by Mr.
“So we have to write our destination down on that piece of wood,” Jack said.
He walked around the planetarium and bent down. “Florence,” he said as he wrote.
“What’s that?” Sophie cried, jumping back in fright. The ermine had appeared again out of a dark corner.
“Just ignore it,” said Tom. “When we came in here on Friday she was here, too. No idea how she keeps getting in, but it’s harmless.”
Sophie and Lisa watched the creature, which came over and sat next to Jack as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Okay, everyone ready?” Jack asked.
“What are you going to do next?” Sophie asked.
“Tom, check the pages to make sure we got everything right,” said Jack, crouching next to the ermine on the other side of the planetarium.
Sophie turned around and quickly grabbed her backpack.
“The painkillers are in my bag! I’ll need to bring it just in case I get another earache,” she whispered to her sister. Lisa grabbed Sophie’s hand and together they leaned slightly forward to read the pages along with Tom.
Tom’s fingers ran down through the text. “Planetarium, check. Planets aligned, check. Pour water, check. Date, check. Ehm, Jack, is the date right?”
“Yes, check,” he replied.
“Okay, destination… Jack, destination?”
“Yep, also check. Florence 1475, check.”
“We’re all wearing the right clothes, too. Everything’s fine, Jack, up to you now.”
Sophie squinted her eyes and tried to focus on Jack’s every movement.
“I’m turning on your phone, looking for camera. Wait a second…”
Jack was tinkering with the phone. “Found it! Now the timer, five seconds, check. Okay, I’m going to put your phone in the right-hand panel with the flash pointed upwards. According to the drawings, that’s where it’s supposed to go. That’s why the space underneath the latch on the right was empty.
“Did it work for Leonardo?” Sophie asked.
“Eh, no, not really,” Tom said. “He wrote that it didn’t work at first because he didn’t have anything that produced a strong enough flash. But then… well, then he succeeded. That’s what he wrote anyway.”
Lisa’s eyes shone with excitement. This was the kind of stuff she lived for. “Come on, what are we waiting for. Turn the thing on!” she cried.
Sophie clutched her backpack and squeezed Lisa’s arm with her free hand. Tom was crouched down on the other side and threw his arm over Lisa’s shoulder. “Come on Jack!” she cried again.
Jack swallowed and clicked on the timer with trembling fingers.
“The ermine!” yelled Sophie.
“Leave it!” said Lisa. “If we have to, we’ll bring her back with us!”
Tom counted down out loud. “Five… four… three… two… one.”
Flash! Blinded by the light, everyone squeezed their eyes shut.
“What’s happening?” Sophie screamed as hard as she could, but no sound came out of her mouth. The room was completely silent.
The flash had caused the spheres on the planetarium to revolve on their axes. A bright light radiated out of the little tunnels. The spheres themselves appeared to light up as they turned faster and faster.
Sophie’s toes were tingling and she had a strange feeling in her stomach. She glanced at her feet to locate the source of the tingling, but when she looked down she saw that her feet were hovering above the ground, she was floating! Terrified, she looked across at Jack. He seemed to be screaming, too, without making any sound. Still crouching and with the ermine next to his feet, he seemed to be rising slowly up into the air. Lisa and Tom were also floating in the air next to her. Lisa had never looked so happy, this was the first time Sophie had ever seen such delight on her sister’s face.
“What’s happening?” Sophie yelled, but there was still no sound.
The light radiating from the spheres slowly illuminated the entire room. With a low-pitched buzz, the light seemed to swallow everything within a few feet of the planetarium. She watched in amazement as the ermine vanished into thin air after being touched by the light. She squeezed her eyes shut in fear. When she opened them again Jack was gone as well. Suddenly she felt her hand losing its grip on Lisa’s arm, which she had been grasping tightly the entire time. Paralyzed, she looked at her sister. Lisa said something, but all she could hear was the buzzing sound. Sophie looked around her in desperation. Tom had also vanished. The light hadn’t reached Lisa yet because she had pulled up her feet. She gave Sophie a thumbs-up and flashed a smile. “See ya,” she seemed to say. She stretched her legs. Gone. Lisa disappeared as soon as the light hit her ankles.
Sophie was sitting farthest from the planetarium. She had lifted up her legs so high that her knees were touching her chin. The light rose slowly until it was impossible to avoid it. She closed her eyes and waited for it to engulf her.
Monday, June 23rd, late afternoon
Sophie looked around with a rising sense of alarm. What had gone wrong? The awful smell was overwhelming. When she turned and tried to run, the heel of her shoe got caught in her long dress. She threw her arms back instinctively to cushion the fall, but Jack caught her just in time.
“Sophie! Yo! You okay? We’re here! But we should have brought some air freshener...” He laughed sheepishly at his own joke.
“I got here first, then Tom, then your sister. And now you’re here, too.”
Sophie was still dizzy from hitting the ground. She looked around to try and get her bearings, but she couldn’t orientate herself in the dim light. All her feelings seemed to converge in her stomach: pain, dizziness, disgust. The smell of death rushed into her nostrils; the thick, sweet, oily stench of a decomposing corpse overwhelmed her again. She pinched her nostrils and bent over double with revulsion.
Jack did his best to bring her back to her senses. “The planetarium... unbelievable... it actually works! All that light radiating from those little planets. When it touched me everything suddenly went turbo. A second later I was standing here.”
“Why am I wearing this?” Sophie stammered. She covered her eyes with her hands, trying to remember why she was dressed this way. She was wearing a long red velvet dress with yellow accents.
“Hello… hello!” Jack waved his arms in front of her face. He tried his best to grab her attention. Sophie tentatively removed one hand from her eyes and gave him a puzzled look. Slowly, things started to come back to her.
“Where is Lisa? Where are Lisa and Tom?” she asked in a trembling voice. “And how…” She forgot to cover her nose as she spoke and was again overwhelmed by the horrible stench. She couldn’t even finish her sentence. She gagged and had to bend over. Gastric acid burned her throat.
“Ugh…” she groaned, as saliva dripped from her mouth and stopped her mid sentence. She stood with her hands on her knees, eyes bloodshot. “Jack, where’s that stench coming from?” She was almost pleading with him.
“Sophie, relax… breathe! I mean, through your mouth.” Jack winked at her as sympathetically as he could.
“Lisa’s in the room next to us… with Tom. That’s where the smell is coming from. I think you’re suffering from some kind of jetlag. It took you ages to get here! We’re all fine.”
Jack noticed that Sophie still had a dazed look in her eyes. “Sophie, helloooo! We’re here! In Florence! In the Renaissance! We did it!” He pointed at the rickety-looking door. “Before the rest of you arrived I took a quick look outside, and we’re really here!”
“Huh?” Sophie stammered perplexed. “Did we… Did we really make it?”
“Yes, really! It looks totally different outside, and I saw people walking around wearing the same clothes we’re wearing.”
Sophie looked him up and down. It was only now that she noticed that Jack was wearing a strange costume.
“In the next room, where the stench is coming from… he’s there! It’s really him!”
“Leonardo?” she sputtered incredulously.
Jack nodded and pointed towards the door. “He’s in the next room, where the stench is coming from. Tom and Lisa are there as well.”
“Really? How do you know it’s Leonardo?”
“Well, ehm, I can’t understand a thing he’s saying, but, you know, he pointed to himself and said ‘Leonardo da Vinci’.” Then, for some odd reason, Jack flexed his biceps.
“By the way, he’s, like, a really young dude, around twenty I think, not nearly as old as in the picture we saw on the computer.”
Sophie was slowly regaining her composure. “But, Leonardo… are you sure? I mean, doesn’t he think this is kinda weird? Isn’t he like completely shocked?”
“Not really. It’s almost as if he was expecting us.”
“Sophie!” Lisa suddenly yelled from the adjacent room. “What are you doing? Get in here and check this out!”
“Isn’t he dangerous?” Sophie stood on her toes so that she could whisper in Jack’s ear. “You never know, he might murder us.”
Jack couldn’t suppress a nervous smile. “Relax.” He held out his arms to her and tried to calm her down. “When I fell out of the sky, so to speak, I found myself lying on the ground.” Jack bent down and held his ankle. “I landed awkwardly and my ankle hurt like mad. I was cursing my luck when suddenly he appeared beside me. And it was really strange, I was shocked, but he wasn’t at all! He looked me up and down, said something in Italian and then ran off again. I heard him rummaging around in the other room and knocking things over. He was obviously looking for something. Then he came back with a pile of loose sheets of paper and tossed them into my lap. Pages from a book.”
“Book?” Sophie mumbled.
“The book!” Jack looked at her urgently. “The book we found. The book that’s lying in your drawer at home! The pages he tossed to me are from that book.”
Sophie looked at him in bewilderment.
“Leonardo crouched down beside me, put a hand on my shoulder, and pointed to the drawing of the planetarium on one of the pages. Then he helped me up and pointed at the planetarium there behind you.”
Sophie turned her head and saw the device. A few of the planets were still turning. Her telephone was sitting in the right-hand panel.
“While Leonardo was showing me the planetarium, Tom appeared out of nowhere and slammed into the ground. Leonardo jumped back, startled, but he quickly regained his composure. He pointed to Tom and me, stuck two fingers in the air, and began talking again in Italian. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but he was calm and composed. He wasn’t behaving like a murderer in any case. Lisa appeared soon after that…” Jack shrugged his shoulders. “You know what your sister is like, she saw me and Tom and was instantly at ease, and wanted to look around the house immediately! Leonardo was quick to spot Lisa’s natural curiosity and led her into that room there to show her what he was working on.”
“Sophie! Are you coming or not?” Lisa yelled.
“Yeah, hang on!” Sophie yelled back. “I’m putting my trust in you, Jack.” She grabbed his hand. “I hope we haven’t made a mistake by coming here.”
Sophie allowed herself a discrete smile, but it didn’t last very long. The smell was so unbearable that she had to focus on her breathing to keep from throwing up.
Together with Jack she entered the room where the stench was coming from. There weren’t any doors or windows, and it was even darker than in the room in which they had landed. A single oil lamp cast a slightly eerie light.
Tom and Lisa stood shoulder to shoulder bent over a table, their backs turned to her. In the dim light Sophie couldn’t really see what was on the table, behind which stood a man in his early twenties wielding a large, heavy knife. With a macabre, almost demonic smile on his face, he raised the bloody knife with his hand.
“Watch out!” Sophie screamed. The man sliced through the flesh in one fluid motion. Sophie saw blood splatter and heard the sound of bones being crushed.
Lisa turned around and saw the horrified look on her sister’s face. “It’s okay, Sophie, don’t be a wimp. Leonardo’s just showing us what he’s been doing. Come and have a look,” Lisa said casually.
Jack nudged Sophie from behind. She took a few steps forward and was dumbstruck by what she saw.
“A horse,” Lisa giggled, “just like the one Hans has in his living room, except that this one used to be alive.”
Tom began laughing somewhat nervously. Lying on the table in front of them were the stinking remains of a horse that had been cut up into pieces. Enormous black flies buzzed about above the horse. Leonardo was carefully dissecting the dead animal. Judging by the smell, the carcass was already a few days old. Leonardo made a few more cuts with his knife, producing fleshy, crunching sounds. He needed all his strength to slice through the tendons and bones. Fresh maggots crawled out of the flesh and onto the table. Sophie looked at the wriggling creatures in disgust.
Leonardo used the knife to sweep the maggots onto the floor. He grabbed a rag and wiped the knife clean before setting it back down on the edge of the table. He lifted up a severed shank with two hands, turned it over, and put it back down again. The hair was plastered against the horse’s skin. The powerful smell of rotting flesh, clotted blood, and horsehair rose from the table.
Lisa stood on the tips of her toes and leaned in to get a better look. Leonardo walked around the table and stood next to her. He lifted the bloody leg and spoke rapidly while pointing his finger at the tendons, blood vessels, and bones, all of which were clearly visible where the shank had been severed.
Sophie had climbed onto a rickety wooden stool to get a better view of what Leonardo was doing. He didn’t look anything like the old man they knew from the internet. She thought of Leonardo’s self-portrait, which pictured an old man with a long beard. But standing here in front of her was a fit young man bursting with energy, who had hardly blinked when they suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Leonardo walked quickly around the table, lifting up a chunk of flesh every so often to reveal the bones and tendons he had already removed from the rotting flesh. As he explained everything in Italian, he seemed very aware of the fact that they didn’t understand him. He tried to clarify his words using gestures, hoping they would understand what he was telling them. Lisa and Tom watched him as if in a trance. His calm, friendly manner helped Sophie to relax, despite the smell.
Then she remembered something and jumped down from the stool. “Wait!” she yelled to the others, and quickly ran to the room they had just come from. Four pairs of eyes stared after her. Even Leonardo stopped in mid-sentence, a long tendon he had just removed from the horse’s chest dangling from his right hand.
“I just thought of something,” she yelled from the other room.
She came back in carrying her phone. It was a strange scene. On the left a horse in the late stages of decomposition, and on the right Sophie wearing a long velvet dress and holding a shiny telephone.
Jack looked at her quizzically. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
Sophie didn’t reply, her fingers moving rapidly across the screen.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but you do know you can’t use the phone, right? There are no wireless networks around here.” Jack chuckled at his own joke.
Sophie gave Jack a withering look. “I know that,” she said firmly, as she continued typing on her phone.
When she was finished she turned to Leonardo. “Leonardo…?”
Leonardo nodded and waited for her to speak.
She held her phone out in front of him. “My name is Sophie.” She quickly gestured for Lisa to keep quiet.
“Il mio nome é
Sophie,” came a voice from the phone.
Leonardo looked at Sophie’s smartphone, dumbfounded. “Cosa c’é di che,” he said as he stepped towards hers.
“What is that?” said the voice in the telephone.
Sophie smiled broadly and held her telephone up in the air. “We’ll explain later,” she said, as her telephone automatically translated her sentence into Italian.
“Va bene!” said Leonardo, throwing his arms up to heaven in an apparent gesture of gratitude.
“All right!” said the telephone.
Sophie saw that everyone was staring at her in disbelief.
“That’s awesome sis!”
“Cool, isn’t it? When I was downloading the apps to translate the pages I downloaded this translation app, too.”
Sophie was enjoying her friends’ obvious elation so much that she forgot to tell them she had downloaded the app by accident.
“But if the battery dies, we’re in trouble,” said Tom.
Sophie shook her head to dismiss his concern.
“We thought of that as well,” Lisa said.
Sophie rummaged quickly through her backpack and pulled out the solar charger.
“How are we going to get back, actually?” Tom asked suddenly.
“Tom! We just got here!” Lisa said sharply.
Listening to their conversation, Leonardo walked towards the planetarium. “You can use this to go back,” he said. “It brought you here after all. Don’t worry, I wrote everything down. You can return whenever you want. But not just yet. Let’s get to know each other better first. There is… there’s so much I’d like to know, so many questions.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said Jack, clearly relishing his role as the senior member of the group.
“I wouldn’t mind getting something to eat, though. Pasta… pizza?” Lisa whispered to Tom.
“Pisa?” Leonardo looked at her in surprise. “You want to go to Pisa? Why?” He didn’t understand what they were on about. “We can eat here. Sorry, I’m a terrible host. I completely forgot to offer you something. Sorry, a thousand times sorry.”