Frederik ran. Straight into the bushes in the overgrown center of the courtyard. The old factory chimney soared above him. He ducked behind thick foliage and watched.
The front door opened again. Father and Mother came down the steps looking very unhappy, Mortensen and Martensen behind them. Martensen closed the front door and ensured it was locked.
“My key,” Frederik breathed. “I forgot it.”
“Where is your boy?” Mortensen barked.
“Is he in trouble?” Father asked.
“He’s suspected of plotting to slur the mayor’s good name.”
Frederik’s parents were ushered into the back seat of the car with too many antennae. It roared and reversed out of the courtyard. Thomas Dahl Dalby angled his camera at the car and clicked rapidly. Frederik’s mother stared, forlorn and frightened, from the back.
Frederik bolted along the winding path to the clearing and the hut. The crumbling brick hut at the base of the chimney was out of bounds and entirely unsafe and frequently frequented by kids he couldn’t stand and who couldn’t stand him. Like Calamity Claus. And what had Claus done? What had he got wrong this time? Calamity didn’t begin to cover it. He must have mentioned the zombies. Why, oh why, had Frederik trusted him?
He scanned the apartment windows and balconies looking down on the square. No one watching. He slipped inside the hut.
“Hello? Anyone here?”
It was dark. No lamp. The pocket penlight long gone, left behind in the pipes. But for now, darkness was fine. Darkness was better than the daylight. He huddled against the back wall and watched the doorway. Heart hammering. How long could he hide here? It was out of sight, but dangerously close to home. He felt sick to his stomach. Pernille had been taken away, Venkatamahesh, and now his mother and father! It was all his fault. He had guessed the detectives were coming. Why hadn’t he done more to get his parents out of the way?
“Down here, is it?”
Voices! Adults. Heading through the bushes outside.
“Got the tools?”
Tools? What tools? Stairs led down to a dark cellar beneath. Frederik ran down them. Cornered. Trapped in the shadows. His hands found the cold, metal pipe. He shuddered.
A crunch. Upstairs. Who was it?
He squeezed himself under the curve of the pipe and covered his face. Could he hide? If they didn’t have a light, maybe. If they had one, he was caught.
There was a bang. A loud bang. Another. Like the bang of a hammer on a nail. And then another. And more. Someone was hammering nails up there.
A man’s voice, faint. “No zombie is getting through here.”
The trace of light that leaked from above seemed to dim. More banging. Dimmer still. The light was going away in the middle of the day. How could that be? Someone was up there, at the door, making the daylight go away.
And he suddenly understood.
They were boarding up the door with wood and nails.
They were sealing him inside the crumbling hut.
Chapter 17
Supernova
When the hammering stopped and the voices melted away, Frederik climbed the stairs in darkness. Something crunched underfoot. What was that? Pieces of the old lamp they had smashed and abandoned weeks ago, when he and Pernille first scared the nasty neighbors away with their zombie story. What a trail of disaster that had caused.
A sliver of daylight squeezed between the boards across the doorway. He set his shoulder to them. Tried different angles, sweated, and grunted. He kicked with his feet, it made a din, and he continued anyway, frightened of suffocating or starving.
Then he got ahold of himself. If light was leaking through, then so was air. He wasn’t going to starve for many days. And why would he go outside? Where would he go? His home was locked. He had abandoned his mother and father to the detectives.
He was better off in here, where he could do no more damage. He had no real fear of being found. The only door was blocked.
And then he remembered there was another doorway. Downstairs, in the dark cellar. An old doorway in the wall, long sealed up with bricks.
It was inky black down there. He felt for the fat, metal pipe, followed it to the wall. He traced his hands across brickwork, one pace, two paces. There. A lip. The edge of the doorway. Bricks set slightly back. He pushed. They didn’t give. He chipped at the mortar between them with his fingernails. Lumps broke away and fell to the floor. He picked and scraped. There were long minutes of resistance and sudden rushes of crumbling. He couldn’t see anything. He persisted, blind, till his fingers and knuckles were raw.
He needed a tool. Something jagged.
He got down on his knees and found a piece of the lamp in the dust. A thick edge he could grip, and a point. He chipped and hacked at the mortar. The shard of glass tore it away. A brick came loose, and another, and yet another, till there was nothing left holding them up and they toppled away into nothing beyond.
Dark nothing. Cool, stale air.
“Hello?” he called, and his voice echoed differently through there. More bricks came away and now there was a trace of light. The hole grew, minute by minute, hands hurting, grit in his eyes, haunted all the while by what had happened, until eventually—it seemed like hours—the hole was big enough to dangle a leg through, feeling for the floor on the other side.
There was a sense of vast space. A haze of light, barely anything.
He clambered through and felt his way along a wall. A very long brick wall. He listened hard and heard only the thump of his heart.
He came to a door. It creaked. A wash of thin light that seemed like a glorious dawn, and steps leading up to a huge, empty room, filmed with fine, white dust. It billowed around him as he walked. He sneezed, and it spiraled in all directions. Daylight seeped through dusty windows. He was inside the disused porcelain factory. Had to be. The unconverted factory buildings. He knew them well from the outside. Enormous brick structures with ornate windows. Silent and abandoned.
He left a trail of footprints. No one had been in here for a very long time. But he’d spent his whole life playing outside. He could find his way. He had come from back there, and now he was here, with these windows up to his right. Half the factory had been converted. Apartments, the business school, the row houses where he lived. And there were two long, unconverted buildings, six floors high. He was inside one of those.
But what now? What was he going to do? What was he going to eat? Was there water? He was desperately thirsty.
He searched unlit hallways and empty rooms. Some were abandoned as though in the middle of a working day. Crockery on benches. Tools, pots, curling sheets of paper. And dust. Everywhere. Drifting around his feet as he walked, on every surface, every door handle. He found a bathroom. No water.
What was going to happen to his family? Imprisoned? Deported? He couldn’t raise the alarm. The mayor was expecting exactly that. She’d be waiting for him. He knew all her secrets, but now those secrets were no use to him. A conspiracy, she’d say. To blacken her name.
There was nothing he could do.
He found stairs, climbed a level and another. Cleared a spy hole in a grimy window, and yes, he’d been right. He could see the flats, the oak tree, the bus stop. A bus pulled up. Someone got off. Gretchen Grondal. Frederik jumped back from the window. She would see him!
But no. How could she?
He dared himself back to the spy hole, and sure enough, she was walking away. She hadn’t spotted him behind the grime, two floors up in a building nobody used. Why would she even look? Ironically, in here, he was safe.
He headed upward and eastward. He wanted to see Municipal Hall. Where all his loved ones were.
He found a window overlooking the courtyard and the chimney by his house. It was a small window up in the gables, snug alongside the roof that ran the length of the row houses. At the fa
r end was his own. Municipal Hall beyond it on the skyline. He stared for a very long time.
In the end, he decided it wasn’t helping. Stepped back to explore.
In the corner of the room, set low in the wall, there was a small door half his height. He waggled the knob. There was a cloud of dust. He sneezed. And then he was looking into darkness behind the door.
He could make out some boxes. And what was that? An exercise bike?
“Someone’s attic?” he whispered. He squeezed his shoulders through and crawled. Light leaked up around the edges of a hatch. What was down there? The bedroom of the first house in the row. It had to be. Mr. Hvidgaard’s house. He sat for a while in silence, wondering what to do. Edged across to the far side and found a sliding panel. He levered it open, squeezed through, and into another loft. This must be Erica Engel’s house. Square shapes in the gloom. Another hatch and more slivers of light. Something beside it. A flashlight? Yes! He grabbed it and flooded the attic with wonderful light. Plastic tubs of Erica Engel’s hand-me-down clothes. Junk. Jars. The skeleton of a rat.
He couldn’t go down into Mr. Hvidgaard’s house. He’d scare the poor old man to death. And he certainly couldn’t risk Erica Engel’s. So he looked for another panel in the far wall, and there it was, opposite the last. This one was stiff. He had to force it, made a noise. He crossed the attics of old Mrs. Østergaard, deaf Mr. Due, cranky Mrs. Carlsen. Two houses from home, then one, and then with a final grunt, he shifted the panel that led to his own.
The flashlight splashed across familiar things. The plastic Christmas tree. The bicycle he’d outgrown. His father’s records in a crate. He choked up at the sight of them.
He lifted the hatch and took a dizzying look down on his own bedroom. He took a deep breath and dropped to the bed. A cloud of porcelain dust puffed around him, hung in the air. His clothes were stiff with it. He grabbed for last night’s water on the nightstand, downed it in moments, coughing.
For a long time, he lay on his back, staring up at the hatch in the ceiling, listening to the familiar ticks and creaks he had known all his life. White dust settled on the bedclothes.
Now what?
He ventured down to the living room, being very, very careful. No one was here. No detectives. No Mother or Father either.
His fingers were streaked with dried blood. His nails were broken and scuffed. He washed his hands in a daze. Drank more water, found some food, kept the lights off, stayed away from windows. There were no notes. No phone messages.
He felt sick. Extremely scared.
He went back to his bedroom and fell asleep midevening, dead tired, head aching. He woke in darkness, anxious. He stared at the attic hatch above his bed. He listened to every tiny sound. He paced the room. He tilted the slats of the blinds and peered between them, down the street.
And his head exploded.
It exploded with light. It exploded with a glare that ricocheted around inside his eyes. He clapped his hands to his face and cried out, and all he could see was the negative image of window slats seared into his eyelids. Light flooded his bedroom. It was brighter than day, brighter than the sun. He howled with the shock of it. Staggered back and toppled onto the bed. Buried his head beneath a pillow. What in the giddy name of goodness was that? He was blinded. Completely blinded.
And then darkness.
Sudden, absolute darkness.
He staggered back to the window. He pried his eyelids apart. The night slowly resolved into familiar shapes—the rooftops, the chimney pots, the same silhouettes he looked out on every night. In the distance, the clock tower above Municipal Hall. And arcing out from its topmost reaches, a beam of intense white light, sweeping in a circle above the borough, catching here a steeple, there a smokestack.
The beam of a lighthouse. A real lighthouse.
Sweeping away and around, picking out the brewery’s huge rooftop vats, stretching over the treetops, out of sight. And then it was back! Full blaze, right in his eyes, knocking him reeling away from the window, as shocked as the first time, unable to believe how night had turned into the center of a star, an atom bomb, a supernova.
And it didn’t shift. Why wouldn’t it shift? It wasn’t looping anymore. It was fixed directly on Frederik’s window. They’d found him!
He hurled himself under the bed, and even down there, it was daybreak. Whoever was steering the searchlight had found him, the boy who started the zombie stories, the boy who sedated the café customers. He’d be rounded up like everyone else. He’d be sent to a home for unwanted offspring.
He tugged a T-shirt over his head, stuffed socks in his pockets. No time to put them on. He had to flee, had to climb. He hopped on top of the dresser, opened the hatch, clambered up inside the attic.
The light below him started to pulse. A flash. Another. Filling his bedroom with lightning, then darkness, then lightning again. He shut the hatch. He hauled the heaviest box in the attic over it, pinning it down, blocking out the supernova, sealing himself up there in the silent attics.
Chapter 18
Every Single Rule and All at Once
He hid in the dark till long after dawn, afraid to even move. Then, he crawled through the attics to the factory. Left footprints in bewildered, swirling patterns.
He couldn’t go anywhere. He was as much a prisoner as his parents. He stared from dusty windows at people passing by, kids hanging strings of little flags from lamppost to lamppost, pasting posters to walls. The mayor’s festival was just five days away. She’d gain the national fame she had craved for decades. There would be no stopping her.
Frederik had to rescue his friends and family. Before midsummer. He had to start now.
There were only two ways to do it: bust them out, or expose the mayor as a fraud. But how? He couldn’t even get out of the porcelain factory.
And then he remembered the railway.
He found a grimy escalator, out of order, deep in the bowels of the building. It plunged into darkness and a platform mired with dust. The old, blue diesel arrived in a cloud of thick exhaust. Staring surprised from a window was a familiar face beneath a familiar hat. “Porcelain Factory!” Edna said, one of her eyes on Frederik. “Next stop Frederik’s Hill Central.”
They sat on the faded seats and watched the shadows slide by.
“I’m going to Municipal Hall,” he said.
“Second stop, dear. Why are you going there?”
“Because Pernille was arrested.”
“For what?” Edna gasped.
“For knocking respectable café customers unconscious.”
“She cannot possibly have done such a thing!”
“She didn’t.”
“Thank goodness.”
“I did.” The tunnels rattled by at top speed. “Mr. Ramasubramanian was arrested too. For nothing at all.”
“But that’s terrible. And I buy my dehydrated-noodle dinners from him. Cheapest in town. Where will I go?”
The lights of Frederik’s Hill station lit the carriage end to end. There was a massive mural along the platform wall. Frederik’s Hill Welcomes the World and a picture of the mayor, smiling, arms open.
“And my parents,” said Frederik. “I have to find them. Help me find them.”
“All right, dear. I will if I can.”
As the train slowed again, she called out to no one. “Frederik’s Hill Municipal Hall and Lighthouse.” She nodded. “Here we are then. Follow me.”
Another neglected platform. A door and a window in the back wall. Cracked glass, chintzy drapes that matched the ones on the train. He glimpsed a tiny room: a bed by the wall, an old oven, a table for one.
“It’s modest,” she said. “But it’s all I can afford. Haven’t had a raise in thirty years. Still, it’s handy for getting to work.”
She blew her whistle and the train hissed away without them. She led
the way into a tunnel, lights in the ceiling, most of them blown. Another ancient wooden escalator leading way, way up. Silent and still. Very wide. Very wide indeed. It creaked as they climbed. Halfway up, Edna stopped, winded, hands on hips. They seemed to climb forever, and then they were finally at the top. A ticket hall, old machines fallen out of repair. Faded advertisements pasted to the walls. High double doors, painted red.
“Is this Municipal Hall?” he whispered.
She nodded.
Just these doors between him and his family, Pernille, and Venkatamahesh. He fell at the handle and rattled for all he was worth. Wanted to shout to them. Yell their names.
“Locked?” said Edna. “Can’t say I’m surprised.”
He searched the floor. Found a strip of metal. Jammed it between the doors and tried to pry them open. But the doors were like rock. The metal bent. He roared with rage and threw it at the wall.
Edna watched. “Fire doors, dear. Mahogany. Ten inches thick. You won’t get through with a little twig like that.”
“Then how?” Frederik howled. “There must be a way. There must be!” He banged at the door with his fist. “I have to set them free.”
“And just supposing,” Edna said, “that you break these heavy fire doors down with your little tin stick. What do you plan to do next?”
“I’m going to…well, to…well…” and he trailed off, seething with frustration.
“You’re going to get arrested too,” she said. “And so will I. We’ll run into large numbers of large policemen, just on the other side of these doors, given the noise you’re making. And I’m sure they’ll reunite you with your loved ones. But on the wrong side of the bars. You are more help to everyone if you’re free.”
Frederik Sandwich and the Mayor Who Lost Her Marbles Page 12