Daisy Malone and the Blue Glowing Stone

by James O'Loghlin

  ‘Daisy!’ cried Blont. ‘You don’t understand. It’s not safe. Give it back!’

  He reached out for her. Daisy dropped the cane and ran out of the room. She heard Blont lumbering after her. ‘Please! Come back! Daisy! You don’t understand! It’s too dangerous! He’s too powerful!’

  She found the stairs and raced down them. This time she was in no danger of being caught. Ben was waiting outside the building and they sped away. They ran for five minutes until they were out of the university and then slowed to a walk.

  ‘Why were you barking?’ asked Daisy once she had her breath back.

  ‘I smelt trouble.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I just smelt something that wasn’t quite right up there. It’s hard to explain. What happened?’

  Daisy explained.

  ‘I was right, then!’ said Ben when she had finished. ‘Wow!’

  ‘Wow what?’

  ‘I was just wowing at how smart I am. It amazes even me sometimes. Wow! What a dog! Hmmm. So Blont wants the stone. Everybody wants that stone.’

  ‘We need to find Mum,’ said Daisy, with a serious look on her face. (Obviously it was on her face. Who ever has a serious look on their knee?)

  Chapter 10

  BRIAN MALONE

  At the railway station Daisy found a payphone and rang her dad at work.

  ‘Hello, Brian Malone here. Is anything wrong?’ asked her father’s tentative, nervous voice.

  ‘Dad, it’s me.’

  ‘Daisy. What’s happened? Did a buffalo attack you? Or did a –’

  ‘Dad! Stop! Everything’s fine. Sort of. In fact, not really.’

  ‘Oh no! Did you hurt yourself?! Are you bleeding?! Daisy, did you break your arm? If you did, was it your left arm or your right arm? Because if it was your right arm you won’t be able to write and that will make school difficult and –’

  ‘Dad! Stop! I didn’t break my arm. Or anything else. It’s just that … Dad, it’s complicated,’ Daisy hesitated and then it all came out in a rush. ‘You see I found this blue glowing stone in our house and Mum sent me a letter saying she put it there and some people are trying to steal it and I went to the person at the university that Mum told me to give it to, and he started sweating and tried to get it from me and we don’t know where Mum is and I can’t get in contact with her and …’

  Suddenly the very brave and fearless Daisy couldn’t talk anymore because she thought that if she did she would start to cry and maybe even sob.

  ‘Daisy, darling. I’m a bit confused but it’s going to be all right, sweetheart. I’m sure whatever it is, it’s only a small issue and not a big issue. Are you at home? I’ll come home right now and we’ll have some spaghetti bolognese and everything will be all right.’

  ‘No, it won’t be all right!’ snapped Daisy. ‘It won’t be all right because Mum has disappeared!’

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. In fact at both ends, and in the middle too.

  ‘Daisy, Mum’s often out of touch for a while when she is away. She’s underground a lot of the time, and you know that even when she isn’t, the mobile coverage up there isn’t very good. It’s nothing to worry about it. It’s a small issue.’

  ‘It’s not a small issue! She’s never missed calling me on my birthday ever before and you know it!’ stormed Daisy. ‘Last year she had to drive for ages to get phone coverage, but she did it. You’re just too scared to admit anything’s wrong. Well something is wrong! Mum’s missing and I’m going to look for her!’

  ‘No, Daisy, your mother is fine. She … she has to be. We just have to keep thinking that and everything will be all right, and it will be. I’m going to come home now and cook spaghetti bolognese, and we can have a game of chess and everything will be normal and soon your mother will come home.’

  ‘Dad, I’m at the train station. I’m about to get on the train to go to Gloomy Gulch.’

  ‘Daisy, no.’ Her father’s voice was shaky. ‘Please. Nothing is wrong. I can’t … nothing is wrong.’

  ‘I’m going. On the train. It leaves in ten minutes. Unless you say you’ll come and get me and we can drive up together?’

  ‘Daisy … don’t … I can’t go there … I just can’t … please … just come home and I’ll explain.’

  Daisy slammed down the phone.

  The train was practically deserted. They had a carriage to themselves, so Daisy could let Ben out of her rucksack.

  They sat quietly. Daisy nibbled on chocolate biscuits and seethed with fury at her father’s cowardice. She was so angry with him that it was ‘father’ and not ‘dad’. The words ‘he’s hopeless’, ‘pathetic’, ‘useless’, ‘hopeless’, ‘pathetic’, ‘useless’ ‘I need to go to the toilet’, ‘hopeless’, ‘pathetic’, ‘useless’, ‘now I really need to go to the toilet’ kept whirling round her head like sausages in a spin dryer, although what sausages would be doing in a spin dryer I don’t know.

  She went to the toilet but when she got back she was still so furious that she couldn’t think properly about anything. Ben sat silently next to her, looking out the window. In fact, because it was now dark outside, what he could mainly see in the window was his reflection, which he quite liked. I am one fine-looking piece of dog, he thought.

  Eventually he turned to Daisy. ‘He wasn’t always like that, you know. Your dad.’

  ‘If I could play a musical instrument and I had it with me I would write a song about him right now called “Useless, Hopeless and Pathetic”,’ replied Daisy.

  ‘That doesn’t scan very well,’ replied Ben. ‘And it’s not his fault. Daisy, listen. I heard your mum and dad talking one night. Actually on a few nights and, because I’m very clever, I think I’ve worked out what happened.’

  ‘You know, continually telling people that you’re very clever is actually an indication that deep down you think you’re not very clever at all.’

  Ben’s eyes widened. ‘Is it?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘I didn’t know that. I’d better stop then.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Yes, well, I am very clever. Whoops! Rats!’

  Daisy stared at the seat in front of her.

  ‘Can I tell you what happened with your dad?’ asked Ben.

  ‘I know what happened. I needed his help to find Mum and he was too scared to do anything.’

  ‘So you don’t want to know what I found out? Okay.’ Ben shrugged and went back to looking at himself in the window.

  After eighteen and a half seconds Daisy sighed. ‘Yes, all right. What?’

  ‘Well, this archaeology site at Gloomy Gulch where your mum works. You know how your mum was in the first expedition that explored it?’

  Daisy knew the story well. The year before she was born, a bushwalker had been exploring the hills outside Gloomy Gulch. Halfway up a hill he had stepped onto a piece of earth and plunged straight through it, ending up dangling by his shoulders, his legs swinging in the air below. He had accidentally discovered the entrance to a cave.

  A week later he returned with friends and ropes to explore. They abseiled into the cave and were astounded to find both natural and human-made tunnels and caverns. They reported their find to the university’s archaeology department and when Jackie Malone and other archaeologists investigated, they found a complex web of underground caves, caverns and connecting tunnels.

  It was very strange. Usually when old human-made underground tunnels and caverns were discovered, it was clear that they had been built for some form of mining. But here there was no sign of any mining having been done. In fact, there was no record of any mining ever being done anywhere in the Gloomy Gulch area.

  Even more oddly, before the discovery of the underground tunnels, it was thought that the first humans to live in the Gloomy Gulch area had arrived
about three hundred years earlier. Before that the area had been, it was thought, uninhabited. But from the analysis the archaeologists had done, it appeared that these tunnels had been dug at least six hundred years before.

  And most oddly of all, no one had ever discovered an object that looked like a television remote control in any other network of ancient underground tunnels anywhere in the world because, of course, television remote controls had only been invented about sixty years ago. But this is precisely what had been found deep in one of these chambers.

  And they were still uncovering more. Archaeology is slow work. You don’t just charge in with a bulldozer. You need to go gently so you don’t break anything. For the last ten years Jackie Malone, other archaeologists and some local workers had been spending several months a year patiently digging, sweeping and collecting, all the while looking for clues as to who had created the underground network and why.

  Ben continued. ‘When the caves were first explored there were two archaeologists leading the way. Your mum was one. Do you know who the other one was?’

  Daisy shook her head.

  ‘It was someone she used to work with.’

  ‘Blont?’

  ‘No. Your dad.’

  ‘My … what? He’s not an archaeologist … he’s a … whatever he is. An accountant. A boring guy who works in a boring office doing boring things.’

  ‘He is now, but back then he was apparently one of the world’s leading archaeologists. Your mum and he met on a site in Egypt.’

  ‘They told me they met in a fish shop!’

  ‘Maybe it was an Egyptian fish shop. They worked on the Gloomy Gulch caves together. Your dad was the leader. He was always the first to explore all the tunnels and passages, while your mum was slower and more cautious.’

  ‘Are you sure? That sounds like someone else’s dad. Not mine.’

  ‘It’s what they said. He explored tunnels and caves that no one had been in for hundreds of years. One day, without telling anyone where he was going, he went into a newly discovered part of the caves. He had been exploring for a couple of hours and was deep underground when a passage collapsed on top of him. It must have already been unstable and his footsteps caused it to cave in.

  ‘Your dad was trapped, squashed against the ground, barely able to move. He had a broken leg and several broken ribs and lay there terrified that at any moment there might be another cave-in. He was there a whole day and then another day, getting hungrier and thirstier and weaker, wondering if anyone would find him before he died. Eventually after two days your mother found him. It took another day to dig him out. Ever since then he’s been, well, the way he is now.’

  ‘A scaredy cat,’ said Daisy slowly.

  ‘And he stopped being an archaeologist. He couldn’t go underground anymore.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Daisy flatly, trying to take it all in and wondering if, in the circumstances, she had perhaps been a bit harsh in thinking her dad was hopeless, pathetic and useless. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘I thought it was more a parent thing to tell you stuff like that. Not really a dog thing. My job is to chase sticks and bark at strangers.’

  Daisy’s anger at her dad started to ebb away. She even went back to thinking of him as Dad. It wasn’t his fault he was the way he was. Of course he didn’t want to return to the site of his accident. Daisy wondered what her old dad had been like. She wished he was still around because right now he would have been a real help. But he wasn’t, which meant that she would have to do whatever had to be done without him.

  And what did have to be done? Jackie Malone had written that she thought she was being followed, and for the first time ever she hadn’t called Daisy on her birthday. The fact that it had happened at the exact same time that Sinclair, Dennis and, it seemed, Blont were all trying to get the stone that Jackie had found must be more than a coincidence. The first thing that Daisy had to do was to find her mum and give her the stone back.

  Hopefully Jackie Malone would be at the Gloomy Gulch site doing what she normally did, and there would be some innocent explanation for her failure to ring on Daisy’s birthday.

  But somehow Daisy doubted it.

  And what about Blont? He was her mum’s trusted work friend, the one person she thought she could tell about the stone. Had he really been trying to get the stone, or had Daisy been so on-edge that she had jumped to conclusions?

  If Blont did know something about the stone, what did he know? And why hadn’t he told her? Was he on the same side as Sinclair and Dennis? Or a different one? Or none at all? And what about those delicious cream buns? Where did he get them? And did he get a discount for buying so many of them?

  She remembered what Blont had shouted after her as she had run from his room: ‘You don’t understand! It’s too dangerous! He’s too powerful!’

  Who was the ‘he’? Sinclair?

  The key to it all, of course, was the stone. Daisy reached into her pocket, pulled out the canvas bag and carefully removed it. Again, as soon as she touched it, a wave of energy and strength surged through her. How did that work? She shut her eyes and allowed the power of the stone to flow through her.

  Her thoughts turned again to her dad. What must it have been like being trapped underground for two days? Suddenly, a huge wave of terror broke over her. It was as if she was trapped in the cave. She could feel exactly what he must have felt; not knowing whether he would be found, the thirst, the loneliness, the pain of his broken bones and, dominating it all, the terrible, panicked fear of being stuck. Daisy’s heart raced. She was panting and sweat rolled down her face. Suddenly a paw knocked the stone out of her grasp onto the seat.

  ‘Daisy!’ called Ben sharply. ‘Are you okay?’

  The panicked feeling quickly receded. ‘Um … yeah. Sorry. It’s the stone. It’s … It’s …’ She trailed off, and then added, ‘… weird.’ But ‘weird’ didn’t really describe it. What the stone had done to her was something entirely outside her experience.

  She used the bag to scoop it up without touching it and put it back in her pocket.

  Chapter 11

  GLOOMY GULCH

  Gloomy Gulch sat in a valley between two mountain ranges that were so steep the entire town was in shadow all day, every day.

  The only way someone who lived in Gloomy Gulch got a suntan was if they painted it on with a brush. To try to combat the effects of sun deprivation, twice a week all of the children at the Gloomy Gulch school were bussed out of the valley to a big field so they could run around in the sunshine. However they all had such pale skin that first they had to be covered up in sunscreen, hats, long-sleeved tops, leggings, gloves, sunglasses, nose guards and scarves.

  When Daisy and Ben arrived at Gloomy Gulch railway station it was especially non-sunny because it was eleven o’clock at night. They stepped onto a deserted platform and watched the train choof off to wherever it was going next.

  ‘Sleep would be good,’ said Ben. ‘I’m happy just to curl up here, but your species are a bit fussier.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Daisy, lying down on a wooden bench and resting her head on her rucksack. Sixteen seconds later she was asleep.

  When she awoke she had a stiff back, a dry mouth, a slug crawling up her leg and not much idea of where, or even who, she was. She pulled herself up to a sitting position, brushed off the slug and rubbed her eyes. Then she realised that when she had tried to brush the slug off her leg it had somehow clung to her hand, and when she had rubbed her eyes it had crawled onto her face and was now trying to hide in one of her eyebrows.

  ‘Yuck,’ she said, peeling it off and dropping it into a pot plant.

  She looked down at Ben sleeping peacefully at her feet, neatly folded up and looking as comfy as could be. Why, she wondered, if humans were supposed to be so clever, were they the only animal that needed a mattress t
o sleep comfortably? What did people do before mattresses were invented? Were they tougher back then, or did they just wake up every morning feeling like they had spent the night being kicked by an antelope?

  The platform was still deserted, so they lingered for a bit while Ben ate dog food and Daisy ate corn crackers and a chocolate biscuit. Then they headed out of the station and crossed a wide, empty road to a park. In the middle of the park stood a statue of a giant cabbage.

  Daisy sighed.

  She had been to Gloomy Gulch once before with her mum. Jackie Malone had driven up to collect some things from the archaeological site, and had tried to turn it into a mother–daughter bonding holiday. But their room at the Gloomy Gulch Hotel was smelly and cramped, Daisy had vomited eleven times after eating the spaghetti bolognese from the hotel’s restaurant, she had missed the sun, and the most interesting thing they could find to do was to look at the statue of the giant cabbage (which, Jackie had explained, had been erected because cabbages are one of the few vegetables that can be cultivated without any sunlight and so they were, in fact, the perfect symbol of all that was great, or at least okay, about Gloomy Gulch).

  ‘Come on,’ said Daisy. The archaeologists’ campsite was about half an hour’s walk over a hill on the other side of town. Daisy and Ben set off across the park to the main street, which was so wide ten cars could have driven down it side by side, although they may have bumped into each other a bit. But definitely eight in complete safety.

  Cars were parked diagonally to the curb, and people wandered up and down the streets and in and out of shops. They all seemed to be walking very slowly, and had blank looks on their faces.

  Jackie Malone was well known in the town, so Daisy thought she may as well start asking if anyone had seen her recently. She knew that her mum was known in the fruit shop, because they had gone in there on their non-excellent ‘holiday’.