Rampage! (19 page)
Authors: Leo ; Julia; Hartas Wills
Rose wasn’t having the greatest of mornings either.
Squinting through the same early grey gloom as Alex, some ten miles west of her, she slipped and slithered over squelches of rotting leaves, catching a glimpse of Medea as she vanished behind the next twist of trees up ahead. Deft as a tarantula, the sorceress scuttled on, picking her way over tree roots, the rolled-up map tucked beneath her arm, whilst Rose gasped, losing her footing, her mind tumbling with the strange new words that she’d just been rehearsing.
Linque tenebras!
Leave the shadows!
Mihi accede, umbra!
Come to me, ghost.
They squirmed and spun in her head, dark and unknowable, writhing about each other like the tentacles of a bloated jellyfish. Medea had insisted they use Latin because Wat had been a learned man and it would draw him more easily. Shuddering, she stumbled into an acacia tree, seething with ants, and yelped. Latin, English, Greek? What did it matter? She still found herself
wishing wholeheartedly that she’d been left in her hammock fast asleep. Rather than having been rudely roused by the sorceress’s nerve-freezing whisper telling her that dawn was the best time for raising a ghost. Which, as alarm calls go, certainly beats a jangling clock on the nightstand.
The idea had horrified her and it still did. Things like turning a butterfly into a caterpillar, even fleetingly bringing her father back to talk with her, suddenly seemed like child’s play compared to this fully fledged sorcery. But then, it wasn’t as if she’d had much choice, because as Medea had calmly pointed out, the summoning spell was a truly difficult one, and if she had to do it all by herself, then she’d end up using so much of the bangle’s remaining power that there simply wouldn’t be enough of it left to retrieve the gold from the lagoon anyway. Meaning that if Rose were truly serious about bringing her father back, she’d have to steel herself to do it.
Rose turned and ran on again, feeling her breath snag in her lungs. A moment later, still trembling with nerves, she dipped her head beneath a low-hanging branch and found herself in a small clearing. On the opposite side, Medea stood poised, framed by the sprawling exposed roots of a huge mahogany tree. Between them, a few low stones jutted tipsily from the ground, standing in a line ending in a taller, more elaborately carved one.
Looking down at them, Rose felt a jolt. Obviously she hadn’t imagined that a makeshift graveyard in the middle of the jungle would be like the cemeteries in
London – all tended lawns, primped yew trees and scrubbed stones set with urns of chrysanthemums – but even so, she felt saddened by the clutch of headstones, rain-eroded and forgotten, cloaked in moss. She walked along the row, pausing to read the single names carved into each one: Carlos, Matias, Enrique, Fernando. The names sounded Spanish and it struck her as odd – after all, Wat was an English name – and she might have asked the sorceress to whom they belonged, except that Medea was waiting for her with a face as tight as a limpet. Standing beside the grandest stone at the end, the sorceress held out her arms like half a bridge, clasping the bangle between her fingers.
Quickening her pace, and careful not to step on any of the graves, Rose hurried to stand opposite her and glanced down.
Wat Raleigh
Killed in battle
3rd January in the year of our Lord 1618.
The name, Wat Raleigh, seemed almost familiar, like someone famous enough that she might have learned about them at school, but history wasn’t Rose’s favourite lesson and she’d probably only have been doodling in her jotter when the teacher talked about the yawny old Tudors and Stuarts.
Stretching out her arms, she tried to slow her breathing to calm the thrum of blood drumming in her ears and
took hold of the other side of the bangle, fleetingly surprised at how much thinner and rougher it felt than the day before. She waited, the pose reminding her of the turns they had to do in country dancing.
‘Start walking anti-clockwise,’ said Medea. ‘And don’t stop until I tell you.’
Rose closed her eyes and began to move, shivering as the sorceress started the spell.
‘Mihi accede, Wat Raleigh!’
The words sounded weirder than ever, out here in the jungle dawn. Stumbling over the uneven ground, Rose took a deep breath and repeated her own part of the chant through dry lips: ‘
Linque tenebras
!
Mihi accede, umbra!’
Over and over, their incantations wove together, twining up through the trees, sounding strange against the chorus of frogs now in full song above them. Rose tried to close off the jungle around her, concentrating hard to remember her own set of words and to curb the rising dizziness she felt as they revolved together over the soil. Each half of the spell was made to dance around the other to make the whole thing work, rather like the parts of those rounds songs you sing at school, ‘London’s Burning’ or ‘Frère Jacques’, except that no matter how well you sing those, they’ll never summon a spook.
42
Suddenly the bangle jumped beneath their fingers. Startled, Rose’s mind went blank for a second, but hearing the sorceress still muttering, her voice tinged with excitement,
Rose screwed her eyes tighter shut, kept her feet moving and forced her mind back on to her words.
A breeze began blowing through the glade. It lifted the hair at the nape of her neck, cooling her. Around her, the air seemed to fizz and crackle, the way it did before a thunderstorm, and she felt her senses prickling, primed and ready for something to happen. Even so, she still jumped as a deafening swoosh of cold air slammed between her and the sorceress, freezing her face as surely as if she’d walked into an air-conditioned room.
Of course, had Rose had her eyes open she would have seen the ice-white bolt of lightning that had shot down from the canopy, blasting through the bangle like a ray of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. She’d have seen it slam into the soil, zapping a nearby Bird-of-Paradise plant with so much frazzling power that its beak-like flowers were now clucking like a tree full of macaws, before toppling over, singed, on to the ground. And she might even have noticed how the fizzing energy trickled outwards, spilling on to the other four graves in flashes of light.
But she didn’t.
To be fair, I suppose that the sound of one grave being drenched by magic – a sort of
whoosh-splut-zzzng
– is much the same as the
whoosh-splut-zzzng
that the other graves standing in the row behind it make when they’re being doused, too. And besides, her attention was now wholly focused on the fact that the sorceress had
stopped moving and chanting. Opening her eyes, she looked across at Medea, noticing her fair skin was tinged pink with effort.
‘It’s done,’ she said, glancing down at the grave.
Rose followed her gaze and blinked to see a flurry of silver stars hovering over the soil.
Then she looked back into the sorceress’s eyes.
Medea smiled darkly. ‘Now we wait.’
Well, that’s enough of all that.
I don’t know about you, but all that grubbing about in the dark, worrying about ferocious great animals with more teeth than a shop full of piranhas only to break for a ghastly beckoning of ghosts has left me quite wibbly.
So, I’m off somewhere more genteel, where the manners are as polished as croquet balls.
Dorset.
Nestled on England’s south coast, this county is home to craggy cliffs, harbours with little bobby boats and fields of pink-nosed cows that twirl their tails and make cream for scones. And the ghost of Wat Raleigh, of course, who at that moment was carrying his croquet mallet across the East Lawn of Sherborne House and chatting to his parents, Sir Walter and Lady Bess. Unlike ghosts from the Greek Underworld, who are as solid as you or me, English ghosts (and particularly those belonging to the aristocracy) are a far more traditional lot in their appearance and are quite invisible to ordinary people. True, they might occasionally allow themselves to be glimpsed along
a galleried corridor or hover unnervingly around the chandeliers of a great hall, but for the most part they’re as see-through as bubbles and almost as floaty.
Centuries ago, Wat and his father – as you may recall from the portrait hanging in Medea’s private gallery – had been flamboyant explorers inspired by stories of the New World. But you wouldn’t think so to look at Wat now. He hardly appeared to be the daring young man who’d been felled by a Spanish musket-ball in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, cut down in his prime, which, I’m afraid, is what four hundred years of playing croquet with your mum and dad will do for you. Instead, stooped over his mallet to take his next shot with his short cloak tucked back over his shoulders like wings, he looked more like a disgruntled crane,
43
an illusion compounded by the flamboyant puffball trousers he wore, from which thin, white-stockinged legs emerged and ended in over-the-knee boots.
He clacked the ball through the last hoop.
‘Bravo!’ said Walter, slapping his left hand against his thigh, a rather unpleasant sound and nothing like applause, but which had remained the old man’s only option since his execution had obliged him to use his right hand for carrying his head centuries ago.
Dropping an elaborate bow, Wat was mid finger-flourish when he noticed the topiary
44
squirrels fronting
The Orangery beginning to twitch. He straightened up abruptly, feeling his eyes widen in alarm as the twiggy creatures then raised the nut-shaped clumps of privet clasped in their paws to their mouths.
‘Zooks!’ he gasped, as behind him the lake exploded with the trumpeting of hundreds of ducks lifting off the water.
But before he could twist round to take a proper look, something blazingly bright slammed into his stomach like an invisible cannon ball and flipped him off his feet to hoik him up, up and further up into the air. Flapping his arms uselessly, he stared down, horrified as the castle shrank beneath him, framed by his splendid purple shoes. Far below, his mother toppled backwards in a flurry of squeals and petticoats, whilst beside her Walter bellowed, holding his head high over his stumpy neck for a better view.
Sucked up into a tunnel of lightning, Wat spun through the air for several minutes, toppling cape over puffballs, to finally land with a dismal squelch. Dazed and blinking through a last drift of stars, he noticed his mud-soaked hose
45
and instinctively dabbed them with his silk handkerchief. Then he heard the chirruping cicadas whose tune had replaced the familiar chatter of sparrows. A lyrebird trilled high above him. As the last wisp of smoke vanished around him, he spied the buttress
roots of a mahogany tree a few metres away, standing like polished walls around the base of the enormous trunk. Half-remembering it, he felt his bones chill beneath his phantom skin and, tilting his head back, he followed its column up with his eyes, knowing he would see a cloud of leaves halfway up, ringed by blood-red flowers. They were still there.
Just like on the day of his funeral.
‘Welcome back,’ said a woman’s voice.
Jerking his head round, he saw Medea standing over him and felt his ghost heart begin to thump.
‘Seamstress?’ he gasped, fingering the soot-edged hole in his jerkin and rising to his feet. ‘Witch maiden! Vile conjurer of curses! Architect of mine own death!’
Ah, yes …
‘Minx of the stitching needle! Dreaded embroiderer of the Fleece …’
… Whilst he’s going on, I’d better explain.
You see, ghosts have lots of spare time and they tend to get rather bored. Even floating around the ceilings of Buckingham Palace and sneaking in free to the movies becomes rather dull after the first hundred years. So, to jolly things up a bit, they like to throw parties. Of course, meeting all those new guests with a ‘Hello and how did you die?’ it wasn’t long before Wat and his father discovered that lots of other spooks, despite living centuries apart from them, were all dressed in clothes fashioned by one and the same person: Medea. Strange enough in itself that a Roman emperor should find himself kitted out by
the same woman who’d sewn an astronaut’s socks, but odder still when they all discovered the cusps of golden wool sewn into the linings of their last-gasp clobber and found out what they meant.
‘Jinxer with the Fleece! Dire mistress of evil! Demon-dabbler of decoration!’ spluttered Wat.
‘And it’s lovely to see you again too,’ said Medea, holding up her hands to stop him. ‘But really, we don’t have time for all this flattery.’
Flicking his eyes sideways, he spluttered to see a red-haired girl step out from behind the sorceress. Odder still, she seemed to be peering back at him, as though she could actually see him. Snatching up the head of his mallet, he jabbed its handle towards her, prodding the air around her, as though at an unwelcome mouse in the castle larder. She flinched. And so did he. Clearly, he realised, the Greek witch had granted the girl some sort of magical clear-sightedness to see things hidden from ordinary mortals.