“What is it?” A woman’s voice. “Can you smell his stink? Is it him?”
More snuffling at Oz’s feet was followed by a deep, skin-crawling growl. A terrible thought struck Oz then. What if they summoned up that well-equipped van and got some bolt cutters, and simply ripped off the garage doors? He’d be trapped like a grasshopper in a matchbox with nowhere to go or to hide. There’d just be him, the woman, and the auramal bear.
Panic had him in its heart-hammering grasp. Was there another way out? Was there a grimy window somewhere he could climb through? Oz moved too quickly and barked his shin on something hard and metallic, wincing in silent pain.
Then there came a new noise. Another engine. Not the smooth rumble of the van but the higher whine of a car. The face disappeared from the foot of the door, and he heard the woman calling urgently. “Come. Come on! Leave it! Leave it, I say.”
Oz caught his breath. The noise of the car was getting louder. It sounded only feet away. He heard the mechanical clunk of a door opening, a tinny blast of some pop tune, and then the rattle of a chain and the scrape of another half-rotten door dragged across tarmac. A car door slammed shut and cut off the radio noise. Oz moved the jerry can and got on his knees. Through the triangular gap, he saw that the doors to the middle garage opposite were open, and a blue Renault was driving slowly through them. There was no sign of the woman and the youth.
Quickly, Oz stuck his feet out of the gap and pushed himself back out before the owner of the garage opposite could emerge. Covered in dust, the knees of his jeans grimy with oil, he ducked behind the garage and dashed along the space at the rear and out onto the street, heading towards the bus stop, glancing back over his shoulder every few yards in search of pursuit. Mercifully, he saw no one.
A bus pulled in just as Oz arrived at the stop. He managed to pant, “Come on, let’s go!” to an anxiously waiting Ellie and Ruff before he clambered aboard.
“What the hell happened to you?’ Ruff asked, staring at Oz’s dusty shoulders and dirt-smeared jeans as they threw themselves into the back seats.
“Long story,” Oz gasped. He wiped sweat from his eyes and proceeded to give them every detail of what had happened at the garages. Ellie and Ruff stared at him with open mouths and unblinking owl eyes. It was only when he felt pain in his fingers that Oz realised that he’d been clutching the seat back in front of him so hard, it had stopped the blood from circulating. When he finally got to the bit where he managed to squeeze back out of the garage and run off, Ellie was frowning.
“And you’re sure it was a bear?”
“Yes. I mean I didn’t have time to take a picture, but his aura was massive.”
No one spoke. They both knew what Oz meant. They too had seen auras around other people whom Gerber had experimented upon.
“So, definitely not a dog, then?” Ruff said.
“No, definitely not a dog. I got the feeling he was there to sniff us out.”
Neither Ellie nor Ruff said anything. They both knew that too many weird things had happened when it came to the artefacts to simply ignore Oz’s theories. But by their expressions, they obviously weren’t a hundred percent convinced. Ellie was the first to voice their misgivings. “But how did they know where we were?”
Oz racked his brain for a memory that had kept nagging at him and then remembered the JG van he’d seen from Caleb’s window at Penwurt. He took a deep breath. “Look, I know how it sounds, but maybe they’re tracking us,” he said, watching the other two for their reaction.
He saw Ellie’s eyebrows arch upwards, and Ruff, too, looked sceptical.
“But why now all of a sudden, when there’s been nothing for months?” Ruff said.
“I dunno, but I got the feeling that, this time, there was more control than we’ve seen before. The woman had this box on her wrist, and when she pressed the button, the boy just transformed. Maybe they’ve been working on the auramal stuff to get it right.”
Ellie didn’t say anything immediately. For a long moment, they all seemed caught up in their own thoughts.
“Come to think of it, I have seen lots of JG Telecom vans lately,” Ruff said eventually.
“They’re everywhere,” Ellie agreed.
Oz nodded and felt a wave of relief wash over him that they weren’t simply dismissing his theories out of hand.
“How did you get Mr Eldred to go back inside?” he asked.
“I got Soph to ring his house phone,” Ellie explained.
“Good thinking,” Oz said.
“Shame, really, because he seemed quite happy to talk about the shop.”
“Well, at least we got Bendle and Son as another lead,” Ruff mused.
“So, what now?” Ellie asked as she took the pebble out of her pocket and handed it back to Oz.
“We should go back to Penwurt and get Soph to find out as much as she can about this Bendle bloke. And,” he added without a vestige of a smile, “we watch our backs and hide our tracks from now on.”
Oz saw Ruff nod approvingly. It was, at least, a plan of sorts.
Chapter Five
The Room Of Reflection
They arrived back to a seemingly deserted Penwurt. Though they were all quite shaken from their morning ordeal, walking through the doors of the old place instilled an immediate sense of reassuring familiarity in Oz.
He called out to his mother from the hall but got no reply. In the kitchen, colour charts and paint manufacturers’
catalogues littered the table. Oz made them all some ginger and lemon cordial, and they drank without speaking for several seconds.
“Well,” Ellie said, thirst slaked, “that was different.”
“Yeah,” Ruff agreed. “Spying is thirsty work. And I wouldn’t want to do it every day, thank you very much.” He looked about him. “I’ve really missed this place, Oz.”
“Thought you’d finished the basement?” Ellie said, picking up a glossy brochure.
“We have. Mum’s decided that the tenants’ rooms need decorating now, too.” A new thought struck him. “Fancy a tour?” They were all a little wound up. It wouldn’t do any harm to take their minds off things.
Ellie and Ruff nodded, and Oz took them downstairs to the basement.
“Wow. I never knew it was this big.” Ruff’s voice echoed in the cavernous space.
“It’s huge,” Ellie agreed. “Great place for a den.”
“Let’s go back up through the passages,” Ruff said, excitement animating his face.
Oz hesitated for just a moment before saying casually, “Sure.”
Though the pause had only been momentary, Ellie noticed. “We don’t have to,” she said quickly.
“Yeah, why not,” Oz said, brushing aside the tiny skip of his pulse. He had not been inside the passages that ran in the walls of the old house since the night of the attack in this very basement. Structural repairs and his mother’s dire warnings had seen to that. Now the repairs and decorating were complete, and, more importantly, Mrs Chambers wasn’t around.
“Hang on; I’ll get some torches.”
Oz ran up to the kitchen, and when he got back to the basement a few moments later, he found Ellie and Ruff both looking pensive and guessed that they’d been talking.
“What?” he asked.
Ruff kicked at some imaginary dust. “Oz, maybe it isn’t such a great idea. I mean, last time…”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. They all knew that the last time they’d been in those passages they’d almost been killed.
“Look, I’m fine. I want to do this. Really.”
Ruff looked at Ellie, who gave a little shrug, as Oz knew she would. Ellie was not one to shirk a challenge. Moments later, Oz was leading them along the reverse of the route he’d taken that fateful night of the fire. They climbed up iron rungs instead of down and moved crablike along narrow walkways flanked by cobweb-encrusted walls. Eventually, they found themselves on the first floor of the orphanage block at the exact point where Rollin
s—Oz’s attacker—had slammed the door on Ellie, Ruff, and Lucy Bishop, locking them in one of the old classrooms while he abducted Oz.
“It’s a bit weird standing here, isn’t it?” Ruff said in a slightly shaky whisper.
“Forgotten how chilly it was,” Ellie said, but Oz suspected the chill wasn’t entirely from the temperature.
“We can go straight back to the library if you like,” he said.
“No.” Ellie sounded firm. “We only ever got this far. I’d like to see what’s up at the other end.”
Oz shone his torch along the dingy passage, to where it petered out at an apparently solid wall.
“Let’s have a look,” he said, and led the way.
“What time’s food?” Ruff muttered. “I’m famished—”
“You and your stomach, honestly,” Ellie cut him off.
At the end of the passage, instead of the blank wall they’d expected, a hidden step at right angles took them up into another, even narrower gap and yet more rungs. The walls pressed in on them claustrophobically now. Flecks of dirt fell onto Oz’s head, and he had to wipe ancient cobwebs from his eyelashes. He sensed the space before he saw it; a cold draft whistled in from the eaves above. Seconds later, he stepped out onto a narrow platform.
“Are we in the roof somewhere?” Ellie asked as she huddled next to him.
“Feels like it,” Oz said. On one side of the platform was rough stone, but the other was a lath-and-plaster dividing wall, which sounded hollow when Oz rapped it with his knuckles.
“Can’t see a door,” Ruff said.
“Hang on, what’s this?” Halfway down the plaster wall, they could make out a dark square mostly obscured by cobwebs. Oz brushed them away to reveal a wooden hatch. He knelt to inspect it and saw that a simple rotating latch secured it.
Outside, the wind moaned around the rafters. For a moment, Oz had the strangest feeling of displacement. On that dark platform, it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night, summer or winter, this century or last. It felt somehow separate from the world as he knew it. Judging by their silence, Oz guessed the others were feeling it, too. Ellie was the one who finally said, “Maybe there’s another passage through there, or another room?”
“Really? Who cares? Let’s go back,” Ruff said in a deadpan voice.
Ellie stared at him. “You want to go back?” There was a hanging silence before Ruff said through gritted teeth, “’Course I don’t want to go back. Open the buzzard hatch. I didn’t come all this way on an empty stomach just to talk about it.”
Grinning, Oz rotated the latch and pulled. The door creaked outwards to reveal a tiny space lit only by watery greenish light.
“Well?” Ruff snapped, jostling Ellie for a glimpse under Oz’s elbow.
“Looks like a cubbyhole,” Oz said. He got to his hands and knees and lowered himself backwards into a small, tight room, no larger than a walk-in cupboard. What little light there was dribbled in through a narrow slit-like window, coated with mossy grime, high in one corner. Ellie and Ruff followed him in. All three of them had to stoop to avoid banging their heads.
“Blimey, was everyone severely vertically challenged in the seventeenth century?” Ruff asked.
“I don’t think you were meant to walk about in here,” Oz said, shining his torch around. The walls were panelled, but not with the dark oak of the library. Like the ceiling in the orphanage dorm, these panels were wooden but elaborately decorated, separated by oak beams such that each was a framed canvas. Oz peered in wonder at the depictions of strange birds and plants and weird designs.
“What do you think this was?” Ellie asked in an awed whisper.
“Priest’s hole,” Ruff said. “A place for the persecuted to hide. In Witchfinder Inquisitor 3, there’s this old house and…”
Ellie shut him up with a piercing glance.
“I’m only saying,” Ruff mumbled.
“You’re probably right,” Oz said. “But I also think it was a bit more than that. Somewhere people came to think, perhaps.”
“Why do you say that?” Ruff asked.
“Because it says so there.” Oz pointed to a panel next to the window. On it was an inscription burned into the wood. Ruff peered at it.
“‘The room of reflection,’” he read. “Buzzardo-weird.”
Oz was only half-listening. One panel had drawn his attention in particular. He stooped to stare at it in the stark light of his torch. In amongst the birds and the crescent moons and faces with elaborate headdresses were other shapes. He recognised a few as alchemical symbols, which he remembered from the library panels. How could he possibly forget the three-pronged fork shape for cinder and the crossed Z of tin, symbols that had helped them solve the cipher that led to opening the passage door? But some of the others were new to him. There was a bird with a long, upright tail, a wheeled cart belching smoke from a stack, and what looked like a hot-air balloon. They were incongruous and yet of the same style and colour as all the other designs.
“Must have been a great place to hide,” Ellie said as she used her sleeve to rub years of dirt off the window. “Ooh, you can see the whole street from here. Actually see who was coming. Bit like a spyhole.”
“But I’ve never seen this window from outside. It must be hidden,” Oz said, joining her. “I wonder if this was what Lucy Bishop was looking for,” he added.
“What do you mean?”
Lucy Bishop had been a lodger at Penwurt. As a member of Obex, she was meant to have been protecting Oz from the Puffers, but what she’d actually been doing was searching for a cure for her brother.
“She said something about places in the house where the artefacts were vulnerable. Where they could be damaged,”
Oz mused.
“Rollins,” said Ruff suddenly.
Oz and Ellie turned to look at him.
“When he was pretending to be Tim Perkins, he was always up ladders measuring stuff, remember? Maybe he was looking for hidden rooms like this, too.”
Ruff ’s imagination frequently took off on long-haul flights of its own, but this time Oz found himself nodding in eager agreement. Ruff was right. It made perfect sense. Rollins had pretended to be a student lodger who had only been too keen to fix basement fuses and leaky guttering, but all the while, he’d been plotting and snooping.
“So, now that we’ve found it, can we go back and have something to eat? People can faint from lack of food, you know,” Ruff added plaintively.
“You sound just like Jenks’ stupid recorder-pen on a loop. I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” Ellie mocked.
Oz knew there was no point protesting. A hungry Ruff would quickly become a sullen Ruff if they didn’t get him some food.
“Okay, okay. Let’s go and find my mum. She’s probably got something on the go for supper.”
They retraced their steps through the passages and tracked Mrs Chambers down in the old servants’ wing. In fact, it was the radio that gave her away, or rather her attempt at accompanying a chart hit’s chorus of “Shake it, shake it, shake it.”
“Hi, Mum,” Oz said, hailing her from the door of one of the bedrooms. But he didn’t get any farther than the threshold, where he came to an abrupt halt, causing Ellie and Ruff to concertina into him from behind. The once pale yellow bedroom was now a riot of vivid colours. Mrs Chambers was obviously trying to match hues, and gaudy stripes of purple, magenta, green, and turquoise covered the wall.
“Wow,” Ruff said. “I didn’t know your mum was an artist, Oz.”
A frazzled-looking Mrs Chambers bit her lip and turned to Ruff. “So, what do you think? The purple and turquoise or the magenta and pea green?”
“Ummm,” Ruff hedged.
“They’re very…bright, aren’t they,” Ellie said in a valiant attempt at finding something complimentary to say.
“Hope you’re not going to expect anyone to sleep in here, Mum,” Oz said. “If they do, they’ll have to wear sunglasses.”
Mrs Chambers frown
ed at him. “Rowena says that these are all full of spiritual tonality. Good for the soul.”
“Yeah, if your soul’s an insomniac,” Oz said.
Mrs Chambers sighed. “It’s so hard to find the right combination.”
“How about white walls and a white ceiling? That’ll work.”
“Don’t be so boring,” Mrs Chambers said, and turned to look at Ruff. “I expect you’re hungry, Rufus?”
“I’d eat something,” Ruff said.
“I’ve been tied up here all day, so I was going to order in some pizza for later, but there’s some cold ham in the fridge if you want a few sandwiches for now.”
“Thanks, Mum,” Oz said, and turned away from the garish bedroom to rest his retinas.
“I thought your mum was more a sort of pastel person,” Ellie said as they took the stairs to the second floor and the landing that crossed over into Oz’s half of the house.
“She is,” Oz said. “That stuff on the walls is all Rowena Hilditch.”
They made sandwiches and took them, together with a big bowl of crisps, back up to Oz’s bedroom, where Oz called up Soph and asked her to find out what she could about Bendle and Son. She tilted her head and glowed for a few seconds before speaking,
“Bendle and Son. Auctioneers and valuers of fine art. They have offices in Brighton and London, but there is one residential address in Bourneshire. Chivyon House, Bog Sturgess.”
“That’s just out of town, isn’t it?” Oz asked.
“Number 56 bus,” Ellie said.
Both Oz and Ruff stared at her. “Have you got the bus timetable tattooed on the inside of your skull or something?” Ruff said.
“Macy’s friend Jemima lives out near there,” she explained with a haughty glance at Ruff before turning to Soph once more. “What else can you tell us, Soph?”
“I have downloaded several cuttings from local and national newspapers for you to consider. They are already on your laptop, Oz.”
Instantly, Oz’s laptop fired up.
The Beast of Seabourne Page 8