by L. L. Samson
Ophelia finished up the tale. “Penelope walled up the tunnel soon after her husband was declared legally dead. The man who did it had served the family faithfully for years and never told a soul.”
“So he was stealing valuables from the houses at the ends of the side corridors,” surmised Walter.
“Sounds right,” said Linus, lightly tossing a jar labeled ASTEROID DUST from hand to hand.
Tom jumped up from the sofa. “See? Pirates wasn’t as far off as you thought.”
“You’re right,” said Ophelia, still feeling bad about those tickets. She wouldn’t have corrected Tom now even if Aloysius Pierce were to appear and offer her all of the money he’d lost if she’d do just that.
“Then we have to find out where the side tunnels lead,” said Walter, dropping to the floor for some push-ups.
“After dinner?” asked Linus. He needed to record a new idea concerning his “plane for all mankind” before his brain filed it too deeply for an easy recovery.
Everyone agreed.
Birdwistell.
Just perfect, thought Ophelia as she walked into the bookshop.
She’d seen the curmudgeonly man more times in the past few days than she had since she and Linus had arrived in Kingscross.
“Come and sit down, dear!” Aunt Portia chimed from where she sat at a large library table blackened by time (and customers’ grimy hands; I don’t wish to be unkind, but no amount of hand sanitizer can deal with that, dear reader). Birdwistell perched opposite her.
“What are you two working on?” Ophelia asked.
“We two—” Birdwistell sniffed “—are looking over the lists made out by the burglar’s victims.”
“What did you have stolen?” Ophelia asked Birdwistell, as she sat next to her aunt. She bit down on an apple that Ronda and Father Lou had left with the family after the party.
Birdwistell winced and sniffed at the same time. “Nothing. Just seeking to be a concerned, helpful member of society,” he said.
“Isn’t that nice?” asked Aunt Portia with delight.
A little too nice, if you ask me, thought Ophelia.
“Ronda told me she had some family jewelry stolen the night of the party, dear,” Aunt Portia said. “We have to find this person. And soon!”
“I agree.” Ophelia shot a glance at the professor then rose to go find the others.
“Did you find out anything about Aloysius Pierce, dear?” Aunt Portia called out as Ophelia started up the stairs.
“Oh yes!” answered Ophelia.
“Such as?” Birdwistell sat up even straighter. His tone held something she’d never heard in it before. It quivered, just a bit, but with what? Panic? Nerves? Surely it couldn’t be that.
“He was quite the gambler,” she said.
“Oh. That.”
“And quite the thief too!” With that she ran up the stairs and into the kitchen where Linus was pulling down a box of butter cookies.
“Milk all around!” she cried.
Everyone cheered. And not because of the milk, but because it seemed as if that bossy, know-it-all side of Ophelia had disappeared along with Aloysius Pierce.
Thankfully, Aunt Portia tossed the idea of a dinner theme that evening. She sunk four slices of bread into the stainless steel toaster, a bulbous appliance from the 1950s that still, miraculously, toasted. “After that delicious dinner at Father Lou’s, I couldn’t eat a big supper if I tried!”
The young people issued no complaints, as the memory of Aunt Portia’s infamous “brown meal” wasn’t buried too deeply. (I’ll leave you to imagine it on your own.)
“All right,” said Ophelia, munching on a tuna salad sandwich. “Let’s talk tunnels.”
Worry not. Aunt Portia and Uncle Augustus had retired to the living room to eat their sandwiches on TV trays while watching reruns of old BBC sitcoms.
“Should we split up this time?” asked Tom. He’d never eaten canned tuna, and as you might imagine, he scraped it onto the plate and ate the plain toast. The potato chips, on the other hand, delighted him as much as a can of fresh night crawlers and a fishing pole.
“Yep,” said Linus. “You and me, Tom?”
“That’s good.” He placed a stack of five or so chips on his tongue and crunched down.
Ophelia slid a glance at Walter and instantly blushed. Poor dear, she tried not to. But if she got lost in those tunnels, Walter would be her first choice for a partner.
“Brilliant,” said Walter. “How will we get in the basement with no one the wiser?”
“There’s a boarding student life meeting tonight,” said Ophelia. “Will Madge notice if you aren’t there?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Okay. Meet us at the tunnel entrance in thirty minutes.”
Walter gave a salute.
“Still got those energy bars?” she asked.
“Oh … no. I got a bit hungry last night.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Just bring water. That should be fine.”
A giant clap of thunder jolted the group.
“Whoa!” said Linus.
A firm rain beat at the kitchen windows.
“Won’t affect us,” Walter said, standing up. “See you in half an hour. We should be able to make quick work of it.”
Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter. How could you be so abysmally wrong?
eleven
Some People Just Make Trouble Naturally (Hopefully You Aren’t One of Them)
or If You Are a Troublemaker, Don’t Come Crying to Me When You Are Friendless and Penniless
When Linus entered the attic to collect the flashlights, he knew immediately that something was amiss (not quite right). Some people take little note of their surroundings. In other words, you could rearrange their furniture and they’d barely notice. Other folks? Well, don’t help yourself to so much as a Kleenex or they’ll have your head. (The expression “have your head” comes from the days when kings or queens—tyrannical ones, normally—chopped off a person’s head for the least little thing.)
Linus noticed everything. But as long as his experiments remained untouched, he didn’t care if the side table sat in the middle of the floor or if the floor lamp sat on the side table. Though Linus was a nice enough person, neither Ophelia nor Walter would even contemplate touching his work. Everyone has their limits. And so they should.
He examined his lab table.
First of all, the levels of the powders in the jars labeled A, B, and C were noticeably diminished. This angered Linus considerably as these powders were quite integral to most of the formulas in Cato Grubbs’s notes. He had no idea where the powders came from or how he might renew the supply once it was depleted (used up).
Second, the afghan was no longer draped haphazardly over the arm of the sofa where Ophelia usually cast it when she was finished using it. It was lying on the wooden floor, its creases and folds flowing toward the door as if it had been brushed off by someone on his or her way to the attic steps.
And finally, a piece of Linus’s sour apple hard candy, necessary for serious pondering and complex calculations, was missing.
Cato Grubbs! Most assuredly he was the one responsible.
Linus reasoned that if Cato wasn’t worried about getting the treasure in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, then he’d decided that serving the teenaged trio a bowlful of bother was a suitable substitute. (Alliteration strikes again!)
“That’ll teach you, children,” echoed in Linus’s brain. Yes. Cato Grubbs would delight in teaching them a lesson or two about meddling with the enchanted circle.
But what was he doing in the attic—other than swiping supplies? (Never mind the fact that Cato owned those three powders and everything else they’d found in the attic lab. But let’s not split hairs here.)
Why did Cato need the powders? Couldn’t he go from Book World to Real World at will?
“Or was he bluffing?” Linus mumbled.
“Ready, Linus?” Ophelia called up the step
s.
Linus gathered the flashlights and quit the attic.
Walter watched as Linus and Tom walked away, and the pair soon turned into a bobbling light in the darkness.
He turned and gave Ophelia a courtly bow. “Shall we?”
“Certainly, sir.”
They ambled along, discussing their theories regarding the possible origin of the tunnels. (None of them, quite frankly, are worth wasting good ink to record here.)
Walter stopped. “Do you feel that, O. J.?”
“Feel what?”
He listened again. “Maybe it was nothing. I have a bad feeling about this. I dunno.”
Dread squeezed Ophelia’s stomach. They had all learned to trust Walter’s intuition. “Do you think we should be down here?”
“Don’t know that either. Let’s just finish as quickly as we can and get out.”
Ophelia pulled a long measuring tape out of her pocket. They had decided to measure the space between tunnels, hoping to zero in on which houses in Kingscross had basement openings. “Well, we’re charting new territory at any rate,” she said.
“Right,” said Walter. “And our theory might be rubbish. These tunnels probably have nothing to do with the burglaries. Chances are, most of the entrances are in much the same state as the entrance at school.”
“It’s true.” Ophelia had that exact thought earlier in the day. She just didn’t want to voice it until further exploration proved it out. Or not.
Thirty-four feet from the school’s tunnel, the first perpendicular passage appeared to their right. They turned and progressed almost fifty feet.
“Does it seem to you,” Ophelia asked, jotting down the measurements in a small notepad, “that we’re going along Rickshaw Street?”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder …”
“If this is Seven Hills?” he asked.
Ten feet further down, an oak door with heavy, black iron hardware more suited to a dungeon barred their way.
Ophelia turned the knob and the door swung open with a groan. (Nothing a little WD-40 couldn’t put to rights if someone had merely taken the time.) A rectangle of darkness confronted them, and she pierced it with her flashlight.
“Oh my!” she whispered, shining the beam around the space.
Walter stepped inside what appeared to be a storage room. Bottles of liquids and jars of powders and shriveled items (mostly unrecognizable, save for an old potato) were stuffed onto the shelves of a bookcase like the ones in Aunt Portia’s shop.
Walter whistled. “Linus will be happy to see this.”
“No kidding.” Ophelia joined him in the room and continued circling the space with her flashlight. She stopped when her beam landed on a clump of fabric, yellowed and dirty. (The kindest way to describe it would be “once white.”) She approached where the fabric hung limply on a faded pink satin hanger on the back of a door. Pulling the fabric toward her, Ophelia noticed buttons and lace, a sleeve with a black cuff, and the neckline was black too. “This looks like an old wedding gown,” she said.
The dress seemed stitched with hope and frayed by despair. For a reason she couldn’t describe, it saddened Ophelia’s heart. A veil peeked out from behind the dress. Ophelia tried to pull it out to get a better look, but her fingers punctured the fabric and disintegrated the netting on contact. “Dry rot,” she said.
“Do you know whose dress it could be?” asked Walter.
Ophelia couldn’t imagine. She just hoped it wasn’t the wedding gown from some folk tale where the girl is found in the trunk years after she disappeared on her wedding day. Imagine a hapless (deserving of pity) young bride, so full of hope and bursting with so much love, locked in a trunk. Yet no one hears her cries or the pummeling of her fists against the inside of the trunk lid.
Really?
I hope you’ll allow me to interject an aside here, since Walter and Ophelia are perfectly safe in the basement of the Seven Hills bookshop. (I’m not interrupting a sword fight, after all.)
By the way, an aside usually has nothing to do with the movement of the story, but hopefully it proves interesting to the reader. In this case, I do hope you are interested in becoming a halfway decent writer. Something important to consider at the very start of your story is believability. Now, the enchanted circle might not be believable to you there in your boring, run-of-the-mill world. But you’ve cheerfully suspended your disbelief and have allowed me to write about something fantastical.
However, if in the middle of this very chapter I were to write that Ophelia grew wings, Linus woke up with a gaze that could set fire to anything except the pair of spectacles (glasses) on his face, and Walter had titanium claws three times the size of his hands that could shoot out from the backs of his hands (but didn’t impede his wrist movements whatsoever), then you’d think, “Well, that sure came out of nowhere.”
Not to mention that I would be pilfering someone else’s ideas.
What does all of this have to do with Walter and Ophelia in the storage room? Only that if you should ever read that folk tale about the bride locked in the trunk (after your feelings of sadness for the young bride have settled down, of course), you’ll probably ask yourself:
How in the world did her family not find her? She was still in the house, wasn’t she? They set up a search party. Why wouldn’t they have found her eventually? And how did an adult fall completely, legs and all, into a trunk, and then allow the lid to latch when clearly her arm would have easily been able to stop it?
The author of this short story never once told us that the bride possessed the coordination of a pair of old slippers (and I’m just putting two and two together here, folks).
In other words, dear reader, it never hurts to analyze a story so you don’t make the same mistakes in your own writings. Don’t bother to do that with this book, however. It would waste your time and, as the saying goes, serve as an exercise in futility to seek out such gross errors among its pages. If you don’t like it, take it up with the Queen of England. She is only a figurehead monarch, after all, and she might be glad for something to do.
Ophelia let the moldering garments fall back into place against the door. “This must be the door to the bookshop.” She rooted around for the doorknob and gripped it. The doorknob turned easily, allowing them to enter another room. However, this one was not a rectangle of darkness. An anemic (in this case, weak, not very bright) light emanated from a bare bulb in the ceiling.
The walls were fashioned from the same stone blocks as the basement of the house on Rickshaw Street, and the cramped space easily displayed its spare contents: a chest of drawers carved with two great dragons and the moon, an open sea captain’s trunk foaming with ruffled men’s clothing, a collection of ornamented walking sticks and canes in an umbrella stand in the corner. And all of it pointed to Cato Grubbs.
A cot draped with a fringed crimson throw rounded out the eclectic (selected from various sources) mix of furniture, and it was presently occupied.
Ophelia immediately recognized the dozing man by his caramel complexion, his proud brow and head of heavy hair, black as a panther’s. “It’s Injun Joe,” she whispered in Walter’s ear.
“Are you sure?”
“Who else could it be? I mean, considering that the book he’s from is open right now.”
They backed out of the room, silently shutting the door behind them and then retreated to the tunnel.
“I do hope we didn’t leave behind any mark of our presence,” said Walter, as he screwed off the top of his water bottle and passed it to Ophelia.
She took a large gulp. The sight of Joe had dried up her throat almost instantly.
Walter followed suit, taking several mouthfuls. (He was obviously unconcerned about sharing someone else’s germs. Nobody said he was perfect.) “I think we found out who’s using the tunnels,” he said.
“Cato Grubbs. It’s how he moves the literary objects out, I suppose.”
“Right.”
They aban
doned any further mapping of the tunnels to go find Linus and Tom.
After fifteen minutes, the beams of their flashlights melded together between the four of them.
“All doors locked so far,” said Linus.
“One we couldn’t even get to!” Tom said. “There was a cave-in!”
“Wow,” Ophelia said as she leaned against the tunnel wall for strength. “You guys are never going to believe what we found.”
Ophelia felt this adventure slipping by more quickly than any of the others. She had yet to address Joe’s awful fate with Tom, and now the violent man was asleep in their basement.
The clock in the attic chimed nine. Only fourteen hours remained until Tom’s return to St. Petersburg, and they hadn’t even figured out who was stealing the antiques.
They lounged around the attic. Tom, using Linus’s utility knife, whittled away at a stick he’d found in the park earlier. Walter did push-ups and knee bends. Ophelia found a piece of string on the sofa and was twisting it between her fingers. Linus concentrated on a drawing.
“So Cato’s living here,” Linus said, not looking up from his task.
“Seems to be the case,” said Walter.
“He’s so wily,” said Ophelia. She picked up the afghan off the floor and spread it across her lap. “He pocketed the money from the sale of this building to Aunt Portia and Uncle Augustus, and he still lives here.”
“Smart,” said Linus.
“What does he need all of this money for anyway?” asked Walter.
The twins shrugged. Who knew?
“What about Injun Joe?” asked Tom, his fear of the man propelling the words forward at breakneck speed.
“Why are you so frightened of him, mate?” asked Walter.
The rain outside pelted the trefoil window.
“He wants to kill me,” said Tom.
A bolt of lightning struck nearby, crackling their eardrums as a blinding white light flashed outside the window.
All went dark.
twelve
