The Gossamer Crown: Book One of The Gossamer Sphere (5 page)

Kevin’s voice was even weaker when he asked, “For whom?”

Caitlin shook her head slowly.  “That, I do not know.”

En route to London, England

The charter jet had ten luxurious leather seats, only three of which were occupied.  Lizbeth wondered at the expense.  Caitlin sat in the co-pilot’s chair, so Lizbeth hadn’t seen her at all throughout the flight to New York, where they refueled before taking off again for London.

Kevin snoozed in his seat and Zach had his head buried in his laptop, leaving Lizbeth to her thoughts.  They were as turbulent as the jetstream propelling them across the Atlantic.

She’d waited in the hotel room last night for Caitlin, who told them she had to arrange for their flight and would be back later.  As Lizbeth lay in bed under the soft yellow light of one small lamp, she stared at Caitlin’s luggage, a nondescript black nylon bag placed in the middle of the unoccupied bed.  It had a tag that read, “Caitlin O’Connor,” with an address in Ireland.  Both zippered compartments were secured with tiny silver padlocks.  The bag was normal, not at all intriguing, unless you considered who it belonged to.  For Lizbeth, it might as well have been Pandora’s Box.

She’d finally given up on sleep while the temptation of Caitlin’s bag sat so invitingly close at hand.  Lizbeth could be in and out in less than a minute, with no one, not even the all-powerful Caitlin, the wiser.

She peeled back the heavy polyester bedspread and slid off the stiff mattress.  She walked to the door and peered out the peephole, then for good measure, opened the door and looked up and down the hall.  After closing the door, she flipped the security lock that would keep Caitlin out even if she used her key card.  The bag sat there like a present on Christmas morning.

She opened her own suitcase and took out her makeup case.  Underneath her eyelash curler were three metal tools she hoped could be passed off as dental picks.  She’d only brought three in case her luggage was searched and she had to explain why she was in possession of a professional lock-picking set.  The smallest pick was in her hand when she heard the quiet beep of the key card in the door.  She was surprised and yet not surprised when Caitlin entered as if the extra security lock had never been fastened.

Lizbeth didn’t say a word, just replaced the pick and put her makeup case back in her suitcase.  Caitlin lifted her bag off the bed and took it into the bathroom.  Lizbeth got back into bed and tried to reconcile the ordinary sounds of sleep preparation, water running, teeth brushing, toilet flushing, with the extraordinary person making them.  When Caitlin returned to the room, Lizbeth pretended to be asleep, knowing it was futile, but not caring.

Now, on the plane, she wondered if Caitlin had known she would try to break into the bag.  Caitlin had been a friend of her father’s, a cohort even, since she’d participated in his magic act.  She’d be aware of his legendary skills, and might logically conclude that Lizbeth had inherited them.  Although Lizbeth wouldn’t exactly say she’d been born with her talents.  She’d worked long and hard to develop the expertise of a lock picker and the nimble fingers of a pickpocket.  Not that she ever stole anything, really.  Not much and not often, and never from anyone who couldn’t afford the loss.

Lizbeth concluded grudgingly that there had probably been nothing in Caitlin’s bag worth seeing.  The woman was the mystery, not anything she might have on her.

Kevin stirred in his seat across the aisle from her, letting out a noise that sounded like he either snorted or ripped one.  Lizbeth plugged her nose just in case and saw from Zach’s profile that he was suppressing a smile.  He looked back at her and waved his hand in the air.  Lizbeth grinned.

“I snore sometimes and it always wakes me up,” Kevin said, rubbing his nose and stretching his short legs out in front of him.  “You people ought to grow up.”

Lizbeth heard Zach say quietly, “Do we have a choice?” before he turned back to his laptop.

“What are you doing?” she asked.  The screen was split into two windows.  In one, he’d isolated the gossamer crown from the rest of the picture he’d drawn.  In the other window, it looked like he’d accessed a search engine.

“Trying to find the crown.  It’s our primary mission, isn’t it?” Zach answered with the mild sarcastic tone she was beginning to associate with nearly everything he said.

“Caitlin said the crown was in your blood,” Kevin said.

“It’s in your blood, too, dude.  You want a knife so you can look inside?”

Kevin said something Lizbeth didn’t understand, a short phrase in another language.  Zach placed his laptop in the seat next to him and stood in the aisle.  He responded back in the same language.

With a flash of alarm, she realized they were about to get into some kind of ridiculous altercation.  “Hey!  We’re supposed to be a team.  Don’t be jerks, okay?”

After a tense moment with the young men staring each other down, Kevin finally looked away.  “Yeah, whatever.”

Thinking fast, Lizbeth said, “Maybe we should pool our resources.  You know, try and figure out what Caitlin thinks we’re capable of.  I mean – I can do stuff.”

Zach didn’t relax his stance one bit, but he said, “So can I.”

“Like what?” Kevin asked.  Lizbeth was relieved that it didn’t sound like a challenge.  Zach was tall, but Kevin was solidly built.  She didn’t know which one would win in a fight, and didn’t want to find out at cruising altitude above the Atlantic Ocean.

“I could tie you into a pretzel,” Zach said matter-of-factly.

Kevin raised his eyebrows. “I believe you.  But you can bet I’d get in a few punches first.”  He held up a fist, and to Lizbeth, it looked as big as a ham.

“You got short man complex or something?  Must be the dwarf in you,” Zach said.

That did it.  Kevin lunged for him at the same time that Lizbeth shouted for Caitlin and threw herself into the aisle between them.  Lizbeth and Kevin scuffled briefly, as Zach stepped back to let her body slow Kevin down.  She felt Kevin’s hands on her shoulders and prepared herself to get tossed aside, but Caitlin poked her head out of the cockpit.

“You’re going to want to sit down,” she told them.

Lizbeth felt strange all of a sudden, just like she’d felt during the massive aurora.  She subsided into her seat.

“What is that?”  Zach asked.  “Is there going to be another earthquake?”

Caitlin shook her head.  “A message is coming in.  It’s what scientists call a substorm in space.”

Lizbeth had a hard time thinking of the earth as a huge communication satellite, but this made sense. “That’s what causes the aurora effect.  A message.”

“Yes.  The sphere harnesses the earth’s magnetic field lines, which stretch far out into space.  They are the gossamers that capture an incoming message.  The problem is:  the sphere is having trouble receiving the messages, so it’s tuning itself.”

“You mean, like trying to find better reception on the radio?” Zach asked.

“Exactly.  The sphere is going to keep switching channels until it’s working properly again,” Caitlin said.  “It will adjust everything it can, including plate tectonics.”

The implication that more devastation was coming struck Lizbeth hard.  Her mother and grandmother lived in one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world.

Caitlin looked out the nearest window.  “You need to brace yourselves.  Now.”

Lizbeth fastened her seatbelt.  Kevin and Zach sat as Caitlin disappeared back into the cockpit.

Moments later, the lights in the cabin dimmed and the plane dipped.  Lizbeth’s stomach lurched just like on a plunging roller coaster.  She saw Zach’s laptop screen go black.  The plane dipped again and she gripped the arms of her seat.  Then a wave of vertigo hit.  She felt sick and dizzy, like being trapped in a whirlpool, but the plane wasn’t spinning, just falling.  They were falling at a steep angle now and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.  An oxygen mask popped out of the overhead and dangled in front of her.  She couldn’t let go of the armrests.  Across from her, she was vaguely aware of the sound of retching.

Then it was over.  The vertigo disappeared, the lights blinked back on and the plane leveled out.  She saw Zach sit up from a slump and tap some keys on his laptop.  Kevin looked sheepish as he mopped something up with a handful of tissues.  He mumbled an apology about the smell.  Caitlin appeared in the cabin. 

“What happened?” Lizbeth asked.

“It’s as I feared.  The gossamer sphere has caused a magnetic reversal.”

“What does that mean?” Zach asked.

Lizbeth knew.  A magnetic reversal hadn’t happened in 800,000 years and scientists surmised that the process was thousands of years in the making, not instantaneous. 

“The north and south poles have switched,” she said.

East of England

Zach expected another hotel room, but Caitlin directed the cab driver out of London proper to a cottage on several acres of ungroomed land.  The cottage looked to Zach like it’d been built in Victorian times.  Patches of siding that weren’t overrun by ivy appeared to have once been white.  On the far side of a thick, green pasture, a fenced paddock leaned into what looked like a barn or stables.  As Caitlin recovered a key from under a web-encrusted flower pot, he heard a plaintive neigh on the cool morning air.

Before she could use the key, the door opened and a large man with grizzled stubble on his slab of a chin frowned down at them.  He was so wide and tall, even Zach had to crane his neck to see his face.  While Kevin hadn’t turned out to be an actual dwarf, this man was clearly a giant.  The man made a noise that sounded like, “Yup,” and disappeared into the dark interior, leaving the door open.  Caitlin entered and Zach and the others followed.

“Friendly,” Lizbeth said.

Past the gloom of the entranceway, Zach saw into a room lit by a lantern.  The orange light cast dark shadows from a grim dozen or so mounted hunting trophies.  Caitlin led them the opposite way, up a dark, narrow wooden staircase to the second floor.  The floorboards creaked every step of the way, and Zach thought a person wouldn’t be able to sneak around much in a place like this.  An ordinary person, that is.

Upstairs, Caitlin must have felt her way to a doorknob in the blackness, because she opened a door and muted light flooded the cramped landing space.  She pointed to another door and said, “Kevin, Zach.”  Zach looked at Kevin, who shrugged and went first.

The room was spare, with no light source other than that filtering in through the one small, shuttered window.  Brown wool blankets covered metal-framed twin beds about a foot apart from each other.  A bureau with four drawers was the only other furniture. Kevin dropped his duffle bag on one of the beds, and Zach watched as he rooted around inside and pulled out a clean shirt.  Zach’s precipitous leave from school meant he had no clothing besides the jeans and shirt he’d been wearing since yesterday.

“I’m going to find a bathroom,” Kevin said.  “I hope they have an indoor toilet.”

“Don’t fall in.”

 After Kevin left, Zach tried in vain to find a light switch or a lamp.  In a sudden burst of panic, he dropped to the floor in a desperate search for an outlet.  When he didn’t find one, he went to the window and looked out across the pasture to the lonely country road, trying to remember how far it was to someplace with a power source for his laptop.  He’d used it on the plane until the battery went low.  Then he’d tried to get some sleep in his seat, but Kevin proved to not
always
, as he’d claimed, wake himself with snoring.

The blanket looked soft as sandpaper and the bed as inviting as a church pew, but Zach eyed it anyway.  He was so tired and overwhelmed by the events of the last twenty-four hours that he felt his control slipping.  Anger, his constant companion for as long as he could remember, boiled beneath a tightly-sealed barrier of what he liked to think of as psychic energy.  He knew it wasn’t fair to take his frustration out on Kevin, but the guy just grated on his nerves.  He was so affable, so weak, couldn’t even handle a little nose-dive without spewing barf all over the plane. 

Not that Zach would admit it, but he’d been scared, too, especially after finding out how many airplanes had gone down after communications had been crippled.  All over the world, the powerful substorm and unexpected magnetic reversal had disrupted essential systems, many of which hadn’t recovered in time to avoid disaster.  There hadn’t been any lasting problems at Heathrow, though, and they’d landed without incident.

Zach sat on the bed, not surprised when the thin mattress sank beneath him on squeaky springs.  Sleep would be impossible.  Unlike his roommate, Zach was a light sleeper.  Besides, Caitlin might drag them off at any time, since they were supposed to find a way to stop the drilling vessel from going back out to Silverpit.

His eyes had adjusted to the darkness now and he noticed something on the wall across the room, an irregular bump in the faded wallpaper.  The bed squealed as he bounced up and strode across the room.

“There you are,” he said to the outlet.  He hadn’t seen it before because it was located halfway up the wall next to the bureau, and the plate was covered in the same brown-on-burgundy flower pattern as the walls.

He had his laptop out and ready to plug until he realized the outlet was shaped differently.  He thought about how nice it would be to put his fist through that horribly papered wall.

Someone was coming up the stairwell.  From the sound of the heavy steps, Zach figured it was the huge man who’d let them in.  Moments later, the man appeared in the doorway.  He had to duck considerably to get under the doorframe and Zach noted the top of his balding head was only inches from the ceiling.

“Thought you might need these,” he said in a rumbling baritone.

He handed over a desk lamp and what Zach hoped was a plug adapter.

“Thanks.”

The huge man nodded and turned to leave.

“What’s your name?” Zach asked.

Brown eyes under an exaggerated brow met Zach’s.  “Simon.”

“Are you a giant?”

The corners of Simon’s thick lips dipped in a frown.  “My pituitary gland produces too much growth hormone.  The politically correct term for it is ‘horizontally challenged.’”

It took Zach a couple of heartbeats to get the joke.

“Oh,” he said with a little laugh.  “So what is this place?  Some kind of hostel for travelers on their way to save the world?”

Something flickered in Simon’s eyes.  “It’s called a farm.”

“No offense, man, but this place doesn’t look very prosperous.”

“It’s secluded and serves my needs.”  Simon ducked under the doorframe and turned.  “You may want to consider carefully who you talk to about your plans.  Not everyone wants the crown to be found.”

He disappeared into the gloom of the landing before Zach could question him further.

“Great,” Zach said to the empty room.  Now he had to keep an eye out for enemies.  He wasn’t intimidated, far from it, but for some reason he thought of Lizbeth.  Of the four of them, she seemed the most vulnerable.

Kevin came back into the room and asked, “Heard anything about what the plan is?”

“No.”  Zach attached the adapter and plugged in his laptop, gratified when it booted right up and even more pleased when he discovered Simon had wireless Internet.  The network was unsecured, but out here in the boonies there probably weren’t a lot of hackers lurking about, and he didn’t hesitate to connect to it.  Behind him, he heard Kevin sit on his bed.

Zach pulled up a search engine and typed in “shapeshifter.”  The results ranged from products to games to personal websites.  He clicked on a Wikipedia article and read it.  Nowhere did the article suggest the phenomenon was anything other than make-believe.  After following almost every link included in the references used to write the article, he checked out the external links section.  Most were sites showcasing stories about shapeshifters, but there were a few that claimed shapeshifters were real.  The first one Zach visited made him shake his head at the loonies on the net.  The site’s forum was populated with people claiming they had proof, usually via badly doctored digital photos or video, that shapeshifters were among us.  He scoffed inwardly until it occurred to him that he’d flown halfway around the world in the company of one such.  But Caitlin said she was the last one.  So unless these idiots had managed to get
her
on film, they were just as deluded as they sounded.

The second site he clicked on didn’t even appear to be about shapeshifters at first.  The site graphics—interlacing lines and knot work from traditional Celtic art—framed the topics.  The banner at the top proclaimed, “Home of Seamus the Bard.”  Below it was a subheading that read, “Before the Celtic people had a written language they had a rich oral tradition.  In the employ of kings and nobles, druidic bards recited generations of family histories and sang of long ago heroic deeds.”  A column to the right had a blog with titles such as, “Bards—the First Rappers?” and “Neo-druidism: These Blokes are Just Making this Dreck Up.”

On the left was the site map.  Zach clicked on “About Me.”  Under a photograph of a blue-eyed man with his hair pulled back, he read the first paragraph.

“In the first century AD, Agricola, the governor of Roman-occupied Britain, was instructed by the emperor to find a way to conquer the intractable peoples of Ireland.  To that end, he gave asylum to Eithne, the exiled queen of a deposed Irish High King, and her son Túathal.  Agricola offered the loan of a legion of Roman soldiers for an invasion on Túathal’s behalf, but Eithne discovered his true plan was to arrest Túathal after the victory.  In secrecy, she summoned her loyal bard, the Druid Seamus, whose name means “one who supplants.”  On her orders, Seamus killed Agricola, disposed of the body, and took his shape.  From that day forward, Governor Agricola became a respected administrator and commander.  Ireland was safe from Roman rule.”

Zach thought this Seamus guy, at least, had an imagination.  He closed the link and went back to the research he’d been working on before his battery conked out.  He’d forgotten all about Kevin until his voice startled him.

“So what are you doing?”

“Research.”

“On what?”

Zach pulled up one of the web pages he’d been reading on the plane.  “Caitlin said the gossamer crown was stolen along with the Irish Crown Jewels, but there’s no mention of it in any of the articles on the theft.  She also said that just about everyone who touched the crown would get sick and die, so I traced each person reported or suspected to have come in contact with the jewels.”

He heard the bedsprings squeak again as Kevin came up behind him.  “Find anything?”

“Actually, yeah.  The guy everyone figured stole the jewels was named Shackleton.  He was the brother of the famous explorer.  One of his acquaintances, who was considered a possible accomplice, was a passenger on the Titanic in 1912.  He went down with the ship.”

“I don’t see the connection,” Kevin said.

“That’s because I haven’t gotten to it.”  Zach tried not to sound as irritated as he felt.  “So, there were a lot of court cases in the eighties and nineties about who has salvage rights to Titanic, right?  I guess under international maritime law, you have to recover something from a wreck in order to have a claim to it.  One of the salvage companies that originally filed a claim had to drop out because everyone involved died.  The owner, his wife, the captain of the ship and about half the crew.  All died of some mystery illness.”

“What artifacts did they recover from the Titanic?”

“I don’t know, but the name of the salvage ship was
The Gossamer
.”