The Riddles of Epsilon (23 page)

MY DIARY

I never saw another swan on the island again—not after that night. The lake stays bare, and the only visitors to it now are seagulls.

I never saw Epsilon again either. Not in the flesh, so to speak. But I spend a lot of time down at his cottage, and he always finds a way to talk to me. Lumic words written in the sand, the waves almost carrying them away. Feathers of tallowy white left on my pillow, with a note stuffed behind. Lumic, always in Lumic—instructions, pointers, clues (he still insists on
clues
!) as to where to look to find more about Agapetos and the Bright Beings.

I can't get enough of them. As Epsilon reminds me often, the mark of Agapetos is on my forehead. I'm his. Nothing, but nothing makes me feel as good—as wild and as free and as frustrated and as sulky and as gleeful and as joyful and as
safe
—as belonging to Agapetos.

 

I'll finish this part of my diary and put it in my file soon. Just catch up the last bit. Tidy up. Then I think I'll hide it all somewhere—somewhere in Epsilon's cottage. The bedroom, probably—that strange, peaceful old place with its peculiar energy—like stepping into a time warp in a sci-fi movie or something.

After all, that's where it all began—down there. Down in the ruined cottage. So that's where it can all stay, until someone else finds it. It will stay hidden only until for some reason it needs to be
unhidden
—that I do know. But until then, I stay quiet as a mouse about it.

 

Dr. Parker keeps on asking me all about that night, and what was going on. His curiosity drives him bananas—not knowing—but I tell him nothing. It's not for him to know.

His questions started immediately, that early morning. As soon as we got back home. We met them on the cliff path when we finally staggered back along it. Him and Mrs. Shilling and Ely Fingers, coming from the lake.

Both men looked shaken to the core.

As to Ely, he didn't seem to quite know where to put his eyes. He took one look at my forehead and shut his mouth for the rest of the walk back to our house. Then he just stood by the window and stared out at the dawn.

All that last hour, as we got warm and dry again in the kitchen, I kept lifting my hand to my forehead.

I could still feel it there.

Not the speck of blood—I'd washed that off as soon as I came in. Something
left
by the blood. Just a feeling—a sort of . . . awareness. That's all. Not much. But it settled right into me and made all the quaking and trembling stop. A sort of . . . resting feeling. I can feel it now, that not-quite-tingling on my forehead. I feel it whenever I think about all this or learn a bit more about Agapetos.

 

As to Dr. Parker, he was all bluff and fuss. He clucked around Mom and me and kept asking what had happened, why were we wet through, where the hell had we been all that time, they'd been out to look for us on the beach a dozen times, they'd been worried sick.

They still
looked
worried sick—except for Mrs. Shilling, who looked like the cat that had got the cream. But the doc and Ely had this stunned, vacant look on their faces, and I knew why. The Miradel. From the lake, they'd have had to stand and watch it come down.

Then Dad burst through the door, cameras swinging everywhere.

He stood and stared, then ran to us both and hugged us close. He hit me in the face with his Canon EOS-1n, but all
I could do was laugh. He couldn't stop hugging Mom, holding her close, telling her he loved her.

In the end, she told him to please stop fussing, she'd tell him all about it tomorrow but right now all she wanted was another hot-water bottle and a cup of tea, her feet were frozen solid. But she was smiling.

So Dad poured her some tea and sat down opposite us. His face was shining with a wild, mad joy. His pockets bulged with used rolls of film. He took them all out and lined them up on the table.

“I went up to the lake to look for you,” he said, his eyes aglint. “Thought those young kids might have been right—thought you'd wandered up there again. But then I felt it—like an earthquake!”

His hand shook as he picked up one of the films. He stared at it as if he could see every image it held.

“Incredible!” he said. “That tower falling down. I got it all. Cracks, all the way up to the gargoyles. The first stones falling. The huge gap. But then I looked into the hole and nearly died of shock.”

He chose another two films and held them up toward Mom.

“Swans, Elizabeth! Pouring out of the gap. Hundreds of them. I got them in black and white—a dark hole in the ground and swans pouring out of it! Then I changed to
color. Swans in the air. Flying out over the sea. The sky a most glorious red. But then . . .”

He picked up the final film and held it tight in his fist.

“But then another bird. I thought I heard a shout. I peered into the hole. And this light shot out, it nearly blinded me! Then the sound of wings. Up it came, out of the ground. It was just . . . 
incredible
!”

Dr. Parker leaned closer. “What was incredible?” he said.

“An eagle!” said Dad. “A white eagle. I'd seen an eagle before, on the lawn, but had no flash set up. But this? This was beyond my wildest dreams. A pure
white
eagle!”

Dr. Parker sat back. His eyes moved from Mom to me to Dad.

“An eagle?” he said. “But Richard—eagles don't just come up out of holes in the ground!”

Dad smiled. He tapped the films, then put them all back into his pocket.

“The camera doesn't lie, Dr. Parker. I'll win the biggest prizes in photographic history!”

Smugly he tucked another blanket around Mom. Then he kissed her on the top of her head.

“You and your prizes. Is that all you care about?” said Mom.

But she was smiling up at him—a thin, watery smile that
went right to my heart.

He knelt down beside her chair.

“No, Elizabeth. I care about you and about Jess and about whatever the hell you've both been up to the past few weeks. You both seem to have gone stark raving mad, running off at all hours in the bloody dark. What on earth has been going on?”

Mom and I exchanged glances. Mom still looked half dazed.

“Going on?” I said. “Nothing's been going on, Dad. Nothing at all.”

 

We finished our tea and Mom dozed off in the armchair, and then the men crept off to find some brandy. Suddenly, Mrs. Shilling dropped a bit of paper into my hand.

“Here's your shopping list, girl. I found it on the kitchen table. Very careless, leaving it lying around like that.”

In my hand, the Lumic rhyme I'd scribbled down as a clue to Epsilon, hours before. The words in Lumic of the document called “The Key”:
“In the space below the well A map to the tooth lies hidden . . . .”

I stared down at the symbols, then back up at her.

“Shopping list? What shopping list?” I said.

She stood above me, the usual glare on her face. Put her bony hands on her hips.

“Oh, for pity's sake!” she said. “Turn the paper
over
!”

On the other side of the paper, the only clues I hadn't been able to solve.

 

Lemon Sq.

Ecclusad 5

Cloves—tooth

 

There they were, those words—the same as they'd always been, ever since I had first found them in the first box from Epsilon's cottage.

“But Mrs. Shilling,” I said, “this isn't a shopping list! It's a
clue
!”

“Oh, really?” she sniffed. “Whose handwriting is it then? Look, girl!”

I stared down at it. The hurried scrawl. I recognized something about the spacing of the letters, the upward stroke of the crossed t's. Mom's. One of Mom's many ways of writing when she's trying out different pens, new brushes.

Mom yawned and stretched in her chair. Smiled blearily my way.

“Still up? What's that you've got there, you two?”

I held it out to her, list side up. She glanced at it and smiled.

“Oh, that's where it is! My shopping list. I wondered where it had got to—good heavens, did that cause a row!”

“List? Shopping list? But it mentions the tooth! The relic!”

“The relic? Where does it mention the relic?”

She yawned and rubbed her eyes.

“But Mom—it even mentions the Lemon Squire!” I pointed to “Lemon Sq.”

“
Squire?
No, no, no! Squash! Lemon
squash
—for the Greet. Everyone was supposed to bring some—for the punch. Another thing I forgot.”

“And ‘cloves—tooth'?” I said. “What does that mean, then?”

“Cloves. Your dad wanted some oil of cloves for his toothache—it was driving him up the wall. That wretched wisdom tooth—he'll have to have it out one day, but he's such a coward! All he'll take for it is an herbal remedy. Oil of cloves. Did I hear someone say they'd gone to fetch some brandy? I could drink a barrel of the stuff, I really could. Ah—here they are at last!”

I stared at her, bewildered, as the men came clattering back in with glasses and a bottle of brandy.

“And Ecclusad Five, Mom? What's Ecclusad Five?”

“What? Oh, that's just a paintbrush.”

“A paintbrush. What do you mean, it's a paintbrush?!”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? It's the
name
of a
paintbrush
. The make and number of a paintbrush. I needed it for my work. Oh, for heaven's sake, Richard, give her a bit
of that brandy—I think she needs it more than I do.”

I sipped the brandy down, thinking, thinking.

 

The document labeled “The Key” was yellowed with age when I'd found it.

I remembered it clearly, nestled there in the first of Epsilon's boxes. Along with Seb's diary and stuff, from more than a hundred years ago. It was faded, curled up at the edges. It was
old
!

Then—only last night—I'd made a quick copy of it, to leave a clue to Epsilon as to where I'd gone, into the Aquila cave. So he'd know where to find me—in case I got lost in there.

I'd grabbed a scrap of paper from the kitchen drawer and scribbled down the rhyme in Lumic. But the scrap of paper had a shopping list on the back—Mom's mislaid shopping list—I just hadn't noticed it. I'd scribbled the rhyme down in Lumic and left it there for Epsilon to find. Mrs. Shilling had picked it up instead, as soon as we all came back in. She'd slipped it into her pocket so that others hadn't seen the Lumic rhyme.
But—on the other side of the original document, more than a hundred years old—there had been Mom's shopping list! Written only recently!

Oh, it didn't make sense. It put my head in a spin.

As I sat there, rubbing my head, Mrs. Shilling walked
over to the window. It was all steamed up. She rubbed a little circle in the condensation and spoke quietly to me. As if she'd heard all my thoughts. As if in reply.

“Time is nothing. Not to Him. That's how your mother managed to see Martha. A glimpse in time. Time? What's time, I ask you!”

Dr. Parker looked up—fumbled for his pocket watch.

“Time? Well, it's—great
heavens
! It's almost five thirty! Good thing it's a holiday tomorrow, no surgery, I'd be dead on my feet! Come on then—let's let these good people get off to bed. And this time, Mrs. Shilling, I insist you
go home
. I told you Ely and I would deal with it all. Really! What a night! Shocking!”

I stared up at him. His eyes are very kind. But . . . 

“Dr. Parker—why do they call you the Lemon Squire?” I said.

He chuckled as he shrugged himself into his jacket.

“Not very complimentary, is it? It's just an old custom here. Whoever lives in Milton House—we used to own all this island, you know—has been given that name. A lemon; a dummy. Someone who doesn't use his head. Doesn't really know very much, I suppose. Can't think what started off the custom. All I
do
know is I'm tired out and need my bed!”

Someone who doesn't really know very much. Yolandë's name for him. The Lemon Squire.
“He in weakness has to
open up like limpets . . . . He has no choice.”
But I didn't think he'd told me the whole truth about why he was called the Lemon Squire.

As he gathered up his coat and took Mom's pulse one last time, I heard a funny little squeak at the window. The squeak of someone dragging a finger along wet glass, of someone writing on the window. I went over to where Mrs. Shilling stood. There on the window she had written the words:

SOLEMN CHOIR

Then, underneath, she wrote two other words:

SOLEMN QUIRE

“Quire is an archaic form of the word ‘choir,' girl,” she whispered.

Her tired old eyes watched me as I made sense of the words.

Solemn quire. It was easy to rearrange the letters. Lemon Squire.

It clicked into place in my mind. The Lemon Squire was the name of the leader of the Solemn Quire. The followers of the Lord of Inversion. Dr. Parker
had
been at the Miradel that night when Mom was sleepwalking! Not only that—he had been the leader of that sinister group of men. Their Squire.

Then the doc strode over to say good-bye, and Mrs. Shilling quickly rubbed out the words from the glass.

As they said their good-byes, Ely Fingers glanced across at me briefly at last. Something in that reproachful glance made my stomach turn over.

Those forget-me-not eyes, brimming with knowledge.
“I notice things,”
he had said. It was not the doctor who had been watching me from the Miradel, I realized. It was Ely.

Now he could not bring himself to seem loud and jolly, like the doc. His face was ashen. But he, too, knew it all, the whole lot of it—I saw it in his eyes. He knew about Cimul and the Dark Beings. So must Jerry Cork and Luke Lively. And others, men I'd not yet met. Old men, chanting rituals to themselves, keeping something alive. Watching. Waiting. Gathering at ancient places, muttering ancient words. Watching for old things to come to pass. The Eye of Miradel. Epsilon's name for him. Ely Fingers, honoring something evil—upholding something filled with vile, dangerous curses.