by Martin Booth
“I’ll do that,” Pip offered eagerly. “I like gardening.” Sebastian smiled and said, “That would please me, for I shall have little time for such matters. Furthermore,” he added, “you will be safe here, for de Loudéac cannot enter this place to do his mischief.”
“Why not?” Tim asked.
“There is much here that can harm him,” Sebastian declared, “much that can sap his alchemic strength.” He turned to a low plant growing on his right. “Do you know of this?”
Pip squatted next to it. The plant had long, broad leaves that were dark green and deeply ribbed, each of them fanning out from a single point. Three small blue bell-shaped flowers protruded from the center. She rubbed one of the leaves between her fingers and sniffed at them. The smell was awful.
“It is mandragora,” Sebastian said, “which protects from evil and demons. This,” he pointed to a taller plant whose small mauve flowers were being visited by at least half a dozen wasps, “is figwort, which also protects. And the others here — wormwood, cowbane, selago, oregano, valerian, monkshood . . .”
Setting off around the clearing, Sebastian started to collect a leaf here, a bud or flower there; two plants he uprooted, nipping off tubers, pieces of root or rhizomes before firming them back in the soil with his heel. Each part he collected he pushed into the bottle of vodka, thrusting it down with a green twig snapped from a turkey oak that grew at the edge of the clearing. All the while, he muttered to himself as if casting a spell or reciting a recipe so as not to miss a single ingredient.
When he was done, Sebastian screwed down the cap, shook the bottle vigorously and said, “Now I must prepare my sauvegarde.”
“Sauvegarde?” Tim repeated.
“I think you would call it your safety net,” Sebastian replied, shaking the bottle again and setting off towards the edge of the copse.
They returned across the field of rank grass, passing the pool and entering the ruined coach house by squeezing through a half-open door, hanging awkwardly by one hinge. The walls were stained with patches of damp while the upper floor looked unsafe, with gaps where planks had rotted through. The wooden staircase lacked a number of steps and the banister was hanging awry. The flagstoned floor, upon which carriages and dog carts had once stood, was covered in debris, drifts of leaves that had blown in and, against one corner, three or four huge barrels, their bands rusting and their ends staved in. The air smelled of dampness, mold and decaying wood.
Sebastian moved to the middle of the floor and stood upon a large flagstone that seemed more or less devoid of rubbish, beckoning to the others to stand with him. As soon as the three of them were on the stone together, he tapped his foot on two other flags. Immediately, the stone they were standing on appeared to sink into the ground. As it moved downwards, the sides of the shaft sped by. It reminded Tim of being in an old-fashioned elevator where you could see through the bars of the door.
After at least twenty seconds, the feeling of motion ceased and a door opened into Sebastian’s underground chamber. Without further ado, he walked straight to the table and poured the contents of the vodka bottle into a glass retort, which he began to connect to a copper distillation tower.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Pip ventured. “Nothing,” Sebastian replied, “but thank you.” He finished setting up his equipment and, with a match-box, struck a spark and lit a small spirit burner beneath the retort. “And now, I must tell you that I am going away for a few days. You shall not see me, but you need fear not. I shall return before long. In my absence, I must request that you not try to come to this place, for it is protected and those who venture here may only do so in my presence. This is the only means by which I may protect myself whilst I sleep.”
“Haven’t you ever worried that someone might have found the panel in my bedroom?” Pip asked.
“Or the flagstone in the coach house?” Tim added. “You’ve been incredibly lucky the builders renovating the house didn’t find anything.”
“And,” Pip added, “if our father decides to convert the coach house into an office, which he is planning to do . . .”
“There is no need to be concerned,” Sebastian said. “Were they to dig up the flagstones, they would not find their way here.”
“But the shaft . . .” Tim began.
“There is no shaft,” Sebastian declared.
“But we just came down it,” Tim replied.
“You think you just came down it.”
“If there’s no shaft,” Pip pondered, “where are we? Aren’t we under Rawne Barton?”
Sebastian made no answer, but turned his attention to the retort which was now bubbling. The contents were swirling around like vegetables cooking in a boiling saucepan, and steam rose from the surface of the liquid to waft along the tube to the condenser. He watched as a colorless liquid started to drip from the spout into a ceramic dish with a pouring lip on it. He counted the drops. When there were thirty, he extinguished the flame on the burner by covering it with a snuffer and poured the liquid into a dark-blue vial the size of a perfume bottle, which he corked. For a short while, the condenser continued to drip. This liquid he allowed to collect in a small, delicate china vessel rather like an after-dinner coffee cup but with an alchemical symbol drawn on the glaze.
“Now,” he said, “I must go.”
“Where are you going?” Tim asked.
“I am going,” Sebastian said gravely, “in pursuit of evil.”
“Can’t we come?” Tim asked.
“No,” Sebastian said firmly. “This I must do alone for there is much danger and you are not yet ready to face it.”
“Is there anything we can do while you’re away?” Pip offered.
“Just be on your guard,” Sebastian replied, “and,” he smiled at Pip, “tend my garden well.”
At that, he picked up the cup, put it to his lips, drained it in one swallow and snapped his fingers.
“Yoh! What the . . . !” Tim exclaimed.
The next thing he knew, he found himself standing, holding the bottle of vodka, by the pond in the field, with Pip looking into the water. Of Sebastian there was no sign. However, when Tim looked at the vodka bottle, he noticed that although the top was still on and the seal was unbroken, it was empty.
Four
The Edge of Darkness
The following morning, Tim found himself alone in the house. His father, who sometimes worked from a study at home, had gone to London on business. Tim’s mother and Pip had departed shortly after him, heading for the county town on what his father termed “a jolly girls’ retail-therapy outing,” which meant traipsing around department stores trying on clothes that neither of them, in a million years, would dream of buying, never mind wearing.
When he was quite sure everyone had left, Tim went out to the stable block and entered the garage. On a shelf against the back wall was a row of three blue metal toolboxes. Tim searched through them: the first held household tools such as screwdrivers, hammers and chisels, the second electric tools, the third car tools. This he opened wide and started to rummage, lifting out the trays of spanners and wrenches. In the bottom of the box was what he was searching for — a rubber mallet used to knock out dents in the bodywork of cars.
Closing the garage door, he walked towards the coach house, testing the hammer against the palm of his hand as he went. The head was black, solid and heavy, yet it would, Tim knew, serve his purpose ideally. Unlike a metal hammer, whatever he hit with this one would leave no mark.
As he edged himself through the broken door, Tim felt more than a little guilty. He knew he was betraying Sebastian’s trust, yet he simply had to know where the allegedly nonexistent shaft was situated.
The coach house looked just as it had when they had entered it the day before, the flagstones littered with leaves, straw and fragments of wood fallen from the floor of the hay loft above. There seemed to be not one flag that had even the faintest sign of having been swept, never mind descending into the
bowels of the earth.
Trying hard to remember where they had stood, Tim narrowed it down to one of four large slabs in the center of the coach house. Going down on his hands and knees, he took a deep breath, cast aside his guilty conscience and thumped the hammer on to the flag-stone with all his strength. It bounced off. Tim did it again, not so hard, and listened for any sign of an echo, of a dull resonance that might imply a hollow beneath the floor. All that came back was a solid thonk!
It was the same with the other three stones. They were, he was sure, set onto bare earth without so much as a drainpipe running beneath them.
Remembering that Sebastian had stood on one flag and tapped two others, Tim tried the same thing, determining that if the stone he was on began to move, he would promptly jump off. That way, he excused himself, he would not upset Sebastian. It was, after all, not as if he wanted to find the chamber, just be assured of the way into it.
Whichever combination he followed, however, nothing happened.
“A virtual shaft,” he said out loud to himself. “That’s impossible. We went down it. It’s not like a computer game. That’s virtual. This was . . .” he hated to admit it “. . . actual.”
Without disturbing the rubbish lying about unduly, Tim worked his way methodically right across the coach-house floor. Not a single flagstone reverberated.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Plan B.”
He put the rubber mallet back where he had found it and, from the household toolbox, picked up a long, thin, flat-headed screwdriver. Armed with this, he crossed the drive to the house, went straight upstairs and entered Pip’s room. The flagstones, he reasoned, might have been too thick to allow an echo to pass through, but the panel in Pip’s bedroom was not. He had heard that echo, had physically crawled through the paneling and descended into the tunnel.
When Sebastian had first arrived, and just before the paneling swung open, there had been a faint click. This, Tim guessed, was caused by a release mechanism of some sort. All he had to do was to trigger it.
Sitting on the floor before the panel, he remembered that it had swung open on hinges that were on the left side of the panel. The mechanism, he reckoned, must be on the right.
Very carefully, so as not to mark the wood, he tried to insert the blade of the screwdriver down the side of the panel. It would not go. Although there was a very slight crack, the wood was more or less flush with the panel frame. If he forced it, the wood might splinter or scar, leaving a telltale sign as clear as if he had used a clumsy burglar’s jimmy.
What I need, he thought, smiling wryly to himself, is a rubber screwdriver.
Then it came to him. He’d seen it done in films. Hundreds of times.
Going into his own bedroom, Tim opened the drawer of his computer desk and removed his bank cash-machine savings card from his wallet. Returning to Pip’s room, he slid it into the gap between the panel and the frame and with difficulty, for it was a tight fit, he slid it up and down the crack. Still nothing. He pushed the card in further, as far as the first raised number of his account. Gripping the card with both hands, he again moved it along the crack.
The click was almost inaudible, but Tim felt the mechanism trip against the card.
“Yes!” he murmured triumphantly.
Using the card as a lever, he edged the panel open. It swung out slowly on its hinges. Behind it, not much more than a centimeter in, was a lath-and-plaster wall.
Like what! he thought.
Tim tentatively tapped the plastic card against the wall. It was firm, hard and doubtless as old as the house itself. There was no indication of a hollow behind it, no sign of even a hairline crack that might indicate a second disguised opening.
He closed the panel and stood up, exasperated and disappointed.
There was no shaft and no tunnel and yet, somehow, he and Pip had followed Sebastian down them.
Back in his bedroom, Tim sat at his desk, replaced the cash card in his wallet and switched on his computer. He resigned himself to the facts. He had been down the tunnel, had been in the underground laboratory — whatever or wherever it was — and he had not been dreaming. There was nothing. No other explanation. Sebastian was on the level. But, and it was a big but, there was a lot — a lot — more to him — and parallel universes — than met the eye.
The computer monitor came on, Windows booted up and went immediately into the starfield simulation screen saver. Tim stared at it: it was like flying down a tunnel that was forever opening ahead of him in the center of the screen.
That afternoon, the sun shone through the branches of the trees that grew along the riverbank, dappling the shade. The water was dark yet clear, running over stones here and there or eddying into deep pools on the edge of the current. The banks were steep where the current had cut into them but, where the river ran a straight course, they were gentle and sloped down to the water’s edge. It looked tranquil but Tim knew that the currents in such a river could be treacherous, with a dangerous undertow. Certainly, it was not a river for swimming in. Tufts of dry straw hanging from the lower branches of the willows showed him how high the river could flood in the winter.
Choosing a spot where the bank descended gently to a shallow shelf of stones and river gravel, Tim put down his fly rod and landing net and studied the surrounding countryside. Everything seemed in order. There was no one in sight and no black swans either.
Fixing the reel onto his rod, he threaded the line and attached a leader with two droppers, tying on three wet flies — a black butcher, a green nymph and a nondescript brown fly his father had made which he called Dad’s Deliverer. In the height of summer, he had discovered, trout could not resist it.
There were trout in the river. Tim could see them swimming by off the end of the shelf, but they seemed not to be feeding. Being within easy casting range of a pool in which at least one was rising regularly, he cast again and again, yet he could not entice it to take a fly. For half an hour he fished in vain before deciding to move upstream.
Passing the knoll, he called out, to be answered by Pip’s voice from within the trees. Keeping her promise to Sebastian, she had gone to the clearing straight after returning home. She was trimming the grass, cutting back weeds and pruning any bushes that needed it.
Beyond the knoll, the river ran for about a hundred and fifty meters through meadowland that was a riot of yellow buttercups. On the Rawne Barton side of the river, the bank was broken only by a few trees but, opposite, woodland came right down to the water’s edge, the land rising sharply behind the trees to a height of at least sixty meters. Tim could see that a quarry had been cut into this hillside, although it was quite obvious that it had not been worked for many years. In places, creepers hung down the vertical rock slopes, the stone dark and blotched where water ran down it. Wild flowers and bushes had established themselves in some of the crannies. Some way upstream were the stone piers of what had once been a bridge, the arch long since destroyed by time or flood. A flash of brilliant blue across the space between them told him that one of the piers was being used as a perch by a kingfisher.
This, Tim decided, was a good stretch to fish. He knew that where trees hang over the river there would be a large number of insects falling from the leaves into the water. What was more, the river ran deep and dark under the far bank: the deeper and darker it was, the bigger the fish could be. He thought he might even be lucky enough to get a salmon.
On his fourth cast, Tim hooked a large brown trout. No sooner had he struck than it leaped from the water, dived and headed upstream towards a large wych elm growing on the far bank, its roots exposed and arching into the river. Knowing that the fish was heading for the protection of the tangle of submarine roots, Tim fought to turn it, halt its run and bring it back downstream. For three or four minutes, he tussled with the fish before, at last, it began to tire. Gradually, he brought it to the bank and into his landing net.
It was a big fish, weighing well over a kilo, in fine condition. Its back
was almost black while its flanks were gray-green with dark-brown and deep-red spots. Holding it still, he hit it on the head with his priest, dispatching it immediately.
“Nice fish!”
Tim jumped, got quickly to his feet and looked around. There was no one in the meadow. Nor was there anyone on the bank. He squinted into the trees, his heart thumping.
“Over ’ere, mate.”
The voice was coming from the direction of the wych elm.
“I can’t see you,” Tim answered, hoping his voice did not betray his fear.
“’Ang on, then,” came the reply.
Tim caught a movement in the shadows beneath the trees. Someone was walking down to a point on the bank opposite him. He waited, the branches parted and a young man stepped into view. He was about twenty years old, wearing open-toed sandals, dirty jeans, a T-shirt with a large sunflower printed on it and a very battered black top hat beneath which his hair hung down in dreadlocks.
“You live near ’ere?” he inquired in a friendly voice. “Yes,” Tim confirmed. “In the manor.”
“The place they jus’ done up?”
“Yes.”
“Nice place!”
“Where do you live?” Tim asked, feeling he was volunteering too much information about himself.
The young man jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “In the quarry,” he said. “We got a camp there.” “We?” Tim questioned.
“Me ’n’ some mates. Look,” he went on, “you don’t want to sell your fish, do yer? I’ll pay you a coupla quid for it.”
“Why don’t you catch your own?” Tim said.
“We ain’t quite got the knack,” the young man admitted. “We been puttin’ out night lines with worms ’n’ slugs on ’em but all we got so far’s an eel.”
Tim considered the proposition. His mother still had some trout in the freezer from a fishing trip at Easter — and a “coupla quid” would certainly supplement his pocket money.
“All right,” Tim agreed. “I’ll sell it to you for £2.” He looked at the stretch of deep water between them and the fast current. Wading was out of the question: this was a prime spot for a vicious undertow. And the river was too wide for him to risk throwing the trout over. “How do I get it to you?”