Spyderglass

By T M Keamy

​​​​​​​It should have been stamped with a warning. Something like: Caution. Contains Armageddon.

 

Because how else is thirteen-year-old serial truant, Jonah Hartz, supposed to know he's put an apocalypse in his pocket? He just thinks it's a tiny, glowing ball that can spin a web of moving pictures and could be bigger than YouTube.

 

He's right. It is bigger. So much bigger.

 

When Spyderglass launches its powerful web, Jonah is hurled three hundred years back in time. On board the notorious Sea Raven, Jonah meets the ship's wily powder monkey, Opus. Trapped in a world from where there is no return and facing certain death if discovered by the villainous crew, it just doesn't get any worse— Until Jonah's nemesis, Chunky Willis, drops through the hatch.

 

Meanwhile, back home, strange characters are gathering and for all their wisdom, magic and skill, they are discovering they cannot change the will of Spyderglass or the fate it's weaving for the three boys who hold it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracie Keamy
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224018796

Book preview

~CHAPTER 1~

A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

Belly down and muttering , Jonah Hartz reached out with throbbing fingers and dragged himself further into the gloom. At thirteen he was a veteran of tight spots, but usually they were the metaphorical kind. This was the real deal, and after three hours of squirming through a dank hole with a two-dollar torch that had flat batteries, his no-guts-no-glory optimism had finally plunged to the unthinkable.

Maybe he should’ve gone to school.

Jonah had issues with school: English, maths, geography, history ... the list was as boring as the subjects. His flashlight flickered and he gave it a thump. It coughed out a sickly beam. He prodded it into ribs of craggy rock. Drips plinked, their echoes hollow, and shadows scuttled like spiders. Yep, just as he suspected. Nothing except more nothing and a thousand sharp edges that’d have him bleeding before breakfast. He’d had enough.

This posed another problem. Without room to manoeuvre, he had to A: exit all the way down, bum first. He uttered a word he’d be grounded for using. Or B: keep going.

He kept going.

Another long century later, he saw a glow. Huh? Couldn’t be sunlight. He figured he’d made it maybe fifty metres inside the cliff, but Shelton still had to be a good hundred or so overhead.

Shelton was home, a dot on the coral coast of Western Australia. Best place in the world for the three fundamentals of life: boating, surfing and cliff-diving. Where miles and miles of barrelling waves smashed against a meandering coastline and flavoured the air with briny smells. Residents: a peaceful 15,000, and mostly lazy. Until tourist season, like now, when peaceful and lazy became dust under a stampede of thongs slapping on feet as the population busted over at a whopping 40,000. Make that 39,999 because currently, one of them was buried deep beneath and bearing the weight of the town on his shoulders, like Atlas but horizontal. So not in the travel brochure.

He wriggled to a halt, clamping his fists around two gnarled posts that dripped from the ceiling. Through the diluted dark, he could see their tapered ends imbedded into the ground like a pair of snake’s fangs. Too narrow to get through, even for him. He gave them a shake. No chance, rock solid. He pressed his face against the bars. That light ... He squinted into the distance. Weird. His eyes adjusted, his heart skittering slightly. And it was weird because it was green.

Green? Jonah shrank back, spluttering on a mouthful of rank air as his better instincts screamed: Go back! Are you crazy? Not normal! Even his worst instincts—and they were pretty bad, generally leading to situations like this one and more weekends being grounded than he cared to count—they were screaming too.

Except they were more: Green! Go for it! Are you crazy? Hack your way through!

Jonah blinked. But he was tired. Soooo tired. And he hurt. All over. His bones were bent at angles he hadn’t thought possible. His skin, burning, like he’d been rubbed down with a cheese grater. He needed food. He needed water. He needed Band-Aids.

Then again ... Jonah followed the strange green ahead, his brows knitted. This was big! Bigger than big! He could feel it. This was Jimmy Jack’s Burger Express springing up right here, right now, out of nowhere on free refill day with a leather booth seat and a first-aid kit. In short, a miracle.

What to do, what to do? Jonah closed his eyes to the green and blocked out the barrage of mixed messages cramming his head. Good, bad, wise, dumb, he cleared them all, focusing instead on the only two facts that mattered right now.

Fact one: Fear—it always came with a fairly good reason.

Fact two: He opened his eyes. Fear was for amateurs.

He went for the diver’s knife strapped to his leg. He hadn’t known what it might come in handy for when he’d found it in the shed that morning, he’d just thought it was a good idea to take it. Plus, it looked cool. It had worked its way from his knee to his ankle. His arm slithered down his leg. He splayed his fingers: stretching, groping, scraping. It was there. Just next to that pesky itch ... he could ...

Not ...

Quite ...

Reach ...

He retracted his fingers and drummed out an irritated beat. Dumb tunnel. Should’ve left it. He grunted. Yeah, right. He’d found the entrance in Devil’s Basin, and glided his dinghy straight past the ‘DANGER! DO NOT ENTER!’ sign, through the channel and into a pool of liquid turquoise. He still couldn’t believe it. Soooo hot, no wind and the water was smooth as glass. Also, his mum was away—no chance of being busted. The world was smiling on him.

And he’d planned to leave as soon as he finished his happy dance. With one foot on either side of the rubber hull, he was jumping, and whooping, and hi-fiving the air when he’d seen it, a small, black hole, the only flaw in a mountain of invincible rock. Half submerged, it peeped across the polished waters, lapping up and down in slow rhythms over it. It was winking at him. Daring him to enter. What else was he supposed to do?

His flashlight flickered again. This time he bashed it. He heard something ping and the flashlight died. His head dropped to his arms, and his groan, deep and unsatisfied, filtered through the eerie green that creeped its way towards him. His stomach rumbled and he jerked his head up. Wow, he had to be really hungry. He cocked an eyebrow. And by the sound of things, getting hungrier. He frowned. Every second! His eyes popped wide. The walls were growling—

The walls were growling?

His hands clapped over his ears as the noise exploded around him, a shrill metallic screeching that blasted his eardrums, leaving him stunned and gasping. The tunnel heaved. He grabbed the bars, tremors pummelling his body. Rock cracked. The ground split. He screamed—and then, as quickly as it came, it went.

Jonah lifted his head, coughing into a swirling cloud of white debris. The bars he’d been clutching crumbled in his fists. He brushed off his hands, his heart thudding against the space, which had definitely expanded. He was panting so hard he would have broken a rib if it hadn’t. He rubbed the grit from his eyes. The glow was still there, and his torch had sprung back to life. He stared at the beam. It was bright. Really bright. As in how bright could a flashlight be when the batteries were dead and he’d broken the thing. Rock shuddered again.

With his alarm bells jangling, Jonah snatched up the torch and scuttled forward, to the light at the end of the tunnel.

~CHAPTER 2~

MEANWHILE, UP ABOVE IN SHELTON ...

From the moment Stanley Grist was launched across his shop at the speed of sound, he knew something was amiss.

He’d just ripped the tab off a ginger beer, planted his ample posterior into an armchair, plopped his feet onto the coffee table, and with TV remote firm in his fist had been ready to do a bit of channel surfing before the intro of his favourite TV show, The Sands of Time.

The explosion hurled him backwards through a pair of slapping saloon doors and into the granite counter behind. Blasting out of his chair and spiralling high in a double somersault, he cleared the cash register, landed on his back and proceeded to spin with head-rushing velocity down the entire length of the floor.

Lying crumpled in the farthest corner of the room, amidst wreckage now spattered with foam spurting from a revolving can, he heard an unknown voice filled with wonder.

‘There is so much life in this earth, Brackley. Did you feel its vitality snatch us to it? I feel it thrumming through the soles of my feet. It tickles the senses and I have an aftertaste of wood, honey, something salty and I’m sure ...’ There was the sound of smacking lips. ‘Yeast and malt.’

‘You will enjoy this world of mortals, Foon Li,’ another voice said, and one Stanley knew only too well. ‘’Tis a breathless landing, but well worth it. Ah! But there he is, over there.’

Stanley, still winded, listened to the soft approach of feet. He closed his eyes, his jaw working a feverish prayer. He clicked his teeth back into position. He didn’t want to lose them. Dentures were very hard to come by. He’d found his at the bottom of an escalator at a city train station and snaffled them up quick smart, before anyone else could. They kept him grounded, a reminder of a world where reason equalled logic and gravity was not an optional extra. Hands hoisted him to his feet. Stanley opened his eyes and rolled them upwards, over the seven-foot length of the man standing before him.

‘Is that what you call an inconspicuous arrival?’ Stanley wheezed, wringing ginger beer from his beard. He assessed the floor-skimming silvery robe and dark goggles Brackley was wearing. ‘And did we not have this conversation last time? Lose the dressing gown, I said. No goggles, I said,’ Stanley continued, staring at the ghost-white hair and beard, too long to be eccentric but perfect for oddball. ‘Get a haircut, have a shave, use the door. As for those things,’ his eyes dipped to the slippers: delicate, finely embroidered and smoking like a pair of freshly fired grenades, ‘they’ve got to go!’

An indignant noise alerted Stanley to a short, rotund man who was glaring at him through eyes that flashed as dark as ink-spots. Under each arm he carried a box. They appeared to be at great risk of floating away, and their lids were rattling. Here was the little fat cherry on top. Brackley had brought a friend.

Stanley had almost got used to Brackley. Almost. But this one was really something. The face had the sheen of the moon, was just as pale and nearly as hairless. A few lonely wisps sprouted from the corners of his mouth, a sparser cluster hung from his chin to his belly, and Stanley could even count the ones coming from a mole next to his nose. All seven hairs began to quiver and it took a moment for Stanley to realise it was because he was speaking.

‘Those things,’ he was saying in a clipped accent as he jabbed at the gases rising from his feet, ‘are travel vapours. The most sophisticated ever created. We transcended eighty-two oceans, bypassed fifteen time corridors, not to mention skimmed a mountainous region of a most hostile species, and all that in just seconds.’

Stanley was listening but only because he had to; he couldn’t peel his eyes off the round man’s coat. It was ... busy. Moving and rippling. As though it was still being woven and from things still alive. Through layers and layers of transparent colours, he could see threads squirming into patterns. He was having urges to scratch.

‘Stanley, allow me to introduce you to Foon Li, colour sage and the most gifted essence master of the ages.’

Several fraying strands on Foon Li’s jacket began to squirt plumes of incense into the air. Stanley swung to Brackley with a vacant expression. He gave a little shrug.

‘Foon Li has an extraordinary connection to nature,’ Brackley explained. ‘He not only sees all living energies as colours, but he can also separate them and join those into any number of combinations to create the most astounding miracles. Foon Li, this is my most trusted emissary of the mortal world, Stanley Grist.’ Brackley surveyed the surrounding space: drab, badly lit and now scattered with broken things. ‘I like what you’ve done with the shop.’

Stanley grunted. These days he kept a simple business plan: no stock, no customers. To make sure, he kept the doors bolted and most lights off. And just recently, all this had proven a successful exercise in forward thinking. Apart from a few shelving units, coffee tables, several chairs and crates filled with forgotten miscellanea, there’d been nothing else in the shop to cause him serious harm as he hurtled like a wrecking ball through the centre of it all.

Brackley’s smile sobered. ‘I’m here, Stanley, on a matter of great urgen—’

‘No!’ Stanley’s hands shot to a halt position. ‘Don’t tell me. Remember? I operate purely on a need-to-know basis ...’ His attention flittered back to Foon Li, who was lifting the cover off one of his boxes and murmuring into it. Then out of the package and an inch from Stanley’s nose, a pair of blue eyes the size of golf balls rose in a length of fog and floated past.

‘Haipifi needs to stretch outside,’ said Foon Li, taking his boxes in the opposite direction and leaving behind him a billowing trail of Haipifi. ‘It hates to be folded around the essence wheel, but it can’t be loosed onto the others.’

Stanley watched the fog seep beneath the two doors barricading the outside world, before his mouth snapped shut with a troubling thought. ‘Well, it can’t be loosed onto the streets, either!’ he cried, ignoring the sharp pain in his injured back as he hobbled after Foon Li. ‘It’s tourist season.’

‘Oh, but Haipifi is a master of disguise,’ said Brackley, stopping to offer Stanley a helping arm. ‘He does a fine impersonation of a cloud.’

Something made Foon Li falter. He turned towards the wall, and before Stanley could stop him, reached for the handle of a narrow door set into it.

Screaming ‘Nooooo!’ Stanley sprinted past him towards the counter at the end of the shop, and hurdling over it, hit the floor in a squat. The sound of hissing entered the room. Stanley lifted his head just enough to peep across the bench. Foon Li stood before the open cupboard, sounding curious but impressed.

‘Your work, Brackley?’

‘Indeed, it is.’ Brackley chuckled as he moved across to Foon Li. ‘The armoury of weapons for all the troubles you might ever encounter in this world. I devised it from one of your teachings and thankfully a simple process it is, as mortals have an insatiable appetite for the stuff.’

Foon Li pulled something wet and limp from the closet and examined it.

‘Behold, Foon Li, Cash Flow. When I first met Stanley, he was suffering a great lack of it. How has the Cash Flow been, Stanley?’

‘Flowing,’ mumbled Stanley, his knees creaking as he stood. He stepped across to Brackley and Foon Li and stared into the cupboard. A waterfall cascaded out of somewhere from the top and pooled into a neat puddle at the bottom, without so much as a cheeky little drop sliding across the threshold. It was ‘the’ cupboard he had opened, only once.

Stanley learned early on that with Brackley, he had to word a request with extreme care. The never-ending cash flow he’d asked for never ended, and in fact, had very nearly drowned him in a tidal wave of ink, water and perfectly reproduced $100 bills. He’d had to tread it for hours, hanging onto the swirling cord of a Tiffany lamp that had become wedged in the raging torrent between an upended piano and a grandfather clock. He’d been saved by an oak dining table. Careening past the cupboard, it had slammed the door against the watery monster, enabling Stanley to rest on the $2 books trolley until the floods had receded.

Luckily, it had been night. Brackley had just left and Stanley had decided to celebrate by treating himself to an expensive dinner and a bottle of fine wine. By three o’clock the next morning, he’d scraped up the $100 bills littered down the street and scrubbed the ink from the footpath, damning evidence alongside the rows and rows of drying money pegged on lines across the shop. But the smell of freshly forged bank notes seemed to linger for days, keeping Stanley sleepless and agitated in case it piqued the curiosity of any relevant authorities who might be wandering by. There were easier ways to make a dollar.

‘We must work quickly, Brackley,’