The Shadow Cipher

by Laura Ruby

  Aunt Esther said, “You should probably keep Nine Eighty-Seven with you. She might be able to help.”

  “How can she help?” said Theo.

  “How do you know she can’t?” Aunt Esther asked.

  She winked and climbed into the driver’s seat. Jaime, Tess, and Theo watched as the van eased onto the street, turned the corner, and was gone.

  Then they were alone. Jaime looked up at the building, squinting into the rain. Maybe it was the gloomy weather, the unseasonable chilly drizzle, but 354 W. 73rd Street seemed shrouded in shadow. It looked—there was no other word for it—dead.

  But maybe not just yet.

  Back in the empty penthouse, Tess unclasped Cricket’s necklace and slid the key off the chain. She slipped the tail end into the lock and turned.

  Click!

  This was it.

  This was it.

  This was—

  The silver case popped open. And nestled inside a nest of red velvet—

  “—a walking stick?” Jaime said. Long, black, with an ornate pewter handle shaped like a dragon. Engraved on a pewter ring underneath the handle were the words All that opens is not a door.

  “There’s a letter, too,” Tess said, pulling a piece of thin paper from inside the suitcase, unfolding it. She read:

  SO, MY FRIENDS, YOU HAVE COME TO THE BEGINNING OF THE END (OR THE END OF THE BEGINNING, IF YOU WILL). HERE YOU FIND NOT A PUZZLE AS MUCH AS A CHOICE: YOU CAN CHOOSE TO MOVE FORWARD, OR YOU CAN CHOOSE TO WALK AWAY. THINK CAREFULLY: IS ANY TREASURE WORTH ANY PRICE?

  YOUR TASK IS BOTH SIMPLE AND MONUMENTAL: TAKE THE ELEVATOR TO THE 122115145112TH FLOOR. SET THE CANE IN THE CLOCK, AND YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.

  BUT REMEMBER, ONCE THE DRAGON IS AWAKENED, THERE IS NO GOING BACK.

  AT LEAST, NOT FOR A VERY, VERY LONG TIME.

  Jaime said, “So, I’m guessing ‘122115145112’ is a code?”

  “The letter says it’s simple, so the simplest thing would be to punch that number into the keypad on the elevator,” said Theo.

  “And then?” said Jaime.

  “And then we see what happens,” said Tess. “What the Cipher wants us to find.”

  Jaime tugged at one of his ’locs. “Why does it sound like a warning?”

  “Because it is,” said Theo. “I think.”

  “But a warning about what?” Jaime said.

  “Maybe we won’t like what we find,” said Theo.

  “How could we not like it,” Tess said, “when the treasure could save our home?”

  Jaime didn’t remind her of what had happened in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel—that Edgar Wellington had not been saved. That maybe the Cipher didn’t care about what they wanted. That it might be bigger than them all.

  Jaime hefted the cane. “Okay, so what do you think the letter means by ‘dragon’?”

  Tess stood. “We’re going to find out. The whole world is going to find out.”

  They went to the elevator and pressed 122115145112 into the keypad. For a second, the elevator didn’t move, but then it began to hum. It trembled and then lifted upward, then over, up and over, up and over, stairstepping through the building on a steep diagonal. Then it flew in a horizontal line all the way to the back of the building, way past what Jaime thought of as the back of the building.

  “Has it ever moved like this before?” Theo said.

  “No,” said Tess, who was watching the doors as if they would open up onto another world.

  And then they did.

  The elevator stopped, still humming, rotating 180 degrees. There was brief whoosh and a slight wind. Nine mrrowed, jerked at her leash. The doors flew open. Beyond the threshold of the elevator was a long, wide marble hallway, as long and wide as an Underway train, a hallway that Jaime had never seen before, with beautiful chandeliers winking like stars in the dim light.

  Without saying another word, they stepped into the corridor. All along the hall, there were paintings of magical creatures: a winged horse; a sort of lion-snake; and giant bird blocking the sun.

  “The Ziz,” said Tess.

  “The what?” Jaime said.

  “This bird. It’s from Jewish mythology,” said Theo. “Kind of like a griffin, but bigger. He has another name, Renanin, which means ‘singer.’”

  They kept walking, allowing Nine to sniff in front of them like a dog on a scent. The cat led them into a large sitting room with arrangements of antique furniture in front of a giant marble fireplace, a dining room with a long table and twelve chairs, another sitting room, a bedchamber with a four-poster, canopied bed. They saw nowhere to set the cane, nowhere obvious at least, until they reached a library with two reading chairs, a table and lamp between them. Jaime scanned the volumes. Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Harper, Mary Shelley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lydia Maria Child, Edgar Allan Poe, Phillis Wheatley, Publius, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, various volumes by a writer known only as A Lady, author of Penelope, as well as volumes in Arabic and Spanish and many other languages that Jaime couldn’t identify, all shelved in no particular order, or maybe an order only the librarian would understand.

  Who was the librarian?

  But then he knew.

  “This is her place,” Tess breathed. “Ava’s. For all this time, people thought she’d left nothing here, but she left everything. That’s why the building is so big. Not just because the elevator needed room to move, but because her apartment was hidden here.”

  Jaime picked up a saucer sitting by the table, the dregs of tea dried at the bottom of the cup. “What happened to her?” he said. But he could have been talking about so many people—Ava Oneal, for sure, but also all those other people who were servants and secretaries and wives and spies and prisoners and lunatics, all those people that history forgot or hid or deliberately erased, because they were not a part of the story that history wanted to tell.

  “Look at this,” Tess said. She was standing in front of a large grandfather clock, but a clock that didn’t look like any other clock Jaime had ever seen. Stained black, it had a dial within a dial—both blue and green and yellow—and two different hands, one with a small golden sun, and another with a smaller silver moon. Small carved figures flanked the larger face of the clock: one man holding a mirror; one man holding a flask; one man playing some sort of lute; and lastly, a grinning skeleton lifting a bell. All along the top of the clock, more figures, these even more fantastical—like the paintings in the hallway—griffins, gargoyles, sphinxes.

  “Creepy,” said Jaime.

  “No, I’m talking about this,” said Tess. She pointed down. On one side of the base stood a tall black post topped with a pewter dragon, but on the other side, just a hole in the wood.

  Jaime set down his duffel, pulled out the dragon-topped cane they’d found in the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel. “It’s the same.”

  “This is where we set it,” Tess said.

  Jaime took a deep breath. “The last clue said that once we do this, there’s no turning back.”

  “We have to set it. We don’t have a choice,” said Tess.

  People always had a choice, Jaime thought. But then, if they didn’t do this, weren’t they letting Darnell Slant write the story of this building, write their story, write them right out of it?

  Before Jaime had a chance to change his mind, before any of them did, he took the cane and set it in place, twisting until he heard a small thunk. Immediately, the hands of the clock began to spin around and around. Nine meowed. The clock chimed. One, two, three, four, five, six, ten, twelve, fourteen . . .

  “What is going on?” Theo said.

  Nine meowed again and pulled on the leash.

  “Clocks don’t chime seventeen,” Theo said.

  Nine scrabbled backward, her claws scratching for purchase on the marble.

  “I don’t like this,” Jaime said.

  Nine howled a long terrible howl.

&n
bsp; “It sounds like a . . . like a . . . timer,” Theo said.

  Tess leaped forward, tried to wrench the cane out of the base of the clock, but the dragon snapped off in her hand. She stared at it dumbly as the clock chimed on and on and on.

  “I think we should go,” Jaime said. “I think we should go now.”

  There was a sharp bang, and then a sound like the drum of rain on a roof. The big face of the clock popped open. Out flew something—what? A fluttering, silvery something.

  Jaime stared at it, watching it dance like silver fire in the air.

  And then it hit him right between the eyes.

  “Ow!” he yelled, knocking it away, forehead and hand stinging. But then Tess and Theo were knocking away more of the moths, an enormous cloud of them, a great heaving shudder of them, all streaming from the face of the clock and heading right for them.

  “Run!” yelled Jaime.

  They tore from the library, skidded down the marble corridor, flung themselves into the elevator, frantically slapped at the keypad. L for Lobby, 1, 2, 5, close, close, close, please close already. The doors shut so slowly, so slowly, as the air beyond them shattered with the sound of a million metal wings. And then the doors were shut and the elevator was dropping, dropping, dropping, straight down, no detours, no melancholy twists and turns, just a stomach-churning plummet from top to bottom, so fast that for just one moment they were weightless as moths hovering in the air. Then the car landed so hard it slammed them all to the floor, but they didn’t have one second to catch their breath before the doors opened again, pitching them into the lobby.

  Right at the feet of Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Tess

  “Well!” said Mr. Stoop. “If it isn’t our old friends!”

  “They’re not my friends,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  “Now, now, we shouldn’t be rude, Mr. Pinscher.”

  “Why not?” said Mr. Pinscher.

  “That,” said Mr. Stoop, “is a good question. Another good question: What is that you have in your hand, Miss, Miss . . . What was her name again, Mr. Pinscher?”

  “Pain in the Butt,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  “I don’t believe that’s her given name.”

  Mr. Pinscher shrugged. “That’s the name I gave her.”

  Up until that moment, Tess had forgotten she had anything in her hand, but when she looked down, she was still holding the dragon handle of the cane. She sat up.

  “Why don’t you toss that to me,” said Mr. Stoop, “and we’ll let you all go without any further fuss.”

  Tess didn’t want to give these men anything. Not the dragon, not anything.

  “Listen,” she said. “My mom knows where we are and she’s coming to pick us up in a few minutes.”

  “Liar,” said Mr. Stoop, in a singsong sort of voice.

  “Children always lie,” said Mr. Pinscher. “Little lying liars.”

  “You didn’t tell your mother what you were going to do. You wouldn’t dare. Give me what you’ve found,” said Mr. Stoop.

  Ever so faintly, Tess heard the chime of the clock. Or maybe she was imagining it.

  What she didn’t imagine: the elevator doors closing behind her. She scrambled to her feet.

  “No . . . ,” she began. But how to explain that they put a cane in a clock and were chased away by moths? What did that mean? And why should she tell them?

  But she needed them to let her and Jaime and Theo go. “Listen, I think something is going to happen. Something is happening right now.”

  “We all have to get out of here,” Jaime said.

  “You do,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  “Who is controlling the elevator?” said Theo, watching the numbers flash over the doors.

  “I will not be distracted by this ridiculous, malfunctioning, crumbling old hut!” shouted Mr. Stoop.

  Theo said, “Technically—”

  “We have been here all month searching this, this, this”—Mr. Stoop twirled his hand in the air, searching for the right word—“this pile of bricks and I am done. Done! So, young lady, you’d better give me what you have in your hand and tell me exactly where you found it or I will have to call in reinforcements.”

  “We’re allowed to be here until midnight,” Jaime said. “The cops won’t do anything.”

  “Who said I was going to call the police?” said Mr. Stoop.

  Theo was still watching the elevator. “Abi thabink thabe maboths abare cabomabing abon thabe abelabevabatabor.”

  Jaime said, “Mabe taboo.”

  “What are you two yammmering about?” said Mr. Stoop.

  Jaime’s expression was pure innocence. “What?”

  “Mabovabe abawabay frabom thabe daboabors,” said Tess. “Gabet rabeadaby tabo rabun.”

  “Stop mumbling!” Mr. Stoop said.

  “Why do you work for Slant?” said Tess. “Why are you doing this to us? Why do you want to toss people from their homes? This isn’t fair.”

  “Fair?” said Mr. Stoop. “Oh my goodness! Didn’t they teach you in kindergarten that the world isn’t fair? Nothing is fair, stupid girl. Do you think this is the worst thing that could happen to you? The worst thing that will ever happen?”

  Tess said, “What happened to you?”

  Mr. Pinscher rolled his creepy eyes. Mr. Stoop checked his watch. “It is a little early, but I don’t think this can be helped. What do you think, Mr. Pinscher?”

  “I think he’s probably hungry by now,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  “Who’s hungry?” said Tess.

  Mr. Pinscher pulled a bag off his shoulder and set it on the floor. He opened the flap and gave a low whistle. Inside the bag, a flutter of movement. More moths? thought Tess. But no, a weird leathery-looking thing about the size of man’s hand crawled out of the bag. Not a bat, not a spider, not a machine—a many-legged thing, reddish and scarred. It had no eyes that Tess could see, no face.

  What kind of creature has no face?

  “He doesn’t have a mouth, either,” said Mr. Stoop, his teeth gleaming in the dim light. “But he does love to eat. I gave him a whole cow once. It was gone in an hour. Except the feet. He doesn’t much care for feet.”

  Nine lowered her head and growled.

  “I’d be careful with your kitty,” said Mr. Stoop. “Our little friend here loves kitties, but not in a way you’d appreciate.”

  The leathery thing raised one leg in the air, tap, tap, tapped the floor.

  It seemed like a challenge.

  Nine growled again, hackles rising, straining against her leash. Impossibly, she seemed larger.

  The leathery thing tapped. Tapped again. Bring it.

  Nine panted, showing her incisors. Are you sure?

  “No, Nine,” said Tess. She risked a glance at the elevator. How many loops around the building was it going to make?

  Mr. Stoop held his hand out. “Give me what you’re holding, Miss, and I’ll call off my friend.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  Mr. Stoop clucked his tongue in annoyance. “Mr. Pinscher, I do wish you’d stop with the spoilers. It ruins the suspense for everyone.”

  There was a loud metallic bang. They all looked around.

  “Okay, now it’s the dumbwaiter,” said Theo.

  Mr. Stoop shook his head. “The dumbwaiter is welded shut. It hasn’t worked in years. Nothing in this building has worked properly in years. Why people are so determined to stay here I simply don’t understand when there are perfectly lovely apartments in Ohio.”

  “If the dumbwaiter is broken, what’s it doing?” said Jaime, pointing. The brass door of the dumbwaiter quivered, as if it were straining against its own lock.

  “What did you foolish children put in the dumbwaiter?” said Mr. Stoop.

  “Nothing!” said Tess.

  “Then who did you put in the dumbwaiter?” said Mr. Pinscher. “Is it that raccoon again? I don’t like that raccoon.”

  “
The abelabevabatabor abis cabomabing dabown nabow,” said Theo.

  “We really need to go,” said Jaime, glancing from the dumbwaiter to the elevator and back again. “Even you guys.” He took a step back from the little leathery thing, which was twitching and shivering, as if it was getting ready to spring.

  “No, I think it’s time for you to go,” said Mr. Stoop.

  “Bye-bye,” said Mr. Pinscher.

  The little leathery hand thing jumped up. Nine charged, wrenching her leash right out of Tess’s fingers.

  “No!” Tess screamed.

  “Yes,” hissed Mr. Pinscher.

  Nine caught the thing in her teeth. Like a bear catching a spawning salmon. Or a giant serval-wolf-cat catching a little leathery hand thing.

  “No!” said Mr. Stoop.

  “Yes,” hissed Tess.

  The cat bit down.

  As it turned out, a mouth was a fairly useful thing to have.

  And so was a cat.

  Mr. Stoop moaned. “Cecil! Not my little Cecil!”

  Mr. Pinscher said, “Stop whining, you sentimental fool. We’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way.” He was reaching for Tess when the doors of the elevator flew wide and a hurricane of silver wings flooded out. Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher batted at the moths but they only came faster, hitting the men in the face and the shoulders and the back, shoving them both toward the dumbwaiter. Suddenly, the dumbwaiter yawned wide. The moths balled up together, one rolling, shimmering mass of wings and fury, and hit the two men like a wrecking ball, shoving them into the waiting maw of the dumbwaiter. Tess heard their brief screams before the dumbwaiter slammed shut.

  And then she was shaking the little leathery hand thing from Nine’s mouth and they were all running to the door. The raging ball of moths blasted past them, blew out the windows in a shower of glass.

  “Go, go, go!” Jaime shouted.

  They climbed out the broken windows, trying not to cut themselves on the jagged edges, trying not to scrape their hands on the pavement, failing.

  “Wait!” said Tess.

  “No waiting!” Jaime said, hauling her to her feet and dragging her across the street. Tess’s thoughts scrabbling and scratching like squirrels trapped in a wall. They were supposed to find the treasure—where was the treasure? What was happening? Where did Mr. Stoop and Mr. Pinscher go? Theo was saying something to Jaime, but Tess couldn’t even make out their words; everything was a furious blur in her head and in her vision. Her breath came hot and fast, her feet dragging until someone—Jaime?—literally lifted her off her feet.