by Kerstin Gier
“You can talk aloud; she’s hard of hearing in her dreams as well as real life.” Henry pushed a pot of Alpine violets aside and propped his elbows on the table. “She lives on the other side of the road from us, and she feeds our cat when we go away. In return, we water her flowers when she goes to see her brother in Bath. It took me ages to find her door, but the more often I … er, visit her, the closer her door moves to mine, and so to yours too.” He let his eyes wander around the room and then smiled at us. “The perfect headquarters, don’t you think?”
Grayson gave him a dark look. “Yes, it’s such a great feeling, stalking a poor old lady. I don’t see how that’s going to help us solve our problems. Or what use it is spending night after night in these corridors, anyway.” He sighed. “I’m going to be dead tired again tomorrow morning.”
“I know you hate all this,” said Henry, in the same gently hypnotic tone of voice that he’d used to Mrs. Honeycutt. “But you’ve seen what happens if you simply keep away. Arthur and Anabel have had months to perfect their abilities every night. So we must practice all the harder, try experiments to keep up with them—”
“You mean you must, not all of us,” Grayson interrupted in such a loud voice that we looked at him in alarm. “Oh, come along, you know I’m right. It’s not just Arthur and Anabel who have perfected their abilities, so have you two. And to be honest, I’ll never learn the things you can do.”
“Never ever,” screeched the parrot, and I was afraid it might be right. Grayson didn’t have a great deal of imagination—and you needed imagination here more than anything.
For a second Henry looked as if he were thinking of something else. “It’s all a matter of training,” he said, and at that very moment he disappeared without a trace. Just like that, without advance warning, without leaving a breath of air behind or making the slightest sound.
“At least a little plop like a soap bubble bursting would be nice,” I murmured.
“Very funny.” Grayson put out his hand to the air above Henry’s chair. “Yes, okay, Henry, a great demonstration. That’s exactly what I meant. I’ll never learn how to do that. And now you can stop it and reappear.”
“Grayson, I’m afraid he hasn’t made himself invisible; he simply woke up.” I looked over at Mrs. Honeycutt, sitting with her back to us and knitting peacefully away. There was something homely about the click of the knitting needles. “We could wait a little while, in case Henry manages to go back to sleep quickly. But he’s probably been woken, and then it takes longer.” I knew about this already. On weekends, Henry’s mother used to go out, leaving him to look after his brother and sister. Those were usually restless nights; little Amy, in particular, was often sick and got thirsty or lost her cuddly toy. Or sometimes Henry was woken by his brother, Milo, who thought he had heard someone breaking in or simply had a bad dream. And if Amy, Milo, or the family cat didn’t keep Henry on the go, it would be his mother coming home drunk and waking everyone with the sound of her high heels tapping on the floor like gunshots. Too bad if she stumbled over the toys in the hallway. She would begin shouting, and she often burst into tears. Henry hadn’t told me that, but those sounds and voices in real life sometimes mingled with his dreams and I could hear them myself, before he woke up and disappeared.
“Let’s go.” Grayson rose to his feet quickly. “Because if you stop dreaming too, Liv, I’ll have to find my way back alone, and I’ll get hopelessly lost.”
“Lost, cost,” screeched the parrot, and then, in an alarmingly human and very deep voice, it added, “Permafrost.”
“Oh, great, you’re giving me goose bumps, you stupid bird,” said Grayson. “Liv, are you coming?”
Presumably there wasn’t any real point in waiting around here for Henry. I reached for the hand that Grayson was impatiently holding out to me, and let him haul me up. “The first thing you have to learn, Grayson, is how to wake if you don’t like the dream or it gets too dangerous. That’s much more important than any shape-changing tricks.”
The grandfather clock against the opposite wall struck twelve. That was the time in Mrs. Honeycutt’s dream, but in reality it must be well after two in the morning. I knew I hadn’t fallen asleep until long after midnight, because Mia had climbed into bed with me and we had tried to comfort each other, saying it would be best for Lottie to begin a new life. Without us.
Even as the clock struck, echoing through the room, a door in the wallpaper beside the clock opened with a slight creak, and a pale, skinny middle-aged man came through it. He was wearing nickel-framed glasses, and he had a round, doughy face and a deep part in his hair on one side of his head. Although he wasn’t exactly a terrifying sight—if only because of the plump flowered cushion wedged under his arm—Mrs. Honeycutt dropped her knitting. Grayson had jumped in alarm as well, letting go of me and sweeping a pot of Alpine violets to the floor. Neither the newcomer nor Mrs. Honeycutt seemed to take any notice.
“Alfred!” gasped Mrs. Honeycutt.
“Yes, it’s me.” Alfred laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh, not the sort you’d expect from a harmless little man with nickel-framed glasses and a flowered cushion, more like what a serial killer might come up with. His voice was the same. “So you triple-locked and checked everything, did you, Becky? But you forgot this secret door.”
“Oh heavens, I get this kind of dream myself,” whispered Grayson.
Alfred wasn’t distracted. Without more ado, he raised the cushion and advanced on Mrs. Honeycutt.
“Please don’t.” It sounded as if Mrs. Honeycutt were short of breath already; her voice was hardly more than a whisper. “Please don’t, Alfred.” She was sitting with her back to me, so I couldn’t see her face but I had a very good view of Alfred’s. There was a wicked gleam in his eyes.
“Begging won’t help you, Miss Know-It-All.” He came even closer to her. “You are about to take your last breath. Oh, how I shall enjoy the twitching of your limbs beneath my hands…”
Grayson cleared his throat. “I don’t want to disturb you, but wouldn’t you rather leave committing murder to a time when there aren’t any witnesses in the room? Hello? Hello, cushion murderer! Can you hear me?” He snapped his fingers wildly in the air.
Alfred frowned but stayed where he was. Mrs. Honeycutt turned and said, “Oh!” as if seeing us for the first time.
I gave her a friendly smile.
“What are these kids doing here?” asked Alfred.
“We were just going,” I said, making my way past all the chairs to the door. “Come on, Grayson!”
“You can’t be serious!” Grayson looked at me indignantly. “I’m not leaving this poor old lady alone with a murderer.”
“It’s a dream, Grayson! Mrs. Honeycutt won’t even remember it first thing in the morning.”
“Never mind that,” said Grayson. “It’s not right.”
I sighed. “Okay. Then here’s a wonderful opportunity for you to get some practice.” I leaned back against the door and crossed my arms. “There you go. The murderer is all yours.”
Rather undecidedly, Grayson raised his arm and pointed to Alfred. “Go away,” he said. “Or … or I’ll call the police.”
I rolled my eyes.
And Alfred had no intention of going away. Far from it. With Grayson’s outstretched forefinger pointing at him, he began growing and getting more muscular. The large, well-manicured hands with which he was clutching the flowered cushion turned into strong paws that you could easily imagine smothering someone, even without a cushion. One-handed, if necessary.
“Okay,” growled Alfred, who didn’t look at all like the Alfred I’d seen at first, and he threw the cushion away. “Your turn first, then, boy!”
“Oh, that’s really…,” said Grayson, taking a step back, which almost landed him on Mrs. Honeycutt’s lap.
“That’s what happens if you let your fears take control,” I pointed out, offstage.
“You might lend a hand, Liv.” Grayson was standing protect
ively in front of Mrs. Honeycutt, trying not to sound panic-stricken. “You can do kung fu. Did you hear that, Alfred? My friend over there can do kung fu.”
Alfred wasn’t in the least impressed. He took no notice of me at all, but reached his enormous, clawlike hands out to Grayson, who snatched up a brass candlestick from the table and brandished it threateningly.
“I warn you,” he said. “Not a step closer, or I’ll hit you with this!”
I groaned. “Do stop acting as if all this was real, Grayson. You can deal with Alfred easily, no trouble at all. You can—oh, think of something yourself—you can be Spider-Man and immobilize him with cobwebs in a flash. Or beam him up to the moon with an intergalactic ray of energy. Or you can turn him into a guinea pig or a strawberry lollipop. You can blow him up like a balloon and let him burst, or—”
“Yes, I get the idea,” said Grayson, angrily interrupting me without taking his eyes off Alfred, who still seemed to be growing larger. “Easier said than done, that’s all.”
Mrs. Honeycutt tugged at his sleeve. “Do you mind, young man?” She picked her knitting up from the floor, stood up herself, and pushed Grayson and the candlestick aside. Then, faster than you’d believe possible, she had thrust both knitting needles into Alfred’s chest. Breathing heavily, he staggered back against the door in the wall.
“Take that, you monster,” cried Mrs. Honeycutt. “And this!” As she picked up a lamp with a marble base in order to bring it down on Alfred’s side part with a yell of triumph, I took my chance to take hold of the totally baffled Grayson’s arm and get him over to the door.
“You see, Mrs. Honeycutt understands the principle too,” I said, slightly breathlessly, once we were out in the corridor and I had closed the door behind us. “Only, unlike you she put it into practice perfectly.” An inappropriate giggle escaped me. “Who’d have thought it?”
Grayson just stared unhappily at the candlestick that he was still holding. “I’m a hopeless case! I didn’t just turn a feeble would-be murderer into a dangerous strangler, I made a killer out of a harmless old lady.” He was going to try opening the door again, but I barred his way.
“We’re not going back in there! Or do you want to help Mrs. Honeycutt get rid of the corpse?”
“I was only going to put the candlestick back,” he said meekly.
He really was a hopeless case, but I didn’t want to discourage him even more. I made the candlestick disappear with a snap of my fingers and took his arm.
“All you need is a bit of practice,” I said as optimistically as I could. “And a little more self-confidence.”
And a sense of achievement. He badly needed that.
6
THE WAY BACK took us a good deal longer than the way to Mrs. Honeycutt’s room had earlier. That was because while we were there, the weird door that could have belonged to Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and was one of the things that helped me to work out where I was, had obviously changed place. Unfortunately that dawned on me only when we had taken two wrong turns.
Instead of cursing me, Grayson just nodded wearily when I told him we still had quite a long way to go.
“It’s a comfort to know that you’re not infallible,” he said. “Although I know it ought to worry me, of course.” He looked briefly behind him for about the thousandth time. “It’s so quiet here.”
“Quiet is good,” I assured him, just as Henry was always telling me. We really did seem to be alone, if I could trust my gut feeling. True, I had briefly glimpsed a shadow out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked more closely, it had gone. But then I made an unexpected discovery, and for once it wasn’t gruesome but a really nice surprise.
I stopped so suddenly that Grayson collided with me.
“Matt’s door!” I pointed enthusiastically to my new find, which was painted a shiny bright red. “We’d never have found it if we hadn’t lost our way.”
“Who’s Matt?” asked Grayson, intrigued.
“Matt next door. I don’t know his surname. The son of the woman who’s scared of blackbirds. He’s moved in with his parents again—didn’t Florence tell you? And this door has to be his.”
“What makes you so sure?” Grayson looked at me, shaking his head. “And why are you so pleased about it?”
I pointed to the words in black ink in the middle of the space above the mailbox slot. “Keep passing the open windows. That’s the motto of the Berry family in The Hotel New Hampshire, which is Matt’s favorite book. And if you want more proof, the red paint is exactly the same color as his Morgan’s Plus Minus something or other.”
“Morgan Plus 8,” Grayson automatically corrected me, before adding, “Don’t say you’re an admirer.”
“Oh, I don’t know the first thing about cars.” As we walked on, I watched the doors carefully so as not to miss our turn. Yes, unless I was much mistaken, we ought to turn left beside that opaque glass door.
“I didn’t mean the car,” said Grayson. “Why are you interested in the whereabouts of Matt’s dream door?”
I left that question unanswered. “We go along here and turn left again just ahead. Then we ought to be in the right corridor.”
“Liv?” Grayson was giving me an intent, sideways look. “What are you planning to do with Matt?”
“Nothing.” Nothing concrete, anyway. I just had a few half-formed ideas that I didn’t want to tell anyone about. Least of all Grayson. “I was pleased to see his door, that’s all.” And now I was very sorry I’d pointed it out to Grayson.
He was still looking hard at me. “I’ve no idea what it is that makes all the girls so keen on that guy. Florence was in love with him for years. It didn’t do her any good, because Matt never saw her as anything but the little girl next door.”
“Yes, that’s the trouble with boys,” I said, incensed. “If you’re inexperienced, they dismiss you as a little girl and just look at you pityingly. But if they hear that you’ve had a boyfriend before them, then, er…”
“Then, er, what?” asked Grayson.
“Then they want you to act that way. I mean, like someone experienced. Only—well, maybe you can look it up somewhere—how to act like an experienced person, that is—but it doesn’t feel genuine all the same.” I was talking myself into a temper, and without noticing it, I was walking faster. Grayson lengthened his stride and never took his eyes off me. “And that’s the problem,” I said. It suddenly came bursting out. “If you have to act like someone experienced, then the only way is actually to have experiences first! And then it gets really complicated. Like flying a plane. Right, so suppose I said I could pilot a plane, and it was a lie, but I only said it because people don’t really want to pride themselves on flying planes, but they can do without those pitying smiles they get just because they’re not pilots. Only, suppose that now I have to fly a Boeing 747, and of course I haven’t the faintest idea how to do it. How would I? Do you see the problem? I can’t go on just acting as if I knew anything about flying, or I’ll never get the plane off the runway. So what do I need? Exactly! Experience! Flying lessons of some sort. And here the flight simulator comes into it. And—” I abruptly stopped talking. Oops. Now I’d gone and told Grayson all about it. But he hadn’t been able to follow me, anyway. The look in his eyes was no longer penetrating but plain confused. Very confused.
Thank heavens.
“Poor Florence,” I quickly added. “And stupid old pilots.”
“Absolutely. What a conceited crowd they are,” said Grayson, and he smiled for the first time that night. I had no idea what he thought was so funny, but to be on the safe side, I didn’t ask. In silence, we passed heavy oak double doors and turned into the corridor where our own doors were. Even for Grayson, this was familiar territory. Judging by his sigh of relief, he’d probably thought I would never find the right way back.
But at almost the same time, he gave a start of surprise, and I almost yelped in alarm myself. Someone was standing there ahead of us, right in front of Grayson’
s door. I quickly drew Grayson back into the shadow of a navy-blue door that I always thought might belong to our headmistress, Mrs. Cook. It was the same color as our school uniform, and the Frognal Academy coat of arms stood proudly in the middle of it. There were plant tubs to the right and left of the door, with fine specimens of box trees trimmed into pyramids growing in them, and we quickly got into cover behind those tubs. (Although why Mrs. Cook’s door should be so close to ours was another question. Personally, I didn’t feel really close to her—and I hoped the reverse was also true.)
Grayson had turned pale. Because the person ahead of us, obviously trying at this very moment to get into his room, was none other than Emily.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered back, and I meant it.
“If you multiply the root of sixty-three thousand and one by a hundred and eighty-six, what is the result?” we heard Frightful Freddy saying in his squeaky voice. “And then if you subtract from that the product of one thousand three hundred and fifty plus six, take away from the result the root of sixty-three thousand and one, and look at it the other way around, what do you get?”
“I thought you were going to change it.” I gave Grayson a reproachful nudge in the ribs.
“Haven’t had time yet,” he whispered.
“Seventy-one thousand three hundred and eighty-three,” announced Emily solemnly, putting a strand of her gleaming brown hair back behind her ear.
“Wrong password,” Freddy politely told her.
“Oh, no it isn’t!” Emily’s eyes flashed at him. “The answer to the sum is thirty-eight thousand three hundred and seventeen, and if you look at the figures the other way around, you get seventy-one thousand three hundred and eighty-three. So now let me in, you stupid vulture.”
“Wrong password,” repeated Freddy, who was not a vulture but half lion, half eagle, and who, in spite of being overweight and having a squeaky voice, made a very majestic impression.
