True to their word, just as Eevie sat down at her desk, a police cruiser crept by slowly. It paused in front of her house and she watched as the spotlight moved across her yard and then down and across her house. The spotlight shone on her window—revealing once again the smudged symbol the prowler had drawn.
She hadn’t told the police or her parents about the symbol. It had disappeared like the ranger as the window chilled again.
Eevie didn’t need to see the drawing again—it was seared into her brain. She pulled out a piece of paper and drew a circle, left open at the bottom with two Ls facing opposite directions, composing what looked like a head, neck, and shoulders.
Now, let’s see what you mean. She grabbed her phone and took a picture of her drawing and uploaded it to Google Images. Her heart pounded in her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. He had drawn the alchemy sign for death.
Eevie sat and stared at her screen until her eyes defocused into a fuzzy, pixelated blur. Her breathing slowed, and a calm resolve filled her. She clenched her jaw and smiled. She and Tommy had destroyed a spider the size of a small tank and taken down a demonic creature that would have made Voldemort soil his shorts.... Ranger, I don’t think you know who you are dealing with...
She’d fill Tommy and Drew in on the events in the morning.
******
Tommy climbed the stairs to his room. He had just told his parents good night and opened the door when he was accosted by the smell of burning fabric. “My favorite socks!” screeched Tommy as he rushed over to his radiator.
“Oh no,” he moaned. It wasn’t his socks; it was Eevie’s cloth. It looked like a toasted tortilla. Eevie is going to kill me. Tommy gently lifted the cloth, which felt brittle and delicate.
He unfolded it gingerly. He knew how much these mementos from her grandfather meant to her. Oh man, this is— Tommy stopped. “These aren’t burn marks,” he uttered, “they’re numbers, and letters....” He unfolded the cloth the rest of the way. It’s some kind of map. “Wait!” said Tommy urgently. Right before his eyes, the numbers and images began fading away. Tommy sprinted over to his workspace, brushing aside his notebook. Then as quickly as possible he carefully spread out the linen cloth on his desk. He grabbed his phone and took several pictures.
As quickly as the markings appeared, they disappeared. He turned and looked at the radiator. “I bet the heat...the heat makes the hidden text appear,” said Tommy, thinking out loud. He carefully placed the cloth on the radiator, and in a matter of moments the coffee brown numbers slowly appeared.
Tommy uploaded the pictures from his phone and opened them on his laptop. Right under the word “Pam,” he saw a series of alphanumeric characters—“42.3417N70.8960W”— and below that, a series of faint lines and shapes.
Tommy opened Google and typed “42.3417N70.8960W.” A single image appeared. “Dude,” whispered Tommy. A map of Black Hallow Park with a tiny red pointer in the center appeared on his screen.
At the bottom of the Google map, a small icon labeled “Satellite” caught his attention. Tommy clicked the button and suddenly he was staring at the rooftop of the ranger’s house. He clicked the “+” button and zoomed in. He could see the ranger’s car and his ATV. Geez, if this thing zooms in any closer, I’ll be able to see what he’s eating for breakfast.
Tommy’s heart pounded with excitement. He flicked back to the photo he had taken. In the center of the linen cloth he could just make out what looked like a circle and some writing, but it was too faded. He placed the cloth over the radiator once again. It darkened a little, but for some reason it still wasn’t dark enough to make out. He quickly snapped a few more pictures and uploaded them to his laptop.
He tried zooming in on the image, but that only fuzzed and pixelated it more. He paused for a moment. WWDD. Feeling slightly nauseated at the thought of thinking like Drew, he decided that he must make sacrifices for the team, so he let his mind journey to a place it had never been before to What Would Drew Do? Then it hit him. Filters...of course, filters. They worked on his selfies. Not that Tommy relied on filters to look amazing; he only used filters to lower the intensity of his smile, which others had found a little too bright—or overwhelming.
My pictures should come with a warning! Never stare directly at Tommy’s teeth, even with sunglasses—blindness, even death, may occur. Thank you. Ah, it’s so wonderful being modest...modest and smart.
Tommy opened the photo on his phone and began applying filters when finally a sepia filter revealed the contents. He saved the changes and uploaded the image to his laptop.
“Awesome,” he whispered. On the screen were three circles. At the top of the circles Tommy could barely make out the word: “Porta.”
“Porta?” said Tommy, scrunching his forehead. He opened Google Translate and typed “porta.” He smiled. It means entrance or doorway! The same series of numbers and letters 42.3417N70.8960W” appeared again, just below the three circles. There were markings inside the circle, but no matter what he tried, his ninja filter techniques were not powerful enough to reveal the hidden content.
OK, we’ll worry about that part later. Right now, he needed to let the others know what he figured out. Great news, guys, I found a secret entrance. Tiny conflict: it’s in the ranger’s house.
He opened Skype and sent a group message to Drew and Eevie. “Genius alert...through the rigors of scientific process, I have discovered where our quest begins. I’ll include you in the acknowledgments of my paper when published. Genius out.”
As he waited for a response, he changed his Skype profile picture to Albert Einstein and in the comments he wrote: “Harvard Graduate.”
Tommy leaned back in his chair, staring at his screen, and smiled. So far Tommy and his friends had been the ones being stalked and hunted like prey. It was time to turn the tables. Was it table or tables? He wasn’t sure, but he knew something would be turning, and if that was a single table or many tables, that would be just fine with him.
******
Tommy’s lips were vibrating. During the night, his phone had slowly inched its way down his pillow and now it lay nestled between his lips. “Argh,” he said, jerking his head back, “not on a first date!”
Tommy picked up his drool-encrusted phone. Gross. His sleepy eyes could barely make out Eevie’s smiling face on his phone screen.
“Hey, Eevie,” said Tommy between yawns.
“Hey, I didn’t get your Skype until this morning. You said you discovered where our quest begins?” asked Eevie excitedly. “What did you find?”
Tommy propped himself up on his elbows and shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “You know the cloth that has the initials Pam on it?”
“Ye—”
“The question is rhetorical, Eevie. I’m moving on—”
“OK,” said Eevie slowly, but Tommy was already talking.
“So after you and Drew left, I was going up to my room and I smelled fabric burning. I thought it was my favorite pair of socks—you know, the ones that are black—”
“With gold lightning bolts,” she said, finishing his sentence.
“Exactly, and I panicked. Not only do they make me run faster, but they’re irreplaceable. They don’t make them anymore.”
“I wonder why...,” said Eevie under her breath.
“But thank goodness it was the linen cloth,” he said, “not my socks.”
“What?!”
“Well, not really burning—it just smelled that way. Personally I think it was my socks, but it just so happened that the cloth had splotches of brown appearing.”
“Tommy! Did you burn my grandfather’s cloth?” asked Eevie with an edge to her voice.
“No! Are you kidding? There’s really no need to escalate things. Geez! I clearly said splotches of brown, and just FYI, you put the cloth on the radiator. I merely rescued it from a tragic demise. I accept paper donations in the shape of money for services rendered beyond the call of
duty.”
“Tommy...did you actually find anything of value...besides splotches?”
“Of course. It’s what I was trying to tell you. The brown marks. When I zoomed in on them, they turned out to be a random string of letters and numbers.”
“Oh, wow, another code?” asked Eevie curiously.
“I thought so, but for some reason—perhaps my inner genius bubbling to the surface played a part...” Tommy heard a muffled cough on the other end of the phone. “...I decided to Google the string of letters and numbers.”
“OK, and...”
“It was map coordinates to Black Hallow Park, and when I zoomed in, the red pointer arrow was right above the ranger’s house.”
“How can a group of numbers make a map appear? It’s not like they had computers back then? Was there anything else?”
“Yes, I won’t bore you with my scientific methodology—mainly because you wouldn’t understand the intricacies and nuances of my genius.” Tommy paused. On the other end of the line: silence.
“OK, I’ll continue,” said Tommy, somewhat offended. “I used filters to darken the image on the cloth. There were three circles inside each other, and above the circles was the word ‘porta’.”
“A portal? You think this is the entrance to the other world?”
“I do. Well, now I do. At first I thought porta meant porta-potty, and I thought yes, that could be incredibly important. But then I of course Googled ‘porta’ and found that it actually meant doorway or entrance, not a temporary toilet.”
“OK...,” said Eevie. Things are about to get really interesting, she thought.
“So, my best guess is we’ll find the porta somewhere inside the ranger’s house.”
“Tommy,” said Eevie, suddenly very serious, “the ranger came to my house last night.”
“What?! Are you sure?” Tommy bolted out of bed, wide awake now.
“Yes, very sure. I was reading the spell book, and for some reason I looked up and he was staring at me.”
“At your window? Was he trying to get in?” Tommy’s head swiveled to his window. A freezing cold finger of fear traced the length of his spine.
“He drew the alchemy symbol for death on my window.”
Tommy took in a deep breath. No one was going to threaten his best friend. “Eevie, we can’t just sit here and wait for something bad to happen. Somehow we need to find a way to—”
“Turn the tables?” she interjected.
“Exactly—you read my mind.” Tommy made a mental note: It was “tables”... plural.
“That’s frightening...,” she said.
“Not as frightening as your face...”
“Tommy!” shouted Eevie. “I will shave your eyebrows while you sleep!”
Tommy involuntary arched his eyebrows, picturing himself eyebrowless.
“Tommy, I’m going to call Drew,” said Eevie, trying to regain control of the conversation. “Can you meet at the library at eleven? That way my parents won’t think I’m rushing off and become suspicious.”
“Speaking of Drew, there are some questions that have been bouncing around this enormous brain of mine.”
“Head,” replied Eevie, unable to stop herself.
“Oh my God, I’m trying to be serious.”
“Sorry,” laughed Eevie. “Go ahead.”
“OK. First of all, we would have never investigated the tree unless Drew had given his report about the demonic tree. We would have never found the underground labyrinth, and we would have never been nearly killed by the death zombie dude and his possessed demon monkey.”
“Yeah,” said Eevie, prompting him to continue.
“Then, all of the sudden, you start finding all of this stuff from your grandfather. I don’t know, Eevie...it just seems a little strange to me.”
“Tommy, Drew never even knew my grandfather, and a lot of people went missing at that park. It was only a matter of time before it happened again. Ironically, one of those people just happened to be in our class.”
“Something just doesn’t seem to fit.”
“We’ll figure it out, Tommy, but right now—”
“I know...right now we have a crazed ranger to deal with. Were you able to decipher any more of the book?” asked Tommy, changing the topic.
“I’ve deciphered two pages. Hopefully Drew has been working on what I sent him last night. I’m going to go ahead and call him, so he’s not rushing. I don’t want to attract any unwanted attention from the parental units.”
“OK, I’ll be there—I want to play with Google Maps a bit more. I have a couple ideas. Bye, Eeves.”
“Bye.”
Operation Ranger’s House Surveillance
Eevie was the first to arrive at the Donovan Hawthorne Library. A bespectacled, middle-aged woman sat impossibly upright at the head of a huge horseshoe-shaped circulation desk. She looks like the captain of a ship, thought Eevie.
Eevie’s smile was met with watchful eyes that peered over black cat-eye glasses. Eevie felt the librarian’s gaze follow her like a cloud as she walked to the study area at the back of the library.
Eevie spotted a long, wooden table nestled in the corner, with two huge, fungus green-colored overstuffed armchairs.
She had just placed her backpack on the table and was about to text Tommy and Drew when they walked in together.
“This room smells like wet newspaper,” said Tommy.
Several patrons looked up from their books and stared at Tommy. Their eyes filled with disdain for his abrupt interruption of their solitude.
“Sorry,” whispered Drew, who pointed at Tommy. “He’s new to knowledge.”
“Wow, guys,” said Eevie, shaking her head, “way to not bring attention to us.”
“Sorry,” Tommy quietly said, placing his backpack beside Eevie’s.
“OK,” said Drew, leaning in and speaking in a hushed tone, “catch me up on what’s going on.”
Tommy opened his laptop and spent the next several minutes showing Drew and Eevie what he had discovered.
“Those numbers stand for latitude and longitude,” said Drew as Tommy showed him the satellite photos of the ranger’s house.
“Oh, cool,” said Eevie, nodding, “and those circles, we think, are the secret entranceway to...well...somewhere. We’re not sure where yet.”
Drew reached in his backpack and pulled out a stack of papers.
“Eevie,” said Drew quietly, “the pictures that you sent to me are plants that are used for different—potions. Each one does something different.”
“Like this one, Aqua Cicuta,” said Drew as he pulled a page from the stack. At the top of the page Drew had sketched the plant and written the description of the potion below it.
“For this one, you can grind the roots and the stem into a liquid paste. It can then be dissolved into tea or even baked into bread. There is no antidote, and if it doesn’t kill you, you are likely to suffer from amnesia the rest of your life.”
“Eeesh,” said Tommy, “so you wouldn’t even remember what gave you amnesia.”
Drew looked at Eevie as if to say, Please tell me he is kidding.
“Anyways,” continued Drew as he slid the stack of papers over to Eevie, “I translated all of the pages with the plants for you.”
“Thank you so much, Drew,” said Eevie, patting him on the shoulder. “That’s a huge help!”
“Sorry,” said Tommy, snapping his fingers in Drew’s face, “back to reality. Eevie, I would be careful accepting any food or drinks from Drew. There was probably a love potion he conveniently left out of the stack.”
“No,” said Drew, “but there is one that will paralyze you temporarily while you can still feel everything. You just need to let the leaves dry and then grind them into a fine powder.” He held out his hand, his palm facing the ceiling. “Then, you just blow like this.”
He pretended to blow powder into Tommy’s face.
Drew’s face reddened. “I was not blowing you kisses. I was paralyzing you, and you’re not my type.”
“Tommy, seriously?” said Eevie, disapprovingly. “These potions could be incredibly important to us. It probably took Drew hours to figure all of this out. You should be thanking him, not ridiculing him.”
“It’s cool,” said Drew, raising his hands. “I worked through the night on them. I thought with everything going on, sooner would be better than later. Tommy’s just being Tommy.”
“And by being Tommy, you mean awesome.”
Tommy was about to continue when Eevie’s eyes gave him the zip-it-or-face-my-wrath stare.
Tommy just now noticed the dark purple shadows under Drew’s eyes and his hunched demeanor. Dang, I’m a jerk. I guess he did work through the night.
“Thank you, Drew,” said Tommy. “I can tell you put in a crazy amount of work on these, and they look awesome. Sorry for being such a jerk.”
Drew nodded and smiled a tired smile. “Thanks, Tommy.”
“All right,” said Eevie, turning her legal pad lengthwise. “One, we need to figure out how to get to, and then into, the ranger’s house without being seen. Two, we need to find the secret doorway, and figure out what to do once we find it. We also need to figure out what we need to bring. Last time we were completely unprepared.”
“Last time we didn’t realize we were gonna be ripped from the face of the earth,” said Tommy as he arched his eyebrows.
“We need to find out if the ranger has a schedule. He has to. He’s the one who checks to make sure everyone leaves at closing time. He’s the one who locks the gate. That’s our window of opportunity. He’s probably out of his house for twenty minutes at least,” said Drew.
Quest Chasers: The Screaming Mummy (A Magic Fantasy Adventure Book Series) Page 6
