The Second Forever (10 page)

‘Gold?'

‘She's spent years scraping all the gold lettering off
the backs of old books,' Peter explained. ‘She hardly got any, but she's convinced she's rich enough to buy a mansion in Switzerland.'

‘I've got this bracelet,' said Festival's mother, taking out a paper bag. ‘The catch broke years ago, and I never got around to getting it repaired. I could give it to her.'

‘That would be brilliant,' said Peter.

Peter, Festival, her mother and Orleans then agreed to split up and search for Festival's father and meet back at Palsy's door every hour until they found him.

It took three hours to track him down by which time it was beginning to get dark. When they all
finally reached Foreclaw's apartment, it was completely dark. Across the far side of the top gallery was a small flickering light. It was the Gold Lady on her endless search.

Peter let everyone into Foreclaw's apartment then took the broken bracelet that belonged to Festival's mother around to the old woman.

Her eyes filled with tears as she put her thin arms around Peter. The Gold Lady was speechless, and she kissed the bracelet and ran her fingers through it again and again.

‘When the water goes away,' she said finally, ‘I will go to Switzerland and buy the biggest mansion I can find, and I'll probably have enough left over to buy another one, too.'

‘Probably,' said Peter.

‘And you and your girlfriend can come and visit me whenever you want.'

‘She isn't my girlfriend,' Peter said.

‘Don't be silly,' said the Gold Lady, ‘of course she is.'

And before Peter could say anything else she disappeared into a jumble of broken books. Peter had never thought of Festival in a boyfriend–girlfriend sort of way. They had been children when they first met, though now, well, he thought of her more like a sister than anything else. But as he walked back to
the apartment, the old woman's words wouldn't leave him alone.

Girlfriend?

The more he thought about it, the more he was overcome with shyness and didn't want to go inside. He leant on the railing and stared into the water. The moon was trying to shine through the dust that covered the dome. The dull glow looked as if it was a full moon and everything had lost its colour. It was all just shades of washed-out blue. Peter felt very lost and far from home.

‘What are you doing?' said a voice behind him as a hand touched his shoulder.

It was Festival, and when he turned around to face her, Peter knew the Gold Lady was right. He and Festival were bound together, not just by their history and the book and its immortal curse, but by something new, something that neither of them could talk about yet. They avoided each other's eyes and returned to Foreclaw's apartment.

Inside, Festival's mother had found matches, candles to light the room and wood to light the fire and soon the apartment was filled with a comfortable warm glow. When Foreclaw had lived there the place had seemed like a storeroom, but now it felt like a welcoming home.

And there was food, more than Foreclaw could
ever have needed, as if he had expected them all along. There was water too, and Peter had the first bath he had had in years. Upstairs they each found a room and in no time at all they were fast asleep, safer than they had felt for a very long time.

‘There is no time to lose,' said Festival's father the next morning. ‘We must go to the island while a part of it is still above water. Although we can see the top of the tallest tree for now, it won't be there for much longer.

‘Of course, if you hadn't gone there in the first place,' he added, ‘none of this would have happened.'

‘Yes it would,' said Peter, realising what Festival's father had just said would undoubtedly make her feel very guilty. ‘If we hadn't done it, someone else would have eventually and it could have been much worse. At least we've got a chance of fixing things.'

‘True,' said Festival's father. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘And I think you three should stay here until Peter and I get back,' said Festival.

‘But . . .' her mother began.

‘There isn't really anything you can do there, and it's quite safe up here,' Festival explained. ‘We will return as soon as we can.'

‘This way, we'll know you'll be okay,' Peter added.

‘But . . .' Festival's father began.

‘There is no but,' said Festival. ‘We'll get ready and set off first thing tomorrow morning.'

‘Yes,' said Peter. ‘We'll organise a boat now and return in an hour or so.'

Peter and Festival headed towards the old hotel and then down to the lowest level that was still above water.

Most of the fishermen had set up camp along the water's edge, building whatever shelters they could in between the houses that had once sat against the iron railings eighty feet above the old waterline. Now the water was creeping into this level, crawling in between the gaps and rising. In some places it was ankle-deep and people were already packing up to move to the level above, not that there was any room for them there.

‘Do you think we should try and find the old man who took us to the island last time?' said Peter.

‘Earshader? I think we should,' said Festival. ‘After all, he's probably the only person who can take us.
Remember?'

‘Yes, I suppose so,' said Peter. ‘Except I thought that this time anyone would be willing to take us, seeing as we're trying to make the water turn back, but then, we don't actually need anyone to take us now. We can get ourselves there. All we need is a boat.'

‘That's true,' said Festival and went in search of one. But after she'd asked several people with boats and been turned away by all of them, she became disheartened. ‘They're all so pathetic. Here we are with the only opportunity there is to save their world, and they're all too superstitious to take us.'

‘That's ridiculous,' said Peter. ‘I suppose if we tell them exactly what the boat is for, then they might help, but like my grandfather said, we've got no way of knowing if any of them are Darkwood's spies.'

‘Yes, but not one single person asked why we wanted to go out there,' said Festival. ‘After I'd asked about the first twenty people, I decided there was no choice but to tell them why we wanted the boat, but even then no one would help.'

‘They probably didn't believe you,' said Peter. ‘I mean, would you?'

‘Well, they should,' snapped Festival. ‘They're so stupid. I mean, the flood's getting higher and higher every day. If someone came along and said they could
stop it, they should at least listen.'

‘It's like they've all given up,' said Peter.

‘I know. You'd that think with a chance of saving their homes and lives they'd be only too happy to help out,' Festival agreed. ‘But they're stupid people and their silly fears overrule any common sense. If they ever had any in the first place, that is.'

So they walked around the whole gallery looking for Earshader and his boat, but there was no sign of him. They walked around a second time asking people if they'd seen the old man, but no one had.

‘He might be dead,' said Peter. ‘He was pretty old when we last saw him.'

‘Maybe, but his boat should still be here,' said Festival.

Eventually they found someone who told them where Earshader lived.

‘Did he die?' Festival asked.

‘Not that I know of,' said the man who had taken them to the shed. ‘He just stopped being here one day.'

‘That's right,' said the man's wife. ‘I used to see him pass by every single day at seven o'clock in the morning, and then half an hour later he'd come back again with bread. But then one day he didn't, and we never saw him again.'

‘So is his boat in here?' said Peter.

‘Boat, what boat?' said the man.

‘When you stopped seeing him,' said Festival, ‘did you go and check up on him?'

‘Well, umm . . .' the man began.

‘We just looked in there a couple of days ago,' said the woman. ‘With homes being flooded and that, there are hundreds of people searching for places to live. So we thought we'd check out what was in here, and what with not seeing the old man for a while, we thought he might have moved.'

‘Okay, thank you,' said Festival. ‘We'll take over now.'

‘I'm sorry?' said the woman.

‘Earshader, the man who lived here, was my grandfather,' Festival lied. ‘So thank you for your help, but we'll sort out everything.'

‘If he was your grandfather,' said the man, ‘how come you didn't know where to find him?'

‘We've been away, and as far as we knew, Grandfather's house was down on the docks. We didn't know he had another house up here.'

Festival was an expert liar and far brighter than the two neighbours, so it didn't take much to convince them and they left, annoyed that they weren't going to get their hands on the place. Anywhere people could stay was worth a fortune nowadays, and they had obviously been planning on making a nice bit of
money out of Earshader's house.

When they had gone Peter and Festival went in and locked the door, and there at last was the boat. It looked exactly as decrepit as it had when they'd used it to go to the island five years earlier.

‘It's a wreck,' said Festival.

‘Yes, but if you look closely, you can see that all the splits and cracks have been very carefully filled up,' said Peter. ‘Each crack has been done up in such a way so as to make the boat seem as though it's just about to fall to bits, when, in fact, it's perfect. It might appear like a wreck, but it's meant to look exactly like that.'

‘Are you sure?' said Festival.

‘Absolutely,' said Peter. ‘I don't know who did it, but it was probably to stop anyone from taking the boat because they'd think it was dangerous.'

‘Well, I'm one of those people. I think it's dangerous.'

‘It isn't,' said Peter. ‘It's perfectly safe. I promise.'

The two of them spent far longer checking the boat out than they needed to because it meant avoiding the door to the upper floors. They were both quite certain they would find Earshader up there, dead and cold, or maybe something even worse. But when the children finally did get around to opening the door they discovered that it was locked.

‘We'll have to break it down,' Festival said.

Neither of them was in a hurry to do it. They searched the room, and finally in a locker on the boat they found a box of tools, which they took over to the door.

‘I reckon,' Peter said, as the door sprung open with very little effort, ‘that those two people probably thought Earshader was up there, dead. That's why they hadn't opened it.'

‘Of course. They probably killed him and stashed him up there themselves,' said Festival. ‘Look, there's no key inside, so it was most likely locked from the outside.'

‘Not necessarily,' said Peter. ‘Someone could have locked it from inside and taken the key upstairs with them.'

They wasted another ten minutes thinking of other possibilities until they could put off going up the stairs no longer.

At the top of the stairs was a large room that took up the whole floor of the building. It was empty – not just in terms of a person, dead or alive – but empty of anything: no carpet, no furniture, nothing. There were no hooks on the wall where pictures might have hung, nor was there a single mark on the wooden floor where feet or chairs might have scraped or tea been spilt or dust collected between the floorboards. There weren't even any cobwebs or dust on the
windows.

It wasn't that the room looked brand new, either. The floorboards were a flat grey colour that only wood hundreds of years old could be. The walls were covered in wallpaper that had faded over a very long time.

While the room had been cleaned, whoever had done it had removed every single tiny mark of anyone or anything ever having lived there. All that was there was a plain window with four panes of glass, the stairs they had just come up and a door that presumably led to the attic above.

‘Now I'm really confused,' said Festival, and it made the thought of going upstairs to the next floor even scarier. That door wasn't locked.

‘Hello?' Peter called up the stairs.

There was a small sound, not a sudden noise of someone being caught unawares, but of something moving. The light at the top of the stairs flickered as a shadow passed in front of the window, and there was Syracuse looking down at them. She meowed, and even from the foot of the stairs they could hear her purring.

‘Hello,' said Peter, picking up the young cat. ‘You're definitely Archimedes's daughter, aren't you?'

When the children finally reached the top room, they discovered it wasn't empty. It had all the furniture from the room below squashed in with what had
obviously been there before. The bed was unmade and looked as if it had been recently slept in, though it could have been from a month before. But on the table was a half-empty mug of tea that was still warm.

‘I think this is where Earshader is living,' said Peter.

‘Where is he, then?' said Festival.

Syracuse jumped out of Peter's arms and ran to a small staircase leaning against the wall. Above the steps was a skylight set into the attic ceiling, which opened out onto a tiny flat roof, hidden from all the other buildings. And there, sitting in a chair beneath a big umbrella staring blindly out across the lake, was Earshader.

Syracuse pounced up onto his lap and the old man, who was deaf and mute as well as blind, took the cat's head gently in his hands and nodded slowly. As Festival walked over to him, he turned to her and held out his right hand.

Festival took Earshader's hand and with her fingertip, as she had done the first time they had met five years before, wrote into his palm.

‘He says we are to take his boat,' she said. ‘He is too tired to travel any more.'

‘Okay,' said Peter. ‘Tell him thank you . . . and for fixing it up, too.'

Earshader smiled and wrote in Festival's hand with
his fingertip:
Ahh, you noticed.

He then asked Peter and Festival to help him down the steps into his room. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but there were lightning flashes and a rumble of thunder across the lake, into the distance.

Will you be all right?
Festival wrote.
Is there someone you would like us to get?

No, I am fine, thank you,
Earshader wrote back.
Besides, Syracuse will be here if I need anything, and she will stay until you return.

The old man climbed back into bed.

Here,
he wrote to Festival as he fell asleep,
take the key and lock me in when you go back down
.

Festival then followed Peter through the empty room and down to the boat before locking the door behind them.

‘How do we get it into the water?' said Festival. ‘How did Earshader even bring it up here in the first place?'

There were bolts on the door that led out to the gallery, so they locked those too just as someone knocked on the outside.

‘Who is it?' Festival called.

‘It's us from next door,' said a man's voice. ‘We were wondering how your grandfather was.'

‘More like hoping to get in here and rent out the place,' Festival whispered to Peter.

‘He's fine,' Festival said, opening the door just
enough to speak to the man but not let him in. ‘He does not need any help, thank you.'

‘How did he get his boat up here?' Peter asked through the door.

‘Boat? Oh, in bits,' said the man, trying to peer into the room.

‘What?'

‘He brought it up in bits. I thought they were just bits of old wood he was collecting for the fire. We only found out it was a boat the other day, when we came to check up on him.'

‘Really?' said Festival.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, everything's under control now, thank you. You needn't bother Grandfather anymore. He's being cared for,' said Festival, shutting the door and bolting it.

The front wall of the room, which looked out over the lake, had two huge windows. They were more than big enough for the boat to fit through, though the rain was now beating against the glass so hard that it was impossible to see how far away the water was.

Festival looked out of the windows as the lightning grew brighter and the thunder came nearer. ‘I think the only problem is that the water's right below us, but we can't see properly because of the rain. For all we know, there could some building sticking out and even if it is the water and we open the window and push the boat out, won't it just fall down nose-first and sink?'

‘Probably,' said Peter. ‘So we've either got to let it down on a rope or slide it down some sort of ramp.'

They searched the building and found neither.

‘Is there anything we could tie to it, so that if it does sink, we can at least pull it up again?' said Festival.

‘If there was, we would need rope to tie it on with,' said Peter.

‘Well, we can't take it to bits and rebuild it, that's for sure,' said Festival.

They both got behind the boat and pushed it towards the window. Peter slipped and as he did so, a
section of the boat broke away.

‘See, I told you it was an old wreck,' said Festival.

‘No,' said Peter. ‘Wait a minute.' He walked around to the other side of the boat and pulled, and a matching section came away too. Except these two bits had not exactly broken off – they had unfolded like a pair of small wings, not big enough for the boat to fly, but just enough for it to still pass through the windows and be able to glide down to the water without nosediving.