Three Strikes

by Lucy Christopher

  ‘Open up,’ Bo called through the glass. ‘I need a favour. Two, actually, seeing as you’re awake.’

  Jared dropped Bo at the end of the footpath leading to Blackfin High and the promenade.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? I could at least keep lookout or something.’

  Bo shook her head. ‘You’re more use to me running interference with my mum. Just go and sleep in my bed. Then if she gets home before I do and she happens to look in on me, she won’t know I’m not there.’

  ‘You don’t think she’ll notice I’m not you?’ Jared said, looking dubious.

  Bo snorted. ‘She’s not going to run a DNA test. As long as there’s a breathing body in my bed, that’s all Mum will be bothered about. I can’t be bothered with getting grounded again.’

  ‘Oh, alright then.’ Jared shifted the van into gear. ‘But if she finds me and starts screaming that I’m some kind of creep, I will not be happy.’

  Bo was about to leg it for the school when she remembered one final thing she needed him to do.

  ‘And can you unplug the phone when you get there? I don’t want Mrs Pearce calling Mum and freaking her out before I’ve found Levi.’

  Jared gave a weary salute, and then the camper was chugging back down the road in the direction of the Peeps household.

  The school was dark and silent ahead of her, the only light coming from the moon glinting off the high sash windows and the reflection of Bo’s torch beam bouncing in her hand. It had only taken a couple of minutes to drive from the woods to the school path, but Bo didn’t have any time to waste. She ran toward the school, yanking her bag when it snagged on the rough stone wall of the Penny Well, and through the school gates.

  On the short journey back, Bo had decided that the most likely spot in the school for an entrance to a tunnel would be via the basement, so she went around the back to where the building supervisor’s office was. She paused at the back door. All quiet. Good.

  Bo pulled out the lock-picking set for the second time that night.

  The leather fold was empty. Not a single pick remained.

  ‘Seriously? Seriously?!’

  The leather became a screwed-up rag in Bo’s fist. She glared back over her shoulder, remembering the tug on her bag strap as she passed by the Penny Well. It had stolen the picks straight out of her backpack.

  Bo stomped over and shone her torch beam down over the stone wall of the well. The light disappeared after perhaps twenty feet, fading into complete and unfathomable blackness.

  ‘Give them back!’

  Her voice echoed back to her, thin and weak.

  Now what was she supposed to do? Bo supposed she could break a window to get into the school, but she had a feeling that would set off an alarm, and she didn’t particularly want to be arrested for vandalism. At least, not before she had found her brother.

  She could go around all the windows checking for one that hadn’t been locked properly, but that would take ages, and she probably wouldn’t find a way in anyway. Then she’d be back to breaking a window with even less time.

  With a growl of rage, Bo kicked the stony side of the well. Pain shot through her foot, and she dropped to her knees to clutch it, a string of incoherent curses spilling from her mouth. She rubbed the tender toes through her shoe. Nothing felt broken, thank God.

  Bo raised her head, about to resume her inevitable descent into breaking and entering (her dad would be so proud) when she noticed something odd about the curved stone wall in front of her. Under the dirt and moss covering the old well’s wall in a patchwork of age and neglect, one of the stones had an odd shape. It was round where the others were all vaguely rectangular, and had two raised notches at the edge, as though to allow it to be turned.

  Bo wrapped her hand around it. The stone was cold and strangely smooth against her skin. What was it for? It had to be a deliberate feature, but she couldn’t imagine what purpose it served. Frowning, she tried turning the stone. It shifted a fraction. Bo twisted it harder. With an awful grating sound that made her jerk back her hand, the stone moved in a complete circle.

  She waited. Nothing happened. Bo was starting to believe the turning stone was just some random quirk of the well’s architecture when suddenly the ground rumbled underneath her. The rumbling grew into a clattering series of thumps, as though a giant was using rocks for a game of marbles. It only lasted a few seconds, and then all was quiet again. Bo stood up and peered over the side of the well.

  At first she couldn’t make out anything different, but as she passed her torchlight over the inner walls, she saw that there were now narrow, regular stairs emerging from them. The steps spiralled down into the darkness, disappearing beyond the reach of her light.

  Bo smiled a small, satisfied smile. ‘The east door,’ she whispered, then threw back her head and yelled, ‘The east door!’

  Because that was what it had to be. An entrance to an underground tunnel – what better place for it than inside an old well shaft? Feeling energised by the discovery, Bo climbed up onto the wall, swung her legs over the side, and started to climb down.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The steps were barely wider than her foot. Bo clung to the rough wall with her fingertips to keep her balance as she descended, one eye on the very deep, very black drop into the shaft. She did not want to end up falling down a bloody well.

  Bo’s torch beam bounced off the pale stones, making the shadows dance as she went deeper and deeper. She saw no sign of there ever having been water in the well; no tide mark, no discolouration. What kind of well had never had water in it? A pilfering one, Bo decided, thinking of all the loose change and other small items she had lost to it over the years … and very recently her father’s lock picks. But it wasn’t actually a well at all, was it? Not if its true purpose was to secretly connect the coast to the catacombs under the church, some half a mile inland.

  Her feet touched dirt. The shift from the narrow stone steps to the gravelly base of the well shaft set Bo off-balance. As she reached out to steady herself, she instead stumbled into a dark recess that smelled damp and stagnant. But it was not actually a recess. A pass of her torch showed her the beginning of a stone-lined passageway. She checked around her in case there were any other tunnels leading from the base of the well but saw none. So, this was it. A musty, dank tunnel which would, she hoped, lead the way to her little brother. And a dead girl’s tomb.

  Yay.

  Her torch pulled glints from the blackness. A coin, a dinner fork, and what might’ve been a tin whistle were all lodged in cracks in the tunnel walls, reflecting her light back to her.

  There was no sound except the echo of her own footsteps, and yet Bo couldn’t call it quiet. There was an odd kind of vibration in the stale air, as though something made a noise too low or too high-pitched to hear.

  ‘Levi?’ Bo called. The sound travelled away into the dark before fading. ‘Levi? Are you down here?’

  She waited for an answer, aware that she only had around half an hour left before Edita’s deadline. Would the spirit really do something awful to Levi? Or would she simply go back to making all the kids in Blackfin sleepwalk? Surely neither would be of particular benefit to Edita if what she really wanted was to be reunited with her twin.

  That means nothing, Bo thought. There’s no point expecting to find logic in Blackfin.

  Sky had always looked for logic in the town, and instead it had swallowed her in its icy waters. Nobody had seen that coming, least of all Bo. There was no logic in the death of a teenage girl.

  Something cold touched Bo’s neck, and she gave a yelp before realising it was only a drip of water from the ceiling. As she hurried further along the tunnel, she saw how crudely it had been built. Parts were made from coarse slabs of rock, and others had been hacked straight through the ground with nothing but thick wooden struts keeping the earth from crashing down on her. If it fell, nobody would ever find her here, or even know where she’d gone. She w
ould be trapped just as surely as Edita.

  Bo swallowed, hard. What was she doing in some forgotten underground tunnel, chasing after a spiteful ghost?

  Looking for Levi, duh.

  She paused after a minute or so, peering into a dark nook that appeared to be an off-shoot of the main tunnel. There had been several of these smaller corridors branching off, and Bo began to doubt her decision to keep to a fixed path. She’d assumed it would be a straight line to the church, but that relied on her map being pinpoint accurate.

  She peered into the deeper darkness. It was impossible to tell how far the off-shoot went without going further in, and Bo didn’t have time to waste exploring. She pulled the shoe-compass out of her backpack and waited for the pointer to tell her which way was west and the church. But the pointer didn’t settle; it just kept spinning.

  ‘What the hell…?’

  Then it struck her. Magnetism.

  Magnets attracted metallic objects to them and affected compasses. All those coins and bits of metal stuck in the walls of the well shaft … something down here was magnetic, and Bo was getting closer to it.

  She couldn’t count on the compass to guide her now. ‘Just stick to the straight path,’ she muttered. ‘The well was a straight line east from the church, so I should just keep going straight.’

  It made sense, but it didn’t stop an additional sheen of sweat prickling along her spine.

  Those peculiar vibrations seemed to get stronger the further she went, too. It was almost a sound now, a deep sound, and Bo could feel the stone wall tremble when she laid her hand against it. She couldn’t say for sure what was causing the magnetic effect of the tunnel, but it had to be something to do with Edita, didn’t it? Was this what happened when she wasn’t allowed to exercise her weird power? Was this why the Penny Well had been pick-pocketing the Blackfin locals for years? Had her power been building within the earth all this time, just waiting for Edita to wake up?

  Again, Bo wished Sky were here to talk logic with her. Then she had a grim realisation: she was buried even deeper than Sky was now.

  Her flat laugh echoed – but not like her footsteps had echoed earlier in the tunnel. She stamped her feet to check, and realised the echo was greatly diminished. Bo panned her torch around her and saw why: she was near the end of the tunnel. And in the wall, just to her right, she saw the same rough patch of mortar she had witnessed Silas hurriedly putting in place.

  This was it. This was where Edita’s corpse lay.

  A rock pile had fallen from the ceiling in front of it at some point since Edita had been walled in. It sat almost as a marker: the burial she should have had. But it also blocked Bo’s path, stacked as it was partly against the wall of the tomb.

  She set down her torch so it shone toward the pile. The rocks weren’t overly large, but she soon found herself sweating as she heaved them out of the way. They chafed at her hands, but Bo ignored it. She had no time to worry about blisters.

  Minutes ticked away as she reduced the pile to around knee height – low enough, she thought, that she could start hacking away at the brickwork Silas had so hastily laid above it. Then Bo saw something glinting from within the remaining pile of rocks. She leaned in, peering closer. From this angle, it looked almost like a bony hand.

  Bo picked up the torch. There was no way it was a hand. The wall of Edita’s tomb was intact, so her skeleton had to be inside it. She shoved another stone from the pile. The hand-like thing seemed to be attached to a wrist-like thing. And on the wrist-like thing was what looked suspiciously like a watch.

  She couldn’t deny it now. She was looking at a dead body. Or a part of one, at least. But whose?

  Ignoring the sensible voice in her head telling her to get the hell away from this place with its skeletal remains and weird, vibrating air, Bo held up the torch so she could see the watch better. It was quite big, probably the kind a man would wear, with a tattered leather strap. The face was shattered, probably smashed during the rockfall. The hands pointed to one o’clock.

  The time Edita died, and when her voice now falls silent.

  The time she promised to do something unpleasant if I haven’t uncovered her tomb by then…

  A time that was only minutes from now.

  Swallowing her nausea, Bo reached out to turn the watch so she could get a better look at it. As her fingers came into contact with the bony wrist, she felt a vibration zing out of it, shooting up her arm until she felt it in her teeth. This was the cause of the magnetic anomaly. This skeleton was where the strange vibration in the air was emanating from, right along the tunnel.

  Bo yelped as something moved in the rock pile, but she saw it was only the watch. The strap had given way, letting it fall face-down onto the nearest stone. Gingerly, Bo picked it up and examined it. There was something engraved into the back of it in bold, determined letters.

  BRUNO.

  Seeing his name etched into the metal casing felt inevitable, somehow. Edita’s twin had found her. He had come down here and … what? Been crushed in a freak rockfall?

  Bo looked at his outstretched hand. It looked like he had died reaching for his twin, probably knowing they would always be held apart. But wait… This probably hadn’t just been some random rockfall, had it? Why here, and nowhere else in the tunnels? Bo chewed her lip, picturing the young man she had seen in Edita’s dreams, and inside the crystal ball.

  He had avoided using his strange gift because it was too powerful, too volatile. But when pushed, he had used it against Silas. Had he used it to try to free his sister as she lay murdered in an unmarked tomb? It wasn’t difficult to see how all that power might have brought the ceiling down right on top of him.

  Even with Edita’s threat hanging over her and Levi, Bo felt a pang of sympathy for the dead twins. They hadn’t been good people, but they hadn’t deserved to die like this. And they shouldn’t be forever kept apart by Silas’ wall.

  ‘I’ll make sure you at least get to spend the rest of your afterlife, or whatever this is, together,’ Bo said. The tunnel hummed around her, the vibrations building as though stirring to life. Was this some remnant of Bruno’s voice, or was he, too, being stirred awake? Bo didn’t know, but she wasn’t about to hang around and find out.

  It only took a minute to uncover the rest of his bones from the rock pile. As tattered as they were, she recognised his clothes as the ones he’d been wearing during his fight with Silas.

  Taking the hammer from her backpack, Bo started hacking at the wall of the tomb.

  Bo knew she would find skeletal remains in the walled chamber, but it still surprised her a little not to see Edita’s beautiful face when she shone her torch inside the tomb. The hair that had been lustrous and curly was now dusty and brittle, the lips and eyes that had captivated Bo now completely gone. Just a grinning skull was left in their place.

  There wasn’t a lot of space inside the tomb, but she carefully placed Bruno’s remains next to Edita’s, avoiding contact with his humming bones as much as possible. Her skin crawled. She was doing the right thing, though. The twins should be together. Bo would make sure they were.

  Once both were laid out as neatly as she could manage, Bo stood back, noticing just how loud the tunnel had become. That hum in the air had changed, turning into a deep rumble she definitely didn’t like. It reminded her of the sound Bruno had made at the moment he felt his twin die.

  Bo checked her watch. Balls. It was almost one o’clock.

  ‘Okay, I’ve done what you wanted – and I’ve got the blisters to prove it. Now hold up your end of the bargain and let Levi go!’

  Bo flinched as laughter echoed through the walls.

  ‘Bruno,’ came Edita’s sing-song voice. It still held such an appealing quality, even now. ‘We are together again, and our powers can mingle…’

  ‘Where is my brother?’ Bo yelled, cringing at the reverberating sound surrounding her. It felt like it might bury her in this place. ‘Levi!’

  Edita’s
laugh rang out again before something in the air snapped. Bo’s ears popped, and she heard cracking, crunching sounds digging their way through the rock walls. ‘Twins should never be kept apart.’

  ‘Where is my brother, you noisy cow?’

  ‘Safe, now that the deal is done,’ Edita said. ‘Now leave us in peace. Run.’

  And then the tunnel began to shake.

  Bo fled. Her hatred of running be damned – she sprinted at a pace she hadn’t known possible. Flying along the tunnel, she jumped as shards of rock and earth showered down on her head. It was like the tunnel itself was waking, straining its lungs and trying to cough her out of its system.

  The light bounced, disorienting her as she ran, but Bo didn’t veer from the straight path that would take her back to the well shaft, the east door, and back up to safety.

  Stupid bloody ghosts and their unreasonable dying wishes!

  She was going so fast she didn’t see the newly fallen rock pile blocking her path until she ran headlong into it.

  Bo took the brunt of the impact on her knees. Cursing Edita and her brother, she felt around for her dropped torch. Luckily it hadn’t broken when she fell, but as she raised the light she saw that a large section of the ceiling had caved in, blocking the tunnel back to the well shaft.

  ‘Oh God.’

  She scrubbed one hand back through her hair, trying to force her brain to work. But all she could think was that she was buried alive, just like she’d feared. She was going to die down here, and nobody would find her, and she’d never know where Levi was or if he was okay…

  ‘Shut up,’ she snapped. Not to anyone in particular, but snapping made her feel calmer. Calm enough to assess the situation and try to find a way out of it.