The Screaming Statue

by Lauren Oliver

  Max pivoted to face them, glaring. “Haven’t you ever heard you’re supposed to wear black to a funeral?”

  Thomas, Pippa, and Sam exchanged a look.

  “What are you talking about?” Thomas said. “What funeral?”

  Max shook the tangled bangs from her face. “Aaron Sadowski’s,” she said. “They’re burying him today.” And without a further word, she started for the door of number 346, looking as dignified as possible, given the fact that she was wearing a fabric tent.

  “Well,” she said, without turning around. “Are you all coming, or not?”

  “Do we have to?” Sam muttered. Pippa elbowed him.

  “We’re coming,” Thomas said, swallowing a sigh. It was inconvenient, he thought, that Max had suddenly grown a conscience.

  It was strange that in all the years they’d been living next door to the Sadowskis, Thomas had never once climbed the weather-beaten steps to their front door. They passed into a narrow foyer that smelled strongly of old cat pee, and came to a second door, this one locked. Next to it was a cracked buzzer, above which was a handwritten sign: Go Away, Please.

  “Very friendly,” Sam said under his breath.

  Max ignored him, jabbing the buzzer repeatedly with one finger. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe he’s not home,” Pippa said after a minute.

  “Of course he’s home,” Max snapped. “He’s always home.”

  “Well, maybe he doesn’t want company,” Sam said.

  Max made a strangled noise. “His brother just croaked. What’s the matter with you?” She turned to Pippa. “Aren’t you the one who said I should feel sorry for him?”

  “And aren’t you the one who said he was cuckoo?” Pippa replied.

  Max didn’t answer. She punched once again at the buzzer.

  This time, they didn’t wait at all. No sooner had Max removed her finger from the bell than the door swung open. Thomas had to swallow down an immediate first desire to laugh.

  The surviving Sadowski brother was dressed even more strangely than he had been on the two previous occasions. He was wearing a tall top hat and a stiff-necked black coat that looked like something a priest might wear. A withered silk flower, stained yellow from age, was pinned to his chest. His pants were also black, made of a ballooning silk that pooled around his ankles. All in all, he gave the impression of a blind man who’d pulled his clothes from a costume shop. Only the fact that he was obviously in mourning helped Thomas keep a straight face.

  Sam didn’t conceal his feelings quite so well; he let out a loud snort, which earned him a long, fierce glare from Max.

  “Hello,” she said, turning back to Mr. Sadowski, and speaking loudly, as though in addition to being absurdly dressed he was also hard of hearing. “We came for the funeral service.”

  Mr. Sadowski blinked rapidly, his eyes passing back and forth between all four children. “The funeral service—yes, yes. Of course. How very kind. But you see, I can’t let you inside. Not without consulting Aaron.”

  To this, even Max had no immediate reply.

  “But isn’t Aaron—oof.” Pippa elbowed Sam in the stomach before he could say dead.

  “My dear brother has passed on, yes,” Mr. Sadowski said. His lower lip trembled. “It is tragic—very unfortunate. Nonetheless, I don’t like to allow guests in without consulting him. Whether or not he is dead, he would find it very rude. Quite intolerable. If you’ll just wait here a moment . . . It won’t take me very long. He’s very opinionated, my brother is.” With that, he shut the door in their faces. Thomas heard the slap-slap-slap of his footsteps receding.

  “He’s lost the plot, hasn’t he?” Sam said, scratching his head.

  “Shhh,” Max said. But even she looked uneasy. “He’s just upset.”

  Pippa gaped at her. “Upset? He’s going to ask his dead brother whether we can come inside.”

  “Will you be quiet? He’ll hear you.”

  “I don’t care if he does. Max had it right the first time. The man is obviously batty—”

  “Quiet, both of you,” Thomas said. He had just detected the sound of footsteps again, this time advancing toward them. “He’s coming back.”

  This time, when Sadowski opened the door, his cheeks were pink and his eyes were sparkling.

  “My brother says you’re very welcome to come in,” he announced.

  “Great,” Pippa said, sounding about as enthusiastic as if she had just won a prize of several-days-old fish.

  Fortunately, Sadowski didn’t seem to notice. He was already beckoning them to follow him into the gloomy recesses of his apartment. “This way, this way. Sorry that things are a little messy. Aaron is so particular about who he sees. I’m afraid we weren’t expecting any company. . . .”

  “A little messy” was, Thomas thought, a gross understatement. The Sadowski apartment made the attic at the museum look as bare as a prison cell. Towers of newspapers surrounded them on either side, stacked from floor to ceiling, some so dry and yellowed they looked as if they might disintegrate when touched. There were piles of broken lamps, tea chests, Thanksgiving platters and old typewriters, interspersed with smaller domestic items like balled-up socks and teaspoons. Thomas, Pippa, Max, and Sam shuffled forward in single file. There wasn’t any other way to move; the hallway was so narrow, Thomas was forced to keep his elbows at his sides for fear of knocking anything over. Technically, Thomas knew, it wasn’t a hallway at all—only a path carved through the mountains of junk.

  “What is all this stuff?” Pippa whispered, reaching out to skim a finger over the dusty surface of a carved wooden music box.

  Though she had surely spoken too quietly for him to hear, Sadowski spun around.

  “Don’t touch!” he roared, and Pippa yelped and stepped backward, landing directly on Thomas’s right foot. Pain shot all the way to Thomas’s knee.

  Sadowski whipped out a handkerchief—also black—and mopped his face. He was breathing heavily. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that Aaron is very sensitive about our things. That’s a very special piece. It belonged to our great-uncle Ezekiel. Neither of us could stomach him—he was a terrible man, a very evil temper—but it’s our only reminder of him.”

  Thomas was tempted to ask why on earth the Sadowski brothers would want to be reminded of someone they couldn’t stand, but decided to keep his mouth shut.

  “This way, this way. Just through here. Mind the ceiling.” The portion of ceiling that Sadowski was referring to was in the process of collapsing, and Sam had to duck to avoid getting plaster and pulpy shreds of wallpaper in his hair. “Here we are. And here’s Aaron. Please don’t be offended if he’s rather quiet today. He’s had a terrible week. Really awful.”

  Thomas, Pippa, Sam, and Max crowded awkwardly in a small circular space at the center of what must once have been a grand sitting room. The chandelier was still visible behind the towers of newspaper and mountains of broken furniture surrounding them, though many of its arms were broken, so it looked like a sorry metal octopus staked to the ceiling.

  In front of them was a small coffee table and, at its center, a ceramic urn: here, Thomas knew, were the mortal remains of Aaron Sadowski. Thomas noticed several small efforts to make the cramped space appropriate for a funeral. There was a faded white wreath pinned to the fireplace mantel (the fireplace itself, he saw, was entirely filled with ancient porcelain animal figurines); a black tablecloth was arranged haphazardly over several stacks of newspaper; a faded photograph of the two Sadowski brothers as children was on display next to the urn.

  Mr. Sadowski fidgeted with his jacket. “Well, go on,” he said, after an awkward pause. “Say hello.”

  No one moved. Pippa nudged Max forward. Max swatted her hand away. Sam was doing his best to disappear into the stacks of newspaper behind him.

  Thomas cleared his throat, stepped forward, and, because he didn’t know what else to do, laid a hand awkwardly on the urn. “Hello,” he said. His voice sounded overloud i
n the quiet. The urn was very cold to the touch. “And I’m sorry. You know, about . . . the fact that you’re dead.”

  He was worried that it had, perhaps, been the wrong thing to say. But Mr. Sadowski seemed pleased. His thin lips trembled and tears shone in his eyes. “Lovely,” he said. “Aaron is very grateful. Very grateful indeed.”

  Sam, Max, and Pippa took turns shuffling forward and repeating the ritual, placing a hand on the urn and muttering, “I’m sorry.” Thomas was hoping that, having fulfilled their duty, they could leave. But before he could suggest it, Mr. Sadowski had disappeared and returned with a plate full of dusty-looking cookies.

  “Please,” he said. “Make yourselves at home. I’ve just put some milk tea up. Or perhaps you’d prefer some licorice water?”

  “Milk tea is fine,” Pippa said quickly.

  Sadowski obviously didn’t have very much practice smiling. He gave a kind of pleasant wince. “Excellent, excellent. It won’t be a moment. Sorry there’s nowhere to sit. We’re in the middle of doing some reorganizing.”

  “Reorganizing,” Sam muttered when Sadowski had once again vanished into the gloom of the apartment. “Right.”

  “Look at this stuff.” Pippa thumbed through a stack of newspapers. “All of these date from 1895. That’s last century. What on earth does he plan to do with all of it?”

  “He must have his reasons,” Max said.

  Pippa rolled her eyes. “Come off it, Max. You nearly flipped when you had to act friendly to a pile of ashes.”

  “Okay, so maybe he’s a little . . . different,” Max conceded. “So what? It’s not like any of us know a thing about normal.”

  Mr. Sadowski still hadn’t returned. Thomas moved off into the stacks, feeling as if he were an explorer navigating the wreckage of an old civilization: towers, pillars, monuments of stuff. He selected a newspaper from the top of a pile at random. From 1916, it felt brittle to the touch, like the dried seaweed they had been served in the restaurant in Chinatown. Somewhere in here, he knew, must be stories about Rattigan dating from his very first arrest. There must be pictures of the cages in which Rattigan had kept his subjects—cages in which Thomas, Max, Pippa, and Sam had once been kept.

  He shivered. He didn’t like to think about Rattigan still on the loose, and what the mysterious note on the kitchen door could mean. His only comfort was in knowing that if Rattigan wanted to find them, he would have already.

  “Hey, Tom. Look at this.” Pippa held up a slim book, bound in faded red cloth. The title, The World’s Best Puzzles and Brain Teasers, was printed in gold lettering. “Want to try your luck?”

  “Pass it over.” Thomas was grateful for the distraction. His mind felt like a broken jigsaw puzzle, all corners and angles, pieces that wouldn’t quite fit together, no matter how much he tried to force them. Here, in the quiet, in the half dark, it was impossible not to think about Rattigan, impossible not to think about Rachel Richstone and her old boyfriend Ian Grantt and poor Freckles and the news Spode had given them about Mark and Jennifer Haskell’s deaths.

  He flipped to a page at random. It was full of word games.

  “What word is an anagram of itself?” he read out loud.

  Max groaned. “Really?”

  “How about ‘mom’?” Sam suggested.

  “That’s a palindrome,” Thomas said. “It’s spelled the same backward and forward. An anagram is when you rearrange the letters to spell a different word.”

  “An anagram of itself . . .” Pippa wrinkled her nose. “How can you rearrange the letters of a word to spell the same word?”

  “That’s why it’s a brain teaser,” Thomas said. He was quiet for a minute, letting the problem twist around in his brain, letting it bend and flex. Then there was a click, a settling, as when he found a comfortable position inside the blade box. “Stifle,” he announced. “That’s an anagram of i-t-s-e-l-f.”

  This time, it was Sam who groaned.

  “Hey, look at this.” Max was rifling through a stack of old pictures. She displayed a photograph of Eli Sadowski as a young man, wearing, it seemed, the very same outfit that he still favored most days. The photograph was labeled in a sloping hand: Elizir Sadowski, 1908. “Eli’s short for Elizir. Funny name, isn’t it?”

  “Speaking of funny names,” Sam said, wincing as he tried to work through one of the ancient cookies Mr. Sadowski had brought out, which looked to have the same texture as a piece of petrified wood. “Have you heard from Spode about Ian Grantt yet?”

  Thomas shook his head. Once again, he could feel his brain shifting, like an ocean stirring up waves. What had Sam said that troubled him . . . ?

  “It is a strange way to spell Grantt,” Pippa said. She, too, was sorting through the stacks, lifting yellowed newspapers and shaking her head over headlines from decades earlier. Suddenly, she stiffened. The newspaper in her hands began to tremble.

  “What is it, Pippa?” Sam asked curiously.

  Wordlessly, she turned and held the paper up for their inspection.

  Nicholas Rattigan Arrested in New York, said the headline. Sick Scientist Performs Human Experiments in Sophisticated Underground Lab. This must have been the news of his very first arrest—after which Thomas, Pippa, Sam, and Max were scattered and orphaned.

  Though Thomas had known for months now about his origins, somehow, seeing the words printed in black and white made them all the more real. The headline began to swim in front of Thomas’s eyes. Sick scientist . . . Nicholas Rattigan . . . Underground. . .

  His mind gave another turn. And suddenly, just like that, he knew. All of those jagged puzzle pieces softened, rearranged, and slid together.

  “Give me a pen,” he croaked out.

  Pippa stared at him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Quick,” he said. There was an urgent pressure in his chest: a need to tell, or burst. “A pen.”

  It took several minutes of rooting to find a pen in the massive piles of old belongings, and another few minutes to find a pen with ink. But at last Thomas, pen in hand, bent over the coffee table and began to scribble in the book of brain teasers.

  “Don’t let Sadowski catch you,” Sam said. “That book might have belonged to his great-aunt’s second cousin.”

  Thomas was in no mood to appreciate the joke. He spelled out IAN GRANTT at the top of the page. “Don’t you see?” Thomas said.

  “See what?” Max frowned.

  “It’s an anagram,” Thomas said. And he carefully spelled out: N. RATTIGAN.

  “Here we are. Four steaming milk teas, with a little dash of Epsom salt for the digestion, just like my mother used to make it!” Mr. Sadowski inched back into the room, holding a large pewter tray on which four mugs were rattling precariously. So intent was he on getting the mugs safely from tray to table that it took him a moment to realize that the four children from the museum next door had vanished, as though into thin air. Other than several newspapers that had, much to his disapproval, been disarranged, there was no sign that they had come at all.

  “Well,” Mr. Sadowski said under his breath. “How very rude.” But he was not altogether sorry to be alone with his brother once more.

  “Tea, Aaron?” he said, turning to the urn. He was gratified when, as always, his brother said yes.

  Meanwhile, Thomas, Pippa, Sam, and Max had already returned to the museum. Luckily, they encountered no hastily assembled protest, no grumbling performers or curious journalists. They saw no one at all. Even luckier, the narrow phone booth nestled underneath the performers’ spiral staircase, which was usually occupied, most often by Quinn or Betty, was empty.

  Thomas fished Ned Spode’s card from his pocket and consulted the number.

  Pippa frowned. “I could have read it off for you.”

  “There’s no time,” Thomas said. Before he could lift the receiver, however, the phone began to ring. Sam groaned.

  “It’s probably one of Betty’s boyfriends,” he said.

  “I’ll get it,”
Pippa said, and snatched up the receiver.

  “Pippa,” Spode said, before she’d even finished saying hello. “This is Pippa, am I right? I have some big news. Gather up the gang. We need to meet as soon as possible.”

  “We have news, too,” she said, tilting the receiver away from her ear, while Sam, Max, and Thomas crowded in to listen. “We don’t think Ian Grantt really died. We think he went underground and came back—”

  “As Professor Rattigan,” Spode said, cutting her off. He spoke with flinty seriousness. “I know. I’ve got it all figured out. Listen, you’re not safe where you are. Let’s talk in person. Meet at 712 West Fifty-Eighth. As soon as you can.” And he rang off so abruptly, Pippa was left staring at the receiver in her hand, a feeling of buzzing anxiety flowing all the way from her fingers into her chest.

  “What did he mean, we’re not safe?” Max asked.

  “What do you think he means?” Thomas answered grimly. “Rattigan’s back. And he’s coming for us.”

  The address Spode had given them turned out to be on a desolate block that dead-ended at the Hudson River. The street was dominated by one hulking building, which looked, due to the narrow, boarded-up windows and the ghostly imprints of old advertising decals, to be an abandoned factory. There was no number. Across the street, a homeless man was dozing in the shadow of a doorway, his hat over his face, using a battered rucksack for a pillow.

  “This must be it.” Pippa squinted up at the side of the building, scanning once again in vain for an identifying mark, or some sign of life in the windows. Nothing. But the previous block had ended with number 710, and there was nothing farther west but water, and seagulls wheeling through the air.

  Max shifted from foot to foot, occasionally palming at her pockets, where Pippa could see she’d placed three separate blades in different sizes.

  “Should we knock?” Sam asked. Thomas shrugged and Sam stepped forward, raising a fist.

  Max intercepted him. “Don’t you do it,” she said. “You’ll knock the whole bugging door down.” She knocked three times on the door. Pippa could hear the sound echoing hollowly within. After a minute, the door opened, seemingly on its own, revealing a triangle of murky darkness.