by Chris Colfer
“I do?” Mrs. Peters asked. The Conspiracy Club’s members nodded in agreement, although the principal had no clue what they were getting at.
“Alex and Conner Bailey,” Lindy said, and pointed at her. “We know you know the truth!”
“The truth?” Mrs. Peters asked.
“About what really happened to them!” Cindy said.
Mrs. Peters blinked awkwardly at them. Had she missed something?
“Miss Bailey is living in Vermont with a relative, and Mr. Bailey is being homeschooled,” she said.
Mindy rose from the chair and slammed her hands on the desk. “LIES!” she yelled.
“Ms. Morris, control yourself or I’ll have you escorted out of my office!” Mrs. Peters said.
Mindy quickly sat back down. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Peters,” she said. “Not knowing the truth is like a poison. We know something strange is going on with the Bailey twins, but no one will talk to us.”
“We’ve filed police reports, we’ve consulted private investigators, and we’ve even reached out to the FBI!” Cindy said.
“Everyone only laughs at us,” Lindy said.
Mrs. Peters shook her head in disbelief. “Girls, what exactly do you think happened to the Bailey twins?”
The Conspiracy Club’s members eyed one another. Lindy and Cindy went to the windows and closed the blinds. Wendy shut the door to prevent any eavesdropping. Mindy leaned across the desk as far as she could without climbing it.
“Based on all the evidence we’ve gathered, we believe they’ve been captured by cross-dimensional beings,” Mindy said in total seriousness.
Mrs. Peters had never raised her eyebrows so high. “Cross-dimensional beings?” she asked. “What on earth made you come to that conclusion?”
Mindy got to her feet again and paced around the room. “It all started four years ago,” she explained. “Times were simpler back then; you were just a sixth-grade teacher, and we were just your students. Do you recall a two-week period when Alex and Conner were absent from class?”
“If memory serves me correctly, they had the chicken pox,” Mrs. Peters said.
Mindy laughed. “Chicken pox?” she said. “That’s funny, because usually you can tell if someone has had chicken pox. Isn’t that right, Wendy?”
Wendy put her foot on top of the desk and pulled back her pant leg. Her skin was covered in tiny faded scars.
“Now, that’s the aftermath of chicken pox,” Mindy said. “And yet the Bailey twins returned without a single blemish on their skin. One year later, the Bailey twins were absent again, this time for almost a month! And, mysteriously, Alex never returned.”
“I remember that quite well,” Mrs. Peters said. “They were visiting a relative in Vermont. Alex stayed there to attend a school for advanced learners. I thought it was a rather odd departure, too, but I had to respect her and her mother’s wishes.”
“You know what else was odd? Alex’s behavior shortly before she left!” Mindy said. “Every day at lunch, she would go into the library and pull the same book off the shelf. She held it close to her body and whispered sweet nothings into its spine, like ‘I want to go back’ or ‘Please take me away.’ It was like she was talking to someone!”
“As if her wish was granted, a couple weeks later Alex disappeared!” Lindy said.
“Last year, we cornered Conner on the plane to Germany and asked him about it,” Mindy said. “In an obvious cover-up, he acted like we were crazy and refused to give us an honest answer.”
“Then history repeated itself, because a few days into the trip, Conner vanished!” Lindy said.
“He didn’t vanish,” Mrs. Peters said. “It was very unlike Conner to run off like he and Ms. Campbell did. His mother was very concerned about his behavior, so she decided to homeschool him.”
Cindy looked like it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. “Homeschool? Homeschool, she says!”
“But did you ever see him again physically with your own eyes?” Lindy asked.
“Um… no,” Mrs. Peters said. “But I don’t believe his mother would have a reason to lie to me.”
“We tried to get the truth out of Bree Campbell, but to no surprise, she couldn’t give us a straight answer, either,” Mindy said. “We caught her making a secret phone call in the janitors’ closet. It was hard to hear her conversation, even with the empty glasses we used, but we did hear the word blood many times.”
“Blood, Mrs. Peters! Why would a fifteen-year-old girl be making secret phone calls about blood?” Cindy said.
“And during school hours, no less!” Lindy said.
“Where did Alex really go? What actually happened to Conner? And why is Bree talking about blood in closets?” Mindy asked, in hysterics. “These are the questions that haunt our dreams!”
Mrs. Peters took off her glasses and massaged her eyes. In over thirty years of working in education, she had never dealt with something quite like this.
“Well, you’ve convinced me of one thing,” Mrs. Peters said.
“What?” the girls asked in unison.
“I need to retire,” Mrs. Peters said.
The Conspiracy Club’s members exchanged guilty looks. This had never been their intention. “Mrs. Peters, you can’t retire at a time like this! We need your help uncovering the truth!” Mindy pleaded.
“Then your next principal will have to help you,” she said. “I’ve been working in education for over three decades—I’m too tired to deal with the ever-growing and eccentric needs of teenagers today. It’s a reality I’ve struggled to realize until this moment.”
“But what about the Bailey twins?” Cindy asked.
They looked up at Mrs. Peters with wide eyes oozing with desperation.
“Let me give you some advice,” the principal said. “Let’s pretend your assumptions are right and the Bailey twins did get abducted by something otherworldly—I can’t imagine there would be a way you could prove it. So rather than wasting all this energy trying to solve the impossible, why don’t you relax and enjoy the mystery? Your generation is so wrapped up in technology, and social media, and instant gratification, you don’t realize that ignorance is bliss. Sometimes not knowing is more fun.”
The Conspiracy Club’s members all collectively slumped. They were a little embarrassed at how far they had taken their theories.
“You know, it would be nice to have a good night’s sleep,” Mindy said.
“My 4.0 GPA has slipped down to 3.98,” Cindy said. “I never thought an obsession would be so time-consuming.”
“To be honest, I’ve been neglecting my pets,” Lindy said. “Now I get why my gerbil has been so moody lately.”
Mrs. Peters smiled at them. “You see, there are so many other facets to your lives that are more deserving of your attention.”
“It might be nice to start reading again.” Mindy shrugged.
“Yeah, I miss reading!” Cindy said.
“It sure was less stressful than solving conspiracies,” Lindy said.
“Then is it safe to say the Reading Club has returned?” Mrs. Peters asked.
The girls shared a smile and nodded. The Book Huggers were back.
“Thanks, Mrs. Peters,” Mindy said. “I hope we didn’t actually drive you to retirement.”
Mrs. Peters laughed. “You were just a drop in the ocean, dear,” she said. “Now I think it’s time you went back to class.”
The Book Huggers moseyed out of her office, each feeling a little lighter than when they entered. However, their time together had the opposite effect on their principal. Mrs. Peters stared off into space in total silence for the rest of the afternoon. The more she thought about their conversation, the more she started to believe their paranoia might have been warranted.
Retirement wasn’t the only thing the Book Huggers had persuaded her of; Mrs. Peters was now consumed with suspicions of her own about the Bailey twins.…
the NIGHT SHIFT
Unbeknownst to mo
st tourists who visit Manhattan, the city’s great Central Park is the home of a small castle. Belvedere Castle sits in the middle of the park between Turtle Pond and Seventy-Ninth Street and is made of gray bricks and covered in ivy. The castle acts as a visitor center and offers spectacular views of the lawns and skyscrapers surrounding the park.
It was built in 1869 and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Since the early 1900s, the National Weather Service has measured the speed and direction of wind with instruments installed in the castle’s tallest tower. However, most important for the sake of this story is that the castle was cleaned three nights a week by a janitor named Rusty Bagdasarian.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening, Rusty would leave his home in Brooklyn at nine o’clock and take the train into the city. From ten o’clock to four in the morning, he swept the stone floors, washed the stained-glass windows, and sang along to his favorite songs on the radio. The large open rooms and solid walls gave a nice reverb, convincing Rusty he was far more vocally gifted than he actually was.
At the end of every shift, Rusty climbed up to the castle’s tallest tower and looked out over Central Park and the city beyond it with pride. No matter how many times he saw the stunning view, it never lost an ounce of its splendor. As far as Rusty was concerned, New York City was the most magnificent place in the world. It was a city of concrete, lights, dreams, opportunities, and life, and the janitor felt lucky to be a part of it.
Naturally, working nights in Central Park had its downside. Occasionally Rusty would find a homeless person sleeping inside the castle or catch a gang of delinquents defacing it, but never anything a quick call to the police couldn’t solve. It wasn’t until a particular Monday night that Rusty witnessed the most bizarre thing he had ever encountered—in the castle and in his life.
It was five minutes after one AM, and Rusty was cleaning the windows. He belted out the lyrics to a song on his radio that was sung by a pop princess about breaking up with a famous actor.
“You’re oh-so-Hollywood, like every bad boy should—but what you didn’t see, was that you needed meeee!” Rusty sang along, oblivious to everything but the lyrics and the windows. “You’ve got that soap-star pout, that most girls dream about—but what you cannot say, is that, boy, you’re—”
Suddenly, a soft vibration traveled through the castle. It pulsated, growing stronger and stronger until the entire castle rattled. Rusty took cover under the nearest table, but the tremor lasted only a few moments.
“Must have been an earthquake,” Rusty said to himself.
He did a quick walk-through of the castle to make sure no damage had been done and then returned to the windows and his song. At the end of his shift, he locked up the castle and headed home, passing a homeless man on his way to the subway station.
“Quite an earthquake earlier, huh?” Rusty asked.
“What earthquake?” the man said.
“The one that happened a couple hours ago,” Rusty explained. “You didn’t feel it?”
“All I felt was a nasty headache brought on by your terrible singing!” he said.
The homeless man was only a few yards away from the castle—how could he not have felt it? Rusty figured he must have slept through it, or maybe was a bit delusional. When Rusty got home, he flipped through the morning news programs, but there was no mention of an earthquake on any of the stations.
“I must have imagined it,” he decided, and didn’t spend any more time thinking about it.
A few weeks later, on another Monday night shortly after one o’clock in the morning, Rusty was back at work sweeping the floors of the castle while he listened to his radio. A song came on by a young man who sang like he was going through puberty, but the lyrics were so catchy, Rusty couldn’t help singing along.
“You give me diabetes, because your love is so sweet—girl, you are my insulin, without you I’m incomplete! My heart keeps break-break-breaking, and I keep drink-drink-drinking, can’t stop eat-eat-eating, because I’m think-think-thinking, about yooou, baby—”
Just as it had a few weeks before, a light vibration filled the castle. It grew stronger with every pulsation, each becoming twice as strong as the previous one. Rusty was so surprised that he didn’t shield himself. He just watched the castle quivering around him, knowing it definitely wasn’t a hallucination this time. It lasted twice as long as it had before, and as soon as it ended, Rusty dialed the police.
“New York Police Department,” a woman answered.
“Hello, I’m calling to report… well, an earthquake,” he said.
“An earthquake? Sir, usually people don’t report earthquakes.”
“I understand, but this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced it, and I figured someone should know about it,” Rusty said. “I work nights at Belvedere Castle in Central Park, and I believe it may be on top of a very active fault line.”
“Sir, we get these kinds of calls all the time,” the woman said calmly. “What you’re experiencing is a train passing underground beneath you.”
Rusty felt like a complete moron. He took the subway to work every day, yet it had never crossed his mind.
“Right,” he said. “That must be what it is. Forgive me for calling. Have a nice night.”
Rusty got off the phone and had a good laugh at his own paranoia.
That night on his way home, a subway map on the wall of the station caught his eye as he waited for his train. He inspected it and traced all the routes through the city, but there didn’t appear to be a track that went under Central Park anywhere near Belvedere Castle.
When his train arrived, he approached the front car and tapped on the operator’s window.
“Can I help you?” the operator asked.
“Yes. Do you by chance know of any trains that travel below Central Park near Belvedere Castle?” Rusty asked.
“Belvedere Castle?” the operator asked.
“Yes, it’s between Seventy-Ninth Street and Turtle Pond,” Rusty said.
The operator looked over a similar map on the wall behind him.
“Doesn’t look like the subway goes under that part of the park,” the operator said. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” Rusty said. “Thank you.”
His original hunch must have been correct—the castle probably sat right on top of a fault line.
The next day, Rusty went to the library and found a massive book on plate tectonics. It had maps of all the existing fault lines beneath New York. He traced the map with his finger, expecting to find one right below Central Park—but there were none remotely close to the castle.
Rusty paced around his apartment for the rest of the day, trying to figure out what else could be causing the tremors in the castle. Before he pursued anyone else’s help about the matter, Rusty figured it would be good to have proof.
He purchased an old video camera from a thrift store. Every night he worked at the castle, he placed the camera on a shelf and left it recording as he cleaned around it. For weeks and weeks, Rusty recorded every moment of his shifts, with no luck.
Over time, Rusty lost interest and stopped bringing his camera to work. He figured the earthquakes—or whatever they had been—had just been rare phenomena and probably wouldn’t return. Then, late one Friday night, as he wiped the railings of the main balcony, he discovered he was wrong.
Unlike the previous instances, there was no soft vibration to warn him. Belvedere Castle violently shook as if it were inside a giant snow globe. Rusty was almost knocked off the balcony, and he desperately held on to the railing. The quake was three times as strong as the first one, and a large crack traveled across the balcony floor. A few windows in the towers shattered, raining shards of glass over the terrified janitor.
Rusty looked around the castle in a panic and saw a bright flash just a few feet in the air above the balcony. At first he thought it had been caused by something electrical—perhaps the weather instruments in the tower had bee
n damaged. Then, suddenly, just for a split second, he could have sworn he saw a thick and endless forest replace the view of New York City around the castle—but before he realized what he was looking at, the forest was gone and the city reappeared.
Eventually the rumbling stopped, but Rusty was too afraid to move, and he continued clutching the railing. Whatever he had experienced was definitely not earthquakes. Rusty feared the tremors were just the beginning of something much worse and more complex headed for Belvedere Castle.…
GOOSE/COLFER: the INTERVIEW of a LIFETIME
moderated by MOTHER GOOSE
Hello to all the wonderful readers of the Land of Stories series and the parents who buy books for them! Mother Goose here—the senior citizen most likely to be under a citizen’s arrest!
Recently, I took a trip to Las Vegas with my favorite literary sorcerer, Merlin (hands off, ladies, the wizard’s mine!). In between playing card games and slot machines and running from loan sharks, Merlin and I took a stroll down a row of shops and passed a bookstore (although I don’t know who has time to read in Sin City). Wouldn’t you know it, displayed in the window were the Land of Stories books by Chris Colfer.
Well, I was just floored! I couldn’t believe the pasty little boy the fairies and I met two decades ago had managed to turn our stories into a bestselling series! Regardless of their success, I thought his books could use a little oomph. So, to help him out, I decided to put together this editorial piece to get the attention of new readers.
I met up with Chris at his home in Los Angeles to talk about everything related to the Land of Stories series and ask him the questions on every twelve-year-old’s mind. Little did I know it would be the greatest journalistic endeavor since Frost/Nixon (look it up, kids). Our discussion went as follows.
MOTHER GOOSE: Howdy, Chris! Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to have a chat with me!
CHRIS COLFER: How did you get inside my house?