Obsidian Pebble (12 page)

“Ah, a trefoil. Armour piercing, that one. Probably Viking.” Caleb peered into the box. “Don't see why not. Looks like your dad might have been cataloguing them.”

“If I take an arrowhead for Ruff and a boar carving for Ellie, and maybe one of each and a Celtic cross for me?”

“Take what you want, Oz. But I wouldn't mind some help with these papers. Some are probably personal.”

“Fine,” said Oz, delighted with having secured some treasure.

It took an hour to go through his dad's desk, but Oz didn't mind one bit, because in amongst the university documents and paid bills were scattered reminders of shared good times—ticket stubs to the cinema, programmes for football matches and, best of all, photos. Even Caleb laughed at the one of Oz, toothless, on a beach eating an ice cream, most of which seemed to be on his T-shirt.

“Caleb, all this stuff on Dad's desk, are they just things he picked up on his travels?” Oz asked after unearthing a collection of Roman coins.

“Your dad was a Senior Lecturer in Historical Materials, Oz. He was always being given stuff.”

“And he could tell if it was real or not?”

“Absolutely.”

Oz reached down into the bottom drawer and picked out a wodge of papers. On the top was a file with a name on it that caught his eye.

“Morsman?” Oz read. “I know that name.”

“Of course you do,” Caleb said. “We talked about him the other day.”

“Yeah, I remember. The chap who bought Penwurt. Ruff was on about him the other day, too.” Oz picked out the file and read the title properly. “‘Daniel Morsman, Charlatan or Visionary,' by Dr. M P Chambers.” He looked up at Caleb. “Did my dad write this?”

“He did, indeed. He wrote all sorts of stuff for magazines and journals. Part of his job.”

Oz studied the article and frowned. “I know that a visionary is someone who believes in things that eventually come true, like Nelson Mandela. We're doing a bit on South Africa in history at school. But what's a charlatan?”

“Someone who pretends to know a lot about something but really doesn't.”

“Cool,” Oz said. “We wanted to find stuff out about the orphanage, anyway. Think I could borrow this?”

Caleb frowned and sucked air in through his teeth. “This Morsman stuff is a bit of a tricky subject. There may be something in there that's a bit sensitive. We run everything past the university lawyers before publishing, in case any of us says something that lands us in hot water. Perhaps I'd better hang on to it.”

Oz shrugged and put the papers down on the desk.

Caleb had moved across to the pile of correspondence on the armchair. “I think your mum ought to look through these.” He picked up a wodge and a large, lumpy padded envelope slid out on to the floor. Oz reached for it and was about to hand it back when he read his own name written on the address label. He stared at it and felt his heart give a sudden leap.

“This is my dad's handwriting. It's got funny stamps on, too, and…” Oz gasped. “It was sent two and half years ago.”

“Really?” Caleb said, peering at the date stamp.

But Oz wasn't listening. He took the envelope and ran downstairs. His mother was in the laundry room. She looked a little more flushed than usual, but Oz needed to know.

“I was going to come up and help, but I thought you and Caleb could do a better job,” she said, but Oz could sense that she didn't really mean it. “What's that you've got?”

Barely able to contain his excitement, Oz blurted, “It's a parcel addressed to me from Dad.”

“Let me see.” Mrs. Chambers' face showed a mixture of surprise and mild horror as she looked up to meet Oz's eyes. “You're right.”

“So what's it doing in Dad's study?” Oz demanded.

“I honestly don't know,” Mrs. Chambers said, but then frowned. “Wait, it must have come just after the accident. It must have got mixed up with his papers. I just stuffed everything to do with his work into that study. I must have just assumed it was for your dad.”

Oz read the defeated look of apology in her face and knew that there was no point being stroppy about this. “Never mind. It's turned up now.”

“Thanks, Oz, and I am sorry,” said Mrs. Chambers, grabbing him in a hug. “Where's it from, anyway?”

“Egypt,” Oz said.

“How do you know that?”

“One of these stamps has a picture of the Sphinx on it,” Oz said as he disengaged from his mother and hurried back upstairs.

“Aren't you going to open it?” his mother called after him.

“Yeah, but maybe there's more.”

But there wasn't. After five minutes frantically searching through the small pile of letters, Oz found nothing more addressed to him. But it didn't matter. One was better than nothing. Grinning excitedly, he ripped the sellotaped envelope open. Inside, wrapped in bright-orange tissue paper, was a small oblong box, six inches long and four inches wide and about three inches deep. It had a brown, mottled colour and was smooth to the touch, except where a date that read “1761” was engraved in the surface. The lid was shut and secured by a copper hinge and clasp.

“A horn trinket box,” Caleb remarked admiringly. “Nice present.”

“Looks old,” Oz said, slightly bemused.

“Mid-eighteenth century, I'd say,” Caleb said with a straight face.

“How do you…” Then Oz looked at the date again and knew that he was having his leg pulled. But then a thought struck him. “Wait a minute, 1761? Wasn't that the date of the Bunthorpe Encounter?”

Caleb took the box and examined it carefully. “It was, indeed. Bit of a coincidence, that.”

“Yeah,” said Oz, “it is, isn't it?” But the tight knot of excitement in his stomach told him that his brain didn't think that at all. After another hour they'd more or less divided everything up into university stuff and Michael Chambers' personal possessions. Oz promised to do some more sorting after school the next day, but then his mother's voice called up to him to say that tea was ready.

* * *

He ate fish fingers, peas, and brown bread, which was up there in his top ten meals to die for. Afterwards, Oz went to the library to try and get some more maths homework done. But he took the box and his dad's old battered laptop with him. He really did try and get his head around more algebra, but Badger Breath's notes might as well have been written in Klingon.

The box, on the other hand, smelled faintly of tobacco and exotic spice and felt solid and wonderfully strange in his hands. It was nice, very nice, but Oz couldn't help wondering why, out of all the things he could have chosen, his father had picked this trinket box as a present. Michael Chambers' study was full of the kind of stuff that Oz would have been delighted to own. So what was so special about this little box? And then there was the article he'd seen on Morsman. Caleb didn't want him to read it, but Oz knew that his dad's laptop had all sorts of stuff on it that no one had ever bothered to erase. He fired it up and typed “Daniel Morsman, Charlatan or Visionary” into the search box. The article took thirty seconds to find and was in a folder labelled “Articles.” Oz opened the file and read the first few paragraphs:

There were other files in the same folder, cuttings and notes that were clearly research. One in particular caught his eye. It was labelled “Mysterious Death.” In it were a couple of scanned newspaper cuttings from 1941 and an obituary, but underneath his father had typed bullet points.

He was reading these strange sentences for the third time when Caleb popped his head up into the library.

“How's it going?”

Oz shut the lid of the laptop and smiled. “Not bad. You?”

“Still labelling boxes. What have you got there?”

“Algebra,” Oz said, and then added, “Can I ask you something? Why was my dad so interested in Morsman?”

Caleb seemed to hesitate for a long moment, but then walked in and sat in one of the chairs. “Daniel Morsman was a distant relative of your dad's. That's really how this house ended up being his. It all came to light when he started researching the old place's history. I suppose it snowballed from there.”

Oz looked around him at the library and the strange symbols, carved into the panels, that Ruff had been so taken with. He couldn't keep the awe and excitement out of his voice as he spoke. “It's this place, isn't it?” he said. “Makes you want to find out about it.”

“You sound just like Michael,” Caleb said, but he wasn't smiling. “Oz, there's something you need to know. Some people think that Morsman was a bit weird. He believed in things.”

“Artefacts like the obsidian pebble?” Oz said.

Caleb's face showed his astonishment. “I should have known you'd find out. Like I said, a lot of people think Morsman was just a crank, but your dad…well, he wasn't so sure. He felt that Morsman was on to something. But your mother…” Caleb hesitated. “Let's just say that Gwen didn't share your dad's enthusiasm.”

Caleb hesitated again and looked suddenly very uncomfortable, but Oz pressed him to continue.

“How do you mean?”

“She, uh…she blames your dad's fascination with Morsman for what happened.”

“You mean, Dad's accident? But what could Morsman have to do with a car crash?”

“It was research on Morsman that took your father to Egypt instead of him coming straight home from Athens.”

“What?”

Caleb sighed. “He went to Egypt on the trail of the artefacts.”

“He was actually looking for them?” Oz's jaw dropped open.

Caleb nodded again. “All I'm saying is that your mother is a little…sensitive about all things Morsman. I thought I'd just warn you, that's all.”

Oz nodded. They both knew exactly what Caleb meant, but this new information about Egypt was fanning the flames of Oz's conviction. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked suddenly.

“Ghosts?” Caleb let out an involuntary laugh. “Why do you ask?”

“Because me and Ruff and Ellie, we heard a ghost on Halloween night in the orphanage.”

“Really?”

Oz studied Caleb's face for any sign of derision but didn't find any. “Really,” Oz said. “First floor. We heard footsteps, all of us did. It was coming from one of the schoolrooms. But when we went in there, it was completely empty. Looked like no one had been in there for years.”

“No wonder you looked terrified that night.”

“We've been trying to work out who or what it might be. We thought maybe it was tied up with the Bunthorpe Encounter. But now, listening to all this about artefacts and Morsman…do you think that the footsteps could have anything to do with—”

“Hey, you two,” Mrs. Chambers sang out from the stairwell.

Caleb slitted his eyes and shook his head in warning, and Oz nodded in silent agreement as Mrs. Chambers' head appeared. She took in Oz shuffling papers on the library table. “I thought you were meant to be doing your homework?”

“I am. We were just talking about…algebra.”

“Oh well, better leave me out of it.” Mrs. Chambers made a face. “I just got off the phone with Lorenzo Heeps. He's agreed to come and pick up most of the boxes of papers that Caleb has sorted. Save us a job, eh?”

Oz glanced questioningly at Caleb, but there was a fixed smile on his face which was unreadable.

* * *

Later, Oz lay in his bed pondering what had been an eventful day. First, there'd been S and S and their fantastic SPEXIT, and then his dad's study and finding the trinket box, not to mention his dad's fascination with Morsman and artefacts. In the darkness, Oz shook his head. Amazing how you could go for years being bored witless, only to have several astonishing things happen in the space of a few hours. His mind was churning. What he should have been doing was worrying about the result of his maths test; instead, he was thinking about just where to start telling Ellie and Ruff about all of this.

He smiled and shut his eyes. So Mum was anti-Morsman… That meant he would have to be extra careful in his digging. Because more digging was what he now had to do. The footsteps and Penwurt and Morsman were all tied together somehow, he was sure of it. And with the added appearance of the trinket box, Oz was totally convinced that his father had reached out to him and sent him a message. Now all he had to do was to work out what it all meant.

* * *

On Monday morning, Oz collared Ellie and Ruff as soon as they got to their desks in room 33.

“You won't believe the things that happened to me yesterday,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “But the best bit of all was that my mother finally opened up my dad's study, so I got you these.” Oz handed over the items he'd taken from his dad's study.