Phantom Arcade: The Third Zak Steepleman Novel: Zak Steepleman, #3

1

ICOULD HEAR THE RAIN as it rustled down against the canvas of my tent. I could smell the rain through the stodgy material. I could feel the rain brushing up against my skin—somehow setting all my hairs upright in a way I’m sure my biology teacher would be able to explain.

This wasn’t any normal rain, either, this rain had an unpleasant salty taste to it.

Because we were beside the sea.

Though it was the middle of the day, I could only just about make out the outline of Mikey lying on his side, his back to me. He had to lie on his side, because, and let’s be honest about this, I’m a big kid . . . and not big as in ‘growing’ . . . big as in fat.

Mikey was reading a book with the yellowish circle of the torch illuminating the pages.

When I looked about me, I could just about make out the way that the midday sun—if that was really what I could call it—glimmered through the pale-green, waterproof material of the tent.

I wondered if we were going to stay here all day.

I wondered if it was going to stop raining.

On my knees, I approached the zip to the tent, inched it down a little and I peered out.

All around us, the only thing that I could see was that grey—grey—slanting mist.

Like, torrential rain.

And even as I knelt up there, looking out through the slit, I was sure that the rain had got even more persistent still.

I swivelled my gaze about, took in the other two tents: the ones which housed, in pairs, James and Alan; and Chung and Dad. They had the same tent as me and Mikey had. We’d bought them all from the same shop . . . well, that’s to say that my dad bought them all from the same shop.

When I turned about a little more, I could make out my dad’s campervan, standing there beside us. I could see that a welcoming, warm glow of light was edging out from around the drawn curtains.

Kate, being the only girl, had managed to swindle getting the campervan as her own personal domain. And it seemed to be serving her pretty well right now.

When Dad pitched this idea of going camping to me, I have to admit that I felt somewhat apprehensive. He said that it’d be great fun. That it would be good for me and my friends to get out into the fresh air during the summer holidays.

. . . Yeah, well, I have to admit that I was about as convinced now as I was before.

Since Mum was off somewhere with her friends, though, there didn’t seem to be much of a prospect of me being allowed to stay home alone. And so I ended up here.

Camping in the south of Wales.

I left the tent flap zipper open, and crossed my arms over my chest—I was wearing a thick fleece, and a pair of extremely thick socks.

I turned around, glanced back at Mikey who seemed pretty engrossed in whatever the hell it was that he was reading. Not only was he wearing a fleece, he was also wearing a pair of insulated gloves, a scarf and a beanie cap snug right down to his earlobes.

Hey, I said.

Mikey didn’t stir. He kept on staring at his book.

I reached out, prodded him in the middle of his shoulder blades.

It did the trick.

Mikey flinched a little and then glanced back over his shoulder. He reached up into his beanie cap, and unhooked the earphones that he’d slipped on.

What? he said.

Mikey had had the music on so quiet that I hadn’t realised that he’d been listening to it.

You wanna go out and do something? I said.

Mikey gave me one of those looks that suggested I was a madman, and that—tonight—he’d be keeping that flick knife of his firmly grasped in his fist, underneath his pillow.

Not that I cared all that much, I was itching with boredom.

Come on, I said, We’ve got coats—let’s throw them on and go off exploring.

Mikey laid his book down so that he held his current page open. He was very measured with his answer—seemed to take an extreme amount of care about it.

No, he said.

I rolled my eyes, and then looked back out over the tents. Already, as I looked out through the constantly falling rain, I could hear Dad drawling on about something or other. The only reason that Chung had ended up sharing a tent with Dad was because he’d been the only one who hadn’t complained profusely about the prospect.

And now he had to suffer the consequences.

Since we’d got here, late last night, I hadn’t heard so much as a peep from Chung, as—I was sure—Dad ripped through just about every bad joke in his repertoire, and went into extreme detail about the last hundred or so chess matches he’d played.

About two, three hours ago, after we’d all headed up to the campervan for some breakfast which Dad cooked up for us, we’d all returned to our tents for a nap ‘while the rain lets off,’ as Dad had put it.

Well, it seemed, if we were going to follow that policy for the duration of this holiday, we were going to be spending an awful amount of time in our tents.

He’d also made a whole bunch of noises about how we were going to do nothing but eat food cooked on a campfire, and that was hardly turning out great . . .

I turned back to Mikey, saw that he’d picked up his book once again, and that his eyes were flickering back and forth over the pages.

I jabbed him between the shoulder blades once more, and then I said, Come on, let’s go see what Kate’s up to, huh?

Mikey held still for another couple of moments till I realised he’d slotted his headphones back into his ears. And that he was doing his best to try and ignore me.

Hey! I said.

He stirred, glanced back at me.

We’re going, I said.

And, with a roll of his eyes, Mikey chucked his book down, with a smack, and followed me out of the tent.

2

THOUGH THE CAMPERVAN was only about ten paces away from us—at most—and we both had a pretty decent waterproof, we both got completely drenched in the downpour.

Maybe somebody turned the tap on a little harder the minute that me and Mikey stepped outside, or maybe we were just unlucky.

Kate had locked the door to the campervan, and I had to knock about a dozen times before she opened up for us. When she did, she looked pretty annoyingly smug. She had on a scarf, beanie hat and a thick coat, but—unlike us—her cheeks were rosy with the warmth which flooded out from the van.

As she stood back and let us in up the few steps, I saw that she’d got all four of the gas stoves burning away. Pretty ingenious. I saw that all the windows of the campervan had fogged up from the heat inside. At least the gas stove seemed to have taken care of the stink of damp that had seemed to cling to the campervan on my previous visits there.

And then something over in the corner of the van caught my attention. Before I really had time to filter my thoughts, I said, Is that a TV?

She kept herself still, and I could feel her gaze against the side of my face. Yes, she said.

It was a plasma, flat screen TV which lay propped up on the pillows of the campervan.

And then, once again, something else drew my gaze.

The large, black block at the base of the TV.

The four controllers.

I turned back to her, saw a fairly sly look in those green eyes of hers. You brought your Sirocco? I held my breath for about a moment, almost unable to keep my disbelief bottled. "Without telling us?"

Kate took a couple of steps into the kitchen, quickly turning her back to us. Uh, do you two want anything to drink? I can do you some hot chocolate if you like?

Mikey didn’t seem as outraged about the turn of events here as I was. Yes, please, he said.

I just stared at Kate as she slid out the jar of cocoa powder from the cupboard and began to scoop it out into a saucepan. Already, though I tried to keep my mind fixed on this whole Sirocco development, I couldn’t help thinking about the slick, thick—warm—chocolate goo that I’d soon be supping at. There was something about hot chocolate that just seemed to make rainy days much better.

As Kate poured what seemed like a whole cow’s load of milk into the saucepan after the chocolate powder, she said, Didn’t think you’d be interested. She gave a little shrug. "I mean, I thought you guys might’ve come down here—camping—to be away from video games for a while."

That just wasn’t going to wash.

"What’re you talking about?" I said.

Kate mixed up the chocolate powder with the milk and then placed the saucepan onto the flaming-away gas stove with a thunk. Already, I could smell that wonderful, warm and rich scent of the hot chocolate ebbing its way through the air.

It was almost enough to forgive Kate.

Almost.

You mean to tell me, I said, "that we’ve been sitting about the whole morning, doing nothing—"

Actually, Mikey cut in, I was reading a book.

I continued as before, "Doing nothing, and now you’re telling us that we could’ve alleviated our boredom if you’d only gone and told us that you’d packed your Sirocco?"

Kate busied herself with the wooden spatula at the saucepan, making sure that none of the thickening hot-chocolate mixture stuck to the bottom. Once she was satisfied with her work, she turned to me, a slight smirk on her lips, and said, Yep.

Well, I guess there wasn’t much arguing with honesty . . .

Five minutes later, and me, Kate and Mikey were all sitting up on the cushions, each of us with a mug of hot chocolate clasped in our hands.

I had to admit, with those warm waves passing through my bloodstream, I felt an awful lot better than I had about half an hour ago, in the tent.

When I’d finished my mug of hot chocolate, I just breathed it in—deep—and felt it buzz about my lungs. Savoured that taste on my tongue. Just lost myself in the wafting scent of chocolate . . . all these great sensory moments were brought to an abrupt halt, though, when Mikey sucked up the rest of his hot chocolate, gargled it—no joke—and then set it down on the table before him with a loud thud that I was surprised didn’t break the porcelain mug.

Apparently, though, Mikey really had no consciousness of his actions, because he spoke as if nothing at all had happened. Why’re we sitting about here, Mikey said, drinking hot chocolate, when we could be playing?

Kate sipped at her hot chocolate, which she had yet to finish a third of. She gave a little shrug, and then she said, Can’t get it to fit the plugs in this campervan.

So maybe we were screwed after all . . .

We sat about the campervan with Kate for a little while longer. When it became apparent that there wasn’t any prospect of playing on the Sirocco, though, it soon turned out that the only real benefit that the campervan held over the tent was its warmth.

Okay, so that wasn’t so bad of a benefit, but it really did very little to sort out my boredom . . . though Mikey did make a few noises about wanting to get back to his book.

Whenever I looked out through the fogged-up windows of the campervan, I was certain that it was raining even harder, that it was somehow getting more and more difficult for me to see the other tents scattered around us.

It was funny, even though this was the middle of summer, the field where we had pitched our tents was pretty much empty—as if even the most hardened of campers knew a lost cause when they saw it. That they’d had no trouble at all abandoning a week of misery.

In the near distance, I could make out the grey, concrete building where all the outdoors toilets were located. The showers too . . . though I didn’t have all that many plans about using them until I absolutely had to.

It got to the point where somebody needed to make a decision—when somebody had to stand up and drag us out of this whole mire we’d found ourselves all bogged down in.

So, I looked to Kate and Mikey, and then I said, Let’s go out and find some fun.

3

IWAS ONLY HALF ABLE to believe that I’d managed to convince the two of them even as we strolled along, over the squidgy bog that had once been the field where we’d pitched out tents.

We were all wearing sturdy boots which came up to our ankles.

It seemed that each of our parents had seen the boots as being necessary attire for coming camping. Still, those boots of ours got old pretty quickly as we trudged along through the muddy field.

I led the way through this broken, wooden gate, which was just hanging off its rusted-up hinges. I could feel the cold rainwater trickling down my neck from where it had managed to breach my waterproof coat, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d maybe gone totally insane in proposing this trip of ours.

When I breathed in, I could almost only smell that damp scent of rain, and the way it clung to my coat. The squidge-squidge which accompanied each of my footsteps really wasn’t helping out matters much at all.

On the other side of the rickety gate—guess what?—there was even more field.

Though I did my best not to glance back at the faces of Kate and Mikey, I couldn’t help registering the surface-level expression peeping out from within their hoods.

Sheer, unadulterated anger.

Nothing but pure fury.

I tried to put those expressions out of mind as I trudged onwards, doing my best to keep to the side of the path—if it could be called that—which seemed fractionally less muddy.

We finally hit the tarmac road about ten minutes later.

The small, single-lane road which ran alongside the sea.

At first, I didn’t think I could see the sea at all.

I thought that it was just one great big raincloud.

In fact, it actually took Kate appearing beside me, and speaking in a defeated—extremely defeated—voice, saying, Looks pretty choppy out there, huh?

When Mikey came up at my other side, he wouldn’t so much as turn to look at me.

I wondered just how strong our friendship was.

Maybe this’d be some sort of a make-or-break point . . .

Since we were all totally soaked through, there really seemed little point in us bothering to search out some form of shelter. And, for the same reason, there really wasn’t much point in us retreating either. We would only get our tents wet.

All three of us just stared on out to sea.

Nothing else for us to do.

Maybe the sea had a sort of hypnotic effect on us . . . at least it did on me . . . but when I finally heard Kate mutter something I thought that it was only the wind which bristled in, blowing cold against our rain-soaked coats and seeming to try and do its best to make us feel even more miserable.

Over there, Kate said.

I followed her finger—dripping with rain—and saw that she was indicating this building, a little way off, which sat right on the coastal road.

The building had a dark-purple, neon sign, and just—well—looked a little out of place along here. The rest of the houses which sat on this road were quaint cottages with prim little gardens. And though this building that Kate was indicating had obviously once been a cottage, the fact that it had a dark-purple, neon sign made it stand out.

You wanna take a look? I said.

Kate shrugged. We’re not going to get any wetter.

I heard some grumbling from behind me, from Mikey no doubt wishing to register his doubts about, not just this little diversion, but