Rollins made Oz go first. He stumbled onwards, his heart sinking abysmally with each step. The walls pressed in on all sides and the air smelled increasingly of damp and decay. There was nowhere to run to even if he’d been able to, and Oz knew that he was in deep, deep trouble.
“Keep going,” Rollins whispered, and all pretence at the smarmy politeness Perkins had exuded every time he’d spoken to Mrs. Chambers had disappeared.
“Where are we going?” Oz asked as he shuffled forward.
“At the end of the passage, take a left.”
Once again, Oz found himself shuffling sideways, the surfaces rough on his face in front and his jeans behind. They were descending now, the gradient slight but definite.
“Keep moving,” Rollins ordered. “At the end are some iron rungs. Climb down.”
Oz slowed down as the floor petered out. The light from Rollins’ torch was sporadic and shaky. He found the rungs more by touch than sight, but eventually managed to clamber down unsteadily until he hit a stone floor again.
“Go right,” Rollins said.
“How do you know about these passages?” Oz asked, moving crablike through the space.
“Cleaning gutters and fixing medieval wiring has its advantages. The inside measurements don’t tally with the outside. It’s simple maths. I knew these passages were here long before I found them.” His voice was dispassionate, and as cold as the stone against Oz’s flesh.
“Gerber must be very pleased with you, then,” Oz said.
Rollins didn’t answer.
“I know his real name is Tanner,” Oz said, “and that he’s after this house and the artefacts.”
“I’m not interested in what you think you know. Now move.” Fingers jabbed at Oz’s shoulders, urging him on.
In the darkness, he shuddered.
They descended another set of rungs, and Oz sensed a change in atmosphere. It was colder and damper, and he felt a moist trickle under his reaching fingers on the wall ahead. He was nudged forward into a small stone chamber guarded by a heavy door. Rollins went to a lever on the wall and pulled it. The door opened with a groaning creak. He stepped forward, flicked on some lights and then turned back to pull Oz in after him. The sudden brightness caused Oz to squint, but after a few seconds recognition dawned, and he realised that they had descended to the orphanage basement.
Oz had been here before. It was just a junk-filled room as far as he was concerned. In his mind’s eye he could see the stair up to the kitchen, but it was on the far side. Separating him from the way out was a mass of boxes, discarded furniture and formless shapes covered by dustsheets. But Rollins seemed to sense his thoughts. He pulled out what looked like a flashlight made of yellow plastic, marked with black stripes. He did it expertly, his face expressionless. Oz had the awful feeling that he’d been in this sort of situation before.
“This is an electro-shock baton.” Rollins pressed a button and the end of the baton extended eight inches. “A variable voltage stun gun to you. Anything from five thousand to fifty thousand volts at the press of a button. So don’t even think about doing anything stupid. Now, just hand over those artefacts.”
Oz peered at the thing in Rollins’ hands. It didn’t look very menacing, but he’d seen videos of people being stunned. It had turned them into screaming, flopping jellyfish and he had absolutely no desire to experience that. He reached into his pocket for the pebble and the dor.
The tiniest flicker of a knowing smile crossed Rollins’ face when he saw them.
“Good,” he whispered. But this, like all the other words Rollins had spoken, contained no emotion.
Still holding the baton and pointing it at Oz, Rollins began pulling off dustsheets to reveal a bank of equipment the likes of which Oz had never seen before. There were things that looked like computer desktops, black boxes studded with LED lights from which sprouted lots of wires and, on its own on a small desk to one side, a metal bowl, into which most of the thicker wires from the black boxes led.
“Put them in that container and sit down.” Rollins indicated the steel bowl. Oz did as he was told and sat on a plastic crate and watched his captor throw switches.
“It was your footsteps we heard on Halloween night, wasn’t it?” Oz said.
Rollins said nothing, but Oz took his silence as confirmation of the glaring truth.
Oz was suddenly quite glad that Rollins was busy, so he wouldn’t see the disappointment etched on his face as he squeezed his eyes shut so that the hot tears didn’t burn too much. All along he’d told himself that the footsteps could not have been ghostly, that such things were simply not possible. Yet a small part of him had harboured a tiny flicker of hope—because this was, after all, Penwurt, the hill where odd things happened. And that sliver of possibility had planted a seed of desperate expectation. If only those footsteps had belonged to one of Miss Arkwright’s spirit heralds. Something bringing a message of comfort, a balm for the grief left behind. He hadn’t told anyone, but deep in his heart of hearts he’d hoped and wished and believed that the footsteps might belong to Michael Chambers.
Sitting on a crate in the basement, tricked and captured, Oz finally realised how much he’d clung to that hope. He had not dared to tell Ellie and Ruff for fear of their derision which, he now realised, would have been completely justified. He felt stupid and childish for even considering such a thing. Worse, he’d been so wrapped up in his belief, so convinced that his dad had sent him the artefacts and left them clues to Redmayne’s and Shoesmith’s letters through the symbols on his laptop, that he’d been blinded to what had been going on beneath his very nose.
Suddenly, everything seemed so glaringly obvious. He remembered seeing Tim Perkins coming in covered in cobwebs and dust on Halloween. He hadn’t been at a fancy dress party at all; he’d been exploring the orphanage in the secret passages. They’d all been taken in, even Caleb, it seemed. But this was not the way Oz had imagined the story ending, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of having been cheated. He’d been so stupid, leading his friends into danger, thinking Lucy Bishop was the threat when it was Perkins who had given Heeps pictures of the library wall and Perkins who had been the spy. Lucy Bishop had been as much a victim as he was.
“What’s the matter with Lucy?” Oz asked, because he couldn’t stand listening to his own thoughts anymore.
“I’m not a doctor,” said Rollins as he busied himself checking dials.
“Okay, then, why did she steal the artefacts?”
“Because she knows what they are capable of,” Rollins muttered.
Oz glanced at the pebble. It was hard to believe what Rollins was saying. He’d held that thing a hundred times in his hand, and although he knew his dad had been convinced of its significance, apart from seeing the maker’s mark glow, there’d been nothing to suggest it was anything valuable.
“So why would Lucy want to destroy it?”
Rollins shook his head. “She’s Obex. Meddlers, the lot of them. She thought she could help her brother, but he is far beyond anyone’s help.”
“What happened to him?”
“A mistake,” said Rollins, grimacing as he tightened some screws. “Just an unfortunate experiment that backfired.”
“One of Gerber’s experiments?”
Rollins turned to look at Oz, and there was just the suggestion of a grudging admiration in his expression before he turned back to his work. “You have been busy, haven’t you?” he muttered.
“He already has an artefact, doesn’t he? The fifth artefact.”
Rollins stopped working and once again turned slowly to look at Oz. “Yes, he does. And soon he’ll have three when I take him these.”
Now that he was in control, Rollins seemed more ready to talk. So Oz pressed him for more. “Did Lucy Bishop’s brother work for Gerber?”
Rollins didn’t look up from what he was doing this time. He merely said slowly, “Let’s just say he was an unwilling volunteer.”
“Gerber turned Lucy’s brother into something, didn’t he?”
“Gerber’s had the artefact to work with for years. He’s used the best scientists, but all they’ve done is scratched the surface of its power. Imagine you’re a caveman finding a mobile phone. Press enough buttons and it’ll make an entertaining noise, but you’d still have no idea of its true capability. Edward Bishop was…unlucky. Gerber’s artefact can capture emotion. Let you feel what someone else is feeling when they do something for the first time. Try and imagine what a cheetah feels like when it catches an impala and closes its jaws over the windpipe. There is no regret. It’s just pure instinct. Once you’ve experienced that…”
Rollins’ voice trailed off into the cavernous room.
Oz tasted bile at the back of his throat and barely managed to stifle the groan of disgust that threatened. What had they done to Edward Bishop? But then Rollins seemed to come back to himself and spoke again.
“Some people can’t handle it very well. Maybe it was the way Bishop’s brain was wired, but he didn’t come back from his little trip. He ended up believing he was a polecat. And they are vicious predators. Anything gets too close, he wants to tear it to shreds with his bare hands.”
“But some of him is still Edward Bishop, isn’t it? He knew who Lucy was. And she was feeding him in the park, wasn’t she?”
“Was she?” Rollins said, his voice still detached and low. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Oz was thinking about the SPEXIT and of how it made you feel you were actually on a roller coaster or shooting rapids. How would it be if, somehow, it could make you believe you were a rat or a lizard or a polecat instead?
Suddenly there was a hum of power as some of the black boxes lit up. Rollins went over to another shapeless lump covered by a dustsheet. He whipped off the cover to reveal a metal office chair. A cable held in place by black electrician’s tape snaked up from the backrest of the chair to an electric light socket.
“Have a seat,” Rollins ordered, one eye warily on the wire.
Oz moved across and looked at the contraption suspiciously. “What’s this for?”
“Your accident,” Rollins explained. “Sit.”
Oz frowned, but did as he was told.
Rollins nodded before continuing, his voice cool. “It’s really very simple. We’ve been led up the garden path by people thinking they’ve found the artefacts before, but this time we’ve followed the trail from Morsman through your father to you.” He nodded towards the pebble. “These things are drawn to certain individuals. They allow themselves to be found only if they want to be. If they are the real thing, we’ll know soon enough. Trouble is, they need a lot of power to kickstart them. We don’t know why, they just do. But if this works, then I’ll have done my job and there’ll be just a bit of tidying up to do.”
“What does that mean?” Oz asked.
Rollins looked up, his face a blank sheet. “We have to make the stun gun injury look acceptable. Loose cable from the ceiling touches a metal chair in a pool of water into which you have inadvertently walked…”
“There is no water,” Oz said, looking down.
Rollins’ eyes flickered towards a large plastic container. “There will be. And then fire will engulf the house.”
Oz tried to swallow, but his throat was too parched. All he could think about was Ellie and Ruff and Lucy Bishop in that locked room, with smoke pouring in and flames licking at the walls. He shifted uneasily on the cold seat. “But Gerber wants the house. If you burn it down, he won’t be happy.”
“There’ll still be the shell once the fire burns out. That’s what’s important. Probably pick this place up for a song, then,” Rollins said. There must have been something in Oz’s face that made him shrug before adding, “Nothing personal, Oz. This is all just business.”
And somehow, that made it all the worse.
Oz realised that he was running out of time. Desperation fought with fear. If he was going to do something about the situation, it needed to be soon. He waited until Rollins turned back to the equipment and took his chance. He bolted up from the chair and ran for the stairs to the kitchen. He was quick, but Rollins’ reaction was quicker. Like a striking snake, he stretched forward and pressed the baton to Oz’s back.
It was as if someone had hit him with a paralysing sledgehammer. He rose on the balls of his feet and hung there as his muscles seized. His whole body became a juddering block of pain. It lasted only three seconds, but when it ended he fell to the floor, quivering.
“Uh, uh,” Rollins said from above him. Oz felt himself being dragged back to the chair and unceremoniously dumped. For several long, agonising seconds, Oz could only sit slumped while his body recovered and the pain ebbed away. All the while Rollins busied himself, twiddling dials so that the machine sent little bolts of blue electricity towards the pebble and the dor as they lay motionless in the metal container. After the fifth attempt, he took them out and, much to Oz’s utter astonishment, pressed the smaller dor into the body of the pebble. The dor seemed to melt into the larger artefact, leaving only the slightest bulge. Rollins put the combined unit back into the container and bombarded them with more power. After each attempt he took them out and pressed the maker’s mark on the pebble, to no avail. At last, the frustration showed as Rollins’ face blotched with anger at each failed attempt.
Oz thought frantically. He didn’t want to be hit by that stun wand thing again. He had never experienced so much pain in his life, but on the other hand, he had to do something or in a few minutes, Rollins was going to electrocute him and set fire to Penwurt.
“It works for me,” he said thickly. He could taste blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten his tongue from the electric shock.
Rollins glared at him. “What did you say?”
“It works for me when I press the mark. Doesn’t for anyone else. It sort of glows when I touch it.”
In the silence that followed, Oz heard nothing but his own pulse thrumming in his ears.
“You’d better not be lying,” Rollins said eventually, cold eyes fixed on Oz.
“I’m not.”
Rollins picked the pebble out of the bowl and, holding the baton an inch away from Oz’s chest, he said, “Show me.”
The pebble felt warm and familiar in Oz’s hand. He turned it over and placed his thumb over the silver mark on the bottom.
“Show me,” urged Rollins through gritted teeth, and pressed the baton to Oz’s sternum.
Oz thought about what he’d seen Lucy Bishop doing with the hammer. He remembered the way her hand had bounced away, as if she’d been hitting rubber, the way the hammer had left no scratch. Oz took a deep breath, put his thumb on the mark, pressed and at the same time brought the pebble up to hit the baton away.
Several things happened at once. Rollins must have reacted quickly and pressed the baton’s trigger, because Oz felt another momentary kick of agonizing pain and he arched backwards in a convulsive thrust. But it didn’t last as long as the first time, nor was it as severe. And despite the pain, Oz could see that something had happened to Rollins, too. Just as the stun baton fired, Rollins was catapulted backwards exactly like Lucy Bishop’s hammer arm had been. Oz was right; there was something in the pebble that protected it from harm.
There was a tremendous crash as Rollins hit the machines. Sparks flew and smoke immediately started drifting upwards from the overturned black boxes. Oz’s convulsion was over in a moment, but his momentum had sent him careening over the back of the chair so that they both toppled backwards. With his muscles like Seabourne County canteen blancmange and unable to protect himself, Oz hit the floor head first with a sickening crunch. A bolt of new pain shot through his skull, but it was what was happening inside it that made him forget the pain in an instant.
From where he was lying and through watering eyes, Oz could still see the room, see Rollins struggling to his feet, tossing aside pieces of equipment as if they were made of cardboard as he tried to get to Oz. But then there was a burst of static and coloured lines, something that sounded like a chime and suddenly, a pretty, grey-eyed face appeared inside Oz’s head. It flickered unsteadily, like an old TV, but then the image cleared and he heard a female voice.
“Emergency power low at point-five capacity. Hostile assailant detected. Probability of attack, 95 percent. Would you like me to instigate amnestic deflection?”
Oz blinked his eyes, but the girl remained even as the rest of the room swam. A wave of sickness washed over him, but out of the corner of his eye he could also see Rollins coming, his face distorted with fury, eyes intent on damaging Oz.
“Yeah. Stop him,” he ordered.
The last thing Oz remembered of that night was also the strangest thing of all. Rollins lunged towards him with a roar. He took three strides before there was again the sound of something faintly musical in Oz’s head. Even Rollins stopped and look around curiously. He looked down even more curiously at the baton in his hand. Then, incredibly, he touched the end of it to his own forearm and pressed the button. The jolt sent him crashing backwards against the basement wall and, like Lucy Bishop having met with Ellie’s right foot, Rollins slid, unconscious, to the floor with an expression of bewildered surprise.
Oz tried to get up on to one elbow, but the room spun nauseatingly. The grey-eyed girl was fading and a black wave threatened. He could still see smoke rising from the equipment. He ought to do something, call someone, tell them about Ellie and Ruff and Lucy Bishop before the fire took hold, but he couldn’t. He was too weak. Despair engulfed him with the realization that he couldn’t help his friends and, worse, that he had failed his mother and father at the last. But then the black wave of unconsciousness finally crashed over him and washed all his pain mercifully away into darkness and oblivion.
* * *
He woke up because he was thirsty. There was no need to, otherwise, because he was actually having quite a nice dream about a water-bomb fight with Jenks and Skinner and finding secret passages with Ellie and Ruff…
“Oz, are you awake?” He heard a familiar voice close by, low and full of concern. “Did I see your eyelids flutter just then?” He lifted his heavy lids and blinked as the room, strange and white and grey, swam into focus. Daylight flooded in through a large window. There was a slightly sickly smell of disinfectant in the air and he knew instantly that this wasn’t Penwurt. His mother’s face loomed into view. She leaned over him, a hopeful smile fighting with a quivering lip for dominance.
“Any chance of a drink of water, Mum?” Oz managed to croak before he was completely engulfed in a bone-crushing hug. He thought about protesting, but then, as memory of what had happened in the basement began to creep in, he realised that being alive and thirsty and being hugged by his mother was a pretty good situation to be in, all things considered.
“Oz, I thought that…we thought that you were…” She squeezed him tighter, and Oz heard her sniff. Eventually, she let him go and fetched him a glass of water from a jug on a locker next to his bed.
Oz hoisted himself up onto an elbow, took a swallow from the proffered glass and then remembered with a jolt what had happened before he’d got to the basement. He shot up in the bed and grabbed his mother’s arm.
“Ellie and Ruff, Mum. Are they…?”
“They’re fine. Both tucked up in bed at home.”
Relief surged through him and he let out a huge sigh.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“It’s half past seven in the morning, Oz. They weren’t sure if you were concussed or if it was just the aftereffects of that thing Perkins used.”
Being reminded of the baton and its power sent a sudden shiver dancing up and down his spine. He put the beaker to his lips again and drank greedily, though he couldn’t stop the rim from chattering against his teeth. Tepid water from a plastic jug had never, ever tasted so sweet and good.
“It was a stun gun,” he said, holding out the beaker for more water. “And his name isn’t Perkins, Mum. It’s Rollins.”
“I know.” Mrs. Chambers nodded. “He told the police he couldn’t remember who he was, but they have him on file.”
Oz noted that her eyes were dark-rimmed and puffy from lack of sleep.
“Did they have it on file that he works for Gerber, too?”
Mrs. Chambers shook her head. “Used to, Oz. He used to work for one of Mr. Gerber’s research divisions, but he was sacked six months ago.”
“But he was working for Gerber, Mum. He spent all that time with us spying, trying to find out Penwurt’s secrets…”
“Now, Oz. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. The police are still not sure what Rollins’ motives were. There’s all sorts of equipment in what’s left of the orphanage basement…”
Oz frowned. “What do you mean, what’s left?”
“There was quite a bit of fire damage. The orphanage is off-limits until the structural engineers can assess things.”
Oz stared at his mother, trying to take in this new information, and the way she’d carefully ignored what he’d said about the artefacts.
“Mum, did Ellie and Ruff tell you what happened? Did they tell you about Lucy Bishop breaking Dad’s clock and stealing the artefacts?”
The words made Mrs. Chambers flinch, as if she’d suddenly heard a jarring noise. But she composed her face into a reassuring smile.
“Poor Lucy. She’s clearly deranged. They’ve taken her to a secure unit. She kept on and on about her brother, and her needing to feed him. He was living rough in the park, apparently. They picked him up, too.” Mrs. Chambers shook her head sadly. “Mental illness, it’s such an awful thing when it happens to someone close to you. Enough to send anyone off the rails, I suppose; we both know that, don’t we?” She held his gaze and he nodded slowly.
“I’m not denying that she did break the clock and steal those items you mention, but you see how dangerous all this nonsense is? There’s always someone vulnerable out there, willing to believe any old superstitious clap-trap. You should know that better than most, Oz.”
Oz knew what she meant, all right, but she was wrong and he couldn’t just let this go. “But it isn’t clap-trap, Mum! Something happened in the basement; something helped me.”
Mrs. Chambers sat down, took Oz’s hand in hers and regarded him wearing her most serious face. “The police think that perhaps Lucy Bishop and Rollins were working together. That perhaps they were members of some kind of sect. I’m really sorry for what they did to you. I should have been more vigilant…”
“Mum, none of this is your fault, and Rollins and Lucy Bishop weren’t working together…” He faltered as another bit of the jigsaw fell into place. He remembered what he’d heard as he’d stood hiding in the garage watching Heeps and Gerber discussing Penwurt. “Gerber knew Tim was Rollins, Mum. I heard him say his name.”
Mrs. Chambers looked suddenly stern. “Oz, you can’t go around saying things about Mr. Gerber like that. He’s a powerful man, and there’s such a thing as slander.”
A sudden pang of panic grabbed him. “You didn’t sign anything, did you? You didn’t sell the place to them?”
A funny little knowing look came over Mrs. Chambers’ face. “We did talk about it, but then I said I’d promised you I wouldn’t do anything without talking to you first about their very generous offer. Lorenzo still doesn’t think I should, but…”
“Tell me you didn’t sign anything, Mum,” demanded Oz through clenched teeth.
“Calm down. I didn’t sign anything, all right? They’d even brought papers, but I was adamant, and then I got the phone call about you and all hell broke loose. By the time I got home, the fire brigade were there and then the police came…” She looked down and gave Oz another wan smile and wiped away a strand of fringe from his forehead. “At least you’re okay. And you know what? There is a silver lining. The fire in the basement has melted everything that was in there, so we can say goodbye to those…Morsman thingies once and for all.”
Oz’s gut plummeted through the floor. “What?” he whispered.
“Amazing, really. Turns out that the basement ceiling is nearly three feet thick. It protected the house above, but it acted like an oven. Everything inside has cooked. Will I miss those old patio chairs or the blue-spotted carpet, I wonder? I don’t think so. The insurance will pay for the basement to be redone. So that should make selling the place a lot easier.”
Oz knew that his mother was trying to cheer him up, but she was failing miserably. He didn’t even protest at her heavy hint about the house being sold, because all he could think about was that the pebble and the dor were gone. Cooked to a carbon crisp in the basement. He flopped back on his pillow, turning his face away so she couldn’t see his despair, mind whirling with this new information.
“Oh, Oz,” said Mrs. Chambers, misinterpreting the flop as a relapse. “The police are going to want to talk to you at some stage, but not while you’re unwell like this. How’s your head?”
“Fine,” he said, keeping his face to the wall. “But maybe I should go back to sleep. I’m feeling a bit tired.”
“Of course, darling.” She went and sat in a chair by the window and picked up a book.
Oz closed his eyes. He didn’t feel sleepy, but he didn’t want to talk anymore. A huge black bubble of bitter disappointment was expanding inside him, threatening to burst at any moment.
The artefacts were gone.
He should have been rejoicing at the fact that he and Ruff and Ellie had survived. But all that was going through his mind were Rollins’ words: ‘Imagine you’re a caveman finding a mobile phone. Press enough buttons and it’ll make an entertaining noise, but you’d still have no idea of its true capability.’
Penwurt was full of secrets. Secrets that Gerber wanted. Oz knew that for certain, now. But what chance did he have of discovering them without the artefacts?
At ten, some doctors came and examined him. They gently pressed the lump on his head and said he’d need the stitches out in a few days. Then they told him that the scan he’d had while he was unconscious showed no damage and, once they’d had a couple of blood tests back, he could go home.
“That’s fantastic news,” Mrs. Chambers said, beaming. “Right. I’m going to get a coffee and freshen up. I’ll be twenty minutes. Will you be okay here?”
“I’ll be fine, Mum.”
He knew he was being desperately unfair to her, but the truth was that Oz was quite glad to be left alone. He just wanted to wallow in his misery for a while, even though common sense told him it would do no good. The artefacts were gone and there was nothing he could do about it. He was even beginning to wonder if he’d imagined the girl in the basement. After all, he’d had a severe knock on the head and… He looked up. The door had opened a crack and a head appeared, followed quickly by a second, virtually identical one. Two voices whispered, “Are you alone?”
“Savannah? Sydney?” said Oz, sitting bolt upright. “What are you doing here?”
The Fanshaw twins hurried over to Oz’s bedside. “We caught the bus in,” Savannah said.
“But how did you know I was here?”
“You mean, apart from Magnus Street being full of fire engines and ambulances half the night?” Sydney said.
“Ah,” Oz said.
“It was your text message, silly,” Savannah explained.
“What text message?” Oz frowned.
“The one you sent us last night. The one that said the basement was on fire and that you needed help—”
“It was us that pulled you out—”
“Although we’re not surprised you don’t remember anything—”
“You were out cold.”
Oz stared at them, knowing his mouth was open but unable to close it.
Sydney took out her phone and showed Oz the message.
Penwurt basement on fire. Need help.
“I don’t even remember sending a text,” Oz said, frowning.
“Who else could it have been?” Savannah asked.
“Though we admit there’s no sender number—” Sydney noted.
“We thought maybe you’d blocked that on your phone,” Savannah said.
“I don’t think it was me,” Oz said.
Sydney gave a dismissive snort. “Then who was it?”
As quickly as possible, Oz told them all about what had happened, from finding the hidden passages and fighting Lucy Bishop, right up until the time the grey-eyed girl had appeared and Rollins had stunned himself into unconsciousness. Being S and S, they accepted it all without question and were only too keen to fill him in on what had happened after that.
“We could see the fire through the telescope—”
“So we sent for the fire brigade—”
“We got you out just as they arrived—”
“There was an awful lot of smoke.”
They grinned at him.
“Thanks,” Oz said with feeling. “Lucky you were in, otherwise…”
The strange thing was, he didn’t feel particularly lucky. Not with the artefacts gone. But it would have been churlish to tell S and S that. After all, they’d just saved his life.
“I sort of owe you both an explanation.” He hesitated and then asked, “Did you know that some people think my dad killed himself?”
They shook their heads solemnly, four identical big eyes watching him intently.
Oz nodded, satisfied that they, too, were ignorant. “This is a long, long story and I will tell you all of it when I know the truth. Trouble is, I’m not sure I ever will, now,” he added thickly.
“Why won’t you ever find out?” Savannah cocked her head.
“Because…” Oz said, fighting back the tears of frustration that threatened, “I wanted to show my mum that Penwurt is special. Show her that my dad was convinced of it and that for him, finding the artefacts would have been like winning the lottery. He would never have wanted to do any harm to himself. He’d have been too excited. And now, with the artefacts gone, there’s no chance of anything…”
The twins studied him with a slightly puzzled look.
Oz could only shake his head hopelessly. “Mum said the basement was like an oven. That everything got cooked. Now the pebble and the dor are just black blobs of charred…whatever.” It came out as a half-sob. Oz let his head fall and wiped the moisture from his eyes on his pyjama sleeve.
S and S exchanged glances, their eyes large and solemn. Savannah reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out something wrapped in a paper handkerchief. Sydney slowly peeled back the dirty paper to reveal something solid nestling there, something dark and soot-encrusted. She wiped it in the tissue and held it out to Oz.
“Is this what you mean?” they said in unison.
Oz looked down. In Sydney’s hand was a black oval pebble with a small bump on its surface that looked very much like the back of a scarab beetle.