Greystone Secrets #1

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Emma wanted so badly to figure out how the tunnel worked. Maybe the spinning opened the tunnel, and then the section of the room with shelves snapped back to being part of the Greystones’ house again? And maybe the tunnel stayed open if . . .

  “Everybody okay?” Chess asked, in such a grim voice that Emma could tell he was thinking, Mom isn’t. She’s in danger.

  Emma forgot about figuring out the tunnel and took a wobbly step toward the door.

  “It smells as bad as before,” Finn said, wrinkling up his nose. “Maybe worse.”

  “Burning rubber?” Natalie said, sniffing the air. “Dead mice? Formaldehyde?”

  “Everything horrible, all at once,” Chess said, as if he were ending the discussion. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He went through the door first, stepping out into darkness. After he switched on the light, the others followed, and Natalie started to shut the door behind them.

  “No!” Emma exclaimed. “Last time Chess put a can in the doorway to prop it open. We have to do everything the same!”

  The others watched her grab a can of peaches from a shelf and wedge it into the doorway. Nobody said anything.

  Do I feel so terrible now just because I’m worried about Mom and I don’t really understand the alternate world? Emma asked herself. Or is there something about this place that really messes with your mind?

  Maybe it was just the trip through the spinning room that had thrown her off. If that really had been a journey between alternate dimensions, no wonder she felt disoriented.

  Emma rubbed her forehead and shoved her hair back from her face.

  One, she told herself. Two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .

  At least she could remember how to count now.

  I should have stayed up all night and figured out how to translate the rest of Mom’s code, she told herself. That probably explains everything we want to know.

  All they had to do was grab a poster and go back to Ms. Morales. Maybe if Ms. Morales decided to call the cops, there’d be cops who could help with the code. Maybe they’d figure it out in a matter of minutes. Emma was only a little girl—why had she thought she could do anything?

  Stop that! she told herself. What’s wrong with you?

  She grabbed Finn’s hand, then Chess’s.

  “Come on!” she said.

  She saw Natalie put her hand on Finn’s shoulder.

  All four of them walked through the empty basement and up the stairs in a clump, almost like a single creature—an amoeba, maybe. The first floor of the house was still empty, the windows still boarded up.

  “It is like our house,” Finn whispered, peering around, his eyes wide. “Our house without us, and without Mom and without Rocket, and really, really sad. . . .”

  They burst out of the house, and Emma wanted to gulp in fresh air. But the air outside smelled just as bad, only bad in a different way.

  More like burning rubber, less like rotting dead mice? she thought.

  Still, it was a smell that beckoned Emma forward, as if a smell could whisper, Come see. You have to find the source, to destroy it. So you don’t have to live with this forever. You have to look now. . . .

  “We should prop this door open, too,” Chess said firmly, and Emma saw that he’d carried a can of corn up from the basement.

  “Good thinking,” Natalie said.

  Were her teeth chattering? Was Natalie that scared?

  “Check your phone,” Emma suggested.

  Natalie barely glanced at the screen.

  “No signal,” she whispered.

  Chess left the can in the door, and they all inched forward: off the porch, down the driveway. . . .

  “Do you feel like . . . like we’re going through patches of fog?” Emma asked. “Only it’s patches of feelings? Hope, fear, hope, fear . . . And it goes along with how strong the smell is?”

  “Yes!” Natalie said.

  “I thought I was the only one feeling that!” Finn said. “I thought I was going crazy!”

  “Shh,” Chess said. He pointed. They’d reached the end of the driveway and the edge of the tall, faded, multicolor fence. And out in the street, people were walking by in clumps.

  “Is that . . . Mrs. Childers?” Emma whispered. The white-haired woman, who’d been their friendly, chatty next-door neighbor for as long as Emma could remember, walked by without even looking at them. Though maybe it wasn’t her after all—her face seemed to have extra lines and wrinkles, as if she’d started frowning and squinting all the time. She was a lot thinner, too. And she was wearing a shirt that was bright orange and navy blue, the same colors as the jackets of the teenaged boys they’d seen before.

  Did the high school change its school colors, and nobody told me? Emma wondered.

  The Mrs. Childers they knew wouldn’t have bothered dressing in a sports team’s colors any more than Emma would.

  How different could people be in this world?

  “I don’t think anybody is going to know us here,” Chess whispered back. “If anybody remembers us, it would be from when we were really little kids, and we didn’t look the same. . . .”

  “Except for Natalie,” Finn chimed in.

  Natalie flipped the hood of her sweatshirt over her head, hiding her hair and the top part of her face.

  “Maybe we should get away from standing in front of this house,” Natalie said. “Just in case.”

  Without even discussing a direction, they all turned and started following Mrs. Childers and the other clusters of people. None of the people around them were talking. Many of them were wearing the same shades of orange and blue as Mrs. Childers, but their grim expressions made it seem more like they were headed to a funeral than to a sporting event.

  Is there anyone in the crowd who doesn’t look afraid? Emma wondered. Even the littlest children—also mostly dressed in orange or blue—cowered against their parents’ shoulders. One toddler actually seemed to be trembling with fear. No, wait, now everybody looks angry. And . . . now it’s back to fear again. . . .

  Was it possible for lots of people to have their feelings controlled all at once? Maybe by a smell?

  But who’s doing it? Emma wondered. And why?

  “There’s a sign on that pole, up on the corner,” Chess murmured. “But I can’t see. . . .” He took two long strides forward, breaking off from the others.

  Emma stretched out her legs to catch up with him. Beside her, Finn and Natalie did the same. Finn was almost running.

  “It’s—” Finn began, and Emma clapped her hand over his mouth so he couldn’t give them away.

  It was Mom’s face on the sign.

  Good, Emma told herself. That’s what we wanted. Now grab the sign and run back to the house, back through the tunnel or the spinning room, whatever takes us back to Ms. Morales. . . . That’s all you have to do!

  But it was so terrible to see her beloved mother’s face under the dark, nasty words “CRIMINAL CAUGHT!” It was indisputably Mom—and her name, “Kate Greystone,” appeared directly below, along with the words “Enemy of the People.” But this was a picture of her mother Emma had never seen before. Maybe it had just been taken, after she was captured—or maybe it was altered. Everything strong about Mom’s face looked defiant and ugly. Everything hopeful looked mocking.

  She still looked like Mom, but she also looked like a criminal. Or an enemy.

  Emma dropped her gaze, forcing herself to read the rest of the sign:

  PUBLIC TRIAL AND SENTENCING

  ALL MUST ATTEND

  SATURDAY, MAY 9

  10 A.M.

  PUBLIC HALL

  Emma’s eyes darted back to the time: 10 a.m.

  “Natalie!” she whispered. “Check your phone! What time is it?”

  Natalie didn’t move fast enough. Emma reached over and yanked the phone out of Natalie’s sweatshirt pocket. She hit the button to light up the screen.

  The clock numerals glowed in white: 9:45.

  “
We don’t have time to go back to Ms. Morales!” Emma gasped. “We have to go rescue Mom now!”

  Forty-Two

  Chess

  “Cover for me,” Chess said, reaching for the sign on the pole. “Don’t let anyone see.”

  Emma grabbed his arm.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” she demanded. “There isn’t time for that plan! That sign doesn’t matter now!”

  Even with Emma tugging on him, Chess kept moving his arm forward.

  “Here’s what we do,” he said. His voice came out sounding deceptively calm and steady. “You and Finn take this sign back to Ms. Morales. Tell her everything. Natalie and I will go rescue Mom.”

  The plan seemed so clear and perfect in his brain. Finn and Emma would be safe this way. They’d be with grown-ups. Maybe even cops. But as Chess yanked on the paper sign, he also turned to glance at Emma.

  And she couldn’t have looked more betrayed and hurt if Chess had balled up his fist and smashed it into her face, full force.

  “You don’t think we can help,” she whispered.

  “You’d still be helping,” Chess said. He held out the sign to her. “Just in a different way. By getting Ms. Morales to help.”

  “No,” Finn said. He crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Right,” Emma said, mimicking his stance. “I say no, too. You can’t make us go back, Chess.”

  Had they been taking lessons all week from how Natalie treated her mother?

  “Don’t you understand?” he began.

  What was he going to tell them? Dad died in this horrible place. He was murdered. Do you want that to happen to us? We’re just a bunch of kids; what can we do to rescue Mom? Don’t you see how even Natalie is terrified, too? Did you see how she had her phone primed to call 911 the whole time we were walking through our own house, in case someone was still there, and jumped out at us? And now there’s no way to call 911? And maybe the police here are the bad guys, if they arrested Mom?

  “We understand that we have to rescue Mom,” Emma said. “Don’t you wish you could have done something to rescue Dad before he died?”

  She understood enough. She’d found the one thing to say that would change Chess’s mind.

  “I—” Chess began. He looked down at the poster in his hand. It didn’t seem real. There wasn’t enough time. Why hadn’t they figured out a way to come last night, as soon as they knew about the alternate world?

  Because we didn’t want to believe any of this was real . . .

  To the others, he settled for saying, “We don’t even know where this ‘Public Hall’ is!”

  “I think we can just follow everyone else,” Natalie said. “‘All Must Attend.’”

  She was reading from the sign.

  Chess stuffed it into the pocket of his windbreaker—his dark green windbreaker, which looked out of place in the midst of so many people wearing navy blue and orange. At least Natalie’s sweatshirt was black, which sort of blended in. But Emma’s T-shirt was maroon, and Finn’s was a bright yellow. They might as well be wearing signs that spelled it out: “We don’t belong here.”

  Or maybe, “Arrest us, too.”

  “Fine,” he told Natalie, biting off the word in a way that made her wince. He tried to soften his voice, but it came out more like a bark. “Let’s walk fast.”

  He couldn’t understand what Emma had meant about going through the patches of feeling—fear, hope, fear, hope, fear. . . . For him, as they moved forward in a group—trying not to be too conspicuous about passing other groups ahead of them—he felt more like he was on a constant downward slide into despair.

  We don’t even have a plan, he thought. We can’t have a plan because we don’t know where Mom is being held or how many guards are around her. We don’t know anything about this public hall or how a trial and sentencing works here. And maybe I don’t understand anything about alternate worlds. I thought there were supposed to be similarities beyond the design of one house and people with the same names being in both worlds. Nothing looks familiar around us—nothing!

  This last part, Chess realized, wasn’t entirely true. The houses they passed were all fenced off or hidden behind towering hedges, so he could barely see any of them. But when they turned a corner, he saw a small pond off to the right. It was the same size and shape as the retaining pond in his own neighborhood. But the pond back home had lilac and forsythia behind it, with picnic tables, a small playground, and a winding bike path off to the side.

  This pond looked muddy and dark, surrounded by nothing but sparse blades of dying grass. Any picnic tables or playground equipment that might have once stood nearby had been swallowed up in dense, thorny-looking bushes and trees.

  Why is it different? Chess wondered. What happened here?

  Had Mom seen all this when she sneaked back to this world to try to rescue the three other kids named Rochester, Emma, and Finn? Had she understood what the alternate world was like? Had it been this bad back when Chess’s family had lived here?

  Chess remembered that the boys who’d recognized Natalie had said “the criminal” was captured by SWAT teams right on the same street as the abandoned house. No matter how much Mom knew or understood, her plan had failed before she even got off the first block.

  So what hope is there for us kids? he wondered.

  He kept walking forward anyhow.

  After they’d gone six or eight blocks, the scenery changed even more: The street opened out into a wide boulevard with imposing buildings on either side. Maybe as the neighborhood Chess knew was falling apart, this part of the town had turned fancy, more like a big city. These buildings were steel and glass and hard to tell apart; they all held enormous banners that swept from their lowest to highest windows. The banners were orange and blue, and maybe they were just for some holiday that existed in the alternate world but not in the world Chess knew. Maybe they were supposed to be festive, like the decorations people put out for July Fourth, Halloween, or Christmas. But these banners were too stiff and formal to seem cheery. They made Chess think more of military flags, as if some invading army had taken over and wanted everyone to know.

  Chess wanted so badly to get away from this strange, unfamiliar street. But so many people surrounded them now that he and the others could no longer dart ahead as a pack, slipping beyond the rest of the crowd. He felt Emma slide her hand into his; when he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that she was also holding on to Finn’s hand, and Finn was holding on to Natalie’s.

  “You lead,” Emma whispered, and Chess nodded. They had to thread their way through the crowd single file now, and holding on to one another was the only way to keep from being separated.

  If we get out of here alive, I’ll have to thank Natalie for being at the end, and making sure Finn doesn’t get pulled away and swallowed up by the crowd, Chess thought.

  Maybe it counted as hopeful that he could even think If we get out of here alive. . . .

  Soon the crowd grew so thick that Chess could no longer see where they were going. If he craned his neck, he could squint up at the murky sky. Otherwise, he couldn’t see past the steel-and-glass buildings with their blue-and-orange banners, or the blue-and-orange clothes of most of the people around him. So he was surprised when he slid his foot forward and clunked it against a marble step. Then there was another one.

  “Stairs!” he called back to Emma, Finn, and Natalie. “Be careful going up the stairs!”

  Others beside him were talking now, too. An excited buzz rose all around him.

  “—heard she wanted to kill us all—”

  “—see her get what she deserves—”

  “—people like that should be punished as severely as—”

  Chess felt sick to his stomach. Were they talking about Mom? His mother, who wouldn’t even kill a spider in the house? He wanted to put his hands over Emma’s and Finn’s ears, so at least they didn’t have to hear. But he could only keep trudging forward and up the stairs, partly carried along by the cro
wd, partly pulling the others along.

  The stairs ended in a long, flat surface, and then the crowd bottlenecked through a pair of narrow doorways. The doors and doorframes were marble, too, and ornately carved. As they squeezed through, Chess’s face pressed painfully against the stone head of a creature that might have been a demon or just a man caught in the worst agony of his life. But on the other side of the doorway, suddenly there was space. Chess saw a giant pit-like auditorium filling before him.

  Okay, we’ve come this far. Now just find Mom. . . .

  After coming in from outside, he would have expected to need time for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior of the Public Hall, or whatever this huge, ornate building actually was. But he had the opposite problem: The glare at the front of the vast, open room was almost too intense to look at. Blinking and squinting helped him realize: The searing light came from a giant screen at the front of the room. It was probably the equivalent of two or three stories high, and maybe the width of a city block.

  A dark shadow blocked the middle of the screen—was it a chair? With someone in it?

  Suddenly the glow of the screen changed. Now there was a spotlight on the chair, and the overpoweringly bright blankness of the screen was replaced with a magnified image of the stage before it. The camera angle zoomed in and panned from the floor up, showing the bolts holding the chair in place, then blue-jeans-covered legs shackled to the rungs of the chair, then two wrists held together by handcuffs.

  It was all wrong: the bolts, the shackles, the handcuffs, even the solitary placement of the chair. Those were all things for criminals, for prisoners, for people who couldn’t be trusted.

  It was all wrong, because Mom was the one sitting in that chair. Chess knew long before the camera reached her face. Maybe he’d even known when the chair was just a dark shadow, a dark blot in the overwhelming glow.

  In spite of everything, Chess felt almost proud that Mom could sit so calmly—imposingly, even—in that cage of a chair. She kept her shoulders back, her head high, her expression firm and clear. This was her “Nobody can hurt me” pose. Chess had seen her look exactly like that in the days and weeks and months after Dad died, every time she left the house.