Ice Claw

11

“You pay extra for a guided tour, which we don’t need, and it’s about half price if you’re under thirteen,” Max told Sayid as he pushed the wheelchair towards the entrance. The van had merged into the coast-road traffic, with a promise from Bobby to return in a few hours when they called him. “So, you’re under thirteen if they ask. I can’t get away with it but you can.”

“I thought I looked older than that,” Sayid moaned.

“No. In fact, you look about ten.”

“Ten!”

Max laughed. “Well, you behave like a ten-year-old. Now shut up and look stupid if they talk to you. That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

The small window at the side of the front door showed an office, where a middle-aged man, who minutes earlier had been thinking only of going home to the fish lunch his wife had prepared, now looked with anguish at the fair-haired boy trying to pull another youngster in a wheelchair up the steps. It was not worth offering to help and risking an injury to his back, the man reasoned; besides, the boy looked strong. But how would the youngster view the chateau in a wheelchair?

“Not exactly geared for disabled access,” Sayid said, wincing, as Max jammed the wheels up another step.

“Yeah, well, I’m hoping it’ll help us fool him later. I have a plan.”

Sayid looked at his friend, who gave him an encouraging smile in return. Max’s plans usually meant trouble. Sayid had told Max he didn’t want to be left out-but he knew he needed a degree of bravado he would find difficult to muster.

Max turned and looked at the German couple, who were already halfway up the steps.

“Bitte?” he called gently towards the stout man, whose face lit up with relief at hearing his own language-someone asking for help. He immediately walked back to Max and took control of pulling Sayid up the steps.

Max’s German was fairly basic-he was better at understanding than speaking the language-but he could pull off a good accent, and his limited vocabulary would be enough to achieve what he needed. The German tourist spoke rapidly. Max only grasped about one word in three, but he quickly assured the tourist that everything was OK. “Alles ist in ordnung.”

By the time they reached the studded door it seemed as though they had known each other for years. Just what Max had hoped for.

Max groaned.

The German turned. “Was? Was ist los?” he asked.

The tourist’s concern for the boy seemed genuine as Max shook his head sadly. The look on his face said everything. He didn’t have enough money. The stout man waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, turned back to the ticket seller and, using sign language, indicated he was paying for everyone.

Sayid looked over his shoulder at Max. What a clever ruse. How did Max get away with things like that? The Frenchman smiled, ushering “the German family” inside.

The ticket seller, by way of appeasing his guilt, as well as protecting the floors and the banisters, and avoiding the risk of walls being scraped, agreed to Max’s leaving the wheelchair in the entrance hall. Sayid got himself onto his crutches as Max tucked it into a darkened corner. The wheelchair would play its part later.

Black walls decorated with an ornate design of bright blue and gold enamel panels made the place seem like a miniature royal palace. Max thanked the German man for his generosity and tried to look appreciative when he explained that the chapel they now gazed at was a private place of contemplation for Antoine d’Abbadie and his wife, Virginie, and that the scientist-astronomer, who died in Paris in 1897, lay buried with his wife in a crypt under the altar.

Max saw the ticket seller go back into the office, thanked the German for his explanation and pointed the couple towards another room as he eased Sayid away.

“Come on, Sayid. We need to get around faster than a tourist.”

Sayid was well practiced on the crutches and quickly developed a swinging momentum as they moved towards the next room.

“Blimey, hang on. I can’t keep up!” Max laughed.

It wasn’t true, of course, but it made Sayid feel less of a hindrance than he thought he was. “Where do we start?” he said.

“Dunno yet. We’ll check down here first. There’s a load of stuff about Ethiopia,” Max said as they walked beneath richly painted scenes of ancient Abyssinia, as it was then known. “If Zabala spent who knows how many years working here, then maybe it means something.”

They stepped into a bedroom. The decor was overpowering. The four-poster bed seemed small compared to the lavish surroundings. Arabic letters flitted across large canvas panels.

“What does that say, Sayid?”

Sayid looked at the delicate calligraphy. “Er, not sure. Something about … Oh, hang on, it’s an old Arab proverb. My granddad was always saying things like that: ‘Never throw stones in your own drinking well’s water.’”

Max looked blank.

Sayid shrugged. “I think that’s what it says. Whatever that might mean.”

“Well, ‘Don’t do anything stupid close to home, as it’ll come back on you!’ Or ‘Make sure you’re connected to water.’ How would I know?” Max said.

“You’re the one looking for clues!”

“That’s not one of them, I’m sure. Come on.” Max moved quickly to another room, keeping an eye out for the ticket seller, but there was no sign of him, and he couldn’t hear the Germans anywhere either. He could see the edge of the parking lot through a window. Their car was still there. Good, that meant he didn’t have to do what he’d planned just yet. He entered the chateau’s dining room. Wood-paneled to shoulder height, buffalo skins on the wall and Antoine d’Abbadie’s family motto boxed next to his coat of arms. It was a Latin inscription.

“What’s that say?”

“Erm … it’s Latin….”

Sayid groaned. He knew Max’s ability on the subject.

Max hesitated. “I think it says ‘Life is but smoke.’” The phrase immediately reminded him of his African Bushman friend, whose people believed that life was a dream and one day we would all wake up in the real world.

“Do you think it might be a clue? Life is smoke. I mean, we’ve got Latin sayings, Arab verses, it could be any of these things,” Sayid said.

“Like that, you mean?” Max pointed at the backs of the dining-room chairs surrounding the marquetry inlaid table. They were covered in green velvet, but on each one was an Arabic letter. Max stood back, walked around the table. “What do they mean?” he asked Sayid.

“I’m not sure, Max.”

“What? Suddenly you can’t spell?”

“It’s Amharic. Ethiopian.”

The German spoke in English. He was in the doorway, smiling as Max spun round, instincts suddenly wary. When he had left the tourist couple at the chapel, it would have been natural for them to carry on their tour on that side of the chateau. And Max believed he would have heard even the softest of footfalls across the hall and down the passageway.

Why so silent? Perhaps Max had been distracted by Sayid and all the different languages on display.

“I thought you were English, though your German accent is good,” the rotund man said, smiling at Max. He gestured with the tour pamphlet for the chateau. “If you get the letters on the chairs in order, they spell out a warning: ‘May traitors never be seated at this table.’” He gave Max and Sayid another smile and handed Max the pamphlet. “We have another one. Enjoy the tour, boys,” he said, ushering his wife into the corridor.

Sayid slumped onto one of the dining-room chairs and rubbed his aching leg. “Well, traitors not being welcomed to nosh might be something.”

Max shook his head. “This is all window dressing. None of it concerns us. If Zabala worked here for all those years, he would have been involved in the science bit. There’s a library and observatory upstairs.”

He checked the corridor. The Germans were just going into one of the other rooms, so he and Sayid turned into the main hallway, where the carved, wooden-banistered stairs began.

“Come on,” Max said. “Piggyback time.”

As he pumped his legs up the stairs, the extra weight stretched his tendons and muscles, but it was effortless; the knowledge that he was getting closer to where Zabala had spent his working life boosted his strength.

On the upper landing there were huge paintings of tribal chiefs from Ethiopia dressed in white robes, with spear-carrying warriors protecting them, the whole tableau set against a deep blue sky. The vibrancy of the chateau’s decoration seemed so out of place when compared to the rough simplicity of how Zabala had lived on the mountain. Max reminded himself that Zabala became a monk after he stopped working here, because of his failure to convince everyone that something terrible was going to happen. The Academy of Sciences ran the chateau after Antoine d’Abbadie’s death, so Zabala would have had the full weight of the French scientific community against him when he failed to prove that Lucifer-whoever that was-would cause some kind of mass destruction. A Basque outsider, a man consumed by his failure, but eventually murdered because his prediction must finally have some validity. Who would benefit from stopping Zabala’s theory becoming known?

Distorted shadows lengthened across the walls. The dark wood sucked in what natural light was left to the day. Arabian shields and swords, once held by warriors, adorned the walls. Antelope trophy heads stared in dumb fear, gazing sightless over the flamboyant neo-Gothic castle they would never have seen in their natural lives.

Max suddenly found all the paintings and decorations overpowering. The weight of color on the walls and ceilings oppressive, like a clown’s face overladen with makeup, concealing misery beneath a false smile. They turned a corner into another room.

“Wow!” Sayid said in amazement.

Bare floorboards; a long, solid-looking table sat square in the middle of the room, bearing a few relics of scientific machinery and an old manual typewriter. Charts, files and folders were neatly stacked in custom-built bookshelves from floor to ceiling. An explorer-scientist’s lifetime’s work. The darkness, from the almost black timber of the ceiling, swallowed the very top shelves of books. This was getting close to where a scientist or researcher could stay in splendid isolation and concentrate on the complexities of his or her project. No overkill on decoration here. It was as if Max and Sayid had stepped behind a facade and found the true heart of the chateau. Was this where Zabala’s secret lay?

Curved, cast-iron supports bore the weight of the gallery that went round the whole room halfway up the wall. The ceiling must have been about six meters high and not a space was to be seen between the soldier-rigid volumes. Dulled gold on black lettering spread across the top of the far wall. It was in Basque; Max had no idea what it meant.

Max knew his dad could spend years in this room, examining every paper written by d’Abbadie. He ran his fingers along book spines. A gentle hum drew his eyes to a humidifier in the corner. Yes, that made sense. They were barely a kilometer from the page-rotting dampness of the Basque coast. These books could be either packed away and held in some philistine of a building in a city, or allowed to remain here where they belonged. A tribute to the achievements of one man and his desire to explore the world and its people, the stars and planets, and his dream of living in a pretend castle.

From what Max could see, the lower shelves were mostly astronomical publications. The folders were protected by strong, thick brown paper. He touched his finger along their edges, pulled one from the shelf and placed it on the table.

“Sayid, grab another one of these. From about twenty years ago, just before Zabala left here.”

The folder was heavy, the big pages cumbersome. Max’s hand hovered over the intricate data. A star chart. Lines bisected each other, stars had numbers, some had letters. Magnifications, magnitudes, it was a meaningless panorama of the galaxy as far as Max could tell. He flipped the pages quickly. There was nothing that could even resemble the name Zabala.

“They’re missing,” Sayid said.

“What?” Max moved to where his friend shuffled along the wide shelves, the only places big enough to hold the star charts.

“The folders go way back. Look”-he pointed one out-“1904, all the way up, 1927, and so on. How long would Zabala have worked here?”

“I don’t know,” Max said.

“Well, if he was here for, say, ten or fifteen years, up to twenty years ago there’s a whole batch missing.”

It made sense. If Zabala had tried to prove something and failed, gone public and brought embarrassment and derision on his scientific colleagues, they would have taken anything he had researched and archived it somewhere, or at worst destroyed it.

“See if there’s a book or something that would list any of the scientists that worked here,” Max told Sayid. “I’ve got to check on something.”

Max automatically looked at his wrist, but of course his father’s watch was missing. A twinge of regret, which he pushed aside. “Time, Sayid?”

“Nearly half-four. They close at five.”

Max nodded and walked quickly to the stair landing.

Looking out of the window, he saw that the Germans’ car had gone. He ran to another window, which looked out onto the fields towards the coast. The Frenchman was locking a small garden-type gate that closed off a footpath towards the cliffs.

Max pounded downstairs to the entrance hall and glanced at the office. The man’s scruffy black anorak was on a hook, so that meant he was probably doing his rounds. He’d be back.

Max trundled Sayid’s wheelchair down the corridor into the chapel, then folded the chair and hid it behind the door. Odds were the ticket seller would check inside the chateau before locking up for the night. Even if he went into the chapel he wouldn’t spot the wheelchair.

And if Max was lucky the man would see that the Germans’ car and Sayid’s chair were no longer there and believe that the whole “German family” had left.

Max sprinted upstairs, two at a time, got back to Sayid and moved closer to him so his voice wouldn’t echo.

“Tell me when it’s quarter to five. Anything?”

Sayid had an embossed leather book on the table next to a rolled-up plan. “I found Zabala.” He grinned. “I couldn’t find any kind of register, but I reckoned those scientists wouldn’t want to miss out on their bit of glory, so they wouldn’t chuck anything away with their own pictures in.” Sayid opened the ledger-sized book. “Different photos of the scientists who worked here until the 1970s, then it looks as though the place was closed down.”

Sayid was pointing at a group photograph. The caption was in a small typeface, but Max could read Zabala’s name.

Two rows of men: the front row seated, the others standing. Zabala stood with his arms folded and a briar pipe clamped between his teeth as he smiled for the camera.

“But I saw newspaper cuttings from the 1980s,” Max said.

“Then my guess is he carried on doing his own research here afterwards.”

“There must have been a reason. What’s here in the chateau? Stuff from Africa, different languages, astronomy …” Max remembered the newspaper piece on Zabala. “And astrology. He mixed the two. So there’s a link somewhere, Sayid. The Arabs were major players in astronomy….”

Sayid closed the book.

“Astronomy was OK because that could be used to tell farmers when to rotate crops and what have you, but astrology was unlawful.”

“OK, so perhaps it’s just an astronomy clue. Europeans mixed the two. There’s a load of stuff here about old d’Abbadie’s journey across Africa. Keep looking. And do it quietly. What’s this?”

He unfurled the rolled plans.

“Architect’s drawings of the chateau,” Sayid said.

They held the uncooperative edges of the plan flat. Max scooted his finger around the drawing, tracing the internal layout of the chateau in case there was a hidden room they had missed, or, more likely, that was kept purposefully from the public.

“Here’s where we are now, here’s the observatory …”

“We should look in there,” Sayid said.

“Yeah, I know. I just hoped there would be something in this room that would help us. This is where all the records are kept. The observatory hasn’t been in use for a quarter of a century.”

A footfall scuffed the floor below. The Frenchman was on his rounds. He wheezed and coughed. Lights were going off all the way through the chateau, but were replaced by the softer glow of all-night security lights, small spotlights strategically positioned to throw a cone of illumination across a corner or edge of stairway.

Shadows changed the shapes of the walls, defacing the huge paintings, making an eerie no-man’s-land of the pockets of darkness.

Max needed to get into the office. He’d spotted the control box for the chateau’s alarm system when they had first entered the building, and it needed to be switched off if he and Sayid were going to spend the next few hours hunting for clues.

Max paused and crouched, watching through the banisters. The old man was pulling on his jacket. He moved towards the front door-going through his nightly routine.

A warning creak, like a snapping stick, seemed to thunder down the stairs. Sayid!

Had the old man heard? He turned but didn’t look up, then stepped back into the office, took his cigarettes from the desk, closed the office door and moved towards the main entrance.

Max turned, stepping lightly but rapidly upstairs.

Sayid had frozen, as if his foot had trodden on an antipersonnel mine that would spring up and explode if he moved. He winced when he saw his friend emerge from the staircase void.

The door downstairs clunked closed.

Max gave a thumbs-up to Sayid, who nodded, eased his foot forward and swung himself towards the library. Max peeped out of the window and saw the man hobbling towards the gate pillars at the end of the drive. The office door was unlocked. Max could smell the lingering residue of tobacco in the air as he slipped inside.

He opened the alarm box’s cover. A simple series of switches with the master switch clearly marked.

It was off. The Frenchman must have forgotten to switch the circuit on. Maybe the chateau was so secure no one could get in anyway. Security systems were a nuisance and a curse when one was forever being dragged out of a warm bed for a false alarm. Whatever the reason, the main switch was off, and that was all Max was interested in. Now they could get to work.

Once again he ran quickly back up the stairs, stepping across a darkened corner. Yellow, crinkle-cut moonlight filtered through the stained-glass window. At the top of the staircase the life-sized statue of a young Ethiopian warrior stood silently, a glass lamp held high, guarding the darkness of the stairwell, showing the way. Max murmured, “Thanks, mate.”

The chateau, full of half-light, relics and mysteries, whispered silence. Max could hear the gentle turn of paper rustling in the library. As he left the upper landing, turning into the passageway for the library and Sayid, he had no idea they were not alone.

Something moved in the shadows below.