The Pet and the Pendulum

by Gordon McAlpine

  And then Allan hit on a better idea.

  “I want you all to imagine a dark cemetery,” he said.

  His classmates leaned forward.

  Birdy set her pencil down and listened.

  “Picture above-ground crypts, decayed and weathered houses of the dead,” he continued. “Of course, you’ve already heard that we discovered the pirate treasure in one such crypt. And you want to hear something more. So I’ll share a few details we didn’t tell the media. . . .”

  He paused for effect.

  “Ghosts are real,” he whispered, just loud enough for all to hear. The quiet made it all the more dramatic.

  And then there was a loud bang!

  The entire class jumped out of their chairs, and almost out of their skins.

  At his desk in the back of the room, Edgar smiled and shrugged. “Oops,” he said, picking up the heavy textbook he had “accidentally” dropped on the linoleum. “Clumsy me.”

  There was a collective sigh of relief.

  Allan settled himself once more at the podium. “Well, as I was saying, my brother and I discovered some important new facts about ghosts during our hours in the Saint Louis Cemetery in New Orleans.” He paused and gazed at the students. “You might be interested.”

  They nodded in assent, their eyes wide.

  Even Mrs. Rosecrans looked interested.

  Birdy was agog, no longer an expert, but a member of the audience.

  “Not everyone who dies becomes a ghost,” Allan explained calmly. He was the expert now. “Most of the deceased move on to some mysterious place that, unfortunately, my brother and I know nothing about. You see, our sources, who were two-hundred-year-old ghosts . . .” He paused momentarily, noting how the whole room seemed to be holding its breath. “Well, since these ghosts had never moved on, they could not describe what lay beyond.”

  “Why didn’t they move on?” asked Stevie.

  Mrs. Rosecrans was sufficiently interested to not scold him for speaking out of turn.

  “The spirits of those who are murdered and whose killers go unrecognized are trapped near wherever the crime occurred,” Allan answered. “It is injustice that keeps them here as ghosts.”

  “For how long?” asked Katie Justus.

  Allan shrugged. “Until someone either publicly identifies their murderer or avenges the crime.”

  “So, your two-hundred-year-old sources had been . . . murdered?” Stevie ventured.

  “Yes, but my brother and I, along with our friends Em and Milly Dickinson, set matters straight by identifying their murderer.”

  “Pierre Lafitte,” muttered Mrs. Rosecrans, as caught up in the story as everyone else.

  “Exactly,” Allan said.

  “And now they’ve moved on to the next place?” asked David Litke, who was usually more interested in pirates than ghosts.

  Allan nodded.

  “And what do ghosts look like?” Birdy asked.

  “They look just like you and me. Except they can do things like remove their heads and hold them in their arms. But our particular ghost friends, Clarence and Genevieve Du Valier, didn’t really like to make spectacles of themselves. Spooking the living held little interest for them.”

  “Remove their heads?” Mrs. Rosecrans interrupted doubtfully.

  “Why not? They’re ghosts,” replied Allan.

  “So if they don’t spend their time spooking humans, what do they do?” Katie asked.

  Edgar spoke up from the back of the room. “Mainly, they wait.”

  “For what?” asked Riley McHuff.

  “Justice,” Edgar said.

  The room was silent.

  Mrs. Rosecrans turned to Allan. “Thank you for your talk,” she said. “Quite an imaginative fantasy. It must run in the family, considering your famous ancestor. You may return to your seat now, Allan.”

  Fantasy?

  Allan only shook his head. Some people were impossible to persuade, being so distracted by mere facts that they were unable to perceive the truth behind the facts. That was Mrs. Rosecrans.

  It didn’t make her a bad person.

  Just an ordinary adult.

  “I’m all finished here,” Birdy announced, nervously putting her notepad and pencil into her handbag and starting rapidly for the door.

  “Must you go already?” Mrs. Rosecrans inquired with surprise.

  But Birdy, pale and anxious to leave, did not answer her.

  At least some adults believe, the Poe twins thought.

  But why did they always believe there was something to fear from the dead?

  Edgar and Allan knew better. They had never met a gentler couple than Monsieur and Madame Du Valier of old New Orleans, even when the pair was headless. No, the dead were all right.

  Judging from the Poe twins’ recent experiences, it was the living who could be dangerous.

  After the bell, as the other students started off to their second period classes, Mrs. Rosecrans approached Allan and Edgar.

  “We didn’t mean to scare Birdy out of the room,” Allan said before she could reprimand them.

  The teacher waved away his concern. “That’s not what I want to talk to you boys about,” she said, leaning on a nearby desk.

  The twins had never seen her adopt such a casual posture.

  “It seems Birdy’s a bit of a chicken,” she continued, chuckling.

  The twins looked at each other. They’d never heard her crack a joke either.

  What was up?

  She collected herself. “I wanted to ask you two if you’re all right,” she said.

  “Oh, Professor Perry’s still in hiding somewhere in Asia,” Allan answered confidently. “He wouldn’t dare show his face in this country. So don’t worry, Mrs. Rosecrans.”

  She shook her head. “Actually, I was wondering how you two are holding up with this recent news about your parents’ satellite.”

  “Oh,” the boys said.

  Many times these past seven years, Edgar and Allan had looked into the night skies—most recently from a dark Kansas cornfield—to locate among the stationary stars the tiny, orbiting speck of light that was their mom and dad’s tomb. It was only periodically visible, usually soaring over other longitudes or latitudes, but with simple calculation its appearances were as predictable as the tides. The twins never lost an opportunity to observe it, though their feelings were always complex.

  Naturally, they loved and missed their parents. So it was always sad. But there was also a comfort in the predictability of the orbit, a sense of permanence that surpassed the carved names and dates on headstones, which, after all, eventually are worn away to blank slates.

  “Why do you ask?” Edgar inquired.

  “Well, all your talk just now about ghosts,” Mrs. Rosecrans started. “It made me wonder if, psychologically, you weren’t really talking about . . . well, if you weren’t kind of reaching out.”

  “But everything Allan said was true.”

  Mrs. Rosecrans shrugged. “That may be. Still, I’m asking because I care about the two of you.”

  “You do?” they asked.

  She’d once given them detention three times in one day.

  “Of course,” she said softly. They could see from her eyes that she was telling the truth.

  In a way, this was even more surprising than meeting real ghosts.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Rosecrans,” said Edgar.

  Allan nodded. “Of course, we’d prefer that the satellite not return to Earth like some kind of erratic bomb. But . . . what can we do?”

  “I understand,” she replied.

  “But we’re OK,” he added.

  A few weeks before, they might not have taken it so well. But it was a consolation to have met Clarence and Genevieve Du Valier. The kind couple was still happy
to be together, even if they’d been trapped for two centuries in the general vicinity of their moldering grave. Edgar and Allan believed that their own parents were still together too . . . somewhere. And unlike the Du Valiers, the boys’ mother and father had been victims of an accident. They would have moved straight to whatever lay beyond, without any need for justice to be meted out.

  “The satellite may contain our parents’ flesh and bones—” Edgar started.

  “—but not their spirits,” concluded Allan.

  “That’s a good way to see it, boys,” Mrs. Rosecrans said.

  “Besides, we don’t need the occasional, orbiting appearance to be reminded of Mom and Dad,” Edgar said.

  “We never forget them in the first place,” Allan added.

  Mrs. Rosecrans blinked, as if she had something in her eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Edgar asked her.

  Students for her next class started coming into the room. Mrs. Rosecrans stood up straight and quickly collected herself.

  “Now, you two get to class,” she told the twins, her tone once again authoritarian. “There’ll be no late pass for either of you, so you’d better move it!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they said.

  Glancing back as they left, the twins noticed that their teacher had taken her position at the podium and had seemed to return to normal.

  But now Edgar and Allan knew the truth about her.

  She was far better than normal.

  WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .

  ENCRYPTED E-MAIL MESSAGE STRING

  From: newpoe@The-poes.net

  Sent: Mon, Jan. 5, 9:53 am

  To: Birdyreynolds@The-poes.net

  Subject: RE: INTELLIGENCE

  Birdy,

  Your information is quite useful.

  Professor P.

  > From: Birdyreynolds@The-poes.net

  > Sent: Mon, Jan. 5, 9:51 am

  > To: newpoe@The-poes.net

  > Subject: RE: INTELLIGENCE

  > Dear Professor,

  > You’ll be delighted to learn that my visit bore

  > fruit. It seems the twins believe that any victim

  > of an unsolved murder is doomed by “injustice”

  > to haunt the vicinity of his or her death until

  > the murder is either avenged or publicly

  > solved. The twins are quite convincing in this

  > ghost business (I must admit to having felt a

  > momentary chill). But regardless of

  > the accuracy of their belief, I thought you

  > might be able to use this intelligence

  > to manipulate them in some way, seeing

  > as your cleverness knows no bounds.

  > Sincerely,

  > “Birdy” (your faithful new eyes and ears)

  > P.S. The teacher suspects nothing of my actions or true intentions.

  HOME SWEET HOME

  IT had been three weeks since the Poes had returned from New Orleans to Baltimore and their nineteenth-century white clapboard house. Outwitting criminals on the road trip—three generations of the nefarious Perry family and a long-dead pirate—had been exhilarating for Edgar and Allan. Finding treasure and making a movie had been fun too. Aside from being kidnapped, Roderick had seemed to enjoy it all. And Uncle Jack and Aunt Judith now had many good stories to share with friends in their bowling league. Still, the twins were relieved to be back home with their projects and experiments.

  This weekend, they planned to finish the cat door that would allow Roderick to move freely between the house and the screened porch.

  It would be no ordinary, pet store–bought door.

  Instead, the boys built an eighteen-inch-high scale replica of the ancient doors of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. There were cat-height motion detectors on either side, so the portal slid open automatically at Roderick’s approach. A snippet of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played whenever he passed through.

  “Roderick’s a cat,” Uncle Jack commented when he saw it in action. “Not the king of France!”

  “Now, Jack, you have to admire the boys’ ingenuity,” Aunt Judith responded, setting down her Saturday morning grocery shopping and kneeling to touch the intricately carved antique French oak doors.

  “Well, maybe if their efforts were going into homework or something . . .” Ordinarily, their uncle was more supportive of his nephews’ independent activities. But today he was grumpy—with winter break over, he had no further excuse for not taking down the Christmas lights, as Aunt Judith had been asking him to do since New Year’s Day.

  “Homework?” Allan responded in disbelief. “We finish our homework every day on the bus ride home, Uncle Jack.”

  “But that’s just fifteen minutes.”

  “Which leaves us plenty of time to chat with the bus driver, who used to be a navy deep-sea diver,” Edgar said.

  Uncle Jack shook his head. Sometimes he couldn’t keep up with the twists and turns of conversations with his nephews. But neither could he argue with their excellent grades.

  “Roderick may not be the king of France,” Aunt Judith observed as the cat paraded out to musical accompaniment, and then back in, “but with that kind of entrance, he might be king of cats.”

  “The doors’ craftsmanship is undeniable,” Uncle Jack acknowledged. He bent and petted Roderick, who purred in appreciation. “It’s a darn good doorway for an ordinary cat.”

  Roderick stopped purring. He sat and puffed out his chest, which bore a distinctive figure eight of white fur.

  Allan’s and Edgar’s jaws dropped. “Ordinary?” they objected simultaneously.

  “Well, um . . .” Uncle Jack stammered, realizing that his grumpy mood might have trapped him in a corner. “What I meant was that Roderick is only ‘ordinary’ because all cats are extraordinary.”

  The twins looked at him doubtfully.

  “If that’s so, then the word ‘extraordinary’ has no meaning,” Allan observed.

  “Remember, dear,” Aunt Judith reminded her husband, patting his shoulder reassuringly, “Roderick does know how to play dead. And he is an expert at untying knots. That’s pretty extraordinary.”

  “And that’s not the half of it,” Edgar and Allan said in unison.

  Roderick was possessed of unusual skills. His ability to play dead and to untie knots had twice saved Edgar’s and Allan’s lives. His latest trick, learned in the backseat of the Volvo wagon on the way home from New Orleans, was to tap his front paws in time with music on the radio. His favorite number was the old surf instrumental “Wipe Out,” with its distinctive drum solo.

  “OK,” Uncle Jack admitted, “he is extraordinary.”

  Roderick purred once more and paraded regally out the tiny cathedral doors.

  “Well,” Allan said in a conciliatory manner as the music played, “it is true that all cats are extraordinary in their own ways.”

  “Exactly,” said a clearly relieved Uncle Jack. “That’s what I meant.”

  “Yes, that’s what we thought you meant,” Edgar said, high-fiving their uncle.

  The twins admired the new cat door for a moment. Then they turned to each other.

  “Next?” they said.

  The rest of the day was spent constructing a telescope with the same materials and design Galileo had employed in the early 1600s. Made of wood and leather with a convex main lens and a concave eyepiece (which the twins had ground using Aunt Judith’s kitchen utensils), the instrument was exactly 980 millimeters long, or roughly three feet. When they took it up on the roof, they did not expect to see farther than they’d see with even an ordinary pair of binoculars. The old design was outdated in that regard. Rather, their experiment was to determine if, by using ancient techniques, they might be able to see back
through time.

  It was a long shot, they knew.

  But then, the remarkable coordination that made Edgar and Allan two boys with one mind . . . that was a long shot too. So who was to say what was impossible?

  Unfortunately, the telescope didn’t see backward through time—except in the way of all telescopes, which capture light that has taken time to travel from a distant image. Still, the experiment was not a failure. It had simply disproven one of many theories that now would not have to be tested again, which was one way science moved forward—by just moving on.

  As did the Poe twins.

  On Sunday, they completed their half-finished work on three-dimensional backgammon and their preliminary design for shoes that used kinetic energy to melt snow from driveways, eliminating the need for shovels and plows (the shoes’ wearer, however, would have to be either a master of tap dance or an Olympic-caliber athlete).

  They’d caught up with all their leftover projects.

  This enabled them now to give their full attention on Sunday night to their new and most important project—finding a way to direct the path of their parents’ gradually descending satellite so that it would land in an ocean or uninhabited desert, thereby harming no one on the ground. Their parents had lost their lives because of the satellite, and those two lives were already two too many.

  As soon as the NASA scientists realized the impending disaster, they had sent a letter to the Poe family, explaining the difficulty:

  Ironically, what makes the satellite’s reentry and landing impossible to control from Earth is that the nine-digit security code necessary to access the craft’s stabilizers was known only to the designers, Mal and Irma Poe, who, of course, are tragically no longer with us. Further complicating matters is that entering any inaccurate series of numbers even once permanently disables the remote system. This is why we cannot use computers to send the one billion numerical possibilities to the satellite to unlock its navigational capacity. . . .