Revenge (10 page)

Winter squatted down and examined the floor of the lantern room. ‘Someone's been sitting here,' she said, ‘recently. Look at the scuff marks in the dust.'

I shrugged again. Dust was covering everything.

Winter glared at me, then shoved the leathery book into her bag, pushed past Ryan and rushed down the stairs.

Strangely, the wind had died down and an eerie stillness took over. I ran my hands through my hair.

Winter tentatively approached the edge of the cliff and peered over. She stood there, perilously close, staring out over the sea for ages, as if willing the wind to pick up again and carry her
news of Cal. Not knowing where he was, not knowing how he was coping, was messing with our heads. But knowing that his nervous system was slowly shutting down and that he was on a timeline controlled by the unforgiving Vulkan Sligo was enough to send us all over the edge.

The wind suddenly swept up again, lifting Winter's hair. She stumbled forward, losing her footing. I lunged after her, grabbing her hand to pull her back. We listened to the echoing sound of stones tumbling and crashing onto the ground, far below.

‘That was close,' she admitted nervously.

‘Yeah, too close,' I said. I stepped back and guided Winter away from the edge. ‘Whoa!' I yelled. The ground beneath my own feet was falling away!

I was stumbling, losing my balance … and before I knew it, I was airborne! Falling off the cliff!

‘Boges!' Winter screamed.

This was it. I closed my eyes, waiting for my tumbling body to collide with the jagged rocks below. Everything blurred. And then something hit my back. I'd stopped falling.

‘Boges!' Ryan yelled.

I opened my eyes and looked up. Ryan and
Winter were looking down on me from about
fifteen
metres up. Carefully, I peered around me. Some sort of scrubby tree had broken my fall. A scrubby tree with …

‘Winter! Ryan!' I shouted.

‘Oh no, Boges, are you OK?' Winter cried, desperately. ‘Please, tell me you haven't broken your back!'

I started laughing.

‘Boges, this isn't funny,' Winter pleaded.

‘Look!' I shouted, pointing to a branch
stretching
out beside me. ‘Pale lemon flowers … mossy green leaves with glands. That's got to be the
Acacia resurgere
! We're close! We're close to where Sligo had us!'

Winter hugged me tight and dragged me away from the cliff edge as soon as I was back on solid ground. Ryan had used a rope from the boot of his car to help me get back up. It took us a while, but finding the acacia helped me forget about the danger I was in … and the bleeding cuts and scratches that lined my arms and legs.

‘Hey!' Winter called suddenly, looking at something behind me. ‘Over there! Did you see that? I swear I saw something move!'

Ryan and I turned around, but could only see grass, shifting in the breeze.

Winter started running, whipping her hands about in the greenery, trying to track down what she'd seen.
Was
there something here?

I untied the rope from around my waist, crawled to my shaky feet and joined her,
swatting
the grass.

Eventually Winter stopped, letting herself fall to the ground in a heap. I looked over at Ryan.
Despair
was etched on his face.

I couldn't find anything either. I was fighting a growing feeling in my gut that the Coffin Bay breakthrough Amy had given us was going to end up as nothing but a coincidence and a false lead. We'd found the acacia, but there was no sign of Sligo here.

‘OK, Hummingbird Hawk-moth,' I said, as I lifted the gadget out of my bag, ‘time to do more than just hover around my bedroom.' Using my remote, I gave the hawk-moth a short test flight to make sure it hadn't been crushed in my fall. It shot up into the air and circled on command.

‘It's recording everything around and beneath it to a distance of seventy metres,' I explained.
‘Pretty good detail, too. But anything further than that gets a bit fuzzy.'

If there's anything here worth finding, I told myself, the hawk-moth will find it.

DAY 14

17 days to go …

‘Hey, guys, get over here,' said Ryan. I opened my eyes. We'd been taking shifts since yesterday, monitoring the footage from the hawk-moth, and I'd just fallen asleep on the rug on the floor. ‘I think I just saw something weird.'

Winter leaned over him as he began
rewinding
the footage a few seconds. I jumped up to join them.

‘Look!' he said, pointing at a dark shape on the screen that seemed to appear and then
disappear
up on the flat area behind the lighthouse, in the ruins of the keeper's quarters. ‘There—what was that?'

Ryan moved aside and let me take control. I rewound the footage and zoomed in on the moving
object, adjusting the contrast to get some more definition. I hit ‘play'.

Again a dark figure appeared, then disappeared.

‘That's a person, I'm sure of it,' said Winter. ‘But it can't be Sligo. This person's too small. But where did they come from? The footage isn't skipping, is it?'

‘Definitely not,' I said, looking at the time code.

‘It doesn't make sense,' said Winter. ‘One second there's nothing, and the next—there's a figure crouched there. Like they've come out … from the ground.'

I played the footage once more. This time it was clear. A dark figure seemed to materialise, crawling out of the ground. It looked up at the sky and glanced around like a meerkat, then quickly vanished once more.

‘Underground?' said Ryan. ‘Did Sligo take you to an underground chamber? Like a bunker beneath the rubble of the lighthouse keeper's quarters?'

‘Were we standing on top of it all along?' I wondered.

The three of us jumped up, wide-eyed, ready to roll again. The hawk-moth had given us the goods!

‘Back to Coffin Bay!' I yelled.

DAY 15

16 days to go …

I stood in the darkness, straining to hear
anything
that might warn me of approaching danger. What if this was a set-up? What if instead of us watching Sligo, he was actually watching us, right now?

I jumped at the sound of a night bird's shriek and felt Winter tense up beside me.

‘We have to be quiet. If they are here, we can't let them know we're onto them,' Winter warned. ‘And if they heard us last time, they could be expecting us.'

At night, the lighthouse looked ominous. Inside the ruins, Winter was on her hands and knees again, gently feeling around for some sort of inconsistency in the ground. I carefully kicked grass and stones around, looking for some sign of a dugout. We had torches with us but didn't
want to alert Sligo to our presence by lighting up our position, so we were counting on the
moonlight
to guide us.

Ryan seemed distracted. He kept looking around him. He'd been doing it since we'd left the car, down on the road by the neighbouring beach.

‘What's up?' I asked. ‘Think Sligo's watching us?'

‘Nah, it's nothing. I'm probably just being paranoid.'

‘About what?' I persisted. Ryan was usually pretty cool, calm and collected, and right now he was rattled.

He gestured me forward with a subtle lift of his head, away from Winter. ‘I just had this feeling that someone was following us,' he whispered. ‘I kept seeing this red car in the rear-view mirror, on the drive over here. I first noticed it behind us in Dolphin Point—when we'd stopped at some lights. Anyway, I didn't think anything more of it until I noticed it behind us again when we turned off the freeway.'

‘What are you guys whispering about?' asked Winter. ‘Come on, help me.'

We turned our attention back to the ground.

‘Hey,' I said quietly, noticing something shiny in the grass. I reached out for it.

There was a metallic clicking noise, and
‘OWWW!' I shouted, falling in pain. Something had clamped down on my hand!

Ryan rushed over as Winter flicked on her torch and pointed it at me. Ryan cursed when he saw the jagged jaws of the bear trap crushing my left hand. Blood gushed from my torn flesh and dripped onto the ground.

‘Careful,' I cried, waving Winter away with my other hand, ‘there might be more.' The pain was excruciating, but I tried to focus on rescuing Cal to stop myself from passing out.

‘Ryan, quick! Help me get this off him,' Winter begged. ‘You grab that side.'

The pair pulled at opposite teeth of the jaws while I tried not to scream out in pain.

‘It won't budge,' said Winter. ‘We're going to have to try something else. Here,' she said, pointing to a sandstone brick, ‘put your hand there, Boges.'

‘Why?' I moaned in agony.

‘Just do it! We'll have to break it open,' she said, picking up a piece of another brick and raising it above her head.

‘No!' I said, but she was bringing the brick down fast. I shut my eyes. ‘OWW!'

An intense hit of pain rushed up my arm as the brick connected … but then the pressure released.

My hand was free. I hugged it close to me.

Ryan took off his jumper and pulled at my arm, wrapping my hand to stop the bleeding. Giant teeth marks sliced my skin in two neat lines. ‘Someone … clearly doesn't … want us here,' I moaned.

I looked up and Winter had a strange smirk on her face. I squinted at her, confused. She
signalled
down with her eyes.

I followed her gaze and the line of her
torchlight
and saw that the sandstone brick she'd picked up had revealed something underneath. Something small, round and rusty.

A small bronze ring.

She'd found a trapdoor. The lighthouse keeper
did
have an underground bunker!

‘You OK?' she asked me. I gritted my teeth and nodded, pushing the pain out of my mind as much as I could.

Winter pulled the ring up, and before Ryan or I could say anything to stop her, she'd lifted the door and jumped down into the cavity below.

I jumped down next, followed quickly by Ryan. We dropped hard, about two and a half metres to the floor. I cried out in pain as I rolled onto my injured hand. The trapdoor slammed shut above us, sealing us in darkness.

‘This is where we were before!' Winter said, spinning around the dark room, shining her torch over the walls. ‘I'd remember this stench anywhere.'

She was right. The room was about four metres square and smelled rank. The air was thick and hot, just like the last time we were here.

‘Look at the TV,' Winter added, panic rising in her voice. It was smashed to smithereens on the concrete floor. She kicked at it.

We all started feeling around the walls, searching for clues or hidden compartments. I found an old rope ladder hooked to a wall as I tried to ignore the throbbing pain in my hand.

‘Do you think Cal was in here?' asked Ryan.

‘Not sure,' I said.

‘No-one's here now,' said Winter. ‘What if we're too late?'

‘No,' I said flatly. This was
not
going to turn out to be another dead end. ‘Keep looking for clues. There must be something here that will lead us to Cal. Cover every square centimetre with your torches.'

I sifted through what remained of the TV and held the end of the severed power cord under my torchlight. The wires were frayed, pulled
forcefully
from a socket. But where could there be a power point down here?

I stood up, fighting off an overwhelming sense of defeat, and turned to my friends.

The hopelessness and exhaustion on their faces was undeniable.

Ryan wiped his forehead on his sleeve. ‘What do we do now?' he asked.

Just then, dust and dirt fell from the ceiling and rained down on us as the room trembled.

Someone was coming!

Instinctively, the three of us tensed and
cowered
, nervously looking up at the trapdoor.

Winter swore under her breath. ‘What should we do?' she whispered. I could practically feel her heart thudding in the dank air between us.

‘I don't know,' I answered, scanning the space for an alternative escape route.

Ryan had his bulky torch raised above his head, ready to attack whoever was about to descend upon us.

The trapdoor creaked open.

‘I thought I told him to leave the ladder out,' a familiar voice muttered as a hand fumbled inside the opening, pulling the rope ladder from the wall.

Sligo! That unmistakeable slimy, rasping voice!

We froze, not knowing what move to make next. We were trapped. He was coming through our only exit.

His bulbous body began squeezing down into the room. Moonlight seeped in through the small gaps as he climbed down. Luckily, Sligo, wearing a ratty pinstriped suit, was facing away from us.

I held my breath and sensed the others doing so too. We would have just one chance to take him by surprise.

His gleaming black and white brogues landed with a thud, just in front of us. I backed away, silently herding Winter behind me, trying to ignore the pain in my injured hand.

Sligo groaned as he straightened up and grabbed his side with pain. He began. ‘I told you not to move the—'

His voice was cut off mid-sentence as a terrifying noise reverberated through the
claustrophobic
den.

‘AAAARRGH!' Ryan screamed as he charged Sligo like a vengeful bull. Sligo slammed up against the chamber wall.

‘What have you done with my brother?' Ryan shouted. ‘Where is he?'

Sligo struggled to turn and meet his attacker. The right side of his face was pinned against the wall, and the left side of his dirt-streaked face shone with beads of sweat. His bulging eye, just visible behind Ryan, scanned the room
frantically
… until it found its target.

It locked onto something beside me, and then froze there.

‘Hello, Winter,' he rasped, struggling under Ryan's grip. His bulging eye seemed to pulsate with wicked energy. ‘What a joy it is to see my former charge looking so desperate!'

I stepped further in front of my friend,
protectively
. I could sense her wanting to pounce, but I held my bandaged arm out to stop her.

‘Ha!' laughed Sligo. ‘And so the trap catches the bear!'

‘Shut up and tell us where Cal is,' I said, putting my hand behind my back. ‘You need to do as
we
tell you now.'

Sligo ignored me, intent on taunting Winter instead. ‘Aren't you going to say hello,
sweetheart
? Feeling lonely in that big old house of yours?' he sneered. ‘If you want company, I'm sure I can arrange someone to, ah, pop around and pay you a visit.'

Ryan pushed him harder, and Sligo fell to his knees. Ryan lifted him back to his feet and shoved him up against the wall again, pinning him into position.

‘Not so terrifying now, are you!' said Ryan.