On the page below the drawing there were twelve lines:
To earn your power, heed this poem
Map the school with fine-tooth comb
Find the one who sadly lives
Inside a house where no one’s home
Go replant a family tree
Whose branches number only three
Wait until the moon is blue
Then what you seek is yours for free
Beware the walking crocodile
Who finds you guilty with no trial
Be sure to travel in short steps
What that one thinks will take a mile
Bruno didn’t understand, but something in the pit of his stomach told him these words were not to be taken lightly. It was like finding an urn in a forgotten closet and being pretty sure someone’s ashes were inside—it wasn’t necessary to be sure, but it felt surreal, and serious, and slightly forbidden, all at the same time.
Bruno had to believe the poem was addressed to him, but he could barely make sense of any of the lines. He was supposed to be seeking power? He already had mapped the school “with fine-tooth comb”—he tended to do that wherever he was, without being told. How could someone live in a house where no one was home? And what to make of the warning? Who was the walking crocodile?
Bruno closed the book, but he didn’t put it back on the shelf. He added it to the Hauser volumes and picked up the lantern so he could find his way back to the main aisle. He turned and walked toward the reading area, which glowed like a distant sunrise at the beginning of the stacks. When he reached aisle 16, where it was light enough, he set the lantern down. Who knows—I may need it again.
“Where have you been? I was starting to get worried!” Lois said when he made it back to the desk.
“Here they are,” Bruno said, setting the Hauser volumes down.
“Thank you! So you had trouble finding them, too?”
“No, I found them right away. But I wound up looking for another book. That’s what took so long.” You Are Here, volume 6, looked even larger in the reading area, making a solid thump when he set it down on the counter.
“What is that? You Are Here? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Neither had I. But apparently it’s heard of me.” Bruno opened to page 1 to show Lois the drawing of where he had been, but he was surprised to discover that now the illustration showed a bird’s-eye view of his head and shoulders at a desk, facing a woman’s head and shoulders on the other side. The Hauser volumes lay between them. Bruno looked up at the well-lit ceiling, but no one was there.
“Is that the two of us?” Lois looked down, and then up, and then at Bruno.
“It is. Except the first time I looked at it, it just showed just me where I was standing in the stacks. And this poem—I don’t know what it means.” Bruno turned the volume around so Lois could read it, and the color quickly drained out of her face.
“I need you to come into my office,” she said in a strange voice, grabbing the big book with both hands. Inside her office, Bruno had only a moment to look around at the incredibly tidy space before Lois closed the door and turned to him. “I am going to tell you some things that may sound quite ridiculous, but I promise you, I am completely serious, and they are completely true.”
“Isn’t that, like, everything at high school?” Bruno asked.
“I guess it is, in a way. But this is different.” Lois sat down at her desk. Bruno had a profound sense that something important was about to happen, and he only hoped it would explain at least some of the bizarre experiences he’d had since school had started. He didn’t care whether it was good or bad. He had grown tired of all the mysteries, and he only wanted answers.
“Some people—very few—are given the opportunity to develop . . . powers that most people don’t know are possible. Bruno, I’m pretty sure you are one of those people. I am one of those people, too.” Lois looked around, then opened her desk drawer. As she concentrated, a handful of rusty paper clips floated up from the drawer and hovered like a flock of birds over the desk. Then the clips began to whirl around in space, now looking more like a swarm of mosquitoes. Glints of light began to leap out of the blur, and when the clips slowed down again and hung in the air, their metal was smooth and shiny.
“How did you do that?”
“It’s not really important to know how. What’s important is to realize it can be done.” Lois eyed the clips back into the desk drawer and closed it.
Bruno put his head in his hands.
“What’s wrong?”
I’m going crazy. He wasn’t being dramatic; in that moment, all the inexplicable things from the past weeks became more than he could ignore, more than he could wish away. He felt the room spin. “I’m going crazy.”
“No, you’re not,” Lois said brightly.
Bruno looked up at her. “I can’t take any more . . . magic.”
“What else has happened? What happened in the stacks?”
“I found volume one by the books you needed, and that sent me to volume two, which was in a completely different aisle, and then another, and I kept going farther into the stacks to find the next ones. It’s so dark back there, someone left a lantern! And then I found this volume, which seems to know where I am at all times, and which has that poem that I think is for me, but I don’t understand it.
“But that’s not all; last week, I found a secret clearing behind my house, and when I went through it I was four and three-quarters miles away from my house in someone else’s backyard.”
“Four and three-quarters?”
“I’m good with maps,” Bruno said.
“I should have guessed that, considering how well you find your way around here,” Lois said. “Tell me about this clearing.”
“It’s called Ebentwine, and—”
“Ebentwine?” Her eyes widened. “Ebentwine?” She enunciated it slowly and watched him nod.
“What is it?”
“I should ask you that. I’ve never been there. There aren’t many resources, and the legends I’ve found, the stories—it’s hard to know what’s true. Ebentwine is the source of the power, what you called magic. There are different ways to access it, but in its purest form it’s far more concentrated than any person can stand. There are stories of people trying to access it directly and getting hurt pretty badly—or worse.” Lois sat back, regarding him. “But that pretty much proves it. Bruno, if you’ve gone through the Ebentwine, you’re one of the Kind.”
“The Kind? Wait, is that why you asked me the other day if I was kind?”
“I wondered,” Lois said. “We develop the ability to sense one another, but I’ve met so few Kind myself, I wasn’t sure what I was feeling with you. But I was right. You are Kind. That may be your main power, Bruno: finding your way around, finding hidden places. That may be why your admonition tells you to map the school.”
“My admonition?”
“That’s what this is.” She put her finger on the poem. “I recognized it instantly. You’ve never seen something like this before?” He shook his head. “Then you are just starting on your path.” She smiled brightly, trying to pull him back from the state of shock he knew was plain on his face. “I’m very excited for you! You are going to have some great adventures now.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“You must study your admonition carefully and try to decipher it. That won’t be easy, but if you open yourself up to it, the answers will reveal themselves to you. You can’t take too long, though; see here, there’s a deadline. Find out when the next blue moon will happen. If you haven’t fulfilled your admonition by then, you won’t earn your power.”
It was all too much; Bruno couldn’t imagine doing such a thing. “What happens if I don’t?”
“Nothing. You receive another admonition, probably completely different, and you try to fulfill that one.”
“What’s a blue moon? I thought it was just an expression.”
“A blue moo
n is the second full moon in the same month. So they’re kind of rare, which is where the figure of speech comes from. You need to find out when the next one will happen.”
“Okay.” Bruno scratched his head.
“But there are other things I must tell you. Very important things. You must keep all of this a secret. All of it. Don’t tell anyone about the strange things that have happened, or may happen. When you figure out how to use your power, don’t show anyone, and don’t let anyone else catch you using it. Don’t try to explain to anyone what I have explained to you.”
Who would I tell? “Why?”
“Because people who are not Kind cannot know about us. In a world where everything must have an explanation, anything that can’t be explained must be suspicious, evil. We are not evil, Bruno. You are not doing anything wrong; in fact, plenty of times we can help people without them even knowing it. We are just different. But it’s better to keep this difference to yourself.”
“Okay.”
“That means you cannot tell anyone about me, either, okay? I will help you however I can, though in truth you will learn the most by yourself, in ways you won’t expect. You’ll receive messages from strange places, like this book. All you have to do is keep your eyes and your mind open. But if you have questions, I am always here.”
Bruno just stared at her.
“You look so overwhelmed! It takes a while to settle in. Whatever you do, though, please don’t tell anyone about me. It’s the only thing I absolutely ask of you. You’ve heard of the Salem witch trials?” Bruno nodded. “That’s what can happen when scared, superstitious people find out about us.”
“I promise,” Bruno said.
“Sleep on it, and I’m sure you’ll have all kinds of questions in the morning.” The bell rang. “Why don’t you copy your admonition, and then why don’t we keep the book here in my office so you don’t have to go hunting in the dark for it again. Here’s a hall pass.” She wrote one out and tore it off her pad. “In case you ever need to come to me. I left the date off, so if someone asks, just pretend I’m scatterbrained. That won’t be too hard.” She laughed a little wistfully.
AS HE RODE HOME WITH Sylvio, Bruno thought about the new secret he carried—a secret so huge it seemed to be carrying him. He felt as though he’d found himself on an iceberg, its breadth and depth unfathomable to him, and the interests and intrigues of his social circle paled.
At home he sat on his bed and read his handwritten copy of the admonition for what felt like the hundredth time. Before today he had done his best to convince himself there was a reasonable explanation for all the strange things that had happened. But after the book, the maps, the admonition, the paper clips, the conversation with Lois, there was no point in denying it—everything was different, and instead of being a confused spectator, apparently he was right there in the middle of it. At least, Lois thought so. Bruno stared at the empty walls of his room; for the first time, they looked stark and unfriendly.
He read the admonition yet again. The only thing I understand is to map the school with a fine-tooth comb. The rest, I have no idea. Bruno sighed and went to his desk to dig out the plan of Suburban High School he had found online before his family moved. At least he could add on the new wing. Surprisingly, as much as he loved maps and plans, Bruno never had drawn one himself. His lines were timid and crooked, and even though he knew clearly what should be represented on the paper, it wasn’t appearing there. He went downstairs to look for a ruler.
His father looked up when Bruno came into his study. “Hey there, what’s going on?”
“Do you still have Grandpa’s old drafting stuff from when he was an engineer?
“I think I do.” His father opened a few drawers. “It’s crazy how everything he did by hand on paper would just be done on a computer now. Wow, look at these. A scale, a couple triangles. What are you working on?”
“School project,” Bruno said. He turned the scale over in his hand. It was triangular instead of flat, with a row of ruler-type markings along each edge. “How does this work?”
“I can’t say I know exactly, but I think each side has a different size on it, like an inch equals a foot, or a centimeter equals a meter. You may have to do some research if you want to learn how to use it.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Sure. You can hold on to those as long as you like. I’ve never used them.”
Back in his room, he turned the scale over and over to find the markings that might match the school plan. But the wing he wound up adding was too large in relation to the rest of the school. The drawing became cluttered and smudged with ink. He was going to have to draw his own plan from scratch, which seemed fair, since that was what his admonition instructed him to do.
Sylvio came in, and Bruno’s first impulse was to try to hide what he had been doing. He stopped himself, remembering that Sylvio wouldn’t find anything suspicious about Bruno with a map. Is this what it’s going to be like? Always trying to figure out if something I’m doing is going to reveal a secret I don’t even understand myself?
“Hey. Do you think I could borrow that zip cardigan you bought last week?” his brother asked.
“I haven’t even worn it yet,” Bruno said.
“Forget it.”
STARTING THE NEXT DAY, Bruno paced off different areas of Suburban High School as unobtrusively as possible, jotting in his notebook the number of steps it took to traverse different hallways and rooms so he could convert them to feet and inches later. He had begun a new map on the inside back cover of the notebook; the challenge became an obsession. The ink had smeared in several places and his lines were wobbly, but he could see Suburban taking shape, and he was gaining a newfound respect for mapmakers and architects. Bruno spent time looking at architecture books in the library, and he did his best to copy the way doors, windows, and stairwells were represented on plans.
He stopped in the library to show Lois his progress. “Wow, that looks so complicated. Have you figured anything out?”
“No.”
Lois hesitated. “There’s something I need to tell you.” She looked around them. “The book—You Are Here—disappeared from my office.”
“Really? Did someone take it?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. I’ve heard about books like that showing up to provide information, then slipping away.”
“Wow.”
“It makes me sad, because hey, I’m a librarian, you know?” Lois smiled weakly. “I’ve never had access to a primary source like that before. I’ve only been able to find obscure volumes filled with wild stories told by citizens who had no idea what they were talking about. And for a day, I had the real thing right there in my office.”
“So you didn’t look at the rest of it?”
“Well, I did take a quick look, right after you left. And apparently there was only one other thing the book wanted me to know.”
“What’s that?”
“When I opened it, the things you’d shown me were gone—the drawing on the first page, and your admonition. There was a drawing of Suburban, though, the floor plan. No words, just the walls and doors and stairs. Except right in the middle of a hallway, there was a drawing of a skull.”
“A skull? What does that mean?”
“Who knows? I’d say it’s probably not good.”
“Like, someone is going to die here?”
“Perhaps. Or maybe it means there’s a killer here.”
“A killer?” The overwhelmed feeling started to come back.
Lois exhaled. “I don’t know. I have no experience with these things. What else could it mean?”
“Which hall? Where was the skull drawn?”
“I don’t remember,” Lois said. “Nothing was labeled. It was . . . I’m really not sure.”
If Bruno had seen it, he would have identified the hall immediately, but he reminded himself that not everyone had the same facility with maps and plans. Anyway, if Lois had seen the skull, he wo
uld let her worry about it.
With everything that was happening, he was having a hard time concentrating in class. Mr. Williams was the first to notice. “Mr. Perilunas, where are you now?”
“I’m here,” Bruno said, prompting titters from his peers.
“Today we are discussing the Pacific Ring of Fire, the collection of active volcanoes that line both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Perilunas”—Mr. Williams had turned back to the board and addressed Bruno without looking at him—“would you favor us with a list of the countries on the Ring of Fire?”
Bruno took a deep breath. The class waited expectantly, genuinely curious to see whether he could rise to this challenge. “Okay, well, Russia, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand, and then Canada, United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Chile?”
“You can include Antarctica, too,” Mr. Williams said. Bruno flushed, but he didn’t know why. He hadn’t made a poor showing with his answer. He knew daydreaming in geography class was a bad idea, but he had answered Mr. Williams’s pop quizzes correctly, and it still hadn’t gotten the bull’s-eye off his back.
Pull Down the Night (The Suburban Strange) Page 7
