The Bone Quill (23 page)

Then draw something to get her out of this!

But it was hopeless; Solon had nothing to draw with. He was about to admit as much when his attention was caught by something high up near the peak of Auchinmurn.

A pulsing mass of light.

The Abbey

Present Day

M
att
decided not to wait until morning.

Jeannie had forced him to bin his medieval clothes, arguing that they didn’t need to bring the plague back to present-day Auchinmurn. Simon’s had gone, too. Matt rummaged through his laundry basket until he found the old T-Rex concert T-shirt that had belonged to his dad.

He pulled on a clean pair of jeans and dug under his bed for his boots. Then he filled his rucksack with the map of the catacombs, a box of charcoal crayons, a pad of paper, a flashlight and the wedding picture of his parents. As an afterthought, he added all the coins from his change jar. Who knew what the shiny things might buy?

Quietly closing his door behind him, he kept close to the wall in the hallway to avoid the places he knew had creaky floorboards. Then he slipped down the far stairs and into the kitchen.

Embers were spitting and crackling in the fire. Through the French doors out to the garden, Matt could see the protective shield oozing and twisting through the stone wall like candyfloss. He lifted an apple, an orange and two bananas from the fruit bowl at the centre of the kitchen table, and a bag of cereal minus its box from the pantry. Finally, after fetching his parka from the utility room, he slid the little painting of the Abbey from underneath the kitchen tablemat, where he had placed it earlier in the day.

Can’t forget you
, thought Matt, rolling the picture tightly and slipping it into the inside breast pocket of his parka.

The fastest way to get to Renard’s study and the vault was to cut outside, across the front of the Abbey and back inside via the west tower’s front door. But Matt didn’t have keys to any of the outside doors. Instead he sneaked past the library, the downstairs bathroom and Simon’s office until he came to the hallway that led to the gym and the swimming pool.

Matt stopped. He thought he’d heard someone coughing. He waited for a few beats. Nothing.

Digging in his back pocket, he unfolded the drawing of the Abbey’s catacombs. When he and Simon had been in the Middle Ages, Matt remembered that the Abbot’s tower stood on the present-day site of the swimming pool. If he could find the access to the subterranean parts of the pool, he could find the original tunnels and simply walk under the compound to the vault’s outer wall. He’d think of a way inside when he got there.

He quietly opened the door to the gym, then stopped and listened again, reassuring himself that he was not being followed. Simon was sedated, Zach would not have heard any of his movements, and Renard slept in the top room of the tower above the vault and would hear nothing through the thick stone.

He headed for the pool boiler room. It was locked.

Concentrating, Matt tore a corner from his notepad and drew the doors to the room, adding a hole directly above the handle and the lock. As he put the last stroke to his shading, the doors in front of him shimmered violently, bursting into light. When they dimmed, Matt put his hand through the hole he had animated, flipping the lock from the inside.

The cramped room was dominated by a water pump, a stack of empty buckets and a long, snaking hose attached to the wall. Matt tore up his drawing, and the doors returned to normal in a flash of blue light. He was now locked inside.

He marked out the place in the middle of the floor that he hoped would take him down to the catacombs. Wiping sweat from his face, he drew a circle in charcoal with an X at its centre.

What could he animate to break open the floor? He could simply draw a hole the way he had with the door, but he wasn’t sure how he could draw the dimensions of a hole deep enough to climb through.

Em would know what to draw, he thought.

A sudden banging on the door made him jump. His phone beeped a text message. Zach.

Matt quickly texted back.

Matt suddenly knew what to draw to get through to the tunnels underneath.

Ignoring the question in Zach’s final message, he cleared the buckets and pool chemicals away from the centre of the floor. Then he wrapped the loose end of the hose around his waist, giving it a tug to make sure it felt secure. Taking out his sketchpad, he copied the room exactly as it was. When he finished, he concentrated again and began to erase the centre of the floor. It began crumbling into flecks of white and grey dust as the cement disintegrated. Scrambling to grab his backpack, Matt slipped feet first into the gaping hole he’d created, falling like Alice into a dusty darkness.

The hose around his waist stretched taut, then snapped. The impact of hitting the cold, hard ground winded Matt badly. Gasping, he pulled his knees to his chest and tried to get his breath back. Checking over his limbs, he decided he hadn’t broken anything. Untying the broken hose from around his waist, he hooked his backpack over his shoulders and flipped on his torch. His phone beeped weakly.

‘T
hat’s
okay, Zach,’ said Matt aloud to himself. ‘You do what you need to do.’

He pulled himself off the ground. A sharp pain stabbed through his chest. Em would have created a mattress for them to land on. Maybe he had broken a rib after all.

He was standing in a small cavern, and he could smell the sea, a briny damp that had coated the walls with a greenish-grey slime. He raised the torch, expecting to see the opening to the passage that ran underneath Renard’s tower and up against the outside of the vault. Instead, the beam hit a stone wall.

Matt thumped the wall with the side of his fist, listening to the echo of his thump. Solid. Turning in a circle, he spent the next ten minutes thumping his way around the cavern. His pulse began to quicken. For the first time since he’d rolled out of bed, he began to doubt his plan.

Pressing a button on his phone, he switched the screen to a compass. The sea was to the west of the Abbey, which meant that Renard’s tower was to his east. The needle on the compass shifted for a few seconds, then settled at true north. Matt stared at the wall to his right. It had to be the one he wanted.

And then he saw it. The two stones close to the curve of the cavern ceiling had no moss, no slime, nothing green on them whatsoever. They were recent additions to the chamber.

Matt quickly sketched a ladder, watching it crawl up the wall like a wooden caterpillar. He climbed to the top rung, and thumped the two dry stones. The wall beneath him began to shift and shake, leaving a gap about two metres wide beneath him. He scrambled down again, tearing up the sketch when he hit the ground, and the ladder exploded, rung by rung.

Clutching his rucksack, Matt squeezed through the gap. Midway, he felt the wall closing again, against his body. In seconds, he’d be crushed.

He realized he couldn’t move forwards or backwards. He was stuck. A sharp edge of stone was digging into his injured arm. The pain brought tears to his eyes, the wall pressing hard against his chest. With one huge burst of energy, Matt squeezed himself all the way through, seconds before the stone passage sealed itself behind him with a thud. Too late, he remembered he’d left his torch on the other side.

Matt was enveloped in darkness, his only light the green digits on the face of his watch and the screen on his phone. A noise like the scampering of a hundred tiny claws stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t like to think about it, but these tunnels were likely to be full of rats. The air smelled like rotting fish and wet animal.

Concentrating, Matt held his phone above his sketchbook with his right hand, illuminating the page. He scribbled with his left hand, drawing a skateboard helmet with a light embedded on the front. When he finished the animation, the helmet materialized in a scramble of reds and greens on Matt’s lap.

Next up, something to ride on
, he thought.
Why not?

There wasn’t time to draw a vehicle that was too elaborate, and he certainly didn’t have room in the tunnels for anything too big. He sketched a scooter with a small motor on the back wheel, and added a light on the front in the shape of a shield. He’d no sooner coloured in the shield than the scooter unfolded itself in a swoosh of silver light.

Matt put on his helmet and stepped on to the scooter. He turned the gears on the handle and shot forward into the long, narrow tunnel that had once been part of the monastery’s catacombs.

He regretted not bringing a more detailed map with him. The drawing of the catacombs wasn’t proving as useful as he’d hoped. Up ahead, the tunnel turned west. If it didn’t lead him to the wall of the vault, he’d turn back and rethink his plan.

Matt suddenly found himself at a dead end. Trusting his compass and his memory, he took his sketchpad from his backpack and began to draw his way into what he hoped was the art vault.

Z
ach
understood Matt’s motives. Leaving Em behind had been the final straw in a haystack full of them. But even as a developing Guardian, Zach always had a difficult time getting a clear reading on Matt. He had started to wonder if Matt was honing his Guardian abilities on himself, working to mask his feelings from others. At sixteen, the twins would be assigned their own Guardians, based on a close psychic connection. If Matt kept his feelings so protected, how would any Guardian ever get close enough to develop the necessary bond?