The House of the Scorpion

by Nancy Farmer

  “Like the horse?” said Matt as a terrible thought occurred to him.

  “Correct. Eejits can do only simple things. They pick fruit or sweep floors or, as you’ve seen, harvest opium.”

  “The Farm workers are eejits!” cried Matt.

  “That’s why they work without resting until the foreman orders them to stop and why they don’t drink water unless someone tells them to.”

  Matt’s thoughts were whirling. If the horse could stand there and die in front of a trough of water, then the man—

  “The man,” he said aloud.

  “You’re bright as a button, lad,” said Tam Lin. “The man we saw on the ground probably lagged behind the other workers and didn’t hear the foreman tell them to stop. He might have worked all night, getting thirstier and thirstier—”

  “Stop!” shrilled Matt. He covered his ears. This was horrible! He didn’t want to know any more.

  Tam Lin was at his side at once. “That’s enough lessons for one day. We’re on a picnic and we haven’t had any fun yet. Come on. I’ll show you a beehive and a coyote den. Everything lives around water in the desert.”

  They spent the rest of the day exploring the burrows, the crevices, the hidden lairs of the secret valley. Tam Lin might not have gone to school for too long, but he knew a great deal about nature. He taught Matt to sit still and wait for things to come to him. He told him how to tell the mood of a beehive by its hum. He pointed out droppings and tracks and bone fragments.

  Finally, as shadows began to fill up the oasis, Tam Lin helped Matt climb through the hole in the rock and return to the horse. It was waiting exactly where they’d left it. Tam Lin ordered it to take another drink before they set off.

  The fields were empty, and the long shadows of hills flowed across the land. Where they ended, the late-afternoon sun made the poppies glow with a golden light. They passed the dry field where the man’s body had lain, but it was gone.

  “Teacher was an eejit,” said Matt, breaking the silence.

  “She was one of the brighter ones,” said Tam Lin. “Even so, she could do only one lesson over and over.”

  “Will she come back?”

  “No.” The bodyguard sighed. “They’ll put her to work mending curtains or peeling potatoes. Let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

  “Could you teach me?” asked Matt.

  Tam Lin let out a bellow of genuine laughter. “I could if you wanted to learn how to break desks with karate chops. I reckon you’ll do your schooling off the TV. I’ll be around to hang you out the window by your ankles if you don’t study.”

  9

  THE SECRET PASSAGE

  On the surface Matt’s life settled into a pleasant rhythm. He studied via distance learning over the TV, Tam Lin sent off the homework, it came back with excellent grades, and Celia praised Matt lavishly. María praised him too when she visited. It didn’t hurt either that Tom had lousy grades and managed to stay in boarding school only because Mr. Alacrán sent the headmaster a large donation.

  But underneath Matt felt a hollowness. He understood he was only a photograph of a human, and that meant he wasn’t really important. Photographs could lie forgotten in drawers for years. They could be thrown away.

  At least once a week Matt dreamed of the dead man in the field. The man’s eyes were open and staring up at the sun. He was terribly, horribly thirsty. Matt could see how dusty his mouth was, but there was no water anywhere, only the dry, rattling poppies. It got so bad that Matt demanded a pitcher of water by his bed. If only he could take that pitcher into his dreams. If only he could dream it there and pour water into the man’s dusty lips, but he couldn’t. And when he woke up, he drank glass after glass to get rid of the dry, dead feel of the poppy fields. Then, of course, he had to go to the bathroom.

  On such occasions Matt would tiptoe past Celia’s bedroom. He could hear her snores and, across the hall, Tam Lin’s thunderous reply. This should have made him feel safe. But Matt never knew, just before he opened the bathroom door, whether the dead man might be lying on the other side, staring up at the big light in the middle of the ceiling.

  María started bringing Furball on her visits. He was a shrill, rat-sized dog that forgot his house training when he got excited. Tam Lin often threatened to suck him—and the mess he deposited—up the vacuum cleaner. “He’d fit,” he growled over María’s horrified protests. “Trust me, he’d fit.”

  What Matt hated about the creature was everyone’s assumption that he and Furball were the same. It didn’t matter that Matt had excellent grades and good manners. They were both animals and thus unimportant.

  During Easter vacation Tom said good manners were no harder to learn than rolling over or playing dead. Matt threw himself at him, and María ran shrieking for Tam Lin. Tom was sent to his room without dinner. Matt wasn’t punished at all.

  Which was okay with Matt, except that Furball wasn’t punished for his crimes either. He couldn’t understand the difference between right and wrong. He was a dumb beast and so, apparently, was Matt.

  When María wasn’t visiting, Matt amused himself by exploring the house. He pretended he was El Látigo Negro scouting out an enemy fortress. He had a black cape and a long, thin leather belt for a whip. He skulked behind curtains and furniture, and he hid if he saw one of the Alacráns in the distance.

  Felicia—Benito’s, Steven’s, and Tom’s mother—played the piano in the afternoons. Her crashing chords echoed from the music room. She attacked the piano with a fervor completely different from her usual, sluggish self, and Matt liked to hide behind the potted plants to listen.

  Her fingers flew from one end of the keyboard to the other. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was pulled back in a grimace that wasn’t pain, but something close to it. The music was wonderful, though.

  After a while Felicia would run out of energy. Trembling and pale, she would hunch over the keys, and this was the signal for a servant to bring her a brown liquid in a beautiful, cut-glass bottle. The servant would mix a drink—Matt loved the clink of ice—and place it in Felicia’s hand.

  She would drink until the trembling stopped. Then she would wilt over the piano like one of Celia’s spinaches when Tam Lin forgot to water the garden. Maids had to carry her away to her apartment.

  One day Felicia didn’t come at her usual time, and Matt hovered behind the potted plants as he worked up his courage to approach the piano. If she caught him, he knew he’d be banished from the room forever. His fingers tingled with the desire to play. It looked so easy. He could even hear the music in his head.

  Matt crept out of his hiding place. He reached out to touch the keys—and heard Felicia’s listless voice in the hallway. She was telling a servant to bring her a drink. Matt panicked. He darted into a closet behind the piano and shut the door an instant before Felicia came into the room. She immediately started playing. Matt sneezed from all the dust in the closet, but Felicia was making too much noise to hear him. Matt felt around until he found a light switch.

  It was a disappointing place. Sheet music was stacked against the walls. A heap of folding chairs filled up one corner. And it was so covered with dust and spiderwebs that Matt sneezed again. He rolled up a sheet of music and began sweeping off the inner wall, more for something to do than from any real curiosity.

  On the inner wall, under a knot of webs that would have made Dracula happy, Matt found another light switch. He flipped it on.

  He recoiled against a heap of music when part of the wall slid open and threw up a cloud of dust that made him choke. He reached for the asthma inhaler Celia insisted he carry at all times. When the dust had settled, Matt saw a narrow, dark hallway.

  He peered around the corner. An empty passage stretched both to the left and to the right. By now Felicia had stopped playing the piano. Matt held very still, listening for the clink of ice in glass. After a while he heard the maids carry Felicia away.

  Matt flipped the switch once more and saw, to his gr
eat relief, that the wall closed up again. He slipped out of the closet, leaving dusty footprints across the carpet, and was scolded by Celia when she saw the state of his clothes and hair.

  This was even better than an episode of El Látigo Negro, Matt thought, hugging the secret to himself. This was a place that belonged to him alone. Not even Tam Lin could find him if he wanted to hide.

  Slowly and carefully over the next few weeks, Matt explored his new domain. It seemed to snake between the inner and outer walls of the house. He found peepholes in the wall but saw only empty rooms with chairs and tables beyond. Once he saw a servant dusting furniture.

  A few of the peepholes looked into dark closets like the one in the music room. Matt didn’t understand until one day, while feeling his way along the passage, his hand struck against another switch.

  He flicked it on.

  A panel slid open just like the one in the music room. Matt’s heart beat wildly. He could walk right into the closet! It was full of musty clothes and old shoes, but if he pushed them aside, he could get to the door on the other side. He heard voices. The doctor and Mr. Alacrán were pleading with a third person whose replies were muffled. The doctor spoke harshly, bringing bad memories back to Matt. “Do it!” Willum snarled. “You know you have to do it!”

  “Please, Father,” said Mr. Alacrán, gentler than Matt had ever heard him be.

  “No, no, no,” moaned Mr. Alacrán’s father.

  “You’ll die without chemotherapy,” his son begged.

  “God wants me to come.”

  “But I want you here,” Mr. Alacrán pleaded.

  “This is a place of shadows and evil!” The old man was clearly becoming irrational.

  “At least get a new liver,” Willum said in his harsh voice.

  “Leave me alone,” wailed the old man.

  Matt retreated to the passageway and closed the opening. He didn’t understand what the men were arguing about, but he knew what would happen if someone caught him listening. He’d be locked up. He might even be given back to Rosa.

  Matt made his way to the music room, and for a long time he didn’t venture into the secret passage. He did, however, keep listening to Felicia’s music. It was something that had gotten inside him, and no matter how dangerous it was, he couldn’t go long without hearing it.

  One afternoon Matt was alarmed to see the doctor arrive with Felicia’s drink instead of a servant. “Oh, Willum,” she moaned as he mixed in the ice. “He doesn’t talk to me anymore. He looks right through me as though I weren’t there.”

  “It’s all right,” soothed the doctor. “I’m here. I’ll take care of you.” He opened his black bag and took out a syringe. Matt held his breath. The doctor had given him a shot when he was sick and he’d hated it! Matt watched, fascinated, as Felicia’s arm was swabbed and the needle jammed in. Why didn’t she cry out? Couldn’t she feel it?

  Willum sat next to her and draped his arm around her shoulders. He murmured things Matt couldn’t hear. It must have pleased Felicia, because she smiled and rested her head against the doctor’s chest. After a while he guided her from the music room.

  At once Matt was out of his hiding place. He sniffed the glass and sampled the contents. Ugh! It tasted like rotten fruit. He spat it out at once. He listened carefully for footsteps outside in the hall and sat down at the piano. He carefully pressed a key.

  The note rang softly in the music room. Matt was entranced. He tried other keys. They were all beautiful. He was so enchanted, he almost didn’t hear the servant coming down the hall, but fortunately, he woke up soon enough to scuttle behind the potted plants.

  After that day Matt studied the comings and goings of the servants, to work out when it was safe to visit the music room. Felicia never used it in the morning. In fact, she didn’t get up until the afternoon and was active for only an hour or so then.

  Matt discovered he could re-create the songs Celia sang to him, using one finger. Felicia used all ten, but he hadn’t figured out how to do that yet. Even so, the ability to create music filled him with a joy too large to contain. He forgot where he was. He forgot he was a clone. The music made up for everything—the silent contempt of the servants, Steven’s and Emilia’s snubs, Tom’s hatred.

  “So this is where you get to,” said Tam Lin. Matt swung around, almost tumbling off the bench. “Don’t stop. You’ve got a real talent there. Funny, I never thought of El Patrón as being musical.”

  Matt’s heart was beating wildly. Was he going to be barred from the room?

  “If you’re musical, he must be,” said the bodyguard. “But I guess he never had time to study. Where he lived, they chopped up pianos for firewood.”

  “Can you play?” asked Matt.

  “You must be joking. Look at these.”

  Matt saw stubby fingers sprouting from large, awkward hands. Some of the fingers were crooked, as though they’d been broken and healed again. “You could use one finger,” he suggested.

  Tam Lin laughed. “Music has to be in the head first, laddie. The good Lord passed me by when He was handing out talent. You’ve got it, though, and it’d be a shame not to use it. I’ll talk to El Patrón about finding you a teacher.”

  This proved difficult. No human wanted to teach a clone and no eejit was smart enough. Finally Tam Lin found a man who had gone deaf and was desperate for work. It seemed odd to Matt that someone who couldn’t hear could teach music, but so it was. Mr. Ortega felt it through his hands. He placed them on the piano as Matt practiced and caught every mistake.

  It wasn’t long before Matt added musical ability to his growing list of accomplishments. He could read ten years beyond his level, do math that left Tam Lin bewildered—and irritated—and speak both English and Spanish fluently. In addition, his art grew better by the day. He threw himself into studying everything that came before him. Matt could name the planets, the brightest stars, and all the constellations. He memorized the names of countries, their capitals and chief exports.

  He was in a rage to learn. He would excel, and then everyone would love him and forget he was a clone.

  10

  A CAT WITH NINE LIVES

  You’re like a wild animal,” complained María as she stood in the doorway of Matt’s room. “You hide in here like a bear in a cave.”

  Matt looked indifferently at the curtained windows. He liked the safe, comfortable darkness. “I am an animal,” he replied. Once those words would have pained him, but he accepted his status now.

  “I think you just like to wallow,” said María, striding in to open the curtains and windows. Outside lay Celia’s garden filled with stands of corn, tomatoes, beans, peas. “Anyhow, it’s El Patrón’s birthday, and that means you’d better take that snarl off your face.”

  Matt sighed. He could unnerve almost everyone by growling at them, but not María. She only laughed. Of course, he never dreamed of growling at El Patrón on those rare occasions when the old man visited. To do so would have been unthinkable. Each time, El Patrón looked more frail and his mind seemed less in order.

  It broke Matt’s heart to look at him. He loved El Patrón. He owed everything to him.

  Matt could hardly remember those terrible days three years before, when he was kept in a pen with roaches for friends and old chicken bones for toys. But he knew he’d still be there—or buried under the floor by Rosa—if the old man hadn’t rescued him.

  “El Patrón’s one hundred and forty-three today,” said Matt.

  María shivered. “I can’t imagine being that old!”

  “Celia said if they put that many candles on the cake, it would melt the paint off the walls.”

  “He was kind of strange last time he was here,” said María.

  That’s one way to put it, thought Matt. El Patrón had become so forgetful, he repeated the same sentence over and over again. “Am I dead yet?” he asked. “Am I dead yet?” And he held his hand before his face, studying each finger as though to reassure himself that he
was still there.

  “Are you ready?” cried Celia, rushing into the room. She made Matt turn and adjusted the collar of his shirt. “Remember, you’re sitting next to El Patrón tonight. Pay attention and answer all his questions.”

  “What if he’s . . . weird?” said Matt. He remembered answering the question “Am I dead yet?” over and over the last time the old man visited.

  Celia stopped fussing with the shirt and knelt before him. “Listen to me, darling. If anything bad happens tonight, I want you to come straight to me. Come to the pantry behind the kitchen.”

  “What do you mean, bad?”

  “I can’t say.” Celia looked furtively around the room. “Just promise me you’ll remember.”

  Matt thought it was hard to promise something like that—nobody planned to forget—but he nodded.

  “Oh, mi hijo, I do love you!” Celia flung her arms around him and burst into tears. Matt was both startled and dismayed. What could have upset her so much? He saw María out of the corner of his eye. She was making a face that indicated how totally soppy she found this display. That was María’s favorite word recently: soppy. She’d picked it up from Tam Lin.

  “I promise,” Matt said.

  Celia sat back abruptly and wiped her eyes with her apron. “I’m a fool. What good would it do if you understood? It would only make things worse.” She seemed to be talking to herself, and Matt watched her anxiously. Then she stood up and smoothed the wrinkles in her apron. “Run along, chicos, and have fun at the party. I’ll be in the kitchen serving up the best dinner you ever saw. You look wonderful, both of you, like you stepped out of a movie.” The old, confident Celia was back, and Matt was relieved.

  “I have to get Furball from my room,” said María after they left.

  “Oh, no! You can’t take him to dinner.”

  “I can if I want. I’ll hide him on my lap.”

  Matt sighed. There was no point arguing with her. María took Furball everywhere. Tam Lin complained that it wasn’t a dog, but a hairy tumor growing out of her arm. He offered to take her to a doctor and have it removed.