Dark Eden

into the edge of forest, like you’d throw a lump of stone. But what could possibly have thrown a thing as big as that?
    We went up to it. We gingerly touched it and then, when it didn’t sting or burn, we felt it all over. It really was metal, hard like stone but colder, and smooth smooth all over, with no grain in it, no roughness, no texture, only from time to time straight lines that divided the surface up into square shapes, and straight rows of little round dots. But the metal was only the beginning of the strangeness of it. At the top of it, in middle, there was a smooth shape sticking out like a bowl that you might use for water but twenty thirty times the size and made of what looked like smooth ice, so clear that you could see Starry Swirl shining right through it.
    Dix was nimble. He climbed up there and touched it.
    ‘It’s not ice,’ he said. ‘It’s warm and dry. And it’s smoother even than metal, smooth smoo . . . Oh Gela’s tits!’
    He came scrambling and tumbling down like he had six leopards after him.
    ‘What
is
it? What
is
it?’ we were all yelling at him.
    ‘Faces,’ he said, ‘faces inside that ice thing looking out. White grinning faces with huge eyes!’
    Lucy and Clare and Mike grabbed their kids and started to run. The little ones began to scream. But John and me climbed up the top and looked in. It was dark inside, but there was just enough light from forest and stars for us to make out two white faces staring up at us, with big dark eyes and toothy gaping mouths.
    ‘They’re just skulls,’ said John, ‘that’s all. They’re just human bones.’
    Human bones weren’t something we saw too often because we always used to bury dead people back in Circle Valley under stones. In fact I’d only ever seen the clean white bones of a person once before, when a bunch of us found the remains of an old Batwing bloke called Johnny in forest when I was a little kid. (He’d been out there scavenging by himself and he’d died for some reason – maybe a heart attack or something – and had the flesh eaten off him by starbirds.) I looked through the smooth hard icy stuff at the faces looking out at us. Their mouths hung open like they were roaring with laughter. Ugh!
    ‘Just bones,’ John called out. ‘They can’t hurt us.’
    The others who’d scattered in panic came reluctantly back to the metal thing.
    ‘Hey, look here!’ Gela called. ‘There’s a hole under here. You could get inside.’
    John and me jumped down to look. It was only a small hole, but certainly big enough to crawl through. John wriggled straight in there, with faithful Gerry following him and then me and Jeff. The rest of them seemed to think it was our special job, mine and Gerry’s and Jeff’s, to be the first to follow John into strange and scary places.
    There was a hollow cave in there under the hard ice-like stuff, a tilted-over cave that smelt like a kind of mud. Three skeletons were sitting in there on special seats made of some soft dark crumbly stuff that we’d never seen before. We hadn’t noticed the third skeleton from outside because its skull had fallen off its neck and had rolled down to the bottom edge of the cave with its skull eyes looking away from us. The skulls and bones stood out because they were white, but it was too dark to make out much else. I went back to the opening and called for someone to pull down some branches of whitelanterns for us to see by.
    When I went back inside to the other three, I reached out for their hands. We were all shaking. I don’t honestly know if it was fear or what. We really didn’t know what to think or feel.
    Then Gela crawled in with three four bright whitelanterns on a bit of branch, and now we began to see just what a
weird
weird kind of cave this was. All round us were strange brown surfaces covered with rows of little shapes. They reminded us of the Kee Board and the Screen that Oldest brought out to show us on Any Virsries, but there must have been thousands of those little square shapes here, dozens of different screens. We didn’t really know what to do next, so we began to touch the little springy squares, pushing them in and out like we used to push them in and out on the Kee Board as little kids when Oldest’s helpers carried round the Mementoes at Any Virsries.
    More people were trying to get inside now. Mike was crawling in, and Clare, and even little Flower, and the metal thing rocked slightly with the weight of us all