Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl

'You're right of course, Mother. I've been meaning to do it for some time. Butler has a sister I believe would be perfect for the position. I think I've mentioned her. Juliet?'

Angeline frowned. 'Juliet? Yes, the name does seem familiar.

Well, anyone would be better than that silly girl we have now. When can she start?'

'Straight away. I'll have Butler fetch her from the lodge.'

'You're a good boy, Artemis. Now give Mummy a hug.'

Artemis stepped into the shadowy folds of his mother's robe. She smelled perfumed, like petals in water. But her arms were cold and weak.

'Oh, darling,' she whispered, and the sound sent goosebumps popping down Artemis's neck. 'I hear things. At night. They crawl along the pillows and into my ears.'

Artemis felt that lump in his throat again.

'Perhaps we should open the curtains, Mother.'

'No,' his mother sobbed, releasing him from her grasp. 'No. Because then I could see them too.'

'Mother, please.'

But it was no use. Angeline was gone. She crawled to the far corner of the bed, pulling the quilt under her chin.

'Send the new girl.'

'Yes, Mother.'

'Send her with cucumber slices and water.'

'Yes, Mother.'

Angeline glared at him with crafty eyes. 'And stop calling me Mother. I don't know who you are, but you're certainly not my little Arty.'

Artemis blinked back a few rebellious tears.

'Of course. Sorry, Moth- Sorry.'

'Hmm. Don't come back here again, or I'll have my husband take care of you. He's a very important man, you know.'

'Very well, Mrs. Fowl. This is the last you'll see of me.'

'It had better be.' Angeline froze suddenly. 'Do you hear them?'

Artemis shook his head.

'No. I don't hear any- '

'They're coming for me. They're everywhere.'

Angeline dived for cover beneath the bedclothes.

Artemis could still hear her terrified sobs as he descended the marble staircase.

The Book was proving far more stubborn than Artemis had anticipated. It seemed to be almost actively resisting him. No matter which program he ran it through, the computer came up blank.

Artemis hard-copied every page, tacking them to the walls of his study. Sometimes it helped to have things on paper. The script was like nothing he'd seen before, and yet it was strangely familiar.

Obviously a mixture of symbolic and character-based language, the text meandered around the page in no apparent order.

What the program needed was some frame of reference, some central point on which to build. He separated all the characters and ran comparisons with English, Chinese, Greek, Arabic and Cyrillic texts, even with Ogham. Nothing.

Moody with frustration, Artemis sent Juliet scurrying when she interrupted with sandwiches, and moved on to symbols. The most frequently recurring pictogram was a small male figure. Male, he presumed, though with the limited knowledge of the fairy anatomy he supposed it could be female. A thought struck him. Artemis opened the ancient languages file on his Power Translator and selected Egyptian.

At last. A hit. The male symbol was remarkably similar to the Anubis god representation on Tutankhamen's inner-chamber hieroglyphics. This was consistent with his other findings. The first written human stories were about fairies, suggesting that their civilization predated man's own. It would seem that the Egyptians had simply adapted an existing scripture to suit their needs.

There were other resemblances. But the characters were just dissimilar enough to slip through the computer's net. This would have to be done manually. Each Gnommish figure had to be enlarged, printed and then compared with the hieroglyphs.

Artemis felt the excitement of success thumping inside his ribcage. Almost every fairy pictogram or letter had an Egyptian counterpart. Most were universal, such as the sun or birds. But some seemed exclusively supernatural and had to be tailored to fit. The Anubis figure, for example, would make no sense as a dog god, so Artemis altered it to read king of the fairies.

By midnight, Artemis had successfully fed his findings into the Macintosh. All he had to do now was press 'Decode'. He did so. What emerged was a long, intricate string of meaningless gibberish.

A normal child would have abandoned the task long since. The average adult would probably have been reduced to slapping the keyboard. But not Artemis. This book was testing him and he would not allow it to win.

The letters were right, he was certain of it. It was just the order that was wrong. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Artemis glared at the pages again. Each segment was bordered by a solid line. This could represent paragraphs or chapters, but they were not meant to be read in the usual left to right, top to bottom fashion.

Artemis experimented. He tried the Arabic right to left and the Chinese columns. Nothing worked. Then he noticed that each page had one thing in common — a central section. The other pictograms were arranged around this pivotal area. So a central starting point perhaps. But where to go from there? Artemis scanned the pages for some other common factor. After several minutes he found it. There was on each page a tiny spearhead in the corner of one section. Could this be an arrow? A direction? Go this way? So the theory would be start in the middle, then follow the arrow, reading in spirals.

The computer program wasn't built to handle something like this, so Artemis had to improvise. With a craft knife and ruler, he dissected the first page of the Book and reassembled it in the traditional Western languages order — left to right, parallel rows. Then he rescanned the page and fed it through the modified Egyptian translator.

The computer hummed and whirred, converting all the information to binary. Several times it stopped to ask for confirmation of a character or symbol. This happened less and less as the machine learned the new language. Eventually two words flashed on the screen:

File converted.

Fingers shaking from exhaustion and excitement, Artemis clicked 'Print'. A single page scrolled from the LaserWriter. It was in English now. Yes, there were mistakes, some fine-tuning needed, but it was perfectly legible and, more importantly, perfectly understandable.

Fully aware that he was probably the first human in several thousand years to decode the magical words, Artemis switched on his desk light and began to read.

The Booke of the People.

Being instructions to our magicks and life rules Carry me always, carry me well.

I am thy teacher of herb and spell.

I am thy link to power arcane.

Forget me and thy magick shall wane.

Ten times ten commandments there be.

They will answer every mystery.

Cures, curses, alchemy.

These secrets shall be thine, through me.

But, Fairy, remember this above all.

I am not for those in mud that crawl.

And forever doomed shall be the one,

Who betrays my secrets one by one.

Artemis could hear the blood pumping in his ears. He had them.

They would be as ants beneath his feet. Their every secret would be laid bare by technology. Suddenly the exhaustion claimed him and he sank back in his chair. There was so much yet to complete. Forty-three pages to be translated for a start.

He pressed the intercom button that linked him to speakers all over the house.

'Butler. Get Juliet and come up here. There are some jigsaws I need you to assemble.'

Perhaps a little family history would be useful at this point.

The Fowls were, indeed, legendary criminals. For generations they had skirmished on the wrong side of the law, hoarding enough funds to become legitimate. Of course, once they were legitimate they found it not to their liking and returned almost immediately to crime.

It was Artemis the First, our subject's father, who had thrown the family fortune into jeopardy. With the break-up of communist Russia, Artemis Senior had decided to invest a huge chunk of the Fowl fortune in establishing new shipping lines to the vast continent. New consumers, he reasoned, would need new consumer goods. The Russian Mafia did not take too kindly to a Westerner muscling in on their market and so decided to send a little message. This message took the form of a stolen Stinger missile launched at the Fowl Star on her way past Murmansk. Artemis Senior was on board the ship, along with Butler's uncle and 250,000 cans of cola. It was quite an explosion.