Finders Keepers

by Peter Speakman

  The girl nodded. “Sounds like a real party.” She was a cute, dark-skinned African American girl with shiny ringlets pulled back in a ponytail. She was dressed in light layers to fight the early-spring chill. “Nice place you got here,” she said. “They run out of space in the boiler room?”

  Parker and Theo just gawked, but Reese couldn’t stop herself from giggling. The girl grinned at her.

  “Robotics!” Parker cut in.

  “Excuse me?” said the girl.

  “I think they might have an opening in the Robotics Club.” Parker knew they couldn’t let anybody else in the club. They all did. “Or maybe Conversational Finnish. Anything is better than Historical Math. It’s super boring. Really. It’s the worst.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Um…detention? Theo and I plugged up a toilet and they gave us a choice between getting suspended or doing this.”

  “I think we chose poorly,” said Theo.

  The girl nodded at Reese. “What about you? You don’t look like the detention type.”

  “It’s my mom’s idea,” Reese said. “Gotta pad out those extracurricular activities for college applications.”

  “I know the feeling. My mom almost sent me to a summer computer camp.”

  “How’d you get out of it?” Reese asked.

  “I told her it was a great idea because there was this really cute boy at computer camp and I wanted to spend lots and lots of time with him. After that she never brought it up again.” The girl laughed. Reese tried unsuccessfully to avoid smiling herself.

  Parker jumped in. “Look, don’t worry about us. We won’t feel bad if you turn us down for something more exciting. Pottery! Meditation! Video Journalism!”

  “What is your name?” Fon-Rahm asked the girl in an attempt to take control of the situation.

  “Naomi Cook.”

  “Miss Cook, you are welcome to join us today, but you should know this will be our final meeting. As I was just about to tell my students, I am disbanding the Historical Math Club. I am sorry to say that it takes up too much of my time.”

  Naomi looked at all the empty desks. “Yeah, I can see how something like this would be a little overwhelming. Thanks for the invitation, but I just came down here to see if there really was such a thing as the Historical Math Club. You never know when you’ll be seized by a sudden interest in math history.” She looked at Parker, then at Reese. “I guess I’ll try Robotics.” And just like that, she was out the door and gone.

  “Man, that was a close one,” said Theo.

  “We’re gonna have to come up with a new name for the club,” said Parker. “Maybe something with dulcimers?”

  Reese looked at the closed door. She would have loved to have another girl to go on adventures with. The new girl seemed so cool.

  “So.” Fon-Rahm turned to Reese. “What exactly do you have planned for us today?”

  Before Reese could answer, Theo stood up. “Actually, I just came to tell you guys that I can’t hang out.” He hoisted his backpack. “I have my thing today.”

  “Again?” Parker asked.

  “Yes, again. I’m not crazy about it, either.” Theo opened the door and took one last sad look at his friends. “Have fun.”

  Reese’s heart sank. “So I guess there’s no Historical Math Club adventure for today.”

  “He’s going to do what he wants to do.” Parker knew his cousin better than any of them. “I think we should go without him. Once he sees he’s missing out, he might not abandon us so quickly next time.”

  Reese perked right up. She had always wanted to hike in the canopy of the Amazon rain forest.

  3

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, PROFESSOR ELLISON’S house looked like a house.

  It was a modest place set back far from the road on a patch of carefully tended lawn, nice, if a bit on the small side. It was pine green with tan trim and brown shingles. There were lace curtains in the windows. Pillars surrounded a charming open-air porch, and flowers bloomed on both sides of the crushed-stone pathway that led to the front door. In the summer, hummingbirds flitted around a feeder hung from a birch tree in the side yard. A cast-iron weather vane in the shape of a farmer pushing a plow stuck up from the roof. It would seem to be the perfect home for an unmarried archaeology professor who didn’t mind living by herself way out in the boonies. It was a quaint and pleasant little farmhouse.

  At least, that’s what it looked like from the outside. If the spell Ellison used to mask the place were to fall away, the locals would be mortified to see that it was in reality as big as a Walmart and about as aesthetically pleasing. It was constructed of concrete, metal, and high-strength glass, and it squatted on the property like a gray monster, sprawling in all directions. The professor had spent a small fortune building and updating the house. She used out-of-state contractors who moved in materials in the dead of night and were encouraged to keep their mouths shut with suggestions implanted by ancient magic directly into their subconscious minds.

  It was less a house than it was a fortress. It needed to be. It was built to protect a collection of priceless books and the world’s most powerful artifacts of magic.

  “Pay attention, Theo! My time is valuable and I’d like to spend as little of it as possible watching you fail to master the simplest of tasks.”

  Professor Ellison was lounging on a silk sofa with a French fashion magazine in one hand and a cold Manhattan cocktail in the other. She was almost impossibly elegant, with long limbs, gray eyes, and meticulously styled hair. The professor was a very beautiful woman. You might have guessed she was around sixty. You would be off by about two thousand nine hundred and forty years.

  Theo groaned and let his shoulders drop. He had been trapped in this ginormous living room for hours, trying without any success to knock down an empty wine bottle forty yards away using nothing but his own connection to the magical force called the Nexus and an ancient amulet carved from the thighbone of a giant ground sloth.

  “I can’t do it!” he said. “I’m concentrating on the bottle, but I can’t get this dumb thing to work. I thought it was supposed to shoot out fire or something.”

  “It would if it was used properly. You’re waving it around like you’re trying to swat a fly.”

  “Can’t we try something else? Maybe I could practice my containment spells.”

  “Your containment spells certainly do need work, but right now this is more important. So if you would be so kind, please pretend you have some affinity for magic and knock over the bottle.”

  Theo let out a deep breath. He scrunched his eyes shut, pointed the piece of bone, and concentrated. A puff of green smoke appeared ten yards in the distance and dissipated pathetically into the air.

  “Lovely,” Professor Ellison said. “Perhaps Vesiroth will be scared off by the smoke and simply run away.”

  “I am so sick of this!” Theo threw down the bone in disgust. “I didn’t ask to be connected to the stupid Nexus and I don’t want to be a stupid wizard. I want to play football and video games and goof off like a normal kid and instead I’m trapped in a museum with…”

  The professor’s eyes lifted coolly from her magazine. “Oh, don’t stop now,” she said. “I’m dying to hear the end of that sentence.”

  “I want to have my own life! This isn’t fair!”

  “Fair? Who ever mentioned the word fair?” Professor Ellison set her drink on a side table and glared at her young pupil. “I for one would be more than content to spend my afternoons in blissful silence while you stared like a brainless dolt at a TV screen far, far away from here. You, Theo, are dim even for a seventh grader, and that’s saying something. You’re insolent, you’re a slow learner, and worst of all, you mumble. I wouldn’t bet on you to win a kindergarten spelling bee, but, for reasons beyond even my vast comprehension, you of all people have been given the ability to perform miracles, and while you stand there with a moronic look on your face and drool dripping down your chin, the most power
ful wizard the world has ever known is preparing to enslave all of mankind.” She flipped open her magazine again. “So we are going to stay here, my thick friend, until you pick up that amulet, summon every ounce of power from that wasteland you call a brain, and knock over that defenseless wine bottle.”

  Theo angrily picked up the fragment of ancient bone. He held it out toward the bottle and concentrated like he had never concentrated before. A sphere of roiling black fire as big as a basketball shot out of the amulet, missing the wine bottle and instead exploding a blue-and-white vase standing on a pedestal a good twenty feet away.

  Theo lowered the artifact in horror.

  Professor Ellison broke the long silence. “That vase was made in the Ming dynasty and at one point stood in the palace of the emperor himself. I bought it at auction for a little more than a million dollars.”

  Theo’s jaw hung open.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Professor Ellison said. “I have three more. That was very good, Theo. You’re making progress.”

  Theo let himself smile, but his happiness was short-lived. “Um, Professor Ellison?”

  “Yes, Theo?”

  Theo pointed at the black fire slowly engulfing the distant corner of the room. “I think I set your house on fire.”

  While Theo trained inside, a black SUV came to a stop outside Professor Ellison’s house. Five men wearing dark suits climbed out. Their leader gave them each orders in a strange language spoken only by the Path, a group of single-minded zealots from every nation on earth who devoted their lives to the goal of establishing genie rule over humanity.

  One of the men opened the truck’s liftgate, exposing a pile of assault rifles. The men each grabbed a weapon, checked to make sure the guns were loaded, and split up to approach the house.

  The fire inside the house continued to grow and Theo’s sense of panic grew with it. “Aren’t you going to do something?” he asked as the strange black flames took over the pedestal that once held the vase and began to lap up a wall.

  Professor Ellison flipped the page of her magazine. “Nope.”

  “But the house will burn down! We’ll both be killed!”

  “I survived Pompeii and the Great Chicago Fire. I’ll be fine. Now, you, on the other hand…”

  “You have to stop it!”

  “I seem to remember teaching you a serviceable freezing spell. You are perfectly capable of stopping the fire yourself.”

  “That was weeks ago! I don’t remember it!”

  “Amazing. You can remember who won the football finals going back twenty years, but anything I teach you has a half-life of twenty minutes.”

  “It’s called the Super Bowl, and it’s…”

  The fire latched onto an oil painting of a very unattractive Dutch woman. The professor watched the painting burn. “That’s a Rembrandt, you know.”

  “Okay!” Theo said. “I learned my lesson. Please stop the fire. I promise I’ll study harder. I’ll pay closer attention. I won’t complain anymore. Just please stop the fire!”

  Professor Ellison picked up her drink. “Magic is a funny thing, Theo. Anyone—well, not anyone, but any one of us—can do amazing things when no one’s looking. The real trick is to rise to the occasion when things get hairy. It’s called grace under pressure. Now, if you have any intention of seeing the next Super Bowl, I suggest you pull yourself together and work a little magic of your own. I’d hate to have to explain to your parents why you never came home.”

  As Theo watched, aghast, the fire reached the wine bottle and knocked it over to shatter on the floor.

  Professor Ellison said cheerily, “Oh, look, you finally got that pesky bottle!”

  The Path members outside walked carefully, step by deliberate step, toward the house. One of the men in suits gestured with his weapon for another to get in closer. The scout raised his rifle into firing position and moved with hesitation to a window on the side of the house. Before he got within ten feet he hit something unseen and was knocked backward. It was as if there was something invisible surrounding the structure.

  The leader, puzzled, picked up a handful of pebbles from the sidewalk. He threw them at the house, but they bounced off something in midair. The true dimensions of the house were making themselves known.

  The living room was engulfed in flames.

  Theo pointed a relic shaped like a brass key and spoke what he thought was an incantation that would douse the fire. Nothing happened. He tried again and this time every door leading out of the room slammed and locked itself. Wrong spell. “You have got to be kidding me!” he said. Sweat poured off of his forehead. He coughed up smoke.

  “So close!” said Professor Ellison. “Maybe the next spell will make the walls close in. Won’t that be exciting?”

  Theo dropped his bag and held his hands helplessly in front of his face. The fire had backed him into a corner. He was going to be broiled like a chicken at a barbecue. Deep-fried. Sautéed. Fricasseed.

  Right before the black flames reached him a high-pitched alarm sounded through the house. Professor Ellison dropped her magazine and clenched her fist above her head. Instantly, the fire froze into great stalagmites of hardened salt.

  Theo dropped his hands. The flames were gone. The room wasn’t even hot anymore. “Thank you thank you thank you,” he said, as relieved as he had ever been in his twelve years on planet Earth. “Thank you!”

  But Ellison wasn’t paying any attention to him. She went to what seemed to be a blank wall, brushed aside the piles of salt, and pushed a button on a hidden control panel. The alarm silenced and the wall lit up with screens that showed the outside of the house from every conceivable angle. Her high-tech security system had been activated.

  Theo came to her side. “What’s happening?”

  The screens showed the five men in suits pointing their guns at the house.

  “It appears we have visitors.”

  “Those guys are from the Path! They must have found out where you live!”

  “I assumed they would drop by sooner or later. Of course, you don’t live to be as old as I am without thinking ahead. Watch carefully. You just may learn something useful.”

  The men outside waited for their leader to return from the truck, their guns at the ready. He came back armed with a portable rocket launcher. He shoved a rocket into the cannon’s barrel and balanced the weapon against his shoulder. He put the front door of the house in his sights and tightened his hand on the trigger.

  Before he could loose the missile, the ground shifted. The men looked at each other with unease. The leader inspected the grass on which they were standing. It seemed solid enough. He gave it a good stamp with his foot and nothing happened. He shrugged the tremor off and put his eye back to the missile launcher’s gunsight.

  Suddenly, the grass beneath his feet exploded upward, thickening into tough green vines that wrapped tightly around him before he had any chance to react. The rocket launcher was wedged against his body in a cocoon of leaves and vines.

  His men were similarly trapped. They called out to one another, but the creeping plants soon covered their mouths, leaving them wriggling and squirming and wrapped completely in green.

  Theo and Professor Ellison watched it all on the security monitors.

  “Holy crap! You got ’em!”

  “Language, Theo.”

  “Sorry! But what are you going to do with them now? We can’t just let them go, can we?”

  “I would think not. But I’m not going to do anything to them. I’m going to leave that up to you.”

  She went to the couch and returned with the Louis Vuitton bag that was her most faithful companion. Inside she kept a jumble of artifacts that might be useful in a world that hid dangers behind every corner.

  She rooted around until she found what she was looking for. She handed a small stone pyramid to Theo. “Use this.”

  Theo turned the thing over in his hand. “What will it do?” he asked.

  “It wi
ll turn our unwelcome visitors into sand.”

  Theo stammered, “I can’t do that!”

  “You can, and you will. We are fighting a war, Theo, and in a war people die. There is too much at stake to be sentimental.”

  He shoved the pyramid back at Professor Ellison. “I don’t care what you say and I don’t care what you threaten me with. I’m not going to kill those guys!”

  “Very well. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.” The professor held the pyramid up to the monitor and closed her eyes.

  On the screen, the mummified men struggled against the vines that held them tight. Theo watched in dread as sand began to pour out between the leaves. When the plants drew back into the soil, all that was left of the men was five piles of sand on the manicured lawn.

  Theo gritted his teeth. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Didn’t I? Should we have let them return to Vesiroth to report on what they saw here? Maybe they would have seen the errors of their ways and gotten jobs selling furniture.” Her eyes grew cold. “I will do anything and cross any line to make secure the future of a free world. And by the time we’re done, you will as well.”

  She put the bag over her shoulder and went back to the couch to pick up her magazine. She unlocked the doors with a cursory gesture and turned back to Theo.

  “It would be best if you kept what happened here today between us. There’s no reason to drag your friends or that genie into this. They’ll just muck things up.”

  Theo didn’t say anything. He just stared at the screens, watching as a gentle New Hampshire breeze scattered the sand into the air.

  4

  TEACHERS AT ROBERT FROST JUNIOR High School were required to make themselves available for twenty minutes at the end of the day to answer any student questions.

  For Mr. Rommy, this was the calmest time of the day. Nobody ever came in for questions after school. He sat and graded papers, and when twenty minutes were up he closed his door, let his jeans and blazer dissolve into flowing silk robes, and began to float. For Fon-Rahm, this was a time to look inside himself. And not in a symbolic, hippie-dippy way, either. Fon-Rahm could literally look inside himself. He didn’t have a heart or lungs but he did have a direct connection to the source of all power in the universe.