Case File 13 #2

by J. Scott Savage

  The headmaster stuck out his lower lip. “Jake?”

  “You know. Seven feet tall. Wide as a dump truck,” Carter said. “He’s kind of hard to miss.”

  “Ahhh.” Dr. Dippel smiled. “Boleslav. A large boy to be sure. I am afraid he, along with all my other students, have gone home for the break.”

  “And where would that be?” Nick asked.

  Dr. Dippel smiled even wider. “Transnistria. You have heard of it?”

  Nick hadn’t. Even Angelo seemed unsure. “Is it somewhere near Ukraine?” he asked.

  “Very good,” the headmaster said, with a clap of his pale hands. “What would you like to see now?”

  Nick had a feeling Dippel would have an excuse for everything. And sure enough, the operating tables were for dissecting frogs and snakes. The lab where they’d seen blue fire was for advanced electronics. Even the body they’d seen on the table was nothing more than a robot the kids had been working on as a school project.

  The headmaster led them through every room in the school. There were no hidden dungeons or cells. Nothing that looked even slightly questionable or dangerous. By the end, Nick was beginning to think they’d made a mistake.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Nick’s dad said when they returned to the front of the school. “What happened to your jaw?”

  Mr. Dippel touched the bolts on either side of his face. “War of Transnistria. A terrible thing. A bullet went from one side to the other, shattering my jaw and cheekbones in many places. The physicians placed screws to hold in place. Now I must eat much of, what is it you say here? Jell-O, I think?”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Nick’s dad said. “And I think we’ve learned a valuable lesson. Not to judge people who are different from us. Don’t you agree, boys?”

  Nick and his friends nodded.

  Dr. Dippel laughed his odd little laugh. “And I will remember to lock my doors.”

  Thanksgiving was usually one of Nick’s favorite holidays. It didn’t have the gifts of Christmas or the costumes of Halloween—which was his all-time favorite holiday—but it had lots of good food, no school, and great parades on TV.

  This year, though, all he could think about was Cody. It was crazy how you could go from fearing someone to worrying about them in less than a week. But that’s exactly what had happened. He phoned the bully’s house so many times Cody’s grandfather threatened to call the police if he heard from him again.

  “I’m sure he’ll come back once he realizes Dr. Dippel isn’t going to press charges for breaking into his school,” Dad said.

  “I hope so.” Nick poked listlessly at a turkey leg. But inside he knew that wasn’t going to happen. Nick had no doubt something bad had happened to Cody. But there was nothing he could do about it except check the news and worry.

  Finally his parents got so sick of him moping about the house that they ungrounded him, with the provision that he not go anywhere near Sumina Prep. That wasn’t a problem. Nick had no desire to even see that building again. While the headmaster appeared to have explained everything away, Nick still had a strong feeling there was more to the school—and the doctor—than met the eye. But he had no proof.

  Angelo’s mom must have felt the same way as Nick’s parents, because Friday afternoon, Angelo called to say he was no longer grounded. “You want to meet at the library?” he said. “Since it’s still raining outside and all.”

  Nick wasn’t fooled by his friend’s casual attitude for a minute. “You want to go see Mr. Blackham, don’t you?” Bartholomew Blackham was a reference librarian with an open mind and an unusually broad knowledge of the supernatural. He’d helped the boys out before, when Nick turned into a zombie.

  “Well,” Angelo admitted, “I have been doing a little research while I’ve been stuck at home. And I think Mr. Blackham might be able to answer some questions for us.”

  “Awesome,” Nick said, feeling a slight ray of hope for the first time in days. “What about Carter? Do you think his parents will let him leave the house?”

  “Are you kidding? He’s driving them crazy, bugging his sisters and fighting with his little brother. They’d probably pay him to go.” Angelo paused. “Would it be okay if I invited the girls too?”

  “Totally. The more brains we have working on this the better.” As soon as he hung up the phone Nick grabbed his coat and backpack and headed for the door. “I’m going to the library,” he called on his way out.

  “Have a good time,” his mom said, looking up from her crossword puzzle. “And find something to read that isn’t about monsters.”

  “I’d recommend Gone with the Wind. Or possibly Little Women,” Dad said from the table, where he was examining the remains of his plane he’d crashed on its first flight. “The only thing better than a good tornado story is one about undersized female wrestlers.”

  Mom wrinkled her nose and Nick laughed. Closing the door behind him, he pulled his jacket over his head as he ran to get his bike. By the time he reached the library, Angelo and Carter were waiting for him in the lobby. Angelo was wearing his long black coat again and for the first time Nick recognized how much it looked like the one Mr. Blackham had been wearing the last time they saw him. Maybe Angelo had chosen it for that reason.

  “Did you bring any leftovers?” Carter asked, eyeing Nick’s backpack. “I could really go for a cold turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce.”

  Nick rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah. I always bring leftovers to the library with me.”

  A few minutes later, Angie, Tiffany, and Dana strolled through the front doors. Nick wondered if they’d all been together when Angelo called or if they just planned to make their entrances at the same time.

  “Any word from Cody?” Dana asked.

  “Nothing,” Nick said. “And the police still aren’t doing anything about it.”

  “I can’t believe his grandparents aren’t even worried,” Tiffany said. “It makes me want to go over there and whack them both upside the head.”

  Angie turned to Nick. “I heard you told your dad about what happened.”

  Nick tapped his foot on the floor, leaving wet shoe prints on the lobby carpet. “It was probably dumb.”

  “Actually,” Angie said, “it was probably the smartest thing any of us have done since this whole thing happened. But thanks for not telling about us. My mom would have grounded me forever if she knew why we were really at the mortuary.”

  Nick shrugged, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “It’s no big deal . . .”

  “Are we just going to stand around?” Angelo tapped his notebook against his legs. “I want to see what Mr. Blackham has to say about all of this. He must have heard about the stolen bodies.”

  “Yeah. I want to meet this mystery man,” Dana said. “I’ve been to this library hundreds of times and I’ve never heard of any Mr. Blackham.”

  Carter laughed. “You’d remember if you saw him. He looks kind of like an older Neo from The Matrix.”

  But when they headed toward the back of the library, where Mr. Blackham worked, a gray-haired woman stopped them at the reference desk. “Can I help you?”

  “We’re here to see Mr. Blackham,” Angelo said.

  “I’m afraid he’s not here.” The woman examined a book, wrote something on a paper, and placed the book on a rolling cart. “Why don’t you try again next week? He should be back by them.”

  “This is kind of important,” Nick said. “Do you have a number we can reach him at?”

  The librarian picked up another book, then spotted a tear in one of the pages and clucked. “I’m afraid he’s out of the country. Some sort of last-minute trip.”

  Nick frowned. Next week could be too late for Cody.

  “Is there something I could help you with?” the librarian asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Angelo said. “This is the kind of problem only he knows about.”

  The woman put down her book and really looked at the six of them for the first time. “Was
he expecting you?”

  “I don’t see how he could have been,” Nick said. “We didn’t decide to come here until this morning.”

  She patted her hair. “Because he did call the day after he left on his trip. The connection was terrible. It sounded like he was calling from the middle of nowhere. But I believe he said something about some girls and boys coming to see him.”

  Angelo perked up. “What did he say?”

  The librarian poked around her desk, searching through scraps of paper. “I thought I wrote it down somewhere. But I don’t see it.” She looked at Angie and her friends. “Is one of you named Shelly, by any chance?”

  Angie shook her head.

  “How about Mary? The static on the line was horrible, but I thought he mentioned two girls named Shelly and Mary.”

  “That’s not us,” Tiffany said. “There are a couple of girls named Shelly at our school. But I don’t know anyone named Mary.”

  The woman continued to look around her desk, although Nick was pretty sure she was just turning over the same papers she’d already looked at. “Well, I guess it’s not you then. I’m quite sure he mentioned a Shelly, a Mary . . . and possibly a Calvin?” She smiled at Angelo. “You wouldn’t be Calvin, would you? You look like a Calvin.”

  “No, sorry,” Angelo said.

  Dejected, the six of them walked back to a circular table and took off their coats.

  “I was really hoping he might have been able to help us,” Angelo said, sliding into a chair.

  “You think he would have believed any of it?” Angie asked. “I can’t imagine anyone who wasn’t at the school that night accepting what we saw. Especially not a grown-up.”

  “This dude’s not like any grown-up I’ve ever met,” Carter said. “He’s actually a little freaky himself.”

  Nick scratched his head. It was going to be a long weekend. “What was that you were saying on the phone about research?” he asked Angelo.

  “Nothing all that helpful at this point. There are just a few things that don’t add up.” Angelo pushed his glasses up on his nose and squinted at his notebook. “First, the screws in Dr. Dippel’s jaw.”

  “The ones electricity was sparking from?” Tiffany shuddered. “Those freaked me out.”

  “Well, he said they were from the Transnistrian war. But the only Transnistrian war I could find was fought twenty years ago. He looks a little old to have been a soldier back then.”

  “Sometimes countries recruit anyone who can carry a gun,” Dana said. “Especially smaller countries.”

  Angelo nodded. “That’s true. But I also couldn’t find any medical procedure that left screws poking out through the skin on a patient’s jaw no matter how badly broken it might have been. Then there’s the castle—the one he said his ancestors built. I could swear I’ve seen that castle somewhere before. But I searched castles from Transnistria and there’s nothing that looks remotely like it.”

  “It was a good thought,” Nick said. “But he didn’t actually say the castle itself was from Transnistria.”

  “I know,” Angelo said, clenching his pen in his fist. “That’s why I wanted to talk to Mr. Blackham. I was hoping he might know more about the building. He’s something of a European history buff. Then there’s the thing with the wires. I noticed it the first night we were there and again yesterday. There are enough wires going into that school to power a building ten times its size. Why do they need so much power?”

  Carter gnawed on a stale-looking Crunch bar he’d produced from one of his pockets. “Especially when all the lights are gas.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nick said. And everyone at the table turned to look at him.

  “What is it?” Angie asked.

  He wasn’t sure. Something about castles and electricity had clicked inside his head. But there was something else. “My mom told me to get a book. But one that wasn’t about monsters.”

  Dana waved a hand at the shelves and shelves of books surrounding them. “You have plenty of choices.”

  Nick closed his eyes, trying to focus. The librarian said Mr. Blackham mentioned two girls named Shelly and Mary. Why did those names sound so familiar? And why did the idea of a castle and electricity make him think about what his mom had said. Separately they didn’t mean anything, but together . . .

  Suddenly his eyes snapped open. “I’ve got it!” He raced into the fiction section that was organized by the last names of the authors, and ran to the S’s, ignoring the dirty looks shot at him by several adults.

  Sherman, Sheehan, Sheldon, there it was. He grabbed a paperback with a man standing in front of icy mountains on the cover and hurried back to the table. It was exactly the kind of book his mother had asked him not to get.

  “It wasn’t Shelly and Mary,” he said. “It was Mary Shelley.” That was an author any self-respecting monster lover knew and every eye at the table opened wide with recognition.

  Nick slapped the book on the table with a bang that echoed through the library. It was Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. “Mr. Blackham wasn’t talking about girls. He was talking about Frankenstein.”

  Angelo slapped himself in the middle of the forehead like a cartoon character who’d just had a great idea. “Of course. Frankenstein!”

  Dana appeared a little embarrassed that she hadn’t thought of it first. She tapped her fingers on the table. “You know, if Mary and Shelly weren’t girls’ names, maybe Calvin wasn’t a boy’s name. In fact, maybe Mr. Blackham didn’t say Calvin at all.”

  Angelo’s eyes lit up. “The librarian said there was a lot of static on the line, so she might have misheard. Maybe he actually said Galvan. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Absolutely.” Dana jumped up. “I’ll go get a book on scientists from the 1700s and 1800s.” She hurried into the nonfiction section of the library.

  “I don’t get it,” Carter said. “What’s the big deal about some old monster book? Frankenstein wasn’t even all that cool of a monster. The mummy was way better.”

  “Frankenstein wasn’t the monster,” Angie said. “He was the scientist.”

  “Exactly.” Angelo picked up the book from the table. “In Mary Shelley’s story, Frankenstein was a mad scientist trying to discover the secret of life.”

  It was all starting to make more sense to Nick. “You think Mr. Blackham was trying to give us some kind of message? You think he knew about Dippel?”

  Angelo flipped through the last few pages of his notebook. “I think he knew about Dippel and he was trying to tell us what he was up to at the school. It definitely explains all the power cables running into the building.”

  Angie held out her hands. “Wait just a minute. What does any of this have to with Calvin or Galvan?”

  “Luigi Galvani,” Dana said, returning from her search. She laid a heavy book on the library table and turned it around so the rest of them could see a picture of a man in a white wig.

  Carter looked at the picture and snorted. “He looks kind of like George Washington. Wasn’t he, like, the sixth president of the United States, or something?”

  “Galvani wasn’t a politician,” Dana said. “He was one of the first scientists to study bioelectricity and he was a pioneer in the field of neuroelectrophysiology.”

  “I hope the rest of you got that. Because it went straight over my head,” Tiffany said, holding her palm about a foot over the top of her perfect hair. “Give this to us in sixth-grade terms. Or in Carter’s case, maybe third grade.”

  Carter made a face. “I may not be a brain. But at least I’m not a pioneer in neuro-ugly-ology like you.”

  Dana turned to Angelo, who was so anxious to talk he was bouncing in his seat. “Go ahead and explain it to them,” she said.

  Angelo leaned forward and took a deep breath like a teacher about to give a lecture. “Okay, so back in the 1700s scientists didn’t know what caused muscle movement. Most of them thought it was controlled by air or blood flow. This was called the balloonist theory,
popular with . . .”

  Nick spun his finger in a “let’s get on with it” gesture.

  Angelo blinked, then bobbed his head. “Right. Anyway, back to Galvani. He was doing this experiment with a frog and static electricity when his assistant accidentally touched a charged scalpel to the leg of a skinned frog. When the electricity touched the dead frog’s muscle, bam! It moved.” He waved his hands excitedly. “That’s how they discovered that electricity, in the form of ions, is what causes muscles to contract. The theory became known as galvanism, which we now call neuroelectrophysiology.”

  Carter opened his mouth in a huge fake yawn. “This is fascinating stuff, and I’m, like, totally excited to be spending one of my last vacation days learning science. But, um, so what?”

  Angelo looked offended. “So what is that a lot of other scientists at that time did more tests using galvanism. Including on corpses. Some of them believed a dead person could be brought back to life by shocking the body. A lot of people think that’s where Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein. Doctors were searching for what they called the life force.”

  Nick rubbed his temples. This whole thing was giving him a headache. “So let me get this straight. You’re thinking that Dr. Dippel believes all this garbage? That electricity can bring dead guys back to life?”

  “It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Dana said. “Every day people are discovering more and more about the connection between electricity and the human body. A jolt from a heart defibrillator can save someone having a heart attack. Electroconvulsive therapy is used on people with depression. Electrical currents control your eyes, your brain, and your heart.”

  “What if he did it?” Angie whispered. “What if Dippel figured out how to use electricity to bring dead people to life? What if that’s why he’s collecting bodies?”

  A horrible thought occurred to Nick. “The football team,” he said. “Maybe those kids were so big because they weren’t kids at all. Maybe they were corpses he brought back to life. A team of monsters he was experimenting with.”