The Riddles of Epsilon (19 page)

I stood up and began to walk around it. Domino and I slid about, our ankles getting skinned on the stones piled everywhere.

But suddenly Domino found it—at least, he disappeared. One minute, he was snuffling in the long grass. The next minute, his head vanished, then the rest of him.

“Stay, Domino!” I hissed. “Sit!” I didn't want him falling down a hole, vanishing for good.

I heard his little snuffly woof as he obeyed and sat.

Then carefully, carefully, I followed him in.

He'd found a small opening—barely a cave at all—this couldn't be it! Just a space, a few feet wide—just enough to wriggle into, really. Domino sat there, wagging his tail. He seemed okay; he wasn't scared like me.

“Good dog! What is it, boy? What have you found?”

Domino inched forward to lick my nose. And my flashlight showed me what he'd found.

Steps. Spiral steps. Leading downward.

 

I hated the claustrophobic space. It made me sweat. Yet it was cold. The sort of cold you only ever get deep underground. Slippery, too—water dripped from the tunnel walls, and the steps were slimy and horribly full of echoes.

There were lengths of chain at the steepest bits, fastened into the rock with ice-cold bolts. Soon my fingers were totally
numb. The air felt stale—dank and sour. Domino didn't seem to mind all that much. He looked uneasy, but not terrified.

But the farther down we went—about thiry-five steps now—new sounds began. Not just the dripping of water through the walls, but a sort of deep echoing. A
shhhh-shhhh
sound. As if something very large were breathing in the dark, far, far below. Stop it, Jess! There will be nothing down there, nothing at all!

 

And after a while, I felt a change of air. Into the sourness, a cleaner smell—seaweed, salt water. This smell got stronger and stronger, the lower we climbed.

All the time, my mind was racing. Mom. Mrs. Shilling. Ely Fingers. Mom. Dr. Parker. The tooth. The map. Mom.

At first, I kept my fears to myself. But pretty soon I started to whisper out loud. I had to. The silence was pressing on me, it was building up, I wanted to scream, to get out. Small spaces totally freak me out, and this was horribly small! No one knew I was here. I could fall. I could get trapped, die down here, and no one would know. That's not true. Epsilon would know. But had I done the right thing, leaving him that clue? Who was Epsilon, after all? I thought of those warnings about him and shivered.

Stay calm, Jess! Get a grip! Stop muttering! Because the echoes of my voice started to merge and change, as if
there were lots of mes, as if there were many voices. Voices falling down the stairwell, voices spiraling up again. Whose voices? It drove me mad to hear them, those echoes. So I'd stop muttering again, and the silence would hem me in, and as my flashlight flickered, all the shadows leaped. Shadows seemed to be bouncing everywhere, colliding all over the walls. The walls, too, were a lot wetter now. They had seaweed growing on them, clinging to the lowest edges. But that was impossible, wasn't it? Unless . . . unless the tide somehow came right in to fill the bottom of this stairwell. I walked down into the whispers and the dark shapes (but it's only me! It's only me and Domino!) until I felt it building up again, the need to speak aloud.

And all the time, the
shhh-shhh
-ing grew louder and louder and louder.

Suddenly Domino stopped. His tail went down.

“What? What is it, boy?”

He gave an uncertain little whine and stepped forward. There was no more ice-cold chain under my fingers. The end of the spiral. The beginning of a small cave. No . . . not just one cave—a series of caves, all tiny.

Each one led into the next. A chain of small spaces. I followed Domino through smaller and smaller gaps in the walls. He could do it easily, but it was harder for me and my backpack. The gaps got smaller. Until the last one came,
barely eighteen inches across—even Domino had to wriggle a bit. I followed him quickly, turning sideways, pushing my backpack in there in front of me.

It was the very last gap. I'd come out into the open air—a cave that was open to the sea.

Fresh air came straight at me from the ocean—it ripped through my fleece and made me shiver. Framed in the seaward mouth of the cave were the waves, lit silver by the moon and the stars. The waves were smashing onto the rocks. The sea would always cover part of the entrance to this cave, I suspected. And at high tide, the whole thing would be submerged. As it was, the only way into it was by the spiral steps. Or by boat.

I sat down on a rock and held Domino to me. He didn't lick my face or nuzzle into my neck. He kept his head turned to the sea, as glad as I was to smell outside again.

Then we both jumped up, terrified by a great
WHOOSH!

This was followed by that steady, rhythmic shushing, like something enormous, breathing from great lungs. But it came from
behind
the rock we were sitting on. And after the huge sigh of its breathing, a gurgling, a trickling.

It reminded me of something. Something I'd only seen and heard on films, on wildlife programs on TV. The watery sounds, the sudden, breathy gasp of lots of air, the whoosh. The sound of the blowhole of a dolphin or a porpoise,
emerging, breathing, spouting, submerging again. Or maybe not a dolphin. Maybe a whale.

The spout of the whale.

I called Domino. Together we crept behind the rock.

Nothing. Just a stinking mass of seaweed in ankle-deep water. Green seaweed, and bronze, and black. All tangled together where the sea had left it, last tide. It was as I'd thought—the sea must come right into this cave and cover the whole thing up.

I turned around and checked the level of the tide. Already it was closer than it had been when I first came in. The tide was coming in fast. I remembered Epsilon's words. The map was hidden
“in a place of great danger, where it would be hardest to retrieve.”
A place, in fact, someone could drown in, if they were here when the tide was coming in. Like now.

Frantically I shone the flashlight all around. Just the back of a cave, that's all—nothing here to fit the rhyme. Unless . . . I angled my flashlight upward, to the roof of the cave. And there it was.

A rock hung down. A black rock, like the head and shoulders of a huge monster. My flashlight followed its line, lit up shoulders, neck, head, and one arm flung out.

The head was gnarled and horned, with a vast, open mouth. The crooked arm led to a black bony hand. One
finger of rock was extended—pointing downward. Pointing to the other side of the seaweed!

A demon.
“The space is marked by an infidel whose hand reveals what's bidden.”

I'd found the infidel. And his hand revealed what was bidden—what was asked of me next. I had to cross the mass of seaweed, wade through it. It was now about calf height. When the tide came fully in, it could block off my exit to the spiral stairway forever.

And I would have to go over the seaweed alone. Nothing but nothing would entice Domino over that stinky mess! He is the most particular dog, when it comes to smelly stuff.

As if to confirm this, Domino found a higher rock, sat down on it, and stared at me nervously.

I knew I'd get wet through—but no way was I going to take my socks and boots off, put my bare feet into that seaweedy ick! I imagined my heels standing on soft, squelchy things, crunching small living things between my soft toes. So I just took a deep breath against the cold and waded in.

The cold seeped in over my boots, into my socks, began to soak up my jeans. And the seaweed against my legs felt disgusting. It clung and sucked. It squelched and popped under my boots. In the glow from my flashlight, it flowed gracefully away from me. Like hair. Green hair.

And suddenly I saw what this was. Merrow hair! A
memory came back to me from a childhood storybook about sea creatures. Merrow must mean mermaid! Green and golden mermaid hair. And I was walking through it, just like in the rhyme.
“Through merrow hair in Neptune's lair past thirty fingers pale”!

As soon as I thought of the thirty fingers pale, I saw them—just a glimpse in the distance. Silvery-white things, hanging down—a long wall of them, curving round a corner.

Out of the seaweed, I squelched forward—pointed my flashlight. Stalactites, old, sturdy fingers of stone. I began to count.

Fifteen fingers later, Domino was out of sight round the corner. He began to yap—a sharp, frightened sound that bounced off the walls, came back to me, bounced away again. He was scared of the incoming tide, too.

“Quiet, Domino! Quiet, boy!”

Domino fell quiet. Round the corner—twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight.

The fingers got shorter as I counted, like the pipes of a great church organ, tapering to the smaller treble pipes.

I heard those watery gasps again—right in front of me. Like a thirsty throat filling up—then a breath. Those giant lungs, hidden somewhere in front of me. They breathed in and out, they swallowed water, they gasped again. It was the most horrible, sinister sound.

But then I realized that the breathing came and went in a steady rhythm. The same rhythm had been at my back at the mouth of the cave. The rhythm of the waves as they came in and ebbed out again. The endless rhythm of the sea.

I was on my hands and knees now, the organ pipes tapering into small fingers, infant fingers, only inches high. Before me was a hole in the rock, a fist-sized tunnel leading downward. Through this hole, the breathing sound echoed, building up and up.

I lay on my stomach. I could hear the sea behind me, rushing in, crashing into the mouth of the cave. Frantically I tried to piece together what was behind this rock wall.

A blowhole. Right behind this massive rock wall, another small space must be filling up with water. A space not visible from here. And as the water came in, it filled it up a bit more. And at each ebb of the waves, the water level inside the space dropped a little, so that air rushed back in—that breathing sound. With each incoming wave, that small space was filling and filling until the pressure built up. Then, somewhere along its length where there was a tiny gap to the air, the water all shot out in a whooshing spout.

“Then hark for a river in the dark and reach for the spout of the whale.”

But when I put my hand into the tiny tunnel and reached down it, my whole hand was underwater. Numb and cold, I
couldn't feel a thing. I'd have to wait for it to empty again.

It took several minutes for this to happen, and as I waited, I grew colder and colder. My imagination started to play tricks. In the flashlight's glow, there seemed to be things swarming all around me, tiny shadows flitting over my skin. I forced the panic away, teeth chattering in the dark. My face was pressed to the rock floor.

I felt I was embracing a giant sea creature, a monstrous, black-skinned thing with eels and sea serpents in its jaws. The sloping fingers of stalactites no longer seemed like the pipes of a church organ. They felt like a rib cage, part of a cadaver I was lying pressed into. I wanted to cry or yell; my nerves were stretched tight. It was as if someone were turning a screw, tightening me up with each breath of the sea. It built up and up until—at last—the great
whoosh!
of water came from behind the rock wall.

I breathed again.

The space was emptied.

Now I could hear it clearly through the gap—the river in the dark. The river of seawater, starting to sneak its way back in.

“Then hark for a river in the dark and reach for the spout of the whale.”

I ripped my hand out of the sleeve of my fleece so that my whole arm was bare. Then I reached again into the tiny
tunnel.

In and in and in, and all the time I felt something would grab my hand, would hold my wrist in its fangs, would trap me there forever.

But I reached farther, grazing my knuckles on rock. Right up to my armpit I went. My fingers fumbled . . . found something . . . took hold. Something rounded and small and smooth, wedged at the end of the gap. I wrestled with it. Come out, come out!

Then out it came, and without looking at it, I scrambled to my feet and ran, away from that horrible rib cage. Away from the pale rock fingers and back round the corner. Back through the mermaid hair grabbing at my feet. Back through knee-deep tide pouring in. Back to my backpack and my wonderful, warm, frightened dog. We ran splashing to the foot of the spiral stairs—climbed up three steps that were already covered in water. And then, safe at last from the tide, I glanced at the object I'd come all this way for.

The map. The map that would tell me where the relic was that we were all looking for—Mom and the Dark Beings and the Bright Beings and Yolandë and myself.

I stared down at it in disbelief.

It didn't look anything
like
a map. It wasn't a map!

It was oval, for a start—a smooth stone egg shape with something carved deep into its face. Something very simple
and crudely carved. Something that didn't help me at all.

Just an arrow. I'd come all that way—just for one simple arrow.

I burst into tears. And then I set off again—back up that horrible stairwell.

 

I barely remember getting back up. I think I cried all the way. All I could think about was that arrow. I felt cheated, hopeless.

It was hard work getting up those steps, with my wet jeans and boots—that's about all I can recall. And the fact that, as soon as we emerged from those spiral steps back into the clear night, Domino was utterly joyful, tail wagging nineteen to the dozen.

I stumbled back through the woods a little way, then stood still, panting. I was drenched to the skin. But Domino had caught a whiff of the path to the cottage. His tail started to wag. He started to run. Back toward the cottage.

I called for him to come back, but he wouldn't. I followed him, swearing loudly. I hated the cottage at that moment—hated everything to do with it. Hated Epsilon and his stupid bucket that had started it all. Hated the bucket and the garden and the arrow in the wall.