History in the Faking

by Andreas Oertel

  Rachel went upstairs to open more windows.

  I turned to Eric. He was staring at the clay with an anxious look. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll only look better if it’s cracked up a bit.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “Gosh, I hope this works,” he mumbled. Eric paced the room in a quick circle and then looked through the glass again.

  “It’ll work.” I tried to sound confident. “We just have to continue to be careful, and we can’t get caught.”

  Another five slow minutes passed without any explosions or major cracks. Eric and I agreed that the plaque was likely as dry as it would get, so he turned off the oven and left the door open. Smoke poured out as Eric carefully extracted the slab with a protective oven mitt. He placed the tablet on the open oven door, and fanned the smoke away so that we could inspect it.

  “MOM’S COMING HOME!” Rachel screamed from the second floor. Three seconds later she was racing down the stairs. “Oh my God, the kitchen is full of smoke!”

  “How can she be home now?” Eric asked, confused. “It’s only 4:00.”

  Rachel ignored him. “I saw Mom down the street talking to Mrs. Klock when I opened my bedroom window.”

  Eric wrapped the plaque in a beach towel and put it in his sister’s backpack. “She must have started at six today instead of eight.”

  “I think we’re caught.” Rachel fanned the air with a tea towel. “It stinks in here.”

  “No, no, no,” Eric said, pacing the room. “We can’t give up now.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “The tablet is baked. It’s done.”

  Rachel continued to swing the towel frantically. “But what about all the smoke? She’s going to be here in five minutes. She’s going to know we were up to something.”

  “Listen.” I turned to Rachel. “Go upstairs and paint anything—anything at all. Do it as fast as you can.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll shove it back in the oven, and you can tell your mom you just wanted it to dry fast.”

  Eric nodded vigorously. “Do it, Rachel! Hurry! Cody and I’ll clean up down here.”

  Rachel bolted up the stairs and disappeared, and we desperately tried to ventilate the kitchen. Mrs. Klock often babbled on and on, so if we were lucky, she might unknowingly stall Mrs. Summers long enough for Rachel to paint something and throw it in the oven.

  If we were lucky, that is.

  We almost got busted twice already—first at the excavation, then by my mom. Could we really avoid getting caught a third time?

  What a day!

  Rachel rushed back into the kitchen. She held something in a paint-splattered piece of newspaper and dumped it on a fresh piece of aluminum foil.

  We heard the front door open.

  I closed the oven door as quickly and quietly as I could. Then, I moved to the left of the oven and crossed my arms, trying to look casual.

  We didn’t hear anything for about five seconds and then, “Rachel!? Eric!? What on earth is that smell?” To my relief, Mrs. Summers didn’t sound mad.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “Oh, hi, Mom,” Rachel called out. I was impressed by how innocent she sounded. “We’re in here.”

  Mrs. Summers walked into the kitchen. “Phooey!” she cried. “What are you kids cooking?”

  Eric’s voice was low when he spoke. He was probably trying to hide his guilt too. “Sorry about the smoke, Mom. We’re just in a hurry to dry something.”

  “What . . . your dirty socks?” She smiled and waited for us to answer.

  Eric and I opened our mouths, but since we didn’t know what Rachel had painted, we closed them again.

  Rachel jumped in and saved us. “Look, we’ll show you.” Rachel opened the door and we all saw three freshly painted arrowheads—a yellow one, a red one, and a blue one.

  “Hmmm.” Mrs. Summers shook her head. “I don’t know why you couldn’t let them dry outside. They’re stinking up the whole house.”

  “No.” Eric shook his head. “The paint sticks better if it’s baked on under extreme heat.” He said that like it was super-obvious, which I thought was kind of funny.

  “I THINK IT survived,” Eric said, his nose inches from the still-warm clay surface. “There are only a few cracks here and there.” He stood up. “All right, let’s go bury it.”

  But Rachel and I just sat there, at the picnic table, staring at the tablet. We were well away from the house and hidden from the prying eyes neighbours. Something about the tablet didn’t look right, and Rachel knew it too. The two of us had had the same thought again.

  “It’s too crisp,” she said, resting her chin on her fist and studying the plaque.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s too edgy.”

  Eric groaned. “Crisp? Edgy? What are you guys talking about now?”

  “Well, look at it,” I said. “It doesn’t look a thousand years old. Heck, it doesn’t even look a week old.”

  Eric moaned and sat down again.

  “Cody’s right,” Rachel said. “It’s not weathered, or worn, or anything. Each pictogram still has the same sharp edge it had three hours ago. We have to make this plaque age three thousand years or it won’t fool anyone. It has to deteriorate.”

  “What if we stick it in your dishwasher?” Eric suggested.

  I shook my head. “No way!”

  Rachel’s forehead creased, deep in thought. “What about putting it in a washing machine . . . with some clothes?”

  “Hmmm,” I pondered. “That may work. But the water might dissolve all the clay.”

  “Or worse,” Eric said. “It might get all smashed up.”

  “So we need to wear it down,” Rachel said, “without getting it wet.”

  “Yeah . . . ” I snapped my fingers. “And I know just the place to do it.”

  RACHEL STAYED WITH the tablet, while Eric and I raced back to my house. He helped me look for something in the garage—something that I knew we would need. Then, with our objects at the ready, the three of us walked across the street to Mr. Jelfs’s shop.

  Mr. Jelfs was a retired mechanic who now spent his spare time restoring classic cars. He had every tool in the world in his huge shop, and he often helped fix Dad’s lawnmower or weld something on my bike.

  Mr. Jelfs was always teasing me, and I know he liked it when I bugged him back. I was never disrespectful—that would be going too far—but he told me he appreciated a kid with “spirit” and he enjoyed a good laugh. In fact, he was usually pretty grumpy until I played a prank on him. I had to come up with something silly, or he might just kick us out of his shop for—as he put it—loitering.

  I racked my brain for ideas, and by the time we got to his garage, I think I had a good one.

  I turned to Rachel and quickly explained how Mr. Jelfs appreciated a kid—or anyone really—who knew something about cars. “So make sure you tell him that you like the Chevette he’s working on.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  Eric gave me a curious look too, but kept his mouth shut.

  “Well,” I said. “He’s kind of grouchy and we need to get on his good side . . . so we can use his tools.”

  Just then we heard a crash inside the shop, followed by the sound of Mr. Jelfs cursing.

  “See,” I said. “He’s already having a bad day.”

  Rachel suddenly looked nervous. “Okay. I’ll try and go along with it.”

  The big double doors on his shop were open, and we could see him rubbing his head under the hood of his latest project. I think he’d just bashed his noggin. Mr. Jelfs heard us approach and gave the chrome air filter a final wipe. His eyes searched for busted objects we wanted fixed. Seeing nothing, he seemed to relax.

  I gave him a formal nod—the same one I always did—and said, “Hi, Mr. Jelfs.”

  He nodded back. That was his customary way of granting me permission to enter his shop.

  We stopped when we got to the car. I turned to Rachel and winked. She looked so nervous, I felt bad fo
r setting her up.

  “I like the colour of this Chevette, Mr. Jelfs,” she said.

  Mr. Jelfs looked from Rachel to me, and back to Rachel again. “Did Cody here put you up to this?”

  When he saw Rachel’s confused face, Mr. Jelfs shook his head and laughed. “This is a Chevelle, Rachel. A 1966 Chevelle. And Cody knows that. There’s a huge difference between a Chevelle and a Chevette.”

  Eric chuckled.

  Rachel’s cheeks and the tops of her ears turned a bright shade of pink.

  “Well,” she said calmly, “they do sound the same.”

  Mr. Jelfs’s face creased up some more and he shook his head again. “Oh, sure, they may sound similar, but they’re nothing alike. A Chevelle is a cool muscle car with style.” He affectionately wiped a microscopic stain from the fender. “While a Chevette . . . Well, let’s just say that’s a car everyone wants to forget.”

  I was relieved. Rachel didn’t know what she was doing, but she got the job done.

  After a few minutes of polite small talk about the hot weather, I decided to get right to the point. I said, “Could we use your sandblaster for a minute, Mr. Jelfs?”

  “What for?” He looked behind us again, towards the door of the shop—probably thinking we had a pile of junk cluttering his driveway outside.

  I pulled an old Howitzer shell casing from Rachel’s pack and showed it to him. “We want to shine this up.”

  He took the foot-long brass shell from me and examined it carefully. “Where’d you find this?”

  “I bought it at a garage sale for a dollar,” I said, telling the truth. I thought it was pretty cool when I first bought it, but by the time I got it home, I didn’t know what to do with it so I put it in the garage.

  Mr. Jelfs returned the oversized bullet. “You know what?” He gently rubbed his head where he’d banged it. “You could’ve polished this in the time it took you to walk over here.” He mumbled a bit more about how lazy kids were and then said, “Go ahead. But don’t waste all my sand.”

  We thanked him and headed for the sandblasting box sitting in the far corner of the eight-car garage. The unit looked like a small coffin, with a window on top and on each side. Any object you wanted cleaned or ground down was placed in the box and sprayed with sand using compressed air. He had let me use it in the spring when I found an old bicycle frame at the dump. I wanted to repaint it, and I used the sandblaster to clean away the rust. It had taken only minutes to strip it to bare metal.

  I pretended to check the sand hopper while we waited for Mr. Jelfs to get back to his Chevette—I mean Chevelle. When we were sure he was distracted, I switched the shell casing with the plaque and shoved it through the opening. I closed the window, put on thick protective gloves, and started the compressor.

  With my arms in the box, I picked up the sand sprayer and gently squeezed the trigger.

  PSSSSSSSS.

  Sand shot out of the gun, startling all three of us. I knew it wouldn’t take much to disintegrate the whole plaque, so I held the nozzle two feet away and gave the trigger a quick squeeze. A fine stream of sand shot out and instantly weathered the bottom corner. The sharp edges disappeared, giving the corner a tired, ancient look.

  I held it up to the window for Eric and Rachel to see, and they both nodded their approval above the din of the compressor.

  Using the same technique, I hit the whole surface with another three-second burst of sand. Perfect. Then when I turned the plaque over to shake off the sand, I thought, what the heck, and gave the slate backing a shot of sand too.

  As soon as I pulled it from the box, Eric flicked off the compressor, and Rachel stashed the tablet away in her pack again. What a team!

  We had almost escaped the garage when we heard Mr. Jelfs behind us.

  “So?” He stared at us with his hands on his hips. “How’d it turn out? Let’s have a look.”

  Busted!

  Since I was in charge, I felt I should answer, but all I could come up with was, “Uhhhh . . . ”

  “We decided we want to paint it instead, Mr. Jelfs,” Rachel said, evenly. “So there’s no need to waste your sand. But thanks.”

  The look on the old man’s face said it all. As far as he was concerned, he was staring at the three silliest kids in Sultana. When we got to the street, I looked over my shoulder. And get this: he was still shaking his head in the garage.

  Back in Eric and Rachel’s yard, and out of sight of nosy neighbours, Rachel placed the plaque on the picnic table and we had a good look at it. Nothing about the slab looked fresh, or new, or crisp. Every glyph was weathered—the edges all worn and eroded. It now looked thousands of years old.

  It looked ancient . . . Perfect.

  “This couldn’t possibly look more authentic,” Eric said, blowing some fine sand from the pictograms. “So pulleeez tell me we can go plant this thing once and for all.”

  I coughed from the dust he’d blown in my face. “Yeah, it’s ready.”

  Rachel clapped her hands and beamed.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE NEXT MORNING we pedalled across town and up the road to our hideout above the Kilmeny River. On the way, I explained to Rachel our plan for having the tablet discovered and revealed to the world.

  She didn’t seem impressed.

  “Let me get this straight,” Rachel said, riding between Eric and me. “We’re going to stick our tablet in the mud, somewhere near the dock, and Dr. Murray’s accidentally going to find it while he’s fishing?”

  Eric threw his head back and let out a whoop. “That’s right, sis. You just wait and see.”

  Once at the hideout, we parked our bikes and scanned the river carefully, making sure Dr. Murray had already left the area.

  He had, and no one else was in sight either.

  “You see,” I said to Rachel, settling down under my favourite wedge of shade, “Dr. Murray fishes from the dock most mornings until he’s caught his limit—”

  “How do you know that?” Rachel interrupted. She pulled out the plaque and gave it to Eric, who had been lurking around her backpack with his hands open.

  Eric sat on the ground and began running his fingers over the glyphs. “Because,” he said, “that’s what he did all last summer. And it looks like he’s going to continue doing it this summer.”

  Rachel seemed satisfied with that part of the problem. “But where are we going to put it?” She pushed a stray lock of golden hair out of her face, and flopped down next to her brother and across from me.

  Eric and I laughed because that was what made Dr. Murray the perfect discoverer of our artificial artifact.

  “Dr. Murray has a certain style of fishing,” I explained. “When he casts his line, he always—and I mean always—throws the lure right across the river to the far bank. Then he begins reeling it in.”

  Rachel squinted across the Kilmeny. “But the river’s pretty low and there’s a huge washout on the other side.”

  “Exactly,” Eric said, “we stick this sucker in the mud, just at the water’s edge—”

  “—And wait for Dr. Murray to see it when he’s fishing,” Rachel said, cutting him off. “Okay, I suppose that makes sense. I just hope he’s got good eyes.”

  “Oh, he’s got good eyes,” I said. “I mean, he doesn’t wear glasses for fishing, anyway. And he always seems to throw the hook within three feet of the far bank.”

  Eric cleared his throat and continued to play with Rachel’s handiwork. “We want people to take this seriously,” he said. “Right?”

  Rachel and I nodded.

  Eric continued, “And it would be cool if people came and dug around a bit. Right?”

  Again, our heads bobbed.

  “And it would be good—”

  “—For Pete’s sake,” Rachel said. “Just spit it out.”

  Eric paused. “Well, what if we chip off a corner of this plaque—only a small piece—and then bury that too? It might seem suspicious that it’s still in once piece after a million years
.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, expecting Rachel to holler at her brother. The nerve of the guy, wanting to break her beautiful . . .

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Huh?” I was stunned. Did the heat finally get too her? A mist of sweat was forming on Rachel’s face again.

  “We can snap off a section of the date, near the top corner.” She reached out and tapped the clay. “Then, we’ll bury the smaller piece in the washout—somewhere higher up in the bank.”

  I began to see the light too. I grabbed the plate from Eric and said, “It would also be logical that the tablet somehow broke when it was bashed around over the centuries.”

  Eric and I were debating which one of us should break the slab, when Rachel snatched the plaque from me and lined up the top corner with a sharp boulder. I held my breath.

  CRACK.

  The hit was clean, and left a single smaller piece lying on the ground. She picked up the fragment and examined the glyph.

  She smiled and said, “Tuthmosis.”

  Eric took the tablet from Rachel, spit on the corner, and carefully ground the sharp edges of the fresh break against a rock.

  Rachel took her piece and began rubbing her chunk against the granite surface too. “Good thinking,” she said to her brother.

  Eric started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I think this is called ‘making history’ .”

  WE ALL AGREED that we were at a critical stage in our hoax, and that we had to be extra extra cautious from now on. For the plan to succeed, it was important that no one see us near the burial site from either the dock or the bridge. It would be a shame if the plaque was discovered, and someone said, “Hey, I saw Cody, Eric, and Rachel digging down there the day before.”

  Anyway, after winding our way back through the forest, we hit the highway and crossed the bridge. There, we hid our bikes in the bush and finalized our plan. We decided that Rachel would stay with the bikes, near the bridge and the highway. And I would make my way along the bush line until I was above the washout. Eric would stay halfway between Rachel and me, and he’d pass on any warnings that Rachel called out to him.