Argleton, Chapter 5: A late night

The decision to camp at Ibemcester turns out to be a bad one.

Read Chapter 4 first or start at the beginning.

The rain was still hammering on the car roof when they arrived at the campsite. They sat silently for a moment.

“It is waterproof, isn’t it?”

“It’s a tent, of course it’s waterproof. That’s the point of tents,” Charlie said.

“We could just drive home.”

“I’ve driven for six hours already today,” Charlie protested. “It’s a long way from the south coast back up to Manchester.”

“It’s only eight o’clock. We could be home by three.”

“Or wrapped around a tree because I fell asleep at the wheel.”

“Good point.”

They surveyed the camping site. The ground sloped gently down to a small pond choked with duck weed. Large green mounds turned out to be ancient caravans so thickly coated in algae that they blended in with the landscape. A grotty toilet block at the end of the field was the only hint that the land had ever been deliberately given over to any type of human leisure activity. A holiday here would certainly require more stoicism than one in the Algarve.

“How hard is the tent to put up?” Matt asked, noting a lighter pitter-patter as the rain eased.

“Piece of cake. If it dries up for ten minutes, we can get it done,” Charlie replied. They waited in silence for a while longer.

“Right! Now!” Charlie opened the door and dashed to the car boot, coat hood pulled up against the drizzle. She pulled out a tent and set to putting it up. Matt stood behind her, unsure how to help.

“Get the groundsheet,” Charlie said as she focused on putting the tent poles together. Matt ferreted about in the boot for so long Charlie lost patience and found it herself. “You really meant it when you said you’d never camped before, didn’t you?” she said.

“Duh,” came the reply.

With the tent up, Charlie began to transfer sleeping mats and bags, a worried glance at the sky hastening her work.

“Quick! Get in, before it starts raining again.”

As they zipped up the tent flaps, the rain returned, beating on the fly sheet like a hundred bored pixies drubbing their fingers on a desk.

“That was close!”

“Can you blow up this mat?”

“When they described this as a ‘two man tent’, they must have had two very small men in mind.”

Charlie took a second look. It was very cosy. She blushed in the darkness. “I normally camp on my own.”

They settled into their sleeping bags and listened to the rain. Matt laid still, willing himself to sleep. The night was warm enough that he felt quite comfortable and the sound of rain was almost soothing, a random white noise of splits and splats. Despite his expectations of a long and boring night, and despite the early hour, he quickly drifted off to sleep.

Charlie lay awake, acutely aware that she was jammed in a one-and-a-half-dwarf tent in the middle of the Dorset countryside in the pouring rain with… She tried not to think about it and attempted to settle down instead. It was hard to turn over in this sleeping bag at the best of times, but her efforts to not touch either the side of the tent or Matt resulted in an awkward series of little shuffles, like a horizontal three point turn. Eventually she got comfortable, or as near to comfortable as was possible given the circumstances, and let her mind unspool. Sleep came gradually but inexorably.

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Matt wasn’t quite sure what made him wake in the small hours. It was still raining, but no more than earlier. He lay still, trying to get back to sleep, but instead his head began to buzz. Anagrams. It seemed to be all about anagrams. Argleton: Not real G; Get on l‘AR. Ibemcester: Be mi secret; Re me bisect.

What did it mean?

Well bisecting is to split something into two. It is something you can do to a line, a shape or an angle, he thought. Right now, they had a straight line between Argleton and Ibemcester. Did this mean there was a third phantom town somewhere between here and there? Was that the end of the puzzle? His eyes snapped open and he reached for his phone. The screen lit the tent up with a weak, bluish glow as he fumbled to get his email loaded.

The mobile data connection was slow and he tried not to huff as he waited for his mail application to start downloading messages, but the progress bar stayed resolutely still. The screensaver flicked the screen to black. He jabbed a finger at the phone to wake it up but his mail had made no progress at all.

A thunder clap startled him, the lightning illuminating the tent.

“What the crap?” said Charlie, dazed but awake.

“Erm…” Matt stared at his phone, eyes confused by the brief bright light. Another lightning flash strobed across the sky, longer than the first.

“Oh shit,” said Charlie. “We’re leaking.”

“What?” Matt played the light from his phone screen around the tent and saw a drip of water run slowly down a seam, plop onto Charlie’s sleeping bag and disperse through the fabric in an instant. Another drip followed.

“Crap,” Charlie said, jerking her feet to take the sleeping bag out of range. “These are goose down. If they get wet, they’re ruined.”

Another lightning flash lit the tent, thunder hot on its heels. The storm was overhead. A gust of wind buffeted the fly sheet, pushing it against the inner tent. Water seeped easily through the fabric where it touched. The wind rose. The rain fell like stair rods.

“Oh, this is so not good,” said Charlie as water began to stream through the tent fabric. “Not good at all. We’d better shift to the car. This isn’t going to end well if we just sit here.”

Matt looked around in the dim glow of his phone’s screen.

“Where’s your laptop?” Charlie asked.

“In the car.”

“Well, that’s one less thing to worry about, I suppose,” she said as she struggled to extricate herself from the sleeping bag and put her shoes on. They got jumpers and coats on as quickly as they could in the cramped space, whilst trying to keep the sleeping bags out of the growing puddle of water collecting at the foot of the tent. Charlie quickly stuffed the bags into their carry sacks and Matt gathered the rest of their things into the holdall.

“Right, ready to make a dash for it?”

The car was parked right next to the tent, but they still got wet ferrying their stuff to safety. Charlie toyed with the idea of taking the tent down in the rain, but it was already soaked through and there seemed no point in her getting colder and wetter.

Finally they were both seated in the car, gear stowed on the back seat.

“Jeeze,” Matt said, looking at his watch. “2am. Great.”

“Well, at least these seats recline quite a bit.”

“Yeah,” Matt twisted the knob at the side of his seat. “Still not the comfiest place to sleep.”

“Comfier than a wet sleeping bag.”

“Talking of wet.” Matt wriggled in his seat, stripping off his wet jacket, trainers and socks. For a moment, he considered taking off his damp trousers but, despite the fact it was dark, decided against it. He rummaged in the bags on the back seat and pulled forth a feather-filled sack. More wriggling and he had it draped over himself.

“Smart move,” Charlie said, doing the same.

After a period of rustling and shuffling, the car fell quiet, except for the thrum of rain and the rumble of thunder as the storm moved off. Matt fidgeted.

“You know,” he said. “There must be a third phantom town.”

“Why?”

“Think of the wifi password, ‘re me bisect’. You can’t bisect a point, but you can bisect a line. And we have a line: between Argleton and Ibemcester. There has to be a third point somewhere in between.”

“In the middle, if they’ve used the term bisect in a geometrically accurate manner.” Charlie contemplated the problem. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence”, she finally said. “Why would someone go to all that trouble?”

“That’s exactly what I mean! Why set up wifi hotspots in the middle of two fields? Why then make the SSIDs and the passwords anagrams of the phantom town names? They clearly wanted to be found.”

“Maybe they’re just jerking your chain.”

Inside the tent, water continued to pool. The fly sheet was plastered to the inner tent and the rain came through without resistance. A wrinkle in the groundsheet that had held the flood back was overtopped and a tiny surge of water ran along the side of the tent.

Tucked in against the tent wall, lost in the hurry to evacuate, Matt’s phone lay helpless against the oncoming tide. Water seeped in through the dock connector and around the sleek phone’s few buttons. It filled the casing, shorting out the battery and the logic board that housed the processor chip and memory. Silently, without even a fizzle, the phone died.

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If you want to read Argleton all in one go, download the free ebook now. And why not try The Gates of Balawat or The Lacemaker as well!

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