If You're Reading This, It's Too Late

by Pseudonymous Bosch

  But that afternoon, when she arrived to walk Sebastian, Cass saw not only a long red fire engine, but also paramedics and policemen and emergency workers of every stripe. They spoke into walkie-talkies. They took photographs. They bandied about phrases you usually only hear on television like “securing the perimeter” and “talking to witnesses.”

  Normally, the sight of so much emergency activity on the quiet tree-lined street would have excited Cass, and she would have pummeled the paramedics with questions about CPR techniques, or at least complained to the firemen about the seat belt situation on her school bus.

  But it was different knowing her grandfathers were inside.

  Had someone been hurt? Had the firehouse caught on fire? Cass looked around, her heart beating in her chest. The sky was clear. She didn’t smell smoke.

  Cass ran up the steps and found Grandpa Larry right inside the doorway, deep in conversation with a woman in a police uniform.

  As it turned out, nothing terrible had transpired — except a rather minor burglary. The reason all the emergency vehicles had come was that Larry had been so distressed when he called 911 that he wasn’t able to get a word out, and the 911 dispatcher had assumed he was choking or worse.

  “They just turned the place upside down!” Larry was saying now.

  “Yes, I can see that,” said the expressionless policewoman, looking at the piles of junk on the floor. There was stuff everywhere: the store was bursting at the seams. The only relief from the chaos was a shiny brass fire pole that disappeared into a hole in the floor above.

  “Oh no . . . those piles are from when we started doing inventory three years ago. Big mistake!” Larry shook his head, remembering.

  “I see. . . . So those shelves, then?” The policewoman nodded toward the open shelves: books and crockery and old machinery and knickknacks, all tumbled out of the shelves very much as if someone had upended them.

  “Are you kidding?” Larry huffed. “We just organized those shelves last month! It took days. They’ve never been so neat.”

  “Right. . . . Then what exactly . . . ?”

  “Well, those drawers, of course! And the cabinets over there! Can’t you tell? Those bloody so-and-sos just tore them apart!” Larry pointed across the room.

  “Uh huh,” said the policewoman, straight-faced. There was no way to tell what had been torn apart and what hadn’t. “But they didn’t take anything at all?”

  “That’s the worst part — how dare they not take anything! They couldn’t find anything they wanted? Those laptops, for example — perfectly usable. And they left the Staffordshire! A chip here and there maybe, but stunning just the same. . . .”

  “Could be someone’s angry at you. Or playing a joke. Unless you’re playing one on me . . . ?” She looked at him sharply.

  “No. No. I never . . . oh Cass, I didn’t see you!” said Larry, agitated. “Sweetheart, could you do me a favor and take Sebastian on a little walk? All this nuttiness is making him . . . nutty.”

  Larry gestured toward his blind basset hound, lying a few feet away. Sebastian, it must be said, looked a lot calmer than Larry. But Cass didn’t argue.

  Grandpa Larry might not have known what the burglars wanted, but she did. Well, she suspected. As far as Cass was concerned, there was only one thing they could be looking for. And it wasn’t at the firehouse, it was at her house.

  “Uh, no . . . I’ll take him. Right now!” She grabbed Sebastian’s leash and he started to roll —

  That’s right. Roll.

  You see, over the last few months, Sebastian had lost his ability to walk. Oh, he could shuffle a little bit. But his back had gotten so painful, and his belly had fallen so low to the ground, that he couldn’t move more than a few feet without exhausting himself to the point of collapse.

  Sometimes, he looked more like a rug than a dog; indeed, more than one customer in Cass’s grand-fathers’ shop had stepped on him only to be surprised by the loudest yelp they’d ever heard.

  Grandpa Wayne (as you know if you’ve read my first book, and if you haven’t, what can I say, there are risks to everything) was a retired auto mechanic and a constant tinkerer. He had dealt with Sebastian’s disability by rigging an old skateboard for the dog’s use. The skateboard was outfitted with a seat belt (to prevent Sebastian from falling off) and a leash (with which to pull the skateboard). Everybody was happy with the contraption, even Sebastian, until an obstacle became apparent: how was Sebastian supposed to “do his business” if he was strapped to a skateboard?

  Hence Cass’s grandfathers had taken to wrapping Sebastian in a towel — oh, let’s call it what it is, a diaper — with a hole cut for his tail.

  If you’ve never seen a dog in a diaper, let me tell you there are few sights sadder. Unless it is the sight of a blind, near deaf, and virtually paralyzed dog in a diaper.

  “It’s a good thing he can’t see himself” was all Cass could say the first time she saw Sebastian in his new getup.

  As brave as Cass was, I must admit that it occasionally embarrassed her to walk Sebastian in this condition. Today, however, she didn’t give a thought to the way he looked.

  She ran down the street with Sebastian practically flying behind her.

  When they reached her house, Cass walked right past — and down another block.

  Partly to look for suspicious activity. Partly to screw up her courage.

  When they returned, she still didn’t let herself in — she went around to the back.

  With Sebastian standing guard (or lying guard, anyway) she dug until she could verify that the Sound Prism was still there, wrapped in a Mylar space blanket, just the way she left it. Then, relieved, she quickly reburied it.

  She entered the house as silently as she could considering she was pulling a dog on a skateboard behind her.

  Inside, the house was quiet — and apparently untouched. The couches had not been torn apart. Bookshelves and drawers had not been upended. The cupboards had not been ransacked.

  Could she have been wrong? Was it possible her grandfathers’ burglars hadn’t been looking for the Sound Prism after all? Was it possible the Midnight Sun had never been to the firehouse? Wouldn’t they have checked her house first?

  She was almost disappointed. She’d been so certain.

  Cass felt a tug on Sebastian’s leash. He’d been acting anxious ever since they’d arrived at her house. But now he was wriggling on his skateboard and barking frantically.

  “What’s wrong, Sebastian? Better not be your diaper because I’m definitely not changing it!”

  Maybe he just wants to get off the board for a minute, she thought.

  As soon as Cass untied him, the blind, near deaf, and physically ailing dog leaped off the skateboard, sending the board shooting backward. And then he bolted toward the stairs with the energy of a dog half his age.

  Astonished, Cass followed Sebastian upstairs, where he ran unhesitating all the way to her closed bedroom door.

  Which he proceeded to paw furiously.

  When Cass opened the door, he bounded into the room and, trembling with excitement and exhaustion, fell in a heap in front of her bed.

  Cass stared at the dog: “What has gotten into you? Are you . . . trying to tell me something?”

  Cass knew from experience that Sebastian had a keen sense of smell — and of danger. Not for nothing did they call him Sebastian, the Seeing-Nose dog. For him to act so peculiarly, there had to be a reason.

  Nervous, Cass went through her regular checks.

  At first she didn’t notice anything unusual — but when she glanced at her windowsill, she stopped short: the dead bee was gone.

  She looked down: there it was on the floor, about a foot away from the wall.

  Somebody had opened her window.

  When she checked her drawers a second time, she saw that the dental floss had been retied rather sloppily.

  Somebody had looked in her drawers.

  Somebody had been in her room
.

  And that’s when she saw it sitting on her bed. Her sock-monster. What was once her sock-monster, anyway.

  It had been ripped to pieces and was now a pile of scraps:

  A FEW TORN SOCKS SOME LOOSE THREADS BOTTLE CAPS & TENNIS SHOE TONGUES LOOSE RECYCLED COTTON STUFFING

  So the Midnight Sun had come, after all.

  They’d even left her a gift of sorts. A warning.

  Of course, now that she’d established she was right, Cass wasn’t so excited about it.

  In fact, she was rather frightened.

  After the bus dropped him off that afternoon, Max-Ernest went home — or, as he sometimes thought of it, he went homes.

  Perhaps I should explain:

  As you may possibly remember, Max-Ernest’s parents had divorced almost as soon as Max-Ernest was born. But they’d kept living together so that Max-Ernest would grow up with both parents in the house.

  In principle, that might have been a good idea. In practice, however, it was very stressful for all of them — especially because Max-Ernest’s parents insisted on living entirely distinct lives, each keeping to his or her half of the house and never speaking to the other.

  Recently, thankfully, Max-Ernest’s parents had made the sensible decision to separate.

  “Isn’t this what you always wanted?” asked his mother. “A nice, normal divorced family?”

  “Now we can be like every other divorced family on the block,” said his father. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

  (Max-Ernest’s parents had an odd habit of repeating each other’s words without acknowledging that the other parent had spoken.)

  Their separation was quite real; they literally cut their house in two. With chain saws. Max-Ernest’s mother’s half of the house (the modernist-style half) stayed where it was, while Max-Ernest’s father had his half (the cozier, woodsier half) hauled to an empty lot across the street.

  I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how unusual the half-houses looked. However, both half-houses were boarded up on the sides where’d they been severed — so their interiors were not exposed to the elements and you could live in them more or less “normally”.*

  In their new mood of commonsense compromise, Max-Ernest’s parents worked out a custody arrangement for their son that made them both equal partners in parenting. They called the agreement “half-and-half.”

  For the first half hour of every hour, Max-Ernest was expected to be at his mother’s half-house, for the second half hour, his father’s. Exceptions included mealtimes, which were broken into fifteen-minute segments so Max-Ernest would never miss a meal with either parent, and sleeping hours, which were spent at alternate half-houses nightly.

  By now, Max-Ernest was used to the arrangement; I might go as far as to say he’d mastered it. His watch was programmed to beep every half hour, but he’d gotten to the point where his internal sense of time was just as accurate as his watch, and usually he was stepping through the doorway of his mother’s or father’s half-house (whichever was next) by the time his watch beeped.

  Today was different.

  The bus had dropped him off at an awkward time, 3:47, and he had trouble remembering whether he was supposed to go to his mother’s or his father’s first, and whether he was supposed to stay with parent number one until 4:00 (thus cheating parent number one of seventeen minutes) or 4:30 (thus cheating parent number two of thirteen). It didn’t matter that neither of his parents would be home yet; it was a point of honor that he abide by the agreement even in their absence.

  As he stood in the middle of the street debating which way to go, his mind went back to his conversation with Cass on the bus. His questions, he thought, had been very sensible: If Yo-Yoji had a crush on Cass, why wouldn’t they be a couple? If Yo-Yoji was good at climbing, why shouldn’t they be collaborators? And yet, for some reason, his feelings didn’t make so much sense.

  Scccrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!

  A truck braked, blaring its horn; Max-Ernest jumped out of the way and wound up in front of his mother’s half-doorstep.

  His mother’s half-house was very stark, almost empty inside. Nevertheless, movement was sometimes difficult because of where it had been split from his father’s half-house. Usually, Max-Ernest ran up the stairs to his room without a problem, his body remembering exactly when and where he had to dart to the side to avoid hitting the plywood wall that bisected the stairway.

  This time, he hit the wall twice, scraping his shoulder and elbow.

  Was he mad at Cass, like she said? Was that why he was he so upset?

  It was strange losing a friend. As strange as it’d been to make a friend in the first place. But much worse. He almost wished he’d never made a friend at all.

  Once safely in his bedroom, almost as a test, he tried throwing some things around in his room, which is what he imagined someone angry would do. Yo-Yoji, for example. He would probably break something. Like a guitar.

  But it was no use. His model rocket didn’t fly any farther than when he tried to launch it properly. The Frisbee bounced off the wall and hit him in the face. He couldn’t even bring himself to throw the specimens from his rock collection.

  I must not be very mad, he thought. Or else maybe I’m just not good at it.

  Then he noticed the brown paper package on his desk. Max-Ernest had received packages in the mail before — kits for building airplanes and spaceships, mostly, and boxes of books — but only when he’d ordered them. This one was a surprise. As was the name written on it:

  “Max-Ernest the Magnificent.”

  Repeating the name with a sense of wonder, he sat on the floor and opened the package, revealing a large cardboard box. The box was decorated with a top hat and a magic wand, as well as the words, The Magic Museum’s Home Magic Show.

  When he lifted the lid off the box Max-Ernest saw a classic magic set arrayed in molded plastic. There was a wand. A deck of cards. A rope for rope tricks. A cup and ball set similar to the ones he’d pointed out to Cass. And a few other things I won’t give away because I don’t want to ruin anybody’s magic show.

  Now all I need is a hat — how ’bout that? Max-Ernest thought.

  A small card was paper-clipped to the manual:

  Try the cone trick.

  It’s a good place to start.

  P.B.

  Following instructions in the manual, Max-Ernest made a cone out of black construction paper. The cone was designed so that it looked empty when you opened it up for your audience, but it had a secret compartment that you could pull a scarf out of. The idea was to make it seem like you were pulling the scarf out of thin air.

  Max-Ernest’s first idea was that he would practice the scarf trick a few times, then try it on Cass the next day. Then he remembered he might not be talking to her ever again. Perhaps instead he could try the trick out on his mom and dad (separately, of course). If it went well, he could make it part of his magic comedy routine for the talent show.

  After all, Cass wasn’t the only person in the world — just his only friend. At least, she had been.

  The manual suggested practicing in front of a mirror. So he took his paper cone into the bathroom along with a bandanna left over from the one day four years ago that he’d tried being a Cub Scout.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” he pronounced, addressing the mirror. “I, Max-Ernest, the Magnificent, have in my hand a normal piece of paper folded into a cone. Look, it’s totally empty and —”

  Max-Ernest was certain he’d made the cone correctly, but as the minutes passed, he got more and more frustrated. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make the cone look empty; he kept seeing the corner of the bandanna poke out. He decided to look in the manual again; maybe he’d missed something earlier.*

  Thumbing through, he noticed that a particular passage had been underlined in red.

  The passage explained that diversions help set up tricks:

  For example, you might hold up your wand and say, “Watch
my wand closely — I promise there’s nothing tricky or magic about it,” before tapping your magic cone with your wand. That way your audience will think the secret of your trick lies in the wand, not in the cone.

  Strange, thought Max-Ernest. It was almost as though the words had been underlined just for him.

  He took the wand out of the magic set and tried the cone trick in front of the mirror again. But he was so frustrated by his earlier failures — and, I suspect, so angry at Cass — that instead of gently tapping his cone, he flung the wand across the room.

  Almost as if he was good at being angry, after all.

  As the wand hit the wall, its white cap flew off — and a tightly scrolled sheaf of papers slid out. Max-Ernest picked them up and unfurled them with a sense of nervous excitement.

  On the first page, there was a note in pencil:

  Dear Cassandra and Max-Ernest:

  I have persuaded Mr. Wallace that as long as you have the Sound Prism, you should have this file as well. Share these pages with no one. And please return them when your mission is complete. Or I will be in big trouble with Mr. Wallace!

  Regards,

  P.B.

  The first page also had a carefully typed label:

  SOUND PRISM:

  Notes, Stories, Memoranda

  1500 Present Day

  In the old days, when he and Cass were collaborators, Max-Ernest would have called Cass immediately. He might even have given the emergency signal. He wouldn’t have read a single page without her.

  But what to do now? Should he read the pages on his own? Rip them up without reading them at all?

  As he struggled with his feelings, the alarm on his watch started beeping: he was late to go to his father’s. For the first time ever.

  He shoved the pages into his pocket, flew down the stairs, and ran across the street. By the time he got to his father’s half-house, he’d reached a decision.

  Or half of one, anyway.