Frozen in Time (2 page)

‘Ow!’ he said. ‘It’s hot!’

Fearfully they looked around the back of the TV. The hot and dusty smell was strongest under its rear outcrop of dark grey plastic moulding and wires. Luckily, nothing seemed to be on fire.

They sat back down again and looked at each other. True, they had probably experienced more excitement around the TV in the last twenty seconds than they had for the past five weeks—but now even Seventies TV detectives were denied to them. The final week of school holiday stretched ahead bleakly. More rain. No telly.

‘Oh no,’ murmured Ben, weakly. ‘I think we’ll start playing Monopoly soon.’

‘It hasn’t come to that yet,’ said Rachel. ‘Maybe it’ll stop raining.’

They both looked forlornly out at the deep, dark green, slithery, slippery garden. Under the beaded curtain of endless drops of water, it fell away down steep slopes towards the lower lawn and the stream. Their parents were hopeless gardeners, but that didn’t matter. In a normal summer the garden was perfect for playing in. It had many tall trees: old oak, rowan, ash and elder; several good apple trees, and hazels, which were a larder for a dozen or more squirrels.

Through its overgrown grass and thickly spreading bushes, foxes would flit. Jays would clack noisily in the trees. It was a wildlife garden. That’s what their mum called it. It was the way she justified never mowing the lawn. Once or twice a year they would get in ‘contractors’ to hack it back a bit—so they could actually get out of the house.

But for most of the time it was left to do its own thing—as was the tangled wood beyond the stream, also part of the grounds which went with the house. The garden was great, thought Rachel, resting her forehead against the old, wobbly glass of the sash window and steaming it up with her sigh, but when it was this wet—
this
wet—you just couldn’t
do
the garden. You couldn’t even get down the bank, unless you were happy about going head first.

‘Bum,’ said Ben. He sat heavily on the old leather pouffe next to Rachel and also rested his forehead against the window.

Then it stopped raining. Just like that. Then the sun came out.

‘What’s that weird light?’ said Ben and Rachel wasn’t sure that he was joking. For the first time in more than three weeks, the summer sun finally smiled.

They whooped. They cheered. They jumped up and down and then ran for the hallway.

Uncle Jerome emerged at the top of the stairs, blinking. ‘What’s all the racket about?’ he demanded fiercely.

‘The sun! The sun!’ Rachel was bouncing up and down, while Ben was flinging their wellingtons out from under the stairs. ‘Look!’

Uncle Jerome squinted down at the large front door, with its stained-glass windows. The green, red, and yellow in the leaded panes were actually reflecting in the unpolished tiles on the hallway floor. Even Uncle Jerome smiled.

‘Good news!’ he said. ‘Now you can get outside for a bit and we can stop driving each other batty.’

Ben was hit in the face by a soggy honeysuckle bloom as soon as the door was open. He didn’t care. He and his sister scrambled past the porch and stood on the narrow gravel path above the bank, raising their pale faces to the sky and feeling the warm sun pat across their noses and cheeks with her soft, fond, long-lost fingers.

‘Oh! Oh! At last!’ beamed Rachel, feeling as if she might possibly cry with delight. Even the sight of the fallen satellite dish, dangling next to the porch on its flex, didn’t bother her now.

They pelted past the ornamental well and across to the giant acer which grew at the top of the bank in a wriggling tangle of pale trunk and branches. It was the perfect hand-hold for lowering yourself carefully down the first few metres of slippery greenery. Then there was a leap down to the rhododendrons, which would hopefully break your fall before you scrambled through some knee-high shrubs and lilies and out onto the lower lawn.

The lower lawn looked like a huge chocolate blancmange. Its grass was drowned in ten or eleven centimetres of muddy water. The stream had overflowed. On the opposite bank the land began to rise again, held firm by the gnarly roots of trees which had been there for hundreds of years.

Ben and Rachel waded across the lawn in their wellingtons and splashed more deeply across the stony bed of the stream. Grabbing the roots, they hauled themselves up on the far bank.

‘Den?’ said Ben.

‘If it hasn’t been washed away!’ said Rachel and they made their way to a collection of planks and old doors which they had made into a den last summer, leaning them up against the almost horizontal bough of a beech tree, like a sort of tent. Inside, their plastic crates were soaked and a wooden tea chest they’d used as a table was growing mould.

‘We should have covered it with plastic sheeting,’ sighed Rachel.

But Ben wasn’t listening. He was peering hard through the triangular entrance at something through the trees. His brow was furrowing and he was narrowing his eyes.

‘What is it?’ asked Rachel, trying to follow his gaze.

‘Dunno,’ said Ben. ‘Something—something shiny. Down there. There’s something shiny stuck in the ground.’

Rachel pushed her shoulder next to Ben’s and stared in the direction he was pointing. He was right. There
was
something, smooth and glinting in the pale sunshine, deep between the roots and the ivy and the rich brown earth.

‘Probably an old hub cap off a car or something,’ she said. ‘Probably someone’s been dumping stuff again. Hey! Wait for me!’

Ben was already running and slithering across the knotty woodland floor to examine the thing. Rachel scrambled after him. It was probably rubbish, but she didn’t want to be left out. By the time she caught him up, Ben was hunkered down, wiping away the dead leaves and peat from the thing. It looked a bit like a car steering wheel. An old style, large metal one, like you might see in classic cars, lying at a slight angle in the earth. The remains of a very decomposed old log lay over part of it. It looked as if the log had slid down the bank slightly in all the rain.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ben, grunting with effort as he tried to prise the wheel thing out of the soil. He had managed to hook his fingers around the curve of metal tubing on each side of its circumference, but although he was tugging hard, it wouldn’t give. Rachel crouched down beside him and dug her fingers into the cold earth around it too. They both, instinctively, took a breath and then pulled hard, together.

Grunts of effort rang through the small copse and startled the wood pigeons, which flapped clumsily among the higher branches, bumbling and cooing in an offended tone.

The wheel wouldn’t give.

‘I reckon it’s attached to something in the ground,’ said Ben, poking his fingers deeper into the dark earth around it. ‘Help me dig.’

Rachel didn’t know why he was getting so excited. It was a just a wheel. Still, she shrugged and knelt down, oblivious to the water squeezing out of the wet sponge of earth into the denim knees of her jeans, and made her fingers into spade shape, like her brother.

Utterly soaked by nearly a month of unstoppable rain, the soil gave up its hold quite readily, and soon they had cleared a sort of crater around the wheel, down to a thick metal post at its centre.

‘What metal is it?’ asked Rachel, flicking a squirming, annoyed worm off her fingers.

‘Steel, I think,’ said Ben, although he didn’t know. ‘Really hard and solid, whatever it is. Keep digging.’

They were getting filthy, but did not worry. Uncle Jerome wouldn’t notice, and as they did their own washing, there was nobody to give a sharp exhalation and fold their arms in annoyance when they traipsed back to the house later.

Soon the crater was a few centimetres deep and the soil was damp rather than saturated. Ben was getting fed up. He grasped the wheel and tried to shake it but it absolutely wouldn’t budge. He sat back on his muddy heels and wiped his dark blond fringe out of his eyes, leaving a wide trail of woodland ink across his brow. ‘It should be budging by now!’ he said, crossly. ‘We should be able to get it out! We can make a go-kart or something with it.’

Rachel sat back too and sighed heavily from the spent effort. ‘Maybe it’s not a steering wheel,’ she pondered. Ben creased his muddied forehead and thought. He stood up and looked at the trees around them. Then he made vague measuring shapes with his soil-caked hands, turning them vertically and examining the sky through the chinks in the gently dripping leaves, before peering back at the wheel.

‘It’s dead horizontal!’ he said, thoughtfully.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. You can’t tell at first, because the ground’s at an angle here—it’s a bank.’ He sank down again, kneeling on the edge of the crater and resting his elbows and forearms on the obstinate wheel. He chewed on his lower lip, as he always did when an idea was coming to him. ‘I think it’s joined to something big and heavy under the soil. It must have been here for years—but that log was on top of it. Come on!’ With renewed enthusiasm he ducked down into the crater and dug harder.

Rachel joined him, raking her fingers deep down into the soil, tearing through its network of fine roots, dragging up clumps of matter and hurling them off away from the excavation. They were both feeling excited. It beat watching telly. After another five minutes Ben gave a shout. His fingers had met with more metal—the thick column under the wheel was joined to a flat surface under the soil. They both tried to make it tilt in its dark brown bed, but it was as immovable as the wheel.

Intrigued, they knelt back and stared at it. Then Ben gave an exclamation and rubbed quickly at the metal surface five centimetres from the column. Under his fingers Rachel could see the earth catching. The metal was raised here, in relief. A curve around the base of the column tapered to a triangular point.

‘It’s an arrow!’ gasped Ben. ‘An arrow!’

‘What does that mean?’

Ben was looking at her with gleaming eyes and an excited grin. ‘It’s an arrow! Like you get on taps or bottle lids. It’s telling us which way to turn the wheel!’

Rachel stared at the wheel and the arrow.

‘Don’t you get it?’ demanded Ben, in a voice which was squeakier than usual. ‘It
opens
! There’s something down there—and it
opens
!’

In the large shed that had been built on to the side of the old Victorian house they found spades and forks and trowels. They each took what they could carry in one arm and slid awkwardly down the soaked bank.

Back at their excavation site they dug around the wheel and its metal base, dragging the earth, roots, stones, and affronted creepy crawlies off its surface. The flat base was, in fact, very slightly curved, like a dome.

‘What do you think it
is
?’ gasped Rachel, her cheeks crimson with effort under the streaks of mud.

‘I dunno,’ Ben gasped back, equally florid and muddy. ‘Maybe some kind of fuel tank. We’d better be careful not to light a match near it when we open it.’

‘We haven’t got any matches!’ pointed out his sister.

‘Well—just don’t make a spark then.’

Rachel gave him a look. ‘I’ll try not to. It’ll be hard though.’

They laughed while they dug on.

‘Hey!’ Rachel knelt up and yanked Ben’s arm. ‘Look!’

The edge of the dome could now clearly be seen. They could see that the whole thing must be about a metre across and perfectly round. It took half an hour to reveal the complete, raised circle of metal and the beginning of another level, about ten centimetres beneath it. At length, they stood back, resting on their shovels and measuring the circle with their eyes. For several seconds, both were silent, before slowly turning to look at each other.

‘You know what I think …?’ murmured Ben in wonder. ‘I think it’s a manhole.’

Rachel felt suddenly frightened. ‘It might be,’ she said, with a gulp. ‘But we don’t know that it’s actually for
men.
’

‘What
are
you on about?’

She looked slightly embarrassed, but also stubborn. ‘It might
not
be for men!’ she repeated. ‘Haven’t you ever heard about this sort of thing? It might be,’ she dropped her voice low, ‘an alien spacecraft!’

Ben stared at her and then burst out laughing. ‘What? With these markings from a distant galaxy?’ he snorted, pointing to the furthest edge of metal he’d been clearing. On it were the letters ‘H J E’ followed by a ‘1’ and a ‘9’. The rest, if there was any more, was still covered in soil.