by Paul Tobin
The house shivered again and the door bulged inward. I shrieked and nearly fired a shot from the crossbow.
I ran into the kitchen to find Nate.
“Here’s some lemonade,” Nate said. “I put out some cookies. That was a good move, right? They’re chocolate chip cookies. I have some ice cream, too. It’s also chocolate chip. Oh. That wasn’t smart, was it? I was trying for a chocolate chip theme, but I only had two items of chocolate chip nature, so that’s not really a theme, more a lack of variety.”
The floor trembled. Something huge had tumbled against the house. Outside, through the kitchen window, I could see Bosper leaping off the roof. He barked the whole way to the ground, then landed nimbly on his feet. He continued barking. I could not see what he was barking at. Honestly, there didn’t seem to be anything to see. Then a tree broke off. The trunk just … snapped in half.
I said, “Nate? What’s … ?”
“There are sun-ripened chips on the table. Better for you than regular potato chips. I put out some tortillas with hummus. Also jam. Jam and hummus. I know it’s weird. Do you like olives?”
“Could we cool it with the snacks?”
He went pale. “You don’t like them? Should I have made pasta? Yogurt? Girls love yogurt, right? All the television commercials make it seem like girls are very fond of yogurt. I could go to the store and get some, or send Sir William and—”
I grabbed Nate by the front of his shirt and pulled him very close, looking into his eyes. I think I may have even growled.
“Nate!” I roared. “What’s attacking the house?” As if in response, the house shivered again. Something outside made a dreadful howl. It sounded like a very angry hurricane.
“It’s a cat,” Nate said.
“No. It’s not.” For a boy as smart as Nate, how could he be so ignorant about cats? Cats sleep. Cats chase after laser lights. Cats ignore you. Cats bask in windows. Cats purr and they eat and have I mentioned that they sleep? This is all very basic. At no point do cats tip over trucks or knock down trees. That is not a cat thing.
“It is,” Nate said. “It’s a cat. Can you, umm, let me go?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said, releasing my grip.
He stepped back and bumped against the refrigerator, which had several blueprints stuck in place with magnets, as well as multiple images of teacups with weird calculations written all over them. Nate’s impact knocked one of the papers loose and it floated to the floor, wafting back and forth. On it was a strange symbol that looked like a family crest, with the entire world floating in a cup, and the words Orbis Terrarum In A Vas, which seemed to be in Latin, a language in which my proficiency is roughly equal to zero, give or take. Nate picked up the paper and put it back on the refrigerator, but then we both stumbled when the whole house shook, and the paper was once more jarred from the fridge to fall to the floor.
I picked it up.
Nate grabbed it from my hands so fast that it felt like I wasn’t supposed to touch it, for some reason.
Putting it back on the fridge, he said, “Hey, Delphine, I was wondering, are there any big game hunters in your family? Any relatives who’ve gone on expeditions? Safaris? Stalking deadly beasts? That sort of thing? I could use someone with experience. Do you like bean dip?”
Bean dip and safaris? He was losing me again. I opened my mouth to speak, but at that moment something landed atop the house with a huge thud. The ceiling groaned in support of the strange new weight. I could hear the entire house creaking, straining.
“That’s not a cat,” I said, looking up.
“It’s Proton,” Nate said. “My mom’s pet cat. I made him bigger.”
“You made him bigger,” I said. The house creaked again. “Of course you did. How big?”
“Not quite as big as an elephant.”
“That was irresponsible,” I said. For the life of me, I didn’t know what else to say or do, so I sat down and began eating the chips and bean dip. They were really good. I mean, seriously really good.
“Are your parents home?” I asked. I was hoping they were, and that they had more experience than me with fighting giant cats. It wouldn’t take much.
“Dad’s off on a rock climb today,” Nate said. “Won’t be home until early Monday morning. Mom went with him. She wants to look for flowers she can plant in the garden.”
“Flowers are nice,” I said. The whole house shook again, as if it was disagreeing with me.
I ate more chips.
“I made those,” Nate said, pointing to the chips. I realized I was only eating because I was nervous. A bad habit, I suppose, but it was exceptionally difficult to quit being nervous when a monster wouldn’t quit attacking the house.
“You made them?” I asked.
“Engineered them, really. Nudged them toward more flavor.”
“Nnak. Cow smarg rr u?” I was still eating the chips and bean dip, but I meant to say, “Nate. How smart are you?”
“Oh. Basically, umm, I suppose, in proportion to everyone else, I’m … How are the chips?” He reddened. I could see that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“Wait,” I said, a thought occurring to me. “If you’re that smart—and you’re clearly that smart—then how did this giant cat escape? Shouldn’t you have taken precautions?” I could still hear the cat walking around on the roof. I was glad that Bosper wasn’t up there anymore. I could hear him in the yard, growling and barking and yelling, “Cat!” He was barking so furiously that I don’t think anyone could have understood him. At least, not any better than they could have understood me with a mouthful of chips and bean dip.
“Well, it was a Friday,” Nate said.
“Okay.” That meant nothing. Was he dumber on Fridays?
“Yesterday. Friday. The thirteenth.”
“Okay.” He still wasn’t making sense. I knew the superstition thing of Friday the thirteenth, but even though a giant cat was screeching on the roof while a dog was talking in the yard, I wasn’t about to believe in anything as weird as superstitions.
Nate said, “Well, I get bored.”
“Okay,” I said, and because he wasn’t doing very well with his explanation, I added, “go on.”
“So every Friday the thirteenth I schedule myself to do three, well, not-so-smart things.”
“You schedule yourself to do three dumb things? That’s not very smart at all!”
“I know!” he enthusiastically agreed. “But it doesn’t count as one of the three things. I thought maybe it should for a while, but then I thought it defeated the purpose.”
“But the reason to be so smart is to avoid doing stupid things!”
“No. It’s to make life better. And sometimes a bit of chaos makes life better. Otherwise, everything is too predictable!”
“So … you do three dumb things?” I pushed the bowl of chips and bean dip away from me. I didn’t want to eat them anymore. They might have been … dumb.
“Yesterday, I enlarged Proton. And I taught math to a caterpillar. And I sent a love letter to …” He faltered.
“You sent a love letter?”
“No.” He waved his hands in a frantic “let’s not talk about this” manner.
“Yes, you did. To who?”
“A … girl I met.” He grabbed a cookie from the table and started chewing on it. He wasn’t eating it. He was only chewing on it. I was about to ask him if he’d sent a letter to me (I hadn’t gotten one, but it could still be in the mail) when a horrible noise came from the roof. It sounded like a giant cat was trying to dig through the roof of a house. It sounded exactly like that.
“He’s trying to get in,” Nate said. He frowned. “I didn’t want to have to do this.”
“Do what?” I was, at that moment, rather glad that it was Saturday the fourteenth. Whatever Nate was about to do, he was a day late for it to be idiotic.
“This.” He opened a cabinet, but instead of glasses or plates or cereal boxes, there was an amazing array of computerized equipm
ent. And buttons. Oodles of buttons. Twisty knobs. Electrical arcs. Keypads. It looked like a NASA control room.
I said, “Nathan Bannister. Explain.” I pointed to the cabinet so he would know exactly what I wanted him to explain. I had to yell in order to be heard over the roar of the cat digging on the roof. The whole house was trembling. Bosper, outside, was scrambling up onto the windowsill, trying to get to the roof. I wasn’t sure what he would do up there. The terrier was capable of speech, but I doubted he was capable of challenging a creature several hundred times his size. Dogs will be dogs, I guess.
Nate said, “This is my command center for the house. Well, one of them, anyway.” He pulled out a drawer so that he could use it as a step, crawling up onto the counter to reach the cabinet better.
“Command center?”
“All the defenses. And the weapons.”
I said, “You’ve weaponized your house?” This came out as more of a squeak than a question.
“Oh, yeah,” Nate said. He was twisting at knobs, entering commands on a keyboard, and, for some reason, drawing a smiley face on a touch pad. “But only a little. And nothing dangerous. Only a few scent-blasters to drive away certain animals. Then there’s a force field, but I ran out of AAA batteries. And I have a nuclear whistle for driving off dogs, from the smallest mutt to, well, even a nuclear Rottweiler, if one of those happens to attack. I also have a few atomic squirt guns, an electric field discharger, a mechanical ghost for scaring away superstitious people, and a giant laser.”
“You have a giant laser? I thought you said there was nothing dangerous! I’ve seen lasers in movies! They’re mainly used for blasting spaceships into very tiny pieces! They’re dangerous!” I used the open drawer to crawl up onto the counter next to Nate, poking him in the arm. He winced.
“It’s not really a laser,” he said. “It’s a laser pointer. A huge one. I’ve been trying to design a way to project video-game holograms into the sky. Haven’t quite worked it out yet, but it should be able to keep Proton occupied long enough for us to find the six messages.”
“The six messages? What six messages? Do you know that you have an infuriating way of not telling me what’s happening?” He nodded and smiled in a way that said, yes, he did indeed know all about that, but he wasn’t going to do much about it.
“I’ll tell you about the six messages in a bit. Here. Put these on. You’ll be able to see better.” From another kitchen cabinet, Nate had grabbed three pairs of goggles. They looked almost like swimming goggles, except with red lenses and something like a cell phone attached to the straps.
I put on the goggles. Nothing changed.
“These don’t work,” I said. I’m going to go right ahead and be honest here and admit that I was actually happy they didn’t work. It made me feel like I’d gotten one up on Nate.
“Wait for it,” he said. “They’ll work soon enough.” Then he took my hand and led me toward the front door.
“We’re going out there?” I said. The tone in my voice made it clear that I was not in favor of this. It’s not that I don’t like cats; I just don’t like cats that are almost nearly the size of an elephant. That’s a big difference. Literally.
“We have to go out if we’re going to find the six messages,” he said. “Besides, Bosper will protect us.”
“No, he won’t! He’s too small! Unless … Nate, you’re not going to make him big, too, are you?”
Nate said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I make a giant dog?” I kept my mouth shut, but of course the obvious question was, Why would you make a giant cat?
The door opened.
Nate pulled me outside.
Bosper came running up to us and said, “Big cat! I’ve been barking! What a good boy!” Nate petted his head and put the third pair of goggles over the terrier’s eyes.
“These don’t work!” Bosper said.
I said, “Hah!”
“Wait for it!” Nate said. He sounded exasperated, but since he was the cause of all the problems, I thought it was somewhat rude for him to—
A giant cat looked down over the edge of the roof. I made a noise. It was close to a scream, just much louder.
“There!” Nate said, gesturing to a colossal feline who seemed quite ready to pounce on us. “I’ve calibrated the goggles to see invisible cats. Of course you wouldn’t have seen anything inside the house. But there, now, look! See!”
“Piffle!” I said. And then, “RUN!”
“Brilliant!” Nate said.
We ran.
It was no good trying to outrun Proton, of course. No good at all. The cat leaped from the roof and landed on the street with a noise like an entire football game condensed into a single sound. The ground shook. Bosper resumed barking.
Nate said, “We’ll be okay! Proton won’t leave the yard.”
“He’s already in the street!” I said. Well, screamed.
“True enough. Okay. But he’ll have to go back to the yard in a bit because of the sonic leash. I turned it on when we were in the kitchen.”
“Of course,” I said, as if I’d been studying sonic leashes just that very morning and knew all about them.
“It has to do with quarks,” Nate said. He was trying to be helpful because he’d seen the confusion in my eyes, though he’d apparently missed the terror.
“And a singularity point of oscillations,” Nate added, helpfully. He made a series of gestures with his hands. I believe he was trying to indicate a singularity point of oscillations. I made gestures with my hands as well. I was trying to signify that Nate should shut up, and that we should run.
The giant cat was coming closer, stalking us. His eyes were each the size of my entire head, and his whiskers were the length of my arm span. He was making a growl that I could feel in my chest, the way I feel when I’m at a concert and stand too close to the speakers, or the way it feels when I stand next to the ocean and there’s all this overwhelming power that’s roaring and rumbling. His claws were as long as kitchen knives. His teeth were even longer. He had orange and white fur, with a concentration of orange around his eyes, shaped like the Lone Ranger’s mask. It would have looked funny when he was normal size, but he was not normal size and it was not funny and I was not having fun. The ground did a bass-drum thump when Proton leaped into the air, pouncing, and coming right for—
“Look out!” I yelled, and I knocked Nate aside, saving him from the cat. It was ridiculously noble of me.
Also, unnecessary.
The giant cat swerved in midair.
He swerved.
Proton tumbled end over end and did not land on his feet. He landed on a birdbath, crushing it. Bosper was barking at him.
“Let’s run!” Nate said, taking my hand again. We ran out into the street, heading in the direction of a car parked along the curb, maybe a half block down. It was colored green and had a painting of Einstein on the driver’s door. Also, the license plate was WAIT4IT. It was obviously Nate’s family car. Were we going to hide there? Was there something important inside?
“What just happened?” I asked, looking back to the yard.
“Bosper got him with the sonic leash. Wow. You sure ask a lot of questions.”
“I’m finding a lot of things questionable,” I said. “What do you mean, your terrier got him with a sonic leash?”
“The leash is somewhat like a whip. Or, I guess, a force field. It’s too complex to go into right now. And, I didn’t mean it was bad that you’re asking questions. I think it’s great. People should always ask questions. Asking questions is like bodybuilding for the brain. Here, get in the car.”
“Who’s going to drive?” I asked.
“I will.”
“You?” Yet another question. My brain was going to be super-buff.
“Do you seriously think someone with my IQ can’t drive a car? And, the windows will project holograms, so I’ll look like a middle-aged balding guy to anyone who looks at the car.”
“What will I look
like?”
“A pretty girl,” he said. He shifted the car to drive, and we went roaring off down the street. Nate had his seat all the way forward and was sitting on a stack of laptop computers.
“You made a hologram of a pretty girl?” I asked. Everything I said was a question.
“No,” Nate said. “There’s no hologram for you. You’ll just appear as you normally do.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Oh, okay.” I sat back in my seat. I felt a bit tingly. Some of it was having been attacked by a giant cat, but another part of it was Nate’s answer. That’s just the truth.
No question.
chapter
4
After a frantic car ride to the center of downtown, Nate hustled me down the busy sidewalk next to all the expensive clothing stores. We were in a rush. People shopping in the fancy stores gave us odd looks. Maybe they could sense that we were two adventurers on an important quest. Or, possibly they thought our red goggles were strange. It was a fair guess.
“We need to find the six messages,” Nate explained. “When combined, they contain the formula that will return Proton to his normal size. They’re out there.” He pointed expansively in front of us.
“Why don’t we already have this formula?” I asked. “Don’t you know it?”
“I did, but I intentionally forgot.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because I like to be challenged. Far too many people lead dull lives, never stretching their boundaries, content to do the same things over and over again. Every day is strictly routine, as if life were an equation they’ve already solved, and they’re satisfied with their grades and don’t want to do anything except sit on their couches for the remainder of their lives.”
“Without ever being attacked by a giant cat.”
“Exactly!” Nate said, agreeing with me, as if he’d never heard of sarcasm before.
“So what are these six messages?” I asked.
“Parts of a formula that I gave to some of our classmates.”
