The Second Forever (12 page)

They waited and waited, though nothing was going to change.

Maybe Darkwood will come down and try to do a deal for the book,
Peter thought, but since he had gone into the Warden's room, there had been no sight of him.

It became obvious that the river was their only way out. So, holding onto each side of the rope, Peter and Festival gave a final push, sending the bundle of planks out into the current, and threw themselves aboard.

The river twisted and turned, and in less than a minute they were in total darkness. Even though the two were only a few feet apart, they couldn't see each other, nor how wide the river was. They both scrambled up onto the bundle of planks and held on to each other as they were thrown first against one side of the tunnel and then the other.

The tunnel grew narrower, making the water even more frantic. Luckily the endless river had worn the rocks so that they were as smooth as glass and, although the children were constantly battered and bruised by them, there were no sharp edges to cut them.

Eventually a dot of light appeared ahead, dancing about in the wild water. The dot grew bigger until it was a window of light and the tunnel opened out into a cavern where the water, with room to spread out, slowed down. As it did so it lost its grip on the broken glass and sand, which sank into the darkness.

The light seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. It filled the cave with a soft blue glow, like moonlight, which reflected on the black lifeless water that seemed to go down forever. The pieces of broken glass grew smaller and fainter as they sank, until they finally vanished.

Peter managed to grab hold of a large rock as they drifted slowly past it and they stopped moving.
They climbed out onto a narrow rock-shelf and tied the end of the rope to the rock to prevent the raft from floating away.

‘I bet we're the first people to have ever come here,' Peter said while they rested to get their strength back.

‘Only
living
people, you mean,' said Festival. ‘If you think about it, every single creature that has died has come down here.'

‘Yes, and we aren't the first,' said Peter. ‘Look, there are marks in the rocks.' He ran his finger over them. There were two sets of initials and dates that were about seventy years old.

‘I wonder where they went?' said Festival, looking down into the menacing water.

‘If they got this far,' said Peter, ‘they most likely managed to go on.'

At the far end of the cave was another tunnel, where the water flowed away. It appeared to be the only exit. There were rocks around the edge of the water that could have hidden other tunnels above the water line, but this one seemed the obvious way to go.

‘If there are any other ways out behind the rocks, I reckon they'd probably take us back to where we came from,' said Peter.

Festival agreed, so they untied the rope, climbed
back onto their raft and paddled with their hands out into the middle of the water, where the current carried them slowly towards the far tunnel.

As they got closer, the water began to move them faster through the tunnel until there was no way they could have changed their minds even if they had wanted to. Once again they were carried into darkness, this time without the turmoil of the crashing glass, and were travelling in almost total silence, which made it hard to tell just how fast they were going.

They continued to get banged from side to side as the tunnel grew narrower, until finally their raft became jammed between the walls. They managed to
rock it free, but thirty seconds later it jammed again. And again they worked it free, but the third time there was just no way of dislodging it.

‘I can't really swim,' said Festival.

‘We'll undo the rope a bit and let a few planks of wood out,' said Peter.

After doing this the children pulled the rope tightly, which allowed them to float further down the tunnel until once again they were stuck. They discarded more wood and floated on and discarded more wood until they had just one plank left, and the two of them were squeezed together, holding onto the rope and the plank and each other.

Peter could feel Festival shaking with fear. He was scared too, but refused to let it show. They were both half-submerged in the water now, the plank only just big enough to stop them sinking altogether.

The tunnel seemed to go on forever and the water become increasingly cold. Neither of them could feel their legs, and their fingers had grown so numb that they were in danger of losing their grip on each other. Peter took the loose end of the rope and wrapped it around both of them before tying it to the plank.

And then another faint spot appeared in the distance and it grew into a frame of light. The frame grew bigger and bigger. This light was not from the remote blue glow of the cave, but from the world outside. But
there was something else in the frame too, something they couldn't see until they were almost upon it.

The frame was a true frame, a rectangular one, and from side to side and from top to bottom there were steel bars. The two children grabbed the bars and shook, even though they both knew that they were set solid in the surrounding rock.

Festival burst into tears. They had come so far and done so much and now there was no way they could escape.

Peter put his face up to the bars and looked outside. ‘I know where we are,' he said.

‘I'm so cold,' Festival whispered, ‘I can hardly speak.'

‘HELLO!' Peter shouted, but no one came.

He removed the rope from everything, wrapped it around Festival's chest, under her arms and then tied it to the bars, keeping her above water.

‘I don't want to die,' Festival cried, putting her arms around Peter. ‘Please don't let me die.'

‘We can't die,' said Peter. ‘We are immortal, remember?'

‘So we will hang here forever until the water wears the bars away in a hundred years,' Festival cried.

‘HELLO!' Peter called, but night was falling outside and still no one came.

Festival drifted in and out of consciousness, hardly aware of Peter talking to her to try and keep her awake.

‘I can hear rain,' Peter said, but even that couldn't bring Festival back. Peter wrapped his arms around her shivering body, trying as hard as he could to keep her warm, though he himself was frozen to the bone by the endless torrent. Little bits of glass that had escaped the deep water in the cave nicked his skin as they sped by, but he was so cold he could hardly feel them.

Outside, in Peter's world, a ferocious storm filled the air with thunder and lightning and all night torrential rain drowned out the sound of the water racing through the bars of their prison. Although Peter wished he had had been there when the rain had returned to his world, at least he could hear it now and know that he and Festival had succeeded in turning back the river.

Around midnight, Festival stirred in his arms. She felt as cold as a corpse, but she looked up at Peter in the violent light of the storm. ‘I love you,' she whispered and fainted.

When morning came Peter, who had been drifting in and out of consciousness, heard voices and called out again as they grew nearer.

Finally a surprised face appeared at the grating. It was a face Peter knew and that knew him.

And then there were men with hammers and chisels. The noise brought Festival around, and an hour later the children were free and wrapped in warm blankets with mugs of soup, recovering by the stream in the Great Palm House. Susan couldn't stop telling them about the rain.

‘It started last night,' she said. ‘The most amazing storm I've ever seen. There was so much lightning,
it was like daylight – you should have been there! It hasn't stopped raining since.'

‘I know,' said Peter. ‘We heard it.'

‘And look,' said Susan, ‘it's washed all the dust off the roof and already things have started growing again.'

Susan asked how the children had got stuck behind the grating. Peter lied and said they'd thought they'd heard water running somewhere, so they'd climbed down a manhole cover to find out where it was coming from. But then they'd got hopelessly lost and somehow ended up in the Great Palm House.

‘So we missed the storm and the start of the rain,' he said.

‘Wow,' said Susan.

‘And it's really important that you replace the grating,' Peter said.

‘Don't you think it would be better to leave it off?' said Susan. ‘I mean, supposing someone else gets lost down there.'

‘They can't,' said Peter, scrambling up thoughts as quickly as he could.

There was no way he could tell Susan or anyone in his world about Darkwood, but he knew that if he and Festival had escaped down the tunnel, then Darkwood, who was trapped in with the Hourglasses, could follow.

‘There was a cave-in,' he said. ‘As we came along
one of the tunnels, it collapsed behind us.'

‘So why didn't the water stop running?' said Susan.

‘Oh, there was plenty of room between the broken bricks and rocks for the water, but no person could get through,' Peter replied.

‘But if no one can come down there, why do we need to put the grating back?'

‘Um, health and safety,' said Peter. ‘Can you imagine the sort of trouble you'd get into if some kids crawled up the tunnel?'

‘Oh my God, I hadn't thought of that,' said Susan, and later when she told her bosses, they panicked and installed a grating that no one would ever be able to remove.

‘Do you think someone could drive us home?' Peter asked. ‘We're just really tired and, umm . . .'

‘I've twisted my ankle,' Festival added. ‘So I don't think I can walk to the station.'

Someone brought a car right into the gardens and up to the door at the end of the Great Palm House and drove the children across the city back to the museum.

It rained non-stop for two weeks. There were floods but this didn't bother anyone, and eventually the rain washed the dust off the roofs and out of the trees and along the streets, into the drains and into the streams and rivers and out into the oceans, where the rain kept falling until dust had settled on the ocean floors, building new mountains, and the world was almost the same as it had been before the terrible drought.

For no reason he could think of, Peter got the idea in his head that the day the rain stopped would be the day Festival would return to her world. Although she had barely whispered it as she had slipped into unconsciousness, Peter knew it had been real and that
he loved her too, and that if she did go back to her world, he would have to join her, though the idea of leaving the museum and his family was almost impossible to imagine.

But then,
he thought,
if she stays here, she will lose her world and her family.

When all the stories had been told and explained, even the Hourglasses, which were supposed to be kept secret, Peter's grandfather took him back to the cat mummy room and said, ‘And the book?'

‘Safe, Grandfather,' Peter replied.

‘Where?'

‘As safe as it can ever be.'

‘But where?'

‘If I tell you or anyone, it will be just that bit less safe,' Peter said. ‘And don't ask Festival. She doesn't know.'

Peter hoped she might have forgotten about it, but of course she hadn't and later, when they were alone, she asked, ‘So where is it? Did you hide it back there?'

Now they that had returned to his world, Peter, who had deliberately avoided talking about the book since they had re-created it, took Festival's hand and held it to his chest. The girl smiled as she felt the book's outline.

‘It's okay to talk here,' Peter said. ‘We've got to
decide what to do with it.'

‘Maybe we could bury it in the botanic gardens, in the roots of an ancient tree,' said Festival. ‘It would be safe there, wouldn't it?'

‘Not as much as you'd think,' said Peter. ‘The tree could die of old age or get blown down in a storm and the book could be exposed.'

‘I suppose so,' said Festival. ‘It's just that the gardens feel so timeless and comforting.'

‘I know, but I think we need to do something more drastic, something far more permanent,' said Peter.

They knew, because of its immortality, that they couldn't burn the book any more than they could weigh it down and bury it at sea to get dissolved by the waves. It might take a few years, but eventually it would wash up on a beach somewhere and the whole curse would begin again. Nothing could harm it.

‘Though, of course, we could take it to pieces,' said Peter.

‘What, you mean tear the pages apart?'

‘No, you know the pages are too strong to do that,' said Peter. ‘But we could pull the binding away and cut the threads so the pages fall out.'

‘And then what?' said Festival. ‘Take the pages to different places thousands of miles apart?'

‘No, it wouldn't work,' said Peter. ‘You've only got
to read one sentence from the book for the magic to take effect.'

‘Well, can we at least cut the pages with a knife?' said Festival.

The children tried and the answer to that was yes, they could cut the pages with a knife, and no, they couldn't cut the pages with a knife. They could make a cut, slice the corner off a page, but as they did so the knife became so blunt that they couldn't make a second cut.

‘Though we could sharpen the knife and use it again,' said Festival.

‘It would take forever.'

‘We've got forever, haven't we?' said Festival, and began to cry.

It was ridiculous. It was just a book. How could it be impossible to destroy a book, or even hide it where it would never be found? Now they realised why it had been so easy to outwit Darkwood and escape. He knew there was nowhere they could escape to and nowhere the book would be out of his reach. He had forever.

‘There has to be something we can do,' said Peter.

‘I think we should talk to your grandfather,' said Festival. ‘If anyone knows what to do, it will be him.'

As he had got older, Peter had grown more wary of the old man. It wasn't that he didn't trust him, though if he was completely honest, there was a tiny voice in the back of his brain that didn't, and it truly upset him. Peter loved his grandfather with all his heart and found it difficult to believe that he had any faults. For the first ten years of his life, while his dad had been missing, the old man had been sort of his father as well as his grandfather. Peter had shared every little thought with him until the day Bathline had given him the wretched book and sworn him to secrecy.

His first instinct back then had been to run straight to his grandfather and show him the book, but something had stopped him. He told himself later it had
been to protect the old man, but he wasn't sure.

But now it seemed as if Festival's suggestion was the right thing to do. Maybe his grandfather would know better.

‘Well,' said the old man, ‘let's see where we are. By the way, I think it's a good idea that we don't tell your parents about all this.'

The two children agreed. It hadn't been something they'd ever discussed, but it just seemed obvious.

‘So we know we can't destroy the book,' said Peter's grandfather, ‘but if we could find a way to divide it up into millions of tiny parts, that wouldn't actually be destroying it, would it?'

‘I suppose not,' said Peter.

‘I mean, imagine we if we took the book into the middle of the Sahara Desert, where we would be surrounded on all sides for hundreds and hundreds of miles by billions and billions of grains of sand,' the old man said. ‘And imagine we could break the book into tiny little fractions the same size as a grain of sand and then somehow mix all those bits into the ground. And then imagine if Darkwood found out that the book was hidden in the desert. How long do you think it would take him to collect all the billions of fragments back together again?'

‘Wow,' said Peter. ‘That's amazing.'

‘Umm, yes it's a fantastic image,' said Festival. ‘But how exactly do we break the book into all those millions of little bits? One tiny cut on a page makes the knife go blunt.'

‘The desert itself will do it for us,' Peter's grandfather explained. ‘We take the book to the Valley of Torment. Do you know why it's called that?'

The children didn't.

‘Because the way the hills and valleys around it are laid out means the wind never stops blowing. And it's not just a gentle breeze, but a vicious wind that runs over the ground and tears everything apart so that no living creature or building can survive there. It is a true desert. The ancient tribes that lived near there tens of thousands of years ago used to leave their enemies tied to stakes in the valley. If the victims were lucky, the wind would shred their ropes before it destroyed their clothes and they could escape, but most of the time their skin went first and they suffered slow, agonising deaths.'

‘Brilliant,' said Peter. ‘So we can tie the open book to a rock and the wind will do the rest.'

‘Absolutely,' the old man agreed. ‘And not only that, it will spread the tiny bits right across the desert.'

‘Wow.'

‘I reckon it will take no more than a week to wear
it down, and then, of course, as each year passes, the bits of the book will be spread further apart more and more. Some of it will be carried out to sea by storms, and who knows, eventually its dust might end up in every country in the world.'

‘We need a holiday,' Peter said to his parents. ‘A quiet week by the sea, lying in the sand.'

‘Of course,' said Peter's father.

‘And you could take your grandfather with you. I'm sure the seaside air will do him good,' said Peter's mother, thinking they would visit the coast and relax in the sun for a week until it was time for Peter to return to school.

‘I suppose you go back the same time as Peter,' she said to Festival.

‘Well, actually,' Festival began, but then decided it was much too complicated to explain that schools as they were in Peter's world didn't actually exist in hers, so she just nodded.

So the two children and the old man went to the coast and then on a boat and a train and a plane to another coast and then travelled inland into the heart of the Sahara.

The Valley of Torment was like the island out in the sea in Festival's world. The people who lived
in the local town were afraid to go there. They pretended they couldn't understand the three strangers, but eventually they found someone who agreed to take them somewhere close to the valley. Then Peter's grandfather would rest in the hotel while Peter and Festival went out to the valley.

‘We need some camels and a jeep,' said Peter. ‘We will tie the book to the roof of the jeep, drive it into the middle of the valley and come back here on the camels.'

‘And make sure you wreck the jeep so no one can move it,' said Peter's grandfather. The old man took something out of his pocket and slipped it into Peter's hand.

‘Shoot out the tyres,' he whispered. ‘Good luck, I will see you back here tomorrow.'

The guide took them out into the hills until they reached a track that led down to the valley. He pointed down the track and left them, refusing to go any further.

With the two camels tied to the back of the jeep, Peter and Festival drove slowly down the track.

‘Wait,' he said when they reached the entrance to the valley. ‘We have one more thing to do.'

‘What?' said Festival.

‘When we read the book out in the lake, didn't that make us immortal again?'

‘It must have done,' said Festival. ‘But how can we
tell for sure?'

Peter took Festival's hand in his. ‘Keep very still,' he said, and placed his fingers on her wrist and closed his eyes.

There was nothing.

‘You are immortal,' he said.

Festival took Peter's hand in hers. There was the scar where he had lost his finger all those years ago.

‘It seems like another lifetime,' she said.

‘It was,' said Peter. ‘Several lifetimes really, when you think about it.'

Festival felt for Peter's pulse. It was the same as hers – silent.

‘Before we go in there,' Peter said, ‘we must read the book once more.'

They attached the camels' leads to the jeep, walked out of earshot and read the book one final time.

After reading it together, they tied the open book to the roof of the jeep and drove slowly out into the middle of the Valley of Torment, the camels behind them. When they stopped, Peter got out of the car and did as his grandfather had suggested and shot out the tyres. Then he put the ignition key into his pocket and the two children rode the camels back to safety.

Even before they had reached the end of the valley and taken off their keffiyehs, which they had wrapped around their heads, the wind had lifted the writing
from the first pages and was carrying the invisible specks of darkness away into the sunset.