Theres No Place Like Home – Opening Chapters
1
CHASING A MYTH
IT WAS HAPPENING twenty miles west of London in the county of Berkshire, England. On a scorching summer’s day in the middle of June, the chase was definitely on …
Along the old winding, Saint Mary’s Road, deep in the heart of the highly populated village of Langley, sped eagerly two forest-green grammar school uniforms—and, of course, their thirteen-year-old contents, Sarah and Terry.
“He’s gone into the Saint Mary’s graveyard,” said Sarah excitedly, peeping over a low red-bricked wall that hemmed in the ancient Saint Mary’s church and its surrounding grounds and graveyard. “See him?”
“Yeah … you don’t think he’s spotted us, do you?” said her friend Terry, his head appearing beside hers. The two of them looked like a couple of excited talking fairground coconuts waiting to be hit off their pegs.
“No, I don’t think so,” answered Sarah.
“Blimey, he moves like grease lightning!” said Terry. “I mean to say, how can a ten-year-old move like that? No wonder he can disappear without trace just as the myth says.”
“Come on, before he disappears again,” said Sarah, nudging Terry urgently.
Off the pair of them scurried with great haste, tempered only with the need to keep their chase a secret from their quarry. The green blazers of their school uniform would serve as useful cover in the thickly wooded greenery of the graveyard they were making a beeline for. Sarah’s uniform was tidily worn, with all her buttons done up and her school tie neatly tucked into her blazer. Her ponytail kept her flaxen hair in place as she raced smoothly to the graveyard. Terry’s uniform, on the other hand, was always dishevelled with his blazer unbuttoned, the top button of his white cotton shirt unbuttoned, and his green and gold striped school tie poorly tied and very loose; and his dark hair seemed out of control, as if each strand of hair had a mind of its own. He charged alongside Sarah in a slightly uncoordinated manner, almost as if he was slightly intoxicated. They made for quite a contrast in styles. Sarah, neat, smooth and stylish in both her clothing and athleticism. Terry, untidy, rough and unstylish in his athleticism.
Minutes later, they found themselves crouching behind some thick fortuitous privet bushes somewhere in the heart of the woody graveyard. Through the tight leafy branches, they could see the small boy looking around suspiciously.
“He’s stopped, for sure,” whispered Sarah, getting her breath back. “This might be where he disappears.”
“But there’s nowhere to disappear to,” Terry whispered back between two deep, gasping breaths. “There’s just an old grave he’s dithering about by.”
“I thought we’d lost him … can’t believe his speed. Suppose it’s because he’s not really a ten-year-old, even if he appears as one. Perhaps he’s an alien, or something.”
“Well, he might not be the boy from the myth,” whispered Terry, breathing easily now, “but the caretaker’s face, when he spotted him in the high street.”
“Yes,” agreed Sarah, “and the boy’s face, when he spotted that the caretaker had spotted him.”
“Yeah, but … I mean to say … I still don’t believe there’s any truth to the myth. They say the last time he appeared he lived with the caretaker, in the school house. And that was over twenty years ago. The caretaker was always telling us the myth, and how the little boy lived with him. And we always laughed in his face. Laughed our silly heads off, didn’t we?”
“And that’s why the boy had such a spooked expression,” whispered Sarah. “And that’s why we’ve followed him. But what’s he up to, standing here in the middle of a graveyard?”
“Hmm … Well, his uniform certainly looks old fashioned. I mean to say, who wears short trousers and a silly maroon school cap these days?”
The boy stood still, looking around suspiciously, and seemed to be trying to make a decision of some kind. His maroon cap, light-grey blazer hemmed by a bright yellow ribbon bordering, short light-grey trousers, spotless white cotton shirt and his maroon and yellow striped tie were all in immaculate order. He looked much smarter than Sarah did, which was quite an achievement.
“Terry!” breathed Sarah urgently, squeezing Terry’s shoulder so hard it was all he could do to smother a yelp. “The grave! THE GRAVE! Where the boy’s standing.”
“What about it?”
“Don’t you see?”
“No. What? It’s just a grave.”
“It’s true, the myth’s true!”
“Huh?”
“LOOK AT THE NAME ON THE HEADSTONE!” demanded Sarah in the loudest undertone she could muster.
Terry focussed his eyes on the grave’s chunky block of a headstone, which rested at the end of the rectangular stone prostrate gravestone. And on that headstone, he read the lettering that was chiselled out over 300 years ago:
Daniel Dalton 1701-1710.
Did die peacefully in sleep.
Age of 9 years. RIP.
“Blimey,” muttered Terry, wide-eyed, “‘Daniel Dalton’—well, that’s the name of the boy in the myth, anyhow.”
“Shh, look, he’s doing something!” warned Sarah, almost forgetting to whisper.
The small boy approached the headstone of the grave, which had a small stone angel standing upon it with its head bowed and its hands in prayer. Standing on the grave’s gravestone, the boy grasped the angel by its waist with both hands and twisted it around clockwise three times. Then he jumped off the gravestone and looked down at it.
A loud muffled metallic click jumped out from somewhere beneath the gravestone, causing Sarah and Terry to jerk backwards in surprise.
The boy leaned over the gravestone and levered the angel down until it lay horizontal on the headstone sideways on to the gravestone. He jumped back and waited. Suddenly, a loud crack of breaking stone disturbed the graveyard, causing a mass of fluttering wings to burst forth as the graveyard’s bird population took flight.
Sarah and Terry looked curiously on …
The gravestone slowly flipped down, headfirst, into the ground as if it were on a giant hinge. A loud rumbling noise followed and shook the ground around the grave.
Sarah and Terry could hardly contain their amazement and excitement at what they were witnessing. Risking discovery, they pushed their heads through the leafy privet branches to get a better look. They glimpsed the beginning of a stone stairway slowly sliding into place beneath the open gravestone, starting from the opposite side to where the stone had swung down. The boy hopped onto the stairway and quickly disappeared somewhere into the bowels of the graveyard.
2
INTO THE DEPTHS OF STRANGENESS
NO SOONER HAD the boy vanished than the stairway rumbled back out of view and the gravestone snapped up with an almighty crack. The angel levered itself back up to a vertical position and span itself counterclockwise three times, returning to its original position.
Sarah bundled out of the bushes, looking completely flabbergasted. Terry followed; his jaw slack and his lower lip trembling.
“Oh—my—giddy—aunt!” cried Sarah, each punctuated word rising separately and seeming to stay suspended in the still of the Saint Mary’s graveyard summery air.
“I-I mean t-to say …” stammered Terry. “I just don’t believe it.”
“Well, you better believe it. The myth is no longer a myth, that’s for certain.” Sarah began stroking her chin. “Hmm …? I’m curious. Let’s get to the bottom of this … this … whatever it is.” Sarah stared down at the gravestone with keen X-ray eyes, as if trying to see what was happening beneath it.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” warned Terry, staring at Sarah then down at the gravestone.
“Well, I’m no scaredy-cat. You’re the scaredy-cat.” Sarah pointed her finger accusingly at Terry.
“I’m not a scaredy-cat!” protested Terry, clenching his fists.
“Okay, that’s settled then. We’re going to continue our chase.” Sarah put her hand out to Terry. “Shake on it!”
Terry shook her hand, his grip continually tightening to match hers with every swoop.
“Right, stand back!” ordered Sarah.
Terry stood clear of the gravestone, seeing what Sarah intended. She rotated the small angel statue on the headstone clockwise thrice …
There was a familiar sounding muffled metallic click, which Sarah and Terry felt pulsing up through the ground.
Finally, Sarah levered down the angel, and jumped off the gravestone to wait in excited anticipation with Terry …
There was a familiar crack of stone.
The gravestone flipped down once again into the ground, and the stairway rumbled and sidled into view beneath the open gravestone.
From the head of the grave, Sarah and Terry stared down the stairway as it disappeared down into the earth.
“There’s no sign of ‘Danny Boy’ if that’s who the boy really is,” said Terry.
“It’s Daniel Dalton all right. Who else could it be?” Sarah looked questioningly at Terry.
“Dunno. There might be some sort of reasonable explanation for all this. You never know. But, I admit, that already seems highly unlikely.”
Sarah squatted down to get a better look at the stairway. “It seems well lighted, but I can’t see any lights. Come on,” said Sarah, tugging at the forest-green sleeve of Terry’s school blazer, “there’s no time to lose, let’s get back on our chase.”
Quickly, before they had time to change their minds, the pair of them fairly charged down the stone stairway.
However, after taking only about twenty steps, a stair seemed to give way slightly beneath Sarah and Terry’s feet. There was a dull stony click followed by an almighty crash, and as the pair of them turned back to view the source of the noise, they saw above them that the gravestone had sprung back into position.
They were fully committed to their hunt now.
“We’re trapped like rats in a trap,” exclaimed Terry, stopping to look back.
“Well, what did you expect? Anyway, the boy, or whatever he is, will tell us the way out. We’ll just have to find him. And have you noticed the stairway’s still well lighted; but where are the lights? Still, at least we’re probably in a safe sort of place. Come on, let’s move it!” Sarah tugged at the sleeve of Terry’s blazer and they were once again plunging downwards.
“I don’t understand where the light comes from down here, do you?” said Terry between heavy breaths as they scampered down the never-ending steps. They were travelling side by side now as the stairway had widened slightly. The greyish stone walls and ceiling were smooth and box-shaped. Down, down, down they sped, with no sight of their quarry on the stairway beneath them.
“I think the whole stairway must be made of a stone that illuminates of its own accord,” remarked Sarah between heavy breaths.
“Hope it’s not radioactive.”
“If it is, it can only do us good.” Sarah smiled.
“How’s that?” asked Terry, slightly puzzled.
“Well, the boy seems remarkably healthy—for someone who’s over 300 years old.”
At last, the stairway came to an end, and the pair of them sprawled out into a vast, brightly illuminated cavernous area bathed in a powerful white-silvery light.
“Awesome,” chirped Sarah, waving her arms around gracefully. “All the rocks are shining ever so brightly. So white and silvery. It’s like I’d imagine a cavern would look like if one existed in Heaven.”
“Humungous, I mean to say …” added Terry, with his hands on his hips, slowly taking in the view. “Perhaps the angels made it for all the dead to pass through before going to Heaven. I mean, we are under a graveyard.”
“It shines like the Moon, doesn’t it … only brighter.” Sarah’s eyes roamed around the cavern. “It’s as if we’re in a place where the Moon is outshining the Sun.”
“Shame there are no stalagmites and stalactites … must mean it’s not natural, I suppose,” said Terry.
“Look! Look! Over there! Right at the other end of the cavern!” cried Sarah excitedly, pointing. And there, in the direction of her pointing finger, built into the cavern wall in the distance, was a rather incongruent and interesting sight.
“Blimey! It looks like somebody’s front door,” said Terry. “That must be where the boy went. I mean to say; where else could he have gone? Let’s investigate.”
The pair raced across the dusty rock-strewn floor and arrived at a black-painted wooden door inset into the white-silvery radiating cavern wall.
“Wow!” exclaimed Sarah, facing the door. “It looks a bit like the front door of 10 Downing Street … accept there’s no number on it.”
“There’s no bell or knocker either,” added Terry, standing by Sarah’s side.
“Or letterbox,” said Sarah. “But there’s a doorknob, though.”
“Try it then.”
Sarah did …
After wrenching and twisting the doorknob, Sarah said in a resigned fashion, “It’s no good. It’s locked. Damn!”
“Well, that Daniel boy must have locked it.”
Then Terry noticed a bizarre phenomenon: the wall of the cavern around the door was developing darkening veins, as if it were the skin of an elephant into which black blood was being pumped.
“Sarah! Look at that!” cried Terry, pointing at the growing meandering veins.
“Oh my god! What does it mean?” blurted Sarah, stepping back from the door.
The developing veins grew thicker and blacker, and suddenly smoke began to seep from them. Then a great hissing, sputtering noise gathered in the cavern, like all the sparklers in the world were burning. And when Sarah and Terry allowed their alarmed eyes to wander around the cavern …
“Yikes!” roared Terry above the hissing. “The whole cavern seems to be melting!”
Great chunks of melting rock began plummeting down from the ceiling, landing with giant crashes in bubbling heaps on the floor of the cavern. Worse still, in the distance, where they had entered the cavern from the stairway, a small river of grey liquid rock was spewing into the cavern.
Sarah’s eyes widened with panic and she screamed, “Terry! Terry! WE’RE DOOMED!”
3
THE 1950s HOUSE
BUT JUST THEN a piercing metallic snip rang out from somewhere behind the obstinate door. Sarah and Terry couldn’t help but swing their attention back to the door for a second. Over their shoulders, the stream of liquid rock was quickly, and inexorably, wending its way towards them; and all the while, huge elephant-sized packets of boiling grey gooey rock were plunging from the ceiling like a certain molten death.
Quickly, Sarah tried the doorknob again, hoping that maybe the metallic click was the door lock unlocking.
The door opened!
Into through the door bundled Sarah and Terry, sprawling forwards in their haste onto a homely royal-blue thick woollen-carpeted hallway floor.
Terry reacted first, and leapt up to slam the door closed.
The doorknob jiggled, then fell with a soft thud onto a thick coir doormat with the words “There’s No Place Like Home” burned into its rugged coconut fibres.
Sarah picked up the doorknob and examined it as she sprang up off the hallway floor whilst trying to take in the surrounding scene. Sarah and Terry seemed to be in a house built and decorated in the style of the 1950s.
“When we were outside, that loud metal clicking noise from the door … I thought it was the door being unlocked. But look, I think it was the lock simply breaking,” said Sarah, handing the broken-off doorknob to Terry so he could examine it.
Terry nodded, and then he turned his face towards the door, his face betraying his concern about the danger lurking from the other side of it. He noticed a tiny magnifying spy-hole in the middle of the door, and he immediately put his eye to it.
“The melting rocks are forming a lake in the cavern,” said Terry, giving a live commentary on the rapidly changing and hazardous geology outside. “But … yes … I think the lake is beginning to solidify though. It’s like a fast-setting grey jelly. At any rate, nothing seems to be coming through the door. Yes … listen … the hissing noise is fading. Yes … it’s all going solid now. I think we’re safe. Jammed in. Rats in a trap for the second time—but safe.”
Sarah and Terry turned their attention to the house.
“Come on, let’s find the boy,” suggested Sarah. “He must be in here somewhere.”
There was a flight of stairs immediately in front of them in the hall on their right, but they decided to check out the ground floor rooms first.
They were just about to turn into a plain white-creamy painted door on their left in the hallway when Terry nudged Sarah, drawing her attention to something of interest. There, just before the door, hanging by a nail, which someone had hammered into the hall’s rose-patterned wallpapered hall, was a glass-fronted wooden frame. Behind the glass, colourfully painted letters seemed to leap out at them with a simple message: “There’s No Place Like Home”.
“Same as the doormat,” remarked Terry.
“Yes,” said Sarah with a hint of strangeness to her voice. “Bit weird, maybe.”
They stood a second or two staring at the frame and then back at the doormat, and then Sarah edged towards the door on the left of the hallway and twisted its simple black ceramic handle. The door to a room opened and in they both shuffled in, keeping quite close to one another.
“It’s a kitchen,” said Terry. And the two of them took in the sight of a kitchen kitted out with furniture and appliances that looked as if everything belonged to the 1950s. There was a tall, chunky fridge with a huge handle that almost looked like an upright 1950s car. A washing machine that loaded clothes from the top. Some pine cupboards and a pine kitchen table that dominated the room.
“Everything’s out-of-date,” said Terry.
“I think the whole house must be fashioned in a 1950s style,” added Sarah. “See the fridge? It’s probably an American import. I’ve seen fridges like that in old films.”
“Me too.” Terry pointed to the washing machine. “And that’s called a front-loader. My great aunt had one in her garage.”
Suddenly Sarah gasped and clutched Terry’s sleeve.
“W-What is it?” said Terry, alarmed.
“The tablecloth!” Sarah’s eyes seemed almost the size of the handful of saucers that were scattered about on the tablecloth, along with a few other items of crockery. There was something very unusual about the tablecloth. It was in the main, a sharp white cotton tablecloth—but embroidered upon it in large tomato-red lettering, the following words almost jumped directly from the tablecloth and lasered themselves into Sarah and Terry’s brains: “There’s No Place Like Home”.
“I mean to say …” mumbled Terry.
“Now this really is weird, I reckon,” added Sarah.
“Definitely,” agreed Terry.
“Hey,” blurted Sarah, with a look of enthusiasm glinting in her eyes as she raised her head to look at some drawn pink-and-white chequered curtains. “Let’s see what’s behind the curtains.”
Terry, being closer, beat Sarah to the curtains and tugged them sharply apart …
The sight that beheld Sarah and Terry had no problem in terrifying the life out of them. They both instinctively backed away with a fearful look in their eyes, Terry letting out a roar, and Sarah a scream. Yet there was nothing of any physical danger to make them do so. The windows were simply made of opaque stained glass. You could not see anything through them, but they were subtly lighted up from behind, giving them a ghostly glow, almost like the face of a huge Christmas lantern. The background colours were different shades of blue and green, and a huge red heart took pride of place in the centre of the window … but a message in milky-white medieval lettering was the reason for Sarah and Terry’s adverse reaction … and it didn’t say “Merry Christmas”.
“‘There’s No Place Like Home’,” gasped Sarah.
“I don’t mind admitting I’m a little scared,” said Terry. “The boy. These repeated messages. The house being out-of-date. Something’s more than not quite right.”
“Not to mention black veins hissing out smoke and rocks melting,” added Sarah.
“Exactly,” said Terry.
“Yes, well … come on, let’s try another room. The boy’s only small. He can’t harm us. We’ll soon get all our answers from him, hopefully.”
“But maybe he has a family living here?” said a concerned Terry.
“I didn’t think of that,” admitted Sarah. “But I’ve got a feeling he probably doesn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because there were no other Daltons we could see buried in the graveyard above. And he’s the only one ever mentioned in the myth. Remember the stories the caretaker told us about him? He said the boy lived with him over twenty years ago. He said the boy claimed to have no parents. Then when the caretaker said he noticed that the boy’s hair never grew and when he started questioning him about it, the boy disappeared. That’s when the caretaker believed the boy was the mythical Daniel Dalton. Do you remember?”
“A bit,” replied Terry, a touch uncertainly. Then he added, “D’you think he’s some sort of ghost?”
“Dunno. But if he is, he’s the first ghost that has a real body. He’s physical, isn’t he?”
“I suppose so.” Terry stroked his chin, looking baffled.
“Well, there’s one way to sort this out. Come on, let’s find the little whirlwind.” With that, Sarah cautiously pulled open the kitchen door and stepped into the hall with Terry in her slipstream.
Opposite the kitchen door was a cupboard under the stairs. Just at that moment, a muffled metallic click seemed to whisper from it. Sarah instinctively pulled open the wooden cupboard door, but it was empty except for some black rubber Wellington boots and a large black umbrella. “Well, you never know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Leave no stone unturned, and all that.”
Sarah closed the cupboard door and walked with Terry the few strides to the far end of the hall. On their right was another plain white-creamy painted wooden door just like the kitchen door. To their left, the hall branched a little and there was another similar-looking door facing them, but there was also what looked like the house’s back door at right angles to this.
Sarah tried the back door first.
“Well?” asked Terry.
“Locked,” replied Sarah.
“Or jammed by some rocks, maybe,” said Terry as he tried to open the door himself.
“Maybe? No spying hole to see out of this time.”
They then tried the simple door that was at right angles to the backdoor.
It was a washroom, quite a reasonably sized room, with a chunky toilet and a washbasin area. Above and just to the right of the pine wooden topped seat of the sturdy porcelain toilet, there was a huge chain dangling down from a robust, porcelain overhead cistern.
“Must be a 1950s toilet,” remarked Terry. He lifted the seat. “There’s clear water at the bottom though. Look!”
“Well, pull the chain down then,” suggested Sarah. “It would be interesting to see if a water system works down here. In fact, it would sort of be amazing.”
Terry’s hand clasped the metal circular handle, and he yanked the chain down …
The toilet flushed normally.
“That’s a relief,” said Sarah.
“Yeah,” agreed Terry, “if we are stuck here for any length of time, at least we’ll be able to go to the toilet. There’s even luxury toilet paper … and a little sink for washing … a bar of soap … and even a hand towel—”
Terry stopped abruptly because he noticed a golden coloured message sewn into the lilac coloured hand towel. He lifted it up and spread it out. It said, of course, “There’s No Place Like Home”, but both he and Sarah were not shocked this time, as it was the sort of thing they expected now.
“What is it with everything having these words on them?” remarked Terry, almost irritably.
“All roads lead to Rome,” replied Sarah, with a glint of determination in her narrowing eyes.
“What? I haven’t seen those words anywhere,” said Terry, his eyebrows knotting slightly.
“No, I mean, if we find the boy, we find our answers. Come on.”
So off the pair of them trundled out of the small washroom and walked the few feet to the only other door leading off the hall, which loomed apprehensively in front of them.
They halted before the door.
“Maybe we should knock,” suggested Sarah. “He’s probably in here. This must be the living room, mustn’t it?”
“Go on then. I pulled the toilet chain, you knock on the door.”
Sarah rapped her knuckles quietly, almost apologetically, on the white-creamy paint of the wooden door.
Not a sound was heard behind the door.
“Harder,” insisted Terry.
Sarah rapped harder. “Hello? Anyone at home? Daniel?”
Nothing.
“Open the door, Sarah,” quietly insisted Terry.
“I don’t know if I want to. Who knows what we’ll see?”
“Probably a 1950s fireplace with the words ‘There’s No Place Like Home’ chiselled out around it,” suggested Terry, and for the first time that afternoon, he laughed. And Sarah laughed back.
“Oh well,” she said, “here’s hoping!” And she turned the black shiny porcelain door handle…
4
IS ANYONE HOME
IT WAS AN ordinary-looking 1950s styled living room. The walls were adorned with rather dull flower-patterned wallpaper. The room was reasonably spacious and was dominated by a three-piece suite (a red leather sofa and a pair of matching armchairs) surrounding a thickly varnished oak coffee table. The coffee table had magazines and newspapers spread haphazardly upon its top. The sideboard, with a matching teak bookcase beside it, was packed with books. And the room was filled with other minor items of 1950s styled furniture. The fireplace did not have any messages, though it did have some lions, frozen forever in glorious poses, chiselled out beneath its mantelpiece.
“Ah, but look,” said Sarah, pointing to a model of a cottage planted on a small table in a corner of the room. The model cottage was surrounded by a miniature garden with ample daintily painted wooden rose bushes and a lazy stone path that led to an elaborately decorated iron gate. The cottage was protected by a white picket fence that safely enclosed it. And on that picket fence at the front of the cottage were tacked a series of thin wooden boards, and each board had a word delicately painted on them, and naturally they made up the message: “There’s No Place Like Home”.
“Let’s open the curtains,” suggested Terry. The heavy royal-red velvet curtains hung from just below the ceiling and kissed the living room’s thick, soft wool-piled Axminster carpet whose colourful patterns of colours and mixtures of textures stood out in stark contrast to the dullness of the rest of the room.
Sarah boldly marched up to the pair of curtains and pulled one of them to the side. Terry quickly tugged the other one aside.
It was again, as in the kitchen, a softly glowing stained glass window. This time there were no messages, but a series of pictures of many types of buildings.
“Buildings,” said Terry. “Look! A church, a school, a historical pub, a farm, a house too,” he said, pointing at various sections of the stained glass window.
“And that?” questioned Sarah, pointing to an odd-looking building.
“I think it’s a ship,” answered Terry. “You know, one of those luxury liners people used to go on holiday cruises on in the early twentieth century. Still, a building—only a moving one.”
“Hey, that building there!” exclaimed Sarah, pointing at another depiction. “I’d swear it’s the shape of our school!”
“Oh yeah … and that church?” added Terry. “It looks like Saint Mary’s, doesn’t it?”
“And look! That building there! That looks like the caretaker’s house. See? There’s even a road that joins it to the school. See?” Sarah was tracing her pointing finger over the stained glass window following a yellow road that connected a house to a school.
“I mean to say …” mumbled Terry, stroking his chin.
“These,” said Sarah, sweeping her hand over the glowing multi-coloured stained glass window, “are all the buildings the boy ever lived in!”
“Well, he lived with the caretaker, we know that,” agreed Terry. “And yeah, according to the myth he lived in the school when it was used as a home for London children during the Blitz when the Germans bombed the hell out of London in the Second World War.”
“Yes,” said Sarah, “and that pub”—she pointed at the depiction of the medieval-looking pub—“is the North Star Inn. Remember the caretaker told us the boy once lived in the inn back in the early 1800s. Remember?”
“Yeah, I definitely do,” said Terry confidently. “I think he’s supposed to have died in the North Star Inn.”
“It’s not a historical pub, then,” said Sarah. “These are places depicted at the time the boy lived in them. I mean, for instance, look at the school? The library building’s not there, is it? The library was built in the mid-1970s, as far as I can remember.”
“What does all this mean?” said Terry.
“Your guess is as bad as mine,” answered Sarah, with a quizzical smile climbing up the corner of her mouth, meaning she knew that both she and Terry were absolutely clueless about the mystery they had fallen into.
Terry pounced on a newspaper that he had noticed leap up from the coffee table and fall on the carpet when he had tugged open his side of the pair of curtains.
“Sarah, look at this?” he said. He held the newspaper with its huge pages up to her eyes. “It’s dated April 17th, 1912. Says, ‘TITANIC SINKS AT 2:20 AM, APRIL 15, 1912 ON MAIDEN VOYAGE AFTER HITTING ICEBERG; AROUND 1,300 PERISH; AROUND 850 RESCUED.’.”
“Well, now we know what the stained glass ship is a representation of.”
“But surely he didn’t live on the Titanic?” said Terry. “There’s not even a mention in the myth of him being sighted in 1912, is there?”
“No. But maybe—oh, hold on, I remember something interesting now. There was a group of children who died in the Titanic sinking from Langley!”
“Oh yeah,” agreed Terry, raising an eyebrow, “the Langley Orphanage Kids! Everyone knows about them.”
“Yes. Perhaps Daniel Dalton lived in the orphanage and was one of Sarah and Terry who went on the Titanic trip. It’s the only thing that makes sense,” finished Sarah, pointing at the faintly glowing depiction of the ship on the stained glass window.
“There’s no building of the Langley Orphanage though, is there?” said Terry, pointing at the stained glass window. “Nothing makes sense.”
Sarah looked at the other newspapers and magazines. “These documents, they’re all from different times. This one’s just a few sheets with poor typesetting, even though it looks as if it were only printed a few days ago. Wow! It’s called The Daily Courant and dated April 1734! It even has adverts … it says here: ‘This day is publish’d, twenty four new and accurate maps of the several parts of Europe.’ And see the price?” Sarah showed Terry the words: “Price 5s, colour’d 6s.”
“Ah, so that must mean the price for a black and white map, and the price of a colour map. What’s the ‘s’ stand for?” asked Terry.
“Shillings,” answered Sarah. “In those days, twenty shillings made up a pound, and twelve pennies made up a shilling. Sterling with Shillings and Pence, as they used to say.”
“That’s nuts,” said Terry, sounding slightly incredulous.
“I know it is,” agreed Sarah. “And what’s more, my granny told me that everyone thought when they converted to decimal money that they would never be able to cope. Can you believe that!”
“That’s nuts as well.”
“The lead story is about a Langley farmer who had his farm repossessed due to mortgage arrears. And … there’s a crude drawing of the farm.” Sarah suddenly became excited. “I’ve seen the farm before!”
“Where?” asked Terry, curiously.
“There!” exclaimed Sarah, pointing at the farm depicted on the stained glass window.
“Oooh, I mean to say …” Terry’s eyes seemed to swell a little with a burning curiosity. “Hmm … there’s no doubt about it. You’re right. I think these newspapers show stories related to the places this Daniel Dalton must have lived in.” Terry picked up a magazine. “See, look at this magazine. There’s an article on the North Star Inn fire. And look, here’s one on the burglary at Mr Filby the caretaker’s school house.”
“Now that’s an article of immense interest, don’t you think?” said Sarah.
“What! A house burglary? It hardly compares to the sinking of the Titanic!”
“Except that it occurred only twenty years ago!”
“What are you getting at?”
“This house appears to be from the 1950s, yet clearly there are items in it from well afterwards. That’s all I’m getting at.”
“Oh yeah. I suppose that’s an interesting point. It seems to make me wonder why this house is a 1950s house. I don’t get it.”
“Funny, but all the headlines and articles are disasters, aren’t they? Maybe the boy caused all these disasters. That would be a bit worrying, wouldn’t it?” Sarah looked at Terry in earnest.
“So he’s some sort of avenging ghost, d’you think?” wondered Terry aloud.
“A physical one, if he is. But surely there’s no such thing as ghosts? Ah, I know,” said Sarah suddenly, as if she had grasped some sort of explanation for the extraordinary circumstances she and Terry had found themselves in, “perhaps there’s some sort of secret organisation, like the Illuminati or the Freemasons, that trains ten-year-olds to be at disasters, or something like that.”
“That hardly explains melting rock … or let’s say, how such an organisation knew the Titanic, an unsinkable ship, would hit an iceberg and sink. I don’t think an organisation in those days could have somehow placed an iceberg so that the Titanic would crash into it. There are just too many questions and hardly any answers—make that, no answers.”
“Okay, you’re right, Terry,” agreed Sarah. “But I don’t buy the boy being a ghost.”
Terry shrugged his shoulders. “Well, as you said before: ‘All roads lead to Rome’. Let’s find him. He must be upstairs.”
Sarah and Terry charged upstairs and searched four bedrooms, a large landing cupboard and a bathroom. All homely, and decorated and filled with furnishings from a 1950s style. The words “There’s No Place Like Home” were found embroidered in navy-blue lettering on white cotton pillowcases in all the bedrooms, and embroidered in green lettering on white bath towels in the large bathroom. But the boy was nowhere to be seen. All the windows they found were glowing stained glass with various illustrations of astronomy type illustrations on each. One bedroom depicted the solar system, another, star constellations; but a third bedroom, the only one with a single bed in it, had a planetary system Sarah and Terry did not recognise.
“Perhaps he really is an alien?” remarked Sarah on seeing the unrecognisable planets.
“I wonder, is that better than being a ghost?” replied Terry.
The bathroom’s stain glass window displayed underwater cartoon creatures going about various bathroom activities; for instance, there was a shark with a top hat and three-piece suit gleefully cleaning his teeth and an octopus in a bubbly bath using all his tentacles to wash and scrub himself. Sarah and Terry tried the taps and found both the hot and cold taps to be functioning perfectly normally.
Indeed, Sarah and Terry found many things of interest in the upstairs of the house, but they did not find the most interesting thing of all—the boy.
They searched the house thoroughly a second time.
Eventually, they retreated into the living room, convinced the boy could not possibly be there.
“He’s nowhere to be found,” said a disappointed Terry. “He can’t have come into the house.”
“He must be somewhere though,” said a disappointed Sarah.
“Perhaps there was another door in the cavern we didn’t see.”
“Well, I’m hungry. Maybe there’s food in the kitchen. The toilet worked. The bathroom even ran hot water. You never know.”
Sarah and Terry trudged to the kitchen feeling a little defeated, thinking that perhaps they were trapped and would starve to death.
To their surprise, they found plenty of fresh food in the cupboards and fridge and all the electrical appliances were working normally.
Minutes later …
“Amazing, tastes fantastic!” said Terry, polishing off a third jam doughnut, and doughnuts 1950s style were huge and full of thick tasty jam that a modern doughnut could never hope to compete with.
Sarah simply made agreeable noises as she tucked into a thick crusty piece of toast made in a chunky steel electric toaster and a huge cup of tea. She had never made tea with tealeaves and a tea strainer before, but there were no teabags.
“Have you noticed that it’s as if it’s daytime in this house?” said Terry, pouring out some chilled lemonade from a green glass bottle into a tall glass, every now and again the neck of the bottle chinked on the lip of the glass. “I mean the light that’s brightening up the rooms isn’t just coming from the stained glass windows.” Terry put down the bottle and began sipping at his sweet, cool glass of lemonade.
“It must be the same sort of light source as the one we saw outside in the cavern and on the graveyard stairway we arrived from,” said Sarah. “It’s like moonshine outside in the cavern, but in here it’s like sunshine. Dunno how it works. Can’t think it’s dangerous though, or we’d be ill by now, and this food probably wouldn’t be so fresh.”
Terry was about to attempt a fourth doughnut when he noticed something alarming. Suddenly, he didn’t feel like devouring any more doughnuts.
“S-Sarah!” he spluttered, with a frightened look in his eyes—eyes that were staring up at the ceiling …
Sarah looked up and saw his reason for alarm. On the ceiling was a slowly trickling black-veined meandering line spreading randomly and ominously across the ceiling!
