December (20 page)

‘We won’t know what we’re looking for until we find it,’ I said.

I started panicking as the distant chimes rang out again. We had two hours to midnight.

‘Spread out,’ I urged, ‘and look for anything that might give us a clue. Anything familiar.’

After a lot of frantic searching, we all stopped and stared back at each other hopelessly. Was this the end of the road? Had we reached another dead end?

‘Come over here!’ Winter suddenly shouted. ‘Look at this!’

Boges and I hurried over to her. She was shining her torch down to where the corners of a huge fireplace met the broken stone of the floor. There was something carved on the stone. It was small and worn by the weather.

‘It’s a rose!’ I said, squatting beside it. ‘Like that one in the drawing of the little kid!’ My heart beat a little faster. ‘And look! Just above it!’

‘The pattern on Gabbi’s ring,’ said Winter, pointing to the silver ring on my finger. ‘The Carrick bend design!’

Just above the rose, the Carrick bend had been carved along the stone wall. It too, was eroded and almost invisible.

‘Maybe the rose means something like “X marks the spot”,’ I said, hopefully. I shone my torch up and around, searching the darkness in the corner under the collapsing roof.

You were here, Dad, I thought to myself. You knew something was here. You noticed
some
thing
—why
can’t I see it?
What were you trying to tell me?

As I strained to make out more of the rotting designs in the crumbling plaster, brilliant lights suddenly came on, flooding the interior of the ruined Keep.

Boges and Winter blinked in astonishment, quickly turning around, bracing themselves.

I freaked out. It was now as bright as day. Who was here?

‘Get out of sight!’ I ordered, ducking into the narrow corridor we’d first come through, and peering around the corner of the wide archway.

Someone had switched on the flood lights. I could hear the generator humming outside.

As I crouched out of the light, I nearly jumped out of my skin as outside some huge piece of machinery revved into life. I craned my neck further around the corner. Some distance away, near the fenceline, the massive bulldozer we’d seen earlier had come to life! A hunched figure sat at the controls.

I raced back to the others. ‘We have to hurry. If we stay out of sight, the guy in the bulldozer might not even realise we’re in here. Looks like he’s loading stones onto a pallet or something.’

‘At this hour?’ Winter asked. ‘Nearly
midnight
? On New Year’s Eve?’

‘I’ve heard of overtime,’ said Boges, ‘but that’s crazy.’

The bright light shone on the stained and
discoloured
plaster of the ceiling above the corner, and for the first time I could see traces of words. As more of the damaged plaster of the corner came into focus, I gasped.

‘Wow!’ yelped Boges over the sound of the bulldozer, following my line of sight and spotting the words on the wall. ‘The words inscribed on the Ormond Jewel!’

‘And look up here! You can see where they are repeated high up on the wall!’ cried Winter, carefully stepping across the uneven floor to see the faint words better. ‘They would have run all the way round this section of the gallery! Just like in the old sketch you found in Dr Brinsley’s study!’

The spot we were standing in looked like it had once been a small room, just off the main, long gallery.

‘Now I
know
we’re in the right place,’ said Winter, ‘even in the right corner! The rose and inscription are showing us the way!’

My exhilaration surged as did the sense of danger. I was
shaking
with mixed emotions. To be so close … so close to
what
?

Boges twisted to look at the roof and tripped over something on the floor. The contents of his backpack flew out and his water bottle hit the ground, popping its lid and spraying water everywhere. He swore, climbing to his feet.

Winter went to help him gather up his things, retrieving his bottle. Most of the water had spilled out onto the ground, making a slippery mess on the mud-covered mosaic flooring.

‘Hey, look at this—there’s some kind of pattern on these tiles,’ said Winter, squatting down to take a closer look. ‘Underneath the dirt.’

‘We don’t have time for appreciating tiles,’ said Boges, getting back on his feet.

‘You’d better make time for this,’ scoffed Winter, her voice quivering with excitement. ‘Cal, get over here and check this out!’

She dropped to her hands and knees, and wrenched off her scarf, scrubbing the ground
with it. She grabbed Boges’s bottle and splashed more water over the tiles. ‘Don’t just stand there, help me!’

We joined her and started clearing more of the tiles—me with my bare hands, Boges with his beanie—pushing aside leaves and debris, wiping dirt away.

Outside, the bulldozer seemed to be getting louder.

‘Luckily they’re only here to dismantle the place,’ Boges said, ‘not destroy it.’

I stood back up, shining my torch onto the area we’d been working on. Although smeared and dirty, parts of the original mosaic floor of the gallery started to become clear. More and more was being revealed with every sweep of Winter’s wet scarf.

‘Get up!’ I shouted excitedly to my friends. ‘Look!’

A pattern in the tiles of intertwined leaves of faded yellow surrounded what once would have been a huge, dark green oval. I dug around in my backpack and pulled out the Ormond Jewel, holding it up over the remnants of the pattern on the floor.

There was no doubt about it.

‘It’s the same design as the front of the Ormond Jewel! The Ormond Jewel is a
miniature
!
It’s a tiny replica of the floor design of Cragkill Keep!’

Stunned by this revelation, the three of us stood immobilised, staring at each other, then at the tiled jewel on the floor beneath us.

Feverishly we dropped back to our knees to clear more of the rubble and grass, revealing more patches of coloured tiling.

‘Look!’ I said. ‘There’s the pattern of red and white tiles! The same pattern as the alternating rubies and pearls surrounding the emerald!’

Little by little, the clues were falling into place!

‘Hurry,’ I said to the others. ‘If that guy in the bulldozer comes any closer, he’ll spot us. We mustn’t be seen. The clock’s ticking!’

I could hear Winter reciting the words of the Ormond Riddle under her breath as she cleared enough ground to start examining the
alternating
red and white tiles.

‘There are thirteen white tiles,’ she said. ‘The same number as the pearls on the Ormond Jewel.’

‘Thirteen teares, thirteen tiles, thirteen steps!’ said Boges, excitedly. ‘The numbers in the Riddle relate to counting out the steps on this floor!’ Boges suddenly stopped, looking deflated. ‘But the thirteen steps we need to take have to start from “the Sunnes grate Doore”,’ he said.
‘Is there some sort of grate or door around here? I can’t see anything like that.’

With the grinding of the bulldozer becoming louder, I risked running down to the other end of the gallery and back again.

‘There’s nothing on the floor near the arch where we came in,’ I reported.

‘We don’t need to look for a grate,’ said Winter. ‘That’s just old-fashioned spelling for “great”. We should be looking for something big that lets the sun in—a
great
door, or something.’

I looked around. ‘“The Sunnes grate Doore”,’ I repeated.

A mix of moonlight and floodlight shone on the rough floor of the ruin. I tried to follow the beams of moonlight, and imagined sunlight pouring through the gaping arches of the
three-tiered
window in the tower rearing above us.

A wave of vibrations shuddered through the stone walls as the rumbling from the big
earthmover
outside became louder. What was left of the roof of the main gallery trembled visibly.

‘Something that lets the sun in?’ said Winter, suddenly beside me. She was looking up at the moonlight, like me—at the crumbling arches of the empty windows.

‘Them?’ I asked, staring at the arches. ‘The sun would have come streaming through those
windows. Onto the floor. Just like the moonlight is trying to do now!’

Winter raced over to the crumbling stones beneath the ruined windows, and stood there directly against the wall. ‘If we take the
thirteen
steps as starting from here, under the big triple window—the sun’s great door—we might find something.’

I ran over to join her and we walked the steps, counting aloud over the drone of the bulldozer.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen … We could go no further. We had already come up hard against the opposite wall of this smaller, ruined room we were in. I stood there with my nose almost touching the cold stone wall as disappointment drained me.

There was nothing beyond the thirteenth step.

‘The tiles don’t lead anywhere!’ I spat bitterly. ‘They end right here at this wall. It’s not
working
. The Riddle isn’t right!’

‘“Thirteen Teares from the Sunnes grate Doore”,’ Winter chanted, ‘“Make
right
to treadde in Gules on the Floore …”’

I paused. ‘Make
right
!’ I shouted. ‘I’ve gotta take a step to the
right
.’

‘Of course!’ cried Winter.

I stepped to the right and kicked away the leaf litter and debris at my feet.

‘You’re standing on a red tile!’ said Boges. ‘
Gules!
Gules means red! Gules on the floor!’

‘But there’s only one of them! Hard up against the wall!’ I said.

At that moment, the sound of the bulldozer outside roared at top speed and the wall under the gaping hole of the ruined window, started to crack in a thin, jagged black line.

Boges yelled. ‘We’ll have to show ourselves, dude. That guy’s going to kill us!’

‘We can’t!’ I said. ‘We’re so close to the
deadline
!’

‘You have to “adde One in, for the Queenes fayre Sinne”,’ recited Winter, who seemed unaware of the danger we were in. ‘That means there should be one more tile! There should be
two
red tiles. The Riddle says so!’

‘But there’s only one here,’ I argued.

‘Can we have this conversation somewhere else please, dudes?’ yelled Boges over the noise of the bulldozer outside. ‘That crack’s getting bigger every second! The wall’s going to fall and we’re going to be crushed if we stay here!’

He was right. The crack in the wall now ran all the way down from the window and almost the entire length of the gallery. It was getting
wider, deeper and blacker the longer I stared at it.

A shower of small stones from around the three-tiered window above dropped dangerously close. It was about to come down. The entire Cragkill Keep was about to come down.

As I stood there, immobilised with frustration, unwilling to just walk away from the Ormond Singularity, the other wall next to me cracked wider with a sound like a gunshot.

Bigger stones tumbled and crashed to the ground, peppering me with stinging fragments.

‘Cal!’ urged Boges. ‘I’m serious, we have to move! We have to get out of here!’

‘We can’t,’ cried Winter. ‘We can’t leave now! We’re so close! There’s gotta be something else. The Riddle talks about the orb being riven and the gift being given. Something’s wrong! Where’s the orb?’

Boges grabbed me and Winter by the arms. ‘You betcha something’s wrong! A lunatic in a bulldozer’s bringing the house down around us! We’ll be flattened if we don’t get out now!’

Everything was trembling violently. Boges’s fingers dug into my upper arm, wrenching me away from the wall.

‘Come
on
! This whole place is about to come down on top of us!’

‘No! We can’t leave now!’ insisted Winter, a crazed, fearless determination in her eyes. ‘If we leave now, the Ormond Singularity is lost. Cal will never find out what it is!’

The crack in the wall next to me suddenly shifted, and another ominous zigzag crack appeared, spearing down its entire length. More stones and rocks cascaded down.