by Manda Benson
It was only now she was here that it occurred to her the whole thing might be a trick, and either nothing or something worse would come of it. Not long ago there had been a girl at school Dana had sat next to who had pretended to be her friend, and kept making arrangements to meet her for lunch or out of school and not turning up. Pauline had said, vehemently when she found out, that the girl probably thought it was funny, on account of being a stupid idiot with only half a brain who wouldn’t know a funny joke if it jumped out and bit her on the backside.
This was the same Eric she’d solved Cerberus’s puzzles with back on Roareim. Surely he wouldn’t do stuff like that? He’d seemed very genuine yesterday, but on the other hand, Dana probably had no idea what genuine was compared to what wasn’t. Perhaps she wouldn’t know genuine if it jumped out and bit her on the backside, the same as Pauline said stupid people don’t know humour.
A gate at the side of the garage scraped open. Eric peered surreptitiously through the gap. “Hey. Come in.”
Dana crossed the drive and went in through the gate Eric held open for her. Perhaps he was her friend, and it felt good that he might be, and to be welcome, but she didn’t want to trust that feeling too much just in case it should turn out to be an elaborate trap.
They entered the house through the back door, into an utility room smelling of cat, and indeed there were bowls containing water and little coloured biscuit shapes for the cat to eat on a plastic mat in one corner. Eric showed her to a second door, that led down a step into the garage. However, it didn’t contain a car, or a load of gardening paraphernalia and junk like most people’s garages did, although Eric’s moped was propped up by the large metal door. There was a sofa against one wall with a darts board on the brick above it and an old CRT telly with a computer console opposite, and a chest freezer against the back wall. Scattered about the rest of the place were boxes of toys, fold-up chairs, an electric guitar and its amp, and dismantled computers and bits.
“This is my lair,” Eric explained. He threw himself down on the sofa. He was wearing a heavy metal t-shirt with jeans and trainers.
Dana looked around awkwardly. “Do you, like, live in here?”
“Well, sort of. I’ve got a bedroom and all, an’ it’s too cold in the winter, but my mum lets me keep my stuff in here and doesn’t come in and mess with it or anything.” Somewhat flustered and red in the face, he got up again and went over to a fridge on a table next to the freezer. “Anyway, do you want a drink? You can have a lolly instead if you want. Or you can have both; I probably will.”
“What are those?” A wooden rack holding nearly horizontal bottles stood next to the freezer.
“That’s cider I was brewing with my brother. Well, he’s my half-brother really. He’s gone to University now.”
“It’s illegal to drink alcohol if you’re under eighteen.”
“No it’s not. It’s illegal to sell alcohol to someone under eighteen, and it’s illegal to buy alcohol for someone under eighteen, but there’s nothing in the law to say a person who’s under eighteen can’t buy the ingredients and brew their own alcohol and drink it.”
Dana selected a lime ice lolly and chose one of the fishing chairs to sit on. Eric grabbed a tin of pop and another lolly and sat back on the sofa. “What happened to the wyvern in that lab, then?”
“He’s going to contact someone who will know what to do.” Dana wanted to avoid saying too much. “Someone who works for the Meritocracy.”
Eric broke off slurping lemon-flavoured ice to say, “See? Told you they would take it away. Now we’ll never hear about it again, and they’ll cover it up and hide it in some secret military installation like Area 69 or whatever it’s called.”
His comment was annoying, not only because of his tone, but because Dana suspected there might be a modicum of truth in it. “Well, it’s not about that, is it? It’s about what’s best for the wyvern. And it’s better off with someone who works for the Meritocracy who knows about things like that than it is stuck in the school. I mean, if the teachers had found it in the classroom the next day, they would just have called the police, and the police would have thought it was a bomb or something and destroyed it.”
Eric abruptly laughed. “And probably the school with it, so we could start the holidays early.” He crunched ice and swigged pop. “So what were you doing in detention, anyway?”
“Mr Slugs put me on.”
“Slugs once put me on detention. He had me doing stupid lines in his office. I farted my guts out and stunk the place up. He never put me on detention again.”
Dana laughed. “I wouldn’t be able to do that. It never works when I try to get away with things.”
“Some teachers you can’t pull it off with. I couldn’t do it with teachers like Kell or McCafferty; they would say something. But teachers like Slugs don’t really have any instincts like that. I mean, he doesn’t have any sense of humour, and it says on the school website that he used to have a proper job before he was a teacher, so he must have got the sack and gone into it to get off the dole. They must train ’em in teacher university how to deal with kids misbehaving, but if you do something weird that can’t quite be classed as misbehaving, they don’t know how to deal with it.”
Dana considered this.
Eric indicated the television. “You want to play a computer game?”
“Okay.”
“What sort? I’ve got first-person shooters, MMOGs, fighting games…”
“I want to play a computer game that you have to kill baddies in,” said Dana, thinking of Doctor Osric.
“I’ve got Pillage and Burn III,” Eric suggested. “You have to ransack settlements and loot them, and you can make yourself better weapons out of the stuff you find.”
A vague memory about an odd dream came into Dana’s mind at his suggestion. “Are there any games around now like the Cerberus game? Online games about exploring worlds?”
“Not puzzle games exactly like that. Pillage and Burn is online. You can team up with other people and kill bosses and that kind of thing.”
Dana chose her words carefully. “I thought I heard something about a new game online, something about…” It all seemed so distant and hard to remember now, but she was sure there had been something, a name. “Something to do with diamonds or something like that. Forged diamonds, I think.”
Eric frowned. “I dunno,” he said at length. “Never heard anything like that.” He grabbed the computer’s keyboard off the floor and typed forged diamonds game into a search engine, but there was nothing that came up on the first two pages that seemed to be anything at all related to what Dana could recall.
“I’ll give you my email address before you go home, and then you can email me the link if you find it again,” Eric said. “I really liked that Cerberus game. I was sorry when it went offline and I couldn’t play it any more. And, uh,” he looked awkwardly away from her and at the keyboard on his knee, “you were nice to play with. I was kind of hoping I would see you again on that forum so we could play something else together, even if it wasn’t Cerberus. I sent you a PM and stuff. But you were never on again.”
As he’d been talking, he’d started up the Pillage and Burn game he’d mentioned.
“So, why did you never notice me at school before?” Dana asked.
“I only moved here recently and started going to that school. I lived in Dudley before.”
“Is that why you talk funny — I mean, differently to other people here?”
Eric snorted. “Are you calling me a Brummie? If me mother comes in while you’re here, you’d better be careful you don’t call her a Brummie. She’s funny about it. She says ‘this esn’t Brummie, this es Black Countraay!’” Eric selected two player and create new character. “Here, what do you want?” He dumped a game controller in Dana’s lap. “Warrior, thief, wizard, priest…”
“What’s a priest?”
“Oh, they’re crap. They just heal other people. But if you want to do
that, I can make a tank and we can play together.” Eric typed Epsilon into the character name box, but an error message came up saying it was already taken.
“Epsilon5?” Dana suggested.
Eric tried that and it worked. He named his character Charonn. A loading screen appeared, a bar filled up with colour, and finally the screen changed to show a split screen of two images of the same computer-generated farm with two characters standing in the middle.
Dana fiddled with the controller. It would have been so much easier just to tell the computer what she wanted her character to do, but if she did that, Eric might notice.
They played for a little while. The purpose of the game, at least for Dana’s character, was to keep up with Eric’s character as it ran around hitting things with a sword. As the things hit the character in return, the red bar indicating its health shrank, and Dana had to press a button to heal the character and put health back in.
By now, Dana had started to feel hunger pangs. “Are we going to have dinner? I told Pauline and Graeme I would be having dinner here.”
“Ya, sure.” Eric frowned. “Why’d you call your mum and dad Pauline and Graeme?”
Dana put the game controller on the floor. “Because they’re not my mum and dad, they’re my foster parents.”
“Oh. Right. My dad left as well.”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.” Eric suddenly looked solemn. “I’m not sure my mum really knew him properly.” Then he looked at Dana, and a crafty, jocular attitude overcame him. “He’s a spy, and he’s not allowed to reveal himself to me because he’s being hunted by Russian agents. But I expect he’ll want me to come with him on missions when I’m eighteen. Actually, she’s not really my mum; my mother is the Duchess of Essex, and when I was born I was stolen and put up for adoption, but really I’m heir to a fortune and a massive estate with gargoyles on the roof and stables and horses and all that.”
Dana laughed. “Well, my mother is a rich and powerful lady, and my father is a mad scientist who made me in a test tube.”
Eric laughed. “Mint!”
“If you go north, through Scotland, almost as north as you can go, there are some haunted islands of black rock, called the Seven Hunters. And that’s where my dad lives in exile, in a secret bunker built by the Ministry of Defence.”
Eric was laughing hard. “Seriously, that’s really good. You should write a book or something. Or a computer game.”
“What would happen in the computer game?”
“Well, I suppose the character would have to journey to the island, fighting—” and Eric punctuated this by seizing an old TV antenna from a corner and waving it about like an epee, “—sea monsters, and giant squids, and Scotsmen wearing kilts like on Braveheart!”
“Ya, and if they did,” Dana added, pragmatically, “they’d have to take him some toilet paper and some razor blades, ‘cause I expect he’s run out by now.”
In contrast to Eric’s raucous laughter that followed, Dana felt a sudden, acute pang of grief. She didn’t know where Ivor was, and she had recurrent nightmares in which she made the journey back to Roareim only to find it cold and abandoned, or decayed and ruined in the ugly state Cerberus had portrayed it in order to hurt and frighten her.
“What’s your dad like, then? Does he have wild hair and glasses, and wear a white coat?”
“No. Well, he wears glasses. But he’s tall, big. And his clothes are all old and shabby because he can’t get to the mainland very often to buy more.”
Dana put her hand into her jeans pocket and closed her fingers tightly over Ivor’s petrified watch. It wasn’t the thought of Ivor being blown up in the helicopter that bothered her most, nor the shocking and unsettling images of him washed up on a beach, cold and drowned, that haunted her mind on nights she couldn’t sleep. It was that awful desolation, that emptiness, she felt in the Roareim of her dreams; that great feeling of loss that she’d never hear his voice again, or recognise his smell, or see him stand the way he used to when he was thinking, one hand on the back of a chair or a table, the other on his hip, with his forehead creased and his bottom lip jutting forwards.
Hope yet still kindled in her. Rack the Internet as she might, she had never found any reference to a body being found in the vicinity of Cape Wrath or the Outer Hebrides that would fit Ivor’s description from that time or after. There was nothing on any of the classified files she’d been able to find and hack into, and Jananin’s words still haunted her mind: Whether he is dead or alive, it was not his intention to return today.
“I wish…” Dana found herself saying, but she noticed Eric watching her, and she suspected he thought it was a joke. She didn’t want to make it sound too sincere. “I wish I knew. And sometimes I wish I wasn’t here. Not because of Pauline and Graeme, because of the school.”
Eric shrugged. “You could always skive off.” He got up off the sofa and went back to the door. “Let’s find something for dinner.”
Dana followed him through the utility room and into the kitchen. “You mean, not go in?”
“Ya. You can forge a note for when you go back in. The main problem is finding somewhere to hide all day where no-one’ll find you. If people see kids skiving, they tell the police and then you get caught. Oh, and you ought to say hi to my mum.” Eric opened the door on the other side of the kitchen.
“Mum, this is Dana from school.”
“Hi,” said Dana.
A woman in a dressing gown sitting on a sofa said hi and went back to watching television. Eric shut the door when they went back into the kitchen.
“What are good places you can hide?”
“Anywhere people don’t go. Which rules out most places if it’s summer. Mind you, most of the best places get used by Smith and his lot, and they won’t put up with other people hanging out there, and we don’t want people from school seeing us anyway.”
“Why not?”
Eric shrugged. “They’ll think we’re, well...”
“What?”
“Going out together.”
“It would seem to be largely academic.” ‘Largely academic’ was a phrase Graeme often used in such a situation. “Since they all hate us at any rate, why should they care if they thought we were going out together? It’s not as though they can be any... any horribler to us because of it.”
“You want to put money on it?” said Eric. He had filled the kettle, and now he was getting out some pots of instant noodles.
“If we skived off, we could go and look for the wyvern.”
“What, at that weird bloke’s lab? We’d be seen for sure there.” Eric was making chocolate spread sandwiches.
She thought again of what Dr Osric had said about the wyvern and Ivor’s experiments. Then she considered the familiar sensation the wyvern had given her. The wyvern didn’t transmit words of a language, or any signal that could be translated and written down as something simple. What it had thought to Dana was an experience, a flight, its great wings beating steadily until the muscles of its shoulders were stiff and aching, a taut, bloated sensation filling its guts, and the colours of the land, from an expanse of nondescript marsh to the sharp geometry of yellow, green, and brown agricultural land, to the grey clutter and haze of cities. She realised what the familiar sensation meant: the wyvern used GPS.
Eric finished making the sandwiches and carried them and the instant noodles on a tray back into the garage. There was a cat in the utility room, but it darted out through its flap when it saw Dana.
“Do you have any road maps?” she asked Eric.
After much rummaging he found a battered AA atlas on a shelf. “Are you going to show me where your dad lives?”
Dana thought that would be a good idea, but when she turned to the map of Lewis, the Flannan Isles weren’t shown on it.
“It should be here!” She pointed to the empty space in the pale blue representing the sea. “It’s got Gallan Head on it, right there!”
“
It doesn’t matter,” said Eric with his mouth full. “It was a good idea.”
“If you look on an Ordnance Survey map, it’ll be on there!” Dana said indignantly. “It must be ‘cause there aren’t any roads, and this is a road map. I suppose it’d be a waste of ink printing a place with no roads.”
“You did say it was a secret MoD site. Perhaps they’re not allowed to show it on a map.”
“Perhaps that’s it. Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to look for. I was thinking about where the wyvern came from.”
“How can you work that out from a map?”
Dana was already thinking. The wyvern had conveyed to her the movement of the sun, which rose in behind it and moved to its right to set in front of it. That meant the wyvern had been travelling west, but it was no good telling Eric that as he wouldn’t believe her. But then she remembered how she’d looked up as the wyvern had flown towards the school, and seen metal glint in the glare, and the yard cool and flooded with the shadow of the school building behind her.
“It came from the east.” She knew this wasn’t entirely logical, since the wyvern could’ve made a pass over the school and come back from a different angle, but she hoped Eric wouldn’t think to question it. “And I think it came quite a long way.”
“Perhaps it came from France.”
Dana frowned. “Why would it come from France?”
Eric shrugged. “Because Mum says they smell of garlic and they won’t buy our meat or our vegetables.”
Dana was sure the wyvern hadn’t come from France because it hadn’t recalled flying over ocean. She struggled to think of something else that would justify it to Eric. “Osric looked at some of the components inside it,” she said at length. “The writing on them was in English. If it’d come from France, it would’ve been written in French.”
“Perhaps it came from Russia.”