When the Golden Lady reappeared, she didn’t say anything.
He told her he was hungry and she gave him some kind of whitish drink that looked and felt like milk but had no taste or smell.
As time passed, the lack of stimulation started to affect him. He began imagining things: sounds, colors, smells, tastes. These sensations weren’t in the front of his mind but in the far back—like when you have a hearing test and the beeps are so high- or low-pitched that they’re almost outside the range of human ears.
When a real sound at last penetrated the room he was so lost in his own head that at first he didn’t realize what it was. When he finally recognized it as the sound of a car engine, he stood up in his bed; by standing on top of his pillow, he could peer out the room’s window. It was night outside, and he could just make out a road through the trees. The limousine was passing by.
A girl was pressing her nose against the limousine’s rear window, and suddenly Benjamin’s mouth was full of the taste of mint-chip ice cream. It was Cassandra, the girl who had stood outside the school watching when he was driven away; and now he was watching her. It was like the same scene in reverse. He considered waving or yelling but then he decided he must be imagining her. What were the chances that she would be there?
He must have been dreaming after all.
L.
L, DR. L.
L FOR LUCIANO.
L FOR LONG-LOST BROTHER.
L FOR LOATHSOME LUNATIC DOCTOR.
L FOR LYING TO THEIR FACES THE WHOLE TIME.
How obvious in retrospect. And how awful.
Cass hadn’t told Max-Ernest because she knew he’d say it didn’t make any sense, but—secretly—she’d been hoping to save Luciano at the same time she saved Benjamin. She’d imagined the magician’s brother as a frail old man with long gray hair, trapped in a jail cell. Her plan was to free him. To tell him how much Pietro loved him. To make his last days happy ones.
And all along this make-believe prisoner had been their real-life captor?
Ms. Mauvais, Cass knew, must have turned him somehow when he was a boy.
Turned him against his brother. Turned him into what he was today.
But that didn’t excuse him. That didn’t excuse kidnapping—or murder.
To think Pietro had spent his life searching for a brother who was nothing but a traitor!
Cass felt betrayed. Personally betrayed.
Max-Ernest agreed that Dr. L deserved the worst kind of punishment. But he offered so many different ideas for what that punishment should be that Cass had to beg him to stop thinking of punishments, and to start thinking of ways to escape.
Unfortunately, the latter was much more difficult than the former.
In the two and a half hours since Dr. L had been informed that “it had to be tonight” (whatever it was), the spa had come alive with activity.
The lantern on top of the pyramid, previously dimmed, now blinked on and off, intermittently flooding the spa with light, and clearly broadcasting some kind of message—although, Cass and Max-Ernest were quite sure, the message was not Morse code.
Through the window of Cass’s room, they had a view of the spa’s tall front gates. They watched the gates open every few minutes, each time admitting new guests drawn to the Midnight Sun lantern like so many moths to a flame. By now there had been at least forty such arrivals, roughly doubling the population of the spa, and filling the courtyard surrounding the pyramid with a strange and not very joyous sort of party.
From a distance, it was difficult to tell what if anything the spa’s new guests had in common—save the appearance of coming from far-off places or far-off times or both. One man wore a top hat and waistcoat, and another wore an Arab kaffiyeh. One woman came in an antique kimono, and another came in a sari. Some of the guests arrived in cars so old they resembled horse-drawn carriages. A few rode in on horseback.
The one thing Cass and Max-Ernest could tell was: whatever was happening tonight, these people had been waiting for it a long time. Some of them were so desperate to get inside the pyramid they stood at the edge of the moat as if ready to wade across.
Ms. Mauvais, more glittering than ever, mingled among them like a perfect party hostess—waving, greeting, gesticulating. She seemed at once to be begging their forbearance and stirring their impatience into a frenzy.
Finally, the large bronze doors at the pyramid’s base swung open, and the narrow drawbridge was lowered over the water. As the crowd surged toward the drawbridge, Cass had a better view of the guests, and she was able to confirm that they all shared one more familiar, unnerving feature:
“Hey, you see that—” she said to Max-Ernest.
“What?”
“They’re all wearing gloves.”
On the other side of the window, their backs to Cass and Max-Ernest, Daisy and Owen were watching the same scene. Cass had been trying to get Owen’s attention for hours, hoping that he might have some sympathy for her plight—that she hadn’t just imagined that spark of friendship between them.
Now that Daisy’s attention was focused on the pyramid, Cass tried motioning to Owen again. But Owen refused to acknowledge her in any way—even though, she was sure, he could see her out of the corner of his eye.
“He’s just as bad as the rest of them,” Cass grumbled. “I don’t know why I thought he was nice.”
She stopped talking in order to listen to the conversation that was taking place outside.
“Most important night of the year,” Daisy was saying, “maybe the most important night of our lives—and we’re stuck out here.”
“G-go ahead, I’ll watch the k-kids,” said Owen.
“Really?”
“Sure. One of us should g-get to see w-what’s happening.”
“I don’t know...”
“Oh, g-go on. Stay in the b-back. No one will see you. And I won’t t-tell anyone.”
“All right. Just for a second. But I’ll come back before they’re through. And thanks—”
As soon as Daisy left, Owen slipped into the room. Cass refused to acknowledge him.
“Dudes. Time to bail,” he said. “There’s a phone at an old ranger station three miles down. But you gotta steer clear of the road ’til then. Soon as Daisy’s back, they’ll be all over you.”
Cass eyed Owen in confusion. It was like a whole new person had walked into the room. Her butler had gone from stutterer to surfer in sixty seconds.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you like a spy or something?”
“Or something. Here, tie me with this—so they don’t think I helped spring you guys.”
He held out a length of phone cord. (Cass was glad to see that his hand, now bare, was the hand of a young person.)
“Wow, I’ve never met a spy before,” said Max-Ernest. “I knew spies were real, though. Well, I didn’t know know—”
“Just tie me up, and haul,” said Owen. “As it is, I put your chances at about ten percent. Wait any longer, your little butts are history.”
Cass and Max-Ernest held up their bags. They’d already packed in preparation for an escape.
But Cass wasn’t exactly prepared to follow Owen’s plan.
“We can’t leave yet,” she said as she and Max-Ernest started winding the cord around Owen. “You know the kid, Benjamin Blake—he’s in the pyramid, isn’t he? They’re going to kill him, right?”
Owen didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.
“He goes to our school,” said Cass.
“So? That leaves more milk cartons for you two.”
Cass couldn’t tell if he was serious. “He’s why we came,” she said.
“Well, he’s why she came. And she’s why I came,” Max-Ernest amended, looking at Cass. “Anyway, she’s right, we have to save him,” he added quickly.
Owen scoffed. “Reality check. You’re children and there’s a hundred people in there. And these guys— they’re so full-on spooksville you can’t even imagine.”
“Man, they get through with you, you’ll wish you had a lobotomy.”
Cass held up a scarf. “Are we supposed to gag you with this?”
Owen nodded. And before he could say anything else she tied it around his mouth.
“Thanks, Owen.”
“Yeah, thanks...man,” said Max-Ernest.
Owen grunted in frustration. The kids had done such a good job tying him up that he was helpless to stop them.
“By the way,” said Cass, walking out, “your surf talk needs work. Your stutter sounded more realistic.”
The spa was empty; everyone was inside the pyramid.
Even so, Cass and Max-Ernest tried not to make any noise as they entered the hall of mirrors that was Ms. Mauvais’s office. Better to be safe.
“There has to be a secret door in here,” whispered Cass. “I’ve been everywhere else—it’s the only place it could be.”
Max-Ernest nodded—and a hundred reflections nodded with him. He and Cass both started walking around the periphery of the room—he clockwise, she counterclockwise—examining the edges of all the mirrors. Until they met in the middle of the wall opposite the office door.
Max-Ernest stared at the mirror in front of them.
“Will you stop looking at my ears,” said Cass, who was having trouble avoiding them herself. “I’m not cutting them off, I don’t care what anybody says!”
“I wasn’t even looking at your ears. I was just thinking—isn’t the pyramid this way?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Well, wouldn’t you want a window here, to see it? I mean, unless there was something behind the mirror—”
Cass pushed on the mirror—it opened immediately.
There was a flash of blond hair—
They both gasped—Ms. Mauvais!
No, they saw when they looked again, it was just a wig, sitting on a mannequin head.
“Must be an extra,” said Cass, breathing hard.
“She wears a wig?” said Max-Ernest, sounding almost disappointed.
“Yeah, and probably a fake nose, too,” said Cass, sounding almost like she was gloating.
Cass closed the panel door and tried the next one. Behind it stood an old wooden filing cabinet such as you might have found in a doctor’s office in a previous century.
Sitting on top of the filing cabinet was—
“I knew they took it,” said Cass.
—the Symphony of Smells. Max-Ernest started to pull it down, but Cass stopped him.
“It’s too heavy. Let’s get it on the way out.”
“OK, but don’t you at least want to peek in here—?” he said, indicating the file cabinet.
Before she could close the second panel door, Max-Ernest pulled open a drawer and started flipping through files.
“Look—the Bergamo Brothers.”
He picked out the file and opened it in his hands. Old faded newspaper clippings fell out, showing Pietro and Luciano performing in the circus as children.
Quickly, Cass and Max-Ernest looked through the rest of the files in the drawer. There were about a dozen, each containing information on a different child. All the children were prodigies of some sort: musicians, artists, poets, mathematicians, some of them born as much as a hundred and fifty years ago. One file had a picture of a beautiful Chinese girl playing the violin. Cass and Max-Ernest looked at it sadly, remembering the girl described in Pietro’s notebook.
Attached to the photos and newspaper clippings, detailed charts described the children’s medical conditions; almost all of them ended with the word deceased next to a date.
“You think she killed all of them?” asked Max-Ernest. “I wonder why she didn’t kill Luciano.”
“I don’t know, maybe she liked him too much. And then he got too old or something. Or maybe she wanted a collaborator....C’mon, we don’t have time,” said Cass shutting the drawer. “Who knows what they’re doing to Benjamin in there!”
The next panel was a door.
Stepping through it, Cass and Max-Ernest found themselves in a small, vault-like library crammed with books—piles and piles of books—all of them, you could tell at a glance, rare and priceless. Some were gilded and encrusted with jewels. Others were studded with brass and bound with leather straps. Some looked so old that they would turn to dust if you touched them. It was like walking into a treasure trove of books, hoarded by pirate librarians.
As Cass searched for hidden doors and passageways, Max-Ernest couldn’t take his eyes off the books; he started thumbing through them almost against his will. While many of them had bindings of great beauty, their insides held nothing but horrors. Even the most casual inspection revealed etchings of nightmarish creatures like two-headed men and three-headed dragons, women with bat wings and monsters born in glass bowls. There were fiery planets and stormy oceans. There were ancient maps to places you should never go. Instructions for experiments you should never try. And memory keys for secret codes best forgotten.
“Hey, Cass,” Max-Ernest whispered over his shoulder. “Have you ever heard of alchemy?”
“Sure, it’s like wizard stuff,” she answered from the other side of the room.
“Yeah, but there are real alchemists, too. At least, there were people who really tried it. Listen to this—” said Max-Ernest. “‘Alchemy holds that all life is made of One Thing. Traditionally, this thing is called the Philosopher’s Stone—although it is not so much a stone as a secret formula. If they could only find it, alchemists believed that they could turn lead into gold, and that they could make themselves immortal.’ Doesn’t that sound like what Dr. L was talking about? Remember—‘the True Science’ where everything is one?”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Cass, not really listening. “But come look at this—”
Okay, I have a confession to make.
Max-Ernest didn’t really read that passage aloud. He saw a reference to alchemy in a book, asked Cass if she knew what it was, then put the book down. Those words describing alchemy—I wrote them myself. You won’t find them anywhere else, certainly not in a jewel-encrusted book in a library next to a pyramid.
The thing is, I didn’t know how else to slip in the information, and you’re going to need it in order to understand the pages ahead.
Also, I have to admit, I’ve begun to care about you to some small—very small—degree. And what is that expression—forewarned is forearmed? After all, being able to grasp what is going on in a book is one thing, being able to survive it is another.
You see, Ms. Mauvais’s spa wasn’t really a spa—or not only a spa. It was home to one of the oldest and most powerful, and by far the most sinister group of alchemists in the world—they who call themselves the Masters of the Midnight Sun.* And while they had not yet discovered the Secret, they had plenty of secrets already—and dangerous ones at that.
If only Cass and Max-Ernest had had the same advantage I’m giving you! Then they might have taken Owen’s advice and run home while they could. Instead, they acted like heroes—that is to say, foolishly, without regard to safety or common sense.
You, I trust, will not make the same mistake.
Now, back to the story:
“I’m sure it leads to the pyramid; it’s got to,” said Cass as Max-Ernest joined her in the back of the library.
She was standing in front of a bronze door embossed with Egyptian hieroglyphs—
On second thought, let’s have a chapter break. I don’t know about you, but I could sure use it.
I’m sure it leads to the pyramid; it’s got to,” said Cass as Max-Ernest joined her in the back of the library.
She was standing in front of a bronze door embossed with Egyptian hieroglyphs. The door was hardly hidden or secret, but it was much smaller than average, and partly blocked by books. It looked like the door to a safe, or perhaps to a tomb—a door designed to keep people out, n
ot to let people in.
In the exact center of the door there was a large dial surrounded by the letters of the alphabet: a combination lock.
“There must be a secret password,” she said. “But how do we figure it out?”
“Maybe there’s a clue somewhere...”
“Sure, if we knew how to read hieroglyphics.” Cass was already feeling discouraged.
“Can you read English?”
Max-Ernest pointed—
Surrounding the hieroglyphics, intermingled with lotus blossoms and scarabs and all sorts of unidentifiable Egyptian designs, were words written not in an ancient Egyptian language but rather in plain English.
When you put them together, this is how they read:
WHAT WORD BEGINS THE BEGINNING?
WHAT IF YOU ERASED THE END OF LIFE, AND REPLACED IT WITH THE CENTER OF JOY?
NOW END AS YOU BEGAN.
FOR YOUR NAME IS A MIRROR. AND YOU ARE THE REFLECTION OF US ALL.
“It’s some kind of riddle, right?” asked Cass, tilting her head to make sure she’d read all of it. “Like the Riddle of the Sphinx?”
Max-Ernest didn’t say anything. His brow was furrowed in concentration.
“You think if we solve it, we’ll have the combi–nation?”
“Yes! Let me think,” said Max-Ernest, annoyed.
“Well, you better hurry, because Benjamin Blake—”
“I know!”
“‘What word begins the beginning?’” Cass read aloud. “The beginning of what?”
“Will you please just—”
“See what it’s like when the other person keeps— Well, did you get it?”
Suddenly, Max-Ernest was smiling. “Just the beginning part—it’s the oldest one in the book.”
“OK, what is it?”
“The.”
“The? The what?”
“Just the. The first word of the words ‘the beginning’ is the.”
“It can’t be that simple.”
“A lot of riddles are like that. I should know—I’ve read over ten thousand of them.”
“OK, if you say so,” said Cass doubtfully. “What’s the next part? The end of life is death, right? But how do you replace death with joy? Does that mean you’re happy that someone’s dead? I guess if you’re like Ms. Mauvais or Dr. L—”
The Name of This Book Is Secret Page 15
