Guns? Emma thought. What would we do if we found guns?
“Maybe there’s something hidden behind these shelves,” Natalie said, tugging on the wood frame of one that held boxes of granola bars. “Chess, what did you do to get the bookshelf back in your Mom’s office to move?”
“I’m not sure,” Chess admitted with a gulp.
His face looked pale, as if he was just as distressed as Emma at the idea of guns.
“I’ll go look,” Emma said.
She ducked back out of the secret room and peered down at the empty bookcase/door, which still hung completely open. To her surprise, Chess followed her.
“Chess, you didn’t know Mom had this secret room down here, did you?” Emma asked.
“What? No,” he said. He held up his right hand. “Scout’s honor.”
Emma believed him.
“So when you opened the door . . .”
“I was just standing on the top of the bookcase,” Chess said. He peeked toward the secret room, then back at Emma. “Well, I kind of kicked the wall, too, but that was by mistake.”
He brushed his fingers against a scuff mark on the wall.
“And then?” Emma said. “Is that when the shelf moved?”
“Yes,” Chess said. “Er, no, first I tried to dig my toes in to keep from falling. And that’s when the shelf moved and I did fall.”
“Then maybe it’s something right where the bookshelf and the wall meet,” Emma suggested. She felt along the back of the shelf. “Oh!”
Emma’s finger brushed a tiny button that looked like nothing more than a small defect in the wood. The shelf began to move back toward the wall.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Emma screamed. She jammed her body between the shelf and the wall.
Chess tugged on her arm, trying to pull her away.
“What are you doing?” he yelled. “You’ll get hurt!”
“No! Finn and Natalie will get trapped!” Emma yelled back at him, keeping her shoulder wedged in place.
The bookshelf-door ground to a halt as soon as it touched her arm. It sagged a little, half-open, half-shut.
“Did we break it?” Chess asked.
“I—I don’t know,” Emma whispered.
Then Natalie and Finn were there, peeking out from the secret room.
“What’s all the shouting about?” Natalie asked irritably.
“We found the button that makes the bookshelf move,” Emma told her. She looked at the awkward way the shelf tilted. “But now maybe it’s stuck.”
“Worry about that later,” Natalie said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Come see what we found.”
“It’s a lever!” Finn said excitedly. “We can all try it together.” He scrunched up his face. “Do you think we’re really going to find guns? Remember how Mom always said she wanted to protect us from guns?”
Emma didn’t answer. She didn’t admit how shaken she still was by the thought of Finn and Natalie being trapped in the secret room. What if the button had stopped working after that, and Emma and Chess couldn’t get Natalie and Finn out?
We would have told Natalie’s mom, Emma thought. She would have figured out how to rescue them. And they would have had plenty of food and water. And money.
But what if there wasn’t enough air in the secret room when the door was shut? What if the lights automatically turned off?
Stop it! Emma told herself.
She turned back toward the bookcase door, to reassure herself that it was still open and there was nothing to worry about. Their cat, Rocket—whom they’d totally ignored, ever since arriving at the house—was just poking his head curiously into the doorway.
“Scat!” Emma yelled at him. “You be safe!”
Rocket turned tail and ran away. Chess looked curiously down at Emma.
“Are you okay?” he muttered.
“Sure,” Emma said.
And then Natalie was showing them the lever.
“At first Finn and I thought it was just part of the top of this shelf, but it sticks out a little,” she said.
“And even though it’s the same color as the wood, it’s actually metal,” Finn added.
“And if you pull it—?” Chess asked.
“Let’s see,” Natalie said.
She reached up and eased the handle down. At first nothing happened. But then the floor jerked—forward a little, back a little, then steadily forward. It made Emma think of a merry-go-round starting up.
“The whole room moves?” Finn crowed delightedly. “Even the walls?”
Emma felt dizzy. The room was rotating, faster and faster and faster. It was like a merry-go-round where you didn’t even have a horse to hang on to.
Emma grabbed the side of one of the shelves. The lights blinked off and on and off again.
“Where’s it taking us?” she shrieked.
“I thought . . . I thought it would just open a secret compartment!” Natalie cried.
“Hold on!” Chess commanded. He grabbed Finn’s arm and Emma’s shoulder. Emma reached one hand back and clutched his hand.
And then the spinning stopped.
“What was that?” Finn asked.
Nobody answered him. Emma glanced back over her shoulder, back toward the opening where she’d seen Rocket’s face just a few moments ago. But now there wasn’t an opening anymore, just row after row of solid shelves blocking the way out.
“The door’s gone!” she cried. “The door’s gone, and now we’re all trapped!”
Twenty-Four
Chess
“Emma, Emma, Emma,” Chess said, patting his sister’s shoulder. “It’s not gone. It just moved. Or—we moved, so it looks like it’s in a different place.”
He pointed off to the left, where a thin sliver of light spread across the floor like an arrow pointing toward a crack in the wall. He was still getting oriented himself. The overhead lights had gone out and come back on and flickered again, and now they were on only dimly, like emergency lights leading out of a burning building or a crashed airplane.
Okay, maybe those aren’t the best comparisons to make. . . .
The floor beneath them gave a shudder, as if it were considering starting up again.
“Let’s get out of here!” Emma cried, running toward the sliver of light and the opening. “Rocket! Rocket, are you okay?”
“Emma . . . ,” Chess began.
But Finn and Natalie ran after her, as if they were just as spooked.
Chess dashed for the door as well, because Emma had infected him with a sudden fear: What if the door closed and he got stuck in the secret room all by himself?
But what if the door closes after we’re out and we never get it back open again? he thought. What if there’s some secret in the hidden room that we need so we can figure out how to find Mom?
Just before he stepped out, he bent down and grabbed a can of green beans from the nearest shelf. He wedged the can against the doorframe, so even if the door tried to shut on its own, the can would keep it propped open.
Then he slammed headfirst into Natalie’s back.
“Oh, sorry,” Chess mumbled. “I wasn’t looking where I was . . .”
Natalie surprised him by clutching his arm.
“Didn’t we leave the light on in your mom’s office?” she asked.
Finn and Emma grabbed on to Chess as well. Chess blinked, trying to make out the familiar furniture of the Boring Room: the desk, the chair, the bookshelves. His eyes adjusted a little to the strangely dim light, but he couldn’t get them to see anything but blank floor and empty walls.
“L-light switch,” Emma said, daring to step away and stride toward the opposite wall.
She hit the wall, and Chess braced for the bright overhead light of the Boring Room to come back on.
A lightbulb flickered and sizzled then steadied, but only sent out a low-wattage glow.
Chess looked down at swirls on the floor—swirls of dust on an otherwise empty concrete floor.
&nbs
p; “This isn’t your mom’s office!” Natalie cried. “We ended up in somebody else’s house!”
Twenty-Five
Finn
“Ian? Mr. and Mrs. Han? Mrs. Childers?” Finn started calling out the names of all the closest neighbors he could think of.
“Shh,” Emma said, grabbing his arm warningly. “We don’t know whose house we’re in.”
“Right,” Finn said in what he thought was a very reasonable tone. “So we should make as much noise as possible, so someone will come down and tell us. Also, so no one thinks we’re sneaking around doing something wrong. Like stealing stuff. The Hans live on one side of us and Mrs. Childers lives on the other, so whichever way that room spun us around, we—”
“Finn,” Chess said sharply. He walked over to the doorway that led out from the little room they were in, into what Finn guessed had to be the room beyond. Chess opened the door a crack, then looked back at the others. “Do either the Hans or Mrs. Childers have a totally empty basement?”
“No, silly,” Finn said, laughing. “Ian Han has more toys than we do in his basement. And Mrs. Childers . . . remember that time she paid us to move her Christmas ornaments down into her basement? Well, she wanted to pay us, but Mom said it was enough that she fed us Christmas cookies. Even though they were kind of stale. And . . .”
Emma pushed past Finn and Chess, and shoved the door leading into the next room completely open. Finn saw a space like the wide-open part of the Greystones’ basement, with tiny half windows at the top letting in murky light.
The light shone down on nothing but a bare concrete floor.
“This basement doesn’t even have carpet,” Emma said. “Don’t the Hans and Mrs. Childers have carpet?”
Natalie turned side to side, facing first one direction, then another. She pointed, and her lips moved silently. Then she looked up at everyone else.
“The main part of your basement was on the side that faced the street,” she said. “So if we’re not in the house to the left or the right, on the same street as you . . . what do you know about the house behind yours, on the next street over? Behind your backyard, I mean?”
“There’s not a house right behind ours,” Chess said. “There’s a bunch of trees.”
“If it weren’t for all those trees, it’d be a great place to play football,” Finn said. “That’s how much space there is before you get to the next street over.”
Emma walked out into the main part of the basement and squinted up at the tiny windows.
“Nothing but bushes,” she muttered. “At least, that’s all we can see from here.” She whirled back toward the others. “It felt to me like we were just spinning, but what if the secret room is on some sort of track? Like . . . a trolley? Could it have carried us all the way to the street behind ours?”
“I guess,” Chess said. But he had his whole face smooshed up into a squint, like he was really saying None of this makes any sense.
“I’ll find out where we are,” Natalie said, yanking her phone from her back pocket. Her thumbs flew, then she looked up, squinting just as hard as Chess. “That’s weird. I don’t have service down here.”
“Then let’s go upstairs!” Finn raced for the stairs. He glanced back to see that nobody else was following him. He paused on the bottom step. “What are you waiting for?”
“Finn . . . ,” Chess began. He pointed back toward the door they’d come through. “Maybe we should just go back to our house. Through the secret room. We probably still have time to pet Rocket a little before Ms. Morales gets worried about us.”
“What if we go back through the secret room and it spins again, and we end up somewhere else?” Emma asked. “Or . . . we get stuck?”
“Why can’t I get my phone to work?” Natalie grumbled. She waved it in the air and held it up toward the nearest window, as if that would make a difference.
Something surprising occurred to Finn.
“Are you all scared?” he asked. “Just because you don’t know where the spinning room took us? Does it scare you that much when you don’t know stuff?” He jumped up to the next higher step. “You should all remember what it’s like to be a second grader. There’s lots of stuff I don’t know or understand, and I’m fine!”
That wasn’t entirely true—if he thought about Mom being gone, he didn’t feel fine at all. But he was fine with the spinning room. He was fine with being in a strange house.
As far as he was concerned, the mystery of it all was a great way to keep his mind off missing Mom.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll make it easy for you. Catch me!”
He dashed up the rest of the stairs and burst through the door at the top crying out, “Hello? I’m lost! Whoever lives here, can you tell me where we are?”
As soon as he was through the door, Finn poked his head around the corner and looked around.
“You all are worrying about nothing!” he called back over his shoulder. “This whole house is empty! We’re not bothering anyone!”
It was a little creepy to see the expanse of bare floor before him. And why wasn’t there more light? Instinctively, Finn gazed toward the place where he’d see the nearest window if he’d come up the basement stairs in his own house.
Oh. There was a window, but it was boarded up, covered with plywood. The only reason any light crept into the house at all was because the plywood was cracked.
Natalie shoved her way up the stairs behind Finn.
“What’s with the windows?” she asked. “Nobody would be able to sell a house with the windows boarded up. Who does that?”
“None of our neighbors,” Finn said. “No one on our street.”
“So is this house on the street behind yours?” Natalie asked.
“Let’s see,” Finn said. He crossed the room before him, which seemed to be about the same size and shape as his family’s living room. He reached for the doorknob of the front door. It was stiff and hard to turn, so by the time he managed to wrench it open, not just Natalie but even Chess and Emma were clustered right beside him.
The door opened in, so everybody had to step back.
Finn saw a crumbling porch first; then a weedy, overgrown yard; and then the tall fences blocking off the houses on either side. The fences soared so high that probably even Chess couldn’t see over them.
They also had rusty, spiky wires lining the top of them.
“Do you recognize where we are now?” Natalie asked, turning from Finn to Emma to Chess. “Does anything look familiar?”
Chess’s face had turned stark white. Emma’s eyes had grown so big it seemed like they’d taken over her face.
It fell to Finn once again to do all the talking.
“I’ve never been here before in my life! None of us have!”
Twenty-Six
Emma
Logic, Emma told herself. Sense. Facts. Think about those, and you won’t panic. We can’t be that far from home.
But even the air seemed to be conspiring against her, making her think otherwise. The weather had been clear and sunny when she and the others had stepped into their own house just—what? Ten or fifteen minutes ago? But the threat of a storm had apparently blown in, just in that short amount of time. The sky now was full of low, ominous clouds, and the air felt murky and thick. It was the kind of air that made it hard for people to breathe if they had asthma. Emma had had a problem with that when she was little; she was just lucky that she’d outgrown it.
Was it coming back now?
Stay logical, Emma reminded herself again. Stay calm.
She made herself take a deep breath of the nasty air.
“This could be the street behind ours, and it’s just changed a lot since the last time we were over here,” she said, trying to force the doubt out of her voice. “We don’t come this way very often because none of us have friends in this direction, and we always go the other way to get out of the neighborhood. And, you know, there are all those trees in the way, so we never really see what�
��s happening on this street. . . .”
“Oh,” Natalie said. “That makes sense. I’ll just look at the GPS location on my phone, and . . .” She peered intently down at her phone, then back up. “Ugh! It’s still not working!”
“Maybe if we walk out to the street, we’ll see something familiar,” Emma suggested, stepping out onto the porch. Finn and Natalie—who was holding the phone up in the air again—followed close behind.
“I think we should go back,” Chess said. He remained right on the threshold, the door open behind him.
Emma’s stomach clenched at the thought of going back through the strange house, back through the secret room—and maybe even back through another round of spinning.
She really wanted to see something familiar and figure out where they were.
And then we can walk back to our house through our own backyard. And tonight back at Ms. Morales’s house, we’ll figure out the code behind Mom’s letter, and we’ll know how to rescue her that way, and we’ll never have to go into that secret room again. At least, not without her being with us, telling us how to work it. . . .
Emma reached back and tugged on Chess’s elbow, throwing him off balance.
“Come on, Chess,” she said. “Where’s your spirit of adventure?” This was something Mom said sometimes; it was amazing that Emma could speak the words without starting to cry. “I just want to look and see if we can find any street signs. Nothing’s going to happen if we walk down this driveway for a minute!”
Chess toppled forward, barely missing stepping on Natalie’s heels.
Maybe Chess’s long, gangly arms caught the edge of the door somehow; maybe there was a breeze that Emma hadn’t noticed. But as soon as Chess was out of the way, the door swung shut behind him with a loud bang.
Chess jumped, knocking his shoulder against the scarred wooden door.
“Oops,” Emma said.
Chess reached back and twisted the doorknob. It didn’t budge.
“We better hope we see something familiar,” he muttered. “Because this door’s locked now. We can’t get back to the secret room!”
Greystone Secrets #1 Page 10