The House on Hoarder Hill

by Mikki Lish

  Mrs. Vilums was waiting for them as they opened the back door.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Better. Thank you.”

  Mrs. Vilums’s keen eyes turned to Spencer. “And you, young man?”

  Spencer slipped his aviator cap from his head. “Yes, better, thank you.”

  “I’d say you’re all right, then,” Mrs. Vilums said, and disappeared into the laundry.

  The children crept after her. Water splashed into the laundry sink, and they found Mrs. Vilums washing a couple of cleaning cloths. “How did you know we needed to go out into the sunshine?” Hedy burst out.

  “I just knew,” Mrs. Vilums said, turning slightly. “Doesn’t it make sense to get sunshine if you are suffering from cold?”

  “Not in England. We could be waiting for years for sunshine here.”

  Mrs. Vilums chuckled.

  “Were you a magician, like Grandpa John?” Spencer whispered loudly, with a guarded look behind him.

  “Not I.”

  Hedy and Spencer watched Mrs. Vilums for a few moments, and then, without speaking, they both moved into the room as though blocking an escape. When Mrs. Vilums began to organize a mop and bucket, Hedy asked, “Do you know how we can contact Albert Nobody?”

  Mopping fluid gushed everywhere as Mrs. Vilums squeezed the bottle too hard. She swallowed, and her ears turned a shade more pink. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Albert Nobody. Is there anything of his here in the house?”

  Mrs. Vilums busied herself wiping the sink. Finally, without looking at them, she said evenly, “I don’t know anything about an Albert Nobody.”

  Lar! Lar!

  All three of them froze, startled. Then Spencer reached into his coat pocket and gently drew out the stone egg. It wobbled ever so slightly in his palm, and fine streaks of copper pulsed in the dark gray of the shell. The muffled warble came again: Lar! Lar!

  “What have you found?” They all jumped. Grandpa John had materialized in the doorway without them hearing his footsteps.

  “An egg!” said Spencer, holding it out.

  Grandpa John seemed shocked. He stared at the egg for a long moment, scratching his chin. “Did you find it like this?” he asked finally.

  “It was gray before, like rock,” Hedy said.

  “What is it, Grandpa?” asked Spencer, running a gentle finger over the eggshell. “What kind of bird, I mean.”

  Their grandfather hesitated. “Well, it’s a … a type of lyre bird. The eggs were in the basin when I bought that statue and I simply left them in there.” He reached one finger out to the egg but let his hand drop before he touched it. “I’d like you to put it back where you found it.”

  Just then the doorbell rang, and there was a muffled din of children at the front door.

  “Max and Jelly are here!” Spencer exclaimed, racing to the hall.

  Hedy skipped after him but almost tripped as she passed through the laundry doorway and saw, out of the corner of her eye, a lump in the wood of the doorframe, just like the one in the floor on their first night. It quivered for a moment before shrinking out of sight.

  At the front of the house, they found Uncle Peter and Jelly holding a real Christmas tree. A box overflowing with tinsel and ornaments had been abandoned on the porch, almost certainly by Max, who was now lobbing a snowball at Spencer.

  “I nicked all my mom’s favorite stuff!” Jelly cried, pointing at the box of decorations.

  “I hope you’re not planning to bring all this inside,” Grandpa John called testily as he eyed the Christmas cheer making its implacable way toward his front door.

  Uncle Peter chuckled. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “My gymnastics school was selling Christmas trees as a fundraiser,” Jelly said. “So we got you one as a surprise—the nicest one left.”

  “You might have called first,” Grandpa John grumbled.

  “Grandad was sure you’d be home,” Max said, “because you’re a hermit, which means you never go anywhere!”

  Uncle Peter smothered a laugh. “Sorry, old boy, but it’s true.” He pulled a Santa hat from his pocket and crammed it on Grandpa John’s head, a twin to his own. “Don’t look so cranky. You can’t have your grandchildren here and not have a proper Christmas tree.”

  Hedy and Spencer delightedly followed their cousins to the living room, where Jelly insisted the tree had to be set up. The two grandfathers busied themselves putting the tree in the stand.

  “I’ve got so much to tell you!” Hedy whispered to Jelly at exactly the same time her cousin said under her breath, “I have something to show you!”

  They laughed and sidled halfway out of the room.

  “Have you found her?” Jelly asked.

  “No, but we discovered a whole lot of other things,” Hedy said. “Bermuda Triangle–type stuff.”

  “Oh em gee. You are in so much trouble for not calling me, then!”

  The two girls bustled their grandfathers off to the kitchen for morning tea as quickly as they could. By the time they returned to the living room, Spencer and Max were sorting the decorations into different piles by color and type. Jelly pulled Hedy and Spencer aside and muttered, “Here, watch this.” She pressed a phone into their hands and then went to take Spencer’s place organizing decorations.

  Hedy and Spencer slipped into the narrow space behind the couch, and each took an earbud. Jelly had a video saved on her phone, ready to play. It was a clip extracted from a longer video titled “Great Magician Mysteries.” The clip showed the Amazing John Sang, Magician, at a venue called the Castile. It didn’t seem like their grandfather. Even though the timbre of the voice was similar, this young man’s stage patter was assured and constant, the spiel of a performer in his prime. Then joining him onstage was the young Rose, in her late twenties, wearing a sequined costume. Despite the fuzzy footage, it was clear that they looked at each other with love. They held hands for a moment and then parted, walking around a large box that stood about John’s waist in height.

  Here it was, the box at the heart of the mystery.

  “The Kaleidos,” Hedy whispered.

  It was a perfect rectangle made of hundreds of mirrored cubes, each about half the size of a fist. They could be moved around in ways that seemed to defy the laws of physics: cascading like water, folded like dough, or scattered like dice on a gaming board. After showing the audience the remarkable ability of the Kaleidos to flow and rearrange, John moved to the opposite side of the stage and, without touching the box, waved his hands to reposition the cubes in their box shape again.

  John then invited a random audience member up onstage, a burly middle-aged man who tried and failed to make the cubes shift even a centimeter. John moved the Kaleidos around, then had the man stand on top of the only trapdoor in the floor of the stage so that nothing and no one could slip through it. Striding back to the box, John pulled down the whole front side, like opening a hatch door. Rose waved to the audience and curled inside the Kaleidos, and then John closed the box.

  Flames leapt out of the cubes, a foot high. The man onstage flinched. The audience gasped. John pushed rows and rows of cubes through the middle of the space where Rose should have been, his hands unharmed by the flames. He stood back and motioned at the box from a couple of yards away, flicking the fiery cubes up and around until the whole box had been turned inside out. It seemed impossible that someone was curled up in its center. John spun the box around, and the flames died down. With a flourish, he opened the front side again. He clearly expected Rose to be there, whole and untouched by fire.

  But she was not.

  John started and joked that she must be powdering her nose. He closed the front of the Kaleidos again, asked the audience to count to three, and reopened it.

  There was a smattering of applause that quickly died as everyone realized this was not how the trick should go. Rose had not reappeared. There was no sound except for John crying out, “Rose!”

  Over a m
ontage of news footage and photographs of newspaper articles, the voice-over explained various theories following her disappearance. She couldn’t have been burned, as one person claimed—there was no burnt body, nor any ashes. Someone in the magician community had tried to stir up suspicion against John, but the police had investigated him and cleared him of wrongdoing. A community search had been set up but was fruitless. Now almost everyone supposed she had simply run away, lived a life undetected, and died before being found.

  Hedy knew that last theory made sense. But those people hadn’t seen all the things that they had seen at Hoarder Hill. They hadn’t seen messages written in the dust upon glass.

  The clip was over. They watched it through once more before crawling out from behind the couch and handing the phone back to Jelly, who slipped a folded piece of paper from her jeans pocket.

  “What’s this?” Hedy asked as Spencer opened it up.

  Jelly leaned in. “I thought you might like this photo of them.”

  It was a printout of a newspaper article with a picture of John, Rose, and the Kaleidos all in frame. The paper claimed the photograph had been taken just before Rose vanished, and it caught John and Rose from the side rather than the front. Rose was grinning merrily out at the audience. John was a step behind, still holding his wife’s hand and beaming proudly at her. Moments after that picture, Rose and John would drop hands and do their trick with the box. After that they would never see each other again.

  Hedy felt a lump in her throat, and she sniffed. “I do like it,” she told her cousin. “It’s just sad too, you know?”

  Jelly gave her a hug and told Spencer, “Me and Hedy will untangle the tinsel. Why don’t you go and help Max?” Then she sat Hedy down on the floor and dumped a pile of tinsel before her. “So, what did you find?”

  Hedy quietly told her everything that they’d discovered in the last couple of days, feeling better as she talked. Jelly’s large eyes grew wider and rounder at each new twist: Doug and Stan, Simon, Mrs. Pal and the golden hands, the cold, Albert Nobody.

  Jelly grabbed Hedy’s knee. “I want to meet Doug and Stan!”

  “Grandpa wasn’t too happy the last time he caught us up there,” Hedy reminded her.

  “Ugh, no, he wasn’t, was he? We need the boys to keep him busy for like ten minutes.” Jelly took a look at the tree. “They’ve finished already!”

  They had indeed. Spencer had let Max climb onto his shoulders, and Max was carefully placing an angel on the top of the tree as the finishing touch. Hedy couldn’t resist making some adjustments so that the red was spread evenly rather than clumped together, and icicles appeared at the bottom as well as in a cluster at the center. To her surprise, there were five ball ornaments with different magicians’ stage shows beautifully painted on them. They were all jammed near the top of the tree, so she rearranged those as well, to spread them out evenly.

  “Why are you moving the magicians?” Max complained. “I wanted them all up at the top under the angel.”

  Spencer rolled his eyes. “Hedy’s a control freak.” Hedy narrowed her eyes at him, and he backed out of the room in a hurry. “I’m hungry. Come on, Max!”

  Jelly put her arm around Hedy’s shoulders. “The tree does look better when it’s decorated by a control freak,” she assured her. “Hey, can I meet Doug and Stan now?”

  Hedy led her cousin up the stairs, and they tiptoed to the room with the green door, which Hedy was beginning to think of as Doug and Stan’s room. “Guys?” Hedy said as she peered around the door. She ushered Jelly in and closed the door. “Doug, Stan, this is my cousin Jelly.”

  “I swear,” Jelly said to Doug and Stan, “I am a friend and I come in total peace.”

  But the bear and the stag were absolutely silent and still. Hedy tried again, this time kneeling down and looking Doug in the eyes. “She’s okay. I mean, I told her about you. And Grandma Rose’s message. She won’t tell Grandpa John.”

  Doug didn’t even blink.

  “Why won’t they talk to me?” Jelly asked.

  Hedy shrugged, disappointed. “I don’t know.” Casting about, she said, “Do you want to see the photo of Nobody?”

  She and Spencer had spent a good half an hour putting all the blown-out clippings back into the album, which Hedy now pulled from the shelf. The two girls settled on the footstool and flipped through the pages until they found the newspaper article. Jelly bent low over the photo. “Hey, look at my grandad with no beard. And he’s so thin!” She giggled. “They looked alike back then.” She pointed. “Is this Nobody?”

  “I guess so,” Hedy said, checking the caption again.

  “He’s pretty cute.”

  “I guess so,” Hedy said again, laughing.

  “Who’s cute?” Spencer’s head popped around the door.

  Hedy snapped the album closed in irritation. “Don’t you ever knock?”

  Spencer stepped into the room, followed by Max. “This isn’t your room. Who’s cute?”

  “Oh, nobody,” Jelly said in a singsong voice, giggling at her little joke, but of course it wasn’t lost on Spencer.

  “You think Nobody’s handsome?” Spencer asked, incredulous.

  “Which one is Doug and which one is Stan?” Max interrupted, wandering around the room and looking at the animal heads.

  Hedy gave her brother a black look. “I can’t believe you told him!”

  “Why not?” Spencer shot back. “You told Jelly!”

  “Yeah,” Jelly threw in, “but they won’t talk to me, so there’s no way they’ll talk to Max.”

  Hedy checked the hallway. “Where are Grandpa John and Uncle Peter?”

  “They went to the garage,” Spencer said. “They’re arguing about how to make a good hedgehog home.”

  “You should go with them, keep them distracted,” Hedy said.

  “But I want to look around here,” said Max, who had clambered up onto a table.

  “You can’t do parkour in here, Max,” Jelly told him.

  “I’m not!” Instead, Max lifted the bundle of metal feathers from the wall. Seeing a lattice of brown leather straps with worn buckles hanging from the inner spine, Hedy suddenly recalled the poster of Sebastian Sello at the Palisade and realized the feathers were wings.

  “Have you tried these on?” Max asked, wide-eyed.

  “You shouldn’t be touching Grandpa John’s things,” Hedy said briskly.

  Max was astonished. “Why haven’t you tried them?”

  Hedy glared at Max, who was beginning to worm his own arms through the straps. “Fine,” she said, more to stop him than anything else. She turned so that the others could help her put the wings on. They were heavy, immovable. “There’s no way these things could fly.”

  “Can I try them, then?” Max begged. “They don’t work, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “One minute only,” said Hedy.

  With the wings on—so heavy they made him wobble—Max stood proudly on top of the table. “I can fly!” He beamed to the ceiling and then leapt off the table as though he were a superhero launching into the sky.

  Snap! A moment before Max hit the floor, one of the wings snapped out to its full span, tilted him off balance, and sent him tumbling onto the bearskin rug.

  “See? If you were meant to fly, you would’ve been born with a beak!” huffed Doug crossly.

  All four children gaped at Doug.

  Finally, Spencer said, “Bats don’t have beaks, and they can fly.”

  Doug looked unimpressed. “No one wants to be a bloody bat!”

  “Master won’t like them knowing about us, Douglas,” Stan said, sounding strained.

  “I know,” Doug said, scratching his head. “Bit late now, though.”

  Max rolled off Doug and onto his knees, the half-spread wing folding into its spine as he got to his feet.

  “How did you get the wings to do that?” Hedy asked him. “Did you press something?”

  Max shook his head. “I don’t know. I just
jumped.” He gaped up at Stan.

  “Your one minute’s up,” Hedy said, unfastening the buckles and looking for a mechanism that might have made the wing spring open.

  As soon as he was free, Max crouched down next to Spencer on the floor, right in front of Doug’s face, the wings forgotten. Jelly stood on the footstool to get a better look at Stan. “We just wanted to see you, like, talking and stuff,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve seen us,” Stan said, “so you’d better run along now, otherwise the Master might catch you in here again—and I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that.”

  Jelly rummaged in her pocket. “Can I take a video of you talking?”

  “NO!” Hedy and Spencer cried together.

  “Why not?”

  “No way, they’re ours,” scowled Spencer.

  Much as she liked Jelly, Hedy suspected her cousin wouldn’t be able to stop herself sharing a video with friends, not to mention parents. “It’s too risky. Uncle Peter or Grandpa John might find out.”

  Spencer remembered the egg in his pocket. He pulled it out. “Guys, look what we found. Grandpa John said it’s a lyre bird egg.”

  “Lyre bird, did you say?” Doug said, looking at it closely. “Well, I never.”

  “May I see it?” Stan called from the wall. Spencer jealously refused to let Jelly hold the egg, and stood to show Stan himself.

  “Ah, of course,” Stan said with a nod. “Handsome things.”

  “Have you seen lyre birds before?” Hedy asked. “I thought they were from Australia.”

  “Nothing the Lord of the Queen’s Wood hasn’t seen,” Stan said pompously.

  The egg in Spencer’s hand wobbled, and they all heard the Lar! Lar! from inside it. Doug guffawed so loudly that Hedy jumped onto the bear’s muzzle to keep the noise down. The laugh made the whole rug ripple, shaking Hedy about as she asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “I’ll wager my tail that’s a lyre bird egg,” Doug said when he had calmed down.

  “That’s what we said,” Hedy said, a trifle exasperated.

  “No, a l-i-a-r bird egg,” Doug tried again. “And it caught the Lord of the Queen’s Wood out in his fib. ‘Nothing the Lord of the Queen’s Wood hasn’t seen.’ Hah!”