“Why’s Dad’s name on the screen?” he asked.
I went cold.
I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t understand what was in Dad’s mind, or what all these strange things I was reading about meant. I wanted someone to help me, to tell me it was okay, and that nothing, absolutely nothing was wrong.
“Why’s Dad’s name there?” Benjamin repeated.
“Is that it?” I asked. “The result of that anagram?”
“Yes. That’s weird. Why did you put those letters in?”
“Never mind,” I said.
I stood up. “Let’s go and get some food, shall we?”
“Yay!” said Benjamin. “Stan says…”
“Actually,” I said. “Wait. There’s one last thing I want to do while we have the laptop on.”
Benjamin groaned and took Stan over to the window.
“See that café, Stannous?” he said. “Soon. Very soon, you, me, and my big sister will go there and eat something. Would you like that? You would? Oh, good!”
While Benjamin spoke to Stan, I checked my emails. Maybe Mum had sent me a message when she couldn’t get through on the phone. Maybe Dad had.
I felt empty inside. Done. And suddenly I knew it was time to give in. I decided to write to Mum and ask her to come and get us.
“Well, Stan, what do you think of Dad’s book? Weird, isn’t it?”
I heard Benjamin move away from the window and sit on the bed again, and I heard pages turning.
I logged in to my email.
There was nothing new from anyone. Just some junk mail.
“Very weird, indeed,” Benjamin said to Stan. “If this is how you make a book, I don’t think I want to be a writer when I grow up.”
I was about to write the email to Mum when out of habit, I logged in to Dad’s email, too, and that’s when I found the email from Mr. Walker, from Michael.
It was recent, sent since we’d met him earlier in the day, and what it said was this:
My dear Laureth,
There’s something I should have said about your dad’s notebook. To be honest it is a matter that I found too peculiar to credit at first, but I’ve been pondering it all afternoon and I find I am unable to remain silent. If you are free this evening, I would ask if you and your charming brother could meet me at eight o’clock, on the corner of Nobell Street and Baisley Boulevard, in Queens. It would be easier to show you than to explain.
Yours sincerely, Mr. Michael Walker
So I knew it was him all right. No one else I knew spoke like that. I went to check my phone and then remembered it was dead.
“What time is it?” I asked Benjamin, but he didn’t answer. I thought about the email I had been about to write, and felt a tiny speck of determination inside me. If I gave up now, not only would Mum be furious, I’d have failed, too. She was going to be furious anyway, but I wanted to find Dad first. Myself.
“Benjamin! What time is it?”
“Hmm?” he said. “What? Oh, it’s seven … I mean seven-fifteen.”
“We have to go!” I said.
“Food?”
“We’ll get something to take away,” I said. “Come on.”
I sent a quick reply to Mr. Walker and we headed downstairs again, and happily this time Benjamin helped me avoid the tricky one.
“It’s spooky here now,” he said.
“What is?”
“It’s so dark now. It’s like being in a scary film.”
“What? The corridor?”
“The whole hotel.”
“Maybe they don’t like their electricity bills.”
“Too cool for school, that’s what Dad would say.”
“You said.”
“I know I did. I’m saying it again.”
We managed to get out of the hotel and across the street in one piece, and into the café.
Benjamin steered me to the counter and I asked him what he wanted.
“A cheese sandwich, please. And Stan will have a dried mouse.”
“I’ll see if they have any.”
“Actually he says he’d like two dried mice.”
It turned out that it’s not so simple to ask for two cheese sandwiches in a New York deli, so it took a long three-way conversation to discuss what kind of bread we wanted, and what kind of cheese and what we wanted on the cheese and about a hundred other things. The man behind the counter was very patient and friendly, but I was worried about the time, and meeting Mr. Walker. Fortunately it was easy enough to buy two cans of Coke, but all the while I was talking to the man, something was bothering me, something unpleasant. And that was on top of a bit of me that was screaming the words, “please don’t let Dad have killed himself” over and over and over, at full volume.
“Do they have mouse?” asked Benjamin.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Did you ask?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Well, please can you ask? Because Stan is hungry.”
I smiled toward the man behind the counter and said in a loud voice, “Do you have any dried mice for my brother’s raven? Please?”
The man laughed.
“Not since the hygiene inspector last paid a call. There you go, sweetheart. Fourteen-eighty.”
Then I realized what was making me feel uncomfortable; there was a bad smell of smoke. You don’t smell it often but when you do it’s horrible, the smell of a chain smoker, a smoker who never changes their clothes or washes their hair. Who reeks of ashtrays, days’ old. It made me want to get out of the café and I told Benjamin to take our stuff while I was paying.
Benjamin made an odd noise, and something hit the floor.
“Did you drop something?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” said Benjamin.
“What? What have you brought?”
“Stan,” said Benjamin.
“Stan doesn’t sound like a book when you drop him.”
Benjamin picked whatever it was up and held my hand.
“Please can you carry our drinks,” he said, “because I already have Stan and the sandwiches.”
“And?”
“And … Dad’s notebook. Laureth, there’s something else in it.”
“There’s what? You said we’d got to the end.”
“I know. But Dad did something weird.”
“What? What did he do?”
“He wrote in the back of it, too. There’s something in the back of it. Something weird.”
“In the back?” I said. I wanted to scream, but I managed not to. “In the back? Why didn’t you see it before? Why didn’t you look in the back before?”
“You didn’t ask me to,” said Benjamin. Then in a small voice he added, “I don’t like you when you’re cross.”
I bit my tongue and waited a moment, and tried to remember that Benjamin was only seven, and that I had abducted him, that he was up way past anyone’s bedtime, let alone his, and that no one might ever forgive me for any of this anyway.
“Sorry,” I said. I wanted to hug him but my hands were full. “I’m not cross. You’re doing really well. Really.”
So we got out of the deli and the bellhop at the Black King called another taxi for us.
“Busy day you guys are having,” he said. There was a tightness to his voice, and I wondered if he knew what Margery Lundberg had planned for us; a crocodile pit, perhaps, or a death ray of some kind.
“Uh-huh,” I said, and we headed for Queens, while Benjamin, in between slurps of Coke and mouthfuls of cheese sandwich, read what he’d found in the back of Dad’s notebook.
Benjamin was right. If there had been odd things already, this was the oddest of all, and the most frightening by far.
THE FINAL CLUE
It’s awful, what she finds here: the truth bare and naked upon the earth. They are truly here: The Death Cult. The Hound. Both are truly real.
Men guard this, the truth. They are known with the awful name: The Death Cult. The Hound?
Some dog! That’s just the coded name for their evil; the gangs they use, which hide the truth.
Well, I’ve found what Poe found.
What did Pauli find? And Price?
—That the truth sets the Hound free.
The Hound runs, and kills.
Each and every good man: smart, wise and noble.
Each one slain.
Each sad death, fake; all faked, like the idiot went mad.
Every time, the Hound runs, and kills. Once it’s shown prey, the howls will fly right over the world. More and older dogs now chase down the paths that you hurry over. The eager dogs run after your wet heels; they are close, hard and cruel.
Flee, you think! Flee! But you’ll fail, and these evil men shall come and break your ego. Maybe kill you. Cause your own death. Kill you stone dead but truly make you think that you ended your own silly life.
* * *
I’ve found just one thing; they, the death cult, are truly here and truly real.
Run!
Would that you could.
Wish for other, good men; noble folk who fight them, but there, Fool, you shall fail.
* * *
But maybe, when she finds this, the truth will set loose over the world, hunt the Hound down and throw that fey beast onto the dirty soil.
* * *
The clues that I’ve found must now reach over the world. When she finds that the Black Book has every fact, and every last lie that’s kept the truth from our sight, when she reads what I’ve found, when she tells good men about what The Death Cult set loose upon the world, then all shall know the truth.
* * *
When I’ve truly gone, she might weep, and she’ll feel the sting that hot tears give sad, tired eyes. But tears mean one thing; that you loved well, and others love you still, even now you’re gone.
GOD PLAYS DICE
“Trust me” is another thing Mum says a lot and it must be one of the most worrying things ever to say. If someone says, “Trust me” to you, you basically know it’s probably a really bad idea to do just that.
“I don’t want to go out again,” Benjamin said, and for once he sounded every bit like an overtired seven-year-old.
But what we had to do right then was get a taxi out of Manhattan and back into Queens as night fell.
“Trust me,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
There was a short gap before he said, “Okay, Laureth.” A short gap that freaked me out more than anything had so far, because it meant my little brother had stopped trusting me, and that made me really sad.
I didn’t want to have Benjamin read those pages again—those two strange pages at the back of Dad’s notebook. But I didn’t need him to anyway, they were seared into my brain, and each time I heard the words in my head I felt smaller and smaller, and despite the wondrousness of Benjamin and Stan, I felt utterly, totally alone. The words were stilted, and forced, yet somehow poetic, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was what it suggested about Dad’s state of mind. Which was that he had lost it. Completely.
What was Dad talking about? A cult? A death-dealing cult hiding the truth? That those who’d come close to finding out the truth about coincidences had been killed, and their deaths made to look like suicides? Kammerer, Koestler? Price, maybe even Pauli and Poe? This was Dad’s life, Dad’s real life. Had he really discovered some weird truth about the world, the universe? Had the cult got him?
And who was “she” in the text? I couldn’t shift the feeling that “she” was me.
And I was just a stupid girl whose brain was melting trying to figure it all out. Dad had said the Hound was a metaphor for coincidences, positive things that guide you; good things. Now he seemed to be saying the Hound, and therefore coincidences, too, were evil.
Was that fact or fiction in the back of his notebook? Did he even know the difference anymore?
* * *
What it seemed to come down to was this: either you believed that coincidences have some secret, hidden meaning, a secret that caused many of these great minds to put an end to themselves, or they are simply chance happenings.
Einstein’s view was God does not play dice, by which he meant that the universe operates to a fixed set of rules. The rules might be very complicated, but if you could discover them all and understand them, then you could predict everything and anything. Imagine balls pinging around on a pool table. It might be very hard to do the maths, but if you were able to, you’d be able to predict exactly where every ball would end up even if you smashed one into a whole bunch of them and they all went flying.
But if that’s the case, then Einstein must have been saying that there is no such thing as chance. Everything follows rules. And if that’s the case, then coincidences aren’t chance, either. They must mean something; there must be a hidden reason behind even the most extravagant coincidences, because if you take the other option, and coincidences are just chance, and have no meaning, that would mean that God does play dice.
And I don’t think Albert Einstein can have been wrong, can he?
* * *
I thought about how Pauli died in the room with his special number on it and I thought about Dad and his special number, and I wanted to scream at him one very simple question:
Why does it matter, why the hell do you care?
Because I really didn’t.
I just wanted Dad to be okay. I wanted him not to have gone crazy, not to have done something stupid, something that meant he wouldn’t be coming back to the hotel that night, or in fact, any night.
I think Benjamin fell asleep in the taxi, because when I asked him if he was okay, there was no reply. I put my hand out and felt him curled up on the seat next to me. I felt his messy hair and I felt Stan tucked up under his chin, and I felt bad. I’d dragged him across the world and all around the city all day on not much more than a cheese sandwich.
The taxi ride was a long one, and I was beginning to wonder how much longer it was going to take when Benjamin woke up.
“Oh!” he said. “Look, Stan. We’re on TV!”
I thought he was messing around at first, but he tugged my arm.
“Laureth! We’re on TV!”
“We are?” I asked, confused. Perhaps he’d been dreaming it. “Where?”
“On the little TV. That picture of you and me. The one Dad took at Christmas at Grandma’s. But the sound’s off…”
“Don’t you touch it!” I said. “I’ll put the sound on, Benjamin. Just tell me where to touch.”
So he did, but it took a second or two, and we were only in time to hear the end of a news story.
“… could be anywhere in the city. Officials from Customs and Border Protection at JFK are facing a barrage of questions, raising the issue of how the two British children were able to pass through the airport earlier today.”
The voice of the TV announcer changed tone. It had been official and serious. Now she went all soft and gentle.
“So please, folks. If you see these two missing children, do the right thing and put them in touch with the police, or other suitably secure professionals. Remember, the elder child is a blind girl of just sixteen. She’ll be terrified at being lost in our big city. Alone with just her kid brother. They’ll be completely helpless.”
I sat, speechless, while the news announcer rattled on.
“Sports news! The Jets today revealed the name…”
“Wow,” said Benjamin. “We’re famous! Sorry you weren’t in the photo, too, Stan. Never mind, maybe there’ll be another one with you in later.”
“Can the driver hear that thing?” I whispered.
Benjamin thought for a minute.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He’s just driving.”
“Good,” I said. “Good.”
I thought frantically, trying to work out what it meant. How did they know we were here? I knew they would have our names as having passed through immigration that afternoon, but why would anyone think we were miss
ing, unless someone had told them?
And how did anyone know we were missing? I’d had that phone call from Mum a couple of hours before, but how did she know we were missing? And even if she did, how did she know we were in New York?
There was no time to answer any of these thoughts, because our journey had come to an end.
The taxi lurched to a stop, swinging into the curb at the last second.
“Thirty-five forty,” said the taxi driver.
I almost shouted at him.
“What?”
“Hey, lady, don’t blame me for the night rate. Take it up with the mayor. Thirty-five dollars and forty cents.”
“No,” I said. “No, you see. It’s just that—”
“Laureth,” said Benjamin. “Pay him. I can see Michael waiting for us.”
I pulled a fifty-dollar note from my left-hand pocket and handed it to the driver, but I was freaked out. Dad’s number was chasing us. And if the number was, then maybe the Hound was, too.
The driver gave me the change and we got out. It was much quieter than Manhattan, at the hotel. It was still hot, although I knew the sun had gone down. I heard another car or two on the street, farther up, but otherwise everything was pretty peaceful.
Benjamin held my hand and took me over to Michael.
“Laureth, Benjamin,” he announced, still in that posh voice of his. “So good to see you again.”
“You, too, Michael,” I said. “What’s this all about?”
I wondered if he had seen us on TV.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve been wondering about your name. It’s most unusual.”
“It’s Welsh,” I said. “Did you bring us all the way out here to ask that? I thought you—”
“No, no,” he said. “There is another matter. It concerns your father’s notebook.”
“And?”
“And, well, I had the opportunity to look over it, when I found it. It was very peculiar, but there was one thing that troubled me somewhat. Puzzled me, I should perhaps say.”
“Which was?”
“I noted that your father is interested in the phenomenon of coincidence, correct?”
“You could say that.”
Or, I thought, you could say he’s lost his mind, and maybe even more than that.
She Is Not Invisible Page 13