Voices in Stone (19 page)

She was still seeing the world through a ghostly doubling. She was Angel, gripping tight onto an alien, and she was herself, seeing Gray’s terrified face and the quarry pressing down on them.

The siren wailed on. What would happen when it stopped?

“We have to get out!”

She searched for an escape route. Not the way they’d come – it was too steep, and they’d be scrambling straight into the formation of charges. The quarry track also wound its way under the rock face, only metres from the blast area. They’d be killed there too.

The siren stopped, its echoes fading away.

“We’ll be all right,” Gray said.

“How?” She’d died before, but there’d been a chance that time, a frozen heart that could start beating once more. Not this time. “There won’t be anything left of us!”

She let go of Angel, of Gray. “We have to run!”

“Don’t!” Gray’s face was desperate. “There are two more sirens – we’ve got time. Please!” He looked up at the quarry face, then stood up. “I’ll pull out the wires!”

“What?”

“The yellow wires, the ones going to the explosive charges.” He was already at the steep bank, pulling up with his hands, scrabbling for footholds. “Stay with the alien! Help him!”

Gray climbed fast, his long limbs powering him up. In a few moments he was on the top, and he disappeared from view.

Isis stared at the empty space where he’d been standing, her heart pounding. Was he really pulling the wires out of the charges? Could you even do that?

Mandeville pulled his head from the ground. “Well I doubt we’ll be seeing the boy again. Probably running for his life.”

“He isn’t!” Isis said.

“I think you should run away as well.”

Isis stared at Mandeville.

“You’ll be no good to me dead. I can hardly be your spirit guide if you’re a corpse.”

Of course, the seances. It was what he always wanted… Isis smiled, realising that she had a bargaining point.

“I won’t leave,” she said. “I’ll die here.”

“Ridiculous! Especially as you know what it means to be dead!”

“You said it isn’t too terrible.”

“I was
lying
.”

She wasn’t going to let Mandeville see her fear. “I won’t leave until we’ve helped the alien.”

“Oh yes, let us be the valiant heroes,” Mandeville sighed. “And how, exactly?”

“You have to possess the alien, and make it leave, because we’re the flies and it can’t catch us.”

“I beg your pardon?”

It had made sense when Gray explained it, but now she wasn’t sure what they were meant to do. She looked up at the blank face of the quarry, her body shivering with
the urge to run. Would the explosion start with a tremor? How much would it hurt, all that rock blasting into her?

She swallowed. “Can you possess such a big creature?”

“Why should I?” Mandeville brushed his hands on his jacket, creating clouds of cloth fibres.

“I’ll start the seances again. And not just in schools, wherever you want.” She knew she had him, by the flash in his blue eyes.

“Will you keep to your promise?”

The echoes of the first siren had faded now, and the whistles and distant shouts of the protest had been silenced too. There was only the sound of her own breathing.

“Yes.”

“This possession won’t be easy. It may even be dangerous.”

“I don’t care.”

“Then we have a bargain.” Mandeville’s skeletal finger poked onto her forehead.

“Whuh…” She couldn’t speak; the cold pierced her brain with a biting pain.

“I said this wouldn’t be easy,” said Mandeville. He leaned
closer. “You will have to give me all of your power, all your strength. You’ll need the help of your little sister as well, and even then…”

He pushed her to the ground, using only his fingertip. The gravel pressed into her cheek.

“Shut your eyes.”

I ran between the mounds, desperately trying not to step on any. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realised these were the piles left from drilling holes, that I hadn’t paid attention to all the wires. Now, every time my foot came down, I thought the ground was going to blow up.

My school shirt was sticking with cold sweat.

There were mounds of earth everywhere, and hundreds of wires, like a net covering the ground. I had to get started! I knelt down and grabbed the nearest wire, yanking as hard as I could.

Nothing. It didn’t even move.

I dug down with my hands to where the wire went into the drilled hole, and heaved with my whole weight.
The wire cut into my palms; I got a few centimetres of it out, but that was all. It didn’t break, or pull out completely.

I scrabbled deeper. In films, it’s always cut the red wire or cut the blue one. I only needed to pull this one out, but it kept on going. As far as I could dig, there was yellow wire. It didn’t seem to have an end to it.

I sat back, gasping with the effort, sweat trickling into my eyebrows. All around me were neat piles of rock powder, lines of them in every direction. Every one had a yellow wire coming out of it.

“I can’t.” Merlin had said the workers spent weeks putting in the charges. Of course I couldn’t dismantle the whole lot in a few minutes.

Weeeeeaaaaaaaaaaa
. A wailing siren, the second blast.

A million thoughts sparked in my head:
Get out of here! Tell Isis! Run! Save the alien! Run! Any second now! Save yourself! Runrunrunrunrun!

And then the part of my brain that was still thinking straight said,
They only press one button.

“Of course!” The yellow wires were laid out neatly in a net pattern, but if there was only one button to blow
the lot, then somewhere there had to be a single wire joining all these ones together.

I ran, stumbling and tripping, my feet landing anywhere, racing for the furthest line of drill mounds. There there there! I could see a different colour wire, grey and red-striped, leading away from the field. I threw myself on the ground, tracing it along, trying to find where it joined the yellow wires. There! A junction: a connector with a load of yellow wires going in one side, and the grey and red one coming out the other. It would only have taken a second to undo it if I had a screwdriver. But I didn’t.

I grabbed the grey and red wire, trying to pull it out of the connector with my hands. I smashed at the little plastic box with my fist, bashed it on the ground, stamped on it, but it wouldn’t come apart, I couldn’t make a dent on it.

“Why… won’t… you… break?” With every stamp, every second that passed, I was expecting a spark of electricity, the surge to rush into all those other wires and blow the ground from under me. I put my mouth around the grey wire and bit it, hard as I could, chewing and grinding the wire, spitting out bits of plastic.

The wire gave! The two chewed ends now lay apart from one other. I sat back panting, nearly crying, and stood up slowly, the relief pouring off me. I’d done it. I’d saved us!

Then I saw another grey and red wire, about twenty metres along the line of mounds. And beyond that, another one. I stared at the field of charges. There was a red and grey wire every twenty metres or so, at least another ten of them.

My heart and mind seemed to stop.

I’d wasted so much time! It was obvious I couldn’t ever prevent the charges going off, and worse, I’d left Isis, told her to stay where she was – right underneath the explosion.

I turned and ran, sweat sticking my shirt to me. I practically threw myself down the slope, landing in a tumble at the bottom, my ankle a shot of pain as it twisted under me.

“Isis!” I hobbled towards her. “Isis, come on! We have to go!”

She was kneeling awkwardly on the ground, the side of her face pressed flat in the dirt.

“Isis!” She didn’t pay me any attention. “Isis?”

I knelt down next to her. “Isis, I can’t break the wire! We need to get out of here!”

Her eyes opened. “I need more,” she said, in this raspy voice. “You’ll have to do.” And one of her hands snapped out, clamping around mine.

I was back underground again.

I could see Angel, her whole body upside down in the dim and rumbling rock, like she’d dived in. It took me a moment to realise I was seeing through Mandeville this time, and it was his skeleton hand holding onto the line that curled and coiled around the darkness, flickering with every colour imaginable. They grew and brightened, as if we were sinking into them, and I realised Mandeville was pressing his face close up to the alien’s body.

“What’s happening?” I gasped.

“I am doing what you demanded.” Mandeville’s voice seemed to come from three places at once. Far away and right by my ear.

“We hepping the effelant,” Angel squeaked from three different places.

“Mandeville’s trying a possession,” said Isis, also weirdly tripled.

“Work of this magnitude requires great concentration, great power,” said Mandeville. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” said Isis.

“… yes.” I don’t know if it was me said that, or Angel or Isis or Mandeville. We were all together. All part of the same thing.

And then Mandeville… I don’t know how to explain what happened next. How can I tell you what it’s like being an alien?

Try. Whatever you can remember.

It was… like going down a slide into a whirlpool made of rainbows. Swirls of colours getting nearer, until they were everything, until we were… him. The-crash-of-a-meteor-into-a-rocky-planet. That’s the alien’s name. Or maybe it’s more of a description.

He stretched underneath the whole valley, going beyond it and down so deep his belly was sitting on molten rock.

Not that he had a belly.

The alien’s body was stone, but also soft and always moving, like water seeping through sand. It flowed and floated inside the bedrock, while all of us tiny humans were scurrying around on top, going to work and school and all that stuff, not even knowing what was underneath. All the houses and roads, they were like insect bites or nettle stings. The diggers, working down to start the quarry, they were knives slicing in. And the blasting, the explosions that were all set up… They were, would be, the most incredible pain. Agony. It was happening so fast, like a burning rash, or a killer virus eating the alien alive.

He was panicking. He was trying to reach out to those of us who’d breathed him in that day in the quarry. He was trying to get our help.

So you could you sense its thoughts?

Well…

He was alone, and frightened at being alone. He was hoping the others, his family, would turn back for him, but they probably hadn’t noticed he was gone yet.

That’s the thing. The aliens live at this other speed, so
slow we can’t even tell it’s happening, like continents moving. To them he’d only just crashed to earth. To us it was thousands of years ago. In hundreds of years from now, when his family returned to find him, he’d have been mined away to nothing. They wouldn’t even have known what had happened, only that he’d vanished.

He was terrified. He’d speeded himself up as fast as he could, the way we get an adrenalin kick, but he still wasn’t fast enough. It had taken him weeks just to say one sentence to me.

That’s what some of his thoughts were.

There were other things too.

Like… he could taste gravity, and the Earth’s was really bland.

He rotated his body with the changing of the seasons, because it made him feel… sun-happy?

He saw our life through the standing stone – soil and plants, trees and birds, animals and humans – and he couldn’t understand why we’d bother. All of us stuck to the skin of our planet, never going anywhere else – he thought it was funny. Until we started hurting him.

I told you. It sounds crazy.

To aliens, human behaviour seems inexplicable.

Yeah, well. That’s for sure.

I was the alien. But I was me too, kneeling in the quarry with the grit digging into my knees. And I was Isis, lying with my face on the ground, and I was Angel, holding colours with my hand, and I was Mandeville telling everyone what a magnificent possession this was…

Through Isis I was joined to all of them, their thoughts crowding into mine so it was hard to tell which was whose, and shot through with the slow-moving hopes of the alien, like a river flowing, or currents in the ocean.
And even though I’d come down here to tell Isis the charges could blow any second, I knew we couldn’t just leave.

The alien was caught and lonely, trapped and in pain, too slow to get away. He needed to escape before the electricity buzzed down the wires and hit the explosive charges, but only we could do that for him, because to do it he needed to be as fast as a human, running away from it all.

I was Isis, she was me. I didn’t need to explain things like I am to you. Isis was me, and we were Mandeville and Angel. We listened to my heart thundering, and felt Isis’s legs aching to run. We poured our own quick lives through the ghosts’ hands, into the slow pulse and sweep of the stone ship-creature. Moving it faster, dragging its reactions. Giving the alien our kind of time, those minutes left before the final siren.

We pushed up, all of us. Tumbling into the sky, throwing off the Earth and heading into the beautiful darkness of space…

“Gray! Isis! Get up! What are you doing?”

It took me a moment to adjust. It was a man’s voice.

I opened my eyes. Grey and white, blue above. A dot moving, getting bigger.

The quarry, the sky. Merlin running along the track, shouting at us.

“I told them! I had to! You’ve only got a few minutes before she’ll be here.”

I sat up, my hand still in Isis’s. She was motionless on the ground.

Merlin slowed to a jog, panting and clutching his side. “Man!” He gasped a breath. “I told them you’re in here – I had to so they wouldn’t do anything stupid, like pressing buttons. That Dr Harcourt…” he gasped a few more breaths, “she’s coming for you, man.”

I smiled, so big it made my mouth hurt.

“We’re nearly done—”

Weeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaa
. The final siren.

And then the shivering in the ground. The horrible creaking of massive forces as the earth began breaking apart.

Merlin stared in horror around the quarry. “No! Dr Harcourt said they wouldn’t. She said the sirens are just to warn you – she said it was safe!”

The air filled with splinters of flying rock.