by Alex Bell
There was nothing to be gained by panicking, so Lex kept his head and desperately ran his eyes down the page looking for anything that would help. He skimmed past, one of the most venomous animals in the world, and no known antidote, as the octopuses clung tightly on to him all the while, about to bite at any second. Then, finally, he found what he was looking for. An innocuous little sentence at the bottom of the page stated that the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii − being closely related to land-slugs − had a low tolerance to salt. Thus they spent some of their time in the water and some of the time out of it, on beaches, coves or − Lex supposed − sunken ships that were full of air pockets.
Now, Lex had quite a lot of stuff in his bag seeing as it was a magic enchanter’s bag and so was much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. He was fairly sure he didn’t have any salt but he did have salty snacks − crispy things that tasted great, and slowly rotted your teeth, according to some people (who were probably very prim, bossy and wore fussy-looking glasses).
Ignoring Jesse, who was demanding to know what he had found out from the book, Lex thrust his hand into his bag, pulled out a bag of salty snacks, ripped it open and shook handfuls of crisps out on to the octopuses that were clinging to him. It was only a hunch, but it paid off. As soon as the crisps touched the octopuses, their skin began to bubble and smoke and they dropped off Lex, squealing even more loudly than they had been before.
Straight away, Lex grabbed a second bag, ripped it open and threw crisps at Jesse. Soon the octopuses on the cowboy were smoking on the floor at his feet as well. The others, who’d been making their way along the floor, stopped, presumably frightened by the noise their fellows were making.
Lex wasn’t going to waste time hanging around. He made straight for the open door, calling over his shoulder to Jesse, ‘Come on, quick!’
A moment later they were in the next room with the door firmly closed behind them. The previously water-filled room was mercifully free of octopuses, although the rotten boards did creak beneath their feet in a worrying way.
‘They’re one of the most poisonous sea creatures known to man!’ Lex gasped. ‘We were covered in them! How the heck did we get out of there without them biting us?’
‘They were trying to bite us,’ Jesse replied, pulling the sleeve of his jacket outwards so that Lex could see the tiny little pinpricks where the octopuses’ teeth had gone through but had been unable to reach the skin.
‘Their teeth aren’t long enough,’ Lex said, staring in horror at his own clothes, all with identical little holes in them. ‘If they’d managed to find some bare skin . . .’ He trailed off with a shudder.
Before going on, he and Jesse put on the spare coats that Lex had brought in his bag. They would offer more protection from the octopuses and they had hoods to shield their heads. They also each opened a packet of salty snacks to carry with them and fling at any other octopuses they might come into contact with. Lex had dropped the starfish again when the water had flooded out at them but there were plenty more stuck to the walls in this room, emitting their faint, greenish glow.
‘I have to say, these Games seemed a helluva lot more fun from the stadiums,’ Jesse grumbled.
Lex said nothing, but the truth was that he completely agreed with Jesse in that moment. This was not fun. At. All. He wondered briefly how the others were faring.
‘The sooner we find the captain’s medallion, the sooner we can leave,’ he said. ‘Come on, we need to get to the bridge.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CURSE OF THE SUNKEN SHIP
Lex would’ve liked to think that the poisonous octopuses were the only dangerous thing on the ship − the only thing standing between him and the captain’s medallion and glorious victory for the first round. But he knew better. Games did not tend to work that way − it would make them too boring. Gods − and the human spectators − liked a little variety. The likelihood, therefore, was that there would be several different nasties on board this ship − possibly a mixture of natural inhabitants (such as the octopuses) and things put there specially by the Gods.
When Lex heard a noise coming from behind a closed door a little later he braced himself to throw it open and discover what was behind it. It was no use trying to avoid the horrible stuff, for there were probably more traps around the captain’s medallion than there were anywhere else on the ship. The more traps they came into contact with, therefore, the closer to their ultimate goal they probably were. But before Lex could open the door, it was flung open from the other side and Jeremiah burst out.
It seemed that Jeremiah must have heard Lex and Jesse because he came flying out braced for attack, shouting and waving his sword. For a split second Lex didn’t realise it was Jeremiah and thought instead that it was something coming to get him, so he used the only weapon he had − he threw his packet of salty snacks in the nobleman’s face.
It was a surprisingly effective − if slightly ludicrous − form of attack, for Jeremiah stopped dead, clutching at his eyes with his free hand and yelling. Clearly some salt had got in there and was stinging. He was making a tremendous fuss about it, though. Anyone would think that he’d just had acid thrown in his face.
‘Sorry, old bean,’ Lex said, not really feeling sorry at all.
‘Oh my Gods, what have you done?’ Jeremiah shrieked, dropping his sword so that both hands could clutch at his eyes. ‘I can’t see! I’m blind!’
‘Well, that’s how these Games work, you know,’ Lex said cheerfully, declining to correct Jeremiah’s misimpression that he had just been attacked with something extremely harmful and possibly deadly.
‘It was only a packet of salty snacks, Jeremiah!’ Tess said scornfully from behind him. She fixed her brother with a withering look and said, ‘Stop being such a baby!’
‘Eh?’ Jeremiah lowered his hands and looked up with eyes that were a little red but, other than that, perfectly fine. ‘Oh. You ass!’ he spat venomously at Lex. ‘What are you walking around munching on snacks in the middle of the Game for? You’ll never win that way!’
‘When you’ve been playing these Games for as long as I have, Jeremiah,’ Lex replied, deliberately flippantly, ‘you become such an old hand that you can eat and play at the same time. Isn’t that right, Jesse?’ He gave the cowboy a stern, meaningful look. No point in telling Jeremiah about the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii if he didn’t know about them already. It would spoil the surprise. And Lex certainly wasn’t going to come out and tell a competitor how to deal with a potential threat.
Jesse nodded and put a crisp into his mouth for emphasis, then remembered the Binding Bracelets and hastily handed the packet over to Lex so that he could eat a crisp, too, and they wouldn’t swap bodies.
Jeremiah shook his head and bent down to retrieve his sword. ‘Well, I think you’re a pair of asses.’
‘I think anyone who’d use the word “ass” as an insult is a stuck-up toff who has no business doing anything more dangerous than playing a game of croquet!’
To Lex’s pleased surprise, Tess sniggered at that, even if she did hastily try to turn it into a cough.
‘What happened to your leg?’ Lex asked, noticing for the first time that part of Jeremiah’s right trouser leg had been ripped away, and there was a jagged gash stretching down his calf − not deep enough to cause any damage, or a limp (more’s the pity) − but enough to draw a bit of blood.
‘Never you mind!’ Jeremiah snapped. Obviously he, too, felt that it would not do to give anything away about threats the other players hadn’t come into contact with yet. It looked to Lex like the handiwork of something with claws − a giant crab, or lobster, perhaps. Unpleasant, but hardly deadly.
‘Well, it’s been fun, but I don’t have any more time to waste standing here chatting with you,’ Lex said.
Jeremiah gave him a haughty, superior look and turned away to continue the Game as well.
And that was where the problem arose.
They were curren
tly standing in a sort of stairwell with two doors leading on to the landing and stairs stretching away upwards and downwards (with a couple of brass octopuses on the banisters). Lex had come from one of the doors and Jeremiah had come from the other. For some reason, Lex had expected Jeremiah to walk straight past him and back the way Lex had just come but it seemed that he, like Lex, didn’t think there was much point in exploring parts of the ship that another player had already investigated. They therefore both went to go up the stairs at the same time.
‘Find your own route!’ Lex said.
‘You find your own route!’ Jeremiah snapped.
‘Look, let’s be sensible about this. Why don’t we both take the stairs but you go down and I go up?’
Whilst Jeremiah and Lex bickered, Jesse held the crisp packet out to Tess. The little girl reached out to take one but then froze suddenly and shook her head, pointing at the Binding Bracelet on her wrist. Jesse shook his own head, impatient with himself for forgetting again. But then he thought of chewing tobacco and he motioned with his hand for Tess to watch. He took a crisp out of the packet, put it in his mouth, sucked the flavour out of it, and then spat the soggy crisp out on to the floor. No body swap. A big grin spread across Tess’s face and she reached for a crisp to do the same.
‘I’m not going down!’ Jeremiah was saying vehemently. ‘There are probably more flesh-eating crabs down there!’
So that was what had taken a chunk out of Jeremiah’s leg. Lex bet those crabs were nowhere near as horrible as the Squealing Blue-Ringed Octopii of Scurlyshoo, though.
‘I’m going up these stairs,’ Jeremiah declared. ‘And that’s that. I would strongly advise you not to get in my way.’
So it was to come down to a race between them, then. Lex decided his best chance would simply be to leg it up the stairs as fast as he could. Jesse could follow in his own time − he was a grown man who could take care of himself. Tess, on the other hand, was a little girl and Jeremiah would have to be even more of a jerk than Lex thought to leave her by herself on this terrible ship.
But just as his whole body was tensed ready to flee, something happened that made them all freeze. There was music coming from above. It was some sort of old sea shanty played on a harmonica. The music was out of place down there on the sunken ship − an oddly lonely sound − a sort of distant echo of the long-gone sailors who had once sailed her.
And that was when Lex first realised that, so far, they had not seen a single skeleton. Where were the crew? Even if the flesh-eating crabs had stripped the bodies bare, they surely wouldn’t have eaten the bones as well. There should be skeletons at the very least. Skeletons all over the place, in fact.
‘It must be Lorella playing some trick,’ Jeremiah said firmly as Tess drew fearfully closer to his side, clearly unnerved by the eerie music. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’
Despite this statement, it was clear from the way he looked longingly at the stairs that Jeremiah would now prefer to go down rather than up. Like an amateur, he thought it was better to avoid the obstacles rather than head straight for them. But as Lex was clearly still intending to go upstairs, Jeremiah decided that he’d better, too. They proceeded as a cautious group, for Lex now felt unable to stick to his original plan of legging it up there. Deliberately going towards danger was all very well but running towards it blindly was just plain stupid.
They got closer and closer to the melancholy music until they finally reached the little landing on the floor above and found the cause. A sailor sat there on the banisters with a harmonica in his hand, which he lowered when he saw them coming. They all stared at each other for a minute. The sailor didn’t look like a ghost. Or, at least, he didn’t look the way Lex had always imagined a ghost to look, in that he wasn’t a floating sheet with a couple of eye holes or, failing that, at least transparent. But he didn’t look quite normal either. His skin had a strange greyish look, his eyes were sunken, his hair dry.
‘What are you, sir?’ Jeremiah demanded, pointing his sword at the sailor in an over-dramatic, threatening manner. ‘Speak up! Are you a ghost?’
The sailor looked at him in cold silence for a moment before saying, ‘We’re not dead. We’re a cursed crew. We’re not allowed to die.’ His voice was dry and hoarse, like he never used it. Something about the tone sent shivers up Lex’s spine.
‘Someone on board pissed off the Gods, did they?’ he asked.
The sailor fixed his baleful gaze on him. ‘Aye,’ he whispered, before shuddering and falling silent. It seemed that whatever the crew had done to get themselves cursed in such a way was not a story this man wanted to dwell upon. Which suited Lex just fine, for he couldn’t have cared less.
‘Stand aside and let me pass!’ Jeremiah demanded.
‘No one is stopping you,’ the sailor replied coldly.
Jeremiah looked at him suspiciously for a moment before edging past him cautiously with Tess. It was as if he expected the sailor to suddenly attack him. Lex made a show of looking suitably wary and suspicious − as if he was allowing his competitor to go first to make sure it was safe. But the truth was that, unless someone was coming at him with a sword or a mace of some kind, Lex was prepared to cautiously consider them safe for the time being − and thus, potential sources of extremely valuable information.
Once they were past the sailor, Jeremiah grabbed Tess’s hand and raced up the stairs. Lex’s lip curled with contempt and he shook his head. What an amateur! The truth was that Lex had no intention of running up the stairs now. He simply wanted Jeremiah out of the way. It seemed that it had not yet occurred to him that, if the crew were all cursed rather than dead, then the captain would be moving around. He could be anywhere on the ship and running about looking for him blindly was not going to get the job done. Lex could hardly believe that Jeremiah had just gone off like that, leaving this rich source of information for Lex to tap alone. Even if this sailor didn’t know exactly where the captain was, he should at least know a little more about the potential dangers on board the ship. There was certainly nothing to lose by just asking nicely.
‘What are those rings on your hand?’ Lex asked, momentarily distracted. They looked horribly familiar and so he was fairly sure that he already knew the answer.
‘The octopuses,’ the sailor replied. ‘We were here before them so they don’t seem to mind us most of the time. But sometimes they bite. Because we’re already half dead, they can’t kill us. But they leave these scars.’ He held up his hand to display the pale, white rings. ‘And it hurts like you wouldn’t believe. Like something has got inside your body and is ripping up your insides. A bite from one of the Blue-Ringed Octopii will stop a live man’s heart in under a minute.’ He added in a sad voice, ‘But our hearts stopped long ago so they present no danger to us.’
‘I don’t suppose you know where the captain is, do you?’ Lex asked.
‘He spends most of his time up on deck.’
‘Up on deck?’ Lex repeated, his heart sinking. ‘You mean . . . out there?’ He pointed towards a dark porthole, the black ocean pressing against it in an unnerving manner.
‘Yes.’ The sailor nodded. ‘He wanders the deck. Most of them do.’
Well, that could certainly be a problem. For whilst the cursed crew might not need to breathe, Lex did. In the past he could have magicked himself up there but he no longer had that option − not since Lucius had burnt all his magical enchanted hats, blast him. Lex made it a habit to always carry one of the little mini-hats he used for calling cards as the Wizard in his pocket (you never know when the chance might arise to pinch something), but all they were good for was lighting pipes. They couldn’t help him breathe under water. Indeed, now that he thought about it, Kala hadn’t actually mentioned what was supposed to happen when someone finally found the captain’s medallion. She wanted it returned to her but there was no easy way for a human to reach the surface of the sea unaided and Lex could only hope that the Gods would pull them out of there the same way
they’d sent them down.
But he would worry about that later − once he actually had the captain’s medallion. And that task in itself had become more complicated now that it wasn’t merely going to be a question of plucking the thing out of a dead man’s hands. If the captain was wandering about up on deck − walking and talking, as it were − then he might not want to give the medallion up. And then there could be trouble.
‘What’s the captain’s name?’ Lex asked.
‘Jed Saltworthy,’ the sailor replied.
The name was vaguely familiar but Lex couldn’t place it. ‘Decent enough bloke, is he?’ he asked, without much hope. After all, this was a cursed ship.
‘He’s the most foul, villainous man ever to roam the Seventeen Seas!’
‘Ah,’ Lex said, not surprised, but not exactly happy to hear it either. Almost as an afterthought he added, ‘What’s the name of this ship?’