by Paul Noth
This vanished and was replaced by more serious-looking text:
“Warning: Use of Doorganizer by unauthorized persons will be catastrophic.”
I tried to remember what the fomercial I had watched in the Black Room had said about the Doorganizer.
“The Ultimate Closet Space Solution,” I recalled. “Reads your DNA.”
So only Alice could open it, because only Alice had Alice DNA.
I scanned the room for traces of Alice DNA.
My eyes stopped on her nightstand.
Oh no, I thought. Anything but that.
I walked toward her big hairbrush—the one she cleaned so seldom that it resembled a small red Persian cat. I picked it up.
In a day full of unpleasant experiences, what I did next might have been the most unpleasant.
Wincing, I pulled a big handful of her hair out from between the bristles. This I wrapped around my fingers like a mitten. I held the makeup compact in this hair-mittened hand and pressed its latch.
New words engraved themselves into the silver: “Accepted . . . Welcome, Alice.”
It popped open so suddenly that I dropped it to the floor. I felt sure it would shatter into a million pieces, but instead it landed there, open. Its circular mirror shining.
Squeep! ran straight toward it.
“Wait!” I said, crouching down toward him. As I watched him run toward his reflection, the Squeep! in the bedroom vanished, while one in the mirror remained, staring out at me.
As I squatted down to get a better look at this, my own reflection came into view behind Squeep!’s. The moment I glimpsed my own eyes, I felt the me in the bedroom disappear.
Squeep! and I were somewhere else, crouched on a different floor, staring out through a small circle at the world we had left behind.
CHAPTER 20
THE COMPACT
“Use of Doorganizer by unauthorized persons will be catastrophic.”
From the moment I entered Alice’s Doorganizer I felt the coming catastrophe. Every instinct in my nervous system told me to get the heck out of there, to somehow crawl back through the little mirror where we had entered.
I looked over at Squeep! He kept bobbing his head in a beckoning gesture, as though to say, “Come on, this way.”
Against my better judgment, I left the little portal to normalcy behind and followed Squeep! deeper into what was simultaneously the largest, the smallest, and the strangest place I’d ever been. I felt a primal terror of the unknown.
I kept recalling that woman in the Doorganizer commercial.
Did this mean that even though Alice had left a compact behind, she still had another one with her somehow? Was Squeep! leading me to her current one? To another mirrored portal through which I could rescue my family, assuming they hadn’t already been killed in the alien death match?
Blocking that last thought from my mind, I focused instead on following the lizard across the cedar-paneled floor. Squeep! scurried along through the piles of stuff that Alice had stolen over the years. I passed several of my old library books, Beth’s favorite jacket, the family’s collection of board games, my first-grade Big Wheel, my gym uniform, my calculator.
The sight of all my old stuff should have been making me angry at Alice, but instead, I realized, I had actually started to feel sorry for her.
She hadn’t even unwrapped a lot of what she had stolen. Her compulsion didn’t even let her enjoy any of it, beyond whatever momentary pleasure she got from the theft itself. What a terrible thing to have to live with.
“Holy moly,” I said, taking it all in.
How could Alice have possibly stolen so much junk?
Kayla’s beloved Raggedy Ann doll—the one she had made a little yellow headband for—lay on the big plastic slide that had disappeared from the school playground a few years ago. I saw Eliza’s dollhouse, where she once had spent hours pretending that each room was hers alone. No sign of Beth’s Specs, however. Most of the things in the loot piles I didn’t recognize at all. Who knew where Alice had gotten so much weird stuff
As I gazed around in bewilderment, I realized that of all the weird things in the compact, the weirdest thing of all was . . . me. That place had changed me into something unfamiliar and given strange new abilities to my body and mind.
I could still move and walk around normally if I chose, but I could also go where I pleased without moving my body at all. I could look through the pages of my old library books without even moving my hands or eyes. Can you imagine what that would be like? You can? Good. Because here’s the weird part:
I could also do the things I did in there BEFORE I DID THEM.
If that doesn’t make any sense to you, how do you think I felt?
It happened like this:
I’d been standing there stupefied, unsure of my next move, when in the distance, I saw something strange on the ground. It looked like . . . a person. A person lying there on the floor! I wanted to walk over and see who it was. But the moment I decided to do so, the plan became a sort of memory, only one that went into the future instead of the past. I “remembered” ahead, how I would walk over to the person on the floor.
As soon as I “remembered” how I was going to do this . . . I had already done it, even though I still hadn’t yet. I became two me’s: the me who walked to the person and the me who hadn’t yet. The me who had looked down and saw that the person on the floor was . . .
. . . ALSO ME!
But, like, a me from even farther in the future, a me who had gotten lost and grown old inside the Doorganizer. I hadn’t gotten any taller, but my face had wrinkled and I had some gray in my hair. Far Future Me also wore a leather jacket exactly like the one I had always wanted.
Was Far Future Me dead?
I reached down toward him to check his pulse. My fingers touched his neck. His eyes sprang open.
Far Future Me grabbed my arm and flipped me over with an awesome judo move. He landed on top of me, pulled my arms behind my back, and began shouting and frisking me and pulling things out of my pockets.
“It’s okay!” I yelled back. “It’s just me. I mean, it’s just you. I mean, I’m you, in the past, so it’s okay.”
He made a low wheezing sound. As he pulled me to my feet, I saw he was laughing.
“I’m not you, Hap,” he said. “Don’t worry. Although, I think you’ve been pretending to be me.”
He held up the badge that he had pulled from my pocket.
“No!” I said. “Detective Frank Segar?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, folding the badge into his back pocket. “You know, it’s a crime to impersonate a federal officer.”
I goggled at him in disbelief.
“What’s wrong, Hap?” he said. “You don’t look very happy to see me.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “I just kind of thought that you were me . . . like me way in the future.”
“You should be glad I’m not. It means you’ll get taller.”
I would have given up getting taller to be a cold-eyed guy in a leather jacket who knew awesome judo moves.
“How did you get in here?” I asked. “I thought this place only had stuff that Alice st—Uh . . .”
“Careful, Hap,” said Frank, smiling. “You wouldn’t want to say the words ‘Alice’ and ‘stole’ to an FBI agent.”
For a guy who wasn’t me, Frank sure knew a lot about what I was thinking.
“Look, I’ll tell you all about it,” said Frank. “But can we sit down first? I’m exhausted. I’ve been trapped in here for weeks, and this place keeps making me fall asleep.”
“Weeks?” I said, sitting down beside him. “Florida Pete told me he just saw you yesterday.”
“Maybe it’s only been one day outside the Doorganizer,” said Frank. “But time happens very differently inside a black hole.”
“What?” I yelled. “We’re in a black hole? . . . But how? Why?”
“ ‘The ultimate closet space solution,’ ” said Frank. “
It’s the extra-dimensional space around a micro black hole. That’s what our scientists think, anyway. Maybe it’s really a white hole or a wormhole or a quasar or something. All I know is, it’s illegal. I mean, can’t your dad build a closet without endangering the stability of the universe?”
“But . . . ,” I said as this all sank in. “How did you even get in here?”
“Long story,” said Frank, yawning.
As he told me the FBI’s side of things, Frank kept drifting off to sleep, and each time I shook him by the arm to wake him up. He said the Justice Department had been investigating my family since Dad invented the Perfect-O-Specs thirteen years back. But that the case hadn’t become a top-priority matter until the zoo animals started disappearing last month. He didn’t say how they knew Grandma was mixed up in that.
The FBI had known all about the Black Room and the incinerator. They knew if they raided the mansion, Chip Ricky could burn all the evidence before they got to it. That’s when they called in an elite infiltration expert: Detective Frank Segar. They figured that Frank looked enough like me to pass through the servants’ gate of Conklin Manor without drawing attention.
But Grandma, somehow one step ahead of them, had posted a guard in the Black Room: Florida Pete, the world’s strongest man.
During their face-to-face encounter, Florida Pete had easily overpowered Frank’s best judo moves and threw him down the incinerator chute. Catching himself halfway down, Frank improvised an exit through the mansion’s wall—the same one I had used to make my own escape the next day.
“Wow,” I said. “So after all that, you didn’t even get your evidence.”
“Who says I didn’t?” said Frank. He reached into his pocket and removed a clear plastic baggie, which contained a familiar pair of green glasses.
“Beth’s Specs!” I said. “You’re the one who took them.”
“They weren’t what I came for,” said Frank. “But they’re still illegal. Enough for us to start making arrests and getting to the bottom of things. Only before I could get out of there, your other sister woke up and attacked me. Alice Conklin. I almost had my cuffs on her when she pulled me into this godforsaken place. She must have done the same thing to you, huh? Pulled you in here?”
“Uh . . . ,” I said. “Well, something like that.”
“Any idea when the little klepto plans on letting us out?”
“What if she can’t?” I said. “What if she never opens the door and lets us out?”
“Huh,” yawned Frank. “Then I guess you’re going to spend eternity looking at a white midget in a black hole.”
“Dwarf,” I said.
“White dwarf, black hole, yellow moons, orange stars, what difference does it make?”
So far I hadn’t told Frank anything about my own situation. Part of me really wanted to blurt the whole thing out. Maybe Frank would help me rescue my family. And for this job, a judo-trained infiltration expert might be just what the doctor ordered. Plus, I liked Frank. In a way, he had saved me from falling into the incinerator.
On the other hand, Frank seemed mostly interested in locking up my family and throwing away the key. Some of us probably deserved it. But for the rest of us it would surely lead to the Last Hexagon scenario that Kayla had been so worried about.
On the other-other hand, wouldn’t my family be better off in an Earth jail than in their current situation?
As I weighed my options, Frank began snoring loudly.
A few moments later, Squeep!, who had been hiding, crept out from behind a pile of backpacks and stared up at me. He flicked his tongue out, accusatorially.
“What?” I whispered. But I knew what he meant. Stop wasting time sitting around. We need to get going.
I looked back at where Frank lay sleeping. I knew what I had to do. Frank had evidence that he could use against my family, and I couldn’t let him keep it.
Carefully, I reached into Frank’s jacket pocket and pulled out the evidence baggie with Beth’s Specs inside. I slipped them into my own pocket.
You can judge me if you want. I know Frank was on the side of the law and everything. But in my heart, I was on the side of my family.
I tiptoed away after Squeep!, following his wending pathway between the piles and piles of stuff Alice had stolen.
Eventually, Squeep! and I came to another tiny mirror, the same size as the one we had entered through.
Squeep! hissed excitedly when he spotted it.
“Wait up,” I said.
Ignoring me, Squeep! ran straight toward the little circle and then vanished. I crouched down to look into it. Again, it happened the moment my eyes met their own reflection. I vanished from the Doorganizer into a very different sort of place.
CHAPTER 21
WHAT THE ALIENS LOOK LIKE
Here’s where Squeep! and I found ourselves:
Squeep! and I floated in low gravity in front of the silver compact we had entered through. The compact stood fixed in some sort of beam of light.
I surveyed the enormous room for any sign of my family. I saw many glass pens, all of which contained strange creatures, though no humans, let alone Conklins. I tried to turn all the way around to see behind me, but this made me so dizzy I thought I might be sick.
Squeep! swatted my face with his tail to get my attention. He flicked his tongue and waved his flippers back in the direction of the makeup compact. I had gotten pretty good at reading Squeep!’s body language and eventually figured out what he was trying to tell me. He wanted me to grab the makeup compact out of that beam of light so we could take it with us. But by the time I realized this, we had floated up so high the compact was out of reach.
I tried swimming back down to it. But you can’t swim through low-gravity air the way you can through water. And trying to made me queasy. If I wanted to get back to the compact I would need to push off against something. I looked up beyond my legs and saw an architectural beam a few feet away, so I wheeled around to grab it.
Squeep! hissed angrily at me. He really wanted me to grab that makeup compact, and here I was going in the opposite direction. I tried to explain, through gestures of my own, that I only meant to float up a few feet so I could push myself back down again off the beam. But this was not an easy concept to mime to a floating lizard.
Our argument was interrupted by the sudden approach of a glowing, eight-foot-tall, giant-headed monster. It looked like this:
Its skin glowed with an indigo light. It did not seem to have noticed Squeep! and me floating there just above it. As it approached, I could feel the enormous weight of its body. The creature must have been made of something heavier than any Earth life-form. As it passed just below us, Squeep! and I churned through the air like dust motes in its wake.
Spinning wildly away, I grabbed hold of a ledge along the wall, which turned out to be the sill of a large window. I found myself staring out at the alien world. A night sky full of strange bubbly clouds above a cityscape teeming with the same sort of glowing aliens that had just passed me. Creatures heavy enough to walk in this low gravity instead of float, and all with giant heads and glowing skins of many different colors.
Quietly, I tried to turn my body back around to reorient myself. Across from me stood a glass animal pen containing a very different kind of alien that I recognized from the preview of the upcoming death match I had seen on the TV. I noticed how, like Squeep! and me, they floated and were a lot lighter than the native aliens.
I turned my body more fully around until I was looking down at that heavy, glowing alien again. It still hadn’t noticed me clinging to the window about ten feet from where it stood. It took an instrument from its utility belt and began scanning around the edges of the silver compact, as though testing it for something. In addition to the belt, it wore a tunic and carried a satchel, both emblazoned with the writing I had seen the Gubbinses use.
I felt sure this alien was a Gubbins.
Then it put the instrument back into its belt. It re
ached one of its four hands toward the compact, as though it meant to take it.
Suddenly, Squeep! jumped out from behind the beam of light and bit the giant alien on its finger. The alien screamed—I assume more from surprise than pain. It shook Squeep! loose from its finger. Then it began swatting wildly with all four of its hands to knock Squeep! from the air. Floating backward out of range, Squeep! stuck his tongue out and hissed furiously.
The native alien glowed red with anger. It reached down into its belt and withdrew what could only be some sort of gun. It took aim at Squeep! and blasted out a bolt of lightning.
The bolt missed Squeep!, zipped past me, shattered the glass pen across from me, and then blew open a large hole in a window.
The air pressure changed violently. My body flipped around so hard that I nearly lost my grip on the window’s ledge as the broken window began pulling me hard toward the dark bubbly sky.
I watched the furry creatures from the cell across from me get sucked through the hole like dust bunnies into a vacuum. I could see them screaming in the night air outside the building, where, I’m sad to report, they met a very unfortunate end. The atmosphere out there inflated them like balloons until they popped. A horrible thing to behold!
I knew from the pressure pulling my body toward the hole that the same thing would happen to me out there if I didn’t hold on. These glass cells were like fish tanks, designed to protect us exotic foreigners from the planet’s real environment.
But to the native alien, still standing there holding the gun, this was all no more than a breeze. Creatures like it were made of stronger stuff that could survive out there.
I began growing lightheaded for lack of oxygen. Soon, I knew, I would lose my grip, get sucked out through the hole, and implode in the pressure. I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a protective spacesuit, or at least a fishbowl for a helmet.
