“But … why didn’t the Wythernsea people stop them?” asked Zoé, confused. “Why didn’t they fight off the wreckers?”
“Now, that’s rich.” Stokes gave what Zoé considered a rude snigger. “Wythernsea fell beneath the waves in 1349.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I forgot.” Ian, of course, would have known that. And she’d known the date, too—but this Stokes character was throwing her off guard.
“Folks in Tenby turned a blind eye to the smuggling that went on here, and I daresay there were some who profited handsomely,” he said with a smirk. “Very handsomely indeed.”
“What did the wreckers do with all the stuff they took?” asked Zoé. “Did they hide their treasures in the tunnels?”
“Heard about the tunnels, have you?” Stokes’s eyes glittered, as if he’d been waiting for her to mention them. “Bleeding treacherous, the tunnels. Many an unsuspecting soul has gone down there, never to be seen nor heard of again. You don’t half know what goes on in the tunnels.”
As he spoke, the light shifted and a stillness fell over the room. The only sound Zoé heard was from her own heart, which thudded steadily against her ribs. She wouldn’t be surprised if Stokes was working as a spy for the Scravens. He definitely seemed like what Granddad called an unsavory character.
A smile worked its way into the corners of Stokes’s thin, dry lips. “And when the fog comes rolling in, no one dares go down the tunnels.”
“The tunnels don’t bother me,” said Zoé, determined not to be frightened. “My granddad’s taken me down plenty of times and never once did I get scared.” She gazed at Stokes’s sweater, which was riddled with holes, the wool unraveling around his neck. “Anyway, my cousin Ian’s doing a history project on Tenby and he’s trying to find an ancient runestone so he can take pictures of it and stuff. We know it’s in this museum, but we can’t find it anywhere.”
Stokes’s eyes grew flinty. “The runestone? How d’you know about that, then, eh? I can’t rightly say where it is, as we’ve no end of storage rooms and closets filled to overflowing. Museum’s not large enough to hold all the relics and artifacts, so we have to rotate.”
“But the runestone’s real, right?” What a breakthrough, she thought. I can’t wait to tell Ian! “And it’s here, in the museum?”
“What’s it worth to you, eh?” said Stokes in a sniveling voice. “If I tell you, how much will you give? Information like that don’t come free, y’know. Around these parts, old secrets are the equivalent of gold.”
Was he trying to blackmail her? Before Zoé could say a word, she saw Dr. Thistle appear in the doorway with a trolley stacked with boxes.
“Stokes, are you in there? Give us a hand, will you, old fellow?”
Without a backward glance, Stokes limped out of the room, knees cracking like dry twigs, and left Zoé on her own, wondering how much the old man actually knew.
“So the runestone exists—somewhere. First-class detective work, Zoé,” said Ian as they walked down Lower Frog Street to the sea. She beamed; praise from Ian was always hard-earned.
The rain had eased up, and Granddad was back at the cottage taking a nap. This was the first chance she’d had to tell her cousin about Stokes.
“Did you look at Dr. Thistle through your puzzle piece?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Zero opportunities. Sorry.”
“I wish I could tell my mom we were searching for a runestone, because she likes things that are mysterious and offbeat,” she said wistfully. “My mom would think a hidden runestone was the ultimate in cool, and she’d write a frontpage story about it, with lots of color photographs and a catchy headline.” She pushed back her dark fringe of hair. “Well, maybe not, because she’d have to come to Wales to write it.”
“My mom and dad would ask a million questions. I can hear them now,” said Ian. “But even if I told them about Wythernsea and the Scravens, they’d never believe me. When I called them the other day, all they talked about was some boring river cruise in Prague. They couldn’t handle it if I told them Tenby’s about to be invaded.”
“Parents, hmph,” said Zoé, but still she felt a twinge of envy. She hadn’t talked to her mother since coming to Wales, because her mom had lost her cell phone right before Zoé left and there was no way to get in touch with her.
“If we’re to believe this Stokes character, the runestone exists, but he can’t tell us where it is. Or maybe he knows and he’s not saying,” said Ian. “So it’s up to us to track it down.”
“Right,” said Zoé. “And, oh yeah, we have to find The First and destroy the Scravens. No problemo, as my mom would say.” She thought a moment. “I’ve never met anybody as peculiar as Stokes.”
“Yes, you have,” said Ian, grinning. “Iris Tintern!”
“Hah! Those two would make a right pair,” she said with a giggle—right pair was one of Granddad’s phrases—and they both laughed. “Stokes kept going on about the tunnels and pirates and wreckers. He tried to scare me, but it didn’t work. When I asked about the runestone, he said ‘What’s it worth to you?’ Then he said old secrets are like gold.”
“He sounds shady,” said Ian. “Stokes could be lying.”
“I have a feeling he was telling the truth about the runestone. His eyes lit up when I mentioned it.”
“Stokes is our only lead so far,” said Ian, going into secret agent mode. “Better keep communication lines open.”
“Hey, why would Iris and Catherine be in cahoots with the Scravens?” mused Zoé. “They were born in Tenby!”
“No idea,” Ian replied. “I wonder if they have information on where the Scravens are hiding? Maybe they’re spying for them.”
“Maybe they know who The First is!”
Moments later they were sitting at a recently vacated table amid the bustle of the King’s Ransom Café. Zoé had dressed up for their meeting with Dr. Marriott in a long Indian skirt stitched with beads and tiny mirrors, a T-shirt embossed with CAT WOMAN STRIKES AGAIN! and a short-sleeved pink hoodie. To top it off, she wore a bracelet made from typewriter keys. She was sure Dr. Marriott would love it, seeing as typewriters were right up his alley.
She had her hood flipped up, and Ian was wearing his Red Sox baseball cap. Ian had taken up her suggestion that they arrive incognito, so that Iris Tintern wouldn’t recognize them. It would be a disaster if she did, since last time Iris had gone berserk and chased them out of the café.
To Zoé’s surprise, all the seats in the café were filling up fast, and she realized extra tables had been squeezed in wherever there was room. Iris scurried from one customer to the next, rattling off menu choices of “sausages and …,” “bacon with …” and “mushrooms or …” and slamming down pots of tea with the food. Iris sure has a unique style, she thought.
A long queue had formed, snaking out through the front door. All the times Zoé had been to the King’s Ransom Café, she’d never seen more than a handful of people, but today the place was jam-packed. Odder still, everyone was wearing blue-tinted glasses.
“Look through your puzzle-glass,” she whispered to Ian. “But don’t let anyone see you.”
“Copy that,” he said. “A good CIA operative is always discreet.”
“Hiya,” said Pippin, appearing out of nowhere, hair fluttering beneath her beret. “Crikey, what’s going on? Where did all these people come from? And everyone’s got specs on! This café is usually zombie land. How’d you get a table?”
“I saw a group leave and we rushed in,” explained Zoé.
“Maybe there’s an optometrists’ convention in town,” joked Ian. “Hey, I know: they’re all beta testers! Dr. Zival’s paying them to try out his tinted glasses.”
“I don’t think so,” said Zoé. Ian was sometimes a bit over the top. Still, the sight of all those blue lenses gave her an uneasy feeling.
“Hey, would you like to meet my friend Bronwyn Gilwern?” asked Pippin, pulling up a chair. “Bron’s off work tomorrow, says sh
e’ll be at her favorite hangout by the sea and we can stop by after I get out of school.”
Ian nodded enthusiastically.
“I’d love to meet a real seeress,” said Zoé, thinking how Pippin was turning out to be a good friend after all.
“Pippin, do you know a Mr. Stokes?” asked Ian.
“He works at the Tenby Museum and tells frightening stories about wreckers crashing ships on the rocks,” added Zoé.
Pippin shook her head. “Never been to the museum.”
“Are you kidding?” said Ian. “You don’t know what you’re missing!”
“My cousin’s a history maven,” Zoé said to Pippin—maven was a favorite word of Granddad’s. Ian turned bright red, but secretly she knew he was pleased.
As Ian launched into Tenby’s past, Zoé looked through the puzzle-glass. But each time she held it to her eye, the people around her shifted in their seats, turning their faces away, until with an exasperated sigh she gave up. Suddenly she glimpsed a shiny round head with tufts over the ears coming through the door: Dr. Marriott was elbowing his way into the café, looking startled by the crush of people.
“Over here, Dr. Marriott!” she called, waving to him.
“I’ll be gobsmacked,” he said, setting down a plastic shopping bag. “What’s this, eh, a costume bash? The place is absolutely heaving! And I’ll be jiggered: everyone here is wearing spectacles.” He noticed Pippin and reached over, shaking her hand. “Hello, I’m George Marriott.”
“Hiya. I’m Philippa Jenkyn Thomas, but call me Pippin.”
“Pippin’s the one who found the glass puzz—” Zoé started, but Ian nudged her with his foot as Iris Tintern scuffed over in her crepe-soled shoes. They’d agreed not to say anything about Wythernsea or the puzzle in front of Iris, just in case.
“Special today for lunch: toad-in-the-hole,” Iris announced, pencil hovering over her order pad. “For tea I’ve gooseberry scones and clotted cream.”
Ian pulled down the peak of his cap and Zoé drew her hood lower, ordering an orange squash using the fake English accent she’d perfected over the years, while Ian mumbled, “Same for me.” Iris was so rushed she wrote their orders without looking up and dashed off.
Zoé shook her arm, jangling the typewriter keys. “What do you think of my bracelet? My mom gave it to me for my birthday last month. I got to wear a tiara and eat a chocolate cake with my name on it.”
“It’s gorgeous,” said Pippin with a lopsided smile, and Zoé felt a pang of guilt, recalling how Pippin’s mum had run off and that she lived with relatives who probably never remembered her birthday.
“Very nice indeed,” murmured Dr. Marriott. “You appear to have a mother who encourages creativity. Most commendable.”
“Sometimes she does,” said Zoé, who chose her words carefully whenever talking about her mom. “But she doesn’t always get it right.”
Her mom had a cut-and-paste history—something Zoé had overheard one of her teachers say, though she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. Zoé knew only that her mother tried hard to be a good mom, though it wasn’t always easy.
“No one gets it right all the time,” said Dr. Marriott with a kind smile, and Zoé relaxed a bit. “Oh yes, I nearly forgot.” He reached into the plastic bag, identical to the one Granddad used for food shopping, and pulled out two books. “For you.” He handed one each to Zoé and Ian. “As promised.”
Doctor Doom and the Starchild read the bold letters on the cover, by George R. Marriott. The book jacket depicted a girl Zoé’s age standing in a barren wasteland, with tiny spiders parachuting down from a blasted-out yellow sky.
“Gosh, thank you,” said Ian. “I’ve never owned a book signed by the author.”
“I love the cover,” said Zoé, opening her book to inspect Dr. Marriott’s signature, all loopy and unreadable—not at all like his handwriting when he was a kid. He’d used a fountain pen, which made it even more special.
“I’ll rustle up a book for you, too, if you like,” Dr. Marriott said to Pippin.
Zoé saw her eyes light up.
“Oh yes, please,” said Pippin, “that would be smashing.”
“My pleasure,” said Dr. Marriott, turning back to Zoé and Ian. “If you don’t mind my saying, you look extremely bleary-eyed today. Too many late shows on the telly?”
“Granddad doesn’t have a TV,” said Zoé. “He says it rots your brain.”
“He listens to the BBC on his 1937 Ekco Bakelite radio,” added Ian. “If we look wrecked, it’s because there’s a lot of unbelievable stuff going on.”
They had a million things to tell Dr. Marriott, but Zoé wasn’t sure where to begin. “It’s like this: Ian wanted to see the puzzle again, to double-check his hologram theory.” She glanced sideways at Ian, realizing that was an out-and-out lie. Still, it probably wasn’t a good idea to mention their plan to start a new Society of Astercôte. “We didn’t mean to, but we, um, put the puzzle together. It just sort of happened.”
“There was this blue light swirling around us,” said Ian, “and we got blasted apart—whammo!—it was giga-awesome—and the puzzle pulled us through a glass tunnel and we landed in Wythernsea.”
Zoé heard Pippin take a deep breath. “Never!” she gasped. “You didn’t tell me that!”
“It’s the same Wythernsea that sank under the waves centuries ago—well, sort of,” said Ian.
“But it’s in a completely different world now,” added Zoé, watching Pippin’s eyes grow so big they seemed to pop out of her head.
“You went to another world?” whispered Pippin.
Dr. Marriott leaned forward. “You traveled to Wythernsea through the puzzle?” Zoé could see his complexion going from crimson to pasty white, fading to shadows beneath his eyes. “Oh dear, I should have warned you of the dangers.” His gaze held a mixture of anguish and guilt. “I told you not to assemble the puzzle, but I failed to explain what you were up against.”
“You didn’t give us all the information, that’s for sure,” said Ian. “You didn’t tell us about the Scravens.”
“Them’s the creatures, right?” said Pippin, suddenly animated. “Them things that came flying up out—”
“Here you go,” said Iris, slamming down three glasses of orange squash and a cup of tea. Judging by her distracted expression, Zoé was sure she hadn’t overheard their conversation.
Once Iris was out of earshot, Dr. Marriott turned to Pippin. “You’ve seen the creatures as well? And what did they look like?”
“Same as the creatures they seen, great horrid shrieking things with wings,” said Pippin matter-of-factly. “Came flapping out of the puzzle when I put it together, same as what happened to them.”
Seeing a look of alarm creep into Dr. Marriott’s eyes, Zoé said quickly, “We wanted to tell you about it, but we didn’t get a chance because your housekeeper made us leave!”
“The Scravens are infiltrating Tenby so they can get back their lost powers,” said Ian in an ominous tone. “Then they’ll be able to connect with other worlds: evil worlds!”
“We met this lady—well, she’s kind of a giantess—and her name’s Miss Glyndower,” Zoé explained. “She said the Scravens were banished to the Harshlands and they hate it there because time goes by too fast and they age quickly.”
“They want revenge on Wythernsea for exiling them. Basically they want to decimate it,” said Ian, and Zoé saw the professor flinch. “The town wall is falling apart and the weathervanes won’t turn and there’s all this dangerous stuff we have to do before Midsummer’s Day or else the Scravens will conquer Tenby.”
Looking miserable, Dr. Marriott began dropping sugar cubes into his tea. Zoé had a funny feeling he wasn’t counting. On all sides of the table, customers were shouting and joking and laughing uproariously. More people were crowding in through the door, all of them wearing blue-tinted glasses.
“Stuffy, isn’t it?” said Ian, swallowing the last of his orange squash.
&nbs
p; “Absolutely suffocating. This noisy lot is rather more than I can take,” said Dr. Marriott, dropping a five-pound note on the table. “Shall we make a dash for it? The harbor is lovely this time of day.”
“Blimey, look at the queue over there,” said Pippin as they pushed their way out of the café. “It’s unnatural-like, all them people wearing specs.”
At the bottom of the street, Zoé saw a crowd milling around outside the optical shop, some lined up and others peering through the window.
“Very curious,” said Dr. Marriott. “Why this sudden interest in Dr. Zival’s shop? I wonder. And Iris Tintern’s café? I suppose there’s no predicting what the public will clamor for next.”
“Hey, maybe Dr. Zival’s a sleeper agent for the Scravens,” said Ian, and Zoé rolled her eyes, knowing what was coming next. Her cousin read far too many spy novels, in her opinion. “I bet he’s got a secret identity and carries silencers and poison bullets, and cyanide pills in case he’s caught. Not to mention cutting-edge gadgetry and meticulously constructed cover stories.”
“Zival’s a spy?” said Pippin, looking confused.
“Anything’s possible,” replied Ian, pulling down the bill of his hat.
They followed the lane along Penniless Cove Hill to the harbor, past the old Seaman’s Rooms (now tourist rental flats) and the fishermen’s chapel, built of stone from Caldey Island, weaving their way past tiny cottages and overturned boats.
“What’s with the hood?” Pippin asked Zoé. “Is it a new gangster fashion from America?”
“It’s not a fashion. Ian and I are traveling incognito.”
“We’re keeping close to the ground,” said Ian. “We don’t want Iris Tintern recognizing us.”
“No chance of that,” said Pippin. “Iris Tintern never looked once at us, did she? Her eyes kept going off to the side, like.”
“I don’t understand,” said Dr. Marriott. “Why shouldn’t Iris recognize you?”
Walking beside the water, Zoé and Ian explained how Iris had chased them out of the King’s Ransom Café when she saw them looking at her through the puzzle-glass.
The Glass Puzzle Page 10