‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she says again. She is boxed in the yellow light of the doorway like a toy fairy.
‘It was fun,’ he says. He is outside now, on the flagstones; as he stands there he feels the cold scurry away with the warmth of his body, hungry goblins happening upon an unguarded bakery.
‘Well, I’d better go and do my homework,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ Skippy says. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
The door closes. He gets his bike and turns dazedly towards the darkness. The gates glide slowly open before him, a mouth spitting him out. Then behind him he hears the latch.
‘Daniel, wait!’ She is running over the flagstones, her bare arms luminous in the dusk. ‘Wait,’ she says, arriving.
He notices how sometimes her eyes, even when they are open, are closed, like when she was kissing him upstairs; now they are open-open again, urgent.
She composes herself, suppresses her shivers. ‘That was really brave, what you did today.’
Skippy semi-shrugs, pretending not to know what she’s talking about.
‘It was – I mean, I know I told you not to, but still it was so amazing that someone would care enough about me to do that, even when…’ There is more but it’s like she can’t say it; instead she just gazes at him, pleadingly, biting her lip, cheeks flushed with cold, as if she wants him to guess what it is, or she thinks he might even know what it is; but Skippy doesn’t know, and just looks back at her helplessly. ‘Oh,’ she moans, like this is something she shouldn’t be doing, and then the next thing she is kissing him again, and this time it’s like the first time, like they’re tumbling down into a dream, warm and sweet with sleep, everything above left behind a million miles away – it’s funny how a kiss, which is just two mouths, can feel like this, like for ever, like infinity.
‘Okay.’ She detaches herself so she can look at him.
‘I’ll call you about Friday,’ he says, not able to keep from smiling but managing at least to stop himself saying I love you.
She studies his face before answering, suddenly, for some reason, very solemn. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Goodbye, Daniel.’ She hurries back inside, and the door clunks shut behind her.
Skippy reels down the driveway and onto the road. He wants to paint her name across the sky. He wants to shout it out to the world at the top of his voice. He makes his way back to Seabrook through the starry night, barely noticing the time go, even though he has to wheel Niall’s bike alongside him – he must have ridden over glass or something on the way up here, because when he came out of her house both his tyres had punctures.
In the afterglow of Skippy’s victory, the mood in Ruprecht’s dorm room, where Team Condor has assembled for its final run-through, is buoyant. As omens go, the fight couldn’t have been better; and now the stage seems set for a second contribution to the history books.
The full line-up looks like this: R. Van Doren (Team Commander and Scientific Director), D. Hoey (First Officer) and M. Bianchi (Navigator and Cinematographer) constitute the ‘A-unit’ that will carry the pod into St Brigid’s; G. Sproke has the dual role of i) Janitor Diversion, and ii) Point Man back at Seabrook HQ.
The plan is simple and bold. While the St Brigid’s janitor, Brody, is being diverted by Geoff in search of a lost football, planted earlier that evening, the A-unit – having neutralized Brody’s dog, Nipper, with dog biscuits – will breach the partition wall via rope-ladder, Geoff keeping them apprised of his and the janitor’s exact location by casually singing the theme song to Bunnington Village, which apparently is the only song he knows all the words to. Upon successful breach of the main school building, the A-unit will proceed to the Locked Room and unlock the Locked Door using Ruprecht’s OpenSesame!™ Skeleton Key, ‘Guaranteed 100% Effective on Every Known Form of Lock’, as endorsed by Mossad and purchased by Ruprecht on eBay; an electric drill, purloined from Potato-Head Tomms’s woodwork class, is to be brought as backup. The pod having been erected in the Locked Room, and the power cable relayed back to the lab via Geoff, a portal into higher-dimensional space will be opened, this time recorded by a functional camera, and international fame and fortune, newspaper headlines to the tune of NEW DAWN USHERED IN BY SCHOOLBOY, last-second rescue of Earth from ecological disaster, golden era of harmony and peace, etc., etc., will ensue.
‘Are there any questions?’
‘What about this Ghost Nun?’ Mario says.
Ruprecht pooh-poohs the notion. ‘There is no Ghost Nun. That’s just some silly story they tell to make the girls behave.’
‘Oh,’ Mario says, not looking entirely convinced.
The time of the strike has been set for nineteen hundred hours, when the residents of St Brigid’s, staff and students alike, will be in the dining hall. With twenty minutes to go, everything is in place. The pod lies on the floor in a tennis bag, attending its hour. Geoff pores over the instructions for the Cosmic Energy Compressor. Victor Hero has been primed to sign the team in at study hall. Ruprecht paces about, working on his speech for the camera: ‘… history books have been written in pencil… though we be young, scorn us not… (awestruck look) Can it be so? Are we the lucky ones for whom God has left the door on the latch? (With growing sense of rapture) Into what lambent destiny have we taken the first step?’
And though none says it, this same lambent destiny seems already to invest the room, to fizz at their pores, as if the Mound, anticipating their arrival, has sent its emissaries to hurry them on. Or rather, sent her emissaries. Earlier that evening, seeking to fill the nervous interim as much as for extra information, Geoff had returned to the Druid’s website, and found tucked away there a poem by Robert Graves, on the subject of the White Goddess who ruled the Otherworld:
If strange things happen where she is,So that men say that graves openAnd the dead walk, or that futurityBecomes a womb, and the unborn are shed,Such portents are not to be wondered at,Being tourbillions in Time madeBy the strong pulling of her bladed mindThrough that ever-reluctant element.
None of them knew quite what it meant (‘what’s a tourbillion?’) and Ruprecht said it had no immediate relevance to the task at hand; but ever since then, each of them finds himself with a vivid mental impression of the Goddess herself, imprisoned by floorboards and masonry and centuries of coercive unbelief, somewhere underneath their sister school; and experiences this curiously externalized impatience, as of something tugging at their sleeves…
Then, with five minutes to Zero Hour, there is a groan from the doorway; they turn to see Dennis propped wretchedly against the jamb. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he croaked. ‘A minute ago I was fine, then suddenly I started feeling really bad.’
‘What do you mean, “bad”?’
‘I don’t know… Kind of tingly? And energized? It’s totally inexplicable.’
‘Holy smoke,’ Geoff looking round wildly to the others, ‘it must be his radiation sickness returning.’
‘No, no,’ Dennis dismisses this. ‘Although now that you mention it, the symptoms are completely identical.’
‘Will you be able to do the mission?’ Ruprecht wants to know.
‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ Dennis says, and then collapses.
‘What are we going to do?’ Geoff says after they have carried him over to the bed.
‘We have to get the nurse,’ Niall says.
‘No nurse,’ Ruprecht replies tersely. ‘Nurses ask questions.’
‘But Ruprecht, he’s sick.’
‘We can’t jeopardize the mission. Not now.’
‘Maybe you could go instead of him?’ Geoff proposes to Niall.