Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun (14 page)

“Aaron,” I whispered.

There were sculptures
everywhere.
Ice tables, ice pillars, ice chandeliers, even ice people — or ice heads, anyway. We couldn’t see their bodies from where we were.

It was as though a whole team of ice sculptors had lived here for years, working nonstop before disappearing and leaving nothing but their work behind. Maybe that was
exactly
what had happened. I certainly couldn’t think of any other explanation.

Aaron let out a low, whistling breath. “Wow!”

I took two more steps and looked down at the statues again. That was when I realized something else.

“The statues!” I said, my voice shaking as much as my knees.

Aaron glanced down in the direction I was pointing. “They’re . . .”

I looked at him. “I know,” I said. “They’re merpeople.”

We stared at the mer-statues. They were so realistic. Some of them were sculpted sitting on boulders, others horizontal, tails out, as if swimming through the sea. Their tails were so intricate, their faces so lifelike.

A sheen of some sort seemed to surround them all. “How on earth did they do that?” I asked.

Aaron pointed toward the top of the sheen. “Look, it’s wavy, just like the surface of the sea.”

It was as though the sculptors had created an entire world of merpeople, complete with the ocean. But why would someone produce such amazing art and keep it hidden in a place like this?

I leaned forward to take a closer look, holding my crystal out in front of me to shed more light on the statues. I was about to take another step when Aaron screamed from behind me.

“Emily! Careful!”

He grabbed the back of my coat, stopping me from taking another step. As he grabbed me, the crystal fell from my hand.

“Why did you —” I began. And then I looked down. We were on the edge of a precipice. I hadn’t realized.

The crystal was still falling — and if Aaron hadn’t grabbed me, I would have gone with it. As I stared, I noticed something else, right in the middle of the display. The largest statue of them all.

“Aaron!” I gulped. “Look at that!”

He followed my shaking finger. “But . . . but that’s . . .”

I felt as though the ice had crept into my throat, my chest, my stomach — it was inside the whole of me. There was no explanation for what we were looking at, none at all.

Down below us, sculpted in the finest detail you could imagine, and more lifelike than anything I had ever seen, was Neptune.

W
e stood, transfixed, staring at the Neptune sculpture and at the crystal, which was still glowing and had landed on the hazy sheen below.

“Emily, this is creeping me out,” Aaron said in a whisper.

“I agree. Let’s get out of here.”

We turned to head back the way we’d come — but before we’d taken more than two steps, something stopped us in our tracks. It was a creaking noise, a bit like the sound we’d heard in the center of the mountain when the ice had begun to melt — only this was about a hundred times louder. It was coming from down below.

I looked back. The sheen was beginning to dissolve in the exact spot where the crystal had landed. The crystal was burning a hole through the shimmering “sea,” carving a well that was growing deeper and wider by the second, glowing and sparkling as it drilled into the ice. As the well grew, something strange started happening to the statues within it. The ones nearest to the crystal began to thaw!

“What’s going on?” Aaron’s voice had an edge of panic I’d never heard before.

“I have no idea,” I said. Part of me wanted to run away, wanted to get the heck out of there as fast as I possibly could, wanted to turn back the clock and never let Neptune talk us into this crazy mission in the first place. But another part of me couldn’t move. I couldn’t take my eyes away from what was happening.

Bit by bit, the sheen was turning into water. Shapes that had been beautifully sculpted merpeople only minutes earlier began to writhe and stretch and swish their tails. Sculpted fish came to life and began swimming in the well of water opening up around them.

Soon, the well had spread into something very similar to the shape of the crystal itself. A giant, jagged droplet of space in the ice, big enough for about six or seven merpeople and countless fish to start swimming in.

The melting seemed to have stopped. Around the crystal-shaped well, everything else was still ice, apart from tiny watery splinters. Inside it, the scene was very different. Merpeople swam toward each other, hugged, shook hands, smiled and laughed. The fish swam frantically around, forming shoals to explore their new giant fishbowl together.

And then I saw something right at the edge of the melted bowl. It looked like a small shark. It was swimming upward through one of the splinters in the ice — heading in our direction. Not only that, but it had some kind of weapon with it. It looked like it was carrying a long spear — on its head!

“Aaron, what’s that?” I gasped.

“I’ve got no idea — but I think it’s seen us.”

He was right. The shark was heading straight for us — and it didn’t look friendly. Nor did the spear that I could now see was at least as long as its body.

“Let’s go!” Aaron yelped.

I didn’t need to be told twice. In fact, I didn’t even need to be told once. I was already running out of that creepy place as fast as my shaking, slipping legs would carry me.

I don’t know how we did it. Maybe terror is good for improving your sense of direction. But we ran and ran, hurling ourselves along rocky tracks, pelting down forks in the tunnels without even thinking, until, eventually, the tunnel began to feel like the one we’d come down in the first place.

A tiny glow of light began to emerge ahead of us. We’d done it! We’d found our way out!

Except, once we were outside the mountain, nothing looked familiar. This wasn’t where we’d come in. We came in underwater. This entrance had water lapping at the rocks, but it wasn’t deep enough to swim in.

We waded through the water until it grew deeper. Then we threw ourselves in and let our tails form. We swam close to the surface, looking around for something familiar. The fjord opened up to a wider stretch of sea. Over the other side, there was a port with buildings and ships.

“Emily, look over there,” Aaron said, pointing at the port. I squinted into the sun — which was dazzling my eyes even though it was the middle of the night! And then I noticed it. A ship.
Our
ship! “Please tell me that isn’t a mirage,” I said.

Aaron smiled. “I remember now. In the brochure, it said there was a midnight concert tonight, at a town on the other side of the glacier.”

“We’ve been all the way through the mountain range and come out on the other side?”

Aaron shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. We’ll need to hurry, though. The program said the ship was sailing again at two.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s half past one. We’ve got thirty minutes.”

We swam harder than I’d ever swum in my life. Finally, we pulled ourselves out of the water in a rocky inlet, just out of sight of the boat, and waited for what felt like forever for our legs to reform. Then we ran like crazy and reached the ship, panting and breathless, just as they were about to start lifting the gangplank.

“Got in by the skin of your teeth, there,” the steward said with a smile as we showed our passenger cards and stepped inside. “Had fun?”

“Mm,” I said, not even bothering to try to sound convincing.

As the large doors slid closed behind us and the ropes were thrown up to the ship from the men on the dock, I could have cried with relief.

“We made it,” Aaron said. He put his arms around me, and this time, I didn’t try to stop him.

“There you are!” Mr. Beeston’s voice made me leap out of my skin — and out of Aaron’s arms. “I’ve been looking for you all night. Pacing corridors, searching the coastline, coming back here every ten minutes.”

He stopped and looked properly at us. I imagine the combination of grime and gravel, messed up hair, torn clothes, and a hundred different emotions on our faces probably didn’t make for the most attractive sight.

“I’m forgetting myself — forgive me,” Mr. Beeston mumbled. “I’ve just been so concerned. Are you two all right?”

Aaron nodded.

“Just about,” I said.

Mr. Beeston fiddled with a loose strand of hair, flattening it over his head. As I looked at him, I realized he looked exhausted. It was only then that it hit me: it was the middle of the night. Suddenly, I was so tired I wasn’t even hungry anymore. I just needed sleep.

“I have to get to bed,” I said.

“Of course, of course!” Mr. Beeston said hurriedly. “We can catch up in the morning.”

We made our way to the corridor. Aaron and Mr. Beeston’s cabin was in one direction; mine was in the other.

“Millie knows nothing about this,” Mr. Beeston said as we walked. “I told her you were spending the evening with a family who had children your age.”

“All this time?” I glanced at a clock on the wall. It was twenty past two. Mr. Beeston waved a hand as if to shake my question off. “Different rules apply when it is daylight for twenty-four hours,” he said. “Anyway, I went past your cabin earlier and you could hear her snores from outside the door. I don’t think she will even notice you come in.”