Obsidian Pebble (35 page)

Oz had been here before. It was just a junk-filled room as far as he was concerned. In his mind's eye he could see the stair up to the kitchen, but it was on the far side. Separating him from the way out was a mass of boxes, discarded furniture and formless shapes covered by dustsheets. But Rollins seemed to sense his thoughts. He pulled out what looked like a flashlight made of yellow plastic, marked with black stripes. He did it expertly, his face expressionless. Oz had the awful feeling that he'd been in this sort of situation before.

“This is an electro-shock baton.” Rollins pressed a button and the end of the baton extended eight inches. “A variable voltage stun gun to you. Anything from five thousand to fifty thousand volts at the press of a button. So don't even think about doing anything stupid. Now, just hand over those artefacts.”

Oz peered at the thing in Rollins' hands. It didn't look very menacing, but he'd seen videos of people being stunned. It had turned them into screaming, flopping jellyfish and he had absolutely no desire to experience that. He reached into his pocket for the pebble and the dor.

The tiniest flicker of a knowing smile crossed Rollins' face when he saw them.

“Good,” he whispered. But this, like all the other words Rollins had spoken, contained no emotion.

Still holding the baton and pointing it at Oz, Rollins began pulling off dustsheets to reveal a bank of equipment the likes of which Oz had never seen before. There were things that looked like computer desktops, black boxes studded with LED lights from which sprouted lots of wires and, on its own on a small desk to one side, a metal bowl, into which most of the thicker wires from the black boxes led.

“Put them in that container and sit down.” Rollins indicated the steel bowl. Oz did as he was told and sat on a plastic crate and watched his captor throw switches.

“It was your footsteps we heard on Halloween night, wasn't it?” Oz said.

Rollins said nothing, but Oz took his silence as confirmation of the glaring truth.

Oz was suddenly quite glad that Rollins was busy, so he wouldn't see the disappointment etched on his face as he squeezed his eyes shut so that the hot tears didn't burn too much. All along he'd told himself that the footsteps could not have been ghostly, that such things were simply not possible. Yet a small part of him had harboured a tiny flicker of hope—because this was, after all, Penwurt, the hill where odd things happened. And that sliver of possibility had planted a seed of desperate expectation. If only those footsteps had belonged to one of Miss Arkwright's spirit heralds. Something bringing a message of comfort, a balm for the grief left behind. He hadn't told anyone, but deep in his heart of hearts he'd hoped and wished and believed that the footsteps might belong to Michael Chambers.

Sitting on a crate in the basement, tricked and captured, Oz finally realised how much he'd clung to that hope. He had not dared to tell Ellie and Ruff for fear of their derision which, he now realised, would have been completely justified. He felt stupid and childish for even considering such a thing. Worse, he'd been so wrapped up in his belief, so convinced that his dad had sent him the artefacts and left them clues to Redmayne's and Shoesmith's letters through the symbols on his laptop, that he'd been blinded to what had been going on beneath his very nose.

Suddenly, everything seemed so glaringly obvious. He remembered seeing Tim Perkins coming in covered in cobwebs and dust on Halloween. He hadn't been at a fancy dress party at all; he'd been exploring the orphanage in the secret passages. They'd all been taken in, even Caleb, it seemed. But this was not the way Oz had imagined the story ending, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of having been cheated. He'd been so stupid, leading his friends into danger, thinking Lucy Bishop was the threat when it was Perkins who had given Heeps pictures of the library wall and Perkins who had been the spy. Lucy Bishop had been as much a victim as he was.

“What's the matter with Lucy?” Oz asked, because he couldn't stand listening to his own thoughts anymore.

“I'm not a doctor,” said Rollins as he busied himself checking dials.

“Okay, then, why did she steal the artefacts?”

“Because she knows what they are capable of,” Rollins muttered.

Oz glanced at the pebble. It was hard to believe what Rollins was saying. He'd held that thing a hundred times in his hand, and although he knew his dad had been convinced of its significance, apart from seeing the maker's mark glow, there'd been nothing to suggest it was anything valuable.

“So why would Lucy want to destroy it?”

Rollins shook his head. “She's Obex. Meddlers, the lot of them. She thought she could help her brother, but he is far beyond anyone's help.”

“What happened to him?”

“A mistake,” said Rollins, grimacing as he tightened some screws. “Just an unfortunate experiment that backfired.”

“One of Gerber's experiments?”

Rollins turned to look at Oz, and there was just the suggestion of a grudging admiration in his expression before he turned back to his work. “You
have
been busy, haven't you?” he muttered.

“He already has an artefact, doesn't he? The fifth artefact.”

Rollins stopped working and once again turned slowly to look at Oz. “Yes, he does. And soon he'll have three when I take him these.”

Now that he was in control, Rollins seemed more ready to talk. So Oz pressed him for more. “Did Lucy Bishop's brother work for Gerber?”

Rollins didn't look up from what he was doing this time. He merely said slowly, “Let's just say he was an unwilling volunteer.”

“Gerber turned Lucy's brother into something, didn't he?”

“Gerber's had the artefact to work with for years. He's used the best scientists, but all they've done is scratched the surface of its power. Imagine you're a caveman finding a mobile phone. Press enough buttons and it'll make an entertaining noise, but you'd still have no idea of its true capability. Edward Bishop was…unlucky. Gerber's artefact can capture emotion. Let you feel what someone else is feeling when they do something for the first time. Try and imagine what a cheetah feels like when it catches an impala and closes its jaws over the windpipe. There is no regret. It's just pure instinct. Once you've experienced that…”

Rollins' voice trailed off into the cavernous room.

Oz tasted bile at the back of his throat and barely managed to stifle the groan of disgust that threatened. What had they done to Edward Bishop? But then Rollins seemed to come back to himself and spoke again.

“Some people can't handle it very well. Maybe it was the way Bishop's brain was wired, but he didn't come back from his little trip. He ended up believing he was a polecat. And they are vicious predators. Anything gets too close, he wants to tear it to shreds with his bare hands.”

“But some of him is still Edward Bishop, isn't it? He knew who Lucy was. And she was feeding him in the park, wasn't she?”

“Was she?” Rollins said, his voice still detached and low. “It wouldn't surprise me.”

Oz was thinking about the SPEXIT and of how it made you feel you were actually on a roller coaster or shooting rapids. How would it be if, somehow, it could make you believe you were a rat or a lizard or a polecat instead?

Suddenly there was a hum of power as some of the black boxes lit up. Rollins went over to another shapeless lump covered by a dustsheet. He whipped off the cover to reveal a metal office chair. A cable held in place by black electrician's tape snaked up from the backrest of the chair to an electric light socket.

“Have a seat,” Rollins ordered, one eye warily on the wire.

Oz moved across and looked at the contraption suspiciously. “What's this for?”

“Your accident,” Rollins explained. “Sit.”

Oz frowned, but did as he was told.

Rollins nodded before continuing, his voice cool. “It's really very simple. We've been led up the garden path by people thinking they've found the artefacts before, but this time we've followed the trail from Morsman through your father to you.” He nodded towards the pebble. “These things are drawn to certain individuals. They allow themselves to be found only if they want to be. If they are the real thing, we'll know soon enough. Trouble is, they need a lot of power to kickstart them. We don't know why, they just do. But if this works, then I'll have done my job and there'll be just a bit of tidying up to do.”

“What does that mean?” Oz asked.

Rollins looked up, his face a blank sheet. “We have to make the stun gun injury look acceptable. Loose cable from the ceiling touches a metal chair in a pool of water into which you have inadvertently walked…”

“There is no water,” Oz said, looking down.

Rollins' eyes flickered towards a large plastic container. “There will be. And then fire will engulf the house.”

Oz tried to swallow, but his throat was too parched. All he could think about was Ellie and Ruff and Lucy Bishop in that locked room, with smoke pouring in and flames licking at the walls. He shifted uneasily on the cold seat. “But Gerber wants the house. If you burn it down, he won't be happy.”

“There'll still be the shell once the fire burns out. That's what's important. Probably pick this place up for a song, then,” Rollins said. There must have been something in Oz's face that made him shrug before adding, “Nothing personal, Oz. This is all just business.”

And somehow, that made it all the worse.

Oz realised that he was running out of time. Desperation fought with fear. If he was going to do something about the situation, it needed to be soon. He waited until Rollins turned back to the equipment and took his chance. He bolted up from the chair and ran for the stairs to the kitchen. He was quick, but Rollins' reaction was quicker. Like a striking snake, he stretched forward and pressed the baton to Oz's back.

It was as if someone had hit him with a paralysing sledgehammer. He rose on the balls of his feet and hung there as his muscles seized. His whole body became a juddering block of pain. It lasted only three seconds, but when it ended he fell to the floor, quivering.

“Uh, uh,” Rollins said from above him. Oz felt himself being dragged back to the chair and unceremoniously dumped. For several long, agonising seconds, Oz could only sit slumped while his body recovered and the pain ebbed away. All the while Rollins busied himself, twiddling dials so that the machine sent little bolts of blue electricity towards the pebble and the dor as they lay motionless in the metal container. After the fifth attempt, he took them out and, much to Oz's utter astonishment, pressed the smaller dor into the body of the pebble. The dor seemed to melt into the larger artefact, leaving only the slightest bulge. Rollins put the combined unit back into the container and bombarded them with more power. After each attempt he took them out and pressed the maker's mark on the pebble, to no avail. At last, the frustration showed as Rollins' face blotched with anger at each failed attempt.

Oz thought frantically. He didn't want to be hit by that stun wand thing again. He had never experienced so much pain in his life, but on the other hand, he had to do something or in a few minutes, Rollins was going to electrocute him and set fire to Penwurt.

“It works for me,” he said thickly. He could taste blood in his mouth from where he'd bitten his tongue from the electric shock.

Rollins glared at him. “What did you say?”

“It works for me when I press the mark. Doesn't for anyone else. It sort of glows when I touch it.”

In the silence that followed, Oz heard nothing but his own pulse thrumming in his ears.

“You'd better not be lying,” Rollins said eventually, cold eyes fixed on Oz.

“I'm not.”

Rollins picked the pebble out of the bowl and, holding the baton an inch away from Oz's chest, he said, “Show me.”

The pebble felt warm and familiar in Oz's hand. He turned it over and placed his thumb over the silver mark on the bottom.

“Show me,” urged Rollins through gritted teeth, and pressed the baton to Oz's sternum.

Oz thought about what he'd seen Lucy Bishop doing with the hammer. He remembered the way her hand had bounced away, as if she'd been hitting rubber, the way the hammer had left no scratch. Oz took a deep breath, put his thumb on the mark, pressed and at the same time brought the pebble up to hit the baton away.

Several things happened at once. Rollins must have reacted quickly and pressed the baton's trigger, because Oz felt another momentary kick of agonizing pain and he arched backwards in a convulsive thrust. But it didn't last as long as the first time, nor was it as severe. And despite the pain, Oz could see that something had happened to Rollins, too. Just as the stun baton fired, Rollins was catapulted backwards exactly like Lucy Bishop's hammer arm had been. Oz was right; there was something in the pebble that protected it from harm.

There was a tremendous crash as Rollins hit the machines. Sparks flew and smoke immediately started drifting upwards from the overturned black boxes. Oz's convulsion was over in a moment, but his momentum had sent him careening over the back of the chair so that they both toppled backwards. With his muscles like Seabourne County canteen blancmange and unable to protect himself, Oz hit the floor head first with a sickening crunch. A bolt of new pain shot through his skull, but it was what was happening inside it that made him forget the pain in an instant.

From where he was lying and through watering eyes, Oz could still see the room, see Rollins struggling to his feet, tossing aside pieces of equipment as if they were made of cardboard as he tried to get to Oz. But then there was a burst of static and coloured lines, something that sounded like a chime and suddenly, a pretty, grey-eyed face appeared inside Oz's head. It flickered unsteadily, like an old TV, but then the image cleared and he heard a female voice.