There was a moment of silence, then the sound of footsteps.
The men were walking away.
“Jaws! Claws! Come!”
The dogs growled and then trotted off after their master.
Still, Nick and Tesla waited a long, long time before they risked peeks around their respective trees.
“That was close,” said Nick.
“That was crazy,” said Tesla. “What took you so long? And where’s the rocket? And the pendant?”
“Duh, Tez. You just answered your own questions. What took me so long was I couldn’t find the rocket or the pendant. Oh! And something else!”
Nick craned his neck, trying to get a look at the window the girl had been standing in. But it was around the corner of the house. You had to be on the estate grounds to see it.
“I saw someone in the house. A girl,” Nick said. “A way-spooky girl.”
Tesla cocked her head and shot her brother a disdainful look.
“Not funny,” she said.
“Not joking!” said Nick. “She even told me to go away.”
“She talked to you?”
“No. She made a sign and held it up in the window. ‘Go away.’ With a frowny face.”
Tesla scoffed. “Oh, yeah—that is spooky. A frowny face? Terrifying!”
“I guess you had to be there.”
“Why would a creepy little girl be in the house with the renovation guys, anyway? What is it, Take Your Ghost to Work Day?”
“Hey, I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“Yeah.” Tesla scanned the estate as best she could from behind her tree. “And what you didn’t see.”
Nick looked, too.
“Your pendant must still be over there somewhere,” he said. “Assuming the dogs didn’t eat it.”
“Even if they did eat it, we could still get it back.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked.
The answer dawned on him before his sister could say a word.
“Ewwwwwwwwwww!”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that,” Tesla said. She stood and walked off toward their homemade launchpad.
“Where are you going?” Nick asked.
“Back to the drawing board,” Tesla told him.
A moment later, she picked up the launcher and the air pump and started toward Uncle Newt’s house.
When they got to the house, they found Uncle Newt hanging from the ceiling.
“Hey, kids!” he said. “Have some ’za!”
He was dangling from the straps in the dining room, suspended horizontally about a foot above the table.
Nick was starving, but he didn’t forget to look before he leaped (or ate). He smiled in a feeble, cautious way and pointed at the slice of pizza in Uncle Newt’s hand.
“Did you make that yourself?” he asked.
“Me? No. I don’t know if you could tell from the cake, but I’m not much of a cook. The pizza’s from a place up the road. It’s on the counter in the kitchen.”
Nick and Tesla smiled at each other in relief, then rushed into the kitchen.
“Could you bring me some more?” Uncle Newt called after them. “Once I strap myself in, it’s kind of a pain to get down.”
“Why do you eat like this, anyway?” Tesla asked a minute later as she handed her uncle a slice of anchovy pizza. (Both she and her brother hated anchovies. Fortunately, half the pizza was plain. Uncle Newt was one of the most irresponsible adults Nick and Tesla had ever met, but at least he knew that not everyone likes pizza covered in slimy, oversalted strips of fish.)
“There are three reasons,” Uncle Newt said. He took a huge bite of pizza and chewed on it happily, which didn’t stop him from talking. “First, a hypothesis. Our ape ancestors didn’t sit on chairs and they didn’t use forks and knives to eat. They ate with their hands, and they were hanging from branches while they did it. Therefore, I submit to you that the human digestive tract should work most efficiently when the body is flat and off the ground.”
“Shouldn’t we be eating raw fruit, then?” Nick asked. “It’s not like our ‘ape ancestors’ had Pizza Hut.”
“Good point,” Uncle Newt said.
Tesla jabbed a bony elbow into Nick’s side.
“What?” he said.
Tesla just glared at him.
If their uncle threw out the pizza and made them eat bananas for dinner, she was going to kill him.
“Unfortunately,” Uncle Newt said, “I can’t stand raw fruit. Now, second reason: When my brother (your father) and I were young, we used to dream of being astronauts.”
“We know,” Tesla said.
“Well, we grew so obsessed with the idea that we tried to add these to our house.” Uncle Newt waved his pizza at the thick gray straps he was hanging from. “You know. So we could eat in a simulated zero-g environment.”
“Oh, sure,” Nick said nonchalantly, as if all kids dreamed of stringing themselves up like piñatas and eating three feet off the ground.
“Of course, because we were seven and five at the time, we didn’t do the best job of it,” Uncle Newt said. “Brought down half the dining room ceiling, in fact. We were grounded until we were eight and six. But I vowed that when I was a grown-up with my own house, I’d give it another shot. So I did. Your dad never talked about trying it in your house?”
Nick and Tesla shook their heads.
Uncle Newt stared off into space with a wistful look. “That’s too bad.”
“What was the third reason?” Tesla asked.
“The what?”
“The third reason you hang yourself from the ceiling to eat.”
“Oh. Right.” Uncle Newt narrowed his eyes, then shrugged. “You know, I can never remember that one. Hey, did you end up building a rocket?”
“Yeah,” said Nick.
“Did it work?”
“Too well. Do you know the Landrigan place?” said Tesla.
“Sure. Everything around here used to be the Landrigan place.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked.
“All the land this neighborhood’s built on used to be part of the Landrigan estate. They were reclusive people, apparently. A little, you know …”
Uncle Newt whistled and circled a finger around one ear.
“Not normal, like us,” Nick said.
Uncle Newt nodded. “Exactly. Eventually, they started to have money problems. Sank most of their cash into a chain of disco bowling alleys. Or was it ostrich farming? Anyway, some kind of investment went belly-up. They had to start selling off their land piece by piece until all that was left was the mansion. I think the last Landrigan died there maybe ten years ago.”
“Have you ever heard about any Landrigans … uh, you know … coming back?” Nick asked.
“To live in the mansion?”
Nick shrugged. “Or whatever.”
Tesla rolled her eyes.
“No, I haven’t heard about anything like that,” Uncle Newt said. “But then again, I’m not the guy to come to for local gossip. I don’t socialize much with the neighbors. A lot of strange uptight folks, if you ask me. The only person around here I talk to on a regular basis is Julie Casserly next door, and that’s just because she’s the weirdest, loudest one of the bunch. Always worked up about some ridiculous thing or other.”
“Oh. That reminds me,” Tesla said. “I think we met Julie. She says you owe her a garden gnome.”
“A garden gnome?” Uncle Newt shook his head and laughed. “See? What’d I tell you? Kooks!”
With a loud meow, the hairless cat sauntered into the room, jumped up on the table, and started licking what was left of the icing off the cake.
“Down, Eureka!” Uncle Newt said. “Stop that!”
He tried to push the cat off the table, but it stayed just out of his reach even when he started swinging himself back and forth in his harness.
“Down! Shoo! That’s for the kids! Go! Get!”
The cat just turned its back to
him and kept eating.
Nick and Tesla looked at each other and sighed in unison.
Their uncle wasn’t going to be any help getting Tesla’s pendant back, and the only other grown-up they knew in town—in the entire state—was a neighbor-lady who already seemed to hate them.
Nick and Tesla chewed their pizza in silence, trying to enjoy something good while they could.
The first day of their summer “vacation” was drawing to a close, and it had been … eventful.
And kind of a disaster.
After dinner, Uncle Newt unstrapped himself and announced that he was headed to his laboratory to “toy with a few new notions” that had come to him as he ate. It would be tricky work, he said, and he’d need privacy. Nick and Tesla were welcome to look through his books or play games (“There might be a Parcheesi board around here somewhere”) or do whatever modern kids did to amuse themselves.
“Have fun!”
And Uncle Newt disappeared into the basement.
Nick and Tesla were too exhausted and overwhelmed and bummed out to do anything but watch TV. But even at that, they didn’t last long. The television was powered by converted kinetic energy—either Nick or Tesla had to be jumping, hard, on the trampoline connected to it or it wouldn’t stay on.
After the day they’d had, neither felt like jumping for joy. Or for an old PBS science show about black holes, which was the only interesting thing on, anyway.
They went to the stairs leading to the lab and called down to Uncle Newt that they were ready for bed.
“Wha’?” they heard their uncle say, and then there was a crash and a flash of light.
A puff of smoke that smelled like burnt marshmallows came rolling up the staircase.
“Are you all right?” Nick said.
There was a moment of eerie silence, then a cough, then a quiet “I’ll be right there.”
When Uncle Newt appeared at the top of the stairs a moment later, he looked slightly singed. But he was smiling.
“Sleep tight! Don’t let the bedbugs fight!”
“Uhh … we won’t,” Nick said.
Uncle Newt turned to go.
“Oh,” he said, stopping in the doorway. “I should probably warn you. Your beds might take a little getting used to.”
“Why?” Tesla asked. “What’s wrong with them?”
When Uncle Newt had shown them their room earlier, the beds had looked normal enough. Not that Nick and Tesla had paid much attention to them. They’d been distracted—and horrified—by the posters haphazardly stapled to the wall: Teletubbies, Elmo, Smurfs, Albert Einstein, and the periodic table. (Nick and Tesla had quickly agreed that the first three would “fall down” and “accidentally” “get ripped” at the first opportunity.)
“There’s nothing wrong with your beds, and everything right!” Uncle Newt declared. “I’m telling you, kids. You haven’t slept till you’ve slept on compost!”
“What?” Nick and Tesla said together.
Even Uncle Newt couldn’t miss the disgust on their faces.
“Maybe I’d better come up and explain,” he said.
Uncle Newt pulled the comforter off Nick’s bed and revealed something that didn’t look like a bed at all. It was more like a lumpy black sleeping bag with tubes and wires poking out of one end.
“Behold!” Uncle Newt said. “The biomass thermal conversion station!”
Nick reluctantly gave it a test-sit. It felt like he was lowering himself onto a garbage bag stuffed with rotten old food.
Because he was.
“As you sleep,” Uncle Newt explained, “your body heat will help decompose food scraps pumped into the unit, which will in turn produce more heat that the convertor will turn into electricity. So, by the time you wake up in the morning, you’ll have enough power to—ta da!”
Uncle Newt waved his hands at a coffeemaker sitting on the floor nearby.
“Brew coffee?” Tesla said.
Uncle Newt gave her a gleeful nod.
“We don’t drink coffee,” said Nick.
“Then you can have a hot cup of invigorating fresh-brewed water.”
“Great,” Nick said. He experimented with a little bounce on his “bed.” He could feel slimy things squishing and squashing beneath his butt.
“Comfy?” Uncle Newt asked.
“Uhh … kind of,” Nick said.
Uncle Newt beamed at his invention.
“Patent pending,” he said.
Uncle Newt was a gangly man with graying hair, but at that moment he looked like a five-year-old thinking about Christmas.
Tesla gave the room a tentative sniff. “Shouldn’t the compost stink?”
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Each biomass thermal conversion station is completely airtight!” Uncle Newt’s smile wavered just the teeniest bit. “In theory.”
Nick opened his mouth to ask another question, but Uncle Newt didn’t seem to notice.
“Well,” he said, slapping his hands together, “I guess you two should wash your teeth and brush your faces and all that. Good night!”
And he went striding out the door.
“Good night,” Nick said glumly.
Tesla was slowly lowering herself onto the big bag of putrid food she was expected to sleep on. From her expression, Nick thought there was a good chance she’d be spending the night on the floor. He saw her reach up reflexively to toy with something hanging around her neck. Something that wasn’t there anymore.
“Good night?” Tesla said. “Yeah, right.”
Nick read for a while. Tesla stared up at Albert Einstein.
After the third time he found himself falling asleep midsentence, Nick put down his book.
“We’re going to go back for the pendant again tomorrow, aren’t we?” he said.
“Of course we are. That pendant isn’t just important to me. You said it yourself: It’s important-important, somehow.”
Nick nodded. “Fine. I just wanted to know what kind of nightmares to have tonight. See ya in the morning.”
“See ya.”
Nick turned out the light and closed his eyes.
When sleep came over him again, he expected to drift into visions of black fur and hateful hungry eyes, snapping jaws, and big sharp claws. But his mind stuck on a different image: a pale frightened-looking girl holding up a sign that said GO AWAY.
As Nick’s sleep deepened and dreams took hold, the girl’s scared face shifted, morphed. The cheeks rounded, the mouth bent, the eyes retracted into lifeless dots.
The girl became a cartoon. Or maybe more like something on a signpost. A hint about what lay ahead.
“I’ve been thinking,” Tesla said when she saw her brother stir.
Nick blinked. The room was bathed in gray light. The coffeemaker was gurgling as hot, clear water filtered down into the pot.
It was morning.
“You’re always thinking,” Nick croaked.
“I’ve been thinking about that girl you saw.”
“Yeah?”
That was the best Nick could manage before his first cup of steaming water.
“Yeah,” Tesla said. “I was thinking about how to look for my pendant, but then I got stuck on the girl.”
Nick thought back to the dreams he’d had that night.
“I know the feeling,” he almost said but stopped himself just in time.
He knew how his sister would tease him if he said something like that.
“Yeah?” he said again.
“Yeah. You really saw her, right? It wasn’t just a bad joke or a cloud reflected in the window?”
“No! I really saw her!”
“Okay, okay! It’s just a little weird, don’t you think? Like, why is a kid there while the house is being restored? And why would she bother writing ‘Go away’? If she’d really wanted you gone for some reason, she could have told that nasty renovator guy about you. Or she could have just ignored you and let you become Dog Chow. But instead she wrote you a message.”
“Hmm,” Tesla said.
“Yeah,” said Nick. “Hmm.”
“I think when we go back for the pendant, I’m going to have a little talk with that girl.”
“How are you going to manage that?”
“I’ve got an idea. But we’ll need another RoboCat.”
“I figured we would. And I have an idea for improving that.”
“Great. Should we get to it?”
“First things first,” Nick said. He put his hands on his stomach, which gurgled and growled as he stood up. “I really hope there’s leftover pizza.”
There was a note on the dining room table when Nick and Tesla came downstairs.
The pizza box was in the fridge. Empty.
Nick and Tesla split stale crackers and an ancient can of pork and beans for breakfast.
“Is this child abuse?” Nick asked as they ate.
“It will be if we have to eat this way again for dinner,” Tesla said.
The only other edible food they’d found was a can of creamed corn.
“At least Uncle Newt went to the store,” said Nick.
“Yeah. But what if he comes back with twenty more cans of creamed corn?”
Nick thought it over.
“You wanna run away?” he asked.
“Not quite yet,” Tesla said. “We’ve still got things to do.”
She started toward the stairs to the lab.
An hour later, Nick and Tesla were on their way to the old Landrigan place. Tesla was wearing a pink backpack she’d found in the closet of their room. She guessed it had been meant as a Christmas or birthday present for her several years before, for it still had a price tag attached and a cartoon kitten on the back under the words AIN’T I JUST THE CUTEST?
So, there was one advantage to being exiled thousands of miles from your home for the summer: You could walk down the street wearing a kindergartener’s kitty-cat backpack and not worry about your friends coming out and laughing at you.
Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab Page 5
