She flinched and knew they must be talking about her.
An hour went by and still Felix hadn’t come out. Stella got up, paced around a bit, and looked up and down before finally deciding that she couldn’t possibly sit in that lumpy old chair a moment longer. She was in the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club, so if Felix wasn’t persuasive enough, and the president was about to have her thrown out, then Stella was going to make absolutely sure that she at least got to see the Map Room before she left.
She figured it couldn’t be that difficult to find and so, with one last guilty look at the club president’s door, she turned her back on it and walked away down the corridor.
CHAPTER FIVE
It turned out that finding the Map Room wasn’t quite as straightforward as Stella had hoped. There were no signs anywhere, for one thing. No handy maps with red You-Are-Here dots to mark the way. She had no choice but to wander at random. She found the library, which was even larger than the one they had at home, and also stumbled into a couple of cosy-looking drawing rooms, which held a lot of over-stuffed armchairs and snoozing explorers and clouds of cigar smoke. The next door she opened led to a steaming salt water pool housed in a huge room with a cavernous ceiling and beautiful wall tiles decorated with polar bears and the explorers’ club crest. Strangely, the Jacuzzi in the corner was full of happily soaking penguins, who looked quite miffed at being disturbed.
It wasn’t long before Stella was completely lost and wouldn’t have been able to return to the president’s room even if she’d wanted to. She felt a guilty twinge as she realised that Felix was going to have to come looking for her, but there wasn’t much she could do to change that now.
Finally, she turned a corner and found herself outside a set of large and impressive-looking double doors. Hoping that these might lead to the Map Room, Stella pushed them open and slipped inside. However, she didn’t find herself in the Map Room, but in the Hall of Flags.
And it was most definitely a Hall with a capital H. The ceiling soared high above her, painted with a white, frozen landscape scattered with some of the most important discoveries claimed by members of the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club. At one end Stella recognised the polar beans that had saved Coldgate from famine sixty years ago. At the other was a collection of frost hares and a whole herd of singing ice whales. In the very centre of the painting was a great yeti, teeth bared ferociously whilst the rarest of polar explorers – a yeti-whisperer – stood alone and unarmed below it, calming the huge beast with nothing but words.
Lining the walls, in gilt gold frames, was a selection of retired expedition flags. All of them displayed signs of wear and tear around the edges, or unidentified stains, or teeth marks – sure signs that they had been out there in the world, proudly displayed throughout their various expeditions.
Stella walked over to the first one and examined the explorers’ crest stitched in the centre. It combined the four symbols of the world’s four Explorers’ Clubs: Polar Bear, Ocean Squid, Jungle Cat and Desert Jackal. But because these were Polar Bear Explorers’ Club flags, the polar bear was stitched in gold thread, whilst the others were stitched in black. A plaque on the wall beneath it proclaimed that this flag had been taken on the ‘Frozen Waterfall Expedition’, the ‘Narrow Gorge Expedition’ and the ‘Snow Shark Expedition’ before being retired to the Hall of Flags. Stella guessed that the snow shark one must have been the last, because the flag had rather an alarming amount of bite marks. It had practically been shredded in some places.
Stella was so absorbed in the flag, and thoughts of the monster that had wrecked it, that she hadn’t noticed there was someone else in the hall with her. She only became aware of his presence when a cold voice spoke behind her: ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
Stella yelped in surprise and whirled around on the spot. To begin with she couldn’t see anyone in the vast hall, but then her eyes found a boy sitting in a corner with his back against the wall and his legs drawn up, his arms resting on his knees. Slowly, he unfolded his skinny body, stood up and took a step towards her.
He was perhaps a year older than Stella, with a thin, pale face and hair so blond it was almost white. Stella narrowed her eyes as she saw he wore the black robes of the Ocean Squid Explorers’ Club. These were similar in style to the Polar Bear robes, except that they were made from waxed oilcloth, to protect the wearer from the elements, and had a tiny squid emblem emblazoned on the chest. The boy’s white collar was so stiff and straight it looked as if it had been starched, and his hair was brushed back so neatly that Stella thought he must have used a whole tube of hair wax to fix it like that.
‘Girls aren’t allowed in the Explorers’ Clubs,’ the boy spoke again. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’
Stella folded her arms over her chest. ‘Well, neither are you. This is the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club, not Ocean Squid.’
‘How did you get in? Did you sneak over the gates?’ the boy
