Maddigan's Fantasia, page 24
Maddie picked herself up and looked around her. ‘What happened? What was that?’ she cried. ‘Garland? Garland?’
‘Surprise!’ said one of the Tunnellers. ‘Big surprise. Shock! Us too!’
Moving as quickly as she could, Maddie now stumbled back into the crossroads chamber, holding her lantern high. She could make out the strange walls and the arched mouths of two tunnels. And she could see rocks still trembling where there had once been the mouth of a third tunnel.
‘What happened?’ she cried again.
‘Rock fall!’ said one of the Tunnellers as if he were speaking to a young and very foolish child.
‘But there was an explosion!’ Maddie cried. She pointed at the rocks. ‘Dig!
‘No dig,’ said the Tunneller. ‘Risky. Need support. Need allies. Get help!’ And immediately the Tunneller set off up the tunnel through which they had just come.
‘Wait! Wait!’ Maddie called. ‘Don’t leave me. I’ve got to get our children out and … listen to me! Wait!’ She ran after the Tunneller, determined not to be left behind.
*
By sheer coincidence, Yves was almost immediately above that underground crossroads when he felt the explosion, felt the van rattle and heard Tane, who was checking the back tyre, cry out in alarm. Picking himself up from where he had been thrown, Tane flung out his arms in confusion.
‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. ‘What next?’
‘Change the tyre,’ called Yves grimly and Tane bent over the back tyre once more, frowning as he saw it was almost entirely flat. This wasn’t the only thing filling him with dismay. The bush around him was ringing with Lilith’s voice. She finished one song and mercilessly began another. Even Yves, peering out of the van window, was looking like a man who had had enough.
‘Lilith, love, maybe you should rest your voice,’ he called back over his shoulder. Lilith broke off and smiled at the back of his head.
‘No, I’m fine,’ she said, and began a new song.
‘Just a bit of a break,’ Yves suggested.
‘But they love me,’ said Lilith. ‘These Tunnellers really love my singing.’ She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Darling girl, I love it too,’ said Yves. ‘Of course I do. It’s just – just echoing in the van and –’
Tane came around to Yves’s window holding something in his hand.
‘Hey, look at this!’ he said. Yves looked at what he was being shown and frowned.
‘It’s – it’s like a dart,’ he said blankly, and then stared at Tane with sudden alarm.
‘It is a dart,’ Tane agreed, ‘and it was sticking out of our back tyre. Not an accident. No way!’
‘Sabotage?’ asked Yves. He turned to Lilith, ‘Listen, love, we’re going to have to jack up the van and change a tyre. You go into the back of the van, get yourself something to eat. Have a rest.’ He swung himself down and moved towards the back. Lilith liked the idea of a small snack. She shifted sideways and made for the door that closed off their living space. Swinging the door open, testing a few notes as she did so, Lilith entered the back of the van happily enough. After all, this door was the door to her home – her safe place in a dangerous world.
But then she stopped still, staring in amazement and horror, for there in the centre of the living space … there at the tiny table between the bunks … was Maska himself, with the solar converter on the table in front of him. He looked up and gave her a smile of hideous triumph.
‘So happy to see you again,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you some good advice, even if it is a bit late for you to make use of it. Always lock the back door of your van when you travel through dangerous territory.’
But, as he reached for her Lilith screamed the loudest scream in the world.
To Yves outside, just beginning to work on the tyre, it seemed as if that scream filled the whole valley around them. To Tane it seemed as if it might split trees and cause birds to fall, stunned, from the sky. And as they staggered, staring wildly at each other in a moment of shocked bewilderment, Maska jumped out through the back of the van, swinging the package that held the converter in one hand and holding Lilith high above the ground in the other. Yves sprang towards Maska but Maska hoisted Lilith, kicking, screaming and struggling, even higher in the air and shook her at her father.
‘If you come after me she will be terminated,’ he said. Though his voice was broken it was still ruthless. He shook Lilith at them yet again, and then took off up the road, carrying Lilith under one arm as if she were nothing more than a small pillow stuffed with feathers. He was even able to carry the converter, which Yves knew to be a great deal heavier than Lilith.
Yves stared after him, panting, stunned and helpless. Tane looked over his shoulder, his face twisted into a helpless grimace. A chorus of voices arose around them, coming out of the green edges of the track, coming through tiny cracks and wormholes in the ground.
‘The songbird! He has taken the songbird!’ the Tunnellers were shouting.
‘What shall we do?’ Yves shouted at Tane. ‘What shall we do? I can’t just let him carry her off.’
‘If we leave him he might – well – he just might let her go,’ Tane stammered. ‘I don’t know what to do. And he’s got that converter.’
‘Forget the converter! What about Lilith!’ Yves yelled. He turned from side to side, staring wildly into the air around him as if the banks of the road or the trees might suddenly give him an answer.
Neither of them noticed that all the Tunnellers had disappeared. There, where they had been only a moment earlier, shouting about the stolen songbird, was an empty track, thick with fallen leaves, dead twigs, but suddenly marked, along the bank on the right, by a line of holes in the ground.
*
Meanwhile in the tunnels winding almost directly under Yves’s van, Garland, Eden, Timon, Jewel and the mysterious Morag inched along their chosen passageway. They stepped out, at last, into another great underground hall, its walls set around with huge carved shelves. Their edges were inlaid with metallic symbols and runes, which flashed in the light of the lantern as it swung a little in Garland’s hand, and on those shelves were laid long boxes … hundreds of them, it seemed, retreating into a distance quickly blurred with darkness.
‘Coffins!’ exclaimed Garland.
‘Sarcophagi,’ said Morag, no longer speaking like that lost velvety stranger, but like a guide who knew the place by heart. Garland and Timon looked at her with startled suspicion, then peered up and down the walls for possible doors between the shelves, but there were no doors to be seen.
Garland turned back to Morag, only to find Morag was moving confidently over to a sarcophagus – an open one – and looking down at the man in it. Garland looked too. He looked fresh and at ease with the world … as if he had only just fallen asleep.
‘Who is he?’ she asked, suddenly sure that Morag would have an answer.
‘He’s the gravedigger,’ Morag answered, and this time there was something curiously familiar about her voice … familiar and terrifying too. ‘Imagine his surprise when, just as he was about to fasten a lid over me, I sat up and smiled at him. There are not many men who can resist my smile.’
Then Morag turned … turned slowly, and looked at them out of green, suddenly glowing eyes. Her face stretched sideway in a horrible grin. Eden screamed, ‘The Nennog!’
‘Uncle!’ hissed Timon. As the two boys backed away from the transforming figure of Morag, Garland backed with them, wondering how on earth the Nennog, that ruler of a future time, could possibly be down in the dark under the Silica Mountains, grinning that dreadful grin. How they could possibly escape anyone who had such power? She shot a quick glance behind her. And now, entirely blocking the way they had come, stood Ozul, arms outspread as if he were longing to embrace them all.
No hope! Garland thought. Not here. Not this time.
‘Time to go home, boys,’ she said – the Nennog said – still speaking with the tongue of this recently dead woman. Garland realized Morag must be dead … she was an empty body the Nennog had been able to possess. As she thought this, Morag reached out an arm that seemed to stretch further than any true person could stretch, to grab the silver chain around Eden’s neck, and to twist it into a strangling halter. Eden made a dreadful choking sound as both Timon and Garland leapt to rescue him. The Nennog loosened his grip and flicked the chain over Eden’s head. The medallion dangled from a hand that suddenly seemed to Garland to be covered in green scales.
‘Mine! Mine at last!’ Morag’s lips moved but now it was entirely the voice of the Nennog that came out between them. ‘You certainly won’t be needing it any more. Get them!’ he commanded. And Ozul obediently moved in on them.
Garland, Timon (holding Jewel) and Eden were being herded back onto an empty shelf among the sarcophagi. Ozul stood over them, guarding them, and now began passing metal units drawn from the pack that swung at his hip, to Morag who fitted them together slowly constructing a device all too familiar to Timon and Eden. Garland, looking over Ouzel’s bent shoulder, watched it grow.
‘What’s that?’ she whispered to Timon.
‘A slider. It’s the machine we used to ride a time-pulse back here, to you.’
‘You said the Nennog couldn’t move through time,’ she whispered to Timon, but it was Eden who answered her, his lips barely moving.
‘He can’t. Not in the way we can. But he can put out tentacles of power. His power can move in on certain people.’
‘He can sometimes possess!’ said Timon. ‘When the circumstances are right it seems he can possess empty people, dead people, and take them over. And I think there might be radioactive links here under the mountain that he can ride on …’
‘He’s been able to take over a body … a fresh body,’ muttered Eden. As he said this the Nennog looked across at them and smiled. Using Morag’s hand with its elegantly painted fingernails he held up the medallion, waving it mockingly at the boys.
Then two fireflies appeared, and began dancing around his head. For some reason this seemed to annoy him, and he struck them away with more that ordinary irritation.
‘You’re giving off radiation,’ Timon said. ‘They want to feed off you.’
‘It is I who will feed off them,’ said the Nennog, plucking one of them from the air and sliding it between Morag’s painted lips. Morag chewed and swallowed, still waving the Talisman before them. ‘How about a magic trick, Eden? How about a little miracle? But I forgot. I have the Talisman. You will be powerless now.’ He hung the medallion around his neck – around Morag’s neck – then touched it tenderly.
‘It is beautiful,’ he said, and went back to building the unit that would transport Eden, Timon and Jewel back to their own time and to some fate Garland could not imagine. And perhaps she, too, would be carried away with them, away from the Fantasia … away from Maddie, and Boomer and Lilith … away from all the people and all the things that suddenly seemed infinitely dear to her.
Even as she watched the device suddenly came alive between Morag’s elegant hands. It was hard to say just how. There was light of course, a pulsing blue light and a continual soft beep, but there was more than that. It was as if some entirely new element was revealed in the aura that extended around it. It was, thought Garland, as if actual seconds had become visible – almost like fireflies of a different kind.
Morag turned, looking over at them with the Nennog’s eyes, then turning towards Ozul.
‘Contact Maska!’ he said. ‘Tell him we have the children and that solar converter too. It is a great source of power and I long for all the power in the world. Tell Maska to join us. We will soon be home in our own time.’
*
‘Let me go!’ Lilith was screaming, up on the mountain track. ‘Let me go!’
But Maska took no notice of her furious cries.
‘Let me go!’ she screamed again and began kicking wildly.
They were negotiating a dangerous curve in the path, and perhaps her furious kicking annoyed even Maska, for he stopped and held her up so they were nose to nose, looking into each other’s eyes.
‘Quiet!’ he said. ‘Quiet, or I will consume you.’
‘Let me go or else …’ Lilith was sobbing with fear, but with fury too. She aimed yet another kick at him.
‘If you are good, I just might let you go in due course,’ he said. ‘If you annoy me I will bring about ultimate termination – then throw you like rubbish over the cliff.’
Something caught between Lilith’s panting body and Maska’s iron chest began to utter a shrill peeping sound. Reaching up with his free hand, he twisted his left ear slightly. Something in his throat shifted. Lilith stared unbelievingly as a narrow jointed rod with what looked like the head of a tiny microphone unfolded from that ear and quivered in front of his lips. Maska spoke into it.
‘Yes?’
‘At last,’ said the Nennog. ‘Ozul will meet you, accompanied by the shape I am controlling. It is hard to maintain. I may have to retreat. You have their converter and we have the Talisman.’
Silence.
Maska twisted his ear once more, and the communication device folded back into him. And as he did this there came a sound far down the road behind them.
‘That’s my daddy,’ Lilith wept. ‘He’ll show you!’
‘No! I will do the showing,’ Maska said. ‘After all, I do have his treasure don’t I?’ He slung Lilith across his shoulder and set off down the road swinging the converter in his left hand as if it were a big box of thistledown.
But all at once the path ahead of him erupted. Maska hesitated, then found himself confronted by about twenty Tunnellers. The road on which his feet were so firmly planted suddenly seemed unreliable. It crumbled at the far edge. Maska leapt back towards the centre of the road, stumbling as he did so.
‘What now?’ he cried furiously.
One of the Tunnellers jumped out in front of the others.
‘You are threatening the songbird!’ he cried.
Yves, desperately chasing after Maska, paused as he saw the way the road was breaking up and twisting in the middle.
‘Set the songbird free!’ the Tunneller was shouting. ‘Restore her.’ And Yves was filled with a strange, wild hope.
‘Lilith!’ he yelled. ‘Stop screaming. Sing something! Quickly! Sing!’
And Lilith, being Lilith, did sing. There wasn’t too much difference between her squealing and her singing, but the Tunnellers began swaying in time to her song.
I am dancing, dancing a rainbow dance,
Singing a rainbow song …’
The ground under Maska’s feet suddenly subsided, and his left leg sank into earth. In shock and surprise, desperately trying to keep his balance, he dropped both Lilith and the converter.
A singer has to take her chance … Lilith sang in her screaming fashion, rolling away from Maska while the ground beneath him crumbled even more dangerously. He tilted, flailing his arms as if they were the blades of a propeller, and staggered towards the space on the other side of the road.
‘Lilith! Lilith!’ cried Yves, terrified that she would fall too.
A singer must be strong! sang Lilith, trying to pull the converter to safe ground. It was much too heavy for her to carry but all the same, like a true and unexpected heroine, she struggled to drag it back towards Yves.
‘Protect the songbird,’ cried a chorus of Tunneller voices, and the whole track under Maska suddenly disappeared. With one of his strange metallic cries, he toppled out of sight and they heard him crashing down, down, down through the bush below them. The converter wobbled dangerously and seemed as if it was about to tumble after him.
‘Oh, Lilith, darling!’ cried Yves embracing her and pulling her back to a safer part of the road. ‘Thank goodness! Thank goodness. Now just stand there against the bank.’ He reached for the converter and pulled it back to safety.
‘Daddy, I saved that converter thing,’ Lilith said proudly. ‘I saved it by singing.’
‘You did,’ said Yves. ‘You surely did! And you can sing as often as you like from now on.’
22
Dancing Fireflies
Far down below Yves and Lilith, hemmed in by the sarcophagi, Garland, Timon and Eden faced dead Morag who looked at them with the eyes of the Nennog.
Timon was crying out in out in protest.
‘But if you destroy the converter you’ll release all that energy – it could destroy everything … everyone … for kilometres around …’
The Nennog interrupted him.
‘Why should you care? You will be safe with me. You will be hundreds of years on ahead of this cursed time.’
‘The time lines will twist!’ Timon shouted.
‘But no one here is of any importance,’ The Nennog said. ‘Believe me I have read about this stupid circus very carefully. I have followed a thousand time threads and, though there will be alterations for a great many other people, none of them will be changes that dislodge me. That is all that matters. Ozul. Bring the boys and the baby over here.’
Ozul moved in on them. Timon passed Jewel to Eden then jumpt to his feet, prepared to defend Jewel, and to defend Garland, too, perhaps, but it was Eden and Jewel that Ozul seized, only to drop him and leap away uttering a cry which was certainly a cry of pain.
‘What?’ cried the Nennog. Ozul turned towards him.
‘Lord,’ he began, crying out in agony and confusion, ‘my arm … my arm …’ He clasped his right shoulder with his left hand, while his right arm dangled beside him as limp and useless as an arm plaited of wet string. ‘I can’t feel my arm,’ Ozul said.
‘Must I then …?’ cried the Nennog. ‘Must I …’
