Northwood

by Brian Falkner

  “I have to go now,” Rocky said. “I think he has heard me barking up at you, and I’m in for a kicking.”

  “He kicks you?” Cecilia said, her jaw gaping open. But the snowy face at the window disappeared and only silence filled the gap between the two houses.

  She went back inside and stared down at the house for a long time, her nose still squashed against the wall. She stood there so long that when she finally peeled her face off the wall, it was red and blotchy, and her nose seemed stuck in the squashed-alien-octopus look. The desperate expression in Rocky’s eyes was fixed in her brain.

  There was no doubt that something had to be done. And there was no doubt that Cecilia was the one who had to do it. Just what needed to be done? Well, that was the question that she still didn’t have an answer for.

  What she needed was a plan.

  If there was one thing Cecilia was good at, it was forming plans — but there was another thing that she was very good at too, which was carrying those plans out.

  She wrote PLAN at the top of a large piece of paper in big block letters. Then she sat down to think. What did she know?

  In smaller letters she wrote Rocky, then Mr. Proctor’s house.

  How could she rescue Rocky from Mr. Proctor’s house? Clearly she was going to need a clever idea. She couldn’t just burst through the door, guns blazing, and carry Rocky off. She wasn’t big or strong enough for that, and anyway she didn’t have any blazing guns, or any kind of guns at all. She would have to use her brain. And she had a very good brain, which more than made up for not having any blazing guns.

  She wrote down Mr. Proctor’s name, and next to it she listed all the things she knew about him, including the word scary. Then she underlined that word, because Mr. Proctor was very scary.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a plan. But that didn’t worry her, because she knew that often your best ideas come to you while you are sleeping. And sure enough, she woke up in the morning with a clear idea of what she had to do, although it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Cecilia found herself on the horns of a dilemma. That sounds like a really uncomfortable and dangerous place to be, involving a large and probably mythical beast, but actually all it means is that she had two choices and neither of them was very nice.

  She could go to Mr. Proctor and challenge him directly about the dog, but she suspected that he would deny everything. She knew that not all people, particularly adults, were as truthful as she was. And what if he asked her how she knew? She couldn’t say Rocky had told her.

  Or she could try to sneak into Mr. Proctor’s house when he wasn’t there and rescue Rocky right out from under his nose. That plan seemed to involve a lot of risks, and sounded very difficult.

  First, she thought, she should try the direct approach. Only if that failed would she resort to a desperate rescue mission.

  Cecilia waited until nine o’clock, which was plenty of time for Mr. Proctor to get up and have a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee, but not so late that he would be rushing out to be somewhere.

  To get to his house, which was on the street behind hers, she had to walk all the way down to the Peabodys’ house at number sixteen. Past the house of the little old lady with too many hats. Past the Smiths’ and the Joneses’, who were cousins and lived next door to each other. Past Mr. Stinkbottle’s house, with the enormous dog that barked furiously at everyone who passed (but just said a polite “good morning” to Cecilia).

  When she reached number sixteen, she turned down the leafy lane that joined her street with Mr. Proctor’s street.

  Next door to Mr. Proctor’s place, there had once been another rather nice house — an elegant old mansion that had belonged to Cecilia’s grandparents (when they were still alive). It had been quite dignified and grand in an old-fashioned way. But it was gone now.

  A large yellow bulldozer stood on the remains of the house’s foundations. Mr. Proctor had bought the house a few months ago and knocked it down so that he could put in a tennis court.

  Cecilia looked at the large yellow bulldozer and was sad for the old house that wasn’t there anymore.

  She felt nervous and alone when she walked up to Mr. Proctor’s doorstep. Mr. Proctor was scary enough when she saw him at ProctorMart, where he was trying to be courteous and professional.

  To actually walk right up to his house . . . that was like jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool full of sharks.

  Nevertheless, she reached out a small, slightly quivering hand toward the doorbell.

  It rang — a huge, echoing ding-donging inside the cavernous mansion. Almost any other little girl would have run away at that point, because it sounded as if the house would be full of vampires, ghosts, or monsters, like in an old black-and-white horror movie.

  But Cecilia waited.

  She readied herself with her best, most charming smile. There was a thwock sound from the door as the lock clicked, and then a creak as the door opened a little.

  An eye peered out from the gloom inside the house, and then the door opened wider when Mr. Proctor saw who it was.

  He smiled a lurking, dangerous sort of smile.

  “Hello,” he said. “What do you want?”

  Cecilia looked at him for a moment as she drew in a breath to answer.

  You could tell that he had once been bigger than he was now. It seemed as though when he lost all that weight, he shrank inside his own skin. Now he looked like a thin man wearing a skin suit that was too big for him. Loose folds of skin hung from his jaw and his neck. Dark bags sagged under his eyes, which were now narrow and pointed.

  She gulped, and then remembered her mission. “Hello, Mr. Proctor,” she said loudly and clearly. “My name is Cecilia. I live over the fence.”

  “What do you want?” Mr. Proctor asked again through sharp eel teeth, with no attempt to be polite.

  “I saw you have a dog,” Cecilia said. Mr. Proctor’s narrow eyes immediately narrowed even further. Cecilia added quickly, “It’s just that, well, I really love animals, particularly dogs, and I don’t have one of my own.”

  All of that was perfectly true, without a word of a lie. Cecilia went on, a little more confidently. “I really enjoy dogs and I wondered if you might let me take Ro— your dog for a walk sometime,” she finished quickly.

  Mr. Proctor’s eyes were mere slits by now.

  “I mean, you wouldn’t have to pay me or anything,” Cecilia continued. “I’d do it just for fun. It’s good for dogs to get exercise and then you wouldn’t have to take him for walks every day. What do you think?”

  Perfect, she thought. She’d said everything she needed to say and she had been totally honest.

  Mr. Proctor stared at her for a moment and she smiled sweetly at him. He stared some more. Cecilia smiled some more.

  Then she noticed that his face was gradually changing color. His rather pale complexion was darkening. He still didn’t say anything, but his nostrils widened, he snorted a couple of times like an angry bull, and his face kept changing color.

  Pink blotches appeared at his cheeks and spread to his ears and his chin. By the time his nose and forehead had turned pink, his cheeks were red and his ears were a brilliant shade of purple.

  Cecilia thought that there must have been some awful pressure building up inside him. She was worried that he might burst or die of a heart attack in front of her eyes.

  “Of course —” she began, but he didn’t let her finish, which was rude by anyone’s standards.

  “How dare you?” Mr. Proctor said, spittle flying from his lips, but fortunately missing Cecilia. “Do you know who I am?” His voice started to rise, growing louder and louder with each word. “I am a very important man in this town. I am . . .”

  Cecilia was wise enough to know that anyone who had to tell you how important he was was nowhere near as important as h
e thought he was.

  Mr. Proctor spluttered and shouted. Most of his words got sucked back into his mouth — only a few escaped for Cecilia to hear.

  Those that did come out were words like “outrageous” and “nosy,” along with “busybody” and “like father, like daughter,” which made no sense at all to Cecilia.

  She was nothing like her father and he was nothing like her. She knew nothing about balloons, and he couldn’t talk to animals, and he almost certainly didn’t know the capital of Iceland.

  “I can see now that it was a bad idea,” Cecilia said politely, trying to fit the words in among Mr. Proctor’s ranting and raving. “I’ll go now. I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  She turned and left, leaving him still shouting and gesticulating incoherently behind her.

  She walked all the way back down to the corner, along the alley, past Mr. Stinkbottle’s, past the Joneses’ and the Smiths’, and past the little old lady with too many hats. She let herself into her house and went up the stairs to the landing, then up two more flights of stairs to her blue-balloon bedroom, and she took off her shoes and lay down on her soft, bouncy bed.

  And cried.

  4

  THE RESCUE

  PHASE TWO OF Cecilia’s plan did not involve breaking into Mr. Proctor’s house when he was away, because that was illegal, and she could be arrested, and she felt that jail would be a very scary place.

  So her plan did not involve dressing up in a ninja suit and climbing up the outside wall of Mr. Proctor’s house, although the thought had crossed her mind.

  She had gotten her idea for the plan from Longfellow’s restaurant and the floating baskets full of food.

  Every afternoon, even if it was raining, Rocky was let out into the backyard to do what dogs do in backyards. If the yard hadn’t been completely surrounded by a high wooden fence, he would have run away from Mr. Proctor’s months ago.

  Instead, he was reduced to sniffing around in the grass, scratching here and there for worms and beetles, like a farmyard chicken.

  But the backyard suited phase two perfectly.

  The only real problem with Cecilia’s plan was that it involved some building. Although she was rather clever and could talk to animals and knew how to spell rhododendron, when it came to practical matters like building stuff, she wasn’t very clever at all. But that didn’t worry Cecilia, because she knew someone who was.

  Jana had been the Undergarments’ housekeeper since before Cecilia was born. Whenever her father was away on his overseas sales trips, with her mother tagging along to keep him company, or when her mother was off practicing her high kicks at her karate lessons, or making little paper elephants at her origami classes, Jana had been there for Cecilia.

  She was a huge woman in every direction and was filled with so much love for everybody and everything that it spilled over all around her wherever she went. All the people she met felt it, and their hearts filled up a little too.

  Jana came from the Bahamas, which Cecilia, when she was younger, had thought were called the Bananas. She could still make Jana laugh by calling her Jana-Banana.

  Jana sang songs from her homeland in her sweet-like-honey voice, which danced in Cecilia’s ears like seashells underfoot, and called up pictures of blue skies and gentle seas in faraway places that seemed real to her although she had never been there.

  Jana was enormously practical. She could make a necklace out of flowers or a sailboat out of an old newspaper. Cecilia was sure she would be able to help with her plan.

  But even more importantly, Jana would never question Cecilia. She would never say, Are you sure you want to do this? or Don’t be silly! If Cecilia said she had an imaginary friend, Jana would cook an extra meal. If Cecilia said she wanted to fly to the moon, Jana would go to the library with her and find books on how to build rockets.

  “How is this gonna work?” Jana asked, turning the laundry basket upside down and tapping the bottom of it to see how strong it was.

  “It’s simple, really,” Cecilia said. “It’s just physics.”

  She had learned about physics from Kymberlee’s older brother, Pike, who was fourteen and had studied it at school. She wasn’t entirely sure what physics was, but she knew it involved gravity and weight and what made things go up and down, and start and stop, and all sorts of really interesting things like that.

  Cecilia was sitting on a sack that had previously been full of flour. She had rescued the sack from the garbage can in the kitchen, and it was now full of sand from the sandbox in the playroom on the first floor of the balloon house.

  It was quite heavy, so she took it up to the attic one stair at a time, lifting it up and resting it on the next step, then the next step, and so on and so on.

  Jana would have hoisted it over one shoulder and marched up to the attic, singing all the way, but she had been out doing the weekly shopping at the dreaded ProctorMart.

  But she was back now, so Cecilia sat on the sack and showed Jana the drawing of her dog-rescuing invention.

  “So Rocky climbs into the basket,” Cecilia said, “and we pull on this string.” (It was drawn in blue crayon on the plan.) “That releases the sand, and up it floats. Then we just pull it in using this other string.” (That string was drawn in orange crayon.)

  “Like catching fish,” Jana said, cracking her knuckles. “It’s a good plan, girl. I think it’s gonna work.” She studied the plan a little longer. “But I think you only need one string. You can let the sand go and pull the basket in, all with one string.”

  “That’s clever!” Cecilia said.

  “But you don’t know how much the dog weighs,” Jana said.

  “I looked it up on the Internet,” Cecilia said. “Usually a Samoyed like Rocky would weigh between forty-five and sixty-five pounds. But because Rocky is so thin, I guessed about forty-five.”

  There were forty-five pounds of sand in the old flour sack. Cecilia had weighed it on the scale one pound at a time before putting it in the sack.

  “I think we need more sand,” Jana said. “Better a little too much, than a little too little.”

  “Good thinking,” Cecilia said.

  ***

  The great dog rescue took place that afternoon at exactly three o’clock. Cecilia’s father was out playing golf and her mother was at a charity fashion show.

  Most importantly, Mr. Proctor went out for the afternoon and Rocky had been left out in the backyard.

  Cecilia and Jana (well, mostly Jana) carefully attached the sack of sand to the bottom of the laundry basket using some wire that Jana had found in the garage. She threaded the wire in and out of the seams of the basket and through the fabric of the sack.

  Then, with the basket still upside down, she cut a long slit along the length of the sack, and sewed it back up using a clever stitch that held the edges together firmly, but would come undone with a sharp tug on the end of the string.

  Next they turned the basket upright and attached the balloons to the top.

  There were always boxes of balloons in the basement. Leftover samples or new product lines. Trials of new colors or shapes or sizes. And there was also always a small cylinder of helium gas, the floaty gas that makes floaty balloons float.

  Jana took the cylinder upstairs, while Cecilia shuffled along behind with a box of balloons.

  There were large balloons and small balloons. Rubber balloons and silver balloons. There were balloons shaped like animals and some with funny faces on them like clowns or aliens. There were all kinds of colors.

  Cecilia selected the biggest, strongest balloons, filled them with gas, and attached one to each corner of the laundry basket using sturdy nylon cord. The basket stirred a little from its position on the floor of the attic, but did not lift.

  So they attached another balloon to each corner, while Cecilia sat inside the basket to weigh it down. Wh
en she stepped out, the basket shot up off the ground and hovered in midair while the balloons stuck firmly to the round ceiling of the attic.

  Jana took one big balloon from each corner and replaced them with slightly smaller ones, until the basket gently floated down to the floor and stayed there. It quivered a little, as if it wanted to take off but couldn’t.

  “It’s perfect!” Cecilia cried.

  “Bam, bam, bam!” Jana grinned and hugged Cecilia, who hugged her right back.

  When the clock on the wall struck three, they took the floating basket out of the attic and onto the balcony.

  Far below, in the backyard of the Proctor house, the painfully thin shape of Rocky stared up at them.

  It was a little cool outside, so Cecilia went and got her jacket, zipping it up against the breeze. When she stepped back out on the balcony, she thought she saw a curtain move inside the Proctor house, but it might have just been the wind creeping its way through some open window.

  Taking hold of the string, Cecilia gave the floating basket a firm push. It obediently drifted away from her, dropping gently as it went. Down, down it went, a little too fast, Cecilia thought, worried that it might just drop into her own backyard and not make it over the fence. Down, down, and away, just nudging over the fence, settling with a sigh into Mr. Proctor’s backyard.

  “This basket flies like a blue-faced booby bird!” Jana exclaimed, smiling. She held up a hand for a high five. Cecilia high-fived her with the hand that wasn’t holding the string.

  The basket had landed quite close to the fence, but fortunately was still in sight.

  “Come on, Rocky!” Cecilia called.

  Rocky was standing beside the basket, one paw on the edge, looking nervously at the flimsy flying contraption.

  “You can do it!” Cecilia shouted.

  Rocky glanced up, nudged aside the balloons with his nose and, with a quick hop, was in the basket. He stood there, waiting.