The Specter Key

by Kaleb Nation

  Chapter 4

  The Unbroken Lock

  A scream escaped Astara’s lips as everyone fell, a tremor knocking their feet from under them as the ceiling plaster fell on their faces. When Astara hit the wall, she knocked over a stack of books that came tumbling to the floor, and in the same split second, the green energy vanished back into the box, leaving Bran, Adi, and Polland coughing on the floor.

  “Astara!” Bran shouted, crawling toward her. She rolled over, spilling more things as she did. Bran got to her side and tried to help her up from the floor as she struggled to steady herself.

  “What happened?” she asked aloud, still trying to catch her breath. She pressed her hands against the floor, the crackling magic gone, though she still looked to be in the last fading edges of pain.

  “Are you all right?” Adi burst, rushing forward. Astara pushed Adi’s hands away and brought herself back up, Bran next to her in case she fell again. For a moment she was unsteady and had to catch herself against the wall.

  “Did I say it wrong?” she asked, blinking.

  “Forget that,” Bran said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right!” she said, pushing away. “What happened?”

  “That box nearly killed you, that’s what!” Polland exploded, and all eyes turned from Astara, back to the desk. The box was still there, all the way across the room, like it hadn’t done anything at all. The clasp was still locked tight.

  “I said it wrong, that’s what happened,” Astara said.

  “No, you didn’t,” Polland replied, his voice lowering. “In fact, you said it perfectly…”

  Polland glanced around to Adi, hesitating with his words. “I think that lock is enchanted.”

  Bran stared at the box from across the room, none of them daring to get closer to it. The box was silent, though Bran felt as if it had eyes, watching them, ready to strike again.

  “Then how are we supposed to open it?” Bran asked. Adi gave a frustrated shrug.

  “Not much we can do about that,” she said. “Without the key, that lock can’t be opened, and it’s made to withstand anything, even magic, from attempting to break it.”

  Bran hesitated. “What do you suppose she’s put in there?”

  Adi tried to speak, but she couldn’t seem to make any words come out. Bran looked from one to the other, but neither Adi nor Polland had an answer for him.

  “So we might never get that box open?” Astara said grimly, voicing the thoughts that were running through all their minds. Adi slowly shook her head.

  “Maybe your mother didn’t mean for you to open it after all,” she said.

  If my mother didn’t mean it for me, Bran thought, then why put it in the vault? He slowly drew himself toward the desk, gently touching the box. When nothing happened, he lifted it, turning it over, but there were no other markings. The others came around him, and though there was deep disappointment within Bran, there was more of a drive to find the key to the box, wherever it was. At that moment, it seemed absolutely hopeless, because he didn’t have a single idea of where to look.

  “Well, either way,” Adi finally said, “it is getting late, and the others might…you know.”

  “Right,” Bran nodded, and Adi started for the door as he bid Polland and Astara good-bye. Astara was hesitant to let him go, glancing at the box.

  “I’d keep away from that,” she whispered to him. “It’s probably going to cause trouble.”

  “You, afraid of trouble?” Bran whispered back with a slight grin.

  “No, I’m serious Bran,” she said, looking at him intently. “Do you really want to know what’s inside that box, if she’s made such an effort to keep it locked?”

  Astara’s words were ominous, and they instantly made Bran’s expression turn grim. He didn’t reply but followed Adi through the house and outside, where the entire city of Dunce had now entered the darkened hours of the early night. The wind had gotten a little chilly as Adi unlocked her trunk for Bran to put his bike in, the back tire hanging out.

  “Don’t put the box in there,” Adi said. He kept it in his hands as she started the car, and they drove off, her headlights illuminating the dim streets. The drive was very quiet for most of the way until Adi spoke up again.

  “Now you know I probably shouldn’t let you keep that box,” she said bluntly.

  “Do you think I’m going to just let it go because it isn’t safe?” Bran said. “It’s from my mother—probably one of the few things she left behind. I have to keep it, even if I can’t get the thing open.”

  Adi still looked uneasy but relented.

  “All right,” she said. “Only because it’s from your mother. But whatever you do—”

  She glanced from the road to him “—don’t try to open it.”

  Bran nodded at her reassuringly. But as he held the box in his arms, he was thinking otherwise.

  ***

  Adi dropped Bran off at the corner of Bolton Road so the Wilomases wouldn’t suspect anything. By that time, the whole street was dark save for the streetlamps and the lights from the homes, but he knew the place well. Parked far down the road, in front of the thirteenth house on the end of the right side, was the Schweezer, resembling a miniature metal elephant in the dark. The neighbors on the left side had recently moved out, and there was a big for rent sign in the front yard. Bran wondered what poor souls might end up there and be forced to deal with all the noise next door, or if they were prepared for the car chases, burglars, gunfire, and spontaneous explosions that seemed to follow the Wilomases everywhere.

  The lights from inside his house were bright on his face as he came up the walk, and his eye caught something that had been stuck on the glass next to the front door. It was a set of stickers pasted down toward the bottom, the first of a tall, red triangle with a circle and a line over it, and next to that, another of a long, slender rectangle with stars floating out the end, again with a circle and a line over it. The first meant “no gnomes,” and the second meant “no mages,” and to complete the collection, there was one final rectangular sticker below these, the words absolutely no solicitors printed in bold lettering. The Wilomas family didn’t beat around the bush when it came to gnomes and mages and especially solicitors, a term which had commonly come to refer to anyone who supported either of the first two.

  He stepped inside, and a huge racket was coming from the kitchen.

  “Help, help!” Mabel was screaming. Bran spun just in time to see a blast of black smoke explode through the kitchen door like a grenade going off.

  “Oh no, she’s tried cooking again,” he said. With Rosie gone, the Wilomases had been forced to cook for themselves. Everyone had quickly become accustomed to bread bricks or delivery food.

  “Mabel, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times!” Bran heard Sewey bellowing and coughing from inside the kitchen. “You’ve got to keep that far away from any source of flame! Now look at this awful mess!”

  The whole house was filled with a clamor from the ruckus the two of them were making. Mabel began screaming and coughing.

  “Oh! Oh! It’s sending me into a Hotron fit!” she shouted, knocking things off the counter. She went on shouting, and Bran turned and saw that someone else was in the room with him: little three-year-old Baldretta Wilomas, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, already in her pajamas with a pink Mandrita-Wingans Bondersnitch rabbit doll in her arms and some candy being chewed between her teeth. She was looking at him glumly.

  “Been like this all evening?” Bran said.

  “Blawthi,” she said, nodding dismally, her brown hair tied with a loose red bow. The noise from the kitchen just went on and on, like the clamor of an iron pot–sorting warehouse.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Rosie will be back sometime, and then we can start eating food again.”

  Baldretta sh
rugged. She looked quite content with the candy and might have been able to survive on just that if they had left her to it.

  There was a table next to the front door that Bran had been ordered to put out earlier in the week, the only preparation the Wilomases had done for the impending Fridd’s Day party. Since the party guest book wasn’t there yet, Sewey had taken it upon himself to dump the postcards from Rosie and Bartley all over it, so he wouldn’t have to look at them every time they sat down for dinner. The top of the table was covered with them, splashes of colors and stamps from all over the world with photographs of Rosie and Bartley: one of them in ski gear in front of the mountains, another of them in scuba gear far underwater, another of them in lava gear deep in a volcano, and piles and piles more. Bartley, always the festive one, wanted to make it the biggest honeymoon ever, and possibly the longest one, as it had been many a month and they still hadn’t returned.

  Bran shifted them around, but there wasn’t anything new, so he started up the stairs past Baldretta, hearing the television, in front of which he presumed Balder could be found. He thought it was probably best to hide the box in his room before Sewey or Mabel appeared, so once he reached the top he started across the hall to his ladder that went to the attic. It was quite a complicated matter going up with the box in his arms, but he made it with some difficulty, and when he poked his head through it was pitch black. He had to feel his way to his desk, running his fingers along it until he found the switch to the lamp. When he turned it on, his room was immediately bathed in light, casting shadows across his pencil sketches pinned to the board on the wall.

  He sat on his bed, underneath a bright painting that hung over the bed frame: it was his Friendship Gift from Polland, a picture of the first time he had visited Adi’s house and found out the truth about his past. Bran turned the box over, hearing the contents rattle about, and he studied it from all angles. It was clean on all sides except for the moon on the top. He ran his fingers cautiously along the edge where the lid met the base.

  “Now how am I supposed to get this open?” he asked himself. There was no answer, not even in the deepest parts of his mind. His senses in recent weeks had become honed so that he could feel parts of magic within him that he had not yet harnessed—though even these seemed to be blocked by the box so that he could not penetrate it.

  He knew it would do him no good just to sit there staring at it and quietly set it on his desk. As an afterthought, he turned the box over so that the moon shape was underneath.

  No point letting anyone see that if they happen to come up here, he thought, though it was highly unlikely anyone would venture into his room.

  He was just placing his foot on the first step of the ladder when suddenly—CRASH! There came an abrupt noise behind him that broke the stillness of the room and sent him spinning around.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded. There was no one. His eyes searched the room, darting from one thing to the next, until he noticed something out of place: the box had fallen off his desk.

  He thought for sure he hadn’t put it close enough to the edge to fall. He lifted it from the floor and situated it closer to the middle, turning it over again so that the emblem was hidden.

  “Stay there,” he commanded, feeling a little silly after he did. He started to turn but then stopped, looking back. The box was still there. Shaking his head, he moved for the ladder again.

  Strange happenings on Bolton Road again, he thought wryly, starting down the ladder.

  CRASH!

  Bran froze in his tracks, halfway to the bottom. He spun, his eyes now level with the floor of his room. And there, across the wood, was the box.

  He had put it in the middle of the desk that time, he knew for sure. Nothing short of a miniature earthquake could have made it fall off. Yet there it was, sitting on the floor—the emblem facing up again.

  He felt a strange sense of deep foreboding urging him to run from that box as fast as he could. But at the same time it seemed as if the box was alive and calmly studying him and his actions. Bran couldn’t move for a minute, and when he did, he jumped up the ladder again and stood across the room. The box didn’t do anything, even as Bran cautiously drew nearer.

  “Now what’s going on…?” he asked softly. The room replied with nothing, empty stillness like a buffer around him. Slowly, carefully, Bran picked up the box again, and this time, he set it on the desk, the marking facing up where he could see it.

  He slowly drew away from it, never letting his gaze fall. When he got to the ladder, Bran started to turn, placing his foot on the ladder, and still it did not move.

  “This isn’t right…” he said quickly under his breath, pushing from the ladder and walking over to his bed. Grabbing a thin blanket, he tossed it over the box, covering it and the marking altogether. He hurried to the ladder, rushing down, and even as he got to the bottom and started down the stairs, there wasn’t a sound from his room or the box again.

  Chapter 5

  The Sound in Rosie’s Room

  Bran hurried to the kitchen and nearly collided with Sewey coming through the door.

  “Watch out!” Sewey bellowed, balancing a steaming silver tray in his hands and swinging it over Bran’s head so it wouldn’t spill. Bran dodged out of the way as Sewey tripped through the door, his face darkened with ash and his hair wild.

  “What an absolute latecomer you’ve become today,” Sewey scolded, twisting around and looking like some space monster from the volcano universe. “Go stir the potatoes. Mabel is on that blasted apparatus again.”

  Bran pushed through the kitchen door without replying and heard the whizzes and whirrs of the latest of Mabel’s health crazes. She had recently invested in a device advertised in Fitness Witness magazine called a tarbofluximator. The ad promised to rid anyone’s body of crinkets and snivs, touted as the secret cause of all the world’s problems. Sewey, who had been forced to put all twelve thousand parts of the hideous device together in the middle of the kitchen, had first mistaken the instruction manual as a conspiracy novel, though Mabel would hear no objections.

  Obviously, the tizzy she had flown into over cooking dinner had immediately warranted some much-needed detoxing, and so she was hooked up to the new machine when Bran entered, a wired headband strapped around her scalp and bunching up her red and black hair. The device was composed of four miniature cranes with magnets dangling down from wires. So far, the only real effect it had had was on the Wilomases’ bank account.

  “Don’t look in my direction!” Mabel hissed the moment Bran stepped through, and he quickly averted his gaze.

  “Stop thinking about it!” she shrieked. “You’re ruining the tarbofluximation!”

  “It’s hard not to with all the noise it’s making,” Bran protested, trying to be heard above the huffing and puffing and beeping.

  “Stop thinking!” Mabel screeched. “Stop thinking this instant!”

  That would be so much easier if I were a Wilomas, Bran thought, but he drained the potatoes and tried to ignore her. He dumped the food into a glass dish and covered it with aluminum foil. He started to wash his hands.

  It was in the midst of this, however, that above his head the lights in the kitchen started to flicker. He stopped and looked up at them quickly, fearing a dying bulb that he would have to change out.

  “Bran, stop fooling about with the light switch,” Mabel demanded, opening one eye.

  “I’m not even near the switch,” Bran said.

  “Change the bulb then,” Mabel snorted. The flickering stopped for a second and then started again, fading out and then back.

  “It’s not the bulb,” Bran said, shaking water off his hands and then looking up at the ceiling. “Look, there, it’s fading out in both lights.”

  “Well, I don’t care what it is,” Mabel snapped. “It’s ruining my tarbo—”

  It was then that Sewey came bac
k through the kitchen door, visibly befuddled.

  “What’s all this?” he said, and Bran could see through the open door that the lights in the downstairs living room were also fading and flickering in the same time as those in the kitchen. It was as if the power in the entire house had begun to fluctuate madly. He could hear Balder going into hysterics upstairs as the reception on the television kept going in and out, and Baldretta stumbled in and clung to Sewey’s leg, visibly frightened.

  Bran, who had never seen something like this before, immediately tried everything he could to get it to stop. He turned off the running water in the sink, and though the lights stopped flickering for a moment, they were half dimmed and then immediately went to full brightness and then out again. It seemed to follow no pattern.

  Mabel’s machine had begun to make garbled noises as a result, so she started to slap its computer box to get it to stop, and it died. Immediately the room was abandoned to silence, which only made the flickering lights more eerie as they all stared up with nothing to say.

  Suddenly, just as quickly as it had begun, the lights gave one final, dim hiss and then sprang back to their full brightness, causing the whole family to blink. Bran hadn’t realized how tense they had all gone until he tore his gaze from the ceiling.

  “Well, I…” Sewey stammered. He blinked a few times, and then his face soured.

  “Power fluctuations,” he said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “Probably a nearby thunderstorm.”

  “Or it’s that ridiculous device,” Bran said, waving his hand at Mabel’s contraption, which had whirred back to life.

  “My tarbofluximator does nothing of the sort!” she roared, turning up the dial and covering her ears with the attached headphones to block him out. Bran grabbed the steaming dish of potatoes and carried it upstairs, worried the power might go out again. They had flashlights and lanterns, but he was irritated that a little power failure had scared him. Ever since he had touched the box, his nerves had been on edge. Everyone soon went up to dinner, and nobody talked about the electricity troubles. For a while, they just sat there. It had been a long time since Rosie had left, but still no one had gotten used to getting their own plates. Nothing felt the same without her.