by Henry Clark
“What kind of a job?” asked Freak.
“Nothing too strenuous. And only for a week or so. There are no benefits, but the pay is quite generous. I’ll let you have whatever the genuine zucchini crayon fetches at auction, to divide among the three of you equally, or in whatever proportions you see fit.”
“I canceled the auction the moment I got home last night,” said Fiona. “You told me to.”
“Yes. And now you are going to send e-mails to everybody who bid on your auction, inviting them to a live auction here at Underhill House. The crayon will be the featured item at that auction, in addition to a selection of historically important coloring books, one of which belonged to the young Jackson Pollock. The auction will be held here at eight o’clock on the evening of October twenty-third. Refreshments will be served.”
“Who is Jackson Pollock?” Freak asked.
“Famous American artist. Opal Austin ran across the coloring book at a swap meet. She phoned me and I bought it on spec for fifty cents. Remind me to show it to you. The man was completely incapable of coloring within the lines.”
Alf looked at Fiona as if he expected her to say something. She didn’t. She just blinked rapidly, the way she does when she’s learning something new in science class.
“I’ve already written out everything you need to put in the e-mail.” Alf handed Fiona a flash drive. “I’ve also included the e-mail addresses of several toy museums and well-known toy collectors who should also be notified. The more people who attend the auction, the more convincing it will look. Also, the more people who bid, the higher the final selling price will be, and consequently the higher your paycheck.”
“What happens at the auction?” Freak wanted to know.
“People bid. The auction ends. Edward Disin is the winner.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Absolutely. He pays in cash, as he always does, and as soon as we have his money, I signal US Treasury agents who have been waiting in the wings. They come forward and arrest him. They cart him away, the Disin Corporation is without its head, the company falters, and, with any luck, it doesn’t proceed with… certain projects.”
“Won’t he know it’s a trap?”
“He’d be pretty stupid if he didn’t. An auction for something he wants, being held on Hellsboro’s doorstep? He’s going to know that’s no coincidence. But the CCD will compel him to come anyway. Compulsive Completist Disorder becomes stronger the closer its victim gets to the desired object. Right now, Edward Disin can still multitask. As the auction gets nearer, he’ll be able to think of fewer and fewer things other than the zucchini crayon. And his own arrogance, his belief that he can handle any situation on his own, should bring him here by himself. Whether he thinks it’s a trap or not.”
The job sounded too easy to me. “What else do we have to do to earn our pay?” I asked. I was wondering if it might involve sacrificing Fiona to Alf’s sister. I wanted to trust Alf, but I could understand why Fiona might not.
“Clean up the ballroom, for one thing,” said Alf. “It hasn’t been touched in years. I’m hoping to use it for the auction. The floor has to be washed and waxed, the cobwebs dispersed, maybe a little paint here and there. Have any of you ever swept a chimney?”
“I swept out the garage, once,” Freak admitted.
Freak actually swept out his garage on a regular basis. He liked to keep things well organized. He had gotten that way not long after his mother left. I sometimes thought he was hoping if he kept the place neat, she would come back.
“The entire house has to be readied for visitors. And decorated. I’m thinking crepe streamers, trailing off the chandelier. Maybe a Halloween-themed tablecloth on the table with the punch bowl. And the balloons will have to be inflated. During the auction itself, the three of you will be serving hors d’oeuvres.”
“Anybody could do that,” said Freak. “Why us?”
“You said you needed children around,” I added, deciding Freak had a good point. “Why kids?”
Alf gave us a thoughtful look, like maybe he was deciding whether or not to tell us. Then he shrugged.
“Because Edward Disin comes from a culture where people your age are not taken seriously. If you’re around, he’ll be a little less on his guard. Having you here might make the difference between his being too wary to catch and his making the slip that will prove his undoing. It’s as simple as that.” He looked at each of us in turn. “Do we have a deal? Can I expect the three of you back here on Sunday, so we can start getting the place ready? Say, around noon?”
“We get to keep whatever the magic crayon sells for?” asked Freak.
“Every penny.”
“All right. I’m in.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“Yes,” said Fiona. “So long as it doesn’t get out that I’m part of the team.”
“There is no team,” Freak assured her.
We didn’t speak again until we were walking past the spot where the sofa had once stood, at the side of Breeland Road. There was a rectangle there where the grass was a little less green than the grass around it.
“They’re saying rain for tomorrow night,” I said. “It should be cloudy tomorrow afternoon. Maybe we should plan on going to Rodmore then.”
“Shouldn’t we wait, now, until after the auction?” suggested Fiona.
“Why wait?” I said. I wanted to see the place where my parents had worked. Even if it was abandoned and covered with soot. I wondered what they would have thought about everything that was going on. I was eager to go anywhere, even into Hellsboro, if it meant finding out more about what had happened to them.
“It might be safer after Alf catches Edward Disin,” Fiona argued.
“I see it as two separate things,” I said. “Looking for proof of the portal is a Guernica project. Catching Edward Disin is an Alf project. If we can catch Disin and give the right people proof of the portal, we’ll be able to stop the invasion thing. We have to do both. And the sooner we can get started, the better.”
“I was going to borrow a digital camera from the school newspaper,” Fiona confessed. “To take pictures of the portal, if there is one. But if Disin donated every piece of electronics the school has, I guess that’s not such a good idea.”
“I have one of those cardboard, use-it-once film cameras,” I said. “It’s from last year’s field trip to Philly. There’re still a couple of shots left on it.”
“That would be better,” Freak acknowledged. “Anybody have any idea what a portal looks like? If there is one?”
“In movies, they always look like water going down a toilet. That’s why I’m always surprised when anybody wants to go in one.”
By this time we were in front of Fiona’s house. Her father, Bill, was raking the lawn. He looked up as we approached. “It’s like old times,” he said, “seeing the three of you hanging out together.” He seemed pleased. “Could one of you climb in the well and get the leaves out for me?”
Fiona had a fake wishing well in her front yard. When I was younger, I had thought the well was real, and that it could grant wishes. I had thrown quite a few nickels and dimes into it. I had made quite a few wishes. I had wished I was taller, had a horse, and wasn’t so often the target of bullies. I wished I were really River Man, defender of the weak. I wished both my parents were still alive. I wished I could see them again.
The wishing well was no deeper than the surface of the lawn. I boosted myself over the side and found myself ankle-deep in leaves. I proceeded to shovel them out with my hands. Fiona and Freak stuffed them into a plastic bag as quickly as I could toss them out.
When I bent down for a final handful, I found a nickel. It could easily have been a nickel I had thrown in with one of my earlier wishes. I wondered which wish it might have been, and if my finding the coin meant the wish was still pending. I was about to put the coin in my pocket. Then I looked at it and wished my friends and I would be safe, no matter what happened between u
s and Alf and Disin and the Rodmore Chemical plant.
I dropped the coin back in the well.
CHAPTER
12
Coal-Dust Pizza
By the afternoon of the following day, the overcast was thick and ominous. Thunder grumbled to the west. I stopped off at home and changed into heavier jeans, a hoodie sweatshirt, and a pair of thick-soled boots. I threw a compass on a chain around my neck and stuffed a pair of oven mitts down the back of my pants.
Fiona showed up in Freak’s backyard a few minutes after I did. She was wearing bright red boots that came up to her knees, a pair of green ski pants, and a yellow waterproof jacket. She looked like a dandelion in a bud vase. Her backpack was loaded with bottles of spring water.
Fiona kept nervously looking out at the road, like she was afraid someone she knew might drive by. I realized she didn’t want to be seen. If I had been dressed the way she was, I wouldn’t have wanted to be seen, either.
Freak emerged from the back door of his house and handed us each a six-foot wooden pole, the kind you might stick in a garden to hold up tomato plants.
“There may be times when you’ll want to test the ground in front of you,” he explained.
“Great,” said Fiona.
“What’s the compass for?” he asked me.
“You can’t get where you’re going without a compass.”
“It’s not like there are woods we’re going to get lost in,” he said, quite reasonably.
“It belonged to my father,” I said.
“Oh.” He looked at it again. “It’s nice.”
We went to the back of the yard and Freak pulled open the slit in the chain-link fence. He bent low and scooted through. Fiona and I followed.
We crossed the backyard of the former Henderson place, went down their cracked driveway, and zigzagged through abandoned streets until we reached Took Lane, where the houses were nothing but charred foundations. The ground got noticeably warmer the farther we went. We crawled through a smaller slit in a second fence, scrambled to our feet, and looked around.
We were in Hellsboro.
It looked like photos of the surface of the moon. It was bumpy and rocky, with long stretches of soil that looked like charcoal from a barbecue. The colors were soot and ash and dirty gray, and I realized I might be seeing things for the first time the way Fiona saw them. I made a mental note to stop making fun of the way she dressed.
Charred and stubby stumps marked the locations of former trees. The landscape had a corduroy look, faint ridges marking where limbless logs lay half buried in the earth, sinking farther into it each year as their undersides slowly cooked away. Off in the far distance, rising from the middle of it all, were the boxy white buildings and towering tanks of Rodmore.
“Think of it as a pizza,” said Freak.
“A very burned, overdone pizza,” said Fiona.
“Actually,” said Freak, “I was thinking more of the coal-dust pizzas they have at Calvino’s.”
The coal-dust pie was a house specialty at Calvino’s. It was topped with crumbled black olives and slivers of portobello mushrooms. It was one of Freak’s favorite types of pizza. And yes, it resembled the surface of Hellsboro.
“The center of the pie is Rodmore.” Freak started walking. Fiona and I followed him, taking care to step where he stepped. “If you cut the pie into eight slices, all the cuts would pass through Rodmore. But if you wanted to get to Rodmore from the outer edge of the pie, you couldn’t walk straight there, along one of the cuts. There’s no direct route that’s safe. You might start out along one of the straight-cut routes, but you’d have to know when to detour.”
We had been walking directly toward the chemical plant. Freak stopped suddenly and turned to the left. Following his example, we walked along the tops of a series of rocks that protruded from the earth like stepping-stones.
“Each winter when it snows, I come out here and make a map of where the snow lasts the longest before it melts. Those are the safest places to walk.”
“Could we stop and look at this map?” Fiona inquired.
“It’s in my head,” said Freak. He pointed at the ground. “If you see something growing, that’s usually a safe place to walk.” Gray grass grew at our feet. Tufts of it struggled here and there for about thirty feet in front of us. I felt a little guilty walking on it. The grass was having a hard enough time as it was.
“If you see anything that looks like smoke, stay away from it.” Freak gestured to the far right. In the distance, white vapor hung above an ash-colored ridge. “That’s where the fire is close to the surface. The ground will be crusty, and you could fall through.”
A flurry of white ash filled the air, drifting over from where the smoke was. It swirled like snow. Freak had suggested we tie kerchiefs around our necks before we started out. Now we levered them up over our mouths and breathed through them. It made us look like Wild West bandits.
We walked along in silence for a while. Once, Freak probed the ground in front of him with his stick. The end of the stick came back charred. We reversed our tracks and took another route. The factory was to the east, but to get to it we sometimes went north, sometimes went south. At one point we passed something that looked like a flat metal bench sticking up out of the ground. Freak said it was the front end of a bulldozer. The rest of the bulldozer had sunk into the earth when the ground had given way beneath it. The bulldozer blade was at just the right height to sit on. I sat on it.
“Isn’t it hot?” asked Freak.
“Very,” I said. “But I’ve got oven mitts in my pants.”
Another moment and it was too hot even for my insulated butt. I jumped up and we continued on.
“I looked up Edward Disin on the Internet last night,” said Fiona. “The only place that has any information about him is the Disin Corporation website.”
“I’m sure it was real helpful,” said Freak.
“It said he was born forty-eight years ago in Tsuris, Russia. I looked up Tsuris and found there is no such place.”
“No kidding.”
“I found a photograph of him in his office, with a bookcase full of PEZ dispensers behind him. In the photo he’s blond, without any mustache. He’s holding what the caption says is the incredibly rare Mary, Queen of Scots PEZ dispenser. He’s got her head pushed all the way back, and there’s a piece of PEZ sticking out of her neck.”
“Did you find anything even remotely useful?” asked Freak as he did an unexpected dance step around a sunken area in the earth and Fiona and I did our best to duplicate his footwork.
“The website listed some of the smaller companies Disin owns. Disin Tel, Agra Nation® Foods, and—get this—Global Organic Research Labs. GORLAB, for short. GORLAB makes chemical weapons like Hista Mime.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Hista Mime? It’s also known as the Silent Killer. It’s shot out of a squirt gun, and if you get any on you, you immediately hallucinate that you’re trapped inside an airless transparent cube, and you suffocate. You can’t call out because it freezes your vocal cords.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“It doesn’t sound like anything. That’s why it’s the Silent Killer.”
Freak nodded. “So the GORLAB connection pretty much proves Disin was the one bidding on the crayon.” He hopped on one foot for three yards, did a half pirouette, and jumped twice to the left. Fiona duplicated what he had done as well as she could. Freak turned to her and said, “That was totally unnecessary. I just wanted to see if you would do it.”
Fiona chased him for about fifty feet, but I hung back. It seemed a little reckless to me.
Lightning flashed at my back. Instinctively I turned around, and when I turned back, Fiona and Freak were gone.
“GUYS!” I shouted, panic-stricken. There had been no place for them to go. We were on a flat, treeless plain with nowhere to hide. I looked in the air as if I expected to see them carried off by buzzards. The air was empty, except fo
r another flurry of ash.
It was as if the ground had swallowed them. The moment I thought it, I knew that’s what had happened. And Hellsboro was the last place you wanted the ground to swallow you. The ground was hungrier there than anywhere else.
“GUYS!” I shouted again, starting to work my way toward the last place I had seen them. I furiously tapped the ground in front of me with my stick, daring it to cave in.
“River!” I heard Freak’s voice, muffled, to my right.
“I’m here! Keep talking!” I altered my course.
“Over here! Down here! Don’t fall in!” Freak shouted. “If you fall in, we’re all dead!”
“Thin ice!” shouted Fiona, proving she was with Freak and just as crazy as ever.
Then I realized “thin ice” was a warning. I moved the oven mitts from back to front and threw myself on my face. I crawled along the ground, distributing my weight, the way you’re supposed to when you’re trying to rescue someone who’s fallen through ice. I hoped it would work just as well on the crusty earth of Hellsboro.
I crawled up on a ridge made by a log that was buried in soot. On the other side, I looked down into an abyss. A sinkhole had opened beneath Freak and Fiona and dropped them ten feet. The heat I felt against the underside of my body was bad, but the heat and strong smell of sulfur rising out of the sinkhole was worse. Freak and Fiona stood in the center of it, covered in ash, clutching each other and choking. A few minutes down there and they would bake.
“Hey!” I shouted, and both their faces turned up to me, tear tracks like rivers in the grime of their cheeks.
“We can’t climb out!” said Freak, between coughs. “The wall just crumbles when I try!”
One of the walls was, in fact, faintly glowing. I leaned forward as far as I could and stretched my arms down toward them. My arms didn’t stretch far. Fiona climbed on Freak’s shoulders and reached for me. A good two feet still separated us.
Fiona fell forward, broke her fall against the side of the pit, then cried out when she brought a small avalanche of fried earth down with her. The log underneath me trembled, like it might at any moment split and dump me down with my friends.
