by Henry Clark
“I do so hate biochemical weapons,” said Alf.
Alf had arrived on the balcony just in time, wearing Cockapoo’s doghat. Coyote must have thought the approaching figure was an ally and gotten caught off guard when Alf made Coyote his target.
Alf quickly leaned forward and injected Coyote with a syringe. Coyote collapsed but started breathing again. “The antidote,” Alf explained. “Anti–Hista Mime. He’ll be back to normal in about an hour or so, I’d guess.”
“Alf!” the three of us cried. We moved to include him in the group hug.
“Let’s not make ourselves an even bigger target!” he said, putting his hands up and refusing to be engulfed.
“How’d you get here so fast?” demanded Freak.
“The keys were in the sheik’s Hummer. Fortunately, something triggered Hologrammy. She started chasing Beauceron with her ax, Beauceron tripped over my outstretched foot, and Opal Austin was able to subdue her.”
“Opal Austin?” asked Freak.
“The private eye who found the zucchini crayon for me. She was at the auction in disguise. Using the name Cicely Shillingham.”
“Alecto!” I said.
“Actually,” Alf admitted, “I’ve been Alecto from the start.”
“So… Opal Austin was doing your bidding.”
“You make it sound medieval. But yes, she was.”
“I have a boo-boo!” Greeves announced.
“Who is he?” Alf asked me.
“Greeves Stainer.”
“Ah. Notorious Indorsian assassin. Wonderful. Anyway, as soon as Opal disarmed Beauceron, my first thought was to follow the three of you. I drove the Hummer through three chain-link fences. Straight across Hellsboro. We have to get back to it before the tires melt.”
“You didn’t fall through the crust?” Freak asked suspiciously.
“The Hummer has sonar. It’s the Luxury Landmine Edition. The cupholders are gyroscopic, so they don’t spill your drinks.”
A short bald man wearing a lab coat scurried across the floor of the cavern, a folder under his arm spilling a trail of papers behind him. He reached a door in the far wall and practically fell through it in his eagerness to leave.
“There must be a kennel full of doghats here,” said Freak, squaring his shoulders and giving us a tough-guy look. “Shouldn’t we round them up?”
“Or flee from them in terror?” Fiona suggested. Much more reasonably, I thought.
“No reason to do either,” Alf assured us. “All of Disin’s people, from Jackal and Cockapoo down to the lowliest lab tech, are corporate employees. Meaning they have no initiative or self-motivation. Without Disin to tell them what to do, they’re not going to do anything. They are no longer a threat. Their main concern right now is who’s going to sign off on their overtime pay.”
“You’re one hundred percent sure about that?” I asked.
“No. Perhaps we should get moving.”
We led Greeves by the hand like a two-year-old and ascended the stairs in the stairwell. It didn’t seem right to leave him behind. He was a twelve-year-old, half-naked kid with amnesia. We couldn’t just let him wander.
At the top of the stairs, we found ourselves once again in the little room where safety began with you. Broken glass crunched beneath our feet and a breeze fanned us from where the door had been blown in.
“What happened here?” wondered Freak.
We found out the moment we stepped outside. The huge spherical gas tank that had concealed the mind-control module had exploded. Nothing remained of it except for some twisted support girders.
“Playground!” cried Greeves, and Fiona pulled him back before he could run off and play.
“What did this?” asked Freak.
“You did,” said Double Six. “You’re the one who dropped the double-headed coin into the works.”
“It was a bomb?”
“So to speak.”
“You could have told me.”
“Most people get antsy when they find out they’re carrying antimatter. I didn’t want to alarm you.”
“Antimatter?”
“The coin was only heads on the outside,” Double Six clarified. “It was tails on the inside. It was programmed to detonate the moment the mind-control module became fully activated. Which occurred later than I anticipated. Slight miscalculation there. Sorry for any inconvenience.”
“The domino talks?” asked Alf, not sounding pleased. “Guernica?”
“Hello, Alf,” said Miranda, speaking through Double Six. “Guernica and I have been advising the kids from time to time. It was my idea. I’ll tell you about it later.”
Alf looked at me. He pointed at the domino.
“May I have that?”
I handed it to him. He put it in his pocket.
The Hummer was parked in a gap it had torn through the fence.
“Shotgun!” said Greeves.
“You want to ride next to me?” Alf asked him.
“No, I want a shotgun!” Greeves’s eyes went wide. “We can play cops and robbers!”
“Put him in the back,” Alf directed us. “He needs rest.”
We put Greeves in the space between the backseat and the hatchback, where there was space for him to lie down, and Fiona put a blanket over him. “ ’Night!” he said. He snuggled into the blanket.
“He looks adorable,” I said.
“He looks like you,” muttered Freak.
“That’s what I said. I’m trying to figure out how I can send him to school in my place.”
All four of the Hummer’s tires were flat, forcing us to drive back to Underhill House on the rims. We stopped once to remove debris that had fallen from the antimatter blast from our path. The car’s sonar—which looked like a device Alf had added, despite what he said about a “Luxury Landmine Edition”—warned us not to try driving around it.
When we arrived at Underhill House a short time later, we got an unpleasant shock. We opened the hatchback and discovered Greeves’s blanket was gone.
And so was Greeves.
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” said Alf two days later as he shared a coal-dust pizza with us. “If he survived Hellsboro he’s bound to be picked up by the authorities the first time he’s caught feeding himself from a Dumpster. The number of feral children in Pennsylvania is well below the national average. Somebody must be keeping an eye out.”
We were sitting around a table in the coachman’s apartment in the carriage house on the grounds of the Underhill estate. Freak had moved in that afternoon. It was going to be his home for the next thirty days, while his father stayed in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic in the nearby town of Flanders. This had come as a surprise to everyone, especially Freak.
“Did you figure out the washing machine?” asked Alf. “You fill the tub with soapy water and scrub the clothes against the bumpy board. The dryer is currently broken, but all you have to do to fix it is retie the rope. Almost everything in here dates back to 1910. Some of it is rather funky.”
During the week prior to the crayon auction, Alf had gotten in touch with Child Protective Services without telling anyone. On Saturday afternoon, around the time his son was helping inflate some hot air balloons, Frank Nesterii had been visited at home by a social worker. Mr. Nesterii was well into his second six-pack of the day and the interview had not gone well. He had been given the choice of entering rehab and cleaning up his act or losing his son to a foster home. Mr. Nesterii had thrown the social worker out of the house.
Later that evening, while sitting on his back steps and trying to sort things out despite the muddled thinking caused by an overpowering headache, Freak’s father had a vision of where his life was headed. He described it to Freak the next day as he broke down and cried in his son’s arms, vowing to enter rehab and make everything right. Frank Nesterii had been sitting there on his steps, looking up into the night sky, and had seen an enormous, fiery toilet bowl.
The vision had given him the final scare h
e needed to make his decision.
The computerized files of Child Protective Services had listed Alf Disin as a neighbor who was also a distant relative and an acceptable guardian for Freak. I had no doubt that Guernica had tweaked the files.
Fiona and I helped Freak move into the carriage house, which was about a hundred yards down the hill from the mansion. The ground floor was filled with empty horse stalls and wagon bays, and the coachman’s apartment where Freak would be living was on the second floor. Its floorboards creaked. There was no television. The only clock had to be wound with a key. I had never seen Freak so happy.
“The toilet flushes with an overhead pull chain,” Alf added. “Did you notice that?”
“I thought it was a train whistle,” said Freak. “To signal the butler in the main house if you ran out of toilet paper.”
“That is most certainly incorrect, François,” Alf replied lightly.
Freak usually winced on the rare occasions when someone used his real name—it was also his father’s name—but he just shrugged and nodded. He didn’t know it, but I had seen him hug Alf shortly after Alf had announced the carriage house was his if he wanted it. I couldn’t really say at what point Freak finally decided to trust him. It had, over time, just happened.
“You know,” said Fiona, thoughtfully munching on the tip of a pizza slice, “if you need a body for Miranda, you could clone me. It would be like having a twin. I wouldn’t mind that.”
Alf stopped chewing his pizza and looked at her. He patted her gently on the shoulder. “That’s very generous of you, Fiona. And there was a time when I might seriously have considered it. There was a time when I was seriously considering something even less ethical, and I’m ashamed of myself for that. I was of two minds, and I think it showed in the way I treated you all and how much I was willing to tell you. Miranda has made it clear the only body she will permit herself to be restored to is her own. And the only available cloning material for that is back in Indorsia, on her father’s mantel.”
“Then we should open a portal, go to Indorsia, and get it!” Fiona declared.
“Portals are not easily opened between the two places,” said Alf with a smile. “It took my father decades to open the one under Rodmore Chemical. I doubt you’ll be seeing a controlled opening of a portal anytime soon, and your chances of being present at the site of an uncontrolled one are astronomically unlikely.”
“Is Edward Disin dead?” I asked.
“Possibly,” said Alf. “There are rumors that the Disin Corporation is currently without its CEO. Which is why whatever doghats may still be out there don’t pose a threat. I told you this in Rodmore a few days ago, and I’m even more convinced of it now. No one pursued us. Beauceron, Cockapoo, Jackal, and all the rest no longer have their alpha dog; they won’t make a move without him. I’ve got Opal Austin tracking down the pack, so I can keep an eye on them. Don’t lose any sleep over it. My father was done in by his own troop transport. ‘Those who live by the sword—’ ”
“The floor looked pretty clean to me,” said Freak.
“His body may have been swept back to Indorsia with the transport.”
“Could he have downloaded a copy of himself?” asked Fiona.
“If he did, it’s back in Indorsia, and it hasn’t been updated since 1952. The technology for downloading is only available in Indorsia.”
“The sofa didn’t have too much trouble doing it,” I said.
“The sofa is unique,” said Alf. “I increased the computing power of the entire furniture set when I got here so I could have a well-disguised computer in an age when Earth’s computers were little better than adding machines. I did not realize Guernica would evolve. The sofa is the only thing outside of Indorsia that can download living minds. It is also the only thing, here or in Indorsia, that can tesser. I have no idea where it gets it from.”
“Anybody seen it lately?” asked Freak.
“I am sure it will turn up. It knows how to take care of itself.”
We had told Alf the story of our adventures, including everything his sister and Guernica had helped us do behind his back.
“All these years, I’ve pretended Guernica has a mind of its own,” he admitted. “Imagine my surprise to find out it does.”
“Sort of like the surprise your father got when he found out the three of us had minds of our own. He called us infants.” I was still insulted.
“And that mistake led to his downfall,” said Alf.
He left us then, after reviewing with Freak an intercom system between the coachman’s quarters and the main house through which Freak could reach Alf any time of the night or day. He promised to check back with Freak at regular intervals.
“I don’t need to be tucked in,” Freak announced.
“I’m sure you don’t,” replied Alf. “Just make sure you lock the doors and brush your teeth.”
“Imagine,” said Fiona, after he had left, “if we’d never sat down on that sofa.”
“I believe I sat on it first,” said Freak.
“I slept on it,” I reminded them.
“More importantly” Fiona replied, through gritted teeth, “imagine if we hadn’t searched between the cushions. Don’t forget that I was the one who suggested that.”
“Yeah,” said Freak. “We wouldn’t have had all those adventures that resulted in you becoming a less annoying person. Oh, wait—”
“There would be Indorsian troops occupying our town,” Fiona interrupted him, counting things off on her fingers. “Most of the world would be enslaved; most of the planet would be strip-mined; Edward Disin would be a global dictator—”
“I would be an inch shorter,” I threw in, because she was missing the important stuff.
“And Freak’s dad wouldn’t be getting the help that he needs.”
“You said ‘hi’ to me in the hall today,” I reminded her. “Even though you were with your friends.”
“She did?” asked Freak.
“I’d say ‘hi’ to you, too,” Fiona informed him. She looked down at her feet. “You two guys aren’t all that bad.”
It crossed my mind that I wasn’t the only one who had grown. I didn’t say it out loud, though. It sounded way too goopy.
“And,” said Freak, adding one of his fingers to the six or seven Fiona was holding up, “my father would still be in debt.”
I had given Freak most of my share of the money from the sale of the zucchini crayon. He told me later that Fiona had done the same. She had sworn him to secrecy when she did it, but he figured telling me didn’t count. The money had pretty much paid off all of the Nesterii family’s bills. Freak was convinced having a clean slate would help his dad recover. I hoped he was right.
“So,” continued Freak, “thank you—both—for that.”
When I got home a little later, my aunt Bernie was darning socks while watching TV. I hugged her tightly, then hurried off to my room.
The previous day, Sunday, when I finally woke up, I had skipped breakfast. I had gone straight out to the garage, set up a stepladder, and poked around in the rafters. Way in the back, tucked in between a stack of burlap bags and a bunch of paint cans, I had found a tin box.
A tin box full of toys.
I looked through the contents of that box, now, for what had to be the twentieth time.
There was a deflated basketball in it, and a slingshot, and a small cardboard box containing a complete set of dominoes—hard plastic, rather than the wood Double Six seemed to be made of—and a plastic bag full of partially used crayons. Bubble wrap protected a single dark green piece of dollhouse furniture, like a force field around a spaceship. A hand puppet in the shape of a Siberian husky hung its head when I picked it up. There was a fancy chess set, still in its original packaging, where the pieces were modeled after characters in The Lord of the Rings. At the bottom of the tin box was a thirty-year-old Superman comic book.
They were toys that had once belonged to my parents. I got teary every tim
e I looked at them. Each time I returned to the box, I felt a different emotion or had a new thought. This time, for some reason, I thought about how Indorsian stories told around campfires were usually about campfires, and I wondered what kind of story might get told around my box full of toys.
I picked up the comic book. It wasn’t worth the million dollars Edward Disin had paid for Action Comics number one. To me, it was worth a hundred times that.
I studied the artwork on the cover, then put the book aside. While I had always liked Superman, I was in no hurry to read about his adventures. My friends and I had had some pretty incredible adventures of our own, and I wasn’t entirely sure they were over.
As far as I was concerned, Superman had nothing on River Man.
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Acknowledgments
“Our bomb-sniffing dog keeps barking at your manuscript” is not, I am relieved to say, anything I heard from my editor, Andrea Spooner, even during the book’s earliest incarnations, when it gave off a distinct pong of gelignite. What I did hear from her were many words of encouragement and advice that vastly improved the final product.
Editorial Assistant Deirdre Jones changed her name midway through the rewrite, but insists it was not out of embarrassment over being connected with the project. I thank her for her many helpful suggestions and, obviously, tact. And I thank copy editor Martha Cipolla for her knowledge of fantasy realms—particularly the color of a certain wizard’s balloon—and her unflagging flagging of words that repeated too closely in the text.
My agent, Kate Epstein, has been extraordinary throughout, and really knows her Wallace Shawn movies. Judy Mitchell and Barbara Keiler both read an early version of Sofa and furnished me with suggestions that benefitted the book while convincing me not to quit my day job. Oldest friends Harrison Hunt and Paul Feldman were both twelve years old when I was twelve years old, and influenced the book’s characters in ways only my subconscious may be fully aware of.
