CHAPTER NINE

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Attack of the Lizardoid
The short walk to the house seemed to take forever, but it still wasn’t long enough to give Ariane time to figure out why her aunt had lied to the ponytailed man. Aunt Phyllis, after looking up and down the street and locking the front door, followed Ariane into the living room. She pointed to the overstuffed armchair in the corner, and Ariane obeyed the unspoken instruction to sit down. Then Aunt Phyllis sat on the couch, took a deep breath, and said, “You’ve seen the Lady of the Lake, haven’t you?”
Everything Ariane had been thinking about saying scurried away like cockroaches caught in the light. She gaped.
Aunt Phyllis sighed. “I’ve hoped – prayed – this wouldn’t happen. I’ve hoped that our family’s curse had skipped a generation. It often does, at least in legends. But it hasn’t, has it?”
That broke through Ariane’s befuddlement. “My mother saw the Lady of the Lake?” I was right!
“So she told me.” Aunt Phyllis’s expression softened and her eyes unfocused a little, as though she were looking at something far away. “And so did I…almost.”
“What?” That was so unexpected that it felt to Ariane like she’d been slapped across the face with an ice-filled rubber glove. “You saw the Lady of the Lake?”
“Almost,” Aunt Phyllis said. “It happened when I was about your age, and your mother was barely six – about a year before our mother died. We were staying at the family cabin at Emma Lake. I went for a walk along the shore. And I heard…singing. Chanting. The water was…calling to me. It wanted me to wade into it. I looked out at the lake, and I saw a…a swirling in the water, and then it opened up, like a doorway…”
She sighed. “And I ran away. I was terrified. Even though I could hear the water’s call, I turned my back on it.”
Hope kindled in Ariane, hope that she’d found another – completely unexpected – ally. “Did you tell Mom?”
Aunt Phyllis nodded. “I couldn’t tell our mother, so I told Emily. I told her it was just a story, a fairy tale, but she knew I was lying, that I’d really seen something. Then I tried to lie to myself, tried to convince myself I hadn’t really seen anything at all, that I’d imagined it. I kept away from the lake for the rest of our stay, and the next day, we went home. And that was that. Until…” She sighed. “Until I got this.” She reached inside her apron pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “A letter from Emily...mailed from the hospital just before she disappeared.”
Ariane’s heart skipped a beat and anger heated her cheeks. “And you’ve never showed it to me?”
“It wasn’t for you. It was for me. And I didn’t want to upset you. It was...distressing. I thought it meant your mother really had gone crazy, and I didn’t want you to think that. I didn’t want to think that. But when that man showed up on the doorstep twenty minutes ago, asking after you – representing the school, indeed! On a Sunday? – I didn’t believe him for one minute. I have a feel for people, you know. I can tell when they’re lying. And that’s when I realized I have to show you this.” She held out the paper. “Read it.”
Fingers trembling, Ariane took the letter and unfolded it. She recognized her mother’s handwriting, and her eyes blurred. But she blinked away the threatening tears and began to read.

Dear Phyllis: I have hesitated to write because I don’t want to worry you, but now I feel I must. After all, you saw her too...the Lady of the Lake. At Emma Lake, the summer before Mom died, remember? You tried to pretend you were just telling a story, but I knew better.
If you ever saw her again, you never told me. And as the years went by I hardly thought of it anymore. Until...
Phyllis, I saw her. I talked to her. Not at Emma Lake, but right here in Regina, in Wascana Lake. I went for a walk around the lake, same as I’ve done a thousand times, but this time...I heard singing. I heard the water calling to me. I went down to the shore, and I saw an opening in the water, like a trapdoor, with steps, leading down...just like you told me about all those years ago.
And the singing...I wish I could describe it to you. It was breathtaking. It pulled at me. I couldn’t resist it. I don’t know how you did. I went down the steps, into a kind of throne room under the water, and there was a woman...a woman made of water. She talked to me. She told me she was the Lady of the Lake, from the days of King Arthur, and that I had to help her retrieve the shards of Excalibur from their hiding places all over the world, and re-forge the sword before Merlin could claim it. She said Rex Major, the computer guy, is really Merlin, but I could defeat him with the power of the Lady of the Lake, that all I had to do was accept it, and I would have all the power I needed...
But...it was all too strange. I didn’t listen any more. “I don’t want your power!” I told her. “I reject it!”
And then she grew angry. “Reject it? Without it, you are helpless,” she told me. “Rex Major will be able to find you. Though you reject my power, a portion of it will still cling to you for a time. He will use it to track you down. He will track down your daughter. She, too, is my heir. If you reject the power I offer, you are defenceless against him.”
“I don’t want your power!” I screamed at her again. “I just want my normal life!” And then I turned and ran.
The water closed in on me, almost drowned me. I stumbled home, half-drowned, freezing, and Ariane called 911...

The letter broke off in mid-sentence, as though Ariane’s mother had thought better of what she was about to write.

I have to go away, she continued in the next paragraph. I have to. Before Merlin – Rex Major – finds out who I am, finds out I have a daughter...or a sister.
I know this sounds crazy. I’m just asking you, Phyl, to be careful. Be on the lookout for strange men asking strange questions. And...take care of my little girl. Don’t tell her anything about this. She already thinks I’ve gone crazy. This would just confirm it.
Goodbye, Phyl. I don’t think we’ll see each other again. I love you.
Emily.

Ariane gulped air. “She ran away to protect me.”
Aunt Phyllis nodded. “As she saw it, it was the only thing to do.”
 “Did you show this letter to the police?”
Aunt Phyllis shook her head. “It makes her sound crazy. And I actually thought she was, when I read it for the first time while I was in hospital for my first surgery. I mean…Rex Major is really Merlin? And he’s searching for the shards of Excalibur? I thought she had just taken the story I told her when we were kids, a story about something I’d convinced myself never really happened, and she’d woven it into her delusion.” She folded the letter and slipped it back into her flowered apron. “But then...” She stopped and took another deep breath. “Last week...the night after the school told me you were suspended...I had a dream.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I saw the Lady, a woman all in white, in Emma Lake, right where I heard the singing so many years ago. She rose to the surface, her face broke the water, and she said, ‘Beware of Merlin. He is searching for you…and he knows I have visited Ariane.’ And then she melted away.” Aunt Phyllis raised her eyes and looked at Ariane steadily. “She came to you, didn’t she? And spoke to you? Just like she did to your mother. But unlike your mother – you didn’t run away. You accepted the power.”
Ariane wanted to deny it. Somehow, having all this move into the humdrum reality of her life seemed wrong, against the rules she had absorbed from years of reading children’s fantasy stories. The parents or guardians of the kids involved never knew what was really going on.
But this wasn’t a story. This was reality. And Aunt Phyllis deserved the truth.
As simply as she could, Ariane told Aunt Phyllis everything that had happened since she had seen the staircase leading into the waters of Wascana Lake.
Aunt Phyllis listened intently, her eyes fixed on Ariane’s. She seemed perfectly calm, but her face grew paler and paler, and when Ariane glanced down, she saw Aunt Phyllis’s fingers digging into the flowered upholstery of the couch. “And so, tonight...we’re going,” Ariane finished. “Wally and me. To the Northwest Territories. By...” She hesitated, but had to say it. “By magic.” She searched Aunt Phyllis’s face. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
A small smile lifted the corners of Aunt Phyllis’s mouth. “If you are, then I was, too, all those years ago – and I still am. I’ve heard of shared delusions, but not spread out among three people – four, counting Wally – over decades.” Her smile faded. “What I want is for the whole thing to go away. Why should you be saddled with saving the world?”
“I don’t know,” Ariane said. “It’s like...an inherited disease or something. I don’t seem to have any choice.”
Aunt Phyllis snorted. “An inherited disease. That’s it, isn’t it? We inherited...something. The ability to use the power of the Lady of the Lake. It’s like the old saying, ‘You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.’ Especially not your family from a millennium and a half ago.” She looked down at her twisting fingers, and clenched them tightly in the afghan. “How can I let you go, Ariane?” she said softly. “You’re all I have left of Emily, all I have left of a family. If anything happens to you...”
“But staying here isn’t safe, either, Aunt Phyllis,” Ariane said. “Rex Major knows who I am. He knows where I live. By now, he must know you’re my guardian. If he decides to simply kidnap me...there won’t be anything we can do to stop him.” There might be something I can do, she thought, remembering the power she had been able to unleash against Flish and the coven – but she had no idea if that would work on Merlin himself. And she didn’t want to sit around to find out. “If I go up north, if I can actually get this first shard of Excalibur, then at least I’m fighting back. And after that...”
“After that, what, Ariane?” Aunt Phyllis said. “Rex Major will still know where you live. He’ll still be able to snatch you away without warning. Where do we go? How do we escape one of the richest men in the world?”
Ariane shook her head. “I don’t know, Aunt Phyllis. But the Lady of the Lake hasn’t given us any choice. We have to try to defeat him. We have to.”
“Damn the Lady of the Lake!” Aunt Phyllis said, and Ariane stared at her. Her aunt had never sworn in front of her before. “What gives her the right to get our family mixed up in some battle that goes back more than a thousand years?” She glared at Ariane as though expecting her to defend the Lady, but Ariane agreed with her.
Oh, do you? a part of her wondered. Or are you secretly glad? The power...you like having it, don’t you?
I don’t know, she answered herself. I don’t know anything.
Either way, she remained silent – and Aunt Phyllis remained angry. Ariane could see it in the bright red splotches on her cheeks and the flaring of her nostrils. But she spoke with forced, icy calmness. “But I guess you’re right, Ariane. She hasn’t left us any choice. She’s fixed our course for us, right into the heart of the storm, and the best we can do is batten down the hatches and hope to ride it out. And if I ever meet her outside of a dream, I’ll –” She stopped, clenched her jaw for a moment, then gave a sharp, short nod. “Very well, then. You and Wally have to go to the Northwest Territories, by magic, to retrieve the first shard of Excalibur.” She paused. “I still don’t really understand how Wally got involved in all of this. You two really aren’t…?”
Ariane felt her face flush. “No!”
“OK, OK.” Aunt Phyllis held up her hands. “Well, I’m glad someone is going with you, at least. Though he’s not exactly a knight in shining armor, at least he’s a Knight.”
Ariane rolled her eyes. “Aunt Phyllis!”
Her aunt chuckled, but her amusement died quickly. “How can I help? What do you need to take with you? Food? Supplies?”
“I don’t think I can transport much more than Wally, and whatever we are already carrying,” Ariane said. “So we can’t take a lot. But food – yeah, food would be good. We’ll have to put it in something waterproof, though.”
“I can do that. Crackers, cheese, summer sausage, beef jerky, chocolate, nuts. Lightweight but lots of calories.” Aunt Phyllis stood. “Let’s get at it.”
Ariane jumped up. “Wait a minute.”
Aunt Phyllis paused. “What?”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What will you do if Major’s...uh, ‘henchman’...comes back?” Ariane felt a little silly. She’d never used the word “henchman” in a sentence before. “What if he decides to kidnap you instead of me?”
Aunt Phyllis smiled a strange little smile Ariane had never seen before. “You leave Major’s ‘henchman’ to me.”
The next couple of hours passed by in a blur. Ariane went upstairs and discovered that Wally had indeed emailed her a list of supplies – a rather daunting one. Ariane wondered how he planned to fit it all into a backpack, whether she’d be able to stand up once she put it on – and most importantly, whether she had the energy to transport it as far as they had to go.
Wally had highlighted several items on the list he didn’t think he had in his house, such as spare flashlight batteries. For once, Aunt Phyllis’s habit of imagining possible disasters came in handy. She had several basement shelves filled with emergency supplies – including waterproof bags into which she stuffed the food. With her help, Ariane soon filled in the gaps in Wally’s list. Pendragon sat on the basement steps, tail curled neatly around his toes, watching her pack with wide green eyes.
Wally showed up in person promptly at six-thirty. “Hello, Ms. Forsythe,” he said to Aunt Phyllis. “I sure am looking forward to seeing a movie with Ariane this evening.” He sounded like a bad actor in a high school play.
Aunt Phyllis caught Ariane’s eye and winked, then gave Wally an innocent-looking smile. “What movie are you going to see? Camelot?” The smile widened. “Excalibur?”
Wally’s mouth fell open, and Aunt Phyllis chuckled as she patted his arm. “Ariane has told me everything. So you don’t have to worry about pretending.”
“Every –” Wally’s gaze slid past Aunt Phyllis to Ariane, “– thing?”
“Everything,” Ariane confirmed with a grin. “And Aunt Phyllis has been helping me round up supplies. Come upstairs and help me pack, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
The pile of stuff on the bed looked impossibly huge, but it took up far less space when organized in the backpack. In the end the only things left behind were a small axe and some cooking utensils.
“We’re not really planning to camp,” Ariane pointed out. “And we’ve got knives.”
“You can’t chop branches to build a lean-to with a knife,” Wally warned. “And just because we’re not planning to camp doesn’t mean we won’t end up camping.”
“The axe is too heavy. It stays behind.” Ariane hefted the backpack, slipped it on, and staggered backward a step or two before she caught her balance. “I don’t know if I can get even this much all the way to the Northwest Territories. And we haven’t added the food yet!”
“Well, don’t wear it now! Save your strength until we’re ready to go.” Wally looked around the room, hesitated. “Are we ready to go?”
“There’s one thing we’re missing,” Ariane said. “We don’t have a clue as to the layout of the mine.”
“Hmmm,” Wally said. “Well, let’s take a look...”
He sat down at the computer.

~ • ~
Wally prided himself on his online researching skills. If there was information about a topic to be found on the Web, he was confident he could find it. And something like a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories should be easy. Big corporations loved to promote their projects, especially flashy ones, and what could be flashier than a diamond mine?
For a moment he hesitated, remembering the threatening warning they had received from Rex Major’s henchman the previous evening. But they’d used the computer again after that with no problem. Besides, Wally thought. I’ve seen scarier things than that in video games.
He twitched the mouse to bring the hibernating computer to life, and the monitor lit up. “We probably can’t get a detailed map, but the mining company is bound to have a website. If nothing else, there ought to be photos of the place.”
“Worth a try.” Ariane sat on the edge of the bed to watch Wally work.
Wally opened the browser, typed “Thunderhill Diamond Mine” into the search field in the upper-right corner, and hit RETURN.
The first entry was the mine’s own website. “Jackpot,” he said, perversely annoyed that he hadn’t had the chance to show off his “skillz.” He clicked on the link, and the screen lit up with a picture of buildings, taken from the other side of a large lake. Only a few low plants, poking up between the big boulders scattered around, kept the surrounding countryside from being completely barren. “North of the tree line,” Wally said, feeling sheepish. “Guess you were right to leave out the axe.”
Ariane very politely did not say, “I told you so.”
Wally kept scrolling. After a moment, he whistled. “Look at this!” He pointed to the screen. “At any given time, there are seven hundred people working in the mine. Seven hundred! That’s bigger than half the towns in Saskatchewan.” He leaned closer to view the fine print. “It’s got a gym, squash and racquetball courts, a games room, a theater, TV lounges, high-speed Internet access, satellite telephones, private rooms and private bathrooms for everyone, a gourmet chef...” He leaned back and shook his head. “It’s not a diamond mine, it’s a resort!”
“It’s also only two hundred kilometres south of the Arctic Circle in the middle of the treeless tundra and a six-hour drive from the nearest town – if it’s winter, which is the only time there’s a road,” Ariane pointed out, reading over his shoulder. “Some resort.”
“Well, maybe not in winter,” Wally conceded. “But in the summer, I’m telling you, they could make as much money renting out rooms as they do mining diamonds.”
He scrolled further. “Ah! There’s a brochure called ‘All About Thunderhill.’ Let’s try that.” He clicked again, and two seconds later they were looking at a map of the mine. “Not very detailed,” Wally said, “but a lot better than nothing!” He clicked PRINT. The inkjet printer to the left of the monitor hummed to life.
Wally was about to get up to grab the printout when the monitor flickered and turned a brilliant, poisonous green. He blinked and leaned forward. “I think your video card is screwed...no, wait a minute, I can see something in there. Maybe it’s a video file that –”
His voice and his breath both choked off: a green, clawed hand, covered in scales, burst from the surface of the monitor and seized him by the throat. He scrabbled at it, trying to pry it off, but his fingers slid uselessly off scales as hard and impervious as glass. The hand began to squeeze...he couldn’t breathe...
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a horrified Ariane leap for the wall socket. She jerked out the power bar plug. The printer stuttered to a halt, the disk drive stopped in mid-chatter, but the green-scaled hand didn’t falter, and the algae-green glow of the monitor didn’t so much as flicker.
Wally, dizzy and terrified, was afraid the hand would drag him into the poisonous green soup the monitor’s surface had become, but instead it pushed him back, away from the computer. The wheels of Ariane’s ancient office desk chair squeaked horribly as they rolled centimetre by centimetre away from the desk – and slowly, the arm attached to that scaly green hand appeared. An armor-plated elbow came through next, then a massive green bicep...
...which meant the head and the rest of the body couldn’t be too far behind. Wally did not want to see either ...but then, it seemed likely he wouldn’t be seeing anything at all in a minute. His vision had narrowed to a blurred tunnel. He couldn’t feel his arms and legs. A buzzing filled his head...
Think...think! The thing was coming out of the computer, so it had to be connected to it somehow. But the computer was not only off, it was unplugged...
Unplugged from the wall socket, but not from the Internet! A blue Ethernet cable ran from the back of the computer to the DSL modem, and a gray cable attached the modem to an outlet in the wall. Wally quit trying to pry the fingers from his neck and instead grabbed Ariane’s arm. She turned wide eyes to him, and he pointed weakly at the high-speed cables. Then he had to turn away and grip the scaly arm again as it lifted him completely off the floor. Ariane dropped to her hands and knees and fell out of his sight. He hoped desperately she had understood. His legs kicked uncontrollably in mid-air. One flailing foot sent the desk chair rolling across the floor. He heard it crash against something. His tunnel of vision was shrinking. All he could see were spots of gray and green light...
And then the floor whacked against Wally’s knees as he crashed onto it, gasping, pulling in huge, shuddering gulps of precious air through a throat as raw as freshly ground beef but no longer in the grip of a giant lizard. His vision flooded back, the buzzing in his ears subsided, and he raised a shaking hand to his sore neck.
Ariane crawled into sight, and he managed a small smile. “Worst computer virus I ever saw.” Talking made him cough. His hand felt sticky. He pulled it away from his throat and saw it was smeared with blood. “I’m bleeding!”
“Let me see.” Ariane put her hand in his hair and tilted his head back to examine his throat. “It’s not serious,” she assured him after a moment. She let go of his head. “Just a couple of little claw punctures. No worse than shaving cuts.”
Wally laughed shakily. “I wouldn’t know.”
Ariane grinned, revealing teeth only slightly whiter than her face. “Anyway, you’ll live.”
This time, Wally thought.
He sat up, groaning. Ariane helped him to his feet, then grabbed a handful of tissues from a box by her bed and held them out to him. He dabbed at the punctures on his neck. “I’m lucky he didn’t just rip my throat out.”
“He was using you to pull himself out of the computer. If he’d made it...”
“...we’d both be lizard chow.”
Ariane frowned. “But Major doesn’t want to kill me.”
“That’s just guesswork on our part. Don’t go thinking you’re invulnerable.” He dabbed at the cuts again. “Besides, who says that thing would have killed you? It might have just dragged you back into...wherever it came from.”
“It could have killed you, though.” She bit her lip. “Wally, you should –”
“Don’t tell me what I should do,” Wally snapped. “I can make my own decisions. And I’ve decided to help you.” No matter what the cost? a small voice asked, but he did his best to ignore it. He held out the bloody tissues. “I think I need some more.”
“You’d better come into the bathroom. We’ll put some antiseptic and then some band-aids on those wounds. Who knows what kind of germs a Lizardoid –” Ariane stopped. “That’s what it was! I thought it looked familiar. It was a Lizardoid!”
Wally blinked. “You mean like in Devil Swamp?”
“Exactly like it. I was playing it just a few days ago.” She looked at the unpowered, unplugged computer. Its blank monitor looked back innocently. “Last time Major just used the computer to send us a warning. This time he turned a computer monster into a real one.” She gave Wally a bleak look. “We’re going to have to be very careful using computers from now on.”
“Now that hurts,” Wally muttered.
Ariane laughed. “Let’s get you into the bathroom.”
She had just put a band-aid on the last puncture when Aunt Phyllis appeared at the bathroom door. For some reason, she was carrying a baseball bat.
“What happened?” Aunt Phyllis looked at Wally’s neck, and then at Ariane. “Never mind, there’s no time. You’d better go now. A car just pulled up outside.”