"Maybe sometimes we can all have dinner together,” Peter suggested happily. He grabbed a piece of pumpkin from the bench and tackled the hard skin with gusto.
"Here, you put these on to cook,” Mr. Edwards suggested, handing him the peeled potatoes. “I'll do that. And keep an eye on the chops. I think we put them on too soon. It might be an idea to turn the griller down."
Peter was still thinking happily about the new “daily help” as he turned the chops over and lowered the heat. He looked at his stepfather critically. How would a woman about Dad's age see him? he wondered idly. He's not particularly handsome, I suppose, but he's still quite nice looking. And he's very kind and caring.
"Dad, why didn't you get married again?” he asked curiously. “Was it because no one wanted to take me on?"
Simon Edwards looked at him in surprise.
"Good heavens, no!” He shrugged lightly. “I've never really thought about it. I suppose it's because I never met anyone I liked enough."
"You'll like Mrs. Evans."
Mr. Edwards burst out laughing. “Oh, now, don't start that! You're too young to be matchmaking."
"I thought only women did that sort of thing."
Mr. Edwards chuckled again. “So did I. Seems I was wrong."
* * * *
PETER WENT to bed that night feeling much happier than he had for a long time. The burden of knowing he was virtually on his own for the third Earthlight Quest lifted as he realized that if he engineered things right he would have nearly as much of the twins’ company as when they were all staying on Bart Brown's small holding. Just a little bit of scheming would be required, he decided. It would be nice to have someone with whom to share the responsibility.
He put his scheme into practice the very next day. When he arrived home Mrs. Evans was already there, and the fencing was well on the way to completion. The men told Peter they would be finished the following day. As Peter sat down to begin his homework, he heard Mrs. Evans enter the kitchen. She had been hanging out some washing.
"Is that you, Peter?"
"Yes, Mrs. Evans. I hope we haven't left too much mess for you."
"Well, things are a little chaotic at the moment,” Mrs. Evans admitted, coming into the room. “But we'll soon get you sorted out. Now before I start dinner, would you like a drink or something to eat?"
"No thanks. I usually wait until Dad comes home so we can eat together."
"Okay. Just thought I'd ask.” Mrs. Evans went back to the kitchen.
"Why don't you arrange with Dad to bring Jamie and John over tomorrow night and we can all have dinner together?” Peter called out.
"Your father's busy enough without having to come home to guests for dinner. And what about your homework? Jamie and John seem to have too much of that to be going out in the evenings."
"Oh, Dad won't mind. And we can all do our homework together. Please!"
Mrs. Evans turned from the bench to find Peter at her elbow. His eyes were bright with entreaty. Poor kid, she thought. No mother and no siblings—and on top of that starting afresh in a new city and a new school. He probably gets very lonely. At least Jamie and John have always had each other.
"Well, you ask your father. In case you've forgotten, Peter, he's my employer and I haven't even met him yet."
"Exactly! How else are you going to meet him?"
Peter asked his stepfather while they were eating the excellent steak and kidney with dumplings that Mrs. Evans had left for them to reheat.
"The only problem I can see,” Mr. Edwards said, “is I might be delayed again, which means dinner will be rather late. If Mrs. Evans doesn't mind a late dinner they're all very welcome. I can always ring half-an-hour or so before I expect to be home, if she thinks that will help.” He paused. “By the way, how's Norah after her accident?"
Peter looked at him in surprise.
"Okay,” he said with deliberate off-handedness. “She wasn't very happy about having to walk to school but apart from that seemed all right."
He omitted to add how she had made a nuisance of herself by hanging around him and trying to separate him from Jamie and John.
* * * *
PETER FOUND Norah waiting at the school gates for him the next day. There was no sign of Jamie and John. He greeted her coolly and made several attempts to cycle past, but she kept blocking the way.
"If you don't mind, Norah, I'd like to put my bike away."
"Well, you don't have to ride it. I can't keep up with you if you ride. I want to talk to you."
"What about?” Peter still stood astride his bike.
Norah looked pointedly at the other pupils who were arriving. “Not here. Wait till we get to the bike shed."
"There'll be other people there, too. If you've got anything to say that you can't say with others around, I don't think I want to hear it anyway.” If she can't take that hint, he thought grimly, she's not as bright as she's supposed to be.
However, he reluctantly swung himself off the bicycle and wheeled it to the shed. To his surprise, there was no one there. The empty shed made him strangely uneasy. He put his bike on its usual stand beside the spaces used by Jamie and John, slid the chain around and turned the key in the padlock. Then he took his helmet off and started unloading his schoolbooks. He felt a sudden strong urge to get away quickly.
"Well, come on, what was it you wanted to tell me?"
Norah made no reply. Annoyed, Peter turned to repeat his demand. She stood at the open door with her back to him. He saw her glance to left and right. Apparently satisfied there was no one around she very deliberately shut the door and stood in front of it, facing Peter.
"Oh, come on! Surely there's no need for that!” Peter began to feel inexplicably alarmed. His spine tingled with apprehension. As though there's danger. But what can possibly be sinister about a silly girl with a crush on me?
Norah took a few steps towards him. Her mouth was set in a tight line. Her eyes glinted as she looked at him. The steeliness of her gaze spoke of strong dislike rather than infatuation. When she was a few meters from him, the hard line of her mouth turned to a sneer. “You flatter yourself. I'm not interested in a little creep like you!"
Peter stared at her, aghast. He went red and white—hot and cold—in turn.
"How—?” His voice came out in a croak. But his senses already told him the answer. The shed seemed to spin around him, so great was the shock. The satchel containing his books slipped from his nerveless fingers. It hit the concrete with a reverberating thump. Peter hardly hear the sound. He was only vaguely aware that he had dropped anything.
"I thought you were smarter than that,” Norah taunted. “Looks like I was wrong."
Peter's first instinct was flight. He tried to rush past her. She grabbed his sleeve and spun him round. Her strength surprised him.
"Oh, no you don't! There's no escape that way!"
From behind him Peter heard a key grate in the lock. Now sheer terror grabbed him. As he jerked his head towards the door, Norah dropped his arm. From the corner of his eye he saw her pull off her spectacles. Ostentatiously she put them in her pocket. Then her hand went to her head and she seemed to pull her hair off. Peter's eyes swung wildly from the locked door back to Norah. It took his stupefied mind a full second to realize she had been wearing a wig. She shook her head—and down tumbled a glossy red ponytail. The homely face of Norah Lahood disappeared, brace and all. Peter stared in horror into the triumphant blue eyes of Eleanor Le Grud.
Chapter 4
Evil in the Bike Shed
BUT THIS wasn't the pretty girl who greeted him in his dream. The malevolence of her gaze—spine-chillingly repellent from one so young—turned her face into an ugly mask.
Even as he heard the sound of the key turning in the lock and stared wildly at Eleanor's sneering face, something on the edge of vision attracted Peter's attention: a shifting of the air by the door. Every hair on his body stood on end. Helplessly, with dry mouth and quaking heart, he watche
d the transformation: the black cloud of the Evil One gradually taking shape. It was one huge cloud this time. He had never seen it so large. There seemed to be five figures standing within. In the center he recognized the Blue Lord and Sujad. Le Grud stood on one side of these two and Jadus on the other with an indistinct, shorter figure beside him.
That makes six! And without Jamie and John I'm on my own.
Le Grud's voice broke the ominous silence. To Peter's surprise, he addressed his daughter. “You idiot girl! There was no need to reveal your identity like that."
Eleanor tossed her head violently. Her face was sullen. “You know jolly well he's been spying on us and already knows what I really look like. He wouldn't have come with me except as Norah so I had to be Norah. But there's no point continuing with the farce now. Anyway, I hate being Norah."
"You're what our young friend here so inelegantly calls a Lord of Corruption now and you'll behave like one!"
Eleanor looked at Peter with hatred matched only by what he'd seen in the eyes of Sujad the Great. She tossed her head again but when she spoke it wasn't her father she addressed.
"You might as well show yourself, Justin,” she said spitefully. “He knows who you are now."
Peter glanced at her and then turned back to the Lords of Corruption, looking directly at the shortest figure. He said flatly, “Justicio Sadra, son of Jadus Castirio. Your mother prefers to call you Justin because she thinks people will laugh at a name like Justicio."
The boy in the black cloud glowered down at him but said nothing. Peter could now see him clearly.
Sujad spoke for the first time. “Well, Pukling, I think you know what we've come for—and this time it's six against one, so you don't stand a chance. Hand over the Obsidian Orb!"
"No,” Peter said, loudly and very clearly.
"You don't have any choice!” the Blue Lord rasped. “You're a prisoner here until you hand it over."
Peter's heart sank. As he reached out with his mind beyond the locked door, his senses told him the truth of this statement. Pupils and teachers who were already at the college were frozen like statues. Others were made late by car and bus breakdowns, punctured tires and various other delaying tactics. Those who did manage to arrive were immobilized as soon as they were out of sight of anyone in the outside world.
"In that case we'll be here forever,” Peter said aloud. With his mind he called frantically, “Essence of Obsidian! How do I get rid of them?"
He felt the throbbing of the Power of Obsidian. Although for some reason slow in coming, it was stronger than ever. Peter's confidence soared. His enemies could see the glow pulsing from and around him. Peter, locked in the center of the light, saw nothing but blackness all around. Then came the familiar wheeling of the stars above him. They sang to him with voices that told him the counter-spell to release himself from the terrible grip of his enemies.
Before he could cast the spell, Sujad divined his purpose and sprang forward. He shouted something in a chilling, wild-animal voice. It seemed to rend the very air in two. The erstwhile Lord of Obsidian appeared to fill all the space around him, blotting the other Lords of Corruption from Peter's view.
The light of the Power of Obsidian around Peter went out like a snuffed candle. An icy chill seeped through him, seeming to freeze his very bones. Left to face his enemy on his own, Peter looked up in despair at Sujad's now monstrous figure...
...and he saw, instead, the huge form of a spider. Never clearly seen, it shifted around inside the black cloud that detached itself from the main mass. With a dry sob of terror, Peter stepped backwards. He crashed into his bicycle. The sound was very loud in the heavy silence that followed Sujad's cry. The pedal tore a great gash in his leg. Blood welled instantly from the wound, but Peter hardly felt it.
The malevolence of the Evil One beat down at him. The air felt too thick for him to breath. The sheer force of the power battering at his mind felt as though it was physically flattening him.
All the time I thought I was dealing with Sujad it was the Evil One himself! He didn't kill Sujad. He merely took over his body, mind and personality.
Peter knew he wasn't ready to face the Evil One and all his Lords of Corruption on his own. His mind groped around, striving to get in touch with the Essence of Obsidian. The effort made his head feel as though it would explode.
I'll be lucky to get out of this alive! He now began to lose all consciousness of the reason for his predicament. All memory of the Earthlight, the Obsidian Orb—and even of the Power of Obsidian itself—began seeping from his frozen mind. He was just a boy facing an unimaginable terror. Almost the only thing left was his strong will to live.
Then something seemed to grab hold of his sense of self-preservation and concentrate his whole being on saving himself from the obscene evil beating down at him. A voice spoke into his raging mind. Through the unearthly tumult it sounded faint and barely audible. The strength of his will to survive made him strain towards it.
"Quick!” It was the Power of Obsidian. “The girl outside!"
Consciousness of who and what he was returned to Peter in a rush. He reached out with what was left of his battered mind to feel for the presence of anyone outside the bicycle shed. Because she stood in the protection of weeping willows, he found the girl without any trouble. Quick as a flash, before the Evil One could even grasp he'd been in contact with the Power of Obsidian, Peter reversed the spell on the girl. Although a very simple counter-spell, it took every ounce of power he possessed at that moment. Without the Obsidian Orb and the Essence of Obsidian he would have been totally unequal to it.
The thing that was once Sujad Cariotis swung to the door with a savage snarl as they all heard the running footsteps. The Evil One tried reaching out to immobilize the owner of the footsteps. However, Maria was now protected by a shower of leaves and twigs that caught in her hair as she rushed from beneath the willows. Before the Evil One could recover and try something else, the door swung open.
Maria stood in the opening, her eyes wide with terror at the sight of the huge black mass with the half-seen—and therefore all the more terrifying—form shifting within. Her mouth, already open to speak, widened to a scream. The scream broke off abruptly as something rushed towards her from beneath the black cloud. She felt someone grab her hand and jerk her back outside. The door closed behind them with a resounding crash.
"Are you all right?” Peter's voice was full of anxiety as he dragged Maria along the path. A sideways glance showed a face that was white and gray eyes that were wide and dark with terror.
"I think so,” she gasped and rushed headlong into her story: “I heard Norah and Justin talking yesterday after school. I heard Norah say, ‘I'm going to get that Peter FitzArthur in the bike shed tomorrow morning. By the time we've finished with him he'll wish he'd never been born.’ Something like that anyway. You'd already gone home. I came early to warn you but I was still too late to stop you going in with Norah, so I hid among the willows."
As they slowed down and came to a halt, she turned her head to look at Peter and, at the obvious concern in his face, the pallor of her cheeks changed to a becoming blush. Her eyes shone out at him and she smiled broadly.
The smile told Peter she was already forgetting her terror. Soon she would have no memory of the incident at all. Because she was the instrument by which he had been able to save himself, Peter returned her smile with one of his own. It had an even more devastating effect on Maria than on others who noticed how it transformed Peter's whole face. Flustered, she suddenly became aware of all the leaves and twigs sticking to her straight, light-brown hair.
"Oh dear! What on earth have I got in my hair? I can't go in to class looking like this,” she said, putting her free hand up to pull the twigs out.
"Pieces of willow,” Peter said quietly, dropping her hand and gently pulling out the rest of the leaves and twigs.
He looked back at the group of large willows behind them. Because of their sheltered positio
n their leaves hadn't even started turning.
"Oh dear!” Maria said, blushing again. “I can't think how you knew. I thought nobody noticed that was a favorite place of mine, particularly in summer when it provides a lovely quiet retreat and nobody can see me in there. I spent a lot of time there last summer when I first came here. I was lonely without my best friend, who's still at my old school.” Maria blushed again as she realized how easily she was confiding the fact of her painful shyness to a boy to whom she hadn't spoken before.
Peter didn't have the heart to say he hadn't noticed her at all. Instead he said, with perfect truth, looking back at the trees again, “The weeping willow's quite my favorite tree, too.” It was then he saw the trail of blood spots on the concrete path leading from the shed to where they were standing. He looked at his leg in dismay and showed Maria the gash on his calf. “Oh dear, I tripped and cut myself on my bike."
"You can't go in to class like that. I'll take you along to first aid. It's bleeding rather heavily. It might need stitching."
Peter found a clean handkerchief in his pocket and quickly tied it around the wound so as not to leave a trail of blood on the school floor. Feeling self-conscious, he followed Maria into the school building. Pupils and teachers were hurrying to their first classes, all anxious about their unaccountable lateness. Nobody took any notice of them.
"Oh, by the way, my name's Peter FitzArthur,” Peter said, realizing he didn't even know his rescuer's name.
"I know.” Maria blushed again. “Mine's Maria Fitzgibbon."
They both laughed at the fact that they shared the same prefix to their surnames. It saved Peter from admitting his previous ignorance of the girl's identity.
He was relieved to learn his leg didn't need stitching. When he and Maria arrived at their classroom, however, he realized he had left his schoolbooks in the bicycle shed. Dismay filled him at the thought of returning to the shed on his own.
The Third Age of Obsidian [Quest for Earthlight Trilogy Book Three] Page 4