The Scattersmith by David James Kane
14. SPECTRE IN THE HOLE
I crept into Mum's room, swinging Uncle Gerry's beer tankard in front of my chest for balance. Made of pewter (mostly tin, with a bit of copper thrown in to make it hard), the tankard glinted silver-blue. I'd chosen it for its strength: it was full to the rim with pieces of Minmi - something Mr Fisk had handled. Even now, the shards of baked clay were too hot to carry in a bag.
Mum was sound asleep in the centre of the bed. Cradled in her arms, his head tucked under her neck, snuffled Joke, his right ear and the top of his head poking out from layers of blankets.
Quietly, I squatted and set the tankard down next to the trunk, winking at the round face carved on its front. The last time I'd inspected it, the face had scared me. But I'd seen real horrors since then, far worse than creepy etchings carved into wood.
Grabbing the edge of the rug, I yanked it towards me. Then I dug out and twisted the loop of wire, and waited for the wooden latches to pop up. They rose with a whiff of lacquer, and I gripped them, pulling the blue-black wooden trapdoor out of the floor. I lowered the trapdoor lid onto the carpet. In the back pocket of my jeans, Platykuk vibrated with what I guessed was excitement.
"Shh, boy," I whispered, flattening my stomach and chest against the floor. "Hold your horses till we get into the tunnel." I lowered my feet into the hole, swinging them from side to side like a metronome until they found purchase on the ladder's second rung.
When my body was halfway into the hole, Joke stirred. I froze, my hips resting uncomfortably on the sharp ridge. "Don't send me to Raglan," he groaned in his sleep. "I want to be an archaeologist. Heinrich Schlieman, another Troy."
I had no idea who Heinrich Schlieman was. Raglan catered mostly for kids who wanted to do a trade when they turned 16, like becoming a plumber, carpenter, or electrician. It focused on useful skills like wood turning, and car stuff. Joke was hopeless at making anything. For his end-of-year woodwork assignment, a pencil box, he'd had so many turns at the sander to get the edges straight that, in the end, it could only hold one pen, and only if you jammed it in diagonally!
If Joke were to become an archaeologist, he needed to know about chemistry, geography, ancient history and languages, like Latin. Raglan just wasn't set up for that kind of thing. And that wasn't Joke's biggest problem, of course. His father was the Zealtor!
I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. There would be plenty of time to feel sorry for Joke later. I grasped the tankard's handle with my right hand, and gripped the side of the ladder with my left. I took one last look at Mum and Joke, then climbed down the silver ladder.
The tunnel seemed different. For one thing it was warmer. Much warmer. I was sweating under my layers of Winter clothes. The air smelt different too, like the mulched sandalwood of Mr Seth's cologne. Oddly comforting.
Blue-silver lights emanated from the cave stubble now coating the tunnel's lower walls. The more brilliant light revealed pictures - cave paintings - I hadn't seen on my first trip. On the tunnel’s ceiling and upper walls, were murals of brown birds, tethered to leafless tree boughs. Giant white bulls were yoked in pairs to what looked like a plough. Above my head, a solitary grey steed tied to a fence post, grazed on grass. An elderly chimpanzee sat, legs akimbo, at the base of a cliff breaking small stones against rocks.
As I advanced down the tunnel, the ground became muddy. Further on, the lower walls were half submerged in water. I'd come prepared this time: my galoshes splashed noisily as I waded through the soupy muck.
Platykuk jiggled in my pocket and emitted a low growl. "Relax, boy," I said. "Just a bit of water. We're not going to melt!"
I reached the end of the tunnel and stepped into the cave. It was almost certainly deeper and wider than I recalled. Though humid and hot as a sauna, it was not as wet underfoot. About five metres above me - I couldn't believe the roof was so high - thousands of tiny silver stars twinkled, like a disco planetarium.
I scoured the cave walls. Like the tunnel, the upper walls were covered with paintings. But these were not drab sketches of entrapped birds, enslaved cattle or broken horses. Snarling sabre tooth tigers, packs of baying wolves, boa coils sprouting cobra heads, and eight legged elephants with sharpened tusks scrutinised us, as if looking for flaws. The wild beasts had been painted with wild brushstrokes in arterial-blood red, electric blue and solar-yellow paints.
Platykuk thrashed in my pocket like a cat in a sack. "Hang tight," I said. "I'm still looking - Aaargh!"
In agony, I slipped and nearly dropped the tankard in the mud, clutching my backside with my free hand as Platykuk dug his spurs into my flesh. The calculator rotated itself and gouged at the back pocket of my jeans, landing in the muck beside me with a dull splash. I massaged my sore backside through the rent material.
"You didn't have to do that!" I spluttered. "Mum's going to be furious," I said. "These were my good jeans!"
My words echoed, and sounded ridiculous. Who cared about ripped jeans! There were more important things going on. As if reading my thoughts, Platykuk clacked his bill then paddle-crawled to solid ground, scaling a small stone lying against the far back wall of the cave. The rear of the cave was not well lit. Platto disappeared into the shadows, and began furiously scratching at rock. I tensed: perhaps something was hidden in the nook of the concave surface where the stone met the wall.
"Easy, Platto," I said, placing the tankard down carefully next to a small rock. I waded over to join him. "What have you found?"
My eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness and Platto's silhouette, or shadow, emerged. He was burrowing into a hidden mural, this one rendered in smudged charcoal. I squinted and deciphered the shapes. "A man," I said. "No, two men." They stood on either side of a raging grey fire and looked like twins. Each of their hands had only four elongated fingers and their feet were hidden behind the fire.
Darker parallel lines thrust down into the flesh above each man's right hip, like a spear. The figures were not identical. The one on the right wore dangling earrings which, on closer inspection, turned out to be tiny statutes of women with blades for legs. The man on the left had antler buds jutting out from the top of his skull. More differences emerged: the men were different heights, weights and shades of black-grey. How had I mistaken them for twins?
Platto started to quiver and quake. Three clawed feet retracted into his casing with a slurp, a belch of foul blue cheese and petrol exploding from his hide. Platykuk's fourth foot and front right leg, slid down and across the bottom of the black case like a manual gear stick, grinding then settling near his belly. Platykuk tottered, then found his balance.
For a few moments, Platykuk stood motionless. Then all four sides of his case stretched flat simultaneously, his edges rounding as the case extended and thinned to become a DVD-sized disk. The disk slowly rotated atop Platykuk's anchoring leg.
The tiny stars on the roof flashed in a deliberate rhythmic pulse. It was as if they were dancing to a rave of sub-sonic drum and bass.
"What are you up to?" I asked.
I stopped talking and used my brain!
I'm going to get Platykuk to summons, help, Mr Seth had said on our call.
Platto accelerated, and I found myself mesmerised, my eyes locked onto the disk's black surface, now as glossy as a pair of polarised sunglasses. Platto started to hum, first low, like a contrabassoon, then up its register till it blasted the high pitched trill of an oboe. The pitch scaled yet higher, becoming the whistle of an old boiled kettle. Dizziness swept over me, and I felt car sick.
As the disk spun, animal shapes began to flicker, green and blue, on its surface. Some, perhaps, were reflections from the cave walls, but others were unmistakably new. Open-mawed sharks and crocodiles chased each other around the disk. A massive claw, like a bear's, shot into frame and tore out the shark's gills with a single swipe. There were voices too, beneath the whistle: wild and discordant, like someone thumping broken piano keys with a hammer.
My head rapped like the side of a snar
e drum. Blood gushed to my ears. Balance deserted me, and my stomach lurched and dropped away. For a moment, I thought I would vomit. Then I snatched my eyes away from the squealing disk. Scores of black spots, miniatures of Platto, marred my vision.
It was nothing like last time. To the wall behind Platto, I fixed my gaze, trying to clear my mind of spinning wheels. Viscous blobs of red and silver fluid sprang off the disk as it twirled, like the split contents of a broken lava lamp.
The lurid paint of the cave wall carnivores shimmered like the air around a desert oasis. Snakes uncoiled, tigers slunk forward, ready to pounce. A cauldron of bats sang their Doppler-affected screeches rippling up and down the tunnel. On the roof, giant mud-caked leather wings cracked and unfurled from hidden nooks, eclipsing the twinkling stars.
The two stick men began to dance around the crackling fire, shuddering ecstatically. Then the man with antler buds tripped the other man and tossed him head first into the flames. The fallen man's earrings whipped from side to side across his face, as his body, whitened and charred. The antler-bud man danced on and became an antelope. From the back of the cave, a rasping whisper echoed off the walls:
SEE THE SCHISM
My splayed palms hit the wet cave ground I'd slipped. I pushed back, straightening up onto my knees, as if in prayer. I tried to stand. But then the cave itself tilted and began to rotate at first slowly, then almost as quickly as Platto. I crashed heavily onto my stomach, and must have hit my head on a submerged rock. I very nearly passed out.
From somewhere deep, a thousand drums pounded. Slow, heavy beats, shook the ground, hijacking my heart. I was sick to the stomach as the heat increased with the spinning and drumming. Hot blood pulsed at my neck, enslaved to the tempo of the drums. Pain erupted at my temples. I flipped over onto my back, screaming as my skull seemed to shrink, the pressure in the cave squeezing my brain like a gauntleted fist. I pressed my cold, soaked palms to my burning forehead, and lurched onto my right side.
Just in time: a twirling white stick man tore an earring from his elongated lobe and gutted a fish with its blade. Beneath, a giant blue snake struggled to swallow the man-antelope, the serpent's jaws straining to gorge on thrashing legs.
Lights continued to strobe. The burnt man with the torn earlobe leapt into the fray. He tore the other earring from his ear and advanced on the serpent. The cobra-headed snake struck, but the burnt man ducked its fangs, lowered the dagger to his waist and charged for the serpent's belly. Savagely curling his biceps, he slashed up with the blade, slitting the snake from head to tail.
TWO KNOTS OF THE SCHISM: WITCH AND SCATTERSMITH.
As the burnt man dragged the antelope-man from the broken jaws of the twitching serpent, the antelope-man cocked his head and gored the burnt man's chest with his antlers. The gutted snake locked its jaws over its own tail and began to gorge on itself.
The antelope man whirled away and danced, faster than ever before, disappearing into a blur that enveloped the snake then the wall in a smudgy storm-cloud.
I blinked. Fat globs of silver and red mercury splashed off Platykuk's sable surface and onto my chin and neck. Jolts of pain lanced down my body, gouging at the flesh of my chest and back.
I rolled and curled up into a foetal position, propped my feet against the wall, and crossed my arms. I screamed again, and felt the agony of terrible loss, as my shadow wrenched itself from my body and started swirling up and down the cave walls like an anti-spotlight. As my shadow gambolled and tumbled, it sprouted horns that split and kinked back on themselves into snarls, like brambles. Then its earlobes split as bloodied ivory daggers unsheathed themselves from shadow-flesh and fell into the shadow's outstretched hands. My shadow, oblivious, twirled and danced with abandon across the roof of the cave, gouging the tigers with its antlers and piercing the membranous wings of bats with its daggers. I flinched as my shadow shoved hunks of riven flesh into its gaping, distended mouth.
Platykuk squealed, then spun up into the air, steaming, like a torpedoed helicopter. The drum beats doubled their tempo, and with them my pulse. Lights, flashed red and silver. The ground beneath me trembled and cracked open. I fell into the abyss. I braced for what I knew would be a painful end, crucified on dirty cave teeth.
I crept into Mum's room, swinging Uncle Gerry's beer tankard in front of my chest for balance. Made of pewter (mostly tin, with a bit of copper thrown in to make it hard), the tankard glinted silver-blue. I'd chosen it for its strength: it was full to the rim with pieces of Minmi - something Mr Fisk had handled. Even now, the shards of baked clay were too hot to carry in a bag.
Mum was sound asleep in the centre of the bed. Cradled in her arms, his head tucked under her neck, snuffled Joke, his right ear and the top of his head poking out from layers of blankets.
Quietly, I squatted and set the tankard down next to the trunk, winking at the round face carved on its front. The last time I'd inspected it, the face had scared me. But I'd seen real horrors since then, far worse than creepy etchings carved into wood.
Grabbing the edge of the rug, I yanked it towards me. Then I dug out and twisted the loop of wire, and waited for the wooden latches to pop up. They rose with a whiff of lacquer, and I gripped them, pulling the blue-black wooden trapdoor out of the floor. I lowered the trapdoor lid onto the carpet. In the back pocket of my jeans, Platykuk vibrated with what I guessed was excitement.
"Shh, boy," I whispered, flattening my stomach and chest against the floor. "Hold your horses till we get into the tunnel." I lowered my feet into the hole, swinging them from side to side like a metronome until they found purchase on the ladder's second rung.
When my body was halfway into the hole, Joke stirred. I froze, my hips resting uncomfortably on the sharp ridge. "Don't send me to Raglan," he groaned in his sleep. "I want to be an archaeologist. Heinrich Schlieman, another Troy."
I had no idea who Heinrich Schlieman was. Raglan catered mostly for kids who wanted to do a trade when they turned 16, like becoming a plumber, carpenter, or electrician. It focused on useful skills like wood turning, and car stuff. Joke was hopeless at making anything. For his end-of-year woodwork assignment, a pencil box, he'd had so many turns at the sander to get the edges straight that, in the end, it could only hold one pen, and only if you jammed it in diagonally!
If Joke were to become an archaeologist, he needed to know about chemistry, geography, ancient history and languages, like Latin. Raglan just wasn't set up for that kind of thing. And that wasn't Joke's biggest problem, of course. His father was the Zealtor!
I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. There would be plenty of time to feel sorry for Joke later. I grasped the tankard's handle with my right hand, and gripped the side of the ladder with my left. I took one last look at Mum and Joke, then climbed down the silver ladder.
The tunnel seemed different. For one thing it was warmer. Much warmer. I was sweating under my layers of Winter clothes. The air smelt different too, like the mulched sandalwood of Mr Seth's cologne. Oddly comforting.
Blue-silver lights emanated from the cave stubble now coating the tunnel's lower walls. The more brilliant light revealed pictures - cave paintings - I hadn't seen on my first trip. On the tunnel’s ceiling and upper walls, were murals of brown birds, tethered to leafless tree boughs. Giant white bulls were yoked in pairs to what looked like a plough. Above my head, a solitary grey steed tied to a fence post, grazed on grass. An elderly chimpanzee sat, legs akimbo, at the base of a cliff breaking small stones against rocks.
As I advanced down the tunnel, the ground became muddy. Further on, the lower walls were half submerged in water. I'd come prepared this time: my galoshes splashed noisily as I waded through the soupy muck.
Platykuk jiggled in my pocket and emitted a low growl. "Relax, boy," I said. "Just a bit of water. We're not going to melt!"
I reached the end of the tunnel and stepped into the cave. It was almost certainly deeper and wider than I recalled. Though humid and hot as a sauna, it was not as wet underfoot. About five metres above me - I couldn't believe the roof was so high - thousands of tiny silver stars twinkled, like a disco planetarium.
I scoured the cave walls. Like the tunnel, the upper walls were covered with paintings. But these were not drab sketches of entrapped birds, enslaved cattle or broken horses. Snarling sabre tooth tigers, packs of baying wolves, boa coils sprouting cobra heads, and eight legged elephants with sharpened tusks scrutinised us, as if looking for flaws. The wild beasts had been painted with wild brushstrokes in arterial-blood red, electric blue and solar-yellow paints.
Platykuk thrashed in my pocket like a cat in a sack. "Hang tight," I said. "I'm still looking - Aaargh!"
In agony, I slipped and nearly dropped the tankard in the mud, clutching my backside with my free hand as Platykuk dug his spurs into my flesh. The calculator rotated itself and gouged at the back pocket of my jeans, landing in the muck beside me with a dull splash. I massaged my sore backside through the rent material.
"You didn't have to do that!" I spluttered. "Mum's going to be furious," I said. "These were my good jeans!"
My words echoed, and sounded ridiculous. Who cared about ripped jeans! There were more important things going on. As if reading my thoughts, Platykuk clacked his bill then paddle-crawled to solid ground, scaling a small stone lying against the far back wall of the cave. The rear of the cave was not well lit. Platto disappeared into the shadows, and began furiously scratching at rock. I tensed: perhaps something was hidden in the nook of the concave surface where the stone met the wall.
"Easy, Platto," I said, placing the tankard down carefully next to a small rock. I waded over to join him. "What have you found?"
My eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness and Platto's silhouette, or shadow, emerged. He was burrowing into a hidden mural, this one rendered in smudged charcoal. I squinted and deciphered the shapes. "A man," I said. "No, two men." They stood on either side of a raging grey fire and looked like twins. Each of their hands had only four elongated fingers and their feet were hidden behind the fire.
Darker parallel lines thrust down into the flesh above each man's right hip, like a spear. The figures were not identical. The one on the right wore dangling earrings which, on closer inspection, turned out to be tiny statutes of women with blades for legs. The man on the left had antler buds jutting out from the top of his skull. More differences emerged: the men were different heights, weights and shades of black-grey. How had I mistaken them for twins?
Platto started to quiver and quake. Three clawed feet retracted into his casing with a slurp, a belch of foul blue cheese and petrol exploding from his hide. Platykuk's fourth foot and front right leg, slid down and across the bottom of the black case like a manual gear stick, grinding then settling near his belly. Platykuk tottered, then found his balance.
For a few moments, Platykuk stood motionless. Then all four sides of his case stretched flat simultaneously, his edges rounding as the case extended and thinned to become a DVD-sized disk. The disk slowly rotated atop Platykuk's anchoring leg.
The tiny stars on the roof flashed in a deliberate rhythmic pulse. It was as if they were dancing to a rave of sub-sonic drum and bass.
"What are you up to?" I asked.
I stopped talking and used my brain!
I'm going to get Platykuk to summons, help, Mr Seth had said on our call.
Platto accelerated, and I found myself mesmerised, my eyes locked onto the disk's black surface, now as glossy as a pair of polarised sunglasses. Platto started to hum, first low, like a contrabassoon, then up its register till it blasted the high pitched trill of an oboe. The pitch scaled yet higher, becoming the whistle of an old boiled kettle. Dizziness swept over me, and I felt car sick.
As the disk spun, animal shapes began to flicker, green and blue, on its surface. Some, perhaps, were reflections from the cave walls, but others were unmistakably new. Open-mawed sharks and crocodiles chased each other around the disk. A massive claw, like a bear's, shot into frame and tore out the shark's gills with a single swipe. There were voices too, beneath the whistle: wild and discordant, like someone thumping broken piano keys with a hammer.
My head rapped like the side of a snar
It was nothing like last time. To the wall behind Platto, I fixed my gaze, trying to clear my mind of spinning wheels. Viscous blobs of red and silver fluid sprang off the disk as it twirled, like the split contents of a broken lava lamp.
The lurid paint of the cave wall carnivores shimmered like the air around a desert oasis. Snakes uncoiled, tigers slunk forward, ready to pounce. A cauldron of bats sang their Doppler-affected screeches rippling up and down the tunnel. On the roof, giant mud-caked leather wings cracked and unfurled from hidden nooks, eclipsing the twinkling stars.
The two stick men began to dance around the crackling fire, shuddering ecstatically. Then the man with antler buds tripped the other man and tossed him head first into the flames. The fallen man's earrings whipped from side to side across his face, as his body, whitened and charred. The antler-bud man danced on and became an antelope. From the back of the cave, a rasping whisper echoed off the walls:
SEE THE SCHISM
My splayed palms hit the wet cave ground I'd slipped. I pushed back, straightening up onto my knees, as if in prayer. I tried to stand. But then the cave itself tilted and began to rotate at first slowly, then almost as quickly as Platto. I crashed heavily onto my stomach, and must have hit my head on a submerged rock. I very nearly passed out.
From somewhere deep, a thousand drums pounded. Slow, heavy beats, shook the ground, hijacking my heart. I was sick to the stomach as the heat increased with the spinning and drumming. Hot blood pulsed at my neck, enslaved to the tempo of the drums. Pain erupted at my temples. I flipped over onto my back, screaming as my skull seemed to shrink, the pressure in the cave squeezing my brain like a gauntleted fist. I pressed my cold, soaked palms to my burning forehead, and lurched onto my right side.
Just in time: a twirling white stick man tore an earring from his elongated lobe and gutted a fish with its blade. Beneath, a giant blue snake struggled to swallow the man-antelope, the serpent's jaws straining to gorge on thrashing legs.
Lights continued to strobe. The burnt man with the torn earlobe leapt into the fray. He tore the other earring from his ear and advanced on the serpent. The cobra-headed snake struck, but the burnt man ducked its fangs, lowered the dagger to his waist and charged for the serpent's belly. Savagely curling his biceps, he slashed up with the blade, slitting the snake from head to tail.
TWO KNOTS OF THE SCHISM: WITCH AND SCATTERSMITH.
As the burnt man dragged the antelope-man from the broken jaws of the twitching serpent, the antelope-man cocked his head and gored the burnt man's chest with his antlers. The gutted snake locked its jaws over its own tail and began to gorge on itself.
The antelope man whirled away and danced, faster than ever before, disappearing into a blur that enveloped the snake then the wall in a smudgy storm-cloud.
I blinked. Fat globs of silver and red mercury splashed off Platykuk's sable surface and onto my chin and neck. Jolts of pain lanced down my body, gouging at the flesh of my chest and back.
I rolled and curled up into a foetal position, propped my feet against the wall, and crossed my arms. I screamed again, and felt the agony of terrible loss, as my shadow wrenched itself from my body and started swirling up and down the cave walls like an anti-spotlight. As my shadow gambolled and tumbled, it sprouted horns that split and kinked back on themselves into snarls, like brambles. Then its earlobes split as bloodied ivory daggers unsheathed themselves from shadow-flesh and fell into the shadow's outstretched hands. My shadow, oblivious, twirled and danced with abandon across the roof of the cave, gouging the tigers with its antlers and piercing the membranous wings of bats with its daggers. I flinched as my shadow shoved hunks of riven flesh into its gaping, distended mouth.
Platykuk squealed, then spun up into the air, steaming, like a torpedoed helicopter. The drum beats doubled their tempo, and with them my pulse. Lights, flashed red and silver. The ground beneath me trembled and cracked open. I fell into the abyss. I braced for what I knew would be a painful end, crucified on dirty cave teeth.