Though I get home how late, how late!
So I get home, ’twill compensate.
Better will be the ecstasy
That they have done expecting me,
When, night descending, dumb and dark,
They hear my unexpected knock.
Looking forward to seeing you boys.
Yours,
Em
CRASH LANDING
PROFESSOR Perry drew nearer to the Poe twins, his attention fixed on the countdown clock as it moved from 5:20 to 5:19 to 5:18 to 5:17.
“Well?” the professor pressed the boys. “What’s this countdown for?”
“Countdown?” Allan responded. “What countdown?”
Professor Perry gestured with the pistol. “The one right there on the screen!”
“Oh, that one,” Edgar said, smiling. Then he gave the professor a look of false sympathy. “You may not like the answer.”
“I’m growing impatient,” the man said.
“It’s a countdown to the crash landing of the Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite, which will occur right here at this mansion in”—Allan glanced back at the screen—“just about five minutes.”
“What? How?” Professor Perry asked, furrowing his brow.
“We accessed the emergency guidance system and entered new coordinates, redirecting the satellite’s trajectory,” Edgar said.
“Here?” Professor Perry snapped. “Change it!”
Allan shook his head. “We can’t. Gravity’s taken over now.”
“So I guess you could say that this is also a countdown to your—oh, what’s the word?” Edgar searched his vocabulary. “Comeuppance.”
“I’ll tolerate no such thing!” the professor said, pointing the gun at him.
“Oh, I think you will,” Edgar said confidently, as he could see what was going on behind the professor’s back.
Uncle Jack had tiptoed into the room and picked up a piece of the broken sculpture, and now quietly moved toward the professor.
Professor Perry hesitated. Had he heard something? Was he just about to turn around?
Edgar wasn’t taking any chances. “Professor Perry,” he said urgently. “Look what the countdown is doing now!”
The professor looked closer at the screen. It was merely counting down, just as before. “What?” he asked, confused.
This gave Uncle Jack just enough time to bring the big piece of sculpture down hard on the back of the professor’s head, knocking the evil Edgar Allan Poe lookalike unconscious to the ground.
“Nice work, Uncle Jack,” the boys said.
Uncle Jack beamed. “Oh, I’m still in my prime.”
Aunt Judith and Roderick joined them.
The twins turned back to the computer screen: 4:42, 4:41 . . .
“What’s the countdown?” asked Aunt Judith.
Uncle Jack had overheard the boys as he was creeping into the room. “It’s how much time we have to get out of here before we’re all toast.”
“But we can’t just walk downstairs and out the front door.”
“So we climb out the window,” Edgar told her.
“But we’re on the second floor!” Aunt Judith objected.
“There’s a ledge, so we’ll find a way to shinny down,” Allan assured her as he moved to the open window.
Roderick shot out onto the ledge. He loved this kind of stuff.
The twins moved next. “Follow us,” they said to their aunt and uncle.
Aunt Judith took a deep breath. “I have a little fear of heights, but since you insist . . .” She hesitated. “You are insisting, right?”
“Right,” Allan said, climbing out.
“We’ll lead you down,” Edgar reassured her, following his brother.
“OK.” She climbed out onto the ledge. Uncle Jack brought up the rear.
Fortunately, ten feet along the ledge a lattice reached from the ground all the way to the roof.
“Just climb down like it’s a ladder,” Edgar called back to Aunt Judith.
“But lean in close to the building,” Allan added, afraid that otherwise she might pull the lattice from the wall.
Once on the ground, the Poe family noticed a pinprick of light approaching from among the stationary stars in the eastern sky. In mere seconds, the pinprick grew proportionally to the size of a marble.
“Make a run for it,” Uncle Jack said.
“We won’t make it far enough on foot,” Allan said.
“We need a car,” Edgar elaborated.
“Let’s go!” cried his brother.
The four Poes and Roderick raced to the front of the mansion, where the guests’ cars were parked.
The only one that was unlocked was a vintage convertible roadster whose interior, even from a distance, smelled of perfume—Barbara Bainbridge’s car.
Uncle Jack jumped into the driver’s seat.
Aunt Judith slid into the passenger seat. Roderick settled on the floor at her feet.
Meantime, the boys pulled down the canvas top so that they could sit directly behind their guardians on the trunk, holding on to the metal luggage rack.
“No keys!” Uncle Jack shouted.
“No problem,” Allan answered, racing around to the driver’s side and reaching under the steering wheel column.
“Hot-wiring an older car is a snap,” Edgar reassured his aunt and uncle.
Aunt Judith gave him a critical look. “When we get home, we’re going to have a little talk about that, young man. Your uncle and I aren’t raising any car thieves.”
If we get home, Edgar thought, glancing into the sky, where the marble-size light had already grown, proportionally, to the size of a golf ball.
At that, the engine roared to life.
“What about everyone inside?” Allan asked.
“They all want to kill you!” Uncle Jack said, incredulous.
“We have to give them a fighting chance to get away, at least,” Edgar said.
Uncle Jack answered by revving the engine, as if to say, Hurry!
The Poe twins turned and ran up the stairs to the mansion, through the big front door, and straight to the dining room. There, Professor Perry’s nefarious guests, unaware of all the happenings, calmly enjoyed their reeking durian as they finished off the last of many bottles of eel wine.
The first to notice them was the professor’s devoted henchman, Mr. Ian Archer, whom the boys had not seen since Kansas, when he was dressed as a flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz. “You two?” he shouted, his voice slurred.
Then Barbara Bainbridge stood up, likewise wobbly from too much wine. “Hey, I thought the drama was over.”
Edgar and Allan shook their heads. “No, this is the climax,” they said.
“Where’s the professor?” a Chinese man asked.
“He’s upstairs, unconscious,” Allan answered. “You have to carry him down and get as far away from here as you can. Now!”
“Why?” demanded a shaven-headed man who was dressed like an undertaker.
“The satellite is going to crash into this mansion in less than two minutes,” Edgar said.
The entire dinner party broke into laughter.
“And to think the professor described you brats as intelligent!” the actress said.
“The thing’s hitting downtown Baltimore,” the undertaker added. “We read about it on our phones.”
“We changed the coordinates!” the boys cried, frustrated.
“It’s some kind of trick,” Mr. Ian Archer said, pulling a small pistol from a shoulder holster and pointing it first at one boy, then the other. “Let’s see—eeny . . . meeny . . . miney . . . moe!” He fired.
Fortunately, he was too addled by eel wine to hit anything. But the boys didn’t want to push their luck.
Besides, they hadn’t any more time.
“You’ve been warned!” Allan shouted as the boys turned and ran.
What else could they do?
By the time they got outside, the descending satellite had grown proportionally from the size of a golf ball to that of a baseball. And it was getting bigger by the second!
“Hurry!” Aunt Judith called.
The twins jumped onto the back of the roadster, grabbing the luggage rack as Uncle Jack sped down the long gravel road.
The fiery baseball was now the size of a volleyball.
“Turn on your headlights, Jack!” cried Aunt Judith.
But by the time he found the switch, it wasn’t necessary. Now the size of a beach ball, the satellite lit the night almost as brightly as day.
The temperature rose.
The snow all around began to melt.
“Go faster!” the boys yelled.
Uncle Jack shifted into high gear, tearing down the road.
The last things Edgar and Allan remembered were a blinding flash of light as the Bradbury Telecommunications Satellite crashed into the professor’s mansion—and then the overpowering shock wave that hurled them from the speeding car, which skidded through the snow and smashed into the stone wall that surrounded the estate. The whole Poe family, including Roderick, were knocked unconscious even before the sound of the explosion reached them.
Was it some kind of concussion-induced dream?
Or did Edgar and Allan actually regain consciousness for a few fleeting moments where they lay, eight feet apart in a half-melted snowdrift?
Their parents stood over them, Mal and Irma Poe.
“We’re so proud of you boys,” their dad said, looking exactly as they remembered him.
“And we love you so much,” their mom added, as pretty as ever.
The boys tried to sit up, but neither could move. Only their eyes and ears seemed to work.
“We’ve missed you every day, but you’ve never been out of our thoughts,” Mom said.
And you’ve never been out of ours, the boys thought, though they couldn’t speak.
“I’d so like to put my arms around you both.” There were tears in her eyes.
“But you know how it works with ghosts,” Dad added, also a little teary. “No touching.”
But you’re not going to have to be ghosts much longer, the twins thought.
Mom smiled, as if she had heard. “Yes, you’ve set us free,” she said. “Thank you so much.”
“And now you boys can be free too,” added their father. “In your own lives.”
Haven’t we always been free?
“We love you, Edgar and Allan,” their parents said, fading into the night.
WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .
PHONE TEXT TO ALL GREEN SPRING VALLEY VOLUNTEER FIREMEN AND EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHS
CODE ZERO. Report to stations immediately. Massive impact and explosion at Willowtree Manor. First responders report car crash, with injuries, at the edge of estate grounds. Additional Baltimore County fire units currently responding. Repeat: CODE ZERO.
TWO NEW LIVES
THE city of Baltimore was saved.
But the professor’s mansion was a mere crater in the snowy ground, still steaming three days later from the heat of the satellite’s impact. The crash had registered a 4.5 on the Richter scale.
In the head trauma unit of Baltimore Memorial Hospital, Edgar and Allan simultaneously regained consciousness.
“What?” Edgar asked, startled and sitting up in his bed, unaware of where he was.
“How?” Allan murmured, equally confused.
Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith each sat at one boy’s side in a wheelchair. Their heads were bandaged, and each had a pair of black eyes. He had splints on both wrists; her ankle was in a cast. Still, they managed to smile at their nephews.
“Our boys are back!” Aunt Judith said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Poes are hearty folk,” Uncle Jack said proudly.
The boys surveyed the small crowd that stood at the foot of their beds:
A beaming nurse in purple pants and a Hawaiian-print smock.
A white-haired, lab-coated doctor.
Stevie “The Hulk” Harrison, who held a bunch of flowers before him like a bride.
Mrs. Rosecrans, who, smiling, put her rosary beads into her purse.
And Em and Milly Dickinson, who looked pretty (each in her own way), but also a little tired, as if they’d been here a long time.
“Roderick is safe,” Aunt Judith assured the twins.
“He’d be here, except that no cats are allowed in the hospital,” said Uncle Jack.
“Sorry, boys,” the doctor said at the twins’ disappointed expressions.
Stevie came to their bedsides with his flowers. No one but the twins could see him unbutton the top of his shirt. Roderick’s furry face popped out for just a moment to greet them, and then popped back inside, behind the flowers, before the medical staff could notice.
“You saved Baltimore,” Aunt Judith said.
“The whole city is grateful,” Uncle Jack added.
Suddenly, it all came back—the professor, the estate, the computer, the raven, the countdown, the escape out the window, the descending satellite, hot-wiring the roadster, the effort to save the professor’s cohorts in the dining room, the careening drive away from the mansion, the satellite’s impact, being thrown out of the convertible, hurtling through the air, blackness . . . and then, momentarily, their mom and dad.
“How long have we been unconscious?” Allan asked.
“Three days,” the doctor answered.
“And in that time you solved a murder,” Uncle Jack said.
Edgar and Allan looked at each other, confused.
“That note you brought out of the Perry mansion,” their uncle continued, “was addressed to a scientist named M. Alexander Martin. Well, last week he was blown up in his office, and the note ties the crime to Professor Perry.”
The boys had forgotten the note. And they’d never heard of M. Alexander Martin.
But solving a murder was never a bad thing.
“The bottom line is that you two saved Baltimore,” Aunt Judith said.
“And what about Professor Perry and his . . . guests?” Allan asked, using the remote control device to bring his hospital bed to a more upright position.
Uncle Jack sighed. “They were all vaporized on impact.”
“Oh,” the boys said with mixed feelings.
“Hey, you’ll never have to worry about any of them again.”
“You warned them,” Aunt Judith reassured her nephews.
“And you couldn’t very well carry them out of the mansion,” Uncle Jack added.
That was true.
The nurse approached. “How do you boys feel?”
“You mean physically?” Allan inquired.
The nurse nodded.
“Pretty good.” Allan stretched his limbs.
Edgar wiggled his toes. “Me too.”
“And other than physically?” the doctor asked.
“You mean psychologically?”
The doctor shrugged. “You could put it that way.”
Allan considered this. “Hmmm, different from before,” he said, a little surprised.
“Yeah,” Edgar agreed.
“Different how?” Aunt Judith asked.
Edgar looked at Allan.
Allan looked at Edgar.
They didn’t know how to answer because they’d never felt this way before. Each strained for the words.
“I feel like . . . well, a computer whose hard drive has crashed and been reset,” Allan said.
The doctor nodded sympathetically.
&nb
sp; “That makes sense,” murmured Milly Dickinson, who knew a lot about computers.
“And I feel like a leaf on an elm that has somehow passed through all the colors of the seasons and yet remains on the tree,” Edgar said.
“That’s beautifully put,” volunteered Em, the more poetically inclined of the Dickinson sisters.
“So you feel like a broken computer?” the doctor asked Allan, narrowing his eyes analytically.
“No, no. That’s not what I meant.”
Milly pushed past the doctor and toward Allan’s bed. “I think I understand,” she said, fixing Allan with her brown eyes. “Now that you feel reset, you also feel disoriented, as if your operating system was updated while your hard drive was down.”
“Exactly!” he said, noticing happily that Milly had rested her hand on the hospital bed not too far from his own.
The doctor didn’t seem to follow. “And you feel like a leaf?” he asked Edgar.
Edgar shook his head emphatically. “It’s not that simple.”
Em moved toward Edgar. “Could it be that even though your leaf on the tree has passed through all the seasons it remains the same, while it is the elm that has regenerated and become new?”
“Yes!” Edgar answered, admiring Em’s quick understanding of poetic metaphor.
Confused, the doctor turned to the boys’ friends and family. “Are they describing the same feeling?” he asked.
“Almost,” Edgar said, before anyone else could speak.
“But not quite,” Allan added.
“How’s it different?” asked Aunt Judith.
“Well, Edgar feels his way and I feel mine,” Allan answered simply.
“That’s to be expected,” the doctor affirmed.
But wait . . .
The boys looked at each other again. How could they be feeling different?
They were two boys with one mind, weren’t they?
Yet Edgar realized that, since waking, he hadn’t known what Allan was thinking, feeling, or seeing.
And Allan was as much in the dark about Edgar.
“What’s your favorite kind of ice cream?” Edgar asked his brother, elevating his bed so that when they turned their heads they were eye to eye.
The Pet and the Pendulum Page 10
