The Day the World Went Loki Page 6

  “What is this, a Viking theme park?” Lewis asked.

  “Never mind that,” Greg told him as he pulled the door shut. “Just stay out of sight and keep quiet.”

  They crouched by the door where Greg could peek out through a knothole. He saw one of the Valkyries wheel past no more than a few metres away. She reined in her mount and looked over at the boathouse.

  “One of them’s headed this way,” he said. “We’ve got to hide.”

  “Where?” Lewis gasped, staring around helplessly. Then he spotted a pile of canvas lying at the bottom of the boat. “We can hide under that,” he said, pointing.

  Without another word they jumped into the boat and wriggled under the canvas. “Your leg’s sticking out!” Greg whispered urgently.

  Lewis quickly pulled his leg in and tugged the canvas down to conceal himself. They were shrouded in darkness and silence, broken only by the exaggerated sound of their own breathing. Then the boathouse door was kicked open and Lewis heard a sword rasping from its sheath.

  He listened to the Valkyrie pace the landing then stop. The toe of her boot tapped impatiently. The brothers held their breath, trying not to make the slightest movement that might give them away.

  Finally the Valkyrie snarled a Germanic curse and marched out, slamming the door behind her.

  Greg and Lewis crawled out from under the canvas.

  “That was close!” Lewis gasped, gratefully breathing in the fresh air.

  A loud snort suddenly drew their eyes to the boat’s dragon prow in time to see its eyes open. The prow stretched its neck as if to untangle a kink, then twisted around to look at them.

  The boys jumped out and stood in astonishment while the dragon’s head blinked at them.

  “What are you two doing here?” it asked in a deep, rough voice. “Don’t you know this is my nap time? Don’t you know I need my sleep? Is this any kind of time to come looking for a boat ride? What do they teach kids these days?”

  “Shhh!” Greg told it.

  The dragon prow raised its eyebrows. “Son, you’ve got a communication problem. I asked you a question and all you can do is hiss.”

  “Please be quiet!” Lewis pleaded.

  The dragon head twisted about on its wooden neck. “I say, am I missing something here? I’m the one that got woken up and you’re trying to hush me. It makes no sense, boy. There’s no reason to it. If you’re here for a boat ride, just come out with it.” It paused to look back and forth between them. “Nod if any of this is sinking in.”

  “We don’t need a boat ride,” Greg told it. “We’re just chilling.”

  “This is a boathouse, boy, not an icehouse,” the dragon head told him. “Do you see any ice here? No, because there isn’t any. You come to a boathouse to use a boat, longship that is. Which I am.”

  The dragon prow ignored Lewis’ desperate efforts to signal him to silence. Finally it said, “Stop waving your arms around, boy. You look like a windmill.”

  “Look, we don’t need a boat,” Greg said. “But I hear there are some Vikings dropping by later to pillage the picnic area. Maybe you should rest up in case they need a quick getaway.”

  “Hmm…” the dragon said. “I could use a tad more shuteye if it’s going to be a busy day. Thanks for the tip-off, son. You and your gobby friend be sure to wake me if those Vikings show up.”

  The dragon head slowly shut its wooden eyes and pretty soon it looked completely lifeless again.

  “We’d better hide out here until the coast is clear,” said Greg. “It should be safe, as long as big mouth doesn’t start sounding off again.”

  “Let’s take a seat behind that barrel over there,” Lewis suggested.

  He hauled The Folklore of Time out of his backpack and tried to read through it in an orderly manner. It wasn’t easy. It kept jumping from one topic to another in a series of badly organised chapters, most of which were little more than a page in length.

  One was on various ways in which time had been measured – hourglasses, marked candles, sundials and the like – another was on the Inca calendar, and another was about unlucky days like Friday the thirteenth. Nowhere was there any further mention of Lokiday.

  Still, Lewis persevered in the hope that he would find a way out of their predicament. There was always a chance that the Fount of All Knowledge the mirror had directed him to might be this book, but the more he read the more he doubted it.

  Looking up from a chapter on pagan festivals, he noticed that Greg had dozed off – just switched off all the weirdness so that it wouldn’t interfere with today’s quota of loafing. At least, Lewis reflected, that meant he could read in peace.

  By the time he’d finished with the book, his back was stiff and aching. He gave Greg a poke with his elbow.

  “I think it’s safe now.”

  Greg rubbed his eyes and stretched his arms. “I’ve been giving this situation some thought,” he announced.

  “In between snores, I suppose.”

  Greg was too busy being pleased with himself to take any notice of his brother’s sarcasm. “Why do we need to leave here at all?”

  “Well, for one thing, the boat might wake up.”

  “Apart from that. This day we’ve conjured up, it’s just a day, right?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “Look, if we hide out here till the morning, the day will be over. It’ll be Friday and everything will be back to normal.”

  “Maybe,” Lewis conceded. He looked around. “This isn’t exactly a comfy place to stay holed up.”

  “It’s not for long,” Greg assured him, glancing at his watch. “What time do you make it? I think I’m running slow.”

  Lewis sighed, wondering if Greg would ever stop fooling around with his watch and let it run properly. He checked his own watch. “Eleven thirty.”

  “Is that right?” Greg sounded puzzled. “How long have we been here?”

  “It feels like an hour at least, but…”

  “But what?”

  Lewis was staring at his digital watch. When he started reading the book it had read 11:30:56. It still read 11:30:56. Even as he stared at it, it didn’t change.

  Greg craned over to take a look. “It’s broken,” he concluded. “You should learn to take better care of it.”

  “Well, why don’t you check your watch?”

  Greg lifted his wrist and looked at his own watch again. It was still five minutes behind Lewis’, but he had the same problem. The display wasn’t changing. Lewis grabbed him by the arm and looked back and forth between the two watches.

  “Is this another thing that’s been messed up by that stupid rhyme?” Greg asked grumpily.

  Lewis’ face screwed up in thought. “It was working fine before. This is something new. If our watches were affected by the Lokiday spell, they would have gone wrong the same time as everything else changed.”

  He shot to his feet, dashed to the door, and took a look outside. “I swear the sun hasn’t moved since we ducked in here,” he said.

  Greg joined him and squinted at the sky. “So what’s going on?”

  “I haven’t a clue. But I think we have to find the Fount of All Knowledge.”

  “What’s your rush?” said Greg with a shrug. “We’ve got all the time in the world, by the looks of it.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” said Lewis. “Don’t you see? If time’s stopped dead, it’s going to be Lokiday forever.”

  8. ONE SAGE IN A SPHERE

  “You mean Mum will be an ogre forever and I’ll keep getting used for target practice?” Greg moaned.

  Lewis didn’t respond. Greg’s words had reminded him of something that had been gnawing at him for a while now, and at last he began to understand what it was. His face suddenly brightened.

  “That’s it!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s what?”

  “The Fount of All Knowledge. Don’t you see?”

  Greg folded his arms and looked at Lewis as though he wer
e dribbling all over his shirt. “Whatever it is, I don’t see it, hear it or smell it.”

  “Look, yesterday you said Mrs Witherspoon would like to use you for target practice.”

  “And I was right!”

  “And last night I said Mum was being a real ogre.”

  Greg’s brow furrowed. “You mean we’re doing all this?”

  “Not exactly,” said Lewis. “The spell’s working on its own, but some of our thoughts have influenced it. You always complain how Lindsay pops up out of nowhere, and now she does it for real.”

  “If she’s turned into a fairy because of something I said about her, then she got off lucky. I’ve said a lot worse.”

  “I know,” Lewis retorted accusingly. “But we won’t bother about that right now.”

  Greg returned to the main point. “But the rest of the town, that’s got nothing to do with us, right? I’ve never even heard of a Valkyrie.”

  “Well, we did recite the rhyme, but it can’t all have been guided by us. Although a lot of things have changed in ways that fit our ideas about them.”

  Greg made a sickly face. “If that’s true, what do you suppose Aunt Vivien’s turned into?”

  Lewis repressed a shudder. “With any luck we’ll never find out.”

  “So what about the Fount of All Knowledge?”

  “My computer has changed, like most other things, but it still did roughly what I expected it to do. It gave me information.”

  “Really useful information, too,” Greg said sarcastically.

  “Well, that’s the point,” Lewis said. “It must be useful to me.”

  “But you don’t understand it.”

  “I didn’t,” Lewis corrected him, “not until I worked out what was going on. The Fount of All Knowledge must mean somebody or something that I see as the source of all knowledge.”

  He gave Greg a few seconds to think about it, then said, “It’s Mr Calvert.”

  “You mean the guy at the library you drone on about? ‘Mr Calvert said this’, ‘Mr Calvert said that’.”

  “I didn’t know you were listening,” Lewis said coldly.

  “I was trying not to, but some of it seeped through anyway. So the mirror meant that we should go and see Mr Calvert?”

  Lewis nodded vigorously. “After all, he was the one that gave me the book in the first place.”

  “I suppose it kind of makes sense,” Greg conceded, “as long as you don’t think about it too hard.”

  “That should be easy enough for you, then,” Lewis muttered under his breath.

  “What?”

  “I said, we’d better get over to the library… before things get any worse.”

  Greg nodded. “Let’s just hope those Valkyries have gone back to Venezuela.”

  “Valhalla.”

  “Wherever.”

  They stepped outside, carefully closing the boathouse door after them.

  “Listen,” said Greg, “we’ll just stroll over to the library, casually, like it was a normal day. That way we won’t attract any attention.”

  He immediately set off in the wrong direction.

  “It’s this way,” Lewis corrected him.

  “I was going to take an indirect route, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Are you going to give me a hard time the whole way? We wouldn’t be in this fix if you hadn’t brought that stupid book home in the first place.”

  Lewis took a deep breath to calm himself and followed Greg as he strode off towards the library, by the direct route.

  They gave a wide berth to the many strange creatures they saw along the way. There was a blue-skinned hobgoblin in a park-keeper’s uniform trying to catch a swarm of tiny, winged pixies in a butterfly net. He growled at the boys to keep off the flowers as he ran past. Elsewhere a small herd of unicorns was grazing on a patch of nettles where the tennis courts used to be.

  Once outside the park they didn’t see anyone they recognised, but there was no telling who these gremlins, trolls and leprechauns had been yesterday. There was a fairly steady stream of traffic on the road: individuals riding horses, oxen and lizards, as well as vehicles being pulled by all manner of beasts.

  Greg appeared to have become inured to the strangeness. He even greeted the odd passer-by with a casual, “Hello there!” or “Nice day, isn’t it?” Certainly everyone seemed friendly enough and they saw no sign of the Valkyries, or Lindsay either. Still, Lewis found it harder and harder to act as though this were just a normal day and he was glad they only had another couple of streets to go before reaching their destination.

  The library was Lewis’ constant refuge from whatever troubles he was undergoing at school or at home, and he hoped that even now, in the midst of this chaos, it might still provide an island of sanity. That hope crumbled when the library came into view.

  It had been transformed into a great sandstone pyramid with statues of animal-headed deities posing on the ledges that ran all round the walls. A pair of sphinxes squatted on either side of the steps that now led up to a set of brass double doors.

  The boys climbed the steps hesitantly and halted before the doors, looking for a handle, or even a bell pull. In the absence of either, Greg reached out to push the nearest door, but before his fingers touched the metal, they both swung open of their own accord.

  As soon as they were inside, the doors slammed shut behind them with a deep boom. The interior was as big as three football pitches. Rows and rows of shelves stretched away into the distance, each one crammed with piles of parchment scrolls. Mysterious hooded figures drifted here and there, removing scrolls then sitting at small desks before carefully unrolling them. The huge room was lit by oil lamps set in the walls and by flaming bowls set atop iron tripods.

  The boys walked forward, their footsteps echoing on the polished marble floor. They came to a desk where a hook-billed bird on a perch clucked at the boys as they approached. The woman seated at the desk was busy making an entry in a large, leather-bound ledger with a quill pen, but the bird’s agitated noise made her look up.

  It was Miss Perkins, the assistant librarian, in the guise of an ancient priestess. Her narrow face was surrounded by an elaborate headdress and an ornate gold necklace hung around her thin neck. She raised her eyebrows challengingly at the two boys and scrutinised them disapprovingly.

  Lewis only plucked up the nerve to speak to her after Greg had prodded him twice in the ribs.

  “Miss Perkins, we need some help.”

  The assistant librarian’s expression became even more suspicious. “Are you initiates?” she asked.

  Lewis looked to his brother for help but was met with blank incomprehension. “Yes, we are,” he answered, hoping that was the right thing to say.

  “Then where is your token of wisdom?” Miss Perkins demanded in a pinched voice.

  Lewis had no idea what she could be talking about. Seeing him at a loss, Greg interposed hurriedly. “He left it in his other trousers. You know how it is.”

  The excuse earned him a stony stare.

  “Only an initiate may enter the Sanctum of Wisdom,” Miss Perkins warned them darkly.

  As if to add weight to her words, the bird ruffled its feathers and bobbed its beak threateningly.

  Lewis had a sudden flash of inspiration. “No, I’ve got it here,” he said, feeling around in his pocket. He pulled out his library card and presented it to Miss Perkins’ dissatisfied gaze.

  She examined it for a few seconds, then said grudgingly, “Very well, you may pass.”

  Before she could dismiss them, Lewis said, “Actually, we need to see Mr Calvert.”

  Miss Perkins looked shocked. “You use the high priest’s name lightly. What business have you with him?”

  Lewis tried to think of an adequate reply. Failing to come up with one, he opened his backpack and pulled out The Folklore of Time. “I have to return this book to him.”

  Miss Perkins wrinkled her nose up at the book as if he�
�d just presented her with a rat sandwich. She tilted her head to view it from a different angle. “This is no manner of sacred scroll known to me,” she said haughtily.

  “That’s exactly why I have to take it to Mr Calvert,” Lewis explained.

  Miss Perkins winced, as though hearing the “high priest’s” name used so openly was physically painful. She sniffed. “Third floor, room one.”

  She dipped her quill in the inkpot and returned to her notes. The bird made a gesture with its beak that left them in no doubt they were being dismissed.

  “Over this way,” Greg said too loudly, beckoning towards an arch beyond which a flight of stairs curled upwards. With one accord, all the hooded figures lurking among the shelves turned towards them and said, “Shhhh!”

  The sound echoed through the vast hall like the crash of a tidal wave.

  “You and your big mouth,” Lewis muttered.

  Greg made a face and walked through the arch.

  They climbed the spiral stairway in silence and emerged in a long gallery lined with mummy cases. Greg walked over to the nearest one and stared it right in the eye. “Kind of looks like Wendy Armitage,” he observed. “She’s always slapping on too much make-up.”

  He started feeling down the side of the case for a way to open the lid. Lewis hurriedly pulled him away.

  “Are you out of your head?” he said. “Don’t we have enough trouble already?”

  Greg looked at the case and thought about an old horror film he had seen on TV a few weeks ago. “Maybe you’re right,” he conceded.

  Lewis pointed out the single door at the far end of the gallery. As they drew closer they could read the sign on it:

  Seekers of knowledge only.

  All others report to the front desk.

  “You see, this must be the Fount Of All Knowledge,” Lewis said with satisfaction.

  “It took you long enough to figure it out,” Greg told him. He walked up to the door and knocked twice. There was no answer. He reached for the doorknob.

  “You can’t just walk in,” Lewis said.

  “What do you want to do? Stand around here all day? It’s going to be a long day, remember.”