Crazy Cornelius & the Magic Pills Ch. 06

The family ambled down onto the beach to stretch their legs after so much driving. Erica removed her sneakers and socks, and rolled up her tracksuit pants to her knees, the now barefoot young girl wading out into the ocean, the sand and saltwater getting between her teenage toes.

Erica's enjoyment at a simple paddle at a beautiful beach at Batemans Bay was short lived. The teen looked down in the blue water as the waves rolled in, and saw several crabs. At least she thought they were crabs at first. These were not crabs, these things were weird, strange segmented bodies like a cross between an insect and a crustacean.

"Hey check these out," said Erica, the others looking in amazement at the odd marine creatures that swam around her bare feet.

"What are they?" Cornelius asked.

Surprisingly, this time it was Danielle that answered, not Gavin. "They're trilobites. I was covering for a biology teacher a few weeks back, the class were learning about them."

"I suppose you're going to tell me they've been extinct hundreds of years too?" asked Alistair.

Danielle shook her head. "No. Millions of years. Many millions of years. The dinosaurs existed closer in time to us than they did to the trilobites."

"You mean like those dinosaurs?" asked Gavin. He pointed along the beach, and everyone stopped short. Coming towards them were a variety of dinosaurs, a fierce tyrannosaurus, a long-bodied brontosaurus, a horned triceratops, a plated stegosaurus and a duck-billed dinosaur. Overhead flew four pterodactyls, and swimming in the ocean was a plesiosaurus, much like the one that had killed the fat guy in the lake back in Canberra.

Erica hastily stepped out of the sea, and coming the other way were other extinct animals these ones a bit more recent, from the Ice Age. There was a herd of wooly mammoths which trumpeted like modern elephants, and some wooly rhinos, two saber toothed cats stalking through the sand dunes.

"They've gone back even further it time to bring back extinct animals," said the amazed Alistair, the presence of the trilobites and prehistoric beasts ensuring that the Hawkins family's visit to Batemans Bay was a short one.

Sporting their false Victorian and Queensland number plates, the two cars crossed the Clyde River and went out of town, into the forests of the area to find a suitable hidden place to camp in the cars overnight.

*

Many miles north in Sydney, the police were doing an A1 job in launching the missing persons' investigation. The extended Hawkins family were contacted, none of whom had heard from Alistair, Faye or the kids in recent days. It was quickly established with Faye's family, both those in Sydney and the sister that had moved to Adelaide that the South Australian story was a complete fabrication, and her sister Angela was in perfect health, this evidenced by the phone call earlier captured on the answering machine. The Hawkins family were immediately listed as missing people too.

Lisa assisted by Pete frantically rang around family and friends both in Sydney and Wollongong to see if there was any contact with Gavin, which of course there was none. Lisa's maternal grandparents immediately came to be with their granddaughter, her paternal grandparents said that they would make the drive up tonight too but it was decided in the end they would stay back for now. Nightfall was approaching, and it was a long drive. There was also a chance that Gavin might turn up in Wollongong to see family, and at this stage it might be better to stay south in case this did happen.

The police made contact with the domestic airlines, and it was confirmed that no passengers in the names of Gavin Baxter or Alistair, Faye, Brendan, Cornelius, Erica or Danielle Hawkins had flown under those names to Adelaide, the Gold Coast, or indeed any other destination around Australia. They could not have gone overseas.

To eliminate the possibility of driving or taking public transport to the Gold Coast, the police quickly rang all the theme parks in the area to see if they had interviewed a Cornelius Hawkins for a clown position over the weekend. None of them had, and had never heard of a Cornelius Hawkins.

The police got recent photos of Gavin and the Hawkins family except Brendan as no recent photographs of him could be found, and the media were informed. The police advised Lisa that there wasn't much they could do so late on a Sunday evening with regards to news reports, but it would be on all channels from dawn tomorrow.

The sun set behind the Blue Mountains, the moon rose and darkness fell across Sydney, and Lisa sat with her grandparents and boyfriend, other relatives there to lend support, helping the police with their enquiries. She agonized about how to tell their parents, but in the end her grandparents decided it would be better to wait until tomorrow morning before the ship docked at Circular Quay.

There was nothing they could do so many miles out at sea, all it would do was cause unnecessary worry. In any case, Gavin had only been missing since Friday and he might turn up as early as tonight unharmed, wondering what all the fuss was about. Lots of missing people did.

*

Gavin at this moment was off a deserted track in the South Coast forest, listening to nocturnal bird calls, waiting for Erica to finish having a poo behind a large gum tree. The young girl emerged a few minutes later adjusting her knickers through her pink tracksuit pants, the teenager balancing a torch, shovel and roll of toilet paper in her hands.

"Everything okay?" asked Gavin.

"Yeah," said Erica. She smiled thinly. "Although it might be better to stay away from that area for a while."

Gavin laughed. "Warning noted."

Erica looked down at noticed that she had a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe and bent down to remove the embarrassing evidence of her visit behind the tree. As she did so she looked upwards and stopped short in amazement.

"What's wrong?" Gavin asked.

"Gavin, look at the sky! Oh my God!"

Gavin looked at the night sky and he could see the moon of course and the stars, but this was all wrong. There was no Southern Cross constellation nor other familiar stars visible, but in its place were the North Star Polaris, the Plough and the Lynx, all stars and constellations only visible in the Northern Hemisphere never the Southern Hemisphere.

"We're seeing the Northern Hemisphere's star systems," said Gavin, his mouth agape.

"We need to tell the others," said Erica.

The two teenagers hurried back to the makeshift camp through the forest. It was probably fortunate for Erica she didn't know how close she came to standing on a sleeping tiger snake, nor Gavin knowing that the thing that tickled his arm when passed close to some vegetation and which he casually brushed away was in fact a scorpion.

Alistair, Faye, Cornelius and Danielle were standing outside their cars, not paying attention to the night sky until the youngest members of the group pointed it out. They all stared skywards, disbelieving that the sky had changed to show the stars of the Northern Hemisphere and not the Southern Hemisphere.

It wasn't the only thing out of place. In a neat line were eight discs, all of different colors. There was a very small grey disc, a larger yellow one, a slightly smaller red one, then a row of four large discs respectively blue and orange, yellow, green and blue. At the other end was another very small yellow disc.

"That's the planets," said Gavin in amazement, the others getting the binoculars to look at the amazing sight of the other planets in perfect alignment. They were small of course, but all visible with the naked eye, definitely not the case for Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. With Jupiter and Saturn, it was possible to make out the red spot for Jupiter and the rings of Saturn with the aid of binoculars.

"Hey Danielle, I can see Uranus!" guffawed Cornelius, as he looked at the strange green planet and its blue neighbor Neptune through the binoculars.

"Ha, ha, ha, up yours Cornelius," laughed Danielle, giving Cornelius the 'up-yours hand' gesture.

"What's that blue streak up there?" Erica asked, indicating the blue light under the moon.

"That's Halley's Comet," said Alistair, having seen the comet 12 years earlier when it flew past Earth during its 1986 visit, courtesy of a night job at a city hotel where he and the crew were able to observe Halley's Comet from the roof.

Everyone took turns to look at the comet through binoculars, before Alistair declared solemnly, "It shows the sheer powers that are chasing us, being able to manipulate the stars and planets like that, as well as move a comet back in time. We need to be extra careful overnight. One person in each car stays awake for two hours to keep watch for danger while the others sleep, then we switch over. Any danger, then sound the alarm and we go. Gavin, you sleep with Danielle and Cornelius in their car, Erica, you're with us."

"Yes Mr. Hawkins," said Gavin, going to Danielle's car and taking first watch, while Danielle and Cornelius snored respectively in the back and front passenger seats. The young man looked out the car window, a shooting star visible in the strange sky, and Gavin could not believe he was looking at the planet Pluto with the naked eye. It was -- should have been impossible -- but there it was. Gavin was tired, but his worry about Lisa was keeping him awake for his watch. He hoped the demons, monsters, ghosts and aliens hadn't come for her if they thought she knew too much.

*

In Sydney, Lisa was also looking at the night sky from the back patio of her parents' house, but she could see the Southern Hemisphere sky, with the Southern Cross prominent. It had been a highly emotional and worrying day when events took a turn in the early afternoon, and Lisa's view of the night sky began to blur as her eyes filled with tears.

Finally her attempts to stop herself crying failed, and she broke down in tears, her boyfriend and grandmother taking her inside and sitting her down in an armchair, getting her some tissues and attempting to comfort and reassure her as she sat sobbing. Floods of tears ran down her pretty face as she thought about her younger brother. Where was he? Who was he with? Would she ever see him again, or was Gavin gone forever? Lisa could barely bring herself to think about this possibility.

END OF CHAPTER 6 -- TO BE CONCLUDED.....