It would’ve helped if the guy in the next cell would shut up.
“—revealing myself to General Washington,” he was babbling on and on. “To do otherwise would dishonor my name, country, and king. A gentleman must remain upright and proper, even during such unseemly times of war as these. I’m sure you agree.”
No one bothered to respond. They had quickly learned the man saw conversation as a predominantly one-sided affair.
“It was quite the monumental task to find the proper words with which to convey my message,” he continued. “While I respect General Washington, he is, after all, rebelling against his king and, as such, beneath a proper British subject such as myself.”
The man, who had introduced himself as Major John Andre, had been talking nonstop ever since the children had been thrown into the adjoining cell. Sydney had quickly tuned him out and was pretty sure her siblings had done the same. Janice, in fact, seemed to have tuned out the entire world, having spent the time since being incarcerated sitting against the wall with a blank look on her face.
What had really shaken Sydney to the core was that near as she could tell from the guy’s continuous ranting, she and her siblings had somehow found themselves in the middle of the American Revolution. Since she was pretty sure that particular war had ended something like two hundred years ago or more, there was a scary-real chance that they had traveled back in time. Which freaked the heck out of her.
“Personally, I blame General Arnold,” continued Major John Andre. “The man is an utter buffoon and I should never have agreed to his haphazard attempt at espionage. Did you know he constantly smells of fish?”
Aside from the self-important Andre, the only other person they’d seen since being thrown into the dungeon was the butler who had screamed when they’d opened the door. He’d come around once to offer them bread and water, managing not to scream this time.
As Andre dove into a list of everything wrong with Benedict Arnold, Sydney once again looked around their cell, trying to come up with a means of escape. She had already tested the bars of their cell as well as searched around for anything she could use to do serious damage to them. No such luck. Finally, she hopped over to Zack and Alexa, loath to step on the cell floor with her sock. “What are they going to do with us?” she asked.
Zack closed his eyes and sighed, gathering his thoughts. “We’re going to be all right,” he said. “What can they do? We’re not spies. We’re not even British. They’ll let us go.”
“Go where?” asked Sydney.
Zack had no answer, so she shuffled back to her corner, less than convinced. She knew her brother meant well, but she was worried.
“I do believe death at the gallows to be relatively quick and painless,” mentioned Major Andre quietly.
“What?” asked Sydney.
“A swift plunge to a merciful end,” he explained, relishing the thought. “The ground beneath you gives way, and you plummet straight into the abyss. But then, of course, your fall is stopped short by less-than-comfortable neckwear. I’m sure you’ll find the experience invigorating.”
He was smiling, but his voice dripped and drooled with an unfriendly malevolence that caused Sydney to stand and move away from the creepy spy. He followed her with eyes glistening and twinkling in the fading, flickering torchlight, but said nothing more.
A loud creaking pulled Sydney’s attention to the lone door leading out of the dungeon. She held her breath as it groaned its way open. Here we go, she thought. Sydney was ready for anything. Firing squad. Poison. The hangman. A dancing bear. Anything.
Except for who walked through the door.
“Aunt Gladys?” cried Alexa, leaping out of Zack’s lap and flying to the bars of the cell with the fervent gusto of a seven-year-old being offered free candy.
“Oh! There you…right. Alex, right?” asked the ever-distracted woman. “No, don’t tell me. Andy?”
The other three children—even Janice—jumped up as their aunt fumbled with a large ring of keys. She wore her white beekeeper’s helmet tight over her face, making it difficult for her to tell key from key.
“How did you find us?” asked Alexa.
“How’d you get past the soldiers?” asked Janice.
“How’d you get the keys?” asked Zack.
“How’d you build a time machine?” asked Sydney.
Aunt Gladys started at Sydney’s question, as if physically struck. “Time machine? You think…? Oh! Well, yes, I suppose…Time machine? How strange.”
“Try another key!” offered Zack, desperate to get their aunt back on track.
“Another…? Oh! Yes, of course!”
She went back to fumbling through the keys, and the four children waited as patiently as possible as she tried first one, then another, to no avail.
“You cannot unlock yourself from fate, children,” crooned Major Andre. “The noose is ever patient.”
Aunt Gladys looked up. “Goodness! Such negativity!” she said.
“The keys, Aunt Gladys!” prompted Zack.
“Oh! Yes. They really should number these,” she muttered. “Perhaps color-code…”
Finally, a key slid effortlessly into the lock. So effortlessly, in fact, that Aunt Gladys was about to pull it out and try another before Zack stopped her. A moment later, the cell door was open and the children were free.
“Now, come,” ordered Aunt Gladys. “It’s time to return home.”
“He smelled of fish!” called Major Andre. “Fish and cheese and the gallows!”
“Aunt Gladys?” asked Alexa. “Can we release him, too?”
“Seriously? The guy’s way creepy!” snarled Sydney.
“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t unlock his cell,” said Alexa, seemingly secure in her knowledge that deep down everyone was good and deserved a second chance.
Sydney begged to differ, remembering the predatory look Major Andre had given her a moment earlier. She was about to argue for letting him rot in his cell but stopped upon noticing a strange look of amusement come over her aunt’s face.
“Release…?” said Aunt Gladys. “How novel. Possibly amusing. Come along.”
She walked back toward the basement door.
“Aren’t you going to set him free?” cried Alexa.
“Why would I do that?” asked Aunt Gladys, reaching the door and pulling something large and bulky from her pocket.
Even Sydney was a bit taken aback by her aunt’s callousness.
“You’re just going to leave him here?” Zack asked.
“We’ve got lumps of it ’round the back!” called Major Andre, making less and less sense with each passing moment.
“Oh for heaven’s…” Aunt Gladys shook her head. “He’ll be dead in less than a week.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked the condemned, snapping out of his slow descent into madness.
“Aunt Gladys!” exclaimed Alexa. Sydney and the others froze in shock.
“Or, was dead, I suppose,” continued Aunt Gladys without a care in the world. “Will soon to have been dead. Will once again be dead. Something like that.” She returned her attention to the door and pressed the large and bulky something up against it. There was an audible click that somehow seemed to resonate more within Sydney than without, and Aunt Gladys turned what Sydney could now see was a big crystal doorknob. With a soft grunt, Aunt Gladys pulled the door wide, and a blaze of bright white light poured into the room.
“Home!” announced Alexa, who ran forward.
“Yes, yes!” agreed Aunt Gladys. “Hurry along, now.”
Needing no further encouragement, Alexa bounded greedily into the light and disappeared.
“How did you do that?” asked Janice.
“Run now,” said Aunt Gladys. “Explain later.”
“But—”
“The polite thing to do would be to set me free!” cried the forgotten Major Andre in a voice far deeper than he had used before. Curious, Sydney peered back down the hallway, and it seemed
quite a bit darker than it had a moment earlier.
“Run!” urged Aunt Gladys.
Zack shoved Janice and Sydney in front of him even as another strangled cry spilled out of the now-unseen major’s lips. This one was wet, hoarse, and disturbing.
“Major Andre?” asked Sydney.
“Has been dead for over two hundred years, child!” assured Aunt Gladys. “Run!”
Another moist roar emerged from the suddenly pitch-black basement behind them, chilling Sydney to the core. With a startled squeak, Janice pushed her way past and vanished into the light.
“Go, Sydney!” urged Zack, shoving her forward.
Confused, concerned, and increasingly disturbed, Sydney gave in and launched herself into the blinding whiteness. The last thing she heard before the world wrapped itself around her was a tortured gasp of unearthly horror coming from a voice that was no longer human.
Alexa held her breath until everyone emerged from the blinding light pouring through the door. Only then did she finally relax. They’d made it! They were home!
The trip into the yellow world had been fun at first, but there had been something nasty lurking out of sight. Something bad. And right at the end, right after Aunt Gladys had shown up to rescue them, Alexa had felt Something Bad stepping out from the shadows….
But now they were all safely back home, and everything was okay. Content, Alexa flung herself into the room’s only chair—a fun, swivelly chair in front of the long bank of old-timey computers—and proceeded to twirl around back and forth, the repetitive motion helping her calm down.
Aunt Gladys was last through the door, and she quickly slammed it closed behind her. The loss of the bright white light cast a momentary darkness until Alexa’s eyes re-adjusted to the dim illumination coming from the lightbulbs scattered around the room.
“Well!” exclaimed the constantly flustered woman. “That was…! Is everyone…? We’re all here? Zorro? Everyone’s back?”
“Yes, Aunt Gladys,” reassured Zack. “We’re all back.”
Alexa giggled. She liked how Aunt Gladys always got their names wrong.
“How did you get us out of there?” asked Sydney.
“How did I…? How did you…!” The giggle died on Alexa’s face as Aunt Gladys flipped from harmless and funny to furious and parental in a heartbeat. “What possessed you to…! So dangerous! You could have…! I’ll never forgive myself!”
“I knew it was a bad idea!” piled on Janice, which Alexa felt was unfair, since it had been her idea in the first place.
“What just happened?” asked Zack. “Where were we?”
“The American Revolution!” exclaimed Janice. “We were actually there!”
“No!” insisted Aunt Gladys, crossing to the bank of computers. “Well, yes. But no. Definitely not.”
“What was that sound? That creature?” asked Sydney.
That was the Something Bad, thought Alexa. Duh.
“I don’t know,” answered Aunt Gladys. “I don’t want to know. You don’t want to know. Forget you saw it.”
“We didn’t see it—we heard it,” reminded Sydney.
“Forget you heard it. In fact, forget your entire trip,” suggested Aunt Gladys as she scurried around Alexa and started adjusting knobs and buttons. “Oh! Yes. Excellent idea. This was all a dream. Nighty-night.”
“I can’t believe you built a time machine!” said Sydney, following her aunt. “An actual time machine!”
Aunt Gladys snorted a laugh and whirled back around. “Time machine? Of all the…! Don’t be silly!”
“It wasn’t a dream,” insisted Zack, backing his sister up. “We were there. We were in the American Revolution.”
“Nope, nope, nope.” Aunt Gladys’s fingers flew over the immense machine, turning knobs and flipping switches. “You were most certainly not in the American Revolution.” A single glass bulb at the top of the machine suddenly blazed bright red, and Aunt Gladys punched a big, round button sitting apart from the other controls. There was the sound of gears straining, followed by a deafening CRACK!
The four children turned to see the magical door they’d just ventured through snapped in half by the strange metallic frame in which it was fastened. All sparks of blue energy vanished, and silence hung in the room.
“You were in a memory of the American Revolution,” finished Aunt Gladys.
Alexa tilted her head, trying to figure out what Aunt Gladys had meant. It didn’t work. “A memory?” she asked.
“The butler’s, I think,” continued Aunt Gladys, walking past her dazed nieces and nephew to the now-broken door. “He seemed to be everywhere.”
The four children looked from one to another, each hoping someone else understood what she was talking about. None of them did. “How…” began Zack, proceeding carefully. “How is that even possible?”
“Possible?” Aunt Gladys unfastened the latches connecting the door to the frame. “You went through the door. Butler’s door, butler’s memory. I don’t fully understand. Don’t have to. Hook up the door. Push the buttons.”
She yanked the broken door free and let it clatter to the floor. “Forgot to shut down yesterday,” she continued, stepping over the debris and approaching a pile of fresh doors stacked one on top of another. “Worried about Alice’s…what’d you hurt? Knee?”
“Ankle.” Alexa didn’t bother reminding Aunt Gladys that her name wasn’t Alice.
“I was distracted,” admitted Aunt Gladys. “I get distracted.”
“You don’t say,” muttered Sydney. Zack shot her a look. She shrugged at him.
“Came in here to shut down. Door was wide open. You didn’t even have a knob! Well, I had to…I had to! So I went in. So much darker. My poor dears! If anything had happened…!” She shook her head sadly. “All my fault. I couldn’t live…I wouldn’t live…My fault.”
She stopped suddenly and looked up, as if seeing them for the first time. “Heavens! Bedtime! You can’t be here! This never happened! Shoo! To bed with you!”
“Are you kidding?” asked Sydney. “Aunt Gladys, this”—she spun in a circle, taking in the entire room—“this is incredible!”
“No, it’s not. It’s scary,” corrected Janice. “And dangerous. Not something we should mess around with. Right?”
“Absolutely. Jake is right. Very dangerous. But also wonderful,” agreed the flighty woman with a pinch of pride, smiling. Then the pinch disintegrated and the smile morphed into a frown. “But so dangerous. You could have…you all could have…”
“How does it work?” asked Alexa as the tiniest beginnings of an idea began to form.
“Work? I hook up a door. To the frame. Work the controls. Just like Father taught me. Then—”
“Your father?” interrupted Zack. “Did he build this?”
“Yes. My father. Your grandfather. Marcus Tulving. Brilliant man. Ahead of his time…” She stared longingly at the central doorframe contraption before whispering so softly Alexa could barely hear her. “I will find you, Daddy.”
“Um…Aunt Gladys?” prompted Zack.
She blinked and was suddenly herself again. “Yes. When you open a door—a wooden door—you leave a bit of yourself behind.” She pulled a fresh door off the top of a stack and hauled it to the platform. Alexa wondered why Aunt Gladys didn’t ask Zack or Janice to help, then wondered why Zack or Janice didn’t offer to help Aunt Gladys. She’d help, but the door looked heavy.
“A small bit. Tiny. Insignificant,” continued Aunt Gladys between grunts of effort. “But it’s there. Open the door enough times, it…imprints…on you. Not the right word. Doesn’t matter. Hunnngh!” She shoved the final grunt out while heaving the door into a standing position on the platform next to the frame.
“Every door?” asked Sydney.
“Every wooden door.” Aunt Gladys carefully set the new door into the metal frame and began adjusting fasteners and latches to secure it. “Wood is organic. Used to be alive.” A few more moments of fiddling an
d everything snapped impressively into place.
“But why does it work?” asked Zack.
Aunt Gladys turned and leaned back on the newly secured door. “Why? Don’t know. Your grandfather could explain. Or your mother. She was always…”
“Mommy?” asked Alexa, perking up.
Aunt Gladys shook her head clear. “Not me,” she said, ignoring Alexa’s interest in their mother. “I was never the…Well, anyway.”
Sydney took a step forward, mesmerized by the machine. “You just open this door and enter someone’s memory? Just like that?”
“Yes. No! Not just like that! There are rules! Memory hopping is incredibly dangerous!”
“Memory hopping?” asked Alexa.
Aunt Gladys looked over at Alexa. “My own term, little Alphonse.” Alexa rolled her eyes. “Yes! Rules! Safety precautions! Checklists!” She marched down off the platform and back to the bank of computers.
“First rule is simple. When you go in, make sure you can get out. Bring a doorknob.” She reached down and pulled open a drawer filled with doorknobs of all shapes and sizes. “I like to use nice crystal ones. They’re pretty. But any knob will do. From here. From now. It’s your ticket home. Stick it on a door in the memory. Boom! Instant gateway home.”
Alexa chuckled at Aunt Gladys’s use of the word boom.
“I don’t understand,” said Zack. “You say we were in the butler’s memory.”
“That makes the most sense, yes.”
“But how? He couldn’t remember us—we’d never met him. We weren’t even alive.”
“You weren’t there, Zippy. You were in a memory. Who’s hungry? I’m famished.” Aunt Gladys made a beeline for the ugly curtain.
“I’m confused again,” announced Alexa, looking to her siblings for help.
“Don’t worry,” muttered Sydney. “I think Aunt Gladys is, too.”
Their aunt ducked under the curtain, then poked her head back through. “Doesn’t anybody else want Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings?” she asked.
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