by Paul Noth
“Tell me.”
“At 11:14, the Golden Hoop will be in Mr. Abernathy’s possession on the third floor. At 11:16, he will leave it unattended on a marble table in the Azure Parlor, but only for about one minute while he goes to pee. If the Hoop vanishes during that minute, its disappearance will never be traced back to us. First Grandma will suspect Abernathy, then she’ll suspect the FBI, but never us. That’s our only chance of safely preventing the experiment on Baby Lu.”
“So I steal it,” I said. “At 11:16. Marble table. Azure Parlor. Third floor. I steal the Golden Hoop. Uncuff me. I’ll do it. Unlock these things.”
But Kayla refused to unlock me until I had memorized a bunch of directions—a lot of walking, counting, turning, running, and waiting. Kayla’s timeline for me looked like this:
I had to repeat the whole timeline back perfectly before Kayla would undo the handcuffs.
She quickly picked the lock with a hairpin. (She had never even had the key!) I walked around and met her where the garden gate opened.
As we stared at the Crest Doors, cold fear rose up through my insides.
“Don’t start walking until I say go,” said Kayla.
Now my stomach dropped roller-coaster style. My head began to spin.
“Okay. GO!” said Kayla. “The timeline’s started. Walk!”
Funny, there hadn’t been anything in her predictions about me throwing up.
PART 2
HOW TO SELL YOUR FAMILY TO THE ALIENS
CHAPTER 11
THE MANSION
As I headed for the Crest Doors, Kayla walked alongside me for a while to make sure I was timing my steps correctly.
“One-two-three, one-two-three,” said Kayla. “That’s it. Good, Hap. Did you know this is a waltz rhythm?”
“Terrific,” I muttered, still feeling lousy.
“The walking parts will be the hardest,” said Kayla. “You’re going to see things that make you want to run, or duck, or hide. Don’t. There will be people everywhere. You’ll be sure they’re going to notice you, but as long as you keep this pace, I promise no one will see you. Don’t start running until you’re past the bearskin rug. If, for any reason, you fall off the timeline, just make sure you’re in the Azure Parlor to get the Hoop by 11:16.”
“Wait, if I fall off your timeline, how will I know when it’s 11:16?”
“That’s why I’m giving you this. As an emergency backup.” Kayla pulled a small half-moon shape from her bag.
“Is that a taco?” I said.
“It’s a frozen Clocko. Use it to tell the time.”
“Ow! This thing is freezing.” Turning the rock-hard taco over in my hands, I wiped a layer of frost from the small clock face on the tortilla shell. “Hey, this says it’s four thirty.”
“Yeah, the clock’s broken,” she said. “They really don’t work very well.”
“Then why give it to me?”
“Look, by 11:15 that thing will have melted enough for you to poke your finger through the queso down to the ground beef.”
“Kayla, this might be the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“It will work!” she said. “Look, I’ve gotta go. I can’t be here when the delivery guy comes out. Remember, don’t run until you see the bearskin rug. And stay out of the Black Room!”
With that, Kayla took off sprinting west. I slipped the Clocko into my pocket, where it began freezing to the side of my thigh. A moment later, a preoccupied delivery guy came out of one of the Crest Doors, which began to drift closed behind him. I had to enter there before the door shut. So, of course, I wanted to run. But instead I kept walking, as Kayla had told me to, counting “one-two-three” between every step.
Never had a bearded boy been happier to see a bearskin rug.
I had been dying to run! Once I passed the tail of that poor grizzly’s hide, I took off like a sprinter. I could keep running now, according to Kayla’s timeline, until I reached the Peacock Tearoom, whatever that was.
I ran onto mirror-polished marble that felt as slippery as ice. Past a fireplace the size of an overpass. Two uniformed maids polished crystal glasses in a gold-framed mirror. Don’t slow down.
I had worried that I wouldn’t recognize the Peacock Tearoom, but you couldn’t miss it. A room to end all rooms! It stopped me in my tracks, despite myself. Around beautiful treasures of gold, ivory, and turquoise, every wall shimmered like the purple-blue body of a peacock. Out huge windows, a jade-green garden grew flowers that matched the peacock colors so perfectly I shivered.
What on earth were we thinking going up against Grandma! The lady used real peacocks for wallpaper! Why were we doing this?
To save Baby Lu, I reminded myself, and hurried on. That wonderful baby deserved the chance to go through life without being experimented on the way I had been. She didn’t have to be messed up like Alice, or the twins, or Kayla. Baby Lu still had a chance.
I summoned to mind the next moves of Kayla’s timeline.
A nook in a far corner of the room hid a butler’s station, and there I found the door to the dumbwaiter, just where Kayla had said it would be. A dumbwaiter, in case you don’t have one, is a little elevator for food. It was also my ride up to the third floor.
I pulled open the door. But this was wrong! The little box inside was moving down. It was supposed to be moving up! Was I too late? Too early? Should I climb in anyway?
The box sank away. So I jumped onto the top of it, grabbed hold of the cable, and balanced on a little crossbar. Reaching up, I shut the door behind me and sank into narrow darkness, toward the basement.
My eyes adjusted. I listened to the echoing whir of the motor. What if I got caught in the gears? I needed to get off the crossbar and down into the proper compartment. But if I tried to slip down and the space turned out to be too narrow, I’d be crushed against the wall. I tried dangling one of my legs down, to see if I could fit.
Then the descent stopped. Light poured in an opening door. I yanked my leg up as the round face of Chef Van Dop came into view. He set a silver tea tray onto the dumbwaiter and polished its edges. The smell—Saturday cookies!—hit me like a truck. These were for Dad’s meeting with Grandma. The cookies! All the cookies.
Chef Van Dop shut the door, leaving me in a dark sauna of aromas, hotter and fresher than I had ever known possible. Special Dutch cookies: pecan Jan Hagels, caramel gevuldes, and chocolate-butter stroopwafels. The tray was close enough for me to touch it. I felt suddenly ravenous. I hadn’t eaten anything but beans for weeks! The gears whirred, and I began to rise. Don’t do it, I thought. Grandma will notice even the smallest thing wrong with that tea tray. Do not do it. Don’t weaken. Think of Baby Lu. Baby Lu.
I closed my eyes and felt at peace.
Then all at once, I thrust down my hand, swiped up a stroopwafel, and plunged it widthwise into my mouth. The flaky blazing hot chocolate-butter tasted so delicious that tears overflowed my eyes and rolled down my cheeks.
“Curse you, Grandma,” I sobbed, licking my fingers. “Curse your stroopwafels.”
I might have eaten another, but I noticed a door with a large three written on it passing by. The third floor! I pushed the door open and dove out, falling farther than I had expected, onto a dusty old carpet. This must have been the only dirty room in the house. It hadn’t been cleaned in fifteen years.
I stood up, brushed the dust off my suit, and looked around at Dad’s old room. A spaceship-shaped bed had the words “USS Conklin” painted across its side. It was the room of a kid completely obsessed with astronomy, space, and alien life in the universe. Well-worn encyclopedias lined the bookshelves, and a framed picture showed youthful Grandma holding infant Dad. After Grandma threw Dad out, she had closed the door on this place for good, as though unable to face the loss of the boy he had been.
I hurried out and shut the door behind me, but my thoughts remained on Dad, and his inventions, and Grandma. What had Dad said the Golden Hoop was for again? Zoo securit
y? Something about giraffes? Why would Grandma experiment with it on Baby Lu? And what would it do to her? And where the heck was I?
By Kayla’s timeline, I was supposed to be in the Chartreuse Vestibule. But this was just some yellow hallway! I must have made a wrong turn.
Up ahead, a pug-faced man hurried into the hallway, walking toward me while looking at an expensive leather clipboard. Chip Ricky! Grandma’s personal assistant.
This could not be right!
Without thinking, I turned and ran in the other direction.
The moment I did so, I could almost feel Kayla’s timeline rip apart into fluttering pieces. As I ran, I imagined Alphonso the Bee following me into some new passageway of hexagons that Kayla had never even considered.
I turned left into an open doorway and bumped into a small robot. A Lil’ Buddy the Walking Panini Press. I had to reach out and catch it before it tipped over, or else it would have made the most ungodly loud clattering crash. Righting it back onto its flex-foot blades, I felt terrified that it would start bleeping and blooping and cooking panini. But, luckily, it appeared to be completely powered down.
I put a hand to my chest and felt my heart kicking to get out.
I stood in a wood-paneled office. At the far end was a closed door with a black doorknob. Closer to me, an office desk.
The nameplate on the desk made me gasp.
“Chip Ricky.”
I had cornered myself! I turned around, peeked back into the hallway, and here came Chip Ricky, strolling toward his office.
Wheeling away from him, I again ran straight into Lil’ Buddy the Walking Panini Press. This time it SMASH-BANG-CLATTERED onto the floor. No way Chip Ricky hadn’t heard that!
I sprinted across the office to the other door. It was locked, but it was the kind of lock I could open by turning a button on its black doorknob.
I ran full speed into a room too dark for me to see anything.
Oh God, I thought, I’m in a black room. Was I in the Black Room?
I turned back toward the door. Into that wedge of illumination stepped Chip Ricky, looking horrified to find the door open. He leaned forward into the blackness.
The room was too dark for him to see me. But he wasn’t looking, he was listening. Now I listened too.
We heard the low, deep breathing of an enormous—I mean enormous—animal.
Kayla’s words from earlier replayed in my mind: Grandma’s brought something here. A terrible creature to guard her secrets. Stay out of the Black Room.
Chip Ricky looked relieved to hear the creature breathing—whatever it was hadn’t escaped.
Then he shut the door.
In total darkness, I heard its lock click.
CHAPTER 12
THE BLACK ROOM
Out of the darkness came a fearsome smell—a raw, predatory muskiness, like the reptile house at the zoo, but with a sickly-sweet, almost fruity, odor underneath. I was in the one place Kayla had told me to stay out of. Not only had I entered the Black Room, I had gotten myself locked inside. Locked inside with . . . What had Kayla called it? Some thing that Grandma had posted to guard her secrets.
From the enormity of the creature’s breathing, I thought it must be a brontosaurus, or something comparably large. Listening in the dark, I found one reason to be optimistic: the breaths came in such a steady and measured rhythm that I believed the monster might be asleep. Maybe I could find a way out without waking it.
My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, but I could still see no farther than the nearest wall, a yard away. So, with infinite care, I began creeping along this wall hoping to find an unlocked door. The wall displayed prototypes and advertisements for secret or banned inventions—the sorts of things that Grandma needed to keep hidden.
A poster showed my dad pointing to a cylinder that flashed light. On it was the familiar Hap Conklin logo, but the ad’s text was printed in crazy dancing blob letters unlike any foreign alphabet I had ever encountered. What did this light-flashing cylinder do? And why hadn’t I ever seen this invention before?
I crept on, carefully listening for any disturbance in the brontosaurus’s breathing. Along the wall, I next saw a large flat-screen TV topped with a tall and curiously elaborate golden antenna that looked a little like the Eiffel Tower.
I was careful not to touch the TV. But it must have been fitted with some kind of sensor device that made it turn on whenever someone stepped in front of it. Because, to my horror, bright light and blaring sound erupted. I reached out and began fumbling along its edges for the off switch.
On the screen, my dad spoke from inside the mirror of a silver makeup compact, just like Alice’s. This was a fomercial for the product tested on Alice! An hour ago I would have given anything to see this. Now I would give anything to shut it off. My hands fumbled around the TV’s edges, searching for the off switch.
My fingers must have found the mute button, because the audio cut out, though the visuals played on. Listening, I could no longer hear the steady rhythmic breathing, and I knew the monster had awoken.
I turned around. The TV now lit half the Black Room, but I still couldn’t see any creature. I scanned the walls for a second exit. I spotted a small door. It looked like another dumbwaiter, a few yards beyond a dark wall in the middle of the room. But then this dark wall began to move.
It was not a wall, but something as big as a wall lurking in the shadows.
The musky reptilian smell grew stronger, along with the sickly-sweet odor underneath, like . . . coconut body oil? From high above me, a deep giggling rolled out of the dark.
Then a new sound hit me so hard I had to plug my ears. The worst noise I had ever heard—not a shriek, but something happier and more evil than a shriek. A whoop.
No, I thought. It can’t be.
Out from the shadow stepped two long red wrestling boots. Gator-skin leggings hugged thighs the size of tree trunks. A muscular torso like the cab of a truck. Last from the shadow came the insane and grinning face of Florida Pete, the world’s strongest man.
“No way!” I said.
“Hot dang!” said Pete, stepping toward me. “I get to kill me another one.”
“You’re Florida Pete,” I said.
“And you the second little FBI feller I caught in two days,” said Pete. “The boss lady gonna be real happy with old Pete.”
“No . . . ,” I said weakly.
“Don’t worry,” said Pete, reaching down. “I’ll kill ya nice and quick.”
Some strange fear-instinct kicked in. I punched Florida Pete! In his leg.
Another deep giggle rolled down at me like tropical thunder.
“Is you crazy, little man?” laughed Pete. “You gonna fight me? I’ve had turds bigger than you today, John Law.”
“I’m not John Law,” I said.
“You FBI, sure as shoot. You look just like that last little FBI detective. Funny thing . . . I never thought they’d send another midget.”
“Dwarf,” I said. “Midget’s offensive. And I’m not one. I’m—”
“I mean, sending a midget after a midget? Is that some kind of FBI mind game?”
“Dwarf,” I said, “and I’m not one. I’m a—”
“That last little feller, Detective Frank Segar? Put up one heck of a fight for a midget.”
“Dwarf.”
“This here’s all that’s left of him.”
Pete tossed me something, and I caught it without thinking. A small wallet. Opening it, I saw a tiny little badge. I felt queasy. An FBI ID showed a photo of the man Pete said he had killed—a bearded, adult little person named Frank Segar.
“Yeah, keep it,” said Pete. “I threw the rest of him into the incinerator. And now I’m fixing to do the same to you.”
Pete reached for me.
“Kid!” I yelled. “I’m a kid with a beard!”
Pete paused. Stooping down, he lowered his huge coconut-oiled face over mine.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’ve wrassled with mi
dgets in my day . . .”
“Dwarves,” I said.
“And you don’t look like much of a midget.”
“Dwarf,” I said. “Or little person.”
“You look more like a kid with a beard.”
“Yes!” I said. “I am a kid! With a beard. The boss lady? She’s my grandma. My name’s Happy Conklin Junior.”
“Sweet corn fiesta!” yelled Pete. “Your daddy’s the Hap Conklin! Why, he’s my own personal hero. His fomercials are what started me fitnessizing. Changed my ding-dang life.”
“Really?” I said.
“Sure did. I was one of the first-ever customers for Buns of Abs. Looky here.” Pete turned around and pulled down his gator tights to reveal spandex Buns of Abs corrective pants. He started flexing the ab muscles on each buttock alternately, while saying, “Left flex! Right one! Left one! Righty! Lefty! Boom! Pow! Boom-boom pow . . .”
“Ah,” I said. “Those are uh . . .”
“Pow-pow boom! Boom-boom pow! . . .”
“Very impressive,” I said. “Hey, Pete? Uh. . . would you mind doing me a favor? Could you show me the way out of this room? And then maybe not tell anyone that you saw me?”
“Hmm,” said Pete, hitching up his gator skins. “I can meet you halfway on that, partner. I won’t tell no one you was here, but I can’t let you leave this room until after I’ve killed you.”
“Wha?” I said. I could see he wasn’t joking. “Why? Why . . . kill me?”
“Have to,” said Pete, stepping toward me. “Fighting and killing is all that’s in my nature anymore. I try to be good, but the badness in me beats the goodness every time. It ain’t even a fair fight. The only kindly thing I can do is kill you as fast as possible.”
