The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black

by Eden Unger Bowditch

  “Well, I wouldn’t say successful, really,” Faye said. “Actually, it was a rather silly thing. You see, when I was in India, I had a little parrot. Well, it wasn’t my parrot. Actually, it was my parrot. Not exactly my parrot, more like—”

  “Oh, shut up, shut up, will you?” Reginald Roderick Kattaning screeched. He began rubbing his temples with his long bony thumbs.

  “Actually,” said Faye, looking reflective, “that brings to mind—”

  “I said shut up!” Reginald Roderick Kattaning turned and pointed directly at Wallace. “You! Where is it, boy?!”

  “I, sir, I... I... I’m sure I don’t—”

  “Don’t ‘don’t’ me,” Reginald Roderick Kattaning said with a sneer. “Don’t you dare ‘I don’t’ me when you know I know you know you do, you know, I do, don’t you, hm?”

  Wallace opened, then closed his mouth. He then opened it again, then closed it. He did this several times, like a fish.

  “Oh, shut up, the lot of you!” Reginald Roderick Kattaning stood up, dropping his paper folder from his lap. In it was a long envelope he snatched up before anyone could see what was written on the front.

  Well, not everyone. Lucy saw.

  He grabbed Jasper by the throat and pulled the boy’s face right up to his own. The rest of the children were about to intervene when Reginald Roderick Kattaning dropped Jasper suddenly. He then brushed off his sleeves and attempted to regain control of himself again. But the cruelty that had come through his eyes when he held Jasper in his grasp had not escaped any of the children.

  He spoke in a hissing whisper. “I want you all to pick up your pencils and write one hundred times, ‘I will obey Mr. Reginald Roderick Kattaning and tell him what he asks.’ Right now, all of you,” he said. Grumbling to himself, he muttered, “Think they’re so clever... think I won’t get what I came for... blasted smelly little children...”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the door, Miss Brett had concerns of her own. The problem was this: She had no idea how to use a telephone. On three occasions, she had been handed a telephone and spoken into the mouthpiece—twice at the home of a friend of her parents, and once in the lobby of an office building when a call was placed to an upstairs office. In each case, she was able to hear someone respond on the other end. It was very exciting.

  On one other occasion, she had seen a call placed and received. In fact, there had been a demonstration in front of a shop near her boarding house. One man stood on one side of the street and another man stood on the other. The first man picked up the earpiece and spoke into the mouthpiece connected to the stand. She hadn’t heard what the first man said, because she was on the other side of the street next to the second man. Moments later, however, an alarm bell had sounded on the phone next to her and the man picked it up. She was thrilled to see the whole thing in action. Several people had signed up right then and there to get their own telephones in their own homes. Obviously, the more people who had them, the better. At the time, she had been excited about the idea of these modern devices and would have loved to have one, but she hadn’t the money or the proper home. She hadn’t known anyone who had a telephone, either. And after her parents died, there really hadn’t been anyone to call.

  But still, there in the farmhouse of Sole Manner Farm, she had to try. Miss Brett tried the door to the little room. It was locked. She had forgotten. She had placed the small key in a jar above the kitchen sink. She went to get it, hesitating when she heard Reginald Roderick Kattaning shouting at the children. She wanted to run in and demand he leave at once, or remove the imposter by force, or at least dump the great big boiling pot of onion water on his head. She was so angry at herself for not having been forceful from the start, leaving the children alone with that man. But he had crushed a rock with his fist. She had taken that to be a threat. Any overt action on her part could put them all at risk. If she was going to help the children, she would have to make the “unless” call. And she would have to do it now.

  She took the little key and opened the door to the tiny room. There sat the glowingly red telephone. She approached it gingerly, looking to one side, then the other. She leaned toward it.

  “Hello?” she whispered, looking around to see if anyone but the telephone had heard her. She waited a moment, then cleared her throat.

  “Hello?” she said in a strong voice—not too loud, she hoped.

  There was still no answer. Of course—how foolish of her. One had to pick up the earpiece and speak into the mouthpiece in order to be heard. She did just that.

  “Hello?” she said into the mouthpiece. “Hello? Please, somebody.” She listened and waited. Still there was no reply.

  She sat on the floor next to the contraption, the earpiece still in her hand. Think, think, she thought. What had the man on the other side of the street done before speaking? She looked at the telephone and jiggled the little arm that held the earpiece.

  “Hello?” came a voice in her ear.

  “Oh, hello, yes, hello, hello,” Miss Brett said excitedly, before remembering the mouthpiece. “Hello, hello, hello.”

  “Enough hello, Miss Brett. What is happening?” The voice sounded gruff but concerned.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Miss Brett, at once quite shocked to hear her name and quite glad to be recognized. “You see, there is a man—”

  “A man?” The voice went up an octave.

  “Yes, he’s in the classroom and—”

  “In the classroom?” The voice went even higher, now almost shouting into Miss Brett’s ear.

  “I’m terribly afraid. I didn’t think he was one of your people. You see, Lucy thought she saw—”

  But now Miss Brett heard a jumble of voices, all talking frantically at once, and quite a bit of confusion on the other end of the receiver.

  Then she heard a door slam shut. But the slamming door was not in her earpiece. The slamming door came from the kitchen.

  Reginald Roderick Kattaning had been pacing back and forth, mumbling rude things about the children. The children, on their end, were doing their part to foil him. Jasper wrote as slow as humanly possible while still appearing to move his hand. As Faye sat, pretending to contemplate the meaning of the assignment, doodling pictures of Reginald Roderick Kattaning in various states of peril, Lucy and Wallace each tried to write as quietly and neatly as possible. Both of them were terrified that Reginald Roderick Kattaning would again lose his temper and do someone physical harm.

  Noah, meanwhile, wrote a note, which he tried to get to Jasper. Jasper was able to grab it subtly. It said, “Patrol will see him! They’ll help us!”

  Jasper passed this to Faye, who nodded.

  The children now found themselves in the strange position of hoping the men in black would come and save them.

  But the note came back from Lucy, who shook her head. “Friday,” the note said. “No patrol.”

  As his pacing became stomping, Reginald Roderick Kattaning walked over to the door connecting the house to the classroom. He sniffed the air and muttered something, rubbing his belly. He opened the door to the kitchen and peeked inside. Suddenly, he slammed it shut and ran out of the classroom.

  All pencils stopped. Several moments passed before anyone could even move. Of all the things that could have happened, the abrupt departure of Reginald Roderick Kattaning was utterly unexpected.

  “What happened?” Jasper said.

  “Do you think he’s gone?” asked Noah.

  “I hope so,” said Lucy, looking at her brother with the deepest of doubts.

  The children looked out the empty doorway through the field to the quiet road. The Daytonic Birdwatching Society motorcar was nowhere to be seen. And there was no sign of their unwanted visitor. But none of the children believed they had seen the last of Reginald Roderick Kattaning.

  “Sorry. What was that?” asked Miss Brett into the mouthpiece.

  The voice in the phone said something, but it sounded very strange. They may have been w
ords in another language, she thought.

  Then, suddenly, the line went dead.

  FEARS OF FLYING

  OR

  MISS BRETT DISCOVERS THE YOUNG INVENTORS GUILD

  “Hello?” Miss Brett called into the telephone receiver. There was no answer. No sound coming from the telephone receiver. Only silence.

  “Hello?” Miss Brett tried again, but it was clear there was no longer anyone at the other end. She replaced the earpiece and ran into the kitchen, then through the door to the classroom.

  The children were all in their seats, looking rather shaken.

  “Is everyone all right?” she asked, looking into each of their faces. A few nodded, a couple shrugged, but they all seemed to be unhurt. Jasper rubbed his neck and Miss Brett could see red marks from where Reginald Roderick Kattaning had grabbed him.

  “Where is that man?” asked Miss Brett, looking around, controlled fury in her throat.

  “He was pacing and chattering and rubbing his stomach,” Lucy said, “and after he opened the door to the kitchen, he just ran away.”

  Miss Brett went to the window and looked left toward the gardener’s shed and the pile of hay bales. There was nothing moving and nothing apparently amiss. Taking a deep breath, Miss Brett looked around for something to use if she needed to clobber someone. She grabbed the old broom by the door and gingerly stuck her head through the threshold. Carefully, as if stepping on glass, she walked out of the schoolhouse. She looked to her right and to her left, and again. There was no one there.

  Broom raised, she walked cautiously to the right, along the wall, and around the corner to see if Reginald Roderick Kattaning was hiding in the bushes. He was not. She walked to the side of the farmhouse and stood below the kitchen window. She looked behind the bundles of hay piled up to the sill. Reginald Roderick Kattaning was not behind the hay bales.

  She did notice, however, a wire hanging out of the wall of the house. She had not seen it before when she’d been out there bringing potato peelings to the compost pile. She followed the wire to the wall of the building. It went into a little hole that led inside. She stepped back and quickly realized it led directly into the telephone room.

  She turned around and saw the other end of the wire. It hung from a pole that ran along the road.

  “He’s cut the line to the telephone,” she said to herself.

  The children were all huddled at the window, watching Miss Brett and the wire.

  “Reginald Roderick Kattaning cut the wire,” Wallace said.

  “It’s a telephone wire. He cut off our telephone,” Jasper said.

  “I didn’t know we had a telephone,” Lucy said.

  “Do you even know what a telephone is?” asked Faye.

  Miss Brett came back into the classroom. “I can’t for the life of me imagine what he wanted,” she said, almost to herself.

  But the children heard her. They looked to one another, knowingly. This exchange did not escape Miss Brett.

  “What?” Miss Brett said. “You know something? What is it? What did he want?”

  Faye raised her hand.

  “You do not need to raise your hand, Faye,” Miss Brett said, emphatically. “For goodness sake, if you know something, tell me.”

  “He wanted our flying machine,” she said, feeling a bit self-conscious at how self-important that sounded.

  “Your what?” Miss Brett’s tone was incredulous.

  “The flying machine,” Wallace said. “Reginald Roderick Kattaning wanted our flying machine.”

  “I heard what Faye said, I... I...” Miss Brett was utterly confused. “He wanted what?”

  “Our flying machine,” said Faye. “We’re calling it an aeroplane.”

  “Your flying machine? What does it fly?”

  “It flies itself,” said Lucy.

  “Are you telling me you have a machine that flies?” said Miss Brett. She felt as if her brain was about to fall out of her head.

  “Well,” Faye said, “my first model was a disaster. I’d been working so hard and I really felt like I had the whole thing, but... well, I hadn’t. You see, it was really just a glider. It had no power and I realized...” Faye looked around at the faces of her classmates. Her fellow inventors. Her friends.

  Yes, she realized. They were her friends.

  “Something like this needs teamwork.” She smiled awkwardly at her classmates. Lucy put her hand into Faye’s and smiled up at the older girl. Faye squeezed Lucy’s hand. “So everyone helped... and, well...”

  Wallace looked down. “Not me, I only—”

  “Everyone.” Faye took a gulp and her breath caught. “It’s just big enough for one child. And it flies. Right now, it can really carry no more than ninety—”

  “Faye,” Miss Brett said. “Dear, listen, men have been trying to invent a flying vehicle for hundreds of years.”

  “It’s true, Miss Brett,” Lucy said excitedly.

  Jasper cleared his throat. “Imagine what power someone would have if they could make a whole fleet of flying machines,” he said. “That has to be why he wants it.”

  “They could take over the world,” Noah said. “One giant evil empire.”

  “Even one bad man with an aeroplane could do any number of horrid, beastly things,” said Lucy.

  “Do you think that’s what he wanted? And for some diabolical plan?” said Miss Brett.

  “What else could it be?” asked Noah. “Your biscuits are wonderful, but stealing recipes hardly seems likely.”

  “And he knew about the pieces, the thing, and the machine,” said Lucy, in horror. “He must have seen us when he was the birdwatcher.”

  “I told you I didn’t think it would be safe to drive with him,” Noah said.

  “We’ve been so foolish,” said Faye. “We did all of our experiments out in the open. At our homes, in our secret meadow, and out here. We were so stupid.”

  “We...” Jasper gulped and took a second to get the words out. “We almost walked right into the hands of the enemy.”

  The children were silent a moment, contemplating their narrow, inadvertent escape.

  “At least I managed to place a call,” Miss Brett said. “Of course, I don’t even know to whom I spoke, but someone on our side, someone wanting to help us.”

  “If you mean one of the men in black,” Jasper said, thinking of the man jumping on his parents’ bed, trying to fool him and Lucy, “how can we be sure they aren’t doing something awful? We still don’t know whether or not they’ve kidnapped our parents.”

  “Children,” Miss Brett said firmly, “we have been through this all before. We simply do not know. We can only judge by the fact that they have not harmed us—”

  “They’ve stolen our mummies and daddies!” cried Lucy.

  “They almost hurt me,” said Faye. “They dragged me into one of those carriages.”

  “And our aeroplane will save everybody,” said Lucy, her expression as full of hope as fear.

  Miss Brett looked into the faces of her wards. “Were you planning to use the aeroplane to find your parents?” Whatever the children thought of Reginald Roderick Kattaning flying their machine, nothing could compare to the visions of mayhem, death, and destruction that came to Miss Brett’s mind at the thought of these children flying in the sky.

  “Children, my stars, don’t you know how utterly dangerous this would be?” said Miss Brett. “Beside the absolute horror of crashing or exploding, don’t you think that, even if you survived, someone would notice you? Someone who might be just the wrong person to notice you?”

  “But...” said Faye.

  “Children, we simply do not know enough to do something that would only create more danger. It’s too much of a risk, in more ways than one. It’s too dangerous to try to find people who could be anywhere. We don’t even know if they want to be found.”

  All five children were caught on the sharp hook of her words. Jasper immediately thought of his mother’s letter. He looked at Lucy
, who had obviously thought the same thing.

  “Don’t want to be found?” said Wallace, thinking of how his father had just driven away and left him.

  Miss Brett realized she had now come face to face with the darkest part of her job description. It was the one thing she had not even thought about herself.

  “Listen to me,” said Miss Brett. “We all need to be better at telling each other more than we have. I wish you all had told me about your plans, because then I would have told you something I wished I’d not have to.” She sighed. “I’d have told you that when I took this job, I was told to keep you from distracting your parents. I never thought... I thought it could do nothing but hurt your feelings—”

  “Who told you to keep us apart from our parents?” asked Faye. “Was it one of them?”

  “Well. To be frank, yes.”

  “But what about Mummy’s—”

  “And how do you know your mummy wasn’t forced into writing that letter?” said Faye to Lucy. “Why do we trust these lunatics?”

  “But we don’t have a choice, do we?” Jasper said softly. “We have no one else. We know that Reginald Roderick Kattaning is definitely not on our side. We don’t have to trust the men in black. We’re their captives and we don’t even know why. But we have to assume they are not going to attack us, at least for now. Not immediately.”

  “Well, the flying machine—”

  “Faye,” Miss Brett said, looking right at the girl, “tell me, do you have the blueprints for your invention here?”

  “Um, yes,” said Faye. “We have them in the Guild journal.”

  Miss Brett looked confused. “The what?”

  The children explained how they came to find the green leather book that wasn’t a book, which had belonged to that mysterious organization of long ago, the Young Inventors Guild.

  “And you are the new Young Inventors Guild?” she asked.

  “I suppose we are,” Jasper said, tentatively, looking at the others one by one.

  “I told you! I told you!” cried Lucy.

  “But you have a book with the details of your invention?” asked Miss Brett. “All the notes? Everything together?”