“Duck!” screamed Zack from behind.
Acting on instinct, Sydney dropped to the ground as an impossibly large and just-as-impossibly real claw flailed above her head, crashing into the shelves and ripping them to shreds.
“What was that?” cried Sydney.
Instead of answering, Zack shoved her down another aisle. “Move! Move!”
She pounded her feet as hard as she could, still clueless as to the nature of this new threat. Whatever it was, it was big, and the floor reverberated with its plodding footfalls.
“Zack?”
“Keep running! Don’t look behind you!”
Unfortunately—and utterly predictably—Zack’s warning caused Sydney to look behind her. What she saw drained the color from her face. A mostly complete skeleton of a horrific-looking dinosaur (Sydney assumed it was a T. rex) roared with fury as it swung its claws back and forth, tossing the shelving aside in its desire to hunt down the fleeing children. The only thing keeping it from overtaking them was the fact that one of its legs was missing some bones, forcing it to shamble forward and drag that leg comically behind it. Sydney screamed all the same.
“I told you not to look behind you!” reprimanded Zack.
“It’s a dinosaur!”
“No, it’s the skeleton of a dinosaur!”
“We’re being chased by the skeleton of a dinosaur!”
“I noticed!”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her forward as the dinosaur skeleton brought its good leg down practically on top of her. Finding her feet, Sydney ran with Zack down the aisle, only to skid to a stop as the two bone-wielding men appeared in front of them.
“Oooh!” said either Wickles or Felton. “Time to bash!”
“Yeeeeeees,” agreed either Felton or Wickles.
The two men raised their bone clubs high, a look of pure evil twinkling in their eyes.
Suddenly, they were knocked aside by a large stone pillar swung at them from behind. They crumpled to the ground to reveal a huffing, puffing, grinning, wizened old man. Their savior dropped the stone pillar—which looked far too heavy for him to have lifted let alone used as a baseball bat—and gestured to the children.
“This way!” he said. “Quickly!”
Another beastly roar from the dinosaur skeleton spurred them on, and they followed the strange man down one aisle and up the next.
“Where are we going?” asked Sydney as they ran.
“Does it matter?” answered the old man.
They turned a corner and came to a small alcove at the back of the warehouse.
“We’re trapped!” worried Zack.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” said the old man. “Trapped? Me? Bah!” As he rushed toward what looked like a giant furnace, Sydney realized two things. One, he wasn’t faded and yellow like everything else in this memory. And two, she recognized him.
“Hey!” she began. “Didn’t we—”
Ignoring her, the old man yanked the door of the furnace open. “Get in! Hurry!”
“Inside the furnace? Are you crazy?” asked Zack.
The floor shook with the approach of the skeletal T. rex.
“Most likely! Hurry!” urged the old man, gesturing toward the door. Within was not the red-hot fire and coals one would expect to find in a furnace, but complete blackness.
“What’s in there?” asked Sydney.
“Gluttonous gum balls, just go!” yelled the old man, pointing behind them.
Another chilling roar of rage from the impossible beast chasing them sealed the deal, and Sydney quickly spurted forward and dove into the darkness.
She landed face-first in a pile of sand.
Not a pile, she corrected herself. An entire beach.
There was a sudden popping sound, and Zack practically ran her over. He leaped to the side at the last instant and fell to his knees, panting heavily.
“What…where…?”
A second popping sound, and the old man walked past them and took a deep breath.
“That was a close one,” he said, shaking his head and pacing. “Did you see that dinosaur? That was a dinosaur! Fascinating! What would have happened had it caught us, I wonder? It would chew us up, certainly, but without a stomach, what then?”
“Who cares? We’d be dead!” interjected Sydney.
“Very true. Quite dead.” The old man turned and jumped back a step as if seeing Sydney and Zack for the first time. “You’re kids! Of course I knew you were kids, but I didn’t know you were actually kids! Why is she sending kids? What is she thinking?”
Sydney scrambled to her feet. They were on a wide, peaceful, yellow-tinted, sandy beach. The sun shone down, birds sang, waves tugged at the shore. Behind her was a small tent, out of which they had evidently emerged. There was neither sign nor sound of any rampaging dinosaur—skeletal or in the flesh.
“Where are we?” asked Zack, standing and brushing himself off.
The old man wasn’t listening. “She should know better.” He was muttering to himself. “Much too dangerous. It’s not a toy. What is Gladys thinking?”
Sydney’s ears perked up. “You know Aunt Gladys?” she asked.
The old man looked up in shock. “Aunt…? You mean you’re…” He took a step forward, peering at them as if through a magnifying glass. Sydney stumbled back a step in the face of such intense scrutiny. “That would mean…Are you…You’re Charlotte’s children?”
“You know our mom?” asked Zack. “What’s going on? Where are we? Who are you?”
Sydney had to hand it to Captain Obvious—those were all very good questions. She also wondered what was going on and where they were. However, she had a sneaky feeling she knew the answer to Zack’s final question.
“Simpering sunspots!” stuttered the old man awkwardly. “I never…Well, I guess I’m…” He took a deep breath before confirming Sydney’s suspicions. “I’m your grandfather.”
Alexa was bored.
She had assumed the moment Zack and Sydney went through the door that everything would just snap back to normal. She had asked Janice what was taking so long, and her sister had told her they needed to be patient, stay calm, and wait.
Seeing as how Alexa—being all of seven years old—was not very good at being patient, staying calm, or waiting, this wasn’t a very satisfying answer.
She would have asked Aunt Gladys, but her aunt just stood there, staring at the now-closed door, jaw open wide like she was waiting for a small airplane to land on her tongue. “What…? How…?” the poor woman had tried to say, her totally confused brain unable to find the words to express how totally confused she was.
It hadn’t helped Alexa’s mood when the weird Dimitri guy had jumped out of his seat and bolted from the room the moment Zack and Sydney were through the door. He had hesitated a moment as he passed Aunt Gladys, but in the end his need to get out of the room overcame his desire to help the dazed woman.
So Alexa had begun to wait. To her credit, she had paced silently around the room for over thirty seconds before she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“It’s been, like, five minutes, Alexa,” answered Janice. “Relax.”
Relaxing was not one of Alexa’s strong suits.
After ten or fifteen more seconds, Alexa found herself wondering if this big, dirty, cluttered, old room contained any small, cute, furry animals. Then she remembered her aunt saying something about not having any pets because her mother had kept cats and they had scared her. Still, she imagined there had to be rats somewhere around the house at least, maybe even a vole or a groundhog or—dare she hope—a bunny. So she spent an impressive fourteen minutes and seventeen seconds searching the circular room for rodents and other assorted vermin. She looked under all the scaffolding ringing the room, behind all the neatly stacked piles of doors waiting to be used, and among the tattered remains of those already broken. No luck. Whatever else went on in the room, it didn’t involve cute little animals.
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Frustrated, she approached her aunt. “Aunt Gladys?” asked Alexa.
Aunt Gladys tilted her head toward Alexa without taking her eyes off the door. “That’s me? Yes?”
“Do you have any rats or possums or cats or hamsters or anything?”
“How should I know?” answered the wide-eyed aunt. “I don’t know what to think. Not anymore.” With a final shake of her head, the tired woman turned and walked out of the room, muttering about needing some rest.
Alexa sighed as she watched her aunt shove her way through the heavy curtain, then returned to pester Janice.
“Do you think they’ll be much longer?” she asked.
“Please stop asking,” her sister replied. “I don’t know any more than you do. We just have to wait.”
“But I’m bored!”
“Go explore or something. Anything. Just leave me alone!”
The last words came out with a bit more venom than Janice had probably intended and knocked little Alexa back a step. “Janice?” she asked.
Her sister’s shoulders drooped and she folded her head into her arms on the computer console.
So Alexa went exploring.
At first she wandered aimlessly around the first floor, not really looking for anything. Halfway around the ring of rooms, she started looking for cute little animals but didn’t find any. When she got to the stairs leading to the second floor, she shrugged and climbed up, continuing her search. These rooms, with their many piles of unused doors, seemed more promising but proved just as empty of furry things as the rooms below. She was halfway around the third floor when she realized there was something else she should be looking for.
Her grandmother’s door.
Mommy had said it was plain with scratches on the bottom. That wasn’t much to go on. Was it big? Flimsy? Painted a fun color, like pink or turquoise? There was no way to know. Especially now that the one person who would have known—Aunt Gladys—probably didn’t know anymore.
Alexa sat crisscross-applesauce on the floor—her back to yet another stack of wooden doors—put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, and tried to figure it out. Grammy’s door would have been one of the first ones Aunt Gladys collected. It’d be someplace special. Like her bedroom. Except it wasn’t in Aunt Gladys’s bedroom. So where else? If Alexa wanted to store a very special door, where would she put it? Someplace safe, where no one else would find it. The big room in the middle of the house? No. She’d put it as far away from that room as possible.
Alexa lifted her head and looked up at the ceiling.
She’d never been on the fourth floor before and didn’t know what to expect. Of course, once she’d climbed the stairs, she found the same thing she’d found on the second and third floors—endless piles of doors.
The fifth floor, however, was different.
First, it wasn’t so much an entire floor as it was a small landing at the top of a set of stairs.
Second, there weren’t any piles of doors lying on the floor or leaning against the walls.
Third, there were no windows, so the room was pretty dark.
Most important, it had something none of the other floors had—a closed and locked door.
This has gotta be it, thought Alexa. Grammy’s door’s gotta be behind this one! She couldn’t wait to tell Mommy the next time she saw her. Maybe she’d give Alexa a treat for being such a good girl.
Pleased as punch, Alexa retraced her steps to the first floor.
It was somewhere between the second and third floor that she suddenly remembered Zack and Sydney had come back.
She remembered that Dimitri had stuck his head in while Alexa had been sitting on the third floor, trying to figure out where Aunt Gladys kept Grammy’s door. He’d told her that her brother and sister were back and had asked her to tell Janice, who had fallen asleep in front of the computers. He also said they should be sure to snap the door in half because too many people had gone through and it was getting bad.
With the new memory fresh in her mind, Alexa was eager to see her siblings as she ran into the central room. Sure enough, there was Janice, asleep at the computer board, head in her arms.
“Janny! Janny, wake up!” Alexa bounded over and shook her big sister awake. “Wake up, Janny!”
“Wha—?” exclaimed a bleary-eyed Janice, lifting her head. “Where…? What—”
“They’re back!” explained Alexa, not having the patience to wait for Janice to be fully awake. “Zack and Sydney are back!”
“They are? Where…” She let out a huge yawn. “Right. Right. I remember. Where are they?” She pushed the swivelly chair away from the computers.
“Wait!” ordered Alexa. “You have to break the door. It’s gone all bad.”
“Break the…? Oh, right. That makes sense.” Janice returned to the computer bank and stared at all the buttons and levers. “Um…how do you…?”
“The big round button over there,” said Alexa, remembering when Aunt Gladys had cracked the door to the American Revolution in half.
“Got it.” Janice reached over and pressed the big round button. Once again there came the sound of gears groaning against a lifetime of neglect, followed by a booming CRACK as the door on the platform was snapped in half like a stale graham cracker.
Zack’s legs threatened to turn to jelly at the old man’s words, but they settled for a thick marmalade. Grandfather? He was pretty sure that was impossible, wasn’t it? Not impossible like he can’t possibly have a grandfather, because of course he had a grandfather. It was just that…but they were…
In a memory.
“Cool,” said Sydney, taking a seat on the sand. “I kinda figured.”
“Did you?” asked Marcus Tulving. “What gave it away? My beard? I’ve been meaning to shave.”
“You sound like Aunt Gladys,” answered Sydney with a smile.
“I do? Ah. That explains it. Though I should point out it is far more likely that she sounds like me,” replied Marcus with just the slightest hint of sarcasm.
“But you’re dead!” exclaimed Zack.
The old man (his grandfather, Zack reminded himself) lifted his left eyebrow. “Am I? How unfortunate. Nobody tells me anything.”
“Nobody said he was dead, Zack,” reminded Sydney. “Just that he was gone.”
Thinking back, Zack realized his sister was right. They’d all just assumed their grandfather was dead, and Aunt Gladys hadn’t bothered to correct them. He wondered why.
“Where have you been all this time?” asked Zack. Sydney rolled her eyes as if Zack had asked the dumbest question in the history of dumb questions.
“Right here,” answered Marcus.
Zack looked around the empty beach. The cry of a lone seagull punctuated the air. “Where are we?” he asked finally.
“In a memory. Duh,” snapped Sydney.
It was all proving too much for Zack, who plopped down next to his sister with a resounding “Huh.”
“How does it work?” asked Sydney. “Can you go anywhere?”
“What are you talking about?” asked Zack.
“We’re not in the same memory we were when we were being chased by that dino-skeleton monster. Unless you think there’s a secret passage leading from the furnace to this beach?”
Zack’s face flushed as his sister pointed out what should have been obvious. He cast a glance at their grandfather, who was eyeing them quizzically, as if they were a pair of goofy lab rats being studied under a microscope.
“Fictional fruitcakes!” Marcus exclaimed. “You’re an amazingly astute young girl.”
Amazingly annoying, you mean, thought Zack automatically even as he mulled over the implications of this new revelation.
“Can you control where you go?” Sydney asked. “What memories you jump into?”
Marcus scratched his beard in thought. “I think we’re done here,” he stated. “Time to go. For you, not me. I stay. You go.”
“We just got here!” proteste
d Sydney.
“And almost died,” reminded Marcus, tossing a blanket on her burning excitement. “The MemorySphere is a dangerous place.”
“MemorySphere?” repeated Zack.
“My own term. Now, go. Shoo. While you still can. You brought a knob this time, yes? Please say you brought a knob.”
“We brought a knob,” repeated Zack. “But we can’t leave.”
“Sure you can. It’s easy. I’ll show you.” Marcus twisted his neck back and forth, searching the shore. “We just need a door….”
“No, it’s not that,” corrected Zack, “We’re here for a reason.”
“We need to save Aunt Gladys!” declared Sydney.
Marcus took in a quick breath. “What’s wrong with my daughter?” he asked in a rush.
“She doesn’t remember anything,” explained Zack. “Not us, not your machine, not the fact that she’s a serial door-hoarder. Nothing.”
Their grandfather’s face turned very pale. “They didn’t,” he muttered. “They must have. They couldn’t? I guess they could. But why now? Why now…?” Slowly, his eyes came to focus on his grandchildren sitting on the sand in front of him. Suddenly, he gasped and brought his hand up to his mouth. “Oh, portable potbellies!”
Zack wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be alarmed by their grandfather’s outburst or not, but he got to his feet and dusted himself off nonetheless. “Who did what?” he asked. “Is that bad?”
Marcus quickly covered Zack’s face with his hand, then pulled his hand back and snapped his fingers nervously a number of times. “No time. There’s no time. You must go.” He looked down at Sydney. “You too. Now. Quickly. Come!”
“What is it?” asked Zack, picking up on Marcus’s sudden anxiety.
Marcus set off across the beach at a brisk trot toward a large house set back from the shore. Zack and Sydney hurried to keep up.
“Grandfather! Wait! We need to fix Aunt Gladys!” repeated Zack. “She must have made some sort of change the last time she was in here—”
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