Frozen in Time

by Ali Sparkes

  ‘Wait!’ he breathed. ‘Me first—remember? I’m the eldest!’ She let him go willingly enough and he realized she was as scared as he was.

  The door opened normally, and beyond it lay another room, also lit by the orange lamps set on the walls. There was more shelving ahead, filled with more curious stuff, on one wall, and two sets of metal bunk beds, complete with mattresses and dark grey folded up blankets, lined the walls on either side of the door. Another door led off to their left. They walked to it as if mesmerized and pushed it open. Now another room—a kitchen, with small units painted cream and blue, slanted glass doors on the cabinets above them, filled with floral-patterned china. A low white sink with metal taps shaped like carrots was set into a pale blue work surface, decorated with little grey specs. ‘Formica,’ Ben mouthed. He opened one of the base cabinets and saw pots and pans.

  Rachel pulled open a cupboard set into a wall and found more packets and tins and bottles. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Heinz! It can’t be that long ago …’ She pulled out a tin and the familiar Heinz label glimmered in the orange light—although Ben could see that it was an old-fashioned design on dull paper. He walked over and looked into the cupboard and saw stack upon stack of square tins with SPAM on them. The label carried the promise ‘REAL MEAT FOR YOUR MONEY’ in old style letters.

  ‘Come on—we should keep going,’ he said, quietly, as if he might wake ghosts hiding among the stacks of tins.

  ‘Wait! Look—sweets!’ Rachel scooped a waxed paper tube out of the cupboard. It was orange with yellow stripes and apparently cost 3d. ‘Spangles,’ murmured Rachel, turning the square tube in her palm. ‘Deliciously fruity—excitingly new …’ she turned to a new side of the tube. ‘The sweet way to go gay.’ She giggled and Ben snorted.

  ‘Oh-kay,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave the fruity excitement alone … there’s another door.’

  The next room was a bathroom, with black and white tiles on the floor and green paint on the walls. There was a bath and a toilet with its cistern high up, and a wall-mounted sink on iron brackets, with a lozenge-shaped mirror over it—and a corner shelving unit filled with stack upon stack of toilet paper in boxes. ‘IZAL,’ read Ben. ‘Must be about three hundred boxes of it! Blimey! Either they were planning to stay a long time or they used to eat some really mean curry.’

  Rachel looked disgusted. ‘It’s the stuff that Gran used to have—do you remember? It smells funny and feels like sandpaper!’

  There was soap on the sink, in a dimple of ceramic between the metal taps. It was dark red and looked almost fossilized under its light layer of dust.

  ‘What was all this for?’ wondered Rachel. ‘Why would anybody want to live underground?’

  ‘Another door,’ said Ben, nodding off into the corner of the bathroom where a square of mottled glass was lit from behind. It made the hairs prickle on his neck again—because this light was different. It wasn’t the regulation orange that they’d grown used to over the past few minutes—but a soft, blue-white glow. ‘Come on.’

  The temperature dipped noticeably as they stepped into the next room. The last room, Rachel realized, as soon as the door had swung shut behind them. It was painted white and no more doors led on from it. One wall was filled with machinery—a kind of huge metal console with knobs and levers and buttons and three small screens, dead and showing nothing. From the top of the console three channels of tubes and wires and ducting pipes led up, across the ceiling and down into the centre of the room. Each group of pipes and wires descended to a large torpedo-shaped thing, which was bolted to the floor. The three torpedo things were lightly covered in dust and stood like small monoliths, silent and odd.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Rachel, shivering with more than just the cold.

  Ben looked all around and up and down and still found it really hard to take even one step forward. He felt terrified and didn’t want to speak, because Rachel would hear it in his voice. His stammer was sitting in his clenched throat like an impatient cricket, waiting to mess up his words and drive a blush up his cheeks. He noticed that there was a kind of desk area protruding to one side of the console, and heaped upon it were books and notepads and even a couple of pencils, under a thin layer of dust. In fact, he thought, the dust wasn’t nearly as heavy as you’d expect, if this place had been here as long as the furniture and the tins of food suggested. Probably because it was underground and there wasn’t much down here to make dust. At last he found his feet and stepped towards the console. He cleared the dust off the open pages and saw spidery handwriting compressed into the narrow lines of the paper. There were figures and diagrams and words that he could barely read. It looked scientific, which was not surprising. This was a laboratory of some kind, surely.

  Rachel had gone over to one of the torpedo things. ‘You don’t think …’ she breathed, ‘that it could be a bomb …? Do you?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘C-could be, I suppose.’ She gulped. ‘But I don’t see why it would be bolted to the floor, if it was.’

  She reached out and gently wiped away the thin skin of dust. The torpedo thing gave up some dimly gleaming grey metal, reflecting the white orb-shaped light that hung above it. She took a spare floor cloth out of her pocket and gave it a more thorough wipe and then let out a shout of surprise. ‘It’s—look—it’s glass!’ Ben spun around and stepped over to see. ‘Or plastic or something,’ she went on. ‘Look!’ Set into the smooth curve of the torpedo was a glass window. It wasn’t a bomb—it was a chamber of some kind.

  ‘It’s like a—you know—a diving bell thingy,’ said Rachel, who had been to a sea life centre recently and seen a display of old diving equipment.

  Beneath the glass lay nothing except what looked like a cushioned leather base to the torpedo. It certainly did look a bit like a diving bell … sort of. ‘Does it open?’ he asked, and they began to wipe more dust away and run their hands over the chamber, trying to find buttons or levers or any clue at all to how they might get into it. But they found nothing other than a fine seam around the base of the torpedo, too narrow to even get a fingernail into.

  ‘Weird,’ said Ben, leaning back against the neighbouring torpedo, his arm wiping a track through the dust on its curved glass window. ‘Really weird.’ He felt suddenly exhausted by the excitement and fear. ‘Maybe we should get Uncle J down to have a look.’

  ‘He’d love all this!’ agreed Rachel. ‘It’s so weird! Amazing.’ She too, leaned on the second torpedo thing, resting her cheek on her palm, her elbow on the bit that Ben had just dusted. Then she opened her eyes wide. And then her mouth.

  And began to scream.

  Ben had heard his sister scream quite a lot. She was a girl, after all. But he had never, in twelve years, heard her scream like this. He jumped violently and grabbed at her and saw that her eyes were bulging with shock and horror. She was pointing and screaming: ‘A body! Oh, Ben! It’s a dead body!’

  Ben stared into the glass and saw a face. Eyes closed, pale pink lips very slightly open, revealing milk-white teeth. Dark hair curled across an alabaster forehead. It was a girl—about the same age as Rachel. It made him think of Snow White in her glass coffin. A shudder of fear went through him, making his heart thud and his legs feel weak. Rachel had stopped screaming now, and was holding her hands across her mouth, her eyes shut, shaking and crying. They should get out of here—now! And yet, something inside him couldn’t let him walk away, just as it had barely allowed him to walk in a few minutes earlier. This girl … this cool, still, sleeping girl …

  ‘She doesn’t look dead,’ he said, finally, still holding on to Rachel’s shoulder. ‘Maybe they had a way of p-preserving them. You know—embalming— like they did with Lenin and Eva P-Peron …’

  Rachel stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’ she gasped.

  ‘I just mean—that she looks … pretty good for a dead person.’

  ‘Oh—my—God …’ said Rachel. ‘You fancy a corpse!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he sai
d, with an exasperated click of the tongue, and suddenly he realized he wasn’t really that scared any more. He was more fascinated— as if he’d stumbled into Tutankhamun’s cave. ‘Come on—we can’t go back now. We have to know …’

  Rachel gave a little shriek as he vigorously wiped the top of the last torpedo chamber. Ben caught his breath in shock, even though he’d been half expecting it this time. Another face lay beneath the curved glass window. Also dark haired. His eyes, too, were closed, and his features were similar to the girl’s. Perhaps they were related. He seemed, thought Ben, to be smiling. As if he was having a bit of a joke. At any moment his eyes might spring open and he might shout ‘SURPRISE!!!’

  ‘He looks like her,’ breathed Rachel, who had overcome her fear to move around to lean on Ben’s shoulder. ‘A bit older. He’s probably her brother. Maybe this is some weird kind of mausoleum … you know … like when they buried Egyptian kings and put all the stuff they’d need in with them, to take them into the afterlife.’ Ben nodded—he’d been thinking similar thoughts.

  ‘But if someone took this much care over burying their kids,’ he pondered, ‘you’d think they’d’ve put up a headstone or something … wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It’s creepy,’ shivered Rachel. ‘I can’t believe I’m still standing here.’

  ‘Well, they’re hardly going to spring up and bite you, are they?’ said Ben. ‘They must have been dead for decades. I wonder what killed them … and who they were … Maybe …’ He walked back to the console, ducking past the pipes and wires that went into the top of the torpedo chambers. ‘Maybe there’s something about who they were in these notebooks.’

  Rachel hurried after him. She did not want to be standing on her own between two dead bodies, no matter how healthy they looked. Ben was flipping through the notebook, coughing now and then as the dust from it caught in his throat. She glanced at the other books, but they looked like textbooks—the kind of stuff she hoped never to have to get down off the shelf in maths class. She studied the console with all its old buttons and levers. Everything looked as dead as the boy and girl in the torpedoes. As if it had lain there for centuries. She could probably press all the buttons and flick all the levers without anything happening but a bit of a dust storm. Although the square plastic or glass one down on the left looked as though it might do something. There was a very faint red glow about it—but that was probably just a reflection of the red top she was wearing. She flicked it idly and, of course, nothing happened.

  ‘Anything?’ she asked Ben, who was squinting at the book.

  He shook his head … ‘Nah … it’s all just equations and numbers and stuff. Science stuff. Weird things to leave in a burial chamber. Maybe they were both … you know … geniuses or something, like Uncle J. What’s that noise?’

  Rachel listened, her fair head cocked to one side. Something was hissing. Not like a snake, but steadily, like escaping gas. She stared up, scared again, at Ben. ‘Shhhh!’ he said, in an imitation of the noise. But now she realized something else was threading through her ears … beneath the hissing … a low hum, almost below the range of hearing, it was more as if they could feel it, vibrating through their bones.

  Now the hiss and the hum were joined by a regular beeping noise, like a slowed down alarm clock.

  ‘Oh no—what did you do, Rachel? What did you do?’

  ‘Me? What did I do? I didn’t do anything!’ she squawked.

  ‘You must have! What did you touch?’

  ‘Only that red square button—but it didn’t work. It’s not even lit up—it’s—oh!’ Now that she looked at it again, she could see that the button was lit up. Quite definitely. And next to it a row of other buttons, in various colours, were also beginning to light up, some glowing steadily and others flashing.

  ‘Oh no!’ moaned Ben. ‘We’ve set something off! We’ve got to get out of here.’

  They both ran towards the door but as they reached it there was a click and a metallic thud and they saw that on this side of the door was not just an ordinary knob, but a turning wheel type thing like on the outside of the shaft … and it was turning. Rachel screamed again and Ben grabbed the wheel, trying to turn it back—but was completely unable to make it stop turning. He could hear the cogs and levers of a strong locking mechanism moving relentlessly inside it. Why had he shut the door behind them? Why?

  Rachel was now banging against it, crying, ‘No! No! No! I’m not staying in here! Get me out! Get me out! I don’t want to die down here.’

  Ben felt fingers of dread creep coldly over his shoulders and make for his throat. He and his little sister were being entombed. Buried alive with the dead. He shouted too then—he didn’t know what; he just bellowed with fear. The hissing went on, the hum grew louder and even the light seemed to get brighter as the beeping got faster. Rachel crumpled against the door and slid down its unyielding surface, crying uncontrollably, her nose running and her eyes screwed up. He felt himself beginning to pitch into hysteria with her … what was the point of trying to stop himself? They were done for. They would never get out and it would take several days for Uncle J to even notice they were missing. There was no food or water stored in this room. They were dead. As dead as the girl and boy in their metal coffins.

  ‘I do wish you’d both stop that racket. It’s like a blasted kindergarten in here.’

  Rachel turned around and stared at the owner of the voice. Then her eyes rolled up into her head and she keeled over, unconscious, onto the floor.

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’ said the boy, after Ben had gaped at him for thirty seconds or more, making faint gurgling sounds of shock and horror. ‘You might stop looking at me as if I’m a ruddy ghost! And what the blazes are you doing in my father’s vault? He’ll go off like an atom bomb when he sees you here.’

  The boy wiped back a dark fringe which hung across his brow from a neat side parting and rubbed his hands together, sitting on the edge of the torpedo under the glass which was now suspended above him at an angle, like the bonnet of a sleek racing car. ‘Shocking cold,’ he muttered and then leaned over and hammered unceremoniously on the torpedo next to him. ‘Hey! Polly! Get up, you lazy coot!’ At this there was a higher note of hissing and the girl’s glass cover suddenly popped up too, like the boy’s. A draught of cool, slightly sweet air flowed from it and Ben heard a sleepy murmuring from inside. He smacked himself on the face with both fists. It hurt. Yep. He was still awake. The boy was giving him an odd look.

  ‘I say, Poll—wake up fast will you? There’s a lunatic boy and a half dead girl here.’

  Rich, thought Ben. Considering.

  Polly sat up, yawning and scrubbing at her eyes. ‘Who? What? Oh, dash it! I’m frozen. He’s done it again, hasn’t he? Left us in too long. It’s really too bad. I bet I’ve missed Hilary’s party!’

  Ben simply could not get his jaw to close. He kept gasping and blinking and shaking his head and trying to wake himself up and then he realized that Rachel was coming round at his feet and he simply did not know what to do.

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Polly, sitting up fully and also rubbing her hands. She peered at Ben as if he were another species.

  ‘Can’t say,’ said the boy, who was getting out of the torpedo now, somewhat unsteadily. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and grey flannel shorts. ‘Oh heck— I think you’re right. He’s left us too long again. I’ve never been this wobbly before. He probably got going on some new experiment and hasn’t eaten for two days—much less think about us. I’m jolly well not doing this again, I tell you. Look, will you two stop all that gibbering! It’s perfectly all right. The door will open again in a few minutes. It’s just a time delay, you ninnies.’

  ‘T-time delay?’ gulped Ben. Rachel had just sat up and begun all the gaping, gasping, blinking, and pinching stuff he had been doing himself only seconds ago. She looked like a mad fish.

  ‘Yes. The air pressure has to be equalized before the lids can be sprung,’ explained the boy. ‘It’s p
robably a bit too complicated for you to understand. Don’t worry. I’d like to know how you got in here, though.’

  ‘We—we d-dug …’ said Ben, and Rachel, who was now past the mad fish stage and getting unsteadily to her feet, nodded feverishly.

  ‘Yes … we dug.’

  ‘We … dug …’ repeated the boy, slowly, a patient smile on his face. ‘Well—we … Freddy and Polly! Are both of you called Doug then?’ He raised one eyebrow and gave a slightly wonky grin.

  ‘No! We dug—we dug down. With spades! That’s how we got in!’ said Ben, his more normal voice finally bursting through. He felt that this was not the time for sarky humour.

  ‘Right-oh!’ said Freddy. ‘If you say so. But you’d better scarper or you’ll be in a lot of darn trouble when my father catches you. And if you tell anyone you’ve seen this place, you’ll be in even more trouble. There are forces, you know, more powerful than …’

  ‘Oh pish! Don’t be such an idiot, Freddy,’ said Polly—who was clambering out of her own torpedo now. ‘They must be Father’s students. And they must be trustworthy, or he wouldn’t have let them in.’ She wore similar shorts to her brother and a pale pink blouse with a neat round collar. Her clothes looked as if they’d been washed, pressed, and put on that morning. She dropped off the edge of the torpedo and her legs immediately gave and she crumpled to the floor with a surprised squeak.

  ‘I should go easy,’ said Ben. ‘I don’t think you’ve used those for a while.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, primly. ‘But I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to walk in one week!’

  ‘One week?’ echoed Rachel and she and Ben exchanged appalled glances.

  ‘Yes—it’s beastly, isn’t it?’ said Polly. ‘That’s what you get when your father’s a genius. You might think we’d get two motorcars, a twelve inch television set, and a trip in an aeroplane, but oh no—we get to be suspended for days on end, just to help out. I’m jolly sick and tired of it. I’m not ever doing this again. Not even for a ten shilling note!’