WYLD BOOK OF SECRETS

By

Richard Jackson

CHAPTER ONE

Legend has it that a book written in the time of the Celtic Britons (a thousand years before the birth of Christ) holds the deepest secret to human nature. Legend has it that those who can read and understand the book, gain the power to control the thoughts of others. Legend has it that this book went missing in the dark ages of Europe, either secreted away by the last of the druids, or destroyed by the Catholic church. Legend has it that one day the book will be found, and then the world will change forever.

While scholars say that the book is a myth, there are, in the twentieth century, some who still believe that the book exists, and will be found, and will be read, and will once again bring power to the person who can read and understand.

Jane Pippin learnt about this mysterious book when she was a young girl living with her alcoholic father in a little house in the woods of Northern England. There was only one book in the house (left by her missing mother). The book was called: Myths and Mysteries from History. It was a large book with illustrations that Jane read over and over again. She was enchanted by every mystery in that special book (Atlantis, the Lock Ness Monster, the Bermuda triangle, Stonehenge) but it was the Wyld Book of Secrets that truly bewitched her. In her childhood life, so filled with sadness, the idea of a book that could change the lives of everyone around her became her holy grail.

Now the year is 1953 and Jane is sixteen, and she has just heard about the Wyld Book of Secrets for the first time in many years. Quite randomly, a nun that taught Latin at the Sisters of Mercy Ladies' College (The British public school that Jane attends) told Jane that she knew how Jane could find the mythical book.

'But surely the book doesn't exist?' said Jane, although she felt a surge of hope. Her heart still believed that the book existed, and her heart still believed that the book had the power to change her life.

The nun urged Jane to leave school immediately, going so far as to tell her to sneak through the back fence. On the other side of a small hill was the brother school of the ladies college that Jane attended. In the school was a boy named Tom Forrest who would help her rescue the book from where it had been hiding for the past thousand years.

Jane believed the nun.

So, on Friday 6th March 1953, Jane went tardy from school for the first time ever and walked over the hill to the boys school. She wore her dour grey girls school uniform, and her hair long, honey coloured, hair was trussed up in a tight pony tail.

She arrived at the back of the boys school near the end of lunch. In the distance were the Gothic halls and turrets and gargoyles and bell tower of the five hundred year old school. The rear playground in the boys school was alive with green blazers moving in random motion.

Jane saw Tom Forrest, right where the nun said he would be waiting for her. He was sitting under an oak tree that grew close to the back fence of the school.

Tom Forrest had intensely red hair. The kind of red hair that made you want to put on a kilt. He was so skinny he looked like he had been stretched. His neck, poking up from his green shirt looked as though it could be snapped like a twig. His green blazer billowed over his body. His hat sat beside him on the grass.

Standing in the blue shadow of the oak tree, Jane thought about how to approach.

Tom’s head drooped over a maths book. Not a primary school maths book as would be befitting Tom’s age of twelve, but one with the algebraic symbols of serious maths, like the advanced maths Jane studied at Our Lady of Mercy. On closer examination Jane recognised the book as the exact maths text that she used now. Tom must be advanced for his age. He brought his head up so she could see his white, almost pale blue cheeks. and he murmured ‘X squared equals Y plus 4’. He nodded, wet his finger, and turned the page.

Jane transferred her weight to her left foot, and discovered her foot had been resting on a stick - a stick that broke with a satisfying crack that brought Tom’s head up from his book. A blue vein ticked beneath the white of his jaw.

He stared at Jane for exactly one second, then he snapped his book shut and scrambled to his feet.

‘Finally,’ He said. ‘We must get going.’

‘Going where?’ Said Jane.

‘Into Miller's Crypt.’

'I'm not going into … ‘

Jane was about to add that she wouldn’t go into a Miller’s Crypt because one: the cave was famous for causing people to disappear; and two: she was claustrophobic, only Tom interrupted.

'If you are the girl who is interested in Wyld Book of Secrets, then you must come with me into Miller's Crypt. If you are someone else then you can leave.'

'I am Jane Pippin and I hope that you are Tom Forrest '

'I am Tom Forrest, and the first thing we must do is go into Millers Crypt, and we must ....'

Tom's eyes caught sight of something on the playground, and he said, ‘bugger.’

Across the playground there were two boys walking in Tom's direction. These boys were larger than Tom (which wasn't hard given Tom's stick like figure) and they had the posture and shuffle of losers. These were boys who didn't do their hair, and didn't shower, and and always wore their hats on stupid angles, and kept furry food between their teeth. The boys walked up to Tom. The first boy, a fat fellow with a belly that wobbled under his buttoned up shirt, said, 'What is that smut you are reading?'

Tom didn't say anything, and he didn't look around at Jane who stood under the tree, unseen.

‘I’m talking to you git,’ said the fat boy, and he bent over Tom.

Tom remained still.

The fat boy grabbed the maths book out of Tom’s hands and turned to the second boy and said, ‘Maths for perverts.’

The second boy was big, on his way to becoming a giant, and he had the dead eyed expression of a future murderer. The dead eyed boy didn’t react, he just stared back with his heavily lidded eyes, like a crocodile coming out from the swamp.

The fat boy threw the book at Tom’s feet, and right then a school bell sounded from a distance.

For no apparent reason the fat boy kicked Tom, the sound of his boot making a meaty thwack. Tom jerked his leg back and a small sound of pain came out.

‘Bleeding gobshite,’ said Jane from beside the tree.

The boys turned: the fat boy opening his mouth in surprise.

Jane strode toward the boys, only to trip over a root. She banged down on her knees, and her ankle twisted and sent up a shot of pain.

A few things happened at once.

Tom ran to the back fence, climbed over, and disappeared into the woods behind the school, leaving his hat behind. For such a skinny little kid he was fast, the way he leapt and scrambled and hippety-hopped into the brush. After a moment of consideration the fat boy took off after Tom, although it took him a moment to get over the fence with his groin straddling the top bar in an uncomfortable manner. He waded into the nettles beneath the woods like a homeward cow, yelling, 'stop you little twat.'

At the same time the dead-eyed boy lunged at Jane who was still on her knees where she had landed after tripping. The boy fell on top of her, only she immediately rolled to the right and he bounced off. Before he could recover and get up and attack again, she scrambled to her feet and took three awkward, almost falling over, steps backward.

The dead eyed boy rose to one knee, breathing slowly.

Jane said, ‘What are you trying to realise?'

‘I want to hurt you.’

Shaking her head, Jane looked over toward the woods.She didn't have time to research a psychopath.

Hobbling on her now painful ankle, Jane went to the back fence, vaulted it, and ran into the woods. Forty feet in she came to a brook. To her left was the Miller’s Crypt, a cave beneath Tawny Owl hill. The entrance to the cave looked like the gate to an ancient torture chamber, and Jane thought: no, I am not going in there.

She could hear the echoing voices and splashes of Tom being chased by the fat boy. Then the noises grew faint, and finally stopped.

Toss it ... she would have to go in after them.

Beneath her feet was a slope of black dirt and rocks and rotting logs and sharp grass, dipping down to the brook. Jane hesitated, then squatted and held the grass and gently fed her feet down the bank. Only she began to slide. She grasped at grass which turned out to be razor sharp and sliced her palm. She fell onto her bottom and slid through sticks and rocks and black loam with her skirt riding up her thighs until she landed in the brook. She almost went completely under the water. She stood and the water came up to the hem of her skirt.

She stood in the thigh high water, shut her eyes and thought: the Wyld Book of Secrets.

After a moment she began to wade through the brook toward the cave, pushing aside waterlillies. A cloud of insects rose from the black water and bumped against her thighs. At the cave's entrance Jane paused. The cave stank like dirt. A spider web was caught in her hair.

Miller’s Crypt was famous, and the stories told about it were legendary. Years ago, on a late night sleepover at the house of a church family that had taken pity on the poor orphan Jane, she had sat up in bed and listened to a girl named Martha speak in a whisper about killers who dragged victims into the cave and held them beneath the glooming water until they drowned. Martha whispered with that deadly serious tone of young-girl-trying-to-sound-like-an-adult about the ghosts that ate cave bats and waited for children to stray too close to the entrance.

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Jane had been interested enough (or frightened enough) to do actual research on the subject. In the library’s local history section, sitting on a beanbag, she read a staple bound book about half a dozen formally documented disappearances dating back one hundred years.

The one that she remembered most was the most recent disappearance.

On 6th March, 1942, a bush walker named Jackson had waded into the Fern brook at Greymill with the goal of walking the brook, through the tunnels under Tawny Owl hill to where it joined the larger river on the far side. Jackson intended to write of this experience as a piece of environmental journalism titled, ‘The Romance of Water’. He thought it would be a welcome distraction from the war, and in his stupidly optimistic heart he felt that it might be a gentle reminder of the more important things in life.

He provided expedition details with a local search and rescue organisation, and when he didn’t radio in as scheduled on the night of March 8 the search and rescue organisation affected a small-scale search, which ballooned into a large-scale search, that resulted in no trace of Jackson the bush walker ever getting found.

In 1949 the local council erected a barrier thirty-five metres into the tunnel, to stop people wandering into the darkness and getting lost (the official ruling for Jackson’s disappearance as well as the five others). Local children dared each other to go in as far as the metal barrier, and without fail the brave-enough-children emerged, blinking.

The stories of ghosts and murderers sounded like a pile of tripe … unless you were about to go into the cave. Then they felt like they were true.

‘Tom,’ Jane shouted into the darkness.

The brook snickered along the tunnel walls.

‘Tom.’

She stepped forward and had hardly gone three steps when the claustrophobic darkness slipped over her. It was like the nights in the little house with her father when she was scared and starving hungry and she thought the night would wrap around her and strangle her.

Wading slowly, she turned every few feet to make sure she could still see the cave's entrance.

She couldn’t hear the boys now, neither their feet splashing nor their voices, and she wondered how far they could have got. Surely noise should be echoing and travelling through the tunnel. She turned to reassure herself that she could see the cave's mouth, and she could, although it had shrunk into a small shape of daylight. If she went much further she wouldn’t be able to see it at all and she was worried that once she lost sight of the light she could get turned around and lost. Still, she waded further, and the water rose past the hem of her skirt. She held her skirt up and took another step.

How far would the boys have walked in absolute darkness?

She stopped again and turned to make sure that the cavern entrance hadn’t receded too far back, only to discover she couldn’t see the entrance. She stared for a moment, completely bamboozled. She hadn’t gone far enough from the last time she had looked for the cave mouth to have disappeared. Time had played some sort of queer trick on her. The second queer thing was that she could still see. There was a light source.

Thousands of crystals lined the roof of the cave, the crystals producing tiny beads of cloudy blue light. Jane could see her surroundings. The brook was a flat black surface. Alongside the brook were ledges and rocky overhangs and off-shooting caves and stalactites and stalagmites. Jane waded to the water's edge where a set of natural stairs rose from the water to a ledge. On closer inspection it seemed the stairs weren’t natural. There were chisel marks.

‘Tom.’

She noticed fading wet footprints, two different sets, ascending the stairs. She looked up into the jumble of rocks and tunnels to see if she could see the boys, but they weren’t in sight.

She called out Tom’s name again, but there was no answer. He had moved fast the little buggar. And the fat boy had moved fast too.

The stone stairs fed up into a dark crevice.

Jane stepped slowly and carefully up the stairs, but as it got darker and she could no longer see her feet she found herself fighting for balance. She put her hand on the cave wall and felt something gooey and perhaps alive.

She began to panic. She stopped and shut her eyes. She couldn’t breathe properly, and the air didn’t feel like it was filling either her stomach or her lungs. Her hand went to her belly, and she imagined her hand was breathing for her - sucking air from her throat, past her lungs, into her belly. After a while she calmed.

Climbing the stairs into the darkness, the crevice curved and the darkness became complete. She stopped and leaned against the wall, her hand on damp rock. Okay, she thought, I will do ten more steps, and if I haven't come across the boys I will turn back. She felt that if she concentrated and didn't panic she would be able to find her way back to the entrance.

After five steps, to Jane's relief, a milky reflection appeared on the rock walls. Another entrance must lay ahead. This was an entrance she knew nothing about, but still at least she now knew where the boys had gone.

Only the light wasn't coming from outside. The light came from a doorway where a door lay partially open. The light coming from within the doorway had the steady consistency of light produced by electricity. This was a weird development, and Jane wondered if this was dangerous. Who would be running electricity down here in the middle of a mountain? This was the behaviour of a criminal, or a fugitive, or a crazy person. She should turn.

She listened for a moment but couldn’t hear the boy’s voices or footsteps or anything resembling young male humans. Sound came from within the doorway. A hum of electricity, like the hum of a transistor tube. A hiss like steam running through a pipe. The slight clunk clunk of machine wheels, gears and cogs, meshing together. Also a beeping sound, like a distant tram.

One sneaky look through the doorway wouldn't be unsafe.

She crept up to the door.

Behind the door was a room as large as a garage, the kind of garage that could fit two cars and a little boat. It was filled with the kind of equipment you would find in a science laboratory. There were machines with dials, and flasks filled with liquid, and small metal wheels for opening and closing pipes, and clear tubes filled with coloured fluid. There were large brass kettle drums with smoky vapour coming from narrowed mouths. A glass globe sitting on a metal cabinet had an iron rod with two weighted balls spinning up with centrifugal force.

In the room’s centre was a circular platform, and on the platform was a dome that rose up several feet into the air. The dome was made of glass, or crystal, or perhaps some other clear stone. Above the dome was a metal arch that acted as a rail for a sphere that was attached to the rail with small wheels and a gear mechanism. The sphere glowed like a miniature sun.

Jane was mesmerised by the dome. It sparkled, reflecting the light from above. Under the dome Jane could see vapour, like clouds. All the machines that surrounded this central dome seemed to be attached to the dome in some way. Copper pipes were plugged into the side, and electrical cable and smaller wires that might have been for information processing were attached in copper junction boxes.

Jane looked around the room for the boys.

She couldn’t see them anywhere.

Over to the right there was a metal cabinet with an open door. The cabinet was also attached to arrays of pipes and cables and on the left hand side was a security keypad, presumably for securing the cabinet shut when it wasn’t in use.

Somebody spoke from the corner, from out of sight behind the dome on the round platform.

‘Don't be startled.’

The voice was male and old, and gurgled with phlegm.

Taking a step to the left, Jane saw an old priest seated in what looked like a dentist chair. Beside the chair was a pole with some kind of hand controller that held dials and red and green buttons. Jane recognised the priest. He was the local priest from the local parish, the one at the top of Shipley street where it joined the Mainway.

Above the old priest's head was a copper dome. Wires sprouted from the dome. It looked like one of the experimental machines for reading brains.

To the priests left, on a table, was a typewriter with wires coming out of the typewriter going up to the copper dome. The priest was wearing his vestments, as though he was about to deliver mass.

‘Father George, what on Earth are you doing here?’

The priest had his fingers up in a steeple, pointer fingers pressed to the point of his nose.

‘I am here to help you get the Wyld Book of Secrets.'

‘Do you have the book?’

‘Oh no … no no no.’

The old priest felt this was amusing and he laughed a little and shook his head.

‘I’m not that important ... I can't read the book. It is not written for me.'

The priest put his hands out, expansively, as though he was going to give a big explanation about the book, but then changed his mind.

'I don't have time to explain things. It is very important that you, and only you, retrieve the book. It will become apparent why in due time.'

'What is Tom's role?'

'I have no time to explain. Just go into the cabinet and ... soon you will understand.'

The priest motioned to the cabinet with the open door.

‘Tom has already gone into the cabinet, even though I didn't instruct him to. He was being chased by a portly lad.'

'What is in the chamber?'

Father George stood slowly, with effort, using his left hand as a lever off the chair's arm, and using his right arm to maintain balance. His joints must have creaked like loose floorboards. When he got upright and stopped swaying, the priest took a step to the circular platform and put a hand on the glass dome.

'Come and look.'

Jane stepped to the dome and put her hands on the glass. She peered through. Inside it was green and blue. The blue looked like water and the green looked like land. This was a model, or a diorama, of a country surrounded by water. The model was scaled down so far it was difficult to distinguish anything much besides the land and the water. There were lines of grey and white that could be mountains, and that thinnest of thin lines might be a river. A tiny, almost dot, could even be a town. You would need a microscope to see it properly though. Or maybe a telescope. Running across the dome was the mini orb that looked like a miniature sun.

‘What is it?’

‘This is a miniature world named Paris.’

‘You have made a miniature world and named it after Paris.’

‘I didn’t make it … and it isn’t named after the city. The city of Paris is named after this miniature world.’

‘That doesn’t begin to make sense.’

The priest stared at her for a moment, once again caught in a moment of indecision as to how much he should explain.

Finally he said, ‘Reality is not always what it seems.’

Between the land and the top of the dome there were clouds that looked real, like actual water vapour. The microscopic land seemed real, as though it wasn’t just a model but something living and breathing. Just then the orb that was mounted on the metal track above the dome sent out a flare.

‘That is actually burning,’ said Jane, and she pointed to the flaring light.

‘At a nuclear level.’

‘Is this an experiment? Is this a model biosphere?’

‘This is the world that you are about to enter. Go into the cabinet and it will bring you into this little world. I must give you one warning though ... a warning i was unable to deliver to Tom as he ran straight past me.'

'What is it?' said Jane, suddenly worried.

'When you arrive in the next world, head straight for the woods where you will find a path up into the trees. Do not tarry. You will be in danger until such a time as you are on the path into the trees.'

'What if ...'

'No more questions. You must go now. Find the boys and find the path into the trees. Go.'

Jane stepped up to the cabinet. She put her hand on the pressed metal door jamb and peered inside, but she could only see two feet then pure black. It was as though the light was being sucked inwards. As if in a dream, Jane stepped over the threshold. She looked back and the priest nodded encouragement, his eyebrows bumping up and down.

Three steps into the cabinet things got really weird. The cabinet began to shake with a jolting arhythmic motion, like the shake of an earthquake. Then the sound of humming became terribly loud and Jane felt her skin shrinking around her face, and she felt intense pain in her stomach. The pain shot from her belly through her body. A pain like an electric shock. Her muscles cramped. She couldn’t even call out because her throat and tongue and mouth were all cramped.

The physical pain became unbearable, then suddenly ceased.

Everything went silent.

Jane turned, but couldn’t see the entrance back through the cabinet into the room with the machine. All she saw was immense darkness. In the other direction there was light. The light moved, fading and growing, the way light does when clouds move across the sky, temporarily blocking the sun. Jane walked toward the light, and approached a fissure that opened to the outside world.

A breeze blew in through the fissure, and the breeze smelled of sweet mint and fallen leaves.

A moment later Jane stepped from the darkness into something wonderful.