Behind me, I heard a huge crash, but I knew I had to stay focused. So I leaped up, and as I jumped, I stabbed the broken branch into its mouth. That did the trick. As he grabbed the branch with both hands, he dropped the cutlass. It was a huge sword, and I had no idea if I’d even be able to pick it up but I had to try. I grabbed the hilt. It weighed nothing. I swung it over my head, ready to chop the freak’s head off. His hair stood on end, his eyes bulged again, his mouth opened to scream and it turned into a giant balloon that made an outrageous farting noise and shot off into the trees.
There was a moment’s silence then I heard a cry from behind me. I turned and saw the trog striding away on gigantic yellow legs with Ciara slung over his shoulder. I raised the sword and saw my hand was empty. I screamed, “Stop! Come here! It’s me you want, you moron!”
I ran. Trog looked back, childishly scared, and began to trot with Ciara bouncing against his back. I was screaming like a crazy man, “Stop, you stupid animal! You’ll hurt her! Stop and fight! It’s me you want!”
But his strides were massive, and as hard as I ran, it was impossible for me to keep up. He reached the top of a rise and vanished over the edge. The last thing I saw before he disappeared was Ciara’s head and hair flopping around like a rag doll’s. I hit the top of the hill running and fell, rolling and smashing against tree trunks as I went. Small twigs and stones tore at my skin, but as I tumbled, I got glimpses of his huge yellow form bounding down the hill ahead of me through the trees.
God alone knows how I did it, but as I fell, I focused on his mind, and just before I slammed my head into a tree at the bottom of the slope, I got a flash of where he was taking her.
I staggered to my feet. My head was in agony and I felt so sick that I had to vomit right there into the autumn leaves as I ran. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but I knew where he was heading, and I reckoned because of his size, he had to take a roundabout route. I could get there quicker dodging through the trees, but I had to be fast. I ran, wiping my mouth with the back of my sleeve like I had all the hounds of Hell on my heels—which was ironic, I guess, because from what I had seen, I was actually on the heels of two of those hounds.
I crested a hill and hurtled straight into a hedgerow but I didn’t stop. The twigs and branches tore at my face, my clothes and my skin, but I just plowed on because I knew that Ciara was probably on the other side of those branches. I burst through.
She was.
She was sitting on the back of a twelve hundred CC Harley. There was one huge, hairy Hell’s Angel sitting astride that bike and another standing by a similar chopper next to it. We were on a lonely road with no houses and just behind them was a canal. A few Canadian geese looked at us and honked. I glanced around. There was nothing I could use as a sword. I peered at Ciara.
She was pale but mouthed at me, “Go.”
I ignored her and turned to the biker who was astride the Harley. I snarled, “Let her go.”
He laughed an unpleasant laugh and kicked the bike into life. The engine roared and I ran. I ran for the front wheel. He let out the clutch and hit the gas just as I jumped. I hit him square and my head, which already felt like someone had left an axe lodged in it, smashed into his big, hairy chin. Me, him, the bike and Ciara all went crashing onto the grassy verge of the canal, sliding out of control toward the edge. I somehow grabbed Ciara’s wrist with my left hand and dug the fingers of my right deep into the turf as the bike and the Angel slid over the edge with a loud splash.
I heard the other engine roar and turned, staggering to my feet, just in time to see the other Angel accelerating toward me. I was paralyzed—too tired and in too much pain to move. He was less than a second away, with his front wheel lined up, rushing straight at me. There was nothing I could do. It was over. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and felt a piercing pain shoot through my legs. Then the ground struck me a shattering blow in the back and I gasped as the air was knocked out of my lungs. Then there was a second loud splash and a gurgling, and a couple of seconds later, I heard Ciara’s voice saying, “You are, without a doubt, the biggest fecking gobshite on the face of the earth…” and I opened my eyes just in time to see her lovely face descending toward mine. Our lips touched and all my pain vanished. I closed my eyes and let my arms and my lips do the talking.
Chapter Seven
Neither of us spoke about any of it, which I guess was odd. But the simple fact was that to us, what had happened between us was much more real and important than a couple of shape-shifting, yellow emoticons trying to sink our boat and kill us.
Yeah, I guess on reflection that was pretty strange, but it didn’t seem weird to us right then because we had much more amazing stuff on our minds. Like Us, with a big, beautiful, capitalized ‘U’. Neither of us could deny, there was now an ‘Us’. And we didn’t want to.
We walked arm in arm through the woodlands, stopping occasionally to kiss for long, lingering, timeless moments then walked on once more, lost in bliss. Again, as so often happened with Ciara, I couldn’t remember afterward what we had talked about. It was like we’d been in a dream that had eventually faded, leaving only the delicious flavor of its meaning but none of the details. I could remember that we talked about how we would find a way to be together, whatever her dad might do or say. We talked about the children we would have and the castle we would live in and the magic we would do. And I almost told her my secret, but I knew there was something I had to do before that. I had to protect my princess.
And I knew, with a stab of fear and pain right through my heart, that if I could not protect her and keep her safe, then I would have to leave her and forget her, because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that those two freaks, those two shape-shifting weirdoes, had come for me. I meant to find out why and do something about it—permanently.
I left her at the fence to her garden where the lawn swept down to the Thames—called the Isis at Oxford—and we kissed in the shade of the trees for a few delicious eternities. Then we finally let each other go and I watched her run like a dancing ray of sunlight across the lawn toward the house.
I made my way back through the town at a very determined pace. Nobody seemed to notice the scruffy kid with the torn clothes and the scratches and grazes all over his face and body. I guess the English have pretty much seen it all, especially in Oxford. And when I checked out some of the undergraduates sloping around the town, I figured they looked worse than I did. Books would do that to you if you weren’t careful. I firmly pushed all thoughts of how her eyes were like the green ocean and her hair spun sunlight out of my mind and focused on Gorm and how I was going to tear him limb from limb and eat his heart if he didn’t tell me what the hell was going on.
It was just after lunchtime when I got home, and I was pretty sure I had a good two or three hours before Rosie and Dad got back. I marched through the house and out into the garden, straight to the arbor and said very firmly, “Gorm!”
Up on the roof of the shed, a blackbird cocked its head at me, like it thought I was a goldfinch short of a charm. Maybe it was right. All the way here I’d just assumed all I had to do was summon Gorm and have it out with him. It hadn’t crossed my mind to wonder how you actually went about summoning a three-thousand-year-old gnome from a parallel universe. I thought about making a pentagram on the grass, but I had no idea how you went about doing that, either. Then it dawned on me that the other night when he’d appeared for the first time, there had been no rituals or pentacles or sacrificial vestal virgins or any of that crap.
I raised my voice and said, “Gorm! I need to talk to you!”
The blackbird tilted its head the other way and sang something complicated into the afternoon air. I tried to remember what I’d done that evening. It had been dusk. Maybe it needed to be dusk. But if that were the case, how come those two shape-shifting crazies had appeared? There was no doubt in my mind that they had come from the same place as Gorm—and me, for that matter. I paused and thought. I remembered I had been smel
ling the roses…
I had been smelling the roses, listening to the blackbird and wishing it was a nightingale, because I had just met Ciara and I was head over heels for her. All I wanted was to think about her. I smiled. The blackbird began to sing. I remembered Ciara’s kiss on the banks of the canal. A big, idiot grin spread all over my face and I began to hear a very distinctive crackling sound.
Gorm—as ugly as Godzilla on steroids, sitting on the garden bench chewing on half of something that not so long ago had been gamboling in a field, eating clover. He belched and several roses that were in the way withered. He wiped his mouth with the back of an arm that was bigger than most tree-trunks and sighed.
“I was just having breakfast. What is it you want?”
“What do I want? I want to know what the hell is going on!”
“Am I not just after telling you? I was having me breakfast and the next thing…”
“Gorm! I have just spent the whole damned afternoon fighting off two giant yellow flying emoticons who were trying to drown me, cut me in half with a cutlass and crush me with Harley-Davidsons. I don’t give a damn if you were having breakfast!”
He grinned. “Was it the shape-shifting leprechauns, then? Have they been here? Did you give a good account of yourself?”
“Leprechauns? Didn’t I just tell you they were giant yellow emoticons?”
“And didn’t I tell you that they were shape-shifting leprechauns?” He frowned at me. “You wouldn’t have some ale there, would you, lad? No, I seem to remember you never have ale. You know, if you’re going to summon me, you might have the courtesy of laying in a bit of ale. A couple of gallons is all I’m saying. Not a vast amount.”
I could feel the anger building inside me. “Didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you tell me? No, Gorm! No, you did not tell me anything about shape-shifting leprechauns!”
“Oh—”
“Oh? Oh?”
“Did I not? Well, you know, I do sometimes forget things. I’m not as young as I was. I am three thousand years old, which is a goodly age, even for a gnome.”
“Gorm, they could have killed me! And what is worse, they could have killed Ciara!”
He made an ‘oops!’ face.
I threw my hands in the air and said, “Who are these guys, Gorm? Why were they trying to kill me?”
He gave an indulgent laugh. “Well now, let’s not get carried away. I don’t think they was actually trying to kill yiz. They was just a little high-spirited. You know what leprechauns are like, after all.”
“No…”
“No, well…they get a little excited with all the fun and stuff. But there is…” He screwed up his eyes and scratched his head. “There is something…and I do think perhaps maybe I have been a little, as you might say, bad—”
“Gorm?”
“Yes! Yes! I’m trying to remember. A little ale to lubricate the old brain cells would not go amiss.”
“There is no ale, Gorm. You need to tell me who these two guys are and why they were attacking me!”
He nodded. “You’re right there!”
“I’m right?”
He raised his eyebrows high on his forehead and gave a wise laugh. “Oooh, yah!” He nodded again. “You’re right there, so y’arre!”
“Then tell me, Gorm!”
“Well, you remember I told you, you had no quest or anything like that, of that sort?”
My skin went cold and prickly. “Yes, I do…”
“Well, I may have been wrong. There may have been some kind of a quest…after all…”
I was getting desperate. “What kind of quest, Gorm? C’mon, man. This is important.”
He gave that complacent chuckle again and shook his head with a daft smile on his big, ugly face. “The old brain, y’know. T’isn’t what it was…” Then suddenly he said, “I know…” and raised a finger. “I know. You have to protect somebody.”
I stepped toward him. My franticness turning suddenly to excitement. “Protect who?”
His face sank. “Jaysus, isn’t that the question? An old man, maybe… It’s hard to say exactly.”
“Why do I have to protect him? Who from?”
“Excellent questions, to be sure…”
“Gorm! You are so infuriating!”
“And haven’t I been told that before? Not least by your own sainted mother!”
“Gorm!”
A voice at my shoulder said, “Jake…” I turned and Sebastian was standing there with two six-packs of English beer. He held them out to me. “I found these in your kitchen. They might do the trick.”
I stared at him. I wondered where he had come from, took the six-packs and turned to Gorm, who was goggling at the beer with a big, stupid leer on his face.
“I think your friend might be right at that,” he said.
I handed them over and he tipped the bottles down his throat whole, without opening them. He chewed, crunched, swallowed then belched—and a couple more roses withered on the bush.
Sebastian stepped forward and spoke. “Gorm, you said that Jake might have a quest. Then you said that quest might be to protect somebody.”
Gorm scowled. “I have no feckin’ call talking to the likes of you, you wee human pipsqueak. I should be eatin’ you raw and grinding up your bones, so I should!”
Sebastian pulled himself erect and, with awesome dignity, said, “It is I, my friend, who brought you the ale. You owe me. And if you wish to drink good English ale in the future, you will treat me with due respect. Do we understand each other?”
Gorm curled his lip. “All right, all right…let me think.”
I went to speak but Sebastian interrupted me. “The thing is, Gorm—and you must know this—a quest is a search. So, what should Jake be seeking while he is protecting this old man?”
Gorm stared at Sebastian so long without saying anything that I began to think he’d passed out or dropped dead or something. But finally, he sighed and shook his head. “It’s no use, lads. All I can remember is this. Them two feckin’ shape-shifting leprechauns are out to cause mischief. They’re not in it alone, either. They’re too feckin’ stupid to do anything on their own. But they are being used by… Let me try to remember… I think, right? I think it was Aren.”
I said, “Aren?”
“That’s right.”
“What can you tell us about this Aren?”
“Feck all, Jake. I don’t know feck all about him, except that he wants to kidnap an old man—or an elderly man—and it is an important part of your quest to stop him from doing that.”
I threw my hands to my forehead and squeezed my eyes shut. “So, let me see if I have this straight. It is your job to inform me about all this sh— All this stuff, right?”
“Right.”
“And you are telling me that I have a quest, but you can’t remember what it is.”
“Right.”
“Part of that quest might be to protect an old man from being kidnapped by shape-shifting leprechauns.”
“Right.”
“But it might not be…”
“Almost certainly is.”
“You don’t know who this man is.”
“Right.”
“Or when or why they want to kidnap him.”
At this, his face brightened. “Oh, now I can tell yiz a bit about that. It has something to do with all the feckin’ mess his lot”—he nodded his head toward Sebastian—“are making with the environment. See, we share this planet with them, and before long, it’ll be too feckin’ hot to live on. So, this feller they’re going to snatch has something to do with that. And as to when? Well, isn’t it this comin’ week? How’s that?” He beamed at me, real pleased with himself.
“This week?”
“On the Friday, I do believe.”
“How the hell am I supposed to help him if I don’t even know who he is? On Friday?”
He gave a huge belch that made his lips tremble like sea anemones, and he was gone.
We sto
od in stunned silence for a long while. Eventually Sebastian said, “How could I possibly have believed you? I’ve seen it with my own eyes and I still don’t believe it.”
I looked at him and he was shaking his head.
“I’m sorry, Jake.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, buddy. I shouldn’t have gone trampling all over your feelings. I had only found out the day before. This Gorm came to me and zap! I was pretty much reeling, and I guess I needed to tell somebody. More to the point, I needed somebody to believe me.”
We stood like that a bit then he said, “I get that, Jake. I won’t doubt you again.” Then he patted my back and said, “Come on, old fellow. Let’s go inside. We have a lot of thinking to do. This is the riddle to end all riddles!”
Chapter Eight
We sat at the big table in the kitchen and I made coffee. The light was turning grainy outside, and the blackbird had come back to sing its long, intricate song from the chimney pot.
Sebastian said, “When are you expecting your parents back?”
I looked at the clock over the cooker and said, “Maybe an hour. Maybe a bit more.”
He sighed. “I think you should tell me everything from the start. There has to be a clue in there somewhere as to what this quest is and who the old man is.”
I nodded. “Okay, and thanks, Sebastian. I appreciate not having to do this alone.”
He smiled. “It’s what friends are for, old chap. You’d do the same for me.”
It wasn’t a question, and he was right. I said, “Yeah. I would.”
So I told him, from the start, everything that had happened since we’d arrived in Oxford. He sat back and closed his eyes, as though he’d fallen into a deep sleep, but I knew he was using the old Sherlock Holmes technique of totally relaxing his body so that his mind could absorb everything. I finally came to the point where he’d turned up that afternoon, and I shrugged and said, “And you know the rest.”
The Dreaming Spires Page 6