The Blackhope Enigma (27 page)

With a grave bow, Hugo escorted Sunni to the mouth of the labyrinth. Before she set off, she rifled through her backpack and handed him something that made him smile — Mr. Bell’s book.

“It’s had a bit too much seawater, but I hope you’ll enjoy it anyway.” She shook Hugo’s hand and stepped onto the path. “Good luck.”

“And to you, Miss Forrest.”

Please be stable. No more earthquakes
, she prayed. As she began mumbling, “Chiaroscuro,” she wondered how she would explain everything that had happened.

“Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro,” she muttered more loudly as the chorus of ravens shrieked.

Suddenly Sunni heard noises nearby.

Hugo shouted, “You must not!” But someone or something made a hoarse sound and he cried out in pain.

Don’t look! Don’t listen!
Sunni urged herself.

Hands grasped at Sunni’s arms and backpack.

“Where is my map?” hissed a voice.

“Chiaroscuro,” whimpered Sunni.

“Lady Ishbel, come away!” Hugo was pulling at the girl, but she dogged Sunni’s steps.

“You were with him! Where is the boy who has my map?”

“Ishbel!” screamed Hugo. “Come away from her!”

Sunni stumbled along the path as the other girl clasped her by the elbows.
Chiaroscuro
. She could barely make out the center of the spiral, but she moved forward instinctively, dragging Lady Ishbel along. From the ground a low rumbling began. The stones of the spiral began to shift once more.

Hugo tried to peel Lady Ishbel away from Sunni, but she lashed out at him. With every ounce of her strength, Sunni staggered toward the center as Lady Ishbel clung to her like an outraged cat. As the familiar weightlessness took over and Sunni felt the stones’ positions changing under her feet, the shrieking of the ravens was almost as loud as Ishbel. The digging fingers fell away, the ravens’ noise faded, and Sunni felt herself swirling like a snowflake in a breeze.

When she came to, it was in a chilly place and a hard one at that. Her cheek was against something cold. She opened her eyes and, to her horror, came face-to-face with a skull. The ivory bone was delicate, even around the black hollows where the furious green eyes had been only a few moments before.

Sunni scrambled to her feet. Lady Ishbel’s skeleton, still dressed in her ridiculous golden gown and pendant, was sprawled across the center of the labyrinth in the Mariner’s Chamber.

An alarm wailed, and Sunni clamped her hands over her ears as she staggered away.

“Sunni!”

Sunni backed straight into Blaise, her whole body shaking. He caught her and calmed her as best he could, though he was shaking himself. “We’re here. It’s OK!”

Dean crouched over the bones and touched the dress. “Is this, is this —?”

“Lady Ishbel. Sh-she tackled me as I was coming through.” Sunni couldn’t take her eyes from the remains. “She wanted the map.”

They stood quietly for a moment, and then Blaise asked her, “Are you OK to do what Corvo asked?”

Sunni ran her hands over her tired face and nodded. She closed her eyes as she stepped over Lady Ishbel into the fourth quarter of the labyrinth. “Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.”

Winding backward along the path, she spoke it out loud, against the shrill sound of the alarm. When she had passed though all four corners, she leaped away from the labyrinth and turned back to watch it.

“Look!” Dean pointed. The black tiles faded in front of their eyes and blended with the surrounding flagstones. They could barely make out the labyrinth anymore.

“You shut it down, Sunni,” said Blaise. “It’s finished.” His voice was weary. “We’d better get our stories straight. What do we tell people?”

“The truth,” said Sunni. “What else? If they think we’re making it up, that’s their problem.”

“So we tell everyone about Angus?”

“I want to forget about him,” grumbled Dean.

“We’ve got to let people know he’s still in there. Especially Mr. Bell.”

Police sirens were shrieking in the distance, adding to the din of the alarm. Suddenly the chamber door swung open and a guard cautiously put his head around it.

“You!” He gasped when he saw the three disheveled figures on the bench. “How did you —? This room was locked!”

The only response he got was tired shrugs.

The sounds of engines and voices filled the air outside Blackhope Tower. Before the children knew it, blankets were placed around their shoulders and they were sipping cups of sweet tea as they waited for their parents to arrive.

L
orimer Bell was pinned against a wall in a darkened room
.

Blaise’s father looked closely into his face and repeated, “It’s not good enough.” Behind him stood Mr. Forrest, nodding incessantly
.

“But, but —”

“It’s just not good enough, never was, never will be.” Mr. Doran’s eyes were flat and blank as he bore down on the art teacher
.

Lorimer protested, “I’ve done everything I can, honestly.”

“You have not, you have not,” intoned Sunni’s father, and Mr. Doran repeated, “Just not good enough.”

The two fathers pushed Lorimer farther into the wall. He felt something against his back. The painting — he was leaning against
The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia.

“No, give me some air!” Lorimer gasped
.

“You should be in that painting, not our children,” said Mr. Forrest, not moving an inch
.

“Go into the painting and get them,” Blaise’s father commanded, and he pulled something metallic out of his pocket. It glinted as he raised it over his head and, in one swift move, slashed it across the surface of the painting. “I have made you an opening. Go and find our children.”

Lorimer leaped away from where the knife had split the canvas open. “Nooo! Why did you do that? They can never get out now!”

The art teacher awoke with a violent jerk. Another nightmare. He had had so many since the children and Angus vanished.

The telephone’s ring sliced through the silence. It had barely rung a second time before Lorimer had fumbled it to his ear and glanced at the bedside clock. Six thirty in the morning.

“Lorimer, great news,” boomed the headmaster. “All three children have been found at Blackhope Tower, worn out but unharmed, barring a few scratches. They won’t be coming to school for a day or two, of course, but we shall see them very soon.”

Lorimer nearly cried with relief. “I am delighted, George, absolutely delighted.” He could hardly focus on what the headmaster said next and hung up as soon as he could.

But as he got up and sat on the edge of his bed, his smile faded. The children were back, but what about Angus?

Later that day, Sunni rolled over and hugged her comforter in close around her face. Her bed was the softest place she could imagine being, and the quietest. She could have stayed there the rest of the afternoon, sleeping more deeply than she ever had before, but sun was filtering through her curtains and the fragrance of roast chicken was wafting up from downstairs. She looked around her room. She remembered choosing the colors, but now it felt like someone else had, in some other life.

On the desk lay her warped sketchbook. She had shown it to the police and told some of her story, but the officers had left scratching their heads and promising to return when Sunni felt “more herself again.”

She swung out of bed and went to peer at something on her bulletin board that caught her eye. Digging a postcard out from under layers of other pictures, she recognized with a jolt the painting of three young men in high-collared white shirts and tunics. They stood against a familiar landscape: a lake and a marble palace with woods and hills beyond. On the left was Zorzi, dressed in green. In the middle, dressed in blue, stood Dolphin. And on the right, proud and confident, was Marin, dressed in rusty red. Sunni turned the card over and read the caption: “
The Apprentices
, by Fausto Corvo, circa 1581.”

“So you’ve been inside the painting all this time and you got there by walking around the maze.” D.C. McNeill read over her notes as she spoke.

“Labyrinth, not maze.” Blaise sat next to his father on the sofa. He had slept for fifteen hours straight and then devoured the juiciest burger and biggest mountain of fries in his life.

“Don’t get used to this, buddy,” his father had said with a chuckle. “Tomorrow we’re back to healthy eating.”

Blaise rubbed his full stomach, ready for any questions the police could throw at him.

“You were saying something under your breath when you walked the labyrinth, Blaise,” McNeill said. “We were watching. Remember?”

“You were watching, all right,” said Blaise’s father. “That’s about all you were doing, seems to me. One minute I get a call saying Blaise is with you in the Mariner’s Chamber, and the next minute you’re telling me I just missed him and he’s vanished into the ether.”

“I can only apologize again, Mr. Doran,” said McNeill, gritting her teeth.

“It’s not their fault, Dad,” Blaise said. “I wanted to go into the painting, and I kind of tricked them into letting me because it was my only chance.”

Mr. Doran let out a long sigh. “Guess we did a good job raising you to be curious and explore the world. But you outdid yourself this time, son.”

Blaise smiled sheepishly at his father and then answered McNeill’s question. “The word I said was
chiaroscuro
. It means “light and dark” in Italian.”

McNeill made a note of it and continued in a flat tone, “And once you got in, you had to make your way through a series of worlds and fight off predators before you found the way out.”

“Yes,” said Blaise. “And we met some people who had been in there for four hundred years.”

The three adults exchanged incredulous glances at this.

“Did you meet a man from, er, our world who vanished after you did?” D.C. Nash asked from the armchair.

Blaise sucked in his breath. “Yes.”

“What was his name?” asked McNeill.

“Angus Bellini.”

A small but triumphant smile crossed the detective’s face as she made a note. “Do you think he’s still inside the painting?”

“Y-yes.” Blaise felt a rush of unease.

Nash leaned forward. “Please, Blaise, if you have information about him, tell us. He put a security guard from Blackhope Tower into the hospital, and we’d like to get him if we can.”

“He’s still in the painting,” said Blaise. “And he’s not coming back.”

“How do you know that, son?” asked Mr. Doran.

“He’s trapped there.” A shiver ran up Blaise’s back. “The labyrinth is closed now. No one else can get in or out.”

McNeill took all this in and pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache coming on. “You’re sure about that?”

Blaise nodded, and his father reached over to squeeze his shoulder.

“Any idea about the skeleton?” Nash asked.

“Lady Ishbel Blackhope,” answered Blaise. “She was alive in the painting, but she was too old to survive once she came out into our time.”

“How did she get through if the labyrinth had gone?”

“She came out with Sunni before we closed it down.” Blaise was grateful for the warmth of his dad’s hand.

McNeill shook her head as she wrote more on her pad. “This is some story, Blaise.”

“You don’t believe me? Then how did we show up in that locked room?”

“I didn’t say I don’t believe you. But it’s a lot to get my head around.”

“Sunni and Dean told us the same story,” said Nash. “Not that it makes it any easier to take in.”

Blaise relaxed a bit at this.

“We’ll give you a bit of time to rest and see if you remember anything else.” The detectives stood up.

When Mr. Doran let them out of the front door, a chorus of voices outside began calling out.

“Mr. Doran, how is Blaise? How about a photo?”

“Mr. Doran, can Blaise speak to us?”

“No, thanks, folks. Please give us a bit of space. If Blaise was your son, you’d want the same,” said Mr. Doran, firmly closing the door on the reporters.

Blaise took the phone to his room and looked up Sunni’s number.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully when she came to the phone. “How are you doing?”

“Eating loads, sleeping even more.” He laughed. “What about you and Dean?”

“Fine, but Rhona, my stepmom, wants Dean and me to speak to a counselor. She thinks we need professional help with our trauma.”

“Are you feeling traumatized?”

“Only about being stuck indoors. All these reporters are hanging around trying to talk to us and take photos.”

“Same here,” said Blaise. “But I’m going to school tomorrow and I don’t care who follows me.”

“Me too — totally. I can’t believe we’ve been away for three weeks. It seemed like we were only there three
days
.”

“I know. Bizarre. Just think — it could have been longer,” said Blaise. “We’ve got to see Mr. Bell and tell him about Angus. He phoned and talked to my dad while I was asleep.”

“Yeah, he phoned here, too, and when he asked Rhona how we were, she gave him an earful about our
terrible ordeal
and how it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been doing his project,” Sunni said, fuming. “When actually, it was all because she dumped Dean on me that afternoon!”