chanting. Opening her eyes, she looked across at Medea, noticing her fair skin was tinged pink with effort.

  ‘It’s done,’ she said, glancing down at the grave.

  Rose followed her gaze and blinked to see a flurry of silver stars hovering over the soil.

  Then she looked back into the sorceress’s eyes.

  Medea smiled darkly. ‘Now we wait.’

  Well, that’s enough of all that.

  I don’t know about you, but all that grubbing about in the dark, worrying about ferocious great animals with more teeth than a shop full of piranhas only to break for a ghastly beckoning of ghosts has left me quite wibbly.

  So, I’m off somewhere more genteel, where the manners are as polished as croquet balls.

  Dorset.

  Nestled on England’s south
coast, this county is home to craggy cliffs, harbours with little bobby boats and fields of pink-nosed cows that twirl their tails and make cream for scones. And the ghost of Wat Raleigh, of course, who at that moment was carrying his croquet mallet across the East Lawn of Sherborne House and chatting to his parents, Sir Walter and Lady Bess. Unlike ghosts from the Greek Underworld, who are as solid as you or me, English ghosts (and particularly those belonging to the aristocracy) are a far more traditional lot in their appearance and are quite invisible to ordinary people. True, they might occasionally allow themselves to be glimpsed along a galleried corridor or hover unnervingly around the chandeliers of a great hall, but for the most part they’re as see-through as bubbles and almost as floaty.

  Centuries ago, Wat and his father – as you may recall from the portrait hanging in Medea’s private gallery – had been flamboyant explorers inspired by stories of the New World. But you wouldn’t think so to look at Wat now. He hardly appeared to be the daring young man who’d been felled by a Spanish musket-ball in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, cut down in his prime, which, I’m afraid, is what four hundred years of playing croquet with your mum and dad will do for you. Instead, stooped over his mallet to take his next shot with his short cloak tucked back over his shoulders like wings, he looked more like a disgruntled crane,43 an illusion compounded by the flamboyant puffball trousers he wore, from which thin, white-stockinged legs emerged and ended in over-the-knee boots.