Obsidian Pebble

by Rhys Jones

  “Exactly,” Ruff said, but he sounded more than a bit stunned by Ellie’s apology.

  “What time is it now?” asked Oz urgently.

  Ruff checked his watch. “Just after nine.”

  “If we hurry, we can get the ten past bus back to my house. Unless you both want to stay here, that is?”

  They looked about them at their fellow pupils milling around, squealing and chattering, some of the boys already charging around with their shirts half-ripped, others chasing screaming girls.

  “Silly question,” Ellie said.

  “Very,” added Ruff.

  Five minutes later, they were running down the street towards the bus stop with a renewed sense of determination.

  Chapter 14

  Essence, Alum, Soap and Tin

  On the bus, they relived the water fight again, much to Ellie’s disgust. She was pretty miffed that they hadn’t made the effort to find her and made them both promise that, if it ever came to it again, she was not to be left out. Then Ruff began explaining how he’d finally deciphered the coded message.

  “At first I thought maybe it was just a simple transposition cipher, but then I wondered if it was polyalphabetic, or even a rotor machine…”

  “I didn’t know you could speak Hungarian,” Ellie said, tilting her head and folding her arms.

  “Us codebreakers—”

  “Just tell us in English,” Ellie said, her eyes flashing dangerously. But Ruff wanted his moment of glory.

  “It’s all a bit technical,” Ruff explained. “Be easier just to show you.”

  Despite more threats from Ellie, Ruff insisted on keeping his powder dry as the bus deposited them at their stop and they hurried to Magnus Street. It was not an evening for dawdling or outdoor conversation; the temperature was dropping fast. Yet another frost was forecast, and if there were any doubt about that they only had to look at the plumes of water vapour erupting from their mouths like dragon breath as they ran along the deserted streets. Christmas trees, adorned with tinsel and lights, lit up the windows of the houses, and one or two front gardens had Santas and sleighs in lurid displays. But they paid hardly any attention to the neon reindeer and glowing elves as they hurried on.

  The wind had dropped and above them the stars glittered in the clear, black night sky. Penwurt was completely dark, the bartizans and spindly chimneys silhouetted against the starlit heavens like dark warning fingers. Noses red from the cold, they went straight to the library and stood around the desk as Ruff finally explained what he’d worked out.

  “Wasn’t difficult, once I figured out the key,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant and failing miserably.

  “Which was?” Oz asked.

  “Well, that’s the thing, I spent ages wondering what word your dad might use as a key. He was almost a professor of history, right? So I was going bananas trying to think of some weird ancient word or saying.”

  Oz frowned. “But I don’t even think my dad knew the letters were in the clock. Like I said, he was always threatening to get the thing fixed so that it would run.”

  “Exactly.” Ruff pointed a confirmatory finger at him. “It was Morsman that found the letters and put them in the clock for safekeeping, right? And it was Morsman that wrote the code on the back as a reminder.”

  “Why bother? I mean, why not just memorise the message?” Ellie said.

  Ruff shook his head. “I reckon it’s like having an instruction manual for a new gizmo. You’ll probably never read it, but you hang on to it in case you just might have to. He wrote the message down as a back-up, but coded it in case anyone else found it.”

  “So it was Morsman’s keyword you needed,” Oz said.

  “And what would be easier than something he’d see whenever he reread the letter?” Ruff said teasingly. He was clearly enjoying this.

  “Come on, Ruff,” Ellie demanded. “Just tell…” She stopped in mid-sentence and her eyes became very large and very round as she whispered, “The clockmaker’s message.”

  “Tempus Rerum Imperator,” Oz said slowly, seeing it, too, now.

  “Exactly.” Ruff nodded and fished out a notebook from his backpack. He wrote out Tempus Rerum Imperator and then wrote numbers beneath. “So if you substitute the letters for numbers, you can see it’s just a simple reverse alphabet cipher. Instead of A being one, Z is one. Look, the sequence of numbers for “tempus” is 722141158, right? So T would be 7 and E, 22. Get it?”

  “Hey, Ruff, I’m impressed,” Ellie said.

  “There’s no need to sound so surprised,” Ruff retorted, but he grinned as he said it. He flipped over a couple of pages of his book. “So every sequence of numbers spells a word. And, surprise, surprise, they all spell alchemical symbols. I wrote it all down, but I just need to check this off against the symbols on the panels to try and make sense of it.” He went to the panel with the wheel of twenty-six symbols and pored over it, consulting his notebook every now and then. Oz and Ellie watched him for a while as he mumbled to himself before Ruff, finally realising that he was being observed, looked up and said tetchily, “I could be a few minutes.”

  Oz shrugged and turned away. He ran his fingers along the dusty spines of the stacked books on their shelves, peering at their titles.

  “What are you looking for?” Ellie whispered, so as not to distract Ruff.

  “Dunno, really. Just something the twins said to me. It sounded important at the time, but I couldn’t make a connection. And I almost had it again tonight. Something to do with Gerber.”

  “Was it the fact that he’s an ugly gonk?” said Ruff distractedly from across the room.

  “Get on with your cipher solving,” Ellie snapped.

  “Something about Gerber’s family firm being involved with the German army in the Second World War,” Oz went on, and then turned to Ellie with a little shake of his head. “Why should that be important?”

  Ellie started to shrug, but then stopped abruptly. She frowned and her eyes widened. “Hang on,” she said, walking along the shelves, searching for a book. “Here it is.” She pulled down a black, leather-bound tome and started flicking pages. “Yeah, I knew it.”

  She looked up at a perplexed Oz and explained, “A Short History of Seabourne’s Ancient Houses. I borrowed it, remember?”

  Oz nodded vaguely

  “Remember that stuff I found about Shoesmith the farrier and the shell thingy? I remember reading somewhere…yes, here it is. They worked looking after horses for the British during the First World War. That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  Oz frowned. “Yeah, but the First World War was, like, thirty years before the second one.”

  “Still, bit weird, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, I suppose there is a bit of a connection, but didn’t you say that one of the Shoesmiths was killed in that war?”

  “That’s right.” Ellie scanned the page with her finger until she stopped about halfway down. “Yeah, here it is. At the Battle of Le Cateau in 1914.”

  “Oh well, it must have been horses that triggered my…” Oz stopped. Something shifted in his brain, like a curtain wafting in the wind to reveal a hidden view. He turned to Ellie, his voice now an excited, harsh whisper. “That’s it. That’s it!”

  “What’s it?” Both Ellie and Ruff stared at him, but Oz was running downstairs to his bedroom. He grabbed his laptop and bolted back up to the library.

  “Look up gerber,” he said as he powered up the laptop.

  “I told you, I already have,” Ellie said.

  “Not Gerber the bloke, ‘gerber’ the word. There’s a German/English dictionary up there somewhere.”

  Frowning, Ellie started searching the shelves as Oz waited for the laptop to boot up. He found the file he was looking for just as Ellie pulled down a battered book and blew dust off its cover.

  “I knew I’d seen it in here somewhere,” Oz said, his voice high with excitement. “In 1914, Morsman went on an expedition to France to look for the fifth
artefact. Everyone said he was mad because the war was on. But he didn’t go alone.”

  Ellie looked up from the dictionary and read out what she found. “Right, ‘gerber, of German origin. Someone who skins animals, a—’”

  “Tanner,” said Oz before Ellie could finish.

  She stared at him in astonishment, brows knitted. “How did you know that?”

  “I didn’t. But I remembered that the bloke who went with Morsman to France was called John Tanner. You worked it out, Ruff. You told us that gerber means someone who skins animals. Don’t you see?”

  “No,” said Ruff, totally flummoxed.

  Ellie’s face bore a strange expression of mingled horror and confusion. “Are you seriously trying to tell us that Gerber is John Tanner?”

  “It all fits,” Oz said, and started pacing up and down the room. “Tanner was Morsman’s big mate in the orphanage. They went to France in 1914 to look for the fifth artefact, but didn’t find anything, or at least that’s what my dad said in his article. Afterwards, Tanner disappeared.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t you see?” Oz exclaimed. Suddenly, it was all so obvious. But the others just gawped at him as if he’d gone bananas. “Shoesmith’s shell was the fifth artefact! And I bet Tanner found the thing and took it for himself.”

  “But what about the Shoesmiths?” Ellie said.

  “You said that one brother was killed in action in 1914. Maybe he was already dead when Tanner found him,” Oz reasoned.

  “Or maybe Tanner had a hand in him dying, too,” Ellie said quietly.

  The boys stared at her.

  “Wait a minute,” Ruff said, his voice dripping with disdain. “Morsman was born when, 1880? If Tanner is the same age as him, that would make him a hundred and buzzard thirty. I know he’s a repulsive gonk, but…”

  Oz’s eyes shone. “The twins told me that Mrs. Fanshaw thinks he’s some kind of freak. Ellie said he’s really difficult to research. Perhaps he doesn’t want anyone to know about his past.” His voice dropped to a loaded whisper. “What if the artefact somehow keeps him young?”

  Ruff’s mouth dropped open and Ellie’s brows crumpled in disbelief, but then her eyes lit up.

  “The Shoesmiths were all renowned for living for, like, ages—over a hundred, many of them—except the bloke who wrote the autobiography.”

  “But he didn’t have the shell by then, did he?” Oz said quickly. “I know how it sounds, but what if it did? What if it was what made the Shoesmiths live longer, and now, somehow, it’s having an effect on how Gerber ages? That would make him want the other artefacts, too, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but a hundred and thirty?” Ruff said, wrinkling his nose.

  “Hold on,” Oz said, and quickly fetched the small ladder that fitted onto the bookshelf. He clambered up and reached for the old photograph albums of Penwurt and the orphanage. In date order, starting in 1886, were faded sepia prints of those lucky enough to have found a home under Colonel Thompson’s wing. Oz took out the loose print he’d found Halloween night. He found Morsman two in from the end in the front row, a smiling, gap-toothed boy in a loose-fitting, open-neck shirt, with his arm around the head of another, slighter boy.

  “This is 1892. Morsman would have been about our age.” Oz stared at the second boy. He looked thin and gawky and troubled, his hair tousled and dark, and even with the poor quality of the old sepia print, from the way his head was angled by the headlock Morsman had him in, it was clear that John Tanner had been cursed with a large, dark blemish that covered most of one half of his neck.

  “The twins told me that Gerber wears high collars to hide a large birthmark.” Oz held out the photograph for Ellie and Ruff to see. When they looked up again, their faces were strained and serious. No one spoke. It all seemed so incredible and yet, somehow, the pieces fitted together perfectly. Oz spoke for all of them when he finally said, “Maybe the coded message has the answer to some of this.”

  Ruff nodded and turned his attention back to the oak panelling.

  “Okay, the letter sequences on the back of Redmayne’s letter spell out sixteen words and they’re all symbols.” Ruff used his finger to point out the symbols as they appeared on his notebook. “Iron, nitre, glass, rot, ummm…essence, soap, soap, alum, tin, and then there’s soap, urine, nitre, rot, iron, soap and essence.”

  “Is that really the symbol for urine?” asked Ellie, making a face.

  “Yeah,” Ruff said.

  “Cool,” Ellie said, shaking her head.

  “But what does all this mean?” Oz said.

  “Maybe we should check the Redmayne letter again?” Ruff suggested. “In case there’s something we’ve missed.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Oz ran down the stairs and headed for the study. The first sign he had that anything was amiss was the fact the door didn’t look quite right. Not ajar as such, but not quite flush with the frame, either. He noticed a small smattering of shiny dust on the carpet right underneath the lock as he reached for the handle. The door swung open and he saw immediately what had happened. The lock itself lay on the study floor with more fine metal shavings around it. Someone had drilled it out, and that same someone had taken the clock off the wall and laid it on the desk.

  Oz stood frozen on the threshold. Nothing else was different about the study, but there was something very different about the clock. The drawer beneath the pendulum lay shattered, the wood splintered and broken. Stomach writhing, he took a step forward into the room, his eyes drawn to the broken clock drawer. It was empty.

  “Ellie! Ruff!” he yelled, and heard rapid footfalls as they responded to the urgency in his voice. In a couple of seconds they ran along the landing and through the doorway of the study, where they both froze.

  “Oh my God,” Ellie said, hand over her mouth.

  “Buzzard,” spluttered Ruff.

  “They’ve got them all,” said Oz dully. “The letters, the dor, the pebble. Everything.”

  “What should we do?” said Ellie. “Ring the police?”

  “And tell them what?” Oz said angrily, not taking his eyes from the broken drawer of his dad’s clock.

  “That there’s been a burglary,” Ellie said.

  “But has there?” Oz said.

  “We’d better check the rest of the house,” Ellie whispered urgently, and ran out, yelling, “I’ll check downstairs. You two do up here.”

  But the TV was fine, and so were the CD player and Oz’s Xbox and his iPod. All the things that burglars usually burgled remained untouched, and after ten minutes of searching it was clear that nothing else had been disturbed. Not one other thing had been taken.

  “But it’s still a robbery,” Ellie protested as they gathered back in the study. “At least ring your mum.”

  “And tell her that someone’s stolen Morsman’s artefacts?” Oz shook his head. “She’d probably get up on the table and do the Macarena.” He slapped the desk angrily. “I should have hidden them somewhere else. Somewhere away from Dad’s study.”

  “No good beating yourself up, Oz,” Ellie said.

  “We’ve still got the message,” Ruff added hopefully.

  “I thought you needed the letter,” Oz muttered, his words leaden and bitter.

  “It was just to double-check,” Ruff said. “See if I’d copied everything down right.”

  Oz looked at his friends. They were desperate to help.

  “Come on, Oz,” Ellie urged.

  Shrugging despondently, his heart iron-heavy and his mind whirling full of self-recriminatory what-ifs, he allowed himself to be led back up to the library. While Ellie and Ruff pored over the coded message, Oz sat in one of the chairs watching them, his appetite for the mystery suddenly gone. If only he’d put the artefacts somewhere really safe, like in the garage with the boxes of old tools. No one would have thought of looking there. Or even in a plastic bag taped to the underside of the lid of the cistern in the unused bathroom. That’s what they did in a
ll the films when they wanted to hide something. Oz’s mind went round and round in ever-decreasing circles. He hardly noticed how much Ruff and Ellie were concentrating and how they’d pause occasionally to give him a worried glance.

  No one spoke for almost ten minutes.

  But it was in one of those tense, silent moments that a new sound appeared, faint but definite—the creak of a floorboard twice in quick succession, followed by the dull tattoo of someone, or something, crossing a room.

  Footsteps.

  Ellie and Ruff paused and Oz sat up. Could it be that their ghost still had the answers to what was going on?

  “Hear that?” Ruff whispered.

  “It’s coming from behind this wall,” Oz said, getting up from his chair and putting his ear against the panelling.

  “Should we go over there?” Ellie said, but there was doubt in her voice.

  “To the orphanage? Tried that, remember?” Oz said, suddenly buoyed by this new twist. “No, the answer’s here. In this library, I’m convinced of it. It’s here in these books, or the symbols, or something…”

  “Maybe we could get a wizard from one of Ruff’s Xbox games to cast a spell and reveal it to us,” Ellie said drily.

  Ruff gave her a long-suffering look. “Very funny.”

  “Just a suggestion,” Ellie said.

  “Don’t give him any ideas,” Oz said.

  “Heeps had ideas,” Ellie muttered, her face glum. “He’d written them all over the poster I saw on Kate’s phone. What does ‘orthographic’ mean?”

  “I dunno,” Oz said. “Something to do with printing?”

  Ruff’s face had gone strangely slack. “Spell,” he whispered, his eyes focused on something far away. Oz and Ellie stared at him.

  “For crying out loud, I didn’t mean it about the wizards. It was just a joke, Ruff,” Ellie snapped.

  “No, it isn’t,” Ruff whispered, his eyes burning. “Spell, don’t you see? There’s a whole section on the Cypherspace page about it.”

  Oz and Ellie just stared at him.

  “I don’t mean ‘spell’ as in jiggery-pokery and wands and stuff. I mean ‘spell’ as in spelling. That’s what orthographic is all about.” He pointed towards the wheel of symbols. “I reckon the message spells out an instruction. Look, take the first letter of all of these symbols.”