Ian shrugged. “Simple: tinted glasses are all the rage. Last summer my dad bought glasses with gray light-sensitive lenses that go dark in the sun. I guess blue’s the popular color this year. Hey, know what would be awesome? Dark glasses made of lightweight titanium and you hook tiny mirrors to the sides of them and see who’s following you. My friend Jackson back home has a pair.”
“Wow,” said Zoé, “that’s icy cool.”
Ian had his career as a code breaker/spy all mapped out. The only obstacles, Zoé knew, were his fear of heights, a tendency to get food poisoning and a habit of falling out of boats—all of which gave Ian’s future a complicated edge.
“I need to buy some postcards to send to Mom and Dad,” said Ian, heading up the steps to the Captain’s Quill Bookshop. “I also want to send some funny ones to Jackson and some of my other friends.”
“I’ll get one for my mom,” said Zoé.
But as she sorted through the postcards, she remembered her mom was traveling all summer without a fixed address, and email was a no-go because Granddad didn’t own a computer. She didn’t have the addresses of any of her friends with her, either—not that she had many friends.
Oh, kids liked her all right, everywhere she went, maybe because she was good at telling stories and organizing adventure games. But she and her mom moved so much that she never had a chance to make close friends. It used to make her feel like an outsider, but now that she was eleven she thought of herself as an independent spirit.
Coming out of the bookshop, Zoé saw a wiry shape run past, wheeling around the corner to Bridge Street: head lowered, elbows pumping, hair streaming from under a black beret. The girl was wearing the same pink jacket with torn pockets over a gray pleated uniform.
“That’s her!” cried Zoé. “The girl who found the puzzle!”
Ian whirled around. “Hey!” he shouted. “You in the pink jacket!”
The girl skidded to a stop at Castle Square, crashing into a placard advertising island cruises, as Zoé and Ian raced over.
“What’s the problem?” said the girl, setting the placard upright. Narrowing her eyes at Zoé, she added, “Blimey, I remember you.”
“I remember you!” Zoé shot back. “You’re the one who knocked me down and got my special journal all wet and you didn’t even say sorry.”
“We have a question to ask,” said Ian, sounding more like a detective than an eleven-year-old, at least in Zoé’s opinion.
“Do you, now?” The girl wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“You bet we do,” said Zoé, lowering her voice. “It’s about something you sold to our granddad, Mr. Blackwood. He sells antique furniture over by the Five Arches.”
“A puzzle,” said Ian. Zoé saw a wary expression flit across the girl’s face. “You were in a big hurry to get rid of it.”
“It was made of glass,” added Zoé, “inside a box covered with mud.”
“What of it?” said the girl, appearing to recover a bit; she threw back her shoulders. “Mr. Blackwood buys and sells antiques all the time. It was a business deal, that’s all.”
Zoé glared at her, trying to look fierce.
“We know why you sold the puzzle,” said Ian. “You did it because you were afraid.”
“You put the puzzle together, didn’t you?” said Zoé accusingly. “And something scary happened.”
The girl’s face turned bright red.
“We put it together, too,” whispered Zoé.
“So let’s not pretend it’s nothing,” said Ian. “We’re all in this together now.”
“I moved here last September from Bargoed,” said the girl as they walked beside a ruined wall covered in vines and creepers that was part of the old castle, climbing uphill toward the headland. “I live on Upper Frog Street with my Auntie Gwennie and Uncle Dai; they run a shop filled with all sorts of rubbish they sell to tourists. He’s a bit of a horror, Dai, sort of pale and pickled-looking, like he was stuffed in a jar and left overnight.” The girl grinned. “Actually Dai’s not a bad old sort.”
Zoé giggled. Then she frowned, remembering something the girl had said earlier. “Hey, you’re not from Tenby, you weren’t even born here! If I’m a foreigner here, then so are you.”
The girl bristled. “Am not a foreigner. I was born in Nantyglo, Wales, and that counts for something. I’ll bet you don’t have a British passport.”
“I could if I wanted.”
“Er, know anything about Zival’s?” asked Ian, clearly trying to change the subject. “It’s a new optical shop across from the Captain’s Quill, and they’ve put up this garish neon sign. I bet the town fathers are turning in their graves.”
Zoé smiled to herself. Turning in their graves was one of Granddad’s favorite expressions.
“Zival’s a mystery, I’ve heard,” said the girl. “Some say he’s over seven feet tall, but Mrs. Larkin the postmistress claims no one’s ever set eyes on the man.”
“I’m Ian Blackwood, by the way,” said Ian as they passed beneath a stone archway. “And this is Zoé Badger.”
“We’re cousins,” added Zoé. She was always proud to associate herself with Ian. Even though they didn’t look much alike, they had similar ideas and adventurous spirits; to use a phrase her mom was fond of, they were coconspirators in the game of life.
“I’m Philippa Jenkyn Thomas.” The girl wrinkled her nose. “Everyone calls me Pippin.”
Zoé nodded, thinking that Pippin’s nickname fitted her perfectly.
They skirted around Tenby Museum, following the path along the headland, a cold wind at their backs.
“Our ancestor was a sea captain,” Zoé boasted. “And there’s a famous lady pirate who has the same last name as mine.”
“Er, why do you live with your aunt and uncle?” asked Ian as they wandered past the ruined castle watchtower.
“Do your parents travel a lot?” Zoé asked. “My mom does. She’s a journalist.”
For a moment Pippin seemed to be lost inside her thoughts. “My mum took off years ago, and we’ve not seen her since, and Da lost his job at the factory, so now he travels around, picking up work where he can find it. Last year he ran the Sizzler Twist at the Barry Island funfair.”
“Where does your da live, then?” asked Zoé, thinking how unhappy she’d be if she didn’t live with her mom. She was lucky, too, having Ian and Granddad, even if she only saw them in the summer. It sounded as if Pippin didn’t have anyone.
“Oh, here and there. I fell behind at school because we moved so much, and Auntie Gwennie said I needed a stable home, so that’s how I ended up in Tenby. Da visits when he can. I never know when he’ll turn up, but he always does—and he always brings me something nice.”
Zoé could hardly believe it: Pippin was a borderline orphan, with no mom and her dad away all the time, shipped off to live with distant relatives. How sad was that?
A soft drizzle started as they climbed up onto the cannons outside the coast guard house and looked out across the slate-gray waves.
Pippin described the dusty three-room flat where she lived over her uncle’s shop, eating tinned baked beans and watered-down tea (her aunt was a dreadful cook) and licorice humbugs from a jar in the pantry. School was a dead loss, she said, because the headmistress had it in for her, as did her biology teacher, an old geezer named Bascomb.
Zoé could hardly get a sentence in edgewise. When at last Pippin stopped to take a breath, she asked, “But don’t your aunt and uncle worry about you?”
“Sure they worry, but they’re ever so busy this time of year. They trust me to do my schoolwork and not get into trouble.” She ran a grubby hand through her hair. “Even so, sometimes I think about going off with the gypsies, so I could be writing poems instead of studying for biology exams.”
“Are you a writer?” Zoé looked at her in surprise. “Me too! I’m going to publish runaway bestsellers when I grow up. Thriller novels!”
“Zoé writes real zingy stories about Tenby,
” said Ian. “Spine-tinglers about evil ghosts and pirates who are bad to the bone.”
Hearing this, Zoé puffed out her chest a bit. She could always rely on Ian to be her steadfast fan—well, her only fan, actually.
“I’m going to be a poet,” said Pippin. “Bronwyn Gilwern at the Captain’s Quill Bookshop says I ought to be a poet if I’m not one already, and she should know, she’s an expert on runes. See, Bron finds ancient writings in the tunnels and copies them down—even though the tunnels are deadly dangerous—then she plugs ’em into her computer and it spits out translations.”
“Your friend goes down into the tunnels?” said Zoé, impressed.
“Hmm,” murmured Ian. “I thought they shut down the entrances.”
“Oh, Bron isn’t fazed,” said Pippin airily. “Just the other day she found a pattern of triskeles; she says they were carved into the rock millennia ago along with a mythic figure she thinks is a goddess.”
“Is it Arianrhod?” asked Zoé. “Our granddad has a weathervane with Arianrhod on it.” What is a triskele? she wondered. It sounded like a breakfast cereal.
Pippin shrugged. “She didn’t say. Bron has sort of, well, mystical connections. Some call her a seeress, though others say she’s right bonkers. Personally I think she’s somewhere in between. Bron can float in space if she sets her mind to it: I saw her with my own eyes, one winter’s eve, drifting out past Caldey Island.”
They jumped off the cannons and Zoé exchanged a dubious glance with Ian as they headed toward the bandstand. Granddad, she knew, would describe Pippin as one of those kids who were prone to exaggeration.
“Are you serious?” said Ian. “You saw her levitate?”
“Think I’d lie about a thing like that?” said Pippin from the edge of the headland. “Look here, a hidden stairway!” She kicked aside a tall leafy plant, revealing a flight of stone steps overgrown with vegetation.
Going single file, they started down; the steps curved sharply and Zoé nearly fell, Ian grabbing her just in time. She’d worn sandals today, yellow ones with daisies, but maybe next time she’d stick to sneakers.
“Does this Bronwyn Gilwern know spells?” she shouted to Pippin.
The girl shot her an exasperated look. “Dull as foggy weather, you are. Course Bron knows spells! Shutting spells, maze spells, fog spells, vanishing spells—there’s heaps of them. It’s a forgotten art, spell conjuring. Has to do with the lost enchantments.”
“The lost enchantments?” said Zoé, intrigued. “What are those?”
But Pippin had already vanished down the twisting stairway.
The crumbling steps spilled out onto Castle Beach, where Zoé, Ian and Pippin walked beneath the cliffs, staring up at the dark, forbidding gap that was Dragon’s Mouth, while Ian gave a running commentary on Tenby, pointing out deteriorating sections of the old wall and castle, and St. Catherine’s Island with its ruined Victorian fort, so near you could walk there at low tide. Caldey Island, wrapped in fog, was hardly visible.
Ian’s tales evoked thrilling scenes of adventure and, as always, Zoé yearned to live in swashbuckling times. It was easy to picture herself and Ian high on the mast of John “Calico Jack” Rackham’s pirate ship, the William, keeping watch for sea lords and marauders.
They strolled along a dune-backed stretch of golden sands as Ian continued snapping photos. Giggling, Zoé and Pippin made silly faces and posed for him, Zoé turning cartwheels and Pippin throwing her beret into the air. By now the two girls had forged an uneasy truce. And although Pippin annoyed her at times, Zoé was fascinated by her talent for pulling images from thin air and tossing out colorful phrases.
“Here you go,” said Pippin, reaching into her torn pocket. “Almost forgot.” From a squashed paper bag she extracted three sticky buns, made with doughy pastry and covered in sugar, nuts and cinnamon—a local specialty. “Time for elevenses.” She handed one each to Zoé and Ian. “Mrs. Owen the baker gives me her day-olds.”
“Wow, thanks,” said Zoé, suddenly realizing her stomach was rumbling. She loved what the Brits called elevenses, that time of late morning when Granddad turned up with a sweet roll and a cup of milky tea.
“Famished, I am,” said Pippin, biting into her sticky bun, looking to Zoé like a street urchin from a Charles Dickens novel. “A bit stale, but never mind.”
Ian cleared his throat the way Granddad always did when he had something important to say. “Right, then, the puzzle.”
“Tell us, Pippin, tell us what happened, and don’t leave anything out,” said Zoé as the three sat in the sand above the high-tide mark.
Pippin began, “I was roaming the tunnels, see, back in March, right before they shut them down, keeping an eye out for triskeles and runes and whatnot, so’s I could tell Bronwyn Gilwern.”
“What’s a triskele?” asked Zoé.
“A pre-Celtic symbol made of three curved lines: sort of a triple spiral,” said Ian before Pippin could answer. “There’s a silver Greek coin in my mom’s museum with a triskele on it.”
Zoé smiled, impressed as always by Ian’s ability to conjure up little-known nuggets of information.
“So I came to a tunnel below Tudor Square,” Pippin continued, “when all of a sudden my candle fizzled out and I tripped over something in the mud. It was ever so dark, stinking of low tide and dead fish and all. I’d a trowel in my rucksack, so I started digging and pulled out a box covered in gunk. Popped it into my rucksack and off I went.” She tugged at her beret. “I knew straightaway the box was ancient. And it was filled with bits of glass—lovely they were, all blue and glowing like. Real beauties.”
Zoé loved the way Pippin pronounced the last word: bewties. That’s how Granddad talked.
“Did you look through the glass pieces?” asked Ian. “At people, for instance?”
He blushed as Pippin furrowed her eyebrows together, acting as if he’d asked an idiotic question.
“Forget it,” he muttered, digging his toes into the sand.
“What did you do then, Pippin?” asked Zoé. “Did you take the box to your friend Bronwyn?”
“I did, but Bron was visiting her sister in Porthcawl, so I went back to my auntie and uncle’s flat, straight up to my room. Took me a while to figure out it was a puzzle. Then I wanted to put it together.”
“Did you see the island inside the puzzle?” asked Zoé, anxious to know. “And the town with a forest all around it?”
“Aye,” said Pippin, scooping up a handful of sand. “But all of a sudden I felt something cold and clammy on my skin.” Her expression darkened and Zoé braced herself for what was coming next. “Then these horrible shadowy things came bursting out of the puzzle, with massive eyes on their heads and great huge wings! Gives me the collywobbles just thinking about ’em.”
Gazing out at the waves, Zoé felt her stomach turn to lead.
“We saw them, too,” she whispered with a shudder.
“How many, Pippin?” asked Ian.
“Just the two, and that were enough. Scared beyond anything, I was, screaming and kicking the puzzle. Then I dropped to my knees and took it apart. Wasn’t easy, mind. By then Auntie Gwennie was banging on my door, shouting like a fishwife—‘What’s all the ruckus?’ she wanted to know—and them shadowy things went flapping out the window.”
“The creatures we saw flew away, too,” said Zoé, her thoughts in turmoil. “We hid the puzzle in our granddad’s attic—just in case.”
“How many got out when you put it together?” asked Pippin.
“Six or seven, maybe more,” Ian replied. “It was too dark to count.”
It was too dark and we were too scared, thought Zoé.
“Six or seven?” said Pippin in a choked voice. “Plus my two? Crikey, that’s nine of them things! So where did they go?”
“Search me,” said Ian. “Out to sea, I hope.”
“I don’t think so,” said Zoé. “I think they’re hiding in the tunnels.”
Wide-eyed, they s
tared at one another, their faces ashen.
After stopping at the Old Bakery, Zoé and Ian headed back to their grandfather’s cottage. On the way they told Pippin about Iris Tintern and Catherine Beedle and how they’d tracked down Dr. Marriott.
“It’s like one of them horror movies at the Garibaldi,” said Pippin, waving her arms in a melodramatic manner. “Iris and Catherine with them great horrid eyes, just like the monsters, what’s that all about? What sort of evil’s creeping into this town?”
“There is something evil, isn’t there?” whispered Zoé. “I can feel it in the air. It’s like a cold tingling all around me.”
“I wish we hadn’t put the puzzle together,” said Ian. “If we’d seen the warning message first, maybe we wouldn’t have—”
“I didn’t see any message,” Pippin cut in. “Then again, I was in a hurry and didn’t want Dai to find it. Auntie Gwennie’s all right, but he’d take the box and puzzle and sell ’em for a few quid.”
The pathos in her voice tugged at Zoé’s heart. She couldn’t imagine having a relative who’d steal your only treasure.
“So you never see your mum?” she asked Pippin.
“She cleared off, she’ll never be back. Da says Mum’s a wild spirit and wanted her freedom more than she wanted us, so he let her go.”
“My dad jumped ship, too,” said Zoé in a small voice. “You know, cleared off.” She saw Pippin’s eyes widen in surprise.
Nobody’s life is ever what you think it is, Zoé reflected. Isn’t that what my mom always says?
“See you,” said Pippin as they turned onto St. George’s Street.
“Wait a minute—you can’t just leave,” said Ian.
“I’ve homework,” said Pippin. “Heaps of it.”
“I thought you hated school,” said Zoé.
“Yeah, but Da says I need to make something of myself. I’m already in trouble for handing assignments in late and being rude to a teacher. Next time it’s detention with old Bascomb—a fate worse than death.” Pippin made a gruesome face, causing Zoé to laugh.
The Glass Puzzle Page 6