by David Alric
Clare looked extremely uncomfortable.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘to be honest …’ She suddenly saw that everybody was laughing.
‘You rotten swines!’ she said. ‘Just because I don’t like spiders!’
‘Sorry to wind you up,’ said Lucy with a grin. ‘You should’ve seen your face – I wish I’d had my camera. But about the spiders: I could go back, but there’s a quicker way to find out.’ She looked down at Sophie:
‘Did you speak to the great arachnopod in the cave of the great rock?’
The monkey gave a visible shudder at the memory.
‘I told it that we were on the service of the Promised One. It knew her not. It had …’ she faltered ‘… it had a terrible voice … it was high like the screech of the arboribane, and dark like a sunsleep without the Great Silver One, and cold like the water that comes from deep in the rocks.’
Lucy told the others what she had said.
‘That settles it!’ she continued. ‘I’m definitely not going back, not for all the science in the world. Anyway, we’ve got our answer. The spiders must have come through from the Cretaceous valley and have been lurking in that ghastly place for millions and millions of years.’
At that moment Queenie pushed her way through the tent flap.
‘The Bearded One approaches. He carries nothing. He wears a special skin but I see him still!’
‘He’s on his way over,’ Lucy told the others. She looked puzzled. ‘Queenie says he’s got a skin on but she can still see him, whatever that means. And he hasn’t brought a gun,’ she added with a wry smile, ‘so maybe it’s just a social call.’
Soon they heard him outside the tent.
‘Knock, knock!’ he called. Clare was tempted to shout ‘Who’s there?’ but thought better of it.
‘Come in, professor,’ Helen called, and the flap opened to admit Luke in a plastic raincoat.
‘Good morning,’ he said. He raised his voice to make himself heard over the drumming of the rain on the tent. ‘It’s a little damp this morning, and I wondered if you might all be more comfortable in one of our cabins. I’ve put some coffee on.’
Their plan had been to examine the stuck plane that morning but there was no prospect of doing that in these conditions, so they accepted his invitation. As they got their macs and umbrellas out Lucy spoke to Michelle on her shoulder. She knew from the recent conversation that the professor probably wouldn’t make a move until his means of escape was assured, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
‘Soon we enter the den of the Bearded One and he will give us something to drink. You have smelt many times the hot, black, water that is drunk by the Tailless Ones and you must warn me if this smells different from any you have smelt before, or if the Bearded One’s drink smells different from ours. Be cautious, the drinks will be very hot!’
‘It shall be done as you wish,’ replied the little monkey.
As she saw her sister communing with the tiny creature Clare smiled to herself; she knew exactly what her sister was up to. Just before they left the tent Lucy turned to Luke.
‘Do you mind if my pet monkey comes with me, professor?’ she asked, putting on her sweetest smile. ‘She’s very curious and she’d love to see inside your cabin.’ Luke welcomed the opportunity to appear to be a genial father figure.
‘Of course I don’t mind, my dear.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve already seen how cute she is.’ As they walked across to the other camp, Lucy spoke to Queenie who immediately disappeared into some nearby trees. Within a few moments she was back.
‘I have spoken to the drumquill,’ she told Lucy, ‘and she will do as thou desirest.’
Soon they were all sitting round the table in the mess hut, which was the communal dining area for the villains. Luke poured them all coffee and, just as he turned away to make a new pot there was a sharp tapping on the door. He stopped and stared at the door, pale with fright. As he watched, Lucy winked at the others. Then the tapping was repeated; this time much louder and more insistent.
‘Who … who in God’s name can that be?’ he whispered. ‘I thought they were all dead.’ He looked questioningly at the others, who shrugged their shoulders in apparent bewilderment. The professor went slowly to the door and opened it a crack. Seeing nothing he gradually opened the door wider and then stepped out and looked around. As he did so Michelle scampered round the table sniffing at the mugs, gave a favourable report to Lucy, and was back on her shoulder before he came back inside, looking totally perplexed.
‘There’s no one there!’ he muttered with his hand on his forehead. ‘I could have sworn …’ his voice faded off as he saw the others seemed completely uninterested in his mystery tapping.
‘Funny thing, the wind,’ said Clive cheerily as the rest struggled to keep straight faces. Lucy glanced out of the window as if to check on the wind, and was just in time to see the woodpecker disappearing into the woods.
In the event the coffee was delicious.
Talk soon turned, inevitably, to the invisibility robes. As his visitors already knew about them Luke saw little point in being secretive about ‘his’ invention, especially as he intended to kill them all anyway. They were naturally fascinated by the discovery and he patiently answered all their questions.
‘Changing the subject,’ he said after a while, ‘you must all lead charmed lives. I still find it scarcely credible that four vicious, heavily armed thugs, five if you include the pilot – I was never quite certain about him – have all met with fatal accidents and the six of you have emerged completely unscathed.’
‘Well, we intended them no harm,’ said Richard, truthfully, ‘in fact we tried to save them. I don’t think anyone would have wished upon them the terrible fates that they suffered but their greed led them to steal your amazing discovery and they’ve now suffered the consequences – speaking of which,’ he continued, ‘I thought you should know that they had a computer disk which presumably contained your invisibility data. We couldn’t retrieve it, but at least you can be sure nobody else will ever see it. I presume,’ he added casually, ‘that you’ve got back-up data?’
The professor paused slightly before replying – a little too long, Clare thought, for a completely innocent victim. She was sitting opposite him, and had been watching him intently for any sign that might indicate his innocence or otherwise. He decided, again, that he should appear completely open. He had nothing to lose for they were never going to speak to anyone again outside this crater.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘And thanks for your concern. The disk they stole had already been degraded, as it happens – I always suspected they would steal it – I have all the original data on the hard drive of my computer and a summary of it on another back-up disk.’ They all paused for a moment as they reflected on the irony of Chopper and Biggles having sacrificed their lives for a worthless piece of plastic.
‘One thing that has puzzled me since you first told me about your kidnap,’ said Helen, the first to break the grim silence, ‘is why they brought you here. I know it’s remote but surely there are dozens of places they could have hidden you while you worked – the basement of a disused warehouse in a city would have been ten times easier and cheaper than coming here.’
‘Ah,’ said the professor with a smile. ‘That’s because of the rocks.’ He went on to explain about the pilot bringing rocks to the university and how they had come here to obtain the raw materials to make the suits. As he did so Helen suddenly interrupted with a gasp.
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘The pilot. He picked up those rocks for ballast when he rescued us from the crater. After Lucy and Richard left and it was safe for us to move about in the evening –’ She stopped and corrected herself, just in time, before mentioning Lucy’s instructions to the animals – ‘when we began to get more adventurous about moving about in the evenings, we occasionally noticed some glowing at dark and we thought that we were looking at glow-worms. From what you’ve told us though, we were obvious
ly seeing the same phenomenon as the pilot.’
‘At least it explains why we couldn’t find any glowworms,’ said Julian with a wry smile. ‘I wanted a specimen to take back with me and was mystified by their absence, even in places where the glow was very strong.’
The conversation moved back to the extraordinary events of the previous twenty-four hours and the deaths of the villains. ‘Can you easily make a new suit?’ asked Richard. ‘Helen told me that Chopper and the pilot took the only two in existence and I’m afraid they are now giving some wild animal indigestion.’ Again, there was a brief but unmistakable pause before the reply, and Clare was now certain the man was lying.
‘I can of course,’ replied the professor. ‘As I said, I have all the relevant data, but it’s a long and difficult job and I’ll probably wait now until I’m back in my own lab with proper facilities.’ He stopped for a few seconds and then continued. ‘Which brings me on to the question of getting out of here. I presume that you’ve got some contingency plans for being rescued and I was hoping that you might be able to include me in the arrangements.’
‘Of course,’ said Julian. ‘As you probably now know, radios don’t work in this crater – we now think it may be something to do with your special rocks and I’d be interested to hear your expert views on that later. Because we’d been here before, we were already aware of the transmission problem so our back-up plan is rather complicated. But before we start getting everybody involved in a great deal of worry and expense I thought I’d take a look at your plane if I may. If we can get it going and it’s a model I can fly, it’ll save a great deal of time and trouble.’
‘Well, the plane’s nothing to do with me,’ said the professor. ‘They just bunged me in it and brought me here. As far as I’m concerned you do anything you want with it! The only thing is,’ he continued, ‘the pilot was adamant it can’t be moved. I haven’t seen it myself, but apparently it’s stuck in some kind of bog and he said it would take at least fifty men to shift it.’
‘Or a team of large horses,’ said Lucy suddenly, with a disarming expression on her face. The professor looked at her in some surprise. It was the first time she had contributed to the discussion.
‘Well … yes, my dear,’ he said with a patronizing smile. ‘If there were any here, I suppose they would be as good as a tractor. But this isn’t a farm, you know.’He then added: ‘I wish it was, I haven’t had any decent grub for weeks.’He suddenly turned to Helen.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve …?’
‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘we do have some supplies as it happens. It’s all longlife or tinned but it’s probably a change from what Chopper and co. fed you.’ She looked out of the cabin window. ‘It looks as if it’s beginning to clear up. Let’s all have lunch together and then we’ll go and look at the plane.’
She and Julian went back to their own camp to get some of the food they had brought. On the way they discussed how they could conceal Lucy’s power from the professor during the plane removal.
‘I think,’ said Helen, ‘that the truth is something so unlikely that he won’t even think about it. We’ll just say she’s got a way with animals – he’s already seen Michelle, and he’ll find that it’s surprisingly true.’
After a lunch of pasta and Bolognese sauce followed by chocolate-chip cookies they went to look at the plane. The rain had stopped and a watery sun had appeared. As they walked its warmth grew steadily stronger and steam began to rise from the water-logged ground. As it happened, the professor decided to work in his laboratory. He wasn’t particularly interested in the operation as he was certain it wouldn’t succeed.
The plane was steeply angled down a grassy bank with the nose just short of the cliff. Its tail stuck up in the air but the front half of the fuselage was embedded in a marsh with the wings just resting on the surface. The marsh itself was fed by water running down a gulley between the bank and the cliff. Rivulets of water streaming down the cliff fed into the gulley and after the recent heavy rain torrents of water were gushing down it. The marsh itself was higher than the river beyond into which it ultimately drained. A ridge of fallen rock formed a natural boundary to the marsh and water streamed through cracks in this down to the river itself.
‘The good news,’ Julian announced as they stood on the bank looking down, ‘is that I can fly the plane. It’s the same model as our own which isn’t really surprising, I suppose – it’s far and away the best aircraft for this kind of work.’
‘Can we get it out?’ said Richard.
‘That depends on you and Clive and Lucy,’ said Julian. ‘You and Clive because we need rope and I seem to remember you and Clive having had quite a lot to do with rope in the last couple of days. And Lucy, of course …’He turned to her with a smile, ‘because we need her to find that team of horses she was talking about.’
They all laughed at the memory of the professor’s reaction to her suggestion.
‘First the rope,’ he continued, turning back to Richard. ‘Do you have any strong enough for the job?’
‘Certainly,’ replied Richard confidently. ‘Climbing ropes are made of braided polyamide filament – a sort of nylon. They’re incredibly strong – have to be; our lives depend on them. The only problem is that the strongest ones we brought were the ones we used on the cliff.’
Lucy had been looking at the plane and listening.
‘So you want the ropes from the central escarpment. The ones you were throwing from the plane?’
Richard nodded.
‘I missed a couple of times, so there should be two lying around. We left the one Clive used on top of the cliff.’ Lucy spoke to Queenie then turned back to the others with a smile:
‘She says they’ll easily find them with the help of the local monkeys.’ As she was speaking Sophie and Clio scampered off towards the central escarpment. Lucy looked puzzled and spoke to Queenie once more.
‘Go thou not with thy kin?’ she asked the monkey.
‘My duty is here, with the Promised One,’ Queenie replied gravely. ‘I must keep watch on the Bearded One.’
‘I thank thee,’ said Lucy. ‘Thou art right.’
She told the others what had passed, feeling amused and slightly ashamed that a monkey had been able to sort out its priorities better than she had.
21
Search for a Subterranean Slitherkin
While the monkeys were finding the ropes the others stood on the bank looking down at the trapped plane.
‘Now,’ said Julian to Lucy. ‘Let’s talk about your “horses”. What do you suggest?’
‘I think the best things would be those things that look like a cross between a camel and an elephant.’
‘That sounds like the animal Queenie got for us yesterday!’ exclaimed Clare. ‘What’s it called?’
‘Macrauchenia?’ said Julian.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, ‘I’m sure that’s what you called them before. Let me call one and you can see if it’ll be OK.’ She started to walk away towards the plain and then stopped and turned back to Clare.
‘What do you think I should say? I can’t really talk about their long noses, but that’s what’s different about them. The easiest thing would be to send Queenie to get one but she’s back keeping an eye on the professor and I think she’d be reluctant to go. I’d hate to force her as she’s being so loyal and dutiful.’
‘Considering you’re meant to be the queen of creation, or whatever, you’re being really stupid,’ said Clare, smiling. ‘Just because we humans think their hose-like noses are incredibly ugly doesn’t mean they do. They probably – in fact certainly – think a nose like that is the best thing since sliced bread!’
Lucy grinned. ‘You’re right, as usual. I’ll give it a try.’
She left the others and wandered away to get clear of the trees round the camp. There were no animals that she could see, but she knew from her previous experience with condors that her ‘voice’ could carry for an incredible distance and she
projected her thoughts across the great expanse of savannah.
‘Hear me O great grazers of the plains; ye with the noses that put all others to shame. The Promised One is in need of your aid!’
She returned to the others and only moments later a macrauchenia trotted out of the undergrowth. It must have been grazing in the bushes nearby all the time.
The gentle herbivore, a female, stood placidly beside them, occasionally stooping to browse while she waited for further instructions. Her head was ten feet from the ground when she raised her long neck and her nose ended in a short trunk that gradually got smaller towards the tip – rather like a conical hose pipe.
‘She seems perfect for the job,’ said Julian. ‘Can you get another five, do you think? One horse is equal to twelve men and these things look a lot stronger than horses. That should give us some serious muscle power, probably more than twice what the pilot estimated was necessary. I won’t ask you if you think they mind helping us because I already know the answer!’
‘I think all we have to do is wait!’ laughed Lucy. ‘I sent out a bit of a general call.’ Sure enough, within a few moments a herd of about fifty of the creatures appeared. Lucy thanked all of them for coming and, after Julian had selected the individuals of his choice, let the others know, as kindly as possible, that their services would not be required that day. She also sent out another call to prevent any more of the creatures appearing.
Julian spoke to Clive and Richard.
‘We’d better knock up some kind of yoke and harness – like you see on carriages and Wild-West wagons. There must be plenty of tools in the crooks’ camp – they built all those cabins.’
As they went off to collect the tools Lucy turned to the six remaining animals and pointed to the stricken plane.
‘The thunderquill’s hooves are trapped in the watery earth. We require your great strength to make it free. There will be lianas around you for a while, but soon ye shall be free once again.’