Lizard's Leap: Chapter Five: Terrified and Alone

‘I wish we’d brought a camera,’ said Vicki.
‘Sharon Lazenby is not going to believe this.’

‘I wish we’d brought a way to get home,’ Emma was dry eyed but she was pale and terrified.

The walkway opened onto a courtyard. They looked around the various buildings. There was a museum, public toilets, a cafeteria, a gift shop and then the railings which were the queuing area for the statue itself. Everything was closed and unmanned. Mark moaned about being hungry and Kerry moaned about her feet being cold and sore. They all moaned about being stranded and alone and yet they were excited. The excitement and terror went hand in hand. The nearest they’d ever come to magic was a magician with the shakes at one of Mark’s Birthday parties.

They noticed that it was gradually getting lighter. It would have been awful to be stuck there all night. They comforted themselves with the fact that soon the first ferry would be coming across the water; then they would be rescued. They doubted that their story would be believed, though.

‘What if it’s all closed on a Sunday and nobody comes?’ Mark asked.

None of them had considered this. ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ Vicki said.

‘I’m not joking, The kebab shop doesn’t open on Sunday and that’s more important than a dumb statue. We’re gonna be for it if we’re here all night. We need to find some shelter.’

He ran along the queuing gates until he found the door that led into the statue. He tried the handle but it was locked. Running his hand reverently over the smooth stone of the statue’s plinth at the side of the door, he said, ‘I can’t believe that I am really in the United States of America and that I’m touching the actual Statue of Liberty. Isn’t it amazing?’

They all touched the statue, just so that they could say that they had.

‘Nobody will ever believe this,’ Vicki sometimes told tall tales. It was important to her to be believed.

‘We will be when Nana reports us missing and then we’re found millions of miles away in American. We’ll be on the news an’ everyfink.’

‘It’s not millions of miles Mark, it’s only …’ Kerry began but Vicki cut her off.

‘We can’t be on telly. I’ve got nothing to wear.’ She patted her hair and combed it through with her fingers

‘Huh, and you think you’ve got wardrobe issues,’ moaned Kerry.

They huddled, cold and scared in the shelter of the doorway and hoped that the ferry would come. Mark’s thoughts about Sunday closing had frightened them even more. Kerry was freezing and was crying again.

‘What time is it, Vicki?’ Emma asked.

‘We left home at just after half eleven so it must be about half past twelve now.’

‘If it’s lunch time, how come it's so dark?’ Mark asked.

Emma had been thinking about it. ‘New York is five hours behind us in England. So, if it’s half past twelve at home, it’s still only half past seven in America. I think that’s why it’s only just getting light here.’

‘What time is it really, though?’ asked Kerry. ‘Because if it’s really seven thirty then we won’t have been missed yet, but if it’s really twelve thirty then Nana will know that we’re not in our rooms. She’ll be worried and we’ll be in so much trouble when she finds out that we went to America without telling anyone.’

‘Well, it wasn’t our fault was it?’ said Mark. ‘If I’d known we were going to drop into America I’d have asked Nana for a picnic.’

Kerry sobbed harder at the thought of being in trouble.

‘I’ll tell her that it isn’t our fault,’ Mark repeated, hoping that somebody would finally listen to him, ‘It’s not fair. We didn’t ask to come to the rotten old Statue of Liberty when the café’s closed.’ He was silent for a second. The girl’s were quiet too; they just clung to each other, miserably.

‘I want to go home now,’ said Kerry.

‘We all do Kez, don’t worry it’ll be all right. We’ll get home.’ Vicki comforted her.

‘What if we don’t?’

‘We will.’

‘But what if we don’t?’

Mark cut in. ‘What’s Dad going to say? Do you think he’s going to blame us and start yelling?’

‘He’ll understand.’

Emma snorted. ‘Oh Yeah, of course he will.’ She did an imitation of Vicki twisting her hair around her finger. ‘Well, you see Dad, it’s like this. A big tornado came into our bedroom and it picked us up and carried us to the middle of the Atlantic flipping Ocean. You know, Dad, the way they do, sometimes.’

Kerry perked up, ‘He will believe us because the room will be messed up, won’t it?’

‘Oh My God,’ said Mark, ‘What if it trashed the house? What if they’re all dead?’

Emma snapped at him to be quiet but other than that nobody said anything. They all thought about their own ideas about what it meant to be an orphan. They didn’t know what damage had been done at home, or if everybody was okay.

‘Maybe we’re the lucky ones.’ Vicki’s eyes were red with crying and tears still fell down her cheeks.

Kerry only knew one way to change the subject. She took comfort from facts. She knew a lot of them, mainly disjointed pieces of information learned from books and school lessons or from documentaries on the television. ‘Do you know...,’ she began. The others groaned. ‘Do you know that there are three hundred and fifty-four steps up to Liberty’s crown and the twenty-five windows represent the twenty-five gemstones of the Earth? Or that the seven rays in the crown represent the seven seas and continents of the World?’

They were stunned into silence for a second. They envied her ability but always turned it against her because she was clever.

‘Oh, shut up, Kerry,’ they all said in unison.

‘And another thing,’ Kerry was on a roll and wasn’t about to be swayed by their lack of appreciation. ‘If we managed to fall into a picture to get here—why can’t we just fall out again to get back home?’

It was logical. If they had managed to just fall to America, then surely they should be able to just fall back again?

‘Kerry, you’re a genius,’ Vicki said, kissing her cousin firmly on the cheek. ‘There must be a way back through the picture; we just have to work out how.’

‘But we haven’t got the picture,’ reasoned Emma. She remembered the piece of paper. ‘Vicki, it might have something to do with that weird poem you read out. You were reading it when the storm came. What happened to it?’

‘I don’t know. When the room went crazy I must have dropped it on the carpet.’ She patted the pocket of her jeans then looked forlornly down at her hands as if she expected the paper to appear.
For the next half an hour they tried to remember what was written on the paper. It was hopeless. They suggested so many different things but none of them worked. They all remembered that it had something to do with lizards and sand but other than that they hadn’t a clue.

‘Oh well,’ Mark said. ‘We’re just going to have to go back to plan A and wait to be rescued.’

Kerry wailed as the hope of getting back home quickly evaporated.

The sun was up. Its rays shone down strong and bright even though it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning American time. Kerry stretched her cold legs out to be warmed. Her face tilted upwards and the sun worked hard to dry her tears as they fell. It didn’t succeed and they dropped in fat splashes onto her legs.

‘Look.’ Mark shouted, excitedly. At the other side of the harbour a ferry was just leaving the jetty. Help was coming. ‘We need to work out what we’re going to say.’ said Emma.

‘All we can do is tell the truth,’ Vicki answered but even she looked doubtful.

‘I know,’ Mark shouted, ‘We’ll tell them that these gangsters came into our house and kidnapped us. And we’ll say that our dad’s dead rich and they dropped us off here to take pictures and stuff for the ransom. And they had machine guns and they brought us here on Jet-skis, and…’

The children ran to the railings to meet the ferry when it arrived. Kerry tried to hide behind the others; she felt stupid standing there in broad daylight in her nightie.

It was a two-tiered boat which was covered on the lower deck and open on the top. The children saw people sitting on the bench seats inside the bottom tier. But, what made them draw back into the shadows of the plinth so that they wouldn’t be seen was the figure standing alone and leaning on the top deck railings at the front of the ferry. When the boat was still in the distance they weren’t sure but as it came closer there was no mistake.

The strong wind blew her grey hair back from her face leaving straggling wisps sticking straight out of the back of her head like a flag. She held onto her floppy black hat and seemed to be fighting against the wind to keep her balance. She wore a bright green skirt, a vivid canary-yellow top and a scarlet scarf. The cousins knew of only one person who would dress like that.

‘Sylvia,’ shouted Mark.

They ran back to the plinth of the statue and tried to hide. But it was too late; she’d seen them. She waved her arm and shouted. But her words were taken by the wind and carried away on the waves. They couldn’t make out what she said. They were trapped. There was nowhere to run.

They were all terrified but even at the worst times in their lives Emma was still sarcastic. It was her way of coping.

‘Oh, great,’ she said. ‘Just when things were getting better we have to run into a colour-blind, crazy woman.’

Then they were all talking at once.

‘How did she get here?’

‘Did she know we’d be here?’

‘What will she do to us?’

‘What if she goes mad and kills us all when she sees that we haven’t got the picture with us?’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘What if everybody on the ferry is crazy? They might be a cult’

‘How will anyone know we’re here?’

‘She’s a witch. I know she is. What if she eats children? I hope she’s a vegetarian.’

These were all questions that the cousins threw at each other. None of them had any answers. They huddled together, terrified.

They were worried that they were going to get into trouble. And now they were also scared that Sylvia was getting nearer and they already knew she was crazy, and probably capable of anything. Vicki rubbed her bruised arm. She looked at her watch; it was twenty five past eight Liberty time. Would Nana have called the police by now? She hoped the police were coming to save them. But even if they’d been missed, nobody would know where to find them.

Vicki stuck her hands in her pockets and sang quietly to herself, she always sang when she was nervous. Her fingers touched something right at the bottom of her jeans pocket. She pulled it out and shrieked in excitement when she realised that it was the piece of paper from the frame. She hadn’t dropped it on the bedroom carpet after all and had missed it when she’d patted her pockets down.

‘Quick. Quick.’ the others shouted.

‘Read the poem,’ Kerry said urgently. ‘Come on, hurry before she gets here.’

None of them expected it to work but it was all they had and time was running out. The ferry was just coming into berth by the jetty.

With trembling fingers and unsteady voice, Vicki read the poem. She started slowly and then, as the words became more familiar to her, her pace quickened.

Here is an image for you to keep -
Follow where the lizards leap.
Move with caution, take a peep,
Beware! Do not get in too deep.

Repeat the words inscribed below;
Take a breath and off you go.

Sand Lizard. Sand Lizard, cautiously creep
Shim. Sham. Shally wham. Lizards leap!

The landscape around them jolted and then moved. It was slower this time.

‘Read it again’ shrieked Emma.

‘No, it’s okay it working.’

Mark stepped out from the shadows and waved at Sylvia. ‘Adios, amigos.’

Vicki grabbed his shirt and dragged him back in case he got left behind.

The world spun. Faster and faster it revolved. They were caught up in the vortex and travelled through time and space in a swirling mass of arms and legs. It was over in seconds but left them dizzy and disorientated.

When it stopped spinning they were sitting on the floor in their bedroom, the picture of the Statue of Liberty on the rug in front of them.

‘Whoa, cool,’ said Mark. ‘That was awesome.’

‘I suppose we’d better go and face the music. All we can do is just tell the police the truth,’ Vicki said.

As she spoke there was a knock on the door and Nana came in with the vacuum cleaner in her hand.

‘I thought I asked you to turn that music down,’ she said, glaring at Vicki. ‘And as for you, Madam,’ she turned her attention to Kerry. ‘Do you ever intend to get dressed today, or are we having a pyjama party?’

Kerry ran over to her nana and flung her arms around her waist. She buried her head in her grandmother’s pinny and smelled the familiar homeness of cooking and soap. ‘I love you, Nana,’ she said.

Vicki noticed that the same album was playing as when they had left, although it was running a different track. She looked at her watch. It said twenty to nine. She looked at the clock on the wall. That one said ten to twelve. She went back to her watch and it matched the time of the wall clock and had righted itself in the time it took to look away. They had only been gone ten minutes and yet they had been in America for almost two hours. It was impossible. She sat back on her heels.

‘When you’re in the picture time moves normally and yet, here, it slows right down. One hour is equal to five minutes,’

‘What a lovely song, dear. Who sings it?’ her nana spoke in a distracted voice already plugging the vacuum into the wall socket.

They were lost in their own thoughts and impressions of their journey.

‘I wonder what would happen if we changed the picture in the frame?’ Emma said after their nana had left the room.

Mark was the first one to ask what all four of them were thinking. ‘When are we going to find out?’