by Ted Bell
2
THE WHIRL-O-DROME
· Greybeard Island, 1940 ·
The Whirl-O-Drome spun ever faster, round and round in a dizzying blur. So fast that Nick, fighting the dizziness, was sure the whole ride would just fly apart any second now, disintegrate, and fling the little planes into the air, crashing into the sea or smashing against the rocks or the rooftops of pubs across the road.
But that’s not what happened.
There was suddenly a loud beeping noise inside his cockpit, and then little No. 7 began shaking hard enough to rattle his bones. He noticed his propeller was turning much faster, too, and he heard loud popping noises from the nose and then the explosive sound of a powerful gasoline engine roaring to life. Flames suddenly shot out of the exhaust manifolds, and the whole aircraft was vibrating heavily now as the great engine rumbled.
There was a screeching sound of metal on his left side, just where the airplane was bolted to a steel plate at the end of the pole. It felt as if his plane was trying to shake itself loose, separate itself from the pole!
And that is just what happened.
There was a slight popping noise and his aircraft soared, suddenly free of the pole, flung into the air, skimming out over the dark waves and gaining speed! The little seaside town spun away to a tiny point of light behind him.
“Captain, you’re too low! You might catch a wave with your wingtips! Climb! Climb!” he heard Orion shouting in his headphones. Nick craned his head around to look down at Pennywhistle Park and saw Orion behind his window, staring up at him through a pair of binoculars.
Nick automatically pulled back on the joystick, and sure enough his nose came up and the little Spitfire began climbing. He saw his altimeter spinning, the needle now at one hundred feet and climbing rapidly.
“Too steep, Captain, too steep! You’re going to stall out! Get your nose down until you’re aimed nice and level at the horizon . . . easy, lad, steady and gentle, now . . .”
Nick eased the stick forward and the plane leveled off.
“Attaboy, now you’re flying right. Where do you want to go?”
“Go?” It hadn’t occurred to Nick that he could actually go anywhere.
“Sure. Just use your rudder pedals to turn left or right and your stick to climb or descend. All there is to it, really.”
“I—I’d like to see our lighthouse on—on Greybeard Island. The place where I live. Is the island too far away?”
“Not in that plane. See the compass right in the middle of your control panel? Come left twenty degrees. Steer due north. You should see the Greybeard Light in about, oh, six minutes or so.”
And so Nick flew on, the fear of flying gradually replaced by confidence in his new skill and tremendous excitement at this wondrous adventure.
Nick experimented with the rudder pedals, and it didn’t take long to determine how to bring the plane around to a heading of due north. Using the joystick, he tried to keep the nose just above the horizon line.
“How’s my altitude?” Nick asked, glancing down at the sea far below.
“You’re flying level at one thousand feet. That’s fine. I’m about to lose visual contact with you, but you can still contact me on the radio. How is it up there, Nick?”
“It’s amazing. I think I’m getting the hang of it, Captain. What do I do, if I want to, say, fly upside down? Or do a barrel roll? Or an outside loop?”
“Nick, listen, I think you just want to fly straight and level for right now, all right? Until you get the hang of it. Stay on your current heading of 060 degrees. You should see Greybeard Island and the lighthouse coming up any minute now.”
“I see it flashing! It’s dead ahead.”
“Don’t see any bogies or bandits up there, do you, Cap’n?”
“Bogies or bandits?”
“The enemy. Luftwaffe fighters or bombers. German Messerschmitt 109s or Junkers Ju-290s, most likely.”
“Nope, no one up here but me, Cap’n, I’m just over the lighthouse now. I’m going to circle it a few times, see if I can wake my father and get him to come to the window to see me!”
Using his ailerons and rudder, Nick rolled his little Spitfire on its side and did three or four high-speed loops around the upper portion of the Greybeard Light, the big supermarine engine roaring and spitting fire. But everyone must have been sound asleep inside because no one ever came to the windows to see what the great noise was.
“That was fun!” Nick said, pulling out of his loop and climbing at a steep angle. “There seems to be a heavy layer of cloud about a thousand feet above me. All right if I climb up through it?”
“Sure! Just keep your eyes open for bogies once you break through the cloud tops. More German squadrons up there every night lately.”
Nick hauled back on the stick, gently now, for he knew that’s the way it was done. A few moments later he was inside the cloud bank, a thick fog surrounding him, and he couldn’t see a thing. Then he broke through the top and entered another world.
A huge yellow moon hung off to his right, bathing the cottony top of the cloud layer in shades of soft buttery gold. And a dusting of twinkling silver stars was sprinkled across the blue-black bowl of the heavens.
“What’s that?” he suddenly exclaimed.
He’d glimpsed another plane, far ahead, waggling its wings, the signal for sighting an enemy aircraft. A German fighter? A bogie?
He swung round to a southerly course and got right on the bandit’s tail, increasing his speed and closing fast. It wasn’t a Messerschmitt, Nick saw, as he closed within a hundred yards of the plane. No, no, it was an old plane, a very, very old plane. A biplane, made of paper and wood.
A Sopwith Camel, in fact, just like the one his father had flown in the Great War, with twin Vickers .303 machine guns mounted on the cowl and firing forward through the propeller disk. The Camel was lord of the skies during the Great War way back in 1916.
What on earth?
“Welcome to the boundless skies, Nick,” he heard a new voice say in his headphones. This voice, too, was very familiar.
Could it be?
He banked hard left, increased his airspeed, and easily pulled abreast of the ancient warplane.
The pilot looked over at him and smiled. He was a young man, very handsome and dashing with his long white silk scarf streaming behind him in the breeze, and he reminded Nick of someone, too. A younger version of the man Nick worshipped and loved more than anyone on this earth.
“Follow me, if you can!” the voice said.
“But, where are we going?”
“To the moon and back, of course!”
Nick nosed over into a steep dive, headed right for the big golden moon hanging just above the far horizon of the world.
“I’m right behind you, Father!” Nick cried.
That fat yellow moon was so big it looked as if it might just swallow the two little airplanes right up.
And that’s just what it did.
And then someone was shaking him violently, saying “Wake up! Wake up!”
3
SECRETS OF THE BLACK FOREST
· Greybeard Island, May 1940 ·
Wake up, Nicky! Wake up!” his sister, Kate, was saying, jumping up and down on his bed, excitement shining in her cornflower-blue eyes, her bright red curls bouncing about her face as if they were a bunch of springs attached to her head. She had her raggedy doll in one hand, swinging her by the hair, what little the doll had left after all these years.
Jip, Nick’s big black dog, had leaped onto his bed and was lathering his master’s face with sloppy kisses.
Nick, knowing sleep was now well nigh impossible, cracked one eye and used it to inspect his little sister. His room, at the very top of the lighthouse, was filled with strong sunlight. Perhaps he had overslept a bit.
“Have the Germans invaded us?” he asked sleepily.
“Not yet. But Father says it’s only a matter of weeks. Or even days.”
Nick McI
ver groaned, rolled over onto his tummy, and buried his face in his pillow. He wanted more than anything to fall back down into deep slumber, to return to his magical dream of racing his father’s old Sopwith Camel to the moon. But Kate was having none of it.
“Go away, Katie. And stop bouncing, for all love,” he said, his sleepy words muffled by goose down. “And you, Jipper, stop barking!”
“No! Never! Not until you get up. We have to go. And I won’t stop bouncing on your bed until we do!”
“Go? Go where?”
“Out to Storm Island, silly. It’s Saturday! We’re sailing out there on Petrel, remember. For a picnic. And I get to steer the whole way. You promised, double-secret-swear promise, crosses don’t count.”
Nick flopped over onto his back and stared at his seven-year-old sister. She had him dead to rights. He’d promised, all right.
“Kate. You know all about promises, right?”
“Sure. You keep ’em.”
“Well—right. Of course you keep them. But sometimes things happen and you have to, well, delay your promises. It’s called postponing. You know what postponing means, don’t you?”
“Sure. Lying.”
“Kate. It’s not really lying. It’s just something you’ll learn more about as you get older like me.”
“Thirteen is hardly old, Nicky. I’ll be twelve myself in less than five years. Unless my birthday gets postponed, of course.”
“Well, still.”
“Nicky, no. You promised and we’re going. I’ve already packed a picnic basket and that’s it. Final, final, final.”
She collapsed at the foot of Nick’s bed and stared at him with blazing blue eyes, daring him to break the solemn promise he’d made two days ago. But at least she’d stopped jumping up and down.
“What if I were to tell you I’d had a dream last night. And that what I dreamed was so amazing, so real, that I decided to try and find a way to make it come true. And you, of course, will have to help, because nobody wants dreams to come true more than Miss Katherine McIver, right?”
“Correct. But this is your dream, remember? It’s my dreams I’m excited about. I don’t care a fig for your silly dreams.”
“Well, when you hear about mine, you will. In fact, it will become your dream, too. And you’ll be excited about it, I promise.”
“I’m listening. What is it?”
“It’s a secret.”
“Is this a trick? You know I love secrets more than anything in the whole wide world.”
“I know you do. And you’re going to love this one best of all. Aside from that golden orb hidden in the gun vault at Gunner’s inn, it’s possibly the world’s best secret of all time.”
“Okay. But to get out of our picnic today, you have to promise to do two things. One: Promise I don’t have to carry anything heavy to the picnic, like when I helped you clean out your boat shed. Two: You have to tell me something about the secret that doesn’t give it away but makes me feel better about not sailing out to Storm Island. Today. Like you promised.”
“You don’t have to carry anything heavier than a picnic basket.”
“That’s one.”
“And the secret is about—well, the secret is about flying.”
“Flying.”
“Yep.”
“Like a bird.”
“More or less.”
“Like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell and Wendy and Michael?”
“Sort of.”
“Do I get to fly? Or just you?”
“We both fly.”
“I already love this secret.”
“I thought you might.”
“But we still get to sail to Storm Island for a picnic.”
“Next Saturday, rain or shine.”
“Promise delay granted. Where are we going?”
“Those spooky woods, the ones we called the Black Forest when we were kids. Up by Lord Hawke’s airstrip.”
“You mean the Green Forest, don’t you?”
“No, I mean the Black Forest.”
“But it isn’t black, Nicky. It’s green! Just like every other forest on this island.”
“Well. I know. But Black Forest sounds better. So just go along with me on this, all right? Besides, it’s black enough when you go deep inside it, as I plan to do.”
“I got lost in that place for a whole day the summer I was four! It was very, very scary. Why, if Jipper hadn’t found me, I would have just died of starvation or something worse.”
“Exactly. The Black Forest is not a place for the faint of heart.”
“Nicky, it is a very spooky wood. I still have nightmares about being lost in there sometimes. Do we have to go through there?”
“I’m afraid so. What I’m looking for is, I believe, somewhere inside that dark wood. But, look, I’ll be with you this time. And Jip, of course. Nothing spooks that dog.”
“You won’t leave me somewhere and run off, will you?”
“Of course not.”
Kate looked her brother hard in the eye, measuring his sincerity.
“Flying, huh?” she said, sliding toward the end of his bed.
“Flying.”
“And I get to fly, too?”
“Let me put it this way. If I get to fly, you will definitely get to fly, too.”
Her sparkling blue eyes lit up and her wide smile returned. “Be downstairs in five minutes, Nick McIver, or I’m leaving without you!” she cried. Leaping off his completely disheveled bed, she ran from his room at the top of the lighthouse, banging Nick’s door closed behind her and dancing down the curving staircase the led to the kitchen.
There was only one thing better than picnics, and that was secrets. And, as she’d learned earlier that summer, when they’d discovered the golden orb inside an old sea chest, there was no shortage of secrets on this little island.
And so they set out that morning on their new adventure. It would not be a long hike. Greybeard Island was the tiniest of the Channel Islands. Jersey and Guernsey, those were the big ones. Ministries and museums and fancy mansions with gardens and stables fit for a king. And although Nick’s home islands were decidedly British, they all lay much closer to the coast of France than that of England.
Greybeard, though small, was a pretty enough place, Nick supposed, as he and his sister strolled along the leafy lane that led from the lighthouse to the coast road going to the south end of the island. The morning sunlight through the trees was beautiful, almost magical. But then he’d never really lived anywhere else.
The island roads were unpaved, and there were no motorcars on Greybeard at all, not one, and more cows than humans. Still, as Nick had learned over the course of one amazing summer, there was plenty of excitement to be found on his little island. Oh, yes. More than enough adventure to satisfy any boy anywhere. For a lifetime.
All the excitement in the world, in fact.
Because young Nicholas McIver had now, through the most curious sequence of events, come into possession of Leonardo da Vinci’s Tempus Machina.
It was a Time Machine.
A miraculous time machine, for all love! This magnificent device, a gleaming golden ball, had allowed Nick, along with his friends Gunner and Lord Hawke, to conquer time and space, using the machine to travel through time, doing good wherever he was needed. Why, he’d even helped Lord Nelson himself, in addition to rescuing his dog Jip and Lord Hawke’s two little children, Alex and Annabel, from an evil pirate named Billy Blood!
Perhaps, he sometimes thought, no, really, the golden orb provided even a bit more excitement than he could handle. After his last adventure with the golden orb, he’d insisted Gunner lock the thing away in the great gun vault at his inn. It had a combination lock and Nick made Gunner swear never to give him that combination, no matter how much he might plead or beg.
Still, Nick had long ago decided, excitement and risk were good for any boy. Especially one who wanted more than anything to be a hero. It took adversity to mold a boy into someo
ne worthy of being called a man. And if he was stong and bold enough, even a heroic man. That’s what he thought, anyway. And that’s what he was bound and determined to become.
Heroes, he knew, were molded in the face of danger. And so, instead of running from it, Nick raced after it. Or, at least, didn’t turn away when he encountered it.
“A good ship is never tested in calm waters, Nicholas,” as his father was fond of reminding him.
And now that the Germans were coming, the waters surrounding the Channel Islands were anything but calm. U-boats could be seen offshore at all hours of the day and night. Squadrons of German fighters, Messerschmitts they were called, roared overhead with frightening regularity.
His father, a spy for Winston Churchill himself, believed an invasion of the Channel Islands was imminent. There would be adversity aplenty then, all right, bags of the stuff.
And when the Germans, the Nazis, did come, when they invaded Nick’s beloved Channel Islands, where his family had lived for generations, what then? More excitement and danger than anyone could reasonably expect, he’d wager. But he’d be ready for them, sure he would. He and Gunner and Lord Hawke and Commander Hobbes and even little Katie, who’d proved herself brave beyond measure in their last adventure through time.
They’d all be ready when the Nazis came.
Now, as he and Kate made their way along a curving path that led up toward the Black Forest, Nick was thinking about these Nazi invaders. He’d need some way to fight back, defend his island, protect his family, his home. That’s why his recent dream had been so powerful, he now understood. If he and Kate could possibly find what he hoped lay somewhere in the forest, it might be a way for him to—
“Jipper!” Nick cried, “Come back here!”
The dog Jip, barking loudly, had raced ahead of the children and disappeared inside the dense and tangled wood.
“I have a bad feeling about this place, Nicky,” Kate said, her brow furrowed with worry.
“Don’t be silly. There’s nothing in there can hurt us. Nothing but songbirds and rabbits and squirrels and such. He’s probably on the scent of a rabbit.”