CHAPTER SEVEN
The Sign of the Times
The brown eagle circled its prey with practised ease; it disregarded the three figures that traipsed over a steep hillock as it dived to make the kill. A sudden scream shattered the valley’s lulling quietness. The eagle’s talons missed its prey by a hair’s breadth and caught something else.
Slumbering creatures never heard or saw the eagle thrash about in terror as it soared skyward into the deep blue sky.
Larry let out another sneeze that seemed to break the sound barrier. He wiped his runny nose on his sleeves and rolled them up his arms – oblivious to the eagle directly overhead and the angry wasps’ nest that had just missed his slick perspiring head.
Lorraine gave Larry a look of utter disgust, then averted her eyes and stared down into the valley with grim determination.
Rachel followed her mother’s gaze. ‘Are we there yet?’ she sniggered.
Lorraine beamed and said, ‘Yes, Rachel – I do believe we are.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ Larry groaned.
Rachel roasted under the heat of the day and took in the uninspiring vista of uninteresting rolling hills that surrounded them and followed her mother for at least another mile. The sharp flint walls that bordered the footpath had long since crumbled away into piles of weathered rocks.
Rachel sped ahead. With her renewed vigour, her heavy backpack hadn’t slowed her down at all, and she easily kept up with her mother’s long strides. Larry, however, had fallen behind after the first mile or so, but he had put on a brave face as they waited for him to catch up.
‘What’s that up ahead? Rachel inquired.
‘Our first port of call,’ Lorraine replied.
‘Now, that’s a welcoming sight,’ Larry puffed, clapping his eyes on the wooden bench in front of them and not the tall tree beyond.
Lorraine, however, had clapped her hands with childlike glee. ‘We can’t stop yet, Larry,’ she blustered. ‘There will be plenty of time for a rest when we get to the signpost,’ she added hurriedly and shot off along the footpath, ignoring his grumpy demeanour and disgruntled retort.
Rachel grinned and said, ‘C’mon, Larry – let’s get after her.’
‘I wish I’d stayed behind on Suzy and helped Lydia tidy up,’ he griped and began rubbing his spindly legs to get some feeling back into them. ‘You know, I’m getting too old for all these adventures.’
‘I can give you a piggy-back ride if you want?’ Rachel snorted.
Larry gave her an endearing smile. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said breezily, squaring his shoulders. ‘I think there’s still plenty of life in the old dog yet,’ he added with a merry wink and marched ahead.
✽✽✽
By the time they had finally caught up with Lorraine, the main footpath had long since disappeared. They crunched their way through leaves, twigs and other bits of dead fauna that lay underfoot.
Much to Larry’s dismay, they had come across the wooden bench, but it had succumbed to the ravages of time and the inclement weather that plagued the glade they were now trudging through, so he quickened his pace and made his way over towards the carved rock chairs up ahead.
Covered with bits of brown bark, crinkly dry leaves and a veil of strange greyish powder, the rock chairs surrounded the altitudinous tree.
Rachel brushed a seat clean, removed her backpack and collapsed into the closest rock chair with an uncomfortable hard bump; with the cooling effect of the rock against her skin, she closed her eyes and breathed in the refreshing pine air that swirled mindlessly all around her.
Ten chairs away, Lorraine said nothing, as she was too preoccupied staring up at the Scots Pine as if it had some hypnotic hold over her.
Rachel stretched her arms high over her head and yawned. ‘What’s Mum doing?’ she asked Larry with an enquiring undertone.
Larry opened his mouth, but he must have thought better of it as he mulled her question over. ‘Searching for Serendipity,’ he replied at last.
‘But you don’t search for –’ Rachel began, but her mother shot to her feet and rushed over towards them, her face full of unbridled anguish.
‘Larry – we need to talk,’ Lorraine told him heatedly. ‘Alone, if you wouldn’t mind, Rachel,’ she added a little too forcefully, but she quickly mouthed a ‘please’ with a warm smile that she needed some privacy.
‘OK, OK – I know when I’m not wanted,’ she told her mother offhandedly and headed towards the tall tree in search of Serendipity.
✽✽✽
Rachel took her own sweet time and trudged in between the mishmash of roots that grew thicker as she made her way towards the towering tree. As her boredom grew, she had a silly childish thought and acted upon it: using roots as imaginary courts, she played Hopscotch for a minute or two before stopping mid hop, as she heard an odd rustling sound coming from behind. Whirling around, she watched the foliage part as something headed towards the tree at a tremendous rate of knots.
Smitten with inquisitiveness, she tried her hardest to head off the speedy something that was in an all fire hurry.
Rachel chided herself as the white something leapt effortlessly into the dense foliage and disappeared up the tree trunk in less than a blink of an eye, but she hadn’t hesitated and launched herself right after it.
Standing on a sturdy branch, she waited for the speedy something to make a move, but she didn’t have to wait long as dried twigs and cones bounced irritatingly off the top of her head.
Rachel caught the flash of a white something as it broke cover. She gave chase and followed its lead as it leapt from branch to branch…
With her vim and vigour flagging to almost exhaustion, Rachel took a breather but heard nothing above her rasping breaths. As the unnatural silence seemed to smother her, slithers of sunlight shone through the murky darkness, and she spotted something amiss. Her eyes narrowed to slits as she peered up at the splintered branch that wasn’t a branch.
Rachel gripped the tinder-dry vines, and as she ripped them apart, their layers of musty bark crumbled away, and the branch that wasn’t a branch transformed into a five-fingered metal plate.
Her body shivered from top to toe as she rapped the plate with her knuckle, and she felt as if her kidneys had caught a mild case of frostbite. Aided by the sickly sunlight, she could just make out the raised black words on the grubby white plate:
Oyster Bay (Mother of Pearls)
Heed your greed and take only what’s agreed 1
Bursting with excited expectation, she pulled herself up the trunk and exposed another branch, squinting as the sunlight faded even further:
The Nook & Cranny Public House
It’s your round, again and again 3
Pushed skywards by the Scots Pine, she had found her mother’s secret signpost that almost touched the sky.
SQUEAK! SQUEAK!
With renewed vigour, Rachel climbed skywards towards the shrill sound, and in no time at all, she had found herself out in the brisk open air and gazed at the scores of wispy white clouds, which whisked their way hurriedly across the powdery blue sky.
Towards the hazy horizon, she scrutinised the range of blurry black mountains. At first, she thought the clouds were distorting her view of the island, but this seemed different somehow; she slowly spun around, but to her chagrin, her eyesight remained slightly out-of-focus.
Her eyesight couldn’t be at fault, she thought, as she could always read the bottom of the optician’s eye chart without so much of a squint.
‘Rachel – where are you? Chop, chop – we’re leaving soon…’
Rachel looked down at the two specs far below; her stomach lurched, as she hadn’t realised how far up she had travelled up the tree trunk.
Averting her gaze from the sickening sight, she slowly stepped back and bumped into the signpost with a clang, but a pitiful squeak distracted her from the throbbing pain down her spine and the headache in the back of her head. The white something slunk out from beneath the signpost’s circular capstan, whose words offered a definite challenge:
The Sign of the Times
Follow me if you dare
The albino squirrel met her gaze and twitched its whiskers.
‘Hello, there,’ she cooed, trying hard not to scare the timid creature. ‘I’ve never seen an albino squirrel before,’ she added brightly.
The squirrel’s dull pink eyes studied her with trepidation; it seemed hesitant about the newcomer who had tailed it to its tall dray. It looked very gaunt and malnourished as if it hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks.
Rachel snuck her hand into her pocket but found only lint and a paltry handful of peanuts that she had half-inched from her mother using sleight of hand, which amazed her as she didn’t know any magical tricks.
‘Here you go,’ said Rachel, offering the squirrel a peanut.
The squirrel leant forward and gave it a swift suspicious sniff as its insatiable hunger overpowered its natural fear, but as it took another furtive sniff, it backed away, losing all interest in the salty legume.
‘Don’t like salt, eh?’ Rachel remarked, licked the peanut completely clean and offered it back. ‘Here you go – salt-free this time.’
With desperate eyes, it craned its neck and sniffed once more, and the peanut vanished from the palm of her hand – and under her nose!
‘How on earth did you manage to do that?’ Rachel squawked, looking utterly gobsmacked. ‘I never saw you move –’
The squirrel munched no more: it let out a terrifying screech and clutched at its furry stomach with its haggard paws. Its eyes welled up, and tears ran down its hollow cheeks – matting its filthy fur. The squirrel hacked up a lung as it tried desperately to get the peanut out of its throat.
Rachel panicked and reached out towards the stricken squirrel, but it stumbled, startled by her lunging hand, then tumbled towards terra firma with the bag of peanuts trailing closely behind.
She spun around and slid down the signpost – dropping like a stone.
Her hands burned until she dug her heels hard against the trunk and jumped onto the nearest branch, hoping it would hold her weight. Way out of her depth and out on a limb, she dodged the bag of peanuts as they plummeted past her head at an incredible rate.
With a flash of white above her, she reached out, plucked the squirrel from out of the air and stared broken hearted down at its battered body.
‘Wake up – wake up,’ Rachel cried, but the squirrel’s body stayed limp and unmoving apart from its straggly tail that swished back and forth in the wind. Her heart filled with sorrow. ‘I’m so sorry, Serendipity –’
Suddenly, every branch she could see quivered. Her body tingled with static electricity, as an invisible puppeteer plucked at her black hair and whipped the strands into a frenzied dance. Disorientated by the whirring sounds of so many mechanical cogs churning and turning, she felt quite lightheaded as the unrelenting cogs pummelled her eardrums.
Rachel felt something – something bad was about to happen –
Her stomach ended up in her chest. The branch beneath her feet had dropped and swung clockwise. With perfect balance, she landed on the branch directly below it. As she pushed Serendipity into her pocket, she jumped towards the rusty metal trunk and hugged it.
The loud clanking sounds shook her body so violently, she wondered if her skin would slide off. A tsunami of dead foliage came crashing down right over her head and shoulders. Shaking her head free of debris, she managed to spit most of the detritus out of her mouth.
As the sun bathed her in a blaze of dazzling light, she watched in utter astonishment as the trunk’s remaining bark cracked and crumbled away, leaving hundreds of five-fingered signs shaking as they folded themselves away into the thick metallic trunk.
Rachel ducked: the sign above her head had almost decapitated her.
Right below her, vibrating signs rotated like propeller blades. There was nothing for it, and she leapt onto the sign below and kept on going, facing sign after rotating sign, but against all the odds, her uncanny balancing skill had kept her upright as the ground drew nearer…
With the coffee-coloured ground less than twenty feet below her, she swung off the last sign in too much haste and tumbled into a deep pile of mouldy bark. Extricating herself out of the pongy pile, she rolled over, wiped her face with her dirty sleeve and saw an enormous umbrella with a couple of concerned faces staring down her dishevelled state.
‘And where have you been hiding?’ Lorraine demanded.
‘As if we couldn’t guess,’ added Larry mirthfully and pulled her off the ground. ‘Looks like you’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards.’
Rachel spat out a twig. ‘Um – I’ve been exploring –’ she began.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Lorraine exclaimed, folding her umbrella away.
‘Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,’ Larry put in.
Rachel whizzed around on the spot. With surprise and wonder, she stared in amazement at the signpost that had collapsed down to about six feet. The five-fingered sign spun around like a wayward weathervane until it finally shuddered to a hissing halt – expelling its residual steam.
Lorraine let out a gasp of surprise. ‘Isn’t the destination wonderful?’ she sniffed joyously. ‘I knew the signpost wouldn’t let me down.’
Rachel read the signpost’s destination that pointed to an avenue of golden willows that she was adamant weren’t there a moment ago:
Inklings Lighthouse
Let this folly be your gilded cage
By Larry’s sullen demeanour, he didn’t seem too enamoured with the destination either and let out a pained sigh.
Lorraine placed Rachel’s backpack into her willing arms.
‘The lighthouse better be worth the walk –’ Rachel began, but her neck hairs twitched and began to tickle. The intense tickling sensation became an irritating itch, and a sliver of fear ran down her spine, as something soft and fluffy kept brushing up and down her neck.
Lorraine and Larry’s eyes grew as wide as dinner plates.
Frozen to the spot, Rachel went to open her mouth, but Larry pressed his finger to his lips, shook his head and inched his way towards her.
Larry made no sound as he drew close and with one swift movement, he lunged at the nape of her neck. ‘Got ya – you little critter,’ he yelled triumphantly, wrestling a white whirlwind of fluff in his clenched hands. ‘So, you thought you could stow away in Rachel’s backpack, eh?’
The maddening albino squirrel let out an earsplitting squeal as it tried to break free from Larry’s indomitable clutches.
‘Serendipity,’ Rachel squeaked, her heart filling with pure joy, as she hadn’t caused the squirrel’s demise after all.
‘Stop struggling,’ Larry fumed.
‘Serendipity’s getting very annoyed, Larry – I think you better put the squirrel down,’ Lorraine urged, but he wasn’t in the mood to give in just yet, but almost at once, he let out a yelp and staggered back in shock.
‘Get it off me – get it off me!’ Larry screeched, but the squirrel’s mouth bit down even harder on his reddening nose. He tripped over a root, and then another and toppled into a rather large stack of dead leaves.
Serendipity released its jaws and pirouetted on Larry’s chest like a demented ballet dancer. It gave Rachel and Lorraine a toothy grin and scuttled away in the direction of the lighthouse.
‘I’ve been mauled – mauled, I tell you,’ Larry told Lorraine, who had just yanked him out of the leaves that had luckily broken his untimely fall. ‘My nose – my nose – I can’t feel my nose. That squirrel’s gone and eaten my nose,’ he added wildly. ‘There’s blood – there’s blood everywhere!’
Lorraine exhaled with an exasperating huff. ‘Now, don’t be such a baby, Larry – there’s not a drop of blood on you,’ she snapped irritably.
Rachel fought hard to keep a straight face.
‘Serendipity’s just numbed your nose – that’s all, Lorraine added with a heavy sigh. ‘Here – take my spare handkerchief and blow your nose. You should count yourself lucky it didn’t take a bite out of you – scaring the poor creature like that. Right, if we’re all fighting fit – may I suggest we follow in Serendipity’s footsteps and head towards the golden willows before they all wither up and die in this unbearable heat!’