Indigo's Key

By Katrina A Fleming and Lauren Elise

A new clue is uncovered from the Vatican and goes on public display, turning 12-year-old Indigo's quest into a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bowker
• Release date: Aug 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780648847618

Katrina A Fleming

K.A.Fleming is a creative producer, director and writer of film, TV, musical theatre and stand up comedy from Melbourne, Australia. She has lived and worked in Los Angeles (USA), Singapore and Edmonton (Canada). Katrina went to Altona Primary School, graduated from Westbourne Grammar, spent a year in Canada on youth exchange at R.F. Staples High. She has degrees from Monash University and Melbourne University in English, Psychology and Teaching. Katrina spent her youth growing up performing in musical theatre, training at her ballet school, waterskiing and camping with her family and at fun family events with the Freemason Masonic Lodge. Primarily she works; as a film producer and also teaches, on occasion, in the performing arts/theatre studies, English and media, in primary and secondary schools and lectures at Universities on screenwriting and film production. Telling stories is at the core of her life and career. "Other than saving lives, what could be more important than creating, experiencing and sharing stories with other people? When you laugh and cry with another person, you get to know them. This creates connection, knowledge, compassion and friendship."

Book preview

1. Miss Adventure

Blood is rushing to my head, filling up my brain. It’s not the refrigerator-sized security guards, or the confounding alarm system, or even the fear of being arrested that worries me. All I can think of, hovering in mid-air, is the poor cleaner who will have to mop up my gross blood sprayed all over the floor if I mess up. And the art-conservationist forced to use a cotton bud to carefully remove droplets of my Sinclair blood from the ancient scroll, tut, tut tutting under her breath, thoroughly unimpressed.

I’m hanging upside down from a ventilation shaft in the ceiling of the National Gallery using the strength of my legs to hold me up, wrapped around white silk cloth. My focus on the ancient scroll within a glass exhibit case blurs and blinks clear but the sharpest sight of all is myself, in the reflective marble floor below, beckoning me to go SPLAT! This is not what my mother had in mind when she sent me to circus school to improve my ‘power and poise’.

The newspapers will report that the ancient scroll has survived humanity for one thousand years, but could not survive one minute with me, Indigo.

That’s been my nickname for as long as I can remember. Indigo’s my favourite shade of blue. My brother, Brett, says it’s because I turn blue when I’m angry—but what would he know? He’s only six. My real name is Roslyn Margaret Sinclair. I am named after a BUILDING. The Rosslyn Chapel is in Scotland. How uncool is that? I suppose it could be worse;

Eiffel Sinclair.

Pyramid Sinclair.

Doghouse Sinclair!

She’s very independent my parents would apologetically explain to other tired parents who were constantly pretending to be aeroplanes, flying food into clamped little baby mouths, whilst I fed myself at eight months of age. Quite frankly, refusing to ‘open wide’ is a battleground forged in stupidity that I will never understand. I mean, who doesn’t love food? I can feed myself thank you very much! My parents said I didn’t learn to crawl—I just stood up and started running. Just watch Indie go, go, go people would say.

My ‘independent’ streak never wore off, so the name, Indigo, has stuck. I like it.

Indigo says something about what I like, and what I am like.

Pop!

Blue bubble-gum calms my nerves in situations like this. Keeps me mildly distracted so I can’t think about how much trouble I will be in if I am caught.

Achoo.

Someone sneezes and it is not me. Oh shoot!

What’s happening? the voice on my radio headset barks at me. Stop blowing those blasted bubbles in my ear! Have you got it? I could not answer. The guard that sneezed is heading towards me for an unscheduled sneak peek at their new exhibit, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

Gross.

I turn off my radio earpiece and roll myself up the silk fabric to safety above and just pray the guard will be more preoccupied with the ancient scroll than the twelve-year-old dressed in a black ops outfit, suspended one storey above her.

And there she is; the middle aged, bored off-duty police officer type who is probably ‘moonlighting’ in a second job in a museum night-shift position. She meanders forward with purpose. She’s not the same guard who was there during the day when I was doing my reconnaissance, which is a shame, because that guard was really, really slow. Like a sloth. This guard looks like she does twenty push-ups before getting out of bed. She rounds the corner, clicks a personal remote to turn off the alarm system surrounding the scroll, and heads straight for the exhibit. The guard is completely oblivious and does not see me dangling, like a spider, doing the splits above her glossy tight hair bun. The she-guard stares at it, cocks her head to one side, and studies it. I bet she is raising one of her eyebrows.

I. Don’t. Dare. Breathe.

The silk is safely wrapped around my legs and I feel secure.

Oh no!

The guard’s sneeze is like a yawn and it is contagious. I struggle to hold back my own sneeze. If I’m caught, I’m a gone-er.

The guard shakes her head and huffs in a combination of confusion and resignation. She doesn’t have a clue what this ancient scroll is or why it’s important or special. She will live her life never knowing the scroll is the start of an extraordinary treasure hunt. She wipes her snotty nose on her sleeve, again, and clicks the alarms back on, and meanders off through the exit—probably for a cigarette given the nasty stale stench that clings to her.

Achooooooooooooo! and there it goes; the sneeze that almost ruined my life. I turn on my headset to assure the voice on the other end that I’m fine.

I’m back, I whisper.

Then get a crack on and get back home, the strained voice waivers with relief.

I unravel myself mid-air and use my mini spray can to show up the webbed streams of laser light from the security system around the scroll. I quickly work to disarm the red maze of beams with the mobile I’d painstakingly made from tiny round dentist mirrors. I have placed a steel wire from the ceiling to the floor to attach and hold the reflective mobile over and around me, like the skeleton of an umbrella, deflecting the laser-red rays from their source, back to another source, leaving me to work within a bubble of safety.

One of the mirrors breaks off!

Panic.

What can I do? I hear a beeping start. If I don’t fix this before the tenth beep the full alarm will blare and security will swarm the exhibit in minutes. I’ll be caught red handed and sent to ‘Juvie’—that’s jail for kids.

Ah Ha! Bubble gum. That might stick the broken mirror back into place.

I bite off the size needed, and quickly tweak the broken mirror with blue gum, and blow a big blue bubble with my mouth as I concentrate. It works a treat. My eyes shut and I make a wish—

The beeping stops.

Phew!

The laser red beams are reflected away from the glass box, and me. I resume breathing evenly and slowly, to focus my emotions and maintain my concentration.

My feet softly land on the marble floor. I jimmy open the glass case with my Swiss Army knife. I carefully place the glass box on the cold floor and take a moment to marvel at the scroll before me.

Written in the year, 1101AD, it’s the oldest thing my nitrile-gloved hands have ever touched. This scroll is old. I mean, really old. Yellow and brown, just like how pirate’s treasure maps look in films. It’s old and beautiful.

Smiling my silly smile that says I’m so excited I might pee my pants, I chant to myself to concentrate. Focus. Indigo. Focus. The giddy feeling of my first adventure distracts me but I also feel like I’m about to burst from excitement. I carefully scan the ancient scroll with a brand new scanner. It uses laser red, heat, and x-ray to scan documents and is shaped like a thick wand. I can’t risk stealing the scroll or breaking into the National Gallery again, so I need to make sure I don’t miss anything that might be a part of the secret of this document. Even if it’s in invisible ink, this scanner can read it.

It’s done.

The beautiful, well preserved, ancient parchment goes back on display where it belongs, behind the glass case, safe, and I hoist myself off the ground, pack up the mobile of mirrors and put everything into my drawstring backpack.

I look around me and scan a quiet, grand hall full of human history. It makes me feel small, hovering over my crime. There’s the faint hum of air conditioning and the thump, thump, thump of my blood.

I’ve done it! My first mission.

Tick.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, I whisper to myself.

Oh No!

I shouldn’t have said that. In every horror movie I’ve ever seen, something terrible happens straight after someone says something stupid like, ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

I wait, squinting and searching the dark corners of the cavernous room.

Hmp!

Nothing happens.

No one comes at me with a meat cleaver. No bogeyman. It’s dark in here, for a second. Out of focus. A little foggy in the head… I want ice cream for dinner. Maybe a snack pack.

What?

Indigo! Roslyn! Are you there? What’s happening? my Grandfather, and cohort in all things naughty, barked at me in a gravelly whisper.

I’m still upside down.

I snap out of it and pull myself up the right way and feel the blood leaving my head. Whoozy. After a few seconds, I start to think straight. Time to get out of here.

I’m good, Poppy. Leaving the Gallery now. Mission accomplished.

Well, done, Indigo. I knew you could do it! he says with a touch too much relief in his voice. For a second, I think my success might have been in doubt.

I roll up to the ceiling, climb through the roof, and gather up my silks and the wire, to abseil down the exterior walls. Adrenaline pumps through my veins as my legs run and I parkour over sculptures in the gallery garden, down concrete stairs, and over garden beds to my getaway vehicle. My bicycle sits in the darkness surrounding the deserted loading bay of the Arts Centre.

My fluorescent safety vest and helmet are buckled tight, and my pumped up legs push the pedals over the grass along the river’s bike path under the trees glistening with moonlight. Blood is pushing oxygen through my veins, and I can already feel my hair sticking to my head. Yuk. I can’t wait to get my helmet off my sweaty head when I get home and share this new piece of information with my Grandfather. We will examine it, together, for hours.

My mind wanders, as I swoop down the bike path along the river towards home. I’ve been waiting to turn twelve years old for my entire life. There is only one year to find the Lost Treasure of the Templar Knights, and fulfil the Sinclair family blood oath, to protect the treasure. I only have this year to find the treasure and if I fail, then the world and the twelve Templar Knights have to wait for my first-born child to turn twelve years old. And what if I can’t have children? I’m not even sure that I want to have children. I’m only twelve. What if I never meet the right person to have children with? Or what if the world has blown up and ended before I give birth to the next first-born of a first born, Sinclair?

Now that this scroll is touring the world in the exhibition, anyone and everyone, who knows what to look for, has the chance to find the clues and grab the treasure. Well, I bet none of my ancestors have had to worry about competing with millions of other people in the first week of their quest! I have to find the treasure or a Sinclair may never find it. The worst thing in the world would be if someone else finds it first and steals it. I think I’m about to self-combust just thinking about it.

What if I didn’t scan it properly? Oh no. What if I don’t have enough ink in the scanner? What if a tram hits me on my way home and someone steals my backpack while I’m lying there on the road helpless and dying? I’ve got to read it, now.

My tyres come to a screaming halt under a streetlight, surrounded by oak trees. Mind racing. Poppy is always telling me to face my fears. I open my backpack, in a fever, to hold the scanner and press print.

HISSSSS.

Oh shush. Its artificial noise irritates some of the neighbourhood dogs. The barking and the hissing and the printing noise join the beating of my loud heart—I’m a one-man band. It’s painful waiting for the scroll to print out.

I tear off the curled up scroll from the scanner and it’s gorgeous. An anonymous person with beautiful handwriting wrote the cipher key on this scroll. It was probably a monk. Thank you, monk with the lovely penmanship.

The scroll lists a random number for each letter in the Templar Knight’s secret alphabet. I stand there in the quiet of the night and try to memorise the letters that match the numbers. The Templar letter A is the number 2, B is 19, C is 13—

Will this scroll be everything I want it to be? Will it change the world? I’m going to use the scroll to crack the code, to read the clues, to find the lost treasure, to change the world, not only because I have to, but because I want to. I want to be special and make the world a better place for everyone to live in.

It’s like the world is pretty great, but it’s also a little bit—unbalanced. Yeah, that’s the word for it, unbalanced. There’s enough of everything in the world for everyone in the world: food, water, money, houses, books, schools, and doctors. But the richest people in the world want to keep it all for themselves. Why? Didn’t they learn from the French Revolution? Hundreds of years ago, in France, the poor people were so hungry and fed up with the pompous, bloated, greedy, rich people that they rose up in rebellion and chopped off the heads of all the nasty rich people. And probably some of the nice, rich people too.

Why are the richest people so stupid? It’s happening all over again. I’ve been training my whole life to be prepared for this year, so that I can change the world, and make it a better place for everyone—in my own way. Sharing is caring my mother says nearly every day—so that’s what I’m going to do. Force the rich people to share with others. They would probably have more friends, too, if they shared what they have. And I would let them keep their heads.