by John Eubank
Now she realized what bothered her. The room had darkened slightly, which meant that someone or something was blocking the light coming through a window. Maybe it was only the man in the green coat again, she thought. She overcame her fear and turned her head just enough to see.
A shadowy figure loomed on the other side of the nearest window pane! It was far too large and dark to be the little man. Her eyes opened wide.
“Will,” she managed to cry. “Shadovecht!”
Chapter 4
The thing in the shadows
“Shadow what?” Will said.
“Vecht!” Angelica peeped in a high, frightened voice, pointing at the window. She popped open a secret compartment in the wall, and a heavy, two-handed battle axe fell out. THUNK. Its sharp blade sunk in the wooden floor, narrowly missing her foot.
Will turned his head with alarm. “Shadovecht?”
A dark shape lurked in the window. For a second he froze stiff, clutching the ladder tensely, but he hopped down and rushed to his sister, who was trying to free the mighty battle axe.
With a grunt he tugged it from the floor boards and faced the window. He remembered his father telling him: “You have to smash their brains to fully stop them. The problem is they can hide them almost anywhere: their chest, stomach, bottom – and some try to throw us off and actually keep them in their heads.”
Only now did Will realize how limited that advice was, and he wished he’d asked his father how you knew where their brains were!
“Run!” he told his sister, planting his feet firmly on the floor and hefting the battle axe into attack position.
The dark shape moved up to the window ominously. He wished he were stronger. Trembling, he stood his ground, tightening his grip on the handle.
“What are you people doing in there?” a muffled female voice said from the other side of the glass, and they realized her shadow had been magnified out of proportion.
Brother and sister stared in astonishment and then broke down laughing. It wasn’t some nefarious assailant from their father’s stories - it was their first cousin, Giselle!
***
“Don’t you ever look out your windows?” said Giselle Steemjammer, who struggled to get comfortable in the oversized armchair in the den. Shifting this way and that, nothing felt right. She ended up settling herself onto a heavily padded footstool. “I was out there for almost an hour.”
“You could have knocked,” Angelica said.
Giselle’s large, gray-green eyes flashed. They were almond shaped and exotic - not bugging out like her Uncle Henry’s, but certainly mysterious and capable of powerful expression. She had long, straight brown hair that was only double-cowlicked. This caused it to have counter-rotating swirls in the back, which made it relatively easy to brush.
Giselle was older than Will by a few months. Angelica thought she was very pretty and had always looked up to her, when they weren’t arguing. Giselle claimed to be “disturbed by small children” but in truth was often nice to Angelica.
“You could have looked outside and seen me,” she said with only the slightest hint of a Dutch accent.
“But why didn’t you knock?” Angelica persisted.
“Because I don’t like knocking, and your door hurts my knuckles. With all those carvings, there’s no flat place to knock.”
“You could have pulled the door chain.”
“And be zapped by your creepy gong?”
“It doesn’t ‘zap’ you.”
“It zaps my eardrums and makes them ring for hours. And then the little door flaps open with that disturbing face popping out! No, I’m not about to pull your door chain, thank you very much.”
Will laughed. When someone used their door gong, a small panel opened to the side, and a hideous white face popped out with a puff of steam. His father thought it was a tremendously good joke.
“Dad says it keeps away door-to-door salesmen,” he said.
“I’m sure it would,” his cousin automatically agreed. “What was that again? A door salesman, you said?”
Will shrugged. They’d never had any, so he wasn’t really sure.
“Speaking of Onkel Hendrelmus, is he here?” Uncle.
“He was,” Will said, “until three days ago.”
“He’s gone?”
“There was a noise in the basement, and he went down to check it out.”
“Aha!”
“You know what happened?”
“No, I said ‘aha’ to sound knowledgeable, like I’m in command of the situation. Don’t be so easily fooled.”
Angelica smiled. She loved it when her cousin spoke like she had some secret, mysterious power and wished she could do the same.
“Anyway,” Will explained, “when we came back from our chores, he wasn’t here. No note. Nothing but his lantern on a work bench by the boiler.”
He folded his hands, not sure what else to say. An uncomfortable silence passed.
“There are ice crystals around your air vent,” Giselle spoke at last. “I see an actual icicle. Do you people enjoy shivering?”
“The cooling system’s on the fritz,” Will said. “We’d rather it be frosty than a sauna.”
“Let’s brew some hot camellia sinensis, then.”
“Huh?” Angelica said.
“Tea! You have some, don’t you?”
***
“Passable,” Giselle said.
Now in the living room, she sipped a cup of green tea while trying to relax on a gray leather couch that had a large and inexplicable knob in the middle, which she avoided. At last she decided to sit on the floor.
“You know you can cook or ferment tea leaves,” she said, “and get other flavors. Oolong is roasted. And Earl Grey is spiked with bergamot, whatever that is. Probably some plant that’s insanely touchy and difficult to grow, like coffee bushes.”
Coffee was too hard to grow in Ohio, but they were able to grow tea shrubs in large pots, which could be rolled inside in winter. They pinched off young, green leaves to brew.
“Or, Maker forbid, you could actually buy some professionally made tea,” she said.
“You mean with money?” asked Angelica, who drank warm milk with honey. She didn’t care for tea.
“No, with shiny rocks. Of course I mean money.”
“Dad doesn’t like money. He says it has no value and might even be evil.”
A burst of laughter struck Giselle so that she accidentally spewed some tea into the air.
“‘Money is the root of all evil,’” she said, then grinned conspiratorially. “I have some. Want to see it?”
Brother and sister glanced at each other.
“Sure,” said Will. “Couldn’t hurt.”
“How’d you get it?” Angelica asked.
“That’s the strange part,” Giselle told them. “I was riding my bicycle around town the other day when I saw a tortoise in a flower bed. It was so little and pretty, with this odd yellow design on the shell that looked like caribou antlers. Anyway, it was very still, and I wasn’t sure if it was alive or made of clay. So I sat down to watch it, to see if it would move.
“Apparently I was there some time, and people walking by on the sidewalk put money in my bicycle’s basket. Take a look.”
From the pocket of her gray, homespun dress she produced a handful of crumpled papers and metal disks. Will and Angelica leaned in to examine them. Rectangular and printed in green and black, the papers had symbols, numbers, and men’s faces on them.
“That’s twenty-nine ‘dollars’ in paper money,” their cousin explained. “These coins all together are worth two hundred and seventeen ‘cents.’”
“Dollars and cents,” Will said. “I’ve heard about that but never really understood.”
“It’s a dual system, I think. Dollars are for larger purchases, and cents are for little things, like gum or wingnuts.”
“What’s with the eye on the pyramid?” asked Angelica, mystified. She’d seen money before but n
ever this close.
“Who knows? It’s kind of creepy.”
“This is what they use to get things?”
“Yeah, like kaffee, which your father buys at the store. I’ve seen the cans in your kitchen.”
“No,” Will said. “He won’t touch money. He trades for what we need. Or he repairs steam boilers and fixes the old engines at the Mad River Railroading Museum. Then, people give him his kaffee and other stuff.”
“Like herrings,” Angelica added.
“Why doesn’t he just use money?” their cousin said. “Money represents time, skill and effort. The more of that you put out, the more money you get, which you can then use to get the products of other peoples’ time, skill and effort, like a decent cup of tea.”
“Because money’s bad and worthless,” Angelica retorted. “If people just gave it to you because you were staring at a tortoise, it must be.”
“I think they felt sorry for me because my dress was homemade, I had no shoes, and my bicycle had been welded together from parts of other broken bicycles. Oh, it was real, by the way.”
“What?” Will asked.
“Velocitus!” she said with a smile, pulling a tiny tortoise from her pocket and putting it on the table next to the money. “That’s what I’ve named it.”
About three inches long, it had a delicate, antler-like yellow pattern on its back. It stood quite still, except Angelica thought she saw it blink.
“It’s adorable!” she said. “Is it a boy or girl?”
Giselle shrugged. “We’ll know if it lays eggs.”
She put it in a large, bone-white bowl of sand that rested on the low table in front of the couch.
“It should be safe there,” she said.
“No-” Will tried to stop her, but he was too late.
All over the house bells and whistles suddenly went off. The hour had struck. Eleven in the morning, the tiny green dragon began its puffing on the wall by the stairs. The little gnome village came alive with a burst of activity, and above them the war zeppelin hissed and zoomed around in circles on its tether, firing off shots from its tiny cannon.
In the bowl there was movement. Jets of steam hissed out of the swirling sand like weird geysers! The tiny tortoise froze in terror. One by one, eleven miniature iron skeletons rose out of the sand and began dancing and twirling in a macabre celebration. Some had little musical instruments in their hands, and others held swords.
Velocitus tucked itself tightly inside its shell. Recovering from her shock, Giselle scooped the tortoise out and kissed its back while rubbing its belly gently.
“There now,” she soothed. “It’s okay. Begekkin steemspeel.” Crazy steam toy.
“Your home has steam clocks, too,” Will said defensively.
“Not like yours! We have dancing bears and woodpeckers and healthy, happy things. Not miniature grim reapers.”
“This isn’t the first time it’s scared you.”
“So I forgot. And I’m not scared. I was worried for Velocitus.” She turned to it. “Poor baby. There now.”
“You seem more touchy than usual.”
“Now I’m touchy?”
“You’ve freely admitted it in the past.”
“All right! Ganoof!” Enough already!
She put Velocitus back in her pocket and stood up suddenly, forgetting that the empty tea cup had been balanced in her lap. It went sailing. Fast and agile, little Angelica reached out and snatched it safely out of the air.
“What if I am touchy?” Giselle admitted crankily.
Like a deflating balloon, she sat back down. Her eyes sank to the floor, and it seemed that all the energy had drained out of her face. Will hadn’t seen her like this before and grew concerned.
“My father vanished, too,” she said.
Chapter 5
another cousin heard from
“Six bushels of ‘maters,” said the burly man in the sweat-stained tee-shirt and denim overalls. Tomatoes. Born near the West Virginia border, he spoke with a strong mountain drawl. “Sev-‘n-a-haif bushels of cukes.” Seven and a half bushels of cucumbers. “Sixty haids of green lettuce, fo’ty of red. Five bushels of mixed summer squarsh, eight dozen aigs.” Squash and eggs. “Nine quarts of goat cream, and a large sack of toadstools.”
As worried as the Steemjammer kids were, it’d been easier to busy themselves with chores, as they had little idea how to go about finding their missing parents. Over the weekend, they’d spent a lot of time searching for a secret door, the possibility of which intrigued Giselle.
When that got tiresome, they hunted wild mushrooms, picked vegetables, collected eggs, and ran several days’ worth of goat’s milk through a separator to get cream. On Wednesday they loaded their wagon, hitched the horse and went to a country market a few miles up the highway.
“Those are good mushrooms,” Will protested.
“I’m sure they are, son,” said Mr. Carter, the burly store owner. “But if even one’s pizen,” poison, “there goes my bizness. So, whatcha need today?”
Will rattled off a list that included pickling salt, flour, cracked corn, and other items of food and hardware. Mr. Carter wrote it down.
“Don’t forget frozen herrings,” Angelica said. “And hot dogs. I love hot dogs.”
“Okay,” Will grinned. “The usual fish order and three pounds of hot dogs.” Remembering that she loved something else even more, he added: “And eight chocolate bars.”
Angelica fist-pumped. Mr. Carter said they had a balance left over for next time, and Will signed for it.
“How’s your dad?” the store owner asked.
“Vanished,” Will blurted truthfully and then seized up. No one should know, so why had he said that?
“Huh?” Mr. Carter said distractedly.
“We expect him back soon,” Giselle told the man.
“Fine. Sorry, I gotta take this.” He took a vibrating cell phone from his pocket. “Jimmy’ll bring your stuff right out. You kids take care now.”
Angelica pulled tall grass growing nearby to feed the horse, while Giselle stared at her shoes, preoccupied. Will had made her a new pair the night before. They felt comfortable, but their colors and seams didn’t match. His own pair looked even worse. The shoe-making machine of Beverkenhaas was hard to master.
A truck full of alfalfa bales rumbled past, smelling like summer and making Will wonder if he’d be cutting hay alone that year. No one cared that they took grass from the vacant lots around Beverkenhaas, but it was going to be hard without his dad.
“Oh, look, children,” called a female voice. “Amish kids! Look at their big horsie and their homemade clothes. Aren’t they adorable?”
A bronze-skinned, athletic lady in a white tennis outfit and huge sunglasses came over with her two young children.
“Do you speak En-glish?” she said to Will very slowly.
“Ick kan Dutch spreken,” he answered jokingly. I speak Dutch. Realizing how this might have been misleading, he felt compelled to add, “And English.”
“Honey,” the lady called to her husband. “Come meet these nice Amish kids.”
“What’s ‘Amish?’” Angelica asked, but no one seemed to hear.
“Can we sit on your wagon?” the lady said, lifting her small children into the seat without waiting for an answer. “Oh, you have to take our picture!”
She thrust a complex digital camera at Giselle, who backed away in consternation.
“It auto-focuses,” the lady explained, pushing it into her hands. “You’ll see the picture you’re taking on the screen. Just push the button.”
While the lady and her husband posed next to their children with wide, gleaming, professionally whitened smiles, Giselle looked uneasily to Will and Angelica, holding the camera like it was a dead rat.
She narrowed her eyes warily. “Is it supposed to do this?”
The screen flickered radically, and it popped. A puff of black smoke came out, and she handed the ruined camera back to its
owner, who gasped.
“I’m sorry,” Giselle said.
“It’s okay,” the lady said, trying to remain calm. “All you did was hold it.”
“I know.”
The lady’s face got stuck somewhere between “what the heck?” and “huh?” Thankfully their order was brought out, and the Steemjammer kids got in their wagon and left.
“What’s ‘Amish?’” Angelica repeated.
Will speculated that it meant someone with hair issues. Giselle just wished people would stop handing her electronic devices. This was the third one she’d broken that month.
***
On the way home, Angelica stood on the wagon seat, holding onto her brother’s shoulder with one hand and slinging rocks at fence posts with the other. THWACK! A crack shot, she rarely missed. Tucking another rock snugly into her leather sling, she spun it to the side, faster and faster. Because of her hair, she couldn’t use the standard overhead method, but that didn’t hold her back. With a snap of her wrist, she sent another rock flying.
They stopped at a dead tree that had fallen in the ditch and cut it into logs with a bucksaw they kept under the seat. Using a pulley and rope, they hoisted the timber into the wagon bed, which sank on its creaking iron springs from the weight.
Going down a narrow, country road, they collected “windfall” or limbs that had come down. The boiler consumed a tremendous amount of fuel, but they always found plenty of free wood to load into the automatic feeder, which could keep the firebox burning for several days.
“Want some?” Angelica said, breaking off pieces of chocolate and handing them out.
They were already on the second bar. Will knew he should have stopped her, that they needed to start pacing themselves. Autumn was near. After the apple harvest, the cold would shut down their garden. Then, there’d only be eggs and cream to trade.
In winter, his dad’s boiler repairing talents were in high demand, and that was when they got their best trades - except now he’d vanished. With their animals and steam-heated greenhouse, they wouldn’t starve. But when machines and tools started to break, Will had no idea how he’d get parts needed to fix them.