“Smoking!” David remembered the smell. He had come across it twice, but he hadn’t recognized it: stale tobacco smoke. “I don’t believe it!” he said. “Smoking is crazy. It kills you. How can you be so stupid?”
“You’ve been pretty stupid too,” Jill muttered.
David fell silent. “Yes,” he agreed.
Vincent struggled with his ropes. “I suppose it’s a little late now to think about giving up.”
The words were no sooner spoken than there was a distant rumble, soft and low at first but building up to a sudden crash. David looked out of the window. The sky was gray, but it wasn’t the color of nightfall. It was an ugly, electric gray, somehow unnatural. There was a storm closing in on Skrull Island, and sitting high up in the tower, right in the middle of it, he felt very uncomfortable indeed.
“I think—” he began.
He got no further. The whole tower suddenly trembled as if hit by a shock wave and at the same moment Jill cried out. A great chunk of wall right next to her simply fell away, leaving a gap above her head. Outside, the air swirled around in a dark vortex and rushed into the room. There was a second crash of thunder. The chamber shook again and a crack appeared in the floor between David and Vincent, the heavy flagstones ripping apart as if they were made of paper.
“What’s happening?” Jill cried.
“The Grail’s left the island,” David shouted. “It’s the end . . .”
“What are we going to do?” Vincent said.
David glanced at the door, at the symbol painted in white on the woodwork. Even if he could have reached the eye of Horus, he would have been unable to rub it out. But while it was there, there was no chance of any magic. If they were going to escape, they would have to use their own resources. He searched the floor, trying not to look at the crack. There were no broken bottles, no rusty nails, nothing that would cut through the rope. Opposite him, Vincent was struggling feverishly. He had worked his hands loose, but his wrists were still securely tied.
A third crash of thunder. This time it was the roof that was hit. As Jill screamed and rolled onto her side to protect herself, two wooden rafters crashed down, followed by what felt like a ton of dust and rubble. Vincent completely disappeared from sight and for a moment David thought he had been crushed. But then Vincent coughed and staggered onto his knees, still fighting with his ropes.
“The whole place is falling apart!” Jill shouted. “How high up are we?”
“Too high up,” David shouted back. The crack in the floor had widened again. Quite soon the entire thing would give way and all three of them would fall into a tunnel of broken stone and brickwork with certain death six hundred feet below.
Then he had a thought. “Vincent!” he called out. “After the prize-giving you came in here to have a cigarette.”
“Yes,” Vincent admitted. “But don’t tell me it’s bad for my health. Not now!”
“You’ve got cigarettes on you?”
“David, this is no time to take it up,” Jill wailed.
“Yes,” Vincent said.
“What were you going to light them with?”
Vincent understood at once. For the first time, David found himself admiring the other boy and knew that if only they’d been working together from the start, none of this would have happened. Contorting his body, Vincent spilled the contents of his pockets onto the floor—a handful of coins, a pen, a cigarette lighter.
Moving with his hands tied behind his back wasn’t easy. First he had to turn himself around, then grope behind him to pick up the lighter. At the same time, David shuffled across the floor, pushing himself with his feet. He stopped at the crack, feeling the floor move. Jill cried out a warning. David threw himself forward. The thunder reverberated all around—closer this time—and a whole section of the floor, the section where David had just been sitting, fell away leaving a jagged black hole. David crashed down, almost dislocating his shoulder. Far below, he heard the flagstones shatter at the bottom of the tower and breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t fallen with them.
“Hurry!” Vincent urged him.
Bruised and aching, David maneuvered himself so that he was back to back with the other boy. For her part, Jill had edged closer to them. The whole chamber was breaking up. Nowhere was safe. But if one of them went, they would all go. There was some sort of comfort in that.
“This is going to hurt,” Vincent said.
“Do it,” David said.
Fumbling with his fingers, afraid he would drop it, Vincent flicked the lighter on. He had to work blind, sitting with his back to David, and there was no time to be careful. David felt the flame of the lighter sear the inside of his wrist and shouted out in pain.
“I’m sorry . . .” Vincent began.
“It’s not your fault. Just keep going.”
Vincent flicked the lighter back on, trying to direct the flame to where he thought the ropes must be. The wind was rushing into the chamber through the holes in the wall and ceiling. David could hear it racing around the tower. He winced as the lighter burned him once again, but this time he didn’t cry out. He was grateful the flame hadn’t blown out.
More brickwork fell. Jill had gone white and David thought she was going to faint, but then he saw that falling plaster had covered her from head to toe. Jill wasn’t the fainting sort. “I can smell burning,” she said. “It must be the rope.”
“Unless it’s me,” David muttered.
He was straining his arms, trying to avoid the flame. It felt like he had been sitting there forever. But then there was a jerk and his hands parted. Another few seconds and he was standing up, free, the two ends of the singed rope hanging from his wrists. Next, he released Vincent. The cigarette lighter had badly burned the other boy’s thumb and the side of his hand. David could see the red marks. But Vincent hadn’t complained.
Then it was Jill’s turn. With Vincent’s help, the ropes came away quickly and then the three of them were racing across the floor even as it fell away beneath them. Soon there would be nothing left of the tower. It was as if there were some invisible creature inside the storm, devouring the stone and mortar.
David reached the door first. It was unlocked. Whoever had tied them up had been confident about their knots. Clinging to Jill, with Vincent right behind him, David made his way down the spiral staircase. About halfway down, two more flagstones fell past, narrowly missing them before shattering with an explosive crash. But the lower parts of the tower were holding up. The farther they went, the safer they became. They reached the bottom unharmed.
But when they emerged into the open air, everything had changed.
Skrull Island was black, lashed by a stinging acid rain. The clouds writhed and boiled like something in a witch’s cauldron. The wind stabbed at them, hurling torn plants and grass into their faces. There was nobody in sight. To one side, the cemetery looked wild and derelict with several of its gravestones on their sides. Groosham Grange itself looked dark and dismal, like some abandoned factory. A latticework of cracks had spread across it. Many of its windows had been smashed. The ivy had been torn away and hung down, a tangled mess. There was a flash of lightning and one of the gargoyles separated from the wall, launching itself into the blackness of the sky with an explosion of broken plaster.
“The Grail . . .” Vincent began.
“It’s begun its journey south,” David shouted. “If it reaches Canterbury, that’ll be it . . . !”
“But who took it?” Jill demanded. “If it wasn’t Vincent, who was it?”
“And what can we do?” Vincent held up a hand to protect his eyes from the hurtling wind. “We’ve got to get it back . . . !”
“I don’t know!” David cried.
But suddenly he did know. Suddenly a whole lot of things had fallen into place. He knew who had the Grail. He knew how it had been smuggled off the island. The only thing he didn’t know was how he could possibly reach it.
Then Vincent grabbed his arm. “I’ve
got an idea,” he yelled.
“What?”
“We can get off the island. One of us . . .”
“Show me!” David said.
The thunder crashed again. The three of them turned and ran into the school.
Pursuit
It was getting very hot inside the Rolls-Royce.
Mr. Eliot ran a finger around his collar and flicked on the onboard computer showing the engine temperature. The engine’s heat was normal but he was sweating. His wife was sweating. Even the leather upholstery was sweating. In the backseat, all Aunt Mildred’s makeup had run and she now looked like a Sioux Indian in a rainstorm. It was very odd. The sun was shining but it was already late in the day. How could it be so warm?
“I think I’m going to faint,” Mrs. Eliot muttered, and promptly did, her head crashing into the dashboard.
“Oh no!” Mr. Eliot wailed.
“Is she hurt?” Mildred asked, clutching her handbag tightly to her chest and peering over the seat.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Eliot replied. “But she’s cracked the walnut paneling. Do you know how much that walnut paneling cost me? It took me a month’s salary just to pay for the walnut paneling. And another month’s salary to have it fitted!”
“I think she’s dead,” Mildred whispered.
Mr. Eliot poked his wife affectionately in the ear. “No. She’s still breathing,” he said.
By now all the windows in the Rolls-Royce had steamed up, which, as they were still driving at ninety miles per hour down the highway, made things rather difficult. But Mr. Eliot still clung grimly to the steering wheel, passing on the inside and swerving on the outside. At least he was driving on the correct side of the road.
“Why don’t you turn on the air-conditioning?” Aunt Mildred suggested.
“Good thinking!” Mr. Eliot snarled. “Pure mountain air. That’s what you get in a Rolls-Royce. In fact I could have bought a mountain for the amount it cost me.”
“Just do it, dear,” Mildred panted as her lipstick trickled over her chin.
Mr. Eliot pressed a button. There was a roar, and before either of them could react, they were engulfed in a snowstorm that rushed at them through the air-conditioning vents, filling the interior of the car. In seconds their sweat had frozen. Long icicles hung off Mr. Eliot’s nose and chin. His mustache had frozen solid. The intense cold had the effect of waking Mrs. Eliot up, but by now her face had stuck to the surface of the dashboard. In the backseat, Aunt Mildred had virtually disappeared beneath a huge snowdrift that rose over her like a white blanket. The Rolls-Royce swerved left and right, sending a Fiat and a Lexus hurtling into the median. Mr. Eliot’s hands were now firmly glued to the steering wheel.
“What’s going on?” he screamed, his breath coming out in white clouds. “I had the car serviced before I left. It was a Rolls-Royce serviceman. And all Rolls-Royce servicemen are regularly serviced themselves. What’s happening? This is motorway madness!”
“There’s a service station,” Aunt Mildred whimpered. “Why don’t we stop for a few minutes?”
“Good idea!” Mr. Eliot agreed, and wrenched the car over to the left.
It took them ten minutes to extract themselves from the frozen Rolls-Royce, which they left to melt slowly in the sun. Eileen Eliot had to be chiseled off the dashboard and they had to use a blowtorch to separate Edward Eliot from the steering wheel, but eventually the three of them were able to make their way up the concrete ramp that led to the Snappy Eater Café.
The Snappy Eater was a typical English highway restaurant. The tables were plastic. The chairs were plastic. And the food tasted of plastic. A few motorists were sitting in the brightly colored room, surrounded by artificial flowers, listening to the piped-in music and miserably nibbling their lukewarm snacks. Outside, the traffic roared past and the smell of burning tires and gas hung heavy in the air.
Mildred looked around and sniffed. “They have wonderful service stations in Japan,” she muttered. “You can get marvelous sushi . . .”
“What’s sushi?” Eileen asked. She was feeling quite carsick.
“It’s raw fish!” Mildred explained enthusiastically. “Lovely strips of raw fish, all wet and jellylike. All the Japanese highway restaurants have them.”
“Oh God!” Mrs. Eliot gurgled, and ran off in the direction of the toilet.
“I love Japanese food,” Mildred continued, sitting down at a table and heaving her handbag in front of her.
“Why don’t you shut up about Japan, you interfering old goat?” Mr. Eliot asked as he wheeled himself next to her. He snatched the menu. “Here. They’ve got batter-fried fish and chips. You can have that raw. Better still, you can have it battered. I’ll batter you myself . . .”
A few minutes later, Eileen Eliot returned and they ordered two plates of vegetarian spaghetti and one portion of fish. But things had already begun to change inside the Snappy Eater.
Nobody noticed anything at first. The roar of the traffic drowned out the screams of the children who had been playing outside on a slide shaped like a plastic dragon. But the dragon was no longer plastic. It had already swallowed two of the children and was chasing a third with very real claws and fiery breath. About a hundred feet away, at the garage, motorists dived for cover as several of the pumps began to fire high-velocity bullets in all directions. Instead of serving unleaded octane, it seemed the pumps had decided to give out unoctaned lead.
Inside the restaurant, the piped-in music was still oozing out of the speakers—but now it really was oozing out. It was dripping down like honey, only bright pink and much stickier. The plastic flowers were being attacked by plastic wasps. All the waiters and waitresses had broken out in pimples. The one who was serving the Eliots had lost all his hair as well.
“Oh, goodness!” Mildred exclaimed as her meal was set in front of her. “This fish is swimming in grease!”
And it was. It appeared that the chef had neglected to kill it and the silvery cod was happily swimming in a large bowl of cold grease.
“I’m not sure about this spaghetti . . .” Eileen Eliot began. But the spaghetti was also not sure about her. It had come alive. Like an army of long white worms, it slithered and jumped out of the bowl and, giggling to itself, raced across the tabletop.
The same thing had happened to Mr. Eliot’s. “Get back on my plate!” he demanded, jabbing at the table with a fork. But the spaghetti ignored him, hurrying away to join two naked and headless chickens that had just escaped from the kitchen, running out on their drumsticks.
“This place is a madhouse!” Mr. Eliot said. “Let’s get out of here!”
Eileen and Mildred agreed, but even leaving the restaurant wasn’t easy. The revolving doors were revolving so fast that walking into them was like walking into a food processor, and two policemen and a truck driver had already been shredded. But eventually they found an open window and climbed down into the parking lot where their car was waiting.
“This would never happen in Japan,” Mildred exclaimed.
“I’ll put her in the trunk!” Mr. Eliot muttered as he started the engine. “I wish I’d never brought her . . .”
“What is going on?” Eileen Eliot moaned.
The Rolls-Royce reversed over somebody’s picnic and into a wastepaper basket. “Margate, here we come!” Mr. Eliot cried.
Mildred Eliot sat miserably in the backseat with her handbag beside her. Although she hadn’t noticed it and probably wouldn’t have mentioned it if she had, the handbag had begun to glow with a strange green light. And there was something inside it, humming softly and vibrating.
The Rolls-Royce swerved back onto the highway and continued its journey south.
David clung on for dear life, suspended between the ocean bubbling below and the storm clouds swirling above. Every gust of wind threatened to knock him off his perch and the wind never stopped. There wasn’t a muscle in his body that wasn’t aching and yet he couldn’t relax, not for an instant. He had to concentrate.
With his hands clamped in front of him, his arms rigid, his face lashed by the rain, he urged the broomstick on.
It had been Vincent’s idea.
Mrs. Windergast’s broomstick was the only way off the island. Even if they had been able to take Captain Bloodbath’s boat, the sea was far too rough for sailing. Mrs. Windergast had taught them the basic theory of broomstick flying. True, they had never tried it before and certainly not in a full-blown storm. But as soon as Vincent had suggested it, David knew it was the only way.
They had taken the broomstick from Mrs. Windergast’s room. Normally the door would have been locked and the room would certainly have been protected by a magic spell. But everything had changed in the storm. The staff and pupils had vanished, taking shelter in the caverns below while the elements—the sea, the wind, the lightning and the rain—joined forces to destroy the island. Mrs. Windergast’s room was empty, but one of the windows had been shattered and pools of water and broken glass covered the carpet. There were papers everywhere. The curtains flapped madly against the wall. The broomstick lay on its side, half hidden by a chair.
“You know where you’re going?” Jill called out. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard above the storm.
David nodded. A half-remembered line here and a few spoken words there had come together and everything had clicked. He had worked it out.
His parents. After they left Groosham Grange, they were taking Mildred back to her home in Margate. Edward Eliot had told him as much in the letter he had written a few weeks before. And where was Margate? Just a few miles north of Canterbury.
And what had Aunt Mildred said as she got into the car? I’m sure it wasn’t as heavy as this when I set out . . . She had lost her handbag. It had been handed back to her—but heavier than before. David was certain. Somebody had hidden the Grail inside the handbag. And she had unwittingly carried it off the island.
Clutching the broomstick in Mrs. Windergast’s room, David knew that he had to fly south, somehow find the orange Rolls-Royce and intercept it before it reached Margate. Someone would be waiting for it at the other end. But who? That was still a mystery.