The Pet and the Pendulum

by Gordon McAlpine

But the boys weren’t easily discouraged.

  They stayed up late Sunday night trying to figure out what nine-digit number their parents might have chosen as the code.

  Likely, they’d have picked a number easy to remember.

  Therefore, it could be a combination of Mal’s and Irma’s birthdays (3-14-71 and 5-2-69) or their respective addresses as children, or their address and ZIP code at the time of their deaths, or some combination of their years of high school and/or college graduations, or it could be their beloved twins’ birthday and identical birth weights, or the twins’ classroom numbers in kindergarten through second grade, or . . .

  The possibilities were, unfortunately, endless.

  And, setting numbers aside, their parents might have chosen one or more words consisting of nine letters that corresponded to the digits on a telephone. For example:

  PoeFamily = 763326459

  RTwinBoys = 789462697

  ReadEAPoe = 732332763

  Or something altogether unpredictable, like:

  Anteaters = 268328377

  So, even if we were allowed multiple guesses, we might never guess right, the boys conceded.

  Edgar and Allan weren’t accustomed to being stumped.

  Hours later, after finally falling asleep, the twins dreamed of sitting on kitchen chairs before bowls the size of oil drums filled with alphabet soup. They each spooned in slurp after slurp of the broth and the little pasta pieces shaped like numbers and letters. Innumerable slurps. But even all this slurping failed to satisfy what became an increasingly ravenous hunger. And the bowls never seemed to empty. Edgar and Allan were relieved of this nightmare only when their alarm clock went off.

  Rarely had they been so glad for the arrival of Monday morning.

  When the twins got home from school that afternoon, Aunt Judith looked up from where she sat at the kitchen table and asked, “So, how was your day?” She was working on a needlepoint version of Rembrandt’s Night Watch while listening to an audiobook about the lives of women in Renaissance times.

  “Fine,” they answered, as they usually answered.

  “A little more information, please,” Aunt Judith insisted, as she usually insisted.

  Roderick sauntered into the kitchen, as cool as ever, only his smiling eyes giving away his enthusiasm for the return of his two favorite human beings.

  The boys petted him as he brushed against their ankles.

  After a moment, Allan made for the pantry.

  Edgar made for the fruit bowl.

  Aunt Judith set her needlepoint down and shut off the audiobook. “Well?”

  “They’ve moved the human skeleton in the biology lab into a locked glass case,” Allan said, smiling.

  Months before, the twins had surreptitiously rearranged the bones into a creature so monstrous that the biology teacher, Mr. Parker, had suffered an anxiety attack when he and the class entered the room.

  “As if a little lock on a glass case could keep us from . . .” Edgar began. He stopped.

  “From what?” Aunt Judith’s eyes narrowed.

  “Nothing,” they answered.

  Their aunt was clearly unconvinced.

  “How was your day?” Allan asked, turning to her with a jar of peanut butter in his hand.

  Edgar arranged neatly sliced apples on a plate.

  “I got a phone call from the Dickinsons,” she said.

  The Dickinson family had been in Mexico and Central America since the movie finished shooting in New Orleans. They traveled the world whenever Dr. and Dr. Dickinson, who were college professors at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had time off.

  “How are they all doing?” Allan asked as he spread peanut butter on the apple slices.

  “They’ve had a good trip. They’re coming home soon.”

  “Great,” the boys said.

  Em and Milly had been sending them postcards: Mayan pyramids in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala; colorful markets and colonial churches in El Salvador; sad-eyed sloths in the rain forests of Costa Rica; white, sandy beaches in Nicaragua . . . Milly, the techie of the two, would have preferred e-mail, instant messages, or texts, but Edgar and Allan were still forbidden to use any electronic devices, having accidentally knocked out the electrical grid for the entire city of Baltimore last year while hacking the Internet.

  “And that’s not all,” Aunt Judith continued.

  The boys joined her at the table, setting the plate of peanut-buttered apple slices at the center.

  “Thank you, boys,” she said. But before taking one, she removed a sealed nine-by-twelve-inch manila envelope from the needlework bag at her feet. She set the envelope on the table.

  “I found this an hour ago with the rest of the mail,” she explained. “However, as you can see, there’s no postage, so it must have been hand-delivered.”

  The boys were impressed with her observational skills.

  “And it’s addressed to you two,” she continued. “No return address.”

  These days, their ordinary fan mail was delivered to the movie studio’s publicity department, sparing the twins hours of autograph requests.

  This was something different.

  “Well, open it,” Aunt Judith said.

  Edgar tore the envelope across the top and slid a well-worn hardcover book onto the table.

  “Who’s it from?” she asked, selecting a peanut-buttered apple slice.

  Allan picked up the book, riffling the pages to see if a note might fall out.

  Nothing.

  Edgar looked inside the envelope. No note.

  The boys shrugged.

  “Have you two read this one?” she asked.

  “Naturally,” they answered. They’d read almost everything written about their great-great-great-great granduncle.

  “As I recall, this biography is from the early nineteen twenties,” Allan said, flipping to the copyright page. “Yes. Nineteen twenty-three.”

  “So why would someone send it to you anonymously?” Aunt Judith asked before taking a bite of apple.

  Edgar and Allan had a long history of receiving mysterious messages from . . . someplace. Until recently, they’d gotten identical fortune cookies whenever the family dined at Chinese restaurants. Even more uncannily, the fortunes had carried accurate messages (except for instances of typographical errors, in which case the fortunes had proved exactly the opposite of the truth).

  The boys had also discovered cryptic personal messages in tourist brochures, newspaper headlines, a misprinted section of the script for the movie in New Orleans, and personalized license plates in three states. Many of these messages were warnings. That Edgar and Allan didn’t know where they came from didn’t mean the twins took them any less seriously.

  And now, here was an old biography of their famous forebear.

  “Maybe somebody’s just passing along an old book they figured you two would like,” Aunt Judith suggested, wiping her fingers.

  “Maybe,” the boys said doubtfully.

  Edgar riffled through the book. There were no markings, no clues. It looked like they’d have to reread the whole thing, looking for a subtle message in the text.

  Or perhaps not.

  “There it is!” Allan shouted.

  “What?” Aunt Judith asked.

  “A page is missing,” Edgar explained.

  “Torn out?”

  Allan shook his head. “Sliced cleanly, as if by a razor blade.”

  “So, what does that mean?”

  “The excised leaf is pages 277 and 278,” Edgar muttered.

  “So?” she asked.

  For a moment the boys were silent.

  Could it have something to do with the mysterious nine-digit code?

  “Added together, 277 and 278 equal 555,” Edgar observed. “Do y
ou think 277278555 could be the code?”

  “Could be,” Allan acknowledged. “Of course, we can’t afford to be wrong.”

  Edgar agreed. “Multiplied, they equal 77,006. Being only five digits, that doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  “You two do have a way with numbers,” Aunt Judith observed.

  With two coordinated brains acting as one? Child’s play.

  “Dividing one by the other you get .996402877 or 1.00361010,” Edgar said.

  Aunt Judith’s jaw dropped. “You did that in your head?”

  “Just out to nine digits,” Edgar said.

  “Because that’s all we need,” Allan added. Then he turned to his brother. “But which set of nine?”

  Edgar sighed helplessly.

  “So what do all those numbers mean?” Aunt Judith asked.

  “Maybe nothing,” Edgar answered.

  “A message may be written in ordinary words on that missing page,” Allan elaborated. “A message that refers to some other mystery altogether.”

  “What do you mean, some other mystery?” Aunt Judith asked worriedly. “And why would someone who wanted you to see a message cut it out of the book?”

  “To draw our attention to it,” Allan said.

  She shook her head. “In that case, why not just leave the page in and underline the important part?”

  The boys looked at each other. Why not?

  “There must be more to it than meets the eye,” Allan proposed.

  “Like what?”

  “Adventure,” Edgar said.

  “Oh no, not more of that . . . please.” Danger didn’t agree with Aunt Judith, though she was slightly better suited to it than Uncle Jack. “Haven’t we had enough?”

  “We need to find that page,” Edgar said.

  “But since we don’t own a copy of this book . . .”

  Edgar turned to his aunt. “We have to go to the library. Main branch. Right now.”

  “To pursue this . . . mystery?”

  The twins got up from the table. “Of course not, Aunt Judith,” said Edgar.

  “We have to go there to do our homework,” Allan said. “School’s back in session, after all.”

  “But I thought you said you always did your homework on the bus,” she said suspiciously.

  The twins shook their heads. “Special project.”

  And with that, they were out the door.

  WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW . . .

  FAX FROM PROFESSOR S. PANGBORN PERRY TO UNDERGROUND QUANTUM INDUSTRIES, INC.

  (RUSH ORDER DEPARTMENT)

  Below, you will find the aforementioned blueprint.

  For additional clarification, you may refer to the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” from which I have taken these helpful, descriptive quotes:

  . . . a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks . . .

  . . . its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor . . . and the whole hissed as it swung through the air . . .

  I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart . . .

  Mr. Poe in the Great Beyond

  EdgarAllan Poe had been dead now for 165 years, and had recently suffered a discouraging string of demotions in the Celestial Office Building. His boss, Mr. William Shakespeare, did not make life—or, rather, death—easy for him.

  First, Mr. Poe had been transferred out of the Fortune Cookie Division, where for years he’d communicated advice, occasionally misprinted with near-disastrous effects, to his beloved great-great-great-great grandnephews, Edgar and Allan, down on Earth. His next demotion, to the License Plate Division, offered him only the opportunity to send the twins general warnings about the evil plots swirling around them (for example, “DNGR4U2”).

  And this latest demotion was even more challenging: the Animal Languages Division.

  Here the surrounding cubicles were occupied not by other writers—like Mr. Walt Whitman (Gardening Supplies Catalog Division), Mr. Mark Twain (Street Signs Division), or Miss Emily Dickinson (Greeting Cards Division). Instead, the cubicles were occupied by cows mooing, lions roaring, horses whinnying, and all other manner of animal racket.

  This was about as low as it got for a writer.

  After all, how could he make use of animal sounds to communicate helpful messages to his nephews? Naturally, preventing this had been the intention of Mr. Shakespeare, who forbade all communication from the Great Beyond down to Earth, considering Mr. Poe the worst offender.

  But this latest demotion was not what infuriated Mr. Poe just now.

  It was the outrage he observed down on Earth.

  How dare that strutting, overblown Professor Perry plan to use one of Mr. Poe’s own imaginary inventions (the giant, razor-sharp pendulum from “The Pit and the Pendulum”) to inflict actual violence on one of the twins?

  What was to be done?

  Mr. Poe didn’t yet know how the professor planned to lure the boys into danger, but there could be no doubt about the man’s intentions.

  If Mr. Poe still worked in the Fortune Cookie Division, he could have communicated to the twins:

  And if he still worked in the License Plate Division:

  And if he were able to steal into Mr. Pablo Picasso’s Art Division, as he’d done once before, he’d create a poster-size image of dolls in international attire, all of whom bore the wretched face of Professor Perry, beneath the now ominous phrase, “It’s a Small World After All.”

  But Mr. Picasso would never again allow him entry.

  Likewise, Mr. Michelangelo kept him from the Personalized Coffee Mug Division’s massive kiln. And Mr. Orville and Mr. Wilbur Wright had long ago barred the hangar doors to the Skywriting Division. All of which left Mr. Poe with the next-to-impossible task of making something useful out of animal sounds.

  Moo, baa, neigh, oink . . .

  “Blazes!” Mr. Poe cursed aloud.

  “Something wrong, Ed?”

  Mr. Poe spun around in his desk chair, surprised to find Mr. Walt Whitman, the shaggy-haired poet who’d been dead a mere 120 years or so.

  “What are you doing here?” Mr. Poe asked.

  “I’ve just come downstairs for a visit,” Mr. Whitman answered gently. “How are your zeal, manliness, and spirit, Ed?”

  “My name’s Edgar, not Ed,” Mr. Poe answered peevishly. They’d been officemates for decades, and Mr. Whitman had never gotten it right.

  The poet grinned, his eyes wide and friendly, his mouth almost lost in his unruly white beard.

  “Thanks for stopping by, but right now I think I’d rather be alone.” Mr. Poe was in no mood for Mr. Whitman’s earthy, life-affirming observations. “Why don’t you go pay a visit to a barber or something?”

  Mr. Whitman laughed. “Your angry wit is exhilarating. It is life!”

  Mr. Poe shook his head. “I hate to break the news to you, Walt. But it’s not ‘life,’ seeing as we’re both dead.”

  “True, but isn’t that exhilarating too?”

  Mr. Poe sighed. This was exactly the kind of optimism that often aggravated him. “Don’t you have work to do? Can’t you go ‘sing your body electric’ someplace else?”

  Mr. Whitman’s eyes grew sympathetic. “Always remember, Ed, you’re not alone. You contain multitudes.”

  Mr. Poe refrained from saying aloud what he thought it was that Mr. Whitman not only contained, but was full of. But then, what could one expect of a poet who didn’t even know how to rhyme?

  “We’ve all missed you upstairs,” Mr. Whitman said.

  “All?” Mr. Poe asked doubtfully.

  “Well, OK, maybe not Mr. Shakespeare.”

  “I was never much g
ood with bosses,” Mr. Poe said.

  “Me neither,” replied Mr. Whitman. “In your conflicts with Mr. Shakespeare, my heart was always with you, Ed.”

  Mr. Poe studied Mr. Whitman’s eyes and found friendship and sympathy there. He was simpatico, as the young Spanish poet Mr. Federico García Lorca, whose cubicle was next to Mr. Whitman’s, would say.

  “What am I going to do with animal grunts and howls and hisses, Walt?” Mr. Poe asked, revealing more desperation than he’d intended. “How do I communicate anything at all to my nephews?”

  Mr. Whitman put his hand on Mr. Poe’s shoulder. “‘O for the voices of animals!’” the bearded bard of Brooklyn said.

  Ordinarily, Mr. Poe wasn’t fond of other poets quoting their own work. But Mr. Whitman’s line stirred a new idea. “Would you please repeat that?”

  Mr. Whitman obliged. “‘O for the voices of animals!’”

  Yes, that was inspired!

  “Thanks for coming downstairs,” Mr. Poe said to Mr. Whitman, shaking his hand.

  Mr. Whitman pulled the handshake into a manly hug.

  Mr. Poe found that up close the shaggy poet smelled of freshly mown grass—and a little fertilizer. But he didn’t mind, because he was distractedly contemplating a new and ingenious way to connect with the twins. “I’ve much work to do now,” he said, pulling away and turning back to his desk. “After all, achieving the impossible will not be easy.”

  HAUNTING THE LIBRARY

  EDGAR, Allan, and Stevie “The Hulk” Harrison jogged around the corner of Cathedral and Franklin Streets, picking up the pace as they neared the steps to the magisterial main entrance of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the longtime pride of Baltimore’s book lovers. But this was to be no mere browsing session.

  The boys had a mission.

  “What if they don’t have the book you want?” Stevie asked as they started up toward the massive doors.

  “No worries,” the boys answered.

  Surely a library the size of a city block would contain a copy of The Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by Joseph Byron (even if the book had been published close to a century before). Wasn’t the twins’ great-great-great-great granduncle the city’s greatest literary figure?