“Your aunt? No. Not your aunt,” said Marcus, leading them around the back of the house to a small storage shed under the front porch. “This was done to her. Deliberately.”
“By who?” asked Zack.
“By whom,” corrected Marcus, who then groaned at himself and waved the comment away. “Not your problem. Well, yes. It could be your problem. But not yet. Just…we need to get you home.”
“We’re not going anywhere until you start answering some questions,” said Zack, puffing out his chest and trying to look serious.
“You can and you will!” shouted Marcus. The outburst took Zack by surprise, and he flinched at the cold strength suddenly on display. A moment later, Marcus blinked the harshness away and was once again the doddering old grandfather. “Children. Grandchildren…grandchildren? Who would have thought…Never mind. The MemorySphere is not a playground. Not meant for children. Not meant for anyone. Now, give me your knob.”
He held out his hand to Zack.
“Go on, Sydney,” said Zack.
“Sydney? Nice name. I had an aunt named Sydney. Now I have a granddaughter. Symmetry. The knob?” He held out his hand to Sydney.
Zack watched his sister squirm under the old man’s kindly-but-not-to-be-disobeyed gaze. Finally, she relented and reached into her pocket.
“Does Aunt Gladys know you’re in here?” asked Zack.
A flicker of doubt twitched across Marcus’s face. “Unfortunately, she does,” he said with a sigh. “That’s why she keeps opening doors and expanding the MemorySphere. She’s trying to find me.”
“Really? But…why…” Zack stuttered out of confusion. “Why not just pop up and say hi the next time she opens a door?”
“You’re assuming I want to be found.”
Zack didn’t quite understand what his grandfather meant, but before he could ask for an explanation, Sydney gave a desperate gasp.
“It’s gone!” she cried.
“What?” asked Zack. “Did you drop it when we were being chased?”
“No! It was in my pocket!” She looked up at Zack, her eyes pleading. “I swear it was.”
“What is in your pocket now, child?” asked Marcus.
“Um…” Confused, Sydney nevertheless shoved her hand back into her pocket. “Nothing. Hold on….” She pulled her fist out of her pocket and opened it to reveal a handful of what looked like bright white sand.
“Sand?” asked Zack.
“Feathered ferrets! No!”
“Is sand bad?” asked Sydney.
“It’s not sand,” answered Marcus with a heavy, weary, suddenly exhausted sigh. “It’s what’s left of your doorknob.”
Zack’s heart sank. “Our doorknob?”
“Has been destroyed,” confirmed Marcus, nodding. “The door you used to enter the MemorySphere has been broken.”
That made no sense at all to Zack. Why would Janice have broken the door before he and Sydney returned?
“But…but…how do we get home?” asked Sydney.
Marcus’s jovial face turned incredibly grim.
“You don’t.”
A less and less groggy Janice followed a very excited and bubbly Alexa to the kitchen. She couldn’t believe she’d slept through Zack and Sydney returning from…from…from over there. More than that, she couldn’t believe they’d just left her asleep when they returned. Well, okay, she could see Sydney doing that, but not Zack.
Hopefully, they were both simply too excited after restoring Aunt Gladys’s memory to notice her snoozing at the computer. She’d been sitting off to the side of the room and was pretty sure she didn’t snore, so she supposed it was possible they’d just missed her.
Unlikely, but possible.
She shoved her suspicions aside as Alexa led her into the kitchen, shouting, “Did you guys fix her?”
Janice scanned the room while waiting for either Zack or Sydney to reply. The place was exactly as they’d left it, complete with the remnants of Aunt Gladys’s bowl of Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings sitting out. The dirty dish gnawed at Janice’s need for things to be neat and orderly, and she grabbed it and moved it to the sink.
“Guys?” Alexa’s voice interrupted Janice’s thoughts. She looked again around the room, finally noticing it was empty.
“Where are they?” she asked her little sister.
“I dunno,” answered Alexa.
“Did they say to meet them in the kitchen?”
“Um…Dimitri didn’t say where,” admitted the little girl.
“Dimitri?” asked Janice, her suspicions once again brandishing the mighty sword of doubt. “You didn’t see Zack or Sydney yourself?”
“Well…no.”
A very dark cloud began to creep into Janice’s mind. “Where is Dimitri?” she asked.
“I dunno.”
The dark cloud flexed its tendrils threateningly. “Come on,” she ordered, quickly rinsing the dish out before walking past her sister and continuing through the ring of rooms.
“Janny? Is everything all right?” asked Alexa, her voice still ridiculously perky, yet tempered with a touch of apprehension.
Janice squeezed her sister’s hand and lugged her from room to room. Where was everyone? Had they actually come back? She refused to think about what it might mean if they hadn’t returned. If they were still inside…
Ducking through yet another empty doorway, they arrived in what amounted to the entry hall—the drawbridge/wall thing stretching out across the moat, leaving four floors of the house open to the elements. Janice breathed a sigh of relief upon spotting the lanky form of Dimitri pacing back and forth. Now, at least, they would get some answers.
“Dimitri!” she called, trudging across the drawbridge.
The man with the unplaceable accent flinched upon hearing his name called, nearly tripping over his feet. Once he regained his balance, he looked back at Janice and asked excitedly, “Miss Gladys is fixed? Miss Gladys is Miss Gladys?”
“Is that what Zack said?” asked Janice. “They fixed her?”
Dimitri cocked his head to the side like a confused puppy. “Zack? Ooooooooooookay. I no talk Zack. Please, Miss Gladys is Miss Gladys?”
“You didn’t talk to Zack?” The dark cloud scratched at the door of her consciousness with its terrible claws. “Did you see him at all? Or Sydney?” Behind her, Alexa shifted excitedly from one foot to the other.
“Zack? Sydney?” repeated Dimitri defensively, sinking his head into his shoulders like a little boy being scolded for eating paste. “Is in memory, yes?”
“You said they came back!” accused Alexa.
Dimitri shivered slightly and shook his head. “I outside. Is seeing nobody.”
Janice’s dark cloud tore out chunks of the protective shield sheltering her mind. Spots formed in front of her eyes. “You didn’t…? You haven’t…?”
“You told me they came back!” cried Alexa. “You said! You said!”
“Did you tell Alexa that they’d returned?” asked Janice very slowly, her voice shaking.
Dimitri’s entire body crumbled under the interrogation. “I see nothing,” he insisted, his voice rising to a panic. “Nothing! Where Miss Gladys?”
“That’s not true! You said they were back!” Alexa’s lips quivered as tears began to flow.
“I no talk little girl!” Dimitri backed away, waving his hands. “I no talk anyone!” Incredibly agitated, he tripped over his feet once again, this time falling to the ground beside his van. Still, he continued waving his hands back and forth. “I no talk! I no talk!”
Janice whirled on her sister. “Alexa! Did you really see Dimitri?”
“He told me!” she cried through a deluge of tears. “He told me! He told me!”
“I no talk! I no talk!”
“You said they were back!” yelled Janice at her little sister.
“He told me! He told me!”
“Do you think this is a game, Alexa?”
“He told me!” repeated th
e shell-shocked little girl. “He told—”
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”
Janice had never let loose with such a force of raw emotion in her life. Her words struck her sister like a lightning bolt straight from the hand of Zeus, sending Alexa sobbing into the house.
Behind Janice, Dimitri continued to babble about “no talking,” his voice rising in panic. She ignored him, as well as her weeping sister, as the enormity of what she’d just done punched her in the gut.
She’d broken the door, trapping Zack and Sydney inside the memory.
Possibly forever.
At first, Sydney figured she’d heard her grandfather wrong. They weren’t stuck in here. That would be wrong. There were other ways out of this place. All they had to do was…
“Whenever a new door is opened, that memory becomes part of your MemorySphere, right?” she asked.
“Yes! Absolutely!” agreed Marcus enthusiastically. “Such a smart girl!”
“So all we have to do is wait for Aunt Gladys to open another door.”
Her grandfather sighed and displayed his sad-puppy face. “Ah. No. You still need a doorknob. They don’t grow on trees.”
Sydney flushed, embarrassed. She should have realized that.
“Aunt Gladys doesn’t remember how to hook up a door in the first place,” interrupted Zack.
“So you say.” Marcus nodded sagely.
The unfamiliar feeling of hopelessness descended upon Sydney. She didn’t like it. “So what do we do?” she asked, determined to find a course of action. “There’s something we can do, isn’t there?”
Their grandfather first shook his head, then nodded, looking more than anything like an out-of-control jack-in-the-box. “For now, I think—”
He gasped and froze in midsentence at the sound of a screen door sliding open above them. “Waggling wombats! Hide!” he hissed, true fear sweeping over his features. He pulled Zack and Sydney down behind a pile of old beach furniture stacked up against the house.
“What—” began Zack.
“Zip it! Zip! Zippity-zip!” Marcus ran his finger across his throat, either telling them to stop talking or indicating that they were going to be beheaded soon. Sydney figured the former.
She tried to imagine what sort of horrific monster stalked these beachside memories. A hideous sand beast? A giant crab? A multitentacled sea monster?
She started momentarily as Zack placed what he probably thought was a reassuring hand on her shoulder. She let him keep it there. He liked to feel he was protecting her, and, to be honest, it was slightly comforting.
The three waited in silence, Sydney straining her ears for signs of the incoming menace. From the look on her grandfather’s face, it was something truly evil.
Eventually, the rhythmic, tranquil beating of the waves against the seashore was finally broken by the oddest of sounds—singing. Someone was singing a sweet, innocent little tune that vaguely reminded Sydney of something she’d heard in a Disney movie. Then the singer came closer, and Sydney could make out the words.
“…with the big red knife that she chopped, chopped, chopped till the teddy bear popped and the head fell, plop!”
Marcus Tulving’s face turned white as the abomination skipped into view.
“Sally the silly clown, liked to chase the children down, chase them all around the town, chase them with a…hatchet!”
It was a little girl, maybe Alexa’s age. She wore an old-fashioned blue-and-white dress, had bright pink ribbons in her hair, and was smiling from ear to ear. She didn’t look evil; she didn’t look monstrous. She looked adorable. She sang out loud and proud the way children do when they can’t carry a tune, and from the look on Sydney’s grandfather’s face, it was obvious that this sweet little girl was, for him, the stuff of nightmares. She clutched a stuffed animal of some sort in her hands—maybe a bear, maybe a dog, maybe an armadillo. It was hard to tell exactly what it was because it was missing all of its limbs.
“She took the hatchet to the store, and she dipped it in the gore….”
The girl skipped lazily past their hiding place and disappeared behind the corner of the house, her chilling tune mercifully fading away until it could no longer be heard over the roar of the surf.
Only then did Marcus relax.
“Close,” he muttered. “Too close. We should leave. Before she comes back.”
He stepped up to the door of the storage shed.
“That was the most horrible song I’ve ever heard,” said Sydney.
“Yes. It’s worse each time I hear it,” admitted Marcus. “It used to be about planting flowers. Still excruciating, mind you—she can’t sing a lick—but nonviolent.”
“Is she a crazy killer or something?” asked Zack.
“No,” their grandfather replied absently. “But if she sees you…nasty. You have to join her tea party. Or she starts screaming.” He shivered. “Horrible little girl.” He pulled the storage shed door open to reveal another wall of absolute blackness. “In we go. Quickly. Before that ribbon-haired monstrosity returns. Trust me. You don’t want to drink her tea.”
“I don’t understand,” said Zack, peering into the void in front of him. “There’s nothing there. It’s just…black.”
Marcus opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted by an uncomfortably near, out-of-tune voice singing at the top of her lungs. “…to chase the children down, chase them all around the town, chase them with a…a bazooka!”
“Go!” spat Sydney, giving her brother a helpful shove. He staggered forward into the blackness, vanishing in an instant. She followed right on his heels….
Sydney found herself in a dingy corridor that might once have been painted white but whose walls had long ago given up the fight against systemic decay. Zack was leaning against the wall, catching his breath.
“Not cool, Sydney,” he said. “Pushing me like that.”
“Actually, it was really cool,” she argued. “And surprisingly satisfying.”
“Ah, sibling rivalry,” commented their grandfather behind them. “As charming as ever.”
Sydney was confused for a moment until she realized he was probably referring to their mother and Aunt Gladys. She wondered what they’d been like as kids.
“Where are we now?” asked Zack.
“Not sure. Probably a hospital. Or a very boring hotel. Never could tell.”
A series of numbered doors littered the hallway, a few rusty lightbulbs flickered on and off in the ceiling, and from somewhere below came the ominous sound of laughter.
“Why did you bring us here?” asked Zack.
“Duh,” teased Sydney. “This is where the storage shed under Evil Little Girl’s beach house leads. Right, Pop-Pop?”
Marcus raised an eyebrow at Sydney. “Pop-Pop?” he asked.
“You mean like how the furnace led to that tent on the beach?” asked Zack. Sydney was impressed to see him putting it all together. “They’re like…secret passages within the MemoryWorld—”
“MemorySphere,” corrected Marcus.
“MemorySphere, right.”
“Terminology is important.”
“Got it.”
“I discovered it, I named it.”
“Okay, yes. I get it.” Zack was amusingly flustered. “The connections are permanent?” he continued.
Marcus nodded.
“How many are there?” asked Sydney. “Memories, I mean.”
“Hundreds,” said Marcus. “With more added all the time. Gladys keeps opening doors.”
“And in all those, there’s no other way out?” asked Zack.
“Zack,” reasoned Sydney, “if there was another way out, don’t you think the guy who created this place would know?”
Marcus gave a little cough. “Well…not that I…I mean yes. Of course. Still…I wonder…” His voice trailed off as he gazed up at the ceiling as if truly impressed by the crown molding.
Sydney and Zack waited for him to finish his sentence. When he didn’t
, Sydney finally poked him in the belly. “Wonder what?” she asked.
Their grandfather frowned. Looked away. Looked back. “Well, the thing is…,” he began.
“You know a way out?” challenged Zack.
He shook his head. “No,” he said, momentarily dashing their hopes. “However,” he said, flaming their hopes back to life, “there may be someone in here who does.”
“Who?” asked Zack and Sydney together.
Marcus’s mouth twisted into an embarrassed smile. “Me.”
“The first door, memory, what have you. It was mine. My door, my memory. It was my closet. From my lab at the university.” He was leading them down the hallway of an old library. “It was an absolute disaster.”
They had followed him through one disturbing patch of blackness after another, traveling from the hospital to a school to a palatial estate to an old sweatshop to a simple country home to another hospital to a pirate ship to a cemetery to an estate even more palatial than the first one to a very ugly barn and now a library. More often than not, they entered and exited these memories not through normal doors, but in obscure and unexpected ways. A pantry. An oven. A treasure chest. Their grandfather had explained that portals between memories only appeared behind doors the memory’s creator never opened.
“The pirate never opened his own treasure chest?” Zack had asked.
“Wasn’t the pirate’s memory,” had been Marcus’s response. “Scullery boy, I think.”
The deeper they traveled into this strange world, the more uneasy Sydney became. At first, the memories had been seemingly normal, but each new vista was just a little bit creepier than the last. The curious looks from those they passed became menacing. The skies darkened. Unseen things whispered behind their backs.
More and more inanimate objects had teeth.
The library was the creepiest memory yet. Sydney sensed an uncountable number of eyes leering at her from just beyond her range of vision, felt the narrow aisles closing in on her ever so slowly, and heard a sound that could only be described as paper being sharpened.
This was not a happy library.
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