The Book of Beasts Read online

  ‘The treasures created by Animare that we keep in the Abbey vault cannot be left unattended,’ said Renard. ‘A direct descendant of the island’s First Animare, Albion, must be present on Auchinmurn at all times to fulfil this duty. In past years, Jeannie and I have had that responsibility. With Jeannie gone, I bear the responsibility alone. The islands’ connection to our kind, and our connection to the islands, are supernatural, intensely powerful and never to be neglected.’

  Em tried making sense of this information. ‘You and Jeannie are both descendants of Albion?’

  ‘We are. It has never seemed like a burden, until recently. But as long as Jeannie is gone, then I must be here.’

  ‘Dumb rule,’ Em scoffed. ‘Who decided that was the way it had to be? What would happen if you left?’

  ‘I would die,’ Renard said simply. ‘The islands would die too, along with whatever else they are protecting.’

  Sandie took Em’s hand. ‘You know that means that you and Matt are descendants of Albion too, Emmie.’

  Em’s eyes widened. Her mum hadn’t called her that in ages.

  ‘So Matt and I can never leave the islands? We’re trapped here for our whole lives?’

  ‘Not as long as Jeannie and I are alive,’ said Renard.

  Em needed to move around, to think this through. She got up from the table and walked over to the model of the Abbey in the Middle Ages, which sat on a table in the corner of the kitchen. Matt and Zach had been working on it since they’d come to the island, and it was perfect in every detail. Renard had always told them that it was a good means of focusing their growing minds and controlling their imaginations.

  Em picked up one of the tiny monks that Matt had taken such care in painting and turned it over in her hand. It had been rendered in fine detail, down to the tiny symbol of the monastic Order of Era Mina on the back of the monk’s robe.

  A geometric shape like a swirling helix.

  A crowd of thoughts pounded into Em, all at once. The helix. The mysterious figure that had haunted her in the night. He was connected to the Abbey.

  She held the proof in her hand.

  And with it, she knew the identity of the mysterious figure of haunting her. He was Albion.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Auchinmurn Isle

  The Middle Ages

  The sun dipped behind the horizon. The wind howled across the bay. Matt’s clothes were damp against his skin and his body ached from exhaustion. Worse, his stomach was rumbling furiously. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He dug his fingers into the corner of his coat pockets in the hope of finding something, but there wasn’t even a fuzzy Polo mint.

  They were heading silently north-west towards the more rugged, uninhabited part of Auchinmurn. Solon was in the lead, his tunic singed and torn, with Carik following, clutching her wounded hand close to her chest. Matt brought up the rear.

  Matt was astonished at how much Auchinmurn had changed over the centuries. He was adapting, slowly, to the overwhelming stink that permeated everything – a heady mix of burning peat, cooking pig fat, human waste and animal manure, all punctuated with the sour smells of sweat. But unlike in the twenty-first century, the island’s forest reached all the way to the shoreline, giving them cover as they climbed to the caves high up in the hillside.

  Solon stopped under a cluster of pine trees. ‘Can you climb this, Matt?’

  Matt looked up at the dense, overgrown cliff face in front of them, and nodded.

  Solon began to clear the way by hacking through the heavy wet brush with his sword as they climbed slowly up the cliff. Mud and water were still flowing through the bracken on this part of the island, so their ascent was a slippery one. Because of her swollen blistered hand, Carik fell backwards twice on to Matt. Her mistrust and wariness of him was still strong; he sensed it every time he set her back on her feet. He did his best to respond neutrally, but it wasn’t easy. She and Solon both smelled sour, like burning wood tinged with rotting meat. It was hard not to wrinkle his nose and convey the wrong impression of his own feelings towards them both.

  You hardly smell of scented soap, he reminded himself. The phrase was Jeannie’s, and the memory caught in his throat. He hoped his dad’s lifelong relationship with the old housekeeper was keeping him from harming her.

  As they climbed, Matt wondered what was on this part of the island in the present day. He, Em and Zach knew all the coves and caves near Seaport and on Era Mina, but he didn’t think Auchinmurn’s spelunkers were aware of smugglers’ caves on this side of the island.

  ‘Look out!’ Solon suddenly yelled, flattening himself against the crags as an avalanche of rocks and roots tumbled towards them.

  Matt covered his head with his hands as rocks rained down on him, battering and cutting him. Curled against the rock face, he experienced a jolt of homesickness that took his breath away.

  Carik reached out her good hand to Matt as the avalanche trickled to a halt.

  ‘You will see your sister again soon,’ she said.

  Kindness at last, Matt thought wryly. She had obviously sensed his longing.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said shortly. ‘Keep going.’

  They climbed on in silence. Solon was some way ahead now, almost at the ridge line.

  ‘Why did your father send those knights to attack us?’ Carik asked abruptly.

  Matt focused on where he was placing his hands. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want us following him, seeing where he took Jeannie.’

  The higher they climbed, the thicker the bracken and brambles became. The moon was full now, glittering on the bay below them. Matt’s hands and face were covered in scratches. Above them, Solon had stopped at a thick curtain of bramble and hawthorn bushes, and Matt detected a cave opening behind their swinging branches.

  ‘May I use your magic glasses again?’ Solon asked.

  Matt breathlessly handed the opera glasses over. They huddled together on the ledge as Solon focused on the small island of Era Mina.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ asked Matt.

  Solon returned the glasses to Matt. ‘Brother Renard’s tower on Era Mina. The one we are building to keep him safe from his own fracturing imagination. Look.’

  The tower on Era Mina stood full height in Matt’s time, slender and commanding. Right now, it was part-way through the process of being built.

  The rocky promontory was swarming with hundreds of black knights in identical armour, cutting stone, mixing mortar, carrying bricks – building the tower at record speed and all moving in the same precise way that Matt, Solon and Carik had witnessed earlier on the beach. Matt wondered again at how his father was doing all of this. Guardians could not animate. What were these creatures? Where had they come from?

  Solon took the glasses again. ‘Why does your father not animate the tower itself?’

  ‘He’s a Guardian,’ said Matt. ‘Not an Animare.’

  Solon looked startled. ‘Then how is he doing this?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  They moved inside the cave and Solon dropped the brush cover, plunging them into darkness. Matt could feel and smell Carik standing next to him. The sense of her mistrust and intense curiosity assailed him.

  Who are you? she was saying, as clearly as if she were speaking the words aloud.

  Matt wasn’t sure he knew the answer to that either.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Solon crouched over a scratched-out pit with two sharp pieces of flint. In seconds, a fire burst to life in the centre of the cave, illuminating the damp space. Then he loosened his sword and slumped on to a flat rock next to the fire.

  Carik set her quiver, her bow and a hunting knife on a rock that jutted out from the far wall like a tongue. She cupped her hand under the water that was trickling down the cave wall, and mixed a poultice of moss, mud and a powder she took from a pouch under her tunic, before caking the mixture liberally on her blistered hand.

  As Solon tossed more kindling on the fire,
thick grey smoke rapidly filled the small cave. Matt started to cough, doing his best to clear the haze building up around him.

  Solon grinned. ‘All will be well, Matt. Be patient.’

  He ducked to the corner of the cave and retrieved a tube made from a hollowed-out branch and coated on the inside with a black tar that glimmered in the firelight. Placed over the fire, the branch created a chimney that carried the smoke up and away, forcing it out through small fissures in the rock.

  When the fire was blazing and the smoke under control, Solon pulled a leather pouch from his vest. Like Carik’s, it was full of dried plants and herbs. He broke off a chunk of what looked to Matt like a ginger root and handed it to him.

  ‘This will help dull the pain in your head.’

  Matt was about to chew the root up when Solon slapped it from his hand. It landed, popping and sparking, in the fire.

  ‘It is to be put on your wound!’ said Solon, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Carik burst out laughing at Matt’s ignorance. Matt couldn’t help himself and began to laugh too. He took another slice of the root. This time he did as instructed.

  Minutes after applying the gooey substance from the inside of the root, he felt the deep cut on his forehead slowly go numb.

  ‘What happened to the white peryton?’ he asked at last, getting as close to the fire as possible without burning himself. He was soaking wet, freezing cold and every bone felt bruised from being tossed around in the raft. ‘The last I saw of her, you two were flying her over the wave.’

  ‘She brought us to safety above the waterline, and vanished,’ said Solon. ‘I’m not sure where she goes, deep into the island somewhere. Brother Renard and I unbound her from the island, to help save the village from the Norse attack.’

  ‘The Norsemen who attacked the monastery,’ said Matt, turning to Carik who was gathering more wood at the mouth of the cave. ‘Were they your people? Vikings?’

  Carik still wasn’t doing a very good job at stifling her curiosity. Like the damp of the cave and the stink of their bodies, it continued washing over Matt in waves.

  ‘They were not my people,’ she said fiercely. ‘I was their slave. They took my mother as spoils of one of their victories when they conquered the islands north of Skye, when I was still at her breast.’

  She tossed the wood into the fire, causing sparks to explode near Matt’s feet. He jumped back.

  ‘We need to find where your father has imprisoned my master Brother Renard,’ said Solon.

  ‘And where he’s taken Jeannie,’ added Matt.

  ‘Who exactly is this Jeannie?’ asked Carik.

  ‘She’s our—’

  Matt stopped, not sure of how to explain who Jeannie was, and what she meant to him and everyone at the Abbey. He wasn’t entirely sure who she was now anyway. Not after everything that had happened that day.

  ‘She was the one who created the wave,’ he said finally. ‘She’s from my time, in the future. I think she is connected to the islands in some enchanted way. Maybe like the peryton is.’

  Solon studied the fire. ‘We saw the destruction of the wave from the peryton. It surged through the monastery walls and destroyed the outer buildings, including our scriptorium.’ A shadow passed over his face. ‘Many manuscripts will have been destroyed.’

  Matt could only guess at how long a single manuscript would have taken these monks to illuminate. One more thing to feel guilty about.

  A thought struck him.

  ‘Solon,’ he said suddenly, ‘was The Book of Beasts kept in the scriptorium?’

  Solon’s gaze was instantly as hard as a diamond.

  ‘What do you know of that manuscript?’ he asked warily.

  If Matt was going to find and free Jeannie and have any chance of returning to the twenty-first century, he would need Solon’s help. Perhaps the help of the old monk Renard too. He’d have to trust them with what he knew about The Book of Beasts.

  But where to begin?

  ‘My mum found a page from an ancient manuscript,’ he began. ‘The Book of Beasts. My sister and I googled it, and learned how it had been used in the nineteenth century to open Hollow Earth—’

  Matt paused. He realized from Solon’s expression that he’d lost him at googled. He began again.

  ‘My mum found evidence of the book’s existence at the Royal Academy, in London.’

  ‘A royal academy?’ Solon asked curiously. ‘For a king?’

  Not for the first time in recent days, Matt wished he’d paid more attention to history.

  ‘Kind of,’ he mumbled, deciding to fudge this bit. ‘She was a visitor to this academy and she found a page that proved the existence of a place called Hollow Earth. A place where Animare trapped the beasts and monsters from ancient times by drawing them into this manuscript, The Book of Beasts.’

  Solon’s eyes sharpened in recognition. ‘My master, Brother Renard, told me a story right before your father arrived on the island. It was about the First Animare, Albion.’

  ‘You mentioned him earlier,’ said Matt.

  Solon nodded. ‘Albion founded the monastery of Era Mina. He drew the first pages of The Book of Beasts. The mission of the monks since his death has been to continue this work, drawing the creatures into this manuscript and protecting their hiding place. The Abbot told me that when The Book of Beasts is completed, it will seal Hollow Earth forever.’

  ‘Yes!’ Matt exclaimed, drinking in this fresh information. ‘That’s it exactly! Where is it now?’

  ‘The Abbot took it from my master when Brother Renard’s mind began to break,’ said Solon. ‘For safekeeping. It may yet have escaped the wave.’

  ‘It’s not complete, is it?’ said Matt.

  Solon shook his head. ‘There is one last beast to be sealed into Hollow Earth. The Grendel. It lives in the swamp near the Devil’s Dyke. Until it is drawn into the manuscript by a trained Animare like my master, Hollow Earth cannot be sealed. It is vulnerable to men like your father. We must finish it, but…’ Solon lifted his hands hopelessly. ‘My master’s mind is too fragile for such work now.’

  Carik had crawled outside and now returned with her hands full of seeds, nuts and one or two squirming wormy creatures that made Matt’s stomach lurch despite his hunger. She handed each of the boys a handful of what she’d foraged.

  ‘These I can eat, right?’ Matt said weakly, trying not to look at what was in his hands.

  Solon laughed and nodded. Matt tossed the whole lot into his mouth, chewed quickly, and tried to ignore the tickling in his throat as he swallowed. Carik crouched next to the fire, warming her hands, eating more slowly.

  ‘We need to get into the Abbot’s tower in the monastery,’ said Solon, tearing the legs off a beetle before popping it in his mouth. ‘If the Abbot had it before your father took him captive, he may have hidden it in his chambers.’

  Carik winced visibly as she rolled out a straw mat next to the fire. Noticing, Solon scooped two fingers into the root he had used to numb Matt’s head wound.

  ‘Show me your injury, Carik,’ he said gently.

  Carik pulled her tunic off her shoulder and turned her back to the fire, revealing a hole the size of a fist directly under her shoulder blade. Matt gawked at the thin translucent skin healing over the centre of the wound, barely concealing a pulsing hole in the girl’s flesh. The edges of the wound had been cauterized, the flesh puckered and pink around the hole. But the hole itself looked like no wound Matt have ever seen before. It wasn’t a bite, for there were no teeth marks. It wasn’t a tear, for there were no claw marks. It was a wound that appeared to be breathing on its own.

  Carik let Solon apply the syrup to the membrane covering the wound and tug her tunic gently back into place.

  ‘What did that?’ asked Matt uneasily.

  ‘It is the mark of the Grendel,’ said Carik. ‘I was lucky my courage abandoned me. If I hadn’t turned my back to run, it would have sucked out my heart.’

  TWENTY-THREE


  Auchinmurn Isle

  Present Day

  Outside the Abbey, the perimeter lights came on. Simon’s animation shield criss-crossed the top of the wall like a laser game of cat’s cradle. Vaughn stood at the windows and watched the light show for a few minutes.

  ‘What if Henrietta stole the tapestry because of what it showed?’ he said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ asked Renard.

  ‘When Sir Charles finally broke into the Council room, he said he could still sense Henrietta’s presence. Her emotions were so strong that they lingered.’ Vaughn paused. ‘He sensed joy and an overwhelming wave of triumph. I think we have to ask ourselves what happened in that room with the tapestry that could have caused such heightened emotions in Henrietta.’

  Renard shook his head. ‘Only one thing would elicit a response like that. A different outcome to the battle of Era Mina.’

  Em tried not to absorb too much of the fear and tension in the room; it was giving her a headache. ‘What was the battle of Era Mina?’

  ‘We’ve always believed it depicted the story of the Grendel attacking the monastery,’ said Renard. He looked older than Em had ever seen him. ‘But like so many of the stories about Hollow Earth, separating myth from reality is difficult.’

  The room grew cold. Em shivered.

  Stay calm, Em. Zach reached his hand across to soothe her.

  ‘Is the Grendel… really bad?’ she managed.

  ‘He is a sin-eater, a beast that sucks out your soul and devours your body,’ said Vaughn grimly. ‘The original tapestry was woven by the monks in the mid-thirteenth century. It showed an army fighting the Grendel, led by a shadowy figure in a cowled robe.’

  Simon jumped in. ‘The story we learned in school was that the Grendel was finally stopped by a powerful monk who lured it back to the centre of the earth—’

  ‘To Hollow Earth?’ Em interrupted.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Simon.

  ‘I think whatever else changed in the tapestry,’ said Vaughn, ‘the figure might now be Malcolm.’