Balance Keepers #1: The Fires of Calderon

by Lindsay Cummings

  “Whoa,” Albert said.

  Farnsworth ran down the tunnel, hopping and ducking as he went, and arrived at the far end, staring back at Albert. It was like looking into two Tonka truck headlights, and the headlights were getting dimmer.

  “Man, I wish this dog would sit still,” Albert said.

  The thought of everything going pitch-dark again got Albert moving in a hurry. As the light from Farnsworth’s eyes dimmed more and more, Albert made his way expertly through the tangle of thick roots. More than once he had to climb up toward the ceiling to pass through, or slither through the middle like a snake. And just about the time Farnsworth’s pilot light went out, Albert dropped down next to the dog.

  He was about to scratch Farnsworth behind the ears again when a sound rang out from his left, where the tunnel turned sharply against the wall of dirt. It was a terrible, shrill squeal, like a door creaking on rusted hinges. Albert’s heart stopped, right there in his chest.

  A few feet ahead of Albert, where the tunnel finally ended, a ribbon of light escaped from the bottom of a closed door. There were shadows inside, moving back and forth.

  Someone else was in the tree.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Path Hider

  Albert had been taught all his life not to open closed doors, especially if he did not know what was behind them.

  But he’d already broken that rule once, and given the circumstances, it only made sense to break it a second time. He revved up Farnsworth’s eyeballs, a trick he was starting to really get the hang of, and pointed the dog in the direction of the sliver of light. There were no roots to avoid on the short path between him and the door, so he arrived a little faster than maybe he’d wanted.

  “Are we doing this?” Albert whispered, looking down at Farnsworth, who was scratching at the door to get in. Albert took a deep breath, recataloged all the terrible decisions that had brought him to this moment, and reminded himself that there was no way out. He starved to death inside of a tree or he forged ahead—those were his options.

  Instead of a handle, the door had an outline of a human hand, like it had been carved in, just waiting for someone to press his palm to it. Albert lifted his hand and held it right in front of the handprint. For a second, nothing happened, and Albert let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. But just as he was about to pull his hand away, something changed. There was a hiss, then a click, and a tremble from somewhere inside of the door. Before Albert could react, the door swung open, and a strange orange light shone from within. Whoever had been there before was gone; the space behind the door was empty.

  Farnsworth stepped inside and sat down on the floor of an orange platform, wagging his tail like this was any ordinary day, in a very ordinary place. The platform wasn’t large. It seemed to have space enough to hold a few people standing side by side, and so Albert stepped on it, too.

  “Now what?” Albert asked Farnsworth. The dog barked, and as soon as he did, the platform began to move.

  Down and down it went, deeper and deeper under the forest outside of Herman, Wyoming. Wind rushed up into Albert’s face, and his ears popped the way they did on the airplane when he’d left New York. There was a very real part of Albert that began to think he was either dreaming a really unusual dream or he was the dumbest boy in the world. Those were the only two ways he could imagine ending up in such an outrageous situation.

  The platform slowed down quickly, like an elevator coming to a basement floor. Albert stepped off, and found himself standing in a room crisscrossed with copper pipes that twisted and coiled in all directions. Some of them were as fat around as telephone poles; others were thin like a garden hose, wrapped with wires and cables. Steam hissed out of the pipes, filling the place with a damp heat that made Albert’s shirt cling to his skin.

  It’s like a mechanical forest, Albert thought. He found himself frozen there in front of the platform, unable to move. Where am I?

  Farnsworth circled around Albert’s feet, yipping and hopping like he was home and couldn’t wait to show Albert around the place. The dog grabbed ahold of Albert’s shoelace again and started tugging.

  “All right,” Albert whispered, unable to speak too loud. He followed Farnsworth through the maze of pipes, ducking every so often as steam escaped from holes in the copper pipes. Soon the pipes started to spread off to the sides of the walls, leaving an open space large enough for him to move comfortably about. And there, just across the room, stood a man, looking downward into what looked like an open grave.

  Albert ducked behind a pipe and hid at a safe distance.

  It took him a moment to gather the courage to peek out. The man was tall and thin, almost spiderlike, and on his head was a miner’s helmet, the hard kind with a light on top. Wild strands of rusty-orange hair flopped out from the edges of the helmet.

  Farnsworth, who looked at Albert like he was crazy for hiding, wagged his tail and took off toward the strange man, barking.

  “Hello, Farnsworth,” the man said. “Did you bring the package?”

  Oh, great, Albert thought. This really is a warlock, Farnsworth is his dog, and I’m about to be cooked in a stew.

  Farnsworth yipped across the room.

  “Is he, now?” the man said to the little dog.

  Albert scooted deeper into the shadow of the pipe, but hot water dripped onto his back from one of the pipes overhead and he jumped out into the open. The warlock, or whatever he was, was too busy to notice, though.

  “Move,” Albert said to himself. “Come on, it’s not that hard. You can do it.”

  The man paced back and forth around the open area, peering down into holes Albert couldn’t see the bottom of. Every few seconds he’d stop, reach down with delicate motions as if he was moving pieces on a chessboard, and then slide over to another hole and repeat the process. He mumbled a lot, as if he was trying to coax things to move in certain ways.

  “You might as well come out from behind the pipe,” he said at length. “Not much sense in hiding.” Then he went back to work.

  Albert took a deep breath and stepped out from the shadows, moving around a fat pipe the size of a giant’s thigh. So far, so good.

  “You have something for me?” the man asked without turning around.

  There was a small part of Albert that thought, Hey, I’m just delivering mail down here, no big deal.

  Albert pulled the envelope out of his back pocket and unfolded it. He took two more steps forward and set the envelope on the top of a copper pipe.

  “I guess I’ll be on my way, then.” He began backpedaling. “Pleasure meeting you. I can show myself out. Really, it’s no problem.”

  “Could you bring it to me?” the man said, holding his hand in Albert’s direction without turning his attention away from whatever weird work he was doing.

  Albert picked up the envelope and paced back and forth a few times. What he really wanted to do was leave, but he didn’t really know how to make that possible. He marched toward the wizard or the mad scientist or whatever he was, and resolved to deliver the letter, even if it turned out to be the last thing he ever did.

  He passed by one of the holes in the ground on his way to the man. It had a round rail that came to about Albert’s belly button, and not being able to help himself, he peered over the edge. Inside lay something Albert recognized at once as a miniature version of the forest he’d just come from. There it was: the same wide perfect circle of trees. And from above, he could clearly see the streams he’d crossed with Farnsworth, and the paths he had stumbled through. The Troll Tree stood right in the middle, only this one was the size of Albert’s hand. The rail contained an array of buttons and knobs that Albert very much wanted to touch. He reached out his hand, nearly had his finger on a button . . .

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  Albert nearly jumped out of his underwear. The man was standing right next to him, staring over Albert’s shoulder like a vulture. Under the miner’s hat, he
had two different-colored eyes. One was blue like the sky, the other copper like the pipes around them, and his eyes were carefully observing the small forest inside the hole. The man reached down and turned a knob, crinkled his long, thin nose, and stared into the forest.

  “Who are you?” Albert asked. He couldn’t help himself.

  The man looked at Albert like he was crazy for not knowing.

  “I’m the Path Hider, of course,” he said. “What do they call you?”

  “Uh . . . Albert,” Albert said. “Albert Flynn.” He held up the letter he’d already opened. “Are you . . . expecting a letter from someone?”

  The Path Hider looked at him from the corners of his eyes.

  “Maybe.”

  Albert held out the envelope again and the Path Hider bobbed his head back and forth like an ostrich, examining the envelope every which way. The guy had a really long neck.

  “This mail has been opened.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Albert stammered. “It was kind of a tough day. I mean, that’s no excuse for opening someone’s mail, but—”

  The Path Hider snatched the letter with his spidery fingers before Albert could finish.

  “You’re not that easy to find,” Albert said, and then suddenly he couldn’t hold back the questions any longer. “Why’s my name on that letter? How do you know my dad? How come your dog has headlights for eyes? Where am I? What’s going on? What are you doing?”

  As Albert asked these questions, he watched the Path Hider open the crumpled-up letter. It took him longer than Albert thought was necessary to read four words, but when the Path Hider was done, he looked right at Albert.

  “Flynn, you say?”

  Albert nodded. “That’s me.”

  The Path Hider rubbed his chin. “Wait here a moment.”

  Albert watched as the Path Hider stooped down and pressed one of the buttons on the rail, a large one with what looked like a zigzag etched onto its top.

  “We must hide the paths,” the Path Hider said. “No one can know of your arrival.”

  Okay, that was one question answered, at least. Albert looked down into the hole with an uneasy feeling and watched as the miniature forest began to move, shifting in hundreds of little squares, like Tiles, all around the Troll Tree.

  “That’s my forest,” Albert said, astonished. “That’s where I came from.”

  The man moved from hole to hole—three of them, Albert noted—pressing buttons, shifting versions of other forests that Albert did not recognize. Some had trees without leaves that looked like bare arms stretching to the sky; others had leaves that were orange and red, the way they turned in New York in the fall.

  “Are these real forests?” Albert asked. The man looked up from his spot by a hole, a few feet away.

  “As real as a graviton’s hiss, dear boy.” Albert had no idea what a graviton was. “This way, that way,” the Path Hider said.

  He waved Albert over. Together, they peered down into a hole Albert hadn’t yet seen. The miniature forests inside, Albert saw, were stacked into three levels. Albert recognized each of the forests as the ones from the other, smaller holes.

  “Help me shift it, will you?” the Path Hider asked Albert. He was starting to crank a giant wheel, a big, rusty one that groaned and squealed as Albert helped him turn it.

  “I hide the paths,” the Path Hider said, blinking his different-colored eyes, “so that we can keep our secrets safe.”

  “What secrets?” Albert asked, but the Path Hider waved him off.

  “Later,” he said, and pointed back into the hole. “Watch.”

  Albert looked on as all three levels of forests shifted and switched places, little pieces of them changing and sliding from left to right, up and down, like a game of Tiles.

  When the forests settled, the man smiled.

  “Coffee break,” he said.

  Albert was so confused he simply followed the Path Hider to a corner of the room, where there was a stained gray couch. He took a seat beside the Path Hider, in the middle of all the pipes and levers and strange holes. Despite the incredible circumstances he found himself in, he was starting to feel less afraid and more curious.

  “What kind of mojo are you cooking up down here?” Albert asked.

  “Coffee?” The Path Hider held a thermos out to him.

  Albert shook his head no, and then ventured one more question he hoped would lead to an answer.

  “Can you at least tell me where I am?”

  A pipe hissed over their heads. Steam shot down in between them, blurring the Path Hider for a moment. When it cleared away, Albert saw that the man was smiling at him again.

  “You’re home, dear boy,” he said. “Welcome to the Core.”

  Albert was as confused as he had ever been in his life. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, Farnsworth barked and ran off toward the platform that had brought them underground.

  Albert peered through the steam as the orange platform, which had left while he wasn’t paying attention, returned. A boy and a girl were standing on the platform, their shapes very much like the ones Albert had seen in the forest. The girl had a wide grin on her face, while the boy, who had glasses too large for his face, looked startled and scared and lost.

  “Ah, here we are.” The Path Hider stood up and motioned for Albert to join him as he walked toward the two newcomers. “It seems the rest of your party has arrived.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Way Inside

  At first, no one spoke. Unless you counted the way Farnsworth was greeting the newcomers. He ran circles around them, yipping at the top of his little dog lungs.

  “Hey, little buddy,” the girl said, though she didn’t reach down and pet Farnsworth. Instead she looked up at Albert as if he was Farnsworth’s owner. “Your dog is excited.”

  The girl had the wildest, curliest blond ponytail Albert had ever seen, complete with pink streaks. She was wearing jean shorts, a purple T-shirt that said Falcon Swimming Team, tall black socks over her skinny legs, and a pair of hiking boots covered in mud.

  “Oh, he’s not my dog,” Albert stammered. “He sort of led me in here, I guess. But he’s not mine.”

  The Path Hider raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t speak.

  “Whatever you say, Freckles,” the girl said.

  Albert started to say his name, but the boy who had arrived with the girl asked a question.

  “Hey, so, uh . . . where the heck are we anyway? I’ve never seen this part of Texas in my life. Must have taken a serious wrong turn on that cow trail.”

  The boy was a foot taller than Albert, long and thin like a tree branch. He had small almond-shaped eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. A mess of dark hair stuck out from beneath a red baseball hat.

  Both the boy and girl stared at Albert like he was supposed to answer their questions.

  “There’s no time to sit and stare like Hoppers in the moonlight,” the Path Hider said, and again, Albert noted that he had no idea what the man was talking about. “I need to get you three on your way, and fast.”

  “Could you maybe explain what’s going on first?” Albert asked. “That kid says he was in Texas a minute ago, but I was walking down a trail in Wyoming, so it seems like this whole situation just got a lot weirder. And I didn’t think that was possible.”

  The tall boy smiled. “I’m with Freckles.”

  “It’s, uh . . . Albert,” Albert said. “Albert Flynn.”

  “I’m Birdie Howell,” the girl added. “And I was out in the woods beyond my parents’ property. In Oregon.”

  Birdie didn’t seem all that bothered by the fact that she was in a room under the earth, filled with pipes and steam and a bunch of people she’d never met before in her life. In fact, she seemed excited, bobbing back and forth on her feet like she couldn’t wait to explore.

  The tall boy looked unsure, but he smiled again, and held a large hand out to Albert. “Leroy Jones,” he said. Albert shook his h
and in what he hoped was a reassuring way.

  All three of them—Albert, Birdie, and Leroy—stared at the Path Hider as he took his helmet off, revealing a shock of coppery-orange hair.

  “It’s not my place to do the explaining,” he sighed. “And it’s too late for turning back. I’m afraid you’ll have to keep going.”

  The Path Hider looked down at the dog. “Farnsworth, you know what to do.”

  Farnsworth barked, his tail thumping over Albert’s ankles, then took off running across the steam-filled room.

  “Go on, then.” The Path Hider poked Albert with a long, spidery finger. “Follow the leader. He knows the way.”

  The Path Hider pointed across the room, past the old couch. Albert saw the wide mouth of a tunnel—something he hadn’t noticed before through all the steam.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” Leroy said. He glanced nervously back and forth between Birdie and Albert.

  Birdie bobbed on her toes. “That’s what makes it so exciting!”

  Albert, feeding off of Birdie’s energy, found that he wasn’t afraid anymore either. He was determined to get to the bottom of whatever was going on. He’d also been wishing for a long time to have a real adventure, and to spend time with kids his own age instead of his younger siblings.

  And here it all was.

  This was a thousand times better than sorting through dead letters or hopping and blinking across town.

  “I tell you what,” Albert said, turning to Leroy. “Birdie and I will go first and see what we’re dealing with, then you can follow. How about that?”

  Leroy shrugged. “Works for me.”

  “I’m game,” Birdie said, fiddling with her ponytail. “We’ve come this far down the rabbit hole. Might as well see what’s down there. Maybe it’s treasure, like we won the lotto!”

  “Or a three-headed monster,” Leroy said, adjusting his baseball cap on his head. “But I guess if we’re going to get eaten alive, we might as well do it together.”

  “Some advice, if I may?” the Path Hider called out to them as they reached the mouth of the tunnel. “Hold on tight and don’t lean out the windows. And know that you’re not in any danger. Not yet anyway.”