The Beast of Seabourne

by Rhys A. Jones

  The sharp April air was a welcome change from the fug of the minibus as Oz, Ellie, and Ruff disembarked. The trio hurried across the car park to the services, which, as always, teemed with travellers. They each ordered a cheeseburger meal combo and found a table in the corner so they could talk without being overheard.

  Ellie slurped deeply from a vanilla milkshake, looked around to make sure no one sat close, and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “But I don’t get how Soph can possibly—” She broke off as a shadow loomed over them. Miss Arkwright stood at their table, holding a full tray, eyes narrowed in good-natured suspicion.

  “Why are you three sitting here on your own?”

  Oz swivelled in his seat and saw that everyone else had grabbed tables right in the middle of the seating area.

  “This was the only empty table, miss,” Ruff said quickly. This was not strictly true, since at least two thirds of the seats were unoccupied, although many tables were littered with trays of half-eaten food and dirty crockery.

  “Well, there’s lots of room over near us now. Come on, don’t be so antisocial.” Her voice aimed for jolly but had an undertone of command.

  Oz thought about protesting, but catching the shrug of reluctant acceptance Ellie gave him, he picked up his tray and followed Miss Arkwright over to where the rest of his year were sitting. Obviously, finding private time for discussion was not going to be easy on this trip.

  “All I know,” Oz said out of the corner of his mouth so that only Ellie could hear as they threaded their way through the tables, “is that I trust Soph, and so should you.”

  Miss Arkwright eased herself into one of the red plastic chairs opposite Mr Skelton. On the table in front of her were a large vegeburger, fries, and a super-sized milkshake.

  “Blimey,” Ruff said in a low voice as he put his tray down on a nearby table, his eyes still glued on the mound of food on Arkwright’s tray. “Don’t know where she puts it all.”

  Oz looked down at Ruff’s tray, which was just as full, and said, “Probably the same place you do.”

  By seven forty-three, they were all back on the bus. The sun had now set, and the temperature was already dropping. The weather forecast had promised a late blast of winter, with the threat of showers and sleet before dawn. Happily, the efficient bus heater soon had Oz out of his anorak and waiting nervously for the next bit of the plan to kick in. As prearranged, once they got back on the motorway, he reached into his pocket for the pebble and pressed the maker’s mark.

  “We’ve just left the service station,” he thought as a familiar tickling sensation kicked in somewhere inside his head.

  “Thank you, Oz. I have already plotted our position,” Soph answered voicelessly.

  Oz hesitated before thinking, “Ellie’s worried.”

  “I know. But she need not be.”

  “Do you want me to do anything?”

  “That will not be necessary.”

  “Don’t want me to create a distraction or anything?”

  “No one on the bus will be aware of any change. However, I can designate the small window at your elbow as a projection-free portal if you like.”

  “Cool,” Oz said without the foggiest idea of what she was talking about.

  They made good progress on the road, passing junction after junction without delay, and people slowly drifted back to their iPods and portable PlayStations. Oz wished he’d brought the SPEXITs, but the truth was, he was too nervous to settle down to do anything much. From the maps Skelton had insisted on showing them all, Oz knew that to get to Cornwall, they had to turn south on the M5, and soon they were seeing signs announcing its approach. The tickle in his head went up a notch as, through the front window of the bus, he watched as they swung off the M4 and joined the M5 South towards Cornwall.

  “How much farther is it, sir?” asked a boy halfway down the bus.

  “A good two-and-a-bit hours,” Skelton said without turning around.

  Oz sat back, feeling confused. Their plan had many flaws, and when Ruff had almost missed the trip, it looked like it might never get off the ground. But Ruff had made it, and with the lab coat misinformation about McClelland visiting Italy hopefully putting Gerber and Heeps off the scent, the coast was clear for the next phase. Admittedly, it was the hardest part of the whole plan, and that’s why they’d called on Soph to help. Hearing Skelton merrily announce that they were a couple of hours from their Cornish destination, Oz, with a plummeting heart, suddenly knew they’d asked too much of her. After all, she was only an avatar. He saw Ellie throw him a crestfallen glance, and read defeat written all over it.

  She was right; Soph could not perform miracles.

  Oz pushed his head back into the headrest and sighed. Next to him, Ruff was looking at him and frowning, too. Obviously, he, like Ellie, had realised things were not going the way they’d hoped. Oz swallowed the lump of bitter disappointment that gathered in his throat. Well, at least they’d tried. He had no idea what they’d do now. Wait for Caleb to come back from Bulgaria and then ask for his help, he supposed. What else was there?

  But Ruff kept staring and frowning in an annoying way. Okay, so their plan wasn’t going to happen. There was nothing he could do about it now, and there was no point making a big thing of it. Oz half-turned to tell Ruff exactly this when he noticed his friend’s pointing finger.

  “What?’ Oz said, not trying to hide his irritation, but when he looked down at Ruff’s hand, he realised it wasn’t his shoulder Ruff was making eyes at. It was the triangular rear window beside Oz’s seat. Ruff’s eyes flicked up to Oz’s and then back over Oz’s shoulder, his eyebrows two arches of puzzlement. Oz turned to look, cupping his hand against the glass to shut out the light of the bus to peer out.

  What he saw was a large expanse of blackness broken only by a red beacon flashing on and off in the middle of the emptiness. A few lights twinkled some distance away, and large vertical posts kept zinging past at speed. Oz peered harder.

  They weren’t posts; they were thick metal cables.

  Then it hit him. The blackness was water. The twinkling lights were houses and streetlights on a shoreline, and the flashing beacon was for navigating ships. And the cables… cables held things up…things like bridges. An electric charge of excitement zipped through him, and he sat bolt upright. He snapped his head up to look out of the front window again and saw Ruff do the same, as Ellie watched them with a puzzled frown creasing her forehead.

  Ahead, they were travelling smoothly along a busy M5 motorway. But out the back window, it was obvious they were crossing a large body of water on a high six-lane bridge. Soph was doing something that made it appear they were heading south on the M5 towards Cornwall. In reality, and only visible through the window Soph had designated “projection-free,” they were actually on the Severn Bridge, speeding west.

  Oz shot Ellie a glance, and something in his face made her frown slip and her eyes widen. He kept his hands low in his lap but put up two thumbs so Ellie could see. Ruff, meanwhile, was blinking and looking highly confused. Oz nodded at him and said quietly, “Soph.”

  “Buzzard,” Ruff said, sounding awestruck.

  Oz nodded. She was sticking to the plan totally. He had no idea how she was letting Skelton see the road and the cars ahead to allow him to drive safely whilst at the same time projecting signs and landmarks in a 360-degree holographic bubble so he and everyone else believed that they were on the way to Cornwall, when in reality, she was taking them west to the hills of Wales.

  Ruff was right. Soph was buzzard. Buzzard amazing, buzzard astonishing, buzzard miraculous.

  They travelled on for another hour and a half. If Oz had been able to stand on the roadside and watch the bus pass, he might have found himself wondering if there was something a tad odd about it, as if it were travelling along in a faintly shimmering bubble of silvery light. But it wasn’t enough to cause anyone anything other than a fleeting thought in the miserable drizzle that spattered traffic on the M4 m
otorway that evening.

  Inside the bus, Oz, like everyone else, saw nothing and felt nothing except the warm and comfortable awareness of continuing south. They appeared to zoom past Junction 29 and turn off the M5 at Junction 31 for Okehampton, while out of his side rear window, as the rain continued to fall, Oz glimpsed other names and different roads and numbers, as the junction numbers went up and up. He saw the “A465 to Merthyr” and a little later the “A4067 to Brecon.” At this point, after an hour and half of travelling at a steady seventy miles an hour since the services, they slowed and turned off.

  Ahead, the signs read, “To Bodmin Moor,” but they had gone no more than half a mile when a dense fog came down, reducing visibility to something less than thirty yards. Cursing mildly, Skelton slowed the bus to a crawl. Through the windshield, the headlights showed up a grey world full of moisture droplets swirling in the headlights, which Skelton dipped to minimise the backscatter. Oz, who was taking much more interest than anyone else in the fog—because on glancing out of his rear window, he could see it was completely absent—saw Skelton turn to Miss Arkwright.

  “Thank goodness for the satnav, that’s all I can say.”

  Oz smiled to himself. He had no idea how Soph was doing all this, but since the satnav was in effect a small GPS computer, it was probably doing exactly what she wanted it to do.

  At five to ten, they turned sharply right and climbed steeply, the fog still apparently dense in front of them. Out of the rear window, however, Oz saw they were deep in the countryside now. The last few houses of a hamlet drifted by, and suddenly, all that was visible were twinkling lights in the far distance. Most people on the bus remained oblivious to anything, but at the front, the fog was making Miss Arkwright increasingly nervous. More than once Oz, saw her tap Skelton on the shoulder and ask him something, to which he responded with a shake of the head.

  Eventually, his patience worn thin, Skelton finally replied in a loud, irritated hiss, “No, we are not lost. Look, according to the satnav, we are just a few miles from the hostel. If it wasn’t for this blasted fog, we’d be able to see it plainly by now.”

  Ten minutes later, they turned off again, and judging by the crunching noise the tyres made and the springy rocking of the suspension, they were on a rutted lane. Skelton drove on for half a mile before the lights in the vehicle all went out and the engine juddered, backfired twice with the sound of a shotgun blast, sputtered, and died.

  “Damn,” Skelton said. He sat at the front, trying the ignition half a dozen times, but then threw up his hands in despair as the engine refused to respond.

  “Great,” he muttered. “Absolutely spiffing.” Except that “spiffing” emerged in a way that made it sound like something you might find festering at the back of a broken fridge.

  Oz caught Ruffs eye and saw him mouth, “Radioflash?” with eyebrows raised.

  Oz nodded. His knowledge of electronics was limited, but radioflashes or electromagnetic pulses were a staple of numerous video games. He knew they fried electronics, and it was no coincidence one had happened now. It had all the hallmarks of being Soph-generated.

  “Sir?” said Harriet Platt, a petulant girl from 2A. “Sir, I haven’t got a signal on my phone, sir.”

  Oz saw Skelton’s head drop. It looked like he might be silently counting.

  “Nor me, sir,” said another worried voice.

  Skelton spun around in his seat and glared at the pupils. “We’re in the middle of a Cornish moor; what do you expect?”

  Miss Arkwright, however, was also pressing the buttons on her phone and frowning.

  “Please, sir,” said Dilpak. “The fog’s gone, sir?”

  “What?” Skelton said, dipping his head to peer out of one of the side windows. “Impossible. It’s been as thick as porridge out there for the last half-hour…”

  Yet when everyone turned to look out of their nearest window, there was indeed no fog, just empty blackness.

  “Where exactly are we?” Miss Arkwright asked.

  Skelton grabbed the satnav from its cradle and thrust it towards her. “Here, see for yourself. It clearly says…” His words petered out into a croak.

  “Ah,” Miss Arkwright said. “It’ll look lovely on my front door as a doorknob, because to me it looks just as dead as one.”

  “Thank you, Madeline,” Skelton muttered, with heavy emphasis on her Christian name.

  “So, what now, Leonard?” said Miss Arkwright, likewise.

  Skelton stood, grabbed his coat, and threaded his arms through the sleeves, still stooping awkwardly under the low roof. “Everyone just stay here,” he said.

  There was a dead silence. Several faces, all wearing the same anxious expressions, turned towards Miss Arkwright for some sort of explanation. All, that is, except for those of Ruff, Ellie, and Oz, which wore a glowing look of knowing anticipation.

  “I don’t like this,” Bernice Halpin said. “I really don’t like this.”

  “Yeah. It’s just like Will-o’-the-Wisp 2 when a school trip gets lost in the Oregon badlands and they all have to walk through the swamp and…”

  “That will be quite enough of that, Rufus,” Miss Arkwright warned, but she added an indulgent smile to soften the impact. “Yes, miss,” Ruff said meekly. But Oz couldn’t help noticing that several other people suddenly looked much paler than they had a few minutes before, and anxious little whispers were drifting up from several rows of seats, much to Ruff’s amusement. Outside the bus, they could see Skelton, in the stark light of the headlamps, reaching for the catch that released the bonnet. Thick, feathery flakes of snow began to fall, and Skelton’s breath plumed out of his mouth before being ripped away by a gusting wind. There was a mechanical thump as the bonnet sprang open, and Mr Skelton disappeared under it. A moment later he popped back up, and they heard him shout through the windscreen.

  “Madeline, try the ignition again, would you?”

  Miss Arkwright moved forward to the driver’s seat, sat in it, and tried the ignition. The starter motor let out an unhealthy nails-on-a-blackboard screech. Miss Arkwright repeated this exercise three times and was on the point of trying a fourth when Mr Skelton’s head appeared above the bonnet again, and he started making sawing gestures with his hand across his throat. A moment later, he was back inside the bus, wet blobs of snow melting instantly to water on his coat.

  “Listen up, everyone,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. “We’ve run into a spot of bother with the bus. Looks like an electrical fault. In addition, we seem to be in some sort of GPS and mobile-phone dead zone.”

  There followed a burst of nervous whispering that ended abruptly as Skelton held up his hands for quiet.

  “I suspect that the satnav has been on the blink for the last few miles. It certainly does not look like the A38 out there. The truth of it is, we’re lost, and the temperature’s dropping like a stone. Otherwise, everything is just peachy.” He grinned at them all.

  “So, is the AA coming, sir?” asked Bernice from her seat next to Ellie.

  “Which part of ‘mobile-phone dead zone’ did you not understand, Bernice?” Skelton said with an exasperated grin. “Fact is, we’re here for the night, and we are going to be warmest and snuggest inside our sleeping bags in our tents.” “Out there?” Bernice Halpin shrieked, pointing through the windshield.

  Skelton looked like he wanted to say something snide, but instead he nodded and smiled a very calm and very forced little smile. “Yes. There is an ideal area of moorland just to our right, so I suggest we set up camp in double quick time, get a fire going for a hot beverage, and get to bed. I guarantee that we’ll probably find ourselves within throwing distance of the hostel come the dawn. Just look upon it as a challenge.”

  Another round of shocked glances was exchanged, followed by another burst of whispering. However, this time the voices sounded more excited than concerned. Skelton’s positive, cheery attitude seemed to have buoyed the party.

  “We’ll do two tents at a time, bo
ys first, so that they can help the girls when it’s their turn. So, let’s go. We’ll start with Marcus Skyrme and Dilpak Malhotra, and Adams and Chambers.” Skelton got out and began unwrapping the tarpaulin and pulling down the tents and rucksacks. As Oz tried to negotiate the bag-strewn aisle to get out, he saw the girl in front of Ellie turn around to speak to her.

  “Don’t remember reading about this in the glossy brochure,” she said. “Bit of an adventure, though, don’t you think?” Ellie replied, trying to sound positive.

  “Lost on a moor an adventure?” said the girl scathingly. “I don’t think so.” She turned back around. But Oz caught Ellie’s glance, and her knowing little smile. Everyone was grumbling because things had gone pear-shaped. Everyone except Oz, Ellie and Ruff, that is. For as far as they were concerned, even though they were in the middle of nowhere in a broken-down bus in the dead of the night, everything was going like clockwork.

  Chapter 18

  Bump In The Night

  The next hour was a bizarre one indeed. It was freezing outside, more like February than April. Armed with headband torches, Oz and Ruff quickly got their tent up. In fact, getting all the tents up didn’t take very long, since they were of the pop-up variety and essentially put themselves up once released from their nylon bags. But the weather didn’t help.

  A bitter wind drove the sleet in big, sloppy sheets. Dilpak, apparently dazed by the cold, spent most of the time with his hands to his face, shivering and blowing hot air over his fingers. Ruff, feeling sorry for his friend but unable to resist, shouted, “Can’t hear anything, mate. Did you leave your harmonica on the bus?”

  Oz laughed, but Dilpak just stared at them miserably. He even managed to raise his tent upside down, and watched in helpless horror as the wind caught it. For a moment, it looked like it might fly off into some dark valley on the mountain, until Marcus Skyrme managed to grab hold of a flailing guy rope. Soon, despite numb fingers, the boys all had their tents anchored, and Skelton, having had the foresight to bring wood, had a small fire going in the centre of the clearing.