The House of Puzzles

by Richard Newsome

  Green turned his head towards the lounge-room door and called out, ‘You may enter now.’

  The sound of shuffling feet came from the hall. Then a figure appeared in the doorway. The red beard was straggly and the eyes were dull, but there was no mistaking the shambling presence of Professor Knox McElderry.

  Gerald jumped from the couch and took a step towards the professor. In one fluid movement, Sir Mason Green leapt from his chair, unsheathed a sword from his walking stick and had the tip at McElderry’s throat.

  ‘Slow down, Gerald,’ Green said. ‘That is, unless you want to witness something quite distasteful.’

  Gerald froze. He looked in despair at the professor. The old man’s clothes were crumpled and his hair was unbrushed. His shoulders were slumped and his head tipped to the side like a cow perplexed by something that had wandered into the paddock. The professor’s expression, normally so animated and engaged, was blank. Sedated.

  ‘Professor McElderry?’ Gerald said. ‘Are you all right?’

  The professor did not respond. His eyes drifted to a window in the far wall, as if looking for a visitor who was long past due.

  ‘Professor?’ Gerald repeated. He turned to Green. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  Green moved the point of his sword towards Gerald and gestured to the couch. Gerald reluctantly resumed his seat. ‘The Voynich manuscript that you so kindly tracked down for me on the island of Ven is throwing up all manner of interesting secrets,’ Green said. ‘I can see why Emperor Rudolph II was so keen to get his hands on it.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the professor?’ Sam asked. ‘He looks like he’s only half here.’

  McElderry stood awkwardly in the doorway, like a scarecrow that had faced one too many tornados. A look of smug success washed across Green’s face. ‘The Voynich isn’t so much an ancient manuscript as a cookbook for the ages—for the Middle Ages anyway,’ he said. ‘The professor and his colleagues from the British Museum have been helping to unlock its mysteries.’

  ‘But I thought the manuscript only had the recipe for the universal remedy,’ Ruby said. ‘At least, that’s what Brahe was using it for.’ Her voice trailed off.

  Green lowered his sword and leaned on it with both hands. ‘Yes, our friend Tycho was fixated on prolonging his days on earth. He failed to see that it’s not the number of days you have, but what you pack into them. He missed the vast wealth of wonder that the Voynich contains. Just look at what one recipe has produced.’ He waved a hand towards Professor McElderry. ‘Observe,’ Green said. ‘Food!’ he barked at McElderry.

  ‘Haggis!’ the professor barked back, his head lolling across to the other shoulder.

  ‘Drink!’ Green called out.

  ‘Whisky!’ the professor bellowed, as if last drinks had been called at his local pub. ‘Single malt!’

  Ruby bristled. ‘What are you doing?’ she cried at Green. ‘Don’t be awful!’

  Sir Mason raised an eyebrow and chuckled. ‘Oh, Miss Valentine, do not despair. The concoction of rare tropical plants and crushed insects that I have fed him merely makes him susceptible to suggestion. It’s a nice warming bowl of hypnosis soup. Imagine if I mass produced it and sold it tinned in supermarkets. I could rule the world.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gerald said. ‘The professor will do anything you tell him?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Green said. ‘And if you fail to solve that coded message, I will tell him to do something most unfortunate.’

  Gerald wanted to stop himself from asking the question. He knew nothing good could come of it. But the words forced their way out.

  ‘Like what?’

  Green stared at Gerald for a moment then picked up the pistol from the table by the armchair. He took McElderry’s wrist and placed the gun in his hand.

  ‘Professor,’ Green began, ‘I want you to shoot yourself. In the head, please.’

  ‘No!’ Gerald yelled. Sam jumped to his feet, but Green whipped the sword to the boy’s face. ‘Be still,’ Green said in a chill whisper. He turned back to McElderry. ‘Now.’

  Gerald watched in dumb horror as the professor lifted the pistol to his temple. His forefinger tightened on the trigger.

  McElderry’s eyes registered nothing as the hammer fell with a dull metallic clack.

  Gerald was almost sick on the rug.

  Green retrieved the pistol and lowered the professor’s hand to his side. ‘Naturally the gun was not loaded,’ Green said as he slid it into his jacket. ‘But I think you have an idea now of what will happen if you do not solve that code for me.’

  Felicity buried her face in Ruby’s neck and sobbed.

  ‘And you can imagine what will happen if you tell anyone about my being here,’ Green continued. ‘You do not want the consequences on your conscience, I can assure you. And Gerald?’

  Gerald glared up at the man with barely controlled rage. ‘What?’

  ‘I understand someone tried to convince you to quit the Triple Crown challenge.’

  Gerald’s stomach tightened. ‘How could you possibly know about that?’ he asked.

  One corner of Green’s mouth turned up into a sickly smile. ‘You must remember, I have eyes everywhere. There is nothing you can say or do that will not find its way back to me. You must continue with the challenge and for the sake of your friend’s life, you will complete it. What’s more—’

  The pounding of a fist on the front door cut him off. The sound was followed a moment later by a man’s voice. ‘Gerald Wilkins! Sam Valentine! Are you in there?’

  Green scowled in the flickering light. He raised the tip of his sword to Gerald’s throat. ‘Not a word about me,’ he hissed through clenched teeth.

  Green took hold of the professor’s elbow and dragged him into the hallway, through a side door and out into the snow-strewn night.

  Chapter 8

  The front door banged open and a howl of wind blasted inside. Heavy footsteps thudded down the corridor, and a burly figure lumbered into the lounge.

  ‘Mr Beare!’ Gerald said. The St Cuthbert’s maths teacher was the last person he had expected to see. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Mr Beare smiled cheerily. ‘Well, hello,’ he said, brushing snow from his shoulders. ‘You’ve set yourselves up nicely, I must say.’ He strode to the fireplace, tugging his gloves off with his teeth. ‘Far better than all the miserable sods under canvas tonight, that’s for sure. I’ve just been doing the rounds to make sure everyone is all right. That snow is really coming down out there. You’ll be happy to know all your classmates are accounted for, though none of them have fires and marshmallows and soft beds like you.’

  Mr Beare turned around to the four faces staring up at him. Felicity was sobbing quietly.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Mr Beare asked. ‘You lot have the least to be sad about.’

  Ruby glared at him. ‘Ghosts,’ she said flatly. ‘We’ve been telling scary stories. One of them upset Felicity.’

  Mr Beare looked at Felicity as if she was about to detonate. ‘I’m not used to dealing with girls,’ he said. ‘Things tend to be a bit more straightforward with chaps. Right
, Gerald?’ Mr Beare clapped him on the shoulder, triggering a sharp cry of pain.

  Mr Beare’s eyes shot wide and he took a pace backwards. ‘Everyone’s on a short fuse tonight. Just to let you know, the time limit for the first leg of the Triple Crown has been extended because of the snow. You can have another crack at it next weekend if you like.’ He looked at Felicity with mild concern. ‘Um, I might hop back in the Land Rover and bunk down at Oates. I’ll leave you lot to your ghost stories. Good night.’ He plucked a marshmallow from the packet and popped it in his mouth then made his way back up the hall.

  Ruby helped Felicity to the couch and sat with an arm around her shoulders. Gerald and Sam looked at each other, then at the girls.

  Nobody spoke.

  There was nothing to say.

  It was a grim breakfast of leftover baked beans.

  Gerald poked his spoon around his plate with no real appetite, shifting beans from one pile to another.

  ‘The professor looked so miserable,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ Ruby said. ‘Stuck in some hypnotic fog and made to perform like a trained seal by that horrible man.’

  ‘Well, that horrible man has given us something to do,’ Gerald said. He dropped his plate onto the table. ‘I say we hike back to Oates and start on that coded message.’

  ‘What about the checkpoint and the Triple Crown?’ Felicity said. ‘Green made it very clear that you need to complete that as well.’

  ‘He doesn’t ask for much, does he?’ Sam said. ‘How are we supposed to do both?’

  ‘We’ll try for the checkpoint next weekend,’ Gerald said. ‘I get the feeling this code is going to take some time to solve.’

  The blizzard had eased overnight, and they tramped four hours through snow-covered fields back to Oates.

  The dining hall was only half full when they arrived just in time for lunch. Ruby watched with distaste as Sam demolished his second serving of shepherd’s pie.

  ‘How was it?’ she asked.

  Sam shoved the final forkful into his mouth. ‘Could have used a bit less shepherd,’ he said. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips. ‘So, what do you think, Gerald? Can we solve this thing, or should I get some pudding to keep me going?’

  Gerald cleared some space in the lunchtime debris on the table and unfolded a sheet of paper.

  Another group of hikers arrived in the hall, full of stories of snow and tents and wandering lost in the dark. Gerald, Sam, Ruby and Felicity ignored them, concentrating on the note in front of them. The paper was creased and grubby from being unfolded and refolded so many times, but the letters were still quite clear:

  Xers blu c axtb pxfbi pab cilbnixg hxracib jl snbeebg xis rjiocuibs cp pj pab sbkpao eqp hy rjiorcbirb co cgg xp nbop c xh lclpy hcgbo ib jl rqgkbkkbn cogxis c sj ijp fijv cl c sbobntb nborqb oj c nbgy ji pab dqsuhbip jl pab jib vaj lciso paco hbooxub hxy yjqn ojqg eb nxcobs ji eqppbnlgy vciuo.

  Midshipman Jeremy Davey, October 1835. May God have mercy on his humble servant’s soul.

  Sam took in a long breath. ‘Well, that makes no sense at all.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Anyone fancy some dessert? They’ve got hot chocolate pudding and custard.’

  Ruby did not look up from scribbling in a notebook. ‘Sam, is it possible for you to forget about food for just five minutes? This is important.’ She tapped the end of a pencil against her teeth and looked up to her brother. ‘Actually, that does sound pretty good. I’ll have one.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Gerald.

  Felicity said a polite, ‘No thank you,’ and Sam wandered off to the kitchen. Felicity nodded at the coded message. ‘Where do we even start in trying to solve that?’

  Ruby consulted her pad again. ‘Our mum and dad used to leave coded messages in our school lunches,’ she said. ‘Ruby, work hard and be the best you can be. Sam, don’t be such a colossal arse your entire life. That type of thing.’

  Gerald grinned. ‘How did you go about solving them?’

  Ruby held up her pad for Gerald and Felicity to see. On it she had drawn a rough grid:

  ‘They were simple substitution ciphers,’ she said. ‘They had to be if Sam was ever going to solve them. You just replace one letter for another. So A might become B, B becomes C, C becomes D and so on.’

  Gerald grunted. ‘So all we have to do is substitute the right letters using the grid and it solves itself.’

  ‘That’s the theory,’ Ruby said. ‘But every combination I’ve tried has gone nowhere.’

  Sam arrived back at the table with a tray of steaming pudding bowls. He glanced at Ruby’s notepad as he handed around the plates. ‘That looks like the notes mum and dad used to put in our lunches,’ he said. ‘Sam, today is the first day of the rest of your life. Ruby, try not to be such an insufferable know-it-all.’

  Ruby ignored him. ‘Sometimes, to make it more challenging, mum would use a keyword. Those ones were really tough.’

  ‘How did that work?’ Felicity asked.

  Ruby scribbled into the grid in her pad. ‘Say the keyword was RUBY. You fill in the first squares with those letters, then complete it in alphabetical order, so it looks like this.’

  ‘Here—try to decode this.’ She wrote down: Prj fp r yliq

  Gerald took the pencil from Ruby and a few moments later declared, ‘Sam is a dolt.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Sam.

  Ruby retrieved her pencil. ‘If you and the person you’re sending the note to are the only people who know the keyword, then the code is almost impossible for anyone else to crack. There are just too many combinations.’

  ‘Unless you can guess the key,’ Gerald said. His mind was spinning at a million miles an hour. The odds were long, but at least it was a start. ‘I think we need to find out a bit more about Jeremy Davey,’ he said. ‘He might give us a clue to finding the keyword.’

  Sam and Ruby nodded, but Felicity did not look convinced.

  ‘What’s the problem, Flicka?’ Gerald asked.

  Felicity tucked her hands under her thighs and rocked gently on the bench seat. ‘I’ve heard you talk about Sir Mason Green before,’ she said. ‘I knew he wasn’t a nice person. But when I saw him for the first time last night…’ She grew quiet, tucking her hands in deeper.

  Ruby put an arm around Felicity’s shoulders. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He is completely vile.’

  Felicity sniffed back a tear. ‘Would he really injure the professor? Would he actually do that?’

  Ruby squeezed her arm tight. ‘He would absolutely do that.’

  Felicity dropped her gaze to the tabletop.

  ‘The last time we saw Mason Green he was trying to find a way to control the future,’ Sam said, ‘like he was a god, or something. Whatever he does, he doesn’t do it by halves.’

  Felicity sniffed again. ‘Then what is he doing this time? What could be so desperately important about this code that he would actually kill someone to solve it?’

  Gerald chewed on the tough skin at the end of his thumb. ‘You can bet it’s more potent than a few recipes from the Voynich manuscript,’ he said.


  Gerald yelped in pain as a heavy hand clamped onto his right shoulder. He looked up to find Alex Baranov beaming down at him. ‘If it isn’t Gerry Willy and his happy crew,’ Alex said, his eyes sparkling. ‘I hear you guys actually had a comfy time of it last night. Half your luck. We were stuck in a leaky tent and had to dig our way out of the snow this morning.’ He looked straight at Ruby. ‘I wouldn’t have minded sharing an open fire and some marshmallows with you.’

  Gerald glanced at Ruby. She was biting the end of her pencil and he was sure her cheeks had turned pink.

  He brushed Alex’s hand off his shoulder. ‘It was an interesting night,’ Gerald said. ‘Hot food, soft beds…all the comforts of home.’

  Alex gave an indifferent shrug. ‘Who cares. At least we got this.’ He dropped a map onto the table. There was a large red stamp in the middle, shaped like an egg with a band of stippled dots running around it.

  Felicity picked up the map. ‘Is this it? The symbol we’re meant to find?’

  The twinkle returned to Alex Baranov’s eye. ‘That’s it,’ he said. He looked again to Ruby. ‘That’s the first leg of the Triple Crown done. You should have joined the winning team. It’s not too late, you know. After a night in a tent with Gretchen, I’d be happy to dump her.’

  ‘You would do that?’ Ruby said.

  Alex nodded. ‘You would not believe the snoring.’

  Gerald plucked the map from Felicity’s fingers and shoved it back at Alex. ‘You’ll just have to get used to the noise,’ he said. ‘Our team won’t be changing.’

  The corners of Ruby’s mouth flickered upwards. ‘You seem very sure of that, Gerald,’ she said. ‘What makes you so confident?’

  Gerald pursed his lips and frowned. ‘Because you chose to be on this team and I am reliably informed that you are always right.’