The Crystal Caves

by Jamie Smart

  Everything hungers for something.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  What Happened Before

  1: An Early Start

  2: The Map

  3: Beyond the Wall

  4: Where it all Went Wrong

  5: A Friendly Face

  6: The Village

  7: Darkwater

  8: Hibbicus

  9: Not Fervus

  10: A Way In

  11: Stew

  12: Priest

  13: Stinkflame

  14: The Hibbicannon

  15: Day Two

  16: To the Coast

  17: Along the Coast

  18: The Hollow

  19: Scavengers

  20: A Safe Place

  21: The Beacon

  22: The New Beacon

  23: An Awful Fire

  24: The Sanctuary

  25: Food

  26: Something Like a Plan

  27: First Launch

  28: The Flight of the Hibbirocket

  29: The Mines

  30: Tunnels

  31: Dahlia

  32: Darkwater’s Last Hope

  33: The Bridge

  34: An Escape

  35: Whatever is Left

  36: The Garden

  37: Prosperity

  What Happened Next

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Jamie Smart

  Copyright

  What Happened Before

  Flember Island was a dark and mysterious place.

  And yet, for all the scary secrets it might hold, there sat upon its tallest mountain a pleasant little village called Eden, protected from the wilds outside by a huge wall. Here lived Dev P. Everdew, a young inventor whose inventions rarely went to plan, often collapsing or exploding – or even spraying his whole village with mouldy cheese. And it was while trying to clean up that particularly stinky mess that Dev discovered a secret book, the flember book, teaching him not only about flember – the energy flowing between all living things – but also how to bring things to life!

  With this incredible knowledge he built a huge robot bear, and absolutely filled it with flember. BOJA was born! A new best friend for Dev, and a powerful helper for the village. But something had gone wrong. Boja had too much flember. In fact, to bring him to life Dev had accidentally taken all the flember from the village, and now everything around them was dying!

  Determined to put things right, Dev and Boja returned most of the flember to where it belonged. But there was one thing they couldn’t save: the Eden Tree – the tallest, most beautiful tree on the island – because its flember was now keeping Boja alive instead!

  Dev couldn’t work out how to save the tree without sacrificing Boja, but then the flember book revealed one last secret. A map, hidden between its words, illuminated by the power of flember itself!

  But where could this map lead, and what might Dev and Boja find there …?

  1

  An Early Start

  Dev P. Everdew stood on the front steps of his house.

  His breath curled out into the morning air.

  He was ill-dressed for this time of day. The night had been particularly chilly, with no sign yet of the sun, and goose bumps ran along the length of his arms. His large, cat-eared helmet kept his head warm, and his long orange scarf protected his neck, but he’d rushed outside without grabbing so much as a coat.

  Just a backpack, slung over one shoulder.

  And the flember book under his arm.

  ‘Come onnnnn, Boja …’ he whispered.

  The house creaked.

  A big red paw squeezed out through the doorway. It gripped the stone steps and then, with some effort, pulled a big red face after it. A bulging eye, then a shiny black nose, then, as if the effort was all too much, Boja stopped halfway, and he fell asleep.

  ‘Boja!’ Dev knelt down beside Boja’s big red ear. ‘Boja, wake up!’

  Boja grunted. His eye opened. A big goofy smile spread across his mouth. Then he started pushing again. The other eye popped through the doorway, the other ear, the whole head. A pause for breath. The shoulders. The chest. Another pause, while Dev watched to make sure the house wasn’t rising off the ground. One more push. A fart, a giggle, the bum – and then OUT.

  ‘Waffles!’ Boja declared, standing up straight as all his mechanical joints click-clicked back into place. His big black nose niff-niff-niffed the air, searching for the faintest scent of waffles, but all it caught was the smell of the Spindletree Forest behind them. ‘No waffles,’ he grumbled, clutching his belly.

  His belly grumbled back in agreement.

  ‘Oh, we’re looking for something FAR more exciting than waffles.’ Dev chuckled. ‘Quickly now, before everyone else wakes up!’

  Together they walked away from the house. Across the broken stone bridge. Up the path. Between all the blue-roofed buildings of Middle Eden and out, onto the moonlit cobbles of the marketplace.

  The stores were closed.

  The streets were empty.

  ‘HUNNNN-GRYYYYY!’ Boja moaned loudly in Dev’s ear.

  ‘Boja, keep your voice down! We don’t want to wake everyone up!’

  Boja frowned a frown so big it almost didn’t fit on his face. Then, suddenly, his nose started to twitch. His nostrils flared. His whole head spun the rest of his body around on the spot. He had caught a scent, a sweet, sugary scent, and it pulled him like a fish on a hook. Down, through the tightly packed alleys. A sharp left, a hard right, Boja’s feet barely touching the ground as his shiny black nose dragged the rest of his body along behind it.

  Finally, he screeched to a halt outside Arnold’s Waffle Shop.

  Boja stared lovingly at the empty, unwashed bowls, the waffley crumbs on the ground, the bins filled with half-eaten waffle bits.

  And his tongue drooped down to his belly.

  ‘The shop’s … not … open yet,’ Dev panted as he caught up. ‘Arnold will still be asleep!’

  ‘I like waffles.’ Boja grinned, his grin now grinning as big as his frown had once frowned.

  ‘Of course you do, they’re delicious.’ Dev leant his shoulder into Boja’s stomach, slowly heaving the greedy bear back towards the main road. ‘And soon, SOON, you can have all the waffles you—’

  ‘BEHHHHHH!’ A loud bleat interrupted them both. A little goat, lying guard on the large stone steps of the Great Hall, jumped onto his tottery legs and waggled his fluffy tail.

  ‘FEVVUS!’ Boja squealed.

  ‘Quietly!’ Dev whispered, lifting a finger to his lips.

  Boja nodded. Then he rose onto his tiptoes and tippy-tippy-tiptoed as quietly as he could towards Fervus. It swiftly became apparent, however, that Boja had even less control over his body when tiptoeing than when his feet were flat to the ground. He started leaning to the left, more to the left, and e-e-even more to the left. Soon he had missed Fervus the goat completely and was heading towards a stack of chicken crates.

  As he neared, the chickens started to wake, their sleepy ‘bukawk’s rising in volume until CRUNCH! Boja’s foot went through one of the crates. CRUNCH! The other foot into another, until he lost his balance completely and flumped into the whole pile, an avalanche of BUKAWK-ing chickens spilling out across the road.

  ‘So much for doing this quietly!’ Dev sighed.

  Suddenly Boja was up again, crates wedged not only onto his feet like a big pair of ridiculous shoes, but also on his paws and his head, while great clumps of chicken feathers spilled out from his nose. ‘BUKAWKKK!’ he screeched, before breaking into fits of giggles.

  ‘Boja, please!’ Dev implored, pushing the loud, clomping chicken-bear along the road. ‘Can we just get through the village without caus
ing any more noise?’

  Boja lifted a crate to his head as if saluting. ‘Bukawk,’ he whispered, striding purposefully on, at least for the first few steps. Then he tripped, stumbled and collapsed onto his face. His bottom rolled over his head, then his head rolled over his bottom, as suddenly the slope of the road steepened and Boja started tumbling down it at speed.

  Dev ran along behind, throwing himself towards Boja as if he could drag him to a stop. Instead, he was bundled up too, crumpled inside a mass of fur, feather and disintegrating chicken crates.

  ‘B-B-B-JUH!’ he shouted through a mouthful of Boja’s belly.

  ‘HU-BUB, HU-BUB, HU-BUB BUB BUB!’ Boja gurgled, bouncing past the houses, the trees, out onto the dusty path and towards the Wall. And though the Wall – a seemingly endless line of tree trunks tightly stacked along Eden’s perimeter – was immense, it still wobbled a little under the weight of a giant chicken-bear crashing into it.

  Boja was caught by the thick, thorny bramble bush that grew along the base of the Wall, but his momentum propelled Dev high enough to grab onto one of its thick metal rivets. Then he reached for another, and another, eventually hauling himself up to the very top where he sat between the Wall’s spikes and took a moment to catch his breath.

  And a moment longer to hold down his stomach.

  ‘That’s one way of getting through the village,’ he wheezed.

  A cold breeze rippled up the back of his neck. He turned, leaning away from Eden and peering over the other side of the Wall, down into the rustling shadows of the mountainside. Down into the Wildening. His pulse quickened. He lifted his head, his eyes nervously following the treetops across the endless darkness of Flember Island.

  And a heavy sense of dread bubbled up inside his stomach.

  He gulped. ‘I really hope we’re doing the right thing.’

  2

  The Map

  ‘DEV! GET DOWN FROM THERE!’

  Santoro jogged down the road towards the Wall. His purple hair was ruffled. His feet were bare. He wore nothing but a night tunic and a furious expression on his face. ‘You … you really think you can squeeze a huge bear out through the house like no one will notice?’

  Dev sighed in relief at the sight of his brother. ‘Santoro!’

  ‘Get DOWN!’

  ‘Let me explain!’

  ‘NO!’ Santoro growled, marching through the trail of broken chicken crates. ‘You nearly destroyed this whole village only yesterday. You and that big red lump!’ Boja, who was currently covered in feathers and upside down with his bum squished into his own face, quietly bukawk-ed with indignation. ‘But we forgave you, Dev. The whole village, we forgave you, we all went to sleep and everything was fine. It was FINE.’

  ‘I found a map!’ Dev beamed. ‘It’s hidden in the pages of this book!’

  Santoro wasn’t looking at the book. His eyes were locked firmly onto Dev. And he wasn’t slowing down.

  ‘Boja, er, maybe you should come up here,’ Dev suggested. ‘Come up, Boja. Quickly! COME UP! COMEUPCOMEUP!’

  Boja scrambled upright, clawing through the thorns and the bracken, grabbing onto the Wall’s rivets and using them to heave his considerable weight to the top. He huddled, precariously, behind Dev.

  ‘Let’s show him the map.’ Dev grinned, pulling out the first few pages. ‘Boja, would you mind?’

  Boja meeped excitedly, lifted one of his paws and pressed a finger against the first page. A gentle glow of flember started to spin around his fingertip. Sparkles of blue light wafted down upon the paper. Flember! It struck invisible lines, symbols, letters, all hidden between the words, all now lighting up as if they had been drawn in starlight.

  Dev had spent most of the night studying these glowing pages, but his heart still swelled at the sight of them. ‘The lines have been drawn with traces of flemberthyst dust, so they’re invisible until flember passes through them.’ He beamed. ‘At first I thought it was a map of the island. See? On these first few pages here’s Eden, here’s the Wall, and then here’s everything beyond it. But then I realized it’s not showing us what’s on the island. It’s showing us what’s underneath it!’

  Santoro threw himself into the brambles. Its thorns tore long thin scratches across his arms, his face, digging into his bare feet as he tried to claw his way through. ‘Get DOWN from there!’ he shouted.

  ‘But it’s a map of the Flember Stream!’ Dev shoved the next couple of pages against Boja’s finger. ‘Oh, Santoro, Nonna showed me the Flember Stream a couple of days ago! It’s the most beautiful thing ever! It’s like a huge, sparkling river deep underneath the ground, a river which carries all of the island’s flember around from one living thing to another.’

  He remembered how magical it had felt when his grandmother Ventillo – his Nonna – had shown him a hidden little cave and together they had watched waves of flember, rising and falling, washing back and forth through all the flemberthyst crystals.

  ‘If I could just reach the Flember Stream again, then maybe I could fix what I broke.’

  Santoro finally gave up, his body tangled and suspended in the thick brambles. ‘What did you break?’ he grumbled. ‘What are you TALKING about?’

  Dev pointed along Eden’s main road. Past the marketplace. The Old Woods. Across Shady Acres and all the way to the top. All the way up to where the most beautiful tree in existence had once stood.

  Now just a twisted, blackened trunk remained.

  Dev sighed. ‘The Eden Tree needs flember to bring it back to life. Boja can carry flember, more than he needs for his own body, so if he could just borrow a little from the Flember Stream and carry it up there, put it back inside the tree, then everything would be OK again!’

  ‘BORROW flember?’ Santoro cried. ‘Dev, you messing about with flember is what caused all this trouble in the first place!’

  ‘Exactly!’ A lump rose in Dev’s throat. ‘My flember experiments broke the Eden Tree. It’s my fault it’s dead. Every time people look at it they’ll say it was me, Dev P. Everdew, the terrible inventor who left it like that.’ He sniffled back tears. ‘Well, it’s me who has to fix it. And I can’t sit around waiting for the Flember Stream to come all the way back up the mountain again. I have to go and find it myself.’

  ‘See, there’s a place on the island called Darkwater. A town, maybe. It’s just at the bottom of our mountain – it really doesn’t look very far at all.’ Dev spoke fast in the hope his brother wouldn’t be able to shout over him. ‘Usually the Flember Stream runs way too deep for anyone to see, but the map says there’s a point in Darkwater where it comes close to the surface!’

  ‘You can’t go over this Wall,’ Santoro yelled. ‘The WILDENING lies beyond the Wall! You wouldn’t dare go into the Wildening!’

  Dev shuddered at the memory of all the stories he’d heard about the Wildening. The wurdelsnumpf, the grobbits and all the other terrifying monsters, creatures and beasties which supposedly lurked amongst the shadows. ‘I … I’ll be fine,’ he stuttered. ‘I’ll have Boja with me! He’ll keep me safe!’

  ‘SNNNNKKK!’ Boja snored. He had somehow managed to fall asleep. His paw slumped away from the pages Dev was holding as his flember crackled back around his fingertips, then sank beneath his fur.

  The glowing map faded.

  ‘What about MUM?’ Santoro replied. ‘She’ll be so worried about you!’

  ‘I left a note!’ Dev replied, closing the book. ‘For her, for all of you! It’s in my workshop. It explains what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and that we’ll only be gone for a couple of days. Then we’ll come right back and fix the Eden Tree!’

  A surprisingly loud ‘BEHHHHHHHH’ interrupted him. He looked up to see Fervus the goat powering excitedly down the road, a variety of window shutters clonk-clonking open around him as bleary-eyed villagers peered out of their homes to see what all the noise was about.

  At the sound of Fervus bleating Boja squealed himself awake. He sat bolt upright only to instantly lose
his balance, his eyes bulging wide with panic as he disappeared over the other side of the Wall. His paws reached out, desperately clawing for something to grab onto.

  They found the end of Dev’s scarf.

  Eden swung out of sight as Dev was yanked sharply backwards, tumbling down the Wall and crashing through a canopy of tree branches before landing on Boja’s huge, pillowy stomach.

  ‘HOOOOOOOF!’ Boja wheezed from one end, while a honking fart escaped from the other. Dev slid down onto the soft, dew-soaked grass, checking his bear for any injuries, and brushing away the last of his feathers.

  ‘DEV, DON’T GO!’ Santoro’s voice called out from the other side of the Wall. ‘It’s DANGEROUS out there. It’s SO DANGEROUS!’

  More voices rose up around Santoro. Other villagers who must have seen Dev and Boja disappear over the Wall. ‘Lad, you must be crazy!’ someone yelled. ‘The Wildening will chew you up and spit you out!’

  Somewhere further up the hill, the bells of the Great Hall started to chime.

  The whole village would be waking up.

  ‘We’ll be OK!’ Dev shouted back. ‘Me and Boja, we’ll look out for each other!’

  He gripped tightly onto Boja’s red thumb, as a gentle pulse of flember coursed across his hand.

  It felt warm.

  Reassuring.

  He smiled up at the big red bear.

  ‘We’ll look out for each other,’ he whispered.

  3

  Beyond the Wall

  The path leading away from Eden was so rocky and overgrown it would have been hard to call it a path at all, were a row of willow trees not lining either side. Their low hanging leaves brushed gently against Dev’s face, then flapped into Boja’s, before the path opened up and there, in the light of an early morning sun, the whole mountainside stretched out below them.