Green Boy (15 page)

We plowed up through the dry sand, as fast as we could. A dozen things were darting around my mind. Where could we go? He could catch us by sea, he could catch us by land—Long Pond Cay was Sapphire Island Resort now, where he worked with his powerful friends. The way we were running, we were headed only for the flats, where the soft mud would catch our feet. We'd have to go sideways instead, along the edge of the flats, away from the new development and over to the windy seaward end of the cay, where a ridge of trees grew.

I called to Lou, “Go left! This way!” and as I turned past the casuarinas fringing the dunes, I tripped and went sprawling on the sand. The machete flew out of my hands and into a bush. Lou saw me fall, and came back to help. I shrieked at him to run, but he kept coming. I scrambled up, and groped around in the bush for my machete.

Overhead I heard that familiar thin cry,
“Peeeu, peeeu,”
and knew that the ospreys were wheeling about, high up, watching.

My fingers found the handle of the machete, and I was up on my feet again, turning inland. My father came running over the dunes, among the casuarina trees. Ahead of me, Lou let out a strange high hooting sound
that I'd never heard before; it echoed eerily over the gleaming mirror-still bonefish flats.

I could hear my father's heavy breathing as he ran at me. Suddenly I was paralyzed; I turned desperately forward and back and didn't know which way to go. I faced my father, holding out my machete like a sword, and stood there screaming at him. “Get away! Get away!”

He paused for a moment, panting, his face stiff with anger.

And a wind sang in the casuarina trees, and the air shivered all around us. I felt Lou take my free hand. The light was dying, and I knew that the Otherworld was there behind me, and that one more step would put me there, out of reach. So I reached my foot backwards.

My daddy's face changed. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened a little way in horror, or astonishment, or plain disbelief. I don't think he saw the Otherworld, I don't think you can see it touching ours unless it's calling you. I think we simply vanished away from him.

And he vanished from us, and Lou and I were standing in half-darkness, in cold air, at the entrance to the labyrinth.

 

In the beginning nobody was there, not Bryn nor Gwen nor Annie. Two lighted lanterns were on the ground, filling the tunnel with dim light. Our shadows were huge on the roof. We stood there facing the rough, damp stone wall, with the three engraved words above
our heads, and beside them the three round holes with a small rock star in the first.

Rigel
Bellatrix
Betelgeuse

We were still gasping for breath after the running and the fear, yet some other things from our own time were quite gone. Though our clothes had been soaked from splashing through the sea, and our sneakers heavy with sea-water and sand, now they were dry. The hunk of bread in my pocket was dry too, though it should have been squishy and soaked. So was the machete in my hand. I noticed these things without wondering about them; the front of my mind was too busy feeling relief that now my daddy couldn't carry me away from Lou. But right on the heels of that came the other fear, the one that belonged to the Otherworld: what was the thing that we had to do here?

That seemed never to have frightened Lou, and it didn't now. He reached into the pocket of his shorts, and brought out the two fossil star shells: little chunks of grey rock in the shape of ten-pointed stars. Holding them out to me, he looked up at the two round gaps in the wall, and made a little questioning sound.

“I know,” I said. “They need to go in those holes, for sure, but how do we get them there? No way we can reach, even with me holding you up.”

Lou was still staring up at the gaps, thinking. He turned to me, facing me, and patted me on the shoulders. Then he bent and patted his feet.

“Hmm,” I said. I didn't think that would work. But when I went and stood next to the wall and reached up both my arms, my fingers weren't much more than a foot from the nearest hole. And Lou was a lot taller than the length of my arms. He was right; if we could get him up to stand on my shoulders, he could reach.

This was something we'd never done before. I crouched down facing the wall, with my hands flat against it, and Lou tried to get a foot on my shoulder. He couldn't, it was too far up. Then he tried to do it by standing on my knee first, and I fell down, and so did he. He laughed. I'd banged my knee, so I didn't laugh right that minute, but I wasn't going to give up yet.

“Try sitting on my shoulders,” I said. We knew how to do that—at any rate, we'd done it a lot in the sea, fooling around. I got down again, and Lou cocked his leg over the back of my neck and grabbed my head, so that he was more or less sitting on my shoulders, and with a lot of effort, and him clutching at the wall as well as my head, I managed to stagger up to standing. He was a whole lot heavier than he'd felt when we did it in the water, I can tell you. But he made a little crowing sound, and I could tilt my head just enough to see him fit one of the star shells into the lowest gap in the wall.

There was a tiny, spooky flash of light, and a click,
and the shell was resting in the gap. But though he stretched as high as he could, he couldn't reach up to the third hole to put the last shell in place.

That was the moment when we heard a rustling, thudding sound behind us: the sound of feet running. I felt a crazy flash of fear that my father had somehow been transported to the Otherworld, to chase and catch me, but as the feet skidded close we heard Bryn's voice, deep and urgent.

“Wait, Lou! Wait a moment!”

He was level with us now, and he swung Lou up off my shoulders. But instead of reaching him up higher, he set him down on the ground. Annie was there too, and Gwen, in the same rough dark clothes as before. They all three looked worried, and very serious; I suppose they'd been afraid they might not reach us in time. In time for what?

Annie crouched beside Lou so that she was looking him in the eye. She took him by the shoulders. She said, “Are you quite sure?”

Lou laughed, as if she had made a joke. He nodded, very hard.

Gwen said softly into my ear, “You see, this is a danger that you are going into. This mystery of the words on the wall.”

I heard myself say, “For love of life.”

She still looked serious, but she punched me lightly on the arm, like saying
right on.
We really could have
been friends, Gwen and me, in spite of her being older. She said, “And you came out of danger this time, didn't you, you came running. I felt it.”

She was looking at the machete in my right hand, but without asking. “It's a long story,” I said.

Gwen turned her head to look at Lou. “Stay beside him,” she said. “Stay beside him all the time.”

Annie was hugging Lou now, very close, the way Mam hugs us when she has to go back to Nassau. When she was done, Bryn put a hand on his shoulder too and gave it a squeeze. His face was grave and stern, and—it's an odd word, considering Lou's only seven—
respectful.
I was beginning to feel more and more as though the Underground didn't think of us as people, but as some kind of offering to Gaia. Whoever Gaia was.

They are fanatics, do you understand that?
Sir had said.
Fanatics . . . threatening doom . . . threatening a sacrifice . . .

But Lou trusted them, so I had to as well.

Bryn lifted Lou up high; he was so big that Lou could sit there on just one of his broad shoulders, with his hand round Bryn's head. Gwen gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Go well,” she said.

Annie came to stand beside me with one hand on my shoulder. And Lou reached out from his high perch and fitted the third star shell into its gap on the wall. Like the other, it flashed and clicked, and there it was, in place, as if it had always been there.

But that wasn't all.

Very gradually, a deep rumbling sound began, somewhere a long way below us. It wasn't too loud, but it was
huge;
you could feel a faint vibration in the earth and the rock all around. It gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling you have when you're empty, except that the emptiness this time was full of fear.

Bryn put up his hands to Lou and swung him down to the ground. Lou looked round for me, and reached out to take my free hand, and I saw Bryn, Annie and Gwen all stepping back away from us.

There we stood, the two of us, alone.

The rumbling died down, and in the wall, the three star shells began to glow. Brighter and brighter they grew, blazing out, filling the cave with brilliant light, and then with a tremendous cracking noise, a split opened in the wall beside them. Very slowly, with the awful scraping screech we had heard when Bryn opened the first rock door, the wall started to move, but this time it swung back like a door on a hinge. The stars were in the middle of this door, and as it swung, the light blazing out of them filled the dark space of the labyrinth.

He walks through stars,
the prophecy had said.

I felt Lou's hand give mine a little squeeze, and we walked in.

Our shadows went before us into the cave. It was wider than the tunnels had been, though not so high, maybe six feet or so. The rocky walls were bumpy but smooth, gleaming with moisture. It smelled damp, but
the air was fresh; there must have been little gaps open to the air, somewhere.

I heard a noise ahead, and I stopped. I could feel my heart thumping. “Listen!”

Lou cocked his head, but there was nothing but a faint dripping of water. He tugged my hand.

“Lou,” I said, not moving, “didn't they tell you what this is all
for?
Are we going in here to find something?”

Lou looked up at me earnestly, and shook his head.

The handle of my machete was damp with my own sweat. “We just go in? And what happens, happens?”

He nodded. Then he flashed a grin at me, and he pointed his finger ahead, and then back, behind us.
We go in, we come out

Let's hope so, Lou.

He tugged my hand again. That talking tree had certainly given him total faith in what we were doing. Total blind faith. I swallowed, and we went on. The cave turned sharply to the left, so we followed it, and the light came with us. I don't know how. It didn't behave like normal beams of light; it seemed to be filling the space all around us, like air.

Our footsteps made soft scuffling noises. We turned another corner, this time to the right. I'd expected the labyrinth to be a maze, where you had to choose the right way to get to the center, and then follow it back again to get out, but this wasn't a maze, it was just a twisty cave. And now that the dim light was all around us, not coming from any one place, we had no shadows.

Just as we came to another dark turning, there was a high squeal from somewhere ahead, and I saw a pair of red eyes shining in the darkness, down on the ground. I let out a yell, and we stopped. The light flowed round us. There against the wall was a black rat, as big as my foot. The red eyes gleamed at us. I could see sharp bright teeth.

Lou let go of my hand and reached awkwardly into the pocket of my shorts. He pulled out the chunk of bread that was still in there, squished but dry, and he threw it onto the ground behind us. The rat rushed past us to get it, brushing by my ankle, and as it got there we heard more squeals, and two other rats dived at the bread out of the darkness. The squeals became angry snarls, and yelps of pain, and we left them tearing not just at the bread but at each other.

The luminous air came with us round the bend. It was a strange half-light, just enough to show the direction of the cave, not enough to show details—which made it scary, because you could imagine monsters in every patch of shadow. I could, anyway. Lou, he just went on.

And then, round the next turning, we came on something with a light of its own. It was the light that we saw first, glowing out of the left-hand wall ahead of us: a wonderful luminous glow of rainbow colors all flowing in and out of each other, the way colors do on the surface of a soap bubble. It was so beautiful that I forgot to be scared; I was too busy wondering what such a light could
possibly be coming from. When we came closer we saw that there was a tall niche, almost a small room, in the wall, from which this light was pouring, and that the thing inside it was even more amazing than the light itself.

It was as if the softest imaginable blanket, very light and thick, woven of long silky iridescent fibres, had been attached to the back of the niche and then molded around the sides. If it hadn't been upright, it would have looked like a wonderful welcoming nest, inviting you to curl up in its coziness. Even the way it was, you wanted to walk into it and nestle up against the sides. The threads shifted very gently, glimmering. I put out a hand, but couldn't quite bring myself to touch, in case the thing, whatever it was, might vanish like a bubble and suddenly be gone.

But Lou reached out and grabbed my hand, hard, and pulled it down. He gave a hard sharp grunt of warning.

And before there was time for anything else, the center of this beautiful feathery nest fell away, as if it had dissolved, and out of the opening came a nightmare. Stalking toward us we saw a sprawl of hairy black legs as tall as Lou, and from them hung a gleaming black head and a huge round body, glittering black with a bright red mark on its belly. It was a gigantic spider, half as big as me. She was horrible. Her long legs swung her body over to us so fast that there wasn't the smallest chance of escape.

One black leg kicked me hard in the chest, and I fell backwards, dropping my machete, banging my head on the rock. Through my dizziness I heard Lou scream, and as I scrambled to my feet I saw the spider towering over him, two bristled black legs flickering to and fro, an iridescence like the light glittering through the air. He struggled only for a second. She was wrapping him in spider-silk. Her spinning-legs moved so fast that already I could only see his head.