A Quill Ladder

by Jennifer Ellis

  Instead, he stared across the square at the Heximer Building, which was one of the dots. Did it have a tunnel too? If it did, would it make sense that the Heximer Building tunnel would take him farther south, closer to the Sinclair house? Would his key open the doors for this tunnel?

  Mark decided it was worth the risk.

  He bolted across the street, once again surprised at how fast he could run.

  14. Apothecaries and Backhoes

  “I just realized something,” Abbey said, shoveling another cold potato with ketchup into her mouth. They had decided that they should eat something while they waited, to be prepared for whatever might be coming. It was close to 7:00 p.m. by now, and still nobody had arrived home. Texts to their dad asking for the family code word hadn’t been answered, and Abbey was now convinced that their dad had been abducted and that Selena had written the text. They had debated going to see Simon, but after looking up the visiting hours at the home where he had been placed, they realized they’d have to wait until 11:00 a.m. the next morning.

  “Ian told me he was in Nowhere for fifty years. He’s way too old to have been dating Mom.”

  “Creepy. I’m pretty sure there’s more to Ian’s story than he’s telling us,” Caleb said.

  They had stationed themselves back to back in the living room—Abbey looking out the picture window that overlooked Coventry, Caleb looking at the picture that had Coventry Hill as its backdrop. Farley paced urgently by the front door, then the back door, then the basement door, in a rotating vigil.

  Calls to both of their parents’ cell phones had gone to voicemail, as had a call to Sylvain’s office. Jake’s mother had informed Abbey that he was out; she hadn’t seemed keen to linger on the phone, and Abbey could hear the clatter of a busy restaurant behind her.

  “We could call Russell,” Abbey said. “See if he has Sylvain’s phone number.”

  “He might be involved in this,” Caleb said.

  “Or Dr. Ford and Sandy.”

  “Dr. Ford is definitely involved.”

  “Well, they’re all involved,” Abbey said.

  “We could go see Mrs. Forrester.”

  Abbey stared out at the deep dark of the January evening and shivered.

  The hospital hummed and as they approached, and Abbey noticed that the air around it was noticeably warmer. They scurried through the lobby and up the stairs to the second floor. Visiting hours ended in twenty minutes.

  They burst into Mrs. Forrester’s room to find the old woman’s bed empty, the blankets pulled tight over the white sheet.

  Abbey spun around, but Mrs. Forrester wasn’t anywhere.

  “Maybe she’s switched rooms,” Caleb said.

  “Are you looking for Francis?” The woman with the scarlet hair, in a purple bed dress this time, flicked off her TV. “Her daughter came and checked her out this afternoon. Said they were going to care for her at home. So nice to see someone’s family caring enough about them to take them home. Not like my Ed. No sir, he’s going to let me rot in this hospital for the rest of my life, while he’s out dancing and bowling.”

  “Sandy came and got her?” Abbey managed to interject.

  “Oh, yes, yes. Sandy. Nice little slip of a thing. Very pretty.” The woman’s rheumy, kohl-lined eyes trained on Abbey and Caleb more sharply now. “She was too young to be your mother though, so she must have been your aunt… but now that I think about it, she was really altogether too young to be Francis’s daughter.”

  “We know,” Caleb said. “We know.” He turned to Abbey. “We better get back home.”

  “She did leave me a nice goodbye drawing, though,” the woman continued. “Although I really have no idea what it means.” She held out a piece of paper.

  Abbey took it. It was a drawing of a man standing behind a cash register, taking money from someone, and a snail with a curving shell. The snail had what looked like a cloud coming out of its mouth. Abbey stared at it. She had no idea what it meant. Cash Snail. Money Snail. Money Shell.

  “We should go. See if anyone’s come home,” Caleb said, angling for the door.

  Abbey shook her head at the scarlet-haired woman, handed the paper back, and followed Caleb out the door.

  The bus bumped them along through the night. Abbey and Caleb were the only people on it, and she stared at their reflections in the large bus window. A dark sky loomed behind them.

  Cash Snail. Register Snail. Abbey ran through all the possibilities. Maybe the man in the photo was selling something. Sell Snail. Air-breathing Snail. Is that what Mrs. Forrester had meant with the cloud? Abbey closed her eyes, tried to remember the advanced biology course she had decided to take at science camp two years ago for fun, then brought out her phone and Googled “land snail.” She scanned the genus names of the snails that belonged to the air-breathing family. Achatina, Amphidromus, Cyclophorus, Ena, Helix.

  Ena.

  Sell Ena.

  Selena.

  Had Selena taken Mrs. Forrester? Or was the snail simply another one of the references to the golden ratio?

  *****

  Mark stood uncertainly in the tunnel, shifting from foot to foot. He had traversed the tunnel all the way to the door at the far end, but he had no idea where he would emerge. In somebody’s house? In a store? In a park?

  The door by which he’d entered, back in the Heximer Building, had been marked with the pentagon, and his key had opened it. And according to his GPS, the tunnel had then proceeded southwest for a kilometer before jogging slightly to the east and continuing on for two and a half kilometers, just as the other one had. He had paused at the turn for a few seconds to feel the outlines of the door there, and he’d debated going through it, but realistically he wanted to get as far from downtown and those dogs as possible. Now he stood at the second door. The tunnel actually carried on to the southwest, but he had no idea how long that leg was. It could take him all the way to Salisbury Swamp, which was definitely not where he wanted to go.

  By his calculation, he should be somewhere in the Coventry Green, a little cluster of shops and offices south of the downtown core. Most of these would be closed at this time of night. And there was no sliver of light beneath this door as there had been in the Dorset Hotel.

  Mark gingerly turned his key in the lock and edged the door open. He was in a small, low-ceilinged basement with the pungent smell of something that Mark couldn’t immediately put his finger on—it was like a vitamin or health food store, combined with a hospital.

  He made his way across the room, passing large dusty worktables covered with small tin plates and ancient glass jars of all sizes, several mortars and pestles, and a very old set of scales. He paused for a few seconds at the scales. He had a strong suspicion about where he was now, and he made his way to the door at the top of the stairs where a very dim light glimmered through the crack. This door was a straight deadbolt, and Mark could open it from the basement.

  He found himself at the back of Abbott’s Apothecary—the tiny pharmacy in Coventry Green, now closed for the night. Even though the pharmacy was mostly modern, it was housed in a heritage building, and Mark had always thought the name funny.

  He closed the door behind him, but his key didn’t fit in the lock, so he had to leave it unlocked. It would look perhaps as if someone had broken in. He made his way down one of the darkened aisles. What if he couldn’t lock the glass door that led to the street either, and someone came along and robbed the apothecary? It would be his fault.

  Once out on the street, he tried the glass door that led back into the pharmacy and was relieved to find that it was an automatic lock. The now-familiar pentagon was etched into its front plate.

  Mark turned and hurried through the dark streets toward the bus stop. He did not like to be out after dark.

  After he got off the bus, he made his way up the street that led to the Sinclair house. He noted that the lights in his own house were off, for once. Maybe the strangers w
ho had been living there were finally gone. He decided to take a small detour; he wanted to get his Vertical Sketchmaster, which projected aerial photographs onto topographic maps. Perhaps ordering some aerial photographs of Coventry City and projecting them onto the dot map would help him see the pattern. And he could pick up his ten-point divider as well. The distances between the dots, and now the lengths of the tunnels, were too regular, and the divider would help with easy measurements.

  The door to his house was unlocked, and Mark let himself in. It appeared as if someone had departed in the middle of making dinner. A large pastrami sub sat partially made on the counter, with a pile of lettuce and the mustard container next to it. Mark’s stomach nearly leapt out of his body in hunger. Nobody seemed to be home. Maybe nobody would mind if he ate the sandwich (it would just go to waste if it sat out on the counter much longer). Mark approached the sandwich gingerly, picked up a bread knife, and applied a thin layer of mustard to the bun. Then he added the lettuce and some pickles from the fridge for good measure and cut the sub in half.

  He would just take half. That would be better.

  He made his way down the hall to his room, eating the sandwich. He removed the Vertical Sketchmaster and ten-point divider from their spots on his shelf, then sat down on his bed to finish the last few bites of the sandwich. He had forgotten how soft his bed was compared to the guest bed he now occupied at the Sinclairs’. He was very tired from all the walking in tunnels, and the running, and the mental expenditure of trying to keep up with Sandy.

  He would just close his eyes for a few seconds.

  *****

  “What now?” said Abbey. They had returned home to find the house still empty and Farley almost insane with relief, which soon turned back into worry when he realized it was only Abbey and Caleb. They had tried calling their parents’ cell phones again, with no luck. They had even reconsidered calling the police, but the whole tale had become so absurd that it seemed out of the question. Abbey oscillated between worry for her dad, Mrs. Forrester, Mark, Simon, and her mother.

  “Maybe it’s time to break into the file room,” Caleb said.

  “Mom won’t be happy about that.”

  “As far as I can tell, we’ve pretty much been abandoned. I’d say the file room is fair play.”

  “Fine,” Abbey said.

  They trooped downstairs to the locked file room, where a few good kicks from Caleb brought down not just the door, but the entire door frame. Abbey screamed when it came loose and toppled into the room. Caleb’s face looked a bit pale under his freckles.

  “I guess there’s going to be no denying this now,” he said.

  “Maybe we can put it back together,” Abbey said.

  They flipped the door and frame sideways and carried it out into the hallway. The room, a converted food storage closet with shelves on all three walls, was lined with banker’s boxes. Each box bore a label, such as “College – 1986,” “Taxes – 2002-2006,” “Family Photos 2001-2003,” and so on.

  “Where do we start?”

  Caleb scratched his head. “I dunno. None of them look particularly exciting.”

  “What did you expect them to be labeled as—All the Secrets of the Stones Explained, or Family History of Witchcraft? I’m guessing that if Mom wanted to hide things, she would put them into innocuously labeled boxes.”

  Caleb pulled down a box on the top far left shelf labeled “Marian’s Stuff – 1970-1980.”

  “I guess we go through them all, starting on this side and working our way around.”

  They sorted through old files for hours, until Abbey’s eyes drooped and Caleb’s face bore a particularly foul expression. They looked at old pictures of their mother as a child and themselves through the years, sifted through uninteresting college files of their mother’s biology courses and their father’s engineering work, looked at pictures of the three of them as babies, and read their parents’ very uninteresting tax returns. In a few of the early boxes, there were a lot of files containing the deeds to all the properties their grandmother had owned in Coventry. She had, according to their father, made her living by owning and renting out old houses. But nothing seemed to be of any value.

  While they searched, Abbey filled Caleb in on the men in animal skins in his future, meeting Sylvain and Russell with the pickaxe and shovel, and the trip to the Madrona and docks where Selena had been so enraged with Sylvain. She also told him as much as she felt she should about the docks and moving his people to Simon’s future.

  Just after one in the morning, after going through yet another box of old tax returns, Caleb rose and pulled at his hair. “Agghhh! I can’t do this anymore. There’s nothing here. Nothing.” He turned and kicked one of the banker’s boxes that Abbey had just removed from the shelf. Instead of the soft thud that Abbey expected, the loud clank of metal on metal echoed around the room.

  Abbey removed the lid. Inside the box was a small metal lockbox. Whatever was inside the lockbox was also metal—it jangled and clunked against the side as Abbey lifted the lockbox, which bore a three-digit combination lock.

  Caleb was already rifling through the papers that had lain beneath the lockbox. He withdrew three sets of paper-clipped cards like the ones that Ian had given them. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and then flipped through them.

  “They’re exactly the same as the cards from Ian,” he said. “They say the same things.”

  He hurriedly pulled out the remainder of the items in the box. Just underneath the cards was a piece of paper covered in small text. Caleb drew it in toward his face, then held it at a distance, his face contorted in concentration. “This is, like, totally weird. What language is this?”

  He passed the paper to Abbey. She looked at the words, trying to make them out. They looked like words she should know, like English, but the words were not in English. The characters were in the Latin alphabet, and some words, like “the,” seemed consistent, and the general shapes of a few other words seemed somehow recognizable, but other than that it seemed almost gibberish.

  “Is it, like, Spanish, or French, or what?” Caleb said.

  Abbey shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not great with languages, but there are no accents, and the fact that ‘the’ appears in so many sentences is strange. We could enter it into Google Translate.”

  There was a stack of cream folders underneath the paper. The first, labeled “Midwest Dynasties,” was empty, as were the second, labeled “Maps,” and the third, labeled “Homes and Asylums.”

  Caleb tossed the empty file folders to the floor in frustration. “It’s just all so confusing. Time travel, multiple futures, witches, camels, maps, cryptic messages, strange languages… And all of the adults are playing their own game, and no one is telling us anything.”

  Abbey nodded. She knew exactly how Caleb felt. But it was a surprising relief to know that her twin felt the same way. There had been too many secrets between them, and she was relieved that they seemed to be on the same team again.

  “Maybe it would help if we start with what we do know,” she suggested.

  “That won’t take long, because it isn’t much,” Caleb said.

  “I don’t mean all this.” Abbey gestured at the paper and the lockbox. “What do we know about what everyone’s up to?”

  “Still won’t take long,” Caleb said. “For starters, we’ve got Selena, Nate, and Damian—they’re definitely trouble. They’re looking for a wormhole to get to a parallel universe and seem willing to do whatever it takes to find it, including stealing maps and cutting off people’s fingers. Oh, and did I forget to mention, using the wormhole incorrectly could rip the world apart, but the good news is that nobody seems to know where it is.”

  Abbey cut in. “Also, don’t forget all Selena’s talk about Altys who can jump between parallel universes. And she made an interesting comment to Ian when she was talking about wormholes. ‘Right person, right place, right time.’ It made it
sound like it was harder to use a wormhole than it is to use the stones.”

  “Let’s hope so, given the whole world-ripping-apart thing,” Caleb said. “Anyway, moving on, we’ve also got Dr. Ford, who may or may not be helping them, but is definitely suspect. Then there’s Jake, who claims he’s being blackmailed to work for them. Sylvain and Russell seem to be vigilantes and have some sort of mining operation going on in the forested future, and are not to be totally trusted either, but for whatever reason, Mom and Dad seem to trust Sylvain. And let’s see, who else? Oh yeah, Ian and the two Franks.” Caleb paused and threw his hands in the air in exasperation. “Yeah, I have no idea what they’re up to. They seem to be on our side, and want to stop Selena, but they could be working for themselves too.”

  “You forgot about Sandy,” Abbey said.

  Caleb gave a sheepish grin. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “Something about her doesn’t seem quite right. She’s too… I don’t know. Eager.”

  “She could just be really happy to be out of Nowhere.”

  Abbey snorted. “Hmm. Maybe.”

  They were both silent for a minute. They didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Finally Abbey spoke.

  “Maybe we should just get on up to bed, Cale. We have no idea what we’re going to have to do in the morning.”

  Caleb raked his hands through his hair. “Yeah, okay.”