The Warriors of Brin-Hask (2 page)

‘But it wasn’t there either. So now I don’t know where it could be.’

‘And you’re just mentioning this now?’

‘I don’t think I lost it at school,’ Charlie said calmly. ‘It’s probably at the hotel.
Hey, watch it!’ he yelled as a car drove too close beside them. ‘Oh, it’s Mum!’

They sped up, groaning as the mayonnaise jars banged against their legs, but eager
to get to Mary’s car.

‘What on Earth are you two carrying?’ Mary leaned out her window, amused.

‘Mayonnaise,’ said Amelia.

‘For Tom,’ said Charlie, heaving his bags into the boot of the car, and then gratefully
climbing into the back seat.

‘Tom?’ The amusement was gone, and Mary looked sharply at them both. ‘You’re running
Tom’s errands for him?’

‘We don’t mind,’ said Amelia.

‘I do,’ said Charlie. ‘Those bags weighed a ton.’

Mary turned back to the steering
wheel, muttering to herself.

It was a relief to sit back and let the car do all the work up the steepest part
of the hillside to the hotel, which stood right at the top of the headland, sheer
cliffs falling away on all sides.

‘Come on,’ said Mary. ‘Leave Tom’s stuff where it is, he can wait. Come inside and
I’ll get you an ice-block each.’

That sounded perfect. Amelia followed Mary into the hotel with nothing more complicated
in her mind than whether she should go for raspberry or lemonade. But when Mary opened
the front door, there was Amelia’s mum – the phone in her hand and a shocked look
on her face.

‘It was them,’ said Mum. ‘The complaint went through, and they’ve decided to follow
it up in person. Immediately.’

The complaint? It took Amelia a second or two to figure out what Mum meant, and then
she was just as stunned. Miss Ardman – their first alien guest. What a disaster that
had been. So bad that Miss Ardman had threatened to report them all. And now, apparently,
she had.

James, Amelia’s older brother, slouched through the front door and stared at them
all suspiciously.

‘What’s going on?’

Mum glanced awkwardly at Mary, and then said, ‘Oh … a bit of bother with the Health
Department. They’re sending an inspector tomorrow.’

Amelia frowned, not following the story now. Miss Ardman had called the Health Department?

‘On a Saturday?’ said James.

The sound of falling saucepans and breaking glass exploded from the kitchen at the
end of the hallway, along with the muffled sound of Dad cursing.

‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ Mum moaned. ‘What now?’

A huge brown rat, its eyes glinting red in the afternoon sun, burst through the kitchen
door and sped past them all.

As the rat scuttled over the toes of her shoes on its way through the lobby, Mum
screamed.

Not in fear, not in disgust, not even in surprise. She screamed in frustration.

‘This
can’t
be happening! Rats in the kitchen? On top of everything else?’

Dad ran out of the kitchen in pursuit of the rat, but stopped when he saw everyone
in the lobby.

‘What do you mean
everything else
?’ he asked her.

Amelia saw Mum lift her eyebrows warningly in James’s direction as she said carefully,
‘That customer complaint has gone through and
they
are sending someone to investigate
tomorrow.’

‘They?’ Dad yelped. ‘Tomorrow? But we’ve got rats in the kitchen!’

Mum put a hand to her forehead and breathed deeply through her nose.

‘Well.’ Dad staggered a bit. ‘Right. Well. Uh … it looks like we’re in a bit of trouble.’

‘Great!’ said James. ‘Shall I go upstairs and start packing now?’

‘Not helping, James!’ Mum snapped.

Mary swept Amelia and Charlie out towards the main doors and said, ‘Why don’t you
two go and tell Tom about the inspection tomorrow?’

‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got to take him that mayo as well,’ said Charlie.

Amelia was only too glad to be out of there. She was so mad with James, she didn’t
want to be anywhere near him.
Such
a jerk. Just because he hated the hotel, he didn’t
care what happened to anyone else. As long as
he
got to go back to the city, who
cared if Dad lost his job?

‘Good old Mum,’ said Charlie, happily. ‘I was afraid we’d get stuck in there listening
to boring arguments all afternoon. Come on, over here!’

‘Where? What are you doing, Charlie?’

Instead of going to the boot of Mary’s car to get the mayonnaise, Charlie was tiptoeing
along the veranda.

‘I want to find where the rat went.’

‘Who cares where it went? As long as it’s out of the kitchen.’

Charlie looked at her in surprise. ‘Didn’t you see it?’

‘The rat? Of course I saw it. Don’t really want to see it again.’

‘Didn’t you notice its eyes were red?’

Amelia shrugged. ‘So? Lots of rats have red eyes, probably.’

Charlie shook his head. ‘Lots of
white
rats do. Like Sophie T’s stupid Voldemort
Moonsparkle or whatever.’

‘That was a rabbit, not a rat.’

‘Same thing,’ said Charlie. ‘White animals – red eyes. Even then, not always. Toby
Finch’s brother had a white dog with blue eyes. But brown animals? They
never
have
red eyes. But this rat did.’

Amelia stared at him. ‘Charlie, who
cares?
Maybe it had curly whiskers. Maybe it
had seven toes on each foot. What difference does it make? The Health Inspector isn’t
going to be checking what colour its eyes are, they’re just going to shut us down!’

Charlie stared back, as though she were the crazy one. ‘Have you forgotten where
we are? The Health Inspector is going to be the least of our worries if that turns
out to be an
alien
rat.’

Amelia swallowed.
Oh.

‘Exactly. Now, are you going to help me look for it?’

‘No.’

Charlie blinked at her.

‘Let’s say you’re right – and you probably are – that only makes it more urgent that
we get down to Tom’s and tell him what’s happening.’

‘Ugh!’ Charlie’s shoulders slumped in defeat, and he stomped back to Amelia. ‘You
can be so
sensible.
’

They dragged the four bags of mayonnaise out of the car and trudged down the hill
to Tom’s place – through the thick magnolia trees, across the leaf-strewn clearing,
to a little run-down shack.

Charlie didn’t even knock, he just kicked the door open and yelled, ‘We got your
mayo, and you’re busted, Tom! Next time you want us to do your jobs, you’ll have
to pay us or I’m telling Mum.’

Amelia winced. She set her bags down on the floor by Charlie’s, and then saw that
Tom was muttering over one of his charts and fiddling with a weird-looking clockwork
machine. The cottage, as usual, was a disaster. Everything was so cluttered with
old clocks, parchments, jeweller’s screwdrivers, plates of toast crusts, broken toy
engines, ancient books, cold cups of tea, springs and gadgets, it was amazing Tom
could find anything.

Charlie looked at Amelia, puzzled. It was impossible that Tom hadn’t heard them come
in.

‘Hey!’ Charlie said.

Tom snapped up and glared at him, one eye fierce, the other hidden behind a black
eye-patch. ‘What?’

‘Your mayonnaise,’ Charlie said deliberately.

‘Like you asked.’

‘Right. Well, leave it there,’ Tom waved his hand vaguely toward the kitchen, his
attention already back to the mess of paperwork on his desk.

‘Uh, Tom …’ Amelia said. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Eh?’

‘I mean,’ she said more firmly, ‘there is a problem. A big one, up at the hotel.’

Now she had Tom’s attention.

‘Mum said Miss Ardman had made her complaint, and now the Health Inspector is coming
tomorrow to follow it up. Plus, we have rats in the kitchen.’

‘Health Inspector?’ said Tom. ‘But Miss Ardman wasn’t complaining about the –
Oi!’
he suddenly bellowed, and Amelia saw Charlie freeze, more than halfway across the
next room, and only a couple of metres away from the stone steps leading down to
the gateway itself.

‘Get out of there!’ Tom blazed. ‘Get over here,
now.
’

Charlie recovered quickly from the shock of being discovered, and took another step
closer to the stairs. ‘What’s the big deal? I only want a look.’

Tom stood up from his desk and limped toward Charlie. He was furious, but Amelia
noticed, also very reluctant to get any closer to the gateway room than necessary.

‘What’s the big deal?’ he said quietly, with an intensity that was chilling. ‘Don’t
you realise how dangerous the gateway is?’

‘Dangerous!’ said Charlie. ‘I told you, I only want to look. It’s not like I’m going
to go through.’

Tom took another half-step toward him.

‘The gateway isn’t a lift. It’s not like the door only opens when the carriage is
there. The gateway is a living thing – a whole system of wormholes that are always
moving and jostling one another for position. And as they move, the wormholes set
off currents in space, so that the gateway is always active, always sighing, and
heaving, and –’ Tom shivered, ‘–
sucking
. Anything can get pulled through if it’s
close enough to be caught in the current. And if you were sucked through without
a wormhole to catch you, we’d never be able to find you, because you wouldn’t have
gone somewhere we could ever look. You’d have been lost in the
Nowhere.
’

Amelia gripped the edge of Tom’s table, as though the gateway were already tugging
at her. Charlie, however, was shining in wonder.

‘Cool,’ he said breathlessly.

Tom glared at him, and Charlie plodded reluctantly back to the front room.

‘Right,’ Tom said gruffly. ‘Now off you go. I don’t know what your parents want me
to do about that complaint business, but it seems that the best thing is to get on
with running the show as well as we can until then. And I’ve got both hands full
trying to get organised for the next two arrival parties.’

‘
Two
arrivals?’ said Amelia. ‘But Mum only told us about the Brin-Hask. Who else
is coming?’

‘What? Oh, slip of the tongue.’ Tom huffed and shuffled his charts around. ‘Go on,
then, off you go. And tell your dad the feast must be ready for the Brin-Hask. There’ll
be trouble if it isn’t.’

The two kids picked their way out of the cottage, and back into the late afternoon
sun.

‘That went well,’ said Amelia dryly.

‘I thought it went excellently,’ Charlie grinned.

‘We didn’t tell him about the red eyes, and you got in massive trouble!’

‘No,’ Charlie corrected her. ‘We found out more about the gateway,
and
got Tom so
annoyed he forgot to ask for the change from his mayonnaise. We scored nearly eight
bucks!’

Amelia laughed, but stopped abruptly as the little house behind them vibrated so
violently that the windows rattled. A low, grinding sound shook the ground. Amelia
stared at Charlie, wondering what might have happened to him if he’d been at the
top of the stairs while
this
was going on.

‘Let’s go.’ She grabbed Charlie by the arm and headed back up the hill to the hotel.
Charlie went along placidly.

‘I can’t wait to see the Brin-Hask. I wonder if they’re guns-and-bazooka-type warriors,
or if they’re more into death-rays and lasers? I can’t decide which would be cooler.’

‘I can’t wait to find out who the second arrival is,’ said Amelia.

Charlie said, ‘I think Tom just made a mistake.’ ‘So do I,’ Amelia agreed. ‘But I
think the mistake was letting us know.’