by Brian Meehl
The sound boomed in my head … along with the echo of the first message. If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. It was a clue! Whoever stood near the desk listening to the message was supposed to look under their feet.
I dropped to my knees and looked at the floor in the semidarkness. It was grimy old linoleum. I ran my hand over it. I hit a small tear in the linoleum. I grabbed the tiny flap and pulled it up. It tore like an old rag. I pulled away the part where I’d been standing next to the desk. In the dim light, all I could see were old floorboards. I brushed my hand along them. A splinter stabbed my thumb. I jerked my hand back, then flattened it down where the splinter had jabbed me. There were grooves in the wood. It felt like someone had carved something.
It was too shadowy to see. I thought about running out to the camper to get a flashlight. But there was a quicker way. I found a sheet of paper and a pencil on the desk. I put the paper over the carving in the wood. I swiped the pencil across it, making sure the tip caught all the edges.
I took the impression to the store window. It showed an address: 132 Mars Hill Road. It was the next clue. I let out a breath. The linoleum hadn’t been torn up before me. Whoever had listened to the messages first hadn’t figured out the next clue. I was the first one to get the address.
I stuffed the paper in my pocket and ran out onto the sidewalk. I panic-stopped.
The camper was gone.
9
Pap
Why Ruah took off, I couldn’t figure. Maybe it had to do with the part of his conversation with Joe I didn’t hear. Maybe it was the twenty-four hours he’d asked for, and he couldn’t wait any longer. Whatever, it wasn’t like him to leave without saying goodbye. Especially after all the stuff we’d been through. But I didn’t have time to worry about it. I had to find the bad book.
I went back in the store and cleaned out the cash register. I told myself I wasn’t adding robbery to my heap of sins. I was collecting an allowance from my father for the first time ever.
I found a taxi and asked the driver to take me to 132 Mars Hill Road. “That’s way out of town,” he said.
I counted the money from the register and what I had left from the last cache. “Is sixty-seven dollars enough?”
“That’ll do.”
Fifteen minutes later we drove through countryside with a mix of small farms and McMansions. We turned on an unpaved road: Mars Hill Road.
The taxi stopped at a rusty mailbox: 132. “You want me to go down the driveway?” the driver asked.
Weed-choked wheel ruts ran about fifty yards through an overgrown field. At the end, an old farmhouse with faded paint and missing shutters rose from the brown weeds. Behind it, a barn collapsed next to a cement silo.
“You sure you got the right address?” the driver asked.
I’d only looked at the paper a hundred times. “Yeah, this is it. How much?”
I paid him sixty dollars and started walking toward the farmhouse. Getting closer, I saw ragged white curtains in the upper windows. I thought I saw someone move behind a curtain, but it was just a breeze billowing the curtain in the open window. The place looked abandoned. I half expected to see one of those CONDEMNED stickers on the door. Or one of those spray-painted symbols rescue teams leave after a flood, meaning the house has been searched and there are no bodies. There were no signs or symbols, just paint flakes clinging to the siding. For all I knew, there was still a dead body inside.
I knocked on the front door. No one came. I opened the door and stepped inside. I called out, “Anyone here?” No answer.
On one side of the entrance hall was a living room, the kitchen was on the other. I went into the living room. The room was filled with a jumble of furniture, with an old TV in the far corner. The room was a bigger version of my father’s store. Bookshelves crammed with Mark Twain junk lined the walls. Boot Heel Collectibles was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to his collecting. It was clear why he called himself a Twainiac. If they made Mark Twain toilet paper, he would’ve had some. The good news: the shelves weren’t disturbed; nobody had ripped through them looking for the bad book. The bad news: my father was more than an idol worshipper, he was a nutcase. And I had a fifty-fifty chance of turning out the same.
I moved through the room, looking for old books, or at least a clue of where to find the bad book. Spotting some books on a shelf in the corner by the TV, I made a beeline for them. The row of leather-bound volumes had different titles, but they were all by Twain.
“Hello there,” a voice cracked.
I spun around. Tucked into a bulky chair was an old man all in white: shirt, vest, pants, swept-back hair. His face looked like a dried and cracked patch of alkali flat. But what jutted at me like a pointing finger was his nose—a beak of a thing.
It was my father.
I must’ve turned as white as him. He rasped, “Looking at a ghost, are you?”
“Ye-ah,” I said, my voice cracking.
His face spread in a smile, revealing the only color about him: his deep blue eyes. “ ‘I hain’t come back—I hain’t been gone.’ Now, who said that?”
The strange words sounded familiar, but I didn’t care who said them first. I only cared who was saying them now. “I dunno.”
“Huck says it when Tom thinks he’s a ghost come back to haunt him.”
“Right.” I remembered the line and got why he’d said it. Huck and my father had risen from the dead they’d never been.
He lifted a spotty, quavering hand off the chair arm. “I’m your father.”
I stepped closer and reached out to shake his hand. It felt like a handful of corn husks. His hand steadied, but holding it made the earthquake inside me shake harder. Two words stumbled out of me. “I’m Billy.”
His thin lips disappeared in a smile. “Yes, you are.” His hand slid away. “And a sight for old eyes.”
“But I thought …” My voice trailed off.
“Yes, you thought I was dead.”
It suddenly hit me how cruel his trick had been. “Why did you lie to me?”
“It was a bad thing,” he answered, still staring up at me. “I hope you’ll forgive me.” He slowly blinked. “I wanted to ensure your journey was for a long-lost book, not a long-lost father.” His eyebrows raised, turning his forehead into an accordion of wrinkles. “Where did you start?”
“Independence, Missouri.”
“Good name. How long did it take you?”
“Over a week.”
His lips spread, revealing another bit of color: his yellowish teeth. “But the adventure isn’t over.”
“What do you mean?”
He reached down below the chair cushion and pulled up book pages. “The last chapters of Huck Finn. I want you to read them to me.”
“What about the group that wants to destroy the bad book? You said they were close.”
“Don’t worry about them. Even if they find my house, they’ll never find the book.” He held up the last chapters. “We have the keys that open the treasure. They don’t.”
It was weird how he’d sounded panicked on the answering machine back at the store, but now was totally calm. Part of me wanted to ask how old the message was, and a bunch of other stuff. But a bigger part of me wanted to do what he asked. It’s hard to say no to a father you thought you’d never say yes to.
I pulled up a chair and started reading Chapter 34. Whenever I looked up I caught his lips moving along with mine. He knew it by heart. The chapter was about Huck and Tom planning to break Jim out of the shack he was being held in. When I read what Tom says to Huck, I should hope we can find a way that’s a little more complicated than that, a phone jangled in the kitchen.
My head jerked up from the page. “Do you want me to get it?”
He shook his head as his answering machine picked up. A woman started leaving a rushed message. She sounded scared. “I’m with the group that’s going to burn your book. We just found out where you are. I despise what’s in th
e book, but now they’re saying they’re not going to stop with the book; they’re going to burn everything. They might hurt you. I’m trying to do the right thing and warn you. When we get there I won’t be able to help. Please, get away from there before it’s too late!” She hung up.
My father’s face was tight with worry. I jumped up. “We gotta go. Do you have a car?”
His expression hardened. “No, I have a book. And I’m not going anywhere until I put it in your hands.” He raised an arm. “Help me up.”
“But, Dad!”—as scared as I was, it still felt really weird calling him that—“They’re gonna burn the place down, and maybe worse. We gotta go!” I took his arm and helped him up. His arm felt like it would snap like a stick.
He grabbed the cane resting against the chair. “Where we’re going, it won’t burn.”
10
The Hunt
With me holding one arm and him using his cane with the other, my dad and I shuffled to the front hall. “Do you have a car, or not?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then where are we going?”
“To free the bad book.”
I saw the phone on the kitchen wall. “Maybe I should call nine-one-one.”
“No,” he snapped. “No police.” He tapped the front door with his cane. “Open it.”
Outside, we moved at a snail’s pace down a path toward the barn. I kept checking the road for vehicles. Vigilantes from Notus came in pickups; I didn’t know what kind of wheels book burners went for. I wanted to ask him a thousand questions, but his breath was so short and raspy I didn’t want to slow us down.
We reached the silo next to the barn, and he stopped me. I thought he needed a rest. There was a metal door in the cement silo. He banged his cane on it and told me to open it. I did. He waved his cane into the darkness. A light flickered on.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Our book shelter,” he said as he tottered inside.
The silo was empty. The weird part was a sheet-metal ceiling two feet above my head. I had no clue why there was a low ceiling in a silo over thirty feet high. A ladder ran up the wall and disappeared next to a hatchlike door in the ceiling. Even weirder was a gunnysack hanging from the ceiling door.
“Close the door and lock it,” he ordered. I pulled the metal door shut and dropped the steel bar, locking us in. The clang reverberated off the walls. “Welcome to my genizah.”
“What?”
He tapped the cement wall with his cane. “Genizah is the Hebrew word for ‘hiding place.’ The Jews never destroy their old scrolls and religious texts when they’re worn out. You don’t destroy the Word of God, you give it a proper burial in a cave, attic, or even a silo. My genizah is a place for something that was, and still may be. That’s what the bad book is: a story waiting for resurrection.”
I knew he wanted to tell me all sorts of stuff, but I wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson. “Can’t we just get the book and get outta here? I mean, if they decide to torch the barn we’re gonna get cooked in here.”
He blinked slowly. He seemed amazingly calm, and oblivious to the danger. As he stared at me, his eyes sparkled like dark raindrops. “Nothing is ever set free without a journey, not even a book.” He grinned and lifted his cane. “Now let’s begin ours.” He poked the cane tip into the gunnysack hanging from the ceiling. It hit something solid. “Take it off.”
I reached up, untied the string holding the sack, and pulled it down. Things only got wonkier. Bolted to the ceiling door, upside down, was an old-fashioned typewriter. A sheet of paper hung from the roller. “What’s this?”
“A magic typewriter,” he answered.
The thing hardly looked magic. It was as paint-chipped and banged up as some of the beater bikes I’d ridden over the years. “What’s magic about it?”
“If you rub it the right way it’ll open the trapdoor.”
“You mean it’s a lock?”
“Yes, and only the right combination of keys opens it.”
“You know the combination, right?”
“Of course. But what if death had claimed me before you got here? You would have had to spring the bad book from its prison yourself.” He nodded up to the typewriter. “That’s why I left you a clue.”
For the first time I noticed there were words on the paper rolled into the typewriter.
“Let’s see if you’ve done your homework.”
I read the typing on the paper.
Bad luck they cannot shake
Once Huck and Jim embrace
The skin of ___________.
It was another of his rhymes, an easy one.
“Do you know the answer?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Type it in.”
I reached up and hunt-’n’-pecked r-a. When I pushed the old keys they just pressed down; they didn’t type letters. “They’re not working.”
“They may not be typing, but they’re working.”
I pushed the rest of the keys: t-t-l-e-s-n-a-k-e. After hitting the e, something clicked inside the trapdoor.
“Very good,” he said. “Now open it.”
I pushed up on the typewriter. The door it was bolted to hinged open and dropped in the space above with a crash. A light came on. I started up the ladder. I didn’t get two rungs before something caught my ankle. It was the hook of his cane.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“To get the book, so we can get outta here.”
“It’s not that easy.”
I stared down at him. “What do you mean?”
“Was it easy geocaching two thousand miles to find me?”
“No.”
“Then why should the last thirty feet be any less challenging? Come down.”
I jumped back to the floor.
He grinned his yellowish smile. “Age before beauty.” He leaned his cane against the wall and began to climb. It was more like the crawl of some ancient albino tortoise. I put my hand on his bony back and spotted him all the way.
The chamber above was almost the same as the first except the floor was sheet metal. There was no book, just another typewriter bolted to a trapdoor in the low metal ceiling. He leaned against the wall and caught his breath. I read the words on the paper hanging from the typewriter over our heads.
Even though they could have sued,
Grangerfords and Shepherdsons
Much prefer a good ol’ ____.
So far the clues were no-brainers compared to the geocaching clues he’d given me.
“Know the answer?” he asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t get it. Anyone who’s read Huck Finn, and has half a memory, would know the answers and be able to get through your—what did you call it?”
“Genizah.” He pushed off the wall and held my arm. “You see, that’s just the point. Anyone who’s read Huck Finn would never destroy the bad book. They couldn’t. They’d be dying to know what happens to Huck and Tom in the sequel.”
I thought he was being way optimistic about book burners. I mean, they could’ve been forced to read Huck Finn in school, known the answers, and still wanted to destroy the book. But I didn’t want to waste time quibbling.
“Besides,” he said, nodding upward, “the very last riddle only you and a couple of others would know.”
“What’s that?”
“Only climbing will tell.”
I pushed the keys for the fill-in-the-blank answer about the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, and pushed up. The typewriter and the door didn’t budge.
“What did you press?” he asked.
“F-u-e-d. That’s the answer, right? Just like ‘sued.’ ”
He let out a wheezing cackle. “I thought your mother would have taught you how to spell.”
I realized my mistake and pressed the same keys in the right order: F-e-u-d. I heard a click and the door pushed up and open. A light came on, illuminating another identical chamber. “How many of these ar
e there?”
He started his slow-motion ladder climb. “Just enough.”
11
Genizah
The higher we climbed, the hotter and stuffier it got. Reaching the next chamber, my father’s forehead and upper lip were sprinkled with sweat. He’d gone from pale to ash white. “Are you okay?”
“Maybe I need a rest.” I helped him to the floor and he leaned against the wall.
“Why don’t you wait here,” I said. “I’ll go the rest of the way.”
He sucked in a breath. “You’ll need me on the last one.”
“I’ll shout down if I need help.”
He shook his head. “I just need a minute.”
I gestured up to the next trapdoor. “At least let me open it so some of the heat escapes.”
“Good idea.”
I quickly read the clue on the paper in the typewriter.
He gives his all, a mighty try,
But Huck can’t pray
A simple ___.
Another no-brainer. I pressed keys: l-i-e. I pushed. The typewriter and the trapdoor opened and banged on the floor above.
As a light strobed on I slid down the wall next to my father and looked up through the opening. There was another sheet-metal ceiling, but I couldn’t see a typewriter. Maybe we’d reached the top. Maybe the bad book was right above us. It took everything not to spring to my feet and fly up the ladder.
My father’s voice reined in the urge. “Aren’t you wondering how a frail old man could build this thing?”
“Sure,” I said. “But you can tell me later.”
“There may not be a later.”
I looked at him. His sweat had found channels in his skin and his eyes were unfocused. I was no EMT, but I figured I should keep him talking. “So how did you build this thing?”
He took a breath. “Three years ago the doctors told me I had cancer. I got better, but I knew it was coming back. I began building my genizah. I built it for the book, and a dream.”