Chapter Nine

If Arthur thought that things couldn’t get any stranger, he was in for a surprise the next day at school. Class was well under way. Miss Keegan had taken his new essay with thanks when he arrived in the door with Ash and Will, and on the board she was now going over some geography homework from a couple of days ago.

As she droned on about mounds and fjords and glacial formations, Arthur found himself being distracted by a strange smell. At first he couldn’t tell what it was but as it grew stronger he found the smell in his memory. The air reeked of dampness and mildew, age and a faint whiff of open sewage. He’d smelled it before: under the ground, along the dank River Poddle. He looked at Ash and Will, but they didn’t seem to have noticed and were both paying close attention to Miss Keegan’s words on the blackboard. He looked at the teacher. Her mouth was moving and her hands gesturing yet suddenly he couldn’t hear a word that was coming out. In fact, there was now total silence in the class. Total silence apart from a distant dripping sound. Drip-drip-drip-drip. It seemed to echo off the classroom walls.

Drip-drip-drip-drip.

He suddenly sensed something at his feet. He looked down to find that he was sitting in a boat. When he looked back up, he was no longer in the classroom, instead he was travelling down the River Poddle. The boat was narrow and basic, barely more than a raft really. The edges were curved inwards so that the water couldn’t seep in. There was no one rowing or even steering; the little boat was being taken along by the flow of the water. It meandered down the river, walled on either side by a cold stone tunnel. A single torch burned, fixed to the bow.

Arthur sat in the stern. Even though he didn’t know how long he’d been there or how he’d gotten there, and even though all he knew was that he was back in the dark Poddle tunnel on a small wooden raft, he wasn’t frightened. But then he wasn’t exactly calm either. He felt anxious, like there was an important task at hand that he had to carry out. He forgot all about his classroom, his friends and his teacher, and tried to remember what that task was.

The only sound now was the water lapping against the boat. No – that wasn’t quite right. It was the sound of water lapping against boats, several boats. He turned around. For as far as he could see behind him, identical boats to his own followed. Each had its own torch, the light flickering on the stone walls and reflecting off the murky waters. But each boat had more than one passenger; in some as little as two, in others as many as five squeezed onto the fragile rafts. They were mostly men, although some looked as though they were barely out of boyhood, with long hair and beards, and were wearing dark tunics and heavy woollen shawls. Some of the men had weapons and shields with them in their boats; others had tools and building materials. Arthur looked down at his clothes and found that he was wearing a similar itchy tunic. He also had a few silver bracelets on his wrist and a necklace with the bronze pendant lying against his chest.

He scratched his head in confusion and found that his hair was long. It grew as far as his neckline and had a greasy, lanky feel to it. He rubbed his jaw to find a thick and bristly beard there. When he looked at his hands, he saw only a man’s hands: veiny and thick with a fine layer of hair over the back.

Without really meaning to, he found himself reaching out to the wall to stop the boat. The others stopped behind him. He stood up, unsure of what he was doing but not in the least wobbly in the boat. His manly hands felt along the stone wall, finding the perfect spot. He pulled the pendant harshly and the necklace split, then he slammed the pendant against the wall. There was a brief green flash of light. When he took his hand away, the piece of bronze was embedded in the stone, glowing faintly. The light faded as he turned to speak to his army.

Strange, Arthur thought distantly, that I know they’re an army.

The voice coming through Arthur’s lips wasn’t his own: it was a deep baritone, echoing off the tunnel walls. And it spoke in a language that Arthur couldn’t understand. The men nodded agreement and he sat back down. The boat moved on by itself.

They travelled further down the river than Arthur, Will and Ash had explored. And yet, somehow he knew that what he was seeing was accurate. He knew that the scratches on the walls were real; he knew that the turn to the right they soon came across was authentic.

There was a light in the distance. It was flickering orange so Arthur knew it was firelight, but it was much brighter than the torches they had. As the boat moved closer, he realised he was looking through a door and into a large, cavernous room. Several torches adorned the wall he could see.

Then one torch in the room blinked out as they approached. It hadn’t been blown out; it just looked like it had run out of fuel or oxygen. Another went dark, and another, and another, until the room through the door was pitch black.

He looked at his own torch, and as he did every torch on every boat faded to darkness.

‘Aaah!’

Arthur opened his eyes and was shocked to find himself sitting in the middle of class. For a brief moment, he wasn’t sure if he’d actually woken at all or was still dreaming. But the giggles coming from some class members gave it away.

‘Am I boring you, Arthur?’ Miss Keegan said. She was holding a piece of chalk in her hand, midway through writing some geography answers on the board.

‘No, Miss, I’m sorry.’

‘Glad to hear it. Now, may I continue?’

‘Of course, Miss. Sorry, Miss.’

She turned back to the board and went on writing.

Will nudged him. ‘Are you all right?’

Arthur nodded.

‘Are you sure?’ whispered Ash, concern written all over her face.

‘Yeah. I just haven’t been sleeping well. I keep having these weird dreams …’

He trailed off mid-sentence when he saw the words that Miss Keegan was writing on the board. The geography answers, which had been written in plain English, were moving by themselves across the board. The chalk letters looked like they were dancing.

‘Hey! Look at that!’

‘What?’

‘That! Don’t you see it?’ He pointed to the blackboard where the letters continued to move independently. No one else seemed to notice; not Will, not Ash, not even Miss Keegan, who was writing more words on the board, only for them to come to life too. The letters suddenly slowed down and started to form new shapes: lines, x shapes, crosses, dots and crosshatching. All shapes similar to the ones he’d seen on the wall of the tunnel, shapes he’d somehow written down himself the day before.

Miss Keegan turned and noticed Arthur’s boggled face watching the board. She opened her mouth to speak but the words that came out weren’t English. Arthur didn’t have to listen long to realise that she was speaking the strange foreign language he’d just heard in his dream.

He jumped off his chair in shock and fear, but became tangled in the strap of his backpack and fell to the floor. When Ash moved to help him up, speaking the same strange language, he recoiled from her. Will grabbed him by the forearm and helped him to his feet, also speaking in the dream dialogue.

Arthur snatched his arm away, ran for the door, through it and down the corridor. He didn’t stop running until he was halfway home and his lungs felt like they were about to burst. He bent over and rested his hands on his knees, panting.

‘It’s a dream!’ he kept muttering to himself. ‘It’s a dream, it’s a dream! Just wake up!’

The pendant slipped out from under his shirt and dangled on its lace in front of his face. It was shimmering with a bright green light. He looked at it, pulled it off straight over his head and shoved it in his pocket. Then he ran the rest of the way home as quickly as he could.

The doorbell rang just after four o’clock. Arthur answered it to find Ash and Will standing there. Will held up Arthur’s backpack.

‘You forgot this,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Am I in trouble?’

‘Well, you could probably do with saying sorry to Miss Keegan.’

‘I’ll do that tomorrow. Come in.’

When Arthur had described everything that had happened in the classroom to them, he took the pendant out of his pocket and placed it on the kitchen table between them. It was still glowing faintly.

‘How is it doing that?’ Ash mused.

‘I don’t know,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s definitely making me see things, hallucinate. And I think it’s making me do things as well, like writing in those bizarre letters yesterday in the essay. On top of that, I had another strange dream a couple of weeks ago. I think they all may be linked somehow, but the pendant couldn’t have given me that weird dream because we hadn’t found it yet.’

‘What happened in it?’ asked Ash.

‘It felt strange, different somehow. You know when you’re in a dream, you’re always living it? Well, in this one it felt like I was watching. And I saw this crazy-looking guy and a snake. Only the snake grew huge. And those letters were there as well. They were called runes.’

‘But the pendant is still magic or something, right?’ added Will. ‘It’s probably the reason you heard us speak that language. And why you saw the letters change on the blackboard.’

‘It’s a translator,’ murmured Ash.

‘What?’

‘It’s a translator. Some kind of magical translator. If you see or hear something in English, it gets turned into this odd ancient language.’

‘Could be,’ agreed Arthur. Another light bulb lit up over his head. ‘But what would happen if you saw something in the ancient language?’

‘What are you getting at?’ said Will. But Arthur was already running upstairs. He came back down a moment later, carrying the pages of his failed essay.

As he smoothed them out on the table, he explained. ‘When I wrote these I was wearing the pendant. It translated them from English to this language but I didn’t realise it. So maybe …’

He tentatively put the pendant back around his neck. Instantly the glowing became more intense.

At first nothing happened. But then the strange patterns on the page started to dance like they’d done on the blackboard. They moved and shifted across the page until finally settling.

‘Anything?’ Will asked, looking anxiously at the essay. ‘What does it say?’

Arthur couldn’t take his eyes from the pages, from the message he couldn’t remember writing. A message he didn’t understand.

‘It says …’ he began, ‘it says the same thing over and over. The same three words. “Beware the Jormungand”.’ He looked at his friends, fear in all their eyes.

‘What’s a Jormungand?’ Ash said.

‘I’m not sure,’ Arthur replied, ‘but I’m really worried.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, because I think that might be what the crazy-looking guy called the giant snake thing in my dream, and if it is we’re in really big trouble.’