The Chaos Code

by Justin Richards

  ‘We shall have to go back,’ Sven said, disappointed.

  Matt was not so sure. ‘There’s space at the edge, we might be able to squeeze through. If it isn’t too densely packed.’

  ‘You think so?’ Sven sounded dubious.

  ‘Worth a try,’ Matt told him. He shone his torch round the edge of the pile of debris, and could see the stone floor disappearing into the gloom on the other side of the obstruction. He turned the torch off and stuffed it into his pocket.

  With only half the amount of light, the tunnel seemed to close in around him. Matt tried to push himself sideways through the narrow gap. Sven was right, there just wasn’t enough room. But the gap got wider higher up. Matt reached his arms over the pile of stone and earth and felt for something on the other side, something to grab hold of so he could pull himself through.

  It was strange, Matt thought as he stared up at the murky darkness of the collapsed roof – the hole in the tunnel ceiling was just about the same size as the space he was now trying to wriggle through. It looked like something had pushed its way through, forcing the ceiling and the earth behind it down into the space below. Had someone got there before them?

  ‘Careful!’ Sven warned as more earth fell through the ruptured ceiling and slid down the pile.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Matt gasped, heaving himself up and into the gap. ‘It’s not blocked for long. I can get through, then we can maybe shift some of this and make the hole wide enough for you.’

  He was nearly there now. Emerging head first from the mass of dirt and debris into darkness. His body was filling the gap and blocking out the light from Sven’s torch. He could feel the grip of the earth round him. It seemed to tighten as the darkness deepened. Then with a last heave he was through, and was tumbling down the other side of the mound of earth.

  There was a roaring in his ears – Sven shouting, the whole tunnel seeming to groan and move. Then dirt and darkness came crashing down over Matt. The roof was collapsing, what little support had been left for it was pulled away by Matt himself as he broke through the blockage. He could feel the earth and stone falling down around him, knocking him sideways. His nose and eyes were full of gritty blackness. He fumbled desperately for his torch, and managed at last to switch it on.

  The beam of light was misty with falling dust and dirt. And behind Matt the tunnel was completely blocked. He could hear Sven’s muffled voice from the other side of the blockage, shouting to him that he would get help and dig Matt out.

  Matt sat on the cold, damp tunnel floor, shining the torch helplessly and hopelessly at the mass of debris clogging the passage behind him. All he could do was wait.

  Or was it? Surely, if he kept going he would meet Venture and Robin coming the other way – he might even find the Treasure. Matt scrambled to his feet and set off quickly along the tunnel.

  Only to find that there was another blockage further along. One of the walls had fallen into and across the tunnel, blocking the way forward with huge, heavy chunks of stone.

  The wind was blowing Katherine Feather’s ice-blond hair round her face as she stood at the end of the tunnel. She was peering into the darkness. There was no sign now of Venture and his daughter. She waited patiently, listening for any sound, watching for any sign that they had found something.

  Sitting on a lower part of the rising mound, Harper was still engrossed in his laptop. He was smiling thinly, oblivious to the cold wind, angling the screen so he could see it despite the bright sunlight.

  There were two windows open on the screen. One showed a basic wire-frame model of the mound itself, with the information from the radar added in so that tunnels formed a cross through the middle. It was the second window where Harper was working. An image solidified slowly from its own wire skeleton – surfaces and textures gradually filling it out like a child’s colouring. A dark, mottled rat-like creature revolving slowly inside the window. Its eyes glinted darkly.

  Satisfied, Harper clicked on a control and the creature stopped turning. It stared back out of the screen at him. Harper’s fingers traced across the touchpad and the pointer on the screen moved to another control. An entry box opened and he typed in a number – 10. He hesitated, then added another 0 – making it 100. The box closed, and the window was suddenly full of the creatures, jostling and fighting for space, disappearing behind the edges of the window. They seemed to scratch at the glass of the screen, trying to get out. Screeching and shrieking erupted from the little speakers at the sides of the laptop, and Harper adjusted the volume.

  Then he closed the window. It shrank back down to a small icon on the desktop. Slowly, carefully, Harper picked up the icon with the pointer and dragged it over to the wire-frame picture of the mound. The pointer, loaded with the icon, hovered for a moment over a point two-thirds of the way along a tunnel – a point where a black web of lines traced out an obstruction. Harper lifted his finger from the touchpad. And the icon tumbled into the tunnel.

  It was the noise that Matt noticed first. A scratching, scraping sound.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Is that you?’ Had Robin and her father reached the other side of the cave-in? Were they trying to get through? ‘I’m here!’ he shouted, shining the torch at the wall of fallen stone in the hope some of its light might penetrate to the other side for them to see.

  The sound was getting louder, a high-pitched shrieking and squealing as well as the scratching. It seemed to be coming from all around him. Matt swung the torch away from the wall. A shape caught in its beam – it hesitated, then darted into the blackness. Shadows moved and trembled all around him.

  Something landed on Matt’s shoulder. Instinctively he brushed it away, looking up in case the roof was about to fall. His hand had brushed against something cold and rough, like fallen earth. The torchlight seemed to be absorbed by the black of the roof – dark shadowy stone. It rippled and moved as the torchlight shone across it. As if it was alive.

  And another shape detached itself from the ceiling and dropped onto Matt’s shoulder. Caught full in Matt’s torch beam, dark eyes gleaming, the shape stared back at him. A rat. Claws raked savagely at his face.

  Matt shouted, thrashed at the thing on his shoulder, crawled back as more of them fell from the roof. They were landing all around him – on him. The scratching and shrieking got louder and louder. A black tide was flowing across the ground, clawing its way up his legs as he struggled back as quickly as he could.

  The back of his head met something hard and gritty, and Matt turned and lashed out. The torch went flying, its light dancing crazily across the scene before landing with a thump. It went out. Darkness.

  But Matt had already seen the wall of earth behind him, and the mass of creatures scurrying towards him. He was trapped.

  Without thinking, Matt was lashing out again, thumping at anywhere on his body he felt – or thought he felt – one of the creatures. He expected them to be soft, oily, warm … But they were hard and brittle, rough and gritty like the earth piled behind him. And cold as stone. He could feel their sharp, brittle claws scraping through his trousers, tearing at his coat. Their teeth nipped at his ears and face as he desperately fought and thumped and ripped them off him. The sound was unearthly – echoing and reverberating in the confined space. No longer the high-pitched shriek of the creatures, but Matt’s own shouts and cries for help and the thumping of his heart.

  Without the light, he could only imagine where the animals were, how many were attacking him. He was breathing in short, sharp, panicked gasps as the blackness itself seemed to take on texture and become a living thing. He could feel it pressing down on him. Dragging him into oblivion.

  ‘Matt is trapped,’ Sven gasped. ‘There was a fall – the roof …’ He paused to get his breath back.

  Harper glanced up. ‘But he is all right?’

  Sven nodded. ‘We need to get him out.’

  ‘We can reach him from other end of the tunnel, I’m sure,’ Harper said. He was smiling as he returned his at
tention to his computer.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ It was Venture’s voice, and Harper looked up again, surprised.

  Venture and his daughter were standing with Katherine Feather. Their faces, hands and clothes were dusted with mud and earth.

  ‘Problem?’ Harper asked.

  ‘The tunnel’s blocked,’ Robin said. ‘We went as far as we could, but there’s no way through. It’s completely collapsed.’

  ‘We can get through from my end,’ Sven said. ‘We just need a couple of shovels.’

  ‘Come on then,’ Venture said.

  Harper tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the area below his keyboard. Then he closed down the program he was running, and snapped the lid shut. ‘The poor boy must be terrified,’ he said. ‘We must help him, of course.’

  Matt found the torch by accident – rolling over it as he desperately thrashed and crawled trying to get away from the attacking creatures. He scooped it up, thumbing the switch without much hope. Incredibly, the torch wasn’t broken. It must have just switched off when it hit the ground.

  A beam of yellow light shot out, illuminating the passageway, and the dark mottled shapes of the creatures as they hurled themselves out of the darkness at Matt like a black wave. He gave a shriek of terror and swung the torch, smashing it into one of the dark shapes. The creature exploded in a shower of dry fragments.

  But Matt didn’t stop to think about that, didn’t wait to see the dry earth that fell to the ground tremble and gather itself back into a new, identical creature – stone-black eyes glinting malevolently. He was tearing at the mass of earth and stone blocking the tunnel. He couldn’t go back, but he could try to dig his way forward, further into the mound.

  Coughing and choking and gasping, tears streaming down his frightened face, he had nothing to lose. He pulled desperately at the rubble, scraping away the smaller stones, leaping out of the way of the larger ones that fell down after them. He jammed the torch under his armpit so he could use both hands to rip away the obstruction.

  With a scraping roar, the whole bank of debris collapsed. A falling lump of stone caught Matt on the shoulder and knocked him backwards. He stumbled away, stamping one of the creatures to powder, not noticing. The tunnel was full of dust like an eerie mist. He almost dropped the torch again. It slipped from under his arm and he scrabbled to catch it. As it fell, the light cut through the opening in the rock wall ahead of Matt, showing him the hole that he had cleared. A hole large enough to climb through.

  He hurled himself towards it and scrambled through into the tunnel beyond.

  On the other side, he waited only long enough to realise that the rat-like creatures were not following him. He didn’t stop to wonder why, he just ran. Head down, he charged along the tunnel, the torchlight swaying drunkenly over the floor and walls.

  Behind him, the small, shadowy creatures fell back into the darkness from which they had come. Scattered across the tunnel floor. Dirt and earth and mud and sand…

  The rock-fall was not as deep as it looked and, with help from Sven, Venture managed to shovel the earth aside quite quickly. As soon as there was room, Robin was past them and pushing through the gap.

  ‘Matt? Matt are you all right?’

  She turned to take the torch that Sven held through the gap for her. The ground was covered with small piles of earth, like mole hills, but otherwise the tunnel ahead seemed empty. She reached the second rock-fall, and like Matt before her, climbed over the fallen lumps of stone from the roof.

  ‘Here!’ a voice called from ahead in answer to her increasingly worried shouts.

  Further on, the tunnel widened out into a large circular chamber with a domed roof. The floor sloped gently down into the middle of the chamber, which must reach almost to the top of the inside of the mound.

  The floor was grey with the dirt of ages, but even so Robin could see that some of the stones were black amongst the light grey that was used everywhere else.

  A pattern, inlaid in the floor – a large Maltese Cross with the centre directly under the middle of the dome.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the chamber was Matt. He looked pale under the dirt that smeared his face and his clothes were torn and caked with mud. There were trails down his face where tears had run, but now he was grinning in the light from the torch resting in his lap.

  ‘I think this is it,’ he said. His voice was trembling, and Robin could sense it was from fear as much as excitement. ‘Here, help me.’

  The centre of the cross, the tips of the four inward-pointing triangles that formed the pattern, was set into a single circular stone. Like a tile it rested in the middle of the floor, about half a metre in diameter. Matt had his fingers in the narrow crack between the circular shape and the stone next to it. He had managed to lift it just slightly.

  Putting down her torch, angling it so she could see what they were doing, Robin reached down to help. The stone was cold and unyielding, but together they managed to inch it slowly upwards. At last, there was darkness beneath as the stone lifted away to reveal a dark circular well.

  Robin picked up her torch. She was only vaguely aware of her father and Sven arriving beside them. Barely noticed Atticus Harper and Katherine Feather entering the chamber.

  Like Matt, she was looking down into the hole they had revealed. Staring at the cracked rolls of parchment, the leather-bound volumes and the glint and gleam of metal.

  Chapter 12

  There was nowhere on the island for Matt to clean himself up, so he had to wait until they were back in Copenhagen. He was cut and bruised, but elated at finding the Treasure. However, just as Robin had warned him, there was no sign of Dad – or even any indication that he had ever been there. Harper gave instructions that the site was to be preserved and left it to Katherine to organise the purchase of the land from the farmer who actually owned it.

  ‘Buy the whole island if you have to,’ he said, and gave her the names of three Danish officials and politicians she could talk to if there was a problem.

  Nothing was touched except for the artefacts and relics and documents that Matt and Robin had uncovered in the central chamber. These were carefully crated up and put on the helicopter to return with Harper and the others to the Waterfall Pyramid. Harper brushed aside the objections of both Venture and Sven, both of whom argued that everything should be left intact and in situ.

  ‘We have to know if this is indeed the Treasure of St John,’ Harper insisted. ‘And if it is, then we need to take it into safe keeping. Who knows what might happen to it otherwise – we’re not the only people interested in it you know. But we are the most trustworthy.’

  Venture said nothing, and Sven was silenced with some quiet words from Katherine. Matt did not hear what she said, but he could guess – a grant for his museum, a pay-off of some sort. It seemed to be how Harper did business. To Harper, everything was business.

  At Copenhagen airport, money also greased the wheels. But Matt did not object – Harper had organised rooms at a luxury airport hotel and Matt was at last able to soak off the mud and dirt in a hot, deep bath. His whole body stung like hell from thousands of tiny scratches. They had three hours before Harper’s plane would be leaving for Rio, and their luggage had been sent over from the hotel. Matt spent over half the time just lying in the bath, occasionally topping it up with hot water, and gradually feeling less of the pain. He tried not to think about how he had come by the scratches and bruises. It was over now, that was what mattered. Just … rats. But a part of his mind couldn’t help but wonder if that was really what they were – where had they come from? Where had they gone?

  When a car arrived and took him back to the runway, Matt wasn’t surprised to find that Harper himself, together with both Venture and Robin, did not seem to have left the plane at all.

  ‘There’s a shower,’ Robin pointed out as they strapped in for take-off. ‘Everything we need. Why bother with the hotel.’

  ‘Oh wish I’d thought of
that,’ Matt said sarcastically.

  ‘Well, you’re a special case,’ she told him.

  ‘Thanks a bunch.’

  ‘I mean, you really did need a bath.’

  On the flight, Matt tried to tell Robin about the creatures in the tunnel. It was the first chance he’d had to talk to her without other people around, but the further Matt got with his story, the more improbable it seemed. Was he starting to imagine things, he wondered? Was it some sort of nervous problem brought on by the strain of the last few days?

  ‘Rats?’ she said incredulously. ‘I didn’t see any rats.’

  ‘No, well, they were there. Hundreds …’ He sighed. ‘A lot of them.’

  ‘Something must have scared them off,’ Robin said. From the way she said it, Matt guessed that she didn’t believe him.

  ‘You, probably,’ Matt grumbled.

  ‘Thanks a bunch,’ she said, echoing his earlier tone.

  The crate was standing in the main cabin, and it wasn’t long before Harper had it opened and together with Venture began to unpack the artefacts onto the conference table.

  Robin, Matt and Katherine helped. Matt could feel the age of the leather-bound books as he lifted them out of the packing and placed them carefully alongside rolls of parchment. The paper was thick and dry and brittle. The writing was faded and none of it was in English.

  ‘Just a fraction of what was there in Constantinople,’ Venture said sadly. ‘It seems they managed to save even less than we thought.’

  ‘Or else Sivel didn’t retrieve it all,’ Robin suggested.

  Harper, strangely, did not seem interested in the papers and parchments and books. Almost at once he had picked up one single artefact, ignoring jewelled crucifixes, bracelets, swords and daggers, and even gold and silver coins. He sat alone on a large sofa and examined a disc that looked like it was made of terracotta.

  The others continued to sort through the materials on the table, except for Venture. He was standing motionless close to Harper, watching him intently through narrowed eyes. He was so still and stern that seeing him made Matt shiver.