by Eric Bower
I crawled around to the other side of the house and picked up the bucket beside our well. There was still water in the bucket, which I used to quickly wash the sand from my face and hair, and also to unstick the lizard that had been stuck to my head—that lizard had been a really good sport about the whole thing. I gave it a couple of crumbs as a thank you.
Once I was clean, I tiptoed over to the large tree beside the house and began to climb it as quietly as I could.
Now, you might be surprised to learn that I had yet to trip or fall or bump my head or even stub my toe as I quietly made my way around the Baron Estate. I was pretty surprised about that myself. It could have been the record for the longest I had gone without stumbling or hurting myself, or, at the very least, without knocking over something valuable and breaking it.
And because that thought suddenly occurred to me as I was climbing, I had my first major slip up.
I had climbed the tree trunk and was slowly inching across a branch that led to Aunt Dorcas’s open window, when suddenly my shirt sleeve got caught. It hooked on a splintered branch underneath my arm, and I couldn’t seem to shake myself free.
The shirt that Deputy Buddy Graham let me borrow came down to my knees, and the sleeves were so long that I had to roll them up so I wouldn’t look ridiculous. But as I tried to get my sleeve free from the branch, the other sleeve came unrolled, and suddenly the cuff was hanging six inches over my hand. I couldn’t free my caught sleeve, and I also couldn’t roll up my other sleeve, no matter how hard I tried, so I got frustrated and decided just to pull off the whole stupid shirt and let it fall to the ground. It landed in the well, which meant it was gone for good. I suppose I’m not that shirt smart after all.
I’m sure Deputy Buddy would forgive me for losing his clothing, though.
His body language told me he would.
I carefully crawled across the branch until I reached its end. Aunt Dorcas’s bedroom window was wide open, and the end of the branch was only about three feet away from it. Three feet might not sound like much to you, but when you have to jump three feet from a tree branch into a second story window, where if you fell you had nothing to cushion you except for some rocks and a bunch of thorny rose bushes, then it seemed like a pretty darn long distance to jump. But I didn’t have any choice. It was the only way I could sneak inside. I felt my nerves bubbling in my belly as I prepared to spring like a frog, or a toad, or a . . . well . . . a spring. After taking a deep breath, I dove off the tree branch with my arms outstretched.
I caught the windowsill with my fingertips. I tried to pull myself up and into the window, but it appeared as though I had exhausted my arm strength for the moment, so instead I just hung there like an out-of-shape bat.
As I hung, I felt something tickling my midsection. I looked down just in time to see the rope belt that I’d fashioned come undone, and the next thing I knew, Deputy Buddy’s trousers had fallen into the rose bushes below. I probably wouldn’t be able to remove them from the thorny bushes without ripping a few holes in them.
That meant I owed Buddy yet another apology. I was beginning to lose track of all the apologies I owed him. Maybe I could just give him one giant apology to cover all of the things that I’d done, as well as the things I’d probably do in the future.
Hanging from my aunt’s window, dressed in nothing but my long johns and boots, I gritted my teeth and used every bit of strength I could find to pull myself up and into Aunt Dorcas’s bedroom. I landed rather clumsily (as usual), but I didn’t think I’d made too much noise until I heard my mother call from downstairs.
“Dorcas? Is that you up there? I thought you were going out!”
I sat there and held my breath. My brilliant idea had been to sneak into Dorcas’s room while she was gone, and then wait there until I knew the coast would be clear. Then I could sneak downstairs, slip into the work garage, find the Doppelgänger Device, and use it to prove to my parents that I was the real W.B.
But if my parents already knew that someone was in the house, and they assumed that it was only Dorcas (because frankly, she’s always yelling and crying and shrieking and singing and yodeling and moaning, sometimes all at the same time—so we often don’t listen to her when she tells us things, like that she’s going out, or that she can’t find her ear medicine), so why didn’t I just pretend to be Dorcas?
I’d done it once before, and my imitation of her had been good enough to fool Rose Blackwood. Remember how I said that it was easy to act like W.B.? Well, it’s even easier to act like Aunt Dorcas. You just need to be very weepy and loud, and wear the sort of clothing that makes you feel as though you’re more of a pillow than a person.
I opened her closet and pulled out one of her poofier dresses and one of her fluffier bonnets, since they would cover most of my body, and therefore make the best disguise. As I dug through her closet, I paused when I discovered something on the closet floor, beside her collection of uniquely ugly and bafflingly uncomfortable boots.
It was a single egg.1
It was just sitting there, minding its own business, just like any other polite little egg in a closet. I stared at it for a moment, before shaking my head.
After slipping on a pair of her glasses, frilly gloves, and lacing up her complicated and unnecessarily pointy boots, I used a powder puff to powder my face so it would be as pale as Aunt Dorcas’s.
That, as it turned out, was a horrible mistake. I must have been seriously allergic to the powder, which meant that I couldn’t stop sneezing, and every time I sneezed, my aunt’s very tight and very uncomfortable boots felt as though they were squeezing my feet in a vice grip, so I would shriek.
As I left Aunt Dorcas’s room, with every few steps I took, I sneezed and shrieked.
“AH-CHOO—EEEEEEEEP!”
I began to panic as I made my way down the stairs, wishing that I had skipped the powder. I was drawing more and more attention to myself, which was the dumbest thing a person could do while sneaking around their parents’ home while dressed as their aunt. I might as well have been stomping up and down the stairs and shouting, “Hey! There’s a sneaking person sneaking around here! And it’s me! I’m the sneaker! Just sneaking about sneakily! Call me Sneakers McSneakyboots!”
But as it turned out, putting on the powder was an unintentional stroke of genius. My aunt had been battling terrible allergies due to the all the plants blooming in M’s garden, and she was always shrieking about something or other. So as I shuffled through the house while sneezing and shrieking, my parents and W.B. simply ignored me, just like they would have if I were the real Aunt Dorcas. They didn’t even look up from their lunch, which I saw was red beans and rice, which happened to be one of my all-time favorite lunches. It smelled heavenly. I thought to myself that perhaps I could just sneak a little bowl or two, with some sour cream, and maybe some garlic bread as well, and was that a pie cooling on the window sill? Boy, that pie would sure taste good with some ice cream and—
NO!
I would not allow myself to grow distracted by pie. Again. There would be plenty of time for pie and red beans and rice and garlic toast and . . . you know what? I’m not going to go into detail about the food anymore.
While continuing my sneezes and shrieks, I made my way past the kitchen where P was telling M about a problem he was having with another one of their old inventions. “W.B.” was reading one of his adventure books.
Silly W.B. His nose was always stuck in a book. No wonder he never had any idea what was going on. I cackled quietly to myself as I walked past him. What a fool.
Without making a sound (other than the sneezes and shrieks), I opened the side door and slipped into the work garage. My mother was typically a very organized person, but P was not, which meant that the work garage was a half-organized, half-unorganized work space. That worked just fine for them, but it could make things a bit tricky for people who were snoopi
ng around the work space and looking for a particular invention that could save them from an evil impostor.
Opening cabinets and drawers at random, searching through the stacks of metal and brass and wooden devices piled on top of the work bench, I struggled as I tried to remember exactly what the Doppelgänger Device had looked like. I remembered it was sort of bread-like in shape, with a lot of copper piping around it. There were two buttons on it, one which copied a person, and the other which transformed you into the person who was copied. As I sorted through all of their mysterious devices, I had a rare moment of wishing that I’d paid attention to my parents when they were describing their inventions. That would have made everything much easier.
I found three different devices that could have been the Doppelgänger Device. I laid them out on the workbench and stared at them. They were all a similar color, made from similar gears and springs, with two buttons on either side. In the center of each was a little glass piece that looked as though it belonged on one of P’s microscopes. I looked through all three of the glass pieces, and saw little numbers and letters and funny symbols. People with brains like M and P could look at those numbers, letters, and symbols and somehow make sense of them. I looked at them and saw a homework assignment from Miss Danielle, which I would have to lie about and pretend was eaten by our dog.
(I know this has nothing to do with the story, but I often I wondered if Miss Danielle believed me when I told her that my homework was eaten by our dog. With all of the strange things that happened around the Baron Estate, a homework-eating pet would likely be considered one of my simpler and more believable stories. I mean, I’ve flown across the country in a house, for goodness’ sake. I’ve walked across the ocean floor in an underwater breathing suit. It would be really silly of my teacher not to believe that my homework assignment was eaten by our dog, which was the sort of thing that happened all the time.
In fact, if my family actually had a dog, I think I would have been insulted by her doubts.)
Anyway, I had no choice but to test all three inventions, one by one, until I discovered which one was the Doppelgänger Device.
I picked up the first invention, pointed it at a bucket in the corner of the work garage, and pressed one of the buttons. The device made a weird belching noise as it spat out a beam of light, which I assumed meant that it was copying the bucket. Then I pointed the device at a broom and pressed the other button, expecting the broom to transform into a perfect copy of the bucket.
It did not.
After it was hit by the beam, the broom began to shake and spin like a tornado, bouncing up and down as it was bathed in a twinkle of mysterious light. Suddenly, the broom sprouted wooden arms and legs from its handle, arms and legs which began to move as though the broom had somehow come to life. I stared in wonder as the broom walked up to me, and used its bristles to brush my face as though it was saying hello.
I whispered “hello,” back to the broom and reached out to shake its wooden hand.
I must have done or said something that was considered very offensive to brooms, because then it tried to kill me.
The angry broom chased me all over the work garage, as I tripped and stumbled and sneezed and shrieked. And I’m certain that I would have been pummeled to death by those little wooden fists if I hadn’t grabbed P’s axe from his work bench, and chopped the murderous broom into splintery bits. I breathed a sigh of relief, and then sneezed a sneeze of relief, as I wiped my sweaty forehead with Aunt Dorcas’s sleeve.
I was about to try the next device, when suddenly I heard a series of little scritches and scratches coming from behind me.
I turned around and saw that the chopped bits of the broom had formed into thousands of tiny little brooms, which attacked me again as though they were a tiny broom army! They climbed me like a tree and continued to punch me—though their fists were too small to actually hurt me, it was still very annoying. I found a big bucket of glue beneath the work bench, and after brushing the tiny brooms off me, I poured the glue over them. Once they were stuck together, I dropped a blanket over the whole gluey mess and kicked it underneath the workbench. I could hear the broom bits continue to struggle to unstick themselves and grumbling even though they didn’t have mouths. Splinters don’t give up easily.
After pausing for a moment to think about the truly mad things that happened in my parents’ work garage, I attempted to use the second invention to see if it was the Doppelgänger Device.
This time, I tried to point the device at something smaller and softer than a broomstick, so in case it came to life and attacked me, it wouldn’t hurt quite as much. I pointed the device at some sawdust and pressed a button to copy it. Then I pointed it at a rag, feeling quite confident that, if push came to shove, I could easily beat up a rag. I pressed the second button and a rainbow-colored light shot out of the end of the device.
The rag stirred, and then slowly began to float in the air, twisting and wrinkling itself until it had formed what looked to be a mouth. The mouth began to move, making noises as though it was clearing its throat (even though it didn’t have a throat), and then it began to sing.
“The Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah! Doo-dah! The Camptown racetrack’s five miles long! Oh de doo-dah-dey!”
“Oh, come on . . . seriously?” I groaned, feeling so sick of that song that I could live to be a thousand and never want to hear it again.
My father must have invented the weird singing device back when we still enjoyed hearing “Camptown Races.”I really wished that he wouldn’t use his talents for inventing this sort of nonsense. In fact, I’d rather he invent terrible things like Lefty and Lefty Also’s “Indoor Outhouse.” That invention sounded disgusting but nowhere near as annoying as this.
I grabbed the rag and tried to shush it, using both of my hands to cover its mouth, but the rag kept on singing. Its powerful voice tickled my palms. I began to worry that someone inside would hear it. If all of the screaming and wood chopping hadn’t made them curious about what was going on in the work garage, then certainly the loud and obnoxious singing would. I was forced to do something drastic.
I went to the coal stove in the corner, opened it up to make sure it was burning, and then threw the rag inside.
“Oh de doo-dah-aaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuughhhhhhhhhhh!”
And then it was silent. I closed the stove.
Feeling very pleased with myself for my quick thinking, I turned back towards the workbench, and spotted something very unpleasant.
There was another person in the garage.
It was W.B. He was standing in the doorway, and he had a gun in his hand. I’d never seen W.B. with a gun in his hand before. It looked about as unnatural as a duck carrying an abacus. I wondered if he’d ever used it before (W.B. with the gun, not the duck with the abacus, I mean). I sort of hoped that he hadn’t, but then again, I sort of hoped that he had. W.B. wasn’t the sort of person you wanted pointing a gun at you if he wasn’t familiar with guns. That klutz could really do some accidental damage if he wasn’t careful. Just between you and me, he really isn’t the sharpest spoon in the drawer.
“Hello, Aunt Dorcas,” W.B. said in a soft but dangerous voice. “Do you have something that you’d like to tell me?”
“Yes,” I said, trying my best to keep my voice from shaking. “I keep an egg in my closet, and you’ll never guess why.”
1. In case you’re curious, that is a mystery that has remained a mystery. My eggy aunt keeps a single hardboiled egg in her closet. And no one knows why.
The world can be a very confusing place sometimes, don’t you think?
Then I Looked At Myself and We Both Frowned
W.B. pressed the gun to my back and led me out the back door of the work garage.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Be quiet,” W.B. grunted back.
“Okay,” I whispe
red. “Where are we going?”
“I didn’t mean whisper. I meant don’t talk.”
“Then you should have said don’t talk.”
“Don’t tell me what I should say!” W.B. hissed at me. “I have a gun!”
“Typical W.B.,” I said as I rolled my eyes. “You can’t even take a bit of constructive criticism without having a hissy fit.”
W.B. whacked me on back of the head with the handle of his pistol. It didn’t hurt because I was still wearing Aunt Dorcas’s big puffy bonnet, but I pretended that it did so W.B. wouldn’t do it again. That guy is pretty easy to fool sometimes.
“Shut up!” W.B. said as he led me into the desert. “And keep walking until I tell you to stop.”
I was a bit worried because he wasn’t leading me down the normal path that went from the Baron Estate to Downtown Pitchfork. In fact, we weren’t traveling on any sort of path at all. It seemed as though we were simply walking in a random direction into the desert, hiking across the sand, climbing over dunes, which is not very easy to do while dressed in your aunt’s pointed boots and largest dress. I tried to explain this to W.B., but he wasn’t very sympathetic.
“That’s not my fault,” he said. “I didn’t tell you to dress up like your aunt.”
We kept heading south until we reached a part of the desert that I was certain I’d never been to before. It was where the desert landscape was interrupted by the edge of a tall cliff.
I stared over the edge of the cliff, which had a dramatic slant. Several tiny pebbles rolled down the slant, picking up speed as they bounced, before dropping several hundred feet to the ground. The cliff overlooked a large, rocky valley, with no town or people or anything else for miles. It was a very long way to the bottom. As we stood there near the edge, with W.B. still pointing his gun into my back, I began to wonder what might happen next. Things didn’t look too good for old W.B., and by “old W.B.,” I meant me. Things were looking just fine for the other W.B. I sort of wished that I was the other W.B., with his impressive riding skills, as well the fact that he was the one with the gun.