“MAYBE ROBOT RABBIT BOY is asleep somewhere in this tall grass?” Kolt said, looking around.
Kolt and Gertie took the Slug Lamps from their pockets and began to search.
“Can’t believe I’ve got wet feet again!” Kolt said, squelching along.
“Again?” said Gertie, but then she remembered. “Oh, that’s right, Marie Curie dropped the kettle of water.”
They stepped over the tall plants, pointing their Slug Lamps down in the hope of seeing a furry bundle. Gertie felt like she was climbing around on the hairy scalp of a giant head. Then, in the distance, at the top of the hill, the blue sky of night darkened to starless black. It was as though a giant wave were coming toward them.
Kolt seemed alarmed. “Oh, what’s that? Up ahead? Shine your bike lamp on it, Gertie.”
Gertie put the Slug Lamps back in her pocket and returned to her Golden Helper, turning the handlebars so her lamp was shining in the direction of the shadow.
“It’s too far away,” she said as the white light lit up the tall prairie grass, “though there is something,” she added, noticing a rocky lump farther up the hill. “A giant boulder.”
“Yes, I know about that . . . it’s a very special rock, but listen! Do you hear that?”
“Not really,” said Gertie. “What are we listening for?”
“You don’t hear that low hissing?”
“No . . .” Gertie said, but then she did hear something, though to her it was more like a drumming.
“Sounds more like a drumming.”
“No, it’s definitely hissing,” Kolt said.
“Really? Because I’ve heard hissing when I was trapped with that giant snake, and this is more of a light drumming.”
Kolt thought for a moment. “I suppose it could be a tapping along with the hissing, but there’s definitely no drumming.”
“It’s too low for tapping,” Gertie insisted, “but I will admit there is a hum.”
Gertie dropped the bike and went back over to Kolt. The hissing-drumming-tapping-humming was now a low and constant rumble. It was as though something very big and very heavy were coming toward them down the hill.
“Could it be the Line of Stones?”
“The Line of Stones is not dangerous,” Kolt explained, “it just marks an entrance.”
“An entrance to what?”
“I told you, the Ruined Village. Long ago there were dozens of Keepers living down there. Shops, bakeries, even a cinema.”
“If it’s abandoned, what was that golden shimmering light I saw from the Spitfire?”
“It was most likely a ground-to-air reflection,” Kolt said dismissively.
But Gertie wondered if the dazzling glow had something to do with what was going on now. She found it hard to imagine that an entire community of people had once been living in a village on Skuldark. Having friends, being able to play, explore the valley and forests with children her own age was something she longed for, something she thought about in bed, her first dream in a chain of dreams that would pull her through the night.
Just then, the drumming-hissing-tapping-humming-rumbling got much louder, and Gertie felt trembling in the ground.
“Back to the bikes!” Kolt said. “Quick as you can!”
“What is it?”
There were now heavy, thumping vibrations in the wet earth.
As they reached their Golden Helpers, the ground seemed to break apart as the shaking grew more intense and the dark cloud on the horizon reared up, almost swallowing the sky.
“Drop your bike!” Kolt shouted. “The ground is too unsteady. We’re going to have to make a run for it.”
Gertie looked around in a panic. “But where to?”
“That giant boulder you saw . . . RUN TO IT NOW!”
Gertie felt her blood freeze with fear as she scrambled after Kolt up the soggy slope through the tall wet grass.
“But we’re running toward the shadow!” she cried. “How is that a good idea?”
“That rock is our only hope to survive!” shouted Kolt, his ripped pants flapping as they scrambled up the hill.
“Survive what?”
“Skuldarkian Tapirs!”
“What!?”
“Megatapirus augustus—PREHISTORIC RHINOS!”
“On Skuldark?” Gertie was now moving her legs as quickly as she could—but the ground was squelching and sucking at her shoes.
Kolt was still trying to explain, but Gertie could only hear bits of what he was saying, over the hissing- drumming-tapping-humming-rumbling-thumping-shaking. “I brought them here . . . just a few . . . many years ago . . . B.D.B.U. . . . allowed it . . . meteor . . . flash . . . wiping out . . . grown into a herd . . . now stampeding . . . apparently . . . make for the boulder . . . trampled . . . horrible . . . squish . . . QUICK!”
Then the most awful thought occurred to Gertie. What if Robot Rabbit Boy had been trampled? Part of her wanted to stop running, face the titanic creatures that were lashing furiously toward them, and shout: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ROBOT RABBIT BOY?!
But her legs just kept on squelching over the sopping field toward the rock. Just as the galloping mountain of tapirs bore down upon them, Gertie and Kolt reached the boulder—but instead of crouching for shelter in front of it, Kolt fumbled for his Keepers’ key, and drove it into a small hole in the stone. A doorway appeared. Kolt pulled Gertie through the opening and they tumbled down a flight of wooden stairs as the thunder of prehistoric hooves passed over them.
For a moment, Gertie and Kolt were just a wheezing tangle of Keepers at the bottom of a long, dark staircase.
When they were able to stand and catch their breath without the threat of being trampled, they freed the Slug Lamps from their pockets and used what light was left from their squishy bodies to check themselves for injuries. No one spoke, as though sensing the worst for their little friend.
“You hurt, Gertie?”
“No, you?”
“Just bruised, and my, er, pants . . .”
They sat down on the step and shone their Slug Lamps into the room.
“Series 8 Forever Friends had a flying package,” Gertie remembered wistfully. “Kevlar-drone blades that could lift them twenty feet into the air.”
“But Robot Rabbit Boy is a Series 7,” Kolt pointed out.
“Yes, I know . . . which means he doesn’t have it and there would have been no way for him to escape a stampede, without knowing about the secret door in the rock. What is this place anyway? Where are we?”
Gertie lifted her Slug Lamps, but their glow had started to wane, and they squirmed to be set free. Kolt stood, then took a box of matches from his pocket and shook it a few times.
“What are you doing?”
He said nothing and stepped through the darkness. Gertie heard the rough strike of a match. A moment later, several candles on a long wooden table flickered to life. She could see clearly now in the shadowy glow. They were deep underground in a large, furnished chamber that seemed to be abandoned.
“How did you know there were candles on that table?” Gertie asked.
“Because I put them there,” Kolt said. “With no one living here anymore, I had to shut the generator down and turn off the water to stop the pipes from freezing.”
“Why?”
“Because when water freezes it expands, so it would have cracked the pipes in the winter, flooding the room when the ice defrosted in springtime.”
“No,” Gertie said, “I meant why is there no one living here, and why is the entrance hidden?”
“It has always been hidden, and it’s empty because there aren’t enough Keepers to man the Gate Keepers’ Lodge.”
“Or woman,” Gertie said. “Not enough Keepers to woman the Gate Keepers’ Lodge.”
“Or rabbit . . .” added Kolt, getting technical.
Gertie stared at what had once been someone’s home. There was a table, comfortable armchairs, an early piano (which Kolt said was called a harpsichord), a bookcase, a mantelpiece, cupboards, a narrow wooden bed, and something called a billiards table. There was even a large chiming clock, not moving and, like everything else, coated in thick layers of dust. When Gertie got up to look around, the floor was covered with broken pieces of pottery and knives and forks that had been twisted into weird shapes—clearly not by human hands. Every mirror in the room had also been broken, as though whatever had caused the destruction wished not to look at itself.
To make the room even more frightening, the stone fireplace whistled. A cold draft was blowing down the chimney that smelled faintly of wet fur.
“Something has gotten in . . .” Kolt said, “something not particularly nice.”
Although Gertie had a sort of morbid curiosity at the idea of discovering the source of the destruction, she felt the pull of something more urgent. “When will it be safe to go back outside and keep looking?”
“I’m afraid we’re trapped down here until the main herd passes,” Kolt said. The ceiling was still shaking with heavy galloping hooves.
“What if Robot Rabbit Boy’s injured?”
“We’ll leave as soon as we can.”
Gertie sighed impatiently and rubbed thick dust off a tabletop.
“Why do you think all the mirrors are smashed?”
“I was afraid you’d ask that,” he said. “Let’s hope it was moisture that froze when winter came—same for the bowls.”
“But the knives and forks?” Gertie said, picking one up. “That can’t have been moisture.”
Kolt’s face looked dark and old in the candlelight. “Something has been going on down here we didn’t know about.”
Gertie was now on the other side of the room, looking at a giant rug hung on the wall. People had been sewn into the fabric with different colored thread. Kolt said it was the Turweston Tapestry, which told the ancient stories of Keepers. Gertie noticed several of the panels showed people with Keepers’ keys running from a giant tornado—which had been expertly spun into the cloth using white thread.
“You didn’t tell me about this place,” she said. “Did you ever meet the Gate Keeper?”
“They had gone before I appeared on the island. Mrs. Pumble, the Keeper who taught me everything, might have known who it was, but I didn’t.”
“But you’ve been down here before?”
“A long time ago to visit someone.”
“But I thought it was abandoned?”
Kolt hesitated. “Not exactly. Most Gate Keepers had a little helper, who kept them company on long, cold nights, when blizzards could trap them down here for a week or two.”
Gertie looked into the dark corners of the room. “What kinds of little helpers?”
“Creatures, Gertie—the kind that probably wouldn’t stick around in all this mess.”
“I wish you’d told me about this place before. How many more secret entrances are there hidden in rocks?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about this island, but finding things out gradually is a normal part of life on Skuldark.”
“Huh,” she scoffed. “There’s nothing normal about this place.”
Then Gertie noticed a steel door at the very back of the room. It was marked EXIT ONLY. The door stood out because almost everything else in the Gate Keepers’ Lodge was made of wood, and this was shiny, bright, steel. Gertie was going to ask Kolt what it was when something zipped out from a hole in the wall and hopped up onto the table in front of them.