Six Days (12 page)

W
e clear up the camp, and I stuff the throwing club in my belt, just in case. It ain’t the safest option, but I figure it’s best if we split up to save time. Me and Wilbur start with Egypt. Erin and Peyto take Africa.

And so the search begins. I take it in at first – all the great carved faces, and lion hunts, and eagle gods, and gold beetles, and long-dead kings. The cats watch us, all jittery, cowering from my flashlight beam. Sometimes whole loads of them make a break for it into another room, weaving about the exhibits like floods of dark water. It gives you the shivers to think how
old
everything is – Wilbur reads bits out to me, and some of the stuff goes back five thousand years, before London even, scavved from some faraway desert city. It makes my head spin with all the millions of lives what’s been and gone since these things was made. Folks in a different age, yakking to each other in another language, with different worries running through their heads … I like the shapes of the Egypt stuff –
it’s all so
royal
and powerful, with all them bird-headed gods looming over you, staring out with their all-seeing eyes …

All the same, there ain’t nothing that looks like a flinder.

Just the
dark weight
of it all – statues and headdresses and fancy daggers – it wears me out. But Wilbur, he’s just lapping it up. He’s still wiping the dust off plaques long after we leave Ancient Civilizations to head upstairs.

And what with all this wandering from room to room, my brain starts wandering, too. And it ain’t just the question of Gramps that’s getting to me. It’s something about the fact that we’re in a museum …

At last I haul Wilbur up.

“Look, if this was such a hot lead, how come it’s gone all cold again? We could be here for weeks.”

“I
know
it’s here, Cass.”

“Don’t get all miffed – we followed you here, didn’t we? It’s just you said you got a tingling feeling when you was on the right track with them comics – but you ain’t getting that now?”

He shakes his head.

“So maybe it was here once, but it ain’t now …,” I go.

His eyes shine as he ponders this. “No, it’s definitely here. We’re getting warmer, I know we are.”

Seeing him there armed with his comics and his pockets full of junk, I get a twinge of fear. Cos the ship is right. Its words about Wilbur come back to me –
His dreams of this
flinder are strong. He can sense where it lies.
Somehow, Wilbur does know stuff. He found Peyto at Big Ben and he’s the whole reason we’re on this trail at all. So maybe he is The One. But this business with the wounded ship singling out Wilbur – I don’t like it one bit. Cos didn’t Gramps say something about how there would be a special one who was gonna make the artifact stronger? But what does that mean for Wilbur? All these puzzles are just hovering round my head like flies, not settling.

And then something hits me. Wilbur’s gone trotting up ahead along a corridor, away from the collection rooms. I hurry after him, past a bunch of NO ENTRY signs and some makeshift barriers.

“Wilbur, wait up!”

He hangs back, but I can tell he’s all eager to get to the next room.

“Listen, this is a museum, right? Everything’s like centuries old.”

“So?”

“Well, if the flinder’s here, then maybe it got found a long time ago.”

Wilbur’s jaw drops open. “What if Halina didn’t leave the ship with her flinder last week, last year, or even a hundred years ago when Bartlett started looking for the artifact? What if she came down to Earth in ancient times?”

“Then she’s been dead …” We both whisper it together. “For
thousands of years
.”

“Not a word about this to Peyto – we don’t want to upset him, OK?”

But then my head just starts racing. Cos if Halina came to Earth way back when, then that means the ship’s been waiting a crazy long time to wake Peyto and Erin up. Waiting for what? For The One? Why leave it so late? ’Specially when there ain’t no time for Peyto and Erin to wake up all the other sleepers themselves … And right then, it twigs. I close my eyes with the horror of it.

The
Aeolus
don’t want to wake
nobody
up if it can help it.
It wants them all to stay asleep.

I open my eyes, and Wilbur’s just staring at me, and all the color’s gone from his face.

“What’s wrong? You OK?”

“I can feel it, Cass.” His voice is quiet and it raises the hairs on my neck. “We’re close, really close. It ain’t like the other flinders, like Erin’s or Peyto’s. This one, it’s different.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s calling me, Cass. I can feel it.”

Then he turns and scurries off ahead.

“Wilbur, slow down!”

When I catch up, I find him standing at the edge of a large space that looks more like a warehouse than a collection room. From the skylight a sunbeam shines down onto forklift trucks and scattered crates. There’s these
panels that make a winding path, and on some of them there’s pictures and bits of writing. The scenes show a hilltop, a grass-covered ditch, and some rough lumps of stone. I start to feel proper uneasy, though I ain’t sure why.

“It’s here, Cass,” he whispers.

He takes my hand and together we go round the maze of panels, and there at the end is a steel box on a trolley. It gleams in the sunlight, and as I move closer I see that it ain’t just a box. The lid’s all complicated with clamps and seals, and it’s linked up with hoses to other machines.

“You reckon that’s it?” I go.

“Yeah, can you feel it, too?”

“What?”

“Like a buzzing in your head.”

“No. Look, if this is giving you the collywobbles, why don’t you sit over there and let me check it out?”

Suddenly he grips my hand so tight it hurts. “Look, Cass!”

He’s pointing at a bunch of stickers and official-looking stamps on the side of the box.

“Slow down – you know I can’t read. What does it say?”

“Specimen: 80304. Renshaw Barrow Dig. Gib Hill. Homo sapiens, female. ‘Arbor Low Woman.’ Caution: contents at freeze-dry conditions.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s all that in English?”

“It’s a body,” whispers Wilbur. “It’s her. It’s Halina.”

“Right, I want you to go and sit over there, OK?”

“Cass, I don’t want to,” he whimpers.

“And I don’t want you to see what’s inside. Trust me. I’m just right here. Let me look first, OK?”

Slowly he lets go of my hand and backs away to the wall panels.

I stare at the box, just hovering there, my hand on the casing.

“Oh God, Cass!”

I spin round, but he’s only reading the wall panels.

“They found her in a burial mound that was already dug. Just by accident. She never showed up on their scans before that. And she was preserved! Normally, bodies just rot away – they don’t survive that long, unless they’re buried in peat bogs or frozen ground. No one knows how the body lasted. She’s from the Stone Age, Cass. She’s five thousand years old!”

I point at the hoses and the tanks, all covered in dust now. “Yeah, well, the power’s been off since the Quark Wars, so there ain’t gonna be much of her left now. Anyhow, there’s no way we’ll ever know it’s Peyto’s mum. It ain’t exactly got her name written on the side. Arbor Low Woman – it could be anyone!”

And I’m trying not to come across scared, but my voice is all over the place. This is nuts – I must have clocked thousands of bodies, but I really don’t want to see what’s inside. Then again, I’ve
got
to.

The catches on the box are loose. I lift back the lid and let it topple open. What I figure I’m gonna see is a heap of bones – something in a worse state than Oxford Street Woman out side.

What I
actually
see makes me cry out loud.

“Cass, what is it?”

“Stay back!”

But there ain’t no stopping him now. He runs up next to me and leans over the edge.

It’s true, Arbor Low Woman ain’t much more than some bones held together with black leathery flesh, but that ain’t the half of it. She’s lying on her back, arms clasped over her chest – the way we lay our dead to rest. But coming from inside the skull is a pale glow, the color of summer sky, and hovering around the cheekbones and eye sockets is a layer of dust that outlines the shape of a face. The ghost of a woman as she had once been – beautiful and young.

It gives me the chills to look at her, cos I can make out hair and eyebrows and eyelashes, like she’s right there, not dead but asleep. And there ain’t no getting away from it, Wilbur’s right. It has to be Halina, cos she’s the absolute double of Peyto. And more than that – I’ve seen this blue light enough times to know what’s causing it.

Buried inside the skull is the missing flinder. The artifact. We’ve found it.

“What we gonna do, Cass? What we gonna tell Peyto?”

“We have to get him up here,” I go, trying to get a grip.
“It ain’t fair to keep him in the dark. Trouble is, what we gonna do about the flinder? The freakish thing’s inside her head …”

A familiar voice stops me in my tracks. “Well done, Cass. Now, if you would both step away from the container, I’ll take over from here.”

I spin round. Standing just a few feet away is Gramps. He ain’t even looking at me. He’s just staring at the steel box like he’s blind to anything else, like his life’s dream is just moments away.

“The hunt for this cursed thing is over. At last. Step back, Cass.” His voice is hard.

I blink at him. “You can’t take it.”

“You haven’t got the slightest idea how long and hard I’ve searched for this.”

“It don’t matter. You’ve been rooting around for it all these years, but you don’t even know where it’s from, what it’s for.”

“And you do?”

“I know that it ain’t of this world and it don’t belong to you.”

“
Belong?!
” He almost laughs at me. “You think I want to keep it? All I want is for it to be gone from our city. It’s caused our people nothing but misery for years. It’s a curse! I want the Russians to take it away!”

“What happened to keeping it out the wrong hands?” And then, slowly, the truth dawns on me. “You’re working
with them, ain’t you? That’s how you got across the river so quick. You just used a bridge … Albert Bridge is closest to Battersea Woods. You’re the Vlad spy.”

“You always were a clever girl, Cass.”

“So you got here to ransack the library for the artifact. But there was always a chance it wasn’t gonna be there, so you hung around for us to show up, to do your dirty work for you.”

“Bravo.” His eyes glitter, but there ain’t a hint of a smile.

“But how did you know we’d even get here? Ah … You overheard us talking about the dinghy when we came out the cellar, didn’t you?”

“I’ll take over from here, Cass.”

“But you don’t get it. If the Vlads get hold of it, then …” I think of the ship spinning end over end, closer and closer to Earth.

“Then what?”

“It’s curtains for everyone. A war that just don’t end. Ever.”

He begins to inch toward me, and I’m trying to think of something that’ll get us out of this, but I know how smart he is, how quick he is.

“Something spoke to you, Cass? What was it? Are you afraid of telling me something important?”

Wilbur presses closer to me, and the poor lad is trembling.
Think, Cass, think!
For an instant, all I can picture is
Gramps’s mad incident map – all the pins and photos and crazy scribblings.

“Lost your tongue, Cass? What spoke to you?”

“The
Aeolus
. The voice that spoke to Morgan Bartlett …”

He just nods and curls his lips up into a horrid smile.

And he’s really close now. I can see the gleam in his eyes, all cold and eaten up, like he’s lost it big-time and he ain’t even Gramps no more. And the whole situation is so horribly wrong that I’ve got to do
something
. But I can’t, and it’s like I’m still lost in the madness of Gramps’s map – all them wasted years searching …

“I guess you know now your map was complete cobblers – all them blind alleys. Guess you wasn’t the one

Morgan Bartlett was thinking of when he made all his clues …”

“The map led me here in the end.”

“It didn’t lead you here.
We
did. You
used
us!”

“I had to do whatever was necessary. It doesn’t matter

how
I did it –”

“Course it matters!” I yell at him. “You’re my grandad!

You’re supposed to trust us!” “Like you trusted me?” He stops just an arm’s length away, uncertain for a moment.

“Trust? You stopped caring about us a long time ago.

Ain’t that right? Cos you been holed up in your cellar with your clues and your crazy map!”

And just for a moment, nothing else matters, cos I know what I say is true, and in spite of everything, I just want him to be Gramps, the man who looked after us when Mum was still alive … But there ain’t so much as a flicker from him. He’s a stone.

“I did what I did for the greater good, Cass. To save our people, our land.”

He shoves me aside and leans over the box for his first glimpse of Halina’s ghost face …

And that’s when I go for it. I whip out my club and belt Gramps in the back with everything I’ve got. His scream echoes round the museum, and it cuts right through me, but somehow that makes it easier to do what I’ve got to do. Cos I know it’s gonna break Peyto’s heart. No fannying about. No respect for the dead.

So I look one last time into Halina’s lovely face and reach up to plunge my hand into the remains of her head …

But I’m too late. Wilbur’s there before me. He practically flips into the box on top of her, and I hear the crunch as his hand goes into her skull. I drag him out and he’s got the flinder in his hand. But he ain’t looking at it. He’s looking straight ahead, right through the walls, and his little body’s all rigid. He looks absolutely terrified.

“Oh God, Wilbur! What is it?”

I shake him, but it’s like he can’t see me or feel me anymore, and nothing I do can wipe that look off his face.

I can hear Gramps groaning now, and in the corner of my eye I see him stirring.