Clement shoved his phone into his pocket and wrapped his scarf around his neck. He hoisted his backpack on and followed Phyllis and Daisy to the foot of the stairs.
‘C’mon, Daisy girl.’ Phyllis lifted Daisy and snuggled her gently into her shoulder bag.
Then she looked upwards. ‘That’s funny,’ she said.
‘What’s funny?’ Clement asked.
‘Look. The TimePocket. It’s different.’
Clement peered over the rims of his glasses. He squinted at the top area of the staircase, then looked through the lenses of his glasses. ‘I can’t see any TimePocket.’
‘It’s very . . . pale,’ Phyllis observed.
‘Huh. No wonder I can’t see it.’
‘You can’t see it because you’re not a true Transiter. But it’s there,’ Phyllis murmured. ‘Hopefully it’ll be strong enough . . . Okay, get behind me and hold on tight. When I say the word, we run.’
‘Yeah, well, let’s go.’ He clutched the hem of her coat.
Phyllis held the Sphere close to her lips. ‘Sianalac, sianalac, sianalac,’ she whispered into it.
Then she shouted, ‘GO!’ and she and Clement hurtled up the stairs.
The pale TimePocket glinted with a yellowy sparkliness, pulsating and dimming, and the centre of it swelled velvety-dark.
As a faint breeze wafted out of it, Phyllis and Clement bounded up the last few steps and plunged deep into its void.
All it took this time was half a minute of floating, sailing . . . There was no huge turbulence, only a series of bumps through the darkness—nothing more jolting than they would have felt being in a car on a lightly pot-holed roadway.
They stepped out, calmly, with barely a hair on their heads ruffled, onto a short flight of outside stairs next to a building in the countryside—a modern-looking building with glass doors and big windows. All the doors and windows were closed.
Opposite the stairs, at the end of a path, was a fence made of posts and wire, and a revolving iron gate.
‘Is this it?’ asked Clement, looking around.
‘I hope so.’ Phyllis opened her bag, pulled Daisy out, went down the stairs and put her on the grass. The terrier blinked, wondering where the basement had got to. Then she shook herself vigorously—her ears flapping loudly—and began sniffing around by the fence posts.
‘Hey, Clemeleon Dude, your eyes haven’t gone green.’
‘Neither have yours.’
‘Hmm.’ Phyllis took out her Date Determinator. ‘That was the smoothest Transit ever.’ She pressed the button on the Determinator and watched as the three rows of brass numbers started spinning. The clicking of the whizzing gears sounded loud against the silence of the surrounding fields.
The emerald and yellow sapphire lights shone, and the Determinator gave its sudden CLICK as the numbers came to an abrupt stop.
Phyllis raised her eyebrows. ‘Clem? What was the date when we left the basement?’
He told her—he knew it straight off because it was a day he was supposed to be having a xylophone lesson.
‘Hmm.’ Phyllis put the Date Determinator back into her pocket. ‘We’ve arrived here only the day before we left. Same year, same week, just the day before.’
‘We’ve got here yesterday, you mean?’
‘We have.’
Clement patted his cheek and said, in a Leizel Cunbrus sort of simper, ‘I feel younger already!’
‘Ha ha,’ said Phyllis. ‘Gee, the place is deserted.’
‘Apart from them,’ Clement observed. On the hillside, dozens of sheep were grazing quietly. He saw something else, too, and pointed out a sign above the doors of the building: Calanais Visitors’ Centre, it read. ‘It is the place,’ he said, grinning.
‘The stones must be through that gate and up over the rise,’ said Phyllis. ‘Let’s go. C’mon, Miss Daisy!’
They went through the revolving gate one at a time, and started along a path that led up the rise. After a few steps, Phyllis stopped and gasped.
Beside her, Clement did the same.
‘Beautiful!’ Phyllis breathed.
‘Cool,’ Clement said.
There before them, the Standing Stones of Calanais stretched across the field, beginning with a line of sarsen stones leading up to an inner circle of taller, weathered stones. From the other side of the circle, another line of stones radiated out, and from each side of the circle there was another line. The whole arrangement was in the shape of a cross, with a circular centre.
In the inner circle, surrounded by smaller stones, stood a heavy monolith. It was the tallest of all the stones, and Phyllis estimated that it was nearly five metres high.
The stones weren’t as tall as Stonehenge and, as Mrs Zepple had mentioned, there were no lintel slabs above them. But these differences didn’t make the Calanais stones any less striking than Stonehenge. Phyllis stood perfectly still, letting her eyes drink in the silent, enduring majesty of Calanais.
As she stood there, being quietly overawed, Daisy trotted off towards the centre of the stones. She was excited by all the smells of the rocks and grass and sheep and some water, which she sensed lay somewhere ahead.
Clement was busy counting the stones. ‘Hey,’ he said after a while. ‘There’s more than two dozen. I’ll have to walk right around the place to get the exact number—I can’t see all of ’em from here . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Phyllis, in a far-away voice. ‘Let’s get in there.’
The wind came up then, like an invisible wave surging across the hills.
‘B-r-r-r,’ Clem shivered. He tightened his scarf. ‘Hey, wait for me!’ he called after Phyllis.
She wandered into the stones and walked amongst them slowly, taking in their shapes and ruggedness, and the way some of them were standing almost perfectly upright, while others were leaning. Some of the weathered surfaces had soft carpets of green lichen growing up their sides. On other stones, Phyllis saw crystals of quartz glinting in the sunlight, almost winking at her.
Clem wandered off, counting again. He found that he had to skirt around the perimeter to see all the stones—but even when he did this, it seemed impossible to get an accurate total, for whenever he moved, the Standing Stone right in front of him would obscure maybe three or four that he hadn’t yet counted, and then he’d lose count and would have to start again.
Daisy had made her way to the centre of the circle. Her senses had been right: there, in front of the largest stone, was a small well. Some shorter stones stood in a ring around it.
Phyllis came up to her. ‘Hey, Daisy girl. What’ve you found?’
Daisy yapped and poked her snout close to the water. Phyllis peered into the well. The water was rich in its blueness, like a dark mirror, but Phyllis was surprised that she couldn’t see her own, or Daisy’s, reflection in the well.
Phyllis breathed in a great lungful of air, shut her eyes and felt . . . centred. She had a strange sort of connection to this place, and a sense of tranquility. It was an exciting feeling, a mixture of calm, tinged with the hope that great, unknown possibilities could come from here. She felt that she’d Transited here for a reason. She hoped that reason was the one she was searching for.
She opened her eyes and looked out through the stones. Clem was now over by the gate, reading an information board that had diagrams and facts about Calanais.
A sudden burst of wind blew Phyllis’s hair horizontally back off her shoulders. She shivered, and went and sat on the grass near the tall monolith. Here she felt less exposed to the wind. Daisy joined her, lying sphinx-like on the grass beside her and licking her front paws.
The conjuror took out her journal from her bag and opened it to the page where she’d transcribed the inscription from Stonehenge. She re-read the words.
So this was his stargazing belvedere, she thought. This was the place he came to look at the stars and the planets. This was Myrddin’s sanctuary . . .
She closed her eyes and leant back against the monolith, st
retching her legs out in front of her. The photographs Orson Quilrose had given her slid out of her journal, onto the grass. Daisy stopped licking her paws for a moment, looked at the photos, then resumed her grooming.
This was the place, Phyllis thought, where he would view the Great Whimpering . . . when it happens . . .
‘Hey, Phyll! Guess what you’re sitting on?’ Clement’s voice came out of the blue, and Phyllis started.
He popped out from behind a stone. She gave him a dubious look. ‘If you’re going to be rude, Clem, don’t bother. I’m—’
‘Me? No! No, I just read on the board over there that right here, under this circle, is a tomb. A chambered tomb!’
‘Really?’
‘That’s what it said.’
Could it be? Phyllis wondered. But no, not a tomb. A tomb means death. It can’t be his—
All at once, an enormous black bird swooped down out of nowhere, its huge wings flapping silently as it rode the wind. It speared into the inner circle, skimmed the air above Phyllis’s legs and, with its long, dark beak, plucked up one of the photographs on the grass. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it soared back up into the sky.
Daisy jumped to her paws and barked angrily at the retreating bird.
‘Holy moley!’ blurted Clement. ‘Did you see that?’
Phyllis, shaking, shielded her eyes with her hand, trying to watch the bird flying against the sun. She couldn’t tell what sort of bird it was—it had come too fast, and gone too quickly, but in the fleeting seconds when it had swooped, she’d got the impression that it wasn’t a crow or a raven. It appeared bigger than either of those.
The bird flew in a wide arc against the sky. The sun made it too bright and glary for Phyllis to follow its course. She averted her eyes and then she saw, reflected in the deep blue water of the well, the bird’s reflection.
Strange, thought Phyllis. I can see its reflection, but not ours . . .
The bird’s image moved across the water, then stopped. It seemed to hover in the one place, as if it were riding a strong air current, just letting itself hang in the updraft. Then, as Phyllis watched the creature’s reflection in the mirror of the pool, it vanished.
‘It’s gone,’ Clement said, plonking himself down on one of the low stones. He slung off his backpack. ‘Man, I hate swooping birds. They give me the creeps.’
‘Me too,’ said Phyllis. She picked up the photos the bird hadn’t stolen. ‘It took one of the pictures I had.’
‘What of?’
Phyllis tucked the photos back into her journal. ‘Just something I collected,’ she replied, grateful that the bird hadn’t thieved her Transiting journal. The creature’s beak was certainly big enough to have lifted it.
‘I’ve got a cousin,’ Clement said, pulling his webPad from his pack, ‘who was swooped by a magpie once. It got him in the back of his head and he had to have seven stitches. He always wore sunglasses on the back of his head whenever he went out after that because—’
‘Clem! Look!’
Phyllis’s eyes were wide, and she was staring down at the pool of water. Clement squinted at it, but he couldn’t see anything unusual. ‘What?’ he asked, frowning.
‘A bubble. I just saw a bubble come up!’ Phyllis crawled forward and knelt closer to the edge of the water.
‘Huh?’
‘A bubble! It rose up to the surface and popped.’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘You were going on about your cousin. It was big.’
‘Probably just some gas escaping from inside the earth. It happens. I once played this game where these zombies—’
‘Shh! Here’s another one!’ Phyllis watched as a large round sphere of air rose up from the depths of the well. It hit the surface and then popped loudly.
Clement shoved his webPad back into his bag. ‘That one I saw,’ he said in a small voice.
Daisy had her front paws right at the very edge of the pool, her snout close to the water. When the bubble had popped, she had barked loudly at the intrusion.
‘Um . . .’ said Clement, ‘I think maybe we should be going?’
‘And another,’ said Phyllis, transfixed. A third bubble rose, bigger than the other two. It hit the pool’s surface, right in the centre of the water, and popped even louder than the others.
Daisy barked noisily.
A fourth bubble ascended and popped when it hit the air. Then, quickly, another bubble and another came, and more and more, all of them rising and popping with such speed that the well became like a swirling, dark cauldron.
Daisy greeted each bubble-burst with a strange yapping of curiosity and warning: ‘ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF! ARF!’
Clement stood. ‘Phyll, let’s go?’
Phyllis moved away from the edge of the water. She pulled Daisy back and got to her feet. Daisy strained to get nearer to the water again.
Then something happened that made Phyllis, Daisy and Clement freeze. With an enormous, squelching gurgle, the water in the well drained rapidly away, deep down into the bowels of the earth, until not a drop remained.
The three of them peered into the hole. There, glistening and green, leading away from them and descending into the gloom, was a flight of stairs.
Shifting shimmer
A minute passed, but for Phyllis Wong it seemed like an hour.
She stared down at the steps, her heart barely beating, her palms cold and clammy. She felt scared, and amazed, and shocked at the sudden manifestation of the staircase, and she felt compelled by the sight of it. She knew she had to venture down there.
‘Phyll,’ said Clement, pleadingly. ‘We should leave. I don’t think this is a good place. It feels . . . weird.’
The wind had died down to a gentle breeze. The only sound that wafted across Calanais was the distant and occasional baa-ing of sheep.
‘It is weird,’ Phyllis said without taking her eyes from the staircase. ‘That’s why we’re here, Clem. Those stairs are why we came.’
‘Huh?’
Daisy wriggled out of Phyllis’s grasp and, cautiously, ventured close to the lip of the hole. She glared balefully at the steps and growled.
Phyllis’s eyes lit up. ‘Jeepers!’ she gasped. ‘Look, Clem! Down near the bottom!’
‘Do I have to?’ He was squirming, taking small steps forward and then backwards.
‘Look!’ she urged.
Against his will, he inched closer to the edge. He pushed his glasses further up his nose and peered down into the dimness. All he could see were the green, glistening steps which faded away into a thick, smothering gloom.
‘Stairs,’ he said. ‘Then darkness. Is that what you mean?’
‘You can’t see it?’
‘See what?’
‘Of course you can’t,’ Phyllis said, more to herself than to him. ‘I forgot.’
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘A Pocket. Way down there. It’s faint, but it’s shimmering. Tiny shimmers of purple, sort of misty lights . . . That’s where we have to go . . .’
‘What? But, Phyll, this is a tomb! I told you what I read on that board. This is someone’s grave!’
‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ she said softly, her eyes focussing on the faint TimePocket.
‘There might be ghosts!’ Clement moaned. If there was one thing that unsettled him more than anything, it was ghosts.
‘I have to go down there, Clem.’
Daisy had stopped growling. She stood as still as a furry statue, waiting for Phyllis’s next move.
Clement looked at his friend. She was fully focussed on what was at the bottom of the stairs, and he knew that she’d made up her mind. And once Phyllis Wong’s mind was made up, there was no unmaking it.
‘Okay, then,’ he said feebly.
‘Stay close to me.’ She picked up Daisy and her bag and deposited Daisy into it.
‘I’m not going anywhere you’re not,’ said Clement. ‘Wait just a sec.’ He squa
tted down with his back to her and rummaged about in his backpack.
Phyllis smelt a sweet, pungent odour—the unmistakable reek of spirit gum.
When Clement turned around a few moments later, he was sporting a large handlebar moustache under his nose. He looked at Phyllis as though he had had the moustache all his life.
‘What the—?’ she began.
‘To make me look older,’ he said. ‘More formidable. In case we come up against anything . . .’ He shrugged and slung his backpack on. ‘I’m ready when you are.’
Phyllis thought that he looked like a walrus with glasses, but she didn’t say anything. She redirected her attention back to the lower realms of the stairs and the shimmering Pocket.
Clement stood behind her. Tentatively, he took hold of the hem of her coat.
The edges of the Pocket shifted and blurred, the purple, misty baubles of light seeming to float as if they were drops of the softest rain, hovering around the darkness in the centre of the Pocket.
‘I still can’t see anything down there,’ Clement whispered.
‘It’s there, all right. And I’m seeing it from above. I’ve never seen a Pocket from above, only from below.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Careful, now, these stairs look slippery.’
Clem gulped, and Phyllis started boldly down the steps.
Down, down, down, and then they’d crossed twelve steps and the TimePocket enveloped them, pulling them in with a suddenness that made Phyllis gasp. It was like an invisible fist had grabbed her and yanked her forward into the darkness.
For an instant, there was nothing under her feet; she could feel a great burst of wind, warm and eye-shuttingly strong, but it only lasted a few seconds. Clement lowered his face behind Phyllis’s shoulders as they hovered in the uncertainty.
Then a faint, high humming came—the same high humming that Phyllis heard on other Transits—and then, her eyes still tightly closed, she felt something firm beneath her feet. She opened her eyes and found that she and Clement were standing on timber stairs that led up to a wooden platform. The darkness had evaporated, and the place before them was bathed in golden sunlight.
‘Where are we?’ Clement asked, letting go of her coat and blinking at the light.
Phyllis Wong and the Waking of the Wizard Page 14