by Jon Jacks
‘Over there! There’s someone over there in the shadows!’
Now Beth could hear the three archaeologists rising to their feet. They were quickly heading towards her.
She turned to pick up Foal, preparing to run.
But the loosened, sandy soil beneath her knees began to give way sickeningly, as if there wasn’t anything below supporting it.
Beth reached up, frantically searching for something to stop her falling.
Her fingers clutched at and thankfully grasped the electrical cable connecting the lamps.
Just as a hole dug on a beach grows as the sand swirls away, however, the ground beneath her continued to open up – and the cable, held in place by nothing more than strong tape, snapped away from the walls.
Beth fell, tumbling down steep, curving steps.
Every drop either winded her or bruised yet another muscle.
The cable looped down with her, finally wrenching from her hand.
The faulty lamp abruptly blazed into light.
Suddenly, she was rolling across a smooth stone floor.
She came to a stop face down, gasping for breath. She groaned in agony.
Raising her head, she quickly took in her surroundings.
She was in another chamber.
Yet far from being empty, this chamber was dominated by an immense contraption of gigantic cogs and wheels.
It could have been a fabulous piece of clockwork.
Only it was made entirely of stone.
*
Chapter 7
As she slowly rose to her feet, Beth groaned once again.
Every muscle, every limb, felt like it had been badly bruised.
As she straightened, she glanced about her.
She was in a semi-spherical chamber. It was almost identical to the one above, barring the steps she had so painfully rolled down.
Barring too, of course, the amazing contraption of stone cogs.
Rising almost to the roof in the centre, it stretched out at its base until it almost touched the sloping walls.
Most of the cogs were horizontal, but there were perpendicular and slightly angled ones too.
Some were like huge rings, with their teeth on either the top or the bottom, the inside or the outside. Smaller cogs were positioned to run around inside larger ones.
Or, rather, they would be running if they were actually moving.
But everything was perfectly still.
Perfectly silent, too.
Abruptly remembering how she had ended up down here, Beth spun around, looking for Foal.
‘Foal?’
I can’t hear her! Please tell me she hasn’t run off somewhere!
Then Beth saw her, standing near the top of the curving flight of stairs.
Beth gawped.
Foal was perfectly still, perfectly silent.
She had been frozen in mid action, as she prepared to leap from one step to a lower one.
*
‘Foal? What…what’s happened to you?’
What a ridiculously stupid question! How would Foal know what’s happened to her?
Beth charged back up the stairs towards the frozen dog.
Carefully, Beth reached out to touch her.
The flesh was still warm.
Even so, there wasn’t the slightest sign of movement. Beth couldn’t even feel the rhythmic beats of Foal’s breathing or her heart.
Beth sharply pulled her hand away, suddenly fearful that she might unintentionally hurt or damage the small, delicate body.
Foal’s eyes shone like globules of dark amber. Her tongue, hanging from an excitedly opened mouth, glistened.
Yet there was something odd about the way they shone, like it was a dulled reflection.
Beth looked up at the lamp, hanging above them at an unnatural angle.
The light seemed – well, strange. Like it was also frozen, also dulled.
She couldn’t hear the people in the chamber above. They should have been down here by now.
Were they, like Foal, frozen in mid-stride?
*
Beth swung a hand up in front of the lamp.
She glanced behind her, looking at the position on the wall where you would expect the shadow of her hand to be.
The light still illuminated the wall as if her hand wasn’t there.
As if the light from the lamp had indeed been frozen; frozen in time.
As if time was standing still.
Beth spun around, staring at the stone cogs in astonishment.
Is that was this ancient machine was?
A time machine?
*
Chapter 8
Beth was horrified.
This whole thing might be amazing – unbelievable even – but she didn’t want to be stuck in a timeless world.
She leapt down the steps towards the stone machine.
Was there anything on it that would set everything back to normal?
She sprinted along one of its sides, trying to take in as much of the elaborate mechanism as she could.
She was looking for anything that might give her an idea how this damned thing worked.
Controls, controls! There must be some sort of control panel.
Or at least a lever!
But there was nothing like a lever, let alone a switch or button she could simply push to close down whatever this damn contraption was doing.
There were signs and symbols everywhere, carved into the stone and coloured with something like dye or paint.
Blazing suns, green and blue planets, clouds, what might be rain, what might be corn, what might be people.
It was all like a far more elaborate version of the pictures she had seen of an Aztec (or was it Mayan?) calendar that had been found in Mexico or some such place.
Suddenly, her eyes alighted on a symbol she recognised.
A single eye inside a triangle.
*
This eye symbol included the extra lines drawn inside the triangle that, in her nervousness, she had forgotten to add when she had been asked to draw it in court.
The lines that made the triangle look more like a pyramid.
Beth touched the symbol tentatively.
What was it doing here?
What could it mean?
She gasped as, with a harsh grinding and a splattering of dirt and dust, the cogs jerked into an incredibly languid movement.
Every wheel was sluggishly rotating, the teeth crunching as they crushed the accumulated dust of centuries of motionlessness.
Beth giggled.
She felt giddy, light-headed.
Felt like she was also beginning to slowly twirl along with the movement of the cogs.
It seemed as if she were gradually moving around the perimeter of the machine, leisurely spinning away from it.
Wait a minute! She really was spinning!
Glancing down at her feet, she saw that she was standing on a relatively small cog, little more than a foot in diameter.
Along with all the other cogs, it was unhurriedly revolving. It was running along the inside of a massive, toothed ring carved into the floor itself.
Just as Beth prepared to jump clear, the cogs began to pick up speed, catching her off balance.
‘Oohhhhherrrr!’
Her arms flailed as she hurri
edly tried to straighten up, to stop herself from falling into the grating gears.
‘Arrrrrrggggghhhh!’
The cog she was on whirled faster and faster, spinning her around the outside of the now violently whirring machine.
Sharply toothed gears were passing by at terrifying speed, just inches from her face and head.
‘Yyyahhhhhhhh!’
As the cog came to an abrupt halt, she was hurled into the air.
‘Eeeeeeeeggghhhh!’
She spun in mid-air.
‘Agggghhhh!’
Once again, she was sent painfully rolling across the hard floor.
Spluttering, spitting dust from her mouth, she began to agonisingly prop herself up on her arms.
She lifted her head up from the stony ground.
‘Ohhhh!’ she groaned forlornly. ‘Does the fun never end down here?’
She instinctively swung out of the way as, out of nowhere, a ball of brown fur suddenly launched itself at her face.
A long, slobbering pink tongue completely drenched her cheek.
Up close, and temporarily out of focus, Foal was a mass of flaying legs and bright eyes. She licked Beth’s face, like it was the best dish in the world.
‘Foal? Foal, you’re all right!’ Beth screamed between her laughter.
Rolling over, she took the breathlessly excited little dog in her arms.
‘It worked! Whatever I did, it worked!’
Beth abruptly stopped laughing.
She spun around, looking over to where she had heard footsteps on the stone steps.
‘Whatever you did, young lady,’ the woman standing on the stairs furiously exclaimed, ‘it’s a serious criminal offence!’
*
Chapter 9
Not again!
I can’t believe I’m in trouble like this all over again!
Beth fumed as she faced her interrogators inside the locked caravan.
She thought about making a break for it. Barging her way past anyone entering or exiting through the door.
But she would be seen and caught, of course. Long before she got anywhere near the edges of the archaeologists’ camp too.
That, after all, was why she had come back here with them quietly, rather than trying to make a run for it.
She had hoped they would believe her claim that she had simply followed Foal into the tunnel (which was more or less true anyway, when you came to think about it).
Then they would let them both go, telling them to stay away in future.
No such luck.
They were angry about the Sword in the Stone.
It wasn’t much of a joke, they said, when an important archaeological site was damaged.
Destroying cornfields to create stupid circles was one thing. But breaking into Silbury Hill; well, that was something entirely different, wasn’t it?
Did Beth and her friends really think archaeologists and historians would be fooled by such a stupid trick?
The riddle was in English! And modern English at that!
But the worst thing, the worst thing of all, was how she and her friends had risked damaging what could be the most amazing archaeological find of all time.
Why did you do that Beth?
Why did you move the calendar?
‘So that’s what it really is?’ Beth asked. ‘A calendar?’
‘Don’t play games with us Beth!’
The woman glared at Beth as if she were about to slap her.
‘We know you and your friends – and yes, we know more people must have been involved, Beth, because you couldn’t have carried and buried that thing in the upper chamber on your own! – we know you must have realised it was a calendar. And we know you must have moved it. Because you moved it to today’s date!’
‘Today’s date?’
Beth gawped in astonishment. What were the chances that the moving calendar would stop on today’s date?
Should she tell them that the calendar had begun moving as soon as she had touched the carved eye symbol?
Should she tell them they should be thanking her?
They would all still be frozen in time if it she hadn’t set the calendar moving.
She bit her tongue to stop herself from saying any of this.
Yeah, that’s it Beth! Make sure they think you’re really crazy!
‘It…it must have moved when I knocked it, I suppose,’ she said instead. ‘I fell down the steps. I fell against it. Yeah, that’s it; that must have started it.’
‘Started it?’ One of the men, short and stumpy, studied Beth curiously.
‘Well, not started it. Just, yeah, as you said, moved it; by accident.’
‘Moved it by accident to today’s date?’
The woman fixed her eyes on Beth’s, probing for honest answers.
Glancing outside, Beth saw that two grim-faced police officers – a tall girl and a plump, older man – were approaching the caravan.
Beyond them there was another man, a man in a slightly different uniform. He held Foal in his arms. He laughed as she stretched up to lick his face.
Beth heard the steps outside creak as the officers mounted them. They unlocked the door.
Before either of the two officers had time to enter the caravan, the woman turned towards Beth.
‘We’ve contacted your mother,’ she said. ‘You’re going home.’
*
‘You’re lucky; they’re not pressing charges.’
The policewoman somehow managed to pleasantly smile while also seriously frowning.
She helped Beth into the back of the police car.
‘They reckon you’re young and were led astray. The others just left you to take the blame. Everyone here – well, mostly everyone – felt sorry for you, when they heard you were a runaway.’
Beth had counted on that when she had told them her name.
She had told them she was living with the crusties because it was better than living at home.
Sure, she knew it would mean they would contact her mum.
But she could always run away again.
*
‘You ask me,’ said the policeman, sidling into the car’s driving seat, ‘they’re all acting like they’ve had too much of the wacky backy.’
He nodded over to where a group of the archaeologists were elatedly studying and discussing photographs of the stone calendar.
As the car doors slammed shut around her, Beth realised they hadn’t brought Foal with them.
‘My dog! Foal!’ she said urgently. ‘You’ve forgotten my dog!’
Without a word, the policeman started up the car and set off.
‘She’ll be well cared for.’
The policewoman spoke surprisingly sternly.
‘Cared for?’
Panicking, Beth swung around in her seat.
She stared out of the car windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of Foal.
‘What do you mean, cared for?’
She tried opening the door, but it was locked.
The policewoman gripped her knee firmly.
‘The RSPCA; they’re taking her to the kennels. There were signs of mistreatment Beth – bruises. She might even have suffered a broken leg at some point, although it seems to have repaired itself.’
Foley! Foley had done all that!
‘But…but that wasn’t me! You can’t take her off of me because of what Fo–’
She stopped herself from saying Foley’s name.
She said instead, ‘She’s a Cloth-eared Dachshund, you know?’
The policewoman shrugged, like the br
eed meant nothing to her.
Beth slumped back into the car’s seat, thankful that she had managed to stop herself from saying Foley’s name.
The last thing Foley would want is the police and RSPCA descending on him.
Last thing Beth would want is for Foley to know they had got his name off her.
Not that she could ever go back there now.
Not without Foal.
She knew what Foley would say; thanks to her, he had lost his nice little earner.
She owed him big time for losing Foal and those nice little puppies.
‘The puppies!’ Beth turned urgently on the policewomen. ‘What will happen to the puppies?’
‘Puppies?’ The policewoman appeared confused. ‘I was told there was just the one dog.’
‘Foal’s pregnant. What will happen to her puppies?’
The policeman driving the car glanced back at Beth with a confused frown.
The policewoman’s grip on Beth’s knee changed from being hard to soft and consoling.
‘They gave her a thorough inspection, Beth; when they were checking her for injuries. Please believe me – your dog was never pregnant, Beth.’
*
‘Thank you, thank you so much for rescuing her, officers!’
Beth cringed.
She expected her mum to invite the police officers in for a cup of tea at any moment.
Thankfully, with satisfied grins, the police officers turned to leave.
‘Our pleasure miss.’
The policeman’s low, deep tone implied a longing wish to add a movie-style, ‘Our job here is done.’
‘No charges will be brought this time.’
The policewoman heavily emphasised the ‘this’.
She obviously didn’t want anyone to miss the warning contained within her otherwise pleasantly delivered comment.
Beth gave them an embarrassed grin, a wary ‘Thanks.’
They had been all right to her. They were just doing their job.
As soon as Beth’s mum had closed the door, she tearfully reached for Beth.
She gave her the same claustrophobic, breath-squeezing hug that she had greeted her with on first opening the door.
She was small, hardly taller than her much younger daughter. Yet her arms clenched hard as iron around Beth.
‘What have they been doing to you, my little girl?’
She released her grip, pulled back slightly. ‘
Just look at all that make-up! And those earrings! Who did all this to you Beth?’
Beth didn’t think her mum was making any sense, but that was hardly unusual. Beth just smiled sickly, like she didn’t have any answers just yet.
Her mum realised that her tears were smearing both Beth’s makeup and her own.
She reached for the handkerchief scrunched up into the end of her jumper’s sleeve. She dabbed her eyes, then Beth’s cheeks.
‘Oh, what a sight I must be! All these silly tears! I’m sorry, sorry Beth; I don’t know what’s wrong with me! I really don’t!’
She leant back and grasped Beth’s hands in hers, as if they were about to break into a jolly dance.