The Second Forever, page 11
‘And as for you two,’ Darkwood said as he began to climb back up the stairs, ‘looks like the only way out is down the Styx, the river of death. Bye.’
The river slowed down and grew quieter as it cleared the last of the accumulated hourglasses. From far above the children could hear Darkwood cursing and screaming at the locked door. Frustrated, he ran back down and demanded, ‘If you give me the key, I will fetch a ladder for you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Peter.
‘No, it’s best that you stay here and become the new Warden,’ Festival said and laughed.
‘Then you two can remain here forever as well,’ Darkwood shouted, going up to the Warden’s room and slamming the door shut behind him.
‘There is only one way out of here, isn’t there?’ said Festival.
‘No,’ said Peter. ‘There are two. The river comes in and the river goes out.’
‘We can’t even see the far end where the river enters through,’ said Festival. ‘And the ground is littered with broken glass. If we don’t get cut to shreds by that, there are hourglasses falling constantly! I reckon you couldn’t walk a hundredth of the way upstream without one crashing right on top of you.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘If you were immortal and lost all your blood, I wonder if you’d die,’ said Festival.
‘You probably wouldn’t,’ said Peter. ‘When I found Bathline and her son, I noticed their arms were covered in scars. I reckon she had tried that.’
So the two attempted to build a pile of broken glass that would reach up to the bottom stair, but it was impossible. And all the time hourglasses shattered around them.
Darkwood came back out onto the stairs. ‘There is another way,’ he said. ‘The book.’
‘What?’ said Peter.
‘Don’t try to be cute,’ said Darkwood. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘We haven’t got it,’ said Peter.
‘Okay, I’ll play your little game then. So, where is it?’
‘I dropped it into the sea when we’d finished reading it.’
‘No you didn’t,’ said Darkwood. ‘It’s near here. Don’t forget I created it. It calls to me.’
‘Well then, I expect it’s saying, oh, oh save me for I am drowning out in the sea,’ Peter sneered.
‘Fine,’ said Darkwood. ‘There’s no hurry. I can wait and so can the book.
‘And so can you,’ he added. ‘We are all immortal.’ Laughing, Darkwood returned into the Warden’s room.
‘So the only way out is down the river?’ said Festival.
‘Yes.’
With the rope that Foreclaw had used to stop himself from falling into the river and the remains of the demolished stairs, the children managed to make something that looked like a pile of demolished stairs tied together with a bit of old rope. It certainly didn’t look like a raft.
‘At least there’s more water than glass now,’ said Festival as they pushed their creation towards the water’s edge.
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.
