Sometimes I see people staring at the scar on the side of my head. I know what they''re thinking. They want to ask how I got it. But they don''t - they just stare. I try to keep the scar hidden by having my hair long. But there''s no hiding the white line that comes over my left ear and down to my cheekbone. And people look but they don''t ask. Other times, they might remember something - if they hear my name, and if they''re the right age.
My name is . unusual, after all, and hearing it will start them remembering. "Porter Fox?" they say. "The Porter Fox?" And I try to smile and say, "No", but I can see they don''t believe me. I can see that they are trying to remember the details and so I leave them to whisper behind my back. For I was famous once, for five minutes, at the end of a certain summer. Over the years I have heard all sorts of versions of what happened. None of them are right, so now I''m going to set it all down.
But before you read it, remember this: I only ever tell one lie, and this isn''t it. Everything I am about to tell you is exactly what happened. It is the truth. 1 Seven times we looked for them. That first day, the Saturday. We searched that dark place, up and down, back and forth, seven times. The first time, it seemed like a game. Hunting for them.
Like hide and seek. None of us were really taking it seriously - none of us kids, I mean. But a strange look had appeared on the faces of Mr Lindsay and Miss Weston, and it was the same look they both had. It wasn''t the normal way your teacher looks cross, to get you to do something. It was something else. Maybe a lot of things: things like worry, and fear, and confusion. I think, to start with, confusion was the main thing. There was a question in their minds: how do thirtyfour people walk into one end of a tunnel but only thirtytwo walk out of the other end? Because that is what happened.
And if lots of us weren''t taking it seriously, our teachers were. I suppose we thought that the missing two kids were just mucking about: hiding on purpose or up to something. Except, that didn''t make sense. Not with the two who were missing. Stephanie. And Stephen. If it had been a couple of the proper "lads" in the class, maybe, but not those two. And the more we searched, the more it became clear to everyone that there wasn''t really anywhere to hide in that place.
Lud''s Church. I didn''t like it, right from the start. Something about the place made me feel uneasy, but I can''t tell you why. I didn''t even notice it to start with - I was too busy just being there and trying to avoid Adam Caxton and his mates. And putting up with my friend Sam''s endless attempts to be funny. And wondering why Miss Weston from the English department had brought her eightyearold daughter along with her on our Geography field trip. But if I had stopped to think for even one second, I would have noticed that the place was unsettling. It was as if there was a low humming sound, the sort of sound that''s so low you can''t even be sure you''re really hearing it, or just feeling it beating at your body.
A sound gnawing away at you, one you only notice when it stops. This place was like that. When we got there, we didn''t even know we had. Not at first. It was all so confusing. For one thing, you have to remember how hot it was. That summer, that famous summer. So hot.
No rain all year, almost none the previous year. The sun beat down, day after day. Even before the holidays began, it was superhot. Now we were back at school, the summer was nearly over, and still it didn''t rain. The temperature was in the high twenties every day, then into the low thirties. Rivers dried up and they put in a hosepipe ban, and then they even had to put these little water trucks out in some places. There was one at the end of our street, and me and my little sister would take it in turns to go and line up for drinking water. By the end of that summer, the ground looked crazy.
I''d seen pictures on the TV once of the droughts in Africa, and now our parks and fields looked like that - the grass all dead and the mud dried out and cracked. Cracked in wild patterns. And there we were, thirtyfour of us packed into a bus on a stinking hot day for our Geography trip, and on a Saturday too. I can''t remember why it had to be a Saturday but somehow it did. We were only a week or so back into term and we had to give up half our weekend. That was another thing that no one liked. Across the moors went the bus, and you know there was no such thing as aircon back then. The bus was ancient, and it just had these tiny slits for windows.
Half of them wouldn''t open at all, so by the time we even arrived at the car park, everyone was in a mean mood. We crawled off the bus, just hanging out. Then I saw Adam Caxton making faces at me, mouthing things, like how he was going to hurt me next, and I tried to pretend I hadn''t seen. But we both knew I had, and there was no avoiding his presence, his bulky strength. I turned away and heard Mr Lindsay making some arrangements with the bus driver, an old man called Ted who always did stuff for the school. He was ancient too, like his bus. I mean, I suppose he seemed that way to me then, but I liked him. Ted was OK.
"OK, Jim, see you at five," Ted said to Mr Lindsay, and drove off. We were left standing by the ruins of some old mill by the river, while Adam sniggered with his friends because they''d just found out Mr Lindsay was called Jim. What was he supposed to be called? Idiots, I remember thinking. From there, it wasn''t really that far to the forest. We just made a meal of it. Dragging along. Thirtyone hot and stupid teenagers. Miss Weston and her daughter were up front.
Mr Lindsay came along behind, telling us things about the rocks and the river and the Dark Peak itself. We walked alongside the River Dane, but there was almost no water in it. With the drought it was no more than a brown trickle between the stones. Sam and I were near the front, to get away from certain people. We were still near the front when we walked up out of the small valley and into the sloping forest that covered the hillside to our left. A few minutes later and we were deep into the trees. And then there we were, at the bottom end of Lud''s Church. Even then you couldn''t see it.
Mr Lindsay had to call ahead to Miss Weston because she''d just walked right past it. You could be right at its mouth - the entrance to this place, I mean - but you couldn''t see it, not until you took a few more steps and then you were inside. Mr Lindsay, who must have been there before, made us stand around him in a circle while he gave us a lecture. He told us how it was formed, from the land slipping, from the whole hillside slipping a tiny bit, and opening this crack in the land. And Mr Lindsay told us when it had happened. It was long ago, but not as long ago as I''d been expecting him to say, though I don''t know why I thought that. And then Miss Weston told us one of the stories about the place, which was why she''d come, I guess. She said there was this really old poem, written in English so old you would barely know it was English, and it was about one of King Arthur''s knights.
She told us that it happened here. "For real, Miss? King Arthur?" Sam said, and people rolled their eyes. Meanwhile Miss Weston explained that the end of the story was set there. And she made Sam feel better by glaring at everyone else and explaining that, while no one knew for sure, there was every chance that King Arthur had been a real king of Britain, once upon 8Sample a time and long ago, when it wasn''t even called Britain yet. She called the country by another name: Logres. She told us tha.