by J. G. Kemp
“Yeah,” said Julee, “I used to think he was a little crazy for carrying all that stuff around, but now we might really need some of it.”
Ben’s eyes sparkled.
As they left the house, Mary closed the door behind them. She looked up at the mountain—its snow-capped summit glistened in the morning sunlight. She followed the others around the house, beside the rock wall, and down the grassy hillside, on the path towards the dock.
Mary watched the rolling ocean waves on the horizon and listened to Elliot talk about home and her parents and her old school and her friends and movies she’d seen and books she’d read and places she’d been and animals she liked. Mary was glad that Elliot did all the talking.
After they had passed through the dense wall of wild roses and had reached the beach, they walked south. The sand high on the beach was loose and formed dunes that were a struggle to walk through, but the sand close to the water was wet and packed firm. They all walked there, just above the white foam of the surf, except Elliot, in her sandals and rolled-up jeans; she scanned the beach for shells and other curious sea-things as the waves lapped against her feet.
After a time, the beach-line turned and the dock was gone from view, behind the grassy hills. Julee was quiet, but she looked happy, and Ben constantly scanned the hills and the horizon, like he was trying to remember everything. Every so often he would stop briefly, aim his camera at something, and take a picture. Mary could never tell exactly what he was taking pictures of.
When the sun was getting high in the sky, they stopped and ate all the donuts and drank a whole bottle of water. Ben stared south along the beach line, shielding his eyes. “Looks like more cliffs,” he said. “If we can’t get around ‘em, we could cut across the hills, and make our way back to the house in a big loop. Some of those hills are pretty high, I bet we could look out and see more of the island.”
They continued along the beach, and soon, Ben was proven right. The flat beach ended abruptly at the base of high cliffs, where powerful waves crashed against boulders that had fallen from above. Huge masses of rock, covered in cracks and still clinging to the cliff face, looked poised to fall at any moment. A constant squawking and babbling from the sea-birds, which sat in countless dirty nests built on the cliff, mixed with the sound of the waves. Mary could feel a light spray of water, carried by the wind, from where the ocean, wave after wave, relentlessly battered the rocks.
“Yeah, there’s no way we’re going around that,” said Julee, decidedly.
They sat close to the cliff, in the cool spray, and ate peanut-butter crackers and nearly finished the water. Elliot kept looking up nervously at the rocks dangling above. When they had finished, they climbed up a steep, sandy ravine onto the grassy hillside above the beach. From here they could see the border of an evergreen forest. The trees stretched from the top of the ocean cliffs, along the hilltops to the east, and disappeared behind the taller, grass-covered hills to the north.
“I bet that connects to the forest by the cave,” said Ben. “Looks like we’d have to go through it to see what’s on the other side of these cliffs.” He scanned the surrounding hills and pointed to the tallest grassy hill in the distance. “I bet that’s the tall one you can see from the House of Andromeda… shouldn’t be that hard to reach it.” Mary surveyed the terrain… gentle, grassy, rolling hills.
They walked up a hill… and then down the other side… and up another… and then down the other side… and another, and another, and another. It was hot. The grass was itching Mary’s legs. The curls that hung on her cheeks and shoulders were damp with sweat.
As she took off her glasses and wiped them dry, she thought that Ben alone still looked happy to be exploring. Elliot hadn’t said anything since the third hill, and Julee’s smile was gone. Mary wanted to whine, are we there yet? but she didn’t. As she walked, she recited the riddle in her mind, in rhythm with her footsteps:
When the next Andromeda,
upon her throne does stare,
at her reflection she will see
the answer will be there.
Hiding up among the stars,
among the black of night,
wait patiently for what may come
of faint and distant light.
When the next Andromeda…
She said the words over and over again, and soon, as if little time had passed at all, they were standing on the top of the tallest hill, the one they had been walking towards.
The white roof of the House of Andromeda was visible in the distance, not far to the north. The great mountain loomed behind it. To the east, the forest blanketed the hills and disappeared into the valley below; and beyond the forest rose the massive cliffs Mary had seen two days ago. The very top of the Stone Tower was visible, behind one of the green hills in the foreground. The cliffs looked like an impenetrable barrier. To the west and south, the grassy hills rolled down to the ocean, which shimmered in the afternoon light. Mary surveyed the route they had taken, up and down, over the hills. It was a long way, she thought.
Ben figured it would take a few hours to get back to the house, and since the clouds that had been building overhead didn’t look like storm-clouds, they might as well rest for a while. While they rested, they drank the last of the water, and ate the apples, and the last of the peanut-butter crackers. Julee licked the jar of peanut-butter clean.
Mary slung her backpack onto the ground and lay down on the soft grass and gazed up at the sky. It was a beautiful clear blue spotted with bright, white, fluffy clouds. She saw faces in them: a silly face with puffed out cheeks and a big bulbous nose, an angry face with furrowed eyes and a sharp chin, a laughing face with an open smile. As she stared at the laughing face its smile grew bigger and then stretched apart and it looked like a face with two mouths, and then the two mouths were the eyes of a different face that was upside down and looked like an old women with a crooked nose, and then the nose got smaller and the old women’s mouth grew longer and it looked like the face of a bird with its beak turned to the side.
click
Mary glanced over at Ben. He was sitting in the grass holding his camera. Julee was lying on her back, a few feet away, her eyes closed, and Elliot was bent over, on her hands and knees, staring wide-eyed at something in the grass.
click
Mary closed her eyes—patterns of circles and lines and a faint purple glow quivered on the back of her eyelids. She listened to the gently blowing breeze and the click of the camera…
click
“Whoa… that’s cool,” said Ben.
“What?” asked Elliot.
“This dial here… I can change the shutter speed.”
“Shutter speed?… like when you shake back and forth if you’re scared?” asked Elliot.
Ben chuckled. “No, the shutter, the thing in the camera that opens and closes to let light in. Ya know, that clicking sound that it makes, ka-chik, that’s the shutter, opening and closing, really fast. If it’s open too long, then too much light is let in, and the picture is all white, or blurry. My mom taught me about it.”
“Oh… well… why would you want to change it?”
“I dunno, the camera usually does it automatically, depending on how much light there is. But it’s cool that I can change it if I want. If I turn it all the way over here and hold down this button—click—the shutter just stays open until I let it go—click.”
“Oh… but wouldn’t that make the picture all white and blurry?”
“Well, yeah… unless it was really dark and the camera was really still. I bet you could take some neat pictures of fire… or stars.”
Mary’s eyes popped open. “Wait, what did you just say?”
“Uh… that you could take pictures of fire or stars?” answered Ben, confused.
Mary sat up straight. Her mind raced: upon her throne does stare—wait patiently—hiding—faint and distant light—stare—stare.
“Mary, what is i
t?” asked Elliot.
“Ben, could we attach the camera to the telescope… in the observatory?”
Ben’s eyes widened. “Maybe… what are you thinking?”
“If we could attach the camera to the telescope, and do what you just said, hold the shutter open, then we could take a picture of Andromeda. The riddle says I have to stare and that the answer is hiding in faint and distant light. If we use the camera, it will be like staring at Andromeda, and we can see the light that is too faint to see with our eyes—all the light will be collected in the camera. Maybe that’s what I have to do.”
“Yeah!” Ben nodded excitedly… and then looked away and frowned.
“What… what is it?”
“Um… well…”
“What?”
“Well… we’d need Henry’s help.”
“Why? What would we need him for?”
“To see the picture on the computer. I don’t know how to do it… and the computer is kinda his… or… he fixed it.”
“Okay. So what? We have all the food. He’ll have to help us or he can’t have any.”
Ben paused and thought. “Yeah… okay… you want me to ask him?”
Mary stood up decisively and slung her backpack over her shoulders. “No. I’ll do it,” she said. “Come on.”
Julee opened one eye and sighed.
They walked quickly, with Mary leading the way over the grassy rolling hills, back to the House of Andromeda. At one point, Elliot spotted what looked like a cluster of white bushes on a distant hillside, but when the bushes started to move, everyone agreed they were sheep. Mary counted exactly twenty-eight by using Cecilia Andromeda’s spyglass, which she still had in her backpack.
In a small pond, which was nestled between two of the hills, Ben thought he saw fish that no one else saw. He vowed to come back later and catch one and prove himself right.
When they finally reached the house, the sun was low in the sky. Mary stood in the sundial—her shadow pointed to 6. She followed the others, wearily, into the kitchen.
“Welcome back,” came Henry’s voice from the corner. He was sitting on a chair, one he had brought from the dining room table, and he was eating. “Did you find any clues… princess?”
Chapter 16
The Amazing Eye
Mary didn’t waste any time. She stood tall, with her arms crossed, and stared straight into Henry’s eyes. “I need your help,” she said proudly.
A grin slowly grew across Henry’s face. He squinted. “You need my help, do you?”
Mary stared back. “Yes.”
Henry took another bite of whatever he was eating, chewed, and swallowed. “Well, what is it?” he said casually.
“Will you help me?”
“Now, that depends on what you need, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll tell you what I need when you agree to help me.”
Henry squinted even further, until his eyelids were open no more than a sliver. “Okay… princess… what do you want?”
“I need your help with the camera. I need to attach it to the telescope, and take a picture of the Andromeda constellation, and then see it on the computer. That’s what I want.”
Henry chuckled. “And… you think this is part of the quest from your long-lost grandmother, do you?”
“Yes,” Mary declared.
Henry laughed again and then stood and glanced at his watch, as if Mary had been keeping him waiting, as if he had much better things to be doing. “Well, let’s go then, shall we?
Ben took the camera from around his neck and handed it to Mary. She took it and walked, determined, to the observatory. When the telescope was lifted, and the dome ceiling was opened, she turned to Henry. “Ben said that we could keep the shutter of the camera open, for as long we wanted, and take pictures of stars.”
Henry reached for the case. He removed the camera and quickly started pushing buttons, and switching switches, and turning the camera over in his hands, and opening and closing little flaps on the sides, and dismantling pieces of it. “It’s just like any camera, clearly,” he said. He carried it up the stairs to the telescope, sat down, and began twisting on the telescope eyepiece.
In less than a minute, he relaxed back in the chair, with his hands folded behind his head. “Would you like to see, princess?”
Mary climbed the stairs and stood behind him. The camera was attached to the telescope eyepiece; flashing numbers appeared on the camera’s display.
“This is a timer,” he said, pointing to the numbers. “You use these arrows to set the time that the shutter will be open, and then you push enter.” He looked at Mary. “Think you can handle that?”
Mary glared back.
Henry chuckled and then spoke slowly, like he was explaining something to a baby. “Tomorrow… you will unscrew the camera… and then bring the camera to me. Can you handle that too?”
Mary continued to glare.
“Aren’t you going to say thank you?” Henry smirked.
“Henry,” Julee said sharply from the floor below, “get outta here.”
Mary felt a rush of pride. She smiled at Henry, and pushed her glasses farther up her nose, and stood poised. “Thank you Henry, that will be all,” she said politely, and graciously motioned for him to leave. “I shall bring the camera to your gloomy cave in the morning. Thank you ever so much.”
Henry scoffed, rolled his eyes, stood, and stepped down off the platform.
“Please help yourself to as much food as you’d like,” Mary called as he passed through the observatory door and walked out of sight. Elliot started giggling, and then Julee joined in, and Ben, and soon they were all laughing out loud.
“I could have done that,” Mary said. “All he did was screw the camera onto the telescope.”
“Yeah,” said Ben, “and I knew about the timer.”
Mary glanced at the camera and the flashing numbers on the display. “How long should we set the timer for, do you think?”
“I dunno,” Ben thought for a moment, “an hour?”
Mary nodded. “Yeah… okay… an hour, if the picture comes out too light or dark we can always try again tomorrow night.”
Mary stepped off the platform, and they all moved to the kitchen. They hadn’t eaten since the tallest hill, hours ago, and for the rest of the evening, they ate and talked and ate more. Elliot talked about her parents, Julee talked about the four different foster families she had lived with, and Ben talked about how he and his mom had moved every year since he was born. He could remember seven different houses in different parts of the world: three in cities, two in the country, one in the desert, and one in the mountains. Mary told them all about her Uncle Edwin’s mansion, and her treehouse, and her sister.
The more they talked, the more Mary realized how her life had been so different than theirs—she had almost never been allowed to leave her uncle’s house, and the only other person she really knew was her sister. Julee had lived with one family that had nine children and another with six, Ben had made friends all over the world, and Elliot had friends from school and a mother and a father that loved her. The only person that loved Mary was her sister… and maybe her mother, wherever she was.
She imagined Henry, saying she was ridiculous for thinking her mother loved her. She remembered her Uncle Edwin saying she left you, little girl. She remembered her mother, driving away, and her sister, standing there watching, only three years old, crying “Mommy! Mommy! Don’t go!”
“Mary, are you okay?” asked Elliot.
Mary sat up straight. “Yeah… I just hope this works, using the camera with the telescope… that’s all.”
Julee put her arm around Mary’s shoulder. “Well if it doesn’t, then we’ll just keep trying, won’t we.”
As night approached, like the night before, Ben left for the cave and Mary, Julee, and Elliot went into the observatory. Mary wanted to sleep there, so that if it rained while the telescope
was out, she could wake up and close the dome ceiling. They moved couch cushions and pillows and blankets onto the observatory floor and watched the sky darken, and when there was no hint of light but from the shining stars above, Mary tracked the telescope to the center of the Andromeda constellation and entered one-hour on the camera timer.
click
Mary took a deep breath. “Well… I guess that’s it.” She shrugged and rejoined Julee and Elliot on the observatory floor.
“Hey Mary,” said Elliot, “ya know how you call your eyes your naked-eyes, when you’re not using a telescope or anything?”
