Six Days

by Philip Webb

  He shakes his head.

  “So maybe it was here once, but it ain’t now …,” I go.

  His eyes shine as he ponders this. “No, it’s definitely here. We’re getting warmer, I know we are.”

  Seeing him there armed with his comics and his pockets full of junk, I get a twinge of fear. Cos the ship is right. Its words about Wilbur come back to me – His dreams of this flinder are strong. He can sense where it lies. Somehow, Wilbur does know stuff. He found Peyto at Big Ben and he’s the whole reason we’re on this trail at all. So maybe he is The One. But this business with the wounded ship singling out Wilbur – I don’t like it one bit. Cos didn’t Gramps say something about how there would be a special one who was gonna make the artifact stronger? But what does that mean for Wilbur? All these puzzles are just hovering round my head like flies, not settling.

  And then something hits me. Wilbur’s gone trotting up ahead along a corridor, away from the collection rooms. I hurry after him, past a bunch of NO ENTRY signs and some makeshift barriers.

  “Wilbur, wait up!”

  He hangs back, but I can tell he’s all eager to get to the next room.

  “Listen, this is a museum, right? Everything’s like centuries old.”

  “So?”

  “Well, if the flinder’s here, then maybe it got found a long time ago.”

  Wilbur’s jaw drops open. “What if Halina didn’t leave the ship with her flinder last week, last year, or even a hundred years ago when Bartlett started looking for the artifact? What if she came down to Earth in ancient times?”

  “Then she’s been dead …” We both whisper it together. “For thousands of years.”

  “Not a word about this to Peyto – we don’t want to upset him, OK?”

  But then my head just starts racing. Cos if Halina came to Earth way back when, then that means the ship’s been waiting a crazy long time to wake Peyto and Erin up. Waiting for what? For The One? Why leave it so late? ’Specially when there ain’t no time for Peyto and Erin to wake up all the other sleepers themselves … And right then, it twigs. I close my eyes with the horror of it.

  The Aeolus don’t want to wake nobody up if it can help it. It wants them all to stay asleep.

  I open my eyes, and Wilbur’s just staring at me, and all the color’s gone from his face.

  “What’s wrong? You OK?”

  “I can feel it, Cass.” His voice is quiet and it raises the hairs on my neck. “We’re close, really close. It ain’t like the other flinders, like Erin’s or Peyto’s. This one, it’s different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s calling me, Cass. I can feel it.”

  Then he turns and scurries off ahead.

  “Wilbur, slow down!”

  When I catch up, I find him standing at the edge of a large space that looks more like a warehouse than a collection room. From the skylight a sunbeam shines down onto forklift trucks and scattered crates. There’s these panels that make a winding path, and on some of them there’s pictures and bits of writing. The scenes show a hilltop, a grass-covered ditch, and some rough lumps of stone. I start to feel proper uneasy, though I ain’t sure why.

  “It’s here, Cass,” he whispers.

  He takes my hand and together we go round the maze of panels, and there at the end is a steel box on a trolley. It gleams in the sunlight, and as I move closer I see that it ain’t just a box. The lid’s all complicated with clamps and seals, and it’s linked up with hoses to other machines.

  “You reckon that’s it?” I go.

  “Yeah, can you feel it, too?”

  “What?”

  “Like a buzzing in your head.”

  “No. Look, if this is giving you the collywobbles, why don’t you sit over there and let me check it out?”

  Suddenly he grips my hand so tight it hurts. “Look, Cass!”

  He’s pointing at a bunch of stickers and official-looking stamps on the side of the box.

  “Slow down – you know I can’t read. What does it say?”

  “Specimen: 80304. Renshaw Barrow Dig. Gib Hill. Homo sapiens, female. ‘Arbor Low Woman.’ Caution: contents at freeze-dry conditions.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s all that in English?”

  “It’s a body,” whispers Wilbur. “It’s her. It’s Halina.”

  “Right, I want you to go and sit over there, OK?”

  “Cass, I don’t want to,” he whimpers.

  “And I don’t want you to see what’s inside. Trust me. I’m just right here. Let me look first, OK?”

  Slowly he lets go of my hand and backs away to the wall panels.

  I stare at the box, just hovering there, my hand on the casing.

  “Oh God, Cass!”

  I spin round, but he’s only reading the wall panels.

  “They found her in a burial mound that was already dug. Just by accident. She never showed up on their scans before that. And she was preserved! Normally, bodies just rot away – they don’t survive that long, unless they’re buried in peat bogs or frozen ground. No one knows how the body lasted. She’s from the Stone Age, Cass. She’s five thousand years old!”

  I point at the hoses and the tanks, all covered in dust now. “Yeah, well, the power’s been off since the Quark Wars, so there ain’t gonna be much of her left now. Anyhow, there’s no way we’ll ever know it’s Peyto’s mum. It ain’t exactly got her name written on the side. Arbor Low Woman – it could be anyone!”

  And I’m trying not to come across scared, but my voice is all over the place. This is nuts – I must have clocked thousands of bodies, but I really don’t want to see what’s inside. Then again, I’ve got to.

  The catches on the box are loose. I lift back the lid and let it topple open. What I figure I’m gonna see is a heap of bones – something in a worse state than Oxford Street Woman out side.

  What I actually see makes me cry out loud.

  “Cass, what is it?”

  “Stay back!”

  But there ain’t no stopping him now. He runs up next to me and leans over the edge.

  It’s true, Arbor Low Woman ain’t much more than some bones held together with black leathery flesh, but that ain’t the half of it. She’s lying on her back, arms clasped over her chest – the way we lay our dead to rest. But coming from inside the skull is a pale glow, the color of summer sky, and hovering around the cheekbones and eye sockets is a layer of dust that outlines the shape of a face. The ghost of a woman as she had once been – beautiful and young.

  It gives me the chills to look at her, cos I can make out hair and eyebrows and eyelashes, like she’s right there, not dead but asleep. And there ain’t no getting away from it, Wilbur’s right. It has to be Halina, cos she’s the absolute double of Peyto. And more than that – I’ve seen this blue light enough times to know what’s causing it.

  Buried inside the skull is the missing flinder. The artifact. We’ve found it.

  “What we gonna do, Cass? What we gonna tell Peyto?”

  “We have to get him up here,” I go, trying to get a grip. “It ain’t fair to keep him in the dark. Trouble is, what we gonna do about the flinder? The freakish thing’s inside her head …”

  A familiar voice stops me in my tracks. “Well done, Cass. Now, if you would both step away from the container, I’ll take over from here.”

  I spin round. Standing just a few feet away is Gramps. He ain’t even looking at me. He’s just staring at the steel box like he’s blind to anything else, like his life’s dream is just moments away.

  “The hunt for this cursed thing is over. At last. Step back, Cass.” His voice is hard.

  I blink at him. “You can’t take it.”

  “You haven’t got the slightest idea how long and hard I’ve searched for this.”

  “It don’t matter. You’ve been rooting around for it all these years, but you don’t even know where it’s from, what it’s for.”

  “And you do?”

  “I know that it ain’t
of this world and it don’t belong to you.”

  “Belong?!” He almost laughs at me. “You think I want to keep it? All I want is for it to be gone from our city. It’s caused our people nothing but misery for years. It’s a curse! I want the Russians to take it away!”

  “What happened to keeping it out the wrong hands?” And then, slowly, the truth dawns on me. “You’re working with them, ain’t you? That’s how you got across the river so quick. You just used a bridge … Albert Bridge is closest to Battersea Woods. You’re the Vlad spy.”

  “You always were a clever girl, Cass.”

  “So you got here to ransack the library for the artifact. But there was always a chance it wasn’t gonna be there, so you hung around for us to show up, to do your dirty work for you.”

  “Bravo.” His eyes glitter, but there ain’t a hint of a smile.

  “But how did you know we’d even get here? Ah … You overheard us talking about the dinghy when we came out the cellar, didn’t you?”

  “I’ll take over from here, Cass.”

  “But you don’t get it. If the Vlads get hold of it, then …” I think of the ship spinning end over end, closer and closer to Earth.

  “Then what?”

  “It’s curtains for everyone. A war that just don’t end. Ever.”

  He begins to inch toward me, and I’m trying to think of something that’ll get us out of this, but I know how smart he is, how quick he is.

  “Something spoke to you, Cass? What was it? Are you afraid of telling me something important?”

  Wilbur presses closer to me, and the poor lad is trembling. Think, Cass, think! For an instant, all I can picture is Gramps’s mad incident map – all the pins and photos and crazy scribblings.

  “Lost your tongue, Cass? What spoke to you?”

  “The Aeolus. The voice that spoke to Morgan Bartlett …”

  He just nods and curls his lips up into a horrid smile.

  And he’s really close now. I can see the gleam in his eyes, all cold and eaten up, like he’s lost it big-time and he ain’t even Gramps no more. And the whole situation is so horribly wrong that I’ve got to do something. But I can’t, and it’s like I’m still lost in the madness of Gramps’s map – all them wasted years searching …

  “I guess you know now your map was complete cobblers – all them blind alleys. Guess you wasn’t the one

  Morgan Bartlett was thinking of when he made all his clues …”

  “The map led me here in the end.”

  “It didn’t lead you here. We did. You used us!”

  “I had to do whatever was necessary. It doesn’t matter

  how I did it –”

  “Course it matters!” I yell at him. “You’re my grandad!

  You’re supposed to trust us!” “Like you trusted me?” He stops just an arm’s length away, uncertain for a moment.

  “Trust? You stopped caring about us a long time ago.

  Ain’t that right? Cos you been holed up in your cellar with your clues and your crazy map!”

  And just for a moment, nothing else matters, cos I know what I say is true, and in spite of everything, I just want him to be Gramps, the man who looked after us when Mum was still alive … But there ain’t so much as a flicker from him. He’s a stone.

  “I did what I did for the greater good, Cass. To save our people, our land.”

  He shoves me aside and leans over the box for his first glimpse of Halina’s ghost face …

  And that’s when I go for it. I whip out my club and belt Gramps in the back with everything I’ve got. His scream echoes round the museum, and it cuts right through me, but somehow that makes it easier to do what I’ve got to do. Cos I know it’s gonna break Peyto’s heart. No fannying about. No respect for the dead.

  So I look one last time into Halina’s lovely face and reach up to plunge my hand into the remains of her head …

  But I’m too late. Wilbur’s there before me. He practically flips into the box on top of her, and I hear the crunch as his hand goes into her skull. I drag him out and he’s got the flinder in his hand. But he ain’t looking at it. He’s looking straight ahead, right through the walls, and his little body’s all rigid. He looks absolutely terrified.

  “Oh God, Wilbur! What is it?”

  I shake him, but it’s like he can’t see me or feel me anymore, and nothing I do can wipe that look off his face.

  I can hear Gramps groaning now, and in the corner of my eye I see him stirring.

  “Wilbur! Speak to me!”

  His voice is small and scared. “Halina? Is that you?”

  “WILBUR! Snap out of it!”

  And then I twig what’s happening. The flinder! It’s making him see things.

  So I close my fist around it, to take it off him, and several things happen at once. I can feel Wilbur in my arms, and he’s crying out in terror. And behind me, someone is shouting, a woman barking orders, and boots come thumping across the floor toward us. But I’m frozen. I just can’t move; it’s like I’ve forgotten how to. And all the shouts are slowing down now, and falling behind, like I’m rushing away. Somewhere else. Diving down, into darkness.

  But Wilbur’s right there, too. I can feel him just a breath away.

  That’s it. I’ve blown it. I’m dead, and so’s Wilbur. It’s my fault. We’re gonna end up a pile of bones …

  The last place I expect to end up is outside.

  HALINA

  We both clutch the flinder – I can see its light pouring from our fingers. And we’re clinging to each other, too stunned to move. There’s trees all around us and they look so real! Thin birches, silvery in the sunlight, their bark peeling and dotted with fungus. Above us, red leaves swish about in the wind.

  “Where are we, Cass?” whispers Wilbur.

  “We’re still in the museum. We ain’t gone anywhere,” I go. “You can only see any of this when you touch the flinder.”

  But it ain’t just making us see. It’s making us feel, too – the cold air on my skin, the springy ground under my boots. The wood is high on a hill, and I’m looking out over bare fields, but the world at the edge of the wood is hazy. Branches and leaves ripple into a half-light, a fuzz of flame and sky. It’s like the wood is sunk in darkness, like them little paperweight worlds, cut off from everything else.

  “It’s her,” breathes Wilbur.

  I follow his gaze, and there, about twenty feet away, hidden in the undergrowth, stands a woman, perfectly still, like she’s waiting for something. Then she steps forward into the clearing. And there ain’t no mistaking – Wilbur’s right – it’s Halina. I just gape at her animal skins flapping in the breeze, the dirt on her skin, the black hair flowing across her face, the flinder shining at her neck. It’s her, just as she was, five thousand years ago. And no word of a lie, she’s just about the most all-out beautiful woman I’ve ever set eyes on. Tall and straight-backed and wild and alive! The way she stands there so proud and powerful, she’s more like an animal than a person. Just being. Not putting on a front or a show. Just living in her skin. I’m so caught up by her that it takes me a while to cotton on to the other people behind her. They’re scattered in amongst the trees, standing back, watching Halina from a distance. They’re dressed like her in animal hides, and some of them have got feathers and fern stalks tied into their hair. And they’re a right wild-looking bunch – thickset and lump-faced, smeared with streaks of black mud, armed to the teeth with sticks and spears and stones.

  I clutch Wilbur harder and try to shrink away.

  But he goes, “It’s OK – they can’t see us. It’s just a recording. From history.”

  Then Halina speaks softly in a language I ain’t never heard before. It’s like verse, like singing, and it sounds so old and strong. The talk of gods, brimming and truthful, spilling out her mouth in strange and wonderful rhymes. And the maddest thing is, I understand every single word of it.

  “This message is for any member of the crew who has managed to es
cape the Aeolus to search for me. As you can see, I have struck out, alone. And I have found a home. For us all. The ancients only know how long we were orbiting this ball of life – it’s been here beneath our sleeping heads, spinning within our reach. I hope for my son’s sake and all our sakes that I will achieve what I’m setting out to do today. Because if I fail, then I expect a very long time will pass before another chance arises.

  “There isn’t time to explain everything. But I will try. I believe that the Aeolus first woke me because there was a problem with my sleeper capsule. As I was repairing it, I was surprised to find that we were orbiting a planet already overflowing with life – a green haven. As sleepers, we had been here for over half a billion years, slowly cloaking this world with air and water, but the Aeolus had chosen not to wake us. When I challenged the ship, it fought with me. There was a struggle. I tried to trigger an emergency in the hope that all of our people would be woken from their sleep, then I escaped in a shuttle-craft to the planet’s surface. I hoped that it would only be a matter of weeks before my friends and my son would join me.

  “You cannot imagine my shock at finding not just life here … but people! And they aren’t here by accident. You must understand that we nurtured them, through our dreams, through our flinders. They are our children, as are all the beings of the Earth.

  “I was so astounded by this world. These people, my people, call it the land of the blinking eye. Day and night, sun and rain, life and death. I yearned to share this place with my Homefleet companions, but all my efforts to return to the ship have been in vain. The shuttle lies a day’s walk from here, buried beneath the stones. The land there belongs to another tribe, who will fight to the death to guard it. I must defeat them first if I am to retrieve the shuttle. These warriors behind me, they cannot understand my words, nor do they understand my task now. But they follow me and they are prepared to die with me. So it comes to this – war, the reason we left our shattered home-worlds all those aeons ago. I know now that this will be my last chance to return to the ship and free the sleepers, or I must die in the attempt.